A Casual Weekend Thing

by A. J. Thomas

  “Yeah. I didn’t know that at the time, though. He was furious. Four years in school just to become a police officer and his education major twink boyfriend passed when he didn’t. That was the end of us. It turned out the police recruiter was incredibly persistent, I was angry, and I still had a lot of issues from growing up with Peter. So I thought, what the hell, why not rub it in Caleb’s face?”

  Doug pushed himself off the fence rail and laughed. “You got into police work to spite your ex? That’s perfect!”

  “What was your excuse?”

  “I didn’t have an excuse,” said Doug. “I’ve always wanted to be a police officer. Ever since I was five, cops and robbers always felt like the only game in town.”

  “So you wanted to be a cop your whole life?”

  “My whole life.”

  “So why Miami?” Christopher asked, flipping open the revolver’s cylinder and checking the chamber.

  “It was the farthest spot in the country from here. I hated this place when I was a kid. After school, and after Brittney, I just wanted to get as far away as possible.”

  “Brittney was the girl who wanted to piss off her dad?”

  Doug nodded. “She’s the coroner now, and she’s still a bitch. You’ve got no idea how glad I am that you showed up after she took off.”

  “That bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, when did you first discover men?” Christopher asked out of the blue.

  Doug froze. “College,” he said carefully. “I used to be one of those kids hanging out in that bar in Missoula. All of the gay clubs in Miami were definitely an eye opener.” Doug knew he had to change the subject. He didn’t want to talk about his history with men. He had been young enough and naive enough in Miami to get in over his head when it came to men. His first crack at a real relationship had turned out to be with a drug dealer. The man had known Doug was a police officer from the start, and looking back, Doug realized he had been manipulated from the very beginning. As Doug became attached, his boyfriend had pushed and pushed for favors, for Doug to ignore the things he was doing. For too long, Doug had done just that.

  When Doug woke up one morning to find his lover putting his department-issue Beretta back into his holster, he realized just how much trouble he had gotten himself into. When he tried to end things, his boyfriend had casually announced that he wasn’t allowed to leave. If he did, his lover promised Doug’s supervisor would get a detailed list of everything Doug had helped him accomplish, and Doug would go to prison as an accessory to drug-trafficking and extortion. With his lover blackmailing him, he had become a combination punching bag and fuck toy for a man who turned out to be far more sadistic than Doug had ever imagined possible. Sick as it was, Doug still got off on it, and that was more humiliating still. For three weeks, he hid his bruises, lived off ibuprofen, and put up with it. When his ex stumbled into his apartment with a roll of duct tape and announced he had brought a couple of friends along to play, Doug lost it. He hadn’t hurt the man enough to kill him, or even to stop him from running away, but he hadn’t pulled his punches, either.

  Then Doug transferred to another precinct, and for an entire year he had lived with the fear that he would walk into work one day only to have his supervisor sit him down with a detailed list of every way he had fucked up with that one relationship—including by ending it with his fists instead of by pressing charges himself. He never saw his ex again, though. It was two years before Doug even considered going out again, and when he did, he found himself holding back in conversations, refusing to stay with anyone long enough to risk getting to know them. He also found himself unable to bottom without trying to kill whoever was fucking him.

  Doug twisted a chip of wood off the fence post and tossed it into the grass. He’d been standing there brooding too long, and Christopher was staring at him with a mixture of concern and amusement.

  “I would have thought a big gay community would make it easier,” Christopher said.

  “Miami was different,” said Doug simply. “I can honestly say I miss the food, and the pace, and even being able to pass for Cuban—but I don’t miss the active gay scene. Not a lot of good experiences to look back on.”

  Christopher let out a sigh that almost sounded like a chuckle. “I got it on the first try?”

  “What?”

  “I was steering the conversation toward why you reach for a gun when you wake up at night and realize you’re not alone,” explained Christopher, as though there was absolutely nothing strange about manipulating the conversation in such an abstract direction.

  Doug stared at him for a long moment, trying to sort out the feelings of anger and betrayal he felt. He was angry, and he felt betrayed, but then he always felt that way when he thought about what happened in Miami. “Do you ever just come right out and ask about what’s on your mind?”

  “Yes. I asked if you were a bouncer, didn’t I? And I asked if you would fuck me. Several times.”

  Doug smiled despite his anger.

  “I was trying to bring it up subtly, but when you got all spacey, I figured I’d give you an easy out. If you don’t want to talk about it, you can just say so.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. And I did not get spacey.”

  “All right. I’m going to talk about it, though,” said Christopher. He set Doug’s revolver back into its case and closed it. “I feel like I owe you an apology, for Saturday night. You said you didn’t like to bottom and I disregarded that when I shouldn’t have. It was obvious you were uncomfortable. I shouldn’t have taken you like that. I’m sorry.”

  “For Saturday?” Doug grinned. “Don’t be. I wanted you to fuck me, Chris. I told you I wanted it. I enjoyed it too. I just… I just can’t….”

  Christopher closed the distance between them, took Doug’s face in his hands, and kissed him. “I have no issues at all with bottoming. I like being on top, but for me, it’s better the other way. If I had stopped for a second to think, I would have realized what was going on. I would have backed off.”

  “I enjoyed it. I really did,” Doug whispered.

  Christopher’s relief was so obvious Doug could feel it. “Are you sure?”

  Doug pulled him close. “Absolutely.”

  “Enough to want to try it again?” When the tension automatically shot through Doug’s body, Christopher laughed. “It’s just as well. Right now I really want you to fuck me.”

  Doug could feel Christopher’s breath against his temple and it made him shiver. He could kiss Christopher so easily. Christopher’s shoulder and neck were at the perfect height, and to reach his lips Doug would just need to tilt his head up a little. So he did. He kissed Christopher’s lips, then the salty corded muscles of his neck and down to the spot on his collarbone that always made Christopher squirm. Christopher melted against him perfectly. “I am definitely okay with that,” he whispered between kisses.

  “Talk first,” Christopher gasped.

  Doug could feel Christopher’s cock, already hard, grinding against him. “You can think straight? I’m not putting enough effort into this.” Doug latched onto the skin above Christopher’s collarbone and kissed, licked, and bit the already sensitive skin.

  “I told you—it takes hard liquor or full-blown sex to make my brain stop. You know what’s in my past, Doug. You should also know that I’m content to leave it there. Everyone’s preferences are shaped by their experiences, and I can respect your preferences without needing to know where they came from. If you don’t want me to fuck you, that’s fine. Right now, my preferences include whatever I can entice you to do to me. Like that.” Christopher gasped as Doug ran his tongue up his neck. “But if you ever want to experiment… I think I can take anything you’ve got, panic attack or not.”

  Doug felt Christopher’s pulse racing against his lips and smiled. “Is that an invitation to get carried away?”

  “Fuck, yes. So long as I’ve still got pain meds left, anyway.”

  Doug
licked Christopher’s earlobe once more and then pulled away with a smirk. “Too bad…. If I take you up on that, dinner will burn.”

  He tried not to laugh as Christopher’s entire body slumped in disappointment. He was quickly learning that Christopher tended to follow his stomach, even over the advice of his brain and dick combined. He imagined Christopher like a lost puppy—feed him once and he’d follow you everywhere in hopes of a second meal.

  “After dinner?” Christopher asked hopefully.

  Even with Doug’s weekend cut short, Doug and Christopher made the most of it. They divided their time between the bedroom, the shower, and the kitchen, but they also walked around the ranch. Doug took Christopher to the oak grove near the creek. They went for a run together, and Christopher didn’t even snicker when Doug couldn’t keep up for more than three miles.

  Saturday they went into the reservation town of Ronan because Doug needed to get groceries. Christopher gawked at the tribal decorations that adorned most of the stores, failed to pronounce some of the street names so badly that Doug actually teased him about it, and was bouncing again by the time they finished in the store.

  “It’s bigger than Elkin,” Christopher said in amazement.

  “It’s about twice as big.”

  “Why didn’t you just get a job here?” Christopher asked, gesturing to the main street. “You wouldn’t have to deal with the suspicions and doubts down here.”

  Doug pressed his lips tight. He shook his head slowly and took a sharp right turn. Less than a block from the main street, run-down trailers were packed close together, entire extended families taking up one or two city lots. Preschoolers, naked except for diapers that no longer fit them, sat and played in the dirt between the trailers. Half-starved dogs ran everywhere.

  “This town is bigger than Elkin, but 90 percent of it is a slum,” said Doug. “It’s the kind of place where most people double-check that their car doors are locked when they’re at a stop light. My family has always been successful, but they did it by working themselves into early graves to build that ranch. Even though they put in ten to twelve hour days every single day, folks in town hated them because they managed to be successful.”

  Doug drummed on the steering wheel and circled around to the south end of town. It was one big series of trailer parks, worn-out buildings, bulletin boards advertising casinos, and old gas stations. “When I was a kid, my grandpa took me around the whole town, and when I asked why people didn’t just fix the broken sections of fences, or replace broken windows with glass instead of plywood, he said it was because the only thing they knew how to do was to be helpless. The men are all trapped in the same cycles—working seasonal construction jobs and making ends meet for half of the year, and pissing away what savings they do have on beer for the other half. Most of them are too proud to ask for help, even from each other. Even though their house might have a cracked window, they’ll cover it with a piece of plywood before they ask someone to help them replace it.”

  Christopher stared out at the crowded trailers, no longer smiling or bouncy. “Was your mom unhappy living so close to the reservation?”

  “Technically, the ranch is part of the reservation. Everything from the Baker County line down to Missoula is part of the reservation. Ronan is the biggest town on tribal land, but there are two more farther south,” Doug explained. “And she loved it here. My dad loved it too. My great-grandpa was part of a government program aimed to help Native American kids adopt white culture. At the age of seven, a case worker from the Bureau of Indian Affairs put him on a train and sent him to a Catholic boarding school on the East Coast.”

  “Just sent him away to school for free? That’s not so bad.”

  “They didn’t have a choice. Looking back, it amounted to kidnapping. Parents weren't even told where their kids were going or why, and it was years before they came home for a visit. He didn’t come back until he was fifteen.”

  “He was seven? Like, first grade?”

  “That’s right. My grandpa said his father was grateful, by the end. He came home well-educated, Catholic, and convinced it was his duty to try to rise up and prove that Native Americans could make something of themselves. Most of the other kids who were taken didn’t come back. They settled wherever they finished school. But he came home, and he came with enough education to write a business plan. He got a loan for the first chunk of land and started our ranch. He worked hard, paid off the mortgage, and bought more land. Everybody hated him for it. By the time he had a family, the forced-education program had stopped, but he sent my grandpa away to boarding school anyway. My grandpa didn’t come back until he was thirty, and he came home with a successful career in property law to fall back on. He tripled the family’s land in five years, which made us even less popular.”

  Doug slowed down and waited for a stray dog, followed by a half-dozen stray children, to get out of the street. Along the side of the road, several men stood up and glared at Doug’s truck.

  “So I see,” said Christopher. “At least the lady at the grocery store was nice.”

  “She's probably one of my mom’s students. My mom fell in love with the romantic image of the Native American, and then she fell in love with the idea of convincing the tribe’s children to embrace her ideal—taking pride in their culture and traditions, but still embracing the future.”

  “Sounds like what most people hope to do,” said Christopher.

  “The romanticized image of the proud Native American doesn’t work very well in the real world,” Doug insisted. “Hell, she was closer to being a real member of the tribe than I’ve ever been. She taught here, so I went to school in Elkin. Every day I went up there, it was like moving between two worlds. By eighteen, I decided I hated it here. I came back when she got sick, but… eh, who am I kidding? I still hate it here.”

  “Why don’t you leave? You don’t have to sell your family’s land. You could lease it or something. Live off the rent in a small place somewhere else.”

  Doug shrugged. “I should,” he admitted.

  “I have trouble throwing out clothes,” Christopher said randomly. “My foster mom, the last one I had, she always bought clothes. Every time she went out, she would pick up a suit, a T-shirt, or a pack of socks for me. She kept doing it while I was in college, and afterwards too. I would stop by their place for dinner, and she would make some comment about how she bought the shirt I was wearing years ago, then she would come out with a stack of new ones that she thought were more my color. I had no trouble throwing them out before she died, but since then, I have kept every single one I’ve still got. I have so many shirts it’s ridiculous. Even this ragged T-shirt she bought me when I was fourteen. It’s really pathetic. It’s threadbare, stained with blood, grease, beer, coffee, pizza, gasoline, and mud. It has a few holes in it from where a dog tried to take a bite out of me. Delgado once told me it’s going to spontaneously combust if I don’t throw it out. I should throw it out.” Christopher smiled whimsically. “But I’m not going to.”

  Doug smiled too.

  Normally, by the time Sunday morning finally rolled around, Doug would be so desperate to get out of his family’s vacant, quiet house that he would go into work early. Now he found himself lingering in bed, running his fingers up and down over Christopher’s bare hip just because he could. He loved to touch Christopher. He loved to watch his eyes crack open as Christopher woke up. He should have been in the shower twenty minutes ago, but he didn’t want to move until he had to. It was already to going to suck when Christopher left, so Doug wanted to enjoy this while he had the chance.

  “What time do you have to leave?” Christopher whispered.

  Doug was spooned against Christopher’s back. He snuggled closer. “About an hour. I don’t want to get out of bed, though.”

  “No choice,” Christopher said sadly. “We’ve got to talk.”

  Even though Doug couldn’t see his face, he had heard that tone, and those words, before. That was the s
ame phrase Christopher had used before sitting him down to explain what his brother’s suicide note meant.

  “Can you find the kid during your shift today? Micah, I mean.”

  “Probably. I’m going to look for the truck anyway. Why?”

  “There were local guys and feds there, in the parking lot.”

  “Just because they’re feds doesn’t mean they’re stupid enough to tell everyone what was on those discs.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if they kept their mouths shut or not. Park rangers, police officers, fire fighters, EMTs… there were more than a hundred people up there. They’re all going to assume we brought down something connected to the fire, just because I was there.”

  “But no one should know what’s on the discs. I was the only one close enough to hear the audio track. And the FBI isn’t going to say anything until they know for sure that your brother didn’t just download those videos off the Internet—they’d cause a panic otherwise and they know it.”

  Christopher sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Those feds wouldn’t have gone up there without some kind of explanation unless they already knew this was more than just an arson investigation. You don’t imagine that whoever set the fire can’t guess what they found? If they were willing to burn down Peter’s house to hide whatever evidence was still there, who’s to say they wouldn’t try to get rid of any other evidence that might be driving around out there?”

  It took longer than it should have for the full implications of that question to sink in. Then Doug was up and moving, frantically trying to find clothes. “Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “I was asleep before.” Christopher yawned and stretched. “Just thought about it. Hop in the shower, I’ll start some coffee.”

  Doug nodded. He stopped at the door to the bathroom. “You just thought about that, at four thirty in the morning?”

  “I’m a morning person,” said Christopher with an innocent smile. He practically leaped out of bed and then squirmed as their activities from the previous night caught up to him. “Eh. Never mind, I need a shower too. I know I can’t be a part of your investigation, but I was going to head to Liedes’s church anyway. If I see Micah or Peter’s truck, should I give you a call?”