“I can take care of anything my son needs.” She smiles and comes in, wrapping her arms around my neck. “Such a beautiful boy. You’re going to be a powerful man someday.”
She presses her body into mine, and I close my eyes, trying to go to that place I always go. Where I can pretend she’s someone else. A girl at school. Some chick in my class.
My mother is still young, only sixteen when she had me, so her skin is still tight from youth and years of dancing, her black hair is long and soft, she smells good…
I’ve had sex with others. Girls around town. Women my father keeps. I can do this.
And if I want it to stop, who will I tell anyway? My father won’t care. No one will, and telling will make him angry and mak
e people laugh at me. I’d be weak and an embarrassment to him.
I can’t tell.
This isn’t a big deal. My mother isn’t unusual. Men look at Banks the same way my mother looks at me. That’s why I hide my sister. So they won’t go after her.
I see so much shit, and I don’t know if it’s wrong, but it never ends, and I’ve gotten used to everything that happens in the late hours. Maybe it happens everywhere and nobody talks about it.
But she rubs her hand over my dick through my jeans, and I just can’t.
“No, stop,” I growl, stumbling back. “I don’t want to.”
I don’t fucking want to. I won’t tell, but I’m not doing shit I don’t want to do anymore.
But she protests, “Damon.”
She advances on me but stops, and looks down at the floor. Picking up her foot, she inspects the smears staining the wood. “Is that… blood?” she asks me and reaches down, lifting the ankle of my jeans and seeing the blood soaked into the hem. “Oh, my God, what have you done?”
Not enough, apparently. I’d completely forgotten about the cuts once she walked in, because the broken skin wasn’t enough pain to mask the shit she brought with her.
Taking my hand, she drags me into the bathroom adjoining my bedroom and pushes me back against the countertop, lifting up my foot.
“Are these cuts?” she exclaims.
Like you’re shocked. She knows what I’ve been doing for years now. The cuts I hide under my feet. The scars under my arms and hair. The slices, pricks, and burns that are covered under my boxers until they heal and then I do it all over again. I’d gotten creative in hiding the shit I did to release pain.
She wets a washcloth and pushes me back more, so I sit on the counter, and lifts my foot.
But I jerk away. “I can do it!”
She slaps me, and my head jerks to the side, the sting of her hand burning across my face like fire and ice. I close my eyes, grateful for it. A cool sweat breaks out all over me.
“There, there, now,” she soothes like I’m five. “You don’t need to talk. Remember what we said? You don’t need to talk. I always know what you need.”
She wipes up the blood, applies Band-Aids to the five slices I made, and checks the other foot, sighing in relief that it wasn’t injured.
“You need to be careful,” she tells me. “The basketball team needs you. You can’t hurt your feet like that.”
That was why I did it. It didn’t hurt my game at all. If anything, I played harder and faster, so the pain of running on that court would exhaust me, so I couldn’t think or fight when I came home.
“Better?” she asks.
She doesn’t wait for my answer, though. Coming in, she wraps her arms around me again, kissing my cheek and trailing more over my jaw and mouth.
“Such a good boy,” she whispers. “So much energy. So physical.” Her hands move over my body as her kisses get wetter and longer. “So much endurance and muscle. So much power.” And then her hand reaches between my legs, massaging my cock. “Such a good, growing boy.”
I grip the back of her hair, and she moans as my fingers dig into her scalp and I stare at my reflection in the glass shower door.
Bitch.