Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  “It’s a public park, actually,” he said. “They don’t let anyone inside the house, but you’re free to use the grounds how you like. So long as you’re not an asshole.”

  “I’ll do my best.” She sipped the coffee he gave her—from the place where they first met, he said, but like a fact or another bit of trivia rather than something that was supposed to be special. There were doughnuts, too, for dessert. “All that’s missing is the newspaper,” she said, and he nodded as he surveyed the flowering vine woven into the hedge. It was hard to believe she’d been so mistaken.

  Her plan was to just tell him, outright, how it wasn’t going to work. I’m going home today. Maybe we can stay in touch. Now, she felt, all that wasn’t enough.

  “I never do this,” she said. She shifted her weight onto her knees and leaned back on her thighs. “But…I don’t know why. I just feel like…” She stared hard at the grass. She couldn’t remember the last time she sat on a blanket, this close to the grass.

  3460 Columbus Avenue, she thought without warning. She was shocked that she still knew the address. The handprints were on the foundation, on the north side of the house—a cluster of children’s hands, in the same, dark stain, all over the concrete, just as she’d seen them on the park gates, moments ago. It was the last house they’d looked at, she remembered. Colin must have been nine or ten. When the agent arrived and unlocked the house it wasn’t what she had imagined—large and gorgeous, yes, but rundown and poorly lit. New light fixtures will make a world of difference, the agent said, and Diane remembered his tone as weary, as fed up. They went down to the basement and despite the mold all along the walls she didn’t rule it out. She was too curious and wanted to see the rest. Colin was running all over the place, opening one door after another in a basement that could have held a Minotaur at its heart. All four bedrooms were upstairs and all four doors were closed, and when they opened the last they noticed scratch marks all over the wood. They kept something in here, she remembered saying. Something or someone. The carpet was frayed in the corner and when Colin peeled it back they found a dead bird, not yet rotting. There was a door in the corner that led, the agent said, to the attic. She wished, now, that she’d opened that door, just to see, but at the time there was nothing she could do to convince herself. I don’t think we’re interested, she said, while Colin, like he was tucking it into bed, gingerly covered the bird with its blanket of carpet.

  They’d looked at houses that entire summer, she remembered. 3460 Columbus was the last. Now don’t tell your father what we’re up to, she’d instructed Colin, her assistant, her companion, her little gentleman. I haven’t convinced him that he wants to move yet. But she’d had no plans to tell him. She was thinking of leaving him, even then.

  Liam cleared his throat and she flinched. “You feel…?” he asked, his hand outstretched and palm up as though he was waiting for her to set her entire life story inside of it.

  It was hard, walking down Hollywood Boulevard, for Colin to feel good about anything. He couldn’t not think of LA as a test he failed. You had to be strong here and he wasn’t. You had to be smart. There were parts of home he missed and would be happy to see, but so much of it would be painful to go back to. Andy he’d inevitably see, at some point—in school or at a restaurant, out shopping with their mothers—and he’d have to stay hateful. Colin would have to resist his eyes, his smile, the curved shadows of his body if they ended up, torturously, in the same gym class; he’d have to look like steel or ice, a living weapon. And then Victor, or Victor’s absence. Colin wanted to be grateful that he’d never look outside and see that car ever again, waiting in the street, but without Victor there was no one else, he was ashamed to realize, who would give him what he’d come to know he needed. Why couldn’t you have waited? he demanded of the Victor in his head. Wasn’t I good enough? Why wasn’t it me? Instead, when he went home, there’d be nothing but gossip, his Facebook and his friends alight with news about their pedo teacher who’d finally been caught, and how they all knew from the beginning. None of it had happened yet and already Colin was tired of the whole thing.

  As he lay awake that morning, listening to his mother shower, he’d thought it all through. Right after she left, he wrote his note. With the pen and paper in front of him, he was still tempted to write his good-bye. Don’t look for me. You’ll be happier. But when he pictured her reading it, he wanted to tear himself open and wrench his insides between his fists like wet rags. LA wasn’t his future anymore. It was a hard thing to admit but he knew he had to go home, and instead his note became a good-bye to Allie. Good-bye palm trees, he thought. Good-bye mountains. Good-bye blow jobs and getting fucked. Good-bye good life. To Allie he wrote everything he thought he should—that he was sorry for bailing and happy for meeting him, that he loved the taste of his cock, that he felt like he’d grown more in the last week than in the last ten years. Even if it wasn’t true it sounded amazing, he thought, and added some stuff about love and missing him forever. That he cried made him feel like this was the biggest mistake of his life.

  It was just before ten when he arrived and the shop hadn’t opened. The sun was already hot through his T-shirt and he leaned into the shade and tried not to look like a kid buying drugs. “People see a kid on his own and they think druggy or rentboy,” Allie had warned him. “They think no one cares about him. No one’s looking out.” How he meant it was for Colin to be careful. He laughed, at the time. After all he’d been through, he was supposed to give a shit what someone on the street might think? “I’m serious,” Allie said, and the anger in his voice was a sad thing to remember. He wondered if there might be a way, yet, to stay and be loved. The door behind him clicked. He touched the note in his pocket to make sure it was still there.

  The way Allie looked at him—like a mythical creature or someone who’d died long ago, something physically impossible—made Colin feel ashamed and proud simultaneously, glad to shatter the image of the weak boy Allie thought he knew, but also pained to know he’d have to tell him the truth. “So you did it!” Allie said, and pulled him inside. It was always easy to forget how strong men could be, how they could pick you up as though you were nothing at all. He set Colin on the counter and looked at him with an undisguised, embarrassing joy. “I wasn’t sure you’d be able to do it. I thought it was all just talk. How’s it feel to be free? Jesus fuck, Colin, you’re…is this for real?”

  Colin could feel the trembling in Allie’s hands. As he began to cry he couldn’t look at his face. He didn’t want to see Allie’s disappointment, his sad realization that he was right all along and that Colin didn’t have the balls to run away. He reached into his pocket and gave him the note. While Allie read it, he kept his face in his hands. For the first time since he arrived it was quiet and he could hear, right then, the groaning from the porn playing behind him. He peeked out of the corner of his eye and saw it was something different than before—not two young men caressing each other in some sunny place but instead an older man securing a younger man to a table, bending him over and fastening his ankles to the legs and his wrists to bolts on the opposite edge. Colin felt dizzy and he broke away. When Allie finished reading he folded the note and slipped it into his pocket. Colin looked up at him. He could feel his heart lashing every faraway part of his body with hot blood but he tried to ignore it. There was a reason he’d come there. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Allie was quiet. His silence made Colin feel even worse, as if he’d tricked him or wasted his time. Then he felt a hand on his thigh, brushing the hem of his shorts. “Colin,” Allie said. His voice was lower now, as though this was their secret even though no one else was in the shop. Colin looked away and again caught sight of the television. The tied-up man onscreen was moaning into the sock that’d been stuffed into his mouth. With a hand on his chin, Allie guided Colin’s eyes gently back to his own. “I’ll bet this is another one of your games, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  Allie’s han
ds were traveling up his thighs, the tips of his fingers now beneath his clothes. “I think this is you playing with me. I think you want me to…detain you. To keep you here. We both know what you’re into.”

  Colin closed his eyes at Allie’s touch. He felt a breath pulled out of him like a rope or a chain caught in his throat. Then he opened his eyes. “Um…no I really…I really have to go. I’m sorry but I just can’t.”

  The hands disappeared. Allie backed away. Again that look of disappointment, of betrayal—how did he keep doing this to people? Colin sighed and looked down at his lap.

  “I wish I could.”

  “I understand. I really do.” Allie adjusted himself in his shorts and walked behind the counter. “I’m sorry, too. I don’t know what I was thinking, just now. I just…you showed up, cute as ever, and I really thought…fuck, I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.”

  Colin leapt down off the counter. In the cabinet were all the things he still couldn’t name but—after his short education—could recognize and understand. Onscreen, the sex had begun, the older man’s pants around his ankles as he slowly moved himself in and out of his captive. Colin made an effort to close his mouth, already dried out from too much breathing. The lump in his shorts grazed against the counter and he pressed himself against it. The older man withdrew and began stroking himself, right above the young man’s back. Colin was sweating as he waited for his favorite part, but the TV went dark.

  “Let’s not make this harder than it has to be,” Allie said, and then he laughed. “Harder. That was totally an accident.”

  Colin tried to laugh but he felt broken. He stood breathing, as though he himself had been switched off right before he came. It didn’t feel fair.

  “Are you really sure it’s not a game?” Allie asked. He reached under the counter and came up with a bottle of water. It gave a little hiss as he opened it and Colin remembered how thirsty he was. Condensation dripped down Allie’s chin. He must have noticed the look on Colin’s face, and he reached down again and brought up a second bottle.

  “Thanks,” Colin said. He uncapped the bottle and drank half in one pull. Allie was staring at him as he drank and it made him feel like an animal, a dangerous creature. “I wish we could play,” he said, in a way he hoped was sexy. He looked into the cabinet, all those toys and treasures. “I’m sad you never got to tie me up or use any of this stuff on me.”

  “Don’t tease,” Allie said. “Believe me—I was dying to. This one right here—” He pointed to a curved set of rings, nestled inside a velvet case. “This is what I was going to use.”

  Colin looked at it. He knew what it was from pictures he’d found on the Internet, but he wanted to play dumb. He bit his lip and peered out from beneath his brow. “What’s that, sir?”

  “Sir? Fuck, you’re a little slut.” Colin beamed at the word and then looked away. He wasn’t supposed to do this. He was supposed to go home. “It’s a chastity cage,” Allie was saying. “You put one ring on the base, and the others guide you at an angle. It keeps you aroused but unable to get hard. Someone else has to unlock it. Perfect for boys who want permission.”

  “So you can’t even jack off?” Colin heard himself say. He knew the answer and he knew he should turn around and leave. It was something he’d imagined before and he was trying not to imagine it now, what being trapped in chastity would feel like, how you’d do anything for the person who had the key.

  “Not a drop. You just get hornier and hornier.”

  The air in the room felt different, the breeze from the vent like someone’s light, expert touch, traveling up to his shoulders and his armpits and then down his spine. “I should get back.”

  “Hey,” Allie said. His voice too had changed, as though it came from inside Colin’s skull. “Maybe you should stay and try it on.” His own heart he could hear, not like a drum or a boom but like the clang of a railcar’s wheels as they dipped into a chipped-out spot in the iron. It was cool in the room but he was sweating as though it was a hundred degrees and humid—and the trickle over each rib enough to sigh over, it felt so good. Something was wrong but there were too many things to take care of first. He reached into his briefs. “Hey, hands off,” he heard, and Allie came out from behind the counter and took hold of his wrists, placing Colin’s arms above his head.

  “I don’t feel good,” Colin said, searching for Allie’s eyes.

  “Yes you do.”

  “No, I mean I do, but I—I don’t feel right.”

  “Keep those hands up.” Allie’s voice was bursting open from inside him, something he needed to listen to. He felt hands and fabrics and the vent’s cool air. A truck went by in the street and rattled into his groin. There was so much touch, right then, that he didn’t know he was locked up until he looked down and saw it, until Allie’s open palm showed him the key. Just a tiny little key was all it took to belong to someone completely. Without that key, he could never go home. “Now,” Allie said. “I need you to do everything I say.”

  They never left the shop but the room began to change—a new kind of light and the doors blocked off with bars. Colin knew he’d been drugged but he didn’t care. He could only marvel at the warmth of the lights, the vibration of music through his body. Stand there, was an order. Shirt off, was another. Shorts too. And those. Don’t touch. Kneel there. Give me your hands. Up above your head. Look at me.

  Colin looked at him. He hadn’t realized what a beautiful man Allie really was, a poured composite of tattoo and muscle and shadow that was painful to see. His jeans he was still wearing, and the realization—Colin hadn’t had much time to think—that they were about to come off made him want to reach for it. But he was immobilized now, fastened to something in the ceiling, and had no choice but to wait to be given, to wait to be taken, to wait for the ache to be relieved. The thought that Allie might abandon him here, not worth his time, made him whimper, and as he watched those jeans glide down those thighs he began to sob outright. He tried to follow Allie with his eyes as he walked behind him, but then there was nothing to see, only fabric over his eyes, hot with the smell of coconut. Ask me, was the next order, and Colin asked for everything: Let me go in a voice full of sobs, Please take this off in something like a groan, Can I taste it between sharp, hysteric giggles, Don’t tell anyone in a whisper he’d forgotten.

  “Colin,” Allie said, but the way it came out, so soft and so pleasant, it didn’t sound like Allie at all. With the blindfold over his eyes it was easy to believe that Victor had escaped, that he was here to do to Colin what he should’ve done a long time ago. The smell of cock was right in front of him and he leaned forward, his tongue tasting the air like a reptile’s, but it was out of reach. There was a laugh, then the rattlings of metals and plastics. “It’s good you can’t see these tools.” Colin knew he should be afraid, but it was hard to care at that point, his entire body like a grinding knuckle that refused to crack. “I want you to tell me how much you need this,” he heard. His life, Colin promised, depended on it. He couldn’t live without it. He’d do anything, just please. “Will you be a good little slave for me?” By then there weren’t things like pain, at least not the body’s pain. If there was pain it was only the pain of being half-finished, half-fucked. There was only the excruciating threat of being half-loved. Each pinch and pinprick this man gave him felt like its own little orgasm; before long he was trembling with the agony of being undone. “Tell me why you deserve this,” he heard, and Colin told him what everyone had wanted to know from the beginning: how he drooled after his best friend, how he’d sell his entire family for a fuck, how he’d killed his father and how he knew, as he loaded the gun, exactly what that gun would do. “It was just something I wanted to see happen,” he confessed. “I killed him because I could.” It was for this reason, he promised, that no one on earth deserved this torture more than he did, but the man above him was silent. And why wouldn’t he be, here before this wretched creature? “Now please!” Colin screamed, and his body began to shake
so terribly he felt sick. The D-rings on the straps that held him chirped against each other. Even the tools, in their tray, were jumping and banging out something you might have called music. “Holy fuck!” he heard, and something like a jet’s taking off began all around him, noises like bombs, noises like the shot he’d heard in the middle of the night. The man was screaming and then, very swiftly, was not screaming. The straps came loose from the ceiling and his arms collapsed on his head. He pulled the blindfold away from his eyes, still shocked at how the fabric felt like the grace of some angel’s wing, and saw what the earthquake had done, his friend Allie nothing but a pair of legs peering out from the concrete. Take cover, his brain warned, and as he turned to look for a place to hide he slipped on the sweat and saliva that’d pooled underneath him. He could no longer move, and he clasped his hands around a bloody rod of rebar that was in his way. It wouldn’t budge. At first he simply thought too heavy and tried to move out from under it. But there was no more trying and no more moving. He touched the blood on his shirt. It belonged to him and it felt wrong to see it outside of him, so much of it. Even dying felt good throughout his body. But the word itself—dying, to die—tasted worse than the blood filling his throat. This was the last thing he’d done, the last place he’d seen, the last person he’d begged and thanked and told, in his own sad way, he loved. He began to breathe heavier, waiting for it. He’d waited so long, and despite what he’d always thought, he wanted to wait longer. Much longer. He would’ve promised anything, right then, to wait forever. But what to promise, and to whom, he couldn’t say. And why—that he’d never been able to explain, not once.

  Right away, the earth had loosened under the obelisk. Diane had seen it in time to move. Liam hadn’t. She’d now seen the spilt brains of two men she loved, or thought she loved, and that was too much to ask in one lifetime. It was nothing like the other earthquake, which could’ve been a semi truck passing down a small street. This felt like someone had picked up her world and shaken it, no chance to start screaming. Even when his skull burst open—when Liam went from a man to a crushed, broken-up thing they’d have to sweep away with the rest of the city’s ruin—there was no time for her to think, to mourn. She wrapped her hands around the roots of the nearest hedge and held on, hoping Colin, back at the motel, was doing the same.