Blind hearts - 17. Fortresses of pain

Through the amber mist in the fridge, Alex peered and ruminated on the eggs he had forgotten to buy, the indecipherable smell that would take hours to pinpoint, his thirst that would not be slaked. And the dinner he was supposed to be preparing … Dinner was supposed to be simple: Pasta, a jar of Alfredo sauce, three cans of tuna, and then plates and cutlery and glasses of tea, buffoonish entreaties to have his mom eat more, Susan’s complete obstinacy to gratitude and his jocular goadings to have a little dessert—Stupid bullshit—he let go of the fridge door with a rueful deflation of spirit.

Out the kitchen window, dwarfing over longitudinal view of the dividing paling was the twilight sky uneven with clouds and mockingly impenetrable. And he mumbled, “Mom could take care of herself.” The words tasted uneasy, indeterminately immoral, but a tad liberating. And as he opened the cupboard and picked a box of pasta, the words resounded braver and bolder and all so without the queasy glimmer of his failure.

He put away the box, then giddy with the unfilial thrust of adventure, checked his phone messages. Frustratingly, Dimov hadn’t replied. Ah well. Sure he could count on Dimov’s big hard cock, but crucially not on his big hard spirit to absolve him of his uncertain mass of feelings. And so it would be Tony, then. Yes Tony, affirmed Alex, already restless in the aching prison of lust.

“Hey love, I heard you wanted dinner,” Alex’s tone was jumpy as he opened the cupboard and looked over the blue muck of strewn pasta boxes.

“Why do you care all of sudden?” droned Tony, all more pathetic for its overtones of belligerence.

Alex would not allow mere aggression to resurrect fainting thoughts on duty. He shut the cupboard and said, “You want dinner or not?”

“That depends. You’re staying the night?”

Tony’s tiny request so mightily resurrected the bastard soldiers of duty. It was so unclear, so wrong, especially with the hot whites of the lights glaring down his face.

“Dinner, cuddle, fuck all night long, anything you want, love.” Alex’s voice rambled ahead of the sprint in his heart.

“You make it sound so … unpalatable.”

“Give me a fucking break,” he said through his teeth.

“Man, are you all right there?”

Alex tumbled out of the stifling kitchen. Even the living room felt sweltering amid the globular forms of furniture in the unconquered dark. The phone felt hot and clammy against his ear, and he switched the phone from one side to another.

“I’m going to jump into the shower,” he said resolutely, “I should be at your place in another hour, then you can punish me all night for being a bad, bad boy. Sounds good, baby?”

“Sounds okay ….”

Alex smiled in congratulations to himself. He danced to Susan’s bedroom and told her, without an inkling of remorse, of his change of plans. Her fallen smile was a bummer, his bad but just as well, he danced away to the shower. Then he danced out the door, brilliant and triumphant in a pair of corduroys, a v-necked shirt, five condoms in his pocket, and with a breath of cologne and a lovely log of a semi-hard dick.

Before he opened his car, his phone interrupted with message from Frank pleading suffering and pride.

FFFFF Janet. got her tixs to weird ass hipster show she whined for then she fing ditched me. tix cnt go to waste, so u and me comin to this shit.

Alex paced the sidewalk. Three cars sputtered by. Magnesium grey had conquered the abundance of sky. So everything, what he said in the car, his sneaky offer for a fuck, was all forgotten, Alex groaned to himself. He came to a full stop in front of a neighbor’s driveway, where three toddlers were running exhausting circles around the mailbox. Their rambunctious glee colored the lilacs and the lilies and tempted their mother’s glowering exasperation. Irritation could not reign long, for her eyes burned with love and tenderness bloomed in the twilight.

The evening seemed to have grown colder, the sky darker. He turned his back upon the sight and wrote back, u called her a dumbass again, didnt u?

Nah, nah, i asked her nice and polite, r u a dumbass?

Alex rolled his eyes. sorry cnt deal right now. got a date with Tony.

u dont give a shit about Tony.

Alex felt his semi-hard dick shrivel. i dont give a shit watchin you getin stiff over hipster chicks.

The irate buzz of a phone call replied, but Alex turned the phone off.

The claustrophobic whiff of Indian sandalwood ushered Alex into Tony’s bachelorette—a tomb of stacked books and tuna fish cans. Evening Books on screenwriting and launching the stand-up career piled high with the books on how to nurture the confidence of a beast, and the tuna cans, well, Tony had said tuna was for brain food. And as Tony, his chest bare, supple, silvery with sweat, brownnosed someone on the phone, Alex wanted to tell him his cum was an even better brain food. It was soft slant of his shoulders that hooked Alex’s eyes, the sparse chest hair that drew them to the trail lining down his belly and disappearing into the waistband of his briefs—navy blue. His fly was open, the clip was still undone; the phone call had interrupted his dressing up. It was all the better for Alex relaxing in the solitary chair and widening his knees to allow more space for his erection to mature.

“Here me out, Diehard in the Getty so works,” Tony said into the phone pinched between his ear and shoulder as his hands struggled to zip his fly. His hands seized in the air, his voice dropped low. “Meredith, a drag queen can totally be badass Bruce Willis …. A drag can be waltzing in the getty and be ready to save the day …. That’s a point here: the first shall be the last and last shall be the first … right, you don’t get that.” His hands dropped back to struggling with fly, but the zipper did not seem to want to cooperate, prompting Alex to jump over to help Tony.

“Dude, dude.” Tony muffled the receiver. “Step away from the dick.”

Alex complied, put his hands behind back and stared now brazenly at the zipper that was sitting squarely against the ridge of his cock.

“Alex, sit your ass down and stop staring at my dick!” Tony fought to keep his voice down and away from the phone.

“You standing there, looking sexy as hell.” Alex swished his smile around as Tony rolled his eyes. “Hot as hell? Rock hard as hell?”

Swiftly Tony turned his back on Alex and resumed talking on the phone. “Sorry Meredith, my dog needs its bone …. Yeah I just got a new dog, an ugly ass Doberman that is about to be put down .… You didn’t know I had a dog? Fuck yeah, I like animals …. All right, all right, so you don’t like Diehard in the Getty, how about Diehard in the Smithsonian?”

Unfortunately, Tony was leaning on the faux wood counter, his buttocks sticking out and swallowing up all of Alex’s view. He could picture his dick nestled and snug against Tony’s crack, the cheeks squeezed tight against his pulsating heat. Alex swallowed hard, dabbed his heat-bathed neck. The sink next to him should have been more cooling fixture, but it shone so bright and rather incomprehensibly spotless next to the fridge door that was a maze of magnets or the nearby working area, which was strewn with opened tuna cans and the lone box of green tea. Blood rushed to Alex’s head, and in the discombobulation of vertigo and savage need for release, a tiny question niggled him: had he remembered to pick up a new box of chamomile tea?

He panicked. Reaching for his phone to call his mother, he remembered with a clenching pain in his throat what he had decided for the night. Unbelievable really thinking about chamomile tea when next to him there was a warm-blooded male, albeit still yakking and yakking about Diehard and drag queen alpha heroes—Alex reached to swipe the phone from Tony, and after some tense struggling for control, Tony gasped into the receiver, “My dog’s chewing on my pant cuff. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow with other ideas that don’t involve Diehard.” Then Tony turned his full feral attention to Alex. “Your dick can’t wait two minutes?”

“Baby,” Alex said, looking dreamily at the emergency growing in his pants, “That needs an all night service, but that can wait till after dinner, speaking of which it’s after nine ...”

Alex loved the half-frown, half-curiosity brightening the almond gloss of his face. Tony looked uneasily and deliciously helpless at the ceiling, the fridge, looked unable to decide an internal debate, as Alex would guess slyly, a debate between his ego and his dick. But that was easy, thought Alex grabbing him by the back of his head and kissing him. Minty fresh, a hint of the special herb and something there with the Tony’s wrestling tongue, drove Alex to explore further, drive deeper, to turn his face aside and suck on the prickly trail of his sideburn. Tony’s surrender was not exactly immediate. But surrender he did on all fours on the bed and after a few breathless gripes about a dog that had promised to be good.

Alex was good, pumping and drilling Tony whose head was squashed against the armrest and his mouth was open, drooling, exhaling fast heated breaths. The muscles on Tony’s back, working and twisting, spurred Alex’s galloping thrusts. The spasm of elation in Tony’s eyes almost drained his reserves.

“Shit!” Tony bit down his lip, even that was not enough to contain his exploding breaths, “Shit, I’m going—”

“Oh no, you’re not.” Alex stopped cold, firing a frustrated growl from Tony.

“We need to get dinner.”

“I’ll make you a tuna casserole.” Alex helped him roll over his back and raised up his legs and braced them flat over his belly.

“You can’t cook.”

“You’ll be surprised at what I can do.” Alex entered him again. A slight twist crossed Tony’s face and then the naked invitation to torture him sparkled in his eyes, and he was absolutely beautiful. And in that nuclear moment, nothing else mattered. Not the starless night imprinted on the window, not numerical analysis project due the next Monday, not the fact that he did forget to buy chamomile tea, not the heartless bitch of his mother, not Dimov’s silly ideas, not Frank, especially not Frank invading his dreams, spread-eagled on his bed, pounding heavily on a proud plump prick—Aww yeah, aww Frank yeah ….

***

Tony’s fridge turned out a wasteland—milk, bread, and nothing more. And Alex forced the honors of driving to the grocery story onto Tony, who looked bleary, perhaps with pleasure’s afterglow or nausea about the downgraded dinner plans for mac and cheese. On the car ride, Tony kept trying to image something on the side view mirror. Alex, himself was trying to ignore Tony’s uneven driving and hold on to the dying glow in his groin, and all while calculating the least expensive way to evade an entire night in the jail of Tony’s bed.

“New York huh?” Tony said for the third time. “I’m actually going to miss your selfish prick.”

The sentiment was touching, damning. Alex was a little wasted, a bit disoriented with the disarming effect of it, and he chuckled.

“Probably New York, I dunno yet. But this selfish prick will be here all night long, most of the summer actually.”

“Yeah …” Tony pulled the parking brake.

There was something protective about the night, draping over the boxlike roof, cradling the egg of light emanating from the grocery’s façade. Alex could see through the automatic doors, pink balloons rising about the blur of shelves into the florescent white ceiling—an smashing party with the late-working cashiers maybe? Or a carnival of fighting tumescent cocks? Oh dear he wished. Well, at least he could get Mom’s tea in there.

Tony wanted to get the boxed mac and cheese, whose ingredients, Alex was sure, were chemically isomorphic to rat poison. It was like a revelation to Diehard script-churner—Real cheddar cheese that came in block wedges, vegetable rows of the red and green and yellow, fresh pasta that came in the fridge aisle. Soon enough he was bouncing off to check out stands to proclaim the miracle of guavas in sunny California.

He wandered off while Alex perused a wall of teas. Nowhere among the mosaic of logos and colors was Susan’s preferred brand of tea, so he turned on his phone to call her. And waiting for him was a tower of digital blue bounding boxes; all messages from Frank, and Dimov had still not replied. He deleted the messages furiously through tumbling feelings of disappointment. Suddenly it seemed the perfect idea to turn down the two California jobs and take the New York job without informing Frank until another one or two years perhaps.

He was feeling lighter when his mother picked up the phone, and even more buoyant when she announced she was making Eggs Benedict for dinner.

“Sounds like a feast,” he said.

“It was the best I could do after you letting me down on dinner. Anyway I can’t find the chamomile tea you bought.”

Her displeasured died on Alex eying over the candy stands the tall blue profile of Tony, who was feeling in his fingers the dreads of the lone boy cashier. An odd feeling colored him.

He asked her if she would make do with another brand and added, “If you’re ok with that, I’ll bring it in the morning.”

“You’re coming back in the morning?”

Alex took a moment to ignore the poison in her question. “The date fell in love with my red hair at first sight. Hate it when that happens.” Meanwhile Tony was inviting the cashier boy to read his screenplays now. Alex continued blandly, “Kind of magical when love fucking happens just like that.”

“Did you just swear at me?”

Alex took a deep breath. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“You haven’t been doing much of that lately.”

She was precisely right because behind a row of yellow-branded boxes, the green silver of her special brand glimmered there, but her relief was difficult to detect at the news.

“Anyway I might as well say it. This graduation, I don’t know … I’m not feeling so well lately anyway. We’ll see what happens.”

It surprised him to know he was not surprised or disappointed; the reasons was washed him in a painless haze, perhaps because he had made his decision or that he really was the shell of a human Susan claimed he was or that nothing mattered anymore.

“I’m up for whatever you feel up to doing. See you in the morning.”

Something crashed over the phone. Sounded like a pot clanging, definitely a sickening thump, the snap of a cane against the floor followed by a long calamitous groan thinned into a whimper that died away to silence. For an instant, his heart flared, and then nothing, just the two-ton weight of the phone in his hand. He got the tea, the box version of mac and cheese, and while the boy rang their order, he made a show of palming Tony’s butt. When Tony asked him in the car why after his speech about chemical food, they were going to eat boxed mac and cheese after all, Alex replied, “Shit came up. I’m going to have the evening short.”

Tony said nothing on the return drive and offputtingly kept looking for something on the side view mirror. His reflection perhaps? The ‘real man’ for him? The wreckage of his aspirations? What was there to see in the starless, moonless night?

Alex offered to meet him the next evening at the Italian place, a do over that would start right this time he laughingly promised. Tony slammed the door on his proposal. As he huffed away, furiously bandy-legged, towards the black upright cigars of cypresses, Alex spared the few thundering heartbeats to feel an inchoation of loss. Then Alex drove home in a lazy anticipation of the inevitable.

The inevitable came with I-told-you-so feelings about her need and his bondage, her pain and his irresponsibility, and then on approaching the cul-de-sac forbidden and bare in the night, the inevitable descended with deafening hoof beats, which gouged at his ears.

The lighted windows shone like the pained eyes of a black beast. He got out of the car and swallowed hard. But somehow in his aching world without sound, the thrills of his phone reached him.

“I can’t believe it. You’re still pissed with me at what I said in the car.” It was Frank again, needy and not the least contrite. The words seemed to have demanded supernal courage from Frank, who sounded like he was panting.

“Don’t have time right now.” Alex threaded carefully to the front door.

“You’ve got five minutes to spare away from Tony’s dick—”

“What the fuck! What the hell’s your problem?” Alex debated cutting the phone off or smashing it against the ground. “Is it Janet? If you like her so much then stop doing shit that pisses her off. Fuck! Cut her loose or take her seriously, and spare me your whiny bullshit.”

Frustration was the least of his problems when he walked into Susan sitting forlornly on the kitchen floor like a defeated sac of flesh. Her cane was slanted across her feet, and a frying pan lay upside down by her limp hand, and in the pits of fabric over her lap were the yellow stagnant pools of eggs and tomatoes. And the tears puckering her jowls—he had never seen his mother cry before. His frustration evaporated; he mumbled into phone, “I got shit to care of at home. You hang tight and do what you need to do with Janet,” and turned it off.

Like a heavy block, Susan’s face shifted towards him without pity or understanding.

“What are you doing here, Alex?” Her tone was disturbingly monotone, and Alex helplessly numb.

“Look, I got tea.” Alex made a show of the box.

Susan’s eyes could barely swing a look at it and she sighed. “It was rude of you to have left your intrepid lover at first sight to run back home all because you were worried. Go back and leave me alone.”

“Can you at least stand—”

“I said leave me alone.”

“Why do you have to be so difficult?” Alex yelled back.

Susan’s tears wrecked forcefully now, powerfully, and were utterly repressing, which lashed Alex even more. He regretted crying, regretted Tony, regretted leaving, felt sorry for thinking of moving away without telling her but overall just wanted to hack the rotten log of himself for failing to his one charge. Was it really so hard to love and to protect? Hell, even the monkeys do it, why couldn’t he? The thought pushed him with anger, propelled him again to try and help, but Susan got a hold of the cane and whacked him back, screaming and sobbing for him to go back to his date, to leave her alone. “I don’t need you.” He needed her, he whimpered in his great void in his head.

It was useless, as she was dead to him wallowing and weeping and he overwhelmed by the impossibility of what he had foolishly thought so facile, so immediate.

He was hardening now and deadening like a tree strangled of life in a sudden frost. Susan had been right, he could agree, like all mothers were right about their sons. He did not care about her or even about Frank. Love had never been his problem, but a delusion, the misguided notion that all he had to do was smile, flash his toned pectoral muscles, make delightful teas, and magically the barriers between souls would break down. But that was impossible, for the heart was so well guarded behind a fortress of egos, fantasies, prejudices. Just as he stood at the perimeter of the kitchen, staring at the spilt lake of eggs and tears, we were just poor souls standing outside the fortress, helpless and desperate and powerless to scale it.

Light and inexplicably addled, he jostled back to his car, thinking cheerily about Tony welcoming back his tight ass, or Tony more possibly, reading his script to the check out boy. Just as well they could use a threesome. But as he stuck his key into the ignition a great wave of tiredness deadened his arm, and he remained there in the crowded dark of his car and welcomed the pain breaking down the fortress of himself.

***

It was the rapid knock on the car window that woke up Alex. He shivered into a respectable pose and peered into the black blurry face pasted on the window and hoped desperately it was not Susan. Upon starting the car to wind down the window, his heart seized at Frank breathing irately over him.

Alex turned off the ignition, supremely exhausted, smiled.

“I told you to hang tight. What the hell are you doing here?” Alex asked, wishing ravenously Frank would not begin again about Janet, but there was hope and there was delusion.

“I was hoping to catch you in lie.”

“You did?” Alex nodded as if he understood. “Right, whatever. I got to go. My awesome Russian has called me for round two of the rumpy-pumpy.”

Alex looked at him and was shakingly afraid of Frank’s wanting white eyes. “Yeah, yeah, Tony and then Dimov, a full night for my dick …. Shit, you’re standing there looking like a pervert. Don’t get me wrong, I love perverted stuff, but I don’t think I can handle stalker, foaming-in-the-mouth kind of pervy—”

“Janet was so right …”

Frank’s cold and sad manner prompted a flippant sigh from Alex.

“She had said all we do is joke and goof off, but there’s nothing solid between us. She was afraid the relationship was going end like that. She wanted something real—”

“What the fuck does that mean? You’re bitching about her is real feelings enough.”

He chuckled. “She wasn’t talking about me and her. She was talking about you and me.”

“Aww, that’s just fucking silly.”

“You say fucking silly, I asked her very kindly if she was a dumbass.”

Alex did not like Frank’s quiet stare; he had to say something. “Fucking silly is a lot nicer to say than dumbass—”

Frank zoomed to the front door, which had Alex catapulting out of the car to hogtie him out of sight. Panting and livid, Alex guarded the door handle against Frank looking up at him like constipated jaguar.

“I told you already to stop coming to my house. Mom can’t handle your rude bullshit,” Alex yelled in his ear.

“Open. The. Fucking. Door.”

The squeal of the door opening by itself turned their astonished gazes onto Susan fresh in a new dress, looking matronly perturbed.

Frank was the first to switch on his rockstar smile. “Mrs. Stanton, gosh darn, you look great. The last time I saw you, a doctor was sticking a needle the length of a sequoia into your tit-ribcage—”

Alex pinched the small of Frank’s back, and for a few embarrassing minutes, their hands fought each other for control.

“Kind of late isn’t it, Frank?” Susan’s steely voice stopped them cold.

“Mom couldn’t stop bugging me to get you to attend her party, and I thought ….” Frank’s voice died into Susan’s soldier glare.

“She called me already. I gather it’s a grand affair.”

“Yes exactly, that’s the word for it, a grand affair. She just so fu-freaking happy about me graduating. Everyone will be there, all happy too. The more people who come, the happier she’ll be. A happy mom is a peaceful mom, so happy and good—”Alex jabbed his elbow into Frank’s ribs. “Fuck that actually hurts—” Frank’s voice croaked into silence as his eyes ran smack into Susan’s frown.

“Tell her we’ll be there,” Susan said in a dead tone, “Then I might actually get to meet your girlfriend, was it Janet?”

“Unfortunately, we’re in the time-out phase right now.”

“But things will be patched in another week or two … I hear the relationship is like a sine wave.”

Frank looked to Alex bleeding sweat. “I thought we agreed it was like a square wave.”

“Anything else, Frank?” asked Susan growing and gaining the heft of a polar bear by the second.

Frank gulped. “No, no, nothing else. I should get going—Actually yes, I need to talk Alex for a sec.” And he squeezed past Susan and dashed straightway for Alex’s room.

Alex could barely look straight at Susan. “It’ll only be five minutes, and he’ll be gone. I promise.”

“Never mind. My appetite’s already ruined.” She turned away and shuffled along to her bedroom, leaving Alex to forge the special blade to decapitate his best friend.

“This had better be good,” Alex said, pounding into the his bedroom, but the image of Frank on the bed, hands over knees stilled him, but then he reminded himself that the lump in his throat did not mean he loved Frank.

Frank said, “You were so far gone earlier, you didn’t even notice me standing outside your car window for twenty minutes.”

Alex’s heart jolted. “I was trying my darnest to ignore you, and I failed … Well then, you got five minutes to bitch about Janet before I ditch you for Tony’s dick.”

“I thought it was Dimov’s?”

Alex clicked off the naughty ideas. “Both—whatever. Your five minutes are counting.”

But Frank did not seem to care anymore as he fell back into the bed, giving Alex a rather generous view of his boxers’ waistband. “Leave already, and go fuck whomever,” he groaned, “I’ll wait. I’ll be here when you get back.”

How so unfair, thought Alex closing the door gently and rummaging through his closet for his sleeping bag. An unfair and useless imposition he really didn’t care for, he grumbled as he kicked off his shoes and unrolled the bag by the bedside. Muttering still when he sat down on the floor by the bedside. Frank’s head lay on the bed behind his, and Alex could hear him breathe uneasily. Lying side by side, they felt like they were thirteen again, when they could talk late in the night about their naughty ill-conceived plans that would put the fear of God into their parents’ timid souls.

Alex said, “Graduation is making everyone freak out. Janet will come around—”

“Just shut up about her. She isn’t the problem. You are.”

Alex stiffened and got ready for another scolding that would end up with him enduring a sleepless night. Snuffing out his irritation, Frank’s hand stamped on his head, like it was his damn coaster, and he said, “Don’t disappear on me again, Alex.”

Alex thought of Susan’s ruined appetite, Tony’s ruined night, the ruined hearts that could heal other much less reach out to the other, and a whirlwind fury possessed him to brush off the hand off his head and he said under his breath, “We’re graduating. I do the shit I got to do and you need to do your own shit.” He was angry and restless, looked around everywhere but at Frank. His bones were roasting inside his skin, so he removed his shirt, mumbled about getting ready for bed and him taking the sleeping bag.

He swept out to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Upon shutting the bathroom door and turning on the light, he shrank before his reflection in the mirror. His freckles smeared over his nose and cheeks like smudges of tar, and his eyes seemed to be sliding down his face like a pair misshapen yolks sliding down a wall. He flurried to turn off the light and carried on his ablutions in the dark. And still that black mass in the mirror jerking when he jerked, breathing when he breathed—he slunk out the door, peered his head into the kitchen—spotless, sterile. It was as if everything that had happened in the past four hours had been erased. He felt his breaths, rapid and feral, rang out in the hollow of kitchen and echoing back to him was a joyless emptiness and those fractious facts and feelings as pellucid as the silver shine of the faucet.

Tremulously terrified, he rushed back to his room but was immediately stilled to see Frank curled up in the fetal position, snoring majestically amid the purple covers. He was careful to close the door but not careful enough to sit gently on the bed without rousing Frank.

“I should be heading back home—”

“No, no, please don’t leave me alone.”

Alex bled under the harsh lights of Frank’s inquisitive stare, and again and again feelings damned him for the loss of control. An act of God, he thought, reclaiming himself with a smile for the piqued Frank, and all was well again.

“Yeah, you should go. I want to sleep in my own damn bed.”

“Tough shit, I don’t feel like driving. Go away for your round two already.” Frank kicked off his shoes, removed his shirt, reached over to the bedside table to switch off the light, and then bed was roiling and rolling as he snuggled himself under the covers much to Alex’s pouting bewilderment.

Alex felt like the needy child being shooed away left and right by pre-occupied adults, rather adults who were more composed, wiser, more self-assured, more worthy of love than himself, and it daggered him enough to demand Frank to move closer to the wall so that he could sleep in his own damn bed.

Frank obliged wordlessly, and next he was in bed, turned towards Frank, who lay smugly supine with his hands clasped behind his head and his elbow jutting into Alex’s eye. The collected countenance surprised him as much as in Frank as in himself. He was not breaking, he was not melting, he was not feeling suspended over a perilous gorge, just exceedingly tired. And he said, “I don’t see why you bother at all. The way I see it, love’s completely impossible.”

“Now, you’re the dumbass.”

“Give me a break. You’re the one who can’t go two minutes without pissing her off.”

“Aww shit, fuck if I know what I feel about her. But I look at my dad. I used to think he was so pussy whipped, staying with the batshit crazy mom when with all his money he could go out there and get the bitches three times his age easily. Hell, he might already be fucking a secretary on the side. Who knows? Who cares? But after thirty years, he doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere. And you know, Mom isn’t so clueless either…”

The silence rode on Alex like someone under the gun to make a bet, burdening him with an unvoiced reply that an instant was all it took for pure love to be transmuted into pure hate, for the certainty about whom you cherished to be sand in the wind, but all that felt too silly to explain when this was probably his one and only night—Strange how he felt no compulsion really.

The bed was shifting again, and Frank was turned to him, his eyes glinting silver in the dark, his breath warm and steady. There was the feeling of Frank’s knee against his thigh.

Frank whispered, “Why the hell are you feeling so hopeless anyway?”

The question released a surge of frustration in Alex. Smothering him out of sight with a pillow seemed like the perfect reply; instead he turned away fully, feeling even stupider and more hopelessly irritated. He could see across the bed shadows streaming runnels down the wall, plunging his senses in the warm and breathy silence, into that secure preserve of satiety. Soon, he was being fluffed in and out of lulling dreams, but never away from the feeling chiding him of his foolishness. Frank loved him, and he could no easier cut Frank off than cut off his own left arm, and he was just going to have deal with it.