Chapter Text
“Do you like, not believe in God?” He asked, between puffs of a joint cradled between his scarred fingers. Fez had beautiful hands; she permitted herself a brief moment of wondering how they would feel wrapped around her throat.
With hazy smoke and the heavy bass of some trending pop song hanging in the air between them, Lexi smiled and shook her head no. There was a kind of quiet reverence in his face at her answer, like she was as fearless as he said she was, for wrestling with God on a house party couch and walking away unscathed. She thought she could subsist on that look alone for the rest of her life.
Everyone underestimated him.
Maddy thought he was an idiot with, like, brain damage, and Rue could barely keep the flippant condescension out of her voice whenever she ranted about her now-former drug dealer. Cassie was typically too self-absorbed to acknowledge Fez existed when he wasn’t selling her molly.
The truth she knew in her bones was that they were all very wrong.
Lexi liked to think she never missed a beat. For the most part. She mentally noted, categorized, then filed every little behavior around her into neat, orderly stacks. Whenever Lexi was alone with her thoughts for longer than an hour, she’d crack open her laptop and rifle through those stacks in her brain for play material. Honestly, being a silent yet all-watching observer was one of Lexi’s hobbies at this point.
Ten minutes later into their conversation, she knew he was like that too. That he watched all the other players in a game, letting them think and say what they wanted, cards close to his broad chest, patiently waiting until the very last moment to reveal a royal flush.
Fez looked at her with eyes a lighter shade of green than his sweater, and he tracked every word that fell from her mouth like she was a prophetess. Lexi had read a book a while back that he reminded her of. A true-made bow. A man who knew himself.
Scarred knuckles.
The edge of a white undershirt, peeking out of the softest-looking sweater she’d ever seen.
A plush mouth and perfect teeth around a joint.
Sandalwood and weed and something darker.
That brief, blood-heady, fire-bright pang of pure want was a new sensation; she pushed it out of her mind as quickly as it came on.
What Lexi wanted to tell him at that moment, and what she’d held herself back from talking about because childhood memories of a now-absent addict father were sort of heavy discussion matter for a first conversation, was that when Gus Howard had still been her father, he’d taken Cassie and her hunting.
Her eleven-year-old sister, a vegetarian of three years after discovering how cute cows and chickens were, despised every moment of that trip. Cassie wasn’t even able to pull the trigger at the firing range without shutting her eyes and squealing in fear. Normally so patient with his favorite daughter, Gus had hastened to pull the gun away from Cassie and unload it before she accidentally shot someone.
While her dad had been too wrapped up in comforting her sister to notice it was Lexi’s turn, the range instructor took pity on her and set up a new target.
At ten, the weight of the 9mm in her hand was a lot more than Lexi thought it would be, a lot more than those pistols seemed to weigh on television. She squared her slim shoulders as their Dad taught them, with two steady hands on the gun, and stared down the target through her sights.
Lexi didn’t miss a shot that day.
After an hour’s drive to Castaic, their father elected to leave Cassie behind in the car. Lexi was rarely under the impression that he liked her as much as he liked her older sister, but when it was just the two of them, Lexi could pretend she was his only and favorite daughter.
In her memories, the sound of dried-out, winter-brown grass crunching beneath her small hiking boots was as loud as any gunshot.
Sometimes, Leslie would take her along with them to church to keep Rue company. Sure, Lexi didn’t believe in God proper, but that evangelical “Jesus loves all” shit was everywhere. It was expected that she might pick some of it up when she was younger.
When Lexi spotted a lone doe, she could almost imagine white Jesus descending from Heaven, with a benevolent smile on his painted face, blessing that quiet, innocent deer.
That day, the October sky was a sallow blue-grey that sucked all the color out of the forest around them. Even her father’s bright safety vest looked dull. “Dad, isn’t it like, bad if we shoot them? Isn’t Jesus or God protecting them or whatever?”
“Where’d that come from, Lex?” He hadn’t turned back to look at her even when she tugged at his jacket, too fixed on spotting a legal buck to notice his daughter seeking his attention. She tried to keep it from getting to her; Lexi got better the older she became.
The ground could have swallowed her up at that moment, and she would have been ecstatic.
Gus Howard’s benign neglect always caved her chest in. All it took for Lexi to curl up and hide away, to succumb to the impulse of turning invisible, was one split second of apathy. If she was being honest with herself, that apathy could last minutes before he snapped back to what she was trying to communicate, at which point Lexi would back down from speaking entirely.
It was easier that way.
But something about that day had been different. Lexi pressed on even as the anxiety fucked up all her words. “I- I just. I always hear people talking about…” Her voice had trailed off into embarrassed hesitation; she remembered cringing violently in the privacy of her mind.
Perhaps some spirit had taken pity on her at that moment as her father carefully aimed his rifle away and at the ground as he turned back to look at her. “You know your mother doesn’t believe in that kind of stuff, right?” His safety clicked on.
Heat rushed to her cheeks, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Lexi was supposed to be too smart to ask stupid questions. But Gus was ignorant of the wave of anxiety that swept over his daughter. Instead, he’d reached out and ruffled her braids fondly in a rare moment of fondness. “There’s this saying; ‘the law is not in heaven.’”
That didn’t make much sense to her. God was supposed to be everywhere, right? “What does that mean?”
Her father paused for a moment there before replying. “There’s a lot of interpretations, and many of them are more orthodox than mine. I interpret it as teaching us that it’s up to us, here on Earth, to decide for ourselves what is most just; we are responsible for our choices, not God.”
She liked the sound of that better.
“We do what we have to do, Lex. That’s not a sin. A real sin would be something like letting other people get hurt.”
Truthfully, her father wasn’t ever a great hunter; they didn’t bring home a deer that day, or any other day. He also was a hypocrite who couldn’t take his own advice and stop hurting others.
All that said, Lexi still thought about that conversation every so often. Fez would appreciate her father’s sentiment. He’d get it. Maybe he would ask her more questions; maybe she would ask him some. Maybe she would get the fucking courage to reach out and brush the scars on his knuckles.
But before Lexi even got the chance, he was gone into the crowd, peeling off his sweater to reveal a broad frame that stoked the want buried deep inside her.
Fez descended on Nate like an avenging angel; he made efficient work of the larger guy, laying him out with precision. Hit after hit, calculated to break.
The people around her were screaming, pointing at the unconscious body on the ground; everyone’s attention fixated wholly on Nate. The attention might have pleased Nate were it not for the fact that he was busy being beaten to a pulp.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from Fez, though. Lexi thought she recognized the look on his face, spattered with blood and godlike. That was the face of justice, not that of a sinner.
Around his neck, his chain swung and flashed in the dim lights.
She caught a brief glimpse of him looking at her before he returned to his task. The darkness behind that masked glance filled her mouth with blood and smoke; that was all Lexi could taste as she watched him, watching her, watching him.
She blinked and saw a wolf tearing into the throat of a six-point buck. Lexi blinked again, and Fez was on top of him, slamming Nate’s head into the floor.
This was not someone she was supposed to want. This was not something she was supposed to watch with large eyes and worship. But the heat in her stomach and the heat between her thighs cared little for what Lexi was supposed to do.
The world around her shrunk to just the two of them, and the rhythm of his strikes followed by Nate’s groans mirrored the beat of her heart.
Just like that, it was over. Nate’s sickly handsome face was ruined, maybe permanently, and Fez allowed himself to be pulled away from his prone form. It seemed just to Lexi that Nate’s appearance would finally match the corruption inside.
The flat, cold expression on Fez’s face was unnerving, unearthly. Something in his countenance reminded her of those sharks on the nature documentaries she loved, but Cassie couldn’t stand. Glassy-eyed and predatory. He cast that gaze on her suddenly, sweat and blood soaking into his white shirt, his chain glimmering around his neck. Lexi wasn’t sure if she should scream or drop to her knees in awe.
He seemed to read her as well as she read him because he instantly softened, the ice in his eyes melting into a summer grass-green that reminded Lexi of home. Fez was gone before the taste of salt-iron and bitter ash left her tongue.
The world sort of went to shit after that party.
Cassie suddenly decided to flip in and out of mania with the kind of whip-crack irregularity that marked their father’s descent into madness.
Her fits were nearly as exhausting for Lexi as they were for her sister; there was something kind of sad about Cassie’s frantic 4:00 AM routine and the dead look in her large blue eyes. She’d bet her older sister had a new boy on her arm. Cassie’s winter formal resolution seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Lexi might have dug into what was going on with her a little deeper, if not for the complete lack of a fuck to give that froze Lexi’s limbs in place and sealed tight her mouth.
She loved her sister, and she would never dream of calling Cassie a bad person.
After the twelfth time she’d screamed at Lexi over the tiniest inflection in her quiet voice, over the way she had closed the bedroom door, Lexi was finding it difficult to call Cassie a good person. If the Howard family were going to keep falling to shit despite her Herculean efforts to hold every broken piece of them together, then she would let it. It might have given her mom a chance to finally pick up the slack, at least when Suze wasn’t drunk and/or hungover.
Her sister’s shiny new hysteria was affecting their mother too. It had been a few years since Lexi had seen Suze so overtly interested in either of her daughters’ lives. Instead of putting Cassie in her place, her mother acted as if letting her eldest daughter run free and wild would tire her out eventually.
Privately, Lexi thought what Cassie needed was a curfew and a therapist, not an enabler.
Rue had so blatantly relapsed it was a miracle Jules hadn’t noticed. In the past, Lexi would have done anything and everything to encourage her to sober up again, but she was bone-fucking-tired of picking up everyone’s messes and getting nothing but shit for it. Her former best friend was as talented at charming people as she was at aiming a knife to their deepest insecurities.
Maybe Rue was right when she called Lexi a coward.
Cowards would let the train wreck happen without doing anything to stop it. Did Lexi care all that much about proving that title wrong anymore? Not really. If she was going to be called a coward, she might as well live up to it.
All of that was overwhelming enough to force her dissociation and unhealthy coping skills to the surface.
But if God was real, he had no interest in cutting her some slack; by the way the Jacobs decided to make themselves absolute menaces to society.
Cal Jacobs darkened their doorstep in the immediate aftermath of New Year’s Eve. She heard him, couching his demand to be let in as a question to her mother.
His voice was as smooth as scales, and Lexi promptly gave up any hope of having a good day.
It didn’t seem possible for any one person to take up the entire long side of their dining table, but Nate’s father managed such a feat. Cassie and her mom picked up on his overt aggression no problem, but she seemed to be the only one to catch his unnerving confidence or the steel of his straight spine.
Cal knew the answers to his questions and wanted them to confirm those answers for him.
Beyond that, he reminded Lexi of someone sitting at the card table they rigged or some mythological general out of her AP World History homework, with a callous disregard for literally anyone else and who was confident he had no equal. Less like a person, more like a villain archetype. People were all pawns to him, “his” and “not his.”
Good , she thought viciously when Cal listed off the myriad of injuries Fez had left his son with. Good. Cassie seemed inordinately worried… didn’t Cassie end up at the hospital with Nate? Something like that.
Lexi was good at triaging Things She Needed To Worry About into a mental list; she shoved this interesting statistical anomaly into the Cassie pile at the absolute bottom of her list.
Her mother was frightened, but she fell hook, line, and sinker for his “concerned father” performance.
Nothing got past Lexi. Cal Jacobs could not give less of a shit about Nate. That was for certain. His offense was far more dangerous than mere concern for his favored heir. Nate was “his.” For standing by as his pride was impugned, for damaging a thing only he had the right to hurt, the man would extract a blood debt they couldn’t afford. Cal would burn this town to the ground if he had to.
It really shouldn’t have come as a surprise when her flighty, high-strung, weird sister caved, but when Cassie snitched, she was still let down. The fear for Fezco’s safety that shot through her was fucking primal; Lexi had been choking on her heart in her throat the entire conversation.
By the time he left with a satisfied expression carved into his face, she was lightheaded from holding her breath as long as Cal had been in her home.
Lexi didn’t really come back into her body until she was on her bike, with Laura Les blasting through her earbuds, a couple of blocks away from Fezco’s corner store. Lying to herself was an art she had gotten good at, but it was getting difficult to keep lying to herself about the powerful hold he had over her.
Fez had been the only thing keeping her sane recently.
After getting her number, he’d abandoned his soft green sweater on the couch next to her. She’d held it to her chest as she watched him fuck up Nate Jacobs, then brought it home. Where does one put the sweater of someone they’d just met that night and couldn’t stop thinking about?
At first, Lexi folded it up nicely and draped it over the back of her desk chair. That didn’t last long. Her gaze always wandered over to it whenever she tried to be productive. Lexi wanted to brush her cheek against it. She wanted to see if the sleeves would go past her hands if she wore it. What kind of person would Lexi transform into if she enveloped herself in this thing that was his ?
Lexi got home from school that day to an absolute wreck of a room. Last night, Cassie had thrown a tantrum over a missing lace bralette that she absolutely had to have, right now, or she would die. When she surveyed the disaster, there was no green sweater in sight. Fuck.
Anger flared hot and heavy in her chest; Lexi pictured the sweater on Cassie, perfectly framing her blue-green eyes and complimenting her figure. The urge to smash her sister’s makeup collection and destroy her favorite shoes, to grab her shiny blonde hair and pull until Cassie gave it back, was as natural as breathing.
The sweater was hers. Fez was hers.
Thankfully, Lexi found the sweater haphazardly tucked between her pillows before she had any time to process what that impulse was or where it came from. He wasn’t hers. She didn’t even know him.
All of this was very rational and objective. He was a person she’d met at a party. He was Rue’s ex-dealer. He beat up Nate Jacobs. They were casual acquaintances at best. Did she even want to get to know him better than that?
Yes.
Lexi did know him, somehow. One conversation and she felt like she knew him as she knew the feel of her fingerprints. Here was a man who believed in God, yet his actions were his own. If the world was unjust, Fez would make it just.
He bore the weight of his choices gladly. They were so alike in that way.
The sweater stayed on her bed. She couldn’t bear to move it, to chase away the sense of his lingering presence when Lex lay down.
He was haunting her.
In her daydreams, she found him integrating seamlessly with the world Lexi had built for herself as if he was always meant to be there.
She would edit countless iterations of the same “Grace confronts Hallie in their bedroom” scene, only for the scent of sandalwood and smoke to hang in the fictional air. Grace’s dialogue picked up some of the same rhythms as Fez’s voice. Lexi absentmindedly drafted a scene on a couch at a party when she should’ve practiced her Oresteia recitation for AP World History. What was his favorite movie? Did he have a favorite baked good? Lexi was good at baking.
At night, Lexi dreamed and dreamed and dreamed. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, there was nothing but the red of Nate’s blood and the red of Fez’s blood, all mixed up together. Dark purple marks like brands on the column of her neck, on the column of his neck. His chain hung in her face as he smeared blood on her skin.
When she pictured him as he’d been that night, godlike and terrible and beautiful, Lexi felt heat in her belly and wetness between her thighs.
And in the few liminal moments between sleep and consciousness, there would be the press of his mouth against hers.
After another dream that left her restless, Lexi decided to text him. Her message was totally cringe and not-at-all smooth. She cursed herself before flinging her phone into a pile of blankets on the floor in frustration. Of course, he’d never respond. Lexi was being weird, and who in their right mind would give a shit about some creepy teenage girl who kept hallucinating about a guy she’d spoken to once-
When her phone chimed a few minutes later from the pile of clothes where she’d thrown it, she just about tripped over three pairs of Cassie’s shoes in her hurry to see the notification.
Fez said he’d been waiting to hear from her. That he was grateful she grabbed his sweater; if she ever wanted to swing by his store, he’d be happy to see her. Relief and giddy happiness blossomed in her. Lexi wanted to sing and scream into her pillow. She did both of these things before texting him back.
Between the two of them, they’d kept up a conversation that never stopped or stuttered. He was easily one of the most interesting people Lexi had ever met and so genuinely interested in her. Talking to him was as innate as breathing. When Cal Jacobs stopped by, Lexi had only made tentative plans to stop by Fez’s store. There was little doubt in her mind where Cal was headed after he left; what kind of a friend would she be if she didn’t warn him?
Selfishly, she was glad to have a good reason to see him sooner.
Given that Lexi had been sort of dissociating until she was almost there, she thought it would be prudent to check whatever makeup had been applied to her lips before she left. As she stopped her bike just shy of the fluorescent store lighting, Lexi opened up the Snapchat front-facing camera on her phone.
She’d chosen a deep red that matched the blood in her dreams. It flattered her coloring and brought out the warmth in her eyes. Good choice.
Fez was as beautiful in person as he’d been in her memories.
His freckles were a lot more visible in better lighting. She froze for a brief moment to count them all before that made her too lightheaded to focus. When he looked at her with that immense softness on his face, Lexi could almost believe he reciprocated the longing come alive under her skin.
The girl behind the counter stopped her in her tracks. Faye was blonde and waifish, with perfect dick-sucking lips. Fez called Faye cool just then; he’d called Lexi cool at the party too. She was everything Lexi wasn’t. Beautiful, fucked-up in an attractive way, and untouchable.
Humiliation was a familiar, if resented and uncomfortable hat. This outcome should’ve been no surprise; Lexi wasn’t golden and sun-radiant like Cassie or icily flawless like Maddy.
Who could look away from girls like them?
In a last, desperate grab for her dignity, Lexi turned away from him and pressed close to the cooler, staring at her distorted reflection in the shiny glass. She wondered who wiped it down every day.
A truck parked outside. Hopefully, the driver avoided running over her bike. Lexi needed that to make the quick escape she was planning out already.
The universe was definitely laughing at her because Cal-fucking-Jacobs walked in just then. All the other PTA moms swooned over his allegedly handsome face, according to her mom. This information was a few years old because Suze hadn’t left the house for something non-liquor-related in a few years, but the thought that Cal would look better with his throat slit still passed through Lexi’s mind.
Fuck.
It was impossible to miss how he walked; one leg weighed down more than the other. A hand stiffly curled around something in his pocket. Concealed carry permits were nigh impossible for civilians to get in California. No doubt this man with the sheriff’s department licking his designer boots had found a way around that.
Fez glanced at her, then at the rack of chips next to her. In another world, Lexi would have followed that glance and tucked herself there, hopefully out of sight. But she’d spent nights fantasizing about this specific razor-sharp cut of his jaw and unearthly strength in his shoulders. His knuckles were still broken and raw. That same chain around his neck flashed as he swallowed tightly. Overwhelmed, Lexi closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them, she could’ve sworn she saw a six-point buck out of the corner of her eye, antlers like tree branches outstretched to the sky.
That settled it.
With the sort of boldness she usually reserved for Grace, she yanked the door open and grabbed a Smirnoff Ice, disturbing the heavy stillness that settled across the store. One, two, three steps, and Lexi dropped it down next to the register with calculated clumsiness. “Sorry about that! Just this, please?” She tried to smile cheerfully at Fez, but judging by how Faye flinched, Lexi probably looked a lot more like she was baring her teeth.
She hoped Cal saw it.
His hand brushed against hers as Fez reached out to take the bottle from her. Dizzily, she thought that licking an outlet couldn’t have shocked her more than his skin against hers and the intertwined rage and awe in Fez’s face when he looked at her.
“Aight, that’ll be $3.00.” He bit out slowly while his gaze stayed fixed on her. For once, Lexi didn’t mind fumbling around with her secondhand Kate Spade wallet. She pulled out a crumpled five-dollar bill and passed it to him with steady hands.
In for a penny, in for a pound, right?
She turned sharply on her heel with the grace of a teen girl who used to take dance classes. “Hi, Mr. Jacobs! I didn’t expect to see you again today.” As Lexi spoke, she made sure to flick her hair over her shoulder and angle herself into Cal’s line of sight.
The older man graced her with a single, venomous look. “Miss Howard. What a surprise.”
Breathe, Lexi , she told herself. Breathe . As if he read her mind, Fezco reached out and gently curled a hand around her wrist, running his thumb over the veins there. Her spine straightened out. “Did my sister give you a good lead on what happened to Nate?” Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. For someone supposed to be smart, Lexi sure had a habit of asking reckless, stupid questions.
“She tell you who I am?” Cal aimed his next barb at the boy behind her. It was not smart to look away from either his face or the gun in his pocket; she decided to keep flicking her gaze back and forth.
She hadn’t realized how grounding Fez’s touch was until he withdrew his hand to bag her Smirnoff up. “Nah, man.” Fight, flight, or freeze—her remarkably out-of-character recklessness dissipated, and with it, Lexi’s will to fight. Flight was not an option. Even if Lexi wanted to slip out the door and bike straight home, her muscles paralyzed her in her body. Moving even an inch wasn’t something that could be managed.
Faye’s voice was hoarse like her father’s had been towards the end. “Are you a cop?”
Cal stepped closer. “No. Just a concerned father.” His words came out sotto voce ; if Lexi hadn’t listened to so many true crime podcasts, she might have made the potentially deadly mistake of leaning in closer.
Antlers and tree branches flashed in front of her, and blood coated her tongue; Lexi could feel where she’d bitten the inside of her cheek. Fez was hers .
As if spooked, Nate’s father backed away suddenly. With a stammered apology, he fled out into the night. It wasn’t until his truck was gone, and there was only the sound of crickets outside, that Lexi let her spine sag and her knees give out.
“Hey, hey, hey, we not doin’ that.” Fezco grabbed her before she could hit the ground, gently guiding her up before wrapping her up in a hug that brought her back to herself. “Lexi Howard,” He murmured in her ear. “Fuckin’ fearless.”
She couldn’t help but press her face into the crook of his neck and time her breathing to his pulse. His hand came up to rest against the back of her head; Fez was trembling.
The moment between them lasted an eternity before Lexi pulled back to look up at him. Fez was looking at her like he had the first time they met; like he was worshipping her, like his whole world had narrowed down to just her.
His younger brother suddenly popped out of the cooler, barely leashed menace emanating off him. Fez had let go of her then as if her touch burned him.
Without his warmth grounding her, Lexi genuinely thought she would pass out soon.
Maybe Fez could read that in her face because he grabbed a chilled water bottle out of the mini-fridge and opened it up for her. “You gon’ finish that.” His tone brooked no argument, but Lexi smiled anyways at how his eyes lingered on her lips.
The younger boy casually pulled a switchblade out of his pocket and dropped it on the counter. Lexi had seen Criminal Minds; that was a threat.
“Who the fuck was that?”
Fuck.