Fourteen ~ David
(This issue may contain triggers for some readers)
It didn’t feel anything like I had thought it would…
I’d been dreaming about this night, this moment, for years. I’d fantasized various means of pain and agony for the man, envisioned horrific fates like castration, hanging, being drawn and quartered, and even tying him to post along some rustic shore and watching as the tide rolled in and drowned him. A bullet to the head lacked the poetic beauty of some means of execution but it would work. Seeing him whimper and grovel at my feet was empowering in ways that Micah and James would psychoanalyze me over for decades.
“You hurt the wrong person, motherfucker,” I said to my uncle bowed before me, his brow on the floor, his hands tied behind his back.
“I don’t know who you are but—”
That hit me in the gut. I dropped to one knee, grabbed him by the hair, and jerked his head upward. His face was slick with tears and snot. He wasn’t quite so all powerful now, was he? No, he was not. He was a sick, pathetic sack of shit who got off on using people who couldn’t fight back. Kids, young men, escorts. My pup. My fingers tightened. He whined.
“You don’t recognize me?” I placed the barrel of the Glock to his temple. He coughed out a snotty plea for forgiveness. “Fuck you. When I asked you to stop, did you? All those years ago when you snuck into my room and hurt me, did you ever once stop when I asked?”
“Oh God,” he blubbered, “I’m sorry. Are you Mikey? Alan?”
I snapped off the safety, bile rising up into my mouth. There were more than just me. Oh yeah, this scum was dying here tonight, and I’d make sure he knew who it was that put the slug into his brain and why.
“David. I’m David, your fucking nephew,” I snarled, pushing the barrel in a little tighter.
“David,” he whispered, his nose running into and over his lips. “David…”
“David!” The shout from behind startled me slightly. I’d been so lost in the pain of knowing he’d hurt other kids that I was just one of many wadded-up bits of trash lobbed into the dumpster. “Sir, stop, stop, please stop!”
Pup. I heard him as clear as day. My gaze darted from the man begging for his life to my boy. He was directly behind me, face drawn in terror, feet bare and filthy.
“Where are your shoes, Pup?” I asked as if I were enquiring about the weather. Zach inched closer, hands out, his green eyes rife with misery.
“Sir, please, don’t kill him. Please. I know he hurt you—”
“There were more,” I told him, my voice suddenly sounding distorted to my ears. “He said there were more. Mikey, Alan. He didn’t even know me. There were so many, this fucker couldn’t even keep them all straight. And then there was you… what he did to you. Yeah, no, he dies for that alone.”
“No, Sir please, don’t do this. If you pull the trigger, you’ll go to jail. I’ll die if they take you away. Please…” Amber knelt beside me, his hands out, shaking violently but still cupped, waiting for me to place the Glock into his palm. “Give me the gun. We’ll make sure he goes to jail for what he did.”
“David, please,” Paul whined, “listen to Amber! He’s a good boy, a good pup that—”
I lost all manner of control for a minute or two, using the gun to knock the name of the man I loved above all others out of his filthy mouth. A few teeth may have hit the plush carpeting as well. Zach finally wrested the bloody gun from me, throwing it aside, and linking his fingers between mine. My eyes moved from the blood I was smearing on my boy’s grip to his face. Such a beautiful, sweet face. A face that had been hit and bruised by the pig on the floor. He pulled me away from the moaning pile of shit, easing me against a thick wall of glass that looked down over Colchester.
“He isn’t allowed to speak your name,” I told Zach as my ass hit the floor, my spine squeaking down the glass window as I went down, shirt riding up.
“He won’t, not for, like, a long time.” Zach knelt in front of me, cupped my face with sticky hands, and forced me to look at him and not my uncle writhing on the floor. “Yeah, that’s good. Look at me. Hey, hi.” He flashed a smile. I tried to smile back but something was jammed up, a cog broken inside my head, or a lever that wouldn’t flip. “No, hey, look here at me,” he said as my eyes wandered. “Yeah, look at me. Sir?”
“I see you, Pup.” And I did. It was through a shimmering gauzy film, but I did see him now.
“I called Butch; he’ll be here soon. We have to go. This guy here will press charges.”
“No,” Paul hacked up some blood. That made me smile. “No…charges…I won’t say anything, just don’t hurt me…”
“Fucker,” I snarled, a red surge of fresh hatred flickering to life.
“Ignore him, he’s dirt. He’s lower than dirt, he’s like a rotten root vegetable lying underground, all gross and vile. A funky carrot or maybe a peanut. I don’t know. Whatever grows in the dirt and has worms crawling over it. Come on, we have to go. This place is evil. It’s making us both sick and cruel, just like him and his bitch wife.”
“She’s going to kill me,” Paul wailed, and I heard true fear in his voice. I hoped Carlotta did off him. It would save the world’s children so much suffering.
Zach’s head jerked around when the front door creaked open. I flew to my feet, lunged for the Glock, raised it, and shoved my boy behind me. Butch rushed around the corner, saw me, and threw his hands into the air.
“Whoa! Whoa! Put that fucking gun down now!” Butch barked, his hazel eyes locked on the weapon. They never moved from the gun, not even to check out Paul bleeding all over the Berber. “Lay it down and walk out, Diamond. Take Amber with you. I’ll clean this up.”
“David, Sir, put it down. Let’s go home. I need to rest, everything hurts.” My gaze moved to Zach for a second. He did look pale. Relaxing my grip, I threw the Glock at Butch, who fumbled it a bit but soon had the handgun tucked into the back of his slacks.
“What exactly happened here?” Butch asked, walking the perimeter of the room as if reading it somehow.
“Sir and his uncle had a fight,” Amber replied, trying his best to get my feet moving. For some reason, my gaze was back on my uncle.
“He sexually abused me from the time I was six until I was thirteen. There were others. Then he hurt Zach.”
There, it was out, hovering in the forced cool air like a cloud of anthrax.
“One of them, eh?” Butch asked from his spot by the glass wall. “Go on then. I’ll take care of things here. Go. Me and your uncle are going to have us a little heart to heart. Ain’t that right?” He nudged the man on the floor with the toe of a well worked loafer. Paul grunted.
I let the pup pull me along, past my uncle who was whimpering about Carlotta, past Butch who was standing over my father’s brother with an unreadable expression, past the broken wine glass I’d swatted out of Paul’s hand when I’d kicked in the front door, past the painting lying on the floor that I’d thrown my uncle into. Zach led me past it all, his fingers meshed with mine. And for once, just this one time, I let him lead. I needed him to take command, to tell me what to do because my head was fucked. I was a dismal Dom.
Zach called a cab. We rode in the shadowed backseat, his head on my shoulder, his softly whispered endearments the only thing keeping me from slipping one way or the other into an abyss of either eternal childhood memories or a blinding red rage that would only end with death. He steered me into my house, helped me undress, washed me in the shower, and curled up close to me in bed. That night, he held me, wiped my tears, and coddled me. When the sun began to tint the sky purple-pink, I was still awake, but Zach was sleeping contentedly in my arms.
I pressed a kiss to his temple. He sighed. The new day looked no different than any other, but it felt forever altered. This tiny pup had saved me. I could see that now. He’d risked it all to come back to where he’d been hurt just to keep me from doing something drastic. Something that would throw us all into an even deeper pot of shit. Something that would stain my soul and lower me to the dark depths that my uncle and father dwelled in. It was a debt that I could never repay but I planned to try for the rest of our lives.
Great post!