Their Boy Beloved [MxMxM] (Taming His Blaze Book 1)

Chapter 4

REUBEN • POV
Eight years old...

"Excuse me, Rachel? You can't just crawl over me whenever you want - you too Uncle Cody! That's extremely rude, especially when I'm trying to do my homework!" I complained loudly, gently brushing the wriggling bugs off my notepad, where I was drawing a pretty awesome picture of all the tattoos I wanted when I was a grown up, with armpit hair.

Uncle Cody scampered back across the page I was drawing on and I almost squashed him with my purple crayon! He almost turned me a murder at eight years old!

"Seriously?!" I shook my notepad and Uncle Cody, Rachel, Peter, Drew - wait, maybe that was Darren - Lucy and Peanut, fell to the stained mattress beneath me.

They were quick to flip themselves upright and began crawling around, burrowing beneath my shirt where my stomach pressed into the bed. I was sprawled on my front, propped up on my elbows, kicking my legs behind me.

Cockroaches were pretty fast.

The little tippy-taps of their feet over my bare skin made me laugh, as I focused my attention back to my drawing, tongue poking out between my cracked lips.

I'd expertly drawn myself, but instead of boring, eight year old Reuben with his boring brown hair and his boring brown eyes and his boring brown skin, there was super awesome Reuben staring back at me from the once blank, white page!

A masterpiece!

This version of me had bright blue hair of course because blue was the coolest colour in the whole entire world - literally! Ocean, sky, blueberries, flowers, the blue parrot from Rio... so many blues!

Lots of jewellery because super awesome Reuben was going to be rich and famous and wear ice around his neck - that meant diamonds according to MTV. Super awesome Reuben also had so many tattoos! A billion-million! Birds, lions, bugs, ice cream, a guitar and batman!

I scribbled furiously, covering my light brown skin until all that was left was vibrant colour and then I leaned back, completely satisfied with my work. I was going to look exactly like this when I was older and I was already antsy with anticipation, newly motivated by my artwork.

This wasn't my real homework, but I'd assigned it to myself because I'd finished my homework pack weeks ago when I'd last been sent home from school. Things had gotten pretty boring after a while of staring at our broken TV or out of the locked window behind it, so I was filling the time by planning my future!

I was just ripping out another page of Mama's ratted diary that she never used, so that I could start designing my castle - which was where I'd live - when she appeared in the doorway of the tiny living room, which was also our bedroom and kitchen.

Warily, I watched her as she stumbled inside the front door, unsteady in her super tall, red heels.

She was murmuring to herself as she dropped her little silver purse on the couch and rubbed at the black paint smudged all over her eyes, her red lips smeared across her cheek, making her look sort of like a clown. Her little black dress was ripped above her thighs and her long, curly brown hair was falling out of its ponytail, matted and oily around her face, like she'd just gone swimming.

Uncle Cody, Rachel, Darren, Peanut and Peter scattered, disappearing, and I wished I was small enough to run away with them, to squeeze through a little hole in the wall and disappear outside or wherever they went to when they weren't climbing into bed with me or taking free piggy-back rides on my back - without paying I might add.

But I couldn't. I was just plain old, human Reuben. There was nowhere for me to hide.

"Hey mama."

"Shouldn't you be at school?" She grunted, chucking her car keys on the kitchen counter loudly beside the rotten microwave.