Dirty Laundry (10 page)

“Tiff-ah, listen to me.” My lover tentatively clasped his sister’s shoulders, pulling her into a tight hug. She fought him, refusing to be comforted, and he reluctantly let her go, steering her toward the back of the studio. “Go wash up. I… we can talk more. Please, let me talk to Cole. I need to… say a few things.”

It was a struggle, with warring emotions playing over her face and her taut body. After a searing few seconds, Tiffany walked away, looking over her shoulder at me. When she reached the end of the bookcase wall, Tiffany stopped and bit her lip. It was a gesture I’d seen Jae do so many times, and it ached when I thought I might not ever again be able to kiss away the dimples his teeth made.

“You did this to him,” Tiffany spat. “You
made
him like this. Why? Why did you do this? How could you take him away from us?”

“He didn’t take me away—” Jae protested, but I cut him off, not thinking before I spoke.

“I love him.” The words slithered from me and wrapped around her before I could stop them. “I just… love him.”

She visibly looked sickened and took a step toward her brother, perhaps to pull him away from me… to yank him back to the safety of their family and their beliefs. Shaking her head, Tiffany replied, “No, you can’t love him. Men can’t love other men. Not really. What you do is
sick
. You need to leave my brother alone.”

“Let me deal with this, Tiff,” Jae urged. “Go take a shower. I need to talk to Cole.”

Tiffany disappeared behind the shelves, and the sound of the bathroom door slamming put a final stab wound into the corpse of my heart. Jae stood in front of me, a brittle, lithe statue of ivory, jet, and pain.

“Jae—” My fingers nearly skimmed his mouth before he stepped back.

“Don’t.” He shook his head. “If you touch me, I think… I will break. Don’t—”

“I didn’t mean to do this.” I drew close enough for him to feel my heat. “I never wanted this. Not… Jae, you’ve got to believe me. I never wanted to do this to you. I thought she was
you
. From behind, she looks—”

“Just go, Cole.” He put his hands up to push me away but didn’t trust himself to make contact. “Just please, go.”

“So this is it? Between us?” This time I refused to be shoved aside by his anger and pain. I wrapped my arms around him and held him as close as I could. My heart broke with every straining push he gave me to get away. “Jae, I can’t lose you. Not like this. Not over something like
this
.”

“You’re not losing me. Maybe. I don’t know. I need time to… I don’t know what I need, but right now, it is
not
you.” He took a small step back, putting a bit of distance between us. It was the length of a knife, and the space thrust into me, cutting at my guts and severing a burning line through my heart.

“Cole, you don’t know how hard it is for me to love you,” he murmured, tilting his head to the side so I couldn’t see his expression. “I can’t… give you everything.”

“You think I don’t know that?” My pain crumbled under a wave of anger. He wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know. “There’s always a part of you I can’t touch. I thought I’d wait it out, that you’d give me enough time to touch every part of you… everything inside of you, but even when I’m inside of you, you’re holding back. Don’t do that now. Don’t pull back from me when I can help you… when I can be with you.”

“Be with me? How? When your kisses burn my skin? Have I told you that? What I’m doing is wrong, and I keep hoping inside of me that something will happen to make it feel right. I
need
this to feel right, Cole-ah.” Jae turned and stared me down. “Everything you do to me is like a poison I need inside of me… something sweet that peels me apart until my bones ache from the cold air around me. Every time you touch me, when your hands are on me, I want to cry and pull away because I want it so much.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, baby.” I couldn’t touch him. It would shatter what little hold I had on myself.

“You are an addiction I can’t fall into, Cole-ah.” His accent curled around his words, softening their tones but sharpening the blows to my soul. “You wanted the truth? The truth is that I cannot love you as much as you love me. I can’t rip myself open for you to feed on. As much as I want to, I know that if I do, I’ll be lost. I begged you to make love to me without anything between us because I thought maybe if we did, I’d finally be able to break away. The feel of you filling me might be enough for me to finally satisfy what I want from you.

“But I know, deep in my heart, that it would just make me want you more.”

“Don’t do this to us, Jae.” Shock ran through me, sucking the marrow from my bones.

“Don’t you see,
agi
?” Jae whispered. “There is no
us
. There is
you
and then there is
me
. We are so different… we want different things. Maybe it was stupid for me to dream that we could be an
us
. Where will it leave me? Like Scarlet
nuna
? Alone and unwanted when she’s older? I don’t want that. I don’t know if I love you enough to make it worth a lonely death. You need to walk away from me now, Cole-ah. You need to walk out the door and not come back. Not for a while. Maybe not ever.”

In that moment, I knew what love was. It was walking away from the man in front of me. It was turning my back on the man I’d made cry out my name and beg for more of me inside of him. I needed to turn away because he asked it of me. Whether I wanted to or not, because I loved him, I was supposed to step back into the shadows and fade from his view.

“If that’s what you need, baby. I’ll give you anything you need.”

“I need to think, Cole. Please, give me some time. Let me talk to her. I need to figure things out.” He wiggled free from my arms, putting distance between us. “Can you keep Neko? I don’t think she’d be happy here—”

“I’ll keep the damned cat!” He winced at the volume of my voice. I was too close to breaking. “I’m going to keep you, damn it. I’m not letting you go.”

“You have to. Even if it’s just for right now,
ne
?” He moved quickly to the door and opened it up to the bright sunshine that refused to chase off the cold inside me. “I will call you. I promise. I don’t know when, but I will. Please, go. Before Tiffany calls my mother and makes things worse.”

Brushing past him, I stole a quick kiss, lingering for a moment on his mouth before he could push me away again. “I love you, Jae. If you have to choose, please choose to let me love you. I’ll wait. As long as you need me to, I’ll wait.”

“I don’t know if you should, but I’m glad you’re going to.” He closed his eyes, shutting them against the anguish I’d put there. Pushing me out the door, he whispered, “
Saranghae
, Cole-ah.”

Then the door shut behind me, a solid sound firm enough to shatter my heart into a thousand pieces.

I
DIDN
’
T
remember driving home. The road was a blur and the city around me a mosaic of colored squares and grayed-out faces. I blinked and found myself in the carport, the Rover’s engine still running. The car lights caught on the green dumpster, and I turned them off, but bright orbs remained in my vision when I blinked. Evening had fallen, sucking all the light from the day sky.

I knew
exactly
how the sky felt.

The cat didn’t greet me at the door and there was no black shadow on the stairs, but I could feel her presence in the house. From the faint whiff of tuna in the air and a mostly empty bowl on the kitchen floor, she’d eaten the offering I’d laid out for her earlier and was now probably sleeping it off in a deep food coma. That was fine with me. I had other things on my mind besides coddling Jae’s damned cat.

A full bottle of Jack Daniel’s sat waiting for me in the cupboard, a leftover from a party we’d thrown. I pulled it out and stumbled to the couch. The seal barely cracked when I twisted the cap, so I scraped it open until it tore. The cap flew off someplace near the apothecary chest we used as a coffee table, and I left it where it fell.

After dragging my phone from my pocket, I tossed it onto the chest’s flat top and stared at the screen. There was an ache in me, a burgeoning need to hear his voice, even if he was only going to tell me to fuck off.

Anything to ease the growing empty hunger that seemed to be eating me from the inside out.

I picked up the whiskey and began my journey to the bottom of the bottle.

T
HE
world was sideways, skewing the ceiling to the right of me. The fireplace sat cockeyed on the wall, and whoever turned the sun on was definitely a Spinal Tap fan because it was dialed up to eleven. At some point, I wasn’t sure when, my stomach had crawled out of my body and rolled around in dog vomit. Loyal to a fault, it then flopped its way back. Sliding over my lips to return to where it came from, the damned thing left its foul trail on my tongue and throat. Regardless of when, I could still taste its foul journey and burped up the remains of its night out.

Strangely enough, the room was also jiggling, and something was grabbing me by the armpits.

“Come on, Princess. Let’s get you in a shower.”

I
knew
that voice and hated it instantly. It taunted me often enough in my daily life, usually at the expense of my legs while running or face when we were in a boxing ring. I’m sure my brain formed something intellectual and scathing, but the message got garbled on its way to my mouth, and instead of the withering, sarcastic reply I knew I could deliver, I croaked.

“Fuck you.”

The trip upstairs to my bedroom was akin to following a white rabbit down a hole. Things grew larger, then smaller again with each jarring stumble against a step. My shins were singing a lament by the time we reached the landing, and my head began its own chorus, complete with pounding hammers and a full range of percussion. The last time I’d heard a bass line this deep, it’d been while working patrol in the Fashion District, where there was a free hip-hop concert with every passing car.

“Why are you here?” I’m sure that was what I said, but the confusion on Bobby’s face would have been priceless if I could have seen it clearly. I tried again, enunciating carefully. It didn’t make much of a difference. For all of my trying, it still sounded like I was playing the kazoo under fifty feet of water.

“Come on, dude, give me a break,” Bobby pleaded with me. “Let’s get you into a shower. Then we can see if I’ve got to take you to the hospital for alcohol poisoning.”

I opened my mouth to object vehemently to the idea that I was drunk, but my belly had other ideas. Probably overfull from its midnight crawl, it began to gurgle, warning me of its impending discourse. Bobby’s arms tightened around my midsection, and I suddenly found myself staring down into a bowl of bluish water, the stink of chemicals burning my nose. I didn’t have much of a chance to object. Within seconds of being flung toward the toilet, my belly emptied itself of its foul mess, turning the bowl water a sickly green.

The liquid deserved to be regarded until I could find the exact phrase to describe its distinct color. This task was made difficult because my innards continued to add to its hue, diluting the crayon blue to varying shades of chartreuse and whiskey. Behind me, the shower blasted on, and I winced at the pain upon hearing the spray hitting the tiles.

My clothes were disappearing at a rapid rate, and the bathroom floor was fucking cold under my bare ass. Trying to change position didn’t help because it only brought the damned tile into contact with my sac. I made a dignified noise to protest this icy assault, but Bobby only heard a whimpering moan.

If I thought the tile was cold, nothing prepared me for the shock of glacial proportions when he picked me up and threw me into the shower. With all the faucet heads turned on, I couldn’t escape the frigid blasting, and the glass door refused to budge when I pushed against it. Blinking, I saw Bobby had knotted one of my ties around the handle and a nearby towel ring, effectively trapping me inside.

I gave in to the inevitable and let the shower pound the stink out of my flesh. Unfortunately, cleanliness is next to sobriety, and by the time my skin no longer smelled like Lynchburg, I remembered Jae breaking my heart.

The water felt even colder on my face, especially when my eyes were hot with tears.

“Fucking son of a bitch.” It hurt. Somewhere deep inside me, the pain grew, frothing up into a geyser of anguish that choked the air from my lungs. The last time I’d felt so desolate, Mike’d been holding my hand and telling me of Rick’s death.

That’s how Bobby found me. Curled up into a ball and screaming for the broken pieces of my heart to quit stabbing my chest.

A
COUPLE
of hours later, I was sitting up in my bed, cupping my hands around my third cup of hot black coffee while Neko played
Hunt the Toes
across my bedsheets. She’d scored a few hits, nearly drawing blood from my big toe, but the taste of her kill didn’t seem to satisfy her, and she continued to dance across the end of the bed, viciously attacking my feet. It felt good to have her, something tangible of Jae’s to hold onto while I made sense of my crumpled life.