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Jerry knew he was very much fucked in the head when the lips of the man he doesn't even know the name of felt good. Too good.
It was electric, but not horny-electric, as it should've been. No, it was a different kind of electricity. It felt like being hit by ten thousand milliamps — not that Jerry has, but he had read about it. That article in some kid's science-for-dummies magazine said that it causes cardiac arrest and severe burns occur. Death is probable, but it all depends on one's resistance.
The kiss felt like it. He could die, but his body wasn't letting him.
He also remembered the part of the article that noted volts don't kill but amps do. His mind casually whispered the man's lips were the volts; that strange nostalgic charge he felt was the amps.
It was weirdly nice, like coming home after work. Like missing your pet after driving it to the vet and picking it up after long, agonizing hours of waiting. Like having a childhood favourite song and listening to it after becoming an adult, just to realise it remains as your favourite song.
It felt like it was familiar. Like he has kissed those very same lips before.
It felt like he should remember something.
Or like he must have forgotten something. Someone. Some piece of his life.
Which, to be honest, fair. He didn't remember much about his childhood, too chaotic and traumatic for his brain to want to cooperate. Even his therapist told him it was normal and he should not worry about it. Coping mechanism, she had called it.
But Jerry didn't want to cope right now. He wanted to remember. To place a name for those lips that kept trailing his skin as if it was something sacred, something worth of worship, of delicacy.
The only thing that shook him out of his reminiscing was the wave of new electricity that travelled through his nerves when the man reached for his hand. While kissing his collarbone like it needed CPR. His breath hitched like he had had an orgasm.
Pathetic, really.
“Everythin’ good? Too much?” the man whispered, hot breath still tingling against his skin but no lips touching. He was giving him time to recover from whatever the hell that was.
Jerry fucking blushed.
“No, I just…” he trailed off, not sure what to even say in his situation. He didn't know what he jumped for himself.
The man left a quick, almost-too-tender little peck on Jerry's bare shoulder, chuckling lowly. Not mocking, but not precisely empathetic, “Never held hands with a man or what?”
“Technically,” Jerry started, the reddish pink hue decorating the bridge of his nose deciding to get comfortable, as if it knew it was going to stay for good. “Not really. Does my dad holding my hand while crossing the roads count?”
“Good fuck!” The man wheezed. Hard. Like, steel-level hard. So much that it made Jerry realised the little dimples freely appearing on the other's cheeks, the little crinkles in the corner of his eyes, how his not-taken-care-of eyebrows meet at the middle for all the laughing. All of those little details that remained shy to Jerry's eyes until now. “You just don't say that kinda thing before fuckin’, dude!”
“I didn't- We aren't-” he groaned before he could even think of what to defend himself with. He was not a virgin, but this man felt like first tlmes and a fucking lightning. Zeus himself would be jealous of the not-conventionally-attractive man looking at Jerry as if he had hung the moon. And as if he was dying to make fun of him, too. “Get off.”
As Jerry tried to push the still-stranger off his lap, the not-melodic-at-all-but-weirdly-comforting, contagious laugh of the man made him feel his knees weakening, even if he was sitting. Hell, he even felt his heart weakening.
“Easy, sweet thing,” the man chuckled and patted his cheek almost patronisingly. “You ain't leaving me wanting… I mean, unless you really wan’ me off, f’course. I ain't that bad, y'know?”
If the smirk from before didn't send Jerry's heart into cardiac arrest, the last part of his comment sure did. He could physically feel the red in his face. Not the warmth, not the blood pressure. The actual colour red. On his cheeks and nose. Probably his ears and neck too, but he wasn't some PhD in feeling of colour or whatever.
It wasn't just the consent-looking part. It was the bare minimum and Jerry knows it. He wasn't stupid and swoon over a fucking basic human treatment.
No, it was the fact that he now had to explicitly say he did want to continue. That he did not want him to actually get off. That he still was turned on and he wanted the man's lips on his skin again.
That he wanted him to fuck the possibly missing memories into his brain until he couldn't forget them again.
“I've seen you before,” Jerry said instead, now holding the stranger's face in between his slender hands. “I swear I've seen you before.”
The man let him turn his face left and right, smirking the whole time. Like he was testing how much would it take Jerry to find out something only he was aware of. Like he did know him and wasn't telling him. Like if Jerry should know they have met before.
“Wasn't what I asked, sweet thing,” chuckled the man, raising an eyebrow and placing one hand on the small of Jerry's back.
The touch was soft, delicate. Just like the past ones, a tingle of a feather trying to wake someone up. Just that the feather was the man looking at him with such a patient calm, and the still sleeping memories about him were lethargic to stir.
Jerry wasn't aware of the exact moment where the smirk turned into soft kisses and praises against his pale skin, or when did the hand on his back trek up the curve of his spine to find his nape. He didn't know when the human version of a half-remembered dream turned into real skin travelling his own, warm wetness tasting his throat as if it had the need to commit it to memory, nose pausing right at his pulse point as if it could count how many second his heart was away from actually tearing off his chest and finding shelter in the hands that held him.
Every drop of saliva passed between them felt, to Jerry, like electrons leaping from a powerful source through a conductor barely capable of carrying such intensity — seconds away from snapping, scattering sparks into the air and igniting something flammable. Every shared breath was a defibrillator to his chest, shocking something awake in him that hadn’t ever really been asleep.
Every grind of hips was a lightning strike — once, twice, again — against a pine tree trying to pretend it was an oak. Trying to mimic strength it didn’t have, shaking under the pressure, splintering beneath the weight of its own wanting.
It felt like his brain was inside an MRI, every thought echoing against itself in pulses of magnetic noise. Loud. Unavoidable. Looking for something invisible to Jerry's eyes, but seemingly obvious to the man's unwaveringly adoring gaze.
“You shiverin’,” the man half-grunted, half-mocked. Yet, his smugness barely covered the struggling that seemed to mildly cloud the clear eyes that left Jerry's face for no second. They both were reaching heights that were impossible to go to between strangers, unholdable for those who had no connection, out of the plausible space to souls that didn't blend in a way that left them wondering when one ended and the other started. “S’so fuckin’ cute.”
Jerry couldn't get a thing out of his dizzy brain, no coherent thought lived up there. His mind was flooded by sensations — too much, not enough. Fingers dancing here, breath mingling there; Jerry couldn't really tell if the creaking he heard was the bed under them or his mind reeling with blurry frames of shooting stars memories and summer Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, overworking like an old film projector.
“Have we-” he tried to speak, to fill the grainy reel of missing childhood and incomplete nostalgia, but the mix of pleasure and overwhelming familiarity fogged his rationality. “Have we done this before?”
A grunt in the crook of his freckled neck and a sweaty forehead looking for stability were all Jerry had as an answer for some seconds, the man's hips unrelentingly satiating the so awaited collision of body fluids and unnamed feelings and tangled limbs.
“Dunno. You tell me, sweet thing,” said the man, breathless and still attached to Jerry. Spasms were present in both men, quick heart beats too. The secrecy and vague confirmations from his part were unhelpful, but something in his eyes reminded Jerry of someone he used to know. Or at least it felt like it.
Jerry knew electricity didn't hold memory, but this whole electric burning one night stand felt like an old path traveled again.
Maybe electricity didn't hold memory, but it remembers the way it once moved through someone. Maybe it didn't store moments — but it traces old routes. Familiar voltage. Echoes of neurons fired long ago.
Maybe Jerry’s body wasn’t remembering a man — just the shape of a current it once felt. The path electricity took, the way it hit him back then, and again now.
“Gotta go work, shit,” the man suddenly said, begrudgingly getting up and off Jerry, letting him feel empty in a way that, more than physical, felt spiritual.
“Stay,” Jerry found himself pleading, watching the man slipped in the definitely-not-expensive looking clothes again, hurry all over his scrunched face.
“Wish I could, Jer, but shitty bills gotta be paid somehow.”
Due to the rush in the man's actions, Jerry almost missed the way the man not just called him by a nickname of the name he didn't tell him, but the way it was a nickname he hadn't heard since high school.
“Wait, what did you-” a goodbye peck that tasted like see you soon shut Jerry up. And down.
“Text me later, will ya?” grinned the man, slipping a business card into Jerry's hand before exiting the room, still zipping up his jeans and cursing about the time and “productions can't fuckin' wait a sec, just in the best part”
Jerry waited until the shitty engine of the car that drove them both to his apartment fainted in the distance to look away from the door and down to his hand.
The business card was simple. Really simple, lame even. Just white paper with black Comic-fucking-Sans on.
SICK MOFO XXX
PM Dinunzio — Co-producer
+1 347 XXXXXXX
Dinunzio. That was a very uncommon last name in Staten Island. Hell, maybe even in all of America. It kind of reminded him of a guy who was obsessed with horror films he hung out with in high school. He also had a funny last name.
Lying down on his mattress, spent and confused, Jerry closed his eyes and put his arm over them, holding onto
the business card still. He could call later, when his ass wasn't hurting and his mind wasn't foggy.