Ian 42

Ian,

 

Bonnie's voice gets soft and desperate, vanishing to the back of her throat in the dim light of the room with the tv on a blank station. 

 

"The thing is people know I'm a slut and no one would believe you're fucking me."

 

I put my hand over my forehead and stare at the ceiling. 

 

"What do you care?" I ask her, and she nuzzles into my shoulder. 

 

"I love your fucking shoulders," she admits to me, and I put my cigarette in her mouth to let her drag. 

 

"I think about how like...other guys you fuck probably think they know shit about you."

 

There's a flurry of sound from outside our haven.  She picks at the lint on my black t-shirt. 

 

"What do you mean?"

 

"I like thinking about you with them.  Sometimes I want to watch you and everything they don't really do for you."

 

"They do a lot," she says, her voice some kind of warning to me, like watch where you put your dick, Vincent, or, watch where I do. 

 

"No, I know," I say.  Sick of talking, I lean over her and get between her thighs, which grip my waist. 

 

"What are you doing?" she asks me, her face smiling. 

 

"Being sick of talking," I admit to her, and he snorts sarcastically. 

 

"Please, when are YOU ever sick of talking?"

 

"Talking about THAT, then," I say, defensive, and kiss her mouth which kisses mine back in soft licks of her tongue.  She moans and moves under me while I find places to touch her; squeeze her skin and mold her into some kind of existence. 

 

"I want to suck your cock," she whines, and I roll onto my back and take my jeans off, while she snakes down my body and looks back up at me with her wide little girl eyes.

 

"Your cock is really pretty," she tells me, and I swallow hard back every thought from pouring out while she slips her lips over the head and pets the underside with her small tongue. 

 

She goes slow almost like she's thinking about every sound I make when I make it, and I pull back her hair from her face and stroke her cheeks while her shoulders and neck move against my hips. 

 

Forget it, is what my body thinks. 

 

Forget it, forget this room, and this pile of tapes, and this milk crate, and this grit under my palms.  Forget cold cement, forget woolen blankets, forget emergency candles, forget acoustical tile.  Forget passing trucks, forget dirt in her hair, forget the fucking impermanency of every moment. 

 

Forget her, forget her hair, forget how it feels on your stomach brushing softly while I fuck her mouth, forget all the posters she ever had on her bedroom walls.  Forget every cock she ever sucked and how her parents didn't love her.

 

"I... I uh.  Fuck.  I'm pretty close," I tell her, and she moans low and happy at something like maybe her own expertise at getting me to cum this fast when almost fucking nothing else can. 

 

My hands dart around her hair in a way she can't see and won't ever.  Frantic, unsure where to put them without hurting her, I ball them into the blanket, into the length of her hair far from her scalp, into the hard edges of my teeth. 

 

Forget it.  Forget it, Vincent.  Forget the broken light bulbs, the stain of ink on my hands, the smell of burnt metal in the room.  Forget dusk and dawn and the times between, forget God, forget your name.  Forget everything, but... how it feels... to escape... down her... throat.

 

I cum hard, holding my whole body still and pressing her mouth against me gently.  I almost tell her to forget it, but I bite my tongue hard enough to bleed.

 

"Hold.  Hold still.  Like that," I remind her, and she does, unmoving, her eyes closed, like she's praying.

 

Love,

 

Annik.

Ian 40

Ian,

 

Brad's narrow hips sway, the bones of them what holds Clyde's jeans in place on his starved frame, his hair low in greasy strings to cover the blue of his eyes.

 

His torso is the impossible length I saw all boys' spines grow to, covering the thin rail of the white cotton shirt to it's ever living end, chasing the knap of it's fabric to the low sling of Clyde's jeans.  They're stained dark with oil and dirt, near the left-hand pocket, where I know without him saying that Clyde was cleaning his .38 and stuck it in that pocket, to make Brad laugh. 

 

The cigarette in his hand is artfully balanced around the handle of his knife, a stark and obstinate switchblade, the handle once black now bleaching, ever-slightly, from the burn of his sweat.  It meets his lips, his sweating pinkened cheeks, and his head low, he drops his arm, holding the cigarette in his teeth, and the knife at his side. 

 

The air is close, and dark, and the stuffy sense of a closet in the Great American South.  He's spotlight from the side by the heavy flashlight, huge in scope, that's on the metal table beside me.  I can hear him pant, and see the flush of his cheeks glisten with the effort of his work. 

 

"C'mere, baby.  Dance with me," he says without looking at me, and I slip off the table, my bare thighs sticking to it from the heat.

 

The white of Brad's shirt is smeared minutely with blood, not enough to spread or seep.  He keeps his knife in his hand, while he wraps his long arms around me, this facet of himself bounding between the well-educated Texan from Denton to the Justif Hyde dragon to some rawboned teenage boy that married Bonnie in an act of fuck you.  The desert has moistened and the storm pelts the outside of his workshop.  The insides of his arms bleed with where I've watched him carve a snaking line around the flesh of his tricep. 

 

"I made this for you," he pushes his words into my hair, his hands sneaking under my skirt and, feeling that I didn't wear panties, gripping tight my ass with the span of his musical fingers.  We dance, slow, to silence.

 

"What is it?" I ask him, my voice light and high.  I'm Brad's shyest most silent counterpart, the open-mouthed and amused sister he gets hard for, over a gossamer laugh in his ear. 

 

"A snake," he mutters back. 

 

I breathe out a laugh, and he squeezes me against his cock, in the dark.

 

"Like Cleopatra," I infer. 

 

He slips his hands, the cool knife blade grazing me, along the line of my back, and presses his knee between mine.  His tongue finds my collar bone and he whispers into it. 

 

"I... will praise any man, that will praise me," he offers, pulling us into a slow turn with shuffling feet, he in his boots and me in my prim ballet shoes. 

 

"Are you going to praise me?" I ask him, settling my face against the wet stick of his shirt, drops of the heat running down the hollow place of my back where my shirt has refused to cling to me.  It's Nick's shirt, black and marked with the face of a kitten. 

 

"One half of me is yours," he agrees, and I slip sticky hands into the gap of denim across his hips and touch the hot skin of his cock, hard, and me now with 2 hours the knowledge of how he'd gotten hard the first time when he was a child. 

 

"I want it in me," I tell him, avoiding his eyes, and the world becomes the sound of the jangling of his undone belt, sighing to a drop on the cement floor the material that once kept us apart. 

 

He runs his thumb over the edge of his knife, splitting it careful, and presses it to my mouth, while he turns me around, to grip the edges of the table.

 

I press his blood between my lips like lipstick, licking it slowly off while he fucks me, little by little, until he cums groaning inside me.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 35

Ian,

 

Today, my struggle is with caring.  If I had a cross born to me every day, it would be today the cross on which I have hung all my care.  I wonder if my care would look like a dying and beaten 26-year-old boy.  I wonder if he would look like you.  I wonder when 26 became a boy to me, and not a man. 

 

When I was 26, I was a boy.  When I was 17, I was a boy.  When I am 41, I'll be a boy.  You're days away from 32.  You're a boy.  Last night, I saw you become a man for a brief interval when I watched you express violence over a woman and not another boy.  No matter what I do, I wonder if in the future no matter how angry I might make you, if you will always be rushing at me to shove me away in our boyhood rage, kicking hard with your shoe the heads off of daisies. 

 

The violence among boys is always done in a sly grin.  You and Brad fight, fight to find what between you there is to prove, and proving it exists, set out to prove that still again; the age old and self-evident question of, "What's it to you?"

 

Adam, Bonnie, sometimes Brad or Grady can make me feel like a girl.  But there is some often sought idea of womanhood I've watched other people grope toward that I have either not cared enough to try for or thought I had been all along, to end up holding this cigarette and this note to you, folded neatly into a box and sealed with the print of my lipstick. 

 

I watched Jack do it sometimes, reach for this...matron, I guess.  Maybe people thought I did that with Red, but really I thought it was understood it was kind of a joke.  I guess I never thought she was regal.  I guess I thought she was...goth. 

 

How she wanted men to treat her, was strange to me.  Maybe all our absent fathers instilled in us a need to be worshipped in some way.  The truth is, I think about women like Circe and Calypso and Helen of Troy, and I think they were probably all pretty scared.  Do I know any women, or just girls playing pretend?

 

Jack felt like a girl yesterday, and it was hard for me to watch because I felt like I could make her feel better.  That's how I knew she was a girl.  Because this part of me felt like I could make her feel better.  That's what this boy in me feels.  I'm better at the dance she wanted to do.  I think to myself, I know where she wanted to go and I could have taken her there.  Told her what was real, led her by the hand all the way to the bus stop, told her goodbye.  I believe I can do that. 

 

I believe that about myself, that that's what I do, is validate the fears of girls in such a way as to ensure their terror is real.  She is growing up now, but I'll be this boy forever and it matters to me, I think, how I'll echo inside someone.  It matters that they can find their way back, because I can't end anything on my own. 

 

But I think I could tell, she wanted to be a woman, in the end.  When a girl lowers her voice and smooths it out like she's run an iron over it, so it softens to something velvet, that's when it happens.  I think it sounds nice, but I've come to associate it with disingenuous message it tends to be used for, and when it's cued in my life, from anyone I know, I scoff it off.  Usually to her utter.  Fucking.  Horror.  I mean, how would you feel if you were trying to femme fatale me and my reaction was to put your toy gun down and laugh?

 

I wonder about men.  I'll never be a man.  I'll only swing in this place, back and forth between the gendered options of teenagers.  Are boys ever men? 

 

I think they must be, when they're so full of the rage of a girl they enact something violent with their hands.  Yesterday, it seemed like you might as well have been wrapped in a gown of your mother's design, up on a stage, singing wavering You Made Me Love You, so broken was your heart. 

 

Now, I swing back and forth, on the rope swing of my identity.  What do I do now?  Do we talk like I'm your brother?  Do I hold you because you've become a girl?  Do I crawl in the lap of the man of you?

 

I think you're beautiful, is my point.

 

Love,

Annik