Black John

by Amy Lane

  So now, giving Tory something to look forward to, something to take his mind away from the guilt and the lies at confession and his mother’s stern disappointment, John was willing to bring him Brant, naked, on a platter, with a dildo in his mouth.

  Well, that wasn’t quite the way it happened.

  Tory was more than happy to go over to Brant’s house, and John packed the video camera his nana had given him for his birthday. He didn’t worry too much about Nana’s reaction to what he was using his presents for—he figured she’d be the first to understand. John wanted to see what Tory looked like naked with another boy.

  They sat at the table for a half an hour after Brant’s parents left, eating the pizza bites his mother had cooked for them all and generally discussing their classes. John was good at all his subjects, and Tory wasn’t too far behind, so they actually did spend some time doing their math homework and giving Brant some tips on his own.

  And then Brant put down his pen, looked up at John, and practically tackled him in a kiss.

  John opened his mouth in surprise and found himself pressed back against the carpet, his shirt rucked up to his chin, Brant’s mouth on his nipple as his hips bucked at warp speed in complete and total arousal.

  Brant was a good-looking boy—all-American, with streaked blond hair and brown eyes, a square chin, and gangly limbs that still showed promise of being part of a lean, fit body someday. It was no hardship to feel those even white teeth nibbling at his nipples or the hard, long-fingered hand reaching down his pants, but….

  “Tory,” he moaned breathlessly. “You were for Tory.”

  Brant pulled up and panted, narrowing his eyes a little in confusion. “But I came on to you,” he said plaintively. “I… you’re the one who saved my ass in the park.” He looked up, brown eyes as limpid as Tory’s ever got, and begged. “C’mon, Tory—I’ll blow you or fuck you or whatever, but let me have John first.”

  Tory’s mouth twisted mutinously, and for a moment John thought, Oh yes—we’ll have a limit. We’ll have a thing. He can fuck guys, and I’ll be director, and he will still be mine. But then Tory backed up, and his eyes seemed to glow, and he looked at their bodies on the ground together.

  “Keep sucking his nipple,” he ordered, eyes hooded. “I’m going to get John’s camera.”

  Brant melted into John, and John had no choice. Tory wanted it. He threw his head back and moaned, spreading his legs and sucking in his stomach to let Brant slide his hand down his pants.

  His fingers were longer and his palm was wider than Tory’s—he engulfed John’s average cock easily, and then started a massage through his underwear that had John gasping.

  “That’s it,” Tory said, sounding as smarmy as possible. “Good. Now pull his pants down and let us see it.”

  For a second John fought panic. No, Tory—you’re the beautiful one. But then Brant exposed his body to air, the prickles of the cold massaging him even more. Brant grasped him and moaned into his mouth, rutting up against him almost in a frenzy.

  “Slow down,” John gasped. “It’ll be over too soon.”

  Brant whimpered, and John remembered that they’d promised to “tutor” him. “Tory, set the camera on the chair and come kiss his neck.”

  Tory focused the camera on the two of them on the ground. When they viewed the footage months later, the three of them agreed that the best part was when Tory crawled into the shot, sliding his body alongside Brant’s and kissing his neck until he backed up a little and gave John some room to work.

  What followed was out of focus and edgy, and every time the camera moved, the view lurched in a stomach-dropping fashion, mostly because John and Tory were too excited to bother with subtlety or angles. But it was also hot. Brant was needy and greedy, and Tory and John got to be the experienced ones, helping him control himself, letting him go out of control when it made things hotter, and generally helping the guy lose his virginity someplace other than the overgrown side of Carpenter’s Park. And then lose it again. And then lose it in a whole different way after that.

  They ended up on Brant’s bed—fortunately a queen-size—naked, dripping with sweat and spit and come. They had used condoms when appropriate, but so many, many opportunities to come on each other’s faces and chests and groins—how to resist?

  John’s camera was propped on Brant’s dresser with the battery warning light blinking, but it was still filming the last kiss—between John and Brant—and it caught the way Brant’s hands shook in John’s hair, and the way his eyes closed and his face went relaxed and vulnerable.

  And it caught the way the moment shattered when they all heard the sound of the front door opening and heard Brant’s mother calling sweetly, “Boys, are you all done with your studying? Hey—whose pants are these?”

  IT WAS amazing how the human mind took the end of the world sometimes. John’s memory had a blank spot right there. He knew because Tory told him later that he’d actually done some quick thinking. He’d thrown clothes at Brant and told him to run to the bathroom, wipe off, and get dressed.

  Then he and Tory lay back down on the bed and kissed like they were about to drive off a cliff and this was their last taste of life.

  They weren’t far wrong.

  When John’s blank spot grayed back into reality, he was in Brant’s living room, bleeding from a split in his forehead. Someone had apparently called his father, who chose once again to beat the living shit out of him.

  With witnesses this time.

  “You think you’re pretty fuckin’ funny, doncha, ya little faggot!” Frank yelled. “Think it’s hilarious to come to decent people’s homes and fuck around!”

  “Well,” John said, praying for a quick death, “I got bored fucking around your house—there’s no decent people in there.”

  He woke up in the hospital, with his nana next to the bed. Apparently he was spending his senior year being homeschooled by Crosby.

  “I’d do it myself, sweetheart, but I don’t bother with fists. I’ve got guns, and with your smart mouth, you wouldn’t last long. Crosby, though, he’s got the patience of a saint. He’ll do fine.”

  If her makeup hadn’t been smeared and her face drawn, John might have believed her about the guns. But she was clutching the hand without the IV and fluttering her fingers through the hair at his temple.

  “I thought I wasn’t fit for decent people,” he said, smiling weakly.

  “Oh honey. We both know I’m a gold-digging whore. You’ll fit right in.”

  John closed his eyes, mostly in relief. Yeah, it might not have been ideal, but it wasn’t like John had been too invested in his fellow high school inmates either.

  “What about Tory?” he asked, because he couldn’t remember where Tory had been when John’s dad had been beating him like cake batter, and he was worried.

  “Honey.” Nana sighed then, just sighed. “Well, he’s staying at my place right now. In fact, he’s welcome to stay at my place as long as he wants.”

  “That’s great!” John brightened, and for the moment he wasn’t even thinking about the sex they would be having. He was just thinking about Tory there. But his nana didn’t look particularly excited.

  “Honey, his parents….” She shook her head. “Your father is a bastard, John, but I’ll tell you this. He never offered you anything he didn’t have. I mean, he didn’t have any love, but he didn’t offer it up to you and then steal it away either, do you know what I mean?”

  “No, Nana—I think I have a concussion.”

  Her sputter of laughter was a relief, but the way she abruptly sobered was not. “Honey, we all met here in the hospital while they were treating you. I’m telling you, first they sat down with Tory and asked what happened. And that boy, he told the truth—didn’t try to get out of it, was even a little proud of it, you know? And his parents—they stood up, looked at each other, and his father said, ‘You are no longer our son.’ Then they turned around together to walk out.”

  John wri
nkled his nose. “What does that mean?” he asked, dumbfounded. “I mean, his mom, she cooked dinner for me and made me a cake. My own mom gave me money, but Tory’s mom made me a cake. Nana, they were… I mean, lots of kids. They laughed. The little kids were… happy.” In his whole life, John couldn’t remember being as happy and loved as Tory and his brothers and sisters seemed to have been. His own parents—well, yeah. It was what it was. But…. “He’s not their son? What does that mean?”

  His grandmother was a smart woman, but that didn’t mean she was a first-class communicator. “It means I’ve got two teenaged boys living with me until they go away to college,” she said simply. “And you boys better not be loud and obnoxious in your wing of the house, do you hear?”

  God, John missed his nana. Corrupt and genteel, brisk and kind, that woman called a fool a fool and her family a blight on the pimple on humanity’s ass.

  But even she couldn’t seem to fix that terrible moment when all of the comfort of family John had assumed would be Tory’s for life was swept away from him forever.

  JOHN SHOOK himself as he neared Daytona, and he brought his attention back to traffic—which wasn’t bad this time of year—and to the absolutely shitty thing he had to do next.

  And then he had a thought, a good one, about how he had people to call, and how it might not just be him and Galen on the funeral barge after all.

  Well, that was a thing to put on the to-do list that wouldn’t suck, right? Right. Absolutely. He could do this.

  He lost confidence when he knocked on Galen’s door, though.

  Galen, who had been bright and articulate and lucid the day before, had left that man in the bottom of his pill bottle.

  “God. Yeah. John. C’mon in.” He opened the door again and swept John inside. The interior of the apartment had been cleaned the day before, the tissues gone, the carpet vacuumed, dishes washed, even some dusting on the mantelpiece and around the window valences. John looked around appreciatively before putting the pizza on the counter and parking his ass on one of the chairs.

  “Place looks nice. You didn’t have to clean up for me, you know.”

  Galen shrugged, but it wasn’t very convincing. “Well, whattya do? Don’t have lots of company. But it really knocked me down. Had to take a gutload of oxy—I’mma be a little loopy.”

  Oh. For a moment John felt a sharp stab of guilt. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Then he heard his rehab group session in his head, something about other addicts being responsible for their own jones, and he swallowed hard. Christ. He already lived with so much guilt—he wasn’t shouldering any fucking more than he had to.

  “That’s okay, brother,” he said with a patience he’d thought he’d forgotten. “I just need the key to Tory’s room.”

  Galen’s face fell, and John felt a terrible twist of disappointment. Dammit, this had meant something to Galen too, and they were going to miss out on it.

  “I’m sorry,” Galen said bitterly. “I’m sorry. I wanted the place to look good for you, and now….”

  “Tell you what,” John said, standing up and steering Galen toward the bed. “You go sleep this off, and in, say, two hours, I’ll be back for some cold pizza, okay? We can still have lunch.”

  “I was going to be here for you.” The plaintive note in Galen’s voice sort of echoed the one in John’s stomach.

  “Yeah, well, that would have been lovely, but we both know, not gonna happen.”

  Galen crawled into bed, and John thought dispassionately that the sheets needed laundering. They weren’t soiled; the condition wasn’t gross. There was just enough lack of care for John to wonder if Tory had been one of Galen’s few friends.

  Well, John knew about that too.

  Galen looked up at him, pale green eyes large and shiny. Weak tears slid between the deepened creases of his eyes and ran down his sharp, straight nose. “I used to despise people like me,” he said, a note of pleading in his voice.

  “Well, you used to be an idiot,” John said practically. With a sigh, he sat down on the side of the bed. It sank down, but not too far, and he bounced experimentally a few times. “Firm!”

  Galen’s laugh skittered like a dry leaf in a tropical breeze. “Not enough use.”

  He lay on his scarred side, and to look at him, his lean face harshly outlined by the mostly white pillow, John was reminded of those caricatures that people had taken when they went to the beach or the pier. All the bold lines looked one way—still pretty, tired, sad—but the detail lines, the lines most artists would miss because they were in too much of a hurry, told a different story. In pain, vulnerable, ruined.

  John stroked his hair back from his brow, and Galen’s lower lip quivered. “I didn’t know,” he said, his harsh whisper broken by sadness. “I didn’t know Tory felt this bad. I thought, ‘Hey, if he can live like this, I can live like this. We’ll both be chemically dependent together.’ It wasn’t love. God, he couldn’t even look at my scars, you know? But he was a friend, and I thought… I thought we could both….”

  “You could both waste away together in this shitty apartment building,” John said, seeing the fine lines and muted colors of this relationship clearly. It was the merging of two broken stained-glass windows from two blocks away in the rain. Once upon a time, the portrait had been gorgeous, but now all that was left was the cold and sharp edges and the tears from the sky.

  Galen sniffled and wiped his scarred cheek on the bedspread. “You make it sound so glamorous.”

  John smiled a little. “You still have some fight in you,” he said. “You ever think maybe this isn’t where it should end?”

  Galen shivered a little, probably coming down from that extra pill. “It’s all so muddled. But yesterday, walking on the beach. That was so… clear. Can we do that again?”

  Yeah. Why not? “There’s no reason my being here has to be awful all the time,” John said. His new mantra, right? One day at a time? You couldn’t make it one day at a time if every day had to suck. “But you gotta not be so out of it, okay? Maybe… you know. Dial it back down a little?”

  Galen nodded. “Pain hurts,” he said, as miserable as a kid who discovered that kittens scratched. “But I can smile through a little pain for a day where someone looks at me. Talks at me like a human being.”

  “Good.” John kissed his temple, thinking that he’d showered, washed his hair, even shaved. “Did you make yourself all nice for me?”

  The sun through the venetian blinds lit up rails of dust motes like a ladder to heaven. Galen’s sweet Benedictine smile illuminated his face in that mix of glory and dirt, and John had to swallow hard or he would have just cried at beauty like a kid in church.

  “I did,” Galen confessed shyly. “I did. And now I’m passing out like a pathetic junkie, and….”

  “Sh….” John kissed his temple again and sat for a minute, waiting until Galen’s breathing steadied into sleep.

  It would be so much easier if he’d never been to rehab. He could preach to the guy, he could hound him. But John could only remember those frantic, blurry moments of his almost sixty-day cocaine run, and twist his heart until it bled dry. He would give anything, anything, not to see someone he cared about go through that again.

  It was a good thing he didn’t really know Galen, right?

  Right?

  GALEN’S KEYS were on the little dish on top of the bookshelf in the living room—John had seen him grab them the day before. He pocketed them before letting himself out and walking the ten paces to the apartment he’d been pretending didn’t exist.

  He stood there for a moment, eyes closed, hand on the doorknob, trying to decide which would be worse: total chaos and ruin or some sort of shrine to their boyhood. He didn’t actually have an answer before he worked the key and walked in, but it helped to lay out the worst-case scenarios so he knew what he could stand.

  What greeted him was surprisingly pleasant. A bookshelf of paperbacks—mostly mystery/thrillers—sat next to a moderately sized flat
-screen television. A collection of DVDs were shelved nearby, some of them movies the two of them had seen in high school, like Titanic and Independence Day, and some of them a little more current, like Brokeback Mountain and the newest Batman trilogy. The couch was an old tapestry pattern, but it wasn’t soiled, simply used, and the sparse kitchen was reasonably clean.

  A coffee cup and cereal bowl sat in the dish rack.

  Okay. So. Box the books, box the DVDs and dishes, have Goodwill pick up the couch and the cheap laminate kitchen table and chairs. Look at John, he was making a list. Next thing you know he’d be Dex!

  Feeling slightly better, John braved the right-hand turn into the bedroom.

  Ah. Yeah. Here lie nightmares.

  Used needles littered the soiled mattress; blood and feces permeated the sheets. The smell—of sex, of urine, of vomit—was old and musty but still potent. Porn DVDs lay scattered around the floor, and a laptop sat primly near the head of the bed, top folded down, surrounded by crumpled tissues, empty dime-bags, and dirty spoons.

  John closed his eyes and prayed that his stomach would stay still. He didn’t want to have to see what was in the bathroom if he sicked up.

  He took two steps back, slammed the door, and leaned against it, panting. When the spots had cleared from his eyes, he did the only thing he could think of: he called Dex.

  Who listened to him ramble and then helped him get his shit together.

  “Okay, John. You got two choices here. The first one is call a hazmat service to come help you clean it up. The needles are dangerous and….” Uncharacteristically, Dex faltered, and John wanted to shake him. “And they might not all be your friend’s,” Dex finished up delicately, and then John was the one who shook.

  “What’s my other option? I hate the idea of….” His turn to stutter to a halt. Great. Conversation of broken sentences. “I don’t want other people to see him like this,” he finished, feeling weak when his voice trembled.

  “I know. I’ve done this before, remember?” Oh God. Oh God, yes, Dex had. He’d cleaned up messes like this, and John had slunk in the shadows like the coward he was because he didn’t want to get too close to the models, too close to the ruin that sometimes happened when the emotionally fragile put it all out there on film for the world to see.