Page 120 of Dirty Hit
I’ve got a window of maybe five minutes before he stirs, and the last thing I need is for him to wake up and find me hovering like some lovesick freak. Because I’m not.
I’m the man who threatened him.
The man who dragged him down into the dirt, made him like it, then laughed when he begged for space and walked right through any boundaries he tried to set. I don’t deserve soft. I don’t deserve this moment.
“Fuck,” I whisper.
I back away from the bed, before I can change my mind. Every instinct in me wants to crawl in there beside him, drag him into my arms, and let myself pretend for a few more hours that I get to keep this. But pretending is what got me here. Pretending I could have him, and still keep him safe. Pretending my mother wouldn’t notice. Pretending love could exist quietly around violence.
I grab my hoodie and wince pulling it on. My wallet. Keys. Burner. Knife. All the things that make up the life I actually live, shoved back into place one by one.
I move through the apartment quickly, collecting myself and leaving everything else untouched. If I start fixing things, or cleaning, or hovering, I’ll end up rationalizing one more hour, one more sunrise, one more morning, with him tucked against me.
By the time I get to my car, my jaw hurts from how hard I’ve been clenching it.
I don’t look back. If I do, I’ll go upstairs again—I know I will.
So instead I get in, start the engine, and drive away from the only place that’s felt safe in years—telling myself the whole time that if he hates me by the time he wakes up, at least he’ll still be alive to do it.
Brendon
Aweekisapparentlyallit takes to pretend nothing happened.
Seven days, give or take a couple of hours, between tending to Dominic’s wounds at 2am, and sitting at my tiny kitchen table today, with a stack of midterms and a mug of coffee that went cold before I even took the second sip.
Seven days between a confession that slipped out of his mouth, and opening my inbox to see no new messages from him. He didn’t even have to say we were done; he just stopped, and didn’t even bother to text.
To be fair, I didn’t either.
My phone sat on my nightstand that night, face down, buzzing occasionally with group chats and TA chain emails, and I stared at it until my eyes hurt. I could have picked it up at any point. I could have typed something simple that sounded like us. ‘You alive, Beast?’ ‘You rip any more throats out today?’ ‘You still bleeding on things you shouldn’t?’Anything.
Instead, I lay there, with Jericho sprawled across my chest, and convinced myself that if I started the conversation, I’d be the only one holding it up.
The next day, there was an email from the Student Support Office, reminding me to submit my updated TA schedule. The day after that, an automatic notification popped up in the system.
Student: Volkov, Dominic Viktorovich
Status: Removed from tutoring program.
Reason: Academic progress achieved / no longer required.
Three lines. Two clicks. All it takes to erase an entire part of my week.
I sat in my cramped little office, the one with the flickering overhead light and wobbly chair, and read that notification three times. My throat felt too tight, and my chest too full. I opened our message thread and reread the last conversation—the one where I told him I’d be at the cottage after the game, the one he didn’t answer, the one that ended with me stitching him up on my couch, instead.
That blank space underneath my name was suddenly the most accurate thing in my life.
Slipping back into my old patterns should not have been as easy as it was; that’s what makes me hate them so much.
I fall back into the good boy role like it’s muscle memory. I get up early, I make coffee exactly the way I always did before him, I pack my bag with neat files and color-coded pens. I answer emails promptly, offer office hours, smile at students who come to me in a panic over grades.
Jericho watches all of this with the unimpressed air of someone who has seen too many human disasters to be moved by one more. He curls up on my lecture notes, smacks my pen when I get too far into my own head, and climbs onto my chest atnight when I can’t shut my brain off. He stares at me, with those unblinking yellow eyes, whenever I linger too long on the stupid leather cuff on my wrist.
It serves as a constant, solid reminder that for a chunk of my life, I belonged to someone who could kill with his bare hands, and somehow chose to hold me with them instead.
Without the sessions, I have more free time. He’s out of sight most of the time, which makes it very easy to pretend I’m out of his mind, I guess. The thing is, being out of someone else’s mind doesn’t seem to stop them from occupying mine.
One week later, the campus looks exactly the same, while I feel like someone reached inside and quietly rearranged all my organs without telling me.
