Talker's Redemption by Amy Lane Read Free Book Online Page A

started shaking all over again.
     
    “Okay, Talker, who took English thirty-A, why were you laughing a minute ago? I’ve got to tell you, man, it didn’t sound sane.”
     

     

     
    Jeremy spoke in… class today….
     
    Brian’s shoulders shook, and it looked like he was laughing, but he was wiping his eyes with the back of his hands like a little kid. “That doesn’t mean you wanted it!” he said, his voice so gruff and choked it practically tickled Tate’s toes.
     
    “I told everybody I wanted it!” Tate snarled back. “I told you!”
     
    “And you don’t get to change your mind?”
     
    Tate had never seen Brian angry before, and Brian’s shout almost unmade him. “Don’t yell at me!” He cringed, hurt. Brian darted his eyes from the door to Talker to the shrink, and he still seemed to know that the only thing Talker wouldn’t forgive was if he bailed.
     
    “Well then, don’t laugh about it,” he said after a moment, hiding his face in his hands. “You asked to be treated decent, like a person. Don’t laugh about it.”
     
    “C’mon, Brian—you’ve got to admit, it’s a little bit funny.”
     
    Brian looked at him with swollen, red eyes and tears and snot and pain running down his pretty, American-boy-freckled face. Suddenly he got self-conscious and used the inside of his plain T-shirt to wipe himself off. He held up his hand to Talker’s cheek, the damaged one, and wiped with his thumb. His hand came away wet and his thumb was smeared with the eyeliner that Tate used on both eyes to hide the fact that the lid on his right side was slightly misshapen. He’d lost some vision in that eye, but not all. He’d been lucky.
     
    Jeremy spoke in… spoke in….
     
    “Look at us, baby,” Brian pleaded. “Look at us here. Are we even a little bit funny?”
     
    Class today….
     

     

     
    “It was funny that you thought Trev was my boyfriend,” Talker said, thinking that he couldn’t think. They already knew, right? They knew it was Trev. They knew Brian had beat him up first. Maybe, if they knew Brian had a reason, maybe if they knew that, then Brian wouldn’t get into trouble. Maybe if they knew how afraid he was, how afraid he was, how afraid he was… oh God… how long could he hold it together?
     
    “He’s not your boyfriend now? Or he never was?”
     
    Talker started to shake, shake hard. “He never was,” he muttered. “Never my boyfriend, never even my friend….”
     

     

     
    “ C’mon , you sweet little bitch, c’mon….”
     
    “Jesus, Trev, use some fucking… ouch! Fucking ouch! Some fucking lube, goddammit! Ouch… fuck, Trev, it fucking hurts! Stop it!”
     
    “Just like you want it!”
     
    “I don’t want it! No! Stop it! Dammit!”
     
    And the little voice in his head, the one that screamed when his heart was jagged, shrieking… Jeremy spoke in…class today….
     

     

     
    “ Yeah , kid? How are we supposed to believe that? What can you possibly say to convince us…?”
     

     

     
    “ What did you say, Tate?”
     
    “C’mon, Doctor Sutherland!”
     
    “The guy was hurting you, wasn’t he? He was hurting you, and you asked to leave, and you were fighting him, right?”
     
    “He had me pinned! He’s really strong, almost as strong as Brian, but Brian tries not to hurt anybody, and I couldn’t move my neck or my shoulders and it hurt….”
     
    …spoke in, spoke in… Jeremy spoke in….
     

     

     
    “He wanted to fuck me, but I didn’t want him....” Could he make this reasonable? Could he even make sense at all?
     
    “Yeah? Fucking convince us!”
     

     

     
    “So what did you say?”
     
    Jeremy spoke in… class today….
     

     

     
    Detective Melville was trying to stop his dark-haired partner from getting in Tate’s face, and Tate was trying to claw his way through the back of the wall and get to Brian.
     
    “You don’t like our version of it, Talker, you’ve got to give us another version,