by Kim Fielding
Jack found himself liking this man and didn’t want to lie. But he couldn’t very well tell the truth, could he? “I just don’t get out much.”
“Huh.” There was that piercing stare again. Jack shifted uncomfortably.
But then Buddy smoothly shifted gears and began a long story about a time he and Rick had groped each other in front of a group of scandalized preachers in Tennessee. That led to another tale, this one about seducing a cop in Virginia, and then a story about getting really drunk in Idaho and finding himself in a stranger’s bathtub, wearing an oversized evening gown.
Jack didn’t know if any of the stories were true, but they were funny and Buddy was good at telling them. Along the way, Buddy asked a few questions of Jack, which Jack tried to answer honestly yet evasively. Jack had this strange feeling that Buddy saw right through him.
Sometime in the wee hours, Jack glanced outside and saw Tag trudging home. He looked exhausted or defeated—maybe both. Jack quickly stood. “I have to go.”
Buddy looked out the door and nodded. “Thanks for shootin’ the shit with me.”
“Thanks for having me over.”
When Buddy held out his huge paw of a hand, Jack shook it. “We’ll have to do this again, next time our significant others leave us high an’ dry. Have a good night, man.”
“You too.”
Jack hurried down the stairs and across the courtyard, arriving just as Tag was about to close the door. “Oh!” said Tag. “You went out.”
“Just over there.” Jack pointed at Buddy’s place. “Buddy invited me over.”
Tag narrowed his eyes. “Yeah? What for?”
“Talking. I can’t tell if he’s lonely or nosy.”
Without answering, Tag walked across the room. His steps were just a little unsteady. If Jack could smell, he suspected he’d smell booze. He lit a cigarette and watched as Tag emptied his pockets, but Jack nearly dropped the smoke when he saw the wads of bills Tag produced.
“Holy cow! How much money is that?”
“Dunno. About sixty grand, I think.” Tag sounded less than pleased over it. “I doubled down on sixteen. Bet everything. I got a five and the dealer busted.”
Jack wasn’t an expert on card games, but he was fairly certain Tag’s betting habits were unorthodox at best. It was almost as if Tag was trying to lose. “You had some good luck.”
“Good luck!” Tag snarled the words so viciously that Jack took a step backward. With movements made clumsy by fury and alcohol, Tag shoved the cash to the bottom of his underwear drawer and slammed the drawer mostly shut. Then he simply stood there, jaw tight, eyes focused on an empty spot on the wall.
“Do you want to watch TV?” Jack asked.
“I’m tired.”
Jack had the impression Tag intended to be matter-of-fact when he said those words, maybe slightly assertive. But that’s not what came out. Tag’s face might still have been angry, but he sounded exhausted and desperate, a lost soul who’d given up hope of finding his way.
After willing the cigarette to vanish, Jack moved closer to Tag. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t molest you.” He smiled slightly as he remembered Buddy saying the same thing. Jack reached over and started unbuttoning Tag’s green shirt.
Tag didn’t stop him. He remained motionless as Jack tugged the shirt from his shoulders. Jack positioned Tag’s arms upward and pulled his T-shirt up and off, making a mess of Tag’s curls. “Come on.” Jack gently steered Tag to the unmade bed. He pushed on his shoulders until Tag sat; then Jack knelt to remove his shoes and socks. He was sorely tempted to nuzzle at the denim crotch so close to his face—he’d always been good with his mouth—but he knew that would lead to disaster. Instead, he pressed Tag flat, unbuttoned the jeans, and drew them off.
“Do you want a drink of water before you go to sleep?”
Tag blinked blearily at him. “Should brush my teeth.”
“Brush them twice in the morning.” With a little cooperation from Tag, Jack repositioned him so that he lay on his back with his head on the pillow. Jack pulled the blankets up too. He clicked off the light.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry. About… before. It was a nice kiss.”
“I thought so too.”
Within moments, Tag was snoring.
Fifteen
TAG SLEPT through the entire morning and well into the afternoon. It was a restless sleep, though, with lots of tossing and mumbling. When he finally woke up, he didn’t look well rested. “Shit. It’s late,” he said, glancing at the bedside clock.
Jack sat at the table, playing on the computer. “Do you have to be somewhere?”
“No. But I’m carrying the Pacific Ocean in my bladder.” He struggled out of the blankets and made a quick but unsteady beeline for the bathroom. Jack pretended not to notice his impressive morning wood.
Half an hour later, Tag emerged from the bathroom. He was freshly showered and looked slightly perkier but wore only a pair of gray briefs. God, Jack wished he could bury his face in Tag’s wet hair and smell his shampoo. But he had to be content to watch as Tag padded to the fridge for a glass of orange juice.
“You had quite a night last night,” Jack ventured.
Tag glanced over his shoulder at him. “And you had a pajama party with Buddy.”
“He’s interesting.”
“I bet he is.” Tag grabbed an apple before sitting down across from Jack. “He thinks you’re hot.”
“I know. He told me. And he thinks you have a nice ass.”
Interestingly, Tag flushed. “I think Buddy’s husband better keep a closer eye on him.”
“He didn’t try to fuck me, Tag. He just told me a bunch of stories about his life.”
The apple crunched loudly when Tag bit into it. Jack had a sudden sense memory of teeth breaching taut skin and plunging into sweet-tart depths. Once when he was seven or eight and visiting the family in Grand Island, he’d gotten into the winter store of apples down in the cellar and gobbled so many he was sick for two days. Nobody felt sorry for him except Betty. While he lay groaning in bed, she sat on the rag rug nearby, telling endless incoherent tales about her doll.
Tag ate the entire apple, core and all.
“You’ll grow a tree in your stomach,” Jack warned with a grin.
“It’ll be a nice addition to the dirt farm my mom used to say I had behind my ears.”
“Mine said the same thing!”
Their mingled laughter was soft, pleasing to Jack’s ears.
“Hey, Jack? Did you want to do some research on your family? I could help you look them up if you like.”
“My parents must be dead by now. Dad would be almost a hundred and ten, and Mom not much younger.”
“Wow. I hadn’t… that hadn’t computed with me. I’m sorry.”
“I hope they were happy. Not bitter. I know I was a huge disappointment to them, but Betty was a good girl.” He had no more lingering resentment toward his family than he did toward Sam Richards. His parents were uneducated people ruled by old religious and small-town values. They’d loved him as best as they knew how. He hoped they didn’t spend the rest of their lives wondering what happened to their son.
“Your sister might still be around,” Tag pointed out quietly.
“I know. I tried to look for her already.” He’d searched both her maiden name and Betty Ellebruck. “Couldn’t find anything. It’s probably best to leave it alone. My gran used to have a saying: no use digging up old graves. She was right.”
They were both silent for a while after that. Jack didn’t know what was going through Tag’s head, but Jack was thinking about how he didn’t even have a grave. Not that he wanted one, exactly, but he was a little sad to have made so little imprint on the world. If he hadn’t become a ghost and been found by Tag, he’d have remained forgotten forever, as if he’d never even been born.
The chair creaked when Tag pushed it back and stood. He stretched, forcing Ja
ck to turn his gaze away from the tufts of dark hair under his arms. “Do you want to go somewhere?” Tag asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. A drive, I guess. God, you’d think I had enough driving lately! But I think I want to get away from the Strip for a little while.”
“Sure.”
Of course, Jack was ready to go right away, but Tag took fifteen minutes or so to get dressed and out the door. The sunlight was blinding as it reflected off the courtyard’s white concrete. All the colors looked slightly washed out, like overexposed film, and the shadows seemed unnaturally sharp and deep. The interior of Tag’s car was blazingly hot.
“Sorry. I’ll crank the AC,” Tag said.
“I don’t mind.” Death was cold most of the time—except when Tag was near.
Tag didn’t seem to have a destination in mind. He took them down the Strip and onto a freeway that led them out of the city surprisingly fast. There was nothing much but desert for a while. The hills were more rounded than the ones near Jasper, and the greenery was sparser.
“What is that?” Jack exclaimed after they’d driven for some time. He pointed at rows and rows of something shiny, with a tall beacon of light in the middle.
“Solar farm.”
“Um… what?”
“It’s for electricity. The mirrors direct the sunlight onto water, I think, and the steam runs turbines.”
“But why?”
Tag grinned crookedly. “Where did the electricity come from in your day, Jack?”
Jack had never really thought about it before. “Coal, I guess. I used to see the coal trains coming in from the west. Oil?”
“Fossil fuels. Nonrenewable and bad for the environment. Climate change, right? Solar’s better.”
Mystified by this discussion, Jack simply nodded. He might have learned to use a computer and a remote control, but there was clearly much about the modern world he didn’t understand. Would he have kept up with it all if he hadn’t died? He imagined himself eighty years old, sitting in a rocking chair, complaining about young whippersnappers today. When he was a boy, one of his elderly relatives refused to ride in a car. “People weren’t made to go any faster than on horseback!” she used to insist. She flat-out denied the existence of airplanes.
Tag exited the freeway and drove toward a large casino with a Wild West theme. But he didn’t stop there; instead, he drove up to a low brick building, spoke to someone via radio, and pulled up to a window. The girl there traded him a paper bag and cardboard cup for some money.
“You can do that?” Jack asked.
“Drive-through.”
“We had carhops.”
“This is even better. No need to turn off your engine, and God forbid you should walk a few yards to collect your greasy, sodium-laden meal.” Tag parked the car at the edge of the lot and cut the motor.
“But cars use gasoline. Didn’t you tell me that was bad for the environment?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t understand.”
Tag slurped through his straw before unwrapping a burger and taking a big bite. “It’s easy,” he said after swallowing. “Twenty-first-century Americans want everything and we want it now. We complain about how much work we have and then send each other e-mails on weekends and vacations. We decide we’re out of shape, so we pay to join a gym, then drive our car there so we can go on the treadmill. We carefully sort our garbage into different-colored bins and we buy endless crap packaged in plastic. We think we do everything bigger and better than everyone else, and anyone who says otherwise is unpatriotic and possibly a socialist. We claim everybody’s created equal, but we commit hate crimes against immigrants, Muslims, blacks, and gays. We insist gun ownership is a constitutional right but health care is a menace. We’re fucked-up, Jack, every one of us, and the sanest of us are crazier than my mother ever was.”
He took another bite of his food.
“Things weren’t always that great when I was alive,” Jack pointed out.
“Oh, I know. The Depression. Segregation. Women treated as second-class citizens, and fags could still be thrown in prison. It’s a screwed-up world, Jack. If there is a God, life is a prank he’s pulling on us all.”
Tag said this lightly, with the corners of his mouth turned up in a grin. But there was nothing humorous about it. It was the most pessimistic monologue Jack had ever heard.
Fuck. Tag really was teetering at the edge of the pool.
“Tag?” Jack settled his hand on Tag’s leg. “Don’t get mad at me, okay? I know… I know you had problems with your family. A really rough childhood. But you survived. And you’re smart and handsome and you have sixty thousand dollars in cash. What’s wrong?”
Tag shook his head bleakly. “Told you. I fuck it all up.” He shoved the burger wrapper into the bag, hopped out of the car, and tossed the trash in a green container. When he returned, his expression was pinched and closed off. Jack decided not to push.
They drove back to the city but not straight to the Baja. Tag drove them past blocks of identical houses, past seedy-looking shops, past casinos and hospitals and shopping malls. He seemed to be choosing his route at random. Jack was struck by the realization that even the old-looking buildings they passed were probably younger than he was.
Just as the sun was setting, they pulled into the alley behind their motel. They hadn’t exchanged a word for at least an hour, and Tag didn’t say anything as he got out of the car. Once inside their room, he headed straight for the dresser and his hidden stash of bills.
“Can I come?” asked Jack.
“No.” Then Tag added in a softer tone, “I’ll just be an asshole. Maybe Buddy’s around. He’ll be way better company.” He walked back to the door, where Jack still stood. And then Tag did something unexpected: he wrapped his arms around Jack and leaned in against Jack’s shoulder—lightly, as is if he were afraid to rest too much weight on him. “I’m sorry, Jack. Now you know why I don’t have any friends.”
“You have me.”
Tag pulled away enough to look up at him and smile. “Thank you.”
JACK WATCHED TV after Tag left, but not for very long. He was tired, and holding himself together was just too much effort. He faded out into the fog, which seemed chillier than before. Maybe just in contrast to the warmth he’d felt briefly in Tag’s embrace. He floated there, not quite seeing or hearing, not quite thinking.
But the sound of the door closing did make its way to him. Pleased with Tag’s quick return, Jack made himself visible, not bothering with clothing.
A short, middle-aged woman stood in the center of the room, her mouth hanging open in shock. She dropped the stack of towels she’d been holding. “Madre de Dios,” she whispered, crossing herself.
Jack blinked himself away.
Sixteen
“JACK? ARE you here?”
Jack was more cautious about appearing when the door opened this time, but he popped into view once he heard Tag’s voice. He didn’t miss the look of relief that flashed across Tag’s face.
“Thought maybe you were with Buddy again.”
“No.” Jack considered whether to tell him what had happened with the maid, then decided not to.
Tag looked exhausted. His eyes were shadowed and red rimmed, and it looked like he’d been running fingers through his hair all night. He trudged over to the fridge and drank some juice straight from the carton, then closed the fridge door and leaned against it for a few moments. He pried himself away to empty his pockets onto the table.
“How much?” Jack asked, eyeing the thick rolls of bills.
“Dunno. I think I came out about even. I lost almost all of it at one point and I thought I’d finally— But then I won it back.” Once again, he appeared to find no joy in it.
“Do you want to go to sleep? I’ll help you get ready.”
“I don’t… I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to touch me.”
“Why not?”
�
�Because I won’t want you to stop.”
Jack swallowed and moved slowly closer, until he was within arm’s reach of Tag. “I won’t want to stop. I don’t have to.”
Tag took a small step back. “We can’t.”
For the first time in almost sixty years, Jack was angry. “Why not? A few days with a ghost is too much for you? Even a commitment-phobe like you should be able to handle that much!”
Blinking slightly, Tag said, “Commitment-phobe?”
“I… I watched some daytime talk shows.”
Surprising Jack with a soft chuckle, Tag came closer. “You’re right. I suck at making commitments. The closest I ever got to settling down was with Jason, and you know how that turned out. But it’s… it’s complicated, you know?”
It was complicated. Would have been even if Jack hadn’t been dead, although that certainly wasn’t helping matters. But Jack was tired of excuses. “There’s not much time left,” he said quietly.
A long moment passed as they stared at each other, silently acknowledging their separate secrets. Jack hadn’t told Tag everything he’d learned from the ghosts at the dam. And Tag—for reasons Jack didn’t understand—was balanced on the very edge, ready to fall. Almost no time was left at all.
“Jack,” Tag whispered. That was enough. They moved to each other, against each other. Tag pressed his warm, wet lips to the crook of Jack’s neck before trailing kisses along his collarbone to his sternum. When he nibbled lightly on a hardened nipple, Jack gasped.
“What do you want, Jack? How can I make you feel good?”
“Th-that’s nice,” Jack replied as Tag turned his attention back to the sensitive nub of flesh. It was even better when Tag grasped Jack’s asscheeks and massaged them firmly, pulling Jack’s hips flush against his. Jack was already fully erect, and the denim of Tag’s jeans rubbed wonderfully against his hard-on.
And then Tag dropped to his knees and took Jack’s cock into his mouth.
Standing nude in the middle of the room while a beautiful, fully dressed man sucked him off—that was so deliciously decadent that Jack had to throw back his head and close his eyes. And Tag’s fingers proved as skilled as his mouth. He toyed with Jack’s balls and teased at the tender skin behind them, making Jack widen his stance so far he nearly lost his balance. “Oh God,” Jack groaned when Tag brushed lightly at his hole.
