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Lyle's thoughts are a swirl of red.
Dried cherries and cherry jam, pies and sorbets and rarely, a fresh little pair plucked straight off the tree.
Wrapped up so carefully and hung up, out of sight.
The leaves are so gentle, sweeping about in a little breeze, each fruit picked and tended and each one that would soil the rest was cast to the ground, rotting and fermenting and turning into a delicious, sweet poison.
And there in the darkroom, where everything was loved in the only light it could handle, the only light that wouldn't scorch the leaves and the branches and the fruit into an unrecognizable mush, a sweet wine lies to age.
A little cask of cardboard, in bottles of protective sheets, each negative is marked. Harvest date, bottling date. Every batch labeled and kept together and it seemed like it was a good, good year.
A newly developed photo is a new fruit he can't take a bite out of, a bottle he can't truly open, one more new temptation added to the rest.
His mouth of cherry developer drenched both Sam and himself, sticking to his teeth and gums and clogging every layer of his throat, swallowed where he could feel Sam drenched in acetic acid, feel where two hearts stopped in tandem, chest aching and squeezing, everything wringed out and juiced for all it was worth, to be digested into the gaping maw that reeked death and hunger and desire that dripped down in awful red and black.
Such a good harvest and yield, and for what?
The smell of sulfur and sweet whispers of spiders and Sam dancing across the web lines rings in Lyle's peals of nervous cackling and talking to himself for hours and hours.
It's all a battle of constant restraint, but Lyle already lost the moment he put on his gloves the very first time after he said he wouldn't, kept saying it, as if his hands weren't already red soaked with juice and blood and flame and deathly cold from the little personal hell he invited into his home, his mind.
But it's what Sam needed, what each little offering called for. So he gave it.
The broken shards of glass and thick, syrupy indulgence made the red dripping from Lyle's mouths so much worse, his love stabbing into his heart and cutting out his lips and eyelids and gushing out of every orifice.
He could feel the way that Sam would bend under his teeth as he held the stem, soft smacks of sticky flesh with the hard, dark pit in the center, plucked out a different mouth with a different hand, an obscene pop ringing out with an image slowly revealed, a mundane little secret that lingered on his tongue like a hard candy.
All the old batches of negatives preserved to last that he took out when he couldn't leave anymore were gone, printed and adored and doted on and Lyle was bound to his apartment because he took one too many bites, got too hungry and greedy and desperate.
The fresh turns to decay so quickly, and it turns dark and into an awful, awful splash as it spirals down and down, so many colors and veins and throbbing, beautiful sea glass sparkling into stardust that oozed out into a thousand ribcages holding every jewel and awful temptation that could ever be known.
And Lyle drank that too, swallowed a little droplet of the blocked-out sun's burning agony, and his body expanded and ballooned and melted into scorching sludge, ached into every wrinkle and pain and groove and he wanted so terribly, felt it in every bend and screech.
Sam seeped into every crevice and cut and crack, burrowed himself deep, staunched the bleeding as Lyle reached and reached and retched.
It was just a little too late when Lyle realized the very first seed he planted so long ago wasn't just any little weed. It was a fruit tree that needed constant tending that he gave and spoiled and promised was just a temporary reprieve, a temporary vice he'd simply rip out once it matured, even as Sam's roots had already sank deep into the foundations of Lyle, too far to go back.
Each little piece of Sam's soul, each a seed for something to grow so much worse. Darkened silver that hurt and hurt and hurt under the light of the moon.
He had so much time, a tree takes its time to set root, inches up into a small sapling in years, but Lyle couldn't let go, couldn't throw it out yet, every time he held Sam's growing allure under his hands in a sweet, tender grip.
A quick candid or a cultivated shot planned for hours, it didn't matter, each one so gently pressed and soaked all the same. The same excuses, the same stuttered defenses, arguing and arguing and Sam just watched from every angle, didn't say a thing. Sleeping on the threads hung up between each sweet branch, laying on the counter like a thousand fallen leaves.
Lyle was broken into too many pieces to count.
Every cord and wire, ripped apart with how embraced and loved and cared for Lyle was by each grasping hand, sinking under carapace into his veins and draining it all dry, held so carefully and Sam didn't even know, couldn't see and never could see what he truly did to Lyle, the way Lyle was under his thrall, buried deep under the earth and hidden away and completely, completely exposed.
His longing was fertilized so decadently, every failed image weeping blood, blurred and distorted and wrong but each one was so undeniably Sam too: flawed and imperfect and blurry and with terrible composition or lighting, a wrong angle, someone else, something else in frame, and—
So much squelched under foot and sighed above and filled his nose and tongue and ears and everything.
It's so worth wading through all the rotten ones just to find him so perfect, in just the right likeness. So close but not good enough, not yet.
Just the right amount of light, just the right amount of water, mixed carefully with the right chemicals to allow him to grow endlessly and get so hungry, Sam starving for Lyle's attention, Sam sinking deeper until Lyle couldn't help but squirm.
He couldn't meet the demand, Lyle could never keep up.
Lyle put everything into each photo, as they deserved, as Sam deserved. Pieces of themselves shared back and forth in an endless kiss, feeding each other sweet sugary pulp that stained their teeth and the insides of their mouths, and the roots tightened, gripped him just a bit closer.
And in turn, Lyle always gorged himself on too much and too little and got so drunk he could vomit, spilled every part of his guts on the floor to mix with everything else useless and faulty. Fed Sam just a little more — what's the harm when they've gone this far already? — and Sam is so gentle as he claws into his stomach.
Lyle always did go too far, drunk himself raw, drunk until he couldn't even see even with every added eye and lens. Couldn't feel a single thing with every claw, couldn't hear the rustling of paper and the fluid in his ears, couldn't smell the earth and nectar and acid of the jungle he crawled in the underbrush of.
His lenses ached, each shutter click and the wheeze of bellows starting a new flame to fan and burn, burn everything down just to get a little, tiny, taste.
A taste of the worn sweaters and jackets that smelled of mothballs and dust and small holes in the sleeves where Sam pulled the threads nervously with nails he let grow long and sharp.
A taste of the unkempt curls that stuck out in an oily, unbrushed fray, smelling of old cooking and his cheap shampoo and the fabric under his skull when he slept in until far past noon.
A taste of the fingerprints and heat left on the doorknob to his apartment, to his bedroom, the refrigerator handle and every cabinet and drawer and remote. The lingering, oily marks left where he leaned his hand to mark out his calendar, the keys on his laptop faded and worn smooth.
A taste of the fat that pillowed out over the last few months, Sam sinking into his couch cushions and his bed just a bit more, just a bit further, the indents growing deeper.
A taste of pronounced cheekbones, a fold of flesh under his chin, lips in the most subtle pout, eyebrows thick and worried and his nose hooked down.
A taste of tired and sunken eyes, eyes that didn't sleep and couldn't sleep and that never saw Lyle back.
Eyes straight from the old convenience store and the stairway and the grocery store down the street and Sam's room and bathroom and kitchen, staring at nothing and everything and something droning on the TV and his laptop.
They always wandered carelessly and lost, striking Lyle like a lash of lightning down his elongated spine when they glanced at him but didn't even see, didn't even realize.
It was so much better and so much worse when they were out of focus. A little misty, a little hazy. Lost in the darkness behind his skull.
Glittering and so deeply empty, an endless depth of thousands of layers of the sky that make different shades and colors as the light reflected through it all. So far away and yet right in Lyle's own lungs as he breathed deeply, panting.
Seeing, watching.
Sam's pretty eyes, slanted in a subtle exhaustion.
The right iris looked like a valley of autumn grass, autumn leaves, on a beautiful blue day.
The left was the depth of a sunset in a photograph that's faded, darkened and turned beautiful browns and oranges and yellows with tender, well-loved age.
They were so gentle. His dark eyelids drooped over them in soft purple and brown and his eyelashes fanned and curled over, his face ever so slightly furrowed when he worried at his lip.
Lyle wants to sink his teeth, the soft flesh of two plump delights conjoined in their stems, until he meets the pit, keep going until every tooth broke, feel how soft he was under his fangs.
He wanted to eat Sam whole, feel him slide down his throat.
Sam, all wrapped up in hot spun threads of sugar, fossilized in amber, and Lyle could pet and coo and drink him into an empty, beautiful husk.
Instead, Lyle only suckles his own stained fingers in some attempt to bring the sweet flavor back out the depth of his bones. The tart tang of summer sweat and salt on a clear, bright sky with winds bringing in something fresh on its wings.
The hints of a sun that was still kind, warmth and heat and scorching so hot, trying to follow a light that was so fake, lead him in circles and astray and everywhere until all he could do was obediently burn into ash and cold, rotten metal.
Endless affection was such good fertilizer, an endless fuel. Growing and growing and unable to stop getting worse and worse, the flames growing hotter, metal beaten into shape, wood turned to charcoal.
Lyle was the only thing privy to the sap that dripped from Sam's tear ducts of where he bored small little holes to try to escape, little galls that showed his true desires in pretty lumps encasing squirming thoughts.
He could feel them move when he pressed his hands up against them, against each and every one. The little vibrations of his web between the branches shaking off dew drops into his fur, soaking him in deep, deep paranoia.
Under the sweet light, the sweet rosy cherry wine-light, Lyle could just drink, drink the desire dripping off the lines and shake his quivering hair into the wall, let the old leaves fall into autumn and freeze into blistering, cold winter, shuffle his cloak closer and hear the creak of his body burning like a radiator, warm himself with how his body boiled itself from the inside.
Hell was so cold and so hot. It froze Lyle into a burning sweat. His stomach sloshes, liquids dribbling out his mouth in his scorching, drunken want as the icicles stabbed needles into chewed-off lips.
Lyle was sick. Deathly ill, and that thing outside only added to it, took away his last reprieve, molted him into something true and terrible and could only skitter on the bark of his little cell in desperation, silken film barely holding himself together, everything leaking and creaking like an ongoing car crash.
He takes another drink. Another swig. Tart and tangy and it tastes like nothing going down his throat, only burns like fuel. Ethanol. Silver halides and gelatin. A sweet pink cake with glitter dusted on the top, each fruit his own heart chopped up and burned at 350 degrees.
Lyle swallowed so much fresh fruit and he was rotten in his core no matter how he tried to preserve it, wrapped his lips around the tree and the bark and every little twig, ran his fingers into the grooves of Sam he cultivated here, in his endless, worshipping care. Sank his claws in and felt the way he breathed.
Whispering and whispering and every leaf and every photo and every loose paper was deafening, too much life in one little scorching room, orchard choking and overgrown and Lyle still can't help but drown his hands in every pool, slide a photo out and then another and another. Coo and fret and twirl and call Sam so gorgeous. Smear every touch of ink with eager lips and hands and smell his own breath on each of Sam's face and form and figure when he did it all over again. Little chirps and clicks every small little ambience of his lush sanctuary, a perfect little torment.
Red, so much red, smudged cherry lipstick all over Sam's mouth, so gaudy and harsh. Hearts and words that didn't really matter, Sam so pretty and perfect and oh he didn't need any words at all.
Everything was already there, wasn't it? Words were so difficult, complicated. It was easier, nicer, like this, able to know just from the sweet squirming gasps he could feel wracking each photo's frame, the way Sam's eyes and hands and shoulders spoke so much louder. Something so special hidden under sweet red flesh, in the tinted monochrome.
Something he could chew and break himself into pieces on, find the little kernel in there too. Go further and dissect even that, the truest and barest parts of Sam.
The negative of a polaroid revealed as its face was burned off, taken and printed so sloppily but so honestly, so true in the rush.
Lyle was so, so hungry. Mouths dripping with so much regret. So much intoxication and desire. It burned his own hands.
To press Sam to every part of him, feel so embraced by every friend and every thread and it was all stained so red, drenched in his complete love for Sam ohhh he loved him.
He loved him and he wishes he could share it, his spinnerets twirling thickened paper in an innocent trap, set and loaded with the flash of bright magnesium powder and hands holding onto him so gently, wrapping him up and they could just live here forever and Sam wouldn't have to worry about a thing, fed from Lyle's own heart, rooted in his guts and brain. A drip feed of his fervor, delicate to not set him on fire.
Blood and sap mixing up into a strange drink, lips touching the same spot on their shared bottle, the shared heat lingering in the neck, on the sides.
Lyle's heart sighs for him.
Hydraulics puffing, glass sliding over plastic and plastic over glass. The soft squelch of a fruit being gently torn apart with bare hands.
Fingers pressing in, and Lyle's eyes squeeze shut, and his cloak isn't enough, isn't enough to be hidden by every watchful glaring rosy shimmer.
Bleached and dyed even redder, unnatural and glowing.
Lyle is torn apart, ripped from every segment and leg in delight at every one of Sam's faces, every heated thought and every little unrealistic fantasy, every want of Sam to fill up every empty part of him.
Seal him up, full and thickened up and oozing out shared desire, a full mouth and nose and ears and...
Drool slides, drips into rusty legs.
His whole body weeps.
Sam was a beautiful, strong cherry tree and he could only breathe in the wind, offer another fruit, another twig, another root. He couldn't open his eyes, and look back. And Lyle couldn't bite. Couldn't use his mouth, greedy greedy mouths that wanted to eat, to develop and immortalize and take one more memory he wouldn't be able forget then, another souvenir.
Share little things back and forth until it was unrecognizable who was even who, an alloy of shared want.
He couldn't. Not how he wants to.
It's never right.
Lyle always etches into the bark, another heart with initials inside, fake words and fake hands and he hides himself under the leaves, in the red light where he can't see anything at all. He laughs and giggles and a crying heart is invisible, it's too red, hidden, and he gorges on the cherries on the ground until he is drunkenly stumbling into numbness.