Feel My Pain (Curse Bound 1)

He parked next to it but didn’t feel like taking his helmet off, even when Karla waved at him from inside her car. He’d showered not that long ago, but sweat kept beading on his body, and he both looked and felt like shit. Which only reminded him that since Zane had come crashing back to his life, Roach hadn’t been drinking nearly as much as before, and not just because Zane was keeping watch. With Zane around, life wasn’t as miserable anymore, and he could focus on the pleasant now instead of the past he drank to forget.

Zane pulled away from him, as if he couldn’t stand the touch anymore and took off the helmet, walking toward the SUV without a single glance at Roach. It had never been this bad between them. Even when they’d met again after the two years, Zane had at least paid him attention. Now, he was determined to pretend Roach didn’t exist.

“Wear the scarf,” Roach suggested, following him with the bundle of gray wool in hand.

He hated how their conversation had gone off the rails last night, but Zane had prodded him so ferociously, as if he’d wanted to poke a hole in Roach’s defences just for the hell of it. All that stupid talk of finding other men and a future where they weren’t together. It turned Roach’s stomach.

Zane ignored him, as if he no longer communicated on the same frequency as Roach, and shook his hair out of the flattened shape created by the helmet. He knocked on the roof of the SUV and stepped back when Karla slid out dressed in a woolen cape that looked as if it had been sewn out of random fabrics.

“There you are. Almost on time,” she said and clapped her gloved hands. Her smile slid off her lips as soon as she faced them. “Oh no… Has something happened?”

“No. Why?” Roach grumbled.

“Well… your auras. They’re much darker.”

Roach shrugged glancing at the burned-down walls. “Must be the place.”

Much has survived, even if without the wooden elements the structure didn’t resemble its old self much. The porch was gone, so was the roofing above it, which left the main entrance to the bar hanging far too high above the snow-dusted ground.

The white flakes kept coming, creating a sharp contrast with even the palest parts of the facade, which had been left untouched by flames. The ruins of Roach’s past were still standing, still that same ugly gray color.

“Let’s get this over with. What do you want us to do?” Zane asked sharply, breathing out a cloud of vapor from underneath the furry hood he’d pulled up. He was so fucking cute in it Roach could hardly stand it. He wished to adjust the hood for Zane and pull him close, bury his face in the trim that already smelled of the Zane’s addictive shampoo bars.

That was when reality hit Roach like his father’s fist. He’d been cruising on the assumption that they’d make up within the week somehow, like they always had so far, but what would happen once the necessity of staying together because of the curse disappeared? Wasn’t this exactly why they’d come here?

Karla yelped when several rats stampeded out of a pile of trash bags someone had dumped by the entrance, just behind a charred wooden plank that might have been the porch railing in another life. She took a deep breath to compose herself, folded her hands on her chest and looked up while the snow swirled around them like ashes from the fire.

Maybe deep in the cellar, where the dead body had been, the earth had opened into hell and was now permanently burning?

“Where did you first meet?” Karla asked.

Roach scratched the back of his head as his thoughts began to race with the realization that he didn’t want this. He said the first lie that came to his mind, desperate to spoil any magic she might conjure. “Inside. I was serving Zane beer.”

“No. I hitchhiked here and ran from the road. You were standing on the porch,” Zane said, glancing past the trees, over the field of weeds and grass that used to be the bar’s parking lot. Not that much had changed here—the place was still a gray mud pit, only with more plants and less cars.

Roach put his hands into his pockets. “Was I?”

Karla pushed her glasses up her nose as they all stared at the blackish stain left behind by char where the porch had been. “And nothing unusual happened in that moment?”

“Yeah, he got hooked by a guy, played like a baby and didn’t even know it was happening,” Zane grumbled, pushing his hands deeper down the pockets of his coat.

Roach looked down, and when he wiped away the thin layer of snow with his boot, he revealed broken glass stuck in the dirt. He wanted to meet Zane’s gaze, tell him what really lay in his heart, but he didn’t dare, even though the words coming out of his mouth were true. “You were a vision.”