The Fullness of Earthly Bliss

by Tessa Buxton

  He had meant it to be drawn out, to be more than this, but the sensation of Tvorceskiy pushed deep inside him, forcing his way in with not enough stretching and not enough lube and almost fire as he rocked against the bed-head, slamming it into the thin plaster, not caring who heard them. He loved the feeling of short nails against the back of his thighs, Tvorceskiy stretching above him, limned by the thin light from the table lamp and the clack of the clock beside them as Marcus curled and uncurled his fingers in the foul-smelling sheet, pulling at it, tugging it from under them as he gasped and grunted and just felt and Tvorceskiy gasped and grunted, no names, no dirty talk just the slap of skin on skin, and the tearing of skin torn from skin stuck fast by sweat.

  There was sweat, fingers grabbing in it, hands crushing his hips and his thighs against Tvorceskiy's shoulders, knees at either ear, bobbing as Tvorceskiy slammed into him again and again and again as if this were the last time. It was like a first time, with all the urgency and need of new lovers who didn't know how to touch each other, but couldn't stop from pressing skin to skin and lip to lip. There had never been urgency between them, Marcus knew but no longer cared as Tvorceskiy slammed into him and the bed slammed into the wall and Tvorceskiy hissed as a pair of fingers tugged on the nipple ring he hadn't wanted to get.

  * * * *

  The kill wasn't as sweet as he remembered. It was quick and futile, like sex against a toilet stall with a cheap hooker and it made him feel dirty, like an oily film had been left behind as the knife slid through the woman's neck.

  She looked like a secretary, a tailored suit although more JC Penney than designer, the leather of her high heels scuffed and one heel breaking as she fought his hold, pulling her into the alley. She smelled of department store perfume and Maybelline face powder. Tvorceskiy nodded, and without a second thought Marcus slit her throat and the world was down yet another Viennese agent.

  He had pulled the blade so hard, because he was so tired, that he had almost severed her head.

  * * * *

  Chicago came and went, most of the hoops in Marcus's ears were left behind in Illinois, and he got the tongue stud as they passed through some place called Cahokia. Tvorceskiy kept the nipple ring and the guy liner even when he took a pair of proper shoes instead of the cute Vans with the skulls, complaining that no other shoes would be as comfortable. Dinner was at a truck stop, some unidentified pig product as they drove south to catch the train that would take them to Chesapeake and then another north to New York. Their plans went no further than that and were easily changed.

  The shower in their motel room was a lukewarm stream and the cockroaches in this one hissed.

  The television seemed to have come from the seventies and was showing I Love Lucy reruns. The pizza had been generic and tasted of cardboard and too much garlic, the Mountain Dew warm and flat as Tvorceskiy sat in the corner, thinking, and gnawing his fingernails. You need to eat, Marcus told him and listened to the usual answer, later.

  Let me blow you, Marcus asked expecting the same answer but instead Tvorceskiy's eyes gleamed like golden beads that caught the afternoon sun, if you must he said instead and uncrossed his legs.

  Marcus looked at the carpet with some distaste before taking one of the towels from the bathroom and laying it down, Tvorceskiy raised an eyebrow, pencilled black to hide the true colour, and smirked. That, Marcus thought as he knelt down, was his Tvorceskiy. So he went to work with gusto.

  * * * *

  The Viennese office keeps a burn-out as an example, like Romans decorating the road-side with used crucifixes.

  They keep him in a wheelchair, sometimes spotted as his nurse moves him about the cloisters in the summer heat, but mostly kept squirreled away. His nurse looks like one of the nuns in an old picture book with a tall wimple, and she keeps numerous handkerchiefs in her pockets to wipe away the drool that stains the shoulder of his pyjama shirt. She has ear buds hanging from her ears and there is the dull tinnitus of music coming from them.

  Marcus is a child as he picks a flower from the cloister, leaving his book there on the grass. He offers it to the man.

  The nurse doesn’t notice but the man’s eyes are dull and empty and Marcus, who is used to hearing the dull buzz of thoughts like the tinny music from someone else’s earbuds, hears nothing. There is nothing in the wheelchair but meat that isn’t quite smart enough to lay down and die.

  * * * *

  In New York the hotel was cleaner, the window overlooking an alley and a blank wall. Tvorceskiy sat on the edge of the bed with Marcus pressed against him, his cheek against Tvorceskiy's shoulder and his hands were at either side of his hips. The sex had been furtive, quick, with fingers twisting through Marcus's hair as if Tvorceskiy knew something he didn't want to share. He had cut the pink tips from his hair and slicked it back with gel, henna tattoos made him look like a gang-banger and Marcus had gone more Wall Street in his clothing choices, but when he spoke there was the bright flicker of steel in his mouth. It would have to go soon so he appreciated it.

  It won't be long now Tvorceskiy said and Marcus wanted to believe him. It was with disappointment he realised he didn't.

  They were in too much danger to run hot, to even dip into their power, living like mundanes running, always running.

  Tvorceskiy kept his arrogance like a shield and Marcus couldn't help but think of Tvorceskiy's nipple ring, something he should have gotten rid of long since, as a reminder of their time in Chicago, a whole month of knowing where they were sleeping and that there was food in their ice-box and people who thought that they knew them. It was almost a home, more than they had had since they'd left Japan.

  London, Tvorceskiy said suddenly, we'll fly to Leicester and then rent a car and drive to London, we'll see what happens then. He didn't protest the hands that crept up around his middle as Marcus sighed against his back. There were moments, Marcus thought, that they were no longer themselves and they were other people, shadows travelling around the world, one step, maybe two ahead of the Viennese hunters. Sometimes they let them catch them up, just long enough to put them down like dogs. So Marcus sat leaning against his back in their medium-priced hotel as Tvorceskiy stared at the wall and what went through his head went through his head.

  * * * *

  The bus stop toilets were small and Tvorceskiy had predicted that they would be locked up for the night but the lock was busted. It wasn't much of a bus stop, just a small piece of tarmac where two roads interlaced in a small village in the ass end of England, they had taken a taxi here before the taxi driver informed them that the bus stopped outside the airport anyway. Tvorceskiy no longer predicted the future, they were too close, too desperate to risk it. A quick scan in JFK had him vomiting blood.

  They burned out so young, Marcus thought, and they needed so much.

  There was a half hour before the bus would come, the first of the day at 6am, it stopped at the train station from where they would take the first train that came and go wherever the tracks led. He went into the toilet with its busted lock and Tvorceskiy followed him and although the public convenience was stinking of cheap disinfectant and black grout it was enough for their needs as he jerked Marcus's pants down and took him in his mouth, perched on the edge of the broken toilet seat.

  Tvorceskiy's mouth was hot and strong and his jaw worked noisily, sucking him off and Marcus didn't care why Tvorceskiy would do this, only bunched his fingers in the muddy brown hair of this stranger—Tvorceskiy and fucked his mouth with quick and mad jerks of his hips.

  When the bus came he leant against his shoulder and smiled dreamily, because it had been good and afterwards Tvorceskiy had kissed him and it was new and wondrous because Tvorceskiy never kissed him after, because that might have shown he cared. This was a new Tvorceskiy, Marcus thought, but he could get used to him, just like he had the other.

  * * * *

  They took the train from Leicester to London and straight through to Paris. They paid through the nose for train sandwi
ches and coffee that was part battery acid part tar but warm and strangely filling. They changed trains there for Lille and then from Lille the whole of Europe was open to them.

  An overnight sleeper to Cannes saw Tvorceskiy asleep on the bench seat with his head against the glass, the white bleeding through the cheap dye on his hair, and looking vulnerable and soft, mundane.

  Marcus murmured to himself as he pulled down his bunk, just a little longer, he swept Tvorceskiy's hair back waking him so he stood with a stretch of his shoulders and an unwanted groaning exhalation.

  The kiss on the back of his neck caught Marcus unawares and for a moment Tvorceskiy's eyes didn't look like amber, hard and brittle, but malleable like honey or molasses.

  His kiss hungry but strangely soft, like rose petals against Marcus's lips, and even with the scratchy feeling of his stubble, four days' worth, and the lingering smell of him because they had only used wipes to wash for days, Marcus missed the old perfectly groomed Tvorceskiy, made of ice. A Tvorceskiy that fucked him because he felt good and because he didn't need it, because Tvorceskiy didn't need him.

  Yet Marcus didn't push him away, he clicked his tongue stud against his teeth and let Tvorceskiy kiss him.

  It was funny how their mouths locked on to each other like homing missiles and how gentle Tvorceskiy's hands were. He had used lotion so his skin was softer, perhaps it was butter left over from their supper of Brie and grapes smashed into a train sandwich with coffee that, although still foul, made the English equivalent taste like used rocket fuel. There had been bottles of bier blonde and olives in oil with chunks of feta cheese and Tvorceskiy had told a joke.

  It was strangely comfortable.

  It was funny how it felt like coming home.

  Marcus had never had a home and so it was easy to sink his teeth into the bared throat even as Tvorceskiy put his hands under his ass and lifted him up onto the bunk.

  The sheets were overstarched and crisp, smelling of linen and train exhaust as the train repeated kuh-chush-chush on the rails as Tvorceskiy looked at him for a long moment before kissing him again.

  He took care as he unbuttoned Marcus’s button-down, making sure not to pop off the buttons as they had before so often, and nuzzling the skin there as Marcus wondered whether or not to melt into his strong hands, softened by lotion so not at all like the sandpaper hands he had come to know as they travelled. He had even clipped his nails.

  But the hand was no less sure. The mouth was no less firm. This, Marcus thought, was his Tvorceskiy, so he closed his eyes so he couldn’t see the strange expression that lingered on Tvorceskiy's face because he thought he might break. Tvorceskiy didn’t look like that because Tvorceskiy didn’t need him and he didn’t need Tvorceskiy. They were partners, occasional fuck buddies, that was all.

  He supposed he must be burning out faster than he'd thought to have such ludicrous fantasies.

  Tvorceskiy’s mouth was exploratory, coming up now and then to taste the metal in Marcus’s tongue as his hands kneaded his ass or flicked his nipples.

  Marcus wondered why he had never gotten a nipple piercing seeing how much Tvorceskiy enjoyed his.

  That would have to go, the way of the tongue stud, just as he was getting used to it. He enjoyed fellating Tvorceskiy with the tongue stud, he liked banging it on the sensitive piece of skin between cock and balls in the way that always made Tvorceskiy jump as if it were cold, running it against the place where his balls separated. He enjoyed catching it in Tvorceskiy’s nipple ring and pulling. He enjoyed the odd little noise Tvorceskiy made when he ran his tongue around his anus and the stud caught, not enough to hurt, just a little unexpected thrum of pleasure.

  Marcus suspected it wasn't sex that night, but something they didn't want to name.

  We're too close, he thought, just a little more, he promised himself, just a little longer.

  * * * *

  A rented car in Cannes took them to a small village in the Languedoc, the kind of place not even the Viennese were aware of. Marcus asked him why. Tvorceskiy's answer took him back to the Tvorceskiy he was in Tokyo, he simply said Blue apples. They drove through Couiza and stayed in Rennes-le-Bains but every day Tvorceskiy took the car elsewhere leaving Marcus behind in the spa town. He had Turkish baths and ate proper French food in proper French restaurants. Tvorceskiy crawled into their shared bed at night, commenting how good he smelled but took no other action.

  From Rennes Le-Bains they went to Bonn, the sort of German place that Marcus thought should make him feel homesick, but he had preferred France.

  Bonn led to Berlin and Berlin took them to a place called Sedlec where they abandoned the car for another. It was there Marcus realised what Tvorceskiy was doing. They were ticking off their places to see, a strange quiet conversation that they had had in Tokyo years before with bellies full of Japan's best cognac. He realised it when Tvorceskiy left him at the door of a church and told him he'd be back in a few hours.

  The tongue stud went in Kuala Lumpur. Tvorceskiy looked sad to see it go.

  The last pair of earrings met their end in Calcutta.

  Tvorceskiy kept the nipple ring.

  * * * *

  They were in an internet cafe in Beijing, which had pretty Chinese waitresses who giggled at Marcus's gall and his black hair with scarlet underneath and heavy eyeliner and leather jewellery. Tvorceskiy was checking their mail, an ingenious system created by the kid using a child's network and a girl with rich parents who did exist to provide a cover for their IP addresses if it were needed. He had been looking online to see if he could divine their next style. He had decided on kodona for himself but Marcus was still a mystery.

  The message was coded, of course, a single paragraph in a much longer email about a boring school trip. I read the most horrid gravestone the other day, -continued to repeat myself even after death-. I was visiting my grandmother's grave when I saw it, and even a non god fearing child such as I was offended. It's not the sort of thing I'd like to leave behind me, perhaps I'm just traditional, I wanted to white-wash it but that is offensive, I can't imagine how it would be treated, after all I was on a school trip and I didn't want the criticism of my behaviour.

  Then the email continued about the waterfall he had seen there and how he enjoyed being with friends but the summer he had spent with Eleanor, Tvorceskiy's alias, was sorely missed.

  Tvorceskiy picked up a novel to read on the way out and turned to Marcus, still between disguises, and threw a second book at him. It's time, he said.

  On the plane, first class, Tvorceskiy in a suit looking like a J-rocker and the dye bleached out of his hair in the airport bathroom, his left eye twitching. Marcus tried to be interested in the book but his eyes kept drifting away from the two hitch-hikers and back to Tvorceskiy, intently reading and rereading the same page, his mouth twitching along and the muscles of his left eyelid jerking.

  I'm getting you a monocle, Marcus joked, your winking at me is getting distracting.

  Tvorceskiy looked up for a moment and then read aloud the passage that had him so fascinated.

  "If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough as her whole affection be monopolised by him. Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse. It is not in him to be loved like me: how can she love in him what he has not?"

  Marcus just laughed and told him he was being sentimental.

  * * * *

  Vienna waited for when the plane landed, and that was an ending, either way.

  The End

  ABOUT TESSA BUXTON

  Tessa Buxton knew she was going to be a writer pretty much as soon as she discovered the comma. Inspired by the work of Jayne Fisher, she’s been writing since she was a small child, finishing her first novel at eleven.

  Published for short stories and poetry by the age of fifteen Tessa then to
ok a time out from publishing, but not from writing, whilst she garnered herself an advanced education in literature to better improve her work. She currently lives in Derbyshire with a small dog who owns her completely, an Internet connection and new publishing credits to her name.

  She has a novel currently available with Eternal Press called East of the Sun, as well as short comedy story called Fey. She is better known as the fan writer Seraphim_grace and her copious amounts of work can be read at http://seraphim-grace.livejournal.com

  If you enjoyed THE FULLNESS OF EARTHLY BLISS,

  you might also enjoy:

  THE HEALING SPELL

  By Kiki Howell

  Samantha, a confident witch, is eager to help David, a creatively frustrated ad executive she happens upon. She proposes a daring venture in which she will lead him through the steps of a sexual magic spell with the intent to heal him. Instantly mesmerized by her beauty and knowledge, he soon learns that pleasure is magick as they create an energy circle by bathing, massaging and arousing one another in various positions.

  Yet, once the spell has been completed, he finds he cannot just take his talisman and walk away from her, and the witch finds her carefully protected heart on the line. When the tables turn will David be able to teach the teacher a thing or two about romance…

  Review from Melissa Conatser at ParaNormal Romance Reviews

  “Kiki Howell wove a story of magic that drew me in on the first page. I was impressed with Samantha and how well she knows herself and her craft. David is like most of us; he has lost his way and does not know who he is or what he wants any longer. Kiki’s use of words and descriptions is indescribable and weaves a kind of magic around the reader. This is my first experience with Kiki Howell, but after reading The Healing Spell, she is now at the top of my to be read list!”

  Review from Stevie B. at Manic Readers

  (H)umorous and cute. The action develops very quickly…The physical relationship is very creative, sensual, and enjoyable to read…I found Ms. Howell’s story to be quirky and her ideas interesting and I do intend to read more of her work.