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backdrifterHe awoke with a start to discover he was alone in the burrow of blankets, and at first his heart wrenched in his chest to think that he’d dreamed everything. Sitting up, however, showed him Ryan standing by the broken window that let in all the cold air, shrouded in Respa’s previously discarded hoodie and staring at the light-polluted sky. He rose, and padded across the floor to embrace Ryan from behind. Ryan leaned his head into the crook of Respa’s neck soundlessly.
“It’s freezing in this corner,” Respa murmured into Ryan’s hair. “Come back to bed.”
“It’s freezing in every corner,” Ryan replied. His eyes were unfocused. “How do you live like this?”
“I think of you,” Respa said, and he knew it was a silly, romantic, cheesy answer, but it was the truth. Ryan had been, for so many years, his reason to keep going, to not off himself in despair. His being in Marcy meant nothing; the simple idea that Ryan was alive was enough for him. “I think of you and I survive.”
“Don’t say stupid things.”
“I think of you,” he whispered again, “and I take a step away from the edge of a building.”
“Stop.” The words barely breathed out, quiet and unresisting.
“I think of you, and I think that I must survive, because then maybe I’ll see you again. And I did.” He petted Ryan’s hair. “I almost thought I’d never see you again, though. Never see or touch or hear you…” He buried his nose in the thick black strands of hair, and inhaled deeply, though Ryan made a small noise of protest. “Never smell you again…”
“I didn’t think they were ever going to let me out of that place,” Ryan said. “I hate… I hate everything there. I hate the pills. I hate the nurses. I hate the revolving door of doctors who don’t want to treat me.” He turned to face Respa, embracing him with hands brushing his shoulder blades, the top of his head coming to rest just below Respa’s chin. His fingertips dug in and his molars ground together to make his whole head feel tight, even as Respa’s hands stroked his back.
“I just want to be left alone,” he said, his voice straining and small. “They keep trying to find a way into my head, but they don’t listen to me when I say there is no way in.”
It was times like these when Respa stopped feeling so disenfranchised, and he hated to think of it, but perhaps that’s why he loved Ryan so much. Ryan made his problems seem lesser. No, not the reason, just one, he amended mentally; there were so many other reasons, if he only thought for a moment, why he adored Ryan. But with Ryan, he never felt like someone falling down under the weight of their own problems, being forced to listen to someone else whine about a chipped nail, so to speak. When it was only him and Ryan, they were just two unlucky kids, together.
“I haven’t seen them in years,” Ryan whispered, and his eyes were wide, stark dots of white reflecting moonlight in the darkness.
Respa nearly wished he didn’t know what “them” meant.
“Sol left me, you know, when I ran away…”
“But I came back.” He ran massaging fingers up and down Ryan’s spine, feeling the body beneath them stiffen at the thought of its former hallucinations. Sol had been Ryan’s childhood protectorate of a hallucination, born when his schizophrenia had fully triggered at age nine, but other than that he knew little about it.
“You did,” Ryan agreed, sounding far away.
“Do you wish…” and here Respa swallowed, “that you hadn’t killed those kids?”
There was silence for a moment, and Ryan’s body relaxed as he sighed. “I don’t regret killing them, no.”
“Not at all?”
“I only regret getting caught,” he said, “because they took me away from you, and you,” and he looked up, bringing a hand back around to pull Respa’s chin down, “are the only fucking thing on this whole soggy, sorry, rotten, hideous, filthy planet that I care about.”
“Not even your sister?” Respa asked, though their faces were bare inches apart.
“I don’t love her,” Ryan replied, “like I love you.” And he pulled Respa into a kiss, a forceful kiss, a kiss that was more like a scream transformed. Respa returned the force, and they fell with a thump against the disintegrating walls, down to the decaying floor. For the first time in ages, Respa felt an actual spark of passion that traveled from his mouth down his body and into his groin, and he moaned into Ryan’s kiss before they stopped abruptly.
Ryan’s eyes narrowed in confusion, and the dark irises flicked back and forth between Respa’s own, as if searching out his answer there. They held hands loosely, Ryan sitting straight-legged on the floor with his back braced against the wall, and Respa kneeling over him, seated on the tops of his thighs.
Respa swallowed again. “When I was doing business, all these years,” he breathed, “I never came.”
“Don’t—“ Ryan shut his eyes against the words, but Respa wasn’t finished.
“Not without thinking of you,” he finished, and Ryan put uncoordinated fingers against Respa’s lips.
“You don’t have to do anything that hurts,” Ryan said, and in his words was the implication that he didn’t want to, either.
“You could never hurt me,” Respa told him, and he didn’t mean the time when Ryan had tied him up in his killing basement. Even then, even tied next to a still-living girl who wanted Ryan’s head on a stick and would talk of nothing but how much their captor deserved to die, Respa had only felt protective of Ryan.
When Respa leaned forward to reconnect the kiss, it lasted only a few seconds before he began to travel downward, and he let go of Ryan’s hands to push up the fabric of the undershirt again. “I love you,” he mumbled into the skin of Ryan’s abdomen.
“I love you, I would die for you, I would kill for you,” Ryan whispered back. “I would kill every person who tried to hurt you if I could. I want to kill the ones that already did.” Respa looked up even as he came down further. “I want to find the man who hurt you… And I want to rip him open, and I want…” Respa touched the button of the court trousers, and Ryan stopped, biting his lip.
“And I want,” he continued, “I want to die with you. I want you to never die because I never want you to hurt, but when you do die, I want to be there with you, and I want to die, too.”
“Don’t say things like that,” Respa said sincerely. “Don’t talk about dying.”
“Everything I do involves killing or dying,” Ryan said, but he caressed the tops of Respa’s hands, gripped them and replaced them on the fly of his pants. “I want this life to be only us.”
“If only,” Respa agreed, but only vaguely. Ryan might act on the idea, and then there would be no chance for them to be together ever again. He unbuttoned the wool trousers slowly, pulling down the zipper as though opening some kind of holy vault, and for a moment his hand simply hovered over the heat he encountered beneath it. Ryan turned scarlet; bit his lip until the thin layer of chapped skin split and bled, looked at the wall. He’d always been humiliated by that part of his body, even with Respa. Respa stopped, though he let the flat of his hand come to rest on Ryan’s cotton-covered crotch.
“You always do this,” he said, sighing slightly. “You act like this is a shameful thing to have.”
“I don’t like to look at it,” Ryan said, still looking at the wall. “Or touch it, or think about it. I hate the smell of it.”
“Do you hate the way mine smells?” Respa asked, removing his hand to move forward and sit directly atop Ryan’s lap. Ryan’s entire body paused, the muscles rigid. “If you even remember?”
“I remember,” Ryan replied, and there was the barest trace of a smile on his lips. “No, I didn’t hate it… Yours smells like bread.”
“So does yours, believe it or not,” Respa teased, even as Ryan snorted. “I love it. I love every part of you.”
“So I’ve heard,” Ryan said sarcastically, but Respa knew that was his acceptance of the rather odd compliment.
Respa pushed himself back off of Ryan’s lap, kneeling again over his legs. As he slid a hand down Ryan’s briefs, he noticed they were heather gray, and who picks out clothes for mental patients with court dates? Did everyone get heather gray briefs, or was there a variety? And why did the state choose heather gray over standard white?
Ryan clutched at his back, shivering even as he pressed a feverish face into his shoulder. Respa asked in half-mumbled words if he wanted him to stop, but Ryan shook his head and tightened his grip on Respa’s back. When Respa tugged at the state-issued underwear, Ryan lifted his hips and let his head hang back, and the slacks and briefs were thrown into a dark corner somewhere.
“This is exactly the way it was in high school,” Ryan panted, trying to look mockingly angry, but he only managed to look more lustful. “You always got my clothes off before you took off even one thing.”
“Some things never change,” Respa said, grinning despite himself, and to even the odds he peeled off his now-sweaty tank top, the cold wind that blew above their heads cooling him. Ryan pulled him forward by the hips and undid his fly, and snorted.
“And you still wear no underwear.”
“I can’t afford the laundry,” Respa said honestly, but he helped Ryan push the jeans down. “I bet this crotch doesn’t smell like bread now, does it?” He screwed up his face, aware of how many days it had been since he’d last had a chance to shower. “Maybe I should just put it away…”
But Ryan pulled him further, and though it made Respa yelp with embarrassment, Ryan pushed his nose into Respa’s pubic hair and took a long whiff, looking dead serious as he did. “It still smells like some kind of food,” Ryan proclaimed, and he laughed his awkward, creepy laugh that put everyone else off but Respa.
“I love your creepy laugh,” he blurted out, but Ryan either didn’t care or didn’t hear, because he was attending to Respa down below with his tongue, and then Respa didn’t care anymore, either. He tangled his fingers in Ryan’s hair, and he remembered other times like this, he remembered being fifteen and being in this exact position, and it only fueled his arousal, made him grip Ryan’s head too tight for a few seconds before he relaxed his fingers.
“How can you even want to do that,” Respa gasped, the words coming out slowly and interrupted by impassioned little noises, “when I’m all filthy?”
“Do you think I care about stupid little things like that?” Ryan asked as he pulled his mouth away, though his fingers kept working. Respa used the opportunity to realign their bodies, and he ground his hips against Ryan’s as he kissed him. Ryan’s mouth tasted like his own nether regions, but it wasn’t enough to deter him.
Ryan broke the kiss first, and whispered into Respa’s ear. “Fuck me.”
The little thrill Respa felt at Ryan actually asking for it was cancelled out almost instantly by something else. “I don’t have anything that could even substitute for lube, not here,” he said, frowning. “You’re not a girl.”
“I know,” Ryan snapped. He was bright red at having attention called to his request, when he almost never used language like that. He sat up, shoving Respa away, and crossed his legs. “And I don’t care.”
“Well I do!” Respa shouted, and he stood abruptly, taking a few steps back.
“Forget I said it, then,” Ryan said, voice angry and bitter. He curled up into a little ball, tucking his knees under his chin and wrapping his arms around his shins, clasping his hands in front of them. “Forget it.”
Respa sighed heavily as he took a seat next to Ryan, and although Ryan batted his arms away as he embraced him, in the end he leaned into Respa’s warmth, livid tears making shiny pathways down his face. “It happened to me, like that,” Respa said, trying to explain without specifically mentioning anything. “And it hurt, so much, and I bled everywhere…”
“I wouldn’t care if it was you,” Ryan said in a tiny voice, but he seemed to understand, in his own way, because there was no real energy in his words.
“Just come over to the bed,” Respa said, standing again and offering his hands to Ryan. Ryan took them, let Respa pull him up, and picked up the errant hoodie. They settled into the blankets more like an old married couple than a pair of kids on the run, with Respa spooning the young murderer and stroking his hair rhythmically.
“It’s freezing in this corner,” Respa murmured into Ryan’s hair. “Come back to bed.”
“It’s freezing in every corner,” Ryan replied. His eyes were unfocused. “How do you live like this?”
“I think of you,” Respa said, and he knew it was a silly, romantic, cheesy answer, but it was the truth. Ryan had been, for so many years, his reason to keep going, to not off himself in despair. His being in Marcy meant nothing; the simple idea that Ryan was alive was enough for him. “I think of you and I survive.”
“Don’t say stupid things.”
“I think of you,” he whispered again, “and I take a step away from the edge of a building.”
“Stop.” The words barely breathed out, quiet and unresisting.
“I think of you, and I think that I must survive, because then maybe I’ll see you again. And I did.” He petted Ryan’s hair. “I almost thought I’d never see you again, though. Never see or touch or hear you…” He buried his nose in the thick black strands of hair, and inhaled deeply, though Ryan made a small noise of protest. “Never smell you again…”
“I didn’t think they were ever going to let me out of that place,” Ryan said. “I hate… I hate everything there. I hate the pills. I hate the nurses. I hate the revolving door of doctors who don’t want to treat me.” He turned to face Respa, embracing him with hands brushing his shoulder blades, the top of his head coming to rest just below Respa’s chin. His fingertips dug in and his molars ground together to make his whole head feel tight, even as Respa’s hands stroked his back.
“I just want to be left alone,” he said, his voice straining and small. “They keep trying to find a way into my head, but they don’t listen to me when I say there is no way in.”
It was times like these when Respa stopped feeling so disenfranchised, and he hated to think of it, but perhaps that’s why he loved Ryan so much. Ryan made his problems seem lesser. No, not the reason, just one, he amended mentally; there were so many other reasons, if he only thought for a moment, why he adored Ryan. But with Ryan, he never felt like someone falling down under the weight of their own problems, being forced to listen to someone else whine about a chipped nail, so to speak. When it was only him and Ryan, they were just two unlucky kids, together.
“I haven’t seen them in years,” Ryan whispered, and his eyes were wide, stark dots of white reflecting moonlight in the darkness.
Respa nearly wished he didn’t know what “them” meant.
“Sol left me, you know, when I ran away…”
“But I came back.” He ran massaging fingers up and down Ryan’s spine, feeling the body beneath them stiffen at the thought of its former hallucinations. Sol had been Ryan’s childhood protectorate of a hallucination, born when his schizophrenia had fully triggered at age nine, but other than that he knew little about it.
“You did,” Ryan agreed, sounding far away.
“Do you wish…” and here Respa swallowed, “that you hadn’t killed those kids?”
There was silence for a moment, and Ryan’s body relaxed as he sighed. “I don’t regret killing them, no.”
“Not at all?”
“I only regret getting caught,” he said, “because they took me away from you, and you,” and he looked up, bringing a hand back around to pull Respa’s chin down, “are the only fucking thing on this whole soggy, sorry, rotten, hideous, filthy planet that I care about.”
“Not even your sister?” Respa asked, though their faces were bare inches apart.
“I don’t love her,” Ryan replied, “like I love you.” And he pulled Respa into a kiss, a forceful kiss, a kiss that was more like a scream transformed. Respa returned the force, and they fell with a thump against the disintegrating walls, down to the decaying floor. For the first time in ages, Respa felt an actual spark of passion that traveled from his mouth down his body and into his groin, and he moaned into Ryan’s kiss before they stopped abruptly.
Ryan’s eyes narrowed in confusion, and the dark irises flicked back and forth between Respa’s own, as if searching out his answer there. They held hands loosely, Ryan sitting straight-legged on the floor with his back braced against the wall, and Respa kneeling over him, seated on the tops of his thighs.
Respa swallowed again. “When I was doing business, all these years,” he breathed, “I never came.”
“Don’t—“ Ryan shut his eyes against the words, but Respa wasn’t finished.
“Not without thinking of you,” he finished, and Ryan put uncoordinated fingers against Respa’s lips.
“You don’t have to do anything that hurts,” Ryan said, and in his words was the implication that he didn’t want to, either.
“You could never hurt me,” Respa told him, and he didn’t mean the time when Ryan had tied him up in his killing basement. Even then, even tied next to a still-living girl who wanted Ryan’s head on a stick and would talk of nothing but how much their captor deserved to die, Respa had only felt protective of Ryan.
When Respa leaned forward to reconnect the kiss, it lasted only a few seconds before he began to travel downward, and he let go of Ryan’s hands to push up the fabric of the undershirt again. “I love you,” he mumbled into the skin of Ryan’s abdomen.
“I love you, I would die for you, I would kill for you,” Ryan whispered back. “I would kill every person who tried to hurt you if I could. I want to kill the ones that already did.” Respa looked up even as he came down further. “I want to find the man who hurt you… And I want to rip him open, and I want…” Respa touched the button of the court trousers, and Ryan stopped, biting his lip.
“And I want,” he continued, “I want to die with you. I want you to never die because I never want you to hurt, but when you do die, I want to be there with you, and I want to die, too.”
“Don’t say things like that,” Respa said sincerely. “Don’t talk about dying.”
“Everything I do involves killing or dying,” Ryan said, but he caressed the tops of Respa’s hands, gripped them and replaced them on the fly of his pants. “I want this life to be only us.”
“If only,” Respa agreed, but only vaguely. Ryan might act on the idea, and then there would be no chance for them to be together ever again. He unbuttoned the wool trousers slowly, pulling down the zipper as though opening some kind of holy vault, and for a moment his hand simply hovered over the heat he encountered beneath it. Ryan turned scarlet; bit his lip until the thin layer of chapped skin split and bled, looked at the wall. He’d always been humiliated by that part of his body, even with Respa. Respa stopped, though he let the flat of his hand come to rest on Ryan’s cotton-covered crotch.
“You always do this,” he said, sighing slightly. “You act like this is a shameful thing to have.”
“I don’t like to look at it,” Ryan said, still looking at the wall. “Or touch it, or think about it. I hate the smell of it.”
“Do you hate the way mine smells?” Respa asked, removing his hand to move forward and sit directly atop Ryan’s lap. Ryan’s entire body paused, the muscles rigid. “If you even remember?”
“I remember,” Ryan replied, and there was the barest trace of a smile on his lips. “No, I didn’t hate it… Yours smells like bread.”
“So does yours, believe it or not,” Respa teased, even as Ryan snorted. “I love it. I love every part of you.”
“So I’ve heard,” Ryan said sarcastically, but Respa knew that was his acceptance of the rather odd compliment.
Respa pushed himself back off of Ryan’s lap, kneeling again over his legs. As he slid a hand down Ryan’s briefs, he noticed they were heather gray, and who picks out clothes for mental patients with court dates? Did everyone get heather gray briefs, or was there a variety? And why did the state choose heather gray over standard white?
Ryan clutched at his back, shivering even as he pressed a feverish face into his shoulder. Respa asked in half-mumbled words if he wanted him to stop, but Ryan shook his head and tightened his grip on Respa’s back. When Respa tugged at the state-issued underwear, Ryan lifted his hips and let his head hang back, and the slacks and briefs were thrown into a dark corner somewhere.
“This is exactly the way it was in high school,” Ryan panted, trying to look mockingly angry, but he only managed to look more lustful. “You always got my clothes off before you took off even one thing.”
“Some things never change,” Respa said, grinning despite himself, and to even the odds he peeled off his now-sweaty tank top, the cold wind that blew above their heads cooling him. Ryan pulled him forward by the hips and undid his fly, and snorted.
“And you still wear no underwear.”
“I can’t afford the laundry,” Respa said honestly, but he helped Ryan push the jeans down. “I bet this crotch doesn’t smell like bread now, does it?” He screwed up his face, aware of how many days it had been since he’d last had a chance to shower. “Maybe I should just put it away…”
But Ryan pulled him further, and though it made Respa yelp with embarrassment, Ryan pushed his nose into Respa’s pubic hair and took a long whiff, looking dead serious as he did. “It still smells like some kind of food,” Ryan proclaimed, and he laughed his awkward, creepy laugh that put everyone else off but Respa.
“I love your creepy laugh,” he blurted out, but Ryan either didn’t care or didn’t hear, because he was attending to Respa down below with his tongue, and then Respa didn’t care anymore, either. He tangled his fingers in Ryan’s hair, and he remembered other times like this, he remembered being fifteen and being in this exact position, and it only fueled his arousal, made him grip Ryan’s head too tight for a few seconds before he relaxed his fingers.
“How can you even want to do that,” Respa gasped, the words coming out slowly and interrupted by impassioned little noises, “when I’m all filthy?”
“Do you think I care about stupid little things like that?” Ryan asked as he pulled his mouth away, though his fingers kept working. Respa used the opportunity to realign their bodies, and he ground his hips against Ryan’s as he kissed him. Ryan’s mouth tasted like his own nether regions, but it wasn’t enough to deter him.
Ryan broke the kiss first, and whispered into Respa’s ear. “Fuck me.”
The little thrill Respa felt at Ryan actually asking for it was cancelled out almost instantly by something else. “I don’t have anything that could even substitute for lube, not here,” he said, frowning. “You’re not a girl.”
“I know,” Ryan snapped. He was bright red at having attention called to his request, when he almost never used language like that. He sat up, shoving Respa away, and crossed his legs. “And I don’t care.”
“Well I do!” Respa shouted, and he stood abruptly, taking a few steps back.
“Forget I said it, then,” Ryan said, voice angry and bitter. He curled up into a little ball, tucking his knees under his chin and wrapping his arms around his shins, clasping his hands in front of them. “Forget it.”
Respa sighed heavily as he took a seat next to Ryan, and although Ryan batted his arms away as he embraced him, in the end he leaned into Respa’s warmth, livid tears making shiny pathways down his face. “It happened to me, like that,” Respa said, trying to explain without specifically mentioning anything. “And it hurt, so much, and I bled everywhere…”
“I wouldn’t care if it was you,” Ryan said in a tiny voice, but he seemed to understand, in his own way, because there was no real energy in his words.
“Just come over to the bed,” Respa said, standing again and offering his hands to Ryan. Ryan took them, let Respa pull him up, and picked up the errant hoodie. They settled into the blankets more like an old married couple than a pair of kids on the run, with Respa spooning the young murderer and stroking his hair rhythmically.