Page 143 of Dirty Hit
“What you’ve seen?” I echo, the edge of panic starting to seep into each word. “Dad, I swear, I don’t…”
He steps closer, into my space behind the desk, and suddenly I feel twelve years old again, standing in the kitchen while he holds a report card and tells me how I’ve ‘fallen short of what God expects’. He lifts his phone, screen lit, jaw clenched so hard the muscles jump.
“Explain this,” he says.
He turns the phone around, and hits play. I don’t want to look, but I do.
I have no idea what I’m seeing. It’s dark, grainy footage—branches in the foreground, leaves, a weird tilt to the angle. Then, the shapes resolve, and my blood goes cold.
We’re in the clearing; the same one from last night. The camera is hidden somewhere off to the side, pointed through the trees; it’s as if whoever took this knew exactly where we’d end up. The lighting is poor, but not bad enough to save me… Because it shows my face, while Dominic is blurred out right to his tattoos.
I’m on top of him; back arched, head tipping back, hands on his chest. His hands are on my hips, guiding, bruising, meeting me thrust for thrust. There’s a completely blissed out expression on my face, and I can see my mouth moving, but there’s no audio.
It cuts out abruptly, then the clip loops back to the beginning.
I don’t realize I’ve grabbed the edge of the desk until I feel the bite of wood on my palms. My knuckles are white. My face is on fire. Cold sweat breaks out along my spine.
My father lets the video play again, then jabs his thumb to pause it. The still frame freezes on my face—head thrown back, mouth open, eyes glazed. It’s like some obscene icon, lit by the glow of the screen.
“Care to explain?” he asks, voice quiet in a way that’s much worse than if he’d shouted.
I drag my eyes away from the phone and stare at him. I open my mouth, and nothing coherent comes out.
“How—” I manage finally, the word catching, my throat gone dry. “Where did you—”
“That’swhat you want to know?” he says, incredulous. “Not how God must feel, seeing you sin so openly. Not how your mother felt, when she received this at 4am, not knowing she’d be watching her son defile himself. You want to know where I got it.”
My mind is spinning. The angle. The zoom. The fact that we were in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, with no one around. That’s what I keep snagging on under the panic; someonefilmedus. Someone was there—watching, recording—and sent it to my father.
I feel nauseous.
My father’s jaw tightens further. “This is filth. This is sodomy!” His voice cracks on the last word, fury bleeding into disgust. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Yes,” I snap. “I was there.”
He slams his palm down on the desk so hard a pen jumps. “Donotget smart with me.”
“I’m twenty-three, Dad,” I say, before I can stop myself. “I’m not sixteen. You don’t get to barge into my office, and talk to me like I’m some delinquent who stole a bottle from the communion cupboard.”
“Oh, you think this is about rebellion?” he asks, voice dripping with contempt. “You think this is about you staying out too late,or missing curfew? This is about your soul, Brendon. This is about watching my son, on his knees in the dirt, defiling himself where anyone could see. This is about watching you throw away everything we raised you to be.”
My heart hammers so hard I feel it in my teeth. “You raised me to lie,” I say quietly. “You raised me to pretend I didn’t feel what I feel. You raised me to smile and nod and say ‘yes, sir,’ while I slowly suffocated. I’m done doing that.”
“We raised you in the Word,” my mother says, her voice trembling. “We raised you to fear the Lord. We raised you to walk in purity. You promised us you were staying pure. You promised us you were staying away from temptation here. You promised, Brendon!”
The wordpuremakes me want to scream. I think about the first time Dominic put his cuff on my wrist, about the way he said ‘I’m going to keep you,’ about how, for the first time in my life, I felt honest and filthy and whole, all at once.
My mother chokes on a sob, stepping forward, hand reaching out like she wants to touch me and can’t quite bring herself to. “How long? How long has this been going on with him? With… men?”
The way she saysmenlike it’s a disease makes my stomach lurch.
I could lie. I could say it was a mistake. One time. I was drunk or confused. I could throw Dominic under the bus and say he pressured me. I see the loopholes being offered, and I can’t take a single one. Even if it would make this easier in the short term, it would kill me.
“A while,” I say quietly. “Not just… not just last night.”
My father laughs, and it’s a sound with no humor. “A while,” he repeats. “How long is ‘a while,’ exactly? Since you came here? Since before then? Have you been lying to us that long?”
“Yes,” I say, because there’s no point pretending now. “I lied. I’m sorry.”
