Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

The ripe possibilities of a horror movie chased their heels on their shuffling struggle up the porch steps, despite nothing being technically present to spook them.

“Salt is a thing, right? I’m making this up as I go along.” “What is this, an episode of Supernatural?” “Looks just like one,” he agreed without humor.

love a SPN moment!

Bodies left traces behind; he’d listened to enough true crime podcasts to know that.

On some level Andrew had forgotten, spending his years as a teen and then a young man in northern Ohio, that histories had a longer and uglier reach where he was from. His mind turned straight to the fat zeroes in his accounts, the estate he’d inherited and the implications of where it came from, with a creeping dread. Of course the Fultons had owned a fucking plantation—how else had he imagined them getting rich?

we speak truths! #racism

Blood for blood, offered to the earth—wasn’t that a familiar story, one that lived curled up at the core of him.

The story has it that even those who don’t try to wrangle the curse, like the second son who brought it on them, it wrangles them in the end regardless. The land’s hungry, and it gets its due, one way or another.”

Trees loomed outside the kitchen windows in the settling night. Andrew felt a desperate call to speak, maddened by the unstoppable fractures spreading from his past to his present; he was the sole living person who knew the tale he was about to tell from front to finish. After he told it, he wouldn’t be alone.

Andrew kept sitting, lost in thought, though he jolted when Sam palmed the topmost point of his scar as he brushed past—glancing, curious.

ooohhhhhhhh <3

Riley got up and scratched his flat, lightly furred lower stomach; Andrew looked elsewhere a second late.

OMG

Andrew spread his hands on his knees and sat deeper into the vinyl chair. Their distinct postures, her leaning in and him withdrawing, struck him.

Troth needed to wrangle a publication out of the mess, but that was beyond Andrew’s scope or interests, and he wouldn’t be derailed.

The ancestral home creaked at the seams with the weight of contained histories, a constant pressure that ached in his nail-beds and molars.

Aside from the outfits, he felt as if he’d stepped backward in time. The persistent, phantom itching ramped up;

The house seethed around them, responding to his nudge. The anxious strangeness dogging his heels since his arrival resolved into a juxtaposition of realities: the boards under his feet were steeped in death, stained to the foundations with knowledge and time. Reverberations echoed for miles around, as if he stood at the center of a welcoming necropolis.

The curse had picked its last Fulton victim and lured him to his first death, friend in tow as a side dish.

Faded photos of two tanned boys, summer sons, gazed into the family camera with hapless eagerness. They’d survived, but not unscathed.

My world doesn’t revolve around him, or you for that matter. Troth’s conflict with me predates Ed by years, and is a symptom of a systemic problem in the whole department.

go off, West!! #SystemicRacism

The sense-memory of careless strong hands toppling Eddie’s corpse into the trunk stung him, and Andrew rode ghostly shotgun toward the old oak tree. West

“There’s no shame in quitting if you’re struggling. I’m sure you’re beginning to realize how goddamn unwelcoming this place is, no matter their public image.

mmhhmmm academia is the worst

Get out from under her thumb, Andrew, and don’t let her use your labor.”

He dropped into the rolling chair and buried both hands in his hair. Skeletal fingers laced with his in the knotted mess of his curls. The whisper of his name drifted through the air like dust. The phantom draped over his crumpled form, offering the relief of an ice-bath after a distance run.

my heart!

The endless throb of missing Eddie kept on pulsing, but as he paced Sam in a pavement-eating game of tag, the pain banked a fraction.

<3

The inside of the car smelled ripe and inviting, musky with weed and the scent he was starting to think of as Sam. “What is it?” “A surprise, birthday boy,” he said, quieter than Andrew expected, smiling. His throat worked around a dry swallow, suddenly parched. “All right.”

OMG

Sam wormed his arm between her back and the couch to rest his fingertips on the patch of bare skin between Andrew’s belt and shirt. The small proprietary touch connected the three of them on one plane of contact.

“I heard this was maybe your thing,” Sam murmured against the side of his neck, closely eager. The thumb he dug into Andrew’s pulse point said control. “I owe Riley a beer for guessing you right.”

OMG, Sam!

Cinders of need burned savage at the base of Andrew’s throat, where Sam had spoken to his skin, glanced against him with his lips. The hand on his wrist slid up his forearm, past the tattoo, to settle around his bicep.

Andrew arced against the wall to shove his whole body onto Sam’s, sinking his teeth with moderate force and immense desire into the join of his neck and shoulder.

They struggled together, rough-edged, with the explosive purpose of a race or a fistfight.

The second time he kissed a man, he meant to do it, reeling Sam in with the grip on his ass and catching his thin lips. The arm that went around his waist forced him onto his toes, a bear hug that made him feel scared and turned the fuck on—something about the rarity of being smaller, though not by much.

thinking for the briefest, sharpest moment about first times and lost chances.

He expected to feel ashamed, or frightened, or like he didn’t know himself. Instead he floundered in a curious free-falling simplicity, almost pleasant.

“I’m waiting for you to flip out, but I’d rather you didn’t.” “Haven’t yet, think we’re in the clear,” Andrew mumbled, partially joking.

Andrew ignored the reflexive burn of dampness that sprang to his eyes at the domesticity of the morning in favor of the fresh wonder of smooth skin under his cheek, magnetic and allowed.

Andrew! You deserve all the domesticity in the world...omg

Life coursed through him with each thud of his pulse. He had no idea what he was doing, except that it fit. Sam pulled him apart one notch at a time to release the horror he held under his skin.

Putting aside what it meant, desire had come as natural as breathing once he’d gotten Sam’s body on his—as if the last decade of his life had been secretly leading to that moment, and when the time came to choose, he had no trouble letting go.

that's right, baby, you be gay

The stillness of Eddie’s paused life decomposed with each passing week, eaten away as the reality settled in. No one was coming home. The

Eddie might fade from the world, but he had a handful of things left to hold close. Platinum

When the shivering stopped, he said to the dead space, “Are you trying to kill me?” Nothing answered.

The distraction of Sam in thin sweatpants and a white undershirt, tired from his afternoon at the garage but clean-smelling from a quick shower, dragged at animal parts of Andrew that had lain smothered for months, or years.

Sam grunted and moved Andrew’s head with a hand on his jaw, licking into his mouth. Andrew twitched with surprised, blazing pleasure. Such simple touches threw him. Sam said, muffled against his lips but undeniably eager, “Yeah, there we go.”

But in the last, he bargains instead for an affinity to death and to the dying, becoming a sort of sorcerer—and it is in this story that he preserves her life, not by using his gift on his wife, but by sharing it with her and inducting her into the heredity of the power. She is, through a witchcraft that is not recorded, made blood of his blood and inheritor of the curse. It is the transferral that either heals her illness or makes it moot, as a secondary effect.

Andrew leaned forward against the burning grip on his scalp; Sam cinched his fist another fraction tighter, provoking a short, grunting gasp. Sensation helped settle him into his bones again, alive.

“He’s spent so much time on me he didn’t bother with his own shit, until now. He deserves a good thing to happen to him, Andrew. I do like you, but I don’t know if you’re a good thing.” “I don’t either,” he said finally.

I don’t want to share not even with a dead man

Sam jogged down the steps in shorts and desert boots, caught Andrew’s waist in one big hand and snagged his coffee from the carrier. The casual touch felt like forgiveness, or an allowance.

Sam gestured with his coffee. “I’d rather we triage according to who’s got the most to lose.” Riley groaned, “As if you’re not worth worrying over, you dick. Text me the entire fucking time, please.”

Once in the car, Andrew asked, “You sure about doing this with me?” “Don’t say dumb shit. You’re one of mine, Blur, and we’re going to get you sorted out fine, okay?” Sam said as the engine growled to life. Andrew shut his mouth. One of mine—that had a ring to it, and so did the promise of safety, of being taken in hand. If Riley had tried to slap a label on the thing budding between them, he’d have rejected it out of hand, because nothing encompassed the particular set of feelings he might sum up as owned. What did it mean that he found that comforting, still, now that Eddie was gone?

OMFG, Samuel!

A mad part of him wanted to beg Sam to pull over, get out and take in the scenery, have a quick fuck in the dirt and grass.

The curse was his and Eddie’s bond; maybe it was an answer too, if he found the right question and put it to the right person.

“He’s dead, Sam.” “I know that. He’s not gone, though. Look at us right this minute. Half the conversations we have, he’s in them. I was going to fuck you wearing his ring on your wedding finger.” The hot flash that washed over him held discomfort and hunger in equal measure. “Sorry—” he started. “Don’t be,” Sam cut him short. “It’s a choice I made, getting in this thing with you, whatever it is. But don’t mistake me, I’m not interested in filling in for a ghost.” “You aren’t,” Andrew said.