Page 63 of Blaze & Ajax

He sat next to me, prattling on about a story of when he was around ten, hiking in the woods with his friends, and found an abandoned tree house. They spent months fixing it up. Then it was about this boy he used to like in the tenth grade. I learned more about Ajax in the past hour than I ever did in the seven months I’d known him.

It was four-thirty before I got to go back to bed. Ajax sat up and scrolled through his phone as I lay next to him. I couldn’t make him sleep, so I closed my eyes and dozed off.

My eyes snapped openfor some reason, and I sat up, not knowing what had woken me up or what was going on until I heard it. Someone was pounding on my front door. It was still dark outside, so it must have been late. I glanced at the clock, and it read just after two in the morning.

“What the actual fuck?” I mumbled.

The pounding became incessant.

I climbed out of bed, grumbling, assuming someone was drunk and had the wrong apartment. There were all sorts of weirdos and creeps living around here, along with too many drug addicts. You could never be too careful.

I pulled on a pair of basketball shorts, grabbed my knife from my scratched-up nightstand drawer, and made my way to the door.

“Blaze, baby!Open up!”

“Ajax?”

I set the knife down on the kitchen counter and rushed to open the front door.

Ajax was resting an arm over his head on the doorjamb, looking down at me, grinning. It wasn’t that he woke me up or how late it was that concerned me. There was blood dripping down his head and along his temple. His knuckles were scraped, and his jeans were torn at the knees, also scraped and bleeding. He wore a black leather jacket, so the rest of him appeared unharmed. Even more strange was that he seemed unaffected, like he wasn’t hurting at all.

Then, I wrinkled my nose at the stench of alcohol.

I yanked on his jacket and dragged him inside. At the same time, Cueball came out, looking tired and yawning. “What’s going on?” he asked.

I hooked a thumb at Ajax. “This idiot here is bleeding, and he’s been drinking.”

I looked back at him, swaying on his feet but still smiling at me like a lunatic. “Did you ride your bike here? Please tell me you didn’t.”

He rubbed his neck and shrugged. “Yeah, I think I left it in a ditch somewhere. It’s all good. I’m fine. See?” Ajax spun with his arms out and nearly fell over. I quickly caught him as he tripped into me, and we tumbled to the floor in a heap.

“Off, you oaf!” I shoved him off me. “You’re a goddamn moron. You know that, right?” Ajax quickly brought back memories of my own idiocy from when I was a teen, which had changed my life forever.

He stood and yanked me to my feet. I crashed into him, and we nearly fell again.

“Fuck!” I complained.

Cueball walked over to us, only in his boxer briefs, and grabbed Ajax’s chin to look at him. “This isn’t like you, Ajax.”

Ajax scowled and shrugged him off. “What the fuck do you know, baldy?” Then he reached for me, wrapping his arms around me and kissing my neck, getting blood all over me. “Need you…”

Cueball shook his head and sighed. “I’ll leave you to it. Get me if you need help. Keep an eye on him. He may have a concussion, but the bleeding looks superficial. Heads are bleeders.”

He rambled on about treating Ajax and getting him sober, but it was hard to focus as Ajax tried to get me naked right there in the fucking living room in front of Cueball.

“I wanna fuck you, baby.”

“Did you come all this way drunk to fuck me?”

“Yes. I was at a bar and thought how good it would feel to be inside you right now. God, I’mfuckinghorny.”

Ajax wobbled as he removed his jacket, tossing it to the floor. Then he pulled his T-shirt over his head and threw it somewhere. His chest had several lacerations and bruises.

I reached for him, touching a few bruises. “You need a doctor.”

He rushed at me, lifted me off my feet, and carried me to my bedroom, tripping, and we nearly fell to the floor yet again. “We’re fucking. Now. God, I need you so bad.”

“If I let you fuck me, will you let me clean your wounds?”

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