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monaboyd Jan. 13th, 2005 06:01 pm)
witt444.livejournal.com posting in monaboyd Jan. 13th, 2005 06:01 pm)Another old one.
Title: Mix Tape
D/E/B
PG-13/Rish
Angst. Music.
x-posted at fellow_shippers
Disclaimer: I always forget this part. Not mine.
I haven’t been this scared
In a long time
And I’m so unprepared
So here’s your Valentine
-Blink 182, “Going Away to College”
“Here,” you say. Elijah looks up at you, smiling tiredly. A cigarette burns against the brick red picnic table, a long column of ash sagging dangerously close to dropping. You offer the paper plate, which is going weak from the dampness of waiting. “Food. For you. All your favorites, right?”
His eyes roam the pickings, slide over mounds of rice and the yellow surfboards of fried plantains pooling in their own grease. Big blank blue eyes rimmed in red.
“Yeah,” he smiles. He takes the plate and puts it on the table. One of the hills of rice wavers and collapses, sending white grains stampeding across the tabletop. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” you grin, and move to go. He reaches out and plucks at your sleeve.
“Wait. Sit down.”
Your ass is on the bench before his words are even finished. Then you scoot up close to him because-- well because of a lot of reasons, but also because it’s cold out, and dark outside the mess tent, and because he is early-morning warm and good to be near. He picks up a plastic fork and pierces a plantain. He pokes it between his lips and sucks it down, and you listen to him chew, watch his eyelids flutter once, happy. The dull sparkle of grease on his lower lip.
“Good?” you ask. He nods and swallows.
“Mm. Tastes great. Warm.” He folds through the rice, unleashing long coils of steam. “But it’s a weird kind of a breakfast, Dom.”
You don’t have to go home
But you can’t stay here
I know who I want to take me home
-Semisonic, “Closing Time”
Lager sloshes over your wrist, burns you cold, wakes you. Billy tilts his head at you quizzically. You were watching Elijah sandwich himself between bodies on the crowded dance floor, his molecules making love to all the molecules around him. He lets go into the frenetic energy of clubbing with all the boundlessness of a high school kid, throwing himself in and coming out without his edges. You bite the rim of your glass sharply and taste hardness.
Billy touches your elbow and points. You follow his finger to where Elijah is looking at you over his shoulder, his eyes bigger and sharper in the strobe light glare. His “rape me” eyes, you’ve called them. How well they go with him and the milky skin in the hollow above the collar of his T-shirt. How well he sweat-streaks his hair with his hand, and how well he swings arms and legs that get more and more countless with each motion.
“He knows, you know,” Billy says with a light little smile. “It’s no secret.”
“What?”
“He knows you want him. He sure as hell wants you.”
“It’s just-”
“Just nothing. Go on with you.”
Billy beams at you. He’s always doing that, beaming at you. You used to wonder if it was some sort of fatherly thing until it became a precursor to wedgies, Dings and other random injuries. You look at Elijah again. He isn’t looking at you. He’s looking across the floor at a girl with very little top on. The motion of his hips changes as he stares. Billy twists his eyebrows and beams into his beer. You wrap your hands around your glass.
“There’s ten thousand good reasons why not,” you tell the rapidly fading bubbles in the rapidly staling beer.
“And there’s why good reason why,” it answers in Billy’s voice. “So it’s your call, eh?”
You drink the whole beer but it doesn’t shut up. It says, “He’s looking at you again.”
/Your skin, oh yeah your skin and bones
Turn into something beautiful/
-Coldplay, “Yellow”
“Dom? Dom, can I?- Dom!”
There’s a lot of banging on your trailer door, hollow tin rumbles that echo in arcs along the walls. You roll onto your side, peeling a sweat-sticky forearm away from your eyes. The door opens because it doesn’t lock. It lets in a lot of light and Elijah.
“Are you okay?”
“Mm. Tired. I fell asleep.”
“On the floor?” he chuckles, plopping down beside you. He’s just come out of makeup and looks fresh-scrubbed and invigorated. He’s barefoot and you like the way the ragged fringes of his jeans lay against the pale tops of his feet.
“The gravity’s better down here. Give me this.” You curl your hands around his toes, squeeze his small smooth feet. He squeaks.
“What are you doing?”
“Just touching your feet. Does it bother you?”
“No,” he says, grinning down at you, his head cocked to the side. “People touch my feet all day. You never do it, that’s all.”
“Well I’m doing it now, so never say never. Just relax.”
He lies down, pushing his feet toward you. You like how everything he wears is pseudo-faded and trendy, lived in long past his years with the synthetic wear of machine-bodies. He presses one of his heels into your sternum and pushes you over on your back. You roll heavily, your nerves still asleep. He rests his ankles in the notches between your ribs and you feel close and cozy. You press your forearms to his shins.
“So what are we doing tonight?” he asks the ceiling. “Clubbing?”
“Is that an activity that requires mobility?”
“X-Box? I’ll move your thumbs for you.”
“Your place or mine?”
“Yours for sure. I can’t have you fuckers eating me out of house and home.” He digs into your chest with his toes. You convulse and squeeze hard until he squawks. His body comes out of nowhere, wrenching and thunking you awkwardly. He squirms on top of you and kneels on your palms, hands slamming down beside your ears. The floor rumbles. The position holds your shoulders open and he leans his face up close to yours. He’s too light and easy to really pin you, but the weight of your body and your willingness are both on his side.
“Then it’s settled,” you huff. His face is very close. Kissing-close.
“Then it is,” he replies challengingly. There’s a rebellious little note in his eyes and voice. Smugly on top.
“Then it is.”
You knee Elijah in the crotch gently. When he yelps you flip him kung-fu style halfway across the trailer.
/I am a visitor here
I am not permanent/
-The Postal Service, “D.C Sleeps Alone Tonight”
All the sweetness of the first kiss is lightly tempered with the let-down of the knowing. You’re young and you love anticipation, where the dream of the first kiss can take on endless variations until it is mythic and never-happened. You love all that wondering about what Elijah will taste like, when he’ll open his mouth, whether he’ll invite you inside or will it be the slick heat of his tongue coaxing yours into action... And now it’s here. Now Elijah’s lips are on yours and his tongue is poking wet and thick between your lips. Here, and real, and had.
He presses into you relentlessly. You try to size up your thoughts and figure out the nerves in your belly. This is the reward for a month of pursuit, your rest after the hard work of making up impetuous excuses to go out to places where you’ll be forced to touch him. But this is not a crowded club, a dangerous drunken street crossings or an unpleasantly small car. This is all the space and willingness of your couch. You’re triumphant. You’re surprised. You didn’t suppose it would be a simple matter of the two of you alone, leaning closer and closer. The simple matter of closing the last little gap and just fucking kissing him on the lips.
“Shit, Dom,” Elijah hisses. His cheeks are flushed and pink, and he looks soft and fuckable. His hands play with the waistband of your jeans, cutting off your breath as they twist and grind. You wanted this and now you’re getting it. You’re half-hard and getting harder with each of Elijah’s errant tugs and squeezes. “I didn’t… I mean I hoped you were serious, but… Shit.”
He grabs you by the back of the head and hauls you in for another kiss. He tastes like the cloves he was nervously smoking, and now he’s starting to get the delicious acrid taste-smell of aroused boy. And he’s all warm and wriggling and pressing up against you, just fucking begging for it like you knew he would. All yours for the taking. You growl into his mouth and crush him closer, pressing him into your chest. His fingers are inside your pants, creeping along your belly toward your cock. Warm and warmer and getting warmer.
“Dom,” he mutters happily, wrenching himself closer. You want to just kiss some more, take it slow, but passion is getting the better of you. His fingertips scrape artlessly along the rim of your cock and it jerks, headbutting itself against the rough inseam of your jeans. You groan harshly and he purrs, wrapping his palm around you. You tumble deeply into the couch cushions, spreading your legs for him, clawing beneath his T-shirt. You think you have a reputation for being easy on the first date.
/Easily you come to me
Summoning the spirit we
Only have a minute to never grow old/
-Rachel Sage, “The Spirit We”
“Tell me where we’re going,” Elijah play-whines, tugging at the back of your shirt. You dart between the sidewalk traffic and feel his fingers trail off your ass.
“You’ll have to wait til we get there,” you reply.
This is very like you. You’re hopeless with dates—anniversaries, Valentine’s, and even Christmas you can’t remember if it’s the 25th or 28th—but you’ve always managed to cover your tracks. Now you charge recklessly through people, slamming shoulders and hips, longing for the space suggested in the huge open twilight of the Wellington sky above. Elijah scuffs along to follow you. You cast feelers into the record shops, the cafes, the bookstores, any place that might be a harbor for a date for Elijah’s birthday. The record shop’s too easy. The café is too lame. You could make the bookstore interesting but he might not bite. You flash him a smile. You can’t let him know you forgot.
OK. Ahead to the right is a toyshop, one of those classy and expensive old-school ones, toys made out of wood and string. You stop shortly in front of it, earning the rage of four frustrated rush hour commuters.
“We’re here,” you announce as the flow brings Elijah to your side.
“The toy store?”
“Surprise. It’s got to be nicer than being out here. C’mon.”
Inside he moans at the smells: lacquer, pine, tissue paper. The elderly proprietor frowns at you and you wave. Elijah pushes his fingertips into a tin box of cast iron toy soldiers and they rattle heavily. He picks up a handful and sifts them down again.
“Did you have these as a kid?” you ask.
“No way. I had modern shit, you know. Plastic, sound effects.”
“Toys that could never survive impact,” you agree, taking his thumb to lead him into the stacks. He reaches out to gently stroke a kite colored to resemble a sunny summer sky. “We could buy that,” you say quickly. “Since it’s summer for your birthday.”
“Summer in January,” he sighs happily, gazing at you. A gaze so open you’re unnerved for a minute. You grab a box for a plywood glider and shake it a little.
“This could be fun.”
“I used to have Voltron,” he says.
“What?”
“Voltron. Do you remember that? It was sort of like Power Rangers, toys that fastened together.”
“I didn’t have that. I had sport toys. Footballs and croquet.”
“You had croquet?”
“After I moved to England. I think my parents bought it as a joke. Did you ever get those chocolate eggs with the wee plastic toy inside?”
“We had Cracker Jack. Our lives were so different,” he says as if amazed.
“Indeed,” you agree with a sage nod, and shake the glider again. “I bet we could attach rockets to this and take out a major city. Pick something, Elijah.”
“I want…” He bites his bottom lip and trails his fingers over the rows of flying toys. He spins around and his fingertips brush across your chest. “…you.”
“Yeah but you can’t throw me off of high things and make voice-overs.”
“Wanna bet?” he giggles.
You put the glider back and go into the next row. It’s full of dolls and stuffed animals. There’s something reassuring about their stuffedness, their empty smiles and their shiny eyes. Like how it might feel good to tumble into a big pile of them. You pick up a floppy dun-colored dog.
“I always wanted one of those,” Elijah says.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Those were, like, those stuffed dogs everyone had. I was always totally captivated by how their limbs moved. They looked so… comfortable.”
You hand the dog to him, smiling at the subtle way his face lights up under the skin. He rubs his cheek against it, then holds it out to consider its range of motion. It hangs down from his palms. You imagine him small and longing for one, never sure why he couldn’t ask, just knowing that this was somehow a toy for other people. He shakes one of its broad paws. Some little thing inside your chest twinges with it.
“Do you want that?” you ask. He looks up as if startled, starting to blush beneath his eyes.
“Uumm…”
“Say yes.”
“Yes.”
“OK,” you announce heroically, puffing out your chest and heading for the counter. “Sold to Mr. Wood to repair years of childhood trauma. Your inner child thanks you for playing.”
Elijah doesn’t hand the dog to the man behind the counter, who seems to know its price anyway. He eyes you both suspiciously, lingering on the way Elijah has the dog pressed to the chest of his too-trendy T-shirt. You’re both crashers to his toy-world, smelling of city and desire and grown-up things. The sort of people who ruin toys, or buy them as jokes. You wonder about him as he rings your purchase, sliding your credit card awkwardly through the reader. You glance back at Elijah. You want to explain to the man that Elijah really /wants/ this toy, wants it like he wanted it as a kid, wants to play with it and hold it, everything in perfect alignment with his own vision. You don’t think you can voice this. Something about the size of you both makes you sad.
Back into the crowd Elijah slips his hand into yours. His palm is warm and slightly sweaty from clutching the dog so tightly. He holds it in the crook of his arm so that its legs bounce between you.
“Thanks, Dom,” he whispers, laying a kiss to the shell of your ear. You bend your head to kiss the side of his mouth.
“Happy birthday, baby.”
“It’s the best,” he answers. And at a crosswalk six blocks later, “Even though you forgot.”
/I have watched your unlove written like tabloids
I had to stumble on while buying my food/
-Bitch and Animal, “Traffic”
“Surprise!”
You look up from your key. Elijah is in your kitchen, rumpled and grinning. He has a wooden spoon in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Smells fantastic,” you say. “What is it?”
“Supper. Nothing, really. Just wanted to cook for you.”
“Can I see?”
“No you can’t see. You can’t see til it’s ready.”
You fling your jacket onto the couch and join it, sprawling to your aching limits. You watch him weaving through your space, smoke swirling around the spikes of his short funny mohawk, stirring and tasting things. He’s glowing slightly with what you suppose is his sheer joy of doing stuff for you. You smile. You know when you look back at this it will be a Happy Time, and then you chide yourself for thinking that. You take a deep breath and center yourself and try to just /enjoy/ it, enjoy being with him.
Which you do. It’s easy and light with him, fun when it’s fun and serious when it’s serious. You like the same things. You have the same friends. His body is nice in the bed, feels nice to curl against in sleep, one of your arms taking him at the waist to tuck him against you. Nice to have him grinning at you now, a smear of something red in the corner of his mouth. The tip of his tongue curls in to wipe it away.
“So you get to taste it and I don’t?” you chide. “No fucking fair, mate.”
“It’s my bonus prize for making it.” His eyes glow at you. His cigarette is about to fall all apart, and the spoon drips on the floor with a self-satisfied plop, and he’s glowing at you. Everything slows down as his glowing interferes with the speed of light.
“What?” you ask.
“Nothing,” he glows in reply. “I just love you. Nothing.”
He turns quickly to the stove. You’ve taken a sharp inhalation and don’t realize you’re holding it until it stampedes out and sounds like a sigh. He looks at you over his shoulder, eyes scared, wet. You sit up. You’re shaking but because you’re tired, not because you’re scared. He stirs the pot intently.
“I just love you,” he tells it.
“Lij.”
He doesn’t turn. You don’t get up. He’s surrounded by smell and steam and whatever his private thoughts are, and you can’t imagine but then maybe you can. Those deer-headlight thoughts that rush across the wasteland of admitting your feelings once everything else in your head has suddenly, terrifyingly emptied out.
“It smells nice,” you say softly.
“I’m about to burn it. Dom, maybe we should just go get Chinese.”
You duck the spear of a French loaf as it sails through the air for your head.
Title: Mix Tape
D/E/B
PG-13/Rish
Angst. Music.
x-posted at fellow_shippers
Disclaimer: I always forget this part. Not mine.
I haven’t been this scared
In a long time
And I’m so unprepared
So here’s your Valentine
-Blink 182, “Going Away to College”
“Here,” you say. Elijah looks up at you, smiling tiredly. A cigarette burns against the brick red picnic table, a long column of ash sagging dangerously close to dropping. You offer the paper plate, which is going weak from the dampness of waiting. “Food. For you. All your favorites, right?”
His eyes roam the pickings, slide over mounds of rice and the yellow surfboards of fried plantains pooling in their own grease. Big blank blue eyes rimmed in red.
“Yeah,” he smiles. He takes the plate and puts it on the table. One of the hills of rice wavers and collapses, sending white grains stampeding across the tabletop. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” you grin, and move to go. He reaches out and plucks at your sleeve.
“Wait. Sit down.”
Your ass is on the bench before his words are even finished. Then you scoot up close to him because-- well because of a lot of reasons, but also because it’s cold out, and dark outside the mess tent, and because he is early-morning warm and good to be near. He picks up a plastic fork and pierces a plantain. He pokes it between his lips and sucks it down, and you listen to him chew, watch his eyelids flutter once, happy. The dull sparkle of grease on his lower lip.
“Good?” you ask. He nods and swallows.
“Mm. Tastes great. Warm.” He folds through the rice, unleashing long coils of steam. “But it’s a weird kind of a breakfast, Dom.”
You don’t have to go home
But you can’t stay here
I know who I want to take me home
-Semisonic, “Closing Time”
Lager sloshes over your wrist, burns you cold, wakes you. Billy tilts his head at you quizzically. You were watching Elijah sandwich himself between bodies on the crowded dance floor, his molecules making love to all the molecules around him. He lets go into the frenetic energy of clubbing with all the boundlessness of a high school kid, throwing himself in and coming out without his edges. You bite the rim of your glass sharply and taste hardness.
Billy touches your elbow and points. You follow his finger to where Elijah is looking at you over his shoulder, his eyes bigger and sharper in the strobe light glare. His “rape me” eyes, you’ve called them. How well they go with him and the milky skin in the hollow above the collar of his T-shirt. How well he sweat-streaks his hair with his hand, and how well he swings arms and legs that get more and more countless with each motion.
“He knows, you know,” Billy says with a light little smile. “It’s no secret.”
“What?”
“He knows you want him. He sure as hell wants you.”
“It’s just-”
“Just nothing. Go on with you.”
Billy beams at you. He’s always doing that, beaming at you. You used to wonder if it was some sort of fatherly thing until it became a precursor to wedgies, Dings and other random injuries. You look at Elijah again. He isn’t looking at you. He’s looking across the floor at a girl with very little top on. The motion of his hips changes as he stares. Billy twists his eyebrows and beams into his beer. You wrap your hands around your glass.
“There’s ten thousand good reasons why not,” you tell the rapidly fading bubbles in the rapidly staling beer.
“And there’s why good reason why,” it answers in Billy’s voice. “So it’s your call, eh?”
You drink the whole beer but it doesn’t shut up. It says, “He’s looking at you again.”
/Your skin, oh yeah your skin and bones
Turn into something beautiful/
-Coldplay, “Yellow”
“Dom? Dom, can I?- Dom!”
There’s a lot of banging on your trailer door, hollow tin rumbles that echo in arcs along the walls. You roll onto your side, peeling a sweat-sticky forearm away from your eyes. The door opens because it doesn’t lock. It lets in a lot of light and Elijah.
“Are you okay?”
“Mm. Tired. I fell asleep.”
“On the floor?” he chuckles, plopping down beside you. He’s just come out of makeup and looks fresh-scrubbed and invigorated. He’s barefoot and you like the way the ragged fringes of his jeans lay against the pale tops of his feet.
“The gravity’s better down here. Give me this.” You curl your hands around his toes, squeeze his small smooth feet. He squeaks.
“What are you doing?”
“Just touching your feet. Does it bother you?”
“No,” he says, grinning down at you, his head cocked to the side. “People touch my feet all day. You never do it, that’s all.”
“Well I’m doing it now, so never say never. Just relax.”
He lies down, pushing his feet toward you. You like how everything he wears is pseudo-faded and trendy, lived in long past his years with the synthetic wear of machine-bodies. He presses one of his heels into your sternum and pushes you over on your back. You roll heavily, your nerves still asleep. He rests his ankles in the notches between your ribs and you feel close and cozy. You press your forearms to his shins.
“So what are we doing tonight?” he asks the ceiling. “Clubbing?”
“Is that an activity that requires mobility?”
“X-Box? I’ll move your thumbs for you.”
“Your place or mine?”
“Yours for sure. I can’t have you fuckers eating me out of house and home.” He digs into your chest with his toes. You convulse and squeeze hard until he squawks. His body comes out of nowhere, wrenching and thunking you awkwardly. He squirms on top of you and kneels on your palms, hands slamming down beside your ears. The floor rumbles. The position holds your shoulders open and he leans his face up close to yours. He’s too light and easy to really pin you, but the weight of your body and your willingness are both on his side.
“Then it’s settled,” you huff. His face is very close. Kissing-close.
“Then it is,” he replies challengingly. There’s a rebellious little note in his eyes and voice. Smugly on top.
“Then it is.”
You knee Elijah in the crotch gently. When he yelps you flip him kung-fu style halfway across the trailer.
/I am a visitor here
I am not permanent/
-The Postal Service, “D.C Sleeps Alone Tonight”
All the sweetness of the first kiss is lightly tempered with the let-down of the knowing. You’re young and you love anticipation, where the dream of the first kiss can take on endless variations until it is mythic and never-happened. You love all that wondering about what Elijah will taste like, when he’ll open his mouth, whether he’ll invite you inside or will it be the slick heat of his tongue coaxing yours into action... And now it’s here. Now Elijah’s lips are on yours and his tongue is poking wet and thick between your lips. Here, and real, and had.
He presses into you relentlessly. You try to size up your thoughts and figure out the nerves in your belly. This is the reward for a month of pursuit, your rest after the hard work of making up impetuous excuses to go out to places where you’ll be forced to touch him. But this is not a crowded club, a dangerous drunken street crossings or an unpleasantly small car. This is all the space and willingness of your couch. You’re triumphant. You’re surprised. You didn’t suppose it would be a simple matter of the two of you alone, leaning closer and closer. The simple matter of closing the last little gap and just fucking kissing him on the lips.
“Shit, Dom,” Elijah hisses. His cheeks are flushed and pink, and he looks soft and fuckable. His hands play with the waistband of your jeans, cutting off your breath as they twist and grind. You wanted this and now you’re getting it. You’re half-hard and getting harder with each of Elijah’s errant tugs and squeezes. “I didn’t… I mean I hoped you were serious, but… Shit.”
He grabs you by the back of the head and hauls you in for another kiss. He tastes like the cloves he was nervously smoking, and now he’s starting to get the delicious acrid taste-smell of aroused boy. And he’s all warm and wriggling and pressing up against you, just fucking begging for it like you knew he would. All yours for the taking. You growl into his mouth and crush him closer, pressing him into your chest. His fingers are inside your pants, creeping along your belly toward your cock. Warm and warmer and getting warmer.
“Dom,” he mutters happily, wrenching himself closer. You want to just kiss some more, take it slow, but passion is getting the better of you. His fingertips scrape artlessly along the rim of your cock and it jerks, headbutting itself against the rough inseam of your jeans. You groan harshly and he purrs, wrapping his palm around you. You tumble deeply into the couch cushions, spreading your legs for him, clawing beneath his T-shirt. You think you have a reputation for being easy on the first date.
/Easily you come to me
Summoning the spirit we
Only have a minute to never grow old/
-Rachel Sage, “The Spirit We”
“Tell me where we’re going,” Elijah play-whines, tugging at the back of your shirt. You dart between the sidewalk traffic and feel his fingers trail off your ass.
“You’ll have to wait til we get there,” you reply.
This is very like you. You’re hopeless with dates—anniversaries, Valentine’s, and even Christmas you can’t remember if it’s the 25th or 28th—but you’ve always managed to cover your tracks. Now you charge recklessly through people, slamming shoulders and hips, longing for the space suggested in the huge open twilight of the Wellington sky above. Elijah scuffs along to follow you. You cast feelers into the record shops, the cafes, the bookstores, any place that might be a harbor for a date for Elijah’s birthday. The record shop’s too easy. The café is too lame. You could make the bookstore interesting but he might not bite. You flash him a smile. You can’t let him know you forgot.
OK. Ahead to the right is a toyshop, one of those classy and expensive old-school ones, toys made out of wood and string. You stop shortly in front of it, earning the rage of four frustrated rush hour commuters.
“We’re here,” you announce as the flow brings Elijah to your side.
“The toy store?”
“Surprise. It’s got to be nicer than being out here. C’mon.”
Inside he moans at the smells: lacquer, pine, tissue paper. The elderly proprietor frowns at you and you wave. Elijah pushes his fingertips into a tin box of cast iron toy soldiers and they rattle heavily. He picks up a handful and sifts them down again.
“Did you have these as a kid?” you ask.
“No way. I had modern shit, you know. Plastic, sound effects.”
“Toys that could never survive impact,” you agree, taking his thumb to lead him into the stacks. He reaches out to gently stroke a kite colored to resemble a sunny summer sky. “We could buy that,” you say quickly. “Since it’s summer for your birthday.”
“Summer in January,” he sighs happily, gazing at you. A gaze so open you’re unnerved for a minute. You grab a box for a plywood glider and shake it a little.
“This could be fun.”
“I used to have Voltron,” he says.
“What?”
“Voltron. Do you remember that? It was sort of like Power Rangers, toys that fastened together.”
“I didn’t have that. I had sport toys. Footballs and croquet.”
“You had croquet?”
“After I moved to England. I think my parents bought it as a joke. Did you ever get those chocolate eggs with the wee plastic toy inside?”
“We had Cracker Jack. Our lives were so different,” he says as if amazed.
“Indeed,” you agree with a sage nod, and shake the glider again. “I bet we could attach rockets to this and take out a major city. Pick something, Elijah.”
“I want…” He bites his bottom lip and trails his fingers over the rows of flying toys. He spins around and his fingertips brush across your chest. “…you.”
“Yeah but you can’t throw me off of high things and make voice-overs.”
“Wanna bet?” he giggles.
You put the glider back and go into the next row. It’s full of dolls and stuffed animals. There’s something reassuring about their stuffedness, their empty smiles and their shiny eyes. Like how it might feel good to tumble into a big pile of them. You pick up a floppy dun-colored dog.
“I always wanted one of those,” Elijah says.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Those were, like, those stuffed dogs everyone had. I was always totally captivated by how their limbs moved. They looked so… comfortable.”
You hand the dog to him, smiling at the subtle way his face lights up under the skin. He rubs his cheek against it, then holds it out to consider its range of motion. It hangs down from his palms. You imagine him small and longing for one, never sure why he couldn’t ask, just knowing that this was somehow a toy for other people. He shakes one of its broad paws. Some little thing inside your chest twinges with it.
“Do you want that?” you ask. He looks up as if startled, starting to blush beneath his eyes.
“Uumm…”
“Say yes.”
“Yes.”
“OK,” you announce heroically, puffing out your chest and heading for the counter. “Sold to Mr. Wood to repair years of childhood trauma. Your inner child thanks you for playing.”
Elijah doesn’t hand the dog to the man behind the counter, who seems to know its price anyway. He eyes you both suspiciously, lingering on the way Elijah has the dog pressed to the chest of his too-trendy T-shirt. You’re both crashers to his toy-world, smelling of city and desire and grown-up things. The sort of people who ruin toys, or buy them as jokes. You wonder about him as he rings your purchase, sliding your credit card awkwardly through the reader. You glance back at Elijah. You want to explain to the man that Elijah really /wants/ this toy, wants it like he wanted it as a kid, wants to play with it and hold it, everything in perfect alignment with his own vision. You don’t think you can voice this. Something about the size of you both makes you sad.
Back into the crowd Elijah slips his hand into yours. His palm is warm and slightly sweaty from clutching the dog so tightly. He holds it in the crook of his arm so that its legs bounce between you.
“Thanks, Dom,” he whispers, laying a kiss to the shell of your ear. You bend your head to kiss the side of his mouth.
“Happy birthday, baby.”
“It’s the best,” he answers. And at a crosswalk six blocks later, “Even though you forgot.”
/I have watched your unlove written like tabloids
I had to stumble on while buying my food/
-Bitch and Animal, “Traffic”
“Surprise!”
You look up from your key. Elijah is in your kitchen, rumpled and grinning. He has a wooden spoon in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Smells fantastic,” you say. “What is it?”
“Supper. Nothing, really. Just wanted to cook for you.”
“Can I see?”
“No you can’t see. You can’t see til it’s ready.”
You fling your jacket onto the couch and join it, sprawling to your aching limits. You watch him weaving through your space, smoke swirling around the spikes of his short funny mohawk, stirring and tasting things. He’s glowing slightly with what you suppose is his sheer joy of doing stuff for you. You smile. You know when you look back at this it will be a Happy Time, and then you chide yourself for thinking that. You take a deep breath and center yourself and try to just /enjoy/ it, enjoy being with him.
Which you do. It’s easy and light with him, fun when it’s fun and serious when it’s serious. You like the same things. You have the same friends. His body is nice in the bed, feels nice to curl against in sleep, one of your arms taking him at the waist to tuck him against you. Nice to have him grinning at you now, a smear of something red in the corner of his mouth. The tip of his tongue curls in to wipe it away.
“So you get to taste it and I don’t?” you chide. “No fucking fair, mate.”
“It’s my bonus prize for making it.” His eyes glow at you. His cigarette is about to fall all apart, and the spoon drips on the floor with a self-satisfied plop, and he’s glowing at you. Everything slows down as his glowing interferes with the speed of light.
“What?” you ask.
“Nothing,” he glows in reply. “I just love you. Nothing.”
He turns quickly to the stove. You’ve taken a sharp inhalation and don’t realize you’re holding it until it stampedes out and sounds like a sigh. He looks at you over his shoulder, eyes scared, wet. You sit up. You’re shaking but because you’re tired, not because you’re scared. He stirs the pot intently.
“I just love you,” he tells it.
“Lij.”
He doesn’t turn. You don’t get up. He’s surrounded by smell and steam and whatever his private thoughts are, and you can’t imagine but then maybe you can. Those deer-headlight thoughts that rush across the wasteland of admitting your feelings once everything else in your head has suddenly, terrifyingly emptied out.
“It smells nice,” you say softly.
“I’m about to burn it. Dom, maybe we should just go get Chinese.”
You duck the spear of a French loaf as it sails through the air for your head.
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You’re both crashers to his toy-world, smelling of city and desire and grown-up things.
I don't why, but that whole paragraph, and that line in particular, gave me shivers.
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That cracked me up.
But the whole thing is gorgeous. It reflects so many emotions, and it's absolutetly lovely.
And I don't mean to nitpick, but I don't really think it belongs in this community. I didn't see any real "relationship" between Dom and Billy, implied or otherwise. Sorry.
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;)
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Thanks!
;)
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;)
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thanks all!
Though--- thanks for all your kind words.