There. It was done. Words. Spoken. Stephen waited for the relief to settle in, but now he realized the problem. Once you’d broken the ice, you were expected to keep talking.
“How are you?” he said.
“Fine. You?”
“Same,” said Stephen, still flailing, but surprisingly it was Venus who came to his rescue.
“I hear you’re doing the sins thing with Sheila.”
“Yeah. I’m Sloth.”
“Envy,” said Venus.
“Obviously.” This time it was Helena speaking, and she couldn’t avoid throwing a smidgen of shade into the word. After all, Venus was pretty damn obvious.
There was an uncomfortable pause. Venus took an audible breath and then said, “Look, I don’t want to get into any shit with you, Helena.”
“I just said ‘obviously’. Because your name is Envy. No shit intended.”
Okay, this was weird. Venus looked…nervous. The kind of nervous she’d never looked around Helena in her life, but was usually reserved when she knew she was about to get put on blast by Bunny. “Look,” Venus said, smoothing down her hair, which looked newly bleached and was seriously not helping with the Draco Malfoy resemblance. “I know you’re pissed…” She stopped herself. “Okay, bad choice of words.”
“Oh, please,” said Helena. “I’m used to it by now. I live with Bunny, for God’s sake. If I get from one end of the hour to another without a golden shower joke, I count myself lucky.”
That got a laugh, and Helena relaxed, grateful. All this aggravation couldn’t be healthy.
“Did you hear about Joy?” said Venus.
“No. What? What did she do this time?”
“Groupon Botox.”
Helena gasped. “That’s a thing? That does not sound smart. Or particularly FDA regulated.”
“It wasn’t,” said Venus, evidently delighted that her peace offering of gossip had landed. “It was some Mexican knockoff and now she’s all swollen and drooling.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah. She was trying to prevent smoker’s lines and the result was kind of…slobbery. Luckily she’s still got that bib from when she was Baby New Year in the calendar.” Venus’s gaze turned suspicious. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the yellow filter on the April photo, would you?”
“No,” said Helena. “Why would I know anything about that? I told you, Venus – I’m not interested in holding grudges. Especially if we have to work together. Why would we bother giving one another ulcers about something that trivial?”
Venus eyeballed her for a moment, waiting for the hiss of the cappuccino machine to die down before speaking again. Once again she looked strangely nervous. “So you’re not gonna…do anything?”
“What? Revenge?” said Helena, although her inner voice – the one that sounded suspiciously like Bunny – was nonchalantly inspecting her cuticles and declaring that she’d found more interesting things than Venus on the back of a pore strip. “No. Definitely not. Where the hell did you get the impression that I was out for blood?”
One of the baristas called out an order for Jason, and Venus moved forward. “Oop – that’s me. Gotta go. I got my personal trainer at noon. Love your hair, by the way. I heard some people saying it looks really white trash, but it totally suits you.”
Ah, Venus. There was only so much work she could do to keep her inner bitch at bay, and most of the time she wasn’t even trying.
Stephen picked up his coffee and went back to the bar, where Justin was stacking glasses back on the shelves. “Where’s Rose?”
Justin pointed to the ceiling. “Upstairs. Recharging.” Rose had to plug her ankle bracelet into the mains for an hour or so every day.
“Okay. I got her a peppermint tea. Can you take it up? Because I gotta scoot.”
“Sure,” said Justin. “Oh, Steve?”
“Uh huh?”
“You know the whole friend thing? And how you said members of my family didn’t count as friends because I wasn’t legally allowed to fuck them?”
“Well, we both know you have a flexible definition of what’s legally allowed when it comes to incest, but yeah. Go on, honey.”
“Does drag family count? Can I be friends with a drag family member?”
“Absolutely,” said Stephen. “Just as long as you keep your dick out of them, and their dick out of you. And no hand stuff, either. You can kiki, but you can’t kai kai.”
A strange expression crossed Justin’s face. If it had been anyone other than Justin, Stephen would have suspected shenanigans, but Justin didn’t have a devious bone in his body. “Ok-ay,” Justin said. “You wanna put your money where your mouth is?”
“What? Make a bet of it? Sure. I’m down. How far are you prepared to go?”
“Two hundred?”
That was more than Stephen had expected, but he wasn’t about to look like a chicken. “Okay,” he said. “And there are rules, Justin. We need to establish some rules.”
“Sure. Rule away.”
“Not right now,” said Stephen. “I’m in a hurry, but off the top of my head, people you’ve already fucked don’t count. So I don’t count, even though we’re not currently fucking. And neither do Bunny and Ryan. Especially not Bunny and Ryan. Or Sheila.”
“I thought my ears were burning,” said Sheila, popping out of the rear door with near Justin-level timing. He had several fresh red hickeys around his neck. “What’s up?”
“We’re making a bet,” said Justin. “That I can’t make friends with a guy without having sex with him.”
Sheila grabbed Justin’s ass behind the bar. “Interesting.”
“It is,” Stephen said, gathering up his cooling coffees. “I’m sure Justin will tell you all about it. Oh, and I heard you were short of a Greed?”
Sheila scrunched his nose. “Yeah. You heard about Joy’s drooly Botox adventure, then?”
“I did,” said Stephen, hopping Bunny-like on the opportunity. “I don’t suppose it would be a problem if one of your Seven Deadly Sins was electronically tagged, would it?”
“No. I’ve photoshopped out much bigger things than ankle monitors,” said Sheila. “Bunny’s dick, for one. And Venus’s chin. I take it you’re talking about Miss Rose?”
“Ask her,” said Stephen. “Pretty sure she’ll do it. You have no idea how desperate that girl is to get her glitter on. The poor baby spent the last eight months making lipstick out of crushed M&M’s, and I’ve still got that giant silk hundred dollar bill I made for when we did the Cabaret shows. Cover her in gold and diamonds and she’ll be a knockout – she’s got eyes like Spanish doubloons as it is.” He pushed open the door. “Gotta go.”
He went back down the block to the apartment above the magic store. Hu was taking a break, paperback in hand, waiting for his coffee.
“Oh, there you are,” said Hu, closing the book. “I was about to send out a search party.” He set down the book. Stephen saw the cover and guffawed.
“Hu, what the hell are you reading?”
Hu blushed. “Fifty Shades Of Grey. Don’t judge me.”
“I’m not judging. I’m just curious why you’d bother. Bunny’s done so many bits around that book that I would have thought reading it would be kind of redundant.”
“Yeah, well – maybe I was curious.”
Stephen joined Hu on the old steamer trunk they’d dragged upstairs as a substitute for a couch. “So?” he said, nudging Hu with his hip. “How is it? Is it…you know…?”
“Disgusting?” said Hu. “Absolutely. The grammar alone is a disgrace.”
Stephen laughed and nuzzled his nose into the warmth of Hu’s collar. “Is this about the cockring in the sink?”
“And safe words,” said Hu, running a hand over Stephen’s cheek. His fingers smelled unromantic – of silicone bathroom sealant – but it didn’t matter one bit, because his dark, delicate beauty still gave Stephen a shot of adrenaline every time he looked at him. “Look, if you want to get
…experimental, we can do that. If you feel you’re ready…”
“No, honey. Of course I’m ready.”
“I know there have been some bumps in the road lately…”
Stephen shook his head and snuggled closer. It had been hard, going to see a therapist and talking explicitly about being raped when he was seventeen, and there had been a couple of nights when he’d come home from his appointment feeling like a blown glass shell of himself. But Hu was always there, always sensitive, and when Stephen felt strong enough for sex again, Hu made love to him with such exquisite care that one night had left him so overwhelmed with gratitude and love that he burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying.
“It’s okay,” said Stephen. “I’m okay. I know I have my little freak-outs now and again, but I’m fine. Honestly.”
“I know that. But I also know you have your wild side. And I’m willing to explore that with you.” Hu nodded to the book on the floor. “Just…not like that. Because it’s been eight chapters of mangled syntax and they haven’t even boned yet.”
Stephen sipped his coffee. “Why did you get that book?”
“They’re drowning in second hand copies at the goodwill store,” said Hu. “And I did glance at a copy of The Hundred And Twenty Days Of Sodom, but that one was…well, it was a little bit too far in the opposite direction.”
“Do I want to know how far?”
“Did you ever see Two Girls, One Cup? It’s pretty much a literary version of that, but with more torture porn than the Saw movies. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to do that. I was just thinking maybe a blindfold and a bit of mild tiesy-upsies.”
“That sounds more like my speed,” said Hu. “And honestly? I can’t really afford to build a sex dungeon.”
Stephen laughed and kissed him on the side of the mouth. “Well, you say that, but I might have some money coming my way.”
“More Instagram cash?”
“Uh uh. Justin is apparently willing to drop two hundred on the whole ‘You can’t make a friend you don’t fuck’ thing.”
“Oh shit,” said Hu.
“What?”
“Steve, this means he has something up his sleeve.”
“He does not. Justin doesn’t even have sleeves. First thing he does when he gets a new shirt is tear the sleeves off it. He puts the pits in Pittsburgh.”
“Whatever,” said Hu, sipping his coffee. “You do know your overconfidence is going to come back and bite you to the tune of two hundred dollars, right?”
“Relax. There will be rules before we shake on anything. I’ve got it all worked out.”
*
Adam woke in the night when Ryan shook him gently awake. At first he didn’t realize why, but then he heard moaning somewhere in the apartment. “What?” Great. Ryan woke him up to listen to Helena getting it on? Moans? No. Whimpers, too. It sounded more like someone was distressed, rather than turned on. “What the fuck?” said Adam. “Are they getting S&M in there?”
“No, I don’t think it’s them.”
“Justin?” Adam swallowed a yawn. “Or is Miss Rose a noisy masturbator?”
They heard a sharp, gasping cry from the living room, like the sound of someone snapping awake from a bad dream, and then the bedroom door opened. Luis’s slight figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, and he didn’t have to say a word for Adam to understand what was going on. One of those dreams. The ones involving razorblades and slow drip fears, and that time you discovered what the bottom of a urinal tasted like.
“Can I sleep in here?” said Luis, in a half-awake voice, clearly too shaken for guile.
“Yeah,” said Adam, nudging Ryan. “Ryan, put some underpants on. The baby wants to get in bed.”
“What?”
“Please, honey. Just do it. It’s a prison thing and I’m too tired to explain right now.”
Thankfully Adam – who felt the cold – was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, unlike Ryan, who was almost always naked in bed and seemed to have his own heat source. Ryan opened a drawer and tugged on a pair of underpants in the dark, while on the other side Adam held out the covers and Luis – a light weight who barely seemed to dent the mattress – slipped into their bed.
“There,” Adam said, as the three of them spooned together, a far more wholesome version of the way they sometimes cuddled with Justin. Luis settled into the curve of Adam’s body. His hair smelled sweetly of coconut shampoo and his breathing slowed almost immediately. A strange sense of déjà vu swept over Adam, who had never exactly envisioned sleeping with Luis in any sense of the word, but he’d lain awake just the same, thinking of Luis locked away in solitary and wishing more than anything that he could somehow leave his body, float out of the window, across the river and somehow drift – like a vapor – into Luis’s cell, so as to whisper in his ear, “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here with you.”
He shivered, his eyes stinging, and pressed a kiss into the kid’s lustrous black hair. God, who put children in solitary for defending themselves? The same kind of assholes who couldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ without smirking like they’d won something. Those assholes were okay with it. And worse. They were okay with kids much younger than Rose being locked in cages. Literal babies. What a rotten, horrible world.
“This is weird,” Ryan said, very softly. “Just so you know.”
Adam took a breath, not trusting his voice to shake when he spoke. “I know.”
Rose didn’t stir. Ryan gently rocked his body against Adam’s and sang under his breath into his ear, “I love you, you love me, we’re a weirdo family.” And then the tears came, and there was no stopping them.
“Shh,” Adam said. “Baby’s sleeping.”
He licked up the tears that had run into his mouth. It was still a horrible world, but at least there was this, this embarrassment of riches, squished between the two people he’d missed and worried about the most when he was alone on a hard prison bunk, staring straight through the ceiling and into the abyss.
The next morning he woke slowly, vaguely remembering that at some point Luis had started beeping and got out of bed to recharge. If the kid was plugged into the mains again that meant they had a moment, and God, did he ever need a moment, because Ryan was grinding against his ass with a purpose, stiffening Adam’s lazy sleep boner. Adam stretched and slid down his shorts, giving Ryan access. He let out a low moan of drowsy bliss as Ryan’s fingers curled around him; he loved morning sex, when his brain hadn’t had time to wake up and ambush him, leaving him purely sensual. The whole world was nothing but warmth and texture and Ryan’s breath hot on the inside of his ear, Ryan’s dick silky and hard against his newly bared ass.
“We need to talk,” Ryan said.
“Huh?” Adam groaned and wrapped his fingers over Ryan’s, making sure they were going to stay right there on his dick. Where they belonged. “Don’t wake me up with that.”
“Sorry. I don’t know why I said talk.” Ryan pushed with his hips, his breath already ragged. “What I meant to say is we need to fuck.”
“Better,” said Adam, reaching behind him, working his fingers between their bodies. “Much better.” His hand found Ryan’s cock and then he realized why Ryan – pressed against him – had felt even silkier than usual. “Ooh…you’re all…”
“Lacy. I know. I accidentally put on your girl drawers in the dark.”
Jesus. He was like a redwood back there. Adam glanced up and saw that Rose had left the door ajar. “Wait, let me get the door…” He jumped up, locked the door and turned back to the bed, where Ryan lay with his legs apart and the top of his hard, pink dick peeking out of the waistband of a pair of Bunny’s oyster-colored, lace-trimmed tap pants. There were spots of pre-come darkening the satin, and Adam stripped quickly and dived naked between Ryan’s thighs, eager to add to the mess.
Oh, this was the best kind of sex, when they were too horny to even care about morning breath. Ryan wrapped his legs around Adam and pulled hi
s hair, so turned on that it barely took him five minutes. When Adam whispered, “Come on, baby. Mess up my panties,” Ryan shuddered and gasped, wet lips pouting around a perfect ‘ooh’ of liquid pleasure, so that the sight of him uncoiled the heat deep in Adam’s belly and they came within a split second of each other.
“Holy shit,” Ryan said, as they slumped back down on the bed. His fair skin was flushed right down to his nipples, and with his dilated pupils his blue eyes looked almost indigo. The winter chill of the bedroom settled on their cooling skins, but his smile was as warm as August. Adam pulled the covers over them and they burrowed down, giggling like children and whispering love back and forth like a secret.
“You. Make. Me. So. Happy,” Ryan said, punctuating the words with soft kisses.
“I know. Me, too.”
“I’m so glad having children didn’t put a dent in our sex life.”
“Yeah. Luckily he’s too big to breastfeed.”
Ryan laughed. “Ew. Well, that’s an upsetting mental image to start the day.” He kissed Adam again, sobering slightly. “So…um…last night.”
“Was weird. I know.”
“Must have been some nightmare.”
Adam sighed. “Yeah. Maybe some flashback to solitary. I don’t know.” He thought of Luis, alone in a tiny cell with nothing to do, nobody to talk to, nothing to read. Nothing but the inside of his own head for company, and that couldn’t have been all that pleasant, filled as it was with the recent death of his grandmother. Not to mention that stepfather, who had once beat him so bad he pissed pink for a week. “I’m kind of scared to ask, actually.”
“I know, honey. It’s fucked up. He’s not much older than my kids.”
“Do you think he’s gonna be okay?”
“I think he’s going to be fine,” said Ryan, with a smile. “Because he has you.”
“And you.”
“I hardly know him.”
“You will,” said Adam. “And he’ll love you, because how could he not? Come on. Let’s go get some coffee.”
Luis was sitting in the corner of the living room, plugged into the mains socket and reading a book. His feet were bare and enviably small: this little queen would never find herself trying to make an outsize kitten heel look not-clownish, unlike Bunny, who wore a size eleven and sometimes felt like one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, trying to cram her giant hoof into something sparkly and pretty.
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