Page 24 of The Boy Who Loved Wicked
Iwaited for him in the living room the following night. Perched at the edge of the couch, surrounded by unpacked boxes, already on my fourth finger of scotch with only a few lit candles to see by. “You’re wet,” I said, when the strike of lightning highlighted the room along with his damp curls.
“I rushed out without an umbrella.” He used his small voice. The one that made me want to shield him from the world. The one that would be the death of me. “You like jazz music,” he said, tucking his hands behind his back. Wringing them together, I imagined.
“It slows down my racing thoughts.” The setting on the ceiling speakers was low, but still, Nina Simone’s“I Loves You, Porgy” could be heard over the roar of thunder outside. I rolled the tumbler between my palms before downing its contents, then reached over to rest the empty glass on the storage bin I’d been using as a makeshift end table. I uncuffed my shirt sleeves and rolled them up my forearms while jutting my chin toward the wingback chair in front of me.
“My first love was a boy named Alexander,” I started. “We met in high school. He was new to town, new to this country, and I was assigned to be his student guide. To help him get acclimated. Alex was shy. Soft spoken. Preferred books to people.”
“Like me.”
“Yes, much like you,” I said. “Our friendship blossomed into something more once we left for college and were away from the prying eyes of my parents. My father specifically. His plans for me included the merging of two powerful families through marriage, and grandchildren to carry on the family name. Very archaic, that man,” he mused. “Dramatic. Power hungry.”
“Who was your father?”
“Senator Duval Wicked,” I said. Phoenix knew about the crash that took my parents from me, but I’d never given him more than that. “We were introverts, which suited me fine because I wanted Alex to myself. I was all he had outside of his immigrant parents. I owned him. I consumed him, Phoenix.” The alcohol had begun to do its job, and the telltale signs of melancholy and self-loathing began to brew in me. I planted my elbows on my knees and dropped my head into my hands.
“Why?” he asked. “Why did you need to own him?”
The reasons were plentiful.Where to begin… “I’d found a stray kitten crying and shivering one rainy winter afternoon when I was about eight years old. Right under the porch of our winter cabin in Vermont. I’d snuck it inside, kept it in my room for a whole week before my father found out. He pried Madeline from my hands, indifferent to my cries and promises to take good care of her. A week later he surprised me with a Tibetan Mastiff. Said they had great character and that no son of his would be seen with a kitten.” I could still remember his sneer of disgust at my perceived weakness.
“And then there was a young boy, Felix, I’d befriended at school. He was a scholarship kid, and he didn’t meet father’s standards, so one weekend he invited a politician’s son over for a play date, and there was to be no more talk about Felix again.” I opened and closed my mouth. The stories were endless but yet all the same.
“Everything that I’d loved had always been taken from me. Pried out of my clenched hands.” I raised my shaking fists in front of me. “Exchanged for something that someone else thought to be better for me. I didn’t want Alex to be taken too.” I sniffed, running my hands up and down my thighs. “My father made an unexpected visit to campus senior year.” I could clearly remember the argument that ensued when he walked in on Alex and me in a compromising position. Threats were made from both myself and my father while Alex sat doe-eyed with the sheet pulled to his chest. “He promised to stop paying for school. To tell my mother. To disown me. That I could’ve handled, it was the private threat to ruin Alex, to lookcloselyinto him and his parents’ citizenship that eventually made me concede.” My father was a powerful man. He would’ve come through on his promises. “Alex didn’t have to be taken from me, because in the end I gave him away. The choice was mine, and I chose incorrectly.”
“It doesn’t sound like it was your fault. You thought you were doing the right thing.”
I didn’t have the heart, or the guts, to admit that even as an adult, my father’s approval had meant something to me. “I met Emily at a function held on my parents’ estate. She’d stuck to the corners of the room all night, no more happy to be there than me.” I rushed through the not-so-happy ending caused by my cowardice. “Within months we were married, Alex killed himself, and my parents died in a car crash.” I pounded a fist into my palm, causing Phoenix to jerk. It was all fornothing. I’d given in for nothing.
“I’m sorry, Sebastian. Does Emily know—”
“—No. Our parents were good friends. Well, powerful people are rarely friends in the sense that you’re familiar with. Quid pro quo was more like it. We didn’t marry for love.” Though Emily had been hopeful. “She came into this with the best of intentions. She tried to get through to me, but I was always out of reach.” I’d resented her for so long. With my father gone, I’d misplaced my blame. It was easier than accepting the fault as my own.
“Why didn’t you tell her?” He kneeled in front of me, resting his hands on my knees. He resembled a golden prince in the candlelight. His cerulean blue eyes brightened and sparkled like shards of the finest crystal. I couldn’t resist touching him, even if it was something as simple as grazing the backs of his hands with mine.
“‘The masks we must wear,’” I quoted on a sigh riddled with exhaustion. I’d deserved the hand I’d been dealt. Emily came with her own baggage. She’d suffered in similar ways, forced to lead a life that wasn’t her choosing. Loss wasn’t lost on her. But her story wasn’t mine to tell. Her reasons were her own.
I ran my hand through his hair, cupping the back of his neck. A faint hue of pink rose to Phoenix’s cheeks as he sat back on his haunches and closed his eyes.
“That feels good.” He swallowed.
“A hand through your hair?” Such a simple act, yet his tone conveyed how much it meant to him.
He sluggishly opened his eyes, the blue expanded. “Being touched,” he confessed through freshly licked lips.
I nodded. Understanding him wholeheartedly, feeling the bond form between us as my skin molded to his. He ran a finger across the blade of my cheek bone. “More,” I said when he dropped his hand to his lap. It’d been so long since I hadn’t had to replace the image of the person touching me with someone else. Someone whose death lay in my hands.
We gazed at each other. The dimness of the room did little to impede our ability toseeeach other. Billie Holiday waxing on about “My Man” did little to hinder us from hearing all that went unsaid but understood between us.
“Why were you upset about seeing me with Mason at the park?” He caressed my other cheek.
“Because in my mind something had been taken from me again.” Something I had no right laying claim to. “What do you want, Phoenix?”
His hand dropped, and I thought he might bolt, but the courage I’d grown to know him for won out over his fear of having to voice his desires. “You,” he whispered.
“This is wrong.” I needed to be clear that he grasped that. I had no excuses. No platitudes to exempt us from the possible fallout if we were caught. I wouldn’t blame this on old trauma. I was in my right mind, and I needed Phoenix to assure me he was in his. We would be embarking on a bad thing, but sometimes, people did bad things for no reason. No, that wasn’t true. Sometimes, people did bad things simply because it felt good. We would reap what we sowed. “Do you understand that?”
“Why now?” He gnashed on his bottom lip. “Is it my fault? Could you maybe fix things?” Phoenix was good. Getting what he wanted wouldn’t release his conscience from the possibility that it came at the expense of hurting someone else.
“I can’t say that we would be divorcing right now if it wasn’t for having met you—” I pressed down on his shoulders when he made to stand. “I’m not in love with her, and she’s not in love with me. Your presence did not tear our marriage down the middle. If anything it shined a light on the fact that it would never be whole. A fact that we were perfectly aware of. My parents were gone. My career path became my own after that. I was no longer the great merger that our parents thought I’d be. There was no longer power in our union, yet she stayed in this, in thisthingright along with me.” Our marriage wasn’t always one of misery. And there were blips of time where I’d convinced myself that maybe I could fall in love with her. She was a beautiful person, but I feared my guilt and anger over our arranged marriage, one that cost me greatly, got in the way of what could have been had we met under different circumstances. Maybe before Alexander. Because nothing after him would’ve prospered. Until maybe now...
