by J. M. Snyder
And there’s that amused smirk, peeking from beneath the trim hairs on the gunner’s upper lip. “You want me to go?” he asks. “We were just getting on a bit, you and me. Have I told you yet I like your eyes?”
My eyes…Trin shakes his head, trying to cast off this dream. The bounder’s between them, as real as if he squatted on the ground at their feet. “Why?” Trin asks. His voice croaks with tears he thought were over with by now. “Why him—because you could? Because he offered?” Gerrick touches his shoulder and Trin twists out of his grip. “First tell me why.”
“Look, it was just one of those things, you know?” The gunner takes his arm, his fingers encircling the sinewy bicep easily enough, and this time Trin can’t pull away. “He said hey and I liked what I saw, what could it hurt?”
Me, Trin answers silently as he stares up into Gerrick’s face and tries to hold onto his anger. It’s hard, with those pale eyes staring back, to remember what it is he’s so torn up about in the first place. Whatever this man does can only be right, that’s what the hand on his arm promises, what the slow smile confirms. Let him touch you and he’ll make it right.
“I didn’t know you’d get so upset,” the gunner purrs as he loosens his grip on Trin’s arm. His hand rubs up over Trin’s shoulder and waits, unsure if it will be shrugged off. It isn’t. Encouraged, Gerrick takes a step closer, ducks his head a little, lowers his voice. “You didn’t even give me a chance to explain—”
“Do you love him?” Trin asks. That’s the most important thing, he decides, because if Gerrick feels for the bounder even one sliver of what Trin himself feels for the gunner, then he’s lost.
But Gerrick shakes his head, confused, and relief floods Trin’s heart. “What?” the gunner asks. “No. Jesus, boy, I don’t know the guy. Love had nothing to do with it—”
Seizing the moment, Trin wants to know, “Then do you love me?”
The gunner’s hesitance is answer enough. His eyes flicker indecisively. Suddenly Trin can’t breathe—there’s a weight on his chest pressing down on him, he can’t draw in air. It was a stupid question, he tells himself, and it was, God it was. He wishes he could take it back. If the answer’s no, don’t say a word, please. He’d rather not know.
The hand on his shoulder squeezes in what’s meant to be a comforting gesture. Staring at him, deep into his eyes, into his very soul, Gerrick whispers, “I could learn to, Trin. You’re sweet as dew and I can’t deny the way you feel about me, Lord knows I could fall for it. But this is a hard world, kid. Your brother’ll tell you as much. My life is out in the wastelands, the devlars and these guns. I can’t stay here any more than you could take to riding the runs.” With a sad smile, he presses his lips to Trin’s forehead in a rough, quick kiss. “I’d love to love you, boy, but I can’t. Another time and place maybe, another life, but not this one. Your girlfriend is right, you deserve a better man than me.”
Trin closes his eyes against bitter tears. Gerrick’s next kiss brushes the dampness from his lashes. A third nuzzles his cheek. But when the gunner tries to touch his mouth, Trin pulls away. “Go,” he sighs. Gerrick’s hand slips up to cradle the back of his neck, his fingers kneading into muscles that have been tensed all night. It feels wonderful, energy flowing from the gunner into him, warmth spreading across his shoulders and down his back. Though he knows he shouldn’t, his body responds to Gerrick’s nearness and his voice has no strength when he says, “Go on. I mean it. Please…” If the gunner tries to kiss him again, Trin doesn’t think he’ll be able to keep him at bay.
Somewhere far away rusty hinges scream out in shocked irritation, and then furious footsteps crunch on the gravel path heading this way. Gerrick’s breath licks over Trin’s lips when he sighs. “I never meant to hurt you,” he whispers. “You know that.” Trin stares at his moustache, each individual hair stark this close, as thick as copper wire. If the gunner kisses him now, it negates the anger and rage that caused him to tear into the truck behind him, the feelings he’s trying desperately to hang onto right now. The fire in him is guttering low and one kiss is all he needs to put it out.
Heavy shoes scuff in the doorway, breaking the spell Gerrick holds over him. As Blain enters the garage, he growls, “Get the hell away from my brother.” His boots ring out like judgment, and Trin sees fear flicker in the gunner’s eyes the instant before he turns away. “I thought you were leaving.”
“Blain,” Gerrick starts.
That’s as far as he gets before Blain’s fist connects with his jaw, throwing him against the hood of his truck. “No!” Trin cries out. He grabs his brother’s elbow in a vain attempt to hold him back. “Blain, stop this.”
His brother shakes him off. “Get out,” he snarls at Gerrick. In one hand he has the gunner’s packs and he flings them at the truck, the contents tumbling out. Toiletries clatter to the floor, packets of gunpowder tear open, clothes land in the oil and grease. Trin falls to scoop them up but Blain’s hand drops to his shoulder and hauls him to his feet. He doesn’t look at Trin, doesn’t dare take his gaze off the gunner splayed against the hood of his truck.
For a moment no one moves. Trin feels trapped, pinned by his brother like a captured moth. His heart flutters to get free. The cut on Gerrick’s lip has opened again and blood trickles from the corner of his mouth as he glares at Blain. Then his hard eyes shift to Trin, focusing on him, on him, until he’s all that exists. Finally he concedes. “Alright.”
Trin’s chest tightens. “No,” he whispers. Warily Gerrick starts to retrieve his items, shoving them in his bags as his gaze darts from Blain to Trin and back again. Leaving… “No,” Trin says again, louder this time. He turns to his brother, pleading. “Blain—”
But he finds no sympathy there. “Trin, stay out of this.”
Grasping at any excuse, he tries, “The truck. I’m not quite finished with the repairs.” He turns to Gerrick, who looks at him with an unreadable expression on his face. “We were talking here—”
“You’re through,” his brother says.
A small twist of paper rests near Trin’s feet, full of gunpowder. When Gerrick reaches for it, Blain pulls Trin back as if afraid the gunner will try to snatch him away. With a wry smirk the gunner mutters, “I’m sorry, boy. Like I told you, another time, another place. You could’ve been enough.”
“Don’t you dare speak to him,” Blain warns. Trin doesn’t know if his brother’s forbidding him to respond or warning the gunner into silence. The truck, he thinks, his mind flashing to the tape that holds the cables together under the hood. He feels like a doctor who has been forced to operate in the trenches with whatever supplies are at hand and now waits for the patient to come around. There’s a very good chance the damn truck won’t even start and then what?
He doesn’t have long to find out. With his personals held to his chest, Gerrick swings into the cab, tosses his shit into the passenger’s seat, and starts the truck. The engine stutters once before it turns over. The gunner gives him a long, last look, his eyes dark in the shadows of the cab, his mouth set in a humorless grin. His hand rests on the top of the steering wheel and as he backs out of the garage, he raises his fingers in farewell. You could’ve been enough.
The truck eases through the open bay door and out into the street. Trin wants to race after to watch it leave but Blain holds him in place. When Gerrick shifts gears, the engine threatens to stall but it holds steady. Out in the early morning stillness, Gerrick guns the motor and the truck backfires once, a hard pop that tells Trin that one of the pistons is loose. But then he peals out, tires spinning in the gravel drive before tearing down the street and back out of his life.
Beneath Blain’s hand, Trin reels as fresh waves of pain wash over him. Gone, he thinks.
Gone.
* * * *
If it isn’t for his brother, Trin would probably stay in the same spot until nightfall came, staring out into the empty street and wishing fervently he hadn’t turned away that last kiss. Now he has nothi
ng to show that the gunner was even his for those two brief nights, nothing except the sore spot in his chest where his heart has shriveled like a dried prune. If it isn’t for Blain, he might never move again.
But his brother takes him by the arm, leads him across the bright junkyard to the kitchen where busy chore girls throw furtive glances their way. His hand is steady on Trin’s back as they climb the stairs. When Trin pauses outside the closed door to his room, Blain shakes his head. “Let’s get you washed up first, what do you say?”
Washed up, yes, good. He nods and lets Blain guide him to the shower. As his brother runs water in the first stall, Trin stares at the floor and doesn’t think of anything at all. He doesn’t look around—he doesn’t want to see something that might remind him of what he saw yesterday evening. The bounder. The gunner. Gone.
“Come on, kid.” Blain holds the curtain back for Trin to step into the shower. The splash of water on tile makes his hands shake and he can’t move. “Trini,” his brother sighs softly. “Come on. The sooner we’re done here, the sooner we can all get past this.” He takes a step towards the stall but Blain stops him. “Trin, your clothes.”
He stops and simply stands still, his gaze fixed on the floor. “Your pants,” his brother offers. Trin doesn’t respond.
With another sigh, Blain lets the curtain close. He looks around the shower as if hoping maybe someone else can help, but they’re alone. When he speaks again, softly this time, his deep voice is unusually gruff. “Hands up,” he murmurs, raising Trin’s arms out at his sides. Trin leaves them there like a child about to be undressed. Blain hooks his thumbs into the waistband of Trin’s pants, takes a steadying breath, and tugs them down with one good yank. Stepping on the pants as they pool around Trin’s ankles, he nods at the stall, where water hits the curtain like rain on a tin roof. “You take it from here, kid. I’ll wait for you. Go on.”
Trin steps out of the pants and into the shower. The spray feels like the sun, warm and hard as it pounds onto his body. Remembering his shorts, he strips them off and tosses them in a corner of the stall, the white fabric already damp and grey. Every move he makes feels stilted, wrong. The washcloth is abrasive, the soap stings. Grease and oil sluice off his body, swirl together down the drain. He closes his eyes and sees Gerrick’s face inches from his, feels lips pressed to his temple, hears the words again, You could’ve been enough. From the other side of the curtain, Blain calls out, “Trin? You alright in there?”
“Fine,” he mumbles. He scrubs at his chest and arms until the skin pinks beneath the suds, then he stands beneath the showerhead and lets the water beat down around him, a driving rhythm. Why didn’t Gerrick ever join him in here? Talking into the spray, he confesses to his brother, “I messed up the truck.”
“What truck?” Blain asks. Trin shakes his head, flinging water from his hair, and waits for his brother to figure out what he means. “Gerrick’s?”
“Last night,” Trin admits as he wipes water from his eyes. “I was mad.”
He expects his brother to get angry now, tell him he shouldn’t have done it—what happens when another mech takes a look under the hood and sees the tape holding the cables in place? The waystation at Arens gets a bad name, that’s what, labeled a hackjob garage and there goes business. But Blain only sighs. “You didn’t do a good enough job of it,” he says. “He drove out of here, didn’t he?”
Trin turns his face up into the spray, savoring the heat pelting his cold cheeks. “I fixed it back.” Water smacks his mouth, his closed eyelids. It tastes clean on his tongue and he licks it off his lips. He wonders what happens now. The gunner’s moved on, that’s Aissa’s voice in his head again. You should too.
He doesn’t want to.
When the water at his feet runs clear, he turns off the shower. The curtain screeches back and strong arms wrap a thick towel around his shoulders, warding off the chill that prickles his skin into goosebumps. “Fixed it?” Blain asks—it takes Trin a second to remember what it is they’re talking about, the truck. He hugs the towel close around his body but still begins to shiver. “You had the parts?”
Trin whispers, “Mostly.” Not really, he amends, keeping the thought to himself. If something happens to the truck, it burns out on a run or dies altogether, he’ll be the reason for it. Blain doesn’t need to know that. He’ll think Trin rigged the damn thing to conk out just so Gerrick would return. And I’d get that kiss. Maybe I’d even get to ask him just what it is I need to do to be enough for him, if he comes back. Secretly? Trin hopes the gunner didn’t even make it through the palisade, though he knows different. The way the truck sounded starting up was a little unsteady but a few miles beneath the wheels and it’ll straighten out. Straighten or blow out, one of the two. The gunner gone or killed—either way leaves Trin dead inside.
With brisk motions, Blain rubs his shoulders and back, drying him off. “Well,” he huffs, “you got it running again, that’s the main thing. You just put him out of your mind, you hear me, kid? I’m sorry he ever showed the fuck up around here. I told him years ago to keep away.”
Trin lets him rub warmth into his arms and asks, “Because of me?”
Across from them in the mirror above the sink, he sees Blain’s brow crease in worry. “He’s just not the sort I want around here, is all.”
“Are you mad at me?” Trin wants to know.
Instead of answering, Blain pulls the end of the towel up over Trin’s head and ruffles his hair to dry it. In the humid room, the only sounds are water dripping from the faucet and the towel around his ears. His ass and legs are cold now. He’s just about to tell his brother that he doesn’t have to answer when the towel drops back to his shoulders, covering his nakedness, and Blain runs a hand through Trin’s disheveled hair to set it right. “Not mad,” he says. He watches his hand on Trin’s head and doesn’t look him in the eye. Trin sniffles into the towel. “Not at you.”
“I won’t forget him,” Trin murmurs. He wipes water from his face, his eyes, his ears. Now that he’s clean, the night is catching up with him and his arms feel leaden, his legs weak. His eyes burn with each blink, from shampoo or sleepiness he’s not sure. Taking his arm through the towel, Blain leads him out into the hall, where cool morning air blasts his bare wet legs. They’re alone in the hall, though the low rattle of dishes drifts up from the kitchen and Trin can hear indistinct voices from the common. The other gunners, probably, finishing up their breakfast before they roll out after Gerrick. At his room, he stops and waits for Blain to open the door. For a moment he sees the rumpled sheets on his pallet and thinks the gunner’s still in them, waiting. He remembers the way Gerrick sat on the pallet that first night, his nude body glorious and cocky, a god in this room. Even then he’d been barking after the bounder, that night. Trin lost before he even got a chance to get things started.
As Blain steps aside, Trin enters the room. “Did they stay here?” he wants to know. The gunner’s musk still hangs in the air, sweat-laced, it stirs his groin and he pulls the towel closer to his body so his brother won’t see his arousal. “Aissa said you came in this morning—”
“He was alone,” Blain assures him. Trin nods—he didn’t want to lie down and smell a strange scent, the bounder in his sheets. With the towel he rubs down, his stomach, his legs, while his brother looks studiously away. “I threw the other one out last night. Should’ve thrown his ass out too you know, but he is a gunner. I’ve run with those guys. I couldn’t.”
Trin nods. “I know.” Kicking Gerrick into the streets would’ve pissed off the other gunners, word would’ve gotten out about Blain going soft, another bad bit for business. You should be mad at me, Trin thinks. He drops the towel to the floor and crawls between the sheets. They glide over his skin like silk. When he lies back against the pillow, Gerrick’s sexy scent wafts up around him. He can’t breathe. His chest hurts and his head swims, he has to close his eyes against nausea and dizziness that sets the room spinning. Fresh tears squeeze between his lash
es. “I’m sorry, Blain,” he whispers, turning his face into the pillow. He takes in the gunner’s smell and almost chokes on it. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s alright,” his brother tells him. An awkward hand pats his arm, then pulls away. Quiet footsteps cross the room. The door sighs open. “Just get some rest, kid. I’ll keep Aissa out. It’ll be alright now.”
Trin buries his face deeper into the pillow, chasing Gerrick’s scent.
* * * *
He sleeps without dreaming and wakes to the golden light of late afternoon. While he was out, he burrowed beneath the sheets, pulling the thin blanket up over his head. Now when he opens his eyes, the blanket filters the light into gauze. Without moving, Trin lies curled into himself and watches the shapes made on the sheet by the clouds passing outside his window. He tries hard not to think.
But images flash through his mind like the glint of light off coins tumbling to the floor. A jackpot, each memory backed by another. The gunner strong and sure above him in the night and on the other side of that, the slashed wires leading into the fuel pump. Another, the bounder bending in front of the jukebox, his pants taut across his ass. On the flipside, the punctured radiator bleeding steam. A third, two men crammed into the shower together, Gerrick fucking into the bounder’s mouth…and another glimpse of the truck, silver tape strapped around cables to keep them in place.
If the truck dies, it’s my fault. Trin shakes the thought away. It started, didn’t it? Surprised the hell out of him but the damn thing started and now Gerrick’s gone. No more apologies, no time to set things right. Not even a chance to say that he could perhaps forgive the gunner, if given time. In another world maybe, where he doesn’t have to rove around. How did he put it? Where I’m enough.
When the sunlight from his window starts to fade, Trin throws the sheets back and climbs out of the pallet. His legs are unsteady as he stands and dull pain rips through his head—he has to hold onto his temples to keep them from splitting apart. A fresh wave of nausea washes over him, he reels beneath it, but a few deep breaths strengthen his legs, calm his stomach, and the room snaps back into focus. Slowly he straightens, inch by inch, moving like a man three times his age to keep the pain in check. When he makes it upright, he leans against the wall, eyes closed, head back. He counts each breath, concentrating on the intake of air, the exhalation purged from his body. The smooth wood is cool against his skin, a reminder that he’s in the nude. What if someone comes in on him? Blain, or even Aissa? He should get dressed.
