by Daryl Banner
Something about my effect on him was intoxicating. It made me feel powerful.
And it wasn’t like all the creeps whose attention I attracted when I walked past them in a smoky bar or on the street. James’s attention was wanted, and it felt like a doggie treat. If I had a tail, it’d be wagging proudly at the way his eyes turn to goo at the sight of my bare chest.
I was proud of my body, even if it was somewhat of a ghost of the body I used to have when I lived in a house, ate regular meals, and had access to my protein powder and school gym. I had a lot of luck on my side this past year, despite having to dodge a lot of grabby-handed creeps to score an often-enough meal ticket.
James dropped into the chair. That wasn’t going to fly with me—not tonight. “Get your ass up on this bed with me.”
He looked up. “Huh?”
“What is it? Do I smell or something?” I lifted an arm and gave a sniff. “Nope. Quit being a weirdo and get your ass up on this bed to watch the movie with me.”
After a moment of sputtering incoherently and failing to form a proper protest, he finally shrugged and climbed up onto the bed, taking his position by my side. Our backsides rested comfortably against the headboard, propped up by strategically-placed pillows.
He was still wearing his clothes from the day. Jeans and a red t-shirt. Of course I was going to pick on him for that, too.
“Aren’t you gonna get comfortable?”
James faced me. “Huh? I am comfortable.”
“Your clothes, dude. You smell like casino smoke, cheap beer, and hookers.” I nudged him with my elbow. “Go and get changed. Get comfy. Movie’s about to start.”
He gave me a short, indignant look, then slid off the bed and went to his bag. He fished for a new shirt and some shorts, then headed for the bathroom.
“Just change right there,” I called out.
James stopped at the bathroom door and stared at me with a look of bafflement on his face, not knowing what to do.
“We’re both dudes,” I pointed out tiredly. “So what’s the big deal?” I gave him a once-over. “Unless you’re shy or some shit.”
I loved the way my taunts made his face redden. Literally, just the sight of it made my heart race with pleasure. Did I mention how much I loved power trips?
Or maybe it’s something about James and that way he looks at me.
“Jeez,” he mumbled. “You’re bossy.”
The corner of my lip curled up. I crossed my arms behind my head, kicked back, then returned my attention to the TV.
After a moment of reluctance, he actually indulged me. He turned his back, undid his pants, then dropped them to his ankles. He kept his back turned to me the whole time—like he really was a shy little bitch—as he kicked off his pants and pulled on his pair of blue shorts.
Of course I was really watching him while he changed.
Something about him obliging me was exciting. I was so used to being shooed out of buildings, or yelled at by other grouchy homeless people on the street, or scolded by police officers who were called out on phony trespassing claims, that making little trivial demands of James—and having him actually obey—gave me a sick and pleasurable thrill.
Is that fucked up?
When he took off his shirt, I still didn’t take my eyes off of him. I noticed that James’s back was smooth and tapered, his shoulders broader than they seemed when he had his clothes on. It surprised me a bit, the shape of his body.
I don’t know why I was surprised. My first impression of him was that he was a handsome motherfucker, even if I was pissed for a minute because he crashed into me on my way out of the hotel. But it had been my experience up until then that people looked better with their clothes on.
Instead, shirtless, James appeared strong, confident, and solid as a wall. Yet that big guy was flustered the moment I whipped off my shirt.
James seemed to be a series of contradictions.
Finally, he pulled on his white tee with dragons on the front—the same one he wore last night—then closed up his bag. When he strolled back to his side of the bed, he had a tightened expression and didn’t look at me once.
“So what’s this movie called?” I asked.
James froze for a second next to the bed until he realized what I asked. He was so damned skittish. “Uh … I … I don’t know.”
“We don’t know what we’re watching?”
He slid into place on the bed. “I …” He straightened his spine, then seemed to find his self-assurance again. “Well, I guess we’re just going to have to live dangerously tonight and watch whatever the heck this channel runs at midnight.”
I grunted appreciatively at that. Then the next minute, timely as ever, the movie started.
During the dark, arty mess of a low budget drama on the TV, I felt the thick tension between our bodies as firm and hard as my nipples in the cold air of the hotel room. I don’t know if it was all my time I spent on the streets—watching over my shoulder, studying the behaviors of others closely, looking people in the eye, listening to the way their words and breaths changed when they spoke—but I had become an expert at body language.
And James was giving a damned monologue with his body.
He wanted me. Badly. He was also pretty much paralyzed. His legs were crossed so tightly, he could suffocate a molecule between his thighs. His arms were folded against his chest like he was protecting his nipples from mortal danger. His breaths were short and somewhat noisy, like he couldn’t get enough oxygen to his brain to function properly. I guarantee you that if I slapped his leg without warning, he’d springboard through the roof and stop with his head lodged up some guy’s ass on the tenth floor.
But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I allowed myself to relax, took calm and even breaths, and paid attention to the movie.
The movie, unexpectedly, hit too close to home. Instead of the cinematic trash of Hollywood clichés and big name actors gunning for Oscars, my own life rolled past my eyes in scenes of —my own life, which was considerably scarier, and real.
A well-off mother and her son, the pair of them inseparable.
A well-off father who spent more time making love to his job and his money and his things than he did his own wife.
A mother who grew incurably ill.
A father who sought comfort with a sweet young office intern during this trying time.
A mother whose new residence was a casket lined by roses.
A father who remarried two months later. To the intern.
A son whose brand new mother wasn’t even ten years older than him.
A father who demanded his son’s acceptance of the new life and the new wife and the new strife he had forced upon him.
A son who kept his mother’s picture by his bed, framed.
A step-mother who couldn’t stand the son’s existence because it prevented her from having the father—and his riches—all to herself. Like the son was an unwanted hand-me-down. Like the son was a spot of residue on an otherwise pristine, sparkly new house she got to live in.
Along with her new thousand-dollar fur coats.
And her twenty pairs of designer heels.
A step-mother who decided she needed a lot more room for all her new belongings in her already enormous walk-in closet.
And who made said room by throwing away all of the garbage that remained there.
A son whose only sweet memories of his mother was among that garbage.
Wedding dress. Irreplaceable photos. A sketch of a garden of daisies he drew her when he was in sixth grade that she kept all these years. A necklace he picked out for her for Christmas the year after he learned Santa wasn’t the one eating the cookies.
A father who threatened to raise the back of his hand to his son’s face when his son dared to call his step-mother a cunt.
Cunt became his new favorite word that fateful night.
The next time he used the word, it gave him a black eye.
As well as the idea to
run away.
He was only seventeen.
A son who packed the one photo he still had into a backpack along with four pairs of socks, underwear, five balled-up shirts, his lucky black cap, a box of colored pencils, and his sketchpad.
And he never looked back.
When the credits rolled, the music was a piano piece, soft at first, then building to an explosive crescendo with swelling strings and horns singing. I wished I could say I got such a fanfare when I made my departure from home. Instead, all I got was a ringing silence at my back—a silence that might as well have carried my father’s voice and whispered, “Good riddance.”
Just kidding. The notion of him saying goodbye at all, even as a ghostly nonexistent whisper, was too ridiculous to fathom.
Maybe he’d died and Countess Cunt inherited it all.
The thought made me laugh out loud.
James turned to look at me, frowning at my sudden outburst that totally shattered the solemn mood of the dramatically rolling credits. I still laughed, imagining that bitch drowning in a pile of her Louis Vuitton bags like quicksand, desperately reaching for the arm of a coatrack to pull herself free, makeup running, tangled hair, an obnoxious thousand-carat diamond ring on each finger.
“You alright?”
I took a breath, all out of laughs, then nodded. “Superb.”
“That was a really heavy movie.”
Typical me, playing off anything emotional, I just shrugged. “Sure.” I looked over at him. “Is this Chopin?”
He wrinkled his face. “What?”
“The credit music. Is it Chopin?”
“Oh. No. I have no idea who it is. The film composer, I guess.”
“I like it.” I pulled a pillow to my chest and hugged it tightly, squinting at the screen as the credits lazily rolled by.
James’s eyes hovered on me for a while before he spoke. “You sure you’re alright?”
“Yep. Said I was, didn’t I?”
“It’s just …” He struggled to find the words. “It’s just that I still don’t really know your story. And we just watched a movie about a kid who was kicked out of his house for—”
“We just watched another exploitive Hollywood piece of shit,” I cut him off, “written by a team of arrogant Hollywood writers who were given a homework assignment to write Meryl Streep another Academy Award-winning role.”
James frowned. “She wasn’t in the movie. I love Meryl Streep.”
“That movie doesn’t even touch on what it feels like to be …” I shut myself up, then rolled my eyes. “Whatever. Let all the idiots who watched this piece of shit continue acting like it moved and stirred them. They’ll still leave the movie theater wearing their big mink coats and stroll right past the starving kid sitting on the curb outside collecting change in his shoe.”
I felt James watching the side of my face. I knew he was trying not to pry. It was impressive, how long he’d resisted poking into my past. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to open up to him. After all, he’d opened up his hotel room and his wallet to me; that was pretty much already a statement of trust.
“So you … were kicked out?”
The question was gentle, perhaps made more so by the soft, not-Chopin credit music filling the room. I let out a sigh. “No. I ran away. I ran away when I was seventeen.”
James said nothing. He only listened, waiting for more.
Then, after a moment to steel myself, I finally let it out. I let it all out. My mother’s death. My father’s remarriage. Countess Cunt. My fateful decision to leave. The lack of my father coming after me and how that spoke volumes about where his heart was.
The one and only thing I didn’t mention was that I really did come from a wealthy family. My father’s greed paid off in giving me and my mom a privileged life, until she died and was replaced by a younger, greedier match for him. I left it all behind when I ran away to the beach and the casinos. The wealth meant nothing, so I left it out of my story. I didn’t even give it a second thought.
“Where did you go?” he asked.
“To my friends’ houses, at first. But their parents never let me stay. It was surprising, how little sympathy anyone ever had. I was just a mooch. Or a third wheel. Or deadweight. I tried going back to school, but I’d fallen so far behind, and no teacher bothered to figure out why. They all saw me as the rebel loser who gave his dad the finger.” I shrugged and let out a chuckle. “Fuck it. Maybe that’s exactly what I was.”
“No one saw the pain you were going through.”
The last thing I wanted to do was admit how much emotional anguish I was in, especially during those first months. I learned quickly to resent all my best friends and their families, none of whom shed a bit of sympathy for me. “I took a bus to the beach,” I finished, “and never looked back.”
“And you’ve been here on the streets for … how long?”
“A little over a year.”
James was doing the math. Then he eyed me. “H-How old are you, exactly?”
There we go. “Does it matter?” I countered.
“Yeah,” he answered too quickly. Then: “I-I mean … well …”
“It doesn’t change who I am. It’s just a number.”
“Yeah, but if I’m …” He swallowed and tried to formulate his thoughts. “What I mean is, if you’re … uh …”
“Nineteen.”
He didn’t respond after that, but I knew his eyes were on me. I guessed he didn’t know what to make of the fact that he’d been ogling someone all weekend who wasn’t even old enough to drink.
“So is that it?” I asked, not looking at him. “I’m too young for you now? You want me to grab my shit and go?”
“No.” James shook his head. “No, no, no. I’m not …” He sighed and shifted on the bed. “Sorry. I just thought you were … older.”
“Wait until you see me shaven,” I teased him dryly.
He studied me. “You’re really nineteen?”
“And how old are you?” I faced him. His eyes were glazed over as the question smacked him across his cheek. “Well?”
He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “How old do you think I am?”
“Wouldn’t put you a day past twenty-six.”
To that, James rolled his eyes.
The thing was, I was serious. But since I had clearly undershot his age by a few years, I threw out another guess. “Twenty-eight.”
James gaped at me. “Are you serious? You think I’m still in my twenties?”
Now it was my turn to squint confusedly at him. Was this guy dicking with me? “How the fuck old are you?”
“I’m thirty-three.”
“No fucking way.”
“Yep.” James tilted his head. “But age is just a number, right?”
The sarcasm in his tone tickled me. For an instant, I felt like I was just shoving back and forth with a buddy of mine from school. James knew how to match my occasional cynicism. When I played at him, he played right back.
Well, most of the time. “Yeah, that’s what I said,” I agreed with a shrug. “Just another number.”
James shook his head. “Sorry. I still can’t believe it. I mean … I mean you’re not even old enough to legally gamble. How are you not getting kicked out of the casino every weekend?”
“You kidding? These motherfuckers don’t care. If you’re even able to find a security guard, you’ll find them asleep on a stool. I bet I could order a beer and the idiots wouldn’t blink.”
“You haven’t tried?”
“No. I don’t drink.”
James gnawed on his lip and glanced away. After a moment of awkward silence, he finally said, “I think I’m gonna go take a leak and … brush my teeth.” Then he slid off the bed and headed for the bathroom.
After the door shut behind him, I stared at the wall. I hoped I didn’t just fuck everything up with us sharing our ages. Also, I wasn’t exactly expecting to pour out my life story to him so soon. That dumb movie just w
orked as a catalyst, and now everything was out in the open.
But maybe I needed all the cards on the table. It was the only way I could feel like he saw the real me—and not just some homeless rat sniffing the beer-stained curbs.
With this ball of angst in my brain, I opened up my backpack on the nightstand, pulled out my big sketchpad and a blood red pencil, then flipped to a fresh page and started to draw.
Yeah, blood red felt like my mood at the moment.
And the sketch that started to take shape before me matched the feelings in me all the more.
Then suddenly there was a bump followed by a groan of pain.
I tossed my sketches aside, hopped off the bed, and poked my head into the bathroom. James was in front of the mirror rubbing his elbow. When he turned to me, he shook his head. “I’m fine,” he insisted. “Just bumped my arm on the counter. The bad one.”
I frowned. “That motherfucker’s still bothering you?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“You need to have it wrapped,” I told him. “Apply pressure to it. Your elbow needs to heal.”
“I’ve had it bandaged all week. The damned thing is just … I don’t know … bruised or something.”
“Go lie on the bed,” I told him, then pushed past him to grab a towel. When I realized he was still there, I repeated myself a touch firmer. “I said go lie on the bed.”
James sighed, then left the bathroom. I heard the bed shift with his weight, which made me smirk. The thirty-three-year-old obeys the nineteen-year-old. I ran the water until it was steaming hot, then drenched a hand towel. Bringing the hot wet one and a dry body towel with me, I left the bathroom and came over to his side of the bed where a wary James sat waiting for me.
“Lie back,” I told him.
He lay back so fast, he bumped his head against the wall. With a wince, he situated himself comfortably, then relaxed and looked up at me, waiting.
“It’s this arm, right?” I asked, indicating the one closer to me.
“Yep,” he croaked.
He tensed the moment I touched him, but seemed to play it off like he was totally relaxed. Of course I hid my own knowing smirk as I wrapped the hot towel around his elbow, then secured it in place with the dry one, wrapping it as tightly as I could. James didn’t grimace, so I figured it wasn’t too tight. I tucked the end of the towel into itself, and it retained its tension.