by BB Easton
“Fuck you,” I spat through my clenched teeth, limping past him and into the hallway. “Your evil drugs did this to me.”
“I’ll report your complaint to the customer service department.” He chuckled, grabbing me by the arm to help stabilize me.
I’d never had a brother—or a sister, for that matter—but in that moment, I kind of felt like I had both. All I’d wanted to do was to come inside and pee, but somehow, I’d ended up bonding with two complete strangers in the most amazing way.
Just before we went outside, Jason pulled an elegant-looking card out of his wallet and handed it to me. “Hey, I have people over every Sunday to watch football and The Sopranos. It’s usually an all-day thing. You and your boyfriend should come.”
I took the business card and studied it. Jason Priest, Information Technology Specialist, 770-555-8730. Slate gray with embossed white font. Very nice.
Looking up at him with my other hand poised on the door handle, I said, “One question: do we have to wear khakis to this shindig?”
Jason smiled. “No. Chinos are also acceptable.”
Stepping from the house to the yard was like going from heaven to hell all over again; only this time, hell was outside, in the form of fire. The band had finished playing, the sun had completely set, and everyone was engaged in some kind of fire play. The bonfire was now at least ten feet tall, licking at the dried leaves on the early-autumn trees. A few people were twirling flaming sticks like batons, and Steven was standing—barefoot—at one end of an eight-foot-long bed of hot coals.
“Fuck yeah!”
“You got this, man!”
“Do that shit!”
“Go! Go! Go! Go!”
Steven had a cheering section that consisted of most of the Phantom Limb guys, at least a dozen black-lipstick-wearing regulars whose names I’d never bothered to learn, and Goth Girl, who was also barefoot and raring to go.
Before I could go get the garden hose, Steven howled at the moon like a werewolf and took off. I grabbed Jason’s arm and watched in horror as Steven’s feet lifted and sank, one after the other, into the glowing orange coals. I readied myself to run back into the house and call 911 as soon as it was over, but much to my surprise, Steven seemed okay. He kind of danced around and rubbed his feet in the grass, but he still had feet, and he wasn’t screaming, so that was good.
Everyone else was screaming though. Holy shit. Walking over hot coals was a real crowd pleaser.
Especially when the entire crowd was high on ecstasy.
I let go of Jason’s arm and clasped my hands over my mouth. “Did you just see that shit?”
Jason looked at me with wide eyes. “I’m doing it.”
“No! What?”
Jason chugged the rest of his beer, kicked off his loafers and socks right there on the patio, and sprinted over to get in line.
Fucking men. Always trying to prove how big their balls are.
Speaking of men, there was one in the crowd who I knew for a fact didn’t have shit to prove to anybody. When you’re the tallest, most beautiful male at the party and your nickname literally refers to the size of your massive cock, you get to take an automatic pass in the pissing contests.
I scanned the crowd gathering around the hot coals, looking for a handsome dark head sticking up above the rest, but I didn’t see him. I glanced over at the two flaming baton twirlers. Nope. No Hans.
Then, I found him. He was sitting in a lawn chair, our lawn chair, but he wasn’t alone. A girl with frizzy brown hair was standing in front of him, excitedly moving her arms in an attempt to regain his attention. But Hans was nothing if not distractible, and at that moment, his entire focus was on me.
Warmth radiated from my chest throughout my extremities as I drank in the sight of him. Hans was almost a shadow with his faded black jeans, black Converse, black Phantom Limb hoodie—which I couldn’t wait to steal—and wild black hair, but his aura was red, red, red.
Like his bass, I thought as I crossed the yard. Like the roses he’s always surprising me with. Red like his heart.
Once I got closer, I realized that Hans’s aura wasn’t red for romance at all.
It was red for rage.
It radiated off of him with every heave of his chest, mirroring the flames rising from the wreckage behind him. As I approached, my pace slowed. My senses went on high alert. What had I missed? What was wrong? I hated that my brain wasn’t operating at full capacity. I wished Jason had a pill in his pocket that would make me sober again so that I could assess the situation better.
“Hey, baby. You okay?” I asked, my eyes flicking back and forth between Hans and the girl with the unfortunate hair.
Was she upsetting him? She looked as confused as I was, her black lips pulled down into a frown, so I didn’t think so.
Hans was backlit by the bonfire, but there was enough ambient light coming from the house for me to see the outline of his jaw flexing as he ground his back teeth together.
“You missed it,” he spat.
“Missed what?”
Hans stood up abruptly, causing the collapsible aluminum chair he’d been sitting in to fall over backward, and jerked a hand in the direction of the patio. “The whole fucking show.”
My heart seized in my chest as the weight of Hans’s words sank in.
He was mad because of me.
The frizzy-haired girl graciously tiptoed away as I struggled to breathe. It had never even occurred to me that Hans was waiting for me. The thought of him spending his entire performance searching the audience for me made me nauseous.
“Hans…”
“You didn’t come outside for one fucking song.” The hurt broke through the anger, causing his voice to shudder at the end.
“I’m so sorry. I was taking care of Maddie. When I went inside—”
“Maddie? That’s who you were inside with? Because I saw who you came out with, and it definitely wasn’t a six-year-old girl.”
My head was spinning. There were so many thoughts flying around in my scattered brain, but I couldn’t reach out and grab just one. I’d grab like four and drop them all before one could even make it out of my mouth. “Hans, please…it’s not like…Maddie was…I wasn’t…”
“Who is he?” Hans asked, glaring at me in the dark.
“Who?”
“Whoever the fuck you were hanging all over when you came outside.” Hans gestured toward the patio again.
I closed my eyes to block out the look on Hans’s face. I never wanted to see it again. The accusation. The anger. Hans and I were joined, had been since before we met, and the drugs only intensified that bond. If he was happy, I was euphoric. If he was in pain, I was in agony.
I couldn’t think out there with the blazing inferno and fire walkers and fire twirlers and two-dozen screaming goth kids all vying for my attention in the background. I put my hands over my ears, kept my eyes shut tight, and shook my head in frustration. I focused on the words swirling around in my head and spat them out before something had the chance to distract me again. “I’m sorry! I’m fucked up, okay? I was taking care of Maddie, and I didn’t think you would miss me with all these people here. Jason is just a friend. He invited us to watch The Sopranos. He said we have to wear khakis or chinos. I don’t even know what chinos are! And now you’re mad at me and people are walking on hot coals and I don’t know what the fuck happened, but I just want us to be happy again.”
I could hear Hans talking, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying with my ears covered and the extreme noise in the background. I felt his fingers, rough yet gentle, wrap around my wrists and slowly pull my hands away from my head. I opened my eyes, reluctantly, as the screaming and cheering and music and laughter and snap, crackle, pop of the fire came flooding back in. Hans was crouched down in front of me, pupils like inky-black oceans, awash in regret.
“Stop it. I’m sorry, okay? I just…freaked out. As soon as you left…this horrible feeling came over me. Like dread. I felt li
ke everyone was laughing at me while I was playing. And I couldn’t find you. And then I worried that something had happened to you, but I couldn’t get to you because I was stuck out there, playing music for people I don’t even fucking like. People who were laughing at me. And I got so fucking pissed off, I wanted to bash all their faces in with my bass.”
I wrapped my arms around Hans’s neck and burst out laughing.
“What?” he snapped.
“You wanted to bash their faces in?”
“God, yes. I just got so fucking paranoid and pissed off.”
“Your brain is on backward!” I giggled. “You drink coffee to calm down, you focus better when you’re high, and you’re the only person I know who hates everyone after taking ecstasy!”
Hans grinned and pressed his forehead against mine. “I don’t hate you.”
Something shifted in the atmosphere around us. Molecules quickened. Particles merged.
“You don’t?” I cooed.
Hans shook his head slowly from side to side, causing mine to turn with it. “I worship you.”
My body melted and slid to the ground, leaving Hans with nothing but my soul to hold on to.
My soul and my lips.
I kissed away the darkness. The doubts and the fears. I kissed Hans until I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began. I kissed him until I felt the corners of his mouth curl up in joy. And once I knew I had him back, I took him by the hand and led him to bed.
“Shit,” I whispered, closing the door to Maddie’s room as quietly as I could in my fucked-up condition. “We don’t have anywhere to sleep.”
Hans pulled me back into his arms. “We have a whole house on the lake we can sleep in.”
“Can you drive?” I knew I couldn’t. I could barely find my next thought, let alone my way home in the dark.
“I think so.”
Good enough for me.
Hans and I left without saying goodbye and drove away with our hands clasped over the stick shift. It felt so nice in the car. Calm. Cozy. It smelled like leather and menthol cigarettes. The heater warmed my bones. The dashboard lights were a soothing blue. Not bright and flashing like the ones on the police cruiser, fire truck, and ambulance that flew past us as we neared the entrance of Steven’s neighborhood.
I vaguely wondered if they were going to Steven’s house, but the thought drifted away as the first notes of Jimmy Eat World came swirling from Hans’s speakers. The BMW’s engine was so quiet, the ride so smooth, that I felt like we were floating over the road. Hans seemed to drive better fucked up than sober, just one more way that his brain worked in reverse, and I smiled, thinking about what a unique, magical snowflake he was. Even his packaging was reversed—dark and hard, manly, intimidating—the complete opposite of the soul housed inside.
When I looked out my window and saw acres of water instead of the usual wall of hundred-foot-tall pine trees, I knew we were almost home. To get to the Oppenheimers’ estate, you had to drive across the lake, over the top of a hydroelectric dam. That stretch of road always made me nervous because the only thing separating the cars from the lake was a few feet of grass, a simple guardrail, and a sheer drop-off to certain death. So naturally, Hans chose that exact spot to stop and admire the view.
When he slowed down and pulled onto the grassy shoulder, I panicked, thinking we must have gotten a flat tire or something, but Hans didn’t seem worried or upset. Instead of calling a tow truck or busting out a tire iron, he rolled down all four windows and cranked the stereo up.
“C’mere.” He grinned, squeezing my thigh before hopping out of the car.
I followed him without question, drawn to the pulsing glow surrounding his body. Hans’s energy field wasn’t red, red, red anymore. It was pink, pink, pink. I wanted to touch it. To swirl my fingers through it to see if it would dissipate like steam or flicker like a hologram.
Hans stepped over the metal guardrail, causing my breath to hitch, then turned and held his hands out to help me over. I forgot my fear when I reached out to grasp his glowing hands and perceived a faint pink light surrounding my own.
We matched.
We matched.
“Listen,” Hans said as I sat beside him on the guardrail. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and planted a kiss on my disheveled blonde head as the next song on his Jimmy Eat World CD began to play.
Hans had told me to listen, but I was too busy admiring the view to hear anything. The surface of the lake looked as if someone had taken the night sky and spread it out like a picnic blanket before us. A million crystalline points of light billowed and swayed below us while a million more floated overhead, just out of reach.
“Did you hear that?” he asked. “The first star you see might not be.” I blinked at him in confusion, then realized he was quoting a line from the song. “What do you think it means?”
I loved Hans’s random deep questions. There was an intimacy to them.
What’s in your brain? Can I see it? Will you show me yours if I show you mine?
“I don’t know,” I said, lacing our fingers together and watching the pink glow intensify everywhere that our skin touched. “But he’s right. Usually, the first star I see is actually a satellite or a planet or an airplane. Tonight, I didn’t really notice the stars until I saw them reflected on the water, so I guess those stars aren’t really stars either.” I gazed at the glittery black expanse before us and breathed it in. “It looks like two skies, doesn’t it?”
Hans nodded, rubbing his thumb over mine. I smiled, remembering how, just a few short months ago, that simple gesture had made my heart skip and my knees weak.
“I know what it means,” Hans said, looking down at me with eyes as black as the lake below. “You’re the first star I see. Before anything in the sky, I see you.”
I could barely make out the features of his face, but I kissed the first one that came into view. I think it was his chin. Then another. His nose? “I’m pretty sure you’re the star in this relationship, LDH,” I teased, finally kissing his lips.
“You’re wrong,” he murmured against my mouth, sliding his tongue along the top edge of my bottom lip. “You’re so fucking wrong.”
The insides of my eyelids glowed hot pink as I accepted Hans’s kiss. Felt it light me up from the inside out, making my bones hum like neon tubes.
I stood up, ignoring the precipice behind me, the black mirror below that would swallow me whole with one wrong step, and climbed onto the lap of my beautiful, backward boy.
I trusted him to hold on to me, and he trusted me not to let go.
I kissed Hans slowly, deeply, like I had nowhere to be and forever to get there. But he wasn’t as patient. Hans kept one arm locked around my waist but let his other hand roam. He unzipped my hoodie—covered in the patches of punk rock bands that I no longer listened to—and slid the threadbare cotton off my shoulders. I slipped my arms out of the sleeves, one at a time, and gasped as a gust of wind caught it like a boat sail and carried it away. Poof. My old life, my high school identity, my facade…into the abyss.
I didn’t mourn it for a moment.
I shivered as the cool night air whipped across my freckled skin, but Hans’s breath was soon there to chase the chill away. As he marked each brown imperfection with a kiss, his hand continued to travel. He slipped his fingers underneath the straps of my bra and tank top and pulled them down, first over my left shoulder, then over my right. I tilted my head back as he kissed his way across my collarbone. My eyes naturally landed on the brightest speck in the sky, and I smiled when I realized it was moving.
“The first star you see might not be.”
My bra slid down to my waist under its own weight, and my nipples hardened instantly against my thin white tank top. Hans’s one roaming hand took advantage, palming me over the fabric, as my hips gave up the fight and began to grind against him in slow circles.
“Listen,” he said again, returning his free hand to my back.
He used bot
h arms to support my weight as he leaned me backward and kissed his way down my breastbone. I tensed, squeezing my eyes shut and fisting his hoodie, but when I felt Hans’s warm, wet mouth close around my cotton-covered nipple, my body surrendered. I opened my eyes, stared at a satellite, and listened as Jim Adkins sang about taking a night drive and making love in the moonlight.
It felt as if the entire universe had conspired to make that moment happen. The sky had shooed away the clouds and thrown a little extra sparkle on the stars to lure Hans off the road. Jimmy Eat World had whispered in our ears to go for it. And the gods had stopped all traffic on the dam just long enough for Hans and me to follow orders.
I stood and locked eyes with my twin soul as we reached for each other’s belt buckles at the same time. Our movements were in perfect concert with one another, as if the music were the puppet master and the stars on the water below were our audience. I leaned forward and kissed him, our tongues possessed by slippery synchronicity as we unzipped each other’s jeans. I shimmied my mine down below my ass just as Hans reached into his and freed himself. Without breaking our kiss, I turned my body toward the mirrored sky and gasped as Hans spread my cheeks with both hands and guided me to sit all the way down on his lap, filling me inch by euphoric inch.
Once Hans and I were finally joined in the one remaining way we knew how, he wrapped his strong, warm, sweatshirt-covered arms around my waist, rested his chin on my shoulder, and sighed. The breeze cooled the damp spots on my tank top where his mouth had been, causing my nipples to strain against the thin fabric. I rolled my hips, moaning in response to the friction inside. The roar of the wind and the water caught my cries and whisked them away.
“No need to be quiet out here,” they said.
I rolled my hips more, feeling bolder, and slid my hands down to grip Hans’s knees.
“Mmm,” I hummed, feeling the vibration everywhere.
“Fuck,” Hans growled as his hips began to thrust.
“Mmmmmm,” I hummed louder, turning my head to capture his beautiful face in another kiss.