This was not the Facility.
“Okay?” the man asked.
Dom. That was his name.
Jesse crashed back into the present, Dom pressed up against him. The memory of the last few minutes smudged into a blur. All he could see was Dom, and those full lips just an inch away from his own. As though... Dom might kiss him.
Jesse’s heart skipped, at the same time he knew Dom wouldn’t. Stop telling yourself he will. Suddenly frustrated, he shoved Dom aside. “I’m fine.”
Dom turned. “Good.” And he headed for the door.
Dom had been there so many times to pull Jesse out of his flashbacks. But every time, he left soon after, like Jesse wasn’t good enough or something. Jesse hated that he felt so disappointed each time, he hated that he knew Dom would much rather be intimate with anyone, but him.
Because of his jumpiness, because of those beads, because he was alpha.
I hate him, Jesse told himself. But he couldn’t help watching Dom slip through the locker room door, he couldn’t help admiring the line of Dom’s jaw, the flex of his biceps. His heart tumbled, and his face warmed.
I barely know him, Jesse thought. Why do I even feel this way?
If he were someone different, if he didn’t have his scars, would Dom look at him a second time?
If he took the beads away, would Dom get angry enough to punish him?
Jesse rubbed the beads on his arms, his thoughts churning.
13
Donut Wars: The Beginning
Some weeks after Christmas, donuts began appearing on Jesse’s locker door.
He thought he’d seen wrong at first, when he stepped into work one morning and found the plastic bag hanging on his locker. It hadn’t even been a shove-and-run thing—someone had gone to the trouble of sticking a plastic hook on his locker door, and hanging the bag from it.
Alec seemed puzzled when Jesse asked him, and Gareth wore the oddest look on his face. Dom didn’t even glance at Jesse once the whole day, so Jesse ate the donut savagely, thinking maybe one of the other guys had left it.
The next week, another donut appeared. It was strawberry instead of chocolate this time, which Jesse wasn’t as fond of. So he gave it to York.
“Why are you eating that?” Dom grumbled at York in the kitchen.
York shrugged. “Jesse gave it to me.”
Dom didn’t answer him. Jesse thought maybe Dom was pissed that someone else had decided to give Jesse donuts.
They couldn’t be from Dom, after all. Dom was an asshole.
There were no donuts for the next two weeks. Then, another chocolate donut showed up.
Jesse waited for Dom to be present before he bit into the treat. There was only silence, and the rustling of his donut bag. When Jesse finished, he licked his fingers.
Dom cursed and stalked off.
But another donut showed up the week after. Chocolate again. The following week, another appeared.
Jesse had taken to eating the donuts in front of Dom, just to spite him. Dom never said a word each time, but Jesse didn’t need him to.
He’d never managed to discover the identity of his donut-giver, though. For all he knew, it might’ve been someone from another team. Jesse had visited the bakery they’d come from, Ben’s Buns, and Ben had refused to divulge his customer’s secret. Jesse had sniffed at the donut bags, but all he’d smelled was the sweet aroma of the bakery.
With each new donut, his curiosity grew, until he began wondering if his mysterious donut-giver minded the beads under his skin, too.
The more he thought about it, the more Jesse wished those beads were gone.
Don’t remove them, the medical center doctor had said.
Those words rang in Jesse’s head, an hour before bar night one day.
It was one of those rare occasions that even the married guys attended, so Jesse had no excuse to sit out. But Dom would be there—Jesse wanted to spite him. Just to see how Dom would react. Just to see if he would get another moment like that Christmas eve morning, when Dom had held his face just a hair away from Jesse’s.
He really, really wanted Dom’s breath on his lips again.
Jesse sterilized his arms with some alcohol swabs, cold prickling all over his skin. Then he disinfected his razor blade, too. The bathroom smelled vaguely like spirits.
With a steady hand, Jesse dragged the blade across the highest point of a bead, splitting his skin open. It stung a little. Blood welled up along the cut, revealing a small white sphere hidden beneath. Jesse pressed his nails against the base of the sphere to squeeze it out.
It clattered onto the counter and rolled away, tinted pink with blood. But there was nothing else under that bit of skin, so he pushed a threaded needle into his arm, sewing the incision shut.
He repeated the procedure with each bead, more and more tiny spheres joining the ones on the counter. Some were white, some were blue, and some were yellow. They’d all been added on different occasions.
Back at the Facility, Rutherford would sometimes add three beads to Jesse’s arms, and remove one from the previous week. Jesse had thought they’d made him feel different, but he couldn’t say for sure what the change was. So he had absolutely no idea what would happen when every last bead was gone.
Tonight... he felt like taking a gamble.
When he’d painstakingly tied off the last knot and snipped off the surgical thread, Jesse swept the beads into an empty toothpaste box. He dropped that into a drawer he rarely used, and closed it.
Then, he inspected himself in the mirror. His arms appeared more even now—no more beads. Just the grooves and lines of several years’ worth of scars. But this evening... Jesse had reclaimed a little bit of himself. His heart grew lighter for it.
He wiped the blood off his arms, got dressed, and left for the bar.
It was well past 8PM when he arrived. He grimaced, checked his arms for bleeding, and headed in.
The team was at
