9. Eight

“Xion?” I rattled the door in its frame, but he didn’t answer. I could hear him on the other side muffling his crying, but to get to him, I’d have to break down the door. That would only scare him more.

It’d been a mistake to kiss him back, but how could I not? The kiss was so awkward, so beautiful and innocent, that it broke my heart in two. He’d let himself be vulnerable with me, and I’d ruined it by pushing things too far, too fast.

I went outside thinking the winter freeze would help cool off my head. Instead, it just made me more aware of the buzzing on my lips, heightening the memory of the kiss.

I lit a cigarette, but it didn’t do enough to calm the rising rage inside of me. I needed to hit something, so I did. My fist slammed into a pile of tires and bounced off, the strike anything but satisfying. I needed something harder, something that would take what I was feeling and absorb it. Something that deserved to be hit.

Harold Spencer was the first thing that came to mind.

But he was out of reach, at least for now. My talk with Annie Laskin had been productive, at least. I told her a client had hired me to go after Harold, and that the client wished to remain anonymous. It was only half true, but she’d respected my request like a true professional. I might not get so lucky when Warrick or Shepherd found out. They might know what I was really doing, and then what would I do? Pay them to keep quiet? How much did they really care about Xion, anyway? It couldn’t be that much. After all, they’d sold him to me without a second thought.

I went back into the trailer and pressed my ear to Xion’s door. He’d stopped crying and fallen asleep, snoring quietly. Slightly relieved, I went to my room to pour myself a drink. It was probably unwise to keep drinking, especially considering where it’d led last time, but I needed to do something to take the edge off.

A sudden crash in the next room had me jumping out of my chair. There was the sound of shattering glass and a guttural scream, the kind I used to only hear in scary movies.

Xion!

Before I knew what I was doing, I stumbled out of my room toward his. The door was still locked, but this time, that wasn’t going to stop me. I kicked it in, ignoring the chunk of wall that came out with it. At least the damn thing had stayed on the hinges. Mostly.

I shoved open the door the rest of the way just as something crashed into the wall next to my head.

“Don’t touch me!” Xion raged at the dark. He sat on the edge of the bed, back stiff, fingers digging into the mattress so hard his knuckles were white. “Leave me the fuck alone!”

He kept screaming while I surveyed the wreck that was his room. The shattering glass I’d heard earlier was a cup he’d smashed against the wall, and the second thing he’d thrown was his alarm clock.

I knew I wasn’t supposed to wake him up when he was in the throes of a night terror, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just stand there and let him suffer alone.

“Xion?”

Xion didn’t respond. He just kept whimpering, shouting, and flinging his arms out as if he were pushing away invisible enemies.

I left the doorway, navigating carefully through the mess on the floor to come sit on the bed next to him. He immediately tried to take a swing at me, but there was no power behind it, and he was punching blind. I caught his wrist easily and brought it to his side.

He tried to get up from the bed. If I let him start sleepwalking, it’d be a disaster, so I did the only thing I could. I put my arms around him and held him there.

“Leave me alone!” He screamed and twisted before bending in half to throw me off. When it didn’t work, he went completely limp, and I had to tighten my grip on him to keep him from falling to the floor.

I thought he’d fallen back asleep until I heard the low mournful wail. Inside me, something broke at the sound. I’d heard too many widows cry for their husbands in that tone, clutching their lifeless bodies to their chest in the aftermath of what I’d done overseas. That wasn’t the sort of cry normal people knew. It was the raw pain of loss, of grief so deep that it could tear lives apart. It wasn’t a sound a twenty-year-old man should ever make.

He groaned and pulled his fists in against his stomach like he was trying to curl up.

I put my arms around him and held him. “I’ve got you.”

“I’m sorry,” he moaned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t…” Sobs swallowed whatever else he’d been trying to say. He twisted in my arms and threw himself at me, burying his head against my chest.

“It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

That was a lie. Whatever was going on in his head, he wasn’t okay. Something in Xion was broken, and I didn’t have the tools or the skill to fix it. All I could do was be there. It wasn’t enough. I knew he needed more, deserved more. If I’d had all the money and all the resources in the world, I’d have given it to him. I’d have pulled down the sun, moon, and stars for Xion if it would heal the scars, but I didn’t even know where to start.

So he wasn’t okay, and I didn’t have him. Nobody did. Xion, by default, walked the world alone, repelling everyone like there was a magnetic field around him.

This is the closest we’ll ever be, I thought, my heart sinking into the sour acid of my stomach. And he won’t even remember it.

Tomorrow, he’d wake up, grouse at me, and act like tonight never happened. I didn’t know if he didn’t remember the dozens of times we’d done this—me holding him while he cried and fought ghosts—but he never brought it up. Neither did I. Things were different in the light. Each of us had too much pride to admit this was who we were in the dark: weak, broken, needy beasts, desperately trying to hold on to hope for a better tomorrow.

I held him until he cried himself back to sleep until I was teetering on the edge of it myself. He was snoring gently when I lowered him back onto the pillow, his face relaxed and serene, soft lips parted. Sandy brown hair swooped down over his closed eyes. Aside from the dark circles under his eyes, you’d never know he’d been crying. He looked so helpless like that, so innocent. Almost sweet. Maybe he had been all those things at one time. I ached to know that side of him, to get past the thick armor he put on every day to function. It must’ve been so exhausting. All I wanted to do was wrap him up tight and hold onto him, to make everything okay.

But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t protect him from the terrible things that’d already happened. The best I could do was try to avenge him.

I sighed and moved my hands away from him before I could do something stupid. My fingers brushed against something rough tucked between the wall and his mattress. With a frown, I closed my hand around a wad of paper and pulled it free.

My eyebrows shot up and I almost snickered as I took in the over-the-top cover of some vintage gay porn magazine. Well, well. What do we have here? I started flipping through the pages. Damn, this is some hardcore stuff. Where’d you get this?

It was old, lots of leather and Tom of Finland type stuff with some bondage thrown in for good measure. A far cry from what most boys his age should be reading. Hell, most boys his age probably didn’t do much reading at all. They just got online and polished the old gearshift to porn. Guess he didn’t have that luxury.

I tried to remember what it was like to be twenty, to still be trying to figure out who you were and what you were into. I hadn’t had that luxury. The world was a different place when I was young. Xion should get the chance to explore that side of himself without having to deal with all the shit I went through, as long as it wasn’t hurting him.

I rolled the magazine up and put it back where I’d found it before going down the hall to my room. The bed was a mess, but I flopped down in it anyways, grabbing my phone on the way. It was going to be another long, lonely, sleepless night.