by Ezra Blake
“I know that.”
“Ain’t much technique at close range. Press it right against my head, here—” Ash taps the base of his skull “—and fire. It’ll kick back, so be ready for that.”
“Have you done this before?”
Ash scoffs and drops to his knees on the tarp. He is reminded again of the fawn, the way its young uncertainty shone through the veil of death, baked into every hair and hoof and strip of bloody hide. Ash isn’t bruised this morning. His wounds were hallucinations, vaporized in the sunlight.
Jake sits cross-legged at his side because it would feel wrong to stand behind him; he’d feel too much like an action movie antihero taking justice into his own hands. He steals the gun from Ash’s limp fingers. It’s heavier than he remembers.
“You’re sure you want to do this,” he says.
“You already asked me that.”
“Okay,” Jake says, and presses the barrel against the back of his neck. Then he lowers it again. Takes Ash’s round jaw in his palm. “Before I do it, I just need you to know—”
But words are limp contrivances; they’re dark reflections of something utterly self-contained. They won’t explain anything, so Jake kisses him. His lips are dry and motionless.
“I forgive you,” he says. “Ash. I forgive you.”
Ash snarls. He grabs Jake’s hand and shoves the gun against his own head. “Stop it,” he says. “Just do what you were gonna do. Do your psycho killer thing. That—whatever you were—fuck.” He takes a deep breath and holds it for a moment. On the exhale, he says, “Make it about sex. That’s why you messaged me, right? It should be about sex.”
“What? I never said that.”
“It’s always about sex. That’s all anyone—”
“Ash, I don’t even want to do this.”
Ash punches him in the chest. He’s small and it doesn’t hurt, but the betrayal is worse than a gunshot. “Rape me!” He screeches.
“What the fuck? I’m not—”
“C’mon!” Ash shoves him again. “You’re gonna take that?”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Jake says.
“You do! God wants you to hurt me, just—just follow through on something for once in your life, Jake!” He lands a final, feeble punch on Jake’s jaw. “This is why everyone hates you!”
The gun is in his mouth. Jake is fucking his mouth with the fucking pistol. The gun is in his throat; he’s choking, and Jake’s flaccid cock is pressed against his face through denim. He’s struck by phantom pain—a bullet hole carved through both cheeks, enough room for Jake and the gun in his mouth at once.
“Rape me,” he gasps with his next breath of air.
Back in his throat. “You can’t ask that.”
“Ugg ou,” Ash mumbles.
Jake pulls out, chipping one of his front teeth. He coughs up thick spit onto the tarp.
“What’d you say?”
“Fuck you!”
A visible shudder wracks his body. He shoves Ash backward and rolls him over, cups a hand under his mouth and says, “Spit.”
Ash sinks his teeth into the meat of Jake’s palm. Jake grabs a fistful of hair and slams his forehead into the ground. “Spit in my fucking hand. I’m doing this for you.”
His teeth pierce his tongue and he dribbles out a handful of bloody saliva. Jake spits too and smears the moisture down the cleft of his ass. He frees his cock with one hand—long and plump but rubbery—and he screws his eyes shut; he pumps and pumps until he’s hard enough to push. None of the videos start like this. It’s going to hurt both of them.
Jake jams the barrel into his lower back, holds it there to still him as he presses his half-hard cock forward, slipping out of place again and again. After half a dozen tries, the friction gives. Jake lets out a miserable groan and keeps pushing. The burn tears into him.
Is this what it felt like last night? Did Ash hurt him like this?
When he’s fully seated, Jake wrenches his head back and presses a kiss to the nape of his neck, followed by the barrel. His finger trembles on the trigger. Ash can’t see it but he can feel the tension, thin and high, throbbing through his bones.
Every thrust drags the tip of his swollen cock through the puddle of precome collecting on the tarp beneath. Every thrust is fatal. It feels like heaven brewing inside him, furious and black, and every time his hips jerk forward, Jake snaps them back and splits him open. No matter how he squirms, only the head touches. It’s driving him insane and he can’t stop it—he can’t. It’s not his fault.
He opens and closes his mouth in a silent Hail Mary. He has to hold on.
Jake’s grip on his hair tightens. He arches into the barrel, a heavy stamp on the nape of his neck. His cock bobs up and down in empty air. He can’t stop it, but if he can just resist temptation for a few more minutes, if he can die in pain and unsatisfied, the punishment might be enough.
“Fuck,” Jake growls in his ear. That’s what it usually sounds like when they come. It’s almost over.
But the pressure eases. Jake isn’t inside him anymore. Ash looks blearily over his shoulder to find him stroking himself, his face bright red and scrunched up. He stuffs himself back into Ash. Feels different. Slipping. Another moment of unbearable emptiness, and then Jake is stroking him and he’s spinning through a field of stars, constellations, galaxies, panting, “Stop, no, don’t let me—ugh.”
A soft whimper slips from his lips. He topples forward and breathes tarp.
Jake disappears.
Rustle of fabric, squeaking box springs, sound of ripping tape. Ash pulls himself off the ground and slaps away the plastic clinging to his sweaty chest. Everything is damp and engorged: stomach full of rage, mouth full of tongue. He sits up.
Jake is standing on the bed, ripping a plastic sheet off the wall. He’s naked from the waist down, still half-hard. He didn’t even get off.
“What’re you doing?”
“Cleaning up.”
Blood trickles down Ash’s balls and drips onto the tarp.
“Aren’t you gonna shoot me?”
“No,” Jake says. “It’s over. You got what you wanted.”
“What I wanted?” He kneels up and scrapes the mess from his cock. “You fucked me!”
“Because you—” He bites his lip. “It doesn’t matter, Ash, you’re not going to hell. God doesn’t care.”
“And how would you know?”
Jake wads up the sheet and tosses it to the ground, hangs his full weight on the next one until its tape tears off the beam, taking some splinters with it. “Because hell isn’t real,” he says. “None of it’s real. I’m forgiving you, so you’re allowed to—”
“You’re nobody to me, you ain’t gonna save me.” He slides the gun out from under the bed and aims it at Jake. “You’re the reason I gotta sin in the first place!”
Jake turns to face him. His voice is dead calm when he says, “So fucking shoot me.”
He can’t see through the blur of tears. Jake’s form drifts around his field of vision. It would feel so good to lodge a bullet in his chest and hear him wheeze, cry, apologize for ruining his atonement—but killing him will only doom them both. Ash’s desperate smile betrays a tinge of serenity as he turns the pistol on himself and wraps his lips around the barrel.
“Ash, don’t—”
Click.
His eyebrows draw together. He points it at the back of his head, checks the safety and pulls the trigger hard.
Click.
“No,” He breathes. “God, no. Don’t do this.”
Click click click.
“It’s not—” He aims it at Jake and squeezes.
BANG!
Ash clutches his aching shoulder.
There’s a hole in the cabinet next to Jake’s head. For a moment, even the wind stops moving.
Then Jake snatches the pistol from his grip and says, “Jesus fuck, pull yourself together. Clean up.” He stalks to the bathroom still clutching the gun, his cock soft and
bare and streaked with bright red blood.
Ash sits on the bed and stares into space. He’s leaking.
Every guy who’s done this has left him leaking, but it’s never been blood. The guys in alleys and Chinese restaurant bathrooms shot bare inside him and made him like it. Some of them even tried to kiss him after. They said he wanted it, that he wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t want it, even though the word Ash used was rape.
God didn’t make him this way. The old guy in the shelter with the beard like a bird’s nest, the first one who said yes—he made Ash this way. When somebody gets raped, that isn’t their fault.
But Jake blames the victim.
He lurches to the table and sweeps everything onto the tarp, shattering glass and scattering puffs of white powder. You got what you wanted. The liar. Can’t take responsibility for his own needs. He rolls the whole mess into a ball and seals it with duct tape—Jake wants him to clean, he’ll fucking clean. He collects beer cans, drinks their backwash, and hurls them off the front porch. He downs the last inch of vodka and smashes the bottle in the sink. He snaps open a garbage bag. It swallows gallons of air and floats for a split second, a shiny black jellyfish in a sea of white plastic.
Ash is lying on the couch with his shirt on inside-out, one leg slung over the back cushion. He looks at the gun in Jake’s waistband and avoids his face.
Without a word, Jake slings two garbage bags over his shoulders and hauls them out to the car. Ash’s dull eyes track the gun with every pass, back and forth like a hypnotist’s coin. Only when he’s cleared the room and started scrubbing an amorphous stain from the countertop does Ash finally speak.
“This happened ‘cause you’re weak. You know that, right?”
His voice sounds like the brown slurry left over after a snowstorm. Jake grits his teeth and keeps scrubbing.
“It was fine last night. God forgave me. This wouldn’t of happened if you jus’ did it when I said, but you couldn’t keep it in your pants. No self-control.”
“Yup,” Jake says. “That’s me.”
He turns away and dumps the wet sponge in the bag of cans and broken glass. Like it makes a difference. No matter how thoroughly he cleans the place, his father will still know he was here. Nothing is ever good enough.
“Jus’ needed somebody to do it when I was clean,” Ash says. “That’s all. Everybody thinks it’s some kinda game or something, some kinda fantasy, but I just wanna be…” He shakes his head. “Thought you knew me better. Guess not.”
He glances in Ash’s direction. His bowl cut is shaggy and uneven. It has the kind of flat, impenetrable shine that’s so popular on luxury cars these days. Jake should at least give this a shot. Explain. But he’s so goddamn tired.
“Knew from the start you jus’ wanted to fuck me. Everyone does.”
He lifts Ash’s legs off the couch, sits, sighs. He should try, at least. Ash deserves that much.
“I never even thought about that, Ash. I wanted to kill you.”
“Bullshit.”
“I did.”
“Nuh-uh,” Ash says, narrowing his eyes. “Why?”
Jake shrugs. “I was lonely I guess.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yeah. It’s true, though.”
He jams his socked toes beneath Jake’s thigh and leans forward, squinting at him. “Then why’d you change your mind?”
“Well, you saw. Those assholes were never gonna get it. They’d never ask me why,” he says, and halfway through the sentence he realizes that this is all nonsense, that nothing he can say will make a difference. “I like you better alive. More than them.” His lips pucker around the next words. “I like you a lot.”
Ash leaps to his feet. It happens so fast that he nearly slips and smashes his face into the countertop. If the tarp was still down, he’d be dead.
“I got it,” he crows.
“Got what?”
“How to make it work!” A sloppy grin spreads across his face. “I could never do it myself, but you could, y’know, if thine eye causes you to sin…” A meaningful glance to his own crotch.
“No,” Jake says. “Absolutely not.”
“But then you won’t have to kill me, Jake, even if we did drugs again this couldn’t happen—”
Frantic, high-pitched yapping echoes from the porch. “Hold that thought,” Jake says, extending an open palm. He shuffles to the back door and pokes his head outside. “Mocha, what—”
He pauses.
Fuck.
He bolts outside and grabs the dog, snaps her collar off. She yips and squirms. Inside, Ash is his fawn resurrected, lost and stumbling into furniture. “What?” He asks. “What is it?”
“Get in the car.”
“Why? What’s—”
“They’re in the driveway,” he says. “It’s my dad.”
Ash pales. He fumbles to the front door, but Jake catches him and yanks him toward the back.
They have two minutes. Arthur Caruso will stop at the gate, leaving the engine on idle. He’ll jam his key in the lock, swing it open, and then he and his friend—colleague; whoever he’s trying to impress—will roll through their gap in the low barbed wire fence; his Father will latch the gate behind them. The whole process took thirty seconds when Jake was a kid, but the lock has aged and so has his father.
Today he’ll make double the attempts in half the time. He’s surely seen the cars out front. His trembling rage might buy them a minute, but he could just as easily get it on the first go.
In sixty seconds he has Mocha, Ash, and their garbage bags of shit crammed into the Nissan. Maybe he hasn’t seen Jake yet. They’re parked on the opposite side of the cabin. He cycles scenarios: he could crash through the woods toward the road and hope they’re obscured by the time Arthur makes it inside. He could try that and immediately hit a tree. He could pull into the far side of the clearing and hide in the forest, postpone his wrath—but they’d still have to get home somehow. If Arthur parks just behind the gate, as is his habit, they’re trapped.
Jake hasn’t considered every option. There’s a good one buried in there under the swirl of terror and speed-rage, but he doesn’t have time to find it.
“Hang on,” he says.
He whips a u-turn, digging swerving furrows into the mud. Ash is scrambling with his seatbelt and Mocha is screeching an endless litany of vowels in his ear.
“Stop! Stop! What’re you—?” Ash lurches backward as he steps on the gas. He drops his belt and braces his hands on the dash, which serves no purpose but to ensure his shoulders will shatter if they hit anything.
He gathers speed as they rocket across the clearing. Ash screams wordlessly, and then they crash through the barbed wire fence with a hellish skreeeeee!
Time slows. They pass within a foot of his father, close enough to see his bleach-white teeth bared, spittle flying, his jowls blubbering in a furious roar the likes of which hasn’t been heard since September of 2008, when the DOW Jones dropped five hundred points in a day. They streak down the driveway, spraying Father and his well-dressed lady friend with mud.
The last time Jake provoked his parents like this, they replaced him.
It was after the hospital, back when he still met them for free dinners and pretended that everything was okay at work. On this particular evening, he showed up on a cocktail of stimulants labeled “not for human consumption.” They were always too wrapped up in themselves to notice when he was high, and Mother spent half the meal nodding through a Vicodin coma anyway—but this time, the drugs made him a little too confident. Confident that they loved him unconditionally. Confident that he was good enough.
His father asked him about work, about how he was performing, and Jake said, “They gave me decent reviews, I guess.”
And his father said “Gave?”
And Jake told the truth, because why should it matter where the fuck he works? He’s their kid. He said, “I don’t think I’m cut out for the corporate world. There
has to be more to life than working twelve hour days and buying shit, right?”
So that was the end of dinner. Suddenly, Father was very concerned about his Lithium and very concerned about where his allowance was going. He wasn’t de-stressing after a hard day; no, he had “substance abuse issues.” Then he failed one med check and the checks stopped showing up. His texts went unanswered.
He found out a month later, through Facebook, that the kid was Taiwanese and his name was Kip. He was fourteen—seventeen now—and better than Jake in every way. Probably because they paid a nanny to raise him.
He thinks about Kip as he bumps up onto the asphalt. Kip hunting and sailing in his profile photos, wearing boat shoes and sharing insightful articles about entrepreneurship, like he wasn’t born in a fucking hut somewhere. Kip would never pull a stunt like this.
The engine hums. Ash breathes like an olympic swimmer who has obliterated the competition and is lying poolside, dazed, staring up into the ecstatic crowd. With one hand on the wheel and both eyes on the road, Jake fumbles with the aux cable and puts on music without words to misinterpret: a playlist called Soothing Roadtrip Piano. It has more than two thousand followers. Two thousand people are listening to fucking Chopin on their way to Vegas, Orlando, or the Grand Canyon.
Twenty minutes in, Ash says something like that’s your dad, huh? He’s too quiet; Nocturne for a Lost Nightingale is too loud, but Jake gets the gist. He grunts. Thirty minutes in, Ash slides his hand up Jake’s thigh.
A semi speeds past them, blaring its horn. His chest tightens like a coke overdose. Ash is whispering. It’s the sort of drunken whisper where you’re pretending to be discreet, but everybody in KFC can still hear exactly why your ex wife is a total bitch. “You could do it,” he says. His hand slides higher. His voice draws nearer as he leans over the console, and all Jake can think is that it must hurt, digging into the bottom of his ribcage like that. Ash has no fat cushioning those bones.
He catches the word castrate at the same moment Ash starts kneading his crotch.
Jake takes a deliberate breath. The joints in his fingers fuse together and lock his hands into feeble claws on the wheel. He tries to catch still frames from the whirling carnival, but they’re warped and oversaturated, passed through a manic vocoder. Make it about sex. That’s why you messaged me, right?