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Jack couldn’t get the image of Robby’s stethoscope dangling on the railing out of his head.
He made his goodbyes to the crew and caught up with Robby waiting on the southbound platform. Robby was sitting on a bench with his eyes closed and his headphones in, arms crossed over his backpack and head laid back against the wall. Jack sat next to him, close enough for their thighs to touch. Robby tensed but didn’t crack an eyelid.
So that was how he was gonna play it.
Jack smirked and planted his elbow on his knee, head in his hand. He took the opportunity to indulge in one of his favorite pastimes: staring. At Robby specifically. Sure, there was the robust bone structure, the striking specificity of his beauty, but more than that, Jack appreciated the traceable history there. The bags under his eyes, the lines of his face, the frost in his beard. It was the kind of topography Jack could map forever: proof of life.
The northbound train came and went with a gust of humid wind and a rumble through Jack’s bones, and Robby still wouldn’t open his eyes. He bumped Robby’s knee, and when all Robby did was tighten in on himself, Jack had no choice but to hip check him.
Finally, Robby peered at him through a scowl, and then Jack was treated to the sight of him jolting up in surprise.
“Jack! Jesus, I thought you were a panhandler.”
“Had to see how long you were gonna let it go on,” Jack said. He bumped their shoulders together. “I thought about pinching your wallet, but I figured you earned a little mercy tonight.”
“You’d never get it,” Robby said. “I have an excellent hiding place.”
“I hope you realize that makes it sound like you have it up your ass. I thought we talked about flared bases, brother?”
Robby let out a surprised laugh—the kind that split his face, squeezed his eyes shut, made the Heavens sing—and knocked Jack’s knee.
“You coming over?” he asked.
“Whether you like it or not, I’m afraid,” Jack said.
“Mexican or Chinese?”
“Syrian.”
Robby let out a groan.
“Yeah. Yeah. Shit, let’s order right now.” He dug around in his hoodie and produced his phone.
“Did you eat anything real today?” Jack asked.
“What are you getting, gyro?”
“Robby.”
“Look, I’m trying to handle it.” He jiggled the phone at him. “No bars.”
“Fine. And yes, a gyro, but also shawarma and some falafel, I’m fucking starving.”
Robby slanted a smirk at him. The southbound train finally slid into the station, and when they got on, Robby bullied Jack into taking a seat while he stood sentinel in front of him. He hung off a hand strap and blocked everyone who budged up close from jostling Jack’s leg. All Jack had to do was sit back and enjoy the view.
They were one double meal and four beers in when Robby, sprawled into the corner of the couch with his knee knocking Jack’s, declared that he wanted a new tattoo.
“What are you thinking about?” Jack said.
“Not sure yet,” Robby said. “But I want it right here.”
He lifted his left arm and pointed to the side of his ribs, just under his armpit. Jack hissed.
“That’s gonna sting, man,” he said.
Robby scoffed.
“How would you know? I can’t believe you got through two and a half tours and never got a tattoo, that’s gotta be some kinda record.”
“Pfft.” Jack kicked at him with his stump. “Shows what you know.”
“Wait, what?” Robby sat up. “I’ve seen you in swim trunks!”
Jack wagged his eyebrows at him. Robby let out a disbelieving little laugh.
“Thigh, ass, or pubes?” Robby asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Oh my God, how embarrassing is it?” he asked. “How old were you? How drunk were you? Wait, wait, let me guess: de oppresso liber.”
“Nah, man, the clichéd Latin phrases are all you.”
“Fuck, I bet it’s like, a Garfield stick and poke with half the ink gone.”
Jack laughed.
“What’ll you give me to show you?” he asked.
“I already bought dinner!”
“And what, I should put out? Wow, Rob.”
“Fine, what do you want?”
“Just a fuckin’ promise, man.”
The humor faded from Robby’s expression and he looked abruptly exhausted. He sagged back into his couch corner, withdrawing all the warmth he was radiating into Jack’s side.
“I wasn’t gonna do anything,” Robby said.
Jack scooted in and plastered himself up against Robby’s side. He was probably squishing him; he didn’t care.
“You know having the thought doesn’t make you bad or weak or whatever, right? All it is is your brain seeing a fire and looking for the quickest way to put it out.”
“Jack, please.”
“Okay. Okay, Robby.” He clasped the back of Robby’s neck. Robby shuddered under his hand but leaned into him, knee to shoulder. Jack slung his arm around Robby’s neck and squeezed him in tighter. Their heads bonked together. Robby grabbed a fistful of Jack’s t-shirt and held on.
“Tell me the story of your tattoo,” Robby said.
“Oh, Christ.” Jack chuckled. “Well. Cast your mind back to 1993. Imagine, if you will, a strapping young man all the girls swooned over, homecoming king, the star quarterback, every teacher’s wet dream, sitting pretty at the top of his class. And then imagine the guy behind him carving dicks into the desktops.” He delivered some jazz hand action with his free hand. “Ta-da!”
Robby drew back enough to send him a wild eyebrow.
“Really, Jack?”
Jack gave a loose shrug.
“What can I say? My school, my hometown, everything around me was so goddamn boring and shitty I felt like my brain was gonna explode. All I wanted was to leave, but, you know, I was a kid who couldn’t imagine a real future. So I fucked around, partied in the woods, took the SATs high, shit like that. And, for the record, I still ended up salutatorian, and boy did that burn Jason Stockwell right up.”
“Was Jason Stockwell the quarterback?”
“Oh yeah,” Jack said. “So what does he do but show up at my house the day the class rankings were released a few weeks before graduation?”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah. He showed up ready to kick my waster ass, except.”
“Except…”
Jack sighed. He stretched his neck and was rewarded with a series of relieving pops.
“My dad was watching TV in the other room when the doorbell rang,” he said. “He wouldn’t get off his drunk, lazy ass to get the door even though he was right the fuck there and I was on a whole other floor, so he was screaming at me, really laying it on, and he didn’t stop even when I opened the door. So now imagine you’re Jason Stockwell, and you’re a fucking star, man, you’re going places, you’re fucking special, everyone’s always said so. You’re pissed that this obnoxious stoner who doesn’t even try is nipping at your heels, maybe even going to a better college than you, and hey maybe he fucking cheated, right? Maybe he fucking cheated and you’re gonna blow this whole thing wide open, really fuck this kid’s life. Only he opens the door with a black eye, and you can see inside his house is some sort of hoarder nightmare and everything’s fucking yellow from smoke and nicotine, and there’s a motherfucker in the other room screaming the most vile shit you’ve ever heard at the top of his lungs just because he needs to vent his spleen and his kid’s the most convenient target, and maybe you’re a callow little asshole but you’re not a monster so you grab this kid you’ve never willingly spoken to before and you drag him out of his house and you ask him something no one’s ever even thought to ask him before.”
Robby was watching him with wide eyes.
“What?”
Jack snorted. His heart gave an old familiar pang.
“He said, ‘are you okay?’”
Robby made a mournful little sound.
“Ha,” Jack said. “Yeah. It was the 90s and I was allergic to sincerity so I puffed up, you know, I was like yeah I’m great, what’s it to you? Fucking humiliated he heard all that, saw all that, realized I came by the stench of stale cigarettes honestly. I was ready to fight. Do you think a bantam weight wrestler can take the star quarterback? I wanted to find the fuck out, but Jason just…invited me over to smoke weed.”
“No shit,” Robby said. “That’s kinda fucking sweet, actually.”
“It was, yeah. He was.”
Understanding dawned on Robby’s face. Jack was watching Robby rearrange everything he knew about Jack in real time. Christ, had he not known? Jack picked at a seam in his pants, which had suddenly become very interesting.
“Hey man, there was a reason all the girls loved him,” Jack said. “It was actually hard not to, once he decided he was your friend. And for the summer before college, me and Jason were thick as thieves.”
“Did you and he…”
“Yes,” Jack said. “But also no. It was, you know. Nothing we ever looked in the eye. Nothing we ever said. Handies in the dark, a girl on your arm at prom. We never even kissed. Do you wanna hear about the tattoos or not?”
“Oh is that where all this was leading? I forgot.”
“I should leave you hanging for that.”
“I’ll be good,” Robby said. He crossed his heart. He looked like he was holding in a laugh. If it was Jack he was laughing at, so be it. It was better than the despair in his eyes on the roof.
“Jason was all set to go to Duke, but he was, I don’t know, restless? Like a sprinter waiting for the shot to go off. Just like, buzzing. One night, he’s a little stoned, a little drunk, I’m doodling shit as usual only this time it’s on his leg. And he goes, ‘Jack Rabbit, ever wanna do something stupid?’ Like I wasn’t doing stupid shit all the time, not least of which was joining ROTC.”
“Oh shit, it is a stick-and-poke!” Robby said.
Jack rolled his eyes.
“The deal was I’d do one on him and he’d do one on me, but here’s the kicker: dealer’s fucking choice.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes.”
“Jack, please let me see it. Please, I need to.”
“Okay but you have to understand that I’m a fucking artist, Robby,” he said. “I gave him a masterpiece in amateur pointillism of the flesh. I like, made sure the hallmarks of the process worked with the image I made. Meanwhile the only class he ever got a B in was art. Do you know what you have to do to get a B in art, man?”
“What’d you give him?”
“You know when there’s a flock of birds, hundreds of them, and the way they’re flying is like, this coordinated throb and ripple of organic shapes in the sky?”
“Holy shit, Jack.”
“I’m telling you, he not only got off light, he made off like a bandit.”
“You have to show me what he did to you, man. I can’t take the suspense.”
Jack blew out a theatrical sigh. He stood up, braced his stump against the coffee table, paused to send an atheist’s prayer into the ether, and rucked his pants down under the meat of his ass.
Silence. Jack held his breath, eyes on the ceiling. And then, a puff of air over his asscheeks. A bark of laughter that rang between the walls. Robby tipping over enough that his forehead collided with Jack’s bare hip. A series of breathless exclamations: sorry, sorry, oh my God, Jack.
“Yeah yeah, yuk it up,” Jack said. He buttoned his pants back up and plonked himself back onto the couch. The sudden dip in the cushions made Robby collide with him. He didn’t make a move to extricate himself, and Jack wasn’t about to, either.
“Is it a burger?” Robby asked. His eyes were watery from laughter.
Another sigh.
“It was supposed to be a burger ordering a man, which was this inside joke we had, but, well. You can see the limits of Jason’s genius. And he was not gentle.”
“What did you even do when you saw?”
“Honestly? I laughed so hard I fucking puked.”
“You never thought about getting a cover up? Or laser removal?”
“Nah, man. It’s godawful ridiculous, but I like it, you know? My misspent youth, or something. This brief and bizarre friendship I had.”
Robby was looking at him with a devastating fondness. It was the kind of thing that gave a man ideas, if a man didn’t fucking know better. If a man hadn’t watched the object of his hopeless yearning embroil himself in doomed relationships with the wrong women lo these ten years.
“You didn’t keep in touch?” Robby asked.
Jack shook his head.
“Last I heard, he was a judge for the North Carolina Superior Court. I don’t go to the reunions, and I doubt he does, either.”
“So reconnection’s off the table.”
“What? I’m not carrying a torch for Jason fucking Stockwell, man. I was never like, soft on him or anything. Besides, it’s been thirty years. Probably fifteen since I last thought of him in any serious way, and only because I have to tell that fucking story every time someone gets a load of my ass.”
Robby pinked up and tore his eyes away before Jack realized what he said. Jack snorted and knocked Robby’s knee with his stump.
“I said of not in, brother, calm down.”
“It would be okay, you know, if it was. I mean, obviously. I mean...”
Robby cleared his throat and Jack cracked a grin at him. He smacked Robby’s shoulder with the back of his hand.
“You know you’re like, fully red right now?”
“Let me live, Jack Rabbit.” Robby slapped half-heartedly at Jack’s hand.
“It wasn’t original then and it isn’t original now,” Jack said. “And yes, thanks so much for being so supportive of my bisexuality, Dr. Robinavitch, at last I can be free of the shackles of my shame.”
“Bisexuality,” Robby echoed faintly. “So it wasn’t like a—”
“If you say ‘phase’ right now, I swear to God, Robby.”
Robby raised his hands in surrender, eyes all lit up with banked laughter.
“I was gonna say ‘one-time thing.’ Or ‘one-guy thing,’ I guess.”
“Ha! No. He wasn’t that special, he was just the first. Besides, that part of it wasn’t even what I remember most about him. He was good to me when he didn’t have to be. He was my friend.”
Robby shifted and cleared his throat again. He took a swig of his beer and started bouncing one of his knees. His ears were still pink. Jack sighed and scooted a few inches away from him. He didn’t know what he expected, but Robby being squirrelly about a few teenage fumbles wasn’t it. It was disappointing, maybe even surprising. Jack wasn’t even aware he could be disappointed and surprised by straight men’s reactions to his sexuality anymore, but he supposed it was different when it was your best friend about whom you’d been harboring futile little fantasies for the better part of a decade.
“You know I’m—” Robby cut himself off with a low cough. When Jack glanced at him, his face had flamed up again. He was looking anywhere but at Jack.
Any other day, Jack would take all this as his cue to leave. Any other day, he’d beat it out of there like his ass was on fire and they could quietly pretend it never happened by the sober light of day. Any other day, he didn’t have to stand guard between Robby and his despair.
“You what, Rob,” he said.
Robby did look at him then, his eyes bright.
“I still want that tattoo.”
Jack frowned.
“Okay?” he said. “We can look up shops that might be open tomorrow, or like, specific artists or something. I don’t really know how it works, do you just Google ‘tattoo shops?’”
“No, I mean like right now.”
“Oh. What? No!”
“Jack, please.”
“Do you want cellulitis? Folliculitis?”
“What are you talking about?” Robby said. “We can wear masks, we’ve got sterile tools, gloves, lidocaine cream, and alcohol swabs. You’re an actual medical professional and an artist, apparently. You’ve been holding out on me, Jack.”
“Oh yeah, hot shot, and what about the ink, huh?” Jack asked. “I am not cracking into a bunch of ballpoints and heating up ink cartridges to stab into your open wounds, are you kidding me?”
“You did it to Jason.”
“I did a lot of things to Jason I wouldn’t do to you!”
Robby’s eyebrows shot up and he scoffed. He crossed his arms and tucked his chin into his chest, shoulder hitched up to his ears.
“Wow,” he said. “Okay. So that’s where we are.”
What the fuck did that mean?
“Holy shit, Robby, you know that’s not what I meant. I meant I’m an adult and an ‘actual medical professional’ and I’m not putting unsterile ink into the biggest organ on your body!” Once again he was treated to the eyebrows and Jack threw up his hands. “Don’t even say it! I heard it and I’m not acknowledging it!”
“So your objection here is to the ink,” Robby said.
Jack blinked.
“What?”
“If I had sterile ink, you’d do it.”
“I…where would you even get sterile ink?”
Robby stood up and disappeared into his office. Jack heard rummaging. He pitched himself backward into the couch. He tipped his beer back, but all he got was a mouthful of dregs, warm and sour. He pressed his fists into his eyes and watched stars cascade in the darkness.
He was having an entirely different crisis than the one he arrived here with. Forget Robby killing himself—he was about to kill Jack.
A bunch of glass clinked together and then the couch dipped under Robby’s weight. Jack slitted an eye open. A line of unopened glass bottles full of ink sat on the edge of the coffee table. Black, brown, red, blue, and green.
“Someone gave me a really nice fountain pen and this set of inks a few years ago,” Robby said. “What the fuck am I gonna do with that, right? So.”
Jack sat up and inspected one of the bottles.
“It’s not medical grade,” he said, but by the tone of his voice he knew he’d already agreed.
Robby clapped him on the back and stood.
“I’ll go shave my chest,” he said.
“Wait.” Jack tugged on Robby’s hoodie. He sat back down, a question in his brow. “Shave, then Hibiclens.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Do I get to know what I’m poking into you?”
“You gotta stop saying shit like that,” Robby said.
“Work with me, brother.”
Robby was silent, and this time Jack was on the receiving end of a stare. He stared back. He wasn’t in the business of losing staring contests, even if he didn’t know why they were happening.
Robby blinked.
“I was thinking bees,” he said.
“…oh.”
“Is that all right?”
Jack’s throat felt thick. He swallowed. Nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll work out a sketch while you get ready.”
They settled on a mostly-black design in the style of a linocut. A hive dripping honey on the ribs offset by a honeycomb grid in brown, a swarm of dots roving in swirls over his pec, under his pit. Robby lay supine in bed with his left arm raised and tucked behind his head, Jack’s chair pulled up as close to the bedside as possible, a tray of ridiculously DIYed tools near to hand. Needles taped to chopsticks, ink in tiny ceramic soy sauce bowls.
They both wore masks. Robby had shaven his entire left pec and all the hair under his left arm, which was both tragic in general and devastating to Jack personally. And the monkey’s paw of it all wasn’t lost on him: he finally had his hands on Robby’s body, prolonged and deeply intimate, but he had gloves on, and he was stabbing him.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “You could sleep on it. I’ll still be here in the morning.”
“I’m sure,” Robby said. His eyes closed briefly and he let out a long breath. He turned his head to meet Jack’s gaze. “Jack, I need it to hurt.”
Jack passed his thumb over the silk-soft skin of Robby’s seventh rib. The outline of the hive didn’t budge.
“Well if there’s one thing I can promise, it’s that, honeybee.”
The lines around Robby’s eyes deepened and his chest shook in a silent laugh. He looked so damn good, all soft and trusting under Jack’s hand. Jack wished he could smell the honest scent of him, the bedrock Robbiness of the feast before him, but all he could smell was mask and Hibiclens.
“All right, here we go,” he said. “Remember to breathe.”
Robby’s chest rose and fell. His eyes fluttered shut. Jack picked up a needle, dipped it in ink, pulled Robby’s skin taut, and pierced just the tip through at a 45º angle. Robby didn’t flinch. In fact, he breathed a sigh of relief.
“You all right?” Jack asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Why don’t you tell me about all this Latin?”
“God, it’s stupid.”
“I told you mine, bitch.”
“Ha! Fuck, fine. I was young, in med school and somehow still deep in the throes of my personal Byronic Romanticism phase when my mom and brother got in the accident, and then the next day Bubbe died of a broken heart.”
“Shit, man. I didn’t know it was so close like that.”
Jack kept tracing the outline, occasionally stopping to replenish his ink. He wasn’t drawing blood yet, which was a good sign. Robby occasionally winced or held his breath, but his story came out fluidly.
“UIC wouldn’t fucking give me time off,” he said. “It was all the family I had left in the world, and they said I could have one day to attend the funerals. Never mind who was going to plan said funerals. Never mind that it was a seven-hour drive on a good day. Never mind even the most basic accommodations for bereavement. ‘If you take leave, you’re repeating the semester,’ that’s what they said to me.”
“Fucking automatons,” Jack said.
“Yeah. And I couldn’t afford that. I already couldn’t afford the whole damn thing. So I offloaded the responsibility onto Bubbe’s favorite rabbi, flew in for a triple-feature funeral, and was back in Chicago by evening. I didn’t get to sit shiva for a single one of them.”
“I’m sorry, Robby,” Jack said.
“So it felt urgent,” Robby said. “To have something that marked the fact that they were there, that they had gone. That I loved them and it mattered. That I’d been fucking left behind. And that maybe, even though I didn’t believe, maybe I would get to be with them again. That all I had to do was wait.”
Jack lifted the needle away and rested his forehead against Robby’s side. Robby’s flesh tensed under him, but then his free hand was in Jack’s hair, petting gently at its ends as if unsure of its welcome.
“I’m sorry, man,” Jack said. He lifted his head away and shook himself, blinking rapidly. “And I’m sorry I called them a cliché earlier, I wasn’t thinking.”
“Hey, don’t do that,” Robby said. “They are clichéd. Impersonal. I was so loaded up with med school Latin that I didn’t think about the fact that I should have chosen something meaningful for each of them. I should have made sure the things I was getting permanently branded onto my body actually had something of my family in them.”
“They do,” Jack said. “They mean what you want them to, and they helped you breathe when you were drowning.”
Robby looked at him for a long moment, warm and sad at once. He blinked and craned his neck to look at the progress of Jack’s work.
“This Jack Abbot original is gonna be my favorite, I think,” he said.
Jack tapped his knuckles on Robby’s bare hip because he couldn’t speak through the humidity gathering in his throat. When he got a grip on himself, he bent back to his task.
The process took a little over an hour, and Jack learned the story about every tattoo on Robby’s body. Some were interesting, others were less so. Some abstract, others concrete. All were impulsive, chosen in a split second decision, often in a moment of desperation. Jack couldn’t tell if Robby himself had noticed the pattern.
He started squirming as Jack neared the finish line and crept closer to his armpit, a notoriously painful part of the body to get tattooed. Eventually, he pulled his knees up and planted his feet flat on the bed.
“Do you need a break?” Jack asked.
“Nope,” Robby said, voice tight.
“Do you want a water or something?”
“Just gotta power through, man.
“Okay, well, not much longer, but you gotta keep still.”
Robby took a deep breath. He didn’t let it out.
“Robby, man, you gotta breathe,” Jack said.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay, I need a break, how about that? I gotta piss anyway.”
“Jack—”
But Jack was already drawing away. He sat up straight and rolled his head from side to side, from front to back. He snapped his gloves off and stood up. He was gonna take a piss and stretch his legs, but he paused when Robby didn’t move from his position on the bed, knees like a mountain range. He had an arm over his eyes.
“Hey, seriously, are you okay?” Jack asked.
“Yep, fine, thanks.”
“Robby. If you aren’t careful I’m gonna check you for hidden wounds or something.”
Robby rolled into a sitting position, pulling his mask away. He hung his legs over the edge of the bed and hunched over his lap. As well as he could with one arm lifted away from his body.
“What are you—”
“Just gimme a fucking second, would you?” Robby snapped.
And then Jack saw it: the extremely obtrusive erection pitching a tent in his pajama pants.
“Oh.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
“It’s fine, it’s just, you know, wires getting crossed, it’s been a really intense—”
“Jack, can you just go piss please? Can you just do that for me please?”
“I, yeah, um.”
Jack stumbled of the bedroom and into the bathroom. He ripped the mask of his face and balled it up to throw into the trash. He sucked in a deep breath and planted his hands on the sink. He looked at himself in the mirror.
He loved to give Robby shit about the ease and thoroughness of his blushes, but now it was Jack’s face up in flames. His heart was hammering. He jabbed a finger at the man in the mirror.
“Don’t,” he said through clenched teeth. “Don’t even think about it.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and drew in a deep, diaphragmatic breath through his nose. He held for five seconds, pursed his lips, and blew out for ten. He did it again, and then one more time, until the frantic buzzing at his core had dissipated enough for him to be a functional human being. He took a piss and washed his hands for two full minutes, all the way up to his elbows like he was scrubbing into surgery.
When he left the bathroom, Robby was already back on the bed, two glasses of water now on the bedside table. He looked up at Jack but wouldn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Got you a water,” he said.
“Thanks,” Jack said. “You ready to get back to it? Not much longer, now.”
“Yeah, let’s get it done.”
New gloves, new masks. No conversation. The repeated woundings saw tiny beads of blood pop up along Robby’s skin. Jack only had a little bit more to go, maybe fifteen minutes, but it was all really close to the armpit.
Note to self: when performing dubiously ethical amateur tattooing on friends in bad headspaces, do not save the worst parts for the end.
“Sorry,” he said, low in the quiet of the room. He dabbed at the blood that was welling up.
Robby shuddered. He held his breath again and Jack told him to quit it. He exhaled slow and shaky, inhaled in hitching bursts. Brought his knees up again.
Jack tried not to look, he really did. But he wasn’t superhuman. He wasn’t some kind of saint. He was just a man. A weak, weak man.
He glanced at Robby’s lap. His knees were doing their valiant best, but they couldn’t hide Robby’s size, shape, or enthusiasm. Jack’s treacherous gaze swept upward to see the spill of Robby’s blush spreading across his chest and down over his stomach. His nipples were hard, though the room was warm.
“Sorry,” Robby muttered. “I’m trying not to.”
Jack paused in his poking to close his eyes for a moment. He had to take his own fortifying breaths.
Fuck it, he wasn’t the type to politely ignore the elephant in the room. Or Robby’s pants.
“Okay is it just like, the pain thing?” he asked. In a show of mercy for both himself and Robby, he focused on finishing up the tattoo.
Robby scoffed.
“No, Jack, it is not.”
Jack frowned. He ventured a glance at Robby’s face. He was staring resolutely at the ceiling, muscle in his jaw ticking.
“Is it something I’m doing? Do you want me to stop?”
“Jack, for fuck’s sake!”
“What?”
“You cannot be this dense.”
Jack sat up and fixed him with a look he’d been told caused people to shit their pants.
“Look man, I’m doing my damnedest to make sure you’re comfortable while I create open wounds on a sensitive part of your body, at your fucking behest, by the way, so yeah, I’d like to know what the issue is. Fuck me for checking in I guess.”
“Jack, there isn’t an issue. This is purely a me problem; just fucking ignore it. We can go back to bro-slapping each other on the back tomorrow morning, no big deal. I’m sorry my dumbfuck dick is making you uncomfortable.”
Jack snorted and shook his head. He stuck and poked in record time, avoiding Robby’s eyes.
“I’m not uncomfortable, but you sure seem to be,” he said.
“Because it’s embarrassing!” Robby said. “Because I am making you uncomfortable even if you keep insisting otherwise!”
“Why would I be uncomfortable about an involuntary bodily function?”
“Oh my God, you’re impossible.”
“You know as well as I do that sometimes sensitive spots for pain are the same as sensitive spots for pleasure, so your brain’s just scrambling it into one big sensory clusterfuck, it’s not even that surprising, really.”
“It’s not the goddamn pain! The pain is nothing but painful!”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed.”
“For fuck’s sake, Jack, it’s you!”
Jack rocked back as though struck. His mouth hung open. Robby pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and went, somehow, redder. He sat up and scrubbed a hand through his hair.
“Look, you smell good and you’re touching me and we’re in the bedroom and I’ve been— and then you told me about—I’m not trying to make it weird, it just is what it is, we do not have to talk about it.”
Jack stared. Robby wouldn’t meet his eyes. After a few moments of Robby’s heavy breathing, Jack laid a hand on the center of his chest. Gently, he pushed Robby back into the bedding. Confusion flickered over his face. Jack swept his hand down through the hair on Robby’s stomach and passed feather-light over the strain in Robby’s pants before giving it a light squeeze. Robby gasped.
“Just a little more now,” Jack said, voice low.
Robby’s eyes were huge. He visibly swallowed. He nodded and lay back.
Jack finished the tattoo in silence. He tapped Robby’s hip so he’d sit up, patted the tattoo with a clean cloth, and stuck a piece of saran wrap to it with athletic tape. He took off his gloves and his mask and shifted his chair so that he and Robby were facing each other full-on, knees touching. He chugged his remaining water without taking his eyes off Robby’s.
The erection was back. The red ears. The ragged breath. Jack’s own arousal had sent his blood rollicking through his body, reducing him to a electric throb more want than man. He spread Robby’s knees and sank to the floor between them without breaking eye contact. Robby looked wrecked.
“I gotta warn you,” Jack said. “I’m playing for keeps here. So either we say goodnight and I go into the guest room and we never mention this again, or I climb into this bed and stay there for good.”
Slowly, carefully, Robby pushed his fingers into Jack’s hair.
“I can’t believe you never told me this was an option,” he said.
“I flirt with you relentlessly, bud.”
“Sure, bud. That’s not how you are with everyone at all.”
“You never picked up what I was putting down, what was I supposed to think?”
Robby leaned down, open lips ghosting over Jack’s mouth. Jack’s heart stumbled. He quivered at the edge of a precipice.
“You’re supposed to know what it means when a guy lets you talk him off a rooftop and then begs you for a stick-and-poke,” Robby said.
“Jesus Christ.”
Robby laughed into Jack’s mouth; Jack took it into himself, swallowed it down as if he could preserve Robby’s happiness that way. Robby opened to him, his mouth hot and cavernous, his tongue a slick enticement drawing him closer. Jack scrambled for the waistband of Robby’s pajama pants and pulled them down, only to discover an actual fortress holding Robby’s dick back.
“What the fuck is this?” he said.
Robby groaned and tilted himself back in order to shuffle the three pairs of briefs off his legs.
“While you were in the bathroom I thought I should contain myself any way I could.”
Robby’s cock was thick and hot in his hand, the head livid and leaking. Jack’s mouth started watering.
“I don’t think it worked, brother,” Jack said.
“Could you not—call me that when you—oh fuck, Jack.”
Jack hadn’t sucked cock in years, but Robby filled his mouth just right, the velvet hardness a luxurious stretch. Jack gave himself over to the rhythm of Robby’s desire, the low dark scent of him, the slick bursting across his tongue. His own cock was growing insistent, and he rose up to unbutton his pants. Of course, it wasn’t long before his knees on the floor reminded him he was nearly fifty years old.
He patted Robby’s hip and drew back. Robby’s hands left his head and Jack stood. Robby sprawled backward on the bed, looking up at him in awe. He let his knees fall open. Jack smirked and yanked his shirt over his head. He unbuttoned his pants and shucked them off, underwear and all. He released the valve on his prosthesis and peeled his limb sock away. He clambered into the space between Robby’s legs and trailed his hands from ankle to ilium. Robby was lush all over, a sumptuous feast. Jack would never get his fill.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” Robby said.
“Tell me what you want,” he said. “Tell me how you want it.”
Robby yanked him down onto himself. He kissed him like it could live off it, clutched at him like he was hoping Jack’s weight could crush him, spread his legs to create the perfect cradle for Jack’s body. They rocked against each other, let their hands roam, grabbed and savored and sucked and went back for more. Jack was careful of Robby’s tattoo, Robby was careful of Jack’s sore stump, but in the collision of their bodies there was only pleasure, joy, discovery. Finally, finally, Robby asked Jack to fuck him.
“Have you ever?” Jack asked.
“Yeah,” Robby said. “It’s been a long time, but yeah. Please, Jack. Please, I’ve been waiting.”
Jack shuddered. He wanted that. He wanted to bury himself in the impossible tightness of Robby’s body, the blazing heat. Wanted to drive himself into the very heart of the man he loved and lodge himself there to stand sentry like the guard dog he was. He wanted to take, and hold, and merge. Cobble together a little paradise, just the two of them.
But.
He rubbed his face into Robby’s clavicle. He kissed him, deep and slow, let him feel how hard he made him, how much he wanted him. He rested his forehead on Robby’s, cradled his jaw, let their noses rub together.
“Robby?”
“Hm?”
“I’m not gonna hurt you like this,” he said. “I can’t be the thing you use to hurt yourself.”
Robby drew back against the pillows.
“What are you talking about?”
“Just, if that’s what you want from me—”
“No,” Robby said. “No, I only want to feel you. As close as possible, I need you, Jack. I told myself to stop because it was never gonna happen, but—”
Whatever else he had to say got swallowed into a kiss. Jack opened Robby up slowly, maddeningly, with his tongue and his fingers and plenty of patience and lube, until Robby was facedown on the bed, writhing and begging, pushing back for more, more, more.
“Condoms?” Jack asked.
“Fuck. Fuck! They were expired so I got rid of them.”
Panting, Jack laid his forehead between Robby’s shoulder blades.
“There’s that 24-hour pharmacy a couple miles down the road. I can be quick.”
“Jack, if you leave this bed, I’ll tell Perlah and Princess about the ass tattoo.”
“But my mystique!”
Robby muffled a pained laugh into the pillow and turned over.
“I’m clear of STIs,” he said. “I had that needle stick last year so I had to do the whole song and dance. There hasn’t been anyone since. I can show you the results if you want.”
“I trust you, man.”
“Okay.”
“I’m clear too, just FYI. You wanna see my chart?”
Robby smiled and shook his head.
“I trust you, man,” he said, only a little mocking.
“Yeah?”
“Jack.”
“Okay,” Jack said.
He leaned down and kissed Robby’s cheekbone. His nose. The corner of his mouth. His nipple. His uninjured side. The inside of his wrist. His navel. His iliac crease. The back of his knee.
“Jack,” he murmured. He couldn’t quite keep the whine out of his voice.
“I got you,” Jack said. “I got you, Robby.”
When Jack sank in, Robby let out a gruff moan that lit up all of Jack’s nerves. Jack rolled his hips and fucked him shallow and slow until Robby whined and tilted his hips for a deeper angle. Jack helped him out by slinging his knees over his elbows and bending him until he made the kind of sound that meant Jack had struck prostate gold. Jack picked up speed until he was fucking him in fast, hard strokes, drawing out Robby’s shouts and whines. His face was a rictus of pleasure, eyes fluttering, sweat slicking his skin. It wasn’t long before his body began to tremble and contract, wringing Jack’s cock hard from the inside. He gripped Jack’s hair with one hand and his cock with the other.
“Come on,” Robby said. “Come on, Jack, give it to me.”
Jack growled at the sight of him, at the stretch and pump of his cock through Robby’s tight, muscular hole, at the smell of him, at the sounds of his mounting ecstasy.
“Yeah, yeah, fuck, honey, look at you. Oh my God, Rob.”
“Oh fuck, oh fuck, Jack, I’m—I’m gonna—”
Robby seized up and keened, ass clamping down on Jack’s cock hard enough to strangle it. He quivered and then broke, the air punched out of him in a silent scream, and then he was coming in thick spurts all over his own chest and belly. Some hit Jack’s chin.
“Oh God, oh fuck, that’s so hot, you’re so fucking hot, Robby, oh my God!”
Jack’s rapture sharpened abruptly and then shot him into the stratosphere. Robby was still coming as Jack pumped a decade’s worth of longing into him. Jack fucked him through the twitchy aftershocks, fucked him until until he was boneless, until his ass relaxed enough to let Jack out. Jack fucked him until his own cock deflated, and he collapsed face first into Robby’s uninjured side. Robby rested a cheek in Jack’s sweaty hair and petted through it idly.
“I’ll get you a washcloth in a second,” Jack mumbled into Robby’s armpit. He tangled his fingers into the hair between his pecs. He could feel the borders of where he’d shaven.
“I’ll get it. I have all four limbs.”
“Fuck you man.”
“Mm, yeah, I’ll need it again as soon as we wake up.”
“That’s ambitious.”
“Is your dick not up to it?”
“I’m only thinking of your poor battered ass, darlin’,” Jack said.
“Well look at that, I got me a gentleman.”
Jack shook with silent laughter. He snuffled deeper into Robby’s pit. Robby began to trace along his ear and down the side of his face and neck until his fingertips ghosted over Jack’s hand and landed unmistakably on Jack’s wedding ring. Jack went still.
“I can take it off if you want,” Jack said. “Sometimes it’s hard to go out without your armor, is all.”
“You don’t have to,” Robby said. “I thought it meant you weren’t up for anything serious with someone else.”
Jack sat up. He took his ring off and set it on the bedside table. His tan line was pronounced and his hand felt naked.
“I am. I have been. It’s just that I thought it was hopeless until very, very recently, so.”
“Sorry to be slow on the uptake,” Robby said. “In my defense, you gave no indication whatsoever that you were into men.”
“It wasn’t a secret! What do you call that entire conversation about Idris Elba?”
“Everyone’s into Idris Elba, Jack! And, what, you somehow came out of that one thinking I was straight?”
“…huh.”
Robby’s laughter reverberated through Jack’s body.
“I guess we deserve each other,” he said.
“Yeah,” Jack said, lacing his fingers through Robby’s. The exposed skin on his ring finger felt vulnerable and over-sensitized, but Robby was warm, and his touch on Jack’s hand settled something restless and pacing within him. “Yeah, I think we do.”
When they woke up in the late morning, Jack peeled the saran wrap off his handiwork and stood behind Robby as he inspected it in the mirror. It was pink and weeping lightly, but that was par for the course. Under all that, the image was bold and dynamic. Its movement followed the contours of Robby’s chest. Some of the curves were distinctive enough for Jack to recognize his hand in them. It was thrilling to see it on Robby’s body. He’d always be there now. However this went, whether they parted tomorrow or forty years from now, there Jack would be.
For the first time in his life, he wanted a tattoo.
“Was it what you needed?” Jack asked.
Robby met Jack’s eyes in the mirror, his smile soft. He pointed to a bee half stuck in a drip of honey on the edge of the hive.
“See that?” he asked. Jack nodded. “And this?” Robby tapped one of the dots hovering above it; Jack nodded again. “This one doesn’t let that one get left behind. He’s always there, even when it seems impossible.”
Jack’s heart was too full for him to speak. He slung his arms around Robby’s waist, chin on his shoulder.
“Someday I’m gonna find a way to return the favor,” Robby said, “but I’m afraid there are some debts that can’t be paid.”
Jack swept his hand up Robby’s stomach and cupped his pec right under the tattoo. The swarm of bees swelled at the touch. In Jack’s hand was Robby’s heartbeat.
“In love there are no debts, man,” Jack said.
“In love, huh?”
“I’m afraid it’s a lifelong condition,” Jack said.
Robby’s hands clasped his, held them tight against his body. He tilted his head in that way he had that always made Jack’s heart brim. His eyes were soft.
“Pretty contagious,” he said.
“At least the treatment is pleasant,” Jack said.
“What does my doctor recommend?”
“Judicious,” Jack sucked a kiss into Robby’s shoulder, “application,” over his pulse point, “of physical,” behind his ear, “and verbal,” on the back of his neck, “affection.”
“Oh good,” Robby said, breathless. “I always follow doctor’s orders.”
Jack threw his head back and laughed.
“I’m gonna hold you to that statement next time you insist you can work through a kidney stone, brother.”
“That was one time.”
Jack patted Robby’s biceps and stepped away.
“Sure, honeybee,” he said. “Breakfast?”
Robby looked at him with his whole heart in his eyes. It wasn’t a new expression directed his way, but Jack finally knew what it meant. He wished he could bottle this feeling. You could power the eastern seaboard with a single gram of it.
“Something sweet,” Robby said.
Robby had stale challah, and Jack had a foolproof French toast recipe. He mixed it up and yammered about whatever while Robby leaned against the counter watching him with a coffee in hand. Outside the window, flowers were blooming in Robby’s garden.
End