Brutal Boy by Selena
four
Harper Apple
Colt turns into the small faculty lot and stops beside the bike rack, whistling “Back to Life” under his breath. The rain has let up for the moment, but fat little drops still sprinkle down at random. “Well, this was fun,” he says, shutting off the wipers. “Next time you want to make a dude cum in his pants, remember, I’m your guy.”
I laugh and grab my backpack off the floorboards. “Thanks for the clothes. And smoking me out, and the sandwich… Damn, I’m starting to think I really do owe you a BJ. At least a hand job.”
“I mean… I’m not gonna argue with that logic,” he says with a grin.
A car engine roars behind us, and his smile vanishes, replaced with a flash of fear.
I twist around to see a black Range Rover barreling toward us.
“Get out,” I yell, yanking the handle and literally diving out the door of the car. My backpack spills from my lap, tumbling to a stop against the bars of the bike rack as I somersault across the concrete walkway and I roll up to my feet. I throw my hair out of my eyes just as the Rover slams into the back of Colt’s truck without slowing.
A sound escapes me, but it’s drowned in the grinding of metal and shattering of glass. The back of Colt’s Denali caves in, the wheels askew so he can’t drive away. They must have busted the rear axel. Black smoke billows up from the tires, and for one second, I’m reminded of the drag race. But this isn’t a race. It’s an attack.
I started bringing a knife to school the past few days, but my fists are still my best weapon, so I don’t reach for it. I’m more worried about Colt than myself, anyway. I run for the cab of his truck, yanking the passenger door open just as Royal yanks the driver’s door open. For one second, our eyes meet, and I see not the dark, dead eyes that meet mine when he’s hurting me, but a rage so deep and raw it makes my soul quake.
“Did you fucking touch her?” Royal asks, his voice low and lethal. “Because if you did, I will cut every single one of your fucking fingers off this time.”
“She was on her own all week,” Colt protests, fighting to free himself from his seatbelt and the airbag, which deployed when he was hit. “I thought you were done with her.”
“I decide when I’m done,” Royal snarls, ripping Colt out of the car by the front of his shirt and throwing him down. For a second, I can’t see anything but the fucking airbag. Heart racing frantically in my chest, I race around the front of Colt’s vehicle, cursing these guys with their big-ass trucks that make it so hard to see. When I reach the other side, Colt’s on his back, and Royal’s on top of him, punching him in the face while Duke and Baron stand back and watch.
“Did you fucking touch her?” Royal demands, his fists landing in quick succession.
“Leave him alone,” I scream, diving for them. But Duke cuts me off, grabbing me around the middle and pinning my arms. I stomp his foot, thrashing to free myself. Under Royal, Colt shouts something, but his words are cut short by a chilling crunch as the bones in his face give way. Blood sprays from his nose, flying up to splatter Royal’s arms.
Baron strolls over, rocking back on his heels as he watches his brother demolish Colt’s face. “See, Cherry Pie,” he says, his voice a condescending taunt, as if he’s completely unaffected by the brutality unfolding in front of us. “This is what happens when you keep pushing. Eventually, something’s gotta give. You don’t get to pick what that something is.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” I scream. “You’re killing him!” I throw my head back, slamming it into Duke’s chin. I hear teeth snapping together, and he curses savagely and shoves me forward so hard I fall to my knees.
“Did you fucking touch my girl?” Royal asks Colt, his voice coming in short burst between blows, as if Colt can answer. All I can see where his face used to be is blood. Baron steps in and kicks him while Royal straddles him, his knees trapping Colt’s body, his fists raining down on his face. They’re going to kill him.
They’re going to fucking kill him because I went to his house, because I dared talk to him after they told me not to. And he doesn’t deserve any of it.
Baron said something’s gotta give, and that something is me. I have no chill. No plan. Only desperation and pure, raw hate. I scramble up from my knees, and this time it’s my rage that makes my insides quake. A scream burns up through my chest like a fireball, and I dive forward, putting everything I have behind it. My fist connects with the side of Royal’s head so hard that blindness sweeps over my vision, and for a second, I don’t know what happened. For a second, I think someone hit me.
I fall back, and Royal falls back, and no one moves.
Pain races up my arm, hitting my brain like a brick wall. No one hit me. I just hit him so hard the pain stunned me senseless. My fist is a throbbing bundle of agony.
“Come on,” Duke says, grabbing my arm and dragging me to my feet. I start to fight him, but Baron comes up on my other side, and they lift me off my feet and shove me in the back of the Range Rover. I’d have thought they loved their car too much to let trash like me grace the seats, but that seems forgotten. Baron hops up next to me and grabs my knee in a death grip.
“Keep fighting this, and you know what’s going to happen to Colt,” he says. That’s all he has to say. I don’t want to lie down and roll over for these assholes, whatever they have in mind. But I also don’t want to get my friend murdered, and right now, fighting back looks like a good way to make that happen. At least I can get them away from here, and if he’s still alive and his skull isn’t crushed into a pulp, he can call for help. I pat my pockets, thinking I can dial 911 on the sly when they drive away, only to realize my phone is still in my backpack, where it’s been all day.
Fuck.
I didn’t KO Royal, but he must have the headache from hell right now. He doesn’t show it, though. He slides into the driver’s seat, and Duke runs around the far side and hops in the passenger side.
“Get my bag,” I say, lunging for the door. I can’t just leave Colt there without even calling for help.
“Don’t worry about your bag,” Duke says as Royal backs up, metal grinding on metal as the Rover separates from the truck.
“It has my laptop,” I say, yanking frantically at the door handle. “It’ll get wet.”
Baron grabs me around the middle and reaches past me to slam the door, almost smashing my hands when I throw them out to block it. Royal engages the lock, and the handle won’t budge. I can’t tell them what I’m really after is my phone. They’ll think I’m trying call the cops on them instead of an ambulance for Colt.
“Forget your fucking laptop,” Royal says. “We’ll buy you a new one.”
Suddenly, I’m sure he’s going to run over Colt’s body, which is sprawled on the ground outside the open door of his truck. The cabin light shines dimly inside the truck in the blue evening, spreading just far enough to reflect off the pool of blood spreading across the wet asphalt. I think I’m going to be sick.
I’ve seen plenty of fights, and I’ve punched plenty of people, but this wasn’t a fight. It was a beating, the kind of thing gangs do to their rivals. There’s a reason I stay away from the gangs in Faulkner, despite the protection and community and employment they offer.
I enjoy using my fists as much as the next girl, but for me, it’s a sport, a rush, and a payout. It’s almost never personal. I don’t want to fight someone who threw shade and insulted my pride. Pride is overrated already. I’d rather put food in my mouth. And I don’t give a shit about territory or guns or drugs or any of their business operations. Getting out of town is more important.
And unlike these assholes, I don’t fight to hurt people. I’m not a sociopath. I don’t take pleasure in other people’s pain.
As Royal pulls out of the lot and roars off down the road, my stomach begins to settle, and I’m glad I distracted them with babble about my backpack, so they didn’t get any ideas about running over Colt’s body while he lay there unconscious on the road beside his truck. But now that the shock is wearing off, anger takes its place.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I demand. “You could have killed him! You left him in a ditch to die.”
“Calm the fuck down,” Royal snaps, touching his head with his fingertips. “You gave me a headache, and your screaming isn’t helping.”
“He won’t die,” Baron says, patting my knee and then leaving his hand there. “We have an agreement with Colt. He bends over and takes it in the ass like a bitch, and he gets to live. He even gets to stay at Willow Heights. He’s got it good. Hell, we didn’t even take his letter jacket.”
I gape at him, a hysterical laugh bubbling up inside me. They let him keep his fucking letterman jacket? As if that fucking matters after they took his family, his friends, his life away. They think a letter jacket matters to him? These guys aren’t just monsters. They’re so far removed from humanity they have no idea what they’ve done to Colt, how their actions affect people.
“What is wrong with y’all?” I ask, my voice laced with disbelief. “What happened to you?”
The wipers go on as drizzle begins to fall, and the only sound in the car is the mechanical swish of them moving back and forth across the windshield. No one says anything for a long minute. I really think about my question, about what I know. Yes, they’re rich as sin, but they still have problems. Their dad is maybe in the mafia, no one seems to really know for sure. Their mother abandoned them in some way. Their sister died.
But is it enough to explain this?
Most of the kids at Faulkner had stories like that. None of my friends had two biological parents. The only people I knew who had good families, at least from the outside, were people in my periphery, the upper echelon of Faulkner’s social order, like Lindsey Darling or even Maisy Gunn. And no one at FHS was like this.
“You don’t get to ask questions,” Royal says, breaking the heavy silence in his low, accented voice that reminds me all over again that there is so much about this family I don’t know, that I can’t begin to understand. “You answer questions. This shit doesn’t go both ways. Got it?”
“Got it,” I grit out. “Let me guess. Next thing, you’re going to tell me women should be seen and not heard?”
“No,” Royal says, pulling up to a red light. “I want to hear what you have to say for yourself. Why were you with Colt Darling after I specifically told you not to talk to him?”
“What are you so afraid of?” I ask. “That he spilled all your dirty little secrets?”
“No questions,” Royal reminds me.
“Fine,” I say, sitting back and crossing my arms. “I was with him because he’s my friend. I didn’t know that carried a death sentence.”
“I warned you to leave that guy alone,” Royal says flatly. “You disobeyed.”
“Yeah,” Duke says, twisting around in the seat with a gleeful smile as we slide through the wet streets of Faulkner. “We told you what would happen if you talked to him, and you talked to him. So, this happened. We can’t just let you get away with it.”
“Because then someone else might dare disobey the kings?” I taunt.
“Exactly,” Baron says, squeezing my knee. “You’re not as dumb as you look. So it should be easy for you to figure this out. What we say goes. What you say doesn’t matter. And when you act like the rules don’t apply, you see exactly how wrong you are. That’s what just happened back there. Consider it a friendly reminder.”
“Yeah, but here’s the thing,” I say, slapping his hand away. “I tried the whole obedience thing, and look where it got me. Nowhere. So what’s the point in obeying, if in the end, I’m fucked either way?”
“You’ve never played by our rules,” Royal growls, sounding equally frustrated and wounded by that affront.
“Except I did,” I say. “I got down on my knees and sucked your dick, just like everyone else.”
“Not like everyone else,” Royal mutters. But I’m too pissed and adrenaline-fueled to care whether he’s trying to insult me or compliment me. I can’t believe I ever cared, that I ever dreamed of being one of these psychos. They crossed a line, and there’s no going back. I fucking hate these boys. I hope they burn in hell for eternity.
But I won’t show them how much they’ve affected me. They don’t get to win everything.
“You said you wanted me to suck your dick, so I did it,” I say flatly. “And you went out of your way to make damn sure I didn’t like it, too. To remind me it was a punishment. But I stuck it out to the end—okay, maybe not the end, because apparently you have some hang-up about ejaculation, but until you were done. I stayed on my knees as long as you wanted me there, like an obedient little servant. And what did I get for falling in line and obeying you? Nothing, that’s what. I didn’t get to disappear into the masses of other girls you face-raped in the basement. You still released the video. So remind me again, what’s the point in obeying?”
In the front seat, Duke’s turned toward the window, his shoulders shaking. It takes me a second to realize he’s holding back laughter. Guess my fury amuses him.
“Oh, now I raped your face?” Royal asks, jerking the steering wheel as we veer off onto a side road out of town. “The way I remember it, you were licking my dick like a fucking ice cream cone.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, was I supposed to bite into it like a Tootsie Pop?” I ask.
Duke loses it, throwing back his head and howling with laughter, falling against the door in his fit of mirth.
Royal shoots him an annoyed glance. “When a chick’s slobbering all over my dick like a bulldog, I’m pretty sure she’s enjoying herself.”
“And you just couldn’t have that,” I say. “Is that why you made it as ugly as possible? To make sure I didn’t get any pleasure whatsoever out of it? Or were you more worried about how much pleasure you were getting out of it?”
Baron’s watching me with that intense focus he had in the basement when Royal said he wanted me all to himself, like he’s barely keeping himself from pouncing on me. I scoot away from him as subtly as I can.
“I don’t give a shit about your pleasure,” Royal snaps from the driver’s seat. “I was worried about you biting my dick off.”
I shrug and turn toward the window, watching the grey blur of tears slipping by. “You call me a slut because I dare to enjoy sex. Is that why it pisses you off so much? Because I have the nerve to enjoy sex when you can’t?”
“My dick was in your mouth,” Royal growls, sounding beyond irritated. “I had you on your knees like a whore, right where you belong. Trust me, I was enjoying it.”
“But were you actually enjoying the blowjob?” I ask. “Were you enjoying the way my tongue moved, or the way my mouth suctioned around your cock? Did you like it when my teeth grazed your skin? Did you even feel what I was doing?”
“Dude, pull over,” Duke says. “I want in the backseat with her. I’m getting hard just listening to her.”
Royal adjusts the rearview mirror so he can see me. “What the fuck are you getting at, Jailbird?”
The truth is, I’m not sure. I feel almost shaky with the power I have right now. I can feel it coursing up inside me, the certainty I’m so close to something, some deeply buried truth.
“Do you actually enjoy sex?” I ask again. “I mean, it’s still fun even if you don’t cum, but isn’t that kinda the end goal for most people?”
“Just shut up,” Royal snaps. “Your ridiculous babbling makes my head hurt worse.”
“Did I hit a nerve?” I taunt, feeling reckless, high with the thrill of unraveling the mysterious Royal Dolce. I like figuring people out. It’s a sickness, really. Or maybe I’m poking the beast because I get the feeling he’ll be my undoing either way, so why not figure out why before he eats me alive? “If you don’t enjoy sex, then what are you getting out of it? Is it just a power trip for you? That’s why you enjoyed me sucking your dick, right? Not because I’m good, because then you would have let me do my thing. You just liked seeing me on my knees, knowing I was powerless, that you could do anything you wanted to me, and I couldn’t stop you. Did it make you feel like a big man to see me on my knees for you, Royal?”
“I said, shut up,” he says, his voice low and hollow. I can see one hand on the wheel, his knuckles white under the scrapes and blood on them.
“I’ll shut her up,” Baron says with a shrug, reaching for his belt. “I thought you didn’t want my dick in her, but if you’re good with it…”
I lean across the seat and give him a wolfish grin. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll suck your secrets out through your dick, too?”
“Okay, psycho,” he says, his dark eyes positively feral behind his glasses, though his words are cool. “Anatomy lesson—there are only two things that come out of a man’s penis, and the truth ain’t one of them.”
Duke snorts with laughter again.
“I’m just curious,” I say, “how it’s possible for men to feel powerful in a situation like that. Are you really so caught up in your ego that you can’t see how small that really makes you? I mean, sure, you took all my clothes and my dignity. You put me on my knees. But I didn’t kneel and worship you. It took three men twice my size to physically force me into a posture of submission and get a dick in my mouth. And you were still so afraid of me that you had to immobilize me while you asserted your dominance. Tell me, how does that make you feel powerful, not tiny and weak and ashamed of yourselves?”
“Put your dick in her mouth or I will,” Duke says, his voice edged with flint. “She obviously needs a pacifier to suck on.”
“Yeah, Baron,” I say, running my nails down his bicep. “You better protect your brothers. They’re getting awfully jumpy, and can you blame them? After all, there’s nothing scarier than a girl who speaks the truth.”
“Where the fuck are you going?” Baron barks.
I jerk back, confused for a second when I think he’s talking to me. But then I see his gaze has snapped to the bridge ahead. It’s a one-lane bridge, the same one where Royal took me on Halloween night, when we started hooking up before he abruptly put the brakes on.
“I was just driving,” Royal mutters. He’s still staring straight ahead, still gripping the wheel with white knuckles.
“And you just drove here?” Duke asks incredulously.
I want to ask what’s wrong with here, since it seems like a good place to rape a girl and toss her body in the river, but instinct stops me. I may goad them like a brat when I have a point to make, but here’s the thing. I’m not a brat. I know when to keep my mouth shut. You learn to read the room real young when your mom’s a peach like mine. And whatever was happening in the car a minute ago, it’s over. Something else is happening now, something that’s sucked the air out of the car and dropped the temperature ten degrees, like a ghost just squeezed into the seat between Baron and me. The hair on my arms rises.
Royal doesn’t answer. I figured this was where he brought his hookups, but that can’t be it. The others wouldn’t care if he parked us in a make-out spot. They made it pretty clear they’re down to fuck me.
“Do you come here a lot?” Baron asks.
“No,” Royal snaps. “I’ll turn around past the bridge. Calm your tits.”
The big car lumbers up onto the bridge, and for a long, tense moment, the only sound is the tires on the wooden boards of the bridge. On the other side, the tires sink into the wet shoulder as he starts to swing the car around. I can see deep ruts further down the bank, grown over with grass now, like someone in a truck went off-roading here a while back.
“Do you come here… Ever?” Baron presses.
“No,” Royal snaps. “Do you?”
“But dude,” Duke says quietly. “Why would you even come here by accident?”
“I made a wrong fucking turn, and I wasn’t paying attention because some bitch was running her mouth,” Royals says through clenched teeth. “Now I told you to fucking drop it.”
No one speaks while he rights the car and slams on the gas, the Rover lurching forward and roaring across the bridge so fast it makes the whole structure tremble. The silence is heavy and grey, like an Arkansas winter.
I remember someone telling me they pushed Mabel Darling off a bridge. I remember someone saying she jumped. Colt didn’t say there was a bridge. He said she went into the river, and Royal pulled her out. Was it here? Is that why they don’t want him returning?
I also remember the story about their sister being swept away in a flood, but that can’t be this place. There was no bridge in that story. And Royal wouldn’t bring me to the spot where his sister drowned when he wanted to hook up. Even he’s not that sick.
When we’re back on the other side of the bridge, the side towards Faulkner, the twins let out a breath, though they don’t speak.
Just when I think Royal’s going to keep going like this never happened, he taps the brake. The driver’s side wheels sink into the shoulder as he pulls off the road.
“Stay in the car,” he says, shutting off the engine.
“What are you doing?” Duke asks.
“Just stay in the fucking car,” Royal says, and he gets out and slams the door.
“Where’s he going?” Duke asks, twisting around as Royal walks behind the car. For a second, I think he’s going to do something revealing, some kind of penance. But he circles around and yanks open my door.
“Come on,” he says, his jaw tight, his words clipped.
I glance at the twins, but they look more confused than I am. I was guessing they were going to hurt me here. Why else take me all the way out of town, where there are no witnesses?
I just have to stay alive. If they leave me stranded out here, I can walk back. I’ve only been out here once, in the dark, and I may not know the roads, but I know Faulkner lies to the south. I could find my way.
