Chapter 36 Vale #2
I don’t need to rely on force to get laid. The day I cross that line is the day I deserve to be put the fuck down like a dog. You don’t need to have empathy to draw that line in the sand—self-respect should be enough of a detriment.
Which is why the second I felt the shift in Aston’s demeanor—felt him shutting down and slipping away from me—I cranked up the intensity and demanded him to tell me what he wanted.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, testing him like that—testing us both. By the time I realized what had happened, what I’d done, how far I took things…I’d already pulled out, and was watching my cum dribble down his crack. Pooling around his puffy red hole.
There would’ve been no coming back from that…
If I didn’t listen…if I kept going…
I think I needed him to tell me to stop, as much as he needed me to respect his wishes.
I needed us to reach our breaking point.
“Vale?” Quentin says, reminding me he asked a question.
“Closure. I think,” I find myself saying, surprising us both with the honesty.
I shake my head. “Maybe? I don’t know. I just…
He wouldn’t give up. He wasn’t going to, not without me doing something…
drastic.” I grimace as soon as the words leave me.
It sounds like I planned what went down tonight. And I didn’t.
I just wanted to have a little…fun.
After all, it’s not every day I get the chance to drop the act and blow off some steam, without worry of consequence. I figured if Aston’s stupid enough to not steer clear of me—I’ve given him plenty of reasons to—then I might as well test how far I could take it.
I felt it tonight—that thread inside him, the one that if I snapped it, there’d be no recovering. It was in the tremble of his body. In the wetness coating my fingers—his tears.
It surprised me, just how easy it was to overpower him so completely, and so quickly.
I can admit I was hoping for a little more…resistance in getting to that point. A little more fight. Somehow, though, by hardly any effort of my own, I was able to lure him into the most perfect storm of a situation for his demons to slip through the cracks and unleash on him.
Priming him for me.
So, that by the time I got my hands on him, he was nothing but a crying, breathless, panicked mess, mumbling nonsense to himself. Clearly on the verge of spiraling into what I assume would’ve been one those volatile blackouts Quentin mentioned weeks ago.
Something I’ve been so, so curious to witness for myself.
Who does he become—what does he become—when that wall hiding all the secrets he keeps from himself comes down?
Who is Aston when he isn’t wearing his armor of lies?
“He seems to be under the impression you’re in a relationship,” Quentin says in an unreadable voice, returning my focus to the conversation.
I roll my eyes. “He’s delusional.”
A moment passes, before he asks softly, “Did you hurt him?”
My lips twitch. “Only a little more than he wanted.”
If my adoptive dad’s horrified, or even shocked by that statement, he doesn’t show it. He just nods. “That’s probably for the best.” He pauses meaningfully. “Seeing as he’s not the monster you hoped he was.”
Stiffening, I narrow my eyes. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Again, unfazed by the creeping threat of violence edging my tone, thickening the air, he turns an arched brow on me. “It means exactly how it sounds.”
I curl my lip, but he’s quick to cut me off before I can speak.
“I truly don’t think he’s out to punish you. In fact, I’m even so far willing to go to say I don’t think he holds any ill will toward you at all.”
“If anything, that makes it worse,” I all but growl, though I’d already come to this conclusion weeks ago. What the fuck did Aston say to him?
Quentin acts as if I hadn’t spoken. “The only person I think Aston St. James wants to punish…” he goes on slowly, contemplatively, “is Aston St. James.”
I open my mouth to protest, only for what he said to fully register before I get the chance. Stealing whatever it is I wanted to say.
This…this didn’t occur to me. Not once. But it probably should have…right?
Quentin nods slowly, like he figured as much. He searches my gaze closely, and I bite back a scoff. If he’s expecting any sort of empathy to magically appear, he’s going to be sorely disappointed. And he’ll have done it to himself. He knows better than to expect the impossible.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I eventually say.
“I don’t know, Vale. You tell me.”
Lips pressed tightly together, I say nothing. Because, truth is? It does.
It does make me feel better. Not because I sympathize, but because that means I was right about him digging his own grave. I just miscalculated the level of conscious intent behind it.
My mind travels back to earlier in the clearing, when I had him on his knees, and he seemed so torn…so at war with what he wanted and what he was feeling and what his instincts were telling him.
It was a visceral thing. How badly he wanted my touch…how badly he craved it…the pleasure, the pain…
How badly he also wanted it all to stop.
It wasn’t like that day in the locker room, when he got off on the thrill of it. The fear, even when he couldn’t breathe. No, tonight something…something shifted. I felt the shift when it happened.
But he fought it, fought it until I extracted it in a ragged scream into the night.
“STOP!”
That was the moment. The moment I could’ve broken him once and for all, just by the simple act of not listening.
But if what Quentin said before is true…
“You want to know what I think,” he says.
Massaging my temples, I mutter, “Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
I roll my eyes.
“I think Aston wants so badly to believe himself capable of hurting someone. That he’s a monster, with no chance of redemption.” He pauses. “Why do you think that is?”
I drop my head back against the seat. “You just said so. He wants to punish himself.”
“But for what?” he says. “It’s not as if he killed anyone to begin with.”
Everything seems to still—time, the air around us, the world outside…
Me.
Quentin.
As if the truth of his statement, put out there, just like that, grabbed hold of everything, and we’re all bracing for the moment it throws us off a cliff.
Slowly, so slowly, I turn to face Quentin. Head cocked, I say in a deceptively soft voice, “You know why.”
This time, I don’t miss the flicker of unease in his dark gaze. There and gone faster than I can blink, but it was there. He’s not as unflappable as he likes to believe he is.
He’s still…human.
And unlike when he’s facing off with criminals he’s been tasked to defend, there’s no chains or cuffs here. No guards or what have you standing by, just close enough in the event the person Quentin’s trying to help decides to hell with it and fights back.
There’s just this too-small space between us.
There’s just him and me.
And for as much as I’m…grateful toward him. As much as I respect him, and feel a bit like I owe him—because I do…
He knows as well as I do that there is a switch that exists inside me, just as there’s one in everybody. Him included.
The difference is, I know where to find it.
And I’m not scared of the dark. Or the silence. The emptiness.
If anything I see better, stand stronger, when I give myself to the void.
I always have.
Quentin clears his throat, averting his gaze. “The night Rick died,” he goes on casually, a beat quicker than his usual cadence. “You told me you let Aston take the fall because you didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Relaxing some, I nod. This we can talk about. Before, he was getting dangerously close to crossing the line. I could almost praise him for retreating so quickly. For not trying to…pry.
“Was that a lie?” he asks me.
I frown, and cock my head, considering that for a long moment. “No, not completely,” I tell him honestly. “I told you how…in the moment, when everything was happening, I sort of…shut down.”
He nods. “You lost control of the situation. Your anger. You went into shock.”
“I did.” I try not to bristle at the memory. Such weakness… “And I didn’t know how to handle it.”
In my mind, a movie plays out. One of me doing what needed to be done, quickly and efficiently. Only for everything to go to shit, because Aston wasn’t like me, and at that age I didn’t quite yet grasp that most people weren’t…like me.
After all, given what Aston did prior to that night…
Was it so far as a stretch to assume he’d be as monstrous as me?
“Later though, you had a chance to come clean,” Quentin goes on. “Especially when it was made pretty clear Aston wouldn’t be charged with murder. What you did was out of self-defense.” We share a knowing glance at that. “What he did after was a result of a psychotic break.”
Again, I nod. We’ve discussed all this, back when I confided in him two years ago. Confessing to what really happened the night Rick died.
Yes, Aston stabbed him numerous times.
What no one but Quentin knows is that Rick was already dead before Aston so much as grabbed a shard of the mirror I broke.
He mutilated a fresh corpse. That was his only crime that night.
“It’s so obvious now, I don’t know how I didn’t see it sooner.
” Quentin meets my furrowed gaze head-on, features creasing in a way that makes me think he…
pities me. “You wanted to punish him. Even back then. And not just for making the situation worse that night.” He quickly holds up a hand when he senses he’s veering dangerously close to the point of no return here.
“I’m just stating a fact. That I didn’t realize. ”
Jaw working, I eye him warily for a long second, before finally nodding. Accepting that.
“I think in a roundabout way,” Quentin goes on gently, “you gave Aston exactly what he needed that night. What he’s needed ever since.”
Seeing my confused expression, he clarifies, “Justification.”
The wheels are uncharacteristically slow to spin in my head, as what he’s saying, what he’s implying fully sinks in.
Justification…