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backdrifterOn the day before his brainless plan, he roused himself from an early bout of sleep at eleven at night, pulling his Chucks on sleepily. He left his distinctive clothes at home, despite the superior warmth he felt they provided, and instead put on a down jacket he’d found in a dumpster, with the ski mask he’d bought stuffed in one of the pockets. Who buys ski masks to ski, anymore? he wondered. Ski masks are a thief’s uniform.
He found himself down at the corner of Centre and White at 12:07am, and he cursed himself for those missed seven minutes. Although he severely doubted the cops had come and gone in such a short time, at the very literal beginning of the day, there was always that tiny chance that they had. He stomped his poorly-shod feet in the cold, and coughed into his bare fist, and he rolled the ski mask into a semblance of a beanie. It was always so much colder at this hour.
He began to notice extra cops roaming a good twelve hours later, around noon, and he began to tense up, waiting for the moment when they would clear out civilians with little to no explanation and gruff faces.
He waited another six hours. He felt faint from a lack of food, and he felt sniffly and gross from standing in the cold for so long.
But he would do anything for Ryan.
At nearly six, cops suddenly rose as if from the very cement of the streets, herding pedestrians away from the courthouse to create a perimeter with a two-block radius. Traffic cops seemed to double, turning cars around with angry blows of their whistles and jabbing motions of their gloved hands. Respa found himself suddenly on Worth Street, packed in with all the other civilians, and he struggled to stay near the police line; he wasn’t sure he would be able to make it otherwise. He ducked down into the crowd, unnoticed by the people around him who were too preoccupied with why they couldn’t walk on those particular blocks now—funny, they normally wouldn’t have cared whether walking down Centre or Canal, but when told they could not walk Centre Street, suddenly Canal was no longer an option.
He unrolled the ski mask, pulling it down over his face with only his mouth and eyes on display, and as he stood he surged forward toward the police line. The cops looked ready for them, but he threw his entire body at them, soaring through the air in front of them, and he bowled them over on his way over the wooden barriers. He ran as though burning back toward the courthouse, and he glimpsed cruisers not meant for him on his way there. A couple of the cops from the police line attempted to give chase, but when it became clear that they weren’t going to catch him, nor could they try without chaos ensuing at the barriers, one of them shouted for backup into the walkie talkie clipped to his shirt.
Two cops appeared in front of him, as if to clothesline him, but Respa was ready for them, sliding beneath them and continuing on his hell bent running. The giant empty space in front of the courthouse was in sight, and so too was the second cruiser in the little parade line, whose front doors were opening. Cops stepped out, and before noticing Respa, one of them headed to the back door to open it up. The other one stopped to listen to her walkie talkie, and then she held up a hand to stop her partner, but it was too late, and he was pulling Ryan out.
His entire system stopped, this time, making him stumble, at the sight of Ryan, but he pushed himself back to full speed, hurtling toward Ryan and his captors until he felt like his lungs had been torn out, and his tongue replaced with a clod of sand. He saw cops on his tail, in his peripheral vision, but he was almost there. The female cop raised her gun, aiming at him, and he began to zig zag his path as she shot, his entire body writhing as he ran. She grazed his back, but nothing could stop him now. Her partner pulled out his gun, but Respa got there first, colliding shoulder-first with the policeman and knocking his gun out of his hands.
And then he was taking Ryan by the hand, and at first Ryan’s whole body froze to the spot, and he looked as though he might tear Respa limb from limb, but Respa leaned in and whispered It’s me, it’s Respa, and then they were flying back into Chinatown, shots firing behind them. They presented a bigger target together, but clever Ryan showed Respa that he’d grabbed the clumsy cop’s gun from the courtyard, and he fired back as Respa pulled the both of them ahead. Respa took more corners than he knew existed in Chinatown, passing a slew of bakeries he thought he recognized, and then they were running into uncharted territory, places where the crowds were so thick nobody could even see them to chase them. Ducking down below everybody’s shoulders again, Respa tore off the mask.
They were near the market below the bridge, a place he personally detested. The first thing he did was take off his jacket, and though his shivering shook him until he could hear his teeth chattering in his head, he draped it around Ryan’s shoulders. The state had been kind enough to give him a civilian outfit, it seemed, comprising of a white button-down shirt and black trousers that were a little too long, and polished black shoes that looked a little too big for his small, Asian feet. No outerwear, though.
“You’ll catch a cold,” Ryan said softly as they leaned against the wall of the bridge together, and these first words of his were so normal, so unlike what one would expect a murderer to say, that Respa turned to him and pressed Ryan to him in a tight embrace, his sobs dying unvoiced in his throat even as he cried hot tears into Ryan’s hair. A few people glanced at them, but here in Chinatown Ryan was just another Asian, blending in the way a white mass murderer never could anywhere. And Respa had never made the ten o’clock news.
The ski mask was rolled back into beanie form and all of Ryan’s longish hair was tucked into it, and they walked all the way west just to take the A train that would take them on a long, but straightforward trip home to Respa’s squat. They stayed silent the whole way, simply holding hands, but that one touch lit Respa’s entire nervous system like a light bulb, energizing him.
He helped Ryan up onto the top of the scaffold, and boosted him through the window of his choice. He followed him in, and then they were standing facing each other in the husk of a home.
“Ryan,” he croaked, his tremulous hands coming to cup the curves of Ryan’s shoulders, and the hands that had not touched him in years came to rest on his waist. He felt the danger of possibly waking up, of finding that it had only been a particularly lucid dream and that he would never see Ryan again. But Ryan looked up at him, big dark brown eyes under his silly pencil-line eyebrows, and Respa decided that if this was a dream, he really, really didn’t give a shit, and he was going to stay asleep as long as he had to. Forever.
“I love you,” Ryan whispered, and the fact that Ryan said it first made it all the sweeter when Respa returned the words, whispering as well. He leaned down and pressed his lips to Ryan’s, and he’d almost forgotten how full Ryan’s lips were, almost, but he remembered every inch of this body. Ryan opened his mouth to let him in as he closed his eyes, and Respa’s hands coasted down his arms.
Ryan had changed since the days of high school, when he’d been meek and medicated and scared. His biceps were pistons under his skin now, small but hard, compact, from swinging the sledgehammer that had become his iconic weapon of choice. His back was strong, too, he saw with his hands as they moved there next to crush Ryan’s body to his. He didn’t have to lean down as far as he used to, to kiss him; Ryan had shot up six inches to a more average five feet eight inches while at Marcy. Ryan’s hands held his face possessively as they moved toward his blanket nest, one of them reaching back to tangle itself in Respa’s curly mess of hair.
They fell to their knees together and broke for air, Ryan gasping. “I missed you,” Respa murmured, directly into his ear, his hands remaining on Ryan’s back. “I missed you. I love you. I missed you.” He would become delirious if he weren’t careful.
Ryan nestled his head against Respa’s chest, burn scars facing outward, and he murmured something back into the fabric there. Burn scarring littered the right side of his body, radiating from his shoulder to lick at his jaw, and eating at his ribs and upper arm. But nothing would ever stop Respa from loving him; the scars were just cosmetic, as far as he was concerned.
“What are you going to do with me?” Ryan whispered, his hands cradling Respa’s elbows, his thumbs stroking the rough skin there. “They’ll come looking for me.”
“I don’t care,” Respa said. “They can look all they want, but they’re not going to find you.” The people at Marcy had maintained Ryan’s hair length, at least; he still had the same style as he had when he’d been fifteen, the coarse ends of his hair brushing a few inches below his earlobes.
“How do you know?”
“Because they don’t love you like I do,” Respa replied, and he knew his reply was utter nonsense, so he kissed Ryan again to keep him from asking any more questions. Ryan kissed him back as though it were the last thing he might ever do, and of course there was the real possibility that it might be. Respa was the one to grip his face this time, his fingers remembering the strong jaw bone underneath them.
They lay on their sides on the pile of blankets, and Ryan reached out to touch Respa’s face, tracing his features. “Did you break your nose?” he asked quietly, lingering on the bridge of the nose that wasn’t as fine as it had been.
“Someone broke it for me,” Respa said, and he returned the touch. He remembered in high school how much Ryan had hated his own nose, all his own features in fact, the big, full pouty lips and the flat, round nose, the big eyes that did little to establish that he was Japanese in ancestry if not by place of birth.
They kissed again, and Respa felt like the reality of things might never really, truly hit him, because this still felt like the best dream he’d ever had. With each passing second, with each panting breath that escaped from between their open mouths, he felt like his head might explode, like his entire body might dissolve, he felt like he was on fire, he felt like he was drowning under a layer of ice, he felt everything there was to feel except that this was really happening. He rolled on top of Ryan, not pressing down on top of him but above him, knees by Ryan’s hips and elbows propping him up with his hands curling around Ryan’s head, and as they gasped and pulled apart again, he stopped.
“Why do you still kiss me?” Respa asked, still whispering. When he’d taken Ryan’s virginity so many years ago, Ryan had hated the idea of kissing, and there was still no reason he’d ever been given as to why Ryan had even agreed to sex. It had taken a traumatic event for Ryan to come to see that Respa’s kisses meant love, not domination; love, not vulgarity.
“Because you’re the only person I love,” Ryan replied, and with his arms bent at acute angles around his face, Respa could have cried again at the image he was presented with.
“I have something to tell you,” he said, and he returned to his position beside Ryan, though he reached to entwine his fingers with Ryan’s.
“Anything.”
“I can’t stand sex anymore.”
“I don’t care.” Ryan rolled onto his side, pushing his mouth against Respa’s shoulder and kissing the skin there. “I’ll only ever do whatever it is you want to do.”
“I got—I got raped—“
“It doesn’t matter,” Ryan murmured, the words a gentle buzz against Respa’s shoulder. With anyone else, Respa might have flown off the handle, might have accused them of being insensitive, had they ever been raped? But he knew exactly how Ryan meant it, and there was nothing malicious about it. He didn’t mean that it didn’t matter that Respa had been raped, because his rape was insignificant. He meant that it mattered nothing to Ryan’s love for him, that no amount of strife or sin would ever keep them apart.
Mushy shit like that. Ryan always made him drop his guard, made him soft and yielding. Loving.
Ryan let his hand linger at the hem of Respa’s hoodie, and when Respa showed no sign of wanting him to move it, he pushed the fabric up, fingers dragging slowly across the skin that it exposed. Respa shivered, but it was because of the cold, not Ryan’s touch. He himself rolled to his knees again, straddling Ryan’s hips delicately as the smaller man’s hands stopped at his waist. He bent at the waist and began to unbutton the state-issued courtwear button down shirt, steadily working his way down. Ryan showed no sign, either, of this being a step too far.
He stopped before pulling the shirttails out.
“It’s cold,” he said simply.
“I don’t care,” Ryan said again, and his hands pulled out of Respa’s clothes to rest on the tops of his hands, telling him in his own way that it was fine. Respa pulled the shirt out of his pants, and pushed up the white undershirt beneath in one motion. The scarring along the right side of his torso was almost like a design, a shining sunburst that blurred the outline, slightly, of the right areola. He leaned down all the way, and he kissed it reverently.
Ryan sat up with Respa still on top of him, and the starchy white shirt fell off his shoulders, his undershirt sliding back down over his chest. Respa pushed the stupid thing down his arms, flinging it away from them both, and slid his hands under the shirt that remained. On Ryan’s back was another scar, a branding of sorts. A giant reminder. An enormous V had been carved into his back, standing for the name of the man who, in Respa’s unprofessional opinion, had shaped Ryan into a murderer with no taste for pleasure. V is for Victor. V was for Victor, and that meant V was also for selfish, for stupid, for cowardly, for pedophilic.
His arms went rigid as he touched the scar, and Ryan sat up further to wrap his arms around Respa’s back, whispering soothingly and without language into his ear. Victor was gone.
The undershirt fell in short bursts of soft movement back down Ryan’s body as Respa conceded his turn of remembering through touch. They rolled together, almost of a single mind, to put Respa on his back, and Ryan unzipped the hoodie that only barely protected Respa from the cold. Respa shrugged his arms out of the sleeves, and it lay beneath him like the wrapping of a candy bar. Underneath was one of his handful of tissuey tank tops suited only for temperatures above seventy Fahrenheit, and Respa raised his arms as this, too, was pulled away from his body. Goosebumps sent waves of shivers down his naked upper body, rolling one after the other, until Ryan lay directly on top of him, sharing his body heat.
The small man—boy? It was so hard to think of Ryan as a man, but he supposed that’s what he was now—drew outlines with his fingertips around the scars on Respa’s own body. The splat on his shoulder from when his own father had shot him, that was the star attraction, of course; the scar where for so long a piece of a rib had stuck out, making him hideous; the burn scar from when he’d been caught cooking, the various scars from years of physical abuse at the hands of the man he hated to call his father.
Scars from street fights, scars from johns who couldn’t stand to look at him anymore, and somewhere in this medley were innocent childhood scars, from falling off the jungle gym when both parents had been healthy and loving, and from taking a misstep at the top of a rather long flight of stairs. He had vague memories of his father cradling him as he held a rag to his bleeding chin, but it was too dissonant with his image of the man as a monster. He rarely called it forward, except now when Ryan, with a thoughtful look on his face, fingered the little nick of scar tissue to one side of his chin.
“You have more scars than I do,” Ryan murmured, and Respa replied by pulling him into yet another kiss, feeling stupid even as he did, because he had no witty answer. Ryan, no matter what his dosage, was articulate, clever. He was literary, for someone in his situation, and he was smart enough to have evaded the police for two entire years before Respa had fucked shit up for him. He’d stumbled into a hick town upstate and found Ryan a successful, secret murderer keeping people half-alive or rotting in the basement, and Ryan, in turn, had seen in him all the memories he’d been repressing, had screamed, had lost it entirely and given away his position, so to speak.
Ryan fell into the kiss easily, and this time it was more desperate, with Respa pushing on the back of Ryan’s head to deepen it. He remembered, even as he thought only of Ryan’s lips and teeth and tongue, how a million years ago, in all the support groups he’d been in, people had told stories of how hard it had been for them to kiss their significant others again without thinking of what had happened to them. He wanted to open a window in time, simply to show them that they were wrong; kissing Ryan had nothing to do with the raw hatred he’d felt that night, the dominance shown in blood dripping on a concrete floor.
But even the simple thought of comparing Ryan’s affection to the attack on the worst night of his life brought it forth, and suddenly he was breaking the connection, pushing at Ryan’s shoulders. Ryan didn’t understand, at first, looking mildly panicked, a little hurt, but when Respa pushed his hands into his eye sockets and bit his trembling lip, his face softened and he rolled off to lie side by side with Respa. He took a hand from Respa’s eyes, and he held the back of it to his own cheek, his awkward attempt at comforting.
“I can’t,” Respa said, feeling horrible and brainless. “I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t…” Ryan made vague shushing noises over his words. The words
Remember this forever, you disgusting, subhuman freak of nature
played over and over in his head, vestiges of the raw, awful sensations that had followed them dancing over his body as he forced himself not to cry. He would never, ever let himself cry about it again, especially not in front of Ryan, or so he told himself.
He fell asleep that way, exhausted from his all-night vigil downtown, and from daring to let himself connect Ryan with the blond man in any way.
He found himself down at the corner of Centre and White at 12:07am, and he cursed himself for those missed seven minutes. Although he severely doubted the cops had come and gone in such a short time, at the very literal beginning of the day, there was always that tiny chance that they had. He stomped his poorly-shod feet in the cold, and coughed into his bare fist, and he rolled the ski mask into a semblance of a beanie. It was always so much colder at this hour.
He began to notice extra cops roaming a good twelve hours later, around noon, and he began to tense up, waiting for the moment when they would clear out civilians with little to no explanation and gruff faces.
He waited another six hours. He felt faint from a lack of food, and he felt sniffly and gross from standing in the cold for so long.
But he would do anything for Ryan.
At nearly six, cops suddenly rose as if from the very cement of the streets, herding pedestrians away from the courthouse to create a perimeter with a two-block radius. Traffic cops seemed to double, turning cars around with angry blows of their whistles and jabbing motions of their gloved hands. Respa found himself suddenly on Worth Street, packed in with all the other civilians, and he struggled to stay near the police line; he wasn’t sure he would be able to make it otherwise. He ducked down into the crowd, unnoticed by the people around him who were too preoccupied with why they couldn’t walk on those particular blocks now—funny, they normally wouldn’t have cared whether walking down Centre or Canal, but when told they could not walk Centre Street, suddenly Canal was no longer an option.
He unrolled the ski mask, pulling it down over his face with only his mouth and eyes on display, and as he stood he surged forward toward the police line. The cops looked ready for them, but he threw his entire body at them, soaring through the air in front of them, and he bowled them over on his way over the wooden barriers. He ran as though burning back toward the courthouse, and he glimpsed cruisers not meant for him on his way there. A couple of the cops from the police line attempted to give chase, but when it became clear that they weren’t going to catch him, nor could they try without chaos ensuing at the barriers, one of them shouted for backup into the walkie talkie clipped to his shirt.
Two cops appeared in front of him, as if to clothesline him, but Respa was ready for them, sliding beneath them and continuing on his hell bent running. The giant empty space in front of the courthouse was in sight, and so too was the second cruiser in the little parade line, whose front doors were opening. Cops stepped out, and before noticing Respa, one of them headed to the back door to open it up. The other one stopped to listen to her walkie talkie, and then she held up a hand to stop her partner, but it was too late, and he was pulling Ryan out.
His entire system stopped, this time, making him stumble, at the sight of Ryan, but he pushed himself back to full speed, hurtling toward Ryan and his captors until he felt like his lungs had been torn out, and his tongue replaced with a clod of sand. He saw cops on his tail, in his peripheral vision, but he was almost there. The female cop raised her gun, aiming at him, and he began to zig zag his path as she shot, his entire body writhing as he ran. She grazed his back, but nothing could stop him now. Her partner pulled out his gun, but Respa got there first, colliding shoulder-first with the policeman and knocking his gun out of his hands.
And then he was taking Ryan by the hand, and at first Ryan’s whole body froze to the spot, and he looked as though he might tear Respa limb from limb, but Respa leaned in and whispered It’s me, it’s Respa, and then they were flying back into Chinatown, shots firing behind them. They presented a bigger target together, but clever Ryan showed Respa that he’d grabbed the clumsy cop’s gun from the courtyard, and he fired back as Respa pulled the both of them ahead. Respa took more corners than he knew existed in Chinatown, passing a slew of bakeries he thought he recognized, and then they were running into uncharted territory, places where the crowds were so thick nobody could even see them to chase them. Ducking down below everybody’s shoulders again, Respa tore off the mask.
They were near the market below the bridge, a place he personally detested. The first thing he did was take off his jacket, and though his shivering shook him until he could hear his teeth chattering in his head, he draped it around Ryan’s shoulders. The state had been kind enough to give him a civilian outfit, it seemed, comprising of a white button-down shirt and black trousers that were a little too long, and polished black shoes that looked a little too big for his small, Asian feet. No outerwear, though.
“You’ll catch a cold,” Ryan said softly as they leaned against the wall of the bridge together, and these first words of his were so normal, so unlike what one would expect a murderer to say, that Respa turned to him and pressed Ryan to him in a tight embrace, his sobs dying unvoiced in his throat even as he cried hot tears into Ryan’s hair. A few people glanced at them, but here in Chinatown Ryan was just another Asian, blending in the way a white mass murderer never could anywhere. And Respa had never made the ten o’clock news.
The ski mask was rolled back into beanie form and all of Ryan’s longish hair was tucked into it, and they walked all the way west just to take the A train that would take them on a long, but straightforward trip home to Respa’s squat. They stayed silent the whole way, simply holding hands, but that one touch lit Respa’s entire nervous system like a light bulb, energizing him.
He helped Ryan up onto the top of the scaffold, and boosted him through the window of his choice. He followed him in, and then they were standing facing each other in the husk of a home.
“Ryan,” he croaked, his tremulous hands coming to cup the curves of Ryan’s shoulders, and the hands that had not touched him in years came to rest on his waist. He felt the danger of possibly waking up, of finding that it had only been a particularly lucid dream and that he would never see Ryan again. But Ryan looked up at him, big dark brown eyes under his silly pencil-line eyebrows, and Respa decided that if this was a dream, he really, really didn’t give a shit, and he was going to stay asleep as long as he had to. Forever.
“I love you,” Ryan whispered, and the fact that Ryan said it first made it all the sweeter when Respa returned the words, whispering as well. He leaned down and pressed his lips to Ryan’s, and he’d almost forgotten how full Ryan’s lips were, almost, but he remembered every inch of this body. Ryan opened his mouth to let him in as he closed his eyes, and Respa’s hands coasted down his arms.
Ryan had changed since the days of high school, when he’d been meek and medicated and scared. His biceps were pistons under his skin now, small but hard, compact, from swinging the sledgehammer that had become his iconic weapon of choice. His back was strong, too, he saw with his hands as they moved there next to crush Ryan’s body to his. He didn’t have to lean down as far as he used to, to kiss him; Ryan had shot up six inches to a more average five feet eight inches while at Marcy. Ryan’s hands held his face possessively as they moved toward his blanket nest, one of them reaching back to tangle itself in Respa’s curly mess of hair.
They fell to their knees together and broke for air, Ryan gasping. “I missed you,” Respa murmured, directly into his ear, his hands remaining on Ryan’s back. “I missed you. I love you. I missed you.” He would become delirious if he weren’t careful.
Ryan nestled his head against Respa’s chest, burn scars facing outward, and he murmured something back into the fabric there. Burn scarring littered the right side of his body, radiating from his shoulder to lick at his jaw, and eating at his ribs and upper arm. But nothing would ever stop Respa from loving him; the scars were just cosmetic, as far as he was concerned.
“What are you going to do with me?” Ryan whispered, his hands cradling Respa’s elbows, his thumbs stroking the rough skin there. “They’ll come looking for me.”
“I don’t care,” Respa said. “They can look all they want, but they’re not going to find you.” The people at Marcy had maintained Ryan’s hair length, at least; he still had the same style as he had when he’d been fifteen, the coarse ends of his hair brushing a few inches below his earlobes.
“How do you know?”
“Because they don’t love you like I do,” Respa replied, and he knew his reply was utter nonsense, so he kissed Ryan again to keep him from asking any more questions. Ryan kissed him back as though it were the last thing he might ever do, and of course there was the real possibility that it might be. Respa was the one to grip his face this time, his fingers remembering the strong jaw bone underneath them.
They lay on their sides on the pile of blankets, and Ryan reached out to touch Respa’s face, tracing his features. “Did you break your nose?” he asked quietly, lingering on the bridge of the nose that wasn’t as fine as it had been.
“Someone broke it for me,” Respa said, and he returned the touch. He remembered in high school how much Ryan had hated his own nose, all his own features in fact, the big, full pouty lips and the flat, round nose, the big eyes that did little to establish that he was Japanese in ancestry if not by place of birth.
They kissed again, and Respa felt like the reality of things might never really, truly hit him, because this still felt like the best dream he’d ever had. With each passing second, with each panting breath that escaped from between their open mouths, he felt like his head might explode, like his entire body might dissolve, he felt like he was on fire, he felt like he was drowning under a layer of ice, he felt everything there was to feel except that this was really happening. He rolled on top of Ryan, not pressing down on top of him but above him, knees by Ryan’s hips and elbows propping him up with his hands curling around Ryan’s head, and as they gasped and pulled apart again, he stopped.
“Why do you still kiss me?” Respa asked, still whispering. When he’d taken Ryan’s virginity so many years ago, Ryan had hated the idea of kissing, and there was still no reason he’d ever been given as to why Ryan had even agreed to sex. It had taken a traumatic event for Ryan to come to see that Respa’s kisses meant love, not domination; love, not vulgarity.
“Because you’re the only person I love,” Ryan replied, and with his arms bent at acute angles around his face, Respa could have cried again at the image he was presented with.
“I have something to tell you,” he said, and he returned to his position beside Ryan, though he reached to entwine his fingers with Ryan’s.
“Anything.”
“I can’t stand sex anymore.”
“I don’t care.” Ryan rolled onto his side, pushing his mouth against Respa’s shoulder and kissing the skin there. “I’ll only ever do whatever it is you want to do.”
“I got—I got raped—“
“It doesn’t matter,” Ryan murmured, the words a gentle buzz against Respa’s shoulder. With anyone else, Respa might have flown off the handle, might have accused them of being insensitive, had they ever been raped? But he knew exactly how Ryan meant it, and there was nothing malicious about it. He didn’t mean that it didn’t matter that Respa had been raped, because his rape was insignificant. He meant that it mattered nothing to Ryan’s love for him, that no amount of strife or sin would ever keep them apart.
Mushy shit like that. Ryan always made him drop his guard, made him soft and yielding. Loving.
Ryan let his hand linger at the hem of Respa’s hoodie, and when Respa showed no sign of wanting him to move it, he pushed the fabric up, fingers dragging slowly across the skin that it exposed. Respa shivered, but it was because of the cold, not Ryan’s touch. He himself rolled to his knees again, straddling Ryan’s hips delicately as the smaller man’s hands stopped at his waist. He bent at the waist and began to unbutton the state-issued courtwear button down shirt, steadily working his way down. Ryan showed no sign, either, of this being a step too far.
He stopped before pulling the shirttails out.
“It’s cold,” he said simply.
“I don’t care,” Ryan said again, and his hands pulled out of Respa’s clothes to rest on the tops of his hands, telling him in his own way that it was fine. Respa pulled the shirt out of his pants, and pushed up the white undershirt beneath in one motion. The scarring along the right side of his torso was almost like a design, a shining sunburst that blurred the outline, slightly, of the right areola. He leaned down all the way, and he kissed it reverently.
Ryan sat up with Respa still on top of him, and the starchy white shirt fell off his shoulders, his undershirt sliding back down over his chest. Respa pushed the stupid thing down his arms, flinging it away from them both, and slid his hands under the shirt that remained. On Ryan’s back was another scar, a branding of sorts. A giant reminder. An enormous V had been carved into his back, standing for the name of the man who, in Respa’s unprofessional opinion, had shaped Ryan into a murderer with no taste for pleasure. V is for Victor. V was for Victor, and that meant V was also for selfish, for stupid, for cowardly, for pedophilic.
His arms went rigid as he touched the scar, and Ryan sat up further to wrap his arms around Respa’s back, whispering soothingly and without language into his ear. Victor was gone.
The undershirt fell in short bursts of soft movement back down Ryan’s body as Respa conceded his turn of remembering through touch. They rolled together, almost of a single mind, to put Respa on his back, and Ryan unzipped the hoodie that only barely protected Respa from the cold. Respa shrugged his arms out of the sleeves, and it lay beneath him like the wrapping of a candy bar. Underneath was one of his handful of tissuey tank tops suited only for temperatures above seventy Fahrenheit, and Respa raised his arms as this, too, was pulled away from his body. Goosebumps sent waves of shivers down his naked upper body, rolling one after the other, until Ryan lay directly on top of him, sharing his body heat.
The small man—boy? It was so hard to think of Ryan as a man, but he supposed that’s what he was now—drew outlines with his fingertips around the scars on Respa’s own body. The splat on his shoulder from when his own father had shot him, that was the star attraction, of course; the scar where for so long a piece of a rib had stuck out, making him hideous; the burn scar from when he’d been caught cooking, the various scars from years of physical abuse at the hands of the man he hated to call his father.
Scars from street fights, scars from johns who couldn’t stand to look at him anymore, and somewhere in this medley were innocent childhood scars, from falling off the jungle gym when both parents had been healthy and loving, and from taking a misstep at the top of a rather long flight of stairs. He had vague memories of his father cradling him as he held a rag to his bleeding chin, but it was too dissonant with his image of the man as a monster. He rarely called it forward, except now when Ryan, with a thoughtful look on his face, fingered the little nick of scar tissue to one side of his chin.
“You have more scars than I do,” Ryan murmured, and Respa replied by pulling him into yet another kiss, feeling stupid even as he did, because he had no witty answer. Ryan, no matter what his dosage, was articulate, clever. He was literary, for someone in his situation, and he was smart enough to have evaded the police for two entire years before Respa had fucked shit up for him. He’d stumbled into a hick town upstate and found Ryan a successful, secret murderer keeping people half-alive or rotting in the basement, and Ryan, in turn, had seen in him all the memories he’d been repressing, had screamed, had lost it entirely and given away his position, so to speak.
Ryan fell into the kiss easily, and this time it was more desperate, with Respa pushing on the back of Ryan’s head to deepen it. He remembered, even as he thought only of Ryan’s lips and teeth and tongue, how a million years ago, in all the support groups he’d been in, people had told stories of how hard it had been for them to kiss their significant others again without thinking of what had happened to them. He wanted to open a window in time, simply to show them that they were wrong; kissing Ryan had nothing to do with the raw hatred he’d felt that night, the dominance shown in blood dripping on a concrete floor.
But even the simple thought of comparing Ryan’s affection to the attack on the worst night of his life brought it forth, and suddenly he was breaking the connection, pushing at Ryan’s shoulders. Ryan didn’t understand, at first, looking mildly panicked, a little hurt, but when Respa pushed his hands into his eye sockets and bit his trembling lip, his face softened and he rolled off to lie side by side with Respa. He took a hand from Respa’s eyes, and he held the back of it to his own cheek, his awkward attempt at comforting.
“I can’t,” Respa said, feeling horrible and brainless. “I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t…” Ryan made vague shushing noises over his words. The words
Remember this forever, you disgusting, subhuman freak of nature
played over and over in his head, vestiges of the raw, awful sensations that had followed them dancing over his body as he forced himself not to cry. He would never, ever let himself cry about it again, especially not in front of Ryan, or so he told himself.
He fell asleep that way, exhausted from his all-night vigil downtown, and from daring to let himself connect Ryan with the blond man in any way.