by Todd Young
“To you?”
“Yeah.”
“When did this happen?”
“A few weeks back.”
“But you’re not on the streets.”
“No. It was …” Angel told Cole what he could of the Umberto Institute, of how he’d signed up for a trial of a new aphrodisiac, and what had come of it. He went on and told Cole about Hunter and, feeling more than a little ashamed, about the pool game.
“Pool balls?”
“Yeah.”
Cole raked a hand through his hair and stared at the floor for a long time. Then he said, “So how come you hate him so much?”
“He gave me a disease.”
“A disease?”
“Yeah.”
Cole nodded, accepting this. Then he froze. “He barebacked me.”
“Yeah, Cole.” Angel took a deep breath. “I know.”
“You know?”
“Yeah.”
“How would you know?”
“Because he gave it to you on purpose. He wants you to have it.”
Cole got agitated, and got agitated quickly. He started to pace, looked panicked, walked into the bathroom, and then came out again. A lock of damp hair had fallen over his brow. He lifted his head, his eyes wide and wild and angry. “What is it?”
“It’s … I can’t explain it to you.”
“You can’t … what? You can’t explain it to me?”
“Cole, it’s just. Here, I’ll show you,” Angel said, and pulled his T-shirt over his head. “You see this?” He turned side-on to Cole. “You see this deep valley between my shoulder blades?”
“Yeah. I like that. I like it when a guy has a back like that.”
“You see the way my shoulder blades jut, though?”
“Yeah.”
“Right.” Angel lifted his arms. “And you see how I don’t have any underarm hair?”
“Did you wax it?”
“No. It’s just … it fell out.”
Angel turned to face Cole and ran his hand over his chest. “You see how I don’t have any chest hair, and even down here,” he said, moving his hand beneath his navel. “You see how I don’t have a treasure trail.”
Cole nodded.
Angel unbuttoned his jeans. “Well, I don’t have any pubic hair either,” he said, pushing his jeans and his briefs to his thighs. He felt his cock wanting to rise as he showed himself to Cole, but he bit his lips. He kicked his jeans and his briefs down to his ankles and turned side-on to Cole again. Then he presented his back to Cole, twisted his body, and turned to face him again.
Now his cock was rising and he was unable to do anything other than ignore it.
“You think I look …?”
“What?”
“Human?”
“Human?”
“Yeah.”
“You look like a god,” Cole said, and then his eyes found Angel’s cock, which had stiffened until it was jutting at the ceiling.
Cole frowned. He peered at the underside of Angel’s cock, angling his head, and then lifted his eyes. His face broke into a smile, into a real smile, and for the first time Angel could see the boy underneath the hurt, a kid with a sense of humor, with a sense of fun, and with a shred of life still in him.
Cole laughed and ran his hands through his wet hair, scooping it over his crown and around his ears. “I will give you a blow job if you want one.”
“What?”
“If you want … I mean, I can’t remember the last time I wanted a guy, but you’re … beautiful.”
Angel stood rigidly for a moment. A tear slipped over his lid and he wiped it away. He didn’t know where it had come from, but he hadn’t been thinking of himself as beautiful. He’d been thinking of himself as some sort of freak.
Cole moved forward, placed a hand on Angel’s shoulder and ran his fingers along Angel’s collarbone. He fingered Angel’s throat and then ran his fingers along the curve of Angel’s jaw. He brushed a thumb across Angel’s lips and then lifted himself onto his toes and kissed Angel, a kiss that seemed to spark like lightning.
Angel placed his hand on Cole’s shoulders and pushed him gently away.
Cole frowned, looked hurt, but Angel struggled into his briefs and jeans again. “We can’t,” he said, as he found his T-shirt and tugged it over his head. “The disease.”
“The disease?”
35
“Now you’re fucking with me,” Cole said, once Angel had explained. “You’re fucking with me. I thought you were nice. You bring me back here, and now you’re fucking with me.” Cole turned and shook his head, shaking his hair out until it stood wetly askew. He looked suddenly wild, his green eyes taking on a dark tinge.
Angel moved toward him.
“Don’t you fucking touch me. You’re a dark fucker. I know. And you’re fucking with me,” Cole spat at Angel’s feet as he finished.
Angel wanted to reach for him. He wanted to enfold Cole in his arms. But right at the moment, Cole was untouchable.
“An angel. A fucking angel? You expect me to believe that shit?”
“I’ve shown you, Cole.”
“You’ve shown me what? That you’ve got a great body? What the fuck have you shown me?”
“You see my skin?”
“What about your skin?”
“You see how pale it is?”
“Oh, wow, you’ve got pale skin. What the fuck do you want from me? Tell me. Give me the money and we’ll do it, and then I’ll get the fuck out of here.”
Angel tried to think. He glanced at the door, wanted to walk toward it, wanted to somehow stop Cole, who looked as though he might bolt at any moment, and then he thought, okay, he’d pay Cole.
“I gave you a hundred dollars?”
“Right.”
“Well. That was to stay. But here,” he said, opening his wallet. “Here’s another hundred.”
“And what do you want for that?” Cole said, eyeing the money.
“I really want you to stay.”
“You want me to stay here?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to sleep with me?”
“You can sleep in the bed if you want …” Angel began, thinking he’d offer Cole the couch, but then he realized he wouldn’t be able to handle it if Cole was in the apartment but out here on the couch, so he said, “Yeah. I want you to sleep with me.”
“I told you, I can’t be fucked,” Cole said, and spat again.
“No sex.”
“No sex?”
“Yeah.”
Cole turned away. He crumpled to his knees and wrapped his head in his arms. Angel stepped forward and put his hand on the nape of Cole’s neck.
“Don’t,” Cole said, spinning suddenly and falling onto his elbow. “Don’t be nice to me. I can’t handle it when people are nice to me.”
36
Angel ordered pizza. He ate two slices and left the rest for Cole, who finished it off along with three glasses of Coke. When he’d finished, he turned to Angel, burped, and then smiled, the smile flooding his eyes so that they darkened in the brightly lit room.
Now they were staring at one another, and Angel felt the urge to move forward into a kiss, but just as Cole began to move himself, Angel got up quickly, turned away from him and walked into the bathroom. He closed the door and put his back against it, wondering what was happening. He’d never felt this sure about anyone — never this close — and now, despite his earlier protestations, Cole seemed to expect something. But hadn’t Angel told him he wouldn’t hurt him? He’d said no sex, and when he said it he’d meant it. If he took Cole into the bedroom and started anything, no matter how mutual it might now appear, then how would he be any better than one of Cole’s tricks?
He dropped his head and closed his eyes. Nothing, right now, could possibly be better than kissing Cole, he told himself, or simply holding his hand. Caressing him, perhaps, if Cole were naked. But ultimately, Angel knew himself well enough to know that it would all lead to
the same end — to fucking Cole. Right at the moment, Angel was sure he couldn’t do that. He glanced at himself in the mirror and found that what he wanted more than anything else was to win Cole’s trust.
When he came out of the bathroom, Cole had sunk deeply into the sofa. He had his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands on his stomach and his eyes closed, his long lashes brushing his cheeks. Angel restrained the urge to reach out and touch Cole’s hair. A lock had fallen forward and was curled around Cole’s left eye. It would have been nice to scoop it back into place, but Angel stopped himself. He took a seat beside Cole quietly, sitting just as he had been a few minutes before.
Cole started.
“Were you asleep?” Angel said.
“Just about.”
“You want to go to bed?”
Cole’s eyes widened and he smiled. “Yeah.”
“But there’s nothing going, right?”
“Right,” Cole said, as the eagerness in his face evaporated.
Angel got up and opened the windows to let the night breeze in. In the bedroom, Cole slipped the jeans and briefs he’d been given off before standing naked in Angel’s T-shirt, a white one that said “Sodomite” on the breast, and in smaller letters beneath, in parentheses, “It’s a brand.”
The T-shirt was barely long enough to hide Cole’s cock, and when he got onto the bed, kneeling, Angel caught a glimpse of it dangling between his thighs. Cole turned away from Angel and lay on his side. As he shuffled into position the T-shirt twisted, riding over his waist until his butt was exposed. There was a purple bruise near his hip, but his ass was pale and smooth and hairless, and Angel fell to imagining what it would feel like to touch it, to slip his fingers over the taut skin and let them stray into the cleft of Cole’s ass. It would all be so easy.
Angel turned away and stripped down to his briefs. But then, because his cock was hard and he knew he’d hate the feeling of trying to sleep with a hard cock in briefs, he slipped his briefs off as well. He climbed onto the bed and it bounced. The curtains fluttered into the room. From the street a woman shouted, “Yeah. Fuck you,” and a car took off.
Angel settled onto his back and then said, “Where you from?”
Cole’s voice emerged from the darkness, sweet and high and lonely. “Indiana.” He sounded as though he was half asleep.
“From Indianapolis?”
“No. There’s a farm. Near Anderson.”
Angel nodded and slipped his hands behind his head. He tucked his chin onto his chest and stared at Cole’s ass in the wan light. Then he shifted his eyes and stared at the ceiling, where the glow of a neon light from the street was flashing hazily. Cole sighed, and Angel smiled quietly to himself. A vague memory of Finn flashed across his mind — Finn smiling in sunlight — but Angel pushed it away. Five or ten minutes later, Cole’s breathing settled into a regular pattern, and Angel figured he’d fallen deeply into sleep.
37
Angel took Cole to the same clinic he’d been to with Finn. Cole said it was a while since he’d been tested, and though red with embarrassment, admitted to Angel that there were other times when he’d barebacked, when he’d been desperate for money.
Hell, he could have AIDS, Angel thought. He could have anything.
On the way home, Cole started to scratch his arms. The skin had begun to peel, as Angel had told him last night it would when he’d tried to explain the disease. He’d done his best to outline all of it to Cole, and already, this morning, Cole had been standing a little straighter, his chest thrust forward and a narrow valley deepening between his shoulder blades. Angel had noted this in silence, thinking it might be better not to point it out. He perhaps should have said something, he now thought, as Cole continued to scratch as they walked along. The skin fluttered away, like dandruff, and Cole turned to Angel, his face a study in confusion. Angel put his hand on Cole’s shoulder, a gesture of friendship, he thought, but Cole writhed away from him.
“I told you. Don’t be nice to me.”
“Hell, Cole, I was just ….” Angel frowned, turned away and watched the passing traffic for a moment. Then he said, “When we get home, have a bath.”
“A bath?”
“Yeah. Scrub the skin off.”
Cole did as Angel said, spinning the faucets in the bathroom as soon as they came in from the street. He asked Angel for some clean clothes, and when the tub was half-full closed the door to the bathroom, as though what he was doing was embarrassing, a thing he didn’t want Angel to see, which seemed a little silly seeing as how he’d spent half the morning in nothing but Angel’s T-shirt, lying on his stomach in front of the TV with his ass on display.
Stupidly, Angel paced, hating the feeling of being cut off from Cole, as though Cole might find a secret exit to the apartment from the bathroom. Every now and then Angel would stop and listen for a splash of water. The door now loomed as a barrier between Angel and a miraculous thing, as though Cole were something priceless and extraordinary, perhaps a jewel, which somehow had volition, a mind of its own, and might at any moment flee.
Fifteen or twenty minutes passed before Cole opened the door and stood naked on the threshold, a skinny kid, dripping water onto the floor. Angel was by then sitting on the couch, biting his fingernails, but he got up right away.
“I’m pink all over,” Cole said.
Angel stood eight or nine feet from him. “It’s new skin,” he said, tracing every inch of Cole’s body with his eyes.
“And my hair’s coming out.” Cole reached down, plucked at his pubic hair, pulled at a few strands worriedly, and then took a grip on the whole bunch and tugged. It came away in Cole’s hand as if it had been secured by Velcro. Cole’s mouth hung open as turned the pubic hair over in his hand, his eyes wide, his groin now strangely empty.
“It’ll all come out,” Angel said.
“All of it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I suppose I never had very much in the first place.” Cole bent forward and began to pluck at a few stray strands on his balls. Then he wandered back to the bathroom and stepped into the tub, leaving the door open, which would give Angel a direct line of sight from the couch.
Angel bent forward and picked up his cigarettes. He took one out and tapped it on his knee before lighting it. Then, as he blew a long plume nonchalantly into the center of the room, he took a sly glance through the bathroom door and sat down. He glimpsed Cole on his knees, jacking off, which he guessed Cole was doing for his benefit, as he had to know Angel could see him from the couch. Angel took a second drag on the cigarette and watched Cole in silence. Cole’s pelvis began to tilt in time with his thrusts until his lower back was writhing, sinking inwards and outwards in a hypnotic rhythm. As he came, his cum pulsing into the air, he turned to Angel and grinned widely. He froze rigid on his knees as a final spurt jetted into the air, and then plonked back into the tub.
“It’s not black,” he said.
“No?”
“No. So maybe … maybe I haven’t got it.”
Angel knew that the black cum was one of the last changes to occur, but he said nothing. Cole sloshed in the bath and sat crossways, with his back against the wall and his feet over the side.
“I don’t think I’ve been this clean since …”
“When?”
“I don’t know — if ever.”
Angel stood up and walked into the bathroom. The water was a mess, dead skin and pubic hair floating on the surface. Cole lifted his face to Angel, and Angel was suddenly struck by a pair of dark rings that marked Cole’s eyes, rings that seemed to have materialized suddenly. Angel frowned and Cole unexpectedly shimmered, his features abruptly shifting so that Angel again saw what he might look like at 40, after years of hard living on the streets.
“I feel dark,” Cole said, and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Yeah?”
Cole nodded.
“You know about the dark?”
“Oh, yeah. I know. And o
n the way to that clinic, hell, I was seeing the fuckers everywhere.”
“Does it seem quieter to you?”
“Quieter?”
“Yeah. Listen.”
Cole cocked his head, frowned, and then said, “Not much traffic.”
“No?”
Cole shook his head.
Everything sounded fine to Angel, but he hadn’t forgotten how he’d slipped over to the dark side after he’d become infected, and now it seemed to be happening to Cole. He was slipping into the darkness, and it was happening right in front of Angel’s eyes.
“Hop up, Cole, and wash off.”
“Wash off?”
“Yeah.”
Cole frowned. Then he drew his feet into the tub and pulled the plug. He spun the faucets for the shower as Angel left the room.
In the bedroom, Angel phoned Finn, but there was no reply. He tried Jason, but Jason wasn’t answering either, so Angel called again and left a message for each of them, asking if they could get in contact with him. Then he turned and stopped.
Cole was standing in the doorway.
“Who you calling?”
“Finn — and Jason.”
“Yeah? I didn’t think you’d want to see them again.” There was something peevish in Cole’s tone, something that might have been jealousy, and for some reason it pleased Angel to hear it, to think that Cole was thinking of him like that, and that he’d be jealous to see him interested in someone else.
“A little while after I got infected, I started to see the dark,” Angel said. “Finn said I’d gone dark, and he showed me how to see the mundane again — the normal people. I think, maybe, you’re crossing over.”
Cole’s eyes widened.
“Have a look out the window,” Angel said.
Cole was wearing a pair of Angel’s briefs, a white pair, and they were already folded in the crack of his ass. As Cole leaned forward and looked out of the window, Angel imagined what it would feel like to step toward him and caress the skin of his butt, and he imagined doing it while kissing Cole’s neck. He stepped forward, as though he might really begin, but at that moment Cole backed away from the window and stumbled.