Foster Siblings 3: Brokedown Hearts (45 page)

Ben shot back, “How do you know so many of them so fast?”

“I’m sorry.” Stricken, David rubbed his arm even harder, and his voice dropped to a murmur. “I didn’t know it would bother you.”

Cursing almost under his breath, Ben crossed the room and pressed a kiss to the top of David’s head. “It doesn’t. I apologize. I didn’t mean to sound so harsh. Come on.” He took David’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “Let’s see what’s in the fridge, and then we’ll decide where we’re gonna eat.”

For a half dozen steps, David followed, happy to have Ben at least holding his hand again. But the pace with which Ben moved, paired with the hardness of his reflection in the mirror, pushed a gush of cold through David and stopped him in place.

“Wait.” David swung Ben around to face him. “You didn’t answer my question. What is going on with you?” Before Ben could get more than a syllable of protest out, David held up a hand and shut him up. “You are not yourself; don’t try to tell me you are. I don’t know if it’s this apartment or what happened to me or something entirely different, but you are not the same man I got to know in Coleman, and you are not treating me like you did when we spent all that time together in those two rooms.”

“What the fuck?” Ben threw his hands in the air and pushed out a sharp, grating laugh. “You’re not even two weeks out of the hospital; of course I’m not treating you the same as I did back then.” Ben darted his focus all over David, from top to bottom—surely cataloging the ugly yellows and greens of fading bruises—and his face fell. “Jesus, David. I don’t want to damage you even more.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” David promised, grabbing Ben’s hands. “I would welcome it. When I look at the marks you leave on me after we’ve been together, they excite me.” Heat burned David’s skin all over, but he held his head high. Ben needed to know all his darkest desires and feelings. “Every time I see them, until they fade away, I think about how much passion we shared when we were together. As crazy as it sounds, those marks from you make me feel secure and loved. I want you to be aggressive with me. I crave it.”

“So what are you asking for right now?” On David in a shot, Ben wrestled David to the bed, facedown, and splayed his legs. “You want me to get rough with you?” Straddling David’s knees, Ben yanked his cutoffs down in the front and pulled on his partially erect cock; David could see Ben’s shape reflecting against the wall of windows. “You want a little raw dog on this bed, right now?” Ben smacked David’s taint hard and fast through his jeans a half dozen times, making David’s cock jump and his channel flare. Ben then covered David, put his mouth to David’s ear, and ground his dick against David’s ass. “You want me to fuck you black-and-blue?”

His breathing already shifting to shallow, David reached back and grabbed Ben’s muscular thighs. “If I get a little banged up because of what we do together, then I’m okay with that. More than okay.” Gasping, he lifted his buttocks into Ben’s heat. “I welcome it, because it’s coming from you.”

Releasing a primal groan, Ben bit the side of David’s neck and jammed his thickening shaft between David’s cheeks, pressing the seam of David’s jeans into his crack. Pumping his hips, Ben tore David’s T-shirt straight down the back, licked across David’s shoulders and partway down his spine.

Suddenly Ben stopped, cursed, and jumped off the bed as if it were covered in snakes.

“Jesus.” Ben yanked up his cutoff sweats and pulled his shirt back down from where it had bunched under his armpits. “What am I doing? You’re still covered in bruises.” Pacing the wall of windows, he looked David’s way but quickly retreated. “You keep saying you’re okay with however rough I get, but I’ve barely given you a hint of what I’m capable of unleashing when I let go of myself around you, so stop saying you’re okay with it”—Ben heaved a tight noise, as if he couldn’t breathe—“because you don’t really understand how easily I could lose control and hurt you.”

Giving up on trying to straighten his shirt, David pulled the tattered material over his head and tossed it to the floor. “I’ve left a few cuts and scratches on you too.” From where David knelt on the bed, he could still see the hint of an old bite mark on Ben’s lower back. “Or have you forgotten?”

Ben shook his head and pointed a defiant finger at David. “But not like what I’ve already put on you.” All the blunt angles creating the harsh beauty of Ben’s face twisted to something unforgiving. “And definitely not like what I left on that bastard Fariday. Not even close.”

Oh damn it. Damn it, baby
. David’s heart broke, and he wanted to cry for this man. “Is that was this is about? Do you think you’ll hurt me too?” He scrambled off the bed and pushed his way into Ben’s path. “Do you think you scared me in some mind-warping way in the woods?” Ben tried to step away, but David grabbed his arms and forced them to stay face-to-face. “Do you think I’m putting on a front and that I’m really afraid of you? Do you think I’m using you? Do you think I’ve been living in your apartment and letting you take care of me while I recover because I don’t have anywhere else to go? Because that’s not true. Brittany and Travis told me I could stay with them, but I didn’t want that.” Standing on his tiptoes, David cupped Ben’s jaw and promised, “I wanted to be with you. My choice. I’m not afraid of you.”

Ben shook his head and backed away. “I did scare you. I saw your face. In that moment, I saw your eyes.” Right now, Ben’s eyes looked as bleak as anything David had ever witnessed. “What I did to that asshole terrified you.”

“Hey. No, no.” Gutted, David pulled Ben to him and pressed gentle kisses all over his face. “I love you.” Ben kept shaking his head, looking toward the ceiling, so David grabbed him by the hair and tugged him down until their gazes met. “Look at me.” Only when Ben focused did David say, “I am not afraid of you.”

Ben snarled, and with his gaze snapping, he yanked away. “Don’t lie to me. Don’t you ever do that.” He got right down in David’s face and growled, “I saw you when you were trying to call me off that bastard’s back. I know you were scared of me.”

“I was afraid,” David cried, desperate to have his feeling clear above the screams of Ben’s tangible fear. “But you misread what you saw. I was afraid
for
you, not
of
you. Had you killed Dr. Fariday, I was afraid of what it would do to your psyche and soul. I knew it would damage you terribly, and I was afraid the act would take you so low you would not be able to recover from it.” David dragged Ben to the bed, sat him at the foot, and knelt between his legs. “I was never afraid of you, I swear.” With love pouring out of him, David dipped down, kissed Ben’s hands, then leaned in and touched his lips to the man’s chest, above his heart, through his T-shirt, and finally looked up into his eyes. “I never once thought you were capable of doing the same thing to me. I know you wouldn’t.”

Wetness shimmered in Ben’s stare. “But that’s the thing.” His voice cracked awfully. “I think I could.”

David clutched Ben’s hands even harder. “No. Absolutely not. I don’t believe that for a second.”

His hand shaking, Ben flitted his fingertips over David’s face. “I’m scared that if you ever try to leave me, I will kill you as retribution. Here you are trying to get mentally healthy and right with yourself, and I’m unloading one fucked-up kind of relationship on you. And I know what I feel isn’t right or normal, and I’ve tried to change it and get help for it, but these feelings I have are entrenched in me in ways I can’t undo, and they won’t go away.” Sucking in an unsteady breath, Ben swiped tears from his cheeks, but more wetness quickly took their place. “And with my emotions for you unleashed now the way they are, with how much I love and need you, I’m terrified of what I’m capable of doing to you if things go bad.”

Tearing up too, David wiped streaks of wetness from Ben’s face. “Ben, please don’t do this to yourself. I can’t bear to see you so tormented like this. First, things aren’t going to go bad. I’m not saying we aren’t ever going to fight, but if you can’t feel it already, know right now that I am never leaving you.”

With each flit of Ben’s fingertips over David’s face and hair, he appeared more and more forlorn. “But you’re still learning about yourself, and you could change. And I’m not even saying you shouldn’t.” Ben curled his hands into fists and tucked them securely under his legs, breaking even more as he finished, “I’m saying I’m afraid of how I’ll handle it if you do.”

His soul already so very intricately tied to this man, David crawled onto Ben’s lap and wrapped his legs around the man’s waist, holding on tightly. “You’re right,” he admitted. “I am learning about myself.” He put his face so close to Ben’s that the man’s features became blurred, but he needed Ben to see and feel him as much as possible in every way, to know he spoke the truth. “You don’t have to be afraid, though, because what I’m learning is that, as insane as it might sound to other people, my soul responds to and wakes up to exactly who you are as a man. I like the overbearing, aggressive, take-charge traits in you. I’m figuring out that I excel when I trust the man I’m with enough to know that he will always be on top of the details that will make our life good and safe. The more I learn about myself, the deeper I’m settling into those parts of me.” His heart painfully full of love, David smiled at this beautiful man before him and shed happy tears. “I have begun to think that maybe the universe knew something before I could understand it, and maybe before you did too, and what it knew is that my needs and your needs meld into one amazing, perfect creation.”

Cupping Ben’s strong face, David grazed kisses against his prominent forehead, sharp cheekbones, and blunt jaw before brushing their lips together. “The changes in me, the confidence I’m gaining, are only going to solidify those feelings for you, and my place with you. I’m not going to do a one-eighty. It just isn’t going to happen.”

Ben clung to David’s kiss for a heartbeat but then pulled back and looked away. “But I don’t know—”

David guided Ben back around, put his fingers against the man’s lips, and shushed him. “But, nothing. I don’t fear you. I don’t ever worry that you’ll hurt me. Let me tell you something. There were a thousand reasons why I didn’t work with Chris, not the least of which was that I couldn’t face telling the world I was gay. But what I’ve figured out about myself since meeting you is that even if I had been in the open, my relationship with him ultimately would have failed, because when I was with him, I was trying to be something I wasn’t. I was living in the dominant, aggressive role with Chris, when in truth that isn’t my nature. My nature is to please and make everything right and perfect in the world of the person I love, to nurture and support without a lot of flash. My core, who I am at the most ingrained depths of my being, responds to a man whose nature it is to demand the driver’s position, to own every space he moves in with clear command, and who makes sure we are safe and secure and happy in that world together. And guess what?” A giddy bubble popped inside David, and through his tears, he laughed and smiled at Ben. “That is who you are in a nutshell, Ben Evans. That is who you’ve been with me from the moment we met. That is who I responded to so completely and who helped me see and accept those parts of myself, and that is the man I fell in love with and feel safer with than any other on this earth.

“So don’t you dare tell me you’re capable of harming me,” David warned passionately, “let alone of killing me. You’re not. You’ll get hellfire pissed at me sometimes, I’m sure of that, and you might punish me, and I’ll surely do the same with you. But we’ll both know when to pull back before truly injuring the other, because what we both already know, so damned fast, is that neither one of us survives without the other. It’s volatile and probably dangerous, and others will probably say it isn’t right or normal, but it’s how we fit together, and we don’t fit this way with anyone else.” With another man, these admissions would have made David embarrassed or feel like a freak or a defect, but looking into the incredible brightness and open love in Ben’s eyes solidified for David that he’d finally found his home. “The truth is we were just biding our time before we found each other. We don’t and were never meant to fit to anyone other than each other.”

Ben grabbed David’s hands. “So if I kill you, I would die.” He lifted David’s hands and, looking into David’s eyes, kissed each of the fingers. “And if you kill me, you would die too.”

“Yes.” In turn, David kissed each of Ben’s fingers, not a bit afraid of the killing strength in this man’s hands. “That’s why we’re always going to make this work. That’s why we have to embrace what we have and keep it nurtured and healthy. It keeps us both alive. Plus”—needing to see this incredible man smile again, David poked him in the ribs, tickling him—“you’re so freakin’ sexy and beautiful and stunning and kind, and you fuck me so damned good it’s like you’re trying to earn an award or something.” David nipped Ben’s nose and then smiled and flicked his tongue across the tip. “With all that going for you, there’s no way on God’s green earth I could ever fall out of love or get tired of you.”

Ben’s chest heaved, and when he spoke, grit coated his words. “You’re something else, David Joyner, you know that?” Ben brushed his fingers through David’s hair, and he studied David’s face so intently, as if his life depended on memorizing every line and wrinkle. “Something pretty damned special. Something that made me feel alive again. Something that made me want to live instead of merely existing.” Suddenly, Ben took his hand away and curled it at his side. He trembled all over as he admitted, “Something I’m so damned scared to love too much and break.”

“Never.” Just as fast as Ben had taken his touch away, David put the man’s hands back on him, one on his waist and the other on his cheek. “If we go up in flames, we do it together.” Heating from his core, feeling as though he might tear out of his skin, David wrapped his arms around Ben, strained against him, and pleaded, “Make love to me, Ben.” He scraped their mouths together and then grazed kisses all over Ben’s face. “I’ve missed your passion. I’ve missed your weight and heat and hardness.” He captured Ben’s gaze with his and said, “I’ve missed you. Every bit of you. I love it all.”