Page 38 of Beneath the Indigo Sky

Namid

I don’t know how to not want Jayce. It’s been a month since we spent the evening together on my porch, and every day, it gets harder to keep my hands to myself when we’re together. I want to slip my fingers between his when we walk down Main Street with our coffees. I want to lay my head on his shoulder in the park, pull him into my arms in the shop, and brush my lips across his every time he smiles at me.

When we spent the night lying side by side, watching the stars, I wanted to slide over and curl up against him with my head on his chest. I wanted to kiss him and ask him to stay. I wanted to take him to bed and show him that I could be enough if he’d let me, that I’d give him everything I am, and that I’d be everything he could ever want.

I can’t be what he wants though. I can’t kiss him or touch him or tell him he’s everything I’ve ever wanted. He’s straight and he’s my friend, and in all the time we’ve spent together, he’s never felt anything remotely romantic for me. For one brief moment when he showed me his studio, I thought…maybe, but then it was gone. He cares for me and he enjoys being with me, but there is nothing more. There is no rush of joy or excitement when he sees me. There is no longing, no want, no need. He doesn’t feel the way I feel. I wish I could at least pretend that he does.

All I feel anymore is Jayce. All I feel is desire and frustration and love, and there is nowhere for any of it to go.

I need to get him out of my system. I need to fuck into someone hard and fast and watch their fingers curl into the sheets as they scream my name. I need to lick the taste of salt from the back of a stranger’s neck and dig my fingers into sharp hip bones until bruises are left behind. I need to dull my need for him with something more than my own hand and memories of his smile haunting me. I need to lose myself in another body until I stop wondering what his looks like undressed. I need something. I need someone. Anyone.

Tourists usually stay out of the old part of town. They rent small cabins along the river and rooms in the tiny condo complex that was built specifically to bring summer tourism money into our small town. Once in a while, they stray far enough during the day to eat at the diner instead of the summer restaurant or pick up cereal and milk and apples at the grocery store, but that’s about it. They normally book locals as wilderness guides to take them hiking in the woods and fishing on the river. They sit in the sun and enjoy the trees and remember what it’s like not to have six a.m. meetings and eight p.m. kids’ basketball games every day.

The tourists who come to this town are mostly families, parents with their 2.5 children who have saved up enough money to go somewhere other than Disneyland for their one-week-a-year summer vacation. There are also men’s groups - packs of two, four, or six men in their fifties or sixties who have talked about fishing in Alaska together since they met in college and are finally making their dreams come true. There are fathers trying to build memories with their teenage sons and young couples on their honeymoons. They have evening glasses of whiskey on their small balconies and split bottles of wine while they barbecue in the fire pits at their rented condos or guzzle martinis in the restaurant bar. They don’t venture to the Hole-in-the-Wall bar on Main Street.

Occasionally, there are other tourists. There are groups of men in their twenties and thirties who come for bachelor’s weekends before one of their members gets married and abandons them forever. Rarely these groups do find their way to the bar. Once in a great while, one of their ranks is gay or bi or curious-only-while-on-vacation-in-the-middle-of-nowhere.

I’ve spent the past three weeks at the bar on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s grating on me, the onslaught of unchecked drunken emotion that I can barely manage to keep at arm’s length. The whiskey helps. I sit at the bar night after night, trying to find someone, anyone, to help me carve out the longing in my chest for a fraction of a moment. Shelly slides me over a third drink. We’re not friends. Before Jayce, I never really knew what it was like to have a friend, but she’s kind to me, and she’s one of the few people in town who doesn’t feel uncomfortable simply because I’m around. Aside from Ken, she’s the only person in town who knows I’m gay, and it doesn’t seem to bother her. I don’t make a habit of trying to pick up men in her bar - I’ve only attempted it a handful of times in the decade I’ve lived here, and I’ve only been successful twice. The last time was four years back. That was the last time I had sex.

I’m sitting in the corner, watching the throng of bodies laughing and dancing while I nurse a bourbon and a headache, when a hand brushes across my lower back. The lust that rolls off the stranger is unmistakable, and it’s strong enough that I’m almost sure everyone else is somehow able to feel it, even without my abilities. As the man leans over the bar and orders another tequila shot, his hand lingers on my T-shirt, one fingertip slipping lower to brush the thin strip of exposed skin between my shirt and belt. He leaves a twenty for Shelly, downs his shot, and heads for the front door without a backward glance.

I follow.

He’s leaning against the bar’s red brick façade, lighting a cigarette when I walk out, and when I walk the nine steps to the edge of the building and turn down the alley, he follows.

I pluck the cigarette from his hand and flick it into the street before hooking my fingers through his belt loops and pulling his body close. His mouth crushes mine, the taste of tequila and tobacco and ash filling my senses as he grinds against me. He’s desperate as his hands work the buttons of my jeans. Good. I’m desperate too. I need this. I need the scent of bar and smoke and liquor, so different from leather and cinnamon and motor oil, to fill my senses. I need to yank and groan and feel teeth on my skin, so different from the gentleness that fills my soul when I’m around Jayce.

I shove the stranger’s pants over his hips. He does the same to mine, and then I’m in his hand. He has our cocks crushed together, and he’s stroking fast, dry skin on dry skin, and it’s so rough it nearly hurts. It’s too cold to be doing this outside, but that’s good too. It’s different and distracting and perfect, and I let my head fall back against the cold brick and try not to think about work-roughened hands and auburn scruff and pale jade eyes hovering over me.

It's not working. My soul feels him all the time now, and it’s almost like he’s with me, like he’s close. He’s felt close all night. I didn’t see him in the bar as I glanced through the writhing, sweaty bodies and tried to sort through the emotional onslaught that accompanied them. I felt him, but I didn’t see him. I always feel him now. He’s always with me, even when he’s not.

I squeeze my eyes tighter and groan as a mouth sucks along the underside of my jaw and a rough beard scratches the skin of my neck. It’s not Jayce’s beard. I lean down, catching the mouth with mine, demanding the taste of smoke and the tongue that thrusts itself just a bit too hard down my throat. I need this stranger to make me forget.

Jayce

The pale skin of his throat almost glows in the silver moonlight; it’s slender and strong, the tendons rippling as his body tenses in pleasure. His head is tipped back, his raven-black hair resting against the crumbling red brick wall. His eyes are closed, and he’s lost in the sensation of the man’s hands moving across his body, across his skin.

They don’t know that I can see them. Even though they’re technically in public, the space behind the bar is largely hidden. It’s only visible for a few feet and only if you’re walking along the sidewalk close to the bar, which few do this time of night. The nights here are cold, and there aren’t many people stupid enough to linger outside for long. Tourists rarely make it to this part of town, and none of the regulars inside are likely to clear out of the bar before closing time. I didn’t see Namid inside. If I had, I’d have asked to join him, and maybe the night would have ended differently. Maybe I wouldn’t be standing here, frozen in place, watching a stranger touch him.

They know they’re on stolen time. The stranger’s hand is rushing, wrapped around both of their hard cocks over the top of open jeans that have only been shoved down far enough for him to gain access. The man leans in, his lips brushing along Namid’s jaw until he leans forward to meet the man’s lips in a kiss. The way their mouths move is raw and desperate and aggressive. So is the way the man’s hand is moving between them.

Namid is so beautiful like this, undone and lost to the world - his chest pulsing as his breaths rush from him, his long fingers curling against the brick beside his hip as they search for something to grasp.

I nearly fall to my knees with the weight of the realization that I want to be the one touching him. I want to trail my fingertips along the curve of his throat. I want to be the one to lean in and taste his collarbone, sucking blood to the skin in prickly tingles until he gasps and whimpers. I want him naked and writhing against me as I take him apart inch by inch until he’s keening and begging incoherently, until he’s not even sure what he’s begging for. I want him to slide down my throat. I want his fingers to clutch at my hair as he thrusts into me, taking pleasure that only I can offer him. I want him to shatter in my arms over and over until he’s spent and sated and sleeping against my chest.

Their kiss breaks, and Namid’s head rolls to the side against the brick, his eyelids fluttering as he squints into the darkness, almost as if he’s looking for something. His eyes snap open as his gaze finds mine through the dark, and the world stills. I no longer see the man possessively touching him. Namid no longer seems to feel him. It’s just the two of us. This is what it would feel like to stare into his eyes as I touch him.

Then it’s gone.

His eyes rip from mine, and he’s shaking his head no and pushing the man away and talking quickly. I’ve already ruined this for him, already been caught watching when I should have passed by. He knows I saw, and he’s not going to understand why I was standing there staring at them. I can’t explain why I was doing it, can’t tell him that I’d sat in the darkest corner of the bar with half a beer and a plate of half-eaten fries for hours because I hadn’t known what else to do with myself when he’d told me he had other plans tonight when I’d asked if he wanted to have dinner. I don’t know why I glanced down the small opening into the ally instead of walking with my head down like I always do. I can’t explain the life-altering epiphany that was the view of his throat in the moonlight. I can’t explain that I want to be that stranger. I can’t tell him that in a single instant, my world has turned itself upside down. I can’t tell him that I’ve realized I love him.

I turn and nearly run to my truck. I have the door open and one foot inside before I hear Namid’s voice behind me. I don’t look back. I hop into the seat and shut the door behind me as I twist the key.

He’s here now, just outside my window. His lips are swollen, and there is a red patch on his throat where it’s been rubbed raw by a beard. Not my beard. The top button of his pants is still undone. He’s talking to me, but I don’t hear his words. I shake my head and back the truck into the empty street. I can’t tear my eyes away from the sight of him as I pull away. He’s shaking his head, and his arm is stretched in my direction. The corners of his eyes are glistening, and his lips move in the same motion again and again.

“Please.”

I drive away.

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