Chapter Text
Where we could be boys together. This region of want:
the campestrial flat. The adolescents roving across the plat.
Come hither. He-of-the-hard would call me hither.Sheer abdomen, sheer slickensides, the feldspar buttes
that mammillate the valley right where it needs to bust.And I could kiss his tits and he could destroy me
on the inflorescent slopes; in his darkest dingles;
upon the grassland’s raffish plaits. And he could roll me
in coyote brush: I who was banished to the barren
could come back into his fold, and I
would let him lay me down on the cold, cold ground.
— from Boonies, by D.A. Powell
The grief came in endless waves. It swallowed him whole, hollowed him out, gutted V from throat to pubis. It was constant and immeasurable. He would lie in bed beneath Misty’s dreamcatcher and think, before sleep came: what remains of him but this? A framed photo on the coffee table of them as boys, turned face-down.
Months later, visiting the clinic as much to sate his own loneliness as to upgrade some implants, Vik mentioned to V that he’d woken between hallucinations—no, not hallucinations but Johnny’s borrowed memories—feverish and crazed, yelling, panicked, that Jackie’s body was still in the Delamain. Misty had to hold him down until Vik got the needle in him and he slipped back into a dreamless, narcotic slumber.
He told Misty, eventually: about them crowded as kids into Jack’s twin bed, sticky with summer heat, their awkward bodies sweating, growing hair and pimples; grooming in the mirror, brushing their teeth side-by-side in the mornings when they were both still going to school (V stayed; Jack sure as hell didn’t). Touching each other’s changing bodies, “practicing” kissing—stuff that Jack never brought up as they got older. He remembered Jackie’s freckled dick, how he was flushed darker between his thighs than elsewhere.
V started getting hairy first, under his arms and all over his belly and wrists and ass and above his cock and the scraggly black hairs on his chest. They’d stand in front of the little mirror in his room, pressed cheek-to-cheek to compare whispy caricatures of mustaches. The two of them were both mutts: absent brown dads, white moms. V’s Spanish was better than his Gujarati from all the time spent at the Welles’ house, all the mornings and evenings squabbling across the table with Jackie’s brothers.
“I loved him, Misty,” V told her, his voice cracking. “I know,” she soothed.
“No,” he said, hardly able to get the words out. “I mean—“
He tried to come home every other day, every three days at most: he’d shower, shave, change his clothes, do laundry if he needed to; resupply the pills in his glovebox and in the under-seat compartment of the Arch and in little dime bags that he wrote on in permanent marker (JOHNNY + and JOHNNY -, he’d scrawl, in cramped, square capitals). Get at least 6 or 7 hours of blessed sleep in his own bed and not some roach-infested motel in another corner of the city. Barry would stop by to feed Nibbles and scoop the litter and play with her on the days V couldn’t make it. The man liked animals, and fuck cops, of course, but he wasn’t one any longer and didn’t talk to his old coworkers—not after the way they’d treated him.
When they were kids, he and Jackie would gorge themselves sick on loquats. Jack was always taller: he’d boost V up into the crown, where he’d pick handfuls of yellow fruit and toss them down for Jackie to catch. They’d go home with their mouths and palms sticky. He remembered when there were still flying things: birds and bees and bats, and how abruptly they had disappeared. Now, the city’s workers hand-pollinated what little was left. The fruit trees in Heywood were long since gone.
He’d found a pit in the desk drawer at Jackie’s garage, dried and shrunken. The grooves of his teeth twenty years ago had scraped it clean of flesh. V swallowed it. As if the traces of his spit could transmute death, dissolve into his bloodstream.
“Were you in his head?” he asked Johnny once. “I mean—long enough to know him at all.”
A long silence. “No. I’m sorry if that wasn’t the answer you wanted.” They didn’t speak the rest of the night.
He took Pepe home after the job tracking his wife. “I have to go,” the bartender said when V showed up, right before closing. He needed to put his kid to bed. “Let Cynthia do it,” V murmured, and he leaned over the bar to fist the hem of Pepe’s shirt in one hand and pull him closer. He yielded.
He spat mezcal back into Pepe’s mouth, mustache to mustache. His cock was like V’s—thick, veiny, brown, with a beautiful little rosette of foreskin at the tip—but wider, obscenely so, and longer still. No scars; all organic meat here. V wanted it in him as soon as Pepe pulled it out from the button fly of his jeans in the passenger seat of the Hella, wanted to be fucked for the first time in so long, but it wouldn’t fit, not with poppers, not with weed. His body was so locked up. “Relax,” Pepe muttered, his cockhead pressed slickly against V’s asshole, but he couldn’t. He sucked him, worked his tongue around the slick head—not like Jack’s, rough from being cut high and tight, rubbing against his bleached briefs and then later his boxers. He tasted like loneliness.
Pepe’s broad body covered his, moved down, gave him sloppy, toothy head—“Jesus, softer”—and the bartender maneuvered his big body around, head pressed to the bookcase, muscled legs up: “in me, V”, fingered him open with spit and lube and then he was inside him, fucking slow and deep, feeling the tight wet ring of Pepe’s ass pulling on him, sucking him in to the balls. He groaned, leaned over him. Looked Pepe hotly in the eye, black heavy lashes shadowing brown irises, his long hair falling around his face. V spat in his mouth and saw Jack’s face for a moment—he couldn’t tell if it was the Relic or grief or lack of sleep or a combination of all three—and Pepe’s cock grew half-hard again against his stomach, a little spurt of precum that grew until it trickled and his dick jerked, lengthening, and V held himself up with one hand and stroked Pepe with the other and fucked him deep until he jizzed all over his own chest, gave a bellowing yell, eyes screwed shut, fucking himself back on V while his ass fluttered, contracting tight around him. V sagged. He hadn’t cum, couldn’t; his dick softened only a minute after he pulled out and wiped himself off.
Later, in the shower, he came to the thought of when Jackie had fucked him for the first time, 14 and clumsy and tender and terrified, and the intensity of his orgasm shook him to where his knees nearly buckled and he sat in the water and cried. Thought of himself then: soft kid putting up a hard fucking front. Hair on his lip first coming in. Big ugly, snotty sobs, until Johnny glitched into the doorframe and he downed an omega blocker. No snide comments, not tonight.
He toweled off and got into bed. Nibbles pressed her little velveteen body back against him and purred.