The Intersection of Purgatory and Paradise (9 page)

Christopher stiffened against him, his hands frozen in the middle of rinsing the dried salt and sand from his chest. “I’d rather you fuck me.”

Doug licked his neck, where he still tasted like the beach. “Please?” he whispered. “Switch with me this time?” Since it might be their last time.

“I told you, I won’t do it again. Not until you’re ready to talk about why it freaks you out.”

Doug remembered the quiet promise Christopher had made to him after they first met. Doug never wanted to talk about his disastrous first relationship, and Christopher had never tried to top him again. Even when Doug had asked him to.

“His name was Leon,” he said before he could let his memories and fear drown out the name. “I’d been in Miami for a year, and I’d just gotten a transfer to the vice squad—homicide, narcotics, all of it. We met in a club one night when he asked me to dance. Dancing wasn’t like dancing with him; it was like fucking with our clothes on. It was so hot, a few minutes later we were fucking in the bathroom. After, we shared some drinks, and I told him I’d started working with the Sheriff’s Department. He didn’t seem surprised. Looking back, I think that should have clued me in that something wasn’t right. But I was young, and I wanted him so much. We moved in together about two weeks later.”

“What happened?”

“He was a drug dealer. He had some friends in the Sheriff’s Department, and they told him I was one of the new guys who’d be working narcotics in Miami Beach. For months, he told me he smoked a little pot, just gave some to his friends, that it was harmless. But over time things started to add up. Every time I got called in for a raid, we never found anything. When I went undercover, it was always dull. He was keeping track of my schedule, keeping track of when we mobilized and the areas we were canvasing. When I finally realized he was using me so he wouldn’t get busted for selling meth, I tried to tell him we were done.”

“Tried?”

Doug buried his nose in Christopher’s hair and took a deep breath, letting the lingering smell of salt calm him down. “I tried. He told me if I walked out, if I didn’t do exactly what he said, he’d go to the FBI and my supervisor and tell them everything I’d been an accessory to—the list included everything from prostitution to homicide.”

“Homicide?”

“It took catching him putting my Beretta back into my duty belt for me to wake up. And then I was such a coward, I did what he said. He was only holding my career hostage, but it still scared the fuck out of me. Maybe I was too proud to admit how badly I’d screwed things up. I don’t know. For over a month, I did what he said. I let him fuck me, beat the shit out of me, even tie me up a few times. At first, he got a kick out of the fact that he could still make me get off during sex. I know how Stockholm syndrome it must sound, but I did get off on it most of the time. I usually threw up afterward, but….” Doug shuddered as he remembered the horrible mixture of pain, pleasure, and utter terror that had burned through him while Leon fucked him, laughing, with the barrel of Doug’s gun held to the back of his head. “The things I did for him…. One night he brought a revolver. He was so excited, like a kid with a new toy. The sex that night was one long game of Russian roulette, and by the third round, I managed to come on command for him. I’d have done anything he told me to. I begged, I cried, and I willed every cell of my body to obey him, to try to please him. I was sure even if Leon didn’t shoot me, eventually my heart would fail when he pulled the trigger again.” Doug’s breath caught in his throat, his chest constricted, and his stomach clenched. He had to force his lungs to draw in air.

“How did you escape?” Christopher asked, his voice shaking and hoarse.

Doug almost laughed. “Escape? The next night he came home with a couple of other guys. He held up a roll of duct tape, and when he looked at me, I kind of lost it.”

“Lost it?”

“I beat the shit out of him. I wanted to kill him. The other two guys took off, and I just kept hitting him.”

“Did you? Kill him, I mean?”

Christopher asked it so calmly it almost made Doug’s tentative control over his stomach slip. “No,” Doug said quietly. “The rest of that night is kind of a blur, but I’m pretty sure I got my shit and got the hell out of there. I locked myself in a hotel and got plastered. I know he survived, though, because I saw him around afterward.”

“What did you do?”

Doug swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. “Nothing. I called in sick for a few days. I transferred to the North County Division, started working homicide instead of narcotics. For a couple years, I kept expecting him to pop up or my old supervisor to show up and relieve me of duty, arrest me.”

“You just kept going?”

“Yeah. What else was I going to do?”

“Report what happened. Press charges. Find out which one of your coworkers sold you out.”

“No one sold me out,” Doug insisted. “I made a stupid mistake. A lot of stupid mistakes.”

“Are you….” Christopher swallowed hard. “Are you going to throw up? Because I might, and if we both do, things are going to get messy.”

Doug shook his head, even though he wasn’t quite sure he could keep his stomach under control.

The faucet squeaked, and the hiss of the shower died. Christopher wrapped a soft, oversized towel around his shoulders. His arms wrapped around him over the towel, crushing him against Christopher’s wet, hard chest.

His chest was the only part of him that was hard at the moment. Christopher’s cock was shrunken and flaccid between his legs. Doug didn’t need to be turned on for Christopher to fuck him into oblivion, but Christopher having an erection was kind of a prerequisite.

“You said if I told you, you’d….”

“I am not going to fuck you right now.” Christopher tightened his arms around Doug’s shoulders. “Even if it was a good idea, I couldn’t.”

Doug winced and tried to get away from him. His worst fears had just crashed out of his subconscious, through his imagination, and into reality. He’d finally worked up the nerve to tell Christopher the truth, and Christopher didn’t want him.

“Tell me what you need,” Christopher said, rubbing his hands back and forth over the towel. “Please?”

“Honestly? I need you to not care,” Doug whispered. “I want you to look at me the same way you did before. To still want me, even knowing what I let him do.” Doug squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out everything. “But how could you? How could anyone want someone who….”

Christopher’s lips moved against his temple. “That’s why you stay in Elkin, isn’t it?”

“Huh?”

“Why you never went back to Miami. Why you stay in Montana, even though half your coworkers and a good number of citizens hate you.”

“It’s what I deserve,” Doug admitted, though he didn’t mean to.

“Do you really think I would think any less of you? You know me, Doug. You know what Peter did to me.”

“But you were a kid! You couldn’t have stopped it! You couldn’t have done anything!”

“I was twelve, Doug, not two. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I was twenty-two, either. What I
could
have done is exactly what I did. I survived, the same as you.”

“I was a grown man! A police officer. It was my job to protect people, and I couldn’t even protect myself. How could I ever deserve someone like you when I’m…?” Doug’s words died in his throat when Christopher hoisted him over his shoulder and carried him into the guest room. He tossed Doug on the bed, then dove on top of him, wrapping his arms around Doug so tight he had no hope of escaping. Not that he actually wanted to get away.

But that was where Christopher’s tackle ended. He held Doug but nothing more. Doug felt Christopher’s heartbeat racing, but his breathing was slow and steady. Christopher kicked the blankets up over them both and set his cheek against Doug’s damp hair.

“I wish I could convince you not to blame yourself,” Christopher said quietly. “But I know it’s not that easy.”

“Hmm?”

“You don’t think there’s anything strange about the things you said in there, do you?”

“Other than the fact that I’d rather not have said any of them? And they didn’t even convince you to flip.”

“Stop with the sex. At least for now, okay? I want you to listen to me and see how you feel about the things I say, okay?”

“Why?”

“Trust me. But let me finish before you say anything, okay?”

Doug nodded.

Christopher managed to squirm himself up onto his elbow without letting Doug out of his grip. “For years, I let my foster father rape my brother. I never told anyone about it. I let my brother convince me things would only get worse if I did. I let him make me suck him off one day. I squirmed, and I cried, but I didn’t try to fight him. I threw up all over him because I didn’t have a clue what the hell a gag reflex was, much less how to control it. I let him beat the shit out of me afterward. I let Peter rape me. I let him beat me.”

“You were a kid! You didn’t let him do anything. You survived the only way you could. It’s not—”

“Didn’t I ask you to wait before you said anything? It’s exactly the same,” Christopher insisted, his tone calm and even. “Everything you said to me in there was about what
you
did. I know how easy it is to blame yourself, to wonder what you did, what you could have done differently. It took years of therapy before I stopped talking about what
I let happen
and started talking about what
they did
.”

Doug shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

“It shows where you’re assigning blame in your head.”

“Does it?” Doug asked, even though it was obvious now he thought about it. And it was a fair observation, since Doug knew he was to blame for what happened. It only made sense he should take responsibility for it.

“You were a rookie officer who was just transferred to a unit assigned to narcotics investigation, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Afterward you met someone who swept you off your feet. And into a club bathroom, which is….” Christopher groaned and turned his head into the pillow. His semihard erection brushed against Doug’s thigh. “Sorry… I’m not focusing on sex, I swear.”

The icepick in Doug’s stomach eased a little. Maybe Christopher wasn’t disgusted by him.

“Okay. He swept you off your feet. He targeted you, knowing you were a police officer, so he could manipulate you. When you tried to leave, he blackmailed you into staying by threatening your job and your freedom. He raped you. He hurt you. He tried to kill you, and he terrified you. The only thing
you
did was survive.”

“But I should have stopped him.”

Christopher was so close to him that when he shook his head, his nose rubbed against Doug’s. “No. That’s the first thing. Before you can change how you feel about it, you have to change how you think about it. You’ve thought it was your fault long enough that when you talk about it, you blame yourself. When I talked about my past that way, it took you about half a second to jump in and tell me I was wrong. Can’t you see it’s just as wrong when you do it?”

“It’s not the same. No one could blame a kid for something like that.”

“This might surprise you, but pretty much everybody blames kids when they’re abused, although they get offended as all hell when I call them on it. I don’t want to get into that, though. My point is sometimes you can’t change the way you feel about something directly. But if you change the way you talk about it, you can sort of reshape it in your head. It helps….”

“Seriously?” Doug’s stomach stopped rebelling long enough for him to risk a smile. “The guy with a BA in Education is trying to explain principles of behavior modification to me? I’ve got a degree in criminology. Do you think there aren’t one or two psychology courses on my transcripts?”

Christopher seemed to consider it and smirked. “There are philosophy courses on mine, and if you judged me by the grades I pulled in them, you’d think I’d have picked up something deep and inspiring to talk about, but… I think I was hungover during every single one of those classes.”

“What were your grades like?”

“Oh, I got an A in each one. University classes were easy. The professors didn’t care if I was sitting there doing crossword puzzles during their lectures, so some of it actually sank in.”

“You going to let me go anytime soon?” Doug asked, nodding at the tight grip Christopher still hadn’t released.

“No. You’re finally willing to talk about this, and if I let you go, you’re either going to find a chore to do, or you’re going to start sucking my cock until I stop paying attention. And you almost managed to distract me with the whole psychology class thing. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

Doug tried to look innocent. Christopher could usually tell when Doug used Christopher’s poor attention span to redirect him, but Christopher never seemed to mind.

“Look, I don’t know the name of whatever it is my therapist used to help me, but it worked. I do want you,” Christopher said, grinning. “I don’t think there’ll ever be a time when I’ll be able to look at you without wanting you. But I also don’t want you to hurt. I don’t want you to feel like you’re responsible for anything that guy did to you. I know how bad that can mess you up.”

“Can you just stop?” Doug asked. “I didn’t want to talk about it. I just thought….”

After a moment, Christopher squeezed him. “Hmm?”

“I thought if this was the last time we were together, it’d be a pity if I didn’t let you fuck me once more. I wanted you to. Still do.”

Christopher’s hands loosened a little. “Do you want it to be our last time?”

“You know I don’t. But you don’t want to come back with me.”

“Stay,” Christopher said immediately. “Here you could surf and climb without leaving the city. In Florida, I bet the only place you could climb was at a gym with a rock wall. It’s nice year-round, too, so I know I could figure out how the hell to grow those peppers you like.”

“Yeah, right. Staying here when a body’s been found on my land is going to look really innocent.”

“I’m not saying don’t go deal with this. Obviously, we need to find out what’s going on, but after…. Maybe we could just give it a try?”