Charlie asked, finally, “How do I fit into this day you’re trying to have?”
“I guess there are things—” the stranger said over their decimated dessert plate, hand trembling enough to wobble the line of his wine. “There are things you need to do on your own terms. But you don’t know what the terms are until the moment they set themselves up in front of you. I didn’t know I’d share this dinner ’til I saw you, and I couldn’t have guessed how much I’d want to know you until I talked to you.”
Charlie scraped the delicate spoon across the last crumbs of cake and syrup. The check folder sat at his elbow, paid in crisp big bills from the stranger’s wallet.
“I do miss Rich,” he blurted out. “But not as much as I did. So, yeah, I’m glad I said yes to you too. I didn’t know I needed this.”
The stranger laced their fingers and Charlie squeezed, their hands the same size to the centimeter. Touching bare skin alone left him blind and guessing, outside of his comfortable habit. But he felt matched. Their eyes met, locked with magnetic and embarrassingly nude potential. Charlie’s stomach flopped. The clock in his head ticked closer to the end of this unexpected mapping of himself against the man seated across the table.
The man who then said, “Time scrambles when you lose someone. You get stuck. Even if he’s still there he’s someone else, and so are you.”
The meal was over. He caught a fortifying breath.
“Take me to bed?”
The stranger’s hand twitched. “You don’t have to.”
“I don’t think our night should end here. I promise, I want to.”
“I won’t say no to that,” he murmured, allowed hunger glowing from his lowered pitch.
The silk of the robe caught between a solid palm and the strip of skin at the dip of Charlie’s spine as his date ushered him from his seat, leaving without their change. A thumb found the divot of his hipbone from behind and pushed into it. He shook with one aggressive tremble from head to toe and smacked the button for the lobby in the elevator. The stranger laughed, airy, rubbing his wrist over his mouth in a nervous motion.
“I’ve seriously never done this before, so don’t be disappointed,” Charlie reminded him.
He said, “Then let me take care of you. That’s all I want to do tonight.”
The stranger paid for a room at a hotel two blocks further on the Loop while Charlie perused the lobby décor. His insides pitched with delighted horror as he heard, at proud volume, “No, it’s just one bed for us, thank you dear.”
In the elevator, Charlie said, “My ex was always worried if we looked too together or if I was too much when we were out. Like, fair enough, but—”
“But you’re not the quiet type.”
The floors pinged past. He leaned enough to touch their shoulders together, flame-silk against shade-wool. “No, I’m not. I’m strange, I guess.”
“Strange is good. Sounds like maybe he wasn’t what you needed, either,” he said.
No one else was in the hall as they picked down the row of numbered doors. Holding his own forearms inside the robe’s sleeves gave Charlie the illusion of calm while the stranger unlocked their room and stepped inside. The lights clicked on, lamps with gold shades. Dusk pitched itself in the corners. Charlie kicked the door shut while his date walked across the room and sat the keycard on the end table, face in profile. He left the slides behind and walked barefoot to sit on the edge of the bed. The clunk of the stranger’s watch on the table drew his eye and he watched as the suit jacket slid off, slick with practice. He pressed his hands between his knees, big and gangly and small and unsure. The comforting whispers from the robe had nothing on the abrupt understanding that he’d made himself available—come upstairs, sat himself on the bed—without doing the conversation.
“Hey,” the other man murmured.
His shoulders hunched like a startled bird; in an instant the stranger took two steps to join him, cupped his cheeks in careful hands. One cuff was unbuttoned, the other still held firm. He bent at the waist, an awkward angle that let Charlie keep his legs together, to press a kiss to his forehead—dry and slight—then another to his left eyebrow. He choked on a nervous giggle.
“Sorry, I’m so nervous,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry. If you’re still into this, all I’m aiming for is to take care of you. Nothing that won’t be safe, I swear,” he said with a certitude and gravity that unlocked Charlie’s risk-stiffened shoulders. Mischief lit the other man’s eyes as he continued, lightening the moment, “Just promise you’ll wear the robe.”
Charlie found himself able to smile as he snagged the stranger’s wrist to unhook the second button. He wished he could steal another peek, but the fresh cuff told him nothing. Instead skin spoke in the language of a tan-line wrapping a pleasant forearm, a smattering of dark hair lightly pricked with goosebumps. He put his other hand on the man’s waist and stood eye to eye, toe to toe, then nose to nose. Breath coasted over his lips.
“Tell me your name now,” he whispered.
“Will you let me lie?”
Charlie tipped his chin in languid invitation and murmured, “All right. And call me Cissy, like my friends do.”
“Then call me Marcel, or Oscar, or—“
“I refuse to fuck someone using Proust’s name, sweet Jesus,” Charlie burst out, the moment breaking into a hundred giddy pieces as he tucked his face against the stranger’s throat. Hysterical snickers shook his whole frame. The man huffed once in affront. “Next you’ll ask me to call you Richard. Worse, Frances!”
A nudge of nose on his cheek. Both men moved at once and the kiss stopped his laughter in his chest. Charlie made a bitten-off sound into the wet plush seam of his mouth while he remembered in all his cells what it meant to be wanted. The mattress dipped at the back of his knees and a hand on his thigh pulled. He collapsed onto the bed in a flutter of silk, visions of cinema in his head again, stubble burning his chin.
“David,” his date said. The plain handsomeness of his face was startling from below. He was anyone, everyone, futures bundled reckless into the present instead of the reliable echoes of a past left behind.
“Nice to meet you, David,” Charlie repeated.
“And you too, Cissy. A pretty name for—you, you’re so pretty.”
“Oh,” he gasped. Teeth skimmed the tendon that strained in Charlie’s neck as he tossed his head.
“Do you like that, darling? Being pretty?”
The question held implication nestled as careful as the fingers skimming his blouse up his belly. He yanked at David’s dress shirt to palm his waist. He’d touched the same body for almost seventy straight months and this was, notably, not it. His heart soared and swooped in time with the pulse taking up residence in his dick.
“Yeah, yes,” he admitted. “Call me pretty.”
Charlie’s clothes vanished to the floor a piece at a time and took their stories with them. He scooted to the center of the mattress, blushing to his chest, bare-ass naked except for the robe pooled at his elbows and strung out around him in a cloud. One hand half cupped and half covered his erection. His fingertips rested ticklish on his balls while David stood at the end of the bed and flung his shirt and tie in the direction of the windows. Streetlight and sunset touched the hollow of his belly as he undid his belt and stepped free of his pants. His briefs were Calvin Klein, straining against the weight of him.
“We don’t have to talk about it or go further if you don’t want to,” David said.
The chain dangling above his pectorals held two gold rings. Charlie’s knees pulled together then relaxed. The mirth drained from his lungs. He leaned onto his elbow and offered his hand. David took it, solid and sturdy, to climb onto the bed. Each moved for the other on instinct: David’s arm beneath his neck, his knee between David’s, tucked at perfect angles. The rings slid to one side on their slender loop of gold; Charlie resisted the urge to read them for himself.
“Are those for someone you’re still w
ith?” he asked.
“No,” David said. His free hand skated across Charlie’s stomach, drawing sloppy circles. “It was for the person I mentioned before, who you, well—” He trailed off.
“It’s okay, keep going. I don’t mind hearing,” Charlie said.
David’s hand joined his, nudged him to stroke himself. He watched their fingers woven together, knuckle against knuckle. His hips kicked in reflex. David hummed into the mop of his hair and kissed him there, then his ear, then his jaw. As the pleasure built with domestic ease he hid his face in the crook of his elbow and sipped for breath. David paused to lick his palm wet before taking over entirely, leaving Charlie to grip the sheets in one hand while the other curled between their chests.
“He was so vibrant. You looked like he did the first day we met,” David confessed in a reverent hush. An arrow of tenderness pierced him, scraped a jolt of unexpected desire across his nerves.
“Oh, fuck,” he groaned.
“But I’m thinking about you, Cissy, just you right now, thank you.” His bent knee splayed over David’s thigh, underside of his leg pressing him through the briefs he’d left on. He reached to reciprocate but David nudged his hand onto his own chest again. “We didn’t grab anything to use, darling, I’m all right. Just let me do this for you.”
Charlie melted. The stranger held him close while he played him with his fingers saliva-slick and, at the end, as far inside him as he could fit. At the last moment Charlie curled his pinky into one of the rings and the resultant rush of bittersweet longing tipped him past his limit. He came with a hoarse grunt and a shudder, letting go of the ring in an instant. David’s thumb drew streaks through the mess on his hip and stomach as their ricocheting, panting gasps began to settle.
“Hey,” Charlie protested when David rolled to stand.
He smiled over his shoulder, adjusting his underwear, and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Charlie drowsed until his companion returned from the bathroom to wipe him clean with a damp towel. The lamps clicked off one at a time as David made the circuit of the room. Charlie slipped the robe off and folded it at the top corner of the bed, unstained except with the fresh experience he’d certainly imprinted onto it: delight, discovery, simplicity. He’d relish in that later, when he needed a reminder of the merits of the world outside his shop.
But inside the quiet dark he asked, knowing better than to hope, “Was it a breakup?”
David shook his head and Charlie wrapped his arms around his stomach, tucked up against the other man’s clothed butt. Strong fingers clutched at his. Despite the early hour, sleep loitered with the palpable intention of a kid needing to bum a cigarette; he was fuck-drunk and exhausted—tenderized enough to hear the memorial that he knew needed to be given.
“I lost him a year ago, this week,” the stranger confessed.
“But you’re not going to forget him, and neither will I,” Charlie murmured against the nape of his neck. He guided their hands to the dangling rings and closed their tangled fingers around the warmed, endlessly looping metal radiating that pained adoration. “I promise I’ll remember.”
“Our moment out of time. You don’t know how much you gave me tonight, truly,” David agreed in a hoarse murmur.
After a pause, Charlie said, “You know, you’re only the third guy I’ve ever slept with.”
“No shame in that. And it was good, right? Something we could do for each other,” he said.
Charlie woke disoriented and sore at moonrise. The keycard and the watch sat together in a pool of light under the bedside lamp. David’s clothes were gone. The robe fell loose and freshly sensual around his shoulders when he shrugged it on; David had helped him create that comfort for himself. Under the watch sat a note that said, Thank you for helping me get through my best-worst day whole. The trails of bites and kisses on his body twanged sweet.
Metal retained less impression than fabric, but when he took the watch onto his palm its bleak, exhausted echoes startled a knotted inhale. The coffee mug untouched in a dish rack for months, boxes half-packed and left to sit in defeat: those were the brutal daily indignities the watch remembered without the buoyant romantic symbolism the rings had to imbue more pleasant impressions. After a settling pause he strung the linked band open to read the interior plate inscription: “DL to RK 8/89.” The watch fit loose. He latched it anyway, platinum banging the knob of his wrist bone when he let his arm fall slack.
If nothing else, their night together had offered David the chance to pass those stone-solid memories along. He’d cherish the watch as a remnant of RK, one man from thousands, gone but held alight in him and in the man each of them had shared. Lingering stiffness as he walked to the bathroom grounded him to his bones again. He started the tub running then used the room’s phone to dial Katrin. Her machine picked up after ten rings. He hesitated. I fucked a stranger and I’m never going to see him again and it was the most beautiful thing to ever happen to me, will you be at the store in the morning—he wasn’t going to leave that on a recording. They’d talk tomorrow; by then he’d have the whole experience neatened into a tale about pasts and futures. He hung up, snagged the book from his satchel, and climbed into the steaming water. The watch clinked on the porcelain at the whispering turn of each page.
(Editors’ Note: Lee Mandelo is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)
© 2020 Lee Mandelo
Lee Mandelo is a writer, critic, and occasional editor whose fields of interest include speculative and queer fiction, especially when the two coincide. They have been a past nominee for various awards including the Nebula, Lambda, and Hugo; their work can be found in magazines such as Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and Nightmare. Aside from a brief stint overseas learning to speak Scouse, Lee has spent their life ranging across Kentucky, currently living in Lexington and pursuing a PhD at the University of Kentucky.
The Bottomless Martyr
by John Wiswell
Content Note: self-harm and suicide
The first time Rang died, it stopped a typhoon.
The typhoon raged at the entire Orphan Cousin enclave. Torrents rolled in for hours, swallowing the harbor in foam and brine, dashing fishing trawlers against the shore. Storage houses were dragged into the surf whole, returning split marlins and salted yellowfins and sweet-core mollusks from whence they came, stealing all the people’s sugar and guava like it was a tax. When the waves caved Rang’s roof and crushed her skull, a storm that should have lasted days gave up. In minutes, it was sunny out.
Rang’s stepmother rubbed the bridge of her nose and filled out the paperwork.
The retreating waters carried Rang’s body far out into the bay. When she came to, she had urchins in her hair. Some of the Orphan Cousins found her on a patch of driftwood, and netted her and dragged her to safety. It was Len and Un’s boat, twin sisters who ran much of the Orphan Cousins enclave.
Len spoke with a softness that sounded like a hand about to close. “How’d you get so far out here?”
Un added, “And survive? You’re the healthiest drowned girl I ever saw.”
Dread and guilt shook up into a cocktail in Rang’s guts. She didn’t know what to say, and feared how anything she said would be taken. How could she put impossible things into words?
Then the twins interrupted her silence.
Un said, “So healthy you can probably work. We’ve got a spare fishing rod. That storm left every blacktip out here biting.”
Len said, “Want in? We’ll let you keep twenty percent of what you catch.”
“Twenty?” Rang twisted her hands in her shirt. “Last time I fished for you, it was thirty.”
Len leaned on the prow and said, “We did save your life.”
Un rubbed her thumb and fingers together. “And we’ve got to feed the family, don’t we?”
Len said, “We Orphan Cousins are all family.”
Un said, “You want to help the family out, don’t you? If we don’t give, what good are w
e?”
Shame could drown a person as easily as a high tide. Rang took a fishing rod and got to casting along with a dozen other Orphan Cousins. Every so often she scratched her forehead, at an oblong scar that nobody seemed to see. She felt it, though.
Rang swore when she found there were no docks to return to. All the fishers slept on the boats while the Orphan Cousins ashore rebuilt their homes, and everyone praised the god Life for sparing them from the storm’s wrath with his miracle. The god Life never showed up to claim his praise.
All the work of fishing and mending nets was good work to hide in. The family needed Rang to keep working and giving. New creatures had come to their waters from the unusual weather. There were blacktip sharks, and a bright green kind of puffer fish, and an enemy flotilla.
The flotilla sailed in on twice as many vessels as the Orphan Cousins had ever owned. These raiders would’ve been wiped out entirely by the typhoon, but by a miracle, they were left untouched. Their ships filled as much of the horizon as the waves had. The raiders introduced themselves with cannon shells, and followed up with an ugly song of rifle fire.
As Rang cupped her mouth to yell for their boat to veer starboard, a bullet flew straight through her heart.
Her stepmother said, “How are you back here already? You’re going to get me fired.”
It was the end of the battle for Rang, and the end for everybody else, too.
Rang floated amid a reef, this time witnessing the tail end of a freak whirlpool sucking the flotilla into the sea’s basements. The invaders went down firing into the surf as though to slay the waters for betraying them.
Rang tried to swim to shore, but Len and Un’s boat overtook her. They picked her up in the same net they’d used for tuna.
The twins touched her where the bullet had pierced her heart. Len said, “Do we have a miracle on our hands?”
Uncanny Magazine Issue 37 Page 9