This story's scaring me a bit, because I still don't know where it's going. Plus this chapter's got a bit of horror in it. You've been warned. Thanks for reading all the same.
Vince felt sick. The walk home had been hard, what with the deceptive ground seeming flat and yet still tripping him up. Stupid ground, always against him. He scowled as he looked up at the staircase before him. Why did they have to live upstairs? It was probably Howard's fault, just another thing he'd done to make Vince's life difficult. That was why he always went up the stairs ahead of him, Vince was sure. Howard was showing off his delicious pumpkin ass every time he walked up the stairs, reminding Vince of what he couldn't have. Stupid attractive Howard with his stupid orgasm inducing sexiness and his stupid shapely arse. He was fairly sure Howard would never want to bottom for him, was fairly sure they'd never be brave enough to have that conversation, especially now. He'd ruined it now. He'd ruined twenty years of friendship by letting a harmless, life-long crush (which was practically platonic anyway) turn into love. All because he'd discovered that sex with Howard wasn't just fun and mind-blowing but also meant closeness and safety and home, even if it was only for a few hours each week. It wasn't fair.
He didn't particularly like wanting Howard so badly. He certainly didn't like the fact that when he closed his eyes there was a one in three chance that he'd see images of Howard moving above him, filling him, owning him, pushing him toward the edge, making him whole. Well, he liked it a little bit, but only when he was alone in the nighttimes. Most of the time it was just inconvenient. There wasn't room in his trousers for those images.
Somehow Vince found himself at the bathroom, watching as the room shifted and the tiles seemed to swim about in a sea of grout. What was he doing here again? His stomach heaved and he ran forward, falling to his knees and clutching at the toilet bowl as a strangled sob escaped his lips. Oh, that's right, he thought, being sick.
He closed his eyes as his body convulsed and the alcohol was forced back out of his stomach. He hadn't eaten dinner, which was probably why he felt so ill, but he just hadn't been able to. He hadn't been eating much of anything lately, wasn't entirely sure why, probably because it was nearly September, but he'd been secretly wishing that Howard would notice and take care of him. He should have known better by now. He should know by now that Howard had a particular gift for failing to see what was in front of his face.
Howard, for instance, had completely failed to notice that he had an admirer when Vince had started following him around on their first day of high school. He'd failed to notice Vince's attempts to become his best friend for three whole years and when he'd finally agreed to be mates he'd continued to ignore Vince's neediness and what it might actually mean. He'd failed to notice how morose Vince got during September each year and why Vince, who loved a good party, never acknowledged his own birthday.
When they'd moved to the zoo he'd failed to notice that Vince hadn't needed to tell his parents that he was moving out of home, and he'd failed to see how lonely and scared Vince had been that first year. Yep, Howard was a true master when it came to not seeing Vince. And Vince was a master when it came to hiding how he was actually feeling. Yeah, he was pretty thick and was easily taken in by people but he was also good at hiding things. Things like loneliness and embarrassment and shame. He'd had a lot of practice at hiding those. The one time he'd tried showing his emotions to Howard, the other man had thrown tea in his face. Granted he'd only been upset over that burke, Lance, stealing his identity but he'd thought that if he started with something simple maybe he and Howard could grow their friendship a bit. It hadn't gone according to his plan.
He'd sort of thought that after a few weeks of regular sex Howard would want to expand things, turn what they had into a real relationship, but he'd forgotten about Howard's obsessive need to compartmentalise. Sex happened on Sundays and wasn't talked about during the week and that was Howard's way of keeping the situation under control. He'd probably made up a whole bunch of rules as well, like the kissing. Vince loved kissing and he desperately wanted Howard to kiss him, but Howard never did. He wondered, as he lay his face against the cool bathroom tiles, his stomach finally empty, whether a kiss from Howard would be magic. It had seemed so the first time, except that Vince hadn't really wanted it then, and the magic had been short-lived. Maybe this time a kiss would do more than making them slightly horny and more than slightly embarrassed. Maybe it would make Howard see that they were meant to be together as more than just friends and friends with benefits. Then again, it might turn one of them into a frog. Or just make Howard chuck Vince completely. Vince didn't want to be homeless again. Being homeless was rubbish.
He closed his eyes groggily, wishing he could have a drink of water. Somewhere nearby he heard a door bang and footsteps coming up stairs but he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. He doubted Howard would even notice he was in here. He tried to open his eyes again but found that he couldn't. He never could when it was the third possibility: not the images of Howard or plain darkness, but the other thing. The thing he had never wanted to see in the first place. The smell triggered it, the horrible stink of vomit that clung to the air and made his nose itch. He tried to get up to flush the loo and the smell away with it but it was already to late. Vince slept.
Vince was happy. He wasn't normally happy, didn't usually have anything to be happy about, but tonight, well tonight he was happy. He grinned giddily, drunkenly. Normally his dad guarded the key to his liquor cabinet with an eagle eye and a fat fist but tonight he'd gotten lucky. The last time, when he'd been caught having a go at the cabinet, the resulting beating had been bad enough that his mum had been forced to take him into Accident and Emergency, what with him still vomiting after two days and unable to walk straight. He still wasn't sure what a detached retina was but it'd left his right eye blurry and made reading and writing even more difficult than they'd been before. And that was after the surgery. It hadn't stopped Vince having another go at the liquor cabinet though, and succeeding.
Vince crept through the dark house, careful not to make any noise. He'd nicked off to his treehouse with the brandy bottle but now he wanted his pillow and his bed and it was late enough that both his parents seemed to be asleep. He moved silently up the stairs, grinning lightheadedly. He was good at being quiet and not being seen when he wanted to be, especially since he was so much smaller than most ten year old boys. All he had to do now was make it past his parents' bedroom and he was safe. Except that the door to their room was open.
The grin dropped from Vince's face and he peered through his mousy fringe in trepidation. His heart pounding, he tip-toed toward the open door. If his dad spotted him he'd be in for a belting. He had to get past the door, he just had to. He peeked his head around the edge of the doorway carefully, trying to focus his bad eye, trying to see whether his parents were asleep or not. Instead what he saw made the brandy come surging back up his throat in a burning wave.
The bed was a mess of blood and things that Vince didn't have the words for and his dad was in the middle of it, his eyes glazed and staring. His mum, her face a mess of bruises as usual, lay by the foot of the bed, her wrists stained dark and her body as lifeless as a marionette. The knife by her hand was like something from a horror movie, the kind that Vince watched with his hands over his eyes late at night. It was too big, too red, too real, and Vince shrieked, pulling at his hair and shaking, screaming until the front door was eventually battered down and men in various uniforms, police and paramedic, ran up the stairs to find the source of the hideous sound.
They'd tried to be nice. They'd tried to be understanding. But Vince couldn't be consoled. He'd run and had remained hidden for a full week before a neighbour had found him and taken him to the police station.
It had been September twentieth, the day he found his father murdered and his mother dead at her own hand. Two weeks after his tenth birthday, and Vince had never had a happy September since.
Every time he was forced to think of it all his mind could conjure up was the blood in the moonlight, the stink of death and bodies that had lost control of their functions, the smell of his own vomit, and the screaming. So much screaming. Screaming until his throat tore and his bad eye clouded over.
Screaming until...
"Vince? Vince? What's wrong?"
...until Howard was there, and Vince didn't have to think anymore.