With the club behind me, the bass became a distant, muffled throb. Cool night air, thick with the smell of exhaust and damp pavement, rushed into my lungs. I sucked it in. My skin felt clammy, the sweat from the dance floor turning cold.
I couldn’t go home.
Not like this.
The pill still fizzed in my veins, an unspent energy with nowhere to go. My fists were clenched so tight my painted nails dug into my palms. The image of Javi’s face—that wounded look—flashed behind my eyes. I shoved it away, replacing it with the hot, satisfying sting of my own anger.
He deserved it.
I stumbled down the sidewalk, the street a blur of neon signs and passing headlights. A few blocks down, the rainbow flags of other gay bars fluttered in the chaotic, inviting light, spilling laughter and music onto the street.
I passed a 24-hour fitness center. It occupied half the block, its plate-glass windows casting a pristine, fluorescent glare onto the dark street. It stood like a sterile outpost amid the messy, vibrant chaos of the neighborhood.
I was almost past it, my eyes already fixed on one of the bars down the street, when the gym door opened with a soft, pneumatic hiss.
I looked back.
A wall of a man stepped out.
A white towel was slung over shoulders so broad they blocked out the words on the window behind him. He wasn't just tall, he was wide, constructed from thick slabs of muscle. Sweat plastered the dark hair on his chest, tracing the deep channel between two pectorals that were as sculpted and solid as armor plating. He paused under the awning, breathing deep, his whole chest expanding with the motion.
The overhead light caught the sheen of moisture on his skin, the glistening curve of a bicep, the hard ridge of his obliques. He ran a huge, scarred hand over his head, the movement pulling taut the intricate tattoos that snaked up his thick neck and disappeared over his traps. He wore simple gray sweatpants, slung low on his hips, a tank, and a pair of worn-out sneakers.
He hadn’t even looked in my direction.
He was just a man leaving a gym.
His eyes moved, sweeping across the empty street and landing on me.
They stopped.
A pair of dark, flat stones in a brutally handsome face.
A slow, mocking grin split his lips.
“No fucking way.”
The voice cut through the night. It was a sound I hadn't heard in years, a sound I had prayed I would never hear again.
My blood turned to ice.
Each drop a frozen shard in my veins.
The air I’d been gasping for moments before solidified in my lungs.
The sheer familiarity of that voice twisted my gut into a knot of pure, acid-laced dread. It was the sound of a locker door slamming shut next to my head. The sound of laughter from the back of the bus. The sound that always came before a shove, before the word that felt like a punch.
He took a step toward me.
The movement was slow, deliberate.
Predatory.
Brock.
The name was a physical blow, knocking the wind from me all over again.
The scar was still there, a thin white line that bisected his left eyebrow. His nose was still slightly crooked, the result of a fight he’d won on the football field. He was bigger now. Impossibly bigger. The boy who had terrorized me was gone, replaced by this monster of a man.
“Look what we have here,” he said. “Little Elliot. All dressed up like a fucking faggot.”
That word.
The same word he’d delivered a thousand times in the echoing hallways of Northgate High.
Each syllable a lash, just like before.
My mind scrambled, trying to reconcile the boy from my memory with the man standing before me. The Brock I remembered was lanky, all sharp elbows and a sneering mouth. He’d been a wiry asshole on the JV football team.
This was not that boy.
This man was forged from something else entirely.
Something heavier.
Denser.
Every line and plane of his body screamed power. His undercut was darker now, the shaved sides a stark contrast to the unruly mass on top. His jawline was sharper, more defined than I remembered, cut like a weapon.
He took another step, closing the distance between us.
The worn-out soles of his sneakers scuffed against the gritty pavement.
The space shrank.
My own breath caught in my throat. I wanted to run, but my feet were bolted to the sidewalk.
Brock stopped just a few feet away.
I had to crane my neck to meet his gaze.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” he said. “Then I saw the look on your face. You always did look like a scared little bitch.”
My body finally screamed at me to move. My heels scraped against the concrete, a desperate, aborted attempt to flee.
It was too late.
His hand shot out, a blur of muscle and tanned skin.
It locked around my wrist.
He yanked.
My arm felt like it would tear from its socket as he dragged me out of the weak circle of the streetlight and into the oppressive darkness cloaking the narrow alleyway wedged between the gym and the neighboring building.
“So you are one of them, huh?”
His laugh was completely empty of humor.
His free hand planted itself flat against my chest.
He shoved.
My back slammed into the rough brick wall. The impact was a brutal, full-body jolt that knocked the air clean out of my lungs. I sagged against the wall, my entire frame trembling.
I squeezed my eyes shut, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached. My body braced for the inevitable. The sharp sting of an open-handed slap. The gut-shot punch that would fold me in half. The litany of slurs that always accompanied the violence. It was a well-rehearsed dance of pain, and my muscles remembered every step.
But the blow never landed.
The silence stretched.
All I could hear was my own ragged breathing. The air in the alley was foul. It was a thick, cloying stench of stale sweat and old piss baked into the asphalt.
My eyelids fluttered open.
Brock hadn’t moved.
A weak, stuttering red light from the gym’s emergency exit painted his face in demonic strokes. The flickering light carved deep, grotesque shadows under his cheekbones, turning his expression into a mask of cruel anticipation. He was caging me against the brick, impossibly close. His eyes… the usual cold cruelty was gone, replaced by a raw, burning intensity. It was the look of a predator that had finally cornered its prey.
His gaze dropped from my face. It slid over my throat, lingered on the frantic pulse hammering there. His eyes traced the edge of my crop top, then crawled over the exposed skin of my stomach. They devoured the barely-there shorts clinging to my thighs, the painted nails on my hands.
“Well, well,” he said. “All grown up and still a little bitch, aren’t you?”
His grip on my wrist tightened. His other hand, still pressed flat against my chest, felt impossibly heavy. The heat from his palm seeped through the thin fabric. His thumb brushed over the fragile bones of my wrist, a slow, possessive stroke that sent a bizarre, unwelcome shiver through my entire system.
His eyes locked back onto mine. The corner of his mouth twitched, the ghost of a smile that held no warmth, only a raw hunger.
He pressed closer.
His body was a furnace, a suffocating wall of heat and muscle that stole the air from around me. My world shrank to the space between his threadbare tank top and the grimy brick digging into my spine. The sheer mass of him blotted out the alley, the street, everything.
There was only Brock.
“You know, you owe me.”
Owed him?
For what?
For the split lips, the black eyes, the years I spent looking over my shoulder?
He leaned in, his breath hot against my cheek.
“All those years you spent pretending you weren’t a faggot…”
His hand on my chest pressed harder, pinning me with contemptuous ease.
“You’re gonna apologize for it. Now.”
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