Which led me back to why I’d asked about his birthday – if he was struggling this much, it was a bad memory for him. It might be physical abuse, emotional abuse, regret over life choices, and a whole range of other things, but he was struggling and I wanted to break the tension for him. There was also four of us here who knew each other and were close, and only one of him while he told this hard period of his life to us – that shit couldn’t be easy given the circumstances.
Lips twitching, Burt replied, “January ninth, which you might already know from the DNA file.”
Feeling my cheeks flush slightly, I glanced quickly at Tabby, and then looked back at him. “I have the memory of a goldfish?”
Pulling me closer into his side, Ellis moved so that his mouth was next to my ear, and whispered, “You’re such a dork.”
“Appreciate you doing that, Jose, but you don’t have to help me out. Y’all deserve to know this information, regardless of how hard it is,” Burt murmured. That might be the case, but there was a noticeable difference in his body language now. Gone was the slight shake in his right hand and the slouching position he’d been in before, now replaced with steady hands and him sitting up straight. “I’d never known affection and love, because the women weren’t in the cult for that – they were vessels to birth new generations, and to look after the men. Any affection and emotion was discouraged, and if they showed any, they were taught not to do it again.”
Stroking Tabby’s hair with the arm that was resting on the back of the couch, Dave clarified, “By taught you mean beaten and punished, correct?”
“Correct,” he confirmed grimly. “So, when I first experienced anything like that, it was overwhelming, and I’d wanted more. I’d go from female to female for it, and then I realized that I wanted even more, and I’d ended up with a group of women who would give it to me constantly, but they were mine so I got emotions with it, too. There were eight, including your mom,” he looked at Tabby sadly. “They were all such great ladies and deserved better than what I gave them in the end. After things ended with Olivia, I went on an emotional bender. I ended it with all the women, started moving around at an even faster rate, and would pull people in and then push them away again because I couldn’t handle the emotions and having any true depth to a relationship. I finally found a place I wanted to live at in Chicago and became a recluse who didn’t want any human contact because it was too overwhelming for me.”
“Holy shit,” Tabby gasped, taking the words right out of my mouth, although I might have added the word fucking in there, too. Nodding, he shifted in his seat and stared at his hands as he spoke this time. “I had money saved so I could do it for a while, but after five months I realized I needed to work to survive, and I got a job in a newspaper office, listening to their police scanner so I could dispatch news crews to the scenes of crimes. One night, four people were killed in a drive-by shooting by one of the mob families, but there had been other shootings that night that the crews were already covering, so it was decided I’d get the story. While I was there, I met the detective on the case and we struck up a friendship. Long story short…”
I was so caught up in the story, that it would have taken magic to stop what came out of my mouth as I suddenly sat up straight, and yelled, “You’re gay!” making everyone jump. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I just had to continue with what came into my head next. “You guys became friends, realized y’all were it for each other, and you live with him wherever you live now,” I squealed, grinning at the thought of tragedy ending in happiness like that for him. We’d never asked each other for the specific location of where we lived, so I wouldn’t have been able to add that specific detail into it. It was never a bad idea to be too safe, and that’s what we’d been, until this morning when Dave had sent their address to him by text, signing off on the message as Sheriff Bell.
I was so caught up in it, that I didn’t initially see the look of shock, horror, and ‘what the fuck’ on the faces of everyone else in the room as they looked at me. When I did, though, I sank back down under Ellis’s arm, trying to hide behind him.