by Damon Suede
“No. Like Kim Kardashian.”
Trip snorted, then immediately covered his mouth.
“Don’t hide.” Silas reached for Trip’s wrist. “I love seeing you laugh.” He laced their fingers and planted their hands in his lap. “Don’t hide it.”
Trip nodded and kissed Silas’s knuckles, then traced the marks. Trip turned his palm over. “These are scars, huh?”
Silas twisted and stroked Trip’s ribs. “Summer I was fourteen, I put up a barbwire fence on my uncle’s farm over vacation: cedar posts. Big ugly Finn, he was. My parents knew I was gay, but my uncle wanted to ‘make a man outta his fat-ass faggot nephew.’” He spat Uncle Roosa’s words. “A month that took us. And my hands bled every night. Sunburn and splinters.” Silas didn’t bother to fight the rasp that seeped into his voice as he talked about home. He could almost hear june bugs.
Trip ran light fingers over the weathered roughness. “They’re not cuts, though.”
Silas shrugged. “Naw. Not exactly. Kept getting infected, and the clinic was too far, so my aunt soaked ’em in a bowl of hydrogen peroxide. I lost twenty-two pounds ’cause I kept throwing up in the heat.” Silas rubbed his palms together so the skin whispered.
Trip crooked his head closer.
“My father almost killed him when he found out. For real: tire iron.” He snorted mirthlessly at the memory of his big ole dad screaming and chasing his brother around the sweltering yard while his mama fussed over his raw fingers. “A great day.” He grinned. “I mean, I was never gonna be a hand model, was I? Alabama?” He squeezed a loose fist.
Trip frowned but said nothing. His eyes said plenty.
“Rest of break, my mama cried and tried alla home remedy shit to fix ’em. Arnica, aloe vera, witch hazel. They healed up eventually. Learned to moisturize, that’s for damn sure. Almost by accident, I started fixing my acne. Football. Humping the bed. And somehow, I started doing makeup for plays and sculpting and got the hell-’n’-gone out. My asshole uncle.” He stared through the bricks at the memory.
Trip laced their fingers.
“You like ’em.” Not a question.
“Ungh. You kidding?” Trip pressed his face into the palm. “I jerk off thinking about ’em.” He let his head fall to the side to let Silas run it over his ear and throat and chest. “Weeks now.”
“He died of stomach cancer a couple years back. I didn’t go. Not even to piss on the grave.” Silas scowled. “Still hate the smell of cedar.”
“Know something funny?” Trip tipped his head all the way to the side like a little boy. “First date. Your hands were one of the first things I noticed. So beautiful.” He pulled the hand to his mouth and kissed the palm.
Silas examined the rough marks. “I wouldn’t fix ’em now. They’re part of me.”
“Good. I think they’re the—” Trip kissed the back. “—sexiest paws I’ve ever had on me.”
“Idle hands and all that.” Silas squirmed against all that lean muscle and smiled. “Maybe it’s ’bout time for me to apologize to you again.”
“I hear tell Alabama boys get awful horny.”
“You heard that?”
“Yup.” Trip nosed him doubtfully. “Somewhere.”
Silas grinned and nuzzled his ear. “Well. That might have been true, once upon a time.” He sucked the lobe and pressed his teeth to it.
“Yeah?” Trip rumbled. “Once upon a time?”
“Well….” Silas rolled over on top of him. “Twice if you’re lucky.”
TRIP didn’t wake until the noise from Greenwich woke him. He flicked a curtain and daylight roared in, shaggy and fierce as a lion. Not quite March, but good as.
They must have fallen asleep again at some point; when, he couldn’t say. They’d migrated from couch to bed to tub and back to bed in the course of the night, his dick raw and his nuts drained to a dribble.
The clock read ten-something. Silas wasn’t in bed, which made Trip anxious until he heard someone humming and poking around in the kitchen on the other side of the studio. He smelled butter. His bed had no view of the rest of his apartment, but hearing Silas in his space felt so right, he dozed off again.
Trip woke for good curled against Silas, who raised a thick hand to Trip’s face and ran a thumb over his lip. Grinning, Silas leaned in for a quick kiss. His stubble was so long now it felt tickly soft. “Hi, stranger.” He smelled like cookie dough.
“I think you—” Trip got a grip before he said something embarrassing. “You’d look handsome with a beard.”
Silas’s face was gentle and unguarded. “Yeah?”
“Well, you’re not too hideous without one.” Trip leaned forward slowly for a kiss.
“I been wanting a secret identity. Maybe it’d disguise me better.” Silas brought their mouths together, a warm dry press that ended in smushed smiles. He twisted and snagged a piece of buttered biscuit. “Check it: cooking occurred.” He offered a bite, which Trip accepted.
They smiled and chewed. An easy silence settled over them. Soon the plate was empty and the crumbs licked away.
Silas took a breath, and took a moment as he twisted a fistful of the satiny sheets.
They’d spent the whole night together, and still Trip itched to share more stories, for them to know each other better. A million secrets crowded into his mouth to be shared, but he still couldn’t read Silas.
Finally, Trip nudged him. “What’s up?”
“On Valentine’s, I read your script about a hundred times. Studied it, actually. And tried to see what scared me.” Silas crimped his mouth. “’Cause maybe it scared you too.”
Trip laughed. “Probably.”
“I think I figured something out. I brought you a present. Like a Valentine.” Silas stretched over the side of the bed. “I thought and drafted. The way I’d build a proposal if I was on a movie.”
Trip blinked, a little off-balance.
Silas twisted back, cradling a sketchbook and a charcoal pencil. “Film people just say ‘monster,’ and they’ve got no fucking idea what that means. Writers or directors. I dunno. Alien was designed by an artist.” He opened to a blank page.
“Giger knew how to scare people.”
Silas’s charcoal flashed over the sketchbook. He frowned in concentration, but he didn’t look up. “People think that if you stick scales or fangs or horns on something, that makes it scary. Duh. It’s not like Bambi or Nemo terrorizes anyone. It’s fucking context.”
Trip squeezed Silas and hooked his chin over his shoulder to watch the drawing take shape before his eyes. A massive hammer, the size of a barrel at its business end. And a scarred hand holding it. A pilgrim, maybe. Sorta Little House on the Prairie, but with manly shoulders and a scarred mouth.
Silas muttered, “’S’bullshit. The best villain is the thing that proves your hero wrong. Whatever murders hope. Y’know?” He bit his tongue like a little boy. His strokes carved the page into segments: dark and bright. “Monsters don’t wreck the world by smashing it. They corrode everything around just by existing. Right? Like acid.”
The charcoal slashed at the paper so that the clothes darkened and lengthened into formal robes carved from shadow. The hateful hammer showed a stark Christian cross on the flat surface of its head. The handle was as long as the grim gent holding it. A monk? A priest. Too boring.
“Okay…. I thought about Scratch. What he needs is something to fight forever. But he can’t be a modern, because Scratch has to be old. History’s romantic anyways. A little sadism, so you can get twisted from time to time. And you want your bad guy to be a little sexy, too, ’cause I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you’re gonna get him shucked bare, too, at some point.”
“Hey!” Trip squawked
“Don’t sass me, bub. You—” He pinched the head of Trip’s cock gently. “—are a kinky sumbitch. This has been established credibly.”
Silas was right. To sustain itself, a comic needed a cast. Scratch needed to meet his match.
“Ev
ery hero needs a nemesis. Batman and Joker. Professor X and Magneto.”
Trip winced, clamping his mouth as he tried to articulate the thought. He tapped the sketch. “But he’s not like a straw dummy or a dumb porno cartoon. Not like a ‘super’ villain with tights and a lava pit.”
“Plus it gives you more story to write down the line.”
The antagonist who emerged from the charcoal strokes had the scary daddy vibe of S&M cartoons, but under the robe he wore homespun clothes from another time. A crazy Dom? An executioner? That seemed too Silver Age. And a big-ass handle in one knotty hand. “But why the hammer? Thor has a hammer.”
“Not like this one.”
A carpenter? A maniacal blacksmith? A Hammer Horror Easter egg? The drawing leaked menace onto the paper, ramrod posture cut in stark shadows.
Silas smudged a puritan collar into place and a weather-beaten face, pocked with shadows: an insane Yankee witchfinder.
Trip touched the paper. “A judge.” And it was: a looming ye-olde-timey magistrate straight out of Salem. He had a lipless, self-righteous sneer; robes hung on his ropy muscle. “Jesus.”
“But not Vincent Price. I mean. He’s scary and all, but his Witchfinder always feels prissy to me.”
Trip protested in a higher pitch. “I love that movie.”
“Yeah, but do you want to fuck him?” Silas looked askance, really asking the question. “So we want something more on the border between kinky preacher and abusive uncle.”
Trip stared at the pad in his hands.
A gorgeous grin lit up Silas’s scruffy face as he wedged in the buckles and the starched cuffs. “I thought about the touching thing. What you said, that your demon has to touch people, so I figured it would need to be someone who kept folks apart.”
“Fuck, this is smarter than any of my concept drawings.” Trip tapped the grim puritan figure. “That right there is a successful series waiting to happen.”
Silas built up the boots over the calves, gave them square toes and modest buckles, like something stolen off a dead soldier. His pencil crept over the stern jaw, adding bristly muttonchops.
“And he even has a prop, like you wanted. A weapon for the fight scenes, so you don’t have to use glowy superpower hoo-hah to fill the panels.” The judge gripped the giant hammer with tight, pale fists. “I pulled a bunch of groovy Salem research.” Silas added lettering to the carved handle, “Thou shalt not….”
Suddenly Trip realized what he was seeing. “A fucking gavel! It’s a gigantic gavel.”
Silas bowed his head and smiled. “Ivory. ’Cause he’s fulla crap. See? Fucking hypocrite. In the script your guy rules the Horn Gate, and this thing’s like the sledgehammer of bullshit.”
“Boy, do you know me.” Trip tapped the page where the judge glowered back at them, barely trapped on the page. “He’s my villain.” He blinked and plucked at his lip in embarrassment. “Genius.”
“Yeah?” Silas turned his face toward Trip’s and pressed closer, scrubbing their chests together a moment. “Well, I do have a thing for sexy monsters.”
“Fuck off.” Trip shoved him playfully. Magnetically, the page full of scowling Judge drew his eyes and hands again. Trip found his voice. “He’s so….” A warm smile. “Horrible.”
Silas scowled, as if about to defend his work.
“No, I mean… scary, ugly, and I still just-a-little wanna fuck him. He’s my monster. Phobia. He is. He’s the whole deal.” Trip sighed in satisfaction. “Like… a punishment, but I’d still jizz myself. Harsh daddy with a jumbo tool.”
The worry between Silas’s bronze eyebrows seemed to melt into relief. “I’m really glad.”
“Oh hell yeah.” Trip rubbed the page with the flat of his palm. “Exactly what the story doctor ordered. He feels kind of, I dunno, important and serious, even. He’s gonna make the whole book seem cooler than it really is.” He looked up. “Why didn’t I think of this? Him.”
“You did.” Silas opened his hand. “You been dancing around this fucker for a month. I just heard you do it. The whole time you been hunting for your demon story. Think about it: Sexiness. Punishment. Rules. Shame. Judgment. You kept saying it. So he is my Valentine present.”
“I didn’t even hear myself.” Trip wagged his head slowly, like he’d woken from an oxycodone coma. “And you listened.”
“Well, yeah. I kinda dig listening to you, y’know?” Silas’s devilish gaze shone and shifted.
Trip covered his mouth with his hand and prayed it wasn’t shaking. His eyes pricked. Why am I sad? He swallowed, unable to process. Not sad. He swallowed again. “No, I mean…. You paid attention to what I said.”
“Of course I did.” Silas looked away.
Trip touched the page again. How many hours and hours had Silas bent over this book? How had Silas known? Had anyone ever taken the time to read something he hadn’t written yet? Trip’s breath wavered high in his chest. His fear and faith and gratitude gathered in him sure as a sneeze but had nowhere to go, no safe release. Instead he just waited for Silas to understand, since he obviously did.
Silas blinked. “At one point I was gonna cut off a hand.”
“Yeah?” Trip watched Silas as he spoke. For some reason, everything Silas said sounded like a fabulous idea.
“Make it a scarred stump, but I didn’t want to box you in.”
Trip covered the right hand with his thumb and squinted. “Right. But I love the stump idea. Awesome to draw.” He flipped onto his back and reached for the sketchbook again. “So how many of these did you do?”
“I did a couple.” Silas sounded sheepish as he turned the page to reveal a side view of the gavel in high relief. “This is a sketch, but I did a full character design. Y’know, in case you liked it. Costume pieces, even.”
On the subsequent page, he’d drawn a loving close-up of the buckled shoes. The clerical collar, the mildewed robe split wide enough to show skin. The next illustration showed the judge naked from the front, side, and back: gray-fuzzed chest, ropey muscle, tight foreskin, swollen joints.
“The Judge.” Trip chewed his lip. “Mr. Goolsby, I think you just finished my script for me. I know what the second half is, now.”
“For real?” Silas ran his finger over the three-quarter. “I did a real 3-D section, if you want. Nudes and all, angles and elevations. He has a whole workup, just like I’d do for Kurt on a game. But only if ya want.” He held his hands up. “I give you full permission to use or ditch or alter anything. He’s a present.” Grin. “For the future.”
Trip opened the cover, and there was the Judge again, this time rendered in serrated marker, a close-up three-quarter of his grim Yankee face and a full-length study of him scowling in his robes with that pitiless gavel in one grizzled hand.
“Ugh. Narsty. Even naked, he’s a bible beater.” The figure radiated stern, dick-shriveling displeasure.
“Zero sense of humor, right? And I put scars on his whanger ’cause I figured that’d give you shit to explain later.” Silas flexed his knuckles. “Plus I figured anybody this uptight would have huge balls.”
Trip laughed. They rode high like anxious tangerines behind the short, thick penis….
“Neck down, he’s a ringer for my shitbag coach in high school. Coach Harden.” Silas side-eyed Trip. “Yup. Homophobic, racist, born-again asshole. Terrorized the queer kids. Fucked the new teachers. Naturally, I had an awful crush on him. He got busted videotaping the girls’ showers. Prick.”
Trip goggled at the paper. “Wait… you had a crush? On him?”
“Well, not this scary monster version. He was very… I dunno… aggressive. Butch. His dick was always half-hard, like he needed to jab it somewhere wet, pronto. And I was this little butterball with bad skin and an underbite, uglier than homemade soap.”
Trip scrutinized the Judge’s knotted cock, as if the scars and veins drew some kind of map. All of it felt potent and personal, as if Silas needed to confess something to him and this was the best way to get
it out on the table. He’d need to chew on that for a bit, but somehow, this monster needed solving. The rough hands, the hairy legs showed obsessive precision. “Does this mean I need to start carrying a big ivory hammer to get your attention?”
“You got one already.” And without blinking, Silas took a handful of Trip’s engorged shaft. “Where do you think I got the idea?” He giggled and bit Trip’s neck, taking bites of laughter out of him. “Slam that monster down on me while I beg for mercy.” Again a flicker of something serious and deep in his eyes.
Later.
“You.” Trip gripped his erection roughly, making the ropey veins bulge and the head darken to plum. “Have been.” He smacked it against Silas’s thigh. “Judged.”
Silas watched as if hypnotized; his tongue slipped out to wet his lower lip, but he never blinked. His own erection strained, trapped inside Trip’s too-small sweats.
Trip eyed the heartbeat as it drummed in the hollow of Silas’s throat.
A ray of buttery light snuck through the dusty windows and landed on Silas, gilding his hard haunch. He noticed and slapped his butt, grinning innocently. “That’s God giving you a hint, Mr. Spector. I think a little sodomy is indicated.”
A drip of precum fell from Trip’s crown onto the sunlit flank. They both dissolved into snickers.
“Jeez. You’re welcome!” Silas gave him a quick peck on the nose. “I’m gonna squirt in your pants.”
“Hold that thought.” Trip held up a knobby finger and hopped out of bed.
Trip trotted to his clothes closet and stuck his arm in, fishing for the little hook on the wall behind his suits. Got it.
“Whatcha doing?” Silas dropped his knee toward the sheet and his balls shifted in the golden light. He-Man sated.
Trip came back to the mattress. He held out his hand. “So you can get in. Is that okay?”
“What is it?”
“Key.” Trip gestured toward his front door. “For you.”
“I never—” Silas shut his mouth suddenly and exhaled. “Yeah. That’s okay. I need to get you one. You should have one too. For me… my place.”
