Tales From Cushman Row

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it feels good,” Jav murmured. He’d drooled a little against the pillowcase.

  “You work hard,” Stef said.

  “Not as hard as you.”

  “It’s different work. And I couldn’t do it.”

  Jav moved one leg over a little and let his breath out. Dialed into the feel of the fleece sheets on his bare skin, Stef’s warm strong hand caressing him. The music. The flicker of the candle on Stef’s shrine. A curl of incense smoke rising up in front of the statue of Kwon Yin. This room a shrine of its own. An oasis of privacy and vulnerability and trust.

  Trust him, he thought.

  I want to. I trust him. I just don’t trust…this. I don’t yet trust in its permanence. I keep waiting to find out it can’t be mine.

  And what if it turns out not to be yours? Will avoiding something tonight be some kind of consolation later? Wow, thank God I didn’t let him eat my ass that night, I’d feel so much worse. I sure dodged that bullet.

  He sighed. No good words.

  Stef sighed too, his breath warm. “Now what are you thinking?”

  Jav turned his head on the pillow to look at him. “That I really do trust you. More than anyone I ever trusted in my life.”

  Stef was drawing up and down in the hollows between Jav’s ribs. “I’m glad I met you now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you were twenty-five and saying something like that, I’d just kind of shake my head and indulge it, knowing you were too young to know what a lifetime meant. But saying it now? Four decades is a good long time to know a few things about yourself. So it means something. It means more than sex. It fucking means the world.”

  Stef went quiet as Feist started singing “The Limit to Your Love.” His hand running in long strokes along Jav’s leg, thumb caressing the inside of his thigh and along the curve of one cheek.

  Jav moved his legs apart a little more. Stef’s hand slid along his quadriceps, curled under his knee and gently nudged it to bend up and out. “Let me look at you,” he whispered. “Trust that I want to.”

  Jav relaxed his fingers. He realized he was starting to want it, too, and as he moved his leg, he shifted to get his stiffening cock into a more comfortable place.

  He felt Stef sit up on an elbow. His fingertips moved closer. The pad of his thumb brushing the quivering, sensitive entrance then moving away again. Coming back. Then his mouth glided across Jav’s lower back. A trail of hard kisses, interspersed with the gentle bite of his teeth. The softness of his mouth within the rough of his beard growth. The wide, warm span of his palm. The stroke of his fingertips. The tiny scratch of short nails. The silken wet of his tongue inching toward where it shouldn’t go, and yet…

  “God,” Jav cried out, seized with a desire to both pull away and push into it. It was too much. Too intimate. Too intense. Too fraught with nerves wired against intrusion. Yet as soon as Stef’s mouth moved away, Jav wanted it again.

  “Come back,” he said.

  Stef slid between Jav’s sprawled legs. His fingers spread Jav wide open and then his tongue, God his fucking tongue. Jav moaned at first, then howled out loud as Stef wormed a hand between the mattress and Jav’s body and took hold of Jav’s cock, rock hard and screaming now. Stef squeezed and stroked as his mouth kissed and his tongue licked.

  “Come,” he said. “If it feels good, then fuck my hand hard and come.”

  Jav hesitated a last split second before toppling over the edge of himself. Spread wide and wanton, his hips bucking up to give Stef’s hand more room to slide and jerk. Give Stef’s mouth more room to get in close, get in tight, go down and get his damn tongue in where Jav was dying for it now. Thick pleasure wrestling with some animalistic need he didn’t know existed in him, but now it was woken like a bear and roaring to be filled. His groin clenched, reared up like an angry stallion, hooves kicking at the air.

  “Come for me,” Stef said, his mouth slick and dripping. “Come in my hand now.”

  Jav exploded with a yell, pinwheeling through the sky in a free-falling dive. Plummeting through crystallized blue and white, not caring how or where he landed because Stef would catch him.

  All my life, he thought, the sky slipping through his fingers. Where have I been all my life?

  “Finch,” he cried, his voice cracking open.

  Where were you? How did I not know? How did I live so long not knowing where you were?

  “Finch…”

  I was five when you were born. How did I even live for five years without you existing somewhere in the world?

  His teeth curled over his bottom lip, trying to form another “Finch” and failing. Just a weak exhaled “fuh” before his body shivered into stillness.

  “Jesus,” Stef whispered, elbowing his way up the mattress.

  “I’ve never come like that,” Jav said.

  Stef wrapped arms around him from behind, pulling Jav against his chest.

  “I’ve never known anything like it in my life,” Jav said, near desperation.

  My life, Stef. My life. You don’t know, you don’t understand, you have no idea what this is.

  Stef buried his face in Jav’s hair and held him tight, stilling Jav’s shaking limbs. “Me neither.”

  Jav laughed through a trembling jaw. “Look at me, this is crazy.”

  Stef held out a hand to show how it shook. “Look at me.”

  “I can’t get you close enough to me. I can’t… I can’t believe this is happening.”

  He was caught up tight. One of Stef’s arms around his head, the other around his chest. Stef’s calf hooked around his legs. All that warm, solid strength snug against Jav’s back, coiled around him like a python, squeezing him into place. Holding him fixed in the universe.

  I want for nothing right now. Don’t let it end. I waited so long. Now just let the rest of my life be this.

  We Wants It

  Stef sat on the kitchen counter, the work day not entirely off his skin yet. Drinking a beer and alternating staring into space with watching Jav cook dinner.

  “Who taught you to cook?” he finally asked.

  “No one, really. Taught myself.”

  “But your dad owned a restaurant.”

  Jav shrugged.

  “Did you help out in the kitchen?”

  “I washed dishes and made deliveries. Every now and then I’d chop onions or peel plantains. I watched. I had an idea how certain things were made, but I had no use for it, I guess. Not until I left home and realized I couldn’t take eating for granted.”

  “Where did you live?”

  “At a teacher’s house for a couple months.” Jav looked up at the stove hood, wooden spoon poised in the air. “Mr. Durante. Jesus, I wonder if he’s still alive. I should find out.” He shook his head abruptly. “Anyway, he and his wife fed me. Then that fell through and I slept in a stock room until I finished high school.”

  “Stock room?”

  “Yeah. Neighborhood lady who owned a beauty supply shop. I worked for her unloading boxes. She let me sleep with the inventory. If she was feeling nice she gave me dinner. If she was feeling really nice, I got laid.”

  “Dinner and a movie.”

  “Then I rented a room up in Washington Heights. I had access to the kitchen but never had anything to cook with. I ate at the restaurant where I worked. Found a few local places where I could eat cheap. Or free, depending on whether the waitresses liked me.”

  The last swallow of beer was bitter in Stef’s mouth. Sometimes, hearing stories about Jav’s early adulthood made him a little miserable. Knowing how sex had turned to currency at such a young age.

  I wish I’d known. My family would’ve taken you in. I could’ve been your friend. We could’ve gone through life together…

  “Finally, when I got my own place,” Jav was saying, “I had to figure out how to eat. So I dredged up memories. I asked the chef at the restaurant
. He taught me how to make a steak in a cast-iron pan. Of course, most of the time, I couldn’t afford steak.”

  “Rice and beans.”

  “Lot of that. Lot of pasta. I kind of messed around and figured out five or six dishes I could rely on. But face it, when I was escorting regularly, I rarely had to make myself dinner.”

  “Or breakfast,” Stef said.

  “No, actually, breakfast I made all the time.”

  “Really? You’d never stay the night?”

  Jav shook his head. “Hardly ever.”

  “Huh. Why?”

  Jav’s expression was both sad and smug. “Not many women could afford it.”

  “Ah.”

  “When I had Ari to take care of, I really had to up the game. Feeding a teenage boy is crazy.”

  “That’ll triple the grocery bill.”

  “I watched Val Lark cook and she taught me a few things. Plus with the internet these days, if you can read and follow directions, you can cook. And Ari had chops, too. With a single mother, he knew his way around the kitchen. So we did all right.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s doing great.”

  “You miss him?”

  “I do. A lot. It’s weird.”

  “Why?”

  Jav opened the fridge to get two more beers. “All those years not even knowing he existed. It’s crazy how quickly I felt… I don’t know. Ownership isn’t the right word. This sense of him being my blood. He belonged to me. This was my sister-son. It was mindless. And fast. Like it was coded into my DNA and it woke up as soon as my genes smelled his…”

  His voice and his eyes trailed off. His face morphed into a look Stef was beginning to recognize.

  “You’re getting an idea,” he said.

  Jav didn’t look away from horizon of his imagination. “Yeah. Just a…”

  Laughing, Stef slid down from the counter and took the wooden spoon. “Go get it. I’ll finish this.”

  Watching Jav scribble feverishly for ten minutes, Stef was equal parts fascination, affection and envy. The envy was sub-divided as well. For all his artistic talent, Stef had never been able to corral words together on paper. He wished he had a fraction of Jav’s wordsmithing. But he also harbored a deeper and slightly unattractive jealousy for that notebook and its pages holding Jav’s secret thoughts and ideas. Sometimes the mere, innocuous sight of it on the desk or bedside table made Stef’s eyes bulge like Gollum’s, his fingers itchy and covetous.

  We wants it.

  Hell if he’d ask to see it. Jav once said if he knew a friend was reading one of his books, he never asked if they finished or what they thought.

  “Feedback’s no fun when you have to fish for it,” he said.

  Stef agreed. Same way the blow job given voluntarily was sweeter than the one you had to ask for. And the secrets freely divulged were more precious than the ones you had to coax out like a shy girl at a party, or pull out like rotten teeth. Stef got his fill of coaxing and pulling all day at his job. He wanted to know everything going on in Jav’s head, but he’d let it come to him.

  Jav straightened up and threw the pen down with an accomplished exhale. He was beautiful. Pleased and exhilarated and smug.

  “Get it?” Stef asked.

  “I got it.”

  Stef was dying to know. But Jav closed the notebook and didn’t offer. And Stef had to respect it.

  But we wants it.

  He rolled his eyes. You can want without having, remember?

  Gollum snarled. We wants to want and we wants to have.

  They ate on the couch that night, watching Planet Earth. When he was done, Jav stacked a few pillows in his lap, using them as a desk to write more in his notebook.

  “That was some big idea,” Stef said.

  “Yeah, it keeps leaving the room and coming back. ‘Oh, and one other thing…’”

  “Is this for your current book or the next one?”

  Jav scratched over his ear with the end of the pen. “I don’t know. It’s just an idea.”

  He went back to writing. A bubble of swollen, jealous air between them on the couch that only Stef could see.

  Oh knock it off, his inner shrink said. You wouldn’t want him breathing down the back of your neck while you were sketching or painting. What you really want to know is if he writes about you. That’s what’s going on here, right?

  He sighed softly. Right.

  He goes to those deep, secret places in his mind and you’re worried he forgets about you while he’s there. Or rather, you wonder if he ever takes you with him.

  “You ever illustrate a story?” Jav said.

  Stef blinked. “No.”

  “Would you want to?”

  “Yeah. Definitely. It would be cool. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  Stef reached toward the coffee table, tugging his sketchpad free from within a stack of magazines and books. He folded it back to the last page, where he’d drawn a variation of his Pegasi yin-yang symbol. Instead of winged horses, it was two men. One dressed in white, the other in black. Each nose to the other’s knees. Wings sprouting from their shoulders and curving around to close the circle.

  He handed the pad across the cushions. “I like illustrating our story.”

  Jav stuck the pen behind his ear and took the pad. He looked. He blinked. His lips parted as if to speak, then closed again as his finger reached to touch.

  Stef sat still. Vulnerable and hopeful.

  “This is us?” Jav said.

  “Mm.”

  “When did you draw this?”

  Stef shrugged. “Don’t remember.”

  Now Jav looked at him. “Can I have it?”

  Stef felt his face spread open. “Sure,” he said, trying to sound casual. “Don’t tear the page. I’ll cut it out for you.”

  Jav put the sketchpad down. He took the pen from behind his ear and seemed poised to write again, then he closed his notebook and folded his hands over it. Seemingly done. He picked up the pad again, studied it, then set it aside.

  Long minutes ticked by, narrated by David Attenborough’s gravelly voice.

  The stack of pillows fell over as Jav rose from the couch. Notebook tucked under his elbow, he picked up their plates. “Want another beer?”

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  He was engrossed in the Planet Earth segment on cave diving when all of a sudden, something dropped between his gaze and the TV.

  “Here,” Jav said, holding his notebook open to a page. “It’s not us, but it’s… It’s just an idea. But you can read it.”

  He walked away so fast, a breeze touched the back of Stef’s neck. The bathroom door clicked shut.

  Stef pointed the remote at the TV to lower the volume. His heart thumped as he read.

  Trueblood goes to find the Pegasi.

  The winged horses don’t interact with humans anymore. The sacred bond between man and horse has been broken. The Centaurs are no more and the Pegasi have no love for men.

  Trueblood needs a Pegasus in human form. He has to find the White Mare—only her foals can take human form.

  (Why is that?

  Maybe only the foals born of two mares can take human form?)

  “The white mares,” Stef mouthed, his eyes glancing up to the ceiling where, above him, his white-haired mother lived with her white-haired lover.

  The Compass helps Trueblood find the Pegasi.

  The White Mare’s herd all have silver hooves. Her favorite foal is silver-grey with blue eyes. (Another sign he can take human form?)

  What does Trueblood have to do to win the foal?

  Fight?

  Fight the foal or fight the White Mare?

  Silver hooves.

  Silver nose rings—are they born with these? The last vestige of when men and horses were bonded?

  Maybe only foals born with the ring can take human form.

  True
blood has to fight to take ownership of a Pegasus. He has to take the ring to make the winged horse take human form.

  It will be bonded to him. But not necessarily love him.

  Trueblood fights the foal. It’s long and brutal. Blood is drawn. The foal cracks the mariner’s rib with a kick. Trueblood’s sword slices above one of the foal’s eyes. Blinded by blood, the winged horse falters and Trueblood takes the ring.

  The White Mare’s eyes are furious as she claps her wings together.

  Thunder and lightning rip the skies open.

  The foal transforms into a silver-haired man with blue eyes.

  The silver hooves are now rings on his fingers.

  His wings reduced to inked tattoos on his shoulder blades.

  Stef’s fingers extended on the page, the light catching on all his silver rings. The inked wings on his back tingled. His fingers wandered across the front of his shirt, along where the horse head was tattooed and circling the silver ring in his nipple.

  A scar cuts through one of his eyebrows.

  No love in his eyes for Trueblood.

  Not yet.

  The love will come later.

  A love heavier than silver. Greater than thunder.

  And it will come at a price.

  A shiver crossed over Stef’s skin. He closed the book and smoothed the cover. He hooked the loop of elastic around the pages to secure them shut. He held the notebook to his face a moment, inhaling the leather scent.

  He got up and turned off the TV and the lights. Made sure the French doors and the front door were locked and the oven turned off.

  He set the notebook on the desk.

  He took one of his rings off and placed it on top.

  “No price,” he whispered.

  Room Service

  “Hey,” Stef said, letting his messenger bag slide to the floor as he heeled off his shoes.

  “Still raining?” Jav said. He was standing in front of the open refrigerator door, staring down the shelves.

  “Mm. What are you doing?”

  “Trying to figure out something for dinner.”

  Stef’s arms slid around Jav’s waist and gave a curt tug.