by J. M. Snyder
Trin lowers his gaze to his hands, where the lather has begun to dry on his skin in lacy patterns. He blinks and his vision blurs—he has to blink again quickly to clear it. His lower lip pushes up in an ignoble pout. He bites the corner to keep it from trembling. Can’t you just let me have this?
In his mind he imagines the look on Blain’s face if he should fling the soapy water at his brother in a fit of rage. There isn’t much left in this world and you know THAT, so can’t you just let me have whatever it is I can take? Is that asking too much? Is that unreasonable?
“Trin?” his brother prompts. “You hearing me on this?”
With a sniffle, Trin wipes his nose on the sleeve of his shirt and nods. “I hear you.” He hates how easily Blain can make him sound like a sullen child.
For a long moment his brother gauges him, just staring, and Trin can’t meet his gaze. Instead he watches the way the soap squishes between his fingers. Turn on the water, he prays. Please Blain, just turn on the water and let me go. Don’t say anything else. God please don’t.
Finally Blain stands back and primes the pump once. Cold water splashes over Trin’s hands, washing away the soap and grime, icy and numbing on his skin like a headache.
“Alright then,” Blain says, his voice low. His tight smile suggests he’s glad they had this talk but his eyes say different. When they look at him, Trin sees his brother’s worry written out in their dark depths.
You’re wrong about him, he wants to say. You and Aissa both, dead wrong. At least, he hopes they’re wrong. Gerrick didn’t talk much last night at all, did he? Did he? Deep inside Trin, a tiny voice whispers, Please be wrong. He tamps it down quick, smothers it like a lick of flame, and it’s gone.
* * * *
On their way back to the kitchen, Blain sees the furtive way Trin glances upstairs and says, “He ain’t back yet. Been gone all day.”
“I know that,” Trin replies, defensive. With scrubbed, red fingers, he picks at his soiled shirt in a lame attempt to keep it off his chest. “I’ve got to go up and change anyway.”
Blain gives him that look again, the one that says he knows better but what the hell, he’ll humor the kid. Trin hates that look. He feels it on his back and shoulders like a palpable weight, and he climbs the steps as fast as he can to escape it. In the cool darkness upstairs, he prays that Gerrick is in his room waiting because it’ll prove Blain’s wrong about the man. More than anything else in the entire world, he wants his brother and Aissa to be wrong.
But a quick peek into his room shows that Gerrick isn’t on his pallet or at his window, and he isn’t down the hall in the shower, either. There Trin strips off his clothes and bathes quickly, washing away the grime that covers the rest of his body with water a degree or two warmer than that in the pump downstairs. He keeps expecting strong arms to encircle his waist, a hot mouth on the back of his neck.
At one point the door leading to the hall opens and through the curtain Trin watches the dark shape of a man enter the shower, sure it’s the gunner, sure he’ll join him…but no. Another faucet adds its voice to the chorus of water raining down around Trin, slapping the tiles of a different stall. Suddenly cold air curls around his legs and he has to turn off the spigot. He’s through. As he dries himself off with a threadbare towel, he wipes at his cheeks and tells himself his eyes sting from the soap he used in his hair, that’s all.
With the towel around his waist doing little to hide his wet nakedness, Trin hurries back to his room. His head hurts, congested, he has to keep blowing his nose between his fingers to be able to breathe. Where the fuck is Gerrick anyway? Gone all damn day, can’t even stop by the garage to see how Trin’s coming along on his truck.
Maybe Blain’s right, a voice inside him whispers. Maybe that was all you get.
Trin shakes his head to clear it. No. Blain wasn’t there last night—he doesn’t know how desperately Gerrick gripped Trin’s ass as he plowed into him, or how tight he held the boy in his arms while they fell asleep, or how his lips lingered on Trin’s when he kissed him goodbye this morning.
His brother knows the gunner, not the man. He’s never touched the soft places on Gerrick’s body. He’s never had those strong fingers curve into him. He’s never seen those eyes dance or felt that moustache tickle his upper lip. He simply can’t see how gentle and loving those hands can be without a gun.
It was only one night. Trin hates how much his conscience sounds like Aissa. “Shut up,” he growls, glancing around the hall to make sure he’s alone. One night he’s dreamed of for years. Blain doesn’t seem to be able to understand that.
The door to Trin’s room is ajar. He catches his breath and pushes inside, so sure the gunner is back. His blood stirs with an all too familiar lust. “Gerrick?” he calls. One hand toys with the towel around his waist, ready to rip it away. Take me, he thinks. Again and again and—
The room is empty.
He tells himself he isn’t disappointed and tosses the towel aside anyway as he closes the door behind him. Harsh light falls in through the open window, a yellow glow cast from the halogens that shine down on the junkyard outside. Trapped in the confines of the small room, the glare makes the shadows stand out stark like an old photograph. The pallet, sheets hastily made and rumpled again. The pillows, clenched into the memory of fists. Gerrick’s bags in the middle of the floor, an unfamiliar cloth balled up beside them.
The musky stench of sex still hangs in the air despite the open window and the breeze cooling around Trin’s damp legs. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’s the only one in the room, he could almost believe he just interrupted an early evening tryst.
A slow smile spreads across his face at the memory of their coupling last night. Blain didn’t see that, he has no clue how it is. So what if Gerrick’s been gone all day? At the tumblers turning rocks maybe, or at the trump store stocking up on supplies, who knows? Who cares?
He’s coming back. His bags are here, right? The pallet’s just waiting to be fucked in again. Tonight, after the last call downstairs, after the lights outside are doused, after the day is gone and the night is fading fast, Gerrick will be his.
* * * *
Trin waits at the bar, sitting in the same seat he sat in yesterday. Hunkered over a glass of tepid water and a half-empty plate of spaghetti, something Aissa whipped up for him because she said he needed to eat, he surveys the common room in the mirror behind the bar. Gerrick isn’t with the other gunners. He isn’t sitting alone at a corner booth. And he isn’t by the jukebox, or over at the pool tables, or at the pinball machines, either. The only good thing about his not being at the waystation is that Trin doesn’t have to watch him flirt with the chore girls again this evening. The leggy blonde has turned her attention to the gunner who propositioned Trin the night before, and the bounder who caught Gerrick’s eye is nowhere around. Trin tells himself the guy probably left the outpost already. Moved on, isn’t that what Blain said? Men just move on.
A little after nine, Aissa comes over to freshen his cup. Trin suspects she has more than water in the pitcher she uses to refill his drink because there’s a metallic undertone that takes his breath away, something alcoholic and heady. “You should get some sleep, Trini,” she tells him, speaking in a soft voice so unlike her that it makes his eyes sting. As he sips at the spiked water, he finds it harder and harder to blink. “It’s getting late and you’ve had a long day, come on.”
“I’m not tired,” he says, hating how weary he sounds. Just sitting here makes his bones ache and the longer he stays, the harder it is to get moving. Aissa’s right, he should head upstairs. He’s tired of looking over his shoulder every time someone comes in through the front door. He keeps expecting it to be the gunner, and no matter how many times he turns around and it isn’t, the next time it happens he still hopes that it will be. At any minute he might hear Gerrick’s laugh or see the reflection of those shimmering eyes meet his in the mirror so he can’t leave now. He might miss him.
&nb
sp; Aissa’s persistent but he fends her off easily enough. She fills his glass again, shaking her head and clucking in her throat like an irritated hen. I could sleep right here, Trin thinks, turning as the door opens. This time it’s one of the chore girls heading home, not the gunner. Frowning, Trin kicks back the rest of his drink and stares into the bottom of the glass. He’s vaguely aware of Aissa down the bar, his brother at her side, the two of them watching him with cloying sympathy. Around quarter to midnight Blain finally comes over, and he isn’t as subtle as she is. No shake of his head, no annoyed sounds. Taking Trin’s plate away, he simply dumps the uneaten pasta into the trashcan beneath the sink and says, “Go on up, kid.” As Trin raises his cup to drink, Blain takes it from his hands, pours the mixed water down the drain. “Get to bed.”
Trin starts, “I’m not—”
Blain holds up a hand to cut off his protest. “You have two trucks waiting for you out in the garage, and I want you to go over that jalopy I bought back with me tomorrow. A full day, Trin. If you sit here and mope, you’ll be no good under the hood. So go on, get some rest. If that bastard shows up here, I’ll send him your way.”
Trin tries to think of something to say to that and can’t. Turning, he gives the room a once-over but Gerrick hasn’t magically appeared and no one interesting meets his gaze. Not that he’d have another, he tells himself as he slides off the stool. His knees buckle and his feet are heavy—he’s not just tired, he’s exhausted. Still, it’d be nice if the hands supporting him weren’t his own brother’s, or if the body he leans against as he trundles upstairs wasn’t the soft, feminine curves of his best friend. At the door to his room, he mumbles, “He’s coming back.”
“Of course he is,” she says, an automatic reply. Trin knows she doesn’t believe that herself.
Leading him inside the room, she holds his shoulders as he steps out of his pants. He struggles to free himself from his shirt and she holds the sleeves up out of his way as the shirt slips off over his head. Like a broken toy, Trin falls down onto the rumpled sheets of his pallet and swats away Aissa’s concerned hands that touch his arms and face. He doesn’t like this sudden gentleness of hers. It makes him suspect that she knows something she doesn’t want to share. As she tries to lie him back against the pillows, he resists. “Aissa, wait.”
“Trin, you’re worn out.” True, and at her words his body feels old. He lays down, the pillow bunched beneath his head. What all did she slip him? “I’ll send him up,” she’s saying from a million miles away, “don’t worry none. I won’t let him have a different room even if he asks for it.”
“Where’s he been?” Trin wants to know. It’s a rhetorical question, one he doesn’t expect her to answer. She doesn’t. He scrunches his face up in consternation and feels the bite of tears in the corners of his eyes. In a whisper he adds, “All damn day. Tell me, Iss, am I an idiot to get all worked up like this? You yourself said he has to know how I ask after him. He has to know what he does to me, what I feel.” He sighs, the weight of the day bearing down on him. Is it too much to ask someone to share his pallet? Not just anyone, Gerrick, is that too unreasonable a request? “Am I the fool here?”
“He’s a fool if he can’t see what he means to you,” she replies. There’s venom in her low voice, a mean throb like the ache of a tooth that’s been broken for awhile and only now begins to hurt. “The sooner you get that truck of his put back together, the sooner he’ll be on his way, and we’ll have this mess behind us. I’d rather have you daydreaming over how he might be than this torn up when you see just what kind of an asshole he really is.”
“He’s not,” Trin starts, but it’s a half-hearted attempt and the words are buried in his pillow. He’s too tired to argue. With a sleepy yawn, he snuggles into his sheets. The blanket Aissa drapes over him is a heavy hand that holds him down. “I just want him here with me.”
A cool hand smoothes the hair back from his brow. “I know,” she whispers. Against his temple, her fingers curl into a frustrated fist. “I’ll tear his balls off if he fucks you over.”
That makes Trin laugh, a quick bark, all he can manage this close to sleep. “Don’t you dare. I like them where they are.” Though I’d like them better if they were here with me, he adds. He thinks he says it out loud but Aissa’s only reply is the soft latch of the door she closes behind her as she leaves.
* * * *
Sometime later the pallet shifts, stirring him awake. A warm hand slips between the sheets and over his hip, eager fingers fumbling for the front of his boxers. In the quiet of the room he hears ragged breathing, the tiny plink plink of his snaps opening, the rustle of the blankets as they’re pulled back. Then his shorts are shoved down and someone crawls into the pallet behind him, a thickness pressing hard against the cleft of his buttocks. Hot breath harsh in Trin’s ear, hands groping for his own stirring erection, an arm sliding beneath his thigh to hold his leg up out of the way. “Hey kid,” Gerrick whispers, kissing his neck and ear and hair. The gunner’s body presses Trin’s into the pallet and kisses trail over his shoulder, down his spine. The fingers working at his hard dick squeeze until his pulse fills the night. From somewhere near his thigh, Gerrick murmurs, “Miss me?”
Before Trin can answer, something wet and warm and impossibly soft licks into him. He grips the pillow with both hands and raises his hips in the air, driving the gunner’s tongue deeper. “Yes,” he whimpers, but the word dissolves into a guttural moan as Gerrick rims him, so he tries again, “please.” It comes out in a series of little bleating noises, puh puh puh. He can’t manage anything more.
Then Gerrick is on him again, his body heavy like the summer sun where it covers Trin’s own. That hardness is back between his buttocks, slick with spit, and this time it eases into him, a knife through butter, he melts away before it. Large hands pull him back against the gunner’s chest, thumbs rub over his nipples until he gasps. The room spins around him, dark, he’s still disoriented from sleep. A distant voice in his mind whispers he might be dreaming. If so, he hopes he never wakes.
He’s ridden into the pallet, the gunner driving into him, his mouth on Trin’s ear grunting each thrust. He hears his name and yes and God and fuck all strung out like beads on a rosary, each one a prayer for more. Twice he gets off, Gerrick smearing his belly and cock with the juices, until the sheet beneath him cools with his own cum. But the gunner is relentless, a force of nature, a dervish or sandstorm whirling through Trin until he can’t even think. It’s just the fucking, the hands on his body, the arms holding him down, and a voice like the desert moaning in his ear. Don’t stop, he thinks, rising off the pallet to meet the gunner’s thrusts. Don’t let me go.
Fire shoots through him when Gerrick finally comes. Flames coil in Trin’s stomach, race along his veins, burning him up inside. He’s sure he’s going to die from it, from this—he can’t feel so much and still go on, not in this life. Like a phoenix he’ll burn in the gunner’s hands, they’re both consumed by this rage, they’ll combust together and in the morning all Aissa will find are their bodies’ outlines drawn in ashes on the sheets. His face is flushed, his brow hot. “You set me on fire,” he sighs, turning in the gunner’s arms. He wants to stare at Gerrick while he burns.
The gunner’s eyes are closed, his breathing already even. As Trin moves, Gerrick stirs and burrows closer, nuzzling his neck. “Hmm,” he murmurs. When Trin starts to speak, Gerrick smoothes a hand over his shoulder, a sleepy gesture to quiet him. The cock that pierced him earlier has started to soften, though it’s still deep within. With strong hands Gerrick repositions Trin easily, rolling him over onto his stomach again so the gunner can lie on him. “Get some sleep, kid.” His words rumble through his chest and into Trin.
Trin’s leg is pressed into a damp spot on the pallet. The weight above him makes it hard to breathe. Already he’s cooling off, the ardor passed, the lust curled back into him where it belongs. He closes his eyes and sees himself in the gunner’s arms, the two of them aflame.
“I’m glad you’re finally here,” he whispers.
“Shh,” Gerrick purrs. Trin stares at the window, the darkness out there a lighter shade than the black of his room, and listens to the gunner’s breath taper off into snores.
* * * *
A few hours later, when a cottony grey dawn presses against the window, Trin wakes up to the quiet latch of the door closing behind the gunner. He lies there for a moment, still feeling the ghost of Gerrick’s body tight against his. He’s decided he likes waking up with another.
Though it’s still early, he slips from between the sheets and stretches in the cool morning air. Before the sun rises, his room is almost chilly, the wasteland sun tempered by the night. Chilly enough to pimple his arms, at any rate, and he rubs the bumps away. Then he strips the pallet, using the sheets to wipe off the sticky cum that has dried to his belly and legs. A shower would be nice, but right now he wants to rush downstairs and sit with the gunner over breakfast, before either of them gets much farther along with the day. His pants lie in a heap on the floor where he dropped them before crawling into bed—looking at them he remembers Aissa, not so much her words but the gentle lilt of her voice, unusual for her. Maybe she knows where Gerrick was yesterday. Maybe she’ll tell him if he hounds her long enough.
Most likely she only suspects, he assures himself. How would Aissa know? She probably thinks the gunner was roving through the town, pants down and erection jutting out in front of him like a divining rod, searching for some hot hole to plunge into. Pulling on his pants, Trin thinks she’s just jealous, despite the fact that he doesn’t see what exactly there is to be jealous of. Him finally getting the man of his dreams? His nights spent in the gunner’s embrace? She has Blain. Why can’t she let him have Gerrick? Happily ever after and all that shit.