Chapter 4 - Things Fall Apart.

I’ve often wondered not only why Ethan chose me as his next victim, but also how he knew that I was so ripe for the taking.

Was it just circumstance that he came along right at a time when I was struggling with so much self-doubt? Was I so obviously damaged that he knew I would be easy prey? Or, maybe, did he turn me into someone that he COULD prey on without me even realizing it?

Granted, Brian and I had always had our problems, but for a while at least, I had thought we’d worked them out. Or at least mostly so. Truthfully, I didn’t actually mind the occasional threesome, and I never expected Brian to change overnight into some monogamous zombie. Really, I didn’t.

I look back on that time, before Ethan, and I honestly can’t tell you now what was so bad about it. I had it all. I had the freedom to experiment sexually with whomever I wanted, with the full support of my partner. And I exercised that freedom at every opportunity, like any horny eighteen-year-old would. At the same time, I had Brian in my bed every night, which was more than anyone else had ever got from him. I got to enjoy both his body and his attentions.

That should have been enough, right? I mean, even though he rarely admitted our commitment out loud, I knew Brian cared about me. He supported me both financially and physically. He gave me everything he could. Why wasn’t I happy when I had all that?

I can’t even pinpoint the moment that my attitude changed. One day I was going along, perfectly content with my unconventional life, and the next I felt profoundly unsatisfied. When did I decide that I needed an exclusive relationship and, more importantly, why? That hadn’t ever been something *I* wanted before.

Maybe it started when I began hanging out with Michael while we were working on our comic book. I remember listening to him rhapsodizing for hours about his romance with Ben. Was that when I became infected by the idea of monogamy? Who knows.

Ethan, however, must have somehow sensed that longing in me - even before I’d fully acknowledged it myself - and he seized on it. He used that opening to get inside my defenses. That was the flaw that made me vulnerable. That was the opening that let him get an emotional hold on me. Before I knew it, I’d gone from a vague uncertainty about my relationship with Brian, to being outright fed up at Brian’s inability to commit to just me . . . Without ever really going through any intermediate stage.

So, maybe it wasn’t just a coincidence that Ethan came along at the perfect time to take advantage of my relationship with Brian starting to fall apart. Maybe he manipulated that circumstance. Like he’s manipulated me so often since. Ethan has always had  this way of making his ideas become your ideas, and he does it in such a sneaky fashion that you sometimes believe it was always your idea to begin with. Either way, within weeks of meeting the charismatic young musician, I’d become convinced that I needed to be with someone that was willing to commit to an exclusive relationship.

In other words, someone who was NOT Brian Kinney.

I guess, maybe, I’ve always been the perfect plaything for someone like Ethan.

It took almost a week after that unadvised kiss on Liberty Avenue for my bad luck to catch up with me. Meanwhile, Ethan and I went blithely along, fucking our way through life without a care in the world. Ethan continued to stalk me around school and even followed me a couple times to Liberty Avenue, but I didn’t care. I got a perverse little thrill out of the clandestine nature of our meetings.

However, it was getting more and more difficult for me to make up excuses for why I kept disappearing. Brian questioned me more than once about how much extra time I was spending ‘studying’ these days - it was actually sweet that he seemed worried about my workload and warned me not to overstress myself or my hand. I wonder if the fact that, regardless of all the extra ‘work’ I was supposedly doing, my hand didn’t seem to be adversely affected, was what tipped Brian off that I was lying? I’m sure that my later and later evenings away from the loft certainly did. But the clincher was probably when I begged off joining Deb’s gay bowling team. Granted, I was never a great athlete, and my bowling was atrocious, but normally I would have been there at least for moral support. Not now, though. Now, I was too busy using the time that Brian was distracted with bowling for my private rendez-vous with Ethan to bother cheering the gang on.

Those were definitely the ‘salad days’ of my time with Ethan. Fuck, he can be so damned charismatic when he wants to be. He totally swept me off my feet. He romanced the crap out of me. Not only was he always following me around, imploring me to come back to his apartment with him, but he’d leave me little love notes in my school locker. He’d bring me small, inexpensive presents - half-blown roses he told me he’d saved out of the trash behind the local florists, a single chocolate truffle from this fancy bakery we both loved, a small heart-shaped pebble he said he’d found while walking - stuff that didn’t have any actual value, but that seemed to mean so much. One day he even wrote me a poem that he claimed had just come to him in a dream, and which he insisted on reciting to me in the cafeteria at school in front of all my classmates. It was pretty much the most romantic thing I could think of and I ate it up.

Little did I know then that it was all just an act. The poem he claimed to have written for me came from a cheesy poetry book that I found in his apartment a few months later. He bought that heart-shaped pebble from a kitschy little gift shop just around the corner from PIFA. He had an account at the bakery and I later found out that he regularly bought the same kind of truffle he’d given me, and judging by what the sales clerk told me, he bought a lot more truffles than the ones I received. Even the love notes were a fabrication that he mass produced and then kept hidden in a drawer underneath his stacks of sheet music, pulling one out every so often when he needed to placate me. But, of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time.

At the time, all I could see was the alluring guise Ethan would put on for me. The way he would act like I was the only man in the world. All I could hear were the teeming compliments he heaped on me. He would tell me how beautiful I was, complimenting my eyes, my hair, my everything. He told me I was his ‘muse’ and that the very idea of me inspired him. He claimed that he had never played better in his life and would routinely demonstrate that fact by serenading me after we’d made love. Since I didn’t know shit about classical music, I had no reason to dispute these statements; all I cared about was the enchanting image we made as Ethan would waltz nakedly around the apartment, playing his violin for me, while I lounged on the ratty old sofa and made sketch after sketch of my musician. If nothing else, the pretence of our love was perfectly suited to my mood.

Looking back, though, I suppose there were tiny fissures in the facade which I noted even back then. It was clear from day one that Ethan was excessively self-absorbed and loved to monopolize the conversation. If you can believe it, Chatterbox Justin, the babbling boy wonder, could barely get a word in edgewise most days. Since he mostly talked about music and the world of musicians - a subject about which I knew nothing - I didn’t have much to add anyway, though, so I let him talk. I also noticed that even his compliments to me seemed to reflect back on him much of the time. He’d comment on my beauty, but it was always in the context of how my appearance inspired him. He’d praise my artwork more vehemently when he was the subject the drawings and virtually ignore my other sketches or more abstract pieces. He’d brag about my intelligence by emphasizing how smart HIS boyfriend was. It was almost like I was only an extension of Ethan and not a person in my own right. And, yeah, it was pretty obvious, but I guess we were new enough that it didn’t overly bother me at the time.

And, while things were good between us, life was wonderful. We fucked and laughed and frolicked together. We lived this separate, idealized, almost fairy-tale life, hidden away in Ethan’s little garrett. It was perfect and there was no reason for conflict between us. Everything seemed perfect.

At first.

Reality caught up with me the night Brian surprised me, lying in wait in the darkened loft as I dragged my ass home from yet another evening of blissful fantasy with my musician lover. I was still drifting along in a cloud of romanticism, humming a few bars of Ethan’s latest piece, as I pulled open the door and made my way into what I thought was an empty loft. As soon as I pulled the door closed, though, Brian appeared out of the gloom, scaring me with the way he seemed to materialize out of thin air behind my back.

I could tell right away that Brian had been drinking rather heavily. He had a tumbler of JB in his hand and was slurring his words. Still, he looked his usual, sexy self, even though he was only wearing a pair of old jeans and a plain white t-shirt, barefoot, his hair messed up and his jawline shaded by a day’s worth of stubble. He was obviously horny too, as evidenced by the bulge in his partially unbuttoned pants.

Normally, that was the kind of Brian I wouldn’t be able to resist. But I was fresh from Ethan’s bed and I hadn’t taken the time to clean myself afterwards - my starving artist lover only had a bathtub, not a shower, which made it problematic to bathe after our trysts, and I usually just waited till I got home to shower - so I tried to sidestep around Brian. He wasn’t having it though. He intercepted me and tried to steal a kiss. I turned my head to the side; probably the first time I’d ever rejected one of Brian’s kisses. My reaction seemed to immediately rile the half-drunk Brian.

“Where’re you going?” he demanded as I attempted to pull out of his grip.

“Taking a shower.”

He wasn’t buying it. “You sure are taking a LOT of showers lately,” Brian intimated, pulling me back towards him by my jacket even as I twisted to try and free myself.

I felt like I was being groped by an octopus; every time I tried to escape, Brian would grab hold of a different part of me. He started by encircling my waist with his arms, pulling my back closer to his chest. I turned in his grip and he looped his left arm around mine, so that I had to face him as I tried to extricate that limb. I tried to step back from him, but he hooked a finger in my sleeve and towed me back.

“Come here.”

“Later,” I insisted.

“Now.”

Brian leaned into me, his face only millimeters away, eyeing me with the kind of hungry look that would normally make me melt.

I tried to act casual as I patted his face dismissively. “Can’t we please do this AFTER I shower?”

He just wouldn’t let go of me, though. “I like smelling YOU, not soap.”

That statement caused me to freeze in place. I knew I was caught. I could no longer look him in the eye. All the struggle went out of me as I just stood there and waited to see what my punishment would be.

In typical Brian Kinney fashion, however, he didn’t do what you’d expect. Instead of yelling at me and throwing around accusations, he simply looked at me with the most tender expression. Then he reached up to caress my face. And then he sniffed at me, his flaring nostrils barely a centimeter from my bee-stung lips. It was a game we’d played before - joking that we could tell what each other’s tricks looked like merely by smelling their leftover scent - but this time it didn’t feel like fun and games. This time I could tell that Brian sensed my guilt. He knew that whatever man I’d been with hadn’t been just another trick.

Then, in a lightning quick change of mood, Brian’s calm shattered. He seized hold of me and slammed his mouth against mine. It wasn’t so much a kiss as a possession. He ate at my lips, sucking at them sloppily, as if hoping to replace the last touch on them with his own. Replacing Ethan’s scent with his. Marking me. Reminding me who I belonged to without uttering a word.

Despite how guilty and unquiet I felt, my body responded instantly to Brian’s assault. I was kissing him back, almost as violently, daring him to prove he actually cared. My hands were scrabbling at his skin, trying to dig their way in and establish a permanent hold on him. I wanted him to take me. To punish me. To PROVE that he loved me.

Things got heated pretty fast. Our bodies were pressed together and it was obvious how immediately aroused we both were. Brian yanked my jacket off and started to pull up my shirt but I didn’t want to leave off kissing him long enough to get the fabric off over my head. Instead, he tightened his hold around my waist and dragged us both down to our knees. Then he pushed me away long enough to get my shirt off before shoving me onto my back so I was lying on the bare, cold floorboards in front of him. And still he was kissing me, biting at my lips and neck, his hands twining so tightly in my hair it hurt.

I was loving every minute of it. I wanted him so badly right at that moment, that I couldn’t think straight. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be punished. Whatever. Just so long as he noticed me. Touched me with those ultra-sensitive hands that always knew how to give me what I wanted, even before I knew what that was myself. I wanted him to fill me and keep fucking me till I forgot all my doubts and insecurities.

I reached up, fumbling at the buttons of his jeans, desperate to hurry things along, but he viciously slapped my hands away and instead unzipped my own fly, yanking my pants down far enough to free my cock.

Then he lay down, covering my body with his own and asked, “you like that?”

I breathed out a raspy, “Yes!”

He seized my lips again, kissing me so hard I tasted blood, his hands tugging at my hair and his hips grinding against me with a series of violent jerks that caused me actual pain. It barely registered though. I wanted to feel that pain. I knew I deserved it. I wanted more, in fact.

But just when I thought I was going to get my wish - Brian fucking me all better - he stopped cold. Brian pulled away from my kiss, hands braced on the floor, one on each side of my face, and he raised up far enough to look me in the eyes. I didn’t want him to go so I kept trying to reach him with my mouth, kissing his chin since it was all I could reach. But he pulled away even more.

“Why’d you stop,” I asked breathily.

He just looked at me, this contemptuous look slowly overtaking the full-blown lust of only seconds before.

“Brian?”

Then Brian did the cruelest thing he’d ever done to me . . . something that I completely deserved but which was nonetheless unexpected enough to hurt like a stake driven through my heart.

He paused, looking directly into my eyes, his gaze raining down unspoken accusations on me for uncounted seconds. I could do nothing besides lie there, pinned in place by that icy stare. Then he inhaled, loudly, through his nostrils, moving his face slightly as if to take in a greater range of whatever he was smelling.

Before I could think of anything to say, he sneered at me and snarled, “go take a shower. You stink.”

After which, he got up and left me lying there on the floor, so devastated by his rejection that I felt like I’d been beaten, and he simply walked away. It was actually a surprise when, a minute later, I reached down to pull up my pants and felt no blood. There should have been blood, right? Anything that hurt that badly should leave some external indicator. I should be bleeding from the hole where he yanked out my heart. There should be something. But no. My body was in one piece. It was just my soul that had been ripped asunder.

And the worst part is that I’d done it all to myself.