Free Beneath the Neon Moon by Theda Black Page B

the pack here. They consider leaving you alone with me as a rite of passage. I couldn't have them seeing something between us and risk them siccing a guard on us. I'm sorry."
    "I know you are. I also know you don't believe me." Mal turned and finally looked at him, regarding him steadily.
    The fear and dull weariness there made Zach's heart contract painfully. He couldn't keep his own fear hidden, not any more. "It's not that I don't want to believe you. But you've been changing. It won't do either of us any good to deny it."
    Mal looked at him levelly. "Then remember this, okay? I'll do anything to keep this thing inside of me away from you."
    "How?" Zach asked softly. The question hung in the air between them.
    "You're right here beside me, reminding me of who I am and what happens to you if I let go. You're the one that told me I can do this, Zach, okay, so you have to believe it now. I'm not gonna kiss you, put my mouth on you and make you feel something for me—God, make you come for me and then hurt you. Not as long as there's any of me still left in here."
    Zach stared at him, at the red-rimmed eyes, the pain and the gentleness in his face, and then he remembered that same face, brutality stamped in every line. He understood what it meant to fear something within himself, and he understood turning the fear away, denying it, though it'd been a long time since he'd fooled himself about how far he'd go to survive. He also understood about holding out against something bigger and stronger, fighting for one more hour, one more minute or second.
    It surprised him to look at Mal and believe that Mal knew and understood these things, too. He'd figured a guy who had a family and college and the normal things Zach had always wanted wouldn't know about the bad times, when all that was left to fight with was inside a person. But that same guy sat beside him, blood spilling onto the dirt from his ankle, hurting and wanting Zach to believe in him. 
    "I told you. I said what I said so that Aaron wouldn't come down on us. C'mere." Zach moved over and wrapped his arms around Mal. He dropped his head, looking down at Mal's ankle. It looked like raw meat, gore too thick to see through. "God, I'm sorry you have to hurt like this," he murmured.
    "Leave it, okay? Please? I don't want to talk about it, fuck, I don't want to see it."
    "All right," he said, and then when Mal looked skeptically at him, " Okay ." He still couldn't help thinking about it. Mal's physiology had to be changing or he'd never have been able to stand the pain.
    He moved his head to Mal's shoulder and rested against it, hearing the grateful, pleased sound Mal made. He was exhausted. He dozed a little, drifting in and out. He sank into a dream about the summer when he was seventeen, his father still alive. 
    They'd stayed in some boggy little town in Florida, Spanish moss dripping off the trees. There were plenty of empty, sandy spots in between the boiled peanut stands and the gas and beer marts off the lonesome stretch of US 231. Their rental place was tucked up in one of those spots behind a stand of trees. The road that led to the place wasn't paved, just sand and rutted dirt. The air was hot and wet and still, and the bugs so raucous up in the trees at night Zach could hardly hear himself think.
    One night Zach heard his dad cursing and yelling outside, followed by the sound of something like a car backfiring, cracking loud and decisive. He scrambled up off the sagging old couch, heart pounding, and ran outside. His dad was drunk, skinny body reared back as he flung firecrackers into the branches of the two trees in the front yard, yelling goddamn bugs and shut the fuck up and fucking driving me crazy . Zach stood and watched, mouth open and eyes big. He leaned slowly against the railing of the ramshackle wooden porch and started laughing, couldn't stop until he was nearly sick, his T-shirt sticking to his back in the clinging heat of the evening while the jar