InsaneJournal

Current mood:

surprised

I'd come home intending to let Brenda out for a moment and grab my gym bag, since it was Wednesday, but that plan was shot to hell. I made tea instead. We sat in the atrium and talked.

It probably was a dumb question, and I don't blame Ben for looking at me the way he did, but he answered me seriously. "No, my name's not Benji. It's Benjiro. Caleb really is as racist as he seems. He didn't like my name, and thought it was funny to call me Benji. He said I reminded him of that dog in the movies - I could do cute tricks, but otherwise, I was just small and scrawny and ugly. He likes to say that I'm a stray that he picked up and no one else wanted."

He paused, and looked into his tea. "It's not true," he said mutinously. "I was loved, I was wanted. I was beautiful, popular in school, my boyfriend loved me, and I was going to succeed. He ruined that. He ruined everything."

Apparently, Caleb was as stupid on four feet as on two. Ben and his lover had been making out in a park when Caleb found them. He'd savaged them both, but the lover had died while Ben hadn't. He'd found out later that wolf-Caleb had mistaken Ben for a girl, and that he'd deliberately killed the boyfriend. That was why Ben's scars were on his lower leg, where I hadn't noticed them before, and where, if he'd been a girl, Caleb wouldn't have had to see them when he was fucking him. Caleb was more of a breast-man than leg-man.

Shamed, marked, and with a secret he couldn't tell his family and friends, Ben had tried to hunt down the one who'd done it to him, only to end up being beaten by Caleb at their next meeting. Caleb had stolen Ben, literally; he'd thrown Ben's unconscious body into the back of his truck and moved his entire pack, hightailing it out of Ben's hometown. Ben had tried to leave - at first.

"Why didn't you?" I wanted to know.

He glared at me sullenly. "Because he takes everything from us," he replied. "When one of us gets a job, he takes the money. If he thinks we're being 'lippy' with him, he hits us. That usually means we end up calling in sick too many times, losing our jobs and being penniless again, depending on him and the others just to get something to eat. If it was just me, I could leave - I could do something, whore myself out on the side, wait tables and not tell him how much in tips I was really making, or even throw myself on the mercy of another pack. Something. But it's not just me. You don't understand. I don't think you know what it is to be beaten down. The pack... They were already submissive before he found them, but now..." He shrugged. "Bridget's scared of her own shadow, Terrie's got so many scars because of him that her self-esteem is zero. Lupe can barely speak English, and Stephanie doesn't speak at all. Lisa's just spiteful - she's the reason he found out about you, in fact. I'm the closest thing that they have to an alpha-bitch. I can't leave them. They don't have anyone else."

I chewed on that for a moment. He had just answered several questions that I hadn't asked yet, and raised still more. I was having trouble to decide which pressing question to ask next. Finally I settled on, "You said this Lisa person is the one who told Caleb about me? How'd she find out?"

He didn't meet my eyes as he explained.

He'd been crying on Stephanie's lap - Stephanie the earth-mother, the one who didn't talk, making her the one safest to talk to. Crying about me. Lisa had overheard, and of course she'd run to Caleb with the whole story. So. Ben hadn't betrayed me further, forced attention on me before I was ready. It had been an accident.

And why me? Why now? Because Caleb had brought them to Wichita, where one of the local alphas had noticed that all five of the girls were especially pretty and especially submissive. Caleb may have been meaner and stronger than Ben, but he wasn't smart enough, or strong enough, to protect them from the bigger, meaner monsters. Ben was afraid that his pack would be ripped apart, that the girls would be forced into a worse life than the one they had now. It was something that Ben had managed to prevent until now, and might have prevented still, if Caleb hadn't boasted of his "harem," trying to impress the local alphas.

And then Ben had found Red, and through Red, he'd found me.

"And found the perfect dupe?" I asked bitterly.

His face was still averted. Not in submission, but in bitterness; I could still see enough of his face to catch his mouth tightening angrily. "I thought you were..." he started, then shrugged, tossing his head back. "I can see it in you," he continued. "You watch everything and judge everything, and you don't talk about it until you've made up your mind, and then nothing stops you. You just bulldoze your way through everyone else to get what you want, no matter what. You did that to me the first night we met. You did that with Caleb, in fact - you sized him up and figured him out, and then you made him go away. You also pissed off someone who's as prideful as he is stupid and mean, and I'll have hell to pay when I try to go back to the pack, but you still managed it.

"But I talked to Red, and a couple of your other friends, and they all say that when you decide to take care of someone, you do that, too. Even when you're pissing them off and not paying attention to their feelings, you keep them safe and push them into better things. And you don't hit. I thought you wouldn't..."

He stood up, his usual grace disappearing with his usual calm, and began to gather up our mugs, taking them to the sink to be washed.

"You mean, you hoped," I said softly. "You hoped I wouldn't treat you the way I treated you the other day."

"I understand," he said, standing with his back to me and using a rag to scrub a mug as though it were covered in sin. "I did lie to you. I was trying to manipulate you. You were angry."

"And angry men hit." Christ.

He stopped scrubbing, and his shoulders slumped. "I can't go back to the pack tonight," he told me. "Caleb would kill me."

"You're not going back at all."

"Yes, I am. I told you. I can't leave them. I'm all they have."

"They've survived this long - "

"I love them!" he shouted, and turned to glare at me. "You don't get to decide this one, Julian," he said. "That's my pack, and it's not as though you ever really wanted me. Did you?"

"Did you?" I shot back. "Was any of it real? Or were you just playing me, trying to be what I wanted so you could lead me around by my dick and make me do what you needed me to do?"

"You're the one who believes in absolute morality, Julian. I may have fucked you over because I needed you, but you fucked me because you could!"

Oh, no he didn't. "You offered - "

"You took!"

"You didn't seem to mind at the time!"

"I didn't!"

Impasse. We scowled at each other for a second or two, him in anger, me in confusion. Then...

"I do love you! You asshole!" And he stomped out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.