The emotionless tone feels almost as though the weight of abuse is still trying to mask the depth of the horrors while he speaks them aloud. Like his mind still fears the repercussions for daring to utter them, and trying to soften the blow by giving the words far less emotion than they wrought.
“He was wrong. One is the most heinous, twisted kind of perversion. The other is natural, despite society’s continued disparities,” Tristan argues solidly.
He huffs as though the distinction is weightless, like it doesn’t matter at all.
“Tomato-tomahto. I was raised to understand the consequences of embracing mine, or daring to ever try to out his.”
Marcus frowns at that. “But understanding those consequences, you still went after Qiang, and not just for a fuck,” he points out.
Honestly, I’d been spiraling so hard on the extent of Kingston’s abuse that the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.
Kingston’s eyes, heavy with regret, meet mine. “You saw me in a way I hadn’t been seen since my mother had been alive. I thought I loved you. I thought I was careful. Father knew you were tutoring me, and I thought I did a good job convincing him that that was all there was to it. But I wasn’t careful enough. The last date we went on ended with us making out in my car. When you pulled away, I saw Father’s driver across the street and knew we’d been caught. I had to make sure he believed you were nothing more than a pastime before he could suspect anything else.”
“So you protected me by humiliating me,” I summarize, realizing all these years of trauma boiled down to getting caught in the wrong family’s twisted web.
“Nothing less would have convinced Father that you meant nothing to me. If he believed otherwise, you and your family wouldhave suffered much worse than you did,” he says, his eyes laden with guilt.
Qi steps forward, having stayed quiet until now as everything unfolded.
“It doesn’t absolve you. Maybe you don’t deserve to rot in hell like your father, and maybe the years of abuse and sick grooming from him play a heavy role in the twisted way you approach things, but it doesn’t disclude the utter lack of care you implemented when pursuing Qiang in the first place.”
“I never asked for absolution from anybody,” Kingston states coldly.
His face is currently holding the mask of disdain to hide how much I’m sure he’s hurting. I’m not even sure he recognizes the amount of pain he’s actually in, since he’s most likely hidden it even from himself all these years just so he could continue to survive it.
“You want me to believe that you cared about Qiang’s family when you goaded Qi into a physical fight right afterward?” Tristan almost barks out.
Kingston shrugs. “In all fairness, I lost that fight miserably.”
“But you still instigated it,” Tristan states firmly, demanding an answer.
“I was angry. I had lost Qiang and had protected Qi, but Qi still treated me like scum. Didn’t matter that Qi didn’t know any of that; it pissed me off anyway,” he says.
“What do you mean by protected Qi?” Tristan asks.
Kingston rolls his eyes at Tristan. “You know what my father is, and you know what your boyfriend looks like. He was just as soft and beautiful when he was fourteen as he is now. Father is more than a little obsessed with him. He’d first spotted him at a regional dancing competition when he was just twelve, and then, two years later, when he found out his older sibling was tutoring me, he tried several times to convince me to bring him around. I always made excuses. He wanted Qi’s performance schedules, but I gave him incorrect dates. I paid for that with a whip,” he says, and the cruel, horrific mystery behind why he always wore a shirt, and fought so hard against Cadeand Tristan when they’d threatened to remove it, makes the most disgusting level of sense now.
Qi’s face drops, indecision crossing his face as he inches towards Tristan.
“But Qi didn’t know any of that,” Tristan almost whispers, and I can tell he’s torn between hating Kingston for goading Qi and wanting to thank him for protecting him from a worse fate.
“Do you think it mattered?” Kingston huffs out in frustration. “Between losing Qiang and facing Qi’s disdain, it was too much.”
“So then after years of leaving them alone, you show up here to taunt them,” Marcus points out, obviously still trying to wrestle with the concept that Kingston’s cruel bullying has been more a misguided mask than anything rooted in a truly malicious intent.
Kingston sighs. “No, Father came for one of my games at my last university and arranged for a pastime for himself, but the dickhead had made the arrangement under my name, and it got leaked. The school thought I was a sick pervert, and Father made sure to cover it all up before anybody dared to look deep enough to realize the pervert was really him. And then he sent me here, claiming the football team was better and it was a better fit for me.
“I don’t know if he knew the Jiangs were here and sent me here as a test to see if I’d fall back in with Qiang, or if he was wholly unaware and it was just a stupid coincidence, but I had to make sure that they remained as distant and disgusted with me as they always had been in case he was watching.
“I don’t know if I ever really was in love with Qiang, but I do know I was infatuated at the very least, and brokenhearted with how everything ended. But I also didn’t pine very long for them, just regretted what I’d done, and they sure as shit didn’t deserve to have Father’s attention on them, so–”
“You were being cruel to be kind,” I finish for him, remembering a conversation we’d had about Hamlet in what feels like another lifetime now.
“Like Hamlet,” he scoffs out, something wistful passing across his face.
“Kingston,” I breathe out, something painful squeezing my heart.
There are so many emotions running through me. The years of humiliation that I’ve struggled with. The world he introduced me to was one I could definitely have lived without. But now the sadness was that so much bad was happening to him right under my nose, and I didn’t come close to suspecting even half of it.
