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I hate this house. The mold. The moisture. The pervasive smell of burnt milk. Goat milk soap. Lactic acid is a skin softener and when combined with our proprietary blend of fats and oils the bars are luxurious. But lye heats as it reacts with liquid and milk burns. Everything smells like burnt milk and mold.
I am Jack's unending hatred.
From below, shuffling. Then Tyler's voice, low and certain the way Tyler's voice always is, like he's finishing a sentence he started before you arrived. I can't hear the words. I don't need to. I know that register. I know what it means when Tyler talks like that, soft and deliberate, working something out on someone.
There's no meeting tonight. No fight club. No Project Mayhem action I've been briefed on.
I stand at the top of the basement stairs and I listen and I feel something that I can only categorize as anger.
She was here last night. I know because I can smell her cigarettes under the mold and the burnt milk. Cheap ones. The smell gets into everything, which is impressive given everything already smells like everything else wrong with this house.
Tyler didn't tell me she'd been here. Tyler doesn't tell me things anymore. There are Mayhem actions I hear about after, from the men, and I think — I used to think — Tyler and I were the same person in the ways that mattered. That what Tyler knew I knew. That there was no Tyler-and-me, just us, just this.
The cigarette smell and the being left out feel like the same thing. I go downstairs.
It's dark down here, the single uncovered yellow bulb barely illuminating anything. I make it off the bottom step and onto the packed dirt floor. Then the first hit snaps my head back.
"Passivity is the price you pay for being thought of as civilized." Tyler says, but I'm already probing my teeth for a new gap with my tongue. I taste iron and salt and it's more comforting that it should be.
I am Jack's unprocessed trauma.
Shoulders up, I've dropped into a stance before I've fully registered the hit. There's something clarifying about getting punched in the face that a cup of coffee will never achieve. We circle. The yellow bulb swings slightly, I don't know why, there's no wind down here. Tyler is smiling. Tyler is always smiling when we do this.
"You've been upstairs," Tyler says, "counting things that aren't yours."
I don't answer. My tongue finds the new gap again.
"Marla," I say, finally. Because that's what this is about. That's what I came down here for.
Tyler hits me again, which is an answer of a kind.
"Marla is a distraction."
"For you, maybe. For me she's a problem."
Then we're not talking anymore.
Tyler catches me across the jaw and I taste fresh blood over the old. I get him back in the ribs, feel something give slightly under my knuckle, not a break, a bruise, Tyler will have it for weeks. He gets me in the stomach and I fold and use the momentum, drive my shoulder into him, we hit the dirt together. His elbow finds my back. My knee finds his thigh. We're breathing like animals. We're breathing like the same animal.
I get on top. Tyler gets on top. It goes like that.
This is the thing about Tyler. Tyler knows exactly how hard and where. Knows which hits sharpen and which ones just hurt. I know this about Tyler the way I know the soap formula, the way I know the exits of every building I've ever been in. I know it without knowing how I know it.
We go until my knee finds the dirt. Until I can feel my pulse in my eye socket. Until Tyler's lip is split and his knuckles are wrong and we're both breathing like we've been underwater.
I haul myself up, or Tyler does, or it doesn't matter because my shoulders hit the wall just the same either way and then he's there, right there and then he's there, right there, and this is different from the fight the way the fight is different from everything else. Closer. Tyler smells like her cigarettes and beneath that something that is just Tyler, just this house, just us.
Tyler is what a man looks like. I know because I have looked. Measured. Found myself wanting.
Tyler's hand is on my chest pressing me back. "You know what your problem is? You keep waiting for someone to tell you it's allowed."
"You?"
"No. That's what I'm telling you. Nobody. Somebody."
Tyler's hands have moved to my hips, and I wonder if I needed steadying.
"You're always waiting," Tyler says. "For permission. For the right time. For someone to want you first."
Tyler's thumb finds the gap between my shirt and my waistband. Just rests there. Just skin.
"I don't—" I start.
"You do," Tyler says. "You have been for a long time."
I have been. I don't know what I have been doing but I have been doing it for a long time and Tyler's hand is warm and the basement is cold and I can feel my heartbeat somewhere it has no business being.
Tyler's forehead comes down to mine. We're still breathing hard from the fight. It seems like we might still be fighting.
I don't close my eyes.
I think: this is what Tyler does. Tyler takes things. Tyler doesn't ask.
Tyler doesn't move and neither do I and somewhere in the not-moving something happens that I don't have a word for and don't go looking for one.
"What do you want?" And Tyler's breath is so close, cigarettes and the faded mint of teeth that have been brushed but badly and hours ago. I run my tongue over my own teeth, feeling the grit and the gaps and Tyler smiles in a way that I cannot understand.
I cannot understand the question. I don't know how to answer that. I'm not sure the question applies.
"Here. In here." Tyler's hand is flat on my stomach. I'm hard. I can't remember the last time. My stomach has been carved away in the fights, in the not eating, and Tyler's hand is warm and I don't move away from it.
"Is this what you've been doing with Marla." It's not a question because I know. I know and I know he knows I know and the question is less rhetoric than I wanted it to be.
"Do you want me to answer that?" And his teeth are in my ear and I hate the way I moan.
He wraps a hand around me and it's better than good, it's familiar. Like the first time I jerked off in the shower. Tyler knows me better than I know myself.
Tyler's palm is dry at first. Rough from the fights and the concrete and whatever else he does with his hands when I'm not in the room. The drag pulls everything tight. It stings in the best way. Then the first bead of precome smears under his thumb and it gets worse. Gets better. Gets necessary.
I am Jack's held breath.
My hips twitch forward and Tyler's other hand pins me back against the wall by the hipbone. Not hard. Just certain. Like he already knows where my body wants to go and he's not letting it get there on its own terms.
"You've been hard since I hit you the first time," Tyler says. Not asking. "Don't lie."
I don't answer. My tongue finds the new gap in my teeth again. The taste of blood is still there. Tyler's hand moves—slow and deliberate, like he's proving something. Base to head. A twist at the top that makes my vision go soft at the edges. He uses what I'm leaking.
The yellow bulb swings. My shadow on the wall has Tyler's hand around its cock. The shadow doesn't look away. Neither do I.
Tyler's forehead stays pressed to mine. We're still breathing like we just finished fighting. Maybe we did. Maybe this is the next round and I just don't know the rules yet.
"You think too much," Tyler says against my mouth. "That's the problem. Stop thinking."
His hand speeds up. Not much. Just enough that my knees go soft and Tyler's body is the only thing holding me up. His thumb drags under the head on every upstroke and I make a sound I hate. Tyler smiles like he won something.
I am Jack's knees giving out.
My hands end up on Tyler's shoulders. I don't remember moving them. My fingers twist in his shirt. Tyler's hand on my hip slides back, grabs my ass, pulls me forward into his fist like he's using me to jerk himself off. Maybe he is. Maybe that's the point.
Marla's cigarette smell is still on him. On his clothes. In his hair. I wonder if she watched him do this to himself. I wonder if she knows he was thinking about me while he did it. The thought makes my stomach twist and my cock jump in Tyler's hand at the same time.
Tyler laughs, low and close. "There it is."
He doesn't speed up. He doesn't have to. He knows the rhythm. He knows when to loosen his grip and when to tighten it like he's trying to wring something out of me I've been hoarding. My balls draw up tight. My thighs shake. I can't stop pushing into his hand even though some part of me still wants to.
I am Jack's surrender.
"Come on," Tyler says. Quiet. Almost gentle. "You've been waiting long enough."
And I have. God help me, I have.
The orgasm hits like the first punch of the night—sudden, clarifying, too much and not enough. I come with a sound I don't recognize, spilling hot over Tyler's fingers, onto his wrist, probably on both of us. Tyler doesn't stop. He strokes me through it, slower now, until I'm twitching and oversensitive and pushing weakly at his arm because I can't take any more.
Then he stops.
I don't think about Marla. I don't think about Mayhem. I don't think about the space between what Tyler is and what I am because right now there isn't one and that feels —
I don't finish the thought.
His hand stays wrapped around me for a second longer than necessary. Possessive. Like he's claiming something. Then he brings it up between us. Looks at the mess on his fingers like it's evidence in a trial I didn't know I was in.
He meets my eyes. Steps back. The cold basement air hits my skin where his body was and it feels like punishment.
"Next time," Tyler says, already turning toward the stairs, "don't wait for me to throw the first punch."
I slide down the wall until I'm sitting in the dirt. My legs don't work. My head doesn't work. Everything smells like burnt milk and mold and sex and blood.
I am Jack's complete fucking mess.
Somewhere above me, a door opens and closes. Tyler's footsteps move through the house like he owns it. Like he owns me. Like this changes nothing and everything at the same time.
I stay in the basement until the yellow bulb burns out.