When you wake up, it feels like you've slept a hundred years. You stretch lazily and try to catch the last bits of the strange, strange dream that still lingers around the edges of your consciousness. It lurks, in fact, like a pale face half-hidden by shadows.
You roll over and press your face into JC's neck, wrap your arms around him, open your mouth to taste his skin. You feel slow and morning-stupid, and what you remember of the dream is creeping you out. Just a little, though, because you're warm and safe and you could just try to wake JC up. If you wanted to. Gently, because JC does not appreciate being disturbed, but if you're careful, he'll--
It registers slowly, so slowly, but when it does, it's like a cold bucket of water on hot skin.
This is not JC.
You back away slowly, pull your hands away, push yourself all the way to the edge of the bed. The bed, too. This isn't your bed. This isn't JC's bed. This isn't any bed you can remember being in before. Still, it doesn't feel wrong. Just, maybe, like something from a dream you've almost forgotten.
You stumble to your feet, and there are dusty wooden floorboards under your soles, uneven and rough. It's dark, but your legs know where to step. After three steps, you realise that you must still be dreaming. You know this house.
Every step you take makes the floor creak, and every step makes the dream clearer. You're not sure you want to remember, because your mind is full of shifting, glowing shapes and voices whispering things in your ear, things you should be able to understand but can't.
Where have you been? You stumble, stub your toe, fall against the wall and stay there, trying to breathe, trying to think through the rising panic. Your breaths cut your throat, and you notice that you're biting your lip only when you taste blood.
You're starting to feel a little sick, a little disoriented, like the floor is tilting. Your thoughts skitter and swirl and won't slow down. You close your eyes and concentrate on the wall, solid, good wall, the roughness of the old wallpaper, a crack in it right under your left hand. You smell dust and mould and ancient smoke, and you can finally stop hyperventilating.
You stand up straight and rub your eyes. You're in a hallway with a bare wooden floor and doors opening on both sides of you. One to the room you just came from. The one with the bed you're not sharing with JC.
One to another bedroom. You look in and see still, quietly breathing bodies outlined under white sheets. Dark heads close together on the pillow, and for a second, you think one of them is JC, but it's Chris and Joey, you see, just Chris and Joey. Guilt for feeling relief, suddenly, because you remember now, it's coming back in little bursts of knowledge, everything that's happened, even though it feels like it's happened to someone else while you've been locked inside, helpless. You remember Lance, clinging to Lance, begging Lance, loving Lance. You're split in two, the one who feels these things and understands what the liquid black shapes in the shadowy corners want, and the one who can't understand, because he misses JC like he'd miss an amputated limb.
Your head clears another fraction, and you notice for the first time that's you're not wearing anything at all. You smooth a hand over your chest and stomach, and what a relief that your body is still the same. You can walk back into the bedroom now without bumping into things or panicking in the dark, and you find a white robe hanging over a chair and put it on. It's silk and slides luxuriously over your skin, but it smells as musty and old as everything else in this house. It makes you feel like a ghost.
It's harder to move again, like walking in quicksand, like running in a nightmare, and you can't wake up, you can't wake up from this. You stumble on the uneven floor, hurt your toes again, reach for the wall for support. You pull a hand through your hair and your fingers catch and tangle and stick in the knotty curls. It's so long, it's like a bush out in the desert, and now you remember the desert, the endless expanse of mummy-dry sand and the dead bushes and the tumbleweeds and the craggy, looming shapes of the mountains. You pull your fingers loose so violently that you tear out a good chunk of hair by the roots. The quick, burning pain clears your head, and you realise that you're leaning against the wall again, and you're still right where you were, outside the bedroom door.
You curl your fist around too-long strands of hair and walk on.
You stop outside the door to what you know is the living room. You've been here before; you even remember lying on the floor, crying because your skin is burning and a million dust motes are eating into your flesh. Looking up into the ceiling and seeing a circle of faces there, high above you, part of the wood, their eyes knotholes, their mouths jagged cracks. You'd been veering between frightened and fascinated and in pain and just plain tripping, and after that, everything was just like syrup-slow dreamscape of colours and shapes.
You know that JC is behind this door. You put a trembling hand on the age-darkened wood and push weakly. Almost fall on your face when the door swings open soundlessly and smoothly. Someone has oiled the hinges.
The lamp on the desk in the corner glows honey-soft, casts fuzzy shadows in every corner. JC sits on the couch, bent over a spread of wires and twisted pieces of metal. The coffee table is cluttered with tools and instruments and open manuals in haphazard piles. He's humming a simple, minor key melody. His forehead is wrinkled in a concentrated frown, and he's squinting furiously at something small and electronic, and he looks so familiar and normal and JC that you want to cry.
You must have made a sound; maybe that choked little sob that stings in your throat and eyes, because JC looks up. And now you recognise the expression in his face, the one you've been seeing for months, obliviously. The flinch he's almost learned to control. You take a shaky step towards him.
"Are you okay, Justin?" he says patiently. He enunciates very clearly, as if he's talking to a small child. You bite back an annoyed reply, because of course he's talking to you like that. You remember what you're like. You meet his eyes, and see him really flinch this time. You know he's seen the difference. "Justin?" he says, and there's a crack in his voice, just a hairline fracture, but you hear it.
You try to speak, but it's like there's a cord tightening around your throat, and you can't make enough air come out. You've seen him every day, every fucking day, but you can feel the separation like a row of walls lined up between you.
You're suddenly, immediately, violently aware of time slipping away. You know, with complete certainty, that this is a fluke. Temporary sanity. You could stand here and stare at him and feel your mind start slipping back into that confusing soup of impressions and half-thoughts that it's been floating in for so long.
You move.
"Justin, what--" he says, but you're already pushing his toys aside, not giving a fuck about whatever it was, not giving much of a fuck about anything but grabbing him by the hand and pulling him up, roughly, and wrapping your arms around him and burying your face in his wild hair and let the tears already burning behind your eyelids flow.
It's not enough, of course, not enough to hug him and squeeze him until he wheezes and shakes in your arms, not enough to find his throat under all that hair and smell him and open your mouth against his smooth skin and taste him and know for sure that this is him, this is the right taste, the right skin, the right JC. It's not enough. You feel him stiffen and pull back and it's like tearing off a scab too early, it just opens the wound again. He's too far away, staring at you with eyes gone black in the dusky room, black with fear, too.
You force your mouth to find words and speak them. "I'm-- me." That is as much sense as you're going to make right now, but he knows what it means.
Before you pull him back, you wonder if this is really so much about him and you and what you may or may not have had as it is about making what you used to be real.
You stop thinking about that because it doesn't matter either way.
"Oh," he whispers hoarsely, and his fingers curl around your wrist and he yanks at you as you tug at him and you crash together bone against bone, tooth against tooth, and you don't know what part of him you want to touch the most, so your hands skitter-slide over him aimlessly, and it's just. not. enough.
He's clawing at your shoulders and arms with blunt nails bitten to the quick, and his mouth is branded onto yours, and he's not careful or gentle or considerate, and you don't want him to be, because you feel the same rising desperation. You want to say something. What if this is it? You don't say it, just bite it into his flesh, and you hope you leave a mark. Don't ever be farther away than inside my skin. You can't say that, because it's too much, but you can scrape it down his back and hope the welts and scratches last. You have sharp nails. You've never bitten them, because your mother told you it makes your hands ugly, and you've always been particular about your hands. You don't mind that JC bites his, though, because those are JC's hands, and they are soft and the nails are harmless because he takes out his nerves on them, chews them sometimes deep enough to draw blood, and that's the JC you remember, the one who's still the same now.
You twist in his grip, and he twists in yours, and you end up on your back on the sofa, pushed into its purple plush embrace. The robe you're wearing slides off you, a whisper of silk on skin and you hardly notice, because his hands replace it, a far rougher fabric. You still don't know how you want to touch him, you just know that you do, that you need to before you vanish again without ever getting the chance again.
So you tear at his dust-grey shirt, yank at the buttons of his fly, cry out in frustration when your fingers are dull and stupid in their eagerness. You're panicking again, although this is a different kind of panic than the dream-hazy fear you felt when you first woke up. This is silver-bright and sharp, and you know exactly what it means and the knowledge does not make it better. In the breathless time out when he leans back and fumbles open his buttons and zippers and every annoying thing some conspiracy of designers has put between you and his bare skin, your mind pictures, unbidden, a LED display with steadily ticking numbers counting backwards towards zero.
Stupid, that's stupid, you think, and you may have mumbled that into his open mouth, because he mumbles something back, but you don't really understand what he's saying and he doesn't seem to expect you to.
The mechanics of fucking seem too complicated all of a sudden, too much work, and you're ready to just pull him down and push against him and do it the easy way, but then you think it again, what if this is it? and you can't cut corners this time because there may not be a next time.
He's probably thinking the same thing, because he's pushing your legs apart. Your mouth lies against his sweat-slick shoulder, and you lick at it, taste salt, then he holds you back and his fingers are in your mouth and you suck on them and bite down, and you hadn't really thought about want before, just need, but suddenly the spark hits, and you're burning for it, your skin is burning again, but it's like ... all kinds of sappy shit about deserts and rain that you might have heard in Rod Stewart lyrics or something, and it does make sense, in moments like these, sappy lyrics are the truth, and you almost tell him that, but then you remember that he also once wrote sappy lyrics, and might not understand the bright, sunlight-on-water joy that you feel right now when your body burns and thirsts and craves.
He's getting to it, and you remember the first time you did this, how scared you were then, and you had no idea, none at all, about how good it could be. You learned, and you're not afraid now, just need more, faster, harder, now, now, now, and you twist and squirm and push against his fingers and grit your teeth and hiss something you don't understand yourself.
Your fingers scrabble uselessly against his sweat-slick neck, and you end up scratching the sofa instead, pushing your fingertips into the fabric until they scream, and you're ready to scream, too, because it's never, never enough.
Not even when he sinks into you, much easier than that first time when it was rough going even with buckets of lube and an hour of foreplay, because by now you've learned to relax the right muscles and enjoy the slight sting and scrape and welcome it, but it just isn't enough, not close enough, and you let go of the sofa and reach for him again, need to have him in your mouth and under your fingers and pressed against your chest, even though it's uncomfortable and hard to breathe scrunched up like this, but hell, you can breathe later, because now you feel. time. slowing. down...
...and you register everything about this moment with perfect clarity. You can feel every lump in the old sofa under your back, feel the way his muscles bunch and flex and tremble against yours, feel his hands clutch at your sides bruisingly hard; taste him familiar and strange in your mouth; smell sweat and sex over the everyday smells of oil and dust and old dirt. You hear his choked whispers that make no human sense but sound right, sound like him and he always gets incoherent during sex, that's how it's supposed to be. You're stuck in this moment and you never want to leave...
...but time picks up again and you throw your head back and arch your back until you're sure you've pulled something or cracked something and it doesn't stop you from doing it again, and you feel your eyes crossing and your face scrunching up and you bite your tongue, or his, or both when you come. You don't say his name because you can't, but you think it. Loud.
He can hold out longer than you, he always could, too, the advantage of being older, you always thought, or maybe that was just an excuse, but it doesn't make any difference now, because you still feel good, and it's great to wait for him, to arch into him even though you already came.
He cries out and his fingers cut into your flesh with enough force to tear you out of this post-coital trance you were sinking into, and you're grateful because you were floating away and not thinking, and you can already feel your thoughts growing soft and porous around the edges. Now it's time to think and try to remember everything, try to force the memories to make sense and stay like that. Even though you know they won't.
You think, not enough. That's what your brain comes up with, panicky, stuttering thought, over and over, not enough, not enough, not enough, and you're saying it because you force your mouth to work and you're mumbling it into his sweaty neck, into his ear and you get his hair in your mouth and you're saying it, "not enough, not enough, not enough," and you might be crying because you taste salt, or it might just be his sweat or yours, or just the heavy air between you.
"Shhh," he says, trying to sound soothing, but his voice cracks around that one, soft non-syllable, and you're not soothed at all.
"I want to--" you say, but you don't know where the sentence is leading. He kisses you again, softly now, without urgency. "no," you say, "I want to. I want to tell you." You're not sure what, though. What can you tell him but what he already knows? This is a dream.
"Justin," he whispers, "Justin, where have you been?"
"I remember. Everything."
"I know," he says.
You don't tell him that you love him, because he knows that, too. You're quiet until he whispers, "I missed you."
"I know," you say then, because it's a simple thing to say. It's not like you can say something profound to make it better. You haven't missed him at all. You're missing him now, though, taking out all the missing in advance.
You stretch your legs a little, and you savour the shivery ache and the creaking in your overtaxed joints. He has settled on top of you, and you remember a time when he was heavier. The desert has pared him down to the bare essentials, and his muscles are lean and ropy under his skin.
You remember the rain in the desert. The rain makes as little sense as this, this dream interlude.
You tell him that, and you feel his smile against your face. "The desert. It'll bloom." You smile, too. "Just for a while, though," he continues, "until the water's gone."
You kiss him to stop him from saying anything more, and you think about flowers in the desert. He strokes your hair and you close your eyes and try to think about nothing but his hand and his body on top of yours and his mouth against yours and smell nothing but him and taste nothing but him, but the world intrudes with its smells and touches and sounds. You hear a loose board bang against the wall as the wind tears around the house, and you hear the building settling with muted groans and creaks around you, and you smell the attic smell of this room, and JC's things, and the silk of your robe, now probably hopelessly ruined, under your back, and the rough-soft-rough scrape of the plush against your arm and side.
Then he sighs and says, "I wish--" and you stop him with your mouth, because wishes can break you now, when your mind is losing focus with every second that ticks by. You can still pull it back together, but it's getting harder, and there are things skulking just outside your field of vision, shining things that call out to you to look here, look here, Justin, look at us, look here--
"JC," you say, because you don't think you've said his name out loud yet, and you want to, while you still remember how to form the syllables.
"Hmmm?" he says, and he's sounding sleepy, feeling sleep-heavy, too, and you kiss him with more urgency, dig into him and wish, wish - even though it might break you - that you could just stay.
He kisses you back, of course, and touches, too, and this time it's not desperate, and there are no teeth or nails or jagged angles, just a languid, soft-edged glide. He comes with a whimper and not a scream. You sigh and come with him.
And you feel it closing in now, the world turning in on itself, and the shadows in the corners have faces, and mouths. "JC," you say, pathetically, but he can't help you. You whimper and cling to him, bury your face in the dry scruff of his hair, and they're all around you but maybe if you don't look, they can't find you, maybe, maybe if you pretend your mind isn't scattered and wide open to the whispers and screams.
You don't know when it happens, because the last thought (what if--) crumples in a shower of dust around you, and you twist out of his grip and off the sofa, and you run outside, because you want to see the flowers, and they're singing to you, a soft hum that vibrates just on the inside of your skull, like the buzz of a thousand tiny bees.
You find a patch of grass with small silver flowers strewn throughout and you lie down and the stars are fading but they're blinking down at you and you whoop softly with teary-eyed joy and the night surrounds you, balmy and rich and you remember nothing.
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