“Grace…” He gulps, red blotching his entire body. “I don’t think I like sex…please stop…”
“Nonsense, honey. Everyone likes sex.” She strokes his hair and then whispers, “You don’t want to be seen as a freak compared to your brother, do you, Bran? Your mum and dad would be so disappointed.”
He shakes his head once and she comes down on him in one go. He screams. And it’s not from pleasure.
He screams and it sounds like a “No…”
But I can’t listen to what he has to say anymore because she slaps a hand on his mouth as she moans. The muffled sounds that rip from him as he tries to wiggle away will haunt me for the rest of my fucking life.
“Mmmmno… Mmmm… Mmmm…”
A breaking sound echoes in the air and a burn spreads through my arm. I can tell I broke the glass and can feel water and blood sliding down my wrist and dripping onto the floor, but I can’t look away from his face.
The confusion.
The pain.
The anger.
Animalistic growls reverberate around me and I realize they’re mine. My body vibrates with rage so extreme, it fills my vision with black. Demons I didn’t know existed flood my bloodstream, and pressure forms behind my eyes.
As I watch and listen, I know, I just know that I’m never coming back from this.
36
BRANDON
Some days, I feel like I’m fine. I can breathe, somewhat, can move, run, talk, and smile.
I can exist and not suffer from the metaphorical bleeding in my fucked-up head.
On other days, I feel like I’m being punished for the good times. I’m being punished for feeling happy when I have no right to be.
Days where my wrist itches and my mind crumbles into a satire of burning emotions and throbbing pulses.
Days where it’s hard to breathe without choking on the gooey ink that’s been flooding my brain since the day I gave up control because of my screwed-up pride.
Today is one of those days.
Today started with waking up in the embrace of the most beautiful, most affectionate soul I’ve ever met and feeling like I got my fucking ink all over him.
I felt like I was tarnishing him, digging him deeper into the black fucked-up hole of my existence until he’d also be submerged in it.
Until he’d have no way out, like me.
That’s why I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t want anyone to see me. Because the moment they get past the perfect image to look inside, they’ll find a grimy, spineless piece of fucking shit whose worst enemy is his own mind.
Nikolai woke up to me wiping the smudges from his chest and thinking I was stroking him. He smiled and I couldn’t look him in the eye without falling deeper into that muddy hole in my soul.
He smiled and it was okay for a while.
Until it wasn’t.
Until Grace decided to come over for dinner and I had to sit across from her again and pretend I wasn’t being pulled apart by my demons. I had to swallow the food and force it down when my stomach demanded I throw it back up.
It was worse with Nikolai around. The more he watched me like he could peel off my outer layer and see all the ugly parts, the worse my nausea got.
A splitting migraine has been pounding on the back of my head and is making my vision blurry as I attempt to walk to the studio.
I barely managed to tell Dad about our arrangements to leave tomorrow before I bolted out of his office.
If I’d stayed, I would’ve exploded. I feel like a ticking time bomb lately, on the verge of spilling my guts and ruining everything for Mum like an ungrateful brat.
She was over the moon when Grace signed her. I was over the moon when she decided to give me private lessons instead of Lan.
For the first time, someone from the art circuit called me a genius instead of my holier-than-thou twin.
For the first time, I felt more important than him.
Lan never liked Grace or got along with her, and that made me fall deeper into her trap.
He told me not to take her classes and that he’d talk to his art teacher so he could teach us together. But I responded with things like, “It’s none of your business, prick” and “Stop being so jealous,” then went to her just out of spite.
It was only after I grew up that I realized two things. One, from a young age, Lan’s narcissism clashed with hers and he probably saw her for what she was, even if unintentionally. The reason she didn’t pick him was because she couldn’t control him. He’s always been so sharp and manipulative, her tactics wouldn’t have worked on him.
Two, she was grooming me at the time. She said the right things, pushed the right buttons, and used my love for art and my parents to shove me right where she wanted me.
And it worked like a charm.
For her. Not me.
Even before Grace, I didn’t like physical touch. I made out with a few girls, and some of them gave me the occasional blowjob, but I had to stop myself from pushing them away every time they touched me. I had to play the game and pretend it was okay.
Lan, Eli, and Remi kept saying shagging was so fantastic and I felt extremely alienated in their guy talks. So for a short period, I suspected maybe I was gay. Maybe the reason physical touch was revolting was because I played for a different team.
The thought freaked me out to no end. I remember thinking, why can’t Lan be the gay twin? Why does it have to be me? He already excels at drawing everyone’s attention, so why can’t he at least be the different one?
But that thought didn’t have any credence. I never felt attracted to my teammates who stripped in the changing room, and they had pretty fit bodies. I never ogled them even subconsciously and never saw them as anything more than teammates. However, I had to test the theory.
One night, I went for it. There was an openly gay boy at school and he often flirted with good-looking straight guys—Lan and me included. When he followed me out during a party, flirting and touching, I kissed him to see if I liked it.
I nearly threw up in his mouth.
So I thought maybe it was because he was so flamboyant and I wasn’t into that. I tried it with a few other boys, but the result was the same. I felt disgusted and couldn’t get past a kiss.
Turned out, I wasn’t straight or bi or gay. I was simply broken like a fucking malfunctioning machine. When Lan and I were in Mum’s womb, he took everything and left me with nothing. That caused me a lot of stress at the time, and I wanted to talk to Dad about it, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I thought he’d be disappointed or something.
He had headaches because of Lan, but he listened with a grin whenever my brother told him about his endless shagging adventures. Dad didn’t agree with many of his actions, but he’s always been irrevocably proud of how my brother handled himself in the outside world.
I was so jealous of Lan, so filled with envy that I started to distance myself from him. I blamed him for how I was broken. I hated him because I wasn’t like him. I despised him for having everything while I had nothing.