A shared inhale and exhale.
Everything in the room exchanged glances.
What’s going on?
I don’t know.
What do we do now?
Sleep.
Seriously? We’re actually taking a nap now?
“Hey,” Jav said.
“Mm?”
“Put your head down here.”
Stef pivoted around, putting his pillow kitty-corner to Jav’s now.
“I’m not usually so boring a date,” Jav said. “I’m just really tired.”
“I get it.” Propped on an elbow, Stef reached to set his hand on Jav’s back. He glided up Jav’s spine and Jav sighed.
“Feels nice.”
All the way up between shoulder blades and the topmost bumps of vertebrae, then Stef’s fingers dug into Jav’s hair. Jav sighed again, then reached a hand behind to grab hold of his T-shirt collar and pull it off.
Stef rose up on an elbow. At the base of Jav’s neck, the word Trueblood was tattooed in black ink, along with a set of coordinates.
“What’s Trueblood?”
“My sad story. Which I’ll tell you someday.”
“All right.” He ran his palm down Jav’s spine, then up again.
“I like how your rings feel on me,” Jav said, the words slurry. “Was thinking about it on the bridge.”
“Go to sleep.” Stef’s mind was blurring at the edges. His hand on Jav’s back, he fell quickly under and didn’t dream.
It wasn’t a long snooze. He woke and watched Jav sleep for a long time, staring at the tattoo on his broad back. Noiselessly, he reached for his phone and looked up the coordinates on the internet. They were for Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The name made his eyebrows furrow, a bell of memory ringing from far away. He slid off the couch and pattered on socked feet to the laptop on his desk.
Shanksville is a borough in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, approximately 75 miles southeast from Pittsburgh. Shanksville came to international attention during the September 11 attacks when United Airlines Flight 93 bound for San Francisco crashed in adjacent Stonycreek Township…
“Shit,” he said slowly.
Heart thumping, he typed “Flight 93 manifest” into the search box and soon a list of names was before him.
Rothenberg, Mark David, 52, Scotch Plains, NJ
Snyder, Christine Ann, 32, Kailua, HI
Talignani, John, 74, Staten Island, NY
Trueblood, Philip, 31, Bronx, NY
Wainio, Honor Elizabeth, 27, Baltimore, MD
“Hey,” Jav said, sitting up, his hair mashed flat on one side.
“Hey.”
“Holy crap, how long was I out?”
“It’s twenty forty-two,” Stef said. “New York seceded. We changed everything.”
Jav smiled, stretching. “What are you doing?”
“Snooping.”
“Snooping who?”
“You.”
Jav gave a disgusted grunt as he walked over. “It’s those damn nudes, isn’t it?”
“No. Nothing fun like that.”
“What, my rap sheet?” Jav pulled on his T-shirt, then peered over Stef’s shoulder. “Ah,” he said. “You found my sad story.” He leaned his butt against the desk, crossing his bare feet.
“Sorry.” Stef felt a little miserable. “I don’t know why I did it sneakily instead of just asking you.”
“It’s fine,” Jav said, shrugging. “It’s not something I talk about a lot. I don’t really know how.”
“Were you with him?”
“We were going to talk about it when he got back from California,” Jav said. “We’d hung out the entire summer in a weird holding pattern. Me being quasi-closeted and him not being able to get a bead on me or what I was about. But gradually, I opened the door a little and he got a little braver. And we had this one…”
“Night?”
Jav shook his head and his smile was fragile. “Twenty minutes? Maybe? This little pocket of time where we were kissing in my kitchen and I leaned into it. Leaned into myself and into my life and thought, Yeah, this is it. This is something I am and something I want. I was feeling his skin and tasting his mouth and pushing up against him and grinding down hard. It was everything I wanted. I was right on the edge of my life. He said, ‘When I get back, we’re having a conversation about this.’”
“Oh, man,” Stef murmured, running fingertips along his brow.
“He left to go home and pack. He called me from Newark the next morning. Checking to see if I was all right.”
“Were you?”
“I was. Everything about me felt right. Thinking about me with him felt more than right.” Jav motioned to the computer screen. “The rest is American history.”
Stef slowly nodded, staring at the names on the manifest, all the lives and love stories cut short. “I’m really sorry.”
“It was a bad day,” Jav said.
They were quiet a while. Quiet, but close.
“I like you so fucking much,” Stef said. He’d never in his life said such a thing to a man.
“I like you, too,” Jav said, as if the words were bubbles on his tongue. He jerked his head toward the couch. “For what it’s worth, that was some of the best sleep I’ve had in a while.”
“What do you want to do tonight?”
“Sleep with you.”
Stef smiled. Heart thumping hard in his chest, he reached to touch the ship’s wheel inked on Jav’s forearm. “All right.”
They went to a barbecue joint on Charlton Place. Jav wasn’t sure if Stef phoned ahead to friends, asking them to meet up, or if this was one of his regular hangouts and he had the kind of friends who randomly showed up. Either scenario only made him like Stef more.
I like him, he thought. God, I really fucking like him.
He met Aedith and Katie, two art therapists Stef worked with. Another co-worker, Beau, a giant man with a giant beard and a diminutive girlfriend. Assorted friends from grad school, other jobs, a lifetime.
They were all cool. Some pulled up stools and grabbed menus, others only hung at the tall table for a drink and a chat, then moved on.
“Good to meet you,” they said, shaking Jav’s hand when they arrived.
Or, “Take care, see you again soon, okay?” with a handshake as they left.
They headed to another Chelsea bar. Dark oak, hip atmosphere, couches and candlelight and cognac. More people Stef knew. Names and stories.
“Jav, this is Kim Bonner.”
“Everyone calls me Bunny,” she said, shaking Jav’s hand.
“We met in the mental hospital,” Stef said.
“Literally,” Bunny said. “We interned together at Creedmoor Psychiatric.” She clinked her lowball glass against Stef’s. “Good times, my friend.”
I can’t think when I had a better time, Jav thought. It was a line he used on clients. It felt good to use it on himself for once. He was wearing one of Stef’s button-down shirts, which fit him perfectly. Everything about tonight fit perfectly.
“What do you do?” a woman asked him. “Wait, don’t tell me. You’re a model.”
Jav shook his head, laughing. “I’m a writer.”
“Oh?” Her glance over her snifter was skeptical. “Would I know any of your work?”
Her date gave an apologetic eye roll to Jav then looked away.
“Well,” Jav said, playing his best card. “The movie Bald? With Kristin Scott Thomas?”
The woman’s eyebrows slowly raised. “You wrote that?”
“I wrote the short story it was based on.”
Now her date was staring at Jav hard. “You’re Gil Rafael?”
“It’s my pen name, yes.”
The man’s eyes flicked to the woman, t
hen back to Jav. They held Jav’s gaze a confused moment, then returned to his date. “Honey, would you give us a minute?”
The woman’s expression trembled and, with a tight smile, she retreated.
“What’s your name again?” Jav asked.
“Bryce. Look… This is a little personal, but The Trade changed my life.”
“How so?”
“My brother died on Nine-Eleven and—”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no. I mean, thank you. But I was angry after. Pathologically, irrationally angry. I severed nearly every connection in my life. I broke my parents’ hearts. Sabotaged a half-dozen other relationships. I was fucked up.”
Jav nodded slowly. As he took a step closer to the moment, the rest of the bar receded into a blurred, buzzing mist.
“It’s a miracle anyone is even speaking to me right now,” Bryce said. “But a lot of my coming back around has to do with your book. And here’s the really fucked-up thing. I didn’t buy it. Nobody gave it to me. I found it stuffed in the seat flap on an Acela train to Boston. Just left there with a dry cleaning receipt as a bookmark. Left behind for me. You know?”
“I know.”
“I’m not even much of a reader. But I started it and it was like a spell, dude. I was sucked in and…” Bryce blinked a few times, cleared his throat. “Shit, this is emotional.”
“It’s okay.”
“It was like you were talking to me.” Bryce’s voice was a thick bubble. “It broke through, you know? It… I don’t know how else to say it, but it helped me stop being angry and let me be sad. I finally had that moment like Glenn Close in The Big Chill, curled on the shower floor crying my face off. When I mopped up and toweled off, I felt like I had some kind of hope.”
“I know,” Jav said. “I wrote it to heal myself, too. I had a buddy on Flight Ninety-Three and—”
“No fucking shit.”
“Yeah. I lost him and I shut down too. Big time.”
The two men regarded each other, an island of connection in the swirling nighttime crowd.
“If you get the chance, I’d love it if you could sign my copy,” Bryce said.
“Done. Absolutely.” Jav tucked his beer in his elbow and took out a card. “Call me. All right? We’ll get together and I’ll sign it.”
“Thanks.” A hesitating beat, then Bryce hugged him, his fists tapping Jav’s shoulder blades. “Man, I can’t believe I met you.”
“Nothing’s an accident.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you.”
A slap on Jav’s bicep then Bryce walked off, rubbing the hair at the back of his neck.
Stef brought over two shots of rum. “Appleton Estate, right?”
“Right.” Jav took one and raised it. “Con mucho abrazos, amor y besos.”
Stef tilted his chin. “Cheers?”
“You say, ‘pero no pesos.’”
“Pero no pesos,” Stef said.
They clinked glasses and threw their heads back.
“What’s it mean?” Stef asked.
“Hugs, love and kisses, but no money. It rhymes in Spanish so it’s cute, but it doesn’t translate.”
“Gotcha.”
“That guy read my book. Said it changed him.”
“Bryce? He was fucked up after Nine-Eleven.”
“Weren’t we all.”
Stef smiled at him and his dimple flickered. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your books changed a lot of people’s lives.”
“That was really cool,” Jav said slowly, taking a long, panoramic look around the new little life he was building. His gaze came back to Stef, who was staring at him.
“What?” Jav said.
“Nothing. Just… What I feel right now is usually what I feel with women.”
Jav smiled. “What I feel is nothing I’ve ever felt with women.”
Their eyes held.
“Want to split?” Stef asked.
“And go where?”
Stef regarded his shot glass as if he wished more were in it. “Home? My place, I mean?”
Jav’s belly was warm with rum, yet he could’ve used another shot himself. “All right.”
They were making out as soon as the door closed. Yanking off shirts, ripping open belts and dropping jeans, jerking and rubbing up against each other until they came, slumped against a wall, moaning in each other’s mouths.
“Jesus,” Stef said, his body giving a last twitch.
“Okay then,” Jav said, gasping. “I’ll just catch a cab. Goodnight.”
“Get the fuck in my bed, Landes.”
But they were both hungry and wide-awake now. They put their clothes back on, made sandwiches and watched some late night TV.
This doesn’t suck, Jav thought, settling back on the couch. He and Stef sat side-by-side, slouched down, socked feet on the coffee table.
“Wait, where’s Roman?” Stef said suddenly.
“He’s still up in Guelisten.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Which means I’m your prisoner.”
“That’s right.” Stef slumped lower, his head by Jav’s shoulder and all his warm, solid weight up against Jav’s side. He undid the strap of his watch and tossed it on the coffee table. A few minutes later, he took each of his rings off and set them in a little pile. Jav watched, mouth watering and groin tightening into a fist with each clink of metal on wood.
Trueblood regarded the silver rings, he thought. Piling up in the moonlight coming through the ship’s round window. For the Finch to come to him bare-handed was an honor most men wouldn’t realize, let alone experience.
Trueblood wasn’t most men.
Stef’s bare hand slid along his thigh, kneaded the muscle a little, then held still.
The Finch’s palms filled up with light. The flesh normally hidden by his rings shone brighter than silver.
Keeping his arms crossed, Jav reached fingertips and lightly drew his nails along Stef’s elbow. His chest was relaxed. His stomach calm. His expectations gone for the night. He turned his head and ran his mouth along Stef’s temple. Stef lifted his chin and his hand slid along Jav’s jaw. Slow kisses grew harder and needier until the couch couldn’t contain them anymore. Their bodies toppled, twisted and shifted around trying to get purchase. Finally Stef got up, shirtless and tousled, and led Jav by the wrist to his bedroom.
“Now get the fuck in my bed, Landes.”
“Which side?”
“All of it.”
Jav was thrown down on the mattress hard enough to bounce. Stef came crawling after, stopping with a knee on each side of Jav’s hips.
“You sure you’re not getting on a plane in the next seventy-two hours?” Jav said.
“No,” Stef said, holding Jav’s eyes as he unbuckled his belt. “And I’m not married.”
A desire Jav had never known took over his body. A hard, itching, all-consuming horniness that strangled him. His fingers wanted to grab, his teeth wanted to bite. The idea he would die if he didn’t get this human being in his hands and his mouth.
Right now.
Jav reached to curl his fingers around Stef’s jeans and give them a tug down his hips. Stef fell on his hands, pulling his legs free, then slid backward down the bed, dragging Jav’s pants with him.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a month,” he said. “Getting you naked in my bed.” He glided back up Jav’s body. Wings spread and mouth open. Hard against Jav’s stomach. One hand tight in Jav’s hair and the other reaching for the bedside table drawer.
Jesus Christ, what is happening?
It was the third time they…
Made love? Jav thought. Is this it? Are we having sex? Does this count?
Then his cock was in Stef’s lube-slick hand and all the blood in his
head, plus all his uncertainty, headed south to get a piece of the action.
His body howled like a wolf in heat. His knees fell open easily and his hands took greedy hold of Stef, yanking him in tight. He couldn’t get enough of this kiss, rough on his face and lips but soft and hot in his mouth.
“Lean on me,” Stef said. “Give me all you got. Let me see.”
Their bodies rolled and grabbed, arms pushing and legs pulling. Gasping and laughing in the dark, they ground and slipped and rubbed together, rutting until each came in the other’s hand.
“I cannot deal with how good this feels,” Stef said after, sprawled in the sheets with a forearm thrown across his forehead. Jav’s eyes wandered over Stef’s skin, happily stuffing themselves with muscle and ink, taking inventory of scars and freckles and moles.
“This must’ve hurt,” he said, touching the tattooed horse head and the ring in Stef’s nipple.
“I wouldn’t pierce the other one for a million dollars.”
“Anyone ever hitch you up?”
Stef laughed softly. “Nah. Chains aren’t my thing.”
Jav was almost sorry when they crawled under the covers, pounding pillows around and getting themselves situated.
“Never literally slept with a guy,” Stef said.
“Me neither. I may suck at it.”
“I’ll never tell.”
They lay on their stomachs, looking at each other, their breathing gently falling in sync.
“I have the fucking best time with you,” Stef said.
“Same.”
Stef rolled his hand palm up between them. Jav slid his on it.
So this is what it’s like, he thought.
In the morning, Jav woke alone in the double bed. In the corner, Stef sat cross-legged at his little shrine, meditating with his earphones on. He wore only sweats. A feathered wing was tattooed across each shoulder blade. They sheltered a centaur inked dead center on Stef’s back, its bow drawn, arrow aimed straight up.
Jav pivoted on the bed, putting his head at the foot, laying his cheek on his crossed arms. Eye-level with the half-man, half-horse. Beneath the creature’s hooves were three lines of print:
A Charm of Finches Page 22
