Free Wild Summer by Suki Fleet Page B

gaze and held it, watching how determined not to cry he looked even as tears spilled down his cheeks. Summer’s expression right then would stay with him always.
    It would haunt him.
    Ren played, and Summer’s body responded. Christopher had never seen anyone turned on by pain. And Summer looked torn apart, humiliated, yet unable to stop his body’s reaction.
    “He likes it rough,” Ren sneered at Christopher. “Perhaps you should stick around until later on, then you can see how rough it can get. A little pain is a turn-on….”
    But when Ren pulled Summer’s hair, Summer looked as though he was in more than a little pain.
    “Stop it!” Christopher yelled, distraught, momentarily squeezing his eyes shut again, unable to watch Summer being used as if he were nothing.
    Without warning Ren stopped and shoved Summer away so hard he stumbled against a table and fell to the floor. Looking disinterested, Ren flung a plastic bag at Christopher. The bag contained his wallet and phone—the things Summer had stolen yesterday.
    Yesterday seemed so fucking far away now.
    “Get out of here,” Ren said, raising his hands as if he were shooing animals.
    Immediately the arms holding Christopher withdrew, though Ren’s booted foot delivered a swift kick to his stomach, leaving him curled into a ball, winded.
    After hurriedly swiping the bag off the floor in front of him, Summer grabbed Christopher’s arm and, with inhuman strength, dragged him across the floor to the stairwell, barely letting Christopher get to his feet.
    Christopher just felt numb.
    He was aware of ascending the stairwell, walking past the bouncer, of being outside in the painful sunlight, of walking a twisting turn of steps, of stopping, the greasy alley wall against his back… but it didn’t mean anything. Nothing meant anything.
    Summer was standing in front of him, breathing like he was running from something. His gold eyes were staring so hard at Christopher, they could strip flesh from bone with their intensity.
    Christopher felt as though he were in a dream. Everything seemed so unreal and distant.
    “Why do you let him treat you like that?” he asked.
    It was entirely the wrong thing to say, but it was the thought in Christopher’s heart, and the only one to make it past the wave of numbness he was riding—numbness that blanketed his guilt and the powerlessness he felt. He should have just hugged Summer. But he didn’t understand why Summer would allow Ren to do that, and from Summer’s general anxiety, he surmised it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened.
    “Fuck you! Just. Fuck!” Summer exploded. His hands went to his head as if he were trying to hold himself together. He opened his mouth as though he were screaming, his beautiful features twisting with anger and pain and hurt. “You know nothing about my life!”
    He slammed his hands into Christopher’s chest, then threw the plastic bag containing his belongings across the alleyway. It was as though a hurricane was whipping up, Summer becoming lost to its forces. “Leave! Fuck off! I never want to see you again! Never!”
    Summer shoved him away, pushed him again and again, looking more and more distraught each time, before he turned and ran back down the alley and into the club.
    It was only once Summer had gone that what had happened truly hit Christopher. Like a bomb had detonated in his chest, he slid down the wall and wrapped his arms around himself to try and hold on as the pain ripped through him. He should have reacted, done something, but he hadn’t, and now Summer was gone. The boy whose life he’d saved—the one whose life he wanted to be responsible for, the one he’d fallen so hard for—never wanted to see him again.
    His heart fractured.
    The break was so deep, he didn’t think it would ever heal.

Chapter 13
     
    Now… (four years later)
     
    C RASH WOKE with a start, blinking at the hazy light that filtered through the thin flowery curtains