Page 77 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
He bit back something that he didn’t want to admit was a sob, hiding his face behind his hands. Where was that damned gala mask when he needed one? “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“It’s okay.” Shane sighed and wrapped his arms tighter to his chest. He glanced away, then back, and when his gaze met Andres’s again, he held it there. “But you did this at the boardwalk, and the next morning, and now... You hurt me.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to.” Andres would not keep crying. He could not. They had work to do here, and he was ruining it, turning his eyes puffy and smearing his makeup and making a spectacle of them both. But the more effort he put into keeping his calm, the harder it became. “I know I keepreacting,but I promise I’ve never wanted to.”
“Sometimes when I go to touch you, I swear you flinch?” It wasn’t an accusation the way Shane said it, but a question, his voice soft and his brow tight. “Has something happened to you, Andres? Did someone…”
“No? No!” Andres laughed, a bitter, choked sound that only made him feel worse. “Why would you ask that?”
Shane curled his arms across his chest, his hands creeping toward his neck. “It’s just that after the blood bank, I looked up more about physical reactions to past events—PTSD and stuff.” His tone softened, and he edged closer, just a hair, but enough to make Andres want to pull him all the way in, hold onto him and never let go. “I know I implied then that you got over Maul’s assault easily, but I was upset and I jumped to conclusions. If the way you’re reacting now is because of Maul, you could tell me, you know that right?”
It was sweet and honest and wrong. Shane was wrong. Andres couldn’t even fathom it, his mind glancing off the idea with a fit of panic. “It’s not like that!” It came out sharper than he meant it; as sharp as the truth. “As you’d said, what Maul did doesn’t bother me that way.”
“And there’s nothing else?” Shane asked, curling a little tighter.
“I think I’d know if someone fucked me up enough to cause this.” He would, he’d know. He’d remember it. Something that big and traumatic—he’d be like Shane, covering his weaknesses. The thought made him drag his hands back through his hair. They didn’t shake. So where the hell were his tears still coming from?
Shane didn’t meet his gaze as he whispered, “Then is it me?”
“No!” Andres responded instantly, throwing all his resolve into the word. He forced himself to breathe after. “I don’t know. I mean, I know it’snotyou. But I don’tknowwhat it is. It’s like something takes over my body and I’m aware, in my head,that you would never show me anything but affection. In that moment, I don’t see you, though. I just see an invader.”
“An invader?”
“I know how that sounds, okay. But I…” He swallowed around the lump in his throat, wiping back another tear. All he wanted was to stop talking about this, to pull Shane into his arms and let everything just stop. He trusted Shane. With his love, with his life. Maybe with his past too. Perhaps they could understand together. Andres ran both hands through his hair, wishing it were Shane’s dirty-blonde waves under his fingers, bringing with them the instinct to nurture and not to yank out. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been like this long before Maul. The reaction was just weaker, or maybe because I was weaker, it wasn’t so obvious the way it is now. If someone grabbed me back then, it wasn’t like I could do anything about it.”
Shane looked no less distressed and worried, but he nodded comfortingly, watching Andres with a gaze like a very specific kind of prey-thing; large and dangerous and prepared to fuck up the world for his family. “Who was grabbing you, my love?”
“Everyone?” Andres said, half an assumption and half a memory. “But no one was abusive,” he clarified. “I was just a small, distractable kid and I hit all my growth spurts late. People pulled me around. And sometimes my friends or partners, if I wouldn’t leave my sewing or I was caught up cleaning or reading or something. And I didn’t yank away back then. At least, not very hard. It would get a laugh most of the time—I was a joke to them anyway, the sad little neat-freak twink—and you know how parents and aunts and uncles are.” It was beginning to sound like a string of excuses, so he shut up.
“Andres.” Shane spoke tenderly. “I mean this with all my love, but I’m not sure if your opinion on what is and isn’t abusive is entirely accurate.”
“Oh,” was all Andres could think to say in response. “Well,” he added, and rubbed his wrists. Then another, softer, “Oh.” He finally managed something a lot like, “But I—” and then shut up again.
Maybe Shane was… right.
Andres didn’t want to admit that. The idea felt large and terrifying and awful and it meant… it meant… he didn’t even know. That he’d been a victim for the first half of his life? That he should have done something, changed something? His family wasn’t malicious, he knew that, and his friends had just been cruel in the same way that many boys were allowed, even encouraged, to be, and while he’d always been pretty sure the couple of partners he’d had before turning hadn’t likedhimas much as they’d like the idea of a pretty twink they could fuck at their leisure, they’d never actually forced him into anything he hadn’t wanted. Just latched onto him, made it clear what they wanted, and that theycouldtake it.
It didn’t feel like enough to fall apart over. Yet the memories crawled up Andres’s spine all the same, begging him to look away. Forget it all. Go back to the life where none of them could take from him any longer.
“Ah,” Andres said finally. “I guess that could be it.”
Shane was quiet for so long that Andres’s stomach began to hurt. He wiped away another awful tear. When his little swan spoke again, it was so gentle and so firm, he felt like the vulnerable one, being unfurled for a lover. “And Maul?”
“I haven’t thought about that night in years.” Andres couldn’t bring himself to do it now, either. He didn’t want to, he realized. Because ithadhurt. Of course it had hurt. He’d been turned into a vampire. But there was a far worse part of it than that even: what Maul did to him had felt… normal.
Not right or good, but accurate, somehow. Like that was just how things were for human Andres; his plans and desires fallingto the wayside because someone stronger wanted something from him. Even if it hurt him. Even if it drove fangs into the already mutilated flesh of his soul and fucked it up in a darker and more terrifying way than ever before.
Andres’s throat caught and slowly, terribly, he began to sob.
Shane didn’t reach for him, but he extended his wrists, vein-side up, calm but defiant. “Would you like to hold me?” he asked, a lifeline in a storm.
Andres grabbed onto him, pulling him close, wrapping him up like a security blanket. He cried softly in Shane’s hair, and it felt a little better, somehow, than standing there alone. People still glanced their way—he could feel their gazes, their unsubtle whispers—but it mattered less now, and that was a revelation. “Thank you.”
Shane kissed his temple in response.
They lingered there, Andres’s chest slowly turning from havoc to a post-cry emptiness, a feeling that said the world was supposed to get better, but offering no actual improvement yet. His contacts blurred across his eyes as he opened them, and he had to blink and twitch his gaze around to finally get the damn things back into place. By then, something almost like reassurance had settled in him.
There was a reason he was like this. And if there was a reason, at least he could understand it, predict it, work through it.
