Aria Graice - 8. Chapter 8

When Drew woke the next morning, the room was dark, and he was momentarily confused as to where he was. Senses honed in dark jungles, bleak deserts and the streets of bombed out cities, told him he was not alone in the room.

The confusion cleared fast and he remembered the previous night. Aria and Amara had been fast asleep when they’d got back to the house and were walking zombies when Drew ushered them through the door and up the stairs.

Ben had wanted to take charge of Amara, but Drew had refused point blank, daring Ben to stand against him. He’d insisted both Aria and Amara slept in Aria’s bedroom, and just to make sure, once he was sure both boys were showered and in bed, he ‘d slipped back into their room and settled on a chair next to the door. He was pretty sure Ben hadn’t gone home, but no one had tried to enter the room.

Drew stretched. He wasn’t unused to sleeping in a chair, but he’d been getting soft and there were cricks in his back and neck that needed a good stretch to work them out. A glance at his watch showed five a.m. The boys should be fine now. He slipped out and over to his own room where he took a much-appreciated shower. He then settled down with a book to await movement or nine a.m. whichever came first.

He was woken out of a light doze by a hesitant tap on the door. It was a little after seven. He sat up and pulled on his boots, then answered the door. It was a freshly washed twin, dressed in grey lounge pants and t-shirt. A pattern of tiny pink hearts decorated the trousers, and one big pink heart adorned the front of the t-shirt. They were definitely Aria’s. Drew couldn’t, however, be certain it was Aria wearing them.

“Can I help you?”

“You slept in our room last night.”

Our room? From the attitude, this was definitely Amara.

“I slept in Aria’s room, yes.”

Amara huffed and pushed past into Drew’s room. “How do you know?”

“Do you want to know a secret? I don’t – until you open your mouth.”

Amara glared at Drew, then smiled. “Fair point. Truth is, we’re not much alike at all.”

“I don’t know. I think you’re more similar than you think.”

Amara huffed and sat on the bed, bouncing a little. Drew would have felt uncomfortable if he’d had his usual smirk, but there was something about Amara today that made him seem pensive and uncertain.

“We don’t, you know?”

“Don’t what?”

“Sleep together. Well, we do but…not like that. I love my brother very much, possibly more than I could ever love a lover, but he’ll never be that. Never. It’s important you know that.”

“Why? Why is it important I know anything? I’m just a minder. Why should you care what I think about you?”

“I don’t. I don’t care what you think about me, but I do care what you think about Aria, because Aria cares. He likes you and I think… I think you could be good for him. He’s not….” Amara paused, expressions fleeing across his face. “I’m not going to tell you his secrets, that’s for him, but he’s not as strong as people think he is. He’s not the person people think he is.”

“And what about you?”

“Me?” Amara seemed confused, frowning at Drew with a puzzled expression on his pixie face. It almost made Drew want to laugh, but he didn’t.

“Are you the person everyone thinks you are?”

Amara chuckled. “Oh yeah, I’m exactly the person everyone thinks I am.”

“I don’t believe that. Not for a minute.”

Amara tilted his head to one side and gazed at Drew, his expression entirely neutral. “Believe it,” he said at last. “Everything they say is true.”

Drew shook his head, but Amara held up his hand to silence him.

“I’m a fuck up and I know it. I’m damned good at what I do and that’s the problem. I’m good at everything I do.” Darkness dripped from every word along with a certain bleakness that made Drew shiver.

“What did that man mean tonight – that you owed him? What did he really mean?”

Amara shrugged. “Only that I’ve worked my way around most of his friends, so he thinks it’s his turn.”

“Why do you do it? You and Aria? You must know you’re beautiful. You both have great careers, an amazing home…. You have everything going for you, so why the drink and drugs? Why the….”

“Sex?”

“Yeah, the sex. Why do you sell yourself so short?”

Amara made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “You have no idea.”

“Then give me one.”

“Look, what I do and who I do it with is none of your business. I know you want to help Aria, and that’s great, but don’t try it with me. I can take care of myself; always have and always will. I can take care of Aria too.”

“Is that what you do when you swap identities? Take care of him? Keep him safe from people who want to do to him what they do to you?”

Amara winced and flushed. His mouth and throat worked but nothing came out.

“I know boys like you,” Drew said softly. “I’ve seen them all over. “They do everything they can everything to take care of someone – a parent, a sibling, even a lover – but they don’t take care of themselves. It never ends well.”

“I am taking care of myself.”

“Do you really enjoy it? A different bed every night – maybe more than one bed? A different body, a different set of kinks. One night after the other until you can’t remember who you’re with anymore, and more than that you can’t remember why, because any pleasure you got from it died a long time ago.”

Again, Amara opened and closed his mouth without a sound emerging. He bowed his head, long blond hair falling forward to obscure his face.

“I’m not that bad,” he mumbled. “It’s not every night. Nowhere near every night.”

“Same question. Do you enjoy it?”

Amara raised his head enough to stare at Drew, emotions flickering through his eyes. He was clearly in two minds, probably whether to get up and walk away, give his usual, flippant answer, or just maybe to be honest for once.

“No,” he whispered at last.

“Then why do it?”

Amara shook his head.

“Do you think you’re protecting Aria by putting yourself at risk? And what about tonight? When you are pretending to be Aria, everyone thinks he’s you. How long do you think it will be before someone does something that gets out of hand? Aria isn’t going to kick up a fuss. He’ll get hurt. I’m here to make sure that doesn’t happen, but I can’t be everywhere.” He gave Amara a pointed look. “You won’t let me.”

Amara had the good grace to look a little sheepish.

“It’s got out of hand,” Amara admitted. “At first, it was just the odd once or twice – for both of us. We’ve been going to adult parties since we were very young, and we were kind of precocious. We’d fall in love with someone, sneak off, get into trouble and it was great fun. At least it was for me. We didn’t start actually having sex until about a year ago, although everyone thought it was sooner. People like to brag, and we didn’t put them straight.”

“People lied about having sex with you when you were what sixteen, seventeen?” Drew was shocked to his core. They were just kids, being taken advantage of by who knows who.

“Well we did…fool around. I guess it wasn’t so far away from sex. Back then, it was only people we liked.”

“And they still made false claims.”

Amara flushed. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “Anyway, it was all sweet and innocent to start with, but it kind of got out of hand and I didn’t… I don’t know how to stop it. It’s not so bad. It’s not as if I’m a prostitute or anything.”

“And the drugs?”

“What about them? Everybody snorts coke and smokes weed. I mean everyone.”

“Not everyone, Amara. I think you take drugs to make the sex easier because I don’t think you want it any more than Aria does.”

“And I’m supposed to care what you think?” Amara snarled. “You’re just…staff, like you said. You’re not my father, not even family. What right do you have to dictate what I do?”

Oh, hit a nerve there. “Not dictate, Amara, just point out. I couldn’t help noticing tonight that the majority of people at that party were much older than you, and no one else from the band or that we saw around the Arena were there. Isn’t that a bit unusual for an after-show party?”

Amara swallowed and shrugged. “It was mainly for Aria. They’re contacts, people Mother is encouraging him to mix with. The after-party wasn’t going to get us noticed by anyone.” He shrugged. “They clashed.”

“Miss Montgomery thinks you went to the after-party.”

“Miss who? Oh, Alicia. Well, she doesn’t know everything.”

“Maybe you didn’t tell her because you knew she wouldn’t approve.”

“Oh, for God’s sake stop moralizing at me. Stop treating me like some silly kid. I know everything you’re pointing out and it doesn’t make any difference. This is my life and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“That’s fair enough, but it’s Aria I’m thinking about. He’s the one I’m here to protect.”

Amara sneered. “Of course. How silly of me. And here I was thinking you gave a shit about me. I should have known it was all about Aria as usual.”

Amara got to his feet and made for the door. Drew caught him around the wrist and literally threw him onto the bed.

“What the fuck?”

“Sit,” Drew commanded.

“I’m not a dog,” Amara growled sullenly, but he remained put.

“Yes, I care about Aria. That’s my job as his bodyguard, and as his friend, but that doesn’t mean I can’t care about you too. Something’s going on. I smell bullshit a million miles away and you’re in to it up to your neck. As I see it, you have two choices right at this moment. You can tell me what’s going on so I can help you, or you can keep pretending you actually want to be whore.”

“I am not,” Amara began, but the fight went out of him far faster than Drew had thought it would.

Shockingly, Amara turned over onto his stomach and buried his face in a pillow, then started to sob.

Drew had never been good with crying. He didn’t do it himself and couldn’t understand what was going on with people who did. Being in the army most of his life, he’d seen men at their lowest ebb, terrified out of their wits. Young recruits often cried with fear and homesickness, but it wasn’t like this. On those occasions, an awkward pat on the back sufficed, then leaving them alone to get themselves under control without feeling any less of a man. That was more bullshit of course. Crying doesn’t make you less of a man, especially when you’re eighteen, straight out of college and facing the reality that the promise “join the army and see the world” was a whole lot worse than bullshit. Facing your mortality whilst still a teen, miles away from everything you find familiar, with a bunch of strangers and the real possibility you’ll be expected to kill-or-be-killed, did bad things to a man and often the only way they could deal with it was being more “manly”. Pride was the only thing they had to hold on to. Bullshit piled on bullshit in the middle of a whole load of bullshit.

That was never going to be an issue with the Gracie boys. Amara, and even more so Aria, were more comfortable with their feminine side, without being overtly camp or femme, than anyone Drew had ever met. They were effortlessly androgynous and nothing about either of them seemed forced or unnatural. And so, Amara was weeping freely and openly with no concern about the possibility of being thought “girly” whatever the hell that meant anyway. In his experience, the women in his life were emotionally stronger than the men. In the Valleys, crying wasn’t seen as a sense of weakness. Whole pubs-full of burly rugby players would cry like babies when Wales won (or lost), especially against England.

Even so, Drew had no idea how to comfort Amara, so he stood uncomfortably and watched. After a while, he sat down. It didn’t feel right to speak or touch Amara. Maybe Amara needed a hug, but that wasn’t really something Drew was comfortable with, so he sat it out.

Eventually, Amara stopped crying, but he didn’t turn his head.

“Please,” he whispered. “Don’t tell Aria.”

“Tell Aria what?”

“How much—That—Just…. Don’t tell him I freaked out.”

“Okay. Any particular reason why? I mean it’s not as if he doesn’t know what you get up to. He’s usually right there with you.”

“But that’s the point – he’s not. He doesn’t—” Amara brought himself up sharply and curled on his side with his back to Drew. “He just doesn’t. He’s so naïve. He never even thinks about it. Even if he did, I’d never tell him how much…. How….”

“How much it hurts.”

“Yeah.”

“Please, Amara, tell me why you do it if hurts you so much. No one is forcing you to sleep around – are they?”

The silence stretched, and Drew’s neck started prickling. Anger washed over him in waves. If someone was—

As if reading his mind, Amara sighed. “Not exactly. Not in the way you think.”

“Then in what way?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not? What’s stopping you?”

“I promised,” he whispered.

“Promised who? What did you promise? Amara, please talk to me. I can help you.”

“Me.” A voice from the doorway had both Drew and Amara sitting up straighter. Drew hadn’t even heard the door open. Christ, he was losing it.

“Aria, don’t,” Amara said, but Aria held up his hand. He slipped in and closed the door. “Amara sleeps with people, so I don’t have to.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We have reputations to keep up,” Aria said flatly.

“Why on earth would either of you want to keep up reputations as sluts?”

Aria visibly winced. “You don’t understand. It’s not about sleeping around so much as…well…not sleeping around. And everyone knows everyone else, so people would talk.”

“So what? There are worse things that could be said about you than that you don’t sleep around.”

“You don’t understand.”

Aria sat on the bed and Amara repositioned until he was sitting on the edge and could put his arms around his brother. They sat there together, perched on the edge of the bed looking uncomfortable and stressed. What the hell was going on here?

“If I don’t understand, make me. I want to understand. I want to help.”

“You can’t help. Not unless you want to start something with Aria. The media don’t much care as long as it’s someone.”

“Well that isn’t going to happen, so why don’t you tell me what exactly is going on. I don’t get it.”

The two boys exchanged glances. In that moment, they looked a whole lot younger than their seventeen years.

It was Aria who spoke. He gripped his brother’s hand until his knuckles were white. Amara winced but didn’t try to pull away.

“Ou-our mother is…. She….”

“Your mother is pressurizing you to be promiscuous?”

“No. Yes. Please, just let me tell it in my own way.”

Drew was confused as hell, but he nodded. “Alright, but are you sure you want to? Believe it or not, I seem to have taken a liking to you, both of you. I didn’t think I would, but what do you know? Here we are. I’ve known you for a day and you’ve got me giving a shit. I must be getting soft.”

Aria chuckled. “You’re like Father. Hard and cold on the outside, soft and squidgy on the inside.”

Amara snorted. “Don’t let him hear you say that. He has a reputation to keep up, too. Mother’s harder on him than us.”

“Are you close to your parents?”

A strange look passed between them, one Drew had noticed before. It was as if they were having whole conversations with their eyes that no one else was privy too.

“Kind of. With Father, anyway. He was the one who used to play with us, took us to the park, taught us stuff like fishing and riding bikes. That kind of thing.”

“When he could,” Amara broke in. “He’s always been away a lot.”

“He does a lot of filming abroad.”

“When we were kids we’d go along sometimes.”

“We’d pretend we were in the film. Sometimes they’d let us film a bit.”

“It depended on who the director was.”

“Some of them were mean.”

“Some were dicks.”

“Some of them were awesome.”

Drew had a hard time keeping up as the twins bounced the conversation back and forth, one starting to speak before the other quite finished. They lit up when they talked about their father and the things they’d got up to when he was home, or when they were visiting his film sets.

“Did you ever visit your mother when she was filming?”

The conversation stopped, and a shutter came down.

“Sometimes,” Aria said carefully. “She doesn’t really like us around when she’s working.”

“She doesn’t really like us around at all.”

“Don’t say that, Mara. She’s busy, that’s all.”

“Right.”

Amara pursed his lips. Clearly this was not the first time the boys had had this argument and Amara backed off quickly. Instead, the turned to Drew, his expression thunderous.

“She wanted girls,” he said, refusing to allow his brother to contradict. He slanted a look at Aria. “You know she did. She’s told us she did. She told us over and over and over. He turned his attention back to Drew while Aria clung to his arm with eyes as wide as saucers. “When we were kids she dressed us like girls – in pink, in dresses, in glitter. In the beginning we tried hard to be girls, so she’d love us. We did everything together when she was home – went shopping, had our hair and nails done. She even called us her girls.”

“I tried to be a girl once,” Aria said, such wistfulness in his voice that for a moment Drew didn’t register what he’d said.

“You’re transgender?” he asked carefully, wondering if that had anything to do with the whole sex thing.

Aria bit his lip and shook his head. He seemed almost guilty.

Amara picked up the story. There was no wistfulness in his voice, only anger. “When we got to about thirteen I got sick of trying to be something I’m not. We were doing modelling and Mother was always on the set, always fussing around, always trying to make us more feminine and always calling us her girls. It was bloody embarrassing. Most of the time people started off thinking we were girls and the comments weren’t kind when they found out we weren’t. At least not those Mother couldn’t hear.”

“Did you get bullied at school?”

Amara scoffed. “Don’t be silly. Mother would never dream of sending her precious little girls to school. There’s no knowing what bad habits we might have picked up. God forbid we might have made friends, or started behaving like boys. We were educated at home. Tutors mostly. Not that Mother really cared if we had an education or could string two coherent words together. If it hadn’t been the law, she wouldn’t have bothered even with that.”

“She did her best,” Aria said, chewing on his bottom lip. “She’s just overprotective.”

“She’s bloody insane. She practically disowned me when I told her I wasn’t going to wear dresses anymore and I wasn’t going to pretend to be a bloody girl for her or anyone. That was just before my music career took off and if there’s one thing mother values more than a daughter it’s fame.”

“That’s not fair,” Aria said, scowling.

Amara scowled right back. “And putting pressure on you to transition to a girl when everyone knew damn well it’s not what you wanted, and you were only doing it for her? That was fair?” Aria winced and shied away.

With a visible effort, Amara got himself under control and took Aria into his arms, rubbing his cheek on his brother’s hair. “I’m sorry. You know it make me mad. I can’t believe you would have done that, and I can’t believe she would have let you. I think…I think out of everything she’s ever done to us that was the most unforgivable.”

“I’m sorry,” Aria whispered. “I’m just…. I’m not as strong as you. I couldn’t stand up to her. I just want her to love me.”

“I know, love. And she takes advantage of that. It’s not your fault, and it doesn’t make you weak.”

Drew watched the exchange between the brothers with interest and growing horror. For the love of God, this woman was a monster. “Has your mother ever seen anyone about…this?” Drew asked and both boys turned their full attention to him. It was creepy the way they synchronized their movements and expressions sometimes. It was like looking at a person and their reflection. He shivered, fleetingly feeling like he was in some creepy horror story.

“It’s been suggested,” Amara said. “Just about everyone we know has brought it up at some point. Everyone can see what she is, but they’re all scared of her, so they back off. She needs a shrink more than anyone I know. She’s a fucking nutcase.”

“She isn’t,” Aria insisted. “She’s just….”

Amara gazed directly at Drew, his voice cold and flat. “She said she thinks we’re her punishment, the price she has to pay for having everything. She’s beautiful, talented, rich, and loved, so God gave her boys…us, to punish her. She said that all she ever wanted was a little girl to be just like her. Someone she could be a friend to, who could understand what she goes through to stay beautiful.”

“Well, she has a point,” Aria piped in. “It is hard.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Aria, stop sticking up for her. You know she’s crazy.”

“But…”

“What about your father?” Drew had noticed Aria begin to shake and he was afraid he was about to break down. He prayed that diverting attention to their father would help. The boys seemed to have more connection there.

“He thinks it’s ridiculous,” Amara said, jutting his chin. “He knows she’s insane as much as anyone else. That’s why he…well….”

“He has affairs,” Aria said sadly.

“You can’t blame him.”

“I don’t.”

“She doesn’t care anyway.”

“I know.”

“You know she screws her “assistants” right?”

“You know I do,” Aria snapped. He glanced at Drew and deflated. “I caught them once.”

“Father at least hides it from us.”

“Yeah.”

“He tries to be a good father,” Amara said, glaring at Drew as if daring him to judge. “I know we’ve got the most fucked up family ever, but Father tries his best. He really does. And we absolutely know he loves us – just as we are.”

Aria gave a weak smiled. “He calls us his little miracles.”

“That’s because Mother couldn’t have children and she had to go through a lot of shit to have us.”

“She feels that after all that she deserves the perfect child.”

“And that was never us. We did our best but nothing we did could ever be good enough. I gave up and outright rebelled when we were fourteen. I yelled at her even more than Father, and she handled it, as she always does, by running away. I haven’t really seen or spoken to her since. We’ve been in the same place at the same time, I just have nothing to say to her.”

Drew smiled at the idea of fourteen-year-old Amara, hands on hips, standing up to the spoiled diva. God, fur and feathers must have flown.

Amara scowled at him. “It’s not funny. Aria’s still trying, still dressing like a girl to please her.”

Aria had his head bowed and turned slightly away from his brother. “I don’t dress like a girl,” he said. “Not always. I just dress like me. I don’t do it for her. I just wear what I’m comfortable in.”

“Right.”

“Don’t be mean, Mara. Please.”

Amara tightened his arms around his brother. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be mean. I just hate that you do that, and she doesn’t care.”

“I don’t do it for her, not anymore. It’s who I am.”

Amara gave him a sideway glance. “You’re not really trans are you? Have you been all this time? Did we—”

Aria laughed softly. “No, I’m not trans. I like being a boy. I just like being a boy who wears nice clothes, that sometimes are dresses.”

“Oh. Okay. To be honest, I don’t mind wearing them when I’m pretending to be you. When you stopped making us wear stockings. I hate wearing stockings.”

Aria laughed. “That’s the best part.”

Drew shook his head. “As fascinating as it is, listening to you two, none of this explains why you change places to have sex.”

The playfulness that had crept into their banter fell away and again that look passed between them. Aria dropped his head and Amara laid his hand over both his brother’s, in Aria’s lap.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We don’t have to do this. We don’t have to tell him anything. He’s not a friend, not really. We only met him yesterday. We don’t know anything about him and he doesn’t know anything about us.”

Drew kept quiet. It was a fair comment after all.

“No one ever does. No one ever will. We never have a chance to make friends. Not proper ones. Who can we trust? I can’t do it anymore, Mara. I can’t let you do it anymore. It was okay when—No, it wasn’t okay. It was never okay and I don’t want to do it anymore. I trust Drew. I know we haven’t known him for long, but I trust him, I really do. He’s not like Ben.”

Drew narrowed his eyes at the wince Amara made even at the mention of Ben’s name. Something was going on. There was no longer any doubt in his mind about that. Something was going on and he intended to find out what, but that was for another day.