As I Watch The Sun Fuck The Ocean "Gnnhmmrr," he mutters and scrunches his eyes shut. The morning sun has found his face, and he turns over. His nose hits Justin's thigh, scratchy hair and heat and the smell of Justin-in-need-of-a-shower. He has a headache, and he feels battered and sticky.
"You hung over?" Justin asks, sliding down, burrowing under the sheets. His skin is too hot against JC's.
"Uh huh," JC says. The world turns over lazily. Justin's arms are tentacles clinging to him, holding him trapped. He struggles helplessly. "Leggo, come on. I'm gonna be sick."
"Ick," Justin says and lets go. "Sorry, yo."
JC rolls out of bed and somehow forgets to catch himself. His ass hits the floor and pain shoots up his tailbone.
He lies naked in a golden pool of light and looks at the dust bunnies gathered in haphazard clusters under the bed.
"You okay, C?" Justin asks. His head pops into view over the edge of the bed.
"I'm fine," JC says through clenched teeth.
The road trip almost seemed like a good idea at the time. "Let's drive down to the coast," Justin said on the phone, out of the blue, and JC, barely awake and scrabbling through the mess on his bedside table for his watch, said,
"Yeah, okay, whatever."
"Great, I'll pick you up," Justin said. JC sat up in his bed. His watch, when he found it hidden under a pile of sheet music, told him it was a quarter past eight in the morning.
"What, now?" he said, but Justin had already hung up. JC crawled out of bed and went to throw some things together.
"How about security--" he said when Justin showed up, wearing a red cap and a pair of wireframed sunglasses. He looked like he should be driving a tractor, but instead he seemed to have procured a red Toyota Carina. "--what the fuck is that?"
Justin grinned and pushed the sunglasses up. They kept sliding down his nose. "3.95 in Wal-Mart, dude. I thought you'd like that."
JC rubbed his forehead. It was bright out here, bright and painfully early. "Not the glasses, dickhead. The car. It's a ... Toyota."
He looked way too happy with himself. "Yep. See, no security required. I borrowed it from Trace's mom."
"She let you take her car."
JC looked at the car. It had a dent in the fender. It was dusty. He never thought Justin would drive something like that of his own free will.
"Hop in," Justin said.
They were already on the freeway when it occurred to JC to ask where exactly they were going.
"The fuck away," Justin said and stomped on the accelerator. The car screamed at them in what probably was car-Japanese for "please make him stop".
JC rolled down the window and watched the white line snake along next to them. It was going to be a hot day.
His mouth tastes like he's had a small dead animal in it all night. When he gets up and walks to the bathroom - very slowly, bumping into weirdly aggressive furniture along the way - his ass hurts. And not just the tailbone, either.
He turns around and looks at the bed. At Justin in the bed, snoring innocently away.
His brain is kicking in, creaking and protesting all the way. Last night. Last night is a blur of sun and wind and the smell of mommy car and motel room and vodka. And things are coming out of the blur, sort of like dinosaurs lumbering out of the mists around some primeval swamp.
He leans against the doorjamb and thinks about dinosaurs. Justin would be one of those flying ones for sure, swooping above the treetops.
Justin turns over in the bed and pulls the sheet along. JC stops thinking about dinosaurs and stares at the long sliver of golden-honey skin that shows.
He remembers trailing his mouth down Justin's back. Oh, he remembers all sorts of things.
He doesn't vomit, but it's pretty close, so he ends up sitting on the floor by the toilet bowl for a while, staring at the yellowed porcelain and trying to catch the tails of his wildly spinning thoughts.
He wants to stay in here. Maybe if he stays in here for long enough, Justin will wake up and go away.
He looks up and sees that the soap dispenser by the sink is marked Holiday Inn - Hudson, Fl.
He leans his head against the cool porcelain of the toilet and makes an effort to stop thinking until his stomach has calmed down.
They stopped outside Kissimmee for breakfast, and JC bought a bottle of black vodka in a small liquor store while Justin waited in the car.
"Are you gonna start on that now?" Justin asked. "It looks gross."
"I'm not driving," JC said. He couldn't remember when he last got really drunk. Today seemed to be a good day for that. "And I think it's kinda neat."
"Neat," Justin said with a laugh and a headshake. "Weirdo."
He turned west on 192. JC looked around for cops before he cracked the vodka and took a careful sip. It burned his throat, but he suppressed the cough. He took another mouthful before he screwed the cap back on and put the bottle in the glove compartment, on top of Mrs. Ayala's collection of Al Green tapes.
"Turn on the radio," Justin said.
After a couple of hours, JC was getting pretty drunk. He had also figured out that Justin didn't have a plan. That was okay, though.
Justin drove the little Japanese car the same way he drove his own cars; too fast and a little carelessly, one elbow hanging out the window, the hand on the wheel loose and low. JC rolled down the window, and the wind whipped his hair into his face. On the radio, they were playing Summer Nights off the Grease soundtrack, which sort of made him want to put his feet up on the dashboard and giggle. All he'd need was a pair of pink strappy sandals and white Capri pants, some barrettes in his hair and a little rose lipgloss...
The thought was just a tad too appealing, so he took another drink and thought about dark alleys and leather-clad men instead. He changed the stations until he got Depeche Mode.
"Holiday Inn?" Justin said incredulously.
"I just wanna stop, man," JC said, "this is fucking boring," and Justin swerved into the parking lot without actually slowing down. He even got the tires to squeal.
"Hope Trace's mom doesn't kill me," he said when they were getting out. "Do you see any smoke?"
"Freak," JC said.
Justin signed them in as Karl and Rutger Schwartzwälder, and the receptionist, a heavy middle-aged woman with hair the colour of dirty dishwater, looked from him to JC and back, lifted her painted eyebrows and handed him the key with a smirk. JC bit his lip so hard he could taste blood just to keep from laughing in her face. He leaned against Justin, too heavily but the floor seemed to be moving. Justin pushed his sunglasses up testily and shook him off.
"Fucking cow," Justin muttered when the door was closed behind them. JC stopped chewing on the inside of his mouth and let the laughter out, laughed hard enough to make his stomach hurt, and ended up in a quivering heap on the bed.
Justin stood over him and shook him. "What?" JC said in between residual giggles.
"She gave us a fucking double, dude," Justin hissed, "what the fuck?"
"Of course she did, Rutger."
"Fuck you."
"Shut up and get drunk with me."
"This is fun, though?" Justin said later, when his eyes looked a little glazed and his skin was flushed a warm pink with the booze. They were watching MTV and laughing at the videos. Nothing they couldn't do at home, JC reflected, but it was fun. Fun going incognito in some pissant town he'd never heard of, fun slumming it out in a Holiday Inn. He couldn't remember the last time he'd stayed in a Holiday Inn.
"It's like, it's like the American Dream," he said, but that wasn't really what he meant. "No, I mean. Like. It's like the Constitution..."
Justin nudged him in the side with the bottle. "What are you talking about?"
"It's a. I mean." He knew what he meant, he thought, or at one time he'd known. He meant. It was. His train of thought had been cut off, though, and he couldn't find the track again. But he knew it meant something. This. All of this.
"You make a lot of sense when you're drunk, dude," Justin said. "Have some more."
"I make sense to me," JC lied.
"Not like you actually make sense even when you're sober, I mean, but it just gets way out there."
"Out there," JC echoed and tugged the vodka from Justin's hand. Because it seemed appropriate, he added, "I love you, man."
"Yeah, I love you too," Justin said in a mocking singsong voice, but then his smile faded and he said, softly, "no, I really do. You know," and for some reason, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to lean over the half-empty bottle and kiss the side of his mouth.
He wants to stay in the shower forever, too, but his fingers start pruning up and the thunder of the water falling on his head is almost unbearable after a while.
When he pulls back the curtain, Justin is sitting on the toilet seat, looking up at him with bloodshot eyes.
JC remembers to turn off the water.
There's a long pause when they stare at each other with uncomfortable intensity. But it's a staring contest, and JC will not turn away even though he can't think of anything he wants to do less right now than stare into Justin's eyes.
Then he blinks and it's easier than he thought to give up and turn away.
"I thought--" Justin says, "I thought. We were kinda drunk, right?"
"Yeah," JC says. "Kinda drunk."
It would have stayed innocent, really. Really, it would, if Justin hadn't turned his head and kissed him back.
Justin kept his eyes open; they were huge and bright, guileless blue in the sharp light from the windows.
"The curtains are--" JC said when Justin let his mouth go for a second. He felt a little out of breath, a little dizzy, a little too hot. "They're."
Justin slid off the bed and went to pull the curtains. There was no sway in his walk, no indication that he was intoxicated. JC watched him stretch, stared transfixed as his t-shirt rode up and reveal a glimpse of skin, and wondered why it was suddenly making his heart lurch and his stomach clench and his mouth water, when he'd seen Justin naked a thousand times before. Not that he hadn't looked before. Justin was just too beautiful to look past, but it hadn't been urgent before, not urgent in this frightening way. JC wanted to fall to his knees on the scuzzy carpet and lick the small of Justin's back.
He felt weak and shaky. Sick with desire, he thought. I didn't know that happened. Yay for vodka.
Justin turned around and for a second, he was haloed in the soft orange light coming through the curtains. JC's breath caught.
"You make it hard to breathe," he said and Justin blinked.
"What?"
"You make it hard to breathe," JC repeated. He felt like honesty was the way to go here. He could always fall back on the booze later. I was really fucking drunk last night. I was so drunk I said God knows what. "You're so beautiful."
"Oookay," Justin said, annoyingly calm. "Maybe--"
"You're so beautiful," JC said again. "I want to write songs about you." He got up off the bed, carefully, but he wasn't too drunk, not at all. Just enough to give him a rush and make him talk too much. He took the two steps that separated them easily, and pressed his palms against Justin's chest.
"Okay, look--" Justin said and lifted his hands. JC felt his knees buckle before he even really knew what he'd decided to do. His head was spinning lightly and he felt great. Wonderful. Fantastic. Outstanding, in fact, and it got better when he rubbed his face against Justin's stomach, smelled laundry detergent and the ghost of spilled vodka. He slid his hand under the faded black t-shirt, smoothed his palm over the tight muscles.
"I'd like to-- see. I'd like to," he muttered. He wasn't drunk enough to say it, though. Funny that. He wasn't as shameless as he thought. Justin laughed a nervous little laugh, and JC said, loudly, "yeah, I'd like to suck your cock, Justin."
Justin didn't answer. JC looked up and met his eyes. Justin was frowning a little. When JC held his gaze, he seemed to shudder and finally nodded. "Yeah. Sure. Um, okay. Just do it, yo. If you want."
"Do you feel sick, man?" Justin asks. JC nods. The nausea is still lurking in the bottom of his stomach, succinctly advising him not to make any sudden moves. "That sucks."
"I drank that vodka of my own free will," JC says, sounding annoying and prim in his own ears.
"That don't mean it doesn't suck," Justin says. "I'm really hungry, though. Can you handle seeing me eat? Do you want something to drink?"
JC tries, tentatively, to think about food. Bread, cereal, milk, coffee. His stomach stays quiet. It balks at cheese, though. "I'll just sit here for a while, I think," he says.
"Okay," Justin says, but he's frowning, like he's really worried.
"I'm okay."
"Okay," he says, but he doesn't go.
"Stop staring at me," JC snaps. He pretends not to see Justin flinch. Jesus Christ. He leans his face against the wall. The tiles are damp and none-too-clean, and not as cool as he wishes.
JC wasn't a stranger to this. Still, it felt different because this was Justin, who was different. Pure. Justin was so pure, like sunlight and the air after a spring rain. And beautiful. Beautiful and pure, and he tried to be a good boy, tried not to grab JC's hair, tried not to thrust down his throat, tried not to talk dirty. JC could feel all the try, all of it, in Justin's trembling fingers twining gently in his hair, in the small, aborted movements of Justin's hips, in the muffled sounds.
He wasn't hot with alcohol now; he was hot with desire, sick with it again, because Justin's skin tasted pure and clean and Justin smelled like clean sweat. He wished that Justin would grab him a little harder, yank at his hair, maybe, but it was enough when a ring caught a strand, a small, sharp pain and JC dropped a hand to his own crotch and pushed his hips forward, once, twice, and there it was. He sucked in a breath through his nose and flattened his tongue along the underside of Justin's cock.
Justin did yank his hair when he came, but he apologised.
He brushes his teeth for roughly ten minutes. For some reason, the smell of mint toothpaste soothes his angry stomach.
When he finally emerges from the bathroom, Justin is sitting on the bed, drinking coffee in small sips. His mouth twists a little in disgust after each one.
He looks up and says, "This coffee is the worst I've had since that time the bus broke down in wherethefuckever, Idaho, and we had to sit in Herbie's Trucker Bar for two hours."
"I didn't drink coffee there," JC says. His mouth feels easier to move after the vigorous cleaning, like it's woken up now. The smell of coffee wafts by, curls in the back of his throat and pulls him towards the bed.
"No, cause you had beer," Justin mutters, like it's JC's fault that he was over twenty-one and Justin wasn't and the bartender at Herbie's was completely unbribable. Far as JC remembers, Justin and Chris both overdosed on the tar-like coffee and spent the next four hours driving everyone insane, off the bus and on the bus once Joey and Lance showed up with the cavalry. JC remembers being grateful for the mellow buzz of cheap beer. He fell asleep on the divan in the lounge and woke up with his head on Justin's belly and Lance's arms wrapped around his waist. It was one of those days.
"And it wasn't two hours," he adds. "More like one and a half." Enough for him to have three beers, enough for Justin and Chris to go mad with boredom and start picking fights with the local yokels. "I'll wring his neck one day," Tiny told JC and nodded at Chris, who was loudly telling a burly, flannel-clad man that he sucked at pool and should better step back. "I know," JC said and ordered another beer.
"Still," Justin says, "the coffee was pretty fucking bad. Like this." He takes another careful sip. "I have a cup for you, too, if you want," and for some reason, the little hesitance in his voice makes JC's chest ache.
He sits down on the edge of the bed, a little gingerly, and takes the cup Justin hands him. True enough, the coffee is a thick, noxious soup, but it's strong rather than the usual dishwater decaf, and it clashes with the minty taste in his mouth, it hits his stomach like a gut punch and his head like ammonia.
"Ugh," he says and gulps it all down.
Justin said "sorry" at least three times before JC got him yanked closer and shut the hell up. Justin clung to him and seemed to want to touch him everywhere and lick his face like a dog and mumble sweet nothings at him, all simultaneously and a little ineptly.
"Don't be sorry," JC said, "you won't break me. I won't break you."
"Do you," Justin says. "Um. About."
JC catches himself wanting to put his fingers in his ears and chant lalalalaaa I can't HEAR you!
Instead he scratches the stubble on his chin until his skin smarts and says, "Well, it happened. This is what they call the Morning After." He feels quite proud of that, too. It sounds like something someone might say in a movie. Snappy. Maybe a movie starring Janeane Garofalo.
Justin stares at him, frowning. "But--"
JC realises that he has no control over what his mouth is saying only seconds before he says, "Don't whine like a baby." It's not what he meant to say, it's not what he's thinking, but he still wants Justin to go away and come back in a week, maybe, when the world has stopped spinning and the slightest movement doesn't make him want to hurl. "We got drunk, we fucked. Not like that hasn't happened to better people before us."
Something deeply buried and nasty in him likes seeing Justin's confusion. Then the world loops and spins and his stomach lurches and he has to run - or he'd run if he could; instead he wobbles to the bathroom.
Hello again, coffee. I hoped I'd never see you again.
He feels fingers on his head, gently pushing his hair away from his face. "I forgot that you totally can't handle your booze," Justin says matter-of-factly.
He loved Justin's back. He always had, or at least he can't think of a time when he didn't think it was pretty much a perfect back, long and slender and muscular and graceful and smooth. He licked his way down along the spine. It felt perfect, in that woozy way things were perfect and perfectly clear at that perfect place of intoxication. Perfect. He thought he could rest his mouth on the little dip at the small of Justin's back all night.
"Oh," Justin mumbled, "oh..." and JC continued on. There were other places to go. Justin had stopped saying sorry about things. He'd stopped being so goddamned careful.
Vodka was good for a great many things. JC scooted down and pushed Justin's legs apart, maybe harder than he needed to - Justin didn't protest at all. JC saw his hands fist the sheets.
He feels better, a lot better, when he gets up again. Justin sits on the floor next to him, patiently.
"You done?"
"Yeah," JC says and rinses him mouth. He wants to brush his teeth again, but he read somewhere that the stomach acids make teeth porous and that brushing immediately after would damage the enamel. He sure wouldn't want that, so he doesn't. He still feels better, even with the sour taste in his mouth.
Justin gets up, looking disgustingly fresh and pretty, and he hasn't even showered yet. There's a row of small lovebites dotting his neck. JC thinks he sees a bruise just below the collarbone. There should be more: on his back, hipbones, along his ribs. On the insides of his thighs.
JC thinks he should feel guilty, but he doesn't, for some reason. He just feels his headache and a little hungry and tired.
He stumbles past Justin and into the room. The bed is a mess, the comforter on the floor, clothes strewn here and there.
Justin is next to him again, following him around now like a hopeful puppy.
"I'm going back to bed," he mumbles and lies down. The sheets smell like the morning after. They spilled vodka last night, vodka and other things.
He fades quickly, but at the edges of unconsciousness, he feels Justin's arm creep around his waist.
"I wanna fuck you," Justin said lazily, "can I fuck you?" They were sprawled on the bed in a sticky heap, reeking of sweat and come and booze. They could be Sid and Nancy, JC thought, only thing missing were the syringes. He sat up and found the bottle, by some act of God still upright, wedged between the mattress and the headboard.
"Sure," he said, a little distractedly. "Do you think this stains?" He looked around the bed and saw a spattering of black spots marring the sheets here and there. "Ooops."
"Whatever," Justin said and spread his arms wide. He looked a lot like some decadent Christ figure; naked and gleaming with sweat, laid out on dirty sheets. JC felt that now-familiar catch in his chest again, the quick sting of wantwantneedwantnow. He leaned over Justin, and his hands shook and he spilled vodka on the sheets again, on Justin, too. It trickled in a meandering black line down his stomach and pooled around his navel.
Justin giggled softly, and the vodka rippled. JC put the bottle down carefully. "Be still," he said to Justin, and leaned back, put his mouth to the sting of alcohol, licked until it was gone.
"Now you can fuck me," he said. The world was blurry, it was impossible to focus on anything but Justin - it was as if the world, in fact, ended at the edge of the bed. This was all that was real and the rest was some fever dream he had before he could lick eighty proof liquor off Justin's washboard stomach.
There's an insistent beeping happening somewhere close to his head. He cracks an eye open and quickly shuts it again. He no longer feels like his stomach wants to turn itself inside out, but his head seems to be cracking down the middle instead.
Justin's arm is still wrapped around him. He feels Justin's breath on his neck, Justin's body pressed tightly against his.
"It's yours," Justin mutters. "You want me to pick it up?"
"Mmmphhf."
"'kay." There's movement, and Justin's gone. A moment later, the beeping breaks off and Justin says, "What?"
JC has a vision of glorious, beautiful, shiny brown Advil pills parading around a pristine mirror surface. He thinks he seriously might have had too much to drink.
"It's Lance," Justin says, "he wants us to get our asses-- no, I don't think I can drive, Lance. Sorry, man. And 's not like you never went on a bender, Mr. Hair of the Dog. We'll be back tonight. I think. No, I'm not telling you. See you later."
"What'd he want?"
"For us to be responsible like him. I think he might have been joking." He lies down again. "Nah, he was going to have a barbecue. At your place. Is it me or does this bed stink?"
"It's you," JC says, "you stink."
"I'm taking a shower," Justin says quickly, as if it was news to him. He's always been sort of hysterically clean, showers twice a day, brushes his teeth after every meal.
JC leans back and closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, Justin is sitting naked on the edge of the bed, with drops of water still clinging to his back and shoulders. He's rubbing his head vigorously with the tiny motel towel.
"You don't have the 'fro anymore, man," JC says.
"I'm trying to massage my brain."
One of the drops on his left shoulder blade quivers and moves, bonds with another drop, trails downwards in a crystal track. JC feels it again, for the first time today: a needleprick of desire.
He doesn't know if he should be relieved or scared to death. He's painfully sober and Justin is painfully sober and the room looks like a tornado passed through it and he still wants.
"Justin," he says and rolls over, crawls closer, presses his mouth against clean, soft skin to catch the drop.
He was on his back when Justin fucked him, with his knees hooked over Justin's shoulders and his fingers clawing bluntly at Justin's arms and sides and neck. He bit Justin's tongue when they kissed.
"You're-- kinda-- crazy, man," Justin panted in between thrusts. JC laughed breathlessly because he was delirious with thick, syrupy pleasure, the kind he knew wouldn't get him off because he was too drunk and he'd already come twice today and that was as much as he had in him, but it was good anyway, deliciously almost-painful and Justin's sweat-slick muscles flexing against his.
"Crazy like Krazy Kat," he said. Justin shuddered and came.
He keeps his face pressed against Justin's back, right between his shoulder blades, and wraps his arms around his waist.
"My head is killing me," Justin says. "We should just do nothing today."
"We're already doing nothing."
"Yeah," Justin says and wriggles out of his grip. "This is officially nothing, then."
He gets up, and JC lets his hand rest on his back and slide down over his ass and fall limply on the bed.
Justin stands in the middle of the room and he looks like he's posing. But Justin looks like he's posing a lot of the time; it's just something you get used to. JC thinks he could pose for artists. JC wishes he was an artist and imagines painting sleek muscles under velvet skin, then imagines stroking the brush over the skin itself, highlighting the curves and planes in blue and red and yellow.
Then Justin disappears into the bathroom and JC sits on the bed and tries to blink away the image.
He's still sitting there, dumbly, when Justin comes back, wearing underwear and a t-shirt, looking less like the earthly manifestation of Beauty and more like a handsome kid with a hangover.
"Maybe we should start heading back," Justin says, and it occurs to JC, maybe for the first time, that this really was nothing. That kind of elusive nothing that is something but will be labelled nothing until it's stopped having any sort of meaning.
There's an elephant in this room, he thinks, and his name is Nothing.
He giggles, because he can't keep it inside, and Justin looks at him with an impatiently quirked eyebrow. "Nothing," JC says.
The moment before he fell asleep, still sweaty and sticky and spent, he thought, we're beautiful together. It's almost like it's meant to be.
He kissed Justin's sleeping face because he could, because Justin was wrapped around him and asleep and it was okay to touch him intimately. Not exactly right, maybe, but right enough, and he was exhausted with desire.
Justin drives the wrong way, but he still drives like he always does. He doesn't tap the steering wheel, though. JC has no desire to put his feet on the dashboard. It's not raining, even though it feels like it should.
He turns the radio on, flips around for a channel. He flips it to short-wave and gets a brief, staticky squeal of guitars and a scratchy voice screaming something unintelligible.
"Turn it off," Justin says.
"Where are you going?" JC counters, but he turns the radio off.
"Down to the sea. We were going to the coast, weren't we?"
It's overcast, but when they spot the grey expanse of the Gulf, the sun breaks through the clouds and reflects in a dazzling splash of glitter.
"Pretty," JC says non-commitally. He's been here before. The sun disappears again, and the water is back to oily grey.
"Okay, let's not stay to buy the t-shirts," Justin says and heads back to the car. JC scuffs at the dusty asphalt with the toe of his sneaker and looks at the sea for a while. Then he follows, hands in his pockets. The salty wind pushes his hair into his face. His eyes hurt.
When he gets in the car, Justin looks at him as if he's preparing to say something, something useful like, "We'll still be friends, right?" or "I still love you, even with a hangover."
Then he looks away again and starts the car. |
