Asher just shrugged.
“Marianne came into my room and said, ‘it’s probably a good thing your father left. At least one of his children gets to be normal.’”
Levi gasped, grabbing Asher’s hand at his side. For a moment, Asher thought Levi was trying to make him stop touching him, but he just held Asher’s hand, his eyebrows upturned, and his lower lip sucked between his teeth. He looked…sad?
That’s not the right way to react to this…
“I didn’t say anything,” Asher continued. “I didn’t cry. I don’t think I felt anything about it, really. But I knew it was wrong. I knew she wasn’t allowed to say that to me. So I stopped eating to teach her a lesson.”
He scooped a spoonful of ice cream, watching it melt at the edges.
“The hunger strike lasted nine days. Marianne didn’t notice for the first three, because she wasn’t paying attention. She noticed on day four because I passed out at school. By day seven, she was scared. By day nine, I was in the hospital with an IV in my arm. She was sitting in the chair next to the bed, and her hands were shaking. She asked me why. I told her very clearly,”He looked at Levi. “‘I don’t care if you like me. But you’re not allowed to talk to me like that.’”
The apartment was quiet, but Levi’s eyes were huge. Asher wasn’t sure if it was surprise, or awe, or just Levi being in love with him. It was probably all three.
“When I was hungry,” Asher continued, tilting the spoon and watching the dollop of ice cream slide around on it, “when my stomach was growling, and I was dizzy, and I could have eaten — I had a thought. The thought was this:she needs to see what happens when she tries to hurt me. She needs to feel it.The hunger wasn’t about food. It was about making her understand that I was a person she couldn’t say things to without consequence.”
He held the spoon toward Levi’s mouth.
“Your stomach’s been growling all morning. You haven’t moved. I need to know what you’re thinking when your stomach growls and you still don’t eat.”
Levi looked at the spoon. The vanilla dripped onto the sheet near his face, a wet circle spreading into the cotton, and Asher watched it spread, wanting to put his thumb in it.
“I don’t know,” Levi said.
“You’re lying.” He pushed the spoon closer. “You know exactly what you’re thinking when your stomach growls. There’s a thought in your head telling you not to swallow, and I need to know what it is, and you’re going to tell me.”
Something shifted in Levi’s face. What came up under the sadness was harder, older — the stubbornness Asher had seen in the game when Levi decided he wasn’t going to do something, and no amount of threat was going to move him.
“No,” Levi said.
Asher’s chest unlocked.
There you are.
He’d been working with this mostly deflated version of Levi for two days, but this was the other one. The one Asher knew. The one who looked at Asher while barricaded in a room he knew he had no chance of escape from, and threw a lamp at him anyway.
“Open,” Asher said.
Levi didn’t. He pursed his lips and glared at him, and Asher’s mouth went dry the way it had in the sanitarium, the way it always did when Levi decided to make him work for it.
He popped the ice cream in his own mouth, set the spoon and the carton aside, and moved.
His knees came down on either side of Levi’s hips, and his weight settled on the mattress before Levi had time to flinch. Levi yelped, a small sound, and Asher kept his mouth closed around the cold as his weak hands pushed at Asher’s chest.
His fingers wrapped the sides of Levi’s neck, his palm settled against the windpipe, and he squeezed.
Levi tried to pry his fingers loose first, then he clawed at Asher’s wrist instead. His legs kicked under the blanket.
Open it. Open your mouth, baby.
Levi’s face went red and then violet at the edges. His eyes were wet. His pulse hammered under Asher’s fingers, and each beat went up his arm, landed somewhere behind his ribcage, all while Asher held him there and watched and felt every single one. His own breath was loud. His own heart was big. Levi’s legs stopped kicking and started shifting — hips arching, his body trying to find an angle that would buck Asher off, and not finding it, and not stopping.
His mouth opened finally, begging for air, and Asher sealed his mouth over Levi’s.
Vanilla. Cold. Levi’s nails were still on his wrist, and his other hand found the back of Asher’s neck, holding on. Levi kissed him back like he hungered for the air and the kiss in equal measure,gasping where he could, his throat moving beneath Asher’s palm as he swallowed and kept kissing him anyway.
Yes.