by John Inman
Boz stepped back to put some distance between himself and the intruder. “You’re drunk, I see. Some things never change.”
“I’ve missed you,” the man said, ignoring the accusation. His words were only slightly slurred.
Boz had to tilt his head up to study Bobby Mayfield’s face in the moonlight. Even in the wee hours of the morning, and stumbling home from a bar after God knows how many hours of drinking, Bobby’s face was handsome. But that handsomeness did absolutely nothing for Boz. He had lived through the best and the worst of what this man had to offer, and he wasn’t about to get roped in again.
“I don’t care if you’ve missed me,” Boz all but spat out the words. “Answer my question. What are you doing here? Why are you following me?”
Bobby’s eyes slid to the dumpster and back again. “Doing a little roadwork?”
“Maybe. Why? Is that illegal or something?”
Bobby dredged up one of his charming grins. Grin number four, Boz thought it was. He had a whole medley of them, after all, and Boz had learned to know and fear each and every one of them during the ten months he and Bobby Mayfield had been together. He felt a little sick remembering how this particular grin had once captivated him. But he was dumber then. It wouldn’t captivate him again.
Boz didn’t wait for an answer, because he didn’t really care what the answer would be. He sidestepped Bobby Mayfield and headed for the back door to his cottage. He only made it three steps before Bobby reached out, snagged his shirt sleeve, and pulled him back.
“Don’t go, Boz. Let me come in for a while.” He had applied honey to his voice since the last time he said anything. Boz wasn’t about to fall for that either.
Boz narrowed his eyes. He could feel himself start to quiver with rage. “What’s the matter? Have you run out of people to beat on? Decided to come back and finish the job you started with me?”
Bobby stepped back as if he’d been slapped. “I apologized for that. More than once!”
“Sometimes an apology isn’t enough.”
He took a closer look at Bobby’s dilated pupils in the light of the streetlamp on the corner. “You’re on meth again, aren’t you? I thought you gave that shit up.”
Bobby sneered. “What I snort up my nose is my business.”
“And who I allow up my ass is mine. Now get the fuck away from me.”
Bobby wheedled, like he used to do in the old days when Boz caught him using drugs. “Come on, Boz. Don’t be like that.”
Boz stared down at his feet, trying to get a grip on his anger. He could hear his pulse pounding in his head. It wasn’t a happy pulse either. It was a flurry of rushing blood that exploded furious little synapses inside his skull with every heartbeat. He lifted his gaze to the man in front of him and saw the familiar sight of Bobby’s fists, clenched tight at his sides. That really brought back memories. “Please don’t make me call the cops on you, Bobby.”
Bobby faked a smile. He relaxed his hands, unfolding his fists, but still there was an undercurrent of fury roiling off him like waves of heat. Boz could see the anger smoldering in those green eyes he remembered so well.
“You wouldn’t do that,” Bobby quietly said. There was more threat than plea in the statement.
Just as quietly, Boz answered, “You’re wrong. Don’t make me prove it to you.”
Bobby reached up with a broad hand and pushed the hair back from his eyes. It was a movement Boz remembered well. There had been a time when Boz found it sexy, that strong hand sweeping through that mass of black hair. It brought back so many memories. Bobby’s size, for one. Wide shoulders, big forearms, broad chest, big dick. Boz once thought Bobby Mayfield was the sexiest man he had ever met. Now he was simply the most frightening man he had ever met. Especially when he was drunk and on crystal meth.
In the moonlight, a sheen of sweat glowed on Bobby’s forehead. Dark circles made shadows under Bobby’s eyes. Boz wondered how long he had been drinking and how much shit he had snorted. And if he was really whacked out of his mind, what might he be capable of? What exactly had he come here to do?
Boz’s eyes traveled around the alley, trying to find a way to escape. If he could just get to his cottage’s back door, he could lock Bobby out.
He made a move to duck past the man in front of him, but Bobby easily sidestepped his maneuver, blocking his path. At the same moment, Bobby reached out and roughly grabbed Boz’s arms, pulling him into a bone-crushing embrace. With his face slammed against Bobby’s chest, Boz heard Bobby chuckling in the dark. Down below, Bobby’s dick pressed against him. The fucker had a hard-on.
“Let me go,” Boz sputtered, fighting to wrench himself from Bobby’s embrace.
Bobby only grinned down at him in the dark. “You used to like this,” he crooned.
For the first time, Boz smelled Bobby’s foul breath. He had been sitting in a bar far too long without mouthwash and a toothbrush for his breath to be anything but disgusting. Boz could also smell sweat and cigarette smoke on the shirt that his face was pressed against. The shirt and the body beneath it were both in need of a good washing. He fought harder to escape.
Bobby pushed his lips into Boz’s hair. Bobby’s broad hand reached down and cupped Boz’s ass. He rolled his hard cock more insistently against Boz’s hip.
“You used to like this a lot,” Bobby purred in a deep grumble. “I used to throw you on the bed and fuck the living daylights out of you. Remember? You screamed and cried like I was killing you, but you really enjoyed it, didn’t you? You really dug the shit out of it.”
Boz tore himself free and took a step back. He was furious. “When you were gentle, I enjoyed it. But you were rarely gentle.”
Anger flared again in Bobby’s eyes. “I never hurt you, and you know it.”
“You’re a liar. You hurt me plenty, but you’ll never hurt me again. Now get the hell out of my way. I’m going home.”
“I want you back,” Bobby said. “I want to be with you again. I’ll be better. I promise. I’ll be good.”
It was all Boz could do not to laugh, and he would have if he hadn’t been afraid it would push Bobby over the edge and he’d really come after him.
“You could be declared a fucking saint by the Vatican and I still wouldn’t get anywhere near you. Now step aside and let me pass.”
Bobby stepped aside, but at the same time his eyes turned mean. His chest heaved with anger. He still had the boner poking down his pant leg. Boz could see it in the moonlight.
“This isn’t over,” Bobby seethed.
And at that, at long last, Boz let out a laugh. With a trembling hand, he pushed his key into his back door and stepped inside. Before closing the door behind him and locking Bobby out, he turned and said, “Trust me, Bobby. It’s over.”
And with a last parting grin, which was all for show since he certainly didn’t find anything amusing about what had just happened, he slammed the door in Bobby’s face. The last glimpse he had of his former lover was when he peeked through the window and saw Bobby driving his fist into the side of the dumpster.
Giving himself a shake to brush off the residue of fear, Boz quickly threw the dead bolt, yanked the curtains closed, and quietly backed away from the door. His heart was hammering like crazy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so scared. He stumbled backward all the way through the kitchen and deep into the living room, still eyeing the back door, wondering if Bobby was going to come crashing through it in one of his uncontrollable fits of fury.
Only when his back was against the far wall of the living room did Boz finally stop. Before he knew it was coming, a sob erupted from deep in his throat. Hot tears instantly welled up and spilled over onto his cheeks.
He collapsed on the sofa and sat in the dark for the longest time while Leon licked away his terror.
Exhausted beyond belief, he stayed on the couch with the dog tucked under his chin, too weary to even climb into bed. At his side, he spotted the LP he’d purchased from the Ret
ro Record Shoppe that afternoon. Like a drowning man, he grabbed it up and held it close to his chest.
Slowly his thumping heart quieted. His last waking thought was of Dilly Jones, and when he finally slept, a smile was on Boz’s lips. His terror, for the moment, forgotten.
An hour later, he was torn from sleep by the sound of a trash can clattering in the alley behind the cottage as if someone had just dealt it a kick and sent it clanging along the asphalt. It was such an impetuous act of childish fury that Boz never considered even for a second that it might still have anything to do with him.
A moment later, he heard a voice at the back door. A wheedling, plaintive voice that sent fresh fear coursing through him.
He clapped his hands to his ears and sat there as still as death. Cowering in the dark, he forced his mind away from the voice murmuring through the back door. If he concentrated hard enough, he found he didn’t have to hear the words at all.
Chapter Seven
BOBBY MAYFIELD understood anger. He lived with it almost every day of his life. It was his staunchest ally and his greatest weapon. It gave him strength when his own physical strength wasn’t enough, which was seldom. During the times when Bobby allowed himself to draw from that well of anger, he wielded it like a club. Unhesitatingly fighting back at life’s unfairness. Sometimes lashing out at the slights he was forced to endure at the hands of the people he worked with as a janitor at the VA Hospital in La Jolla. He was a veteran himself, for Christ’s sake. They should show him a little respect. Even if he did receive a dishonorable discharge and three months in the brig for popping a First Class Petty Officer in the snout back in his Navy days. His fellow fucking janitors didn’t know that. At least he didn’t think they did.
Lately of course, his anger had been focused solely on Boz.
The damp night air closed around Bobby as the reek from rotten food or dead cats or something spilled out of the dumpster behind him. He tore his eyes from the cottage window closest to him—Boz’s cottage window—and without thinking, without planning even three seconds into the future, he kicked a trash can so hard that trash flew every which way across the alley and the aluminum can landed ten feet away, a crumpled mess.
Somewhere in one of the other cottages a voice screamed out, “Shut up out there! We’re trying to sleep!”
Bobby screamed a returning, “Fuck you!” and the voice fell silent.
Bobby squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to calm down. He felt the anger flow through his veins like mercury until it coalesced into a fine point of heat somewhere deep in his belly. Like a tiny shimmering flame it lay there, burning. Red hot. Piercing. He aimed that needle-sharp blade of hatred directly at the cottage into which Boz had escaped.
There were no lights on inside the cottage. There hadn’t been since Boz disappeared inside it. He was probably cowering in a corner, trembling with fear. And trembling with something else as well. Hunger, maybe. That same old hunger that Bobby’s presence sent shuddering through Boz back in the old days. It didn’t matter if Boz denied it. Bobby knew better. Bobby knew exactly what Boz was made of. And how to turn him on.
He wondered what Boz would do if Bobby came crashing through the door, tore off Boz’s clothes, threw his naked ass on the bed, and fucked the daylights out of him right this very minute. It would be just like old times. Bobby remembered how Boz enjoyed being fucked. The little queer lapped it up with a spoon. Yes, sir. Especially when it was Bobby’s big dick doing the fucking.
In the stinking alley, with the dewy night air laying a sheen of cold dampness across his skin, Bobby reached down and stroked his long cock as it craned against the trouser fabric holding it back.
With a faint click of a trouser button and the metallic grind of a zipper sliding down, Bobby released his iron cock into his hand. He stroked it. Once. Twice. Shivering with desire, he felt it lengthening, hardening even more inside his fist.
Stepping closer to the door Boz had disappeared through, Bobby laid his cheek to the wood and listened. Down below, he stroked himself harder until the need for release built inside him like the welling up of steam. He remembered the sensation of burying his cock to the hilt inside Boz’s quivering, hungering body. The heat of him. The way he clawed at Bobby, pleading to be pierced deeper. Deeper.
“Let me in,” Bobby groaned, his lips to the filthy door, remembering back to the way it used to be. “Let me in, Boz. Please. Let me in.”
Suddenly, beyond even his own surprise, Bobby’s knees buckled as he pressed his bulging cock to the cold, unforgiving wood and bucked and bucked, his ass tight, his excited breathing sucking tiny, quick gasps of cold night air into his lungs. Until, with a weary, saddened cry, half-jubilation, half-rage, he spilled his seed against the door.
Emptied of lust for the moment, and shamed, too, by what he’d done, Bobby slid to his knees and came to rest, hunkered down on Boz’s back step. With his cheek still pressed to the cold door and the smear of hot liquid he had deposited there, he pleaded one last time in a voice barely audible even to himself.
“Let me in, Boz. Please.”
Only when angry tears began to mix with his own sexual juices on the wooden door did Bobby push himself away and rise to his feet on trembling legs. Why had he snorted so much crank? His head was aching. Adjusting his clothes, he gave one last shudder of shame and fury, and with his anger building yet again, he reeled off into the night with a curse, stumbling from both the alcohol and the drugs he had consumed and the emotions that only moments before had almost leveled him.
As if a little faggot like Boz Jenkins could level a man like Bobby Mayfield. No. No way. This wasn’t over yet, by God. Not by a long shot. He would make Boz plead for it again. He swore he would. And he would claim Boz for his own too.
For one short moment, Bobby Mayfield’s mind had almost revealed the truth to himself, that he needed Boz. That he loved him. But he shook that thought away before it could take root. This wasn’t about what Bobby needed, it was about what had once belonged to him, and what, by God, would one day belong to him again.
Mayfield receded down the alley, fading away through the shadows. In his wake, a spray of semen, cooling in the night air, lay drying on Boz’s back door. It was Bobby’s mark of ownership, spewed there by his hand, through his craven cock. A symbol of his unquenchable hunger for Boz Jenkins. And a symbol of his absolute refusal to be fucking ignored. It pleased Bobby, knowing he’d left his mark behind. Remembering that thick smear of jizz on Boz’s back door made him grin as he reeled through the city streets, heading for his car.
The next time he wouldn’t leave his jizz on the little fucker’s back door. He’d leave it buried deep in Boz’s tight little ass. Just wait and see if he didn’t.
Chapter Eight
DILLY HOPPED down the front steps of his apartment complex and immediately tangled his legs around a stupid orange traffic cone someone had left standing in the middle of the sidewalk. This time, at least, when he crashed to the ground he was graceful about it. He did a perfect three-point landing—two hands, one knee—and didn’t even break the skin anywhere. He clutched at his glasses to make sure they were still parked on his nose, then popped up again quickly before anyone spotted him. He was especially careful to gaze around at all the apartment windows staring down on the street, wondering if Boz Jenkins was out there somewhere watching him be a putz.
Not seeing anyone, he was about to walk on when he glanced down at the imperfection in the sidewalk. To his amazement, he saw that the ridge in the cement had been repaired. Of course! That’s what the cone was for! It didn’t look like a particularly professional repair job. In fact it looked like a three-year-old did it with Silly Putty and a Lincoln Log, but at least it was repaired. Somehow that pleased Dilly very much. It was nice to know there were invisible beings out there looking after things—gremlins maybe, or would they be sprites?—and that he personally didn’t have to worry about every little thing in the universe all on his own.
; On this brilliant Saturday morning, Dilly was on his way to the Street Saviors monthly get-together. Once every four weeks, Dilly and a reasonably large group of concerned citizens volunteered four hours of their time to pick up trash. Along the streets, inside the city parks, up and down the hillsides surrounding the freeways. Today, Dilly knew, they would be gathering litter along the Juniper Canyon hiking trail, a three mile stretch of beaten path that meandered through wooded areas where the health conscious came to stay healthy and absorb a bit of nature even if it was inside the city limits.
Being shy, Dilly was never entirely comfortable attending these Street Saviors affairs. It was more a matter of self-flagellation than anything else. He knew it was good for him to get out among people. It was the right thing to do for his fragile psyche in that it helped him fight back against his inclination to withdraw. It also alleviated a bit of the loneliness in his life. Even if he didn’t make any actual friends at the meetings, at least he did usually have someone to talk to for a few hours once a month.
Dilly knew the other Street Saviors considered him an odd duck. More than once he had seen them quietly snicker to themselves when Dilly did something clumsy or stupid, which he seemed to do on a regular basis no matter how hard he tried not to. Yet with the Street Saviors there was no unkindness about the way they treated Dilly. If anything, they seemed to understand and sympathize with his social weaknesses.
More than once, Dilly had been extended invitations to house parties and get-togethers from various members, but he always begged off, saying he had to work, or he had made other plans. Every time he did it, Dilly hated himself for it. But he also knew that if he accepted the invitations, he would be even more miserable than if he simply stayed home. It had taken Dilly a long time to learn the art of saying no. And now that he had learned it, even Dilly had to admit that sometimes he abused the privilege by using it too much.