Page 108 of Dirty Hit
I can’t hold his hand in the student union. I can’t press him against a brick wall by the library and kiss him. He can’t look at me the way he does in my kitchen, when my hands are on his waist. All that intensity has to be shoved into the cracks—his office, my car, a cottage at the end of some shitty gravel road.
“Get your shit together,” I mutter to myself. “It’s a weekend. You’ve done this before. You can let him go.”
Except I know that’s a lie. I’ve never done this before. Hookups are easy; they come, they go, they bleed, they forget me, or I forget them. I leave a trail of bodies behind me, some literal, some metaphorical, and I don’t lose sleep over it. We’re just using each other, and that’s the point.
Brendon is not a one-off soul I can scrub off in the shower. He’s in everything already—in my coffee routine, in the way Iword texts, in the way I check my phone between drills. He’s in the way I think about my future, and see his face flickering at the edge of it, like a glitch. He’s the first thought I have when I wake up, and the last one before I fall asleep, and that’s not superstition, that’s fact.
But I’m not built for forever. He’s not safe around forever.
The fan hums behind me, and somewhere inside Brendon mutters, “That sentence is disgusting,” at one of the papers he’s grading. Jericho chirps once, offended on behalf of whatever student just got slaughtered. It drags a grin out of me before I can stop it.
I set the wrench down, and lean both hands on the edge of the open hood, lowering my head.
“Love you, Beast.”
It doesn’t land in my head like a compliment, it lands like a command my body doesn’t know how to follow. I don’t know what to do with love when it isn’t poison. I know what to do with lust, obsession, possession, and worship twisted up with fear. I know how to handle devotion when it’s dirty and kneeling and begging, and doesn’t ask anything of me except control.
But love—quiet, sleepy, real enough to slip out when his guard is down—that’s a whole other thing. That’s not a game, or even corruption. That’s not me getting my claws into a pretty little good boy, and ruining him until he likes it.
That’s him giving me something clean, while I’m still covered in everything dirty, and my first instinct is not to reject it. It’s to curl around it, like a fucking dragon around gold.
“You’re thinking too loud again,” Brendon calls from inside, voice drifting out like he read my mind. “I can hear it from here.”
“You can barely hear yourself think over your grading rage,” I call back, but it’s automatic, affectionate. “How many freshmen have you sentenced to academic hell today?”
“Only five,” he says, offended. “And it’s not hell, it’s feedback. They’ll thank me when they’re not failing Con Law because they thought ‘idk’ was an acceptable answer.”
I snort. “You’re the only person I know who says ‘thank me’ and ‘Con Law’ in the same sentence like that’s not a hate crime.”
“I’m shaping young legal minds,” he argues. “What are you doing out there, Volkov?”
“Keeping my dad’s car from dying,” I say. “And trying not to fuck the TA on the dining table, so you’re welcome.”
There’s a choke, a sputter, then the sound of a pen dropping. “You’re disgusting,” he says faintly, which just makes me grin because I can picture exactly how red his ears just went.
“Still grading?” I ask.
“Yes,” he mutters. “Some of us have jobs that don’t involve concussions and celebrity.”
“Concussions build character,” I say. “Celebrity gives me leverage. You’re the one who works for peanuts teaching rich kids what the Constitution is.”
“Someone has to,” he says. “If they’re going to grow up to be lawyers who keep you out of prison, they should at least know the basics.”
“You planning on being my lawyer?” I ask, half joking, half not.
Silence hangs for a second, heavier than the teasing warrants. When he speaks again, his voice is quieter.
“If it ever came to that,” he says, “you know I would be.”
“Good to know,” I say, keeping my tone light, like I didn’t just picture him sitting across from me in some jailhouse interview room, cross shining under fluorescent lights, while I tell him not to tank his career for me.
I finish what I’m doing and close the hood, wiping my hands on the rag still tucked into my waistband. When I stand, my backcracks pleasantly. The air is cool, the sky hazy, as leaves rustle softly in the trees.
Brendon steps out, and my brain short-circuits.
He’s wearing my shirt.
Not just any shirt: the black practice one with my name across the shoulders in bold white letters and my number, thirteen, stenciled across the back. It hangs off him a little, since I’m bigger, the hem hitting mid-thigh and sleeves nearly swallowing his elbows. He’s paired it with soft gray shorts that mostly disappear under the shirt’s length, bare legs pale and on display.
