wanderingsoul
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A Cold Night in Hell (in progress) NC-17
It was a cold night and it wasn’t much warmer in the bar. Which probably accounted for the lack of clientele. I looked around. Except for the two guys in leather playing pool—or, more accurately, taking turns stroking the pool cues and each others’ asses—everyone (a grand total of maybe five people) in the place seemed pretty much stationary. Most had had the same drink in front of them for as long as I’d been here. I looked at the clock over the jukebox. I’d been here for nearly half an hour. Which meant that they were probably just trying to stay somewhere warm for a while. A couple of them looked like they might be looking for something more, but business wasn’t likely to be booming on a night like this.
I threw a twenty down on the bar and asked the bartender for another beer. It wasn’t my drink of choice, but it suited the look. The door opened and the temperature in the room dropped another five degrees. No one seemed to notice. There was something to be said for the anti-freeze properties of alcohol.
The boy who came in walked straight through to the back.
“Sebastian playing rough again?” the smaller guy in leather stopped him, turning his head, and the light over the pool table lit up a rather livid bruise on the boy’s cheek and a swollen, bloodied lip. The boy jerked his head away and pushed past him and went into the rest room, slamming the door behind him.
Something about the boy caught my eye. Something I’d been looking for.
I jerked my head toward the back and asked, “What’s his story?” If the boys in leather had known the kid’s name, the bartender would probably know at least as much.
“Name’s Jeremy. He comes in here once in a while. Usually after the freak he lives with beats the **** out of him.” I looked at the guy behind the bar. He had a spider’s web tattooed on his shaved head with the spiders that lived in it crawling up the side of his neck, two piercings in his lower lip and a ring in his nose. I was curious about the person he would call a freak.
“Freak?” I raised my eyebrows as I raised the beer bottle to my lips.
He nodded. “Yeah, real freak. Claims to be a vampire or something. From what Jeremy has said, he’s into some ****ed up freaky ****.”
I looked at the bartender, thinking it must be some extremely “****ed up freaky ****” for him to say that. I said the obvious thing. “He must like it if he stays with him.”
He shrugged. “Keeps him off the street—most of the time, when he’s not being thrown out on his ass.”
The boy, Jeremy, came out of the rest room and the smaller guy in leather stopped him again.
I could see him reach in his pocket and press something into the boy’s hand while the bigger guy in leather bent over the table to take his shot. He patted the boy’s ass and gave him a look that I interpreted as “go on before stud muffin catches on.”
The boy put the five on the bar. The bartender pushed it back toward him and poured him a shot of Jack. The boy pocketed the five and downed the shot.
I took a good look at him. He was young. Too young to buy a legal drink and certainly too young to be living with a vampire freak who beat the **** out of him on a regular basis. He reached for a handful of nuts from the bowl that sat about half way between us and glanced up at me. I met his eyes for a moment then looked away.
As I looked away, I caught a look passing between him and the bartender. I smiled and finished my beer and walked out, leaving the change from the twenty on the bar.
Once outside, I walked about ten feet up the street and stepped into the doorway of an abandoned building. There were a lot of abandoned buildings around here. I lit up a cigarette and leaned against the brick and waited.
I didn’t have to wait long. The boy from the bar, Jeremy, wasn’t a minute behind me. “Got a cigarette?” His voice was a little deeper than I’d expected. Maybe he wasn’t quite as young as I’d first thought. Not that it mattered.
I reached in my pocket and held out the pack. “So you live with a vampire?” I didn’t bother to explain how I knew.
He looked a bit startled, but covered it up quickly. But his hand shook as he took a cigarette from the pack. “He isn’t a ****ing vampire; he just wants to be one. He pretends, that’s all.”
I handed him a lighter and steadied his hand as he flicked it.
“Does a pretty good job of it though.” The boy pulled down the neck of his t-shirt, exposing two partially healed puncture wounds surrounded by fading bruises. “Could show you a few more like them, but it’s too cold to pull my pants down and I doubt you’d want to see them anyway.”
I reached out and touched the bruises—not the wounds, just the bruises. He winced slightly and pulled away. The wounds I knew. The bruises I didn’t. But he was wrong. I did want to see the others. But not here. Not with everything so…exposed.
“Do you have a place to stay? I mean, tonight?” I hoped he didn’t. And even if he did, I had no intention of letting him go.
He took a drag on the cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. His hands were fidgety, and he kept fidgeting with his feet, too, stepping from one to the other, back and forth, constantly in motion. And his eyes… they kept looking over my shoulder, then at me, but only a brief glance at me, then up at the streetlight, then down at his feet, then over my shoulder again. I could tell he was nervous. But I didn’t think it was because of me. I hoped it wasn’t because of me. I didn’t want him that way.
He gave a short laugh and took another drag on the cigarette. I noticed his hand still shook. “Yeah, lots of places. The street’s full of them. No place I really want to go though.” He looked over my shoulder again. “Not tonight.”
I took a second good look at him. His face was thin, unnaturally so, like he hadn’t eaten well in a while, not like it was anything genetic. But it wasn’t an unattractive look. The hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes created a striking arrangement of shadows and planes, a sort of black and white look. The boy knew I was looking at him, and knew I wasn’t just looking at him. I could tell by the way his face changed. The nervous look changed to a knowing, almost calculating look. And I could tell he felt more like he was in familiar territory now.
“You have someplace I can stay?” He looked at me, his eyes running over me as if he was trying to look like he wanted what he saw—or at least like he was hoping what he saw wanted him.
I dropped my eyes from his face and made it look like I was having a good look at what he had to offer. He took a step closer to me and ran one hand over my upper arm. He flicked his cigarette to the ground and slipped the other inside my jacket, rubbing my stomach with the back of his fingers.
I nodded. I didn’t need to say anything. I knew what he expected from the transaction—and that was what he expected, a transaction. I would offer him a place to stay tonight, presumably someplace at least a little warmer than a doorway and a little safer than the places he really didn’t want to go—though there was no guarantee of that, and I could see that understanding in his eyes. And in return, he would offer me whatever it was I wanted, which he automatically assumed would be his mouth or his ass. He might also hope for something more in the bargain, a bit of food or a few bucks, but I doubted he expected either. And I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t likely to waste much time on any hopes or expectations.
Life on the street would do that to you, deaden those nerves. Live long enough on the street and it was like you had a lobotomy, of a sorts—you stopped thinking and feeling anything but what was necessary to get you to the next day. And after a little while longer, you stopped thinking and feeling even that much.
As we passed under the streetlight, I glanced at the boy’s neck. And I wondered how long he had been on the street before it had driven him to that.
***
He’d been lost and alone when I found him. Or at least that’s how I saw him. He was hustling for whatever he could get—money, drugs, food, anything he could barter his body for. And when he looked past me to size up the guy in the old Caprice who kept circling the block, I could see by the “look” in his eyes that he’d been doing it for a while. Long enough to know a customer when he saw one and long enough that the past was someone else’s memories and the future was his next breath. Except he looked barely more than a boy, a boy who would never make it to a man. Or at least that’s what the odds would likely favor.
A quick hard one against the back of a dumpster and twenty bucks later, I reassessed the odds. When I asked, he shrugged and said he’d been hustling since he was 13. So as far as the odds went, the fact that he was still alive and was not obviously infected with one disease or another made it likely he would either beat those odds—or likely he was “due” for his number to come up. Depended upon what kind of bettor you were, which way you looked at that.
I was never much of a bettor. To me, it always seemed that no matter what the odds were, there was no way to beat the house. The only sure way to win the bet was to walk away with your money still in your pocket. And I was already twenty bucks down. So why didn’t I just walk away? What can I say? I was…younger.
And I have always had a thing for deep brown eyes.
And it had been a while since I’d had anyone for more than a one-time thing.
***
As we walked through the door of my apartment I reached against the wall and flipped on the light switch. I squinted my eyes for a moment. I always had that reaction to lights any brighter than a dim bulb. I didn’t make a habit of hanging around in brightly lit places. But sometimes lights were needed.
I could see him glance around and I knew he was sizing me up as he did so. What kind of man was I? What was I into? Would I be likely to want to knock him around a little? Or a lot? Or was I maybe as big a freak as the one he lived with? Or was I just looking for a straight **** or blow job, nothing more, nothing less? I could see him looking for clues that would give him the heads up he might need to keep himself alive.
And I could see he wasn’t finding any. At least, he wasn’t finding anything obvious, nothing that would make him feel uneasy. He turned to me and smiled. It was a mechanical smile, but it was fairly convincing. And it showed how wide his mouth was, and how mobile, with soft, pale lips that were obviously designed specifically to wrap themselves around a hard, throbbing ****. Which was exactly what he meant that smile to show. The kid was good. And it worked. I was throbbing.
The nice thing about having a one-room apartment is that the bed is right there. No matter where you are in the apartment, the bed is right there. Saved time. Saved effort.
I shrugged my jacket off and let it fall where it fell. He slipped his hands around my waist as I undid my pants. My **** was pushing through my boxers before I had the zipper down. He teased it with one finger as he walked backward toward my bed, his other hand rubbing my ass. I didn’t notice whether his hands were mechanical or not. I didn’t care. They felt good. As the back of his knees hit the edge of my bed, he slipped my pants and my boxers down over my hips and started lowering his head. I stopped him, grabbing his shoulders and turning him around before pushing him face down on my bed. I could almost feel him shrug. It didn’t make a difference to him. He raised his hips and let me pull his jeans down over his ass. I ran my hands over his ass and down his legs and pulled off his shoes and pulled his jeans the rest of the way off. He wasn’t wearing anything else.
---
And by and by my Soul returned to me, And answered "I Myself amd Heav'n and Hell"
Omar Khayyam
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