Chapter Fifteen Uncontrollable Urge
Michael didn’t start when he heard the door creak open. He’d left it unlocked. For him. For Julian. Michael had known he’d come. He took a swig of Scotch and continued to play the dismal, melancholy music he’d been pounding into the piano’s keys for hours.
Out of the corner of his eye, Michael saw Julian cast aside his bloody parka onto the armchair. Michael laughed bitterly to himself. Of course. Ignoring the Goddamned coat rack to the very end. How very Julian of him. Heedless to everything but himself and his own hedonistic desires.
He was a dark shape in Michael’s periphery, standing awkwardly behind him, shifting from foot to foot.
Michael stubbornly ignored him, continuing to slam out the keys of Rachmaninoff’s études Tableaux.
If Julian had something to say, he very well wasn’t about to help him.
He should come right out and say it on his own.
“You’re playing piano.”
How bloody observant. Michael kept on playing with one hand as he knocked back another swig of his drink. The tumbler was nearly empty. He’d have to refill it soon. Was there even any Scotch left? He couldn’t remember. At this point, it hardly seemed relevant.
“Are you… are you drunk?”
“Would it be any business of yours if I was?” His fingers dove dramatically from A# to G minor. In the corner of his eye, Julian wrung his hands.
“I just… I never seen you drink so early.”
“You have never seen me drink so early,” Michael corrected snobbishly.
“Um, yeah.” Julian seemed at a loss for several moments. Good. He should be at a loss. He should be at sea, marooned away from everyone he knew and loved. It was what he deserved. No, it wasn’t even the beginning of what he deserved.
“I got something -- I have something to tell you,” Julian began shakily.
“I’ve thought it over and, uh, I don’t think it’s gonna work out, you and me.
I don’t think we’re compatible. You know, we’re so different and stuff.
You’re all posh and I’m all, you know, I’m all me and whatever.
I just don’t think it’s a good match. I’m sorry and everything.
I really am. You know, I really did fancy you. It’s just not right anymore.”
Michael’s fists pounded the keys in a cacophonous, discordant note.
Julian flinched, covering his ears. Michael stood, properly facing him for the first time since he’d entered his flat.
Michael laughed a cold, mirthless laugh that stood even his own hair on end.
He’d tried to quell his wrath with drink but even with a bottle’s worth of Scotch in him, he could still feel the white-hot anger rising up like bile in his throat, clouding his vision in a sheet of red, boiling the blood inside his veins.
“That’s rich.” Michael grinned with shark’s teeth. “That’s bloody rich. ‘Not working out between us,’ is it? And it wouldn’t have anything to do with getting fucked by a certain bloody Paki?”
Julian flinched as if struck. He backed up a step, offence written clearly in his expression, just over the guilt he was attempting to hide.
Michael could have spit in that pretty face of his.
He tried to rein in the darkness that sprang from his withered heart in leaps and bounds, but it was a losing battle.
He was able to redirect it at the last second by upending the armchair Julian always threw his fucking coat onto.
It tumbled to the floor with a great clatter that rivalled the thrumming of the piano. Julian backed up another step, shoulders hunched and arms folded across his chest as though he could put up a shield between himself and Michael. He only wished.
“I knew I was making a mistake letting you go,” Michael began, rage pulling the words from him in fragments, faster than he could make sense of them.
“Thought if I let you go, you’d see. You’d miss me.
You’d understand Rahul was an idiot who’d betrayed you.
You’d come back. You did come back. But I should’ve known, when you didn’t kick him out of your life.
I should’ve realised what was going on. But no.
I was a bloody fool. Thought I was one step ahead of you.
You told me not to worry. You told me not to worry.
How could I have been such a prat and let you make a fool of me?
You’re mine, Goddamnit! You belong to me, and you let that filthy foreigner touch you, fuck you.
I’ll show him. If you can’t be mine, you’ll never get to be his. ”
He crossed the distance that separated them and buried his fists in Julian’s jumper.
The boy was too startled at first to react as Michael hauled him forwards and crushed their mouths together.
But after a beat Julian regained his faculties and pressed his palms hard against Michael’s shoulders, trying to shove him off.
He’d never be able to move Michael. Not in a million years. Not with those skinny arms of his.
Julian did manage to snatch his face away, though, ducking his head down and out of the reach of Michael’s mouth. “Stop it,” he cried, still shoving against Michael, boots scrabbling at the floor. “Michael, stop it. Let go. You’re drunk.”
But it was far too late to reason with him.
And it wasn’t the drink that was propelling his actions.
Drunkenness might have kept Julian safe.
It was the rage, the darkness, the unquenchable need to hurt.
Whatever logical part of Michael might have remained was drowned out by that throbbing darkness, fuelled by Julian’s betrayal.
He was going to learn what it meant to betray Michael’s trust. He was going to learn if it killed him.
Michael released Julian’s jumper and moved fast as a cobra to snake his hands around Julian’s throat.
But his fingers only grazed hair as Julian stumbled away from him.
They both looked at Michael’s hands, still poised in the air in front of them.
There was a single heartbeat’s moment of stillness, the way one treads on air the second before falling.
Julian’s big eyes went wide with realization, then panic, the same moment Michael lunged for him.
He grabbed Julian around the middle, throwing the lighter man over his shoulder.
Julian beat his back with fists that were as impotent as raindrops for all the effect they were having on Michael’s massive form.
Michael reared back and tossed him, meaning to throw him onto the sofa but misjudging his rage-fuelled strength.
Instead he sent Julian hurtling over the back of the sofa with a heavy, muffled thump that made the entirety of the flat tremble as if in fear.
Michael sneered a triumphant smirk, stalking around the sofa to grab hold of the winded Julian.
But he had apparently underestimated Julian’s flight instincts as much as he’d underestimated his own strength.
Though still wheezing, Julian was up like a shot, making to run for the hall to the bedroom.
Michael’s hand shot out quick as lightning and grabbed a fistful of dark hair, yanking back with a force that made Julian cry out in pain. “Michael, stop,” Julian commanded squeakily, to no avail. “Please,” he implored, a last-ditch attempt at reason.
Michael laughed at him then, a hard, cold noise filled with more hatred than mirth. If he had had any reason left, Julian wouldn’t have been in this predicament, would he, foolish boy?
But Julian used the opportunity to stomp the heel of his pixie boot down hard on Michael’s foot, making him yelp and momentarily release his hold as he fell to the floor. Michael roared, a sound of primal anger, as Julian slipped away from him. Slippery little bastard. Whore. Ungrateful slag.
“Fuck you,” Julian shouted back at him, dashing into the bedroom, and only then did Michael realize he’d spoken his thoughts aloud.
Good. Let him hear. Let that be part of his lesson.
Now he knew what he was. The whole of London ought to know.
Ought to be warned of what a viper lived in their midst.
The bedroom door slammed shut and Michael leapt to his feet, reaching the door in two great strides.
He kicked it hard and it sprang violently open, impacting the wall with a boom like thunder.
Julian’s head snapped up in alarm from where he sprawled across the bed, phone receiver in one hand.
Seeing Michael standing there, blocking the only exit, the colour that had risen to his cheeks from exertion drained in an instant, leaving him as white as fresh fallen snow.
Then Michael was on him, as unrelenting as a force of nature.
He grabbed Julian’s wrists and pinned them behind his back.
The boy bucked and heaved but the angle was awkward, the mattress too giving, and he could get no purchase as Michael held his wrists in one hand and unbuckled his belt with the other.
Michael snapped his belt out of his trousers in one fluid motion with a crack like a whip, then looped the belt around Julian’s neck and pulled it taut.
The difference in Julian’s body was immediate. It shifted from blind fight to a focused struggle on regaining lost breath. The beast in Michael’s chest roared in triumph. He had him. Now, just a little more. Just a little longer…
Julian wheezed and sputtered for several seconds until finally going limp. At last. That took long enough. Michael released the tension on the belt, ready to flip Julian over and --
Julian drove his elbow into Michael’s gut like a sledgehammer. Michael’s vision whited out for several moments as he doubled over coughing, vomit stinging his throat. Wily bastard. The boy, coughing himself, scrambled across the bed.
He thought he was so bloody clever, that one.
Michael was the one who was clever, not him.
How dare he. The rage inside him pulsed and frothed, boiling over and darkening his vision.
Any vestiges of humanity he might have still held sloughed off as easily as a snake sheds its skin, leaving him a growling, slobbering beast that wanted nothing but to hurt, hurt, hurt.
“Stop,” Michael choked out, grabbing hold of Julian’s calf and yanking him back. “You’re making this --” Michael tried to grab him round the waist but the boy was slippery as an eel. “-- so much harder --” Michael threw blind punches at him but to no effect. “-- than it has to be!”
Michael finally managed to grab Julian by the shoulders, despite his twisting and thrashing.
He shook the boy like a naughty child, making his dark head snap to and fro as though it might pop right off.
“Stop!” Michael shouted hoarsely in the pale face that blurred in front of him with the force of his shaking. “Stop! STOP!”
Without warning, the body in his hold went limp as a rag.
But Michael was still shaking him with all of his strength, counting on the force of his resistance.
Without it, he sent the boy crashing down onto the bedside cabinet with all his might.
There was a bone-chilling CRACK that reverberated through Michael’s very being.
The cabinet upended, sending the heavy glass ashtray, lamp, and phone all flying, and Julian tumbling off the bed onto the floor.
And that’s where Julian lay, in an interminable moment of silence.
That silence cleared some of the cobwebs from Michael’s mind. Enough of them for his logic to resurface, if only barely. What the fuck was he doing? Had he actually been trying to… Had he really been about to…
Julian, he thought with a sudden desperate panic.
He clambered off the bed and sunk to his knees on the floor beside where the boy lay sprawled. His beautiful blue eyes were glassy and unseeing, long black hair fanned out around him, and a pool of dark blood steadily growing beneath his head.
“No,” Michael muttered. “No, no, no, no. Julian. God.”
The beast he’d briefly become slunk off, whimpering, its tail between its legs, and Michael shuffled forwards on his knees, extending trembling hands out to Julian.
To his boy. His beautiful boy. He’d done this.
Oh God. He’d done this. He hadn’t meant to hurt him, not really.
He just wanted to teach him a lesson, to show him he couldn’t go around cheating and breaking people’s hearts.
He hadn’t meant to… God, he hadn’t meant to -- to kill him…
It was Eton all over again. His darkness had overtaken him until he’d hurt an innocent boy.
He’d promised himself he’d never let it happen again, but he’d been weak.
He’d been a slave to his emotions. He’d let his pride get in the way.
Now he’d snuffed out a vibrant life and the police would be on him like flies on shit.
All Julian’s friends knew Michael was his boyfriend, and Rahul more than likely knew he’d been on his way to break up with him this very day.
There was no escaping it now. Money wouldn’t buy his way out of this one.
He was royally fucked. Well and truly this time.
His trembling fingers closed around Julian’s limp wrist, hoping beyond hope to find a pulse. He lowered his head, trying to listen for the intake of breath, trying to discern a rise and fall to his chest.
He was so preoccupied with finding proof he was still alive that he didn’t notice Julian’s fingers closing around the heavy glass ashtray.