Page 38 of Rarely Pure and Never Simple
"Thanks."
They stood shoulder to shoulder, watching the cloud shadows play tag across the hills, neither one, apparently, ready to move yet. "He wasn't good to you at all, was he? Your uncle."
For a long time, Damien said nothing, and Blaze assumed he wanted to ignore the question. Instead of answering, he finally asked, "Blaze, do you believe in God?"
"Gonna hurt yourself on the conversational whiplash someday, Twitch." Blaze gnawed on a ragged fingernail, certain that an offhand, sarcastic answer wasn't appropriate. "I don't believe that there's some guy with a white beard up in the clouds who has to tell us what's right and wrong. People know what's wrong. They just want excuses. But I do believe in something bigger than us. Something that connects all of us. Just don't have a name for it."
Damien nodded, every word dragged out slowly as if his throat were full of broken glass. "I wanted to believe in God. I wanted it so badly. Every night in my bed, every time in that root cellar, I prayed so hard for someone to save me. For a long time, I blamed myself. I wasn't good enough. Hadn't prayed hard enough."
Blaze wanted to wrap an arm around him, but the heavy bitterness made him hesitate. "No one came."
"No one came," Damien said on a slow, measured breath. "In the end, I suppose I saved myself. Though at the time, I was sure I couldn't live with what I'd done. In that moment, I knew there was no God."
"Damien?" Blaze dared to put a hand on his shoulder, pleased when Damien leaned into the touch instead of jerking way. "How old were you?"
"Ten."
Blaze squeezed his eyes shut, unable to comprehend such bleak despair at such a young age. It had to have been horrific. He didn't press for details. He didn't have to. So many years later, Damien still hadn't recovered.How can your own blood do that to you? How can someone do that to a child he's supposed to be protecting? Blaze's dad hadn't always been great, but he'd never been scared of his old man. Ever. And their final falling out had been when he was old enough to be on his own.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked."
Damien gave a weary, one-shouldered shrug and leaned into him until his head rested on Blaze's chest. "It's always bad for me when it's about kids."
The jobs he was handed, Blaze knew that was what he meant. Threads of anger curled in his gut when he realized people used Damien this way—the government, the Guild, Dr. Parma when she needed to. They knew how a case involving underage variants would affect him, but they also knew he wouldn't be able to turn his back on the case. They knew all about the wreckage of his past, probably in more detail than Blaze would ever know, and they exploited it.
Despite the warning bells in the sensible half of his brain, he wrapped an arm around Damien and hugged him tight. "You need to rest, Twitch. We'll go see if Shuds has some kind of shower arrangement and then someplace out of the way we can crash."
"Blaze?" Damien's soft voice quavered, a terrible vulnerability in it that made Blaze wonder if he might shatter right then like a microglass sculpture under vibrational stress.
"Yeah?"
"Sleep with me?"
"Sleep? As in close your eyes and slumber, not as in a euphemism?"
"Yes."
"I can do that."
With his arm still draped around Damien's shoulders, which might have been comfort for Damien or it might have been the only thing still holding Blaze up, they turned and meandered back down the hill.
6
BDP
Shudder's solution to showering in his foothill hideaway was rather ingenious, though Blaze would never have told him so. He had poly pipes running from a couple of latrine buildings to the lowest point in the fast-running stream nearby. A point well above that served to pipe drinking water into the camp. Someone in his organization had civil engineering skills, since Shuds barely knew how to swing a hammer.
The shower, though, was communal and located in one of the valley-floor level caves where an impressive waterfall crashed down the rocks and into a continually circulating pool. The waterfall Blaze thought was natural from the smooth-worn rocks behind it, but the perfect drainage might have had some human help.
Blaze had taken first crack at it, the cold water bracing to the point of stealing his breath, but he'd managed to get respectably clean with only a few small whimpers and without asking Damien to help him back out of the pool.
His assumptions were knocked on their ass again when Damien stripped down right beside him. He had thought that someone so reticent and socially uncomfortable would be more body shy. Apparently, that wasn't part of the package. Damien did fold every piece of clothing carefully, precisely, and stacked everything in a neat, architecturally sound pile, which restored Blaze's faith in the universe. In doing so, though, he practically waved his supremely fine ass in Blaze's face. Not that Blaze was interested in more than the view, but it was beautiful in its hard-muscled perfection, and Blaze would need to be dead not to look.
Oh, fuck. Who are you trying to fool? Of course, I'm interested. It's just damn stupid to be. He's a mess. You're a mess. He's a damn client, for fuck's sake.This was why he couldn't be acting on it. Hell, no.
Damien in the water was too fine a sight as well, water sluicing over sleek muscles, sparkling with intermittent sunlight from the ceiling shafts above the falls. Until he turned and stepped up onto the ledge to wash his front, giving Blaze a view he had missed before. White scars laced Damien's stomach and thighs, an interwoven mesh of them. Nothing on his back or chest where someone might spot them if he removed his shirt, but only on the front, below the belt line, the care in placement more horrifying than any other remnant of torture Blaze had ever seen.
He looked down quickly, busying himself with his bootlaces before Damien could catch him staring. Self-inflicted? Possible. But there was a rhythm to the scars suggesting the use of a lash. Unlikely that Damien was a cutter or that those marks were made with a pocketknife. Good thing his uncle was dead. Blaze would have hunted him down and killed him, slowly and painfully.
