Cutting Cords

by Mickie B. Ashling

  He was an Indian, turbaned head and all, doing the whole head-shake thing and expecting me to haul my gear into the cab on my own. I hefted the duffel with all my worldly possessions and placed it in the open trunk. “Can I smoke in here?” I asked, as soon as we got going.

  “Sure, buddy.”

  I pulled out a joint I’d rolled in the airport restroom and lit up, inhaling deeply, letting the smoke fill my lungs. The cabbie lifted an eyebrow as soon as he smelled the weed. “You want to share some of that?” he asked, hoping I’d say yes.

  “Knock yourself out,” I replied, passing the joint through the opening in the glass.

  He took a huge hit, nodding his head in appreciation. “Good stuff, buddy.”

  “Yeah, it better be, for what it cost.”

  “Where are we going?” he asked, finally realizing I hadn’t given him an address.

  “Chelsea.”

  “Okay, buddy.”

  It was almost eleven by the time we stopped in front of Cole’s building, and after I handed over my money, I waited to see if Mohammed would help me with my bag. Stupid thought. The man just sat there and shook his head. “Good luck, buddy.”

  Fucking asshole.

  I dragged my shit out of the cab and waited for the doorman to let me in. Apparently he’d gotten word of my arrival, and he actually helped me place my bag in the elevator and told me the apartment was on the tenth floor. When I got there, I stabbed at the doorbell for a good five minutes before I saw a light go on and heard footsteps coming toward the door. It was pulled open and a guy stood there, pissed off as all hell.

  “Will you ease off the fucking bell already?”

  “Hey, I didn’t know if you were asleep or what.”

  “Well, I’m wide awake now.”

  “Oh. Sorry about that. I’m looking for Cole Fujiwara.”

  “You found him,” he replied warily. “Sloan?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Wow. You’ve grown. When’d you get so tall?”

  And when the fuck did you get so hot?

  “Probably when you lost all the weight,” I replied out loud, taking a really good look at him. He was nothing like I remembered. The fat kid with thick glasses who teased me and told me I threw like a girl was gone. In his place was a Johnny Depp look-alike with bone-straight black hair that fell over his forehead. The glasses were gone as well, probably replaced by contacts, but those dark blue eyes were the same, courtesy of his Irish mother, and a little disconcerting in his obviously Eurasian face.

  “So, are we going to stand here all night?” I asked, needing to move away from this guy. I was doing the whole staring thing again, and I was afraid he’d say something.

  “Oh, sorry. Come in,” Cole said, turning and walking down the hall. I picked up my bags and followed. The place was immaculate, nothing like I expected.

  “Wow, you have a housekeeper?”

  “No, why?”

  “Everything is just so neat.”

  “I like order, and I’ll expect you to maintain this apartment the way I like it,” Cole said, pushing a lock of hair out of his eye. “You hungry?”

  “Not really. Can I light up?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “I don’t smoke. Do you mind?”

  “Yeah, I mind! This is my place now, and I should be able to smoke whenever I feel like it.”

  “It’s not your house!” Cole spat out. “It’s mine, and if you want to stay with me, you’ll follow my rules.”

  “Rules,” I groaned. “I thought I’d just escaped from rules.”

  “Look, Sloan. There are just a few things I need from you,” Cole said, changing the tone of his voice. “I really can’t be around cigarette smoke.”

  I stared at him, taking a good look at his face now that we were in better light. The artist in me picked out each feature, lingering over his nose, which was straight and narrow, his ridiculously high cheekbones, and finally his mouth, which looked soft and tempting. He probably tasted great as well, since he was a nonsmoker. I tore my eyes away and said, “What about weed? That’s medicinal.”

  Surprisingly, he said, “I’ll let you smoke weed, but only in your room with the door closed and the window open. Understood?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  “Well, it’s late,” Cole said softly. “Let me show you your room and then I’m going back to bed.”

  I let him lead the way, giving me the perfect opportunity to check out his body. He was about five-eleven and beefier around the arms and shoulders than me. The rest of him was perfect. His broad back tapered into a slim waist, and his silk boxers clung to his rounded ass. His long legs were tanned, well shaped, and muscular. A sudden vision of those same legs wrapped around my hips stirred my imagination. My cock twitched, confirming the unexpected and powerful attraction.

  “You still playing ball?” I asked, hoping my voice didn’t betray my feelings.

  “No,” he replied, without turning around. “I gave it up.”

  “I heard you were pretty good at it. In fact, my dad said you might be following in daddy’s footsteps.”

  “Nah, no way,” Cole said, with a little hitch in his voice.

  We stopped in front of a door, and he pushed it open and said, “This is your room. We share a bathroom, so don’t be a slob. I can’t be wiping up after you all day.”

  “God, Cole. Have you always been this anal?”

  “Yup,” he replied. “Deal with it.”

  He spun around and opened a door on the other side of the hallway entering his room without even turning on the light. “See you in the morning,” he called out and disappeared.

  I was a little taken aback by his sudden departure, but I shrugged it off and began to unpack. It had been a long fucking day and I was ready to unwind. I opened the window and noted that a fresh breeze came in easily. My room was facing in the right direction, which meant I could air it out after too many cigarettes. I’d be damned if Cole was going to tell me what I could or couldn’t smoke. Fuck that shit! This was my space now, and I’d do whatever the hell I wanted.

  2

  COLE LAY in bed, going over the last hour. Things had gone as well as he could hope, considering the fact that he and Sloan hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years.

  He had waited up as long as he could but had ended up falling asleep on the couch with his contacts in, hoping he’d be able to see Sloan when he arrived. Cole deluded himself into thinking that the little bit he did see was thanks to the lenses, when in reality they did nothing. His eyesight was going rapidly. All that was left was his central vision, and that was fuzzy. It was like looking at the world through a broken camera lens; it used to drive him crazy in the early days, but now, each little glimpse was a treasure he clung to. What little he saw of Sloan seemed familiar in some strange way. He was a very tall man with piercing gray eyes that commanded his attention, just like they had as a child. Cole remembered those eyes as soon as he opened the door and saw the tall form looming there. Sloan used to stare at him for the longest time, which made him uncomfortable even then. It felt almost as if Sloan could see deep inside him, past the layers of his many personas. So much so that Cole had started to tease him, telling him that he threw the baseball just like a girl, which would make Sloan cry and run away.

  Cole had no idea why he’d done that. There was just something about Sloan that hit a nerve. Some kind of weird connection they had, and he’d forgotten all about it until tonight when he looked into his eyes again. He also noticed that Sloan’s energy was supercharged. Almost as if he was on drugs, or maybe this was just his natural state and Cole wasn’t used to it.

  He’d begun to notice people’s energy a lot more, shortly after he was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa. That was years ago, and the ability to read people had increased with his diminishing eyesight.

  It had all begun when he was in his teens. He started havi
ng trouble with his night vision, but never mentioned it to anyone because he didn’t want to lose his chance to drive. Eventually, night driving became a problem, and soon after that, he started to lose his peripheral vision. This was just around the time when he was coming into his own as a pitcher in the minor leagues. He was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps because he had inherited the arm, the determination, and the stamina. But somewhere in that wonderful gene pool lay the altered gene that carried the disease. No one could explain why he got it. No one in their family had it, but the doctors said that it was an inherited thing, passed down through the generations, and somewhere in Japan or in Ireland, on his mother’s side, there was a person in his bloodline that had passed this onto him. When the specialists told Ken that his son would eventually go blind he had almost killed himself, he’d been so devastated.

  Cole had gone into denial—a typical reaction, he had come to find out. For several months he continued to struggle with his baseball career, pretending he didn’t have issues with depth perception. He’d laugh it off when he missed a ball because he couldn’t see it coming, until finally, reality had smacked him in the face: he had hit another ball player in the head with his ninety-mile-an-hour fastball. He’d dropped to his knees on the mound and buried his face in his hands so his teammates couldn’t see the tears, but he decided then and there to quit. He walked off the field and never looked back.

  He threw an arm over his eyes and kicked off the bedsheets. He wondered how long it would be before Sloan figured it out. He really didn’t want to deal with the solicitous hovering or the forced kindness. He had enough of that from his parents and Juliana. He was much more content putting up with Sloan’s snarky remarks and defiant attitude. It made him feel normal, and right now, feeling normal was a good thing.

  IT MUST have been around two in the morning when I finally realized I was starving. The weed had opened up the floodgates of my hunger, and the fact that I hadn’t eaten since I left California made the growling in my stomach difficult to ignore.

  I got up and decided to go to the kitchen and see what I could find. The apartment was as quiet as a tomb; the only sound I could hear was the thumping of my heart, which sounded pretty fucking loud to my mind. The weed was magnifying everything, including my paranoia. The fear that Cole would wake up and throw me out was pretty real, since he didn’t seem too happy to have me around. Trust my father and Ken to assume this was all okay. If I had my own place, and looked like Cole, I’d be pissed as well. Whatever made the old fucks think that Cole would accept me with open arms?

  I wondered if he had a girlfriend. Probably more than one, I supposed, with a face and body that screamed hotness! Okay, so I noticed. I admit it. Who the fuck wouldn’t?

  My interest in men wasn’t some new thing. It had started a zillion years ago, right around the time I’d discovered Queen. Another thing that Freddie and I had in common, although I certainly hoped to do better than him and not die of HIV-related diseases. If my father only knew how Freddie’s history had affected the way I dealt with safe sex, he’d endorse Queen. I was the poster boy for condoms, always carrying a spare in my pocket in case the need arose, which was really wishful thinking on my part.

  I wish I could say that sex was a huge part of my life, but it wasn’t. I suppose it all had to do with my body image, but I was sorely lacking in the experience department. I’d had a few encounters that stood out clearly in my head. The first one was when I had just turned sixteen, and some pervert, who must have been in his late twenties, picked me up when I was rollerblading in Golden Gate Park. He’d blown me in one of the stalls in the public restroom. It was the first time anyone had done that, and I was so shocked I didn’t realize that he’d expect me to reciprocate. I freaked and ran off, listening to him cursing at me as I rollerbladed down the road.

  My next relationship was with Andy, a geeky kid I knew in high school who stalked me despite what I looked like. It was all about blowing each other and learning which parts went where, but I would never take off all my clothes in front of him. I was afraid he’d find me too skinny and I couldn’t handle the thought of the school dweeb making fun of me.

  There was only one part of my body I was proud of, but unfortunately I couldn’t walk around with my nine-inch dick on display. When Andy kept pushing about the clothes, I shoved down my pants, gave him my virginity, and left him soon after.

  The third encounter was with a woman. I had convinced myself into thinking that if I were straight, all my troubles would disappear. My parents were mildly hysterical when I told them I’d begun dating Emily. They were so glad I’d come to my senses, they even bought me a car so I could have some privacy. I removed all my posters of Queen and put them in my closet to reaffirm my intentions to go straight.

  And I suppose that if I had really made an effort, I could have dealt with Emily’s presence in my life. She was a nice girl and very supportive of my career in graphic arts. We seemed to share that same dry sense of humor and a tendency toward sarcasm and self-deprecation, probably because she wasn’t very pretty. She was quite ordinary physically but had a great mind, which is what convinced me that I could get past the notion that she didn’t have a cock. Wrong.

  Our one attempt at fucking was an experience I try never to think about. She refused to take off her blouse, ashamed because she had no boobs, and I didn’t want her to see my xylophone rib cage and skinny ass, so we did it with all our clothes on. It was over much too quickly, and although the few minutes of relief were reasonably good, the pain and heartache that followed weren’t worth it. Emily and I agreed to remain friends and not fuck buddies. It was much more doable and a lot less embarrassing.

  After that, I’d take sex wherever I could find it, but it was always hurried and lacking in emotion. So I turned to chat rooms, prowling them aggressively, having sex with multiple men who all thought I had the body of Adonis. It was satisfying for as long as it took to get off. The rest was too painful to discuss.

  It was dark in the kitchen, and I switched on the light before going to the refrigerator and pulling the door open. It was fully stocked, but none of it was junk food. There were two gallons of juice and some yogurt cups. I didn’t recognize a lot of small packages that had writing in Japanese, but I was heartened to know that, despite being anal retentive about his surroundings and cigarette smoke, Cole had a normal appetite. There was a small box of pizza that caught my eye and I grabbed it, hoping it wasn’t too old. It looked and smelled okay, so I threw a slice in the microwave, grabbed a bottle of Bud, and sat down to eat. I inhaled the food and drink, satisfied enough so that sleep might come at last.

  I was walking down the hallway to go to my room when I heard groaning coming from behind Cole’s bedroom door. I pressed my ear to the wood, wondering what was going on. The groaning continued, and it seemed to be escalating instead of dissipating, so I turned the doorknob and slowly stuck my head in through the opening. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust, but all I could see was Cole lying on the bed, naked. His eyes were closed, so I assumed he was asleep and dreaming of something horrible. I walked in and paused for a minute, staring down at his body. He was beautiful in every way and my breath caught in my throat, the urge to touch so powerful it was making me careless.

  His cock was thick and pushing up toward his stomach. He was circumcised, a fact that seemed to catch my attention for some reason. I would have given up every single DVD I owned to be able to suck on him. Instead, I sat on the edge of the bed and shook his shoulder, “Cole, wake up.”

  He opened his eyes almost immediately. “Who… wha?”

  “It’s me, Sloan. You were dreaming.”

  “What the fuck are you doing in my room?”

  “You were groaning, man, I thought you were hurt.”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he growled, pushing me off the bed. He grabbed hold of the bed sheet and covered himself. “Don’t ever come in here uninvited, do you understand?”

  �
�Hey! Fuck off, okay? I was just trying to help.”

  “Get out, Sloan!”

  I spun around and rushed out of his room. I slammed the door behind me, listening to the sound reverberating in the quiet of the night, and the click when I locked my bedroom door seemed even louder. I threw myself on the bed and pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around my legs to stop the trembling that had already started. I could feel the urge coming over me and I was doing my best to hold it at bay, but eventually, it was too strong to ignore. My need to hurt myself was the biggest demon in my life, the one thing I had yet to conquer, and once again, I stopped thinking rationally and moved off into some dream state.

  I straightened out my legs and pulled my pants down, lifting my hips to get them off easily. I dug my nails into my thighs, and began to scratch the letter S onto my skin with the jagged edges. I didn’t stop until I saw the pink turn to red and the blood seeping through, all the while saying the same thing over and over in my head as the tears poured down my face in torrents. S is for sick, S is for stupid, S is for Sloan ….

  3

  COLE SCOOPED more food into his mouth, savoring the taste of the chicken and onion he’d added to the scrambled eggs he’d made himself for breakfast. He ate slowly, enjoying the different flavors as they blended with the rice.

  He’d become quite the chef—no small feat, since he couldn’t boil water a few years ago. But he’d insisted on learning how to cook, adding it to the list of things he needed to accomplish to become self-sufficient. Now, he could not only boil rice, he’d become quite skilled at preparing his meals, thanks to his mother’s tutelage. They’d spent many hours in the kitchen going over the finer points of traditional Japanese cuisine. Her contention was that he could always get burgers or pizza anywhere, but a fine donburi or tempura were hard to come by; so she’d taught him everything, just as her Japanese mother-in-law had taught her when she and Ken were newly married.