Vein Fire by Lucia Adams Page B

Usually. Except for Hannah. She might be a bird—a little blackbird in her long shirts and pants, hiding something he was eager to see. But first—first, he wanted inside of her in every way possible. She had secrets and he wanted to make them his before he heard her chirp.
    Matt was a prick. Jared didn’t mind taking all of the responsibility for Danny, fuck, it was his idea, but Matt could show his gratitude. He could share . Living in a group home made getting laid almost as hard as it had been when he spent his entire teenage years in near solitary confinement. The doctors didn’t trust him. His blood tests frequently showed he wasn’t taking his anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers. They labeled him as uncooperative and either shot his medicine into his ass, or made him drink it. They thought they were smart, but Jared was the one living on the outside now.
    The group home sucked. He shared a room with Ben, who he kept catching masturbating into a hole he had cut into his stuffed teddy bear. It was disgusting. He told him to blow his load into tissues like everyone else did, but he just kept fucking the bear. The bear’s insides had to look like a Jackson Pollock painting with the varying shades of dried cum.
    The worst part was the staff. They were such fucks; they made him forget about the rules. He only had an hour long window to take his medication three times a day. They still didn’t trust him to medicate himself. He missed his afternoon dose on Sunday when he was with Hannah, so they restricted his privileges for ten days. Because of this, he couldn’t visit Matt or Hannah. He had only missed his medication by fifteen minutes and the staff woman, Carla, refused to give it to him. She was a fat bitch with three chins. He called her ‘jowls’ and it made her hate him even more. She had toothpick legs with a beach ball belly and she smelled like a mixture of cheap perfume and shit. Her arms were kind of short and he figured she might not be able to reach her ass to wipe properly. She brought in video recordings of soap operas and sat on the couch watching them when she should have been working for her pay. She wasn’t the laziest, there was a tall skinny woman named Susan. She kept her hair in cornrows and started and ended her shift on the couch. At least Carla passed meds to the residents.
    The e veryday routine consisted of chores and day treatment, which was a circle-jerk version of group therapy. The day therapy was six hours long, so it consumed most of his time. Attendance was mandatory, so he went. He followed the rules because he didn’t want to return to Oakmont. He hoped he could get his own place in a few months like Matt had done. Matt had left the group home in record time, but he wasn’t court-ordered there like Jared was. Jared would live there for at least a few more months, depending on how well he played the game.
    His time in Oakmont taught him about people and games, secrets and need. Want was a forbidden candy which tempted people to make mistakes. He could read others well—it was one of his strengths. The remainder of his time at Oakmont was spent as a watcher; nurses, orderlies, patients and doctors all operated on the same habitual matrix. People didn’t change. Everything was a game and the trick was to not get caught, but to play better than everyone else. Every person kept secrets, and these were to be used to be a game player. Jared knew he needed things. He needed to satisfy his wants. And what he wanted was Hannah.
    When he met her, he knew she was special. He could almost see her heart fluttering under her blouse. She scared easily and couldn’t hide that she hid things.
    Matt resisted giving Hannah to him. He asked if he could have her there, on the couch, like Matt had done in Hannah’s apartment. Yes, he admitted to having watched them that night. Matt turned him down, saying he didn’t want anything to do with it—that he had done enough to Hannah. Jared knew