Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (45 page)

I shook my head, probably to Nero’s surprise. “I didn’t like how it made me feel.”

“Bad?”

“No… I liked it. I’m a pervert just like Jasper…” I said, the burning returning to my face, especially my ears. I don’t know what was coming over me, but suddenly I just wanted to tell him everything. This secret had been festering inside of me for so long and the rot from it was starting to leak further into the life I was living now. Maybe it was time to tell someone I trusted.

“Because you liked him doing shit to you? What did he do?”

“Kiss me.”

Nero was quiet for several moments. “That’s it?”

I nodded.

“That’s as far as he took it?”

I nodded again. “He stopped when I became uncomfortable.”

“He
stopped
when you asked? He actually fucking
stopped
?”

“Yeah.”

More silence.

“And you still blinded him and burned a hole in his face?”

“I didn’t like how it made me feel…” I said again.

Nero let out a whistle and squeezed my side tighter into his. “Okay, well I’m not Mantis, but you kinda burned your bridge with him, so let me try and crack this, okay?”

“Okay,” I said in a low voice. I just wanted to crawl somewhere and hide, but at the same time I think I did want to have this conversation.

‘Share the infection?’
Crow mused in my head. ‘
Give him a little bit of that putrid rot you carry on your shoulders.’

“You say you didn’t like how it made you feel. So it made you uncomfortable because it reminded you of being in the basement?”

I shook my head no. “I didn’t like… that it was doing things to my body.”

“OHHH!” I jumped as Nero said that loudly, then to my further embarrassment he laughed.

“I fucking get it now. You didn’t like that you liked it and you panicked didn’t you? Oh my god, I think I get it now – he made you horny and you flipped shit, didn’t you? You panicked and I know why… because you felt shitty for liking something sexual.”

“Can you not say it so bluntly?” I murmured. “You’re making me even more uncomfortable.”

“It’s Nero, dumbass. I’m your older brother… it’s my job to make you uncomfortable.” But then he sighed and I saw him reach into his pocket. He pulled out something brown, liquor obviously, and put the bottle to his lips.

Another sigh, and he pursed the inner corners of his eyes with his fingers. “I can’t believe we left you just to have that happen…” He swallowed another mouthful of liquor. “You gotta understand… Silas just wanted us to leave you in a town. Ellis and I did as much as we could under his nose. We were even going to hide you in Cardinalhall Mansion when we came back three years later.”

He looked at me. “I’m sorry.”

I held out my hand and he gave me the bottle. I took a drink, trying not to wince at the taste. It was rum, which was better than the whisky I used to be able to smell on Jasper.

“Look, bro, so it doesn’t come as a shock when you see it…” Nero began. “King Silas can be a huge, controlling, manipulative, fucking insane, jealous, psychopath… he’s kind of nuts sometimes. He’s being really, weirdly kind to you and it’s because he feels guilty as fuck over what happened to you and he hasn’t felt the feeling of guilt in quite awhile. But just know: he does love you, all of us do, more than anyone will ever love you. Silas isn’t perfect, okay? He jumps on all of us as soon as we turn fifteen, so jumping on you isn’t odd or anything… it’s kinda cool he backed off right away.”

I tipped the rum bottle back and forth and took another drink. “I know… I think I know anyways. I heard things from the merchants growing up. I just assumed he treated his family different.”

“And he does,” Nero said with a nod. He took the bottle back and tucked it back into his pocket. “But just… shit, Sanguine. Don’t hate him when you start to see the protective covering peel off. Don’t be scared. Silas is… kinda manic. He’s suffered a lot, and he’s kinda messed in the head like you sometimes.”

Then another silence filled the room. “Maybe that’s why he likes you?” Nero suddenly said, then shrugged it off. “Anyways… less about the king, more about you. You do know you’re in for a lifetime of torment if you flip out every time your cock gets hard, right?”

I groaned and put the pillow over my head. “Stop being so blunt…”

Nero pulled the pillow away and lightly smacked me in the face with it. “Someone needs to be blunt with you. If we all dance around it you’ll never feel better. Look, bright eyes… I’m not even going to go there when it comes to this Jasper shit. It’ll just piss me off and make you go into that crazy-Sanguine-psychosis and I don’t want that. So…” He dug into his pocket and got the rum bottle out again, then to my surprise… he also got out a tin of cigarettes.

He shifted away from me and laid the rum bottle on the bed, then the tin of smokes which he opened, displaying over twenty perfect cigarettes all on top of each other.

“This is simple shit because I’m a simple guy…” Nero took out a cigarette and put it to his lips. “Jasper got you when you were a tyke… Jasper is the cigarette tin.” Nero pointed. “And you’re the rum bottle.”

I looked at him like he had just gone crazy but he seemed to have a method behind this odd madness.

Nero took all the cigarettes from the Jasper tin and started surrounding the Sanguine rum bottle with cigarettes. “Jasper messed you up big time. Now you have all this fucked up baggage. You’re scared all the time when you shouldn’t be, you have this Crow dude screaming at you and talking to you, you have an incredibly messed up view of sex.” Each time he made a statement another cigarette surrounded the bottle. “All of this Jasper did to you, all of your weirdness. Well, some of it is being a chimera but that’s normal to you so it doesn’t count. Anyways, see what you’re looking at? All of this shit you’re dealing with… is stuff Jasper did. This is all Jasper stink surrounding you.”

Nero then flicked the empty tin onto the ground. It landed with a rattled clank. “Now Jasper is gone… but look at that, honey-beans, you’re still surrounded by his shit. Now you’re in Skyfall with your family but… look at all this Jasper residue you still have in you. That’s Jasper still… what you need to realize, kiddo…”

Nero lifted up the rum bottle and swept the cigarettes away. “That’s not who you are. You need to get rid of all those cigarettes and just be a rum bottle. Jasper’s gone, and you need to realize… you’re okay.”

Then he smiled and shook the bottle back and forth. “You’re okay, brother. Seriously, you’re a sweet little fucker who can thankfully still feel emotions. You’re not as lost as you think or as messed up as you think. You just need to listen to your heart – and not the voices in your head.”

It was an odd visual display… but I understood what he was talking about. I wish it was just that easy, to push the essence of Jasper away, but –
“I was with him longer than I was alive,” I said in a quiet voice. I stared at the rum bottle as the little bubbles rose to the surface. “What being around him, locked in that basement, did to me… those cigarettes are me now. If you strip every part of Jasper away… there isn’t much of me left.”

“That’s okay,” Nero said, he gave me an encouraging smile. “That’s just fine. We can rebuild you, baby. We have the technology.”

I chuckled at his stupid quote, and that made him smile wider.

“You can still laugh, you can still love, and you have some hilarious quirks like that squirrel-food thing and the Crow dude… but you’re okay. One day you’ll be banging all of us and you’ll look back at this moment like… why the fuck didn’t I stick my cock inside of Nero that day in the Skylander condo.”

My heart jumped and I held my hands over my head. “No, not ever… I could never do that.”

“Oh, you will…” Nero smirked. “There isn’t a chimera past fifteen I haven’t had sex with besides you. Same goes for every single one of us, even Elish. It’s like how we reinforce our family bonds. It’s not weird for us, it’s normal and eventually it will be normal for you too.”

I shook my head back and forth. “No… not me.”

“That’s the Jasper stink talking… not the nineteen-year-old chimera. You’re in your prime right now, you should be having at least two of us between your sheets every night,” Nero said with a shake of his head. “Throw that cigarette away already; it doesn’t belong near the Sanguine rum bottle. Look… you trust me right?”

I nodded but shifted around nervously. I didn’t like where this was heading, and I was wondering how much more of this conversation I could take before my anxiety overshadowed my need to talk about some of the things rotting inside of me.

“Good…”

My body spasmed from shock as Nero started taking his boots off. Immediately I got up and tried leaving the room.

“Oh, fucking sit down… I promise I won’t touch you,” Nero said in such an indifferent voice it… actually made my anxiety go down. He wasn’t… tense or nervous. That resonated with me, because it meant he was casual about all of this. I liked casual more than… more than… the lust I had felt in Silas when he kissed me.

And myself.

I slowly turned around. My eyes widened when I saw he was slipping his cargo pants off.

“What are you doing?” I said alarmed. “You gotta tell me or else Crow’s going to command me to rip your face off…”

“I’m going to make you hard,” Nero said with a coy, almost boyish smirk. “And you’re going to sit there with that hard cock and not be freaked out about it. It’s normal and you’re going to deal with it until you realize it’s normal.”

I put a hand over my mouth, feeling my entire body flush with dizziness.

“Have you ever seen another dude aroused? Besides him?”

With my hand over my mouth I shook my head.

The smirk got wider. He honestly didn’t care… he wasn’t like Silas, he wasn’t throwing himself at me. Nero didn’t want me like Silas did at all. He either wanted to fuck with me… or he wanted to help me.

But how was this helping? Why was…

I swallowed and almost choked on my own shock when he pulled down his underwear and separated his legs. He was baring it all at me, sitting on my bed.

His dick was huge… even soft it was long and thick. I had never in my life seen one so large, not even in that movie I saw.

Nero chuckled and I knew he was laughing at my reaction. “I’ve seen that look before, though that’s when the poor guys know they’re going to have to take it. You have a huge one too you know. We all do, though yours isn’t as big as mine. I’m the biggest, thank-you-very-much.”

I couldn’t talk; I stared at it before my eyes slowly travelled up to Nero’s face. “What are you going to do? You won’t…”

“I’m – not – going – to – touch – you,” Nero said again, slowly and deliberately annunciating every word. “Just… watch, and hell, I know you won’t… but if you want to touch it, get a feel for it… by all means.”

Nero put one arm behind him to help prop himself up, and the other started pulling and rubbing his dick. All I could do was stare, but I found the breath quickly leaving my throat.

I wanted to tell him to stop. I wanted to turn around and run out of the apartment and go back to Alegria – but as I watched that giant, thick dick start to harden, suddenly all my mind demanded was for me to keep watching him.

His eyes closed for a moment and a growled curse word rolled from his lips. As it stiffened and got rigid, he ran his hand down to the shaft and grabbed the base, before removing his hand altogether.

It stood at full salute, with a round, well-defined pink head, connected to a thick shaft that had a small blue vein. His pubic hair was trimmed and neatly groomed and his testicles big, oval-shaped, and shifting around as he rubbed his inner thigh.

When I tried to swallow I found that my throat was parched, and as I started to become aware of my body again I confirmed to myself that I was indeed liking this… because I was hard as rock. I was… so hard it was aching inside of my underwear.

“Have you ever…” Nero opened one eye. He started running his index finger and middle finger over the shaft, before twirling the digits around the head. “… cum before?”

I swallowed again and shook my head.

Nero groaned and tugged on the head. “Oh fuck, you’re killing me. Not once? You’ve never jerked off once?”

“No…” I croaked. “I hate my body, I hate my–”

“You just haven’t been properly introduced,” Nero said cutting me off. I saw a twitch in the side of his mouth. “How can you hate something you’ve never tried? Sex isn’t what you experienced, that’s rape, Sangy. Sex is different than rape and jerking off is different than both of those. No wonder you’re so fucking tense… you would be a lot more relaxed if you busted yourself for the first time.”

I tried to squeeze my legs together, in a feeble attempt to make the hardness in my dick go away, but it wasn’t working, mostly because I couldn’t take my eyes off of Nero’s penis. I had never felt this pull towards another man, ever. With Jasper I looked upon him with disgust, but for the first time…

I think I wanted to do something with him.

Nero closed his eyes and groaned. He started rapidly moving his hand back and forth over his dick, his other hand now unbuttoning the white shirt he had been wearing.