Chapter 9 The Mouse Hole #2
He wanted to clamp his mouth shut, to keep the crazy pressed down where it wouldn’t pull, but the noise inside would hollow him out if he didn’t let some of it out. “What if she dies and she still doesn’t stop.”
“What do you mean?” Asa’s voice sharpened only enough to show he was paying attention. “Like…what if she haunts you?”
Asa didn’t mock him. If anything, he sounded concerned.
“Gage did,” Zane said softly.
Asa was quiet for a long moment, thinking, feeling the weight of Zane’s words. He watched Asa’s jaw tick. He pressed his thumb to the spot behind Zane’s ear as if he could press the fear down.
“Do you really think it was Gage talking to you? Or did your brain find a way to make sense of losing the only family member you trusted?” Asa asked, gentle and blunt in the same breath.
Zane’s nose felt stuffy; his head throbbed like a drum. More tears came even though he thought there were none left. “I don’t know. I just miss hearing his voice. And if it gets replaced with hers…” His voice broke on the last word.
“It won’t.”
The denial was simple and sure, totally Asa, as if now that he’d declared it, the universe wouldn’t dare defy him. Zane’s whole body shook as sobs racked him. “What if when she dies, she haunts me forever? What if she finds a way to get to me even after she”—he swallowed on the word—“dies.”
Asa rocked him slowly, one hand along his spine, the other cradling the back of his skull. The motion was small, repetitive, steady as a metronome. “Lois, that’s not gonna happen.”
“Gage talked to me for years,” Zane confessed. “What if I wake up tomorrow and it’s her voice in my head?”
He hated how absurd it sounded in the light of day, but rational thought had been shoved out the window. Fear smelled like his mother’s cloying cheap perfume and her constant disappointment; it tasted like ash on his tongue.
“Then we’ll bring the girls over and have them cleanse the house. It can’t be much different than an exorcism and they learned that in an afternoon off a YouTube video.” Asa tried for humor and landed somewhere between ridiculous and tender. Zane laughed through a wet sniffle and said nothing more.
“Lois, I’m never going to let her hurt you again. If I have to fly to the Vatican, kidnap the new pope, tie him to a chair, and force him to send that evil bitch to the deepest circle of hell, I will. Hell, if I have to escort her there myself, I will. No hesitation.”
“That’s…so many felonies,” Zane managed, a short laugh before the next wave of crying.
Asa’s chuckle was Zane’s favorite security blanket. “I’d kill the pope for you, baby. Hell, I’d kill God for you.”
Zane gasped, then managed a breathy, “Easy, Satan. Let’s not tempt fate.”
“I am fate,” Asa growled in his ear in a ridiculous, cartoonish monster voice that made Zane snort despite himself.
“You’re a dork.”
Asa made a wistful sound. “Yet you married me anyway, Lois.”
“I did,” he agreed softly.
They sat like that for a while, Asa rocking Zane like he was one of the boys after a nightmare. “You believe me when I say I will always keep you safe, right?”
Zane paused, tasting the words. He let his forehead rest against Asa’s, their breaths mingling. “I believe you over anyone else,” he whispered. “I’m just…old things keep coming back.”
Asa cupped his face, thumbs brushing his wet cheeks. “I’ll always be here to ground you, Lois. To remind you that even if you do hear her voice, it's not real. But I do think you should talk to Dr. Jones about this. All of it. I feel like maybe this is too much for you.”
Zane wanted to deny it but how, when he was so clearly falling apart in front of him. “I’ll talk to Jeremiah, but right now I just need you to squeeze me. I just want to hide for a while.”
Asa’s lips brushed his temple. “I got you, baby.”
Zane squirmed until he could koala his arms and legs around Asa, melting into him.
Asa tightened his grip until it was almost impossible to breathe.
The noise that left Zane was much like he imagined a mouse would make while being strangled by a boa constrictor.
It sounded helpless, ridiculous…perfect.
On any other night, Zane would have fallen asleep like this. Asa or Avi had carried him to bed on more than one occasion. There was just something so…safe about the warmth, smell, the crushing embrace. It made Zane’s whole limbic system just shut down.
Adam had once told Noah that he wanted to fuse their bodies together, that he sometimes imagined a world where they could crawl inside each other and make a home.
That’s what Zane wanted. He wanted to wear Asa like armor.
No, he did do that. Asa was his shield, his shelter, the turtle shell that protected the soft, squishy, vulnerable creature that was Zane.
It wasn’t that he thought Felix wouldn’t protect him. His kitten had sharp claws, in multiple colors, in many different carats. He would protect Zane with his life. But…it wasn’t the same.
When Felix entered a room, the world took notice.
Not because he was threatening—intimidating, certainly—but because he radiated untouchability.
Felix looked like someone who didn’t need to fear anything and the predators immediately looked for weaker prey.
Zane was the weaker prey. It was like he’d been born that way. Victim-coded. Was that a thing?
Asa…however. He wasn’t a predator. He was the apex predator.
One look from him could stop time itself in its tracks.
Even with his mask of affability firmly locked in place, Asa exuded a confidence that was unnatural.
His existence set the world’s teeth on edge.
People knew something about him was wrong, even if they couldn’t name it.
And that was what Zane needed right now.
He needed Asa to be a brick wall, a barricade, the immovable force to his mother’s unstoppable object.
He hissed as Asa’s teeth sank into the scar tissue that never quite healed.
He whined, hips shifting restlessly, fully aware they were both turned on.
Something eased within him. Asa’s bite was a pressure release valve, pain, pleasure, and adrenaline twisted together until the world shrank to just the two of them.
“What are you doing?” he asked, voice rough and splintered from crying.
“Amusing myself. That alright with you?”
“And if I said no?” Zane asked, already slowly rocking against him.
“I’d know you were lying,” Asa said. “But I’d still stop if you said the magic word.”
Zane lifted his head to meet Asa’s eyes. He wanted to speak, to tell him all the things clogging his throat, but the words refused to come. His chest hurt with all the things he couldn’t say.
“What am I gonna do with you, Lois?” Asa mused, his voice low and wrecked. “You have no idea what seeing you cry does to me. It gets me so hot.”
Zane blushed like he’d given him the biggest compliment. “I’m a mess.”
Asa’s next words came out like a snarl, like the sheer vulnerability of Zane had him shifting from human to animal.
“I know. You look just how you look when I’ve been using you all night.
Stalking you, chasing you, running you to ground, fucking you wherever you fall.
It’s the sexiest thing in the world when you submit to me. ”
Zane let out a broken laugh. “Good thing, ‘cause I’m apparently destined to be a marshmallow for the rest of my life.”
Asa chuckled, soft and genuine, a sound that didn’t belong in a man like him. He nuzzled Zane’s hair, breathing him in. “You’re my marshmallow, Lois. Sticky, sweet, and impossible to get rid of.”
“You’re the only one who thinks so,” Zane said, still not ready to stop splashing around in his pity pool.
“Untrue. Marshmallows are amazing…and versatile. You can do all kinds of things with marshmallows, and most people love them. There’s nothing wrong with being a marshmallow. If you were anyone else, then you wouldn’t be you.”
Zane snorted. “That last part made no sense.”
Asa tugged his costume to the side and bit down hard on untouched skin until Zane yelped. “Don’t sass me, Lois. You know the best part about marshmallows, Lois? You can eat them.”
He ran his tongue over the fresh indentations, then buried his face against Zane’s neck, biting and sucking with deliberate purpose, making Zane throb, hips kicking against his will.
Nobody would miss the evidence of how they’d chosen to pass the night.
Zane tipped his head, offering more. He wanted the last thing his mother ever saw to be him marked, a reminder that she hadn’t destroyed him, that someone still wanted him enough to leave proof.
“Fuck, you smell good,” Asa growled against his skin, nipping at his Adam’s apple before dipping his tongue into the hollow of his throat. “How do you expect me to behave when you smell like a literal dessert? I want to devour you.”
Zane let himself get lost in the feel of Asa’s mouth on his, his hips rolling against his, the way their breathing came faster. Zane’s tiny whimpers and Asa’s low growls. When Asa bit his shoulder once more, it was like it knocked loose the sentence that had been stuck in his throat for hours.
“Do you regret it?” Zane blurted, too suddenly to stop himself.
His face flushed. It was like he was on a mission to make sure he didn’t have an ounce of dignity left by sunrise. Maybe he should have just stuck with Felix.
“I’m a psychopath, Lois. I regret nothing. But what specifically are you referring to?”
“Marrying me?” he managed, voice barely above a whisper.
Asa huffed out a laugh that made Zane want to crawl inside himself.
Before he could brace, he was flat on his back with Asa hovering over him, a solid shadow in the mouse hole’s half-light.
Asa slipped a hand under the flowy pants of Zane’s costume, tracing the line of his thigh until he was squeezing his hip.