Page 62 of Fool Me Twice
“For the hundredth time, we’re not talking about this,” Hart said.
Cane rolled his eyes, remembering each and every time he’d brought it up in the past. “Why do you give a shit what they think of you? It’s just smoking. It’s just fucking. Why do you care? You think they’re squeaky clean and perfect?”
“Cane,” Hart warned. “I mean it.”
Cane puffed another mouthful of smoke up to the ceiling. It was stupid to expect anything to have changed in the time they’d been apart. Hart was still as closed off as he’d ever been. “Man, that facility really must have fucked you up. The trauma must run deep, huh.”
Hart kicked out at him, and Cane looked over with a lazily arched brow to see him fuming, face like a thundercloud.
“Firstly, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Secondly, you’re one to talk about childhood trauma.”
Cane snorted. “Got me all figured out, sweetheart?”
“No,” Hart said after a beat, surprisingly honest. “But if you get to make assumptions about me, then I can too.”
“You know what they say about assumptions,” Cane drawled, sucking in another lungful of smoke, then letting it out. “They get your head beat in.”
“That is not how that saying goes,” Hart said.
“No?” Cane asked, looking over to him. “Coulda sworn it was something like that.”
Hart pinched his lips shut, turning his head quickly, but Cane caught the beginnings of a smile. He was always soft in the aftermath. Malleable. Sated.
And then he would be out the door.
This was the first time he’d stuck around.
Cane watched him smoke for a moment, thinking he’d never seen anything so beautiful. The graceful movements, the way his lips wrapped around the cigarette that Cane had just had in his own mouth, the satisfaction Hart got from breathing in.
It wasn’t just the cigarettes, it was the relaxation only Cane could provide him.
They smoked silently until they hit the ends, and Cane lit them up two more without asking. Hart took one without protest. Cane pulled a bottle of vodka out, grabbing a glass for Hart, knowing he wouldn’t drink from the bottle. He splashed some into the glass then took a pull for himself. It wasn’t his personal liquor of choice, but Hart enjoyed it, so he always had a bottle on hand.
Sometimes Cane drank it just to remember how Hart tasted on the nights he would come to him.
Hart rolled over onto his stomach and reached for the glass, cigarette still burning between his fingers in the other, Cane’s marks all over him.
He was a fucking masterpiece.
“You know…I didn’t have that bad of a childhood,” Cane found himself saying.
Hart looked at him over the rim of his tumbler, eyes a little surprised.
They never did this.
Ever.
But Cane was feeling some type of way.
“My dad was a drunk, and my mom couldn’t stick it anymore and left his deadbeat ass and me. But it was pretty standard,” Cane said.
Hart frowned. “You know that’s not standard, right? Or it shouldn’t be. I don’t exactly have personal experience, but even I know that.”
“It was where I came from,” Cane said with a shrug that was only slightly tense, memories sliding along the edges of his mind. “Some people had it much worse. Like the twins. And it taught me the lessons I needed early.”
“What lessons?”
“That all I needed was myself. That if I wanted something I could go out and take it. That once something was mine, I wouldn’t let anyone else have it,” he said, almost biting the words out with how strongly he felt them. How deep they went into his core.