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I dreamed about water up my nose and the way that man caught his lip in his teeth when he stared at me. Then dream-Victor grabbed my head and forced it under the hazy, ash-flecked water of Lake Chelan, holding it there as I struggled.
And just like that, he’s gone, leaving behind a pile of clothes like he was fucking raptured.
I can’t control my own body and the things it wants, the things it asks for, and I can’t tell the difference anymore between fear and lust.
He stands behind me and rests one elbow on my shoulder. He’s always so strong and stable, like he’s anchored solidly to this earth, like he could keep me from floating away.
Maybe fate is recursive—the mention of fate can, itself, be fate, signposting the steps our unlikely journeys take through the universe. Or maybe fate is a word people invoke to manipulate those who are desperate for meaning.
Don’t turn around. Don’t touch me. Don’t speak. Don’t go. Fall asleep between me and the door. Give me your dreams, the dreams of someone who has never done anything wrong. You tasted good. You sounded even better. But I’m not what you deserve. I just needed to make sure you’d stay here, between me and the door. And I don’t know any other way to ask. Sometime in the night, you climb out of bed and put on a shirt, some shorts. I watch you go, because I’m not asleep, and I expect you to leave. Maybe for good. Maybe, after everything I’ve done, it was this that drove you away. But you don’t
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But he’s not here to love me, and that promise has filled me with a dangerous hope.
If my body knows, I’ll follow it anywhere.
“I don’t care how any other asshole fucked you, Victor Lang. If I’m going to do this, I’m gonna do it my way.” My thumb slips into his mouth and he grips it in his teeth, eyes wide. “I’m the one you’re wet for, right? Not them. Because they don’t hate you like I do.” He nods.
He whimpers when I pull him into my mouth. He tastes wild, dark and feral and good. I suck him as hard and tight and flushed as he can get as he watches me through pleading eyes, sprawled on his back with his arms over his head.
When I was sixteen, I watched Victor on TV and he smirked, glanced at the camera with those pale eyes, and my core twisted and ached. That flutter in my stomach, like a prophecy.
He hooks my knees around his hips and pumps his cock into me, faster this time, and pretty soon it doesn’t matter what he sees or doesn’t see because I’m lost to everything but him, a shipwreck on his shore.
“If you so much as think the word ‘love’, I will take you back out on that yacht and hold you under the water myself.”
I’m skin and bones and swimming and pain. Those are the four building blocks of me: I’ll never be anything more. You can’t plan your future when you don’t have one.
It’s the shape of you, as best I can make it. I had to be good at forgetting, to protect myself, and now I can’t remember anything. I put it here, so that when you’re gone I can rebuild you again every time I forget.
“I don’t think I can hurt you tonight.” His eyes cloud a little, and the corner of his mouth tips up in a sad, strange smile. “God, you’re so soft tonight. My soft boy.”
“Love is such a fucked-up thing, Ethan. The person you love tears you apart, crushes you, owns you until you turn into whatever they want you to be. I think I’d rather never see you again than have you love me.”
And if this has to be the end, maybe that’s ok, because this is absolute and forever, no thoughts or words, just us. If love can see us now, it must be ashamed that it has nothing to offer.
I touch the bruise on his arm and when he flinches, I bring it to my mouth and kiss it too gently to hurt.
I never thought. I never thought I’d be here. I never thought I’d know what it means to be happy.
And sometimes we say I love you, and sometimes we say I hate you, and sometimes we just exist together without a name, two stars in the universe, and it doesn’t matter because they’re all different names for the same thing, something that will never belong to anyone but us.
