“Ain’t deep,” she said. “Just need to get it clean and get it covered.”
“Tell me if he’s okay?” Nathan asked, and he allowed Hellabeth to maneuver his hand closer to the water.
“This’ll sting.”
It did, but Nathan didn’t give a shit. “Beth, just fuckin’ say something, would you?”
Hellabeth chuckled. “That’s what he calls me when he’s angry.”
“That happen a lot?” Nathan flinched when the soap got added to the mix.
Another chuckle. “No. And I’m not sayin’ nothin’ ’cause I don’t know nothin’. I know he limped out of the warehouse. I know he wasn’t feverish. I know he went straight into your bedroom and crawled under the covers.” Hellabeth glowered in Matt’s direction. “I know that he and the preacher had a nice chat while I had to wait outside.” She snorted. “Always the last to know these days.”
“That’s more than I know, if it makes you feel better.”
Hellabeth’s eyebrows went up, down, and the left one arched. Nathan paused, studying the line of her jaw and the fullness of her mouth. “He calls you Beth, huh?”
“Yeah.” Hellabeth got a paper towel and started patting Nathan’s skin dry.
“He call you anything else?”
“Oh, Izzy, sometimes.” She smiled.
“How about ‘sis’?”
“No,” Hellabeth said, her predator’s gaze cold and calculating. “Not ever.”
“Sorry,” Nathan said quickly.
Hellabeth handed Nathan the paper towel, and she sniffed. “Though he did give me the name. Couldn’t say Elizabeth. He said Ellabeth.” She shrugged. “It stuck.”
“It suits you.”
Hellabeth grinned. “Fuckin’ frat boy. You’re cute. I get it.” She suddenly leaned closer and pressed the length of her body against Nathan’s. The hilts of not one but two weapons dug into Nathan. Hellabeth’s motion was entirely the opposite of seductive. In that moment, Nathan was a rat being wrapped and squeezed by a python.
“An’ you’re gonna treat him good, or you’ll get to fuck with me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Hellabeth startled, laughed, and slid away. “Yeah.” She tapped Nathan’s cheek. “Cute.”
Nathan cleared his throat and worked on convincing his bowels that immediate evacuation was not necessary. “You wouldn’t, by any chance, be into women, would you?”
“Why?”
“Nothing. Just have this friend…” Nathan licked his lips. The idea of Laura and Hellabeth in the same room was likely a bad idea. Nuclear-plant meltdown sort of bad. “Never mind. I take it the minister knows that you two are—”
“’Course he does. The people who have to know, do. Others don’t. Better that way.”
“Sure, I get it,” Nathan said, even though he didn’t.
Hellabeth sniffed at Matt, who was off the phone and sitting on the sofa, lost in thought or prayer or whatever. “Hale’s been trying to get me to see him for years. Don’t need it. Don’t want it. I do my own thing.”
“And whatever that thing is means you don’t advertise that you and Hale are related?” Nathan ventured.
Hellabeth’s silence was answer enough. She went to the fridge to get out the fruit juice, and the bedroom door opened. A small, plump woman with gray hair and bright blue eyes stepped into the living room.
Hellabeth forgot her drink, stalking around the kitchen’s bar and over to Vicky with the empty glass in her hand. “Well?” Hellabeth demanded.
“He’s fine. The worst is a possible bruised rib,” Vicky said, but Nathan didn’t bother to stick around to hear the rest. Not with the source of information so close.
Nathan pushed past both women and went into the bedroom, shutting himself into the dim. The bathroom light was off, and the blinds were cracked, imprisoning Fury in a cage of moonlight. Fury rested on his back, covers at his waist, torso bare, and one arm tucked under his head on the pillow.
“Hey,” Nathan whispered. He toed off his shoes as he walked, climbing onto the bed still in his suit. He crawled next to Fury, burrowed under the blankets, and rested beside his boyfriend, one hand propping up his head and the other on Fury’s chest.
One of Fury’s eyes was swollen nearly shut, but the other was steady on Nathan. “Hey,” Fury said, and if Nathan didn’t know better, he’d say Fury sounded congested and raspy, as though he’d been crying. Nathan couldn’t really fit Fury weeping from physical pain into Nathan’s world without it shifting off its axis. Which meant…
“You all right?” Nathan asked.
“How was the party?” Fury coughed, and Nathan reached to get a glass of water and hand it over.
“Doesn’t matter,” Nathan answered while Fury drank.
“You look good,” Fury said in a pause between gulps. “What happened to your hand?”
Nathan waited until Fury put down the glass. Then he turned Fury’s head toward him and kissed Fury carefully, in case Fury’s lips were split. “They said you wanted me.”
“I did,” Fury whispered. “I do. Bad night, Nate.”
“I’m here.” Nathan reached and found Fury’s hand and laced together their fingers. “So this is where you tell me what the asshole did to deserve it.”
Fury’s eyes slammed shut. He wrenched away, eyes closed, and his jaw muscles flexed in a clench. “Nobody
deserves
it. Not even him.”
“Okay.” Nathan kissed the pounding pulse at Fury’s temple. “I’m sorry.”
Fury breathed like he was remembering how the process worked, all jerky stops and starts. “I lost it. Guy was big. Dark. Older than all the punks Dennis usually has in the rings. And he looked like…”
“Who?” Nathan had a horrible suspicion that he knew where this conversation was heading. “Who did he look like?”
“My old man,” Fury said grimly, but the admission let him exhale, long and loud and lax against the bed once again.
“It wasn’t him, though, right?” Nathan asked, but his weak attempt at humor went awry when Fury’s eyes opened, flat and dull and inwardly fixed.
“No. Old man’s dead.” Fury released Nathan’s hand, and his voice was soft but clear. “I killed him.”
Nathan probably should have felt at least a twinge of anxiety when his boyfriend was lying in their shared bed, owning up to murder after nearly killing another man earlier the same night. But Nathan’s faith in Fury and that the bastard probably did deserve it, no matter what Fury thought, was too damned strong. Nathan didn’t say a word, but he found Fury’s hand and took it again. Fury made a soft sound that might have been pain or might have been relief. Sometimes, Nathan knew, they were basically the same thing.
“We had a farm, out in Maryville. Me, my sister, my old man, and whoever my dad had gotten to help him out.” Fury spoke as if going by rote, but Nathan didn’t care. He held as still as humanly possible, kept clasping Fury’s hand, and listened with every fiber in his being.
“Mom was gone. Meth head. Got cleaned up enough to have us kids but left when I was too young to remember her. Dad always had women around to fuck. Some of them were nice to Izzy and me. Most of them didn’t give a shit.
“Dad fixed things. Cars, TVs, whatever he could get his hands on. He built things too. He had this shed that he called his shop. I spent a lot of time there, can still remember the smell of oil and grease and sawdust.” Fury’s throat worked in a swallow, and his tone hardened. “But mostly, I remember Dad and the game we’d play.”
Nathan didn’t ask, didn’t say a word, and he held his breath until Fury chose to continue, somber and grave, like a spirit handing out bad omens. “I think back on it now, and it wasn’t that bad, I guess. Not compared to what he could have done. He’d come in the room at night, sit down next to me, and sort of watch. Sometimes he’d tell me he knew what I was, because he was the same way, but not to worry ’cause he had friends who were our way too, and we’d figure it out. I didn’t know what the hell he meant until the night he came in and did more than sit.”
Stifling a sound of disgust and pain, Nathan bit his lip. Fury turned his head, gaze on Nathan’s chest. “He never fucked me. He told me to play with my dick or did it himself sometimes. That’s it. Never amounted to much, but it felt all right. Dad didn’t come in every night either. Don’t know how often it was, but he was always drunk and sometimes he was high. I didn’t think anythin’ of the touchin’ either, until Izzy started sleepin’ in my bed, and she told me the new rules of the game.”
“What were they?” Nathan whispered when Fury didn’t talk for a full five minutes and seemed more and more lost in memory and less and less there with Nathan.
“She told me it was too easy, getting’ into the bedroom, and Dad wanted a challenge. So she started puttin’ a chair under the doorknob. And sometimes, she’d get me to help scoot the dresser in front of the door. One time, Dad came through the window, and you’d think Izzy would have screamed or Dad would have yelled, but it didn’t go like that. He passed out on the floor next to the bed, and Izzy kept me awake all night. She said if we fell asleep, we’d lose the game.
“It must have gone on for years.” Fury sighed. “I don’t remember how old I was when it started, but I remember when it stopped. I was about ten, maybe eleven, and big for my age. I was out in the shop doin’ somethin’ for Dad. He came in with two of his buddies, all drunk and strung out.”
Nathan must have tensed or given himself away, because Fury squeezed his hand and met Nathan’s eyes for a couple of seconds. “Not as bad as it could have been. They got me drunk, they got me undressed, and they watched me play with myself. I don’t know why it wasn’t nothin’ more than that. Maybe Dad really was gay and in his fucked-up way, he was tryin’ to let me know it was all right.”
“That wasn’t all right,” Nathan spluttered. “In no way was any of that all right.”
“I know.” Fury searched Nathan’s face and settled somewhere around Nathan’s nose. “And Izzy knew too. She stopped it ’cause she came barging in with another one of Dad’s friends right behind her. Tony was a huge guy; big blond bear with a beard. And when he came in and saw what was goin’ on, he started yellin’ and beatin’ the shit out of people. I remember the way Tony’s fist connected with Dad’s jaw. I remember him screamin’ that they were all sick fucks. Izzy got me out of there, and we spent the night in the woods out past our fields.”
“Did your dad go after Izzy?” Nathan asked, and out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at the doorway leading into the living room where Izzy now sat. He tried to picture Hellabeth as a twelve-year-old savior, and he kept seeing her in chain mail with a round shield and that short sword she carried. If only she could have been so well armed.
Fury shook his head. “I woke up, and Izzy was gone. I found out later she was shackin’ up with her boyfriend at the time, who was nineteen and thought she was sixteen. I went back home, went to school, and ate canned beans out of the cabinets. Dad came out of the shop eventually, and he never said a word. Never saw Tony again, and I guess he didn’t call nobody. Social services never came or nothing like that. Maybe he figured beatin’ the hell out of Dad would do the trick. It sorta worked. Dad never tried to come into my room again, but I started sleepin’ with the chair under the knob. When I did sleep, that is. Guess that’s about when I started thinkin’ taking naps when I got home from school was better than sleepin’ at night. That’s when I found out I liked readin’, though I was slow. Borrowed books from the library, and the library teacher let me keep ’em out for longer than usual. Nice woman.”
Nathan’s chest constricted, his heart suddenly too big to fit. “Yeah, sounds like she was.”
“Eventually, Izzy came home, and I was too dumb to figure out why it was that she and dad used to keep bruises and cuts all the time. I remember once we had to go to the ER ’cause Dad had this gash on his arm that needed stitches, and Izzy’s cheekbone was fractured. I got questioned over and over by women in dresses and by this young cop, and they always asked me if I heard anythin’. And I had to tell them that no, it’d been quiet. The only thing I ever heard was thumpin’ around, and that was usually when it was too late. Dad would already be bloody.”
“Didn’t she sleep with the chairs under the knobs or get a lock or something?” Nathan asked, despairing over events that had already happened and that he couldn’t change, no matter how much he wanted to make them right.
Fury didn’t speak again for a little while, and Nathan rhythmically bit his tongue to keep quiet in the interim. “Didn’t find out till I was grown and he was dead, but he told her he’d keep his hands off me if he could try to lay hands on her.” Fury chuckled, the sound sudden and out of place. “Too bad he didn’t say that she couldn’t be armed or fight back, because she did. Like a hellcat. She told me later that she’d broken his fingers, dislocated his kneecap, knocked out teeth… She learned how to fight by keepin’ him off her. She got good at fightin’ real quick, especially when she learned that if she hurt him bad enough and fast enough, he would quit and wouldn’t come back for a while.”
“You’d think he’d learn,” Nathan drawled.
“I figure he must have liked it.”
“And nobody did anything to help you? Surely the cops must have seen what was going on.”
Fury covered their joined hands with his free one. “Maybe. Never understood Izzy’s reasons, but she never said a word. Maybe she thought the system wouldn’t treat us any better and we’d get split up. Maybe she wanted to stay and keep beatin’ the shit out of Dad, to get him back in her own way. I don’t know, but we was two county farm kids, Nathan. Nobody gave a shit.”
“But—”
“You have any idea how many kids out there are hurt by their families? Mean people have kids, Nate. So do selfish ones and stupid ones. If I had a dollar for every man or woman who came through Reverend Hutchinson’s counseling circle with that kind of story to tell, I’d be rich, and the money would keep on coming because it don’t stop. And it’s not all sex abuse. It’s hittin’ and yellin’ and tellin’ the kids that they’re no good ’cause they’re fat or lazy or don’t love Jesus enough. It’s everywhere, Nate, and you should know. You’re one of ’em too.”
Nathan had to look away because Fury’s eyes were too bright with the dark kind of knowledge. Fury briefly clasped the side of Nathan’s neck, rubbed a thumb behind Nathan’s ear, and let go to cover their hands again.