Sick & Tragic Bastard Son

by Rowan Massey

  No. Back to Zander.

  He was starting to move fast, already panting. I watched his hand pumping at his cock, and I wanted to get my tongue on it. Instead, I gripped his waist and thrust up into him to give him a break from doing all the work. A few moments of that, and he came on my stomach. It got on his stomach as well.

  I maneuvered us into a different position so that he was laying on the couch. I was like a puppet, controlled by my lust. I licked his belly clean, flipped him over, and fucked him from behind, enjoying the way he curved his back. Right before I came, I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I hadn’t been carried away by sex in so long. It was impossible to account for such a person to have come into my life. He was young, vulnerable, and sweet. What in the world did he want with me?

  The orgasm packed a punch. I’d forgotten I could move with such abandon. As soon as I pulled out, he twisted around and hooked an arm around my neck. Our kiss was full and happy.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Zander Age 18

  THE DAY I exchanged emails with Clay, everything was happening fast, so fast that I felt like there should be streaks of light shooting past me like when a space ship goes into lightspeed.

  The plan was to ask Lottie if she wanted to hang out, but after school, Greg texted me and said he had a friend who needed to offload some pills. I begged some money off my mom, which wasn’t hard. I just didn’t do it often because I had my pride. I stole a few bucks out of her purse almost weekly so I didn’t want to be a total dick. To get my hands on the pills, I drove to Greg’s and picked him up, then hurried to meet some guy at a gas station, but I almost balked at getting into a stranger’s shady pickup truck to buy it. After a little stalling, I ended up climbing up into the cab to have a terse conversation with a dodgy dude who smelled like an ashtray. Despite trusting Greg, he apparently didn’t trust me at all, but he kept saying, “Shit, man. I gotta get rid of this shit already or shit’s gonna go down.” When I told him how much I could buy, he was disappointed and thumped a fist onto the steering wheel. The wheel flinched and arched away like an abused animal. It was growing patchy fur right before my eyes. I tried not to look at it.

  Since he needed to get rid of it so badly—I didn’t ask why—he gave me a the whole prescription bottle with six pills in it. It was more than I could pay for, but he told me to just get out of his truck. I gladly scooted on out of there and went back to my car where Greg was waiting with his elbow out the window.

  I held the bottle up for him to see and said, “What the fuck!”

  The problem was that I was holding a prescription bottle with some poor woman’s name and information on it. How in the world was that guy stupid enough to keep that kind of evidence? No wonder shit might go down. I noted that the name of the drug ended in “pam” so it was indeed a downer. I put the pills in my pocket and tossed the bottle out into a nearby ditch.

  The whole thing had made me nervous, and when we got back to Greg’s and prepared to veg out and play something on his Xbox, I was ready to clear my vision of the unnatural lights pushing at the edges of the room.

  We each took a pill, and I checked my phone the way I did pointlessly fifty times a day. Clay had emailed me, which sent a crazy shot of electric anxiety straight up my spine. I took another pill, even though the first one hadn’t had time to kick in. I read the email twice, felt horrible for Clay, and sent him the email I’d prepared. I didn’t change anything, despite the touching things he’d said about wanting to meet me.

  Half an hour passed. My mind raced, and every time I closed my eyes for even a split second, I’d see evil, distorted things. It was getting horrific and fascinating. All the while, I was trying to beat Greg at some ridiculously cheap game he’d picked up someplace. I couldn’t be sure of the graphics I saw on the screen, but even if it was less bright and speedy than I thought it was, it was shitty.

  It all occupied my mind and made time into a rapid descent. The pills kicked in slowly with a nice, neutral effect. I wasn’t slowed down or particularly chilled out; I was just normal. I told Greg I needed to take care of some family bullshit and left him zoned out in front of his TV.

  I wanted to get in touch with Clay and see how he was taking it. We exchanged a few messages in which he tried to act like he was okay. I didn’t buy it. There was no question he needed me if he was home by himself, so I invited myself over.

  For the first time, I hadn’t preened myself before going to see him. He hadn’t been put off by my saying I had no job or acting crazy in front of him so I figured it was alright to be myself. Clay wouldn’t reject me for being a little dingy. Still, I tried to make the messiness of my hair look like it was done on purpose, then checked myself all over for zits. There was one on my lower back, but it was tiny.

  I was already headed to his place when he agreed to let me come over, so I drove twice in a circle around a block near his house before pulling onto his street. It had still only been about ten minutes, but I didn’t want to lurk around for longer. The pills were making me pretty confident about things I might have sweated otherwise.

  He opened the door. His mouth was drawn down with sadness and he seemed grateful I was there to comfort him. I resolved to have sex with him again. Maybe it would be nice for him to have that kind of distraction.

  Just to be sure I wasn’t about to be inappropriate, I offered to sit around with him, but he kissed me like he wanted a better entertainment than that. The sex felt as fast as the rest of my day, but start to finish, it must have been less than half an hour. Afterward, laying on my side on his sofa while he was in the bathroom, time finally started to ease up. I closed my eyes and remembered the way he’d basically rejected my well-practiced moves and asked me to be real with him. I’d switched to hookup mode in my head because my nervousness was coming back with an edgy discomfort. Tucking those feelings away and making myself relax had been worth it.

  “Here.”

  I opened my eyes and Clay was standing over me with a wet cloth in his hand. There wasn’t much to clean up, but for the sake of his sofa, I used it on my ass before sitting up. He handed me my clothes from off the floor, and put his sweatpants back on without the underwear. Since he didn’t put his shirt on, I didn’t either. We sat there for a moment as if recovering ourselves. I didn’t look at him, not sure why I didn’t want to, until his dog came over to us. We both petted and scratched his head and neck, which he loved. His doggy groan of pleasure made us both laugh. Clay’s hand grabbed hold of mine and squeezed. I took a chance on eye contact. He was giving me a sad smile.

  “I don’t have a favorite movie, do you?” he asked, going back to the question I’d asked him earlier.

  “Not really. I like science fiction.”

  “Star Wars?”

  I thought of the incest story line in that series and shook my head a little too long. “More like, uh, like Alien. Anything scary. Doesn’t have to be in outer space. Could be about a virus or something.”

  He smiled. “You don’t seem like the horror type. Don’t you get freaked out?”

  He dug a teasing finger into my ribs, making me pull away, but he just moved in closer until he put an arm around me and gave me a quick kiss.

  “Watch a movie with me. We’ll watch something mindless. I just want to lay around, even though I have a lot of work. Can you stay?”

  Staying close to him sounded pretty good.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I told him, which made him smile, but the sadness hadn’t disappeared from his eyes.

  He turned on the TV and started to find some science fiction for me to watch. I tried to tell him I didn’t care what we watched, but he was determined, so we decided on Serenity. People never talk about how fucked up and freaky that movie is. Everyone talks about it like it’s a fun family movie. He let me carry on about it for a minute while we poked around for snacks in his kitchen. I was afraid I was letting out my inner nerd, but he was a real nerd, so I let myself talk.

  “Popcor
n?” He asked, standing in the pantry door. “I have some cookies, but they have raisins. Hot chocolate?”

  “Yeah, hot chocolate.”

  We made mugs of it side by side. I felt clingy and kept sneaking my arms around him, letting myself rest my head on his shoulder just a moment at a time, searching his face for signs of anything he might want. I could tell he was feeling guilty every time I made him laugh. He quickly pulled himself back into sad mode, then tried for my sake to cover how sad he was. It was a cycle that was hard to watch. I’d caused all of it. I thought of people I’d made sad over my lifetime, and there were plenty, but I’d never cared about it before.

  In the living room, he sat our mugs on cork coasters and took an ugly greenish throw blanket off the back of the sofa, putting it around both of us. I gave him an amused look because we weren’t wearing shirts and it wasn’t cold in the room, but I didn’t complain. I’d never sat under a blanket with anyone. I’d suspected it was something people only did in antidepressant commercials.

  Nothing in the room was coming alive, glowing, or moving in the wrong ways. I could tell the pills had started to wear off, but I still felt safe. It was that wholesome thing again. It was deeply strange to abandon my former self, even temporarily.

  The lights in the room had been turned off. I laid my head back so that I could look at Clay without him knowing. He was watching the movie as if it were a serious task. It was impossible for him to take his mind off Lysander, but he was trying to focus on something else. Anyway, that was what I imagined going on in his mind. My scheme was damaging the thing I’d aimed to get for myself; Clay.

  His hand was resting loosely on my leg, and every time he started thinking about things too much, his fingers would tighten and his thumb would start kneading into my muscle. But then, he would make himself focus on the moment and his hand would relax. It happened several times until he switched to rubbing up and down my thigh. He was turning me on all over again. I leaned in close to his ear.

  “Come on, daddy,” I said. “Stop teasing me.”

  He turned and blinked at me, then blinked at what his own hand was doing and laughed. I kissed him and managed to quickly get him all worked up again. There was a nervous moment where I thought maybe I’d gotten myself into a fix because I didn’t know if I wanted to bottom again. I wasn’t a fan of doing it twice in a row. But Clay surprised me after taking my pants down. He got on his knees and started sucking me off. Men didn’t usually do that for me since I was more excited by a dick in my own mouth. Sometimes they did it as an obligation after I made them come. It wasn’t something that bothered me, but right then, with Clay’s mouth and hand doing awesome things, I resolved to get a lot more blow jobs in the future. Hopefully, Clay wouldn’t mind doing that for me. He certainly seemed to be enjoying himself as much as I was. It was building fast. I couldn’t help making a little noise right before.

  Time sped, skittered, warped wildly, and I had a sense of Clay being there at first, but then he was gone. The harsh rush lasted a long time, and then there was only blackness. I woke up in a cold sweat. I was laying somewhere soft and warm, but it was completely dark. A heavy arm lay on my chest, hand right under my throat. For a moment, I lay there trying to remember how to breath. Where the hell was I?

  Wanting to jump back through time, I tried to focus on how Clay had looked bent over my lap, but it got me nowhere. I couldn’t force my mind to travel back through the wormhole to the beginning of the orgasm.

  I had the usual flop sweat all over me. Too terrified and confused to move, I laid there with my racing thoughts, listening to the man beside me snore lightly. Each exhale sent a warm breeze over my shoulder.

  What had happened? Maybe the whole evening with Clay hadn’t been real, and I’d been with some hookup the whole time.

  No, no, there was no way! That was a brain tumor talking or something like that…a deep knot of sickness in my head that ate memories and made me confused. It was possible. I clawed at my head, trying to get a feel for what might be lurking inside. I could feel it eating at my memories.

  God. Fuck. Where had I gone off to? Poor Clay. Had I gone crazy in front of him? He had enough to deal with.

  My hand dared to move after a few minutes. It was a test of my motor skills. Slowly, I started flexing this and that, seeing if my body was the same. Nothing hurt. Nothing was missing. It gave me the creeps, but I took the man’s hand and slowly moved it towards his torso. His skin was cold, his arm heavy. I startled when he huffed and turned over. If he was a light sleeper, I had to be stealthy. The last thing I wanted was to wake him up and talk to him. I didn’t think I could handle that scene.

  After a few more minutes of my eyeballs searching the darkness for even a tiny bit of light, I found some, but it wasn’t natural. It was the light I’d seen in Mr. Mask’s house. It was yellow, then green, blue, purple. Was that where I’d ended up?

  Enough. I wanted to get up and go home.

  I turned slowly and felt around to orient myself against the side of the bed before sitting up, careful not to uncover him. With a little groping, I found a table beside the bed. I continued to explore slowly with my hands and made out the shape of a phone with the charger plugged in. The buttons were easy to find, and I pressed one. The screen lit up, filling me with fear. It was what I’d wanted, but I looked anxiously over at the man to make sure it wasn’t bothering him. His face was turned away, so I still didn’t have a chance at recognizing him, but there was no movement.

  Looking back to the phone, I recognized it as mine. It had the plain white background that I’d put on the lock screen because it reminded me of my bedroom walls. The time was four twenty-six. At least the date was the same.

  I unplugged it and stood, then reconsidered the situation and sat down again. Knowing who the hell I’d spent the night with had to be made a priority. Hunched over my phone, trying to block the small amount of light from his vision, I checked a few apps to try and figure out what had happened. There was nothing. I rechecked four apps to make sure I hadn’t missed something, but no one had messaged me after Clay had. I went to Google maps. I could put a pin in the location and maybe later on that would give me a clue. It was showing me Clay’s house. Puzzled, I zoomed in and out, trying to get it to reset or something. I waved my hand over the screen, trying to see if I was hallucinating, but there were no shimmers, no flies.

  The truth sunk into my body slowly. Vivid memories came to me. I’d given Clay a blow job too, then he’d said, “What would I do without you right now?”, making me feel better about what I was doing to him. We’d turned the movie back on, it ended, then he said, “It’s been a long time since anybody spent the night with me.” I told him I could fix that. We’d gone to bed after he’d found me an extra toothbrush and a phone charger. That was it. Nothing bad had happened. Or else, I’d created boring memories in my imagination in order to keep the reality from myself.

  I turned to him and slowly edged the light of the screen over and nearer to Clay’s face until I could clearly see his features. How had I not recognized that it was his arm? Well, we didn’t actually know each other well enough for me to know instinctively. I hadn’t detected his familiar scent because my nose was already used to it. There was no real smell to things at all.

  Laying down again, I faced him and wondered what it would be like in the morning. I’d spent the night once with a guy who wasn’t much older than me—the one Mom had caught me with—and he’d been horribly cranky, even after a few hours.

  Still worried that I’d done something crazy, I propped myself on my elbow and held the phone up to his face again, almost hoping he would wake up and give me some clues. I watched him like a creep until my arm got tired. I’d been hitting the button again every time it started to switch off. When he stirred, I quickly turned it off and tucked it against my body.

  After a moment, his hand came clumsily toward me and touched my arm.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, and I scrambled
for an answer.

  “I-I woke up and didn’t know where I was…” A hint of fear made its way into my voice, and it didn’t get past him.

  “You okay?” He asked with a rasp, and cleared his throat.

  “Thought I was in bed with some stranger,” I instantly regretting saying that, for bothering him instead of saying I was fine. “Go back to sleep,” I said, and turned onto my back.

  He wasn’t having it. He propped himself up on one elbow and reached across me to turn on the lamp. We blinked at each other, and I put a hand up to block the light, only I didn’t block it from my own eyes, I blocked it from his. It made him smile and he gave me an amused look. I didn’t know what reflex had mad me do that, so I put my hand on my stomach instead. Wiping at his eyes, he gave me a sleepy smile.