Me, I guess.
There was no getting around it.
My nipples hardened into jeweled peaks every time I remembered being filled up, clutched tight, and fucked in the face. It was hard to understand that my deviancy could exist separately from my identity, but I forced myself to carefully detach the two, like stuck pages in a magazine.
I did research on it, found out it was called pain play, rough sex, Domination and submission.
I found examples of deviancy in art, because that was a medium I always turned to for solace and for understanding. I found a Rembrandt sketch of a monk breaking his vows with another man in a field of corn. My favorite artist, Pablo Picasso, had a rather astonishing collection of erotic art, including La Doleur, a painting depicting a woman shamelessly fellating a man in the same manner I had sucked off Tiernan. Artists from Michelangelo to Cezanne and Correggio who had painted scenes of the beautiful mortal, Leda, seduced or raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. The same Japanese artist known for the famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa created an erotic tangling of a nude female and a massive sea monster.
It proved to me that humanity had always been transfixed by the sharper edges and darker corners of sexuality. It soothed me to know that if I was a deviant, so were many of the brilliant artists I’d idolized since my youth.
My sexual predilections were mollified, but not the painful, unreliable stirrings of my heart.
I couldn’t research how I felt about Tiernan because I didn’t know how to put it into words.
I was, in a sense, captivated by him. In the way a child was afraid of the monsters under his bed yet refused to look beneath it, to banish them in the light forevermore. Some part of me liked that I didn’t understand him, that he could be cruel and heartless, then unquestionably, erratically kind.
Case in point, the day after he fucked my throat raw and told me I was a better whore than my mother, he took Brando to an appointment with the top neurological surgeon in New York City. They had him on a new regime of drugs meant to help with the increasing frequency of his seizures. They also had him booked in for laser interstitial thermal therapy in January when he was off school for winter break.
I’d locked myself in a bathroom stall at Sacred Heart Academy in the middle of my fourth-period math class to cry when Brando had called from Tiernan’s phone to tell me the news.
And then today, when I’d returned home from school exhausted from a chemistry exam I’d stayed up the entire night prior to study for because I needed perfect scores in the subject to go on to university for art conservatism, he’d rocked me again.
I’d stared at the lion’s head door knocker for a long moment while I gathered my composure in case I saw Tiernan and was forced to interact with him before I pushed into the house.
Chaos met me.
The house rang like a cacophony of bells with child and adult laughter and a distinct noise that was unmistakably canine.
A deep, alerting bark.
I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the dark of the entrance hall, then gaped as clamor sounded in the hall leading back to the kitchen and seconds later a streak of grey shot into the hall between the legs of a suit of armor.
It came bounding toward me on legs capped with white feet, its compact body shaking with the force of its wagging tail.
The dog didn’t slow down as it reached me, barreling into my legs, then weaving around them like a herding sheepdog.
“What the hell?” I asked before I could curb my language because I noticed Brando had come into the hall after it, followed shortly after by Walcott and Ezra.
“Anca! He heard you at the door and he got so excited,” Brando cried, laughing with pure joy as he sprinted across the hall to my side, then sunk to his knees.
The dog abandoned me immediately, jumping up to place his paws on Brando’s shoulders so he could lick at his face. My little brother giggled, the sound scouring through me.
Brando had always wanted a dog but we hardly had the money to fend for our family of three as it was, let alone after introducing vet bills and dog paraphernalia.
“Whose dog is this?” I whispered, suddenly as hoarse as I’d been the day after Tiernan fucked my throat.
But I already knew, with sinking clarity, whose dog it was.
“Mine!” Brando cried as the dog pushed him onto his back and peppered his face and hands with doggy kisses. “His name is Picasso, like after your favorite painter. Do you like him?”
He was worried I wouldn’t, knowing I’d spent years telling him that he couldn’t get a dog. Jealousy and resentment warred with gratitude in my chest, a tug-of-war over the swampy ground of my heart.