by Arden Powell
“We’re good,” Kris promised, catching Rayne’s hand to hold it. “And hey, good riddance, right? You’re better off without the guy.”
Rayne cracked a genuine smile and squeezed his fingers. “You’re a marked improvement over him,” he agreed softly.
Kris’s insides went warm and melty at that, though his brain was too fuzzy to process everything Rayne had shared. He smiled back and rubbed his thumb reassuringly over Rayne’s knuckles. “You got anything else you need to talk about? Any deep, dark secrets you’re harboring? Lip-synching onstage? The long lost prince of Genovia?”
Rayne hesitated for a split second before shaking his head, his curls catching the only light in the room. “No, I’m done. No secrets, no royal bloodlines.”
“Too bad. Guess you’ll have to make do being a millionaire rock star.” Kris’s head was dropping of its own accord back toward his pillow as sleep rushed in to meet him. “Fancy rock star with a fake boyfriend,” he mumbled, reaching over to swat at Rayne one last time. “You’re like a walking fantasy, man. All those fics Cassie talks about, they’ve got nothing on the real you.” The last thing he saw before his eyes slipped shut was Rayne’s expression, caught somewhere between startled and wondrous.
He was surrounded by warmth. Sunlight filtered through the curtains, covering everything in pools of gold. The bedsheets were rumpled, and the body under him arched as Kris’s veins flooded with heat. It was the lazy, unquestionable kind of enjoyment that came from familiarity, when he knew every inch of his partner’s body and they knew his. Kris didn’t even need to open his eyes; they were connected spirit to spirit, pleasure crashing through them with no regard for where one body ended and the next began. Kris dropped his head to his partner’s shoulder and breathed in deep. They smelled like oranges and lemon peel, so fresh his mouth flooded with water. He tasted the salt of their skin as he moved his hips in lazy circles.
“Oh god, fuck,” he panted, chasing his climax. It felt like burning coals in the pit of his stomach, spreading out through every limb.
“You feel so good,” his partner breathed, nipping at his ear. Kris shuddered. “You feel so good . . . come on, come on—”
“Wait,” Kris gasped. “Wait, I want to kiss you.” He leaned down to find his partner’s lips, and when their mouths met, his eyes flew open for the first time. He knew that kiss. Looking back at him, sun-dappled in the bed, lay Rayne, his hair tousled and his eyes bright and flooded with want.
“Oh, fuck,” Kris said, and woke up.
It was morning, and Rayne was spooning him from behind, his face buried in Kris’s shoulder. Kris was painfully, achingly hard. So, he noticed, was Rayne. Rayne’s breathing was slow and steady, fanning over the back of Kris’s neck. It felt damp and too hot. Kris shifted, trying to escape it, but only succeeded in pushing himself farther back into Rayne’s embrace.
Kris paused and considered his options. Rayne was asleep, no matter what his libido was thinking. Kris could extricate himself—very carefully—and slip away to the bathroom, have an excruciatingly cold shower, and pretend nothing had happened. Rayne would probably be awake by the time he came back, and neither of them would have to talk about it. Or Kris could pretend to go back to sleep until Rayne woke and left for the bathroom, and again, neither would have to mention anything. Or least advised: he could stay exactly where he was and wake Rayne up to call him on his accidental intimacy. It was a terrible idea, especially considering their last conversation concerning Calloway, but Kris could still see his dream-Rayne glimmering behind his eyelids every time he blinked. That made it hard to remember why, exactly, he should be keeping his distance.
Kris held his breath and waited to see if his erection wanted to subside on its own.
It didn’t.
He took the third option, shifted onto his stomach, and elbowed Rayne in the ribs.
“Dude,” Kris said.
Rayne whuffled in his sleep and held him tighter.
“You are getting way up in my business here, man.” Kris twisted around just enough to see Rayne blink awake, looking baffled and adorably out of place. He stayed pressed against Kris’s back from chest to knee.
“Huh,” said Rayne, his voice rough and low from sleep. “You don’t seem to mind.”
“You have to make an honest guy out of me now.” Kris kept his tone deliberately light. “Roses and fancy dinners and a big fat ring. No fake boyfriend for you after all.”
“You’re so high maintenance.” Rayne yawned. “Fine, we’ll detour through Vegas and get married by some Elvis impersonator, how about that?”
“Perfect.”
Kris wriggled onto his side, pretending to search for a way out from under Rayne’s arm, but actually pressing his ass back against Rayne’s hips, testing how far he could push things. Rayne groaned and buried his face in the pillow.
“You’re a menace. Stop moving like that.”
“Like what?” Kris asked, all innocence.
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“So go jerk off in the shower, rock star.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be straight? Straight boys don’t do this, unless the world’s been lying to me this whole time.”
Kris bit his lip and hid his face so Rayne couldn’t see. “Maybe I’m just getting you back for rubbing up on me all morning.”
He couldn’t admit he was still chasing that high from his dream, trying to get close to Rayne in any way he could before they reached the festival and whatever complications it was going to bring. It wasn’t smart, whatever the excuse. Rayne narrowed his eyes, and Kris had a second to brace himself before Rayne flattened him onto his stomach, swung a leg over Kris’s thighs, and pinned his wrists to the pillow. Kris noted Rayne was keeping their hips conspicuously apart.
“What are you going to do?” Kris asked around the pillow.
“You are such a brat.”
Kris shrugged as best he could, which was minimal. “You like it.” He struggled against Rayne’s hold, but only for show. Rayne was taller and heavier than him; he didn’t stand a chance if Rayne really wanted to keep him pinned. He was pretty sure Rayne was bluffing, though.
“You going to stare at the back of my head all day, or you going to make good on that threat?” Kris bucked his hips up, and Rayne jolted up to avoid contact. Kris grinned. “Didn’t think so.”
He could feel Rayne’s glare through his skull. Rayne held him there for a moment longer as if considering him, before dropping his full weight on Kris’s back. Kris wheezed as he deflated, the air fleeing his lungs.
“Brat,” Rayne repeated, more fondly now that Kris had been unilaterally defeated.
Kris pulled one hand free to smack Rayne in the shoulder. “Off,” he wheezed. “Dying. You win.”
“You sure?” Rayne asked. “You sure this wasn’t what you wanted?”
“You’re still poking me.”
Rayne shifted around and jabbed his elbows into Kris’s ribs.
“Okay!” Kris managed. “Okay, I give up. You win. Off.”
Rayne didn’t move, and Kris wondered if he was really going to be crushed to death under an annoyed, blatantly aroused rock star first thing in the morning. He’d just started drafting his final will and testament when Rayne grinned and pressed a smacking kiss to Kris’s shoulder and dismounted, hopping off the bed.
“First shower,” Rayne announced.
“Roses and dinner,” Kris repeated. “The most expensive shit you can find.”
“I can do coffee and a muffin. Maybe weed, if Angel’s generous.”
“Deal.”
Rayne disappeared into the bathroom, and Kris rolled onto his back, flinging one arm over his face as he palmed himself through his shorts with the other. It was a fluke, he repeated to himself. It had been a while, and Rayne was the only person he’d touched in months. He wasn’t in love—he wasn’t even in lust, whatever his subconscious was saying—and he was not going to rub one out over his boss-slash-best-fri
end, no matter what kind of thrill had shot through him when Rayne had pressed him into the mattress like that. Rayne was going to go meet his publicity-stunt-fake-boyfriend, and Kris wasn’t going to get between them, because he and Rayne were just friends. Friends and bandmates. Brian would kill him if he pulled a Fink and fucked up the tour, and Kris would kill himself if he pulled a Fink and fucked up Rayne’s heart.
“Fuck me,” Kris complained to the empty room.
“Marriage first!” Rayne hollered from the bathroom.
Kris pulled the pillow over his face and groaned into it. He was such a mess.
Modern spirituality is a strange thing, often made difficult by the unrelenting fast pace of the twenty-first century, but people find ways to make ends meet. Some attend church; some read Buddhist teachings. Some surround themselves in nature and breathe deeply until they feel at peace.
Leif had started a cult.
He hadn’t meant to, at the time. But it had gotten away from him, as those things tend to do, and before he knew it people had been coming to him for guidance and spiritual well-being, and he could hardly have turned them away with nothing to believe in. He might have fucked up, but he was damn well going to take some responsibility for once in his life and see it through.
So: cult.
Seven Years Earlier:
The exact moment it began, he was sitting in the rickety foldout chair in front of his rickety little trailer, parked in a lot of other semipermanent ramshackle homes in the Mojave Desert. Leif did his best with what he had, but he’d always felt there was something missing. The outside of his trailer was rough and weather-beaten, and inside wasn’t much better. He might as well be living in a cave somewhere, for all the home touches he lacked.
His soul was as neglected as his physical surroundings, and like every other hole in his life, he filled his missing sense of purpose with drugs. When his life changed, he was extraordinarily high on a combination of weed, ecstasy, and LSD, to the point where he was barely tethered to reality. His head swam with shapes and colors; his mind was so far open that the universe was pouring in through his third eye and his soul was pouring out and connecting to every other living being in the cosmos, and he understood everything. It was beautiful, but when he came down, it wouldn’t have been marked as truly spiritual.
It was the peacock that tipped the experience into life-altering territory.
Leif had never seen a peacock in real life before, and at first he wasn’t convinced the bird was real at all. It was too big, too colorful, too . . . much, to be a real animal existing in three-dimensional space. He flew down to Leif from the sky, surrounded by lights of a billion different colors, colors Leif had never seen before, beyond the spectrum of human visibility. The peacock’s wings beat in slow motion as he descended, and Leif’s mouth fell open in slack-jawed awe as they fanned his face. The breeze was warm and, it seemed to him, originating from another plane of reality. When the peacock landed on the ground before him, folding his wings back and shaking out his tail in a series of short ruffled waves, Leif was convinced he wasn’t looking on any mortal bird, but some divine creature sent from heaven to bring enlightenment to his life.
He was incredibly high, and he knew he was incredibly high, but what really cemented the idea of the peacock being divinity was that he felt the same once the drugs wore off. Hours later, when he was settled back in his own skin and his mind worked slowly and linearly again, the peacock still gave him that same sense of otherworldly reverence. The peacock regarded Leif with bright, shiny eyes that seemed too intelligent to belong to a bird, and his feathers were so glossily iridescent that Leif thought there must be LSD still left in his system.
“You’re something else, aren’t you?” he whispered, his voice hoarse and his mouth dry.
The peacock screamed, an unearthly wail that sent goose bumps running up and down his arms, and the hairs on the back of his neck raising in alarm.
He called his friend Red.
Red was a uniquely belligerent man whose only source of inner peace came from the drugs he imbibed, and he made sure to carry a wide variety on him at all times, a pill for every occasion. He was the type of man more likely to stare at a wall for six hours when he was high than talk about the wonders of the universe, but he and Leif had been crossing paths for years, and found it easier to call themselves friends than anything else. Red was as logical and down to earth as anyone Leif had ever met, if prone to brawling. If anyone could offer some perspective on the peacock, it was him.
“What do you mean you saw God?” Red grunted over the phone.
“Not God-god, a different god,” Leif said. The peacock watched him, seemingly judging his every word. “The god of . . . truth, or beauty or— I don’t know. Enlightenment.”
“You know you sound nuts, right?”
“Yeah, I know. But listen, get over here and judge for yourself, okay? I’m telling you, there’s something about this thing. He’s not a normal bird.”
Red grunted again and hung up, but he came. He pulled in on his big hulking motorcycle, the machine choking out fumes, and parked beside Leif’s trailer. By then the peacock was perched on the edge of the aluminum roof, his tail cascading down over the window, and he looked back over his shoulder to watch Red’s approach. Leif rose from his chair to greet him.
“That’s a hell of a bird,” Red said eventually. “Bigger than I thought. Don’t know about it being any god, though. You sure all that shit you smoke hasn’t fried your brain?”
“I haven’t tried anything you haven’t,” Leif retorted, but it was the peacock that demanded the last word. He shrieked and launched himself from the roof to assault Red in a flurry of feathers and talons, and Red shrieked in return and fell to the ground, his arms up to protect his face.
“Okay, all right!” he hollered, curling up while trying to fend the bird off. “I believe you! It’s a god!”
The peacock hopped back a pace and cocked his head to one side, watching him. Red slowly got to his knees, his arms and face covered in scratches. He and Leif watched the bird, wary in case he launched a second attack. Instead, the peacock took another step back and fanned out his tail, keeping his gaze fixed on them all the while.
Now, Leif wasn’t given to superstition. He hadn’t been raised in a barn. He’d gone to college and studied poetry and philosophy, looking for anything to give his life a little meaning, though the student loans had piled up too quick and he’d dropped out before finishing his degree. Then he’d gone off grid for a while to avoid the debt collectors, and things had spiraled from there. The point was, he’d had an education, and he wasn’t the sort to unquestioningly follow the first thing that showed any promise of spiritual fulfillment. But when the peacock spread his tail, Leif dropped to his knees alongside Red, his hands pressed to the dusty ground as he leaned forward until his forehead touched the dirt. Submitting himself like that brought the strangest sense of serenity, like all his worldly troubles were drifting away, out of reach and suddenly meaningless in the face of this beautiful, radiant creature.
And sure, maybe the drugs had fried his brain. It was possible. But the thing was, once they started showing the peacock to other people, they all agreed that there was something about the bird as well. The peacock made them feel things about life and beauty and the universe that they’d never felt before, and if that wasn’t the sign of some kind of godhood, Leif didn’t know what was. That, and the fact that as soon as the peacock arrived, his luck had started to change. Things started to go right again for the first time in years. He’d found a twenty-dollar bill on the ground that very day, and that was only the beginning.
From there, the cult seemed like a natural progression of events. He and Red were the only members at first, and they didn’t call it a cult then. But the more time they spent communing with the bird, the more attention they attracted from like-minded individuals. Boar came next, a great hulking mountain of a man, like a Viking berserker from centuries past, lookin
g for a community and a purpose. By that time Leif had determined his own purpose in life, which was to devote himself entirely to the peacock in return for his feathery blessing, and he was happy to bring others into the fold. Boar took to worship like it was a lifeline saving him from drowning, and everything escalated quickly after that.
They named their god to better worship it: Incandescent and All-Seeing. They shaved their heads like monks, forsaking all earthly beauty, and tattooed themselves with the images and messages they saw in their visions. Leif sold his trailer and bought a motorcycle, and traveled to hold court in music festivals and hippie camps, preaching the gospel that flowed from the universe straight into his brain. He had a gift for talking; all those years of reading poetry had left him with a deep, lilting intonation and an unusually developed vocabulary that caused his audience to sit up and pay attention, even the skeptics. Leif didn’t actively recruit people to the order, but more did join, here and there. Some stayed for a few days, some for a few years. It always hurt when they left, for whatever reason, but the peacock never seemed inclined to smite them for their abandonment, so Leif didn’t either.
They rarely strayed out of Nevada. The peacock had come to them in the desert, and in the desert they would stay, haunting the highways on their motorcycles as their god watched over them from above. They took money where they found it, whether from hustling pool at roadside dives, or jacking cars for parts when out-of-state drivers broke down in the desert and had to pull over and call for help. It wasn’t always a legal living, but Leif thought it was an honest one. Spiritually honest: that was the important thing. Otherwise, the cops should have caught them by now. Bald and tattooed, they were hardly inconspicuous: dressed all in dusty motorcycle leathers, roaming the desert like great earthbound vultures. They had to be on the right path. Otherwise, the peacock would have abandoned them, and they would have gone to jail.
Now:
“Where to next?” Red asked.