by Todd Young
“You’re not crazy,” Cole said. “Maybe a little young.”
“Is it good to grow up?”
“Good?”
She nodded, and put her thumb in her mouth.
Cole glanced at Angel, and Angel wondered what they could possibly say to her. Was it good to grow up?
“What are you doing?” This from the little girl’s mother, practically hysterical, marching across the grass. “Put her down. Who do you think you are? Some pervert?”
“He’s an angel, Mommy,” the little girl said.
“Frances, I’ve told you time and time again not to go running off, and I’ve said to you ….” Her voice trailed off as she dragged the little girl away.
“Well, they must have something,” Cole said, “to have a daughter like that.”
“Oh, yeah, they look like real nice people.” Angel bit his bottom lip and inhaled through his nose. “But we’re not in the Realm, are we?”
“I don’t suppose so.”
Cole reached for Angel’s hand and they wandered along Well House drive to the Nethermead, Angel surprised as they emerged into a large, grassy clearing, which looked as though it was the center of a forest. There were a couple of elderly people walking a dog, and in the middle of the meadow, a group of teenagers playing with a frisbee. The clearing was surrounded by some oaks, some lindens, some sweet gums, and what Angel recognized as some young cherry trees.
They followed a series of paths through the forest and came out on Ocean Avenue. Angel hailed a cab. When Cole protested, he said, “I’m in pain, Cole. My wings are aching.”
54
As soon as they’d walked through the door, Angel shucked his hoodie off and drew his T-shirt over his head. He twisted his wings from beneath his shoulder blades and stretched and flapped so hard his toes left the ground. He sighed and stepped out of his sneakers, pulled his socks off, and then flopped onto the couch, folding his wings over the back of it, his feathers trembling in protest.
“You know, that doesn’t bother me at all,” Cole said. “Having my wings like that.”
“Yeah, well you … you’re a proper angel. I’m some kind of dud.”
Cole knitted his brows as he unzipped the windbreaker and twisted his shoulders out of it. He contorted his back, slipped one wing and then the other from beneath his shoulder blades and extended them, fluttering the tips of his wings fretfully.
“Feel better?”
“Yeah.”
“So what was it like?”
Cole didn’t know what Angel meant.
“Flying?”
“Oh, it felt real good, though my heart was pounding.”
“You know, I was dying there. I’d had a knife thrust into my throat, and you took off like—”
“I was going for an ambulance.”
“You do have a phone.”
Cole shrugged. “I wanted to … hell, I wanted to get them, but I was reaching for my cell — or trying to. Then I saw that big angel.”
“That Darius?”
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t seem very happy with us, did he?”
“No. Well, maybe it’s like they say in the bible. Maybe you shouldn’t be gay.”
“Oh, fuck Cole,” Angel said, leaning forward and gripping his forehead, “don’t give me that shit.” He raised his eyes. “Animals are gay. There’s gay baboons. Blue dolphins mate for life.”
“Blue dolphins?”
“Male blue dolphins mate for life with another male. They only have sex with the females during the mating season. The rest of the year, they swim in pairs. They fuck each other up the ass. They fuck each other in their blowholes — in the head.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I’m not kidding you. All creatures great and small. If you want to hear weird, you ought to read about bonobos.”
“Bonobos?”
“They’re a type of chimpanzee. They fuck everything and anyone — males, females … their mothers. Their kids.”
“The mothers and fathers fuck their kids?”
“Hell, Cole, the kids fuck their mothers and fathers. They do it every which way you can imagine, and they’re the closest species to us, genetically speaking.”
Cole took a seat on the armchair and unlaced his sneakers. “I’d sure like to tell them that back at the hall.”
“The hall?”
“The Kingdom Hall. It’s like a church — for Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
Angel nodded and was then unable to repress a smirk. “Tell them the wolf will lie with the lamb.”
“What?”
“You know — like lie down — lie with someone.”
Cole laughed. It started as a chuckle, but quickly grew bizarrely hysterical, and Cole was soon wiping tears from his eyes, the two of them exchanging bashful smiles. “You’ve got no idea what they’d say to that,” Cole said, thumping his chest. “You just wouldn’t have a clue.”
“I’m guessing they’d think it a little depraved.”
Cole shook his head disbelievingly. “So,” he said after a few moments had passed, and lifted his head, “are we going to take these jeans off?”
55
Cole fell to his knees at Angel’s feet and stared at him longingly, with his hands on Angel’s thighs.
“Are you my dog?” Angel said.
“I’d be your dog.”
“Then unbutton me, Rufus.”
“Woof!”
Cole reached forward and unbuttoned Angel’s jeans. He laid his chin between Angel’s knees and stared up at him like a lovable puppy. Angel patted him on the head, jokingly at first, though once he’d touched Cole’s hair, he couldn’t help trailing his fingers through it. His cock stiffened and he smelled that smell again. He lifted an arm, sniffed his armpit, and realized it was coming from him.
“I’m pretty dirty,” he said.
“You smell fine to me.”
“You gonna unzip me?”
“Is that a command, master?”
“Unzip me, dog!”
Cole growled. He reached for Angel’s zipper and teasingly yanked it down. Angel’s cock pressed forward, trapped in his clean white briefs.
“Can you take them off?” Angel said, lifting his ass off the couch.
Cole tugged on Angel’s jeans and threaded his feet out of them. Angel’s cock bobbed forward, straining in his briefs, the head of it pink and damp beneath the cotton.
“Touch me,” he said.
Cole reached out and ran his fingers teasingly along the length of Angel’s cock. Angel’s wings shuddered and then began to beat, ruffling their hair with a draft of warm air.
“Can I suck you off?”
“You want to suck me, dog?”
“Woof!”
“Go ahead. Good doggie,” Angel said, and patted Cole on the head. He lifted his ass off the couch and held still while Cole yanked on his briefs, pinching them near his balls and tugging them insistently. Angel’s cock rose into the air, trapped under the waistband, and it was painful for a moment. Then, with a slap, his cock slipped from under the band and smacked his abs.
Cole drew the briefs over Angel’s feet. He straightened up, kneeling on the floorboards, and made fists of his hands, like paws, which he placed on either side of Angel’s thighs. Then he began to pant, his tongue lolling out of his mouth.
Angel smirked, and his torso spasmed with repressed laughter.
“You think dogs do it too?” Cole said.
“You better believe it.”
“You think that’s what we are?”
“The dogs of the angel world?”
Cole nodded, lifting his paws and sliding them along Angel’s thighs.
“Nah,” Angel said. “We’re just …”
“What?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Who is this God fellow anyway?”
“Someone with a seriously fucked up head. That’d be my guess.”
“You think so?”
“Look at the world,
” Cole said, rubbing his thumb over the slick on Angel’s head. “Poor people. Dark people. Gay animals.” He leaned forward and licked the tip of Angel’s cock. “Nuclear weapons.”
“Leprosy.”
“Leprosy?”
“Yeah. Like he said one day: ‘How about a disease that makes people fall to pieces. That sounds like a good idea.’”
Cole chuckled. “I could bite your dick off.”
He ducked forward, taking Angel’s cock into the back of his throat, and then bit on the base Angel’s shaft gently, teasingly. Inevitably, it reminded Angel of Finn, and he sighed inwardly, wondering what had happened to Finn and feeling a frisson of residual emotion. He reminded himself he was with Cole, whom he loved and trusted, and he relaxed as it occurred to him that he was more than prepared to joke around with Cole if that’s what Cole wanted.
“I’d be cockless,” he said good-humoredly, as Cole lifted his head.
“Well, we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
Cole smoothed the slick over the length of Angel’s cock and then ducked forward again. He span his tongue around Angel’s head before dipping it into the eye of his penis. Angel groaned and reached for Cole’s hair, watching through half-closed lids as Cole’s wings expanded, forming a V over them that blocked the sunshine from the window.
Cole thrust his head forward until his bottom lip was wrapped over Angel’s balls. He gagged, his throat spasming time and again around the head of Angel’s cock, and as he gagged, Angel threaded his hands into his hair and came. Cole lifted his head. A gob of cum dribbled over his lips and dolloped onto Angel’s thigh. Angel sighed deeply, staring at the plash of jism. He thought it odd for a moment but didn’t know why. Then it occurred to him that it was no longer dark, but somehow as white as Cole’s had been in the tub. And it seemed to be glistening with life.
“Sorry,” Cole said. “I meant to swallow.” He leaned forward and licked the dollop of jism from Angel’s thigh. Then he stood up, bent over and peeled his jeans off, his pale ass naked.
56
The sun sank toward the horizon, as on any other day, and as the light dwindled, Cole paced the apartment, pacing anxiously, which only served to make Angel more jittery than he already felt. Every now and then his wings would flutter, twitchiness rippling through his feathers.
He turned over in his mind how best to approach this evening’s meeting. They’d most likely be best off catching a cab to the Bronx, though not to the address Hunter had given them, but to a street a few blocks away. What they might find, or what might happen once they reached the address, Angel had no idea, though he felt, somehow, as Cole disappeared into the bedroom behind him, that he was meant to go. He felt as though someone was calling him, a voice he couldn’t quite place, though it occurred to him it might be Finn.
Finn, the peculiar boy whom no one could love, apparently, though Jason must have found a way. Unless that smell had been left in Jason’s apartment by Hunter. But why would Hunter want to kidnap Finn and Jason if their disease hadn’t progressed? Surely, only if they’d been transformed would he be interested in someone who was infected. He’d infected both Angel and Cole, but had shown no interest in getting in touch with either of them again, other than leaving his card with Cole.
Then, suddenly, as though from a dream, Angel remembered something Hunter had said to him in the institute, on the night he’d fucked him.
“If you ever find yourself thinking of me,” he’d said, “come looking. You’ll find me, somewhere, somehow. Think of me, and call to me in your mind.”
At that point, Angel had been raw and aching. His body had been covered with sweat and with the smell of Hunter, which, as Angel thought about it now, had seemed a little odd. Then again, there had always been something odd about Hunter. The way he’d been covered in thick, dark body hair; the way he’d organized that pool game, and then the bukkake with Jesse; the way he’d smirked and joked, as though in on some great secret. And some of his comments, which Angel had barely grasped, now seemed to have some deeper significance.
Then there was what Angel had seen on the street, Hunter’s miraculous metamorphosis. He’d mutated into a woman, or had seemed to, though Angel had seen him as if through a haze, as he thought about it now, and as he turned it over in his mind, the phrase “hazing someone” came to mind, though he didn’t know where from. Had someone dark said that? Had he overheard one of the dark fuckers say it?
“What’s hazing?” he said, lifting his voice to Cole, who was behind him in the bedroom.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“What?”
“Hazing.”
“I don’t know. I think someone dark said it to me.”
“Probably Finn.”
“Finn?”
“He was always going on about it. When we were on the streets together, when he taught me how to see the dark — how to tell the difference — he used to say they could haze.”
“Haze?”
“Make something disappear, or make something look like something else, like you’re seeing it through a haze.”
“So it’s a trick?”
Cole made no answer.
Angel got off the couch and walked into the bedroom. Cole was lying on his stomach with his wings folded over his back, his ass as firm as a fruit.
“Is it a trick?”
“I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how they do it. I’ve seen …”
“What have you seen?” Angel said, taking a seat on the bed beside Cole.
“That fuck in the street, turning into a woman.”
“Yeah. And …?”
“Can we just not talk about it?”
Angel allowed his eyes to drift over Cole’s body. The afternoon was hot. Even now, as the sun was going down, it was somewhere in the nineties and sultry too. Cole’s body was beaded with sweat. Angel leaned forward and gently licked his shoulder. Then he lifted his head and watched as Cole closed his eyes. Gently, he put one hand on the crown of Cole’s head and then began to lick the nape of his neck, Cole’s feathers tickling his chest.
“We’re going to have to get going,” he finally said, lifting his head.
“Do we have to?”
“You know we do, Cole. Finn’s a friend. He’s more yours than mine. And we have an obligation to help Jason, I think, if we can.”
“And if we can’t — if we end up where they are?”
“Where they are?”
Silence.
Cole got up quickly and twisted his shoulders, as though he were an expert at withdrawing his wings. He splayed his feathers over his lower back and slipped the windbreaker on. In the dresser he found a clean pair of briefs, a white pair. Then he picked up the jeans he’d been wearing in the park. There were some grass stains on the butt of them, and Angel almost said something, but he left it.
Instead, he sighed, stood, and stretched his arms over his head. He twisted his shoulders one way and the other. The elbows of his wings slipped beneath his shoulder blades, though it felt a lot more comfortable now than it had earlier. He flattened the tips of his wings against his back and scooped up the hoodie, which he’d slung over the back of the couch. Seeing as it was almost dark, he figured he could get away without wearing the T-shirt. He found some clean boxers and a pair of jeans in his closet, and after he’d changed into them he laced his sneakers up. He stood and reached for Cole and they hugged one another, a harmonious rushing of sound pulsing between them and filling Angel with strength, it seemed, strength flowing from Cole with the insistence of water.
“You’re giving me strength,” Angel said with a quiet sense of wonder.
“No,” Cole replied. “You’re giving it to me.”
They parted and stared at one another. Angel reached for Cole’s hand. Somehow, simply from the touch of his skin, Angel felt a strange power flow into him. “You know, I really don’t think we can ever be apart.”
“I don’t think I could bear it,” Cole said. “Even wh
en I was in here, lying on the bed, I was aching for you to come in and lie beside me.”
Angel nodded. He drew Cole into his arms again and they remained clasped together for minutes, reveling in the mysterious harmony that surged between them as the daylight waned, the room growing dim and shadowy and secretive while somewhere the sun burned majestically, flaming coral and brass on the horizon.
“Come on,” Angel said. He collected his phone, his wallet, his keys and opened the door.
Cole hesitated, slipping his phone into the inside pocket of his windbreaker. He glanced up at Angel from under his brows, making a last plea, though he saw it was hopeless.
They hailed a cab in the street. Angel gave the driver the address he had decided on, an intersection three blocks from the corner of Bronxwood and Waring Avenues — the address Hunter had given to Cole — a place Angel had never seen, somewhere over in the Bronx.
57
In the back of the cab, Cole reached for Angel’s hand and held it as they crossed the East River. Impassively, Angel turned his head and stared down at the darkening water.
Twilight.
A time he had always hated, though it seemed to hold some additional sorrow now.
“You feel weak?” Cole said.
“Weak?”
“Yeah. Like the energy’s draining out of you?”
“You haven’t had anything to eat, Cole. The only thing you’ve had since breakfast is a glass of Coke.”
“I drank some water.”
Angel frowned.
“I wouldn’t mind some water now,” Cole said.
Angel nodded, frowned again, and was surprised to find that he felt like water also, the thought of it coming with the sudden knowledge that it would help, that he would draw strength from it.
“Can you pull over at a 7-Eleven or a gas station?” he said to the driver, leaning forward.
“One of you’s gonna sit in the car, or you’re gonna pay me. You’re not both getting out.”
Angel jolted. He glimpsed the driver’s eyes in the mirror, his vision was fixed on the fact that Angel and Cole were holding hands. Angel unmuddled his hand from Cole’s and replied in a flat, dispirited voice, a familiar weariness flooding his body. “I’ll get out. My friend here’ll sit in the cab.”
