[Can’t Opt Out]

Andre’s arm looped around Emilia’s waist, pulling her back into his chest, just like he’d done a thousand other times over more than a decade of friendship. Nearing twenty, Andre had never even hinted that he might be sexually or romantically interested in anyone, let alone her. While he’d never outright come out and said it, Emilia increasingly suspected he would never be interested in sex or romance. That was fine—she would love him no matter what, and it somehow just made them a perfect balance to one another.

Her, perpetually horny and willing to entertain virtually anyone.

Him, friendly with everyone but never pushing the line to imply he might want more.

Best friends, able to laugh and be naked with each other. Emilia, able to grind back into her friend as the music danced around them, dozens of sweaty bodies shifting together in the heat of the last party of the summer. Andre, pressing into her back, his hand slipping upwards until he was offering her a dose of haze in the safety of his arms.

“I think my brother is jealous~” he teased, slipping the spray into her nose and letting her breath in its intoxicating, relaxing fumes.

Across the patio of their treehouse, barely visible between the ever moving bodies of their classmates and all the other random kids who had shown up to party, Rafe was glaring at them. He’d always been more awkward, his black knot holding him back from needing or even wanting a connection with most of their friends. Emilia was sure he’d rather be anywhere else, but she was here, and she was one of the only people he cared about. Not in the way Andre was implying, though. His older twin brother was jealous, yes, but only of the way his brother was able to let go and enjoy himself.

“I’ll dance with him if he asks.”

Her friend snorted a laugh, shifting the haze until he could take another breath, his chest expanding into her back as she continued grinding against him. Andre, so completely uninterested in sex that he wouldn’t even get hard for her. Maybe he didn’t get hard at all? One day, he’d hopefully open up about not being interested in sex or romance. Being open was good, and while she didn’t want to laden him down with questions, she just had so many!

Being open about all manner of sex and kinks—even if she didn’t have the most experience with such things, all the boys she hooked up with just coming into their sexuality and preferences—also meant being open about the complete lack of sex and kinks!

“The day Rafe asks you to dance is the day I start to worry you two are fucking. The guy won’t even dance when you ask him, even though he clearly wants to.”

“Bet he knows he won’t be able to keep his boner down if he lets Emmie grind on him like that~” Levi teased, popping up next to them with a flustered looking Darrian in tow.

If Emilia was pretty sure Andre was asexual, Levi was 100% a little gay bottom, while Darrian had no idea what he wanted. He’d get there, eventually. For the moment, he had ended up as everyone’s prop—girl or boy or anyone in between, Darrian was there to dance and snuggle, awkward and adorable in the too-tall body that he hadn’t quite figured out how to manoeuvre since his last growth spurt, earlier that summer.

“Bet he has one now, just from watching you and imagining he’s the one your ass is moving for,” Levi continued, shifting closer until he was pressed against Emilia’s front and letting his cousin slip the haze into his nose. One of his hands slipped onto Emilia’s hip, the other tugging Darrian in until the four of them were a hot little puddle of giggles, Darrian shuddering as his own dose of haze slithered through him, his entire body relaxing until he was grinding up into Levi’s back.

Emilia liked seeing her friends so chill—so free with who they were, even if they were all still too young to have even the slightest clue what sort of adults they would become. Maybe Levi knew the most, with his chaos and waiting position in the Baxter branch of The Black Knot and very solid identity as tiny little gay boy, just as willing as her to vanish and fuck whoever was interested.

Currently, one of the boys from further north, who was attending the party on the invitation of someone from another class, was definitely sending Levi fuck-me vibes, even Darrian’s eyes shifting towards the young man to assess him. Andre didn’t look because Andre would have to walk in on people having sex to actually realize they had been hooking up.

“Want out?” Darrian asked just as his own cousin popped up, scowling and asking if they could go yet.

“I’m just done,” Leerin grumbled, pulling at her sleeves. “And hot.” Yeah, because she was wearing a sweater and pants when everyone else was in shorts and tanks, if not less. “Everyone is too drunk and high.”

As though to punctuate her words, BJ shifted onto their other side, holding a platter full of shots. “The expensive stuff. Swiped it from my dad’s stash.”

Emilia and Levi immediately grabbed two each—BJ’s dad had exquisite taste in alcohol, even if he was far too strict with his son. Didn’t help that the man only paid attention to BJ when he was being a little shit. What did the old man expect? For his kid to be well-behaved and accept that his dad would never even say hello when they passed in the hall? Having your parent yell at you was better than being ignored.

“Cash’ta!” she and Levi cheered, each tipping one of their shots into the other’s mouth before downing the second.

Behind her, Andre had shifted away to chat with BJ, Darrian swiping a shot while Leerin glowered and dragged him off. Emilia’s vision swam, the alcohol surging through her system until she was leaning against the treehouse, away from the dancing and people, Levi vanished… somewhere. Probably to the boy who had been eye fucking his barely covered ass.

“Drink too much?” Nᴇw ɴovel chaptᴇrs are published on novelꞁire.net

Emilia was not drunk enough to deal with Halen’s shit at the moment. “Who invited you?”

Her classmate glared at her, hands tucked into the pockets of his loose, grey shorts. The light blue shirt he was wearing was unbuttoned, revealing all the hair that increasingly spread over his body—not that Emilia was looking or paying attention! It was just hard not to notice when he was constantly swimming, his body slowly changing as the years passed. The clones had a fair amount of hair, a dark trail leading from their belly buttons to what she knew were impressive bushes. The triplets hadn’t had much, the last time she’d seen them naked—although it had been a few years—but thanks to all the times she’d accidentally wandered in other the older clones having sex, she knew they’d eventually be full and lovely and so different from most of the people she’d hooked up with.

Having seen Halen’s dad at the beach a few times…

Well, one day, Halen would definitely be covered in an impressive amount of hair that would put even the clones to shame. Was he the sort to shave or wax it off, the way so many people did? While the guy was certainly fastidious, he also had a lot of Grey Sander beliefs, and most of the Grey Sander men she’d met left their body hair was it was, only ever shaping and grooming their hair hair and facial hair.

Emilia hoped he left it, which was silly. It wasn’t like she cared what he looked like, or whether he would be self-confident enough to let his body exist the way it wanted, regardless of the current trend of keeping body hair trimmed, if not outright removed.

“Emmie?”

The world had shifted again, the press of the treehouse against her back as she blinked blearily into the dancing crowd replaced by the scratch of the patio railing under her forearms, the heat of all the party guests radiating through her back. Halen was gone—had he even answered her question about who invited him? Her Censor burned, trying to collect any information about what had occurred between that question and now.

Nothing came back, just emptiness because something was wrong.

When had she drunk so much?

There had been a few drinks, before the haze, then the shots. That shouldn’t have been enough to leave black spots in her mind—over an hour of blackness, no less.

“Emmie?” the voice asked again. Familiar, yet not. Someone she knew, but not well, maybe?

Fuck. There had been so many people at the party. Their class. All the classes in the same year. A few up. A few down. All the people they’d invited.

Maybe… two hundred people?

Had they all been on the patio? Emilia didn’t think it could support that much weight.

She should get off it before it collapsed. Just like that, the world tipped and altered. No more railing, no more treehouse. It was there, far in the background. Voices chased her through the woods—why was she in the woods? At least she hadn’t wandered into the pond, but there were things to trip over out here, and she shouldn’t be alone.

“But you aren’t alone,” a voice laughed. Familiar, yet not. Someone she knew, but not well, maybe?

That seemed familiar—a thought splintered by more lost time, by the spin of her body.

Not her own spin.

A trip?

No, a hand on her wrist, her waist, tugging and pushing—someone faceless and familiar and impossibly foreign.

She pushed back. Hissed. Struggled. Managed a no, a please, a don’t.

Everything was blurry.

A face, disappeared and impossible to remember, impossible to forget.

A body, disappearing into her. In. Out. In. Out.

Dirt on her back, pressing into her fingers. There was a rock under her nail—how strange to remember that, the pain of it digging under her glittery purple nails, and not the face of the man fucking into her as she shook her head.

No.

Please.

Don’t.

Maybe she wasn’t actually speaking—wasn’t moving, scratching at their skin, shaking her head.

Emilia could have sworn she was, but maybe she wasn’t. After all, Rafe had searched for the boy who hurt her, forcing each of them out of their shirts searching for marks of her struggle. He’d never found any.

How had he found Warren then?

How did she know he’d found Warren? Know that he’d protected her—taken revenge for this thing being done to her?

“Emilia!” a voice called—not quite a scream, not quite not. It wasn’t Warren—wasn’t the familiar and yet unfamiliar voice fucking her and whispering about how good it was, wasn’t it good for her too?

This new voice wasn’t familiar, yet it was.

“Emilia!” that voice called again—a voice she knew, but not now; a voice that, just like she shouldn’t have known Rafe had killed for her, she shouldn’t have known.

“Emilia!” There it was again: this voice that she didn’t know, yet also a voice she felt she’d heard before—this voice, removed from time and place, calling to her through the void of assault until she was dragging herself home and slipping back into the house.

“Emmie?” That was someone else—someone she knew; someone who shouldn’t be calling her so familiarly. Then again a lot could change in a decade, two, never reaching three, those lost decades yet to leave an ache of wrongness and pain and vengeance in its wake.

“Emilia. Hatrav.” That was a different voice—one she didn’t yet know, one that didn’t yet exist.

How weird was that? To dream and nightmare a decade on. To dream and nightmare of voices decades removed during the worst moment of her life, fractured by her Censor’s inability to record even a single moment of it, by alcohol and drugs and her brain not knowing how to deal with the trauma of it all.

“Emilia?” Another voice, lilting in a way that she didn’t know—some Free Colonier with an odd accent? Almost no accent at all? Pretty, though. Familiar, like a warm hug that filled her veins with undying, obsessive affection. Removed and yet so close—a single decision away from crossing her path soon or thousands of years from now.

Thousands of years? Emilia had good genes, but even non-devs were lucky to reach four hundred.

“Emilia!” Back to that voice, —the one she knew now, calling to her through nightmares but not dreams the way the one speaking words she didn’t understand yet called, nor the one she would skip over meeting under the hands of the well-meaning, nor the one she had just filled her heart with.

This was the one of now.

Now.

Now.

Not then, but now. Not the real now—the now now.

Someone safe. Someone who would keep her safe, just like Rafe had. Someone who would never hurt her—that was important.

Olivier.

Olivier would never hurt her, not the way that whispering voice—Warren’s voice—had, so she couldn’t snap out at him when she woke. Olivier wasn’t Rafe, trained to defend himself by his mothers and the clones and their never-ending stream of shitty teachers who couldn’t teach combat classes to save their life. Emilia couldn’t wake and lash out at Olivier the way she sometimes had Rafe, who was safety and warmth even through their struggles, who knew exactly what nightmares and memories had come for her when she thrashed in bed and would never hold her fear—her murderous skills—against her.

Olivier didn’t deserve that. Olivier couldn’t handle that the way all the other voices could, each of them a rip of power and passion through the universe who would never not hold her lashes of pain against her when nightmares came calling.

That one voice, though… this might well be the only time they held her as this memory racketed through each of the three bodies she lived within. They would seldom need to hold her when the nightmares came, decades removed. No… that one, not yet a spark of thought in the golden one’s mind… that one would need her and Olivier, when the visions of their pain and suffering came for them, when visions of futures that could never be splashed over them and became an even more painful reality because they could come to be.

Emilia could do that. She could be a rock for someone she was meant to love, the way Rafe had been for her—still would be, if she asked—the way Olivier would be without being asked, without being told. For her, he would be whatever she needed—eventually, anyways, even if their love would be as fractured as the love she wouldn’t allow herself to remember, lest it rip her apart.

And the last voice?

Yeah, that one would always be exactly what she needed—eventually, anyways. Once they met; that was the important part, she supposed.