by
Trisky
Inside... of me.
******************
I’m not sure what time it is, or how many hours have passed. It looks faintly dark behind the sheer curtains that hang on the picturesque windows. I can’t tell if the sun is rising or the sun is setting. I’ve lost track of a lot of time lately. When you have too much of it on your hands it suddenly doesn’t seem all that important to keep track of its whereabouts. This may have begun days ago, or it may have ended hours ago. I don’t know. I can’t decide what feels more appropriate.
“What the fuck are we going to do, Brian?”
I was so sure he was asleep.
“About what?” I mold my form into the soft, cushioned pillow of the futon, the tips of my too long, unkempt hair grazing the wall. I could swear this thing started out in the middle of the room somewhere near where my couch used to be. I miss my couch. Somehow or other we wound up nearly shoved almost entirely into a corner of the room. The corner where my television used to be. I miss my television. Maybe it started out in the middle of the room and I just hadn’t noticed how far we’d come with our best efforts since then. Or how many times. I haven’t paid enough attention.
“Oh I don’t know, about starvation in third world countries?” He squeezes the inside of my thigh, the one that he fed on and made mincemeat out of for hours, or maybe minutes. A few fleeting seconds? I’m not sure anymore. All I remember is the way his tongue dragged itself around in circles and his teeth grazed my skin and it didn’t seem to matter to either of us that I wasn’t inside his mouth. He wasn’t anywhere close to being ready for me to be there. Until he was. He wasn’t in any kind of hurry and I had no place I needed to be, or wanted to go. Except here. Somehow he knew that. I think he knew that all along. He could take all the time in the world, eventually we’d get around to that.
I can still feel him inside of me. I wasn’t anywhere close to being ready for that. Until I was.
“Maybe Rage and JT can perform another miracle.” I shift my arm to rest behind his head, so he doesn’t accidentally bang his head into the wall.
“Not if they’re the ones that are starving. Besides they don’t perform miracles, they just try to correct wrongs.”
“Well Rage and JT aren’t going to be any good to anyone without some sleep. Go back to sleep.” I say it, as if he had been awoken, or was ever asleep to begin with. He might have closed his eyes for a little while, but he never drifted off.
“I can’t sleep. Besides, I need to be up in a little while anyway. If I try to bury my head now, I’ll never wake up.” He buries his head into my forearm instead, massaging his scalp with its strands of long hair against the bone. It feels so fucking good.
“Where do you need to be?” Other than here that is.
“I’m taking on a few extra shifts at the diner. It’s not like I have much else to do. We could use the money.”
I guess it’s closer to mourning then. Morning even.
“What did they tell you at school?” We don’t need anything. He needs to get his ass back in school.
“They said that I’m welcome to re-apply for reinstatement for the winter semester, since it’s too late for fall and that the mitigating circumstances would reflect kindly on my re-application. Apparently outing homophobes and police conspiracies is now considered slightly redeemable, did you know that?”
“It’s a start.” I roll to my side, to face him, keeping my arm in place. We have a while before he has to leave, and he does need to stay awake after all...
“I told them ‘no fucking way’.” His head continues to move steadily on my suddenly heavy arm, the relaxing pattern lulling him into the trance that comes before sleep.
“What the fuck would you do that for?” I feel compelled to simply move my arm and let his head hit the wall to wake him up. I don’t. For whatever reason.
“Because I don’t want to attend a school that would only have me as long as I was dutifully agreeing. What kind of artist would I be, if I all did was conform to their standards?” His head stops moving and he waits for the response he’s heard a thousand times, as long as you’re using them first, they can’t use you. “Besides, how the fuck would I pay for it?”
He lifts his head, his chest following suit and stretches his arms above him, twisting the kinks out of his neck, crawling on both knees to get out of the twisted sheets. He stands with pained precision, the blood beginning to flow in his legs again and his muscles unclenching.
“We’ll work something out.” We won’t do anything. I will work something out.
“I’m not going back there, Brian. I spent enough time in a school that only wanted me to exist by their standards.” He searches the dark expanses of this cavernous, hollow room. Without any furniture it feels twice as big as it normally does.
“Technically you’re the one who fucked up, even if they don’t agree with your politics.” I see him reach underneath my pants, digging around for a lighter. I drag my body into a semi-upright position, my head dragging along the hard surface of the wall.
“And I’ll deal with the consequences. If all we do is play along with everyone else’s game to get ourselves ahead, then what the fuck is the point of playing at all?” He sits on the floor with his makeshift ashtray of a paper cup containing day old coffee, flicking the first drop of ashes of the cigarette he drags on into the cup. I think he brought that with him yesterday. Or maybe it was already today.
“The point is to get to a place where you can make your own rules and not have to follow anyone else’s.”
“That’s such shit. You didn’t believe it when I was about to go to Dartmouth and you don’t believe it now.” He rubs his eyes free of any exhaustion he might be feeling, slightly amused at my pathetic attempts to play do as I say, not as I do. “I can see how far following the rules got you in the end. I’m just skipping the middleman. You know, we wouldn’t exactly be in this situation if all we did was follow everyone else’s rules.”
We... no I guess we wouldn’t. He fixates his groggy, sleep deprived eyes on my own and I feel my insides give up their slight protest.
“So what do you plan on doing? Waiting tables for the rest of your life?” I reach out for the cigarette he drags on, inside his mouth. My finger brushes his lip accidentally and I feel that same vibration, on the verge of desperation.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Obviously you’re concerned if you’re up in the middle of the night worrying about it.”
“I’m stubborn, not stupid,” he deadpans. “Forget what I’m going to do. What the fuck are you going to do besides using our asses to polish the floor?”
I feel myself smile, the smoke trapping itself inside my lungs as I inhale. He feels so much better inside me. “Saves some money on a cleaning lady, doesn’t it?” He holds the cup out for me to deposit a tip full of ashes. “I’ve been meaning to alphabetize my CD collection.”
“To play on your non-existent stereo system? Well that ought to earn you absolutely nothing. Any other brilliant plans?” He reclaims his cigarette from my fingers, letting his hand linger a second too long. I feel the vibration, temptation this time.
“I was thinking of using my newly discovered considerable talent for doing absolutely nothing to do more of the same today.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed how well you’ve adapted to being a man of leisure.” He laughs a tired laugh, his jaw on the brink of a yawn, dumping the remains of the cigarette in the cup. “But I think a week has been long enough to regroup and short enough to not be desperately depressing.”
“Are you saying you don’t like the pathetic, down-trodden, directionless, poor slob version of me?” He straddles his legs on either side of my hips, pinning me with his chest to the wall.
“I like every version of you. And you’re not pathetic. You’re merely... momentarily unenhanced.” Like a picture before airbrushing.
“And unfurnished, unbankable, unorganized, undone...”
“Unbreakable... unbelievable.” He draws me out, draws me into his game, pulling me off the wall by my arms. “If you could snap your fingers and have everything you want, what would it be?”
My furniture, my job, my money, my life back? “I have no fucking clue.”
“That’s as good a place as any to start.” He drags his lips in slight, quiet movements across the palpitating twitch of my tired eyes.
“How do you figure?” Right this very moment I want nothing more than to be inside... of him, to figure him out, to soothe the savage propulsion I feel beginning to stir about in my gut. The feeling of my insides being reconfigured without my permission.
“It means you’re open to anything, not just what you used to know.”
It’s my turn to search for something in the dark. I feel one hand meet the floor and the other introduce itself to the seat of his ass. Somehow the bowl of condoms has moved with us wherever we’ve traveled in this maze, like a little lone lifejacket that survived the capsizing. My fingers feel the various rims in my hand, a brief fleeting breath of confliction passing over me. For what I don’t know. Maybe it lasts longer than a breath. I haven’t been able to tell time very well lately. Maybe it’s better to ignore my instincts... Maybe it’s better to not be inside of him, overwhelming him and distracting him from his course, dragging him along with me. Maybe it’s better, but it doesn’t stop me from twisting his body so that he winds up underneath mine. So that the only thing he sees when he looks up is me and the only thing he feels is my effort beginning to form a thin layer of sticky sweat all over my body.
Maybe I don’t belong inside of him, but I let myself in anyway, protected, and with slow conflicted motions that follow no rhythm but my own. It’s when he opens up and relaxes the walls around me that I let go and I let myself all the way inside, unconcerned any longer.
I can feel him move... inside of me.
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Screencap courtesy of Princess of Babylon