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10. Thou shalt not covet
The thing about growing up poor, Mac thinks, is that it’s not something most people can ever understand unless they’ve actually lived it. It’s one of the things that will forever separate people like him and Charlie from Dennis and Dee – who, for all their bitching about what a horrible father Frank is, have no real comprehension of what it is to go without. To go for whole weeks in the middle of winter without heating because your mom can’t afford to pay the bills while your dad’s rotting in jail, or to know before high school that college will never be an option even if you were smart enough to get in.
The majority of Mac’s time at school is marked by an ugly jealousy and resentment towards his classmates, who always seem to have new clothes without holes in and who get allowances from their parents to do normal kid stuff like going to the movies on the weekend. By the time he starts dealing, he uses his drug money for some of that shit, the stuff he’d never feel right asking his mom for – but it only goes so far, and there’s always a lingering feeling that he shouldn’t have to be relying on that income anyway; that what other kids take for granted, Mac has to work for.
The first time he’s invited back to the Reynolds’ house, he’s nearly bowled over by the sheer amount of wealth that’s on casual display. He doesn’t know Dennis too well at that point, other than as the weird kid who hangs around on the fringes of the popular crowd and goes on about being a “golden god” or some bullshit, but Dennis has apparently decided that they’re going to be friends, which Mac is actually okay with.
Anyway. He’d known that Dennis was well-off, had gathered as much just from observing how he dresses and speaks and presents himself, but he hadn’t appreciated just how loaded Dennis’s family was until setting foot in that house for the first time. The thing that really pisses him off is how cavalier Dennis is about the whole thing, insisting it’s not a big deal, they’re not really rich-rich, and he’s seething with envy by the time he gets back to his own place, which seems like a rundown crack den by comparison.
He knows that it’s unfair of him and probably makes him a shitty friend, because Dennis doesn’t seem to care that Mac is white trash, Dennis seems to genuinely enjoy hanging out with him and is probably the only person other than Charlie to treat Mac exactly the same as he treats everybody else, but he can’t help it. Over the next few months, as their friendship grows and they start spending more and more time together, he slowly begins to covet practically every aspect of Dennis’s life.
He’s not delusional – he knows that Dennis isn’t as popular as he thinks he is, that Dennis is actually kind of strange and even a little scary sometimes. But he’s also charming, and self-assured in a way that Mac has never been, and he gets plenty of girls interested in him; the hot ones too, not just losers like Fatty Magoo. Dennis is smart – not top-of-the-class smart, but he gets good grades and it’s already decided that he’s going to UPenn – and his parents might be assholes but at least they’re together and present, and Mac thinks that if he could get even the tiniest slice of that life for himself then he might not end up in the gutter after all.
Dennis somehow manages to convince Krissy Anderson to go to the prom with him, and spends the entire two weeks leading up to the event smugly asking Mac whether he’s jealous. Mac is jealous, of course, but not because he particularly likes Krissy; he’s jealous because currently, his best offer for the night is huffing glue in Charlie’s basement, while Dennis will be spending the evening in an expensive tux with a pretty girl who will laugh at his jokes and probably have sex with him. It’s just another reminder of how far apart their worlds really are.
All of which is why he seizes the opportunity to sleep with Krissy on prom night when Dennis pisses her off, starting his long-standing tradition of banging every girl his best friend dates once Dennis is through with them. If he thinks about it hard enough, he realizes it’s weird and probably kind of gross, but he keeps doing it anyway, for the same reasons he rescues most of Dennis’s old shirts from the trash and recycles them with the sleeves cut off. He can’t resist any chance to have a taste of what life is like for Dennis Reynolds, no matter how small and ultimately unsatisfying it may be.
09. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor
Ratting out Darren Grady for selling drugs on school property is a simple business decision, nothing personal; with the competition out of the way, Mac is free to corner the market as the sole dealer at St. Joe’s. Of course things like that have a way of getting out, and the other kids aren’t quite so impressed with his brilliant strategy, especially once he jacks up his prices. Adriano derisively christens him Ronnie the Rat, and from then on, the name sticks.
The thing is, he doesn’t even mind his new reputation that much, at least not at first. Being called a rat is still a million times better than being known as the poor bastard with the same name as the McDonald’s mascot, and it’s definitely better than being invisible. It doesn’t make him any more popular or even respected, but it does bring a certain amount of power; nobody can make a move against him if they want their drugs to keep coming, and if anyone who doesn’t know the drill starts trying to muscle in on his territory, he just gives them the Darren Grady treatment and gets them expelled.
Eventually he starts making up shit that isn’t even true, like putting it around that he saw Sweet Dee going down on Rickety Cricket behind the chemistry building, or telling Dennis that Tim Murphy was the one to sleep with his prom date. Sometimes it’s to save his own skin or because somebody pissed him off, but mostly it’s because high school is boring and if his reputation as a narc has already been solidified, he might as well have some fun with it.
“You better hope like hell you never get caught, bro,” Dennis tells him one day when they’re both getting stoned under the bleachers. “Nobody has a worse time in prison than snitches.”
Mac wonders what his dad would say about that; for some reason he’d hoped the old man might be proud of him for pulling off such a tight operation, but maybe not if Dennis is right – and Dennis usually is.
Either way, he tells himself it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t intend to get caught.
08. Thou shalt not steal
The thing with the Christmas presents isn’t technically his fault, because when he’s eight years old and his dad, who is pretty much his idol, is telling him that breaking into the neighbors’ houses and taking their stuff is just tradition, he doesn’t think to question it. Admittedly, it takes him longer than it probably should to realize what’s really going on, and even once he knows the truth he doesn’t feel as bad about it as he maybe ought to, but whatever. He thinks that God would probably understand, given the circumstances.
What’s a little harder to explain is his habit of stealing random crap he doesn’t actually need, which he starts sometime in middle school and never really grows out of. It’s usually pretty harmless, like eating Dennis’s food because he somehow always manages to buy better shit than Mac does, or taking Dee’s pens just because he knows it’ll piss her off. Occasionally he does things that are a tiny bit less legal, like taking all the cutlery home when they eat out at a fancy restaurant, but he’s never stolen anything that’s actually valuable, that someone might actually miss.
“You have a serious problem,” Dennis remarks on one occasion after Mac gets them thrown out of Walmart for trying to shoplift a novelty alligator-shaped bottle opener. “We already have like twenty bottle openers, and also that thing is tacky as shit. Have some class, bro.”
Mac doesn’t really know how to explain it in a way that Dennis will understand; the weird, panicky feeling he gets when he thinks about the fact that maybe one day they won’t be able to get any more bottle openers or dessert spoons or Thin Mints, so he’d better start hoarding them now. In truth, he doesn’t entirely understand it himself. He knows that Dennis probably has an entire page of notes dedicated to it in one of those creepy files he thinks Mac doesn’t know about, but it’s far from the strangest habit either of them has, so mostly he lets it slide.
(Mac still goes back to the same Walmart the following week and pockets the bottle opener when security isn’t looking. What Dennis doesn’t know can’t hurt him.)
07. Thou shalt not commit adultery
The year that Dennis and Dee go to college is also the year that Mac gets his first – and only – real girlfriend. Even though Charlie is still around, he’d been drifting a little bit without Dennis, and Tara comes along at exactly the right time to distract him. She’s just a little bit rough, a little bit dirty; they spend their evenings getting high together, and the sex is fun – good, even, as far as Mac can tell with his limited frame of reference. If it always feels like there’s maybe something missing, he just puts it down to his lack of experience. For all he knows, this is what sex is supposed to be like.
His first thought when they start hooking up is that he can’t wait to tell Dennis, but for some reason he chokes every time Dennis calls with tales of wild college parties and even wilder sorority girls that sound as though they can’t possibly be true, though Mac knows better than to voice his doubts.
Eventually, he ends up blurting out his news during a visit to Dennis’s fraternity, as Dennis is in the middle of giving him a twenty-minute lecture on how to be cool for the party they’re supposed to be going to that evening.
“I see,” Dennis says neutrally.
Mac had thought – or at least hoped – that Dennis would be proud of him, but instead he gets an oddly blank expression on his face that it takes Mac a second or two to recognize as the same look he’d gotten when he realized someone had slept with his prom date. He’s suddenly uncomfortably aware of how close they are, sitting together on Dennis’s narrow dorm bed, and before he can move away or steer the conversation back onto familiar ground, Dennis strikes, fisting his hand in the collar of Mac’s shirt and yanking him forward until their lips meet.
Dennis, it has to be said, is an excellent kisser, and Mac is too caught off-guard to push him away. He goes with it, allowing Dennis to lick into his mouth and bite down gently on his lip, and it feels good and right in a way that kissing Tara or any other girl never has, like maybe everything Mac’s been told his entire life about why he shouldn’t want this was a bunch of lies.
(It’s the first time they kiss. It won’t be the last.)
“What the hell, dude?” he demands when Dennis finally lets him go. The tone he’s aiming for is manly and affronted, but his voice is an octave too high and it mostly just sounds like an undignified squeak.
“I just wanted to test something,” Dennis says, like that explains anything at all.
“I’m not gay.” It’s a dumb fucking thing to say, because Dennis knows that, Dennis knows him, and hadn’t he just been talking about all the amazing, straight sex he’s been having lately anyway.
“Okay,” Dennis says simply, as though Mac had just offered an opinion on what they should have for dinner and he’s being too polite to disagree out loud.
Mac doesn’t go to the party. He gets the next bus home and jerks off furiously in the bathroom with the taste of Dennis still lingering on his tongue. He tries to picture Tara, but when he shuts his eyes all he can see is Dennis. When he comes, furtive and guilty, it’s Dennis’s name on his lips.
He ignores Tara’s calls for the next week, and breaks things off with her when he can’t possibly drag it out any longer.
Over the following twenty years, the closest he comes to dating again is the thing with Carmen, which isn’t really a relationship as much as it is Mac sneaking off to her apartment for secret, shameful sex before she throws him out on his ass. He’s aware that this isn’t exactly normal, somewhere in the part of his brain that still remembers what normal looks like, but it doesn’t matter. He has Dennis, and God, and the Gang. It’s all he needs.
06. Thou shalt not kill
Okay, so he’s never actually killed anyone. He thinks that should count in his favor when he’s dead and they’re tallying up his sins or whatever, because killing is pretty much the big one, right? He’s reasonably certain that nothing he’s done is worse than murder, so all things considered, he can’t be that bad.
Sometimes he thinks that Dennis might have it in him to kill a person, if he’s pushed far enough. Dee has commented on multiple occasions that she wouldn’t be surprised if he’s secretly a serial killer already, in a way that’s sort of joking but also a hundred percent serious. There’s a certain look Dennis gets sometimes – usually when he feels he’s been insulted or disrespected – where his eyes go sort of flat and cold like a shark’s, and it’s like he’s in some other place, looking at something only he can see. It makes Mac uneasy, like maybe he doesn’t really know his best friend at all.
Sometimes he wonders what he’d do, if Dennis ever actually crossed that line. He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t rat Dennis out, because the thought of going to the work at the bar every day knowing that Dennis won’t be there, only to return to an empty apartment at night, honestly just sounds kind of depressing. He wonders whether he’d help Dennis bury the body, get rid of the evidence, and concludes that he probably would, if Dennis asked him to.
Sometimes Mac thinks that if Dennis asked, he’d do just about anything. Which, when you think about it, really makes him just as bad.
05. Honor thy father and thy mother
His memories of the day they came to take his dad away to prison are scattered and disjointed, more fleeting impressions than anything substantial. He remembers the cops bursting in without warning, yelling and waving their guns around, and his dad shouting and cursing at them in return as they dragged him away in handcuffs. He remembers his mom crying quietly, the last time he ever saw any real emotion from her other than anger.
He remembers being more scared than he’s ever been in his life, before or since, and that fear giving way into anger and confusion because nobody would explain to him exactly what was going on.
All he knows is that from that day on, it’s just him and his mom, and he tries his best to be strong and tough because he’s the man of the house now and it’s his job to keep them safe. He tries to be the kind of man his dad would be proud to call son, but he never quite seems to measure up. He’s always been just a little too emotional, a little too needy and soft.
(He knows, deep down, that he’s a coward. It’s his most shameful secret. Sometimes it feels as though he’s afraid of everything; of pissing off the wrong people, of ending up in jail, of being left behind by all his friends and dying old and alone and miserable. More than anything, he’s afraid of being who he really is, so he covers it up with bravado and bluster until it’s almost enough for him to believe his own lies.)
“You know, sometimes I don’t even think my dad really cares about me at all,” he admits one night when he’s too drunk to filter out the truth like he normally does. Saying it out loud makes him feel a little sick, like he’s done something blasphemous, and he wants to take it back right away.
Dennis gives him a look that’s half-exasperated, half-pitying, like he can’t quite believe that Mac is this slow on the uptake.
“Probably not,” he agrees, though not unkindly. “What do you even need that asshole’s approval for, anyway?”
Dennis makes it all sound so easy, but then he’s never appreciated the importance of family. Not that Mac can really blame him for that, given who his parents are. If anyone deserves to be abandoned by his children and left to the ravages of old age, it’s Frank.
“Come on, man,” Dennis says when Mac doesn’t answer. “You don’t have to keep bending over backwards trying to prove yourself. You’re better than him.”
Mac knows it isn’t true, but when Dennis says it like that, soft and sure and full of conviction, he can almost believe it.
04. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy
“Are you planning on actually getting up at, like, any point today?”
Mac rolls over with a groan, squints past the throbbing behind his eyes to focus on the source of this disturbance. It takes him a second to realize that Dennis is in his room, looming over his bed, glaring down his nose at Mac. He looks irritated, but not yet annoyed, so Mac lets his eyes drift shut again and buries his face back into the pillow.
“It’s Sunday, bro.”
“So? It’s also three in the afternoon.”
“Day of rest. I’m resting.”
He thinks the implicit fuck off comes through clear enough, but apparently he’s mistaken, because Dennis isn’t leaving.
“Mac, we’ve been over this. You work in a bar. We open on Sundays, because it is completely nonsensical to turn away perfectly good business one day out of every week just because some old dudes wrote it down on a tablet a million years ago.”
Mac sighs. The throbbing turns to more of a stabbing between his eyes, like there’s somebody driving a white-hot needle into the bridge of his nose. “I’m exercising my right to religious freedom.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Dennis mutters, and he definitely sounds annoyed now. “Religious freedom nothing, you’re just hung over as shit. Which, incidentally, I said you would be if you kept knocking back those tequila shots. Let this be a lesson in how you should always listen to your friend Dennis if you know what’s good for you.”
“Whatever, man. I’m pretty sure you guys can hold down the fort without me for one day. When was the last time we even had any customers in on a Sunday?”
“That’s not the point,” Dennis insists. “We’re in this together, remember? We’re co-owners, partners. What happens if I get into a jam? You think I can rely on Charlie in that situation? Or Dee? Or Frank? I need my Head of Security with me to have my back.”
Mac isn’t actually as stupid as Dennis sometimes seems to think he is; they’ve been friends for long enough that he knows when Dennis is playing him, when Dennis is telling him exactly what he wants to hear so that he’ll do whatever Dennis says. The trouble is, none of that actually makes a difference – it still works like a charm, every damn time.
“Fine,” Mac grumbles, because he might be a total pushover where Dennis is concerned, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it. “Give me an hour. And get me some Tylenol.”
“Sure thing, buddy.” Dennis smiles an obviously fake smile that sets Mac’s teeth on edge. “Oh, just one more thing…”
Without any further warning, Dennis abruptly reaches over and yanks the blinds open, flooding the room with sunlight and laughing his most psychotic laugh as he saunters out the door, leaving Mac groaning and cursing a blue streak in his wake.
03. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain
“Jesus fucking Christ!”
Mac mouths a silent apology at the crucifix on the wall for his blasphemy – though he thinks it’s a perfectly valid response to dropping a kettlebell on his foot – crossing himself for good measure even as he’s still wincing in pain. In truth, he’s never been all that good at remembering not to take the name in vain, but he figures it can’t be that much of an issue, all things considered. It’s got to be one of the little sins, because practically everyone does it, except for maybe nuns, and if all of those people are damned then Hell is going to have a serious overcrowding problem.
The first time he gets an oh God slip out while Dennis is fucking him, Dennis immediately gets this predatory look on his face that terrifies Mac as much as it turns him on, because it usually means that Dennis isn’t going to give up until he gets what he wants. He knows about Dennis’s weird god-complex thing, of course he does; mostly he tries to ignore it for the sake of his sanity, but Dennis seems to revel in making Mac uncomfortable, especially when sex is involved.
“Say it again,” Dennis insists. Mac does, because he’s helpless to resist Dennis at the best of times but especially when Dennis is fucking him through the mattress, and from then on it becomes routine. He recites the Lord’s Prayer while Dennis sucks him off, wet and warm and eager; Dennis sliding into him slow and easy is a dozen Hail Marys, and when Dennis finally, finally lets him come it’s amen.
The rest of the time it’s mostly just a garbled litany of fuckgodjesusdennis, and Dennis rewards him by heaping on the praise in return: that’s it, you’re doing perfect, such a good boy, you’re so good for me.
It always makes him feel ashamed and kind of dirty afterwards, and eventually it gets to where he can’t even pray for real without getting painfully hard. Which, he supposes, was probably the whole point. Few things seem to get Dennis going as much as subverting Mac’s faith for his own twisted purposes.
Still, he forces himself to go to confession every week, hoping the priest can’t sense how guilty and aroused he is as he sits in that dark wooden box and talks about anything other than how he’d do whatever degrading, blasphemous thing Dennis asked him to so long as it means Dennis will keep looking at him like Mac is the answer to everything he’s ever wanted.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…”
02. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
On Mac’s thirty-sixth birthday, the rest of the Gang decides to surprise him by presenting him with a life-size cardboard cutout of Chase Utley. He knows it’s a joke gift, and he’s pretty sure the joke’s on him, but he still stands it up in his room anyway, pride of place beneath the crucifixes hanging on the wall.
“I can’t believe you actually kept that thing,” Dennis remarks a few weeks later, when he wanders into Mac’s room to borrow his phone charger. “You know it’s creepy as shit, right? It’s like a shrine or something.” He squints at Mac suspiciously. “It’s not a shrine, is it? Because I don’t think Jesus would look too kindly on that.”
“No, it’s not a shrine!” Mac snaps, maybe a little too defensively. “It’s just, you know. Inspiration.”
“Ohhh-kay.” Dennis lifts his eyebrows, drawing the syllables out disbelievingly. Mac throws the phone charger at his head in response; it misses by a clear inch, and Dennis picks it up off the floor before backing out of the room with his hands raised in mock surrender, smirking the entire time.
It’s not a shrine, and he doesn’t have a crush either, no matter what Dee says. It’s healthy to have role models, to be inspired to reach the same levels of physical excellence as your heroes. Mac worships at the altar of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, because those are real men with real muscles who handle their problems with a sweet roundhouse kick and look cool as shit doing it. And if he occasionally fantasizes about how it would feel to have those real men with their real muscles pressed up against him, well, that’s probably normal too, and no-one has to know.
Either way, he likes to think Jesus understands where he’s coming from. He was pretty ripped too, after all.
01. Thou shalt have no other gods before me
Dennis is celebrating a successful scheme that saw him swindle Frank out of nearly three thousand dollars, and accordingly they both end up getting slightly tipsy on cheap champagne. It’s the good, fun kind of buzz that comes just before true drunkenness, the kind that has them laughing helplessly and falling into each other; it’s the best mood that Mac can remember Dennis being in for a long time, and he can’t help but get caught up in it.
Dennis rides him in bed that night, fucking himself up and down on Mac’s cock, and it’s all Mac can do to lay back and hang on for the ride. Dennis is beautiful like this, he thinks: powerful, in control despite the fact that he’s the one with a dick up inside him; head flung back, sweat-slick and bathed in moonlight, jerking himself off with the hand that isn’t currently pressing Mac down into the bed.
Mac is barely keeping it together, and when Dennis comes it’s enough to push him over the edge too, gasping out his climax as he watches Dennis spill over his hand, a feedback loop of positive reinforcement that seems to go on forever.
Fuck, I love you, he thinks, and only realizes a second too late that he might’ve said it out loud.
(It’s not the first time he’s said the words, but it seems different now. More real. He doesn’t have the excuse of being held hostage by a bunch of inbred maniacs; he can’t take it back later and insist it was just the stress of a life-or-death situation talking.)
Dennis goes very still and actually looks visibly surprised before he dismounts and goes to clean himself up. The part of Mac’s brain that isn’t currently freaking out over whether or not he’s just gone and ruined everything mentally congratulates him on actually managing to unsettle Dennis for once instead of the other way around.
Dennis doesn’t say it back, but he kisses Mac softer than usual when he returns from the bathroom. Dennis doesn’t say it back, but he stays the whole night in Mac’s bed, not quite touching but close enough that Mac can feel his body heat. It’s enough.
About two weeks later they’re lazily grinding against each other on the sofa when Dennis pulls back to ask him, apropos of nothing, “Do you love me more than God?”
It takes Mac’s brain a few seconds to disengage from his dick and comprehend the question, and once he does he has no idea how to respond. He wants to laugh it off. He wants to punch Dennis in the jaw. He wants to insist that it’s not like that, that the two things aren’t really comparable. Instead he just sits there like a mute idiot, unable to speak until Dennis smiles and pats his cheek condescendingly.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to say it.” He sounds infuriatingly satisfied with himself, like he’s in on some massive secret and he loves the fact that Mac is floundering in the dark. “I know you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t get off on this so much.”
Mac wants to deny it, but it feels like too big a lie even for him. The truth is he spends more time these days kneeling with Dennis’s cock down his throat than he does kneeling in prayer, and sometimes he thinks the two things might as well be one and the same. The truth is he spends hours worshipping Dennis with his hands and mouth and body, and every time Dennis comes for him it feels like a blessing, a gift he isn’t worthy of receiving. Dennis created the man Mac is today, has been sculpting him from the raw materials since they were fifteen years old, and Dennis has the power to unmake him with a single word or action, like walking out the door and never coming back. He’s given himself over to Dennis body and soul; he’s forsaken almost every vow he ever made to God simply because Dennis asked him to, and he can’t even bring himself to regret it that much.
If Mac is a sinner, then Dennis is the devil who led him from the path. If Mac is going to Hell, then Dennis will be right there with him, probably leading the way.
On his very worst days, Mac thinks that doesn’t really sound much like a punishment at all.