Page 36 of Drag Me Up

I’m thrown roughly onto a bed and I can do nothing, say nothing, while my clothes are removed and the number of hands on me increases from two to four to six to who knows…

The voices in the room are loud yet muffled.

Their faces are clear, but I have no clue who they are.

“Sabrina only said to get him drunk,” one guy says from where I assume the door is. I don’t see who it is. I can’t even move my head to look. “Why the fuck are you messing around like this? This is going too far. I’m calling an ambulance.”

I can hear something that sounds like a slap and something hitting the wall before the hands are back on me and the faces are swimming in front of me again.

“Donny just got his ass benched for next season,” the man who first grabbed me says to the others in the room before leering down at me. “This little faggot is begging for it. So we’re going to be nice and give him what he wants so that bitch gets what she wants later and we get the dough.”

My fear bleeds to the background and I start to feel a sort of numbness creep over me. The hands hurt me, but I can’t react. The assholes rub me raw trying to get me erect. You would think a bunch of guys would understand the importance of lube, but they don’t seem all that bright.

They finally give up on getting me hard when my fingers start to twitch instead of my dick. I feel strange being thankful when they flip me over onto my stomach. I probably should have hidden the fact that whatever they used on me was wearing off already. Maybe then I could have braced for it.

Pain unlike anything I could have ever conceived tears through my body and it burns through the rest of the drugs holding my voice captive. A scream rips from my throat, but before I can think enough to form words, someone’s funk drenched cock gets shoved in my mouth.

Between the pain and the lack of air, I lose consciousness. When I come to, I don’t know how long I was out or what else happened to me. I don’t even know how many guys did anything to me. How many guys are on a hockey team?

I lurch over the side of the bed and vomit the contents of my stomach onto the filthy floor. Opening my eyes, I can see puddles of a viscous substance that I don’t want to think too deeply on. How many times did I throw up in this exact place before awareness came back to me? Are all those puddles vomit or are they… from the monsters in the room?

The door slams open and shadowed in the doorway is one of the very few people in this world that I know would never hurt me. Spencer Wright looks like he’s gone a couple rounds with someone, but he looks like a fucking superhero to me right about now.

He’s too late to be the hero, but I know he won’t let them touch me again. He’ll protect me.

30

MATT

It’s obvious to me that Eric isn’t watching the movie. He’s thinking through something. As a kid, it was one of my favorite things to watch. His mind is a thrilling place where he can make connections between things in minutes that would take most people ages to figure out. I’ve often wished my brain could take the same shortcuts his does, but today is not one of those days. He looks tormented.

“Cutie? Are you alright?” I ask, pausing the movie. I give his hair a little tug to make him look at me. His eyes are haunted. Leaning down, I place a kiss on his forehead. I’m sure we brought up some not so good memories for him today, but I want to make sure going forward that we are actually moving forward. We can’t get trapped in the past.

“I love you, Mattie,” he says as he snuggles back down on my lap. “Tomorrow is the fifth anniversaryof…the event… I haven’t really faced it before today, not really.”

Pulling the blanket off the back of the futon, I tuck it in around him and continue to stroke his hair. I only found out about what happened to him this morning. He’s been living with it for five years. I know only general statements. He has vivid and explicit details. It’s tearing me apart inside, so what is it doing to him?

“What can I do to help?” I ask him softly. I need to do something to make this right for him. I can’t change the past, but I have to try to make his future brighter.

“Just be here, Mattie. Let me be your unicorn boy again,” he tells me with a sad smile. Turning back toward the television, he grabs the remote from my hand to press play on the movie. I barely hear the whisper. “Don’t let me go, Super Mattie.”

Somehow I manage to keep my silent tears from falling on my boy as he drifts off to sleep with his head in my lap. Despite the fact that I have a class to teach at ten tomorrow morning, I refuse to move from where I am until I absolutely need to. This precious man still thinks I’m his hero.

“Super Mattie and Sparkles to the rescue!”

I can’t stop my lips from quirking up at the call to arms from the seven year old at my side. I was teaching him how to play catch when the baseball ended up rolling into the rose bushes, his mother’s prize winning rose bushes.

“Easy there, Sparkles,” I tell him, restraining him bygrabbing the back of his shirt when he tries to dive after the ball. “We can’t damage your mother’s flowers”

Turning to me, his bottom lip quivers. “B-but what about the b-b-ball? I don’t want to be done playing base-m-ball with you.”

An athlete he is not, but I love that he tries so hard just for me. Seeing the tears start to form in his eyes, I know what I have to do. Ruffling his curls, I get down in the mulch and slowly army crawl between the bushes and the wall of the garage.

Mom is going to be pissed with how filthy I’m getting, but it’s better for the kid of the cook to be dirty than their precious showpiece. Thorns from the rose bushes tear at my clothes and exposed skin, but I can see the ball just ahead. Snatching it up, I decide it’s safer to keep going forward instead of trying to move backward or turning around.

“Mattie?” Eric’s worried voice calls out from behind me, but I don’t stop moving. His sniffles make me move even faster.

When I reach the end of the wall, I crawl out of the mulch and jump to my feet. I raise the hand holding the baseball in triumph as my little buddy sprints around the bushes to wrap his arms around my middle. The warmth I feel from his hug makes it easy to ignore the small pains and itches from the scratches on my left side.

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