Grip - 15. Chapter 15

Jae’s Garage

He loved his car, Boomer bopped along to music as he drove out of the garage, running the car through the dim evening streets just after a snow storm was a true blessing. He loved it.

The car swept down the street, sending jets of snow flying as he whooped for joy. Unaware that he was being carefully watched, the large truck sitting in the shadowy alleyway ahead of him started its engine.

He crested the hill, barrelling down it, feeling the rush of elation suddenly turn to bone chilling terror as the truck pulled out of nowhere into his path.

Twisting the wheel did nothing except send the car into an uncontrolled slide. He crashed under the trucks wheels, the underside of the bed sheering off the roof of the Peugeot. As the rear axel rode up and over the wreck finishing the job.

Smoking his cigarette, Sasha blew a long trail of smoke into the air as he pulled out his phone.

“Message has been delivered,” he said with a chuckle.

* * *

Max’s Dacha

The Telephone call had ripped through their lives.

Jae threw one leg over his bike, hands gripping the throttle as his soul could rip through the rubber and steel with icy rage. He should have known better. Boomer was too reckless… had been too reckless.

The rage clung to his back, claws dug, ripping at his heart. Brown eyes watched the dacha door, watched for any sign of dark eyes, of response. Nothing. Max probably hadn’t moved from where he sat at the table. Jae revved the motorcycle. Nothing mattered, he tried to tell himself, but the echoes of past hurts wailed like lost souls in the hell of his being.

This rage had been there before he had come to Moscow. It had powered his friendship with Boomer from the stupid racing they’d done until the bloody death of his friend. Ugly, lonely, weak, unwanted, it was dangerous to his friendships, nasty puss oozing anger. What right did he have to think he could do any more than that?

It was bitterness, he knew, lifting his foot from the ground and throwing up litter as he let the bike’s power jerk and carry him forward. Friendship, it was some impossible belief in the value of another, and yet again a life had been ripped away from him. Greedy, desperately greedy, and vile. Rage overwhelmed the pain, burned out all the vulnerability. He wasn’t a man with a glass heart, bruised soul. He was a man on a 150cc pocket rocket on snow slicked wooded roads outside of the cities Outer Ring, a streak of blue metal and brown leather, black hair, and hands that felt like claws as he leaned into the first curve from the dacha’s access road.

Behind him, Max stood on the porch of his dacha, wearing nothing but dark blue silk pyjamas and the new rain darkening his hair. He knew where Jae was going. He just knew.

Jae leaned over the engine, knees in, shifted lower, and took another curve. Wind blasted rain across his face, as if nature were crying for him. The white lines, broken or double, danced together in a taunt to his aloneness.

“Now you know what it felt like,” the woman’s voice screamed in his memory, an inner demon that would never stop haunting him. “Now you are going to know what it’s like to loose someone you love.”

The next curve was posted with a fifteen mph limit. Jae took it at forty-five, leaning the bike over, fighting the pull of momentum and rage between his legs to keep the wheel on his side of double white. Water from the road soaked his pants, his tee-shirt, and he shot straight out of the curve into a short straight away. He shifted back up, hit fifty-five by the time the straight away turned into a small hill.

Boomer. The wheels of the brand new scooter left the road, and for a moment he felt just like when any of his team won a rave, like when Max talked too much, and the demons were quiet. Jae lifted up, knees still bent, body off the seat, the heat of the engine vaporizing snow and rising to hit him in the chest, and he knew. The wheels would hit the road again, slicker than before, full of fucking demons, but for this moment, he was off the ground.

The jolt of landing hit him, reverberated up through his knees, thighs, clenched in his gut and he held tight, kept his balance, kept his heart on his memories. Sliding on the icy road, he stayed upright by sheer will, sheer manic refusal to accept anything less. When wheels gripped road again, he wrapped himself around the heat of the engine, poured on the throttle and flew. Max didn’t really give a shit. It was all in his head, all his own fucking neurotic daydream.

“You now know what it feels like to be betrayed, humiliated and alone,” that same female voice snarled. Jae screamed out loud, his body vibrating with the hum of engine of the scooter. Rage. He’d been nothing but a disease from the moment he’d been born!

The next curve went the other direction and he leaned into it, accelerating as he went, kicked up rain painting grit down his bare throat, into his hair. Over the white centre lines this time, he pulled out of the curve just as a tiny little car screamed its horn at him. He was already pulling up out of the lean-in though, and flashed the little Russian girl with glasses a smile as he blasted past her.

It had been too close though and the cautious side of him didn’t appreciate the risk. With Boomer’s death a darker rage rose, thick as boiling candy, bubbles of heat bursting the surface so slow like molten cherry lollipop, boiling in the pot of his being, sweet when it’s cooled, lava when it’s not. The Korean liked speed as well, cool and elegant, faster than a sane person would take the curves, slower than a hysterical sane person. It was Jae who was vulnerable and human. Rage and power were all that he cared about. The final rage, maybe, because a part of him still cared and cared about when the pain was too much to tolerate.

However many curves there were coming through the forest, they all fed into the long straight away that went back towards the city. There was time, before he got where he was going.

* * *

Max’s Dacha

Max slipped on his jeans, boots, a leather jacket over his blue silk pyjama top. He hadn’t meant it however, Jae had taken it. Jae didn’t understand him. No one did. It wasn’t possible. He thought about just letting their friendship end there, just let it fade away, quietly. If he disappeared, Jae would get over it. And so, he’d stood there in the rain, listening to the sound of that foolish pocket rocket fight the rain. Jae would get over the loss. There wasn’t all that much to get over really, just numb nothing.

Except, deep within him, so slight he could hardly hear it, and yet so vivid and steel strong that he could not ignore it and keep his soul. Standing there, still in his pyjamas, he’d wondered if he wanted his soul, if he wanted anything other than just release. Only a few minutes later, he was in his XKR, a loyal friend that stood ready to help him. Since the news of Boomer’s accident, he hadn’t wanted anything for himself, not felt this want of his own. Revenge was a want of its own, so beyond demon and well onto being a demi-god that used them all as it saw fit. That left no room for wanting even so much as this lunch over that one.

It felt unnatural to know he wanted Jae, to understand that this want, if unmet would collapse his soul. After fasting, one should start with little wants, that pair of pants over this, but maybe it took something big to reboot the soul.

The XKR revved too fast, the tyres squealing on the pavement of the garage. There was a path down the side of the hill, of the road and much shorter. His wheels dragged in the gravel as he spun the Jaguar set it off down the shorter steeper path, lit only with moonlight and resentfully awaking soul.

* * *

The Forest Road

For Jae, the rage slowly cooled along the straightaway. He didn’t want it to, didn’t want the cold focus that came with it to relax and slip away. Rage was so much more comfortable than the feelings underneath. The feelings underneath made him feel like he was going under, fading away. He held to the hope of reaching the small chapel.

Of to the right, down another door dirt road, under the cover of majestic and tranquil redwoods, he slipped passed the bounds of reason and into a private sanctuary. Anger shredded, becoming thin as wet rice paper, as he neared the only thing that mattered to the only one he’d let close, really close. He’d hid his soul in it.

It was lack of focus that took the big motorcycle over. Shaking arms failed to hold the front wheel and his running shoe skidded in the mud. Before he knew it, he and the bike skidded towards the small clearing side ways, his forward foot on the ground, digging up muddy ground. “You caused her to die, maybe if I die you’ll finally be punished… finally know the consequences of what you did.” The voice from his memory screamed at him, and the bike laid over on him. The engine scaled his leg, cold mud sucked into his ear, hot tears scalded his face. It would be better for Max to never love him. He wasn’t good enough, and with the last of his rage, he shoved the dying scooter off of his leg.

Self-hate is just another face of rage, just another way to protect from that which is underneath. In the mud, cold rainy clumping dirt between his fingers, under his knees, soaking into his pants and cooling the cooling burn on his inner thigh, he crawled forward, toward the little private shrine for his Boomer.

She was the last person Jae had let in, last person he’d cared for. God, he thought as he crawled, maybe he’d have some power to fix how broken he was. The chapel itself was just a little cement poured church-shell with a burned out candle in it. Some ivy and some flowers, and Jae went boneless in front of it, sinking into the mud, as even the self hate left him, left him laying in the mud, wishing he could at least cry, cry out his life force because even anger had abandoned him. It wasn’t Max’s fault that he was broken, worthless. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, the things of the past, and he wished, that admitting that, screaming that would make it okay, get him past this pain somehow.

* * *

Back on the main road

Through the open window Max smelled the burned engine oil, flesh, spilled gasoline, before he found the scooter lying in the mud. Turning the wheels and inching the XKR forward, he made it around the bike and on down the path. It was only another eighth of a mile to the little shrine that he had helped Jae build.

What he saw there now made him brake, the back end of the XKR swinging around as he sat there staring through the open window, rain running down his ear tails, down his throat. This was the man he was friends with? Friendship? Love? Those words didn’t have any meaning to the deep part of him that truly liked Jae. The more articulate part of himself refused, absolutely refused to take responsibility for this Korean man wallowing in the mud. The intensity and disaster of emotions was not his problem. It wasn’t.

And yet, climbing out of the car there in the rain, Max realized that this part of his soul that needed Jae would rather be there in the mud with him than be without him. Not at all agreeing with the logic of his soul, Max closed the car door, taking a few steps as he walked forward. About the only sound competing with the rain was the sound of mud sucking up under his boots as he walked.

Jae turned, rose up a little and got on his knees, hands resting on ruined pants. Max was surprised to find no tears in Jae’s red eyes, frustrated desert numbness instead. It was beyond Max’s understanding. Even before tragedy had taken apart his life, his emotions had been discrete, polite, organized. Defying what was, the understanding he’d had of life, Max reached for Jae’s face, wiped mud away, without a word.

The first tears slipped free, from the outside of his eyes, as if they couldn’t really be tears, after all, ran down dirty skin to soak into Max’s fingers. Not an offering, existing only for themselves, more tears followed becoming a sadness so profound that Jae thought he could sink into the mud, abandon his humanity and become some wood gnome.

Max’s other hand caressed Jae’s cheek, cleaning away mud, reaching maybe for those tears and then they flowed, rushing out, soundless tears from brown eyes, years of hidden sorrow, headed off with anger and nursing his pride spilled down his face. He felt Max’s hands in his hair, combing, petting, accepting.

He thought he’d cry forever, on his knees in front of Max, his crimes and ruinous spectres of his past having no hold on him, no escape into anger or rage, only the purity of his sorrow and the undefined loyalty of his friend. And then there weren’t tears, just a light, lacy feeling. He felt Max’s movement then, as his friend knelt in the mud with him, shared space with him, no matter where it was. “Max?”

“I’m here for you.” Max’s arms opened, and Jae collapsed forward, filthy face against the body warmed blue silk pyjamas. Max’s leather jacket and arms closed around him, holding him. He wasn’t home. There wasn’t any home anymore, no rules to make it clean and neat, but Max’s heart beat under his chest and they were both alive. The sun was rising, slipping gold into the forest, and both men knew they weren’t alone. And that was all either of them really needed.