The Night He Came Alive
A Halloween Short Story
Raleigh Ruebins
Contents
Copyright
Author’s Note
The Night He Came Alive
More from Raleigh Ruebins
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This is a work of fiction. Names, businesses, places, and events are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2017 Raleigh Ruebins
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Author’s Note
The Night He Came Alive is a spooky short story intended for Halloween! It has all the steamy M/M content you know and love from Raleigh Ruebins, but with a “dark-and-stormy-night” twist.
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For books with all the steam of this story, but that take place in our everyday world, check out more Raleigh Ruebins books listed after the story!
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For now, pour yourself a good cup of tea or wine, listen to the cool rain outside, and enjoy….
The Night He Came Alive
I’d been awake for forty-three hours.
Reality starts to bend and warp when you’re awake for too long. I’d say I hadn’t planned on it, but I knew it was mostly inevitable. The time had slipped by like wax slowly dripping toward the base of a candle, the tight cylinder giving way to an unruly pool. Hour eighteen is when my eyelids first started to protest, ready to give up on that cursor on the computer screen in front of me. Blinking on and off, on and off, over and over and over. A yield signal, informing me to proceed with caution. I barreled ahead.
A deadline is a deadline, after all, and mine was in exactly five more hours. I’d been working on my novel for nearly two years, but if you wanted the truth, it had been my whole life.
I’d pitched the idea to countless publishing houses since I was sixteen. Nobody had ever accepted it. They all said the same thing: there was no market for the story I was trying to tell, no one who would willingly read such a thing. “A young boy’s imaginary friend becomes a real live boy himself one day, and after growing up together they fall in love.” Too strange, too silly. Nobody ever told me it was too gay, but it certainly wasn’t the sweeping, eviscerating, tragic type of gay novel they typically published.
There was nowhere for my little story other than its lifelong home, rattling around the confines of my own head.
When I got the response back from Tenelux Publishing, an interested response, I’d known immediately it was too good to be true. They loved my idea? They couldn’t wait to publish my book? I researched the company online, but found very little—I couldn’t seem to nail down a headquarters address, and the phone numbers I tried never went through. Their past publications were largely now out of print, old guides on arcane subjects and a few horror stories and not much else.
The man who’d contacted me went by the name M. I’d asked him what the deal was, why the strange publishing history, why the fuck did everything seem so damn fishy and yet even as I sent him my questioning email, something inside of me knew I was going to do it anyway.
I didn’t care if I sold a single goddamn copy of the book. I just wanted it. I wanted it in my hands, I wanted it on my bookshelf. I wanted it to exist.
Maybe something only I’d see would be better, anyway.
The guy named M seemed sane enough through online correspondence, and against all better judgment I agreed to the deal. Two years ago, I’d promised to have it finished by the end of October, this year.
Which was five—now four—hours from now.
Imagine my delight when I realized that I had finished early, if delight can even describe the feeling. Around the fortieth straight hour of being awake a tremble had developed in my hands, and the shadows that my candles cast on the ceiling seemed to make the room move, like it was breathing all around me. Occasionally I heard a crack or a slip from the other end of the house, the floorboards settling, the wind moving through the frame.
It used to scare me, but I knew better now. There was nobody else here. I was always alone.
The candles I’d set up in the room were meant to be romantic. The end of the story was full of love, after all, and in my small office, I had to make do with what I had in order to set the mood. I had candles. I’d draped red tapestries and throws across my chair and the small couch behind my desk. When it had started raining (hour thirty-five), I’d cracked the window so that the lush sounds would enter from my garden. It didn’t often rain here.
But now it was a downpour, and all the candles had become short; the overhead light had burnt out weeks ago and the only other bulb was in the small lamp beside me.
So there I was, perched in the humid glow, and my novel was finished. Hours, weeks, months of isolation, and it was done. It felt like a dream come true because I was so delirious I might as well have been dreaming, and because the labor of my life, my love, was complete.
I saved the file and backed it up in three locations. I busied about the office in a frenzy, reaching for the unopened bottle of red wine I’d set on my bookshelf for this moment. I worked out the cork, stood in front of my computer, opened an email to M, told him that I had done it, that I was finished.
The moment I pushed send I closed my eyes, tipping my head back and drinking deep from the wine bottle, feeling it work its way through me, and swearing I could feel electricity course in my veins.
I moved the bottle from my lips, my eyes still pressed shut, just breathing in place. In and out, over and over. Joy and utter fatigue. Barely awake and completely alive. My couch was just behind me and I sank back onto it, dropping the empty wine bottle to the floor beside me.
Empty. That sure had gone fast.
By this point I can’t be sure I was experiencing time as I normally did. I could tell you it was hour forty-six, but I’m not sure it would be meaningful. Because the things that came next don’t make any sense—they definitely happened, but they’ll never be explained. Their lifelong home really should have just been forever in my own memory, too.
I don’t know how long I sat lolling on the couch for after I finished the wine. All I know is that some amount of time later, at hour who-the-fuck-knows-what, I became aware of my breath again. There was still the sound of the rain, pattering on the glass some ten feet in front of me.
And another, slower, more measured breath, right beside me.
I felt its warmth a second later. It couldn’t have been from the window. The air outside was far colder, and brutal—this was gentle, and at my side, and falling at a perfect rhythm.
My eyes shot open in panic and I clamored over to the furthest side of the couch, away from the nameless breathing. I don’t know if my trembling had stopped earlier, or if this was only a continuation, but I was shaking everywhere, every limb and finger and up to my parted lips.
The lamp on my desk had gone out. My computer was pitch dark. The only thing I could see on the windowpane was the splattering of rain, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the only candle left burning in the room, the one on the table near the other side of the couch, the one flickering as it died, waiting before it expired in order to show me the figure that was sitting, looming,
waiting patiently on the other end of the couch.
“Alexander, stop freaking out.” His eyes were calm as he regarded me, his large frame somehow unassuming in the impossibly dim amber light.
My teeth chattered inside my mouth.
“Are you cold?” came the next thing from him, that deep voice, one I’d listened to a million times before but never, ever thought I would hear. “The window, Alexander. I know the sound of rain is achingly poetic and you can’t resist, but wouldn’t you feel better with it shut?”
Who are you. What the fuck are you doing in my house. Get the fuck out before I call the police. How did you get inside here. Am I losing my goddamn fucking mind, is this the end, is this a nightmare, why can’t I fucking move?
As I thought all these things the only thing that came out of my throat was a tight gasp, a weak offering, and the realization that I wasn’t paralyzed by anything but my own mind. I relaxed my arms from the defensive posturing I’d apparently thrown them into at first sight of him. As my position changed, his expression remained the same.
A few more wordless gasps came from inside, like I was having the wind knocked out of me repeatedly before I could finally speak.
“I like the window open,” I finally said.
“Reminds you of home,” he replied.
“So much.”
How could he know that?
I answered my own question as quickly as I’d thought it, or, I’d known the answer all along.
I experienced myself relaxing and igniting all at once, unwilling to accept that any of this was real but also well aware I’d fucking regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t take it further. As many steps further as I could.
He was as beautiful as I’d written him. Perfect, from the dark hair to the thick lashes to the strong but steadying presence. The scar along his temple that he wouldn’t talk about but that I knew he’d like to have me touch. The long black coat could have looked stupid on anyone else, but on him it was a uniform, armorlike, only removed when necessary.
I knew all these things, though I hadn’t been told.
The suit underneath the coat was more beautiful than I could have conjured on my own, like something out of Victorian England, and despite the fact that I should have been in five-alarm panic, fleeing or fighting or fearing for my own sanity, all I could think was how stupid I must look in my flimsy, cheap house robe next to this catastrophically gorgeous man.
He sighed, disappointment in his breath. “You’re so quick to believe all this, to throw all your chips in completely, to submit yourself, and yet you still won’t even believe your own worthiness?”
He shifted for the first time, turning slightly more toward me, and reaching out a black-gloved hand to my own, pale and bare.
“Please,” he said, glancing down.
I pulled the glove. It slipped off his hand with a small tug, the leather smooth as I pressed it between my fingers. He slowly lifted his hand to my face, hovering a moment just above my cheek, before gently resting it where my cheek met my jaw.
Warm and dry like velvet against the chill of my skin. My cheek heated as he stroked me there, my own embarrassment growing as I couldn’t help but lean my head into his firm touch. Simultaneously I shifted my thighs to allow the movement that was inevitably now happening below, my cock responding in alarming fashion to this—this touch, his touch—and only against my cheek.
I clutched his empty glove like a worry stone, then let it fall to the floor.
My eyes had fluttered shut and as I slowly opened them again, seeing him there, still there, and knowing to my bones that he loved me like I loved him, a lone tear gathered in the corner of my eye and slid down my cheekbone, onto his hand.
I was already fucking crying. I was a goddamn mess.
“Tell me you’re okay, and I’ll give you what you need,” he said, low and measured, before dipping to kiss the cold streak that was left on my face.
“I don’t know,” I said, barely audible.
“That isn’t enough,” he said. “Are you with me, Alexander?”
“I’m with you. I’m here.”
“Good.”
My body was on fire. I needed so much more and thoughts had failed to make sense in the way that they used to. A gust of wind blew through the window, bringing damp air with it, covering me in goosebumps everywhere but the exact spot his hand remained pressed on my skin.
I wanted it all. I wanted and needed it more than anything I’d ever needed in my entire, stupid, pitiful life, but I couldn’t say it, couldn’t voice the words that thrummed through my mind like a mantra.
I swallowed hard, knowing I had to ask something I didn’t want the answer to, first.
“Is this real?” I whispered.
“You know I can’t answer that.”
A pained groan escaped me, and I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, reaching up to clasp his hand in my own as I sat up on the couch, straightening my spine. I opened my eyes to look at him directly, slowly lowering our interlocked hands to the space between our bodies.
“You’re… my dream,” I said weakly. “You’re him. You can’t be real, I know it isn’t possible, I know this won’t last.” My words sounded feeble and meaningless. They tumbled into the air in front of me and dissipated to nothing.
“Yes.”
I cried out, exasperated, reaching compulsively to place my hand on his chest. It was a test, a check to see if every small detail was in its place, but of course it was right there. I felt the small medallion beneath his shirt, the one I’d made sure he was always wearing. When I’d written him I never let myself in on the particular reasoning behind it; he had the medallion, he never took it off, and the why was something I left unanswered.
I leaned toward him, reaching down the front of his shirt to fish it out, my fingers gripping around the chain. The metal held the heat from his body and as I sank further against him, pulling it out and moving it toward the dying candlelight, I fell neatly into his arms.
I’d always just described it as a gold pendant, but when I turned it to examine it in the light, I saw that it was carved in a delicate pattern. I could make out some shapes that looked like stars, others that looked like looping lines, others that I couldn’t decipher.
“Do you like it?” he asked. For the first time I caught a hesitant tone in his voice, like my answer would matter a lot. “I never knew quite what you meant to have on it, but this is what I came up with.” As he spoke low I could feel his voice against me, the back of my body pressed against his chest.
“It’s beautiful, of course,” I said. I leaned back a little, letting the pendant drop back down to his chest, and twisted in his arms so that I was facing him, essentially sitting in his lap. “Do you know why you have it?”
He paused for a moment, his eyes gently searching my face. “I’m not sure yet.” After a moment he reached his other hand up, removing his remaining glove with his teeth. A second later his bare hand found its way toward me, stroking through my hair and onto the back of my neck. I sank against him and when he let the glove drop from his mouth, it fell with a soft tap against my lap.
That’s when I realized that in my earlier jostling and twisting against him, my robe had come partially undone, and my bare thigh was exposed beneath me. It felt crude. It felt necessary.
I uttered a strangled whimper. “It isn’t fair,” I whispered, “I can’t think about anything else when you touch me.”
“Is it fair that I’ve never had a thought about anything but you?” he said.
The question, his hand, the position we were in was too much for me to handle and I pulled in a deep, shaky breath. Every nerve in my body was being pulled toward him, seeking its home, starved for touch.
“Okay,” I said. “The answer is yes.” The words tumbled out of me now.
“To what?” he asked, patient as ever.
“The answer is yes, I’m okay, yes, I want you, but I don’t think it can even be called want, I t
hink it’s more of a need, and it isn’t lessening, actually it’s threatening to fucking kill me if I don’t have it—if I don’t have you—if you don’t… please don’t make me beg you—”
I felt his first two fingers pressing against my lips to quiet me. I let them rest there a moment before I wrapped my lips around them, pulling them inside my mouth, feeling the tips against my tongue. I had peeled two oranges, hours earlier, and his fingertips tasted like them, sweet and faintly scented and inside me.
“Alexander,” he whispered as I rocked my hips, pushed down against his lap. I recognized he was as hard as I was, insistent underneath me, and I moaned around his fingers with the realization.
He was here. Right here. And I realized I’d passed a threshold that there was no going back from, that I’d admitted to myself there was nothing I’d ever wanted so much.
He slipped his fingers from my mouth and I crashed toward him with a kiss I had needed for my entire life. His lips were plush and yielding, his mouth opening to mine and returning the kiss hard, the way I liked. I nibbled against his lower lip, pulling it into my mouth; another test, to be sure, but his lip was slick and warm and undoubtedly alive against my own.
His hands slid slowly inside the open front of my robe, gripping around my waist, and soon he was lifting me up, standing up to lay me down against the couch. As I sank into the cushions I caught the full grasp of his height before he knelt on the floor in front of the couch, looking at me, now at my eye level again.
“You’re mine, I’m yours,” he said, slowly sliding his palm from my hip all the way up to my chest.
“You’re mine, I’m yours,” I repeated.
He tugged at the last remaining vestige of the belt knot on my robe. He slipped the garment from my shoulders and down my arms, opening it and revealing me until my body was bare in front of him, exposed.
The Night He Came Alive: A Halloween Short Story Page 1