Collapsing against me, he draped his arms over my shoulders, rubbing his palms over the skin of my back. His face found a home in the crook of my neck, and though he exhaled, it was unsteady. I saw his toes curl in frustration, feet flexing against a rumpled bundle of sheets.
He coughed against my skin, heaving just slightly before spitting out a single word. “Why?”
Voice cracking on the last syllable, I could only imagine what the inside of his throat looked like. The fibers swollen—throbbing and bleeding into his chest.
“Your mutism is selective and trauma-induced, baby bird. In some situations it’s going to feel impossible for you to speak. Usually those circumstances, those situations, have to do with your past. Say… Ridgemont’s campus, the place your father abused you? Or possibly your bedroom, the spot your best friend died? Baby, you’ve been living in a horror movie where the monster never dies. It’s why we’re not going back there. It’s not safe.”
“I… I want to go back, Roman. I ha… have to.”
Shock rendered me immobile, just for a split second, then it reared back and punched me straight in the face.
“What do you mean you have to go back? Sebastian, your father is deranged. He could’ve killed you over two fucking canisters of old photo film.”
He peeled his face from my neck, exhaling with his chin low. Nails digging into my shoulder blades, I saw his throat working to build words. When he looked at me, I found his gray eyes brimming with a cloudless storm. They shook with fear but pulsed with bravery.
“That’s… that’s why I have to go back. There is something in that film my father doesn’t want the world to see. Foster captured something on that camera, and now he’s dead.”
“He’s right. Arthur needs to be put down. Bullets and bombs.”
“My skin feels alive, like it’s crawling with all the words I couldn’t say, and I swear it’s trying to tell me that my father is the reason Foster fell off the balcony that day.” Tears crested the edges of his eyes, and he struggled to blink them back. One errant tear slipped over the hill of his cheek, and he swiped it away angrily.
Oh, baby bird.
“Is that why you went back to school? Why you didn’t just run away?”
“I told myself it was because I needed a diploma. What job could I get without a basic education? No college would ever accept me. Not that I have the slightest clue what I want to do, anyway.” He sniffed and used his fingers to trace the lines in my skin. It was something he did often, a way to cope when his brain got too loud.
He wasn’t ignoring the words it was saying… he was just making them quieter.
“Maybe it was actually because I never believed he fell. Maybe it was because I was angry people thought it was me, and maybe it was because I’d always been wary that my father was the one who started calling me Vicious.”
That son of a bitch…
“It makes sense now that I know about the film. If my father killed Foster over some photos, he’d do whatever it took to keep suspicious eyes off of him.” Sebastian shook his head, jaw rigid as he batted away another tear. “Arthur used me as a scapegoat so he could protect himself.”
My eye twitched, my vision blackening as I struggled not toss Sebastian off my lap and make a fist-sized hole in the nearest fucking wall. Blood throbbed beneath my cheeks, my temperature rising enough to make me sweat. The only thing keeping me sane was his finger and the shapes it made across my skin.
“You have to go to work. We have to act like everything is normal.”
The fuck?
“Sebastian, baby, I want to curb stomp your father with a steel-toed boot.”
“Are you flirting with me, Daddy? Because it sure sounds like it.”
I licked over the bite marks I’d left across his neck last night—little love notes written in flesh. He made me promise to never let them fade.
“Does my devotion make you horny, baby?”
“A little.” He squirmed when I grazed my teeth against his skin. “I think maybe I’d like the smell of blood if it was his.”
Christ.
“You say stuff like that, gorgeous, and then expect me to walk into that school like everything’s normal.”
“We have no other choice. We can’t let him know we’re on to him. That’s like mystery 101. Haven’t you ever watched Scooby Doo?”
“The show with the talking dog?”