Chapter Text
They do laundry.
It’s been a while, too long since the last time they had clean clothes, and while Marcus is fine with scrubbing briefs and socks in motel sinks, Tomas has higher standards. “And so should you,” Tomas says pointedly as he pulls into the parking lot of a laundromat near the Four Corners, and Marcus laughs and says, “It’s monkish. Ascetic. God’s very proud.” It’s an old argument, one as threadbare and soft as Marcus’ shirts, one they’ve been having since Marcus commandeered Tomas’ apartment without ever making demands on his washer and dryer. Tomas fusses and insists. Marcus teases and relents. It’s a favorite song of theirs. And it’s nice to sing it again.
This is normal, Tomas thinks cautiously. This is what normal looks like now.
Marcus catches him staring and smiles with just his mouth.
While Tomas turns the last of his cash into quarters, Marcus makes phone calls. Bennett’s doing well, judging by the annoyance on Marcus’ face. “Yeah, well, easy for you to say,” Marcus is saying as Tomas jangles back to the little booth by the window of the laundromat where Marcus, who never met a chair he couldn’t abuse, sprawls with his legs out on the bench. His eyes flicker to Tomas briefly. “Doesn’t matter. You got work for us?” And then, “That’s what I said, isn’t it.”
Tomas is good at knowing when he’s being discussed. “What do you need washed?” he says to Marcus, who grimaces, reaches under the table, and tosses Tomas his backpack. Everything, then. Tomas is doing about the same. He can’t remember the last time his clothes hadn’t smelt of sweat and death.
It must be a sign of progress that Tomas cares about how much he reeks. He’s working his way up the hierarchy of needs.
Tomas upturns Marcus’ bag on top of a washer, picks out his Bible, his tape player, and his pack of cigarettes he thinks Tomas doesn’t know about, and pushes everything else into the spin cycle. There’s nothing worse washing can do to Marcus’ clothes than living hasn’t already done. He thinks about sorting his own clothes and ends up tossing them with Marcus’. They don’t have enough clothes to overstuff a washer. Exorcists carry their heavy lives lightly.
Marcus’ bible feels warm in his hands. It always does on the rare occasions Tomas has handled it. The leather of the cover is so worn it feels soft as velvet, the embossing of the words indistinguishable by touch. Tomas’ abuela had cherished a bible like this, a book that had been read too often and too passionately to ever lie flat. It looked like faith made solid. He’d wanted that bible after she died, but no one knew where it was when he finally, finally flew down (she died alone waiting for you, said the first demon that had stolen Marcus’ skin, and what a mixed blessing that the first demon has so recently been overshadowed).
Holding Marcus’ bible, so similar, so familiar, Tomas has the sudden, irrational thought that this is that missing bible. The book had gone to one who had needed it most, and now God had brought it back to his life.
Feeling like he’s cracking open a diary, albeit one Marcus has never minded handing him before, Tomas opens the bible. Birds erupt from the pages. The columns of texts become forests, black and looming. Blue jays and cardinals flutter over Adam who names them, Cain and Abel fight underneath a field of roses. God breaks Job and Marcus draws children, gangly limbed and smiling or twisted and bleeding, and then Marcus crosses them out or labels them or stops halfway through. Most of the portraits he draws never get finished: bodies without faces, faces without eyes, skeletons sketched in and the skin left out. Marcus draws from life and leaves life undone. Even the book is left undone—some pages redacted, some removed altogether.
Bennett’s right, technically. This is defacement (difficult to say it’s not, especially considering Leviticus 18:22, over which Marcus has drawn a blushingly accurate erect penis). But Tomas cannot imagine God would mind, or that the Adversary would take strength from this. There is no evil in the honest work of love. The Sermon on the Mount peeks out between the boughs of a willow, which sweeps across two pages, along a river that undulates from margin to margin. Tomas traces its curve down the fine paper as if he could follow it to the sea. The gentle water susurrates the same words Jesus does.
Marcus’ hand is present everywhere in this book, every pen stroke and every blank space, but here by Psalm 103 Marcus has drawn himself. Tomas would recognize his hand anywhere, even without the gun barrel tattoo Marcus stick-and-poked himself. Marcus drew his hand clasped to another, perhaps in prayer, but the hand he holds doesn’t look like his, and Tomas can’t pretend not to wonder whose it is. It could be his. Tomas can’t tell. How well do you really know the back of your hand? Marcus and Tomas used to pray like this, hand in hand like at any moment the music might start and draw them into a holy waltz. But maybe this isn’t prayer. Just clasping. Two hands, holding each other. It looks like a man’s hand. Marcus isn’t a priest anymore. He had touched his lips on the island and smiled to himself; he had shielded the name “Peter” from the demon’s mouth. Marcus can do as he likes, as he loves. He’s earned that and more.
Tomas’ dreams are worn as soft as Marcus’ bible. Neither belong to him.
Across the room, Marcus laughs, surprising as a whip crack. Something’s changed in the booth. Marcus is sitting feet on the ground, hunched forward and in as if protecting the phone pressed to his ear, and he is smiling, beaming, saying, “All that in just your first game? You’ll be at the Olympics next year.” Pause, and Marcus replies, “Nah, they’ll start them early, just for you. Happens all the time for the best athletes.”
Probably not Bennett, Tomas thinks, but he can’t imagine who. He comes back, puts the bible and the tape player down on the table in front of Marcus who looks almost sheepish as he smiles at Tomas. “No, I never played,” Marcus says to the phone. “No one likes baseball but Americans.” The person on the other end of the phone says something, and Marcus throws his head back and laughs again.
Tomas raises his eyebrow as he sits opposite him, and Marcus says to the phone, “One sec, duck.” He tilts the receiver from his mouth. “Bennett got me in contact with Mouse. Mouse is still with Andy’s kids. Harper’s telling me about her new baseball team. Sorry, sorry—her softball team,” he adds with good natured grumbling clearly not directed at Tomas. “What’s the difference, then?”
Marcus falls silent as Harper explains, except for the occasional noise of acknowledgement and a few earnest wows. He’s thrumming, shredding a napkin to down fluff as he listens to her, this almost silent child who is now talking his ear off about her softball team, her new school, how Verity is teaching her how to make a robot. Tomas wants to rip the phone from Marcus’ hands and beg her to forgive him for what he nearly did to her; this is because Tomas is selfish. Instead, Tomas folds his arms on the table and rests his head in them, and Marcus, perhaps without thinking, ruffles his hair. Then draws his hand back. Tomas closes his eyes. Their legs are not touching, but they’re close enough that Tomas imagines he can feel the heat of them. When Marcus shifts, their feet bump together.
Marcus laughs again and says, “Pull the other one.”
This is normal. The new normal. This is their new good times. It looks almost like their old good times. I miss you, Marcus had said, and Tomas had replied, I miss you too, and the words had sounded like a closing door. And you know what they say God does when that happens.
The new open window, he thinks, is friendship and brotherhood, but Tomas is still working out the exact metaphor. All that he can think at the moment is Marcus on the other side of the door. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
“I don’t know,” Marcus says, and the new tone draws Tomas out of his reverie. Mirth’s been replaced. Marcus nearly stammers. “It’s not exactly safe. Keeping in contact with us.” Marcus pauses. “Not this number, no, we got through a lot of phones.” Marcus pauses again and Tomas raises his head to see his brow knit together as he chews his thumbnail. Marcus needs to fiddle; Tomas has thought more than once about offering up his own hands for the fiddling, but again, he’s not thinking those things anymore, except in how he’s not thinking of them. After all, he prayed for normality and so God shut the door.
“Alright.” Marcus draws out the word, a cautious concession. “I can’t—yeah, I’ll call. Yeah, alright.”
Harper squeals so hard even Tomas winces.
They say their goodbyes, Marcus offering a “talk to you later,” like he’s baffled by the concept, and when he hangs up, he looks at the phone as if he doesn’t understand how it got into his hand.
“You’re popular,” Tomas says. He can’t help smiling.
Marcus laughs as if the sound embarrasses him. He slinks lower in his seat, his head cradled in his hand. He’s half a teen, just texted by their crush, and half a kicked dog, just offered a strange hand. “It’s, ah. Not the usual way. You know. How it’s normally goes.”
Tomas thinks of Mouse, the awkward and unsaid history there. He thinks of his lessons, Marcus tucking his bleeding heart back into his chest and telling Tomas that to be an exorcist is to be alone. “You don’t linger in people’s lives.”
“No point outstaying my welcome. Bet she won’t even know who’s calling in a week. Some old weirdo ringing her up." Marcus says it like a joke. It's got the cadence of a joke, at least. None of the humor of one. “
Good things should not shock you. Tomas wants to grab Marcus’ face like this is an exorcism, wants to tie Marcus down to a bed and scream a while about love. You deserve better than that. But they don’t touch each other like that anymore. They’ve made peace with each other, and now they pray several feet apart.
They hadn’t touched each other like that before either. They had touched each other, and left the why unsaid. Tell me what you want, the demon had commanded, and that’s when Tomas should have known that this was not Marcus, because Marcus and Tomas had always, always taken refuge in silence.
They head to a motel early by their standards, which means the sun is just setting and neither of them are on the verge of collapsing. They don't have anywhere to be, and on a different night, on an older kind of night, they would have saved the money and slept off the side of the road in the truck. But they don't have their truck anymore, and Mouse's just doesn't seem as comfortable, and Bennett's promised them funds and a new case soon. Until then, wait and see.
"Unless you've got a better plan," Marcus says. The question of visions is implicit.
"No," Tomas says, and Marcus nods as he relaxes.
When Marcus comes back from check-in with two key cards for two rooms, Tomas smiles and takes his and says nothing of it. There was a time when he would have rejoiced at privacy. He pretends this is still that time. Tomas will fall asleep to the sound of his own breaths; he will stand naked in a shower knowing Marcus has never stood naked there as well. A reprieve from the false intimacy of a shared space.
"You want to grab dinner?" Marcus asks.
"No, thank you," Tomas says. "I'm going to turn in early."
"You should eat."
"I'll eat later. I'm not hungry now."
"Fair enough."
They're so polite to each other now. It gives Tomas a headache. He grabs his bag from the backseat and only just stops himself from slamming the door.
Marcus shoves his hands in his pockets and leans against the driver's door. He's close, so close. The slanting twilight paints him softly. Tomas tries not to look. "Well," Marcus says. "Good night, then."
Tomas takes a step forward without thinking, without letting himself think, and it's a small step that makes the space between them all the smaller, and when Marcus' eyes widen, Tomas thinks again, I miss you, and he smacks Marcus on the arm. Pats him. Something between the two. Where aggression meets the platonic. This is the touch of men—fleeting and violent. All his boyhood with one arm flung around his friends' necks, while the other hand beat them. Slapping, ruffling, pinching, punching, shoving, hugging, embracing, practicing, laughing. Always laughing, and always letting go. Tomas lets go. Doesn't even hold onto Marcus in the first place. Just claps his arm and says, "Good night," like some jovial asshole thinking about nothing at all, least of all how it would be such an easy impossible thing to take one more small step forward.
Tomas steps back. What he sees as he turns away, is Marcus touching where Tomas touched him.
We were happy, Tomas thinks as he climbs the stairs to the motel's second floor. In my vision—my dream—my fantasy—we were happy. And God was happy that we were happy. How could God not have been happy? I wanted God to be happy, so I told myself God was happy. I make God what I want Him to be. When I woke up from the exorcism, Marcus was holding my hand and crying, and I thought that meant something. But he was holding Oscar's hand too. It means Marcus is a good man. The Mother Superior told me to love as Christ loves and mourned her friend who lived next door. Marcus saved a child’s life again and again and shakes at the idea that she wishes to keep him in her life. God wants us lonely and indiscriminate. God wants us to love everyone and no one. Marcus loves me as much as he loves Oscar, and he’ll never see Oscar again.
The air smells like motel chlorine and the evening sky, nearly night, is so beautiful that Tomas lingers outside his room and watches the lights come on across the flat land. The desert turns a rich blue-black. God is the expanse. God is the limitless sky. God is not a man leaning against a truck down below, his own little star of light as his lighter flashes and his cigarette burns. Remember that, Tomas thinks.
The motel room looks like a motel room, like every motel he's been in for the last half year, except instead of two beds, there's one, and instead of company, there's air. God is everywhere, Tomas reminds himself, but sometimes he makes himself more known than other. All the Gideons in the world can't make God feel present in an America's Best Value Inn. Is this the room he saw when he dreamed? Is this just a room? Tomas had noticed nothing except himself and Marcus.
Tomas tugs off his collar and tosses it onto the table, trying not to make a metaphor of the whole thing. He could use a shower. He could use a clean set of clothing. He’s wearing his last dirty outfit, unwashed since you can’t be naked in a laundromat at two in the afternoon. He strips naked in the middle of the room now, because that’s what you can do in a room alone, and promises himself as he climbs exhausted into bed that he’ll shower in a minute.
What he needs is something to think about, something that’s not demons or Marcus or where the two intersect. The trouble is, there isn’t a road in the world that doesn’t lead him where he wants to go, and Tomas has spent so long thinking on Marcus, living with Marcus, working with Marcus, dreaming on Marcus, that his mind can’t help but fall in the rut. Even now, naked and sprawled facedown in bed, his strongest thought is how proud he should be for how little he is thinking about Marcus.
(Dream Marcus in sheets and nothing else, his face pressed against Tomas’ legs, and his lips, kissing with his eyes closed as if not even sleep could stop him—)
Tomas gets up, beats himself numb with a cold shower, and dresses for bed in a workout shirt and pajama pants that smell blessedly like dryer sheets and a pair of neon green socks. It’s the least erotically charged outfit he can come up with on short notice. His head still throbs in time with his pulse, and despite the ice water, his blood still runs hot. He’s antsy, has been antsy all day with nowhere to go and nothing to do but think about what he shouldn’t think about. Things like how many times can one man be tempted by the same thing before he learns his lesson and if he’s making the same mistake again and again, is it a mistake of starting or stopping.
He still has the romance he picked up from the garage sale a while back. He’s barely started it. Marcus had stolen it while Tomas was driving and wouldn’t stop dramatically reciting it until Tomas pulled over and begged him to please not enunciate "turgid" that emphatically while Tomas was trying to merge.
There. Hardly connected to Marcus at all.
Tomas reaches in his bag and pulls out Riding At Midnight, which has held itself together well considering the publishers had printed it with the kind of paper that yellows within a week and glue that merely suggests stickiness. The cover features a shirtless man in jeans and a cowboy hat, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. In the background, a black horse rears underneath the tagline, Passion rides on horseback.
“Is this a book about fucking a horse?” Marcus had asked the first time he saw it.
“It was fifty cents,” Tomas had said in his defense. “And I don’t think so.”
“You shouldn’t be uncertain about it.”
Marcus had read it all, though mercifully he’d started doing so silently about fifty pages in when he got invested. He’d read it at arm’s length as he read since Marcus believes he doesn’t need reading glasses if he squints hard enough. Maybe that’s why he draws in his bible, Tomas thinks. No point worrying about covering up the words if he couldn’t read them in an emergency anyway. He’s been saying the words since he was twelve. Why should he need the text?
“Here, take them, just take them,” Tomas had said, thrusting his glasses case at Marcus who took it only to toss it in the backseat. And later, that evening or maybe the next day, Tomas had come back from the gas station bathroom to see Marcus standing by the pump wearing Tomas’ frames, frowning at his commandeered romance novel. Tomas had frozen right there in the middle of the parking lot until an SUV honked at him and Marcus’ head shot up and he’d seen Tomas staring and he blushed. He yanked off the glasses, which had slipped halfway down his nose, the same one he’d tweak for Harper and smile at her so sweetly Tomas would feel as if he were spying on a stranger.
“You look good,” Tomas had said, more honestly than he’d meant.
Marcus had just said, “Course I do, I always look good,” but he hadn’t put them back on, and Tomas did not offer them again on the grounds that he now had an ulterior motive for doing so. Honesty could have cleared up the ethics of the matter, but since Tomas could not figure out a way to tell his friend, his brother, that the sight of him wearing Tomas’ things made him so hard he’d had to contort himself in the passenger seat so Marcus would not notice, Tomas kept his mouth shut and his glasses and his shirts and his socks and his thoughts to himself.
Tomas takes out his reading glasses, slides them onto his own nose, thinks about Marcus’ fingers pushing up his frames when they start to slip too low. There’s nothing illicit about that thought, surely. Not compared to other thoughts he’s had, where Marcus fucks him from behind over his desk at St. Anthony’s, a desk that no longer existed by the time Tomas thought to fanaticize about it, until they’re both soaked in sweat, absolutely dripping, and Tomas is still wearing his reading glasses which are nearly falling off his face, and then Marcus pulls out and turns him around and almost falls to his knees to take him into his mouth, but then he pauses, and kisses Tomas on the mouth, and brushes a bead of sweat off the tip of Tomas’ nose before he pushes Tomas’ glasses back up, secure.
His head falls back against the headboard with a thump and a wince. He does not touch himself, though his body stirs. He’s sworn off of that, made a late night promise to God that he wouldn’t, not again, never again, and in return God had sent him visions of mana in the wilderness.
He ought to pray for guidance, but he’s sick of holy words. He’s used them too much as weapons.
So instead, Tomas opens Riding at Midnight. Its cracked spine falls open where it always has—to the dramatic first kiss, hero Jackson Wyoming dipping his new lover Kitty against the desert sunset. And where Marcus has drawn in charcoal Tomas laughing as he drives, bent nearly double over the wheel, his eyes squeezed shut in mirth. Tomas has never seen himself so happy.
He studies his own face, drawn by someone who memorized it. Someone so pleased by its mirth that he had to remember it the way that he remembered things, in charcoal on paper belonging already to words of love.
There’s this joke about a flood, though presumably not The Flood, and a priest at his altar. A man runs up and says, Father, Father, we have to go, come get on my boat. And the priest says, no, no need. The Lord will provide and save me. And the rain keeps falling, and the water keeps riding, and this time a life raft paddles in through the door, and the sailors onboard say, Father, Father, we have to go, come with us before the storm gets worse. And the priest says, no need, don’t worry. The Lord will provide. And the rain falls still harder, and the water rises still higher until the priest is clinging to the crucifix to stay dry. And a helicopter hovers outside where the giant stained glass windows used to be before the storm shattered them, and someone gets on a megaphone and shouts over the din, Father, Father, we have to go. If you stay you’ll drown. And the priest says, nonsense, never. The Lord will provide. And the helicopter leaves, and the priest drowns.
When he gets to heaven, the priest asks God, why didn’t you save me? I had such faith. And God replies, what do you mean? I sent you two boats and a goddamn helicopter.
There’s a knock on the door, and it’s good Tomas is decent, as decent as he can be with his mouth dry and his hands numb, heart pounding repentance against his chest, because Marcus doesn’t wait before coming in. He’s got two plastic bags in hand, half steamed up, and instantly Tomas’ motel room smells like Indian food.
“It’s later,” Marcus says. “I brought food.”
“Later?” Tomas repeats blankly.
Marcus pulls out the takeout and says, “When you said you’d eat. Don’t worry.” Marcus winks at him. “I got it mild.”
And here is what Tomas should say: something about how Tomas likes spice, how he can actually handle spice, and Marcus will say something like, what does that mean, and Tomas will remind him which one of them was the one who got horribly sick in Texas because he got ambitious about hot sauce, and Marcus will something like about how it wasn’t the hot sauce, it was food poisoning, and Tomas will say, sure sure, and then ask then why it is that Marcus bursts into a sweat just looking at pepper. And then the food will be on the table, and they’ll eat without ever once bumping, and when they’re done, Tomas will stay in his room and Marcus will go to his.
Tomas closes his book and uses his fucking head for once. “How’d you get in?” Tomas asks. And then, when Marcus opens his mouth to lie, Tomas says, “Both keys are for this room.” And when Marcus doesn’t respond, Tomas says, “You only got one room.”
Marcus, head bowed, finishes unpacking the food.
“Where are you sleeping?” Tomas says.
“It doesn’t matter,” Marcus says.
“In the truck? In a park? Or are you not sleeping at all?” Horror lurches in his stomach as he sits up. “Were you going to leave me?”
Instead of saying no, Marcus sets the plastic forks on the table like he’s prepping a dinner party. Tomas wants to slap them out of his hand. “Not unless I need to. Thought you might want some space at least for a night. Didn’t seem worth wasting the money for two.”
Tomas thinks, almost, how much he much hate me that he cannot stand to sleep near me. But he doesn’t. He might have once, even earlier this evening, but Tomas can’t imagine how or why he could think that. In his mind, Marcus hunches in the booth, curled around the voice of a little girl telling him about her day. He said goodbye to her and here she’s back again; Marcus looks like this is a miracle on par with the resurrection. He thinks he’s doing me a favor.
“You think you’re doing me a favor,” Tomas says. What a strange pleasure, to think something and say it. Tomas tries it again, just to see how it tastes on the tongue. “You think your gift is going away. Look at me, Marcus.”
And Marcus’ head twitches like he wants to disobey. Then, he looks.
All those times before, when Marcus and Tomas looked at each other and just knew, those magically holy moments when it felt like God had given them access to the language before Babel, when all the world simply understood—had they ever understood? Had they ever, in even their moments of closest connection, looked at each other and thought the same thing? When everything is left unsaid, did they only assume they had got it right?
Because in this moment, Marcus looks as if he is afraid Tomas hates him. And Tomas doesn't know what Marcus could have ever seen in his face if he can think that.
When Tomas was a teenager in the cloistered black box, burning with lust and terrified of the flames, Father Antonio commanded him to confess. “No need to say why you did it,” he said whenever Tomas wavered into explanation. “Reasons are excuses. Name the sin and bury it.”
"I love you," Tomas says. The truth feels sweet on his tongue, the sweetest weight he’s ever choked. “As a man. Not a friend or a brother.”
Marcus stands ramrod still and pale as that day in Chicago when Tomas let a demon crawl inside of him and Marcus staggered to Tomas’ door bloodied and bloodless. "Don't say that," Marcus whispers. "Don't fucking—no."
The words are a wound, possibly fatal. He has so often looked at Marcus and known, known, that Marcus found him wanting and unwanted. So all the demon had needed to do was say Tomas was wanted. That he was good. He wore Marcus' face and told Tomas that it was good that he was here, and Tomas had fallen to his knees. I miss you, Marcus had breathed, and Tomas should have kissed him then, if only so that he might have kissed Marcus once. But he continues, he mourns, "It's true. And I’m sorry. I'm sorry that it upsets you. I'm sorry that I've—I've disappointed you." Marcus makes a keening noise in his throat like Tomas has stabbed him. Tomas takes a deep breath in lieu of crying. "But I'm not sorry I love you. I'm not, Marcus. I'm sorry, but I'm not."
"Stop fucking apologizing," Marcus practically snarls, but not at Tomas, not at anyone Tomas can discern. He shivers across the room, and Tomas wants to sweep him up in his arms. He does not look at Tomas, but looks everywhere else, like a wild animal in a cage startled into fear. His eyes dart about, and his hands ball into fists he releases and reclenches. It is the look of a man trying to bite back violence.
Tomas wonders briefly if he should be scared of him. He could not be even if his life depended on it.
"Then I won't," Tomas says. And because despite everything it was a joy to say the words, to free the battered bird at last from the wretched cage, he says again, "I love you."
"No, you don't," says Marcus, hopeless as a drowning man. "You don't, Tomas. You're just—you get sentimental, you, you, you're kind, you're too fucking nice, no, Tomas, no, no, you don't."
Tomas takes a step forward and Marcus stiffens, stills to utter immobility, except for his breathing, just short of hyperventilation, and Tomas takes another step forward, and Marcus shakes as though every muscle in his body tenses. "Don't tell me what I feel," Tomas says.
Marcus says nothing, does nothing, until Tomas reaches for his hands, pure white and clenched, and Marcus flinches away. The movement is so suddenly, so fierce, that Tomas flinches himself. Shame scuttles across Marcus’ face. "I need to go," he says. "I'm going to go." But he takes no move, and this time when Tomas reaches out again, he holds himself still as a prey animal as Tomas brushes his fingers against the back of his hand. They're close now. They've been close before. They used to be close all the time, and they would whispers prayers that the other would breathe deep so that their words lived on in the other person's lungs and blessed them with every pump of the bellows. Tomas can hardly feel Marcus' hand, he's so nervous. His own pulse pounds in his fingertips and ears and throat.
"Te amo," Tomas prays.
And Marcus shakes his head.
And Tomas says, "Sí."
Marcus takes a shuddering, inadequate breath through his nose, and says, "Please don't. Not after."
"After what?"
"You know."
"I don't."
Marcus begs with eyes alone.
Tomas says, "Tell me."
"I can't—please—not now—not—you said when you look at me, it's all you—" Marcus clenches his jaw, grinds his teeth, looks away. In another hotel, in another time, Tomas snapped off his words like this trying to give shape to his shame. Tomas does know what he wished Marcus did then. He takes his hand from Marcus, watches Marcus crumple at the loss, and watches Marcus stiffen anew when Tomas brings his hand to Marcus' cheek. The stubble scraps so sweetly against Tomas' fingers. He can feel the iron tension of Marcus' jaw, and he runs his thumb along the muscle, feels it twitch under his touch.
Marcus surrenders and buries his face in Tomas' palm. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I fucking hurt you, I hurt you, I’m sorry, love, forgive me—”
“You did nothing, nothing,” Tomas whispers, his voice cracking. Marcus’ tears bring out his own. He does not know who he is weeping for. “Mea culpa, mine, me.”
“My face,” Marcus pleads, lips hot against Tomas’ hand, tears hotter. “My face, it wore my face, and I brought you—I should have warned you—”
"Warned me what, Marcus?" Tomas asks, though he fears he knows the answer, fears the explanation that forms in his mind.
Marcus squeezes his eyes shut, and tears roll fat and heavy down his cheeks. Tomas cups his face with both hands, pulls them still closer together. Even now with Marcus weeping and shaking, it is blessing to hold him. He tilts Marcus' head down and Marcus lets him, puts up no fight, makes no sound but a gentle sob as Tomas presses his lips to Marcus' brow. He smells like Tomas's missing shampoo. The thought of Marcus smelling like him makes him ache. "Confess," Tomas commands softly. Marcus shivers against his words.
Marcus' hands dangle by his sides like dead things. If Tomas gave him the smallest push, Marcus would be flat on his back.
"I should have told you what they do," Marcus says flatly.
"I already knew," Tomas says. "Casey and Jessica." They've never discussed it since Tomas started his training. Tomas had always assumed Marcus was too disappointed in the event to think it bore repeating—an unfair judgment, unfair and untrue. It was easier to make Marcus disappointed than to be disappointed in himself.
Marcus shakes his head, almost. Twitches it to the side like he wants to look away, but Tomas holds his face fast. He presses their foreheads together. Marcus has nowhere to run. "No one told me," Marcus says. "Father Sean, he didn't tell me, and why would he? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. I don't know, Tomas, I can't trust what I remember. You remember the face and you forget the rest. Forget who was wearing the face. I don't know, I can't remember. And others—they said I wanted it, that's why the demons did it, and I can't say they were wrong, but I think they must have been. If someone else told me what I told myself, I'd tell them that some monster got them twisted up, that they didn't deserve it, that they didn't ask for it, and it sounds true for them, but it isn't the same. When it's you. Not you. When it's me. It's true for you."
Tomas' vision blurs until he cannot see Marcus as they press together nose to nose, and Tomas croaks, "Oh Marcus.” Marcus brings his hands up as though they weigh ten thousand pounds and ghosts them up Tomas' shirt as if he is afraid to touch. Until Tomas exhales, "Mi cariño, mi amor, dime por favor," and Marcus grasps at Tomas—a drowning man who found something to hold.
"My fucking face," Marcus says. "It wore my face."
"I'm glad," Tomas says, "I was glad, I was glad, I wanted it. I wish it had been you."
"No, no—" Marcus spits, and Tomas silences him with a word.
“Hush,” Tomas says, "hush. I do, that's what I wish."
"It hurt you, it hurt you, and it looked like me."
"It didn't hurt," Tomas says. "Not until I knew it wasn't you."
"It raped you, Tomas." This, Marcus pleads as if he requires forgiveness. His eyes are wild, and as if he had forgotten until now Tomas' grasp upon him, his grasp upon Tomas, he starts the contact and tries to jerk away. And Tomas holds him fast, not that he needs to; Marcus’ fists are still balled in Tomas’ shirt. "Let me go, Tomas, let me—" But Tomas doesn't. “Please, love, please don’t look at me,” Marcus sobs, truly sobs. “You said it was all you see.”
And Tomas presses his lips against Marcus’ cheeks and kisses his tears. Benediction, salty and sweet.
“I thought I disgusted you,” Tomas says softly against Marcus’ cheek, and Marcus, so eager to comfort the broken who aren’t himself, swears, “Never. Tomas, never.”
“I thought you thought I was weak.”
“Never, never.”
“I wanted so badly for you to touch me.”
Marcus takes a shuddering breath. His ragged exhale tickles Tomas’ cheek. “The demon made you—”
“No.” Tomas kisses his cheek again, just because he can, because his cheek is there and his lips are willing and Marcus’ head falls as if it weighs too much to hold, so Tomas kisses his cheekbones as well, kisses his temples and the bridge of his nose and the impossibly soft skin of his eyelids. He holds Marcus’ face between his hands and rains kisses upon him like the sprinkle of holy water. “The demon was a lie. My desire wasn’t. It isn’t.”
Marcus hisses though his teeth, but his hands move, sliding as though he cannot bear to take them away from Tomas for a second, until he wraps an arm around his shoulder, an arm around his waist. There’s modest air between them. Tomas coaxes Marcus flush, and together they gasp.
"I never hoped. I stopped hoping," Marcus croaks, his forehead pressed against Tomas'. "You deserve more than this. More than a broken down old man."
"Don't talk that way," Tomas says. "I'll not hear you insult the man I love."
A whimper tears out of Marcus' lips, and Tomas cannot stand to hear that either, not from this, not from love, so he presses their lips together and tries to swallow Marcus' doubt. God, God, God, Tomas thinks, all those years of seminary and now I have finally found you. You are the taste of my love’s lips.
Tomas pulls back, just enough to whisper, “Do you love me too?”
And Marcus says, “Christ, Tomas, did I not say it? I love you, I love you. It terrifies me how much I love you.”
“Good, good, me too,” Tomas says, relieved to be on the same page, and kisses Marcus again with a hunger that terrifies as well. Vast wondrous things are terrifying. God is a pillar of fire from the sky, lighting the way out of Egypt. The angels say be not afraid.
On the bed, the one bed, their bed, Tomas straddles Marcus’ hips as he unbuttons his shirt with fumbling fingers. Marcus runs his hands up Tomas’s thighs and blushes under Tomas’ stare. “You’re beautiful,” Tomas says, and Marcus doesn’t dare to deny it. Tomas would not let the words pass his lips. “May I?” Tomas asks, reaching for Marcus’ belt, and Marcus laughs as if it doesn’t need to be asked before he says, “Yes, God, yes.” And Tomas slides down Marcus’ body as he takes off his pants, and there between Marcus’ bare legs, long and leaned and scarred and perfect, Tomas asks, “May I?” and Marcus swallows and opens his mouth and when no words come out, Tomas waits until Marcus nods. And when Tomas nuzzles against Marcus’ clothed cock, Marcus sobs exquisitely, and Tomas is filled with light. Like his blood is champagne and his sins forgiven.
When Tomas starts to pull Marcus from his briefs, Marcus mumbles, “You don’t need to do that,” as he strokes Tomas’s hair like Tomas might leave any moment.
“I have dreamed of this,” Tomas replies and kisses the tip of Marcus’ cock with every bit of reverence with which he kisses his bible.
He can’t imagine God would be angered by that. There is no evil in the honest work of love.
He takes Marcus into his mouth as best he can—he’s never done this before, has only once received this act himself, but the noises wrung from Marcus’ mouth make Tomas’ mouth water and his hips grind against the mattress.
Then Tomas gags, and the hand on his head tugs him back. And Marcus is bringing him up, bringing their mouths back together as their legs entwine—Marcus’ bare, Tomas’ still clothed. “Come on, love,” Marcus murmurs, one hand brushing through Tomas’ hair as the other lies flat against his stomach, just above the waistband of his sweatpants. “Let me take care of you.”
Tomas kisses him in answer, and grabs Marcus’ hand on his stomach, and slides it lower. Together they grasp Tomas’ cock, and when Tomas gasps into Marcus’ mouth, it finally hits him—good good God so good thank you thank You God thank you, he is making love to the man he loves and the man he loves loves him back. Marcus pauses—“Are you alright?”—and Tomas nods and nods—says, “Call me love again”—and throws his head back Marcus takes them both in hand—whispering “love, love, oh love” like Hail Marys—and strokes them together.
He wants to pin Marcus down and ride him until his legs give out. He wants Marcus to lie over him and fuck him face to face. He wants to be on all fours and come cock untouched while Marcus takes from behind and drives out every false memory, every misstep. The demon copies Marcus’ body and got him all wrong. There is nothing in this bed of hell, nothing, nothing.
God is in me, Tomas had told the demon, and the demon had replied, Did God fuck you too? Tomas wants to say yes, yes, yes, He is incardinate and infinite and He sent me my husband.
Tomas comes with his face buried in Marcus’ neck. Marcus comes with his face buried in Tomas’ hair. They could be buried in this bed. They breathe and shiver as one.
When Marcus asks too hesitantly, “Was that good for you?” Tomas brings Marcus’ hand to his mouth and sucks his fingers clean one by one.
Marcus watches through half-lidded eyes, dark as the desert night and as full of stars. He hooks a leg over Tomas, hooks his foot behind Tomas’ ankle. “Imagine our dinner’s gone cold.”
Tomas laughs, giggles to be more accurate, and Marcus giggles with him and into him. They sound drunk. They are, and kiss again, and get drunker still. Tomas’ hands roam Marcus’ body, the scars he knew and didn’t, the freckles constellated down his back, the softness of his belly and above, the rhythm of his ribs. And Marcus undresses him, a question at every step, and Tomas says yes, please, yes, yes, yes, mi amor, yes. I want this. Give me what I want.
And Marcus, ever generous, ever sacrificing, gives and gives and apologizes for takes until Tomas stops his mouth once more, and they begin again.
A desert road, from nowhere to nowhere. The track of a boulder. It is not in the same place today as it was yesterday. It will be in a new place tomorrow. Somewhere nearby there is a woman with a knife. Her wife sings a lullaby for the child that has not arrived. The boulder is coming for them. It will turn them into a smear in its track. Tomas does not know how he knows that. Just that he does. The end of the world is not yet here and a family needs help—
Tomas does not jerk awake. Instead, the vision ends and he opens his eyes. Nevertheless, there is a hand stroking his face at once, a familiar hand, a familiar comfort. “Are you okay?” Marcus whispers. The hotel room is pitch black, and they are tangled in each other.
“Yes,” Tomas says with complete honesty. He turns his head and kisses Marcus’ thumb, just because he can. “Sorry for waking you.”
“I was awake.”
Tomas raises an eyebrow he knows Marcus cannot see. “I didn’t tire you out, old man?”
Marcus pinches his bottom. Tomas will deny that he yelped. “Rude,” he says primly just to hear Marcus laugh. “Go to sleep.”
Marcus hums, not agreement or disagreement, rests his head against Tomas’ chest, and Tomas rolls onto his back and takes Marcus with him so that Marcus ends up cradled in Tomas’ arms. Tomas delights in the weight of him with every breath. “I can hear you worry,” Tomas murmurs.
“I’m scared this is a dream,” Marcus confesses, his mouth pressed to Tomas’ heart.
“It isn’t,” says Tomas, who has considered it. “You were never so beautiful in fiction.”
After a long silence, a sacred silence, Tomas raising up Marcus with every shared breath, Marcus says, “Well, you would know,” so dubiously that Tomas has to laugh, and Marcus laughs, and Tomas almost says, the demons never made me laugh, but decides to save that thought for the morning as the laughter peters off, and Marcus stills and stills some more and grows heavier still until Marcus sinks down into him, and breathes with Tomas’ lungs, and turns his blood to wine, and makes a torch of his heart for all of the angels to follow, and it’s possible that Tomas has drifted off to sleep now himself, that he is dreaming at last, but there are truths and truths and lifeboats and helicopters, demons, exorcists, a family in need, and Marcus so close against him that Tomas cannot tell whose body is which, and Tomas decides that deciphering the holiest mysteries of the universe can also wait until morning.