Chapter Text
Maybe we can start again, in the new rich land – in California, where the fruit grows. We'll start over.
But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me – why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.
(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath)
Even now, I'm still the only one you trust. Kill me again. Come on, kill me again. Show me the only way you know how to love.
Interview with the Vampire (2022-), "No Pain" (S2E03).
The night was still when the window was shut close and the only thing alive was the faint breathing of a boy. At a glance, the night was still and nothing moved apart from a twitch of a hand, the untightening of the muscle of a thigh. There was no feeling of the droplets of water drying up in the bathroom's sink, of the blood hardening on the moquette and taking the dust under the bed with it; the clothes laid on the bed and on the floor without moving, the silenced gun on the nightstand bearing the imprints of the last hand that had touched it. The shuffle of the bed covers tied everything together, giving voice to what didn’t have one.
The late morning welcomed the hotel room with an unexpectedly warm light, catching blue eyes that soon buried themselves inside the pillow. A layer of nightly sweat still pooled at the base of the boy's neck despite him sleeping naked. He had left the curtains open, the night before, as if being woken up by sunrays would have been better than floating in total darkness. The bed was unmade and more messy than it would have been if only one person had been sleeping in it the whole night. When he turned and only found crumpled up sheets at his side, he was relieved.
The alarm clock on the nightstand said that it was eleven since the night before, so it was difficult to figure out what time really was. Eleven in the morning would have however been a fair guess. The air inside the room was stale with overnight oxygen and a silence far too odd for that time of the day down in the city. The boy got up and in a moment his naked silhouette moved from one side of the window to the other, his ribs mirroring the window panes with their crispy, peeling white paint. His bare feet on the moquette echoed like choked-out breaths and the iron tinge of the blood bothered him like a chipped silver crown wrapped too tight around a tooth. The dead man laid perfectly still at the foot of the bed, and the boy crouched near his head to inspect the two shots, each one night old. One near the heart, another above the hip; not his best work, but it wasn’t like he had been ready for it just nine or ten hours before. Sometimes he had to do it, but he didn’t like to kill.
By lifting one foot and then the other he stepped over the corpse, avoiding the blood puddles around him, now hard and gritty pieces of sidewalk. The coldness of the bathroom was refreshing and familiar, his face's reflection in the mirror for once something stable and rationalized in its solids and voids. The boy washed off the smeared lipstick from his cheek, but it felt flaky like a streak of blood. The gun silencer only made the shot impossible to hear from the other room, but who had held it would have bore the proof of it all over his body; the handle hadn’t burnt his palm like in the first few times, and in thinking that once again he felt relief.
He removed what was left of his make up with established, ritualistical motions of his hands, something that had become more natural for him than eating or locking his door. He had used to do it during dark mornings, floating in a fuzzy numbness that was the only one in charge to determine if he was going to get up from the bed that day or not. Now, when he did it, he already felt the morning breeze on his face, his flushed cheeks under the sun. With each brush of the towel he was closer to getting out.
The cold water jolted him awake and in a second he turned it warm again. He always started washing from his forehead, face and neck because it was the first habit he had picked up from someone close and he had always claimed it as his own since then. He absentmindedly washed off dried cum from his inner thighs; he didn’t remember its stains to have ever been that stubborn. The twin, old scars scattered around his body in three or four places were almost impossible to see, round and just a bit harder to the touch than the skin around them. The ones on the neck had patched up by themselves without him even realizing. Those last two years had been nowhere close to a blur, each day fire-branded in his mind's eye, and he remembered the tug at his heart in seeing that even that last trace had gone away sooner than he had expected.
When silence was too heavy on his stomach, he just closed his eyes and a thousand voices gathered inside his mind at once like he had been the one to call them. The voices actually belonged to only two people but it was almost impossible to keep track of what they were saying. Blurred lights gathered over the dark scenery behind his lids and subtitles moved too fast for him to catch up. At times they said something vain and useless, so he just brushed them off. Other times, a voice said: I was waiting. He brushed it off. I am not. That time, under the warm shower, after nine pill-induced hours of sleep, he heard his own voice, different but somehow still the same, something playful in it like he had already seen everything in life and wanted to see how it would have unfolded from there. I'm Guy, by the way. His eyes busted open. He opened the shower door to make sure everything was still there.
As he dried off his hair with a towel, something in his head buzzed like a microphone being turned on. His own breathing echoed in his ears and in his head but it wasn’t his anymore. Call me how you want. The voice, that time, had felt like the prelude to something new and thrilling, like someone was giving him the occasion to choose a new brand of poison after years spent intoxicating with the duller and less strong ones. Guy's dampened curls tickled his shoulders but his eyes and nose and dry lips were still in their place inside the mirror. It had been a while since he had last been called his name. To the men he met at night in those luxurious hotel rooms he told names he made up at the moment or said his real one making sure to make it look like it was fake. No one really used what he pretended was his name anyways; it was almost like he had been nameless his whole life.
When he spent the night with someone, every morning he woke up hoping that he wouldn’t have found a dark shadow sleeping beside him. Sometimes, around three, those men just left him alone while thinking that he would have preferred them to spend the night. Most of the time, he was the one to get away first, vanishing in the early morning daze. Some other times, they both stayed in the room until sunrise and after, but Guy slept comfortably in the bed and the other was nothing more than a dead body on the floor.
He didn’t like to kill, but when he had hallucinated for the first time familiar hands wrapped around his neck and the glimpse of a face he knew way too well striking the darkness, he had shot at the man's head without a second thought. Guy hadn’t felt bad, after doing it, and not even the times after. It had never been the blood or the drugs, never the auto-induced numbness; he was just born with the kind of firmness in his eyes that kept them focused even when he was pulling the trigger – or he had had it since someone had molded him for the first time into who he was now without asking first, something that felt still painfully closer to birth.
In the dark, it was difficult to distinguish what was new from what were just old memories. A shadowplay of features often overlapped the face of the man moving over Guy while the voice in his own head became louder like it was coming from a speaker and sex hurt as if a claw was ripping him open from the inside. He had always faced it only because he had been taught how to endure, but when his body was left on display on the unmade bed to recollect its own pieces he didn’t even earn the reward of having done the right thing. Split in two, he couldn’t bring both his hands to do the same thing at once.
When he woke up alone, something stormy and revolting had materialized on the other side of the bed, and turning towards the wall didn’t make it go away. When he was left alone during the day, that looming shadow took the bodies and the faces of the men around him at night, and Guy had never killed someone with more resolve and less resentment than when he had heard that voice ringing again in his head and the person he had loathed and longed for standing in front of him. He shot those men because he couldn’t kill Jasper, on that one early morning, not when his mortal body could only offer to that inhuman skin his obedience or disrespect or the caress of a blade. Outside of those times, Guy stuck to making it out of the room before the other could wake up. The oily gun in his palm could as well have been a pencil or a needle, because he didn’t like to kill except for when he could do it to Jasper.
The shirt from the night before smelt of smoke and men's perfume and every button fastened was a bullet loading the magazine. He didn’t even bother opening the window; he was standing closer to the door. Under the daylight, a hotel room was nothing to fear, nothing more than a crowded street or a public swimming pool. It was too silent and too hot but there was no place for Jasper to hide. The fact alone that Guy was about to depart would have been enough for him for not even thinking about lurking in there. As he buttoned up his pants, his abdomen was flat and pale and not even a scar bothered its frailty. He wondered what would have happened if Jasper hadn’t turned around and he had just directed the knife towards himself instead. He wanted to see what Jasper would have done with all of his bleeding.
A few steps and Guy was outside and walking through the padded corridor, fixing his hair in the shiny elevator, crossing the lively hotel hall with sunglasses over his eyes and the same red shirt he had stripped off from during the night before. He winked at the receptionist as he passed. All set. Until next time. Outside, he welcomed the sunlight like a rare gift, something that sooner or later would have been pried from him before he could savor it entirely. His curls entangled with the salt of the ocean and his skin blushing under the burning rays would have been fleeting and transient like a long lost summer. Still, every time Guy stepped out and onto the sidewalk he felt a stranger to that kind of life, like he was doing something forbidden or he was stealing someone else's opportunity at living.
The first time Guy had felt the urge to sleep, not even a day after he had almost stained his feet with the muddy blood taking over his kitchen's floor, he hadn’t woken up for thirty-six hours. In his motel room he had slept through day and another night and through the restlessness that had started pooling around his bones until it had become too much to bear. It had startled him awake. His body was enveloped in a cold sweat, his bowels twitching and twisting, lungs shrinking and cutting air directly from his throat. His muscles spasmed between coils of barbed wire, his legs moving in jolts like they were tied to the bed by an invisible noose.
When he threw up, he tasted blood thick with bile between his jittery teeth. The cold bathroom floor welcomed his sticky back, giving time to his hands to stop shaking, nails scraping slightly at his thighs, up and down, up and down, in a desperate attempt to calm himself down. Artificial light was painful to look at, and so he laid in the dark on the bathroom floor for hours until he could finally get up again with a shudder.
For a week, what Guy experienced wasn’t different from what he had felt when he used to take too much vampire blood or cocaine, except that he had never before experienced its effects for more than a few hours. It wasn’t just a side effect to sweat out, now, but rather a prolonged and abrupt overture to what his life would have been from then on. Headache throbbed behind his eyes, fatigue preventing his lids from lifting and revealing too much of his surroundings. For a little over a week he could not get up, arms and legs heavy with lead, each limb stripped down to raw muscle and bones, nerves exposed. Despite the draining feeling he couldn’t bring himself to rest, couldn't stop his eyes from wandering around the room trying to flush dark shadows out of the corners, couldn't prevent his mouth and eyes from watering until the pillow melted between sweat, tears and saliva.
Guy slept a few hours in intervals, night taking up day's place and day coming back up again behind the half closed curtains; when he woke up, restless, claws scraped at his stomach from the inside while fuzzy dreams, incoherent and violent, fogged up his mind and made the whole room spin. When he was awake, that same presence from his dreams – always that dark shadow, like a clump of smoke, or perhaps something more real – filled up every inch of his field of vision; he felt like he was never alone, but didn’t know if he was supposed to feel scared or relieved or just don’t care. His intermittent sleep once again built his misery up brick by brick, and when he laid still in the unlit silence he felt a tongue relentlessly licking up every corner of his mouth and each of his teeth, hands turning him over and again on his back, the parasite of an unleashed hunger prickle under his skin.
When he had started to feel better enough to finally walk around the room and wash without nausea shoving him up the wall, light and dark didn’t matter as he crouched to the floor and tortured his hands or scratched the dried up paint off the wall until his nails bled. He reached a point when he had straight up stopped sleeping, paranoia making his fingertips tingle and his knee bounce with the same rhythm of his heart. What had started as an excuse to avoid the feeling of being ravaged in his sleep quickly turned into a stomach churning, bed tossing insomnia, bloodshot eyes piercing through the dark and suddenly missing the feeling of closeness the fangs and claws in his dreams had provided him.
Sometimes, when Guy closed his eyes to try to deceive his body into sleep, he felt a reassuring, statuary presence on the other side of bed, and clutching at its chest he only gripped at sheets and scraped the mattress. When he wasn’t looking, that familiar weight laying near him felt unexpectedly warm, close to the only thing that had always given him a sense of belonging, and when day struck and he found himself alone his stomach sank and settled in the mattress.
Those times, he tried to keep sunlight at bay, closing window panes and curtains but never earning total darkness. Only the windowless bathroom could provide him the rawness of marble and metal, something he had always thought as unnecessarily cold and distant but that now reminded him how coldness and distance were actually supposed to be. He closed himself inside the shower, dry and unwelcoming like a glacier or a nook inside a rock, crouching down with his back pressed to the tiles and the forehead up to his knees, eyes closed to imagine something far from that world and borrowing from that bathroom only the dull sound of the silence he was accustomed to, all sharp edges and smooth surfaces. Guy felt closer, like that, closer to that kitchen aisle and the uncomfortable sofa and the darkened windows, four walls pressing around him just like the ones of the narrow shower seemed to be shrinking down all around him. Where he came from, the shower used to be large enough for two.
For some time he had liked them showering together, him and Jasper, the too warm water, rough hands over shoulder blades and hips, fingers brushing beads of water off his eyebrows or stroking the wet curls away from his face – They're getting long. He didn’t remember if it had ever been another time like that, but he was sure it had never been his fault. He brought his hand up to touch the closed up holes between shoulder and neck, wanting to rip them open again; under the imperceptible scar they felt hollow and vain and now that the skin had sewn itself up again there was no reason to think that something still connected them anymore, that those wounds would have again been the door that guided Jasper right through him.
When things got bad enough he thought those walls to be a warming embrace, and with eyes heavy with tears he begged to be found and brought back where he belonged, to start all over again if that meant he would have tasted vampire blood on his tongue just another time. Take me out of here. He choked himself with silent screams that didn’t want to come out and talked and talked like a madman until the voice died inside his throat, each word marking its exit from his mouth like teeth pulled out one by one. Take me and make it all stop.
The need, the hunger, the craving was by then ingrained so deep inside him that he had almost forgotten how every emotion and sensation used to punch him in the guts when he was sober, how much Jasper had fucked him up for the sake of something he still hadn’t quite grasped. He would have let him do it again a hundred times, but then, just after entering Jasper with a knife and seeing him fall to the ground, he would have kneeled beside him to drain him dry, wrapping his lips around the wound and drink his blood directly from there until there was nothing left – It's time, baby. Into Guy's own body his organs would have had to flee to accommodate the gallons he had just drunk, and after it he would have been so high that he could have almost stayed to patch Jasper up like nothing had happened. Take me with you again.
In the shower, daylight still peeking inside despite his attempts at an hallucination of the night, Guy prayed to Jasper’s shadow like it was the manifestation of a saint, pretending to see something more than white light and stillness behind the frosted glass, inaudibly asking him to feed him until he no longer remembered the outside world, to guide his head down over the white lines on the table until capillaries bursted in his nose and eyes, his irises stuck forever in the bittersweet aftertaste of the drops of blood that from a nostril always reached the lips. Ah, beautiful.
Guy needed all the blood and the drugs that Jasper could have given him, and he would have eaten directly from his hands, mouth closing behind the nausea, licking at his fingers to catch every remaining drop or trace of powder while still looking at the other with the pearly whites of his eyes. You're next. If something ever spilled, he would have knelt at his feet and licked it from the floor, and that's just how much he wished to do it all again, how easy he would have surrendered, bent over by the pain, even if it would have meant going back where he had started. I can take everything. I'll stay with you forever if you make it stop. But Jasper never answered and his thoughts clashed against his skull before they could even reach the mouth. He tried to fall asleep again, night after night, just to pretend someone else was to his side, only to wake up at the first graze of claws over his naked shoulder.
The bell of the drugstore's door clinked against the grey sky, the light rain still unusual for a morning in Los Angeles. The air inside was thick with tobacco and women's perfume but stepping out was no relief when the atmosphere was even thicker with humidity and disappointed breaths. Buying cigarettes for himself had felt unnatural, at first, and for the first time Guy had thought himself as spoiled, just then realizing how many things had actually been done for him during all those years, how many responsibilities had been lifted off from his shoulders so he could focus on getting high and stay hidden from everything and everyone else. Anything to please him.
Since he had left he had never once pondered changing his cigarette's brand, like that purple package had been engraved in his mind inch by inch through the span of three years, carving a space for itself in his pockets or on his nightstand day after day. Most of the time, he didn't even need to light one up for himself, a hand holding a lighter always stretched out in his direction. Doing everything alone, now, felt like betrayal, like a transgression, like he had grown out of something that was getting tighter instead of adjusting to his size.
In that unknown abyss Guy still grasped at what he already had, like a voice telling him to control his breaths, the ability of forgetting what day it was, a pack of overpriced Slim Vogues even if he no longer paired them up with fur. He stuck to them because they were the first cigarettes someone had ever bought him when he had asked for some, a gesture he liked to remember with the fondness of a treasured goodbye gift, just another detail of what now was his past life that had become so natural to become his own in his current one.
Guy lit one of the cigarettes up and started heading back, eyes covered by sunglasses down to the sidewalk, when something got caught in his peripheral vision, striking the dull scenery with its sharp, black outline. A man was standing on the opposite side of the road from him, leaning against the wall under the shade of a shop's awning. He was smoking, too, sunglasses to cover his eyes, an eyebrow slightly raised. Guy stopped in his tracks, slowly turning his head to inspect the man's appearance as the other squared him up to down well knowing that he had been noticed too.
Guy's face refused to lose its composure as he leaned against the wall to his side, facing the other man as their hands mirrored one another. Jasper kept his mind closed up tight and Guy saved himself the bother to even look for an entrance. They had never seen each other like that, during the day, under natural light even if the sun had been locked away by heavy clouds. They indulged over one another for a while, just wanting to see who would have broken the contact first. The wired tension and the secret complicity of their past silent conversations were no longer there, like something crucial had been severed between them forever, a tendon cut in half and making movement impossible.
As Guy turned again and started walking along the sidewalk he wondered how much time Jasper had been there watching him, outside the shop and everywhere around the city; if he had found him only then, after two years, or if he had always known where he was but just didn’t want to look for him. The second option was the one he liked the most. He was sure that Jasper wouldn’t have followed him home, as he left him there, probably still looking at his back and trying to figure out what had changed and what had stayed the same in him, not expecting that the answer would have been everything and nothing at all to both questions.
The hall of the Chateau Marmont echoed with chatters and glasses as Guy tepidly skimmed a magazine and inspected the people entering the hotel from the sofa on which he was sitting. The inside was unbelievably hot, the chandeliers dimming their lights as the day slowly lent its place to the evening. The open bar to his right was all a glimmering reflection as the glasses, the liquor bottles and their transparent shelves clinked against each other and mirrored the flames of the candles lit up along the counter. Guy didn’t really know who he was waiting for, what he expected coming from that door; he wanted something to do with himself, that night, because he could just feel that he wouldn’t have gone to bed until four or five in the morning and he really didn’t want to spend those remaining hours awake in his bed, letting the shadows win. He wasn’t taking anything that could have made him sick and bedridden, now, and he could stand on his legs and lock his own door. If it was ever going to get bad again, he didn’t want himself to be the reason.
Entering the Chateau Marmont had made him recall long lost memories of nights that belonged to a different life entirely. The images were all a blur, nothing much apart from the business he and Jasper had conducted on those nights and the mornings in which he had wanted to go out but couldn’t. Jasper came and went while day unfolded behind the closed windows of the suite, and drowsy with sleep Guy asked himself what he was doing out there and why he wasn’t asleep, why he couldn’t keep his own eyes open. Before leaving he had really intended to visit Los Angeles, using those few days to walk around in the open, not constricted between the four walls of the penthouse for once. Once they had gotten there, however, he hadn’t found the strength; he couldn't even tell the difference between being there and in his own room at home, his body weakened by the weight of a life of enclosure.
The words had begun to blur one over the other, his fingers sweaty over the glossy pages. After some time, after the hundredth couple had entered the foyer with a reservation for two at the restaurant, he smacked it closed on the polished coffee table, pondering if he should have ordered something to drink even if he was alone. He tortured his lips with his fingers, looking around the room and wondering if there was a poker table, somewhere in that hotel. He didn’t know if he would have still been able to play it or if he had ever sat around it before; he was afraid he had lost the best part of him, in getting rid of the drugs and the blood, like they were the only thing that could bring out his true self, deep buried in a dark corner of his body just waiting for it to feel lighter to get out.
Guy knew that he should have expected to encounter Jasper again any moment now, but when he saw his figure sitting on a stool at the counter without having seen him enter from the door, he found it more and more difficult to avert his gaze. The other wasn’t even looking at him as he gave him his back and ordered a drink by waving a hand at the bartender. Guy was just half surprised when he noticed that he could still anticipate the other's expressions and gestures without even having to read into him; he had never noticed how much he had had the chance to get to know Jasper as much as after he was gone, like he had wanted to stick around a little more just to slip further into his skin. When Jasper’s whiskey was placed in front of him, he took the first sip from the glass, probably trying to catch Guy's attention without even making direct eye contact. There was no chance of Jasper having materialized there out of sheer coincidence, just like Guy was purposefully looking away hoping to earn something as a reward for his lack of interest.
Jasper shifted in his seat, turning slightly to have a look at the hall. Guy fidgeted with his fingers, getting ready for the inevitable collision. A few days before, in that silent road between the drugstore and two walls, they hadn’t had the chance to look at their bare faces, both feeling the need to shield themselves from one another. There, no reason to wear sunglasses and no shadow to hide under, their eyes met in the natural and painful way they always did, like striking an exposed nerve. It made Guy's spine tingle and Jasper raise an eyebrow, like he always did when he looked at Guy and saw in him something he recognized and something more that he didn’t – and that was always enough to make him uncomfortable.
Like they had done before, they just stared at each other for some time apart from when Jasper went back to his drink and Guy let his gaze wander around the room like he didn’t already know it by heart. Their minds were dead silent, no sharing thoughts nor unwanted digging, just them brushing against each other like a touch of foreheads before telling each other goodnight. That was at least enough to make Guy relax, undoing the second button of his shirt to give himself more space to breathe. Before getting up, he tried to predict the worst that could have happened that night. He was already headed towards the open bar before giving himself time to think of an answer.
“Can I join you?”
Guy sat on the stool on his left before the other could even open his mouth. Jasper turned like he didn’t already know to whom that voice belonged and answered with a kind and complacent smile.
“Please do.”
Guy felt his eyes all over him, but he was at least grateful for the effort at making it a casual gesture.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
Guy's voice had turned silky and smooth, purring over every inch of Jasper’s exposed neck. His slim hand left fingerprints on the counter as his rings glimmered under the light. The ring with the black stone was still wrapped around one of his fingers, but Jasper showed no reaction to it, the absence of surprise painted over his face as he squared him with unfazed eyes, his own rings clinking over the counter's surface in return.
“No, not really.”
Guy tried to take in any difference in his appearance but the vampire's face was unharmed and honest like the first time he had seen it. He had no more wrinkles than the last time and the time before that; that morning on the sidewalk his sunglasses had concealed the icy eyes he already knew by heart. He hoped his knife had left a scar, along his stomach and waist, but he didn’t let his eyes linger on Jasper’s shirt for more than a second.
“What about you?”
Curiosity glinted in Jasper’s eyes as he supported his head with his hand in order to take in Guy's full figure. From up close, their bodies felt too real, like a burden they had been wanting to get rid of for some time. The stools were so close that their knees brushed with every movement of their legs, no matter how brief.
“Maybe. Don't know, actually.”
Guy shrugged like he didn’t care about the reason Jasper had found him there and toyed with the napkin in front of him with his thumb and index finger, momentarily getting lost in his reflection behind the shelves and the bottles. Jasper fell silent for a moment, like they had just met and he was pondering what to say to make an impression, the ghost of rejection looming between them. He leaned in but his breath didn’t bring Guy any warmth.
“Can I buy you a drink, while you look for something to wait for?”
“It’s the least you can do.”
Jasper called the bartender and Guy was soon back to being revered and provided for, leaning into it with such ease that it didn’t even feel like no one had ever done it for him for the last two years. Once the bartender came, Guy ordered for himself, chin on his palm and flushed cheeks. With all the other men he had always ordered a Margarita, and so he did the same with Jasper because whatever they were doing wasn’t far from his other nightly encounters. Jasper acted along, ordering a refill for himself.
“See, maybe you were waiting for someone to offer you a drink.”
Guy looked sideways at Jasper, already feeling drunk. When he unfocused from Jasper’s presence, the hall suddenly became loud and full of blinding reflections darting from the chandelier to the tables and the mirrors. Their conversation, still fresh and yet to be uncovered, would have kept everything at bay for at least another half an hour. He answered Jasper hiding a smile behind the glass that had just been placed before him.
“No, I highly doubt that.”
The grains of salt around the rim of the glass could as well have been the freckles on his cheekbones or the moles adorning his back. Jasper imagined his unusually red, wet lips to be salty and sour, and to get closer to them he offered him a cigarette, the orange end of one already peeking out of the package he had opened in his way. Guy took one Parliament – Jasper’s usual Parliaments – and let the other light it for him, his eyelashes flickering over the trembling flame. His carved lighter was still the same, just like his habit at keeping it in his back pocket, the casualty with which he always took it out and put it back.
Your cigs always make my head spin, Guy remembered himself saying as the early evening stretched its arms inside the penthouse. He was laying on the couch, head on Jasper’s legs, and he was furiously rubbing at his eyes to prevent them from closing. Jasper had let Guy steal his cigarette just a moment before, taking a few drags before placing it again between his lips. Guy's head was spinning, but he had actually been light headed since he had woken up; the smoke he had sucked in was like mist getting caught in his hair when they got out on rainy nights. Pressing a cold hand over his forehead Jasper had just replied No, baby, I’m pretty sure it's the drugs.
“Are you from here?”
Jasper pushed the ashtray in Guy’s way to prevent ashes from falling from his cigarette onto the counter. Guy welcomed it, feeling revered and looked after with the casualty with which Jasper used to coat his thorough care.
“Oh, no, I'm not. You?”
“I'm here for business.”
Jasper looked around them like he felt they were being watched, but he quickly returned to Guy’s face. His hair was longer and it reminded him of the first time they met, the same amount of tequila in his glass and impudence on his lips. The mocking smile Guy gave him wasn’t scripted.
“You must be very rich, then.”
He licked the remaining salt from the rim of his glass, staring at Jasper through half lidded eyes, while the dark purple shirt he was wearing outlined a non-demarcation territory over his pale skin. His presence was enough to make heads dizzy and skin tingle; under those lights, he was the soft inside of a pearly seashell, iridescent in whites and pinks, all crystallized sugar.
“Oh, you bet.”
They were silent for a while, sipping their drinks and brushing against each other’s minds like different pairs of arms colliding together in a crowd. Jasper finished his whiskey and brushed his hands over his thighs like he was about to stand up and depart from him.
“Should I wait for a second date to take you upstairs?”
Guy crushed his cigarette in the ashtray, a spiral of smoke still twisting against his lips.
“I don’t have time for that,” he said then, a bored look in his eyes as he inspected the wet traces his tongue had left around the rim of his glass, a few grains of salt still clinging to it. He couldn’t say that his encounters with rich men in hotels had never meant anything to him, and that some of those men didn’t even get through the night in the first place, dead before they could wish to see him a second time. “What makes you think we'll meet again?”
“It would really be a shame not to.”
When Guy stood up first, his shirt revealing a slice of his waist as he moved, his voice was lively and amused in front of Jasper’s act, like for once he had been the one whose life or death relied only on Guy’s acceptance or rejection.
“Book us a room, then, show me what you've got.”
Guy didn’t remember the numbers of their Chateau Marmont suites, but it had never mattered less. Jasper had already booked a normal suite, different from the ones they had stayed in together. It was smaller and slightly cheaper, the perfect theatre for a one-night stand. Jasper had opened for him the heavy door that brought to the corridor and the one of the elevator, and tried not standing too close to him as they reached the fifth floor.
Once inside the room, Jasper walked up to the window to close the curtains and emptied his pockets on the table. Guy let his fingers slide on the drawer, basking in the thrilling sensation that the delay of their feelings was producing on him. Treating Jasper like he had never seen him until that night helped to make him feel a little less real, a little less tied to him than how much he really was. Their matching rings claimed each other like magnets or a red thread. Angled towards him, Jasper already knew where to look, already knew which parts of him were his favourites.
Jasper sat at the foot of the bed, curious to know who would have been the first to talk and what Guy’s next move would have been. Guy came up to him with measured steps, never breaking eye contact until his lips reached his ear. His voice was thick with alcohol and had a bitter and fruity tinge to it.
“Sit back, now. I’m gonna take care of you tonight.”
The corners of Guy's eyes betrayed the laugh his lips were trying to conceal. Jasper steadied himself on the bed with his hands, leaning slightly back like he was about to witness a one man show. Guy took a few steps forward, halting in front of the mirror facing the bed and showing his back to Jasper. From there he could see his sitting mirror image, and the eyes that were looking straight at him from the back were almost human-like, wandering around the room without really knowing where to look and what to focus on.
“Damn, relax,” Guy laughed, turning his waist to look at himself in the mirror at different angles. “Have you never done this before?”
He licked his lips, attempting to mask another giggle, as he hooked their gazes together through their reflections. He lifted his hands up to the collar of his tight shirt and slid his fingers down the hems, tying the two indexes together as he started undoing the first button, and then the second and the third. His intent eyes, still looking inside the mirror, were teasing and eager, the slow and expert motions of his fingers mesmerizing and hypnotic, swirls of skin and fabric from which no eye could have ever peeled itself from. He unbuttoned his shirt all the way, revealing his bare chest and arms as the sleeves swiftly slid down his shoulders and elbows.
Jasper felt each one of those fingers down his own chest, his neck held captive of that cherry stained mouth. He couldn’t help but stare at Guy’s body and its sinuous image in the mirror, the reflection of his naked chest, his pointy hipbones peeking over the low-waisted pants. His back, slowly uncovered by the fabric, was no more real than the other body parts reflected in the mirror even if he could look directly at it. Guy’s spine was the path he needed to follow, the one that would have brought him home.
“You sure know the moves,” Jasper had said then, like he didn’t already know everything about the boy, like he had forgotten the valley of his sternum and the mole between his shoulderblades.
Guy turned leaving Jasper hanging to his back, shaking his head slightly to adjust to the new vision. Jasper let Guy spread his legs and kneel between them, but he still did not dare to touch him. The warmth he radiated was the one of an asphyxiating summer day while his own, if he had been alive, would have been of overheated iron. Jasper even let Guy’s hands unbutton his own shirt, lifting his eyebrows in an amused surprise. He knew far too well that inside that room he had no more power over Guy than he had over himself.
“I've been doing this for a long time.”
Guy's expression had no intention of showing Jasper what all of that actually meant. Once his hands reached Jasper’s abdomen, his fingers fiddled with hesitation as his eyes began to climb over his chest, going back down before they could reach the other's face. Jasper didn’t get the reason hidden behind that gesture, at first; the buttons that were still closed laid heavy on his skin like an anchor dragging him down. But Guy was just saving time for later, when he trailed his gaze down his still clothed stomach and hips and lifted the hems of his shirt to have full access to his belt. Jasper let him have it.
He didn’t stop Guy even when he opened his belt and undid the button and the fly of his pants, bejeweled fingers searching and searching in elegant and measured motions, making it impossible to believe that they could as well been holding a gun or a knife. As Guy’s hands wandered over his crotch, Jasper could almost see the shield with which he was concealing his thoughts without the minimum effort. He was a loaded weapon, his mouth a wet outlet before the short circuit.
“All your life?”
Guy looked up towards Jasper for a moment, eyes big like crumbs and a facetious desire impossible to split from all of the words he couldn’t say. Guy didn’t know where to start answering, but he wasn’t the type to overshare on a first date. He just bobbed his head down and took Jasper’s dick into his mouth, the gesture sudden and refreshing just like the boy he had been when Jasper had seen him for the first time.
Jasper realized a moment too late that his hand was buried inside his curls, gripping slightly at the roots to steady his head between his legs. Guy's tongue moved painfully slowly around his length and the back of his throat welcomed his tip with a raw wetness, the bead of the piercing trailing up and down against a throbbing vein. Did it hurt, getting it done? Jasper had asked Guy once, one of his claws inspecting the healed hole, right where the tongue met the barbel. I don't know, does it hurt? Guy had replied in a quick breath, making sure Jasper could feel skin and metal behind his ear.
The room’s air was thickening with every wet sound escaping Guy’s mouth, his hand over the creases where Jasper’s upper thighs met the groin. Jasper’s fingers scratched at the nape of Guy’s neck, tracing its outline carved out of marble; a light scrape of teeth made his head tilt back. Every time his girth hit Guy’s soft palate he felt close to reaching those recesses that the boy always kept safely hidden, and he hoped that Guy was swallowing something of him along with his precum, too. Jasper kept tugging at his hair like he had forgotten how they settled between his fingers or how it felt seeing the curls lay messily on the pillow near his or splayed across his chest. Guy’s hands moved, like he had just envisioned those memories too, and the streaks of glistening saliva coating his skin started to feel like the beginning of a goodbye.
Guy detangled his teeth and tongue from Jasper’s dick with a last, guttural hum, threads of saliva still claiming its place inside his mouth. He got up by levering himself on Jasper’s thighs, a smooth movement of hips and knees that made him look like he was made of water. It reminded Jasper how fleeting and frail he had been, how much more firm and down to earth his body felt then. Guy cleaned a streak of shiny precum and saliva from his chin with the back of his hand, mocking his own vulgar brazenness. Jasper let him go on with his play even if a shadow over the boy’s eyes told him that they were close to a breaking point.
Guy glanced at the mirror but didn’t turn all the way as he quickly unbuttoned his pants and peeled them from his thighs and legs. Guy had always liked to watch Jasper struggle, when he put all his efforts in trying to free him from the tight fabric without surrendering to the urge of just tearing them apart with his nails. Lucky for Jasper, he rarely wore them when he was at home.
Guy’s expression was unreadable, when he approached Jasper again, his naked body looking slightly out of place. He placed himself again between Jasper’s spread legs and lifted his chin with two fingers, a sudden closeness that imposed even more of a distance between them. Jasper wanted to beg him to stop, to tell himself to stop sitting there and take action, but he could just hang onto Guy’s ribs and waist and pretend that they didn’t know each other at all. He wondered if that was the same show the boy had put on in front of all the men he had seen him enter expensive hotels with all around Los Angeles. When in the morning he saw him getting out alone, he wondered what his boy had become.
“You’re so tense,” Guy said in a far too serious tone, visibly biting his lower lip right after to prevent a laugh from escaping his mouth. He reached for Jasper’s shoulder with his other hand and the other followed the nudge of his fingers, slowly laying his back on the mattress. “I’m gonna make you feel good now,” Guy continued as he climbed over him, knees to both his sides, making their hipbones almost touch.
Guy lowered Jasper’s pants as much as he could to have full access to his crotch. Sweat and a light shimmer clinged to the curves of his cheekbones and to his Cupid’s bow as he tucked loose curls behind his right ear and licked at his lips again. It was those small and casual gestures that always made Jasper feel light headed, like he was the one being overpowered and could only mouth obedience.
As Guy lowered his head again to go back to his cock, providing some lubrication for what would have followed, Jasper was abruptly snapped out of the spell that overly warm hotel room had casted on him. Without pondering the idea for more than a second he inverted their positions on the bed in an uncomfortable entanglement of legs and arms, his belt buckle clinking with every movement. He was on top, now, palms pressed on the bed near to Guy’s cheeks while the boy looked up at him like he had just acknowledged his presence in the room and how much he had desired and missed it when he wasn’t there. Jasper gently made his way into the slit slowly gaping in Guy’s mind. Behind, there was only light.
Hello, kiddo.
Guy’s eyes filled with question and contentment, the same light Jasper had seen inside him now spreading over his features. How did you find me?
Jasper just shrugged, a smile tugging at his lips. I'm the man.
Why are you here?
Last look. Jasper tilted his head to take in every detail engraved on Guy’s face. If you let me. With wide eyes and mouth ajar, disheveled hair and a silent surprise in his blue irises, he bore all over himself the proof of the quietness and wilderness of natural landscapes. He let his arms fall to his sides, finally surrendering in front of the inevitable reality he would have had to face, sooner or later, be it sitting at the bar’s stools or with his back pressed to the bed.
Depends. Guy pretended to reflect on it, brows furrowed, like after everything that had just happened he could have ever had a doubt. He spread his legs to invite Jasper closer. Are you gonna be nice?
Jasper lowered himself a little, his mouth hovering over Guy’s neck, hands grabbing his thighs to spread them even wider. I've never been nice in my whole life.
Guy let out a pleased smile against Jasper’s temple. Good.
They hadn’t kissed yet; before, when they were strangers, it wouldn’t have brought them anywhere. Now, when they did, it yanked them out of the flow of time; unlike the last time, Guy’s mind wasn't silent nor riotous anymore and Jasper’s eyes weren’t pleading to be looked at. It was like their old bedroom in the dark Vegas penthouse had never belonged to them, like it had always been inhabited by two different people entirely.
Guy hadn't forgotten the nausea-inducing sensation of kissing and being kissed just to earn something, as his lips had touched more men than the barrel of his gun. Crushed against one another, Guy didn’t really think about feeding or being fed, about the clashing of their bloods and how what they provided for each other was the same in the same measure it wasn’t. With his arms around Jasper’s neck, laying in a hotel room just like when he had seen his black outline looming over the bed for the first time, he finally felt one with the voices and the shadows.
Jasper was kissing him without wanting to hurt, hips sinking between his legs, reminding himself how Guy felt by tracing the outline of his face with his fingers so he would have recognized him even in the dark. He trailed his hands down Guy's chest, eyes getting hooked on the twin, white scars at the base of the neck. They didn’t tingle, that time, every hint of sensation long gone from the two scraps of skin, and Guy looked down at Jasper more to see his reaction than to prove a point. They held their breaths just for a moment, like they had done as Guy had refused to unbutton all of Jasper’s shirt. Guy's eyes, glossy and alert like he had been caught red handed, still glimmered with the smile that had made their teeth clash together during the kiss. Jasper’s expression would have shown concern, if Guy had ever asked him to justify his own actions, but the boy stayed silent and so he just buried his nose in his chest.
He went back up to face Guy as the boy looked at him full of anticipation. He toyed with the metal belt buckle that was tickling his stomach, a And now what? hanging between his lips, walking on tippy toes along each of his eyelids. Everything, from the blade of iris and pupil revealed by the lids to the blonder streaks in his hair due to the sun and the ocean water, radiated with a spark Jasper had rarely seen take hold of Guy in that way. His cheeks, flushed, made Jasper jealous of the sun, who could still steal and kiss his boy all day while he was forced in the darkness. Sweat spread the sticky glitters he had on his face all over the cheekbones, making his face glisten in iridescent hues.
You're all a sparkle, today, baby.
Jasper let his fingers slide along the crease of his ass as Guy rolled his hips up to feel his crotch still partially covered with rough pants against him. He was almost grinning, now, and Jasper had really never seen him have this much fun, but that he couldn’t say even if he was sure Guy could feel it at the back of his head. Those batting eyes were definitely asking for some kind of ruin that would have left him quivering and sensitive between the sheets. That, at least, was already one of the memories of the penthouse that had made him feel like he belonged somewhere for the first time, that somewhere being in every room Jasper stepped into, in every thought it ever occurred in his mind.
Jasper traced the outline of Guy's rim with a finger before pressing the pad over his hole just enough to make him aware it was there. Guy let out quick, throaty breaths as Jasper’s hands made his body promises that wouldn’t have been fulfilled if not with the roughness that always cut breath from his throat.
Every inch of Jasper’s body pressed over his sent a tingle up his thighs and between his legs, now wrapped around Jasper’s middle. Jasper retracted his fingers to add some saliva, but Guy stopped the hand mid-air and without a word brought it to his own mouth, sucking eagerly at the fingers, two and then four, claws gently scraping at the warm inside of his cheeks, rings clanking against his teeth. He let Jasper keep them inside for a while, rearranging his mouth and making a mess of his chin, now streaky with saliva. Every time he pressed a nail at the back of his throat he could feel the bitter tingle at the corners of his eyes, the tears pooling and then hiding just to reveal themselves again after a second graze.
Jasper never waited for his fingers to be wet enough before sliding into Guy; he always wanted everything to still hurt a little. He forced his hand out of Guy's hold and brought it back down, pressing inside without a second thought, looking at Guy's wet lips parting just like he was sure his rim was doing, wrapped tight around two fingers. A third finger came shortly after, a warm huff escaping from between Guy's lips just like Jasper had always felt his heart doing as he sucked his blood from his throbbing neck artery, like his heart was beating just for him and it was getting tired. It surely hurt, and the boy with half lidded, drunk eyes under him was surely the same one who had left him miserable and bleeding on the kitchen floor.
Guy's mind was a constellation of glass shards, each a reverberation of reflected light, memories and sensations overlapping over one another and making it impossible to sort them out. The penthouse and the hotels merged as it was almost impossible to distinguish who was Jasper and who were the men Guy used to fuck in rooms way too similar to the one they were into. Jasper heard the suffocated gunshots, Guy's tears or laughs as he saw blood staining the floor, the rage and the weariness as he cocked the gun to someone’s head.
Jasper already knew everything, having already seen him blooming on the sidewalk in slow mornings after having pushed the hotel glass door open, but seeing those memories from Guy's perspective made him feel like he had lost the opportunity to provide growth and shelter to the one he loved, to teach him things before he was forced to learn them on his own. Guy brushed Jasper’s thoughts off, making him see how much he liked to spread his legs through the night and imagine it was Jasper, the one buried inside him, to feel rivulets of pain slide down his legs and kill the one who had done it to him just to be even. The bullets slid easily inside the gun and even more easily inside a man's body. The first thing Guy had learned was how to put on a gun silencer in the dark.
Kiddo, you really know the moves.
Guy's lips lifted in a smile, as far as his light headed whimpers let them. Jasper stopped for a moment, leaving his three fingers in even if the slightest scrape of nails was enough to make Guy shiver, tight and supple around him just like the inside of his mouth had felt a moment before. Jasper lifted up one of Guy's legs to dive deeper, the cold rings marking the sensitive skin as Guy let out a pained hiss.
Guy was eager to let Jasper know what he could do now, and the images he was projecting into his mind told that he could have easily done each of those things even when he was still with him. Jasper already knew it, and as much as he had wanted to see his unsettling beauty and rage unravel he mostly needed him to be quiet and compliant, denying him every other reality apart from theirs and making it impossible for him to even imagine a world outside their own. But he was moving alone, now, the strength to fight back holding down both his body and the overflowing feelings he was pouring inside Jasper. Through the healed scars of his biting Guy mocked him, shouting that he had finally had the chance to move on, momentarily forgetting that he had had to kill him first.
Guy eased himself around Jasper’s fingers, finding it harder and harder to conceal the memories of his withdrawal and his nightmares from him. If Jasper noticed it, he didn’t let anything slip out, not even a shadow over his pleased smile as Guy urged them closer, the white flash of fangs near his cheek. The silver rings sat uncomfortably against his reddened skin.
Who even are you now?
I am no one. Guy bit his lip, hoping Jasper couldn’t see anything apart from his face and could feel his warmth like he had last felt his own a hundred or little more years before. I'm whatever the day brings.
When they were together they had a way of moving that for Guy had never been comparable to what he had done with other men. He hadn’t recognized them as he stripped naked and took the lead; he started to remember how Jasper felt taking up every inch of his skin the moment he had bared his fangs inside his mouth without tearing and drawing blood.
Jasper let his fingers slip out, the pants and belt around his hips the way Guy had lowered them when they were still sitting. Guy's legs ached, but he still pressed Jasper’s crotch towards his, already feeling precum smeared over his rim. When Jasper entered him, it was nothing like closing his eyes in a dark hotel room while a stranger thrusted between his legs, and not even like that violent shadow that ravaged him in his dreams. Jasper was still the one who had sipped at his whiskey just before welcoming the knife’s blade in him, and to Guy, even as he moved over him on that bed, his chest was still wide open and hollow, a gaping hole through which he could easily slide his hands and arms.
Guy laid on his back, the room's ceiling hovering far too close to the tip of his nose. To his left side, the curve of Jasper’s chest, the hems of his shirt still partially covering it. Guy propped himself on one elbow and quickly unbuttoned the rest of the shirt with clumsy fingers; Jasper didn’t stop him, taking everything off when he was done. The fabric had revealed nothing, Jasper’s chest unmarred and smooth like Guy remembered it from the last time he had seen him without clothes. He climbed on top of him, lowering his face on the spots he was sure he had cut through with his knife, his sides, over his hips, around the navel. He inspected every part of Jasper’s chest and stretched the skin with his fingers just to let it go and see how it readjusted itself over the bones and the organs.
He traced the trajectory of the blade, imagining roughly patched up skin under his index finger; the scar would have run along the whole length of Jasper’s chest, smaller scars converging in it where he had torn and cut reaching up at the stomach and down at the hips. It would have taken months to heal, if he had been human, and after it his chest would have never been the same, an uncomfortable tug at the scraps of skin glued together every time he moved his arms.
Since he had left, Guy had only waited for the moment in which he would have finally seen Jasper’s skin all patched up, bearing all over himself the traces of the early morning in which Guy had robbed him of his skin and run away; now, he could just pretend to see something, the phantom of a cut that had started to heal the moment it had been opened. Guy tore and scraped his teeth along it, gnawing with round teeth that barely produced dents in the skin. He bit and sucked, licking wet trails like his tongue was made of sharp steel, willing to do everything again if it would have meant that a memory of him would have forever marked Jasper’s skin.
Jasper buried a hand in Guy’s hair, feeling only a light tickle where the boy’s mouth was pretending to bite off bleeding chunks of skin. He let out a laugh, tracing Guy’s small canines with the thumb of the other hand as Guy bit it too. Hey, easy there, tiger.
Guy raised his eyes, wet and filled with disappointment and something close to nostalgia of a time that he had let slip from between his fingers even if he didn’t want to. Jasper just caressed his cheek, fingers lingering over the swollen bottom lip.
If it makes you feel better, it was a real bitch to heal.
Guy fell to his side again and buried his face between Jasper’s neck and shoulder, trying to swallow down tears and holding his arm like someone was threatening to tear them away from one another. To the tear that he felt sliding down his shoulder Jasper could just say: I would have gladly kept it if I could, meaning: I’ll never get to make you stay.
When Guy woke up, light was peeking from behind the curtains and the room was empty except for him. On his forehead and on the tip of his tongue, the fleeting trace of Jasper’s address, left there by his last touches right before dawn.