Chapter Text
Chapter One: The Ballad of Billy the Kid (Billy; Los Angeles, California, 1983)
It had been 4 weeks, 3 days and 27 minutes since his father last hit him—3 weeks, 3 days and 16 minutes longer than any reprieve between beatings from his father had ever lasted before. Something was wrong. Billy could feel it building in the thick air between them.
A few days was one thing. Often his father would get busy and distracted with something long enough to hold his attention for a day or so to the point that Billy’s presence in the house didn’t even seem to register. But after day five, the previous bruises and ache dear old dad had left on his jaw bone had already begun to fade and Billy felt the fear begin to creep back in. It was odd, but in the silence of the absent storm he was afraid, tense and waiting for something to just give and snap.
After the eighth day, Billy was even more surprised to find that his body started almost craving the violence—the crunch of bone, the rush of pain, and the taste of blood on his tongue. It was, after all, what his body knew at that point. He’d been through enough hits to know that the pain and blood would always fade; he could get through it. When he was younger the hits were more sporadic, but as the years went by, growing and molding him into a rebel yell of a teen who screamed defiance even with downcast eyes, he got it more and more often until the injuries from the previous hits had barely recovered before they were raining down again. He didn’t have time for the suspense of the next outburst to build because they were always coming, a constant flurried storm of dull grey violence. It was the frequency his body vibrated to at all times. What his body didn’t know as well was the constant state of anticipation and fear for the next hit. After the tenth day, he found himself flinching in an embarrassing visible jerk every time his father’s voice echoed in from the hall, pressing his back tight against the walls as Neil passed him in the kitchen, and clenching the muscles in his stomach up against fists that failed to fall.
Billy felt like a ghost then. He felt even more invisible than he usually did, wandering around his house waiting for his father to acknowledge him, even if only with fists and foul words. But for thirty-one days nothing came, and on the day after that Billy started to wonder if he really was a ghost, if the last beating had maybe actually killed him and he was now doomed to haunt the hallways while Neil passed right through him for all eternity.
What was even more fucked, was that by day thirty-three his body officially, actively missed the attention of violence. He was constantly wound so tightly that Billy found himself yearning for the break, the release of tension from his taught muscles. The boys at his school couldn’t help him. The local high school crowd were made up of the sun-kissed blonde locks of surfers, the lank strands of mellow pot heads, and the coiffed pieces of blown out yuppies. Everyone was too preoccupied with their boards, pot, or pagers to want to start a fight.
And back then in California, Billy had yet to become much of an instigator. He still wore jeans that were a little too big and over worn—old hand me downs of Neil’s—as if wearing his father’s marks to school weren’t enough. He had no idea how to style his mass of blond curls. They made him look feminine when subdued and a mad scientist when left to their own devices, neither of which appealed to him, so he mostly just kept it pulled back. And, as he had learned from the age of twelve to never hit back, his hands were still soft, albeit a little mangled from that time Neil had broken his fingers.
His body ached for violence and release. It rattled through his joints until his fists bunched and his teeth clenched and he knew if he waited too much longer for something to happen he was going to scream and finally hit something. If he were to lose control at the wrong time—if that something was Neil—well, Billy couldn’t even fully fathom the consequences of that level of disrespect.
There had been a few fleeting times over the years growing up where he had let his mind briefly engage with the idea of pushing back against his father. The idea was always so swiftly followed by a paralyzing sort of pure fear, the kind of fear Billy felt whenever his father used ‘that’ voice, or that frozen moment right before the first hit, that Billy knew he never would. Billy had always hated that a little bit about himself, so he’d long since exiled the notion of standing up to Neil from his mind, even as a fantasy.
California had never been the sun-glinted promised land for Billy, but the one thing about The City of Angels is that somewhere contained within its sprawl was anything and everything anyone might go looking for.
It only took three days of listening and asking around the boardwalk for Billy to learn that there was a club in Venice, a few streets away from where the dirty sand meets the waves. The worn structure was an old graffitied building, just like the rest of the brick facades on the street, and he almost walked right by it even when looking for it.
He likely never would have found it at all if it hadn’t been for the man, all leaned up outside the door smoking against the wall and looking exactly like what Billy has been aching for. The stranger was all muscle and height, a tatted up thick neck and raw knuckles on big hands that fingered his cigarette in a way that let ash carelessly fleck onto his boots: combat, leather, and black.
Billy’s mouth went dry as he quickly flashed on an image of his tongue running along the boots to gather up the ash, imagined how his throat might sizzle and burn. The man noticed Billy and raised an eyebrow, appraising him. He wasn’t a ghost after all, at least not one that couldn’t be seen. Billy tried for eye contact, but settled shyly on the man’s lips instead, watching as they twisted into a smile.
The man was casual in the shadows, rather languid despite his ropes of muscle. After a final drag, he flicked the cigarette from between his fingers into the alley as he spoke, his voice low and unfiltered, “You looking for something, sweetheart?”
Billy wasn’t entirely sure, but thinks he may have nodded his head imperceptibly. The smile grew wider: gentle, coaxing, and wicked.
“You’re awfully young to be out here all by yourself. You looking for your daddy?”
Billy felt a weird rush of chills and warm blush run up his bones. ‘No,’ he knew he should say, ‘no, I want to get away from my *daddy*.’ But his body was tense, trembling with the adrenaline that had been coursing through it for days and he couldn’t make it snap by himself. So he nodded again, a bit stronger than before. Traveling his eyes lower, Billy took in the lines of the man’s crotch, his cock visible in thick long lines through the denim even when still casually soft. “Yeah,” he managed to croak out, “I’m looking for my daddy.”
The man made an appreciative sound. “Alright, pretty boy, follow me.”
He turned back into the club, the door plain and unassuming. The man left Billy at the top of the stairs without turning back, allowing for Billy to either follow his descent or not, giving him an out, a chance to realize that young boys don’t follow strange men into Venice beach basements.
Only apparently the reckless and desperate ones do, because Billy didn’t hesitate, just followed him down, pressing himself a little too close against the man’s back on the stairs because he was nervous and the stairwell was dark, and he had already been overwhelmed by suspense for so long that he couldn’t even focus on it as a warning, could only focus on the notion that this suspense might at least break.
The club was dark, intercut by flickers of red, blue, and white lights that strobed through a pattern streaming from an old cop car light mounted to the wall. Beneath the glow, men were packed into the center of the floor and sprinkled throughout the corners. Billy took in the mass of muscles and leather pulsating together to a deep beat of music, smelled the sweat, and felt the damp tang of the air.
In all the times he had lain in bed at night, jerking himself off with one hand on his dick and the other between his teeth to try and keep quite so that his father wouldn’t hear his thoughts of rough hands, hard bodies, and sweat, his mind had never conjured up something this intricate and overwhelming and he instantly regretted the limitations of his imagination. The sheer volume and weight of these men could consume him and in that moment he yearned for that to happen.
Billy followed the man through the crowd to another door, a back room with an even deeper shade of light. It was the sounds that hit Billy’s senses first. Sounds of impact: the thud, hiss, and slap of beaten flesh that he knew too well. He looked around, taking in the sight of men, some bound and kneeling, others pressed to walls, getting pounded by strips of leather and fists. Billy hissed out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a ‘yes.’
The man he had been following finally turned back around and looked at him, appraising the flush on Billy’s cheeks, the desperate wild want in his eyes and the hardening line of his dick in his too loose jeans. He was apparently able to read something in Billy more clearly than Billy could himself. The man gave Billy a slow crawling once over with his eyes as he asked, “What do you need, pretty boy? Do you need to be punished?”
Billy did. He knew that he needed it, deserved it. That it was the only thing that would right the balance in his body again.
What he hadn’t expected was that right then, right there, he desired it. That the idea of bending over in the dark for this new “daddy” to hurt him sent courses of something hot and dangerous spiking through him. Made him yearn with a new form of desperation.
Billy opened his mouth, his response quiet and hesitantly seeking, “please.”
The Man’s voice was steady, hitting a lower register as he evenly demanded, “Please what, pretty boy?” And after a moment of Billy floundering for a response the man pressed on, “Come on now. Are you going to stand there and tease me or are you going to be a good boy for daddy?”
Billy whined, nodding, because he was, or, has always tried to be. It had never been enough though, no matter how hard he tried. He always seemed to fuck it up somehow and disappoint his father again. Billy realized that the man had been waiting for a verbal response and rushed to give it to him, “Yes...yes, ...sir, I promise to be good. Please, do that…punish me.” And then, in a softer afterthought, in case it wasn’t clear, “please make it hurt.”
Upon his verbal confirmation, the man swept Billy’s wrists up into his hands. Pressing Billy’s palms to the wall, he leaned his body against Billy’s back for a moment, full and heavy and so much stronger that Billy began to shake. Leaning further forward, the man’s mouth hovered over the shell of Billy’s ear, his voice a low rumble of an order, “Keep your palms flat against the wall. Don’t move them until I say you can.”
And Billy had moaned, mumbled out a “yes sir,” determined to acquiesce.
The man seemed satisfied, stepping back and pulling at the denim waist of Billy’s jeans as he kicked his legs apart. The hand that came down on his ass in the next moment was heavy, sending a jolt up Billy’s spine that he could feel in his throat. Billy’s back arched, absorbing the sting and then pushing back up and out for more. The hits kept coming, mostly with an open palm sting that set his skin ablaze. Billy could sense himself flush and sweat, felt the man’s palms slide against the wet, increasing the sting.
Billy, who was usually always so intentionally quiet when faced with Neil’s fists, knew he’d been moaning embarrassing sounds of need that made the flush of his skin spread to his cheeks. He could hear the man breathing, heavy and even, but with a higher electric hitch to it at the end that was different from his father’s. The pain was there, but the tension was different. Billy was hard. He didn’t have the time or inclination to really question or analyze it at the moment. All he could focus on was the sensation, how his body was bending and straining to break under the stranger’s hits.
Without thinking, Billy pushed himself forward into the wall, his cock aching against the cold concrete as he tried pathetically to rub himself against it. He only got in three shallow thrusts of his hips before the man grabbed him by the back of his jeans, still scrunched up just below his ass around his upper thighs, and yanked his lower body back from the wall. “Such a dirty boy,” the man growled, the movement and voice so sudden, teasing, and dangerous that it ripped a cry from Billy’s throat. “Yeah that’s it. Look at you whining and simpering like a bitch. You want me to give you something to really cry about don’t you, boy.”
His hand held fast to the back of Billy’s jeans; Billy could feel fingers brush against his skin where they twisted into the denim and knuckles grazing the cleft of his ass. Billy tried to still his hips from grinding back towards the wall, tried to be good. The man’s other hand was quick, unbuckling his belt with a metallic sound followed by the lightening whistle of leather pulled quickly through belt loops. Billy knew that sound, just as well as he knew the similarly familiar sound of the leather belt snapping taught as the man looped it around his palm.
Billy also knew what came next, and yet, no matter how many times he’d been in this position—arms up and face planted on a wall waiting for his father’s belt—the sensation of the belt coming down on him in the club was somehow foreign. It stung and bit into his flesh in the way that he knew, but instead of trying to curl in and away from the searing zing that ran through him at the impact, his body twisted up and into it.
There was red behind his eyelids and Billy thought of stretching out beneath a rain storm of razors and fire. The pain was everything he’d needed the last few weeks, finally a rush of overwhelming crunch that he could get lost in, where he could let his mind go blank until it became a blissful reprieve devoid of fear and anticipation.
Pain meant forgiveness, however fleeting. And as much as the pain had always been a sort of escape for Billy, this was so much better than his father’s fists. Pain at his father’s hands was never truly a free escape from fear, as the lingering worry that he’d go too far to come back from was always present. The sad, enticing truth of his current state was that Billy trusted this stranger with his body more than he ever had Neil. This new man may want to hurt him, just as much as Billy needed him to, but he didn’t want to kill him, and in some deep twisted way that made Billy feel like he was at least worth that—which was something.
The tension that had been compressing him for weeks shuttered around him, Billy could feel it climb and rattle, desperate for it to break. He realized that the chattering of his teeth was a chant, a repeated “please, please, please,” over and over again. Billy didn’t know what he needed, only that he needed it, please.
Once again, the man read him well, seemed to know what desperate, pathetic boys with deep daddy issues needed. The belt was still slicing in hot strokes on Billy’s ass and thighs as his other hand let go of Billy’s jeans. He wrapped his fingers into the mound of hair Billy had pulled back into a knot at his neck and yanked.
Billy’s spine snapped and arched at a strained angle, the sharp pain of the sudden strain to his scalp making him cry out as all his neurons lit up. The sensations clashed at the apex, an intermingled painful precipice of pleasure that Billy had never felt before. The curve of his spine kept him locked for the final hit, a harsh quick cut across the tenderest stipe of his skin, and with a surprised shout, Billy came hard and fast across the wall, the shivered burst of white across his vision overtaking all the red.
Billy struggled to regain his breath as he slumped his body forward; his cheeks were wet and it was only then that Billy realized he’d been crying. The Man didn’t seem to mind, or at least didn’t comment on it. He simply reached around and fisted Billy’s cock, sensitive with orgasm, and cupped his large knuckle fingers around it. He chuckled darkly as he admonished, “Such a dirty boy. I should really make you lick that clean.”
Billy’s spent cock twitched as he moaned and hiccuped in another breath. The man laughed louder, but the sound wasn’t unkind. “Oh, pretty boy, if you’re not careful, this place will eat you alive.”
This place. Billy let the idea roll over him, a dark haven of basement secrets, the writhing bodies in the adjacent room, the swell of flesh, sweat, sinew and muscle grabbing him, dragging him into the center and grinding him into nothing. He knew he’d willingly let it take him.
**
Not even a week had passed since Billy had his first descent into The Club, but as Friday rolled around and Neil still hadn’t bothered to acknowledge that Billy was also alive and in the house, Billy began to feel that itch on his skin again.
Neil had been distracted for almost five weeks now. Billy had even started to keep a tally with etched lines behind his bed, like some old-fashioned prisoner locked in a cell somewhere outside of space and time.
Billy had no idea what Neil’s new indifference to his presence meant, but he was smart enough to dread the fallout. He didn’t really know what else to do, so Billy just kept doing what was usually expected of him: going about his chores and generally keeping the house in order. He cooked dinner every night and always left some out for Neil on a plate on the stove. Sometimes his father came home for it, other times Billy cleaned up the untouched plate in the morning.
The week had passed by in a growing rebuild of silent tension. Friday night found Billy washing the dish from his own dinner, Neil’s still full and laid out in offering on the kitchen table, when Neil came out of his bedroom.
But Neil passed right by the food, briefly sweeping through the kitchen instead to scoop up his wallet from the end of the counter. There was a far off look in his father’s eyes suggesting that he was still in his weird state of distraction and he was dressed much nicer than usual. The disruption of routine, even if it was only a newly pressed dress shirt, was unsettling.
Neil drew closer. Within arms length. Billy froze in front of the sink, trying desperately not to drop the plate he was holding in his soap-slick hands as he waited for the hit. A steady warm breath hit the back of Billy’s neck as his father reached right up and around him for his keys that Billy had remembered to hang up on the wall hook for him where they belonged. The smell of Neil—denim, oil, cigars, and some new after shave Neil had begun wearing five or so weeks ago—engulfed him and the simmering terror in his gut skyrocketed.
Billy kept his own breath on an inhale, not wanting to risk the sound of breathing out. He knew if he did it might catch, or shake, or something else that might invite attention. With his eyes cast down past the counter, Billy couldn’t tell if Neil was looking at him. So he just waited for something to happen. The only thing in his line of vision were his father’s boots on the kitchen tile, two squares from his own, and the ghost pain of memories of what the steel behind that leather felt like against his ribs.
Neil paused. Billy sensed the settling of that invisible weight and could tell now that his father’s eyes were on him. For a frozen moment the stretch of silence and its possibilities seemed infinite, but before the sound barrier could break, Neil simply turned around and left, walking out the backdoor without a word.
The door swung shut with the gravity of its own weight and Billy finally exhaled, the force of it echoing in the empty kitchen. The adrenaline Neil had stirred up inside him remained trapped, bouncing around his chest. His hands felt numb and Billy let the plate slide from his fingers. The cheap but heavy ceramic went down fast, shattering as it hit the edge of the sink.
The sound was exhilarating, terrifying. He contemplated leaving the broken shards on the counter. Surely such an act would get Neil’s attention. He’d be angry, he’d snap, and then he’d finally look at Billy again if only to teach him some responsibility and respect. It would hurt like hell, but it would restore the balance to this weird liminal zone. He was just so sick of the constant tension of the wait. Surly, he reasoned, taking the hit was easier than waiting for it to come.
With that decided, Billy left the broken plate in the sink. It made him feel defiant and alive for the first ten minutes before the doubt crept back in. Neil wasn’t there, and Billy had no idea when he’d be back. He couldn’t just wait around all night with the anticipation of Neil’s reaction. He looked at the clock that hung over the phone and watched the minute hand tick towards eight pm. It was early for a Friday night, but his skin was crawling and he couldn’t wait. Pulling on his sneakers, he headed out into the night towards the club.
He’d clean the dish up after.
**
Billy didn’t know if he should be surprised or not to find the same man from the week before smoking outside the door. He was also not really sure of the etiquette in these situations. The situation when a stranger has you call him ‘daddy,’ whips you, and watches you come from it is then what? A stranger returned to shadows? A familiar acquaintance? A perversion colleague?
The man seemed to notice his discomfort and smiled warmly at him. “Hey there, pretty boy. We haven’t scared you away yet, it seems.”
Billy shook his head and relaxed slightly as the cigarette was offered to him. He reached out cautiously and took it between his fingers for a pull. His hand grazing over the man’s brought up fragments of images, vivid memories of that palm on his skin, and he blushed, taking a drag of smoke into his lungs so quickly that he embarrassingly choked on it. The guy chuckled at him, “Whoa there, easy now.” And after a beat continued, “So what brings you out here again? Didn’t get enough the first time?”
Trying to pull himself together, Billy found himself stuttering over his words. He vaguely recalled what his mother once taught him about girls liking confidence. He figured it might apply here as well and tried to drum up some bravado. “I—,” Billy started, only he didn’t know what he wanted exactly, just knew that he wanted it and needed it to hurt. So he led with that, licking his bottom lip in a nervous tick that he twisted at the last moment to try and render as cocky, “I’m looking to hurt. You interested?”
The man cocked an eyebrow up, amused as he chided, “Is that any proper way to talk to your elders, boy? I think someone needs to be taught some respect.”
The words hit so close to those he’s heard before that Billy was taken aback for a moment. The word ‘respect’ and its consequences filled his vision and his bravado crumbled. The dangerous rush of blood flushed through him until it forced him to break eye contact, casting his eyes down instead to see the boots in front of him–steel-toed just like Neil’s–and he nodded.
“Fuck,” he whimpered, “I mean, yes, sir, I do. Teach me my fucking place.”
Billy could feel the other man’s eyes on him and the heat of his body as the guy moved away from the wall, reaching out to wrap his fist around the collar of Billy’s shirt. Billy braced himself for a fist, managed to grate out a “yes” and “please” before the impact.
Only this fist didn’t fall either. Billy whined low in his throat. The guy huffed out a laugh, “Easy boy. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you. But not out here.” He flicked the cigarette into the alley and pulled open the door, pushing Billy in front of him into the stairwell. “By the way, kid,” he added, pressing Billy further into the dark. “The safe word is Christopher.”
Billy blinked up at him confused, “Christopher?”
The guy stared back at him, pity and amusement in his eyes. “Yeah, Christopher. You say that and I stop. Whatever we are doing, it stops. Do you understand?”
All Billy knew was that there was a dizzying swirl of electricity in the air, pulsing through him, and he couldn’t understand why he would ever want to stop, but he nodded his head anyway, “Why Christopher?”
“That’s my name, kid. You don’t want a Daddy any more, you just say my name.”
The man’s—Christopher’s—hands pushed him the rest of the way down the stairs all the way into the back room. By the end of the night, Billy was a shuddering aftermath of tears, spit, and come. Billy had asked—begged—for him to hurt him harder. He had cried, whimpered and screamed until his throat was raw. He had pleaded, ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ ‘can’t,’ and ‘more,’ but not once did Billy ever say his name.
The next morning Billy woke up aching, but in that full sore way of survival, of being alive.
Dragging himself up from his mattress, he paused to assess the aftermath in the mirror, taking in the bruises from fingers and fists interwoven among thin strips of blood scabbed over from the strap. It had been so long since he had seen the familiar colors on his body that it momentarily surprised him to see them reflected in the glass.
It had been a while, but he still remembered how to move carefully, gingerly lifting his thermal down over his head to cover his chest, concealing last night behind the fabric. His muscles were aching and sore, and the familiar strum of low grade pain was oddly comforting. It was proof he could still survive it—that he was still strong—and he felt a little proud of himself for that.
There was a different feeling present as well this time. The memories of last night, of strong hands on his wrists and leather cuffs on his ankles keeping him pinned down to a wooden cross of all things—a big wooden X that had stood in the corner of the room—mixed little surges of arousal in with the sore ache of his body.
That arousal was short lived, however, as the sounds of his father filtered in from beyond the thin wood of Billy’s bedroom door. Despite the early hour, Neil was already up and on the phone, speaking in a softer voice than Billy had heard him use in years. The tone reminiscent of the one he would use to charm the attendants at grocery stores, the women in church, and the teachers that used to call him in for conferences in grade school because Billy always seemed so tired and didn’t want to volunteer answers in class.
From what Billy was able to discern from the snippets he could overhear is that Neil was planning to take some woman named Susan and something named Max—which Billy assumed must be the woman’s dog—on a picnic in the park. Billy couldn’t really imagine Neil picnicking in a park, but the knowledge that his father has been dating (rather than his usual one night or single weekend stands), and dating her long enough to take her dog on a picnic, at least filled in some of the gaps as to why Neil had been so distracted over the last month.
The phone’s cord didn’t have a very long reach and Neil’s footsteps paced around the kitchen as he spoke into it. Billy could hear the cupboard where the glasses were kept open and shut and some kind of unnamable fear prickled up his spine. He was just beginning to process why the thought of Neil getting a glass would set his teeth on edge when the clack of his father’s boots against the linoleum came to a sudden stop. Neil immediately interrupted his own sounds of affirmation to whatever the Susan woman was saying on the other end of the line with an eerily even tone, “Susan, I need to call you back” and hung up the phone.
The image of the broken plate that Billy had left carelessly in the sink the night before flashed before his eyes and before he could do anything else, his father was bursting open the door and crashing into his bedroom.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Billy admonished. He had meant to clean up the plate; he hadn’t really wanted his father to find it. The club had just distracted him so thoroughly that by the time he had snuck back into his room he had been exhausted and collapsed on the bed. He knew better than to leave the mess. He knew better, could have done better, but once again he had fucked up.
His father’s body crashed into him, barreling him into the wall. It took a moment for his body to absorb the impact, a futile attempt anyway as Neil pulled back to shove him again harder against the wall. At the second shove, the marks on his back made contact with the plaster, causing Billy to wince at the impact more than he usually would. Neil caught the shudder of pain that ran through him, the further disapproval in his father’s eyes a clear indicator that he took it as a sign of weakness. That Billy had gotten soft in the reprieve.
“Why,” Neil asked, his voice deceptively low and even, “is one of my plates broken and in the sink?”
Fuck. Billy didn’t have an answer, not a good one anyway. “I’m sorry, sir,” he admonished, tongue already dry in his mouth. “I broke it.”
Neil slammed him against the wall again, his face still calm, but his body taught, pressing into Billy to keep him pinned to it. “My plate,” he emphasized, “that I paid for. Is that why you feel like you can just carelessly break anything you please? Because I paid for it and you have no understanding or respect for other people’s things? What have we talked about?”
Neil followed up his question with another pull followed by a hard slam against the bookcase behind him. Billy hissed as the corner of a shelf dug into a bruise right under his deltoid. But the sharp pain slicing its way through him at least provided a moment of distraction from the haze of fear, allowing Billy to focus. “Responsibility and respect, sir.”
The words were a mantra at this point and Billy felt sick at having to repeat them; he couldn’t believe he’d been so careless. The thing is, is that Billy was usually exceptionally careful. He had inherited a bit of his mother’s natural gracefulness. He didn’t really trip, fall, bump into, or break things all that often without his father’s assistance. The last time he had broken something that wasn’t his had been just after his eighth birthday. There had been peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and Billy had wanted a glass of milk. He remembered thinking that he was eight now, and despite the fact that the full gallon was heavy, he was determined to pour it for himself. The glass of the milk bottle had been cold and slippery and Billy had only managed to get about a fourth of it into the glass when it had slid through his palms and shattered on the kitchen tile. Neil had come in as Billy was trying to mop up the mess with his mother’s dish towels and broken his arm in return, snapping both the ulna and radius right through the middle with a disturbing ease. His mother had set and bandaged it for him so that he at least hadn’t needed to go to the hospital. In hindsight that hadn’t been the best decision. The arm had never quite healed properly and still ached sometimes, particularly when the barometric pressure spiked. Billy was just grateful that it rarely rained in California.
Neil’s next words were the same he had used that day, “If you are so keen on breaking other people’s things, maybe you should know how it feels.”
Neil’s hand flashed up and Billy braced himself for a fist to the jaw, only the hand reached past his face to the shelf next to him. Billy watched cautiously as his father blindly pulled one of his cassettes off the shelf. Using both hands, he snapped the tape down the middle, his chest pressed tight and deliberate into Billy as he did it to keep him in place. The mangled cassette dropped to the floor. Billy heard the plastic snick against the carpet, but didn’t dare move his head to watch it fall. His father brought his fingers up to his jaw, gripping tightly for a moment, and Billy could feel Neil’s rage twitch through the tips.
He waited for the hit, the pain, so that his father would stop. But Neil just let him go, withdrawing his body from Billy’s in a sharp way that made Billy lose his balance and pitch forward towards the floor. He caught himself with his forearms as he landed on the carpet next to the cassette, but he knew better than to try and move any more than that, or to try and get back up.
Billy counted backwards from eighty-seven (the numeral that Billy had dubbed “the safety zone of silence” after a lot of trial and error). If he could make it from eighty-seven down to one, that usually meant the storm had passed. By seventy-two, Neil was already back in the kitchen reaching for the phone. He rung Susan and apologized with the assurance that he was on his way to pick her up. Neil’s voice was higher than Billy was used to. Sickly saccharine. There was a pause and then a further response, “Oh no, no emergency. It was nothing. No one important.”
By fifty-one, the phone call ended. Neil’s boots appeared in the doorway again. “Clean it up,” he demanded, voice back to the timbre Billy knew, and then he walked out the door.
Billy stayed where he was on the floor, forearms to the carpet with his head bowed and counting. By twenty-eight he heard the engine of Neil’s truck start and roll out of the driveway.
When the count reached down to ‘one,’ and he was pretty sure his father wasn’t coming back, Billy finally let his shoulder muscles drop and he screamed into the carpet, the loud raw sound of it muffled by the fibers.
His body was still tight with anticipation, his pulse racing as he tried to settle his breathing. There was a part of him that couldn’t believe that his father hadn’t hit him, no matter how late for his date that would have made him.
But then again, Neil was a man of respect and responsibility, and keeping a lady waiting was a violation of both.
Billy reached for the cassette, scooping up the mangled remains without even checking which of his collection it was. The movement caused his back to spike with a quick twinge of pain and Billy suddenly realized just how dangerous and reckless what he’d been doing was. That when his father did decide to touch him again—and no matter what this weird grace period was, Billy knew he would, he always did— his father could, would, see the bruises of someone else on his skin. He would know that someone else could hurt Billy, certainly not worse, but perhaps ‘better’ than he ever could. That all of the respect he tried to demand from his son flowed freely towards other hands.
It was all so very very dangerous, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
In a daze, Billy pulled himself together, cleaned up the plate, and headed back to the club.