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“You look like you need a drink.”
Ryland looked up from his drink—he already had a drink—to stare at the tall, dark-haired stranger who had spoken. He was older than Ryland, but not by much, a couple years, maybe four. He had a collared shirt on with the sleeves pushed up around his elbows, like the bar was too warm. Was the bar stuffy? Ryland hadn’t noticed. He’d been staring at the foam on his beer for long enough that it had probably grown its own ecosystem.
“I—yeah,” Ryland said. He swallowed, feeling his throat click. “You offering?”
“Sure,” the guy said, and flagged down the bartender. He had a nice watch on, Ryland noticed.
He tipped back and drained what was in his pint glass, nearly a third of it left, gone warm while he’d been staring into the foam.
“Bad day at the office?” the guy suggested, sliding a fresh, cold beer across the bar to him, as well as a shot of something clear.
Technically, yes. The problem was that the office had been a funeral home.
Ryland took the shot. He barely felt the burn of it, didn’t ask what it was. Alcohol, obviously. Beyond that, he didn’t give a fuck.
“Something like that,” Ryland mumbled, and then chased the shot with a gulp of his beer. “I’m… Ben.”
A lie, a quick and easy one. He and Ben had shared a tiny dorm room on campus their first year, and then had gotten adjacent rooms in off-campus housing with three other guys from the biology department. Borrowing his name was as easy as borrowing a pen, ill-fitting though it was. Ryland had gone by worse-fitting names, after all.
“Nice to meet you, Ben,” the man said. He took his own shot and then bit a lemon. Ryland hadn’t noticed the dish, the bright yellow peels lying against a pinch of salt. “I’m Will.”
Will’s cock was rather unimpressive, but Ryland didn’t care much. Easier to fit in his mouth, even if it wasn’t anything to write home about. He moaned in a weird way, though, which Ryland might have written home about—if there had been someone to write home to.
Went out with this guy who sounded like a dying whale when he came, he might’ve texted Stellan, once. It would’ve made him laugh.
Not that they’d gone anywhere, except the men’s room at the back of Murphy’s. It was the single-occupancy kind, and there were four of them, so Ryland felt less bad about monopolizing the whole space when Will had suggested they find somewhere private. Five drinks made him very agreeable, though not enough to leave the premises—not enough to get in a car.
He was acting pretty dumb, but Ryland Grace was smarter than that.
Probably.
So now he was on his knees, sucking off the guy who had bought him four of his five drinks. Considerate, really. A gentleman. And his cock wasn’t bad or anything, just… well. A mouthful.
He took it easily to the root, sucking with his trademark enthusiasm. He’d always been annoyingly good at this. A natural, his first partner had said. Unfortunately, not a transferable skill.
“Fuck, Ben,” the guy whimpered, grabbing his hair and thrusting roughly. Not great etiquette, but Ryland wasn’t choking or anything.
He catalogued the sensations like he was taking lab notes: pressure of his lips stretching around the base, the scrape of Will’s pubic hair against his nose, the heaviness of the cock on his tongue. Weight, mass, volume. He could probably estimate the density, if he’d been in a mood to do math.
He wasn’t. The math part of his brain had gone quiet somewhere around the fourth drink, and the fifth had shut it up entirely. What was left was this: a warm, pleasant blur, his knees aching against the tile floor, the taste of skin and the bitter tang of pre-come.
Ryland relaxed his throat and let it happen, let himself float in the endorphins. Will’s hips snapped forward as he moaned again—that strange, low yawning sound. Ryland would have laughed if his mouth hadn’t been full.
The sound he did make was weird and wet.
Will’s grip on Ryland’s hair tightened.
“Yeah, baby, choke on my cock,” he said.
Ryland made the sound again. A wet laugh. He wasn’t choking at all. The tip was mostly hitting the roof of his mouth, sliding back and forth across his palate. When Will pulled Ryland right up to his pubic bone, he could just barely settle in his throat. He swallowed, and Will bucked, groaning.
He let his eyes fall closed and sucked harder. The float was nice. That was the word, the only word. Floating. As if his body was doing something very far away, and he was watching from a safe distance. His jaw was starting to ache a little. His knees would bruise, but the bruises would belong to someone else. He was just... observing.
Will came with a high, wounded sound, spilling in Ryland’s mouth without warning. The taste was unpleasant, but he swallowed anyway. It was fine. Impolite, but fine. He just wished it had lasted longer. The buzz was already leaving him feeling empty and cold as Will’s dick slipped from his mouth.
“Fuck, Ben, are you okay, baby?”
Will’s hands touched his face, awkwardly petting. Like they knew each other or something. Oh, he was crying. Well, that was awkward.
“Sorry,” Ryland slurred, wiping at his face with his sleeve. “Where’s my bag?”
“It’s—oh, you must’ve left it at the bar.”
Panic pushed the remnants of the happy chemicals aside as he lurched to his feet. Will barely had time to do up his fly before Ryland was unlocking the door and stumbling back out into the bar, feverish. His bag his bag his bag.
It was sitting beside the stool at the bar where he’d been sitting; even the dregs of his last pint were still there. They hadn’t been gone long. He grabbed the bag, a leather messenger-style one—not quite a briefcase, but smart-looking, appropriate for a PhD candidate (My treat, kiddo. You deserve the best.)—and rummaged through it frantically. Please please please please—
His hand closed around the Ziplock and yanked it out with a wave of relief. Will had followed him out of the bathroom and was looking at him like he’d grown three heads as he cradled a bag of gravel to his chest.
“What the fuck is that?” he asked.
Ryland hiccupped. “My uncle.”
The crematorium returned Stellan in a box. Not a nice box. A cardboard box with a label on it that just said Grace. Not Munck. Because he’d been the one to have to pick it up. Why hadn’t he taken Stellan’s name? He could have. He should have.
Ryland carried the box up the stairs like he was holding a box of kittens: as far away from his body as possible. Kittens were nice, but they made him sneeze and had sharp little claws and didn’t like him. (His uncle’s ashes were not nice. They made him feel nauseated to think about, a cold sweat breaking out on his back.)
Mike opened the door mutely before he could ring the bell. He was a tall Black man with short-cropped hair and the kind of posture that suggested he’d once been in the military. Ryland always forgot if he’d been in the Marines or just in the Navy, partly because Mike never talked about it and partly because Ryland had never considered it important. He worked as a machinist now.
They stood in the doorway for a long time, neither one quite sure what to do. Then Mike stepped aside, and Ryland came in and toed off his Chucks. Then they sat at the kitchen table, and the box sat between them. It looked like something that might contain shoes, or a belt. Not a person. Not a whole life.
“We should—” Mike stopped. He laughed once, a weird little bark, a horrible, hollow sound. “I don’t know how to do this. We just… divide them up?”
Them, the ashes. Divvying up pieces of Stellan. Like Stellan was a sample. Like they could aliquot him into two sterile tubes and label one Mike and the other Ryland. Ryland’s stomach lurched.
He’d been thinking about it all week, doing the math in his head: if a body weighed 52 kilograms at the end, after the disease and the treatment ate away at it, and if cremation reduces to approximately 4% of that mass, then—
What parts did he get? Which parts did Mike get? One portion for Mike, one for Ryland, everybody gets a souvenir! That was 2.8 kilos each of dead uncle— of dry biomass—
“Ryland?”
He blinked. “Yeah?”
“You still with me?”
Mike’s eyes were soft, kind. He’d looked at Stellan that way, fondly, when he had been sitting in his studio for ten hours without eating, perfecting the shading on a sketch or rotating between three paintings he had on the go. Like he was something that needed to be taken care of.
Ryland looked away awkwardly.
“Sorry, yeah. I was just—thinking.”
Everyone talked about death as though the difficult part was losing someone. Nobody mentioned the administrative nonsense afterward. The paperwork, the endless phone calls. Changing all the bills over, making copies of the death certificate at Kinko’s for the life insurance people and the bank and the university and the cable provider. It was all so empty, so useless. And all you were left with was the expectation that you would calmly decide which percentage of a person you wanted to take home and put in an expensive urn.
Mike reached across the table and put his hand on Ryland’s forearm. The touch was warm, and Ryland flinched, and then felt terrible for flinching, and then flinched again from how terrible he felt. It was a loop.
Mike wasn’t his dad. Nearly six years in his life, but he wasn’t his dad. He was Mike, and Mike was nice, but he wasn’t… he wasn’t Stellan Munck, and he wasn’t Aaron Grace. He’d lost two dads in twelve years. (Three. No. Two.)
“It’s okay,” Mike said. “It’s okay, I know you’ve been through—”
“If you say ‘so much’ or ‘a lot,’ I’m going to throw the box out the window.”
He meant it. The window was open, letting in a beautiful breeze that fluttered the curtains that Stellan had picked out. It was ridiculously sunny. Fucking California. If he never saw the sun again, it would be too soon. So bright and happy.
Ryland looked back at Mike, and saw his mouth twitch. That almost-smile was the most real thing Ryland had seen in weeks.
“Fair enough, kiddo,” he said.
They opened the box.
The ashes were not like in the movies. They were coarse, grayish, with grit. He could see bits of bone. Ryland had thought it would be soft, like the stuff from a fireplace, but it wasn’t. It was gravel, wrapped in a plastic sheet, or a bag, twisted at the top but not sealed.
“Jesus,” Mike whispered.
The pill hit somewhere between the kitchen and the living room, and by the time Ryland made it to the couch, the party had gone soft at the edges. He sat down and let his head fall back, watching the ceiling fan spin in wide, lazy circles.
Ryland wasn’t sure whose house this was. It was one of those shabby bungalows near campus that grad students shared by the half-dozen, with mismatched furniture and a kitchen that smelled permanently of weed and stale coffee. There were red cups everywhere, couples making out on the makeshift dancefloor, someone shouting a story in the kitchen to be heard over the music. The music was loud. The pill helped take the edge off his overstimulation.
People moved around him. Conversations happened in fragments that surfaced and sank. A girl sat down close, offering him a sip from her solo cup. He drank a little, wrapped an arm around her when she leaned in to say something in his ear. Her voice was indistinct. He laughed anyway, and then kissed her. She kissed back.
She was gone again after a while. He felt the start of a hickey on his neck where she’d bit and sucked at him, squirming in his lap. She was pretty, long black hair in a braid he wanted to tug on. Where’d she go? Monica, or Erica, or… something. Pretty, soft. She’d smelled like strawberries.
A hand landed on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and found a man leaning over the back of the couch—thin face, eyes a little close together, sandy hair trimmed short around his ears. Not really his type, but he was looking at Ryland like he was hungry, which made something in him stir.
Sure, why not?
His mouth moved, and Ryland watched it shape words for a beat too long before the sound caught up.
“Saw you lookin’ at me. You want to go upstairs?”
Huh. Had Ryland been leering across the living room at this guy? There had been a few people dancing, grinding on each other. He’d been enjoying it, watching a skirt swish, a hand sliding up the back to grab a firm bum. Everyone was laughing, touching each other, kissing. Two guys had been dry humping near the fireplace. Oh, this was one of those guys. The humpers.
“Sure,” he said, setting his red cup on the coffee table. Had Monica given it to him? Where did she go? Maybe she wanted to come upstairs, too?
He stood up and looked around for the long, dark braid. The room tilted, then righted itself. He followed the man up the stairs, past a couple fused together against the hallway wall, into a bedroom at the end of the hall.
The door closed, dropping the music to a throb. He kissed him, or was kissed, pressed back up against the door. Hands wandering over his chest—his flat chest, right, good—and then trailing down his stomach. Nope.
Ryland dropped to his knees, sliding down the door, his hands on the guy’s hips. Not a problem, it would seem. A sharp inhale, and then the man was unzipping his jeans. Ryland took him in his hand first—warm, solid, bigger than he’d expected—then into his mouth, the stretch at the corners of his jaw familiar as breathing. He let his throat go loose and took him deeper, the way that made men’s voices go stupid.
“Nnn,” the man groaned, hips twitching forward gently, carefully, polite. “Yeah. Like that, like that.”
Ryland didn’t gag as short, tentative thrusts became longer, rolling forward with more force every time Ryland hummed, making happy, satisfied sounds. He was good at this, a professional, even if he’d never put that on a résumé. There were worse things to be good at.
The thinking stopped. That was the gift of it. The noise in his head went quiet—quieter. Time folded in on itself. Ryland existed only in this one dark room, this one damp mouthful of flesh, this one endless moment of being someone else’s body and not his own. Object, not subject.
“God, you’re so pretty,” the man was babbling. “So pretty on my cock. God, your mouth. So pretty. You gonna swallow my load like a good girl—?”
Ryland jerked away, but it was too late. There was semen on his tongue, and then a second spurt against his cheek. He spit what was in his mouth on the guy’s shoes.
“The fuck you call me?” he gasped, shoving hard. The man fell back, stunned as Ryland climbed on top of him and raised his fist.
“Jesus, Ryland.” Marissa’s face was pale as she looked up at him, her mouth going slack with shock. “What happened?”
He shrugged, sliding into the seat beside her. The lecture theater was half-full of undergrads. He and Mar liked to show up to the lectures; keeping on top of the course helped them grade the papers and exams and run seminars. The other two TAs didn’t usually bother.
“You should see the other guy,” he joked, grinning. His lip stung as it stretched over his teeth.
“That’s not funny.”
Ryland didn’t like the way she was looking at him. He hated when people pitied him. He was fine, it was fine. A couple of bruises. They were going to look at apartments that afternoon. There was no reason for that to change.
“Some guy, uh, called me a girl. That’s all. I held my own.”
Marissa’s expression went stony. “I’ll kill him,” she said, and she almost sounded serious.
“Not worth it,” Ryland countered, pulling his notebook from his messenger bag. All his notebooks were labeled neatly in Sharpie. Organic chemistry 201, this one said. It contained more doodles than actual notes. He flipped to a clean page.
“You promise you’re okay?” Marissa asked.
Professor Allen waved to them as she set up her slides. Her eyebrows furrowed slightly when she spotted Ryland’s face. Ryland swallowed, his ears reddening. Don’t say anything, he pleaded with his eyes.
A thumb pressed to his split lip, gently. Marissa’s thumb. Ryland flinched, hissing, and broke eye contact with the professor.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Would you tell me if you weren’t?”
No, he probably wouldn’t.
“Of course.”
Ryland wanted to be somewhere else. He wanted to be under the table. He wanted to be in the mountains, or on the coast. England, maybe, or Seattle. Somewhere appropriately dreary. (He wanted to be back in the bleak, sterile hospice room, holding Stellan’s cold hand, because at least then Stellan had still been in the room, then. At least he’d been one thing, tangible. Not fragments.)
“We need a container,” Ryland said. His voice surprised him, calm and practical. The kind of voice he used for lab work, for teaching.
“We have Ziplocks,” Mike whispered, still looking in the box. “In the drawer with the plastic wrap and baking paper.”
Ryland slid off his chair and padded to the kitchen in his socked feet. The box of bags was unopened. Stellan had bought them to store leftover chili in the freezer—gallon-sized bags. He took one and carried it back to the table, splitting the sealed zipper with his thumbnail.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” Mike repeated.
They divided the ashes. It was absurd, it was the most absurd thing Ryland had ever done. Mike scooped the gritty gray material into the bag with a measuring cup, a one-cup measure, while Ryland held the bag open. Neither of them spoke.
Tears rolled down Mike’s face, slow and silent. He didn’t wipe them away. Ryland wanted to look away, but he didn’t. He owed Mike that much. The dignity of being seen.
“I can’t believe—six years and they didn’t let me—” Ryland’s throat closed. Mike poured another scoop. “I was the person who made him coffee in the morning every day for five years, and I didn’t get to—”
He never finished any of his sentences.
When the bag was maybe half full—a rough half, an eyeballed half, because life didn’t come with measuring lines and Ryland couldn’t bear the thought of actually weighing the ashes—Mike stopped.
“Which, ah, half…?” he murmured.
Ryland sealed the Ziplock and pulled it toward himself. His messenger bag was by the front door; he would put it in there. “Easier to take on the bus,” he said.
Mike tied the top of the bag in the box and then stared at it. There was a smudge of whitish powder on his wrist, like powdered sugar on a cake. Absurd, really. Bonkers. That had been part of Stellan, eight days ago.
“It’s not enough,” Mike said. “You should have all of it, you should—you should have the house. You were his kid.”
There it was. The word. Someone had said it, finally. You were his kid.
“I was just his nephew,” Ryland murmured. “You were his—you were his everything.”
He remembered the first time he’d seen them kissing, standing over a sink of soapy water. Stellan had grabbed Mike by the face with his two wet hands and planted one on him, laughing. They were always pretty private about it, pretty averse to public displays. Ryland had walked in and seen them, and thought, wow. That’s what love looks like.
He’d been seventeen, and felt his heart crack open. He hoped he’d be allowed to love someone like that, someday. He hoped someone would look at him with the ferocity in Mike’s eyes.
(“I’m so glad you’re my son,” Stellan had said, his eyes unfocussed on the ceiling. He was less lucid, some afternoons. Loopy from the drugs. “My brilliant Ryland. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be so okay.” He turned his face on the pillow. “Tell Mike I—”)
Mike’s arms were wrapped around him. One moment he’d been on the other side of the table, and then he was suddenly bent over Ryland, crushing his arms to his chest. He worried the Ziplock would pop from the pressure.
“Maybe—maybe we could get coffee, sometime. Or an egg cream at Mel’s. Or something. Next time you’re in town.” The words were mumbled into Ryland’s hair. “I don’t want to—I can’t lose you too, kid. I’m not leaving you, you know?”
Ryland didn’t say You will. He didn’t say Everyone does. He just nodded and let himself be held, because it was the least cruel thing he could do.
“We can’t afford this place!” Marissa stood at the window, looking wistfully at the view. “I can see the ocean! You’re crazy, showing this to me. Cruel, even.”
“I’ve got it covered,” Ryland laughed, wrapping his arms around her from behind. He put his chin on her shoulder. Touching, being touched. It was nice.
“Is Kevin going to move in?” she asked, her eyes still on that tiny sliver of the ocean in the distance. “Even split three ways, I can’t imagine this is in our budget. I mean, come on.”
It was a nice apartment. The living room was big enough for a sectional, and there was a small third bedroom Ryland was already mentally decorating with two desks and a bookshelf. They’d never have been able to split the rent on two TA salaries and the remnants of his stipend.
“No, we broke up.”
Kevin had been nice. Smart, handsome, eager to please. Reminded him to take his T, never used the wrong pronouns. Liked to fuck him from behind so he could smack Ryland’s ass, and always used a condom without being asked. A psychology major, but what could you do? Nobody was perfect.
(You can’t just disappear and act like it didn’t matter. I just want to be there for you. I could come, help with the arrangements. Have you even talked to a funeral home yet? Don’t hang up on me again, Ry—)
Marissa pulled out of his hug and turned to face him. His arms fell limply at his sides.
“What? When?”
“While I was away.” Ryland shrugged. Away. A month sitting vigil, reading aloud from Adventures of the Nebula Queen, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers. The smell of the room stinging his nose, his eyes. “It was a phone call.”
Marissa looked like she wanted to say something, but bit it back.
“Then we definitely can’t afford this apartment,” is what she landed on, when her voice came back to her. No pity. No apologies. She knew him well. Too well. Better than anyone alive, probably.
“I’ve got it covered,” he repeated. “You contribute what you can. I’ve got life insurance money.”
“You can’t—”
“I already put down the deposit,” he lied. “It’s ours for a year. Just enjoy it.” He paused, searching for the right note of levity. “But I’m taking the bigger bedroom. No arguments.”
Marissa harrumphed, but looked at him fondly.
He was dancing. Swaying, drunk and loose-limbed, letting the bass from the shitty speakers rattle his sternum like a second heartbeat. Earlier, a girl had given him a pill to put under his tongue. She’d let him finger her in the kitchen, her skirt flipped up and her thong pushed aside, not caring who saw. It was happening everywhere, and nobody cared. Everyone was too drunk or high or giddy. Spring break started tomorrow, technically.
Somewhere behind him, glass shattered. A skinny kid in a backwards hat was funneling beer from a tube while the crowd chanted. Ryland tipped his head back and laughed at nothing. His body felt good. That was the thing. He was inside his skin, inside his hands, inside his own mouth.
He was, he realized, pretty fucking high.
Dancing, dancing. He didn’t normally. Not this much. Not with hands touching him, petting him. Someone passed him a joint and he pulled deep from it, felt the hot tickle in his lungs bloom into something warm behind his eyes before he exhaled a ring of smoke toward the ceiling. Inside, they were smoking inside? Crazy. These guys were crazy. Were there laws about that? Student housing.
A friend of a friend of a classmate had invited him. Someone he’d partied with before. He was pretty sure he’d sucked that guy’s cock at the last one; maybe he wanted a repeat. Where was that guy?
“Come downstairs,” joint-guy said, pulling smoke into his mouth and then leaning in to kiss him, to blow the smoke into Ryland’s mouth. They kissed, his mouth oddly dry. The smoke. The taste was weird, but it felt nice. Everything felt nice.
“What’s downstairs?” Ryland asked, his hips still moving to the music. It was too loud, really, to have a conversation, but joint-guy was close.
“There’s some people who want to meet you,” he said into Ryland’s ear. “More privacy to get a little freaky.” Joint-guy’s hand settled on the small of his back, then lower. “Thought you might want to join us.”
Ryland let himself be kissed again, open-mouthed and a bit sloppy, wetter now without the smoke being passed between them, though still tasting like it. When they surfaced, the guy’s eyes were wild, pupils blown.
“Sure,” he said. “I’m down for freaky.”
He was, too. His blood was near the surface of his skin, burning everywhere. He was hard, had been since he’d gotten his fingers wet in the kitchen. Maybe he’d even let someone fuck him. (No. No, you don’t do that. Not with strangers.) He hoped the girl with the pills was downstairs getting freaky. He wanted to eat her out.
The stairs creaked underfoot. The hallway was dark save for a single bulb that flickered like a nervous eye. A door at the end, half-open. There were a bunch of guys in the room, a den. Two were kissing on the couch, both shirtless. Another leaned against the desk, arms crossed, watching with an expression Ryland’s high brain labeled interested. Joint-guy took his hand and guided him into the room. Someone was sitting on the floor—oh, freckles. Yep, he’d blown that guy a couple weeks ago.
“Hey, freckles,” he said awkwardly. “How’s your head?” He’d hit it on a bookshelf when he’d thrown his head back as he came down Ryland’s throat. He remembered that detail, but he guy’s name eluded him. Most did. Remembering someone’s name generally required the belief that you might see them again, and he never did. Or hadn’t, until now. There were only so many guys on campus into baby-faced nerds.
“Never had any complaints,” freckles quipped. Old joke. “I told you he was pretty.” He had turned to desk-leaner, who was a stocky, broad-shouldered man. He’d put his hand on his belt.
“Be prettier on his knees.”
Ryland didn’t wait to be asked. He took a few steps further into the room and sank down onto the shag carpet, reaching for the belt buckle on offer. Freaky? Just because some guys wanted to watch? Whatever. He’d done worse.
Desk-leaner’s cock was thick and uncut, which was a surprise. For all the times he’d done this, he’d never seen an uncircumcised penis in the bunch. He moved the unfamiliar skin experimentally with his thumb, examining it. It slid easily up and down. Freckles was watching him closely, licking his lips.
“Never seen one of these before,” Ryland said by way of explanation, then licked a stripe up the side to ease the glide of his hand. Uncut-desk-leaner laughed softly, one of his hands settling in Ryland’s hair.
“It’s not different. I’m clean, I promise. Washed it just for you.”
Ryland doubted that. The just for you part. But he did smell cleaner than most guys, actually. A hint of soap still clung to his pubes. But it was real considerate, if true. Couldn’t be. Maybe the royal You, like whoever I entice to suck my dick tonight. Surely this guy hadn’t heard tales of Ryland’s prowess giving head. Had he? Had Ryland gotten that much of a reputation? Maybe he had. People talked. Universities were just small towns with worse accommodation and more grant money.
He took it in his mouth, hollowing his cheeks as he sucked deeply.
Uncut-desk-leaner groaned, his fingers lightly scratching Ryland’s scalp. Oh, that was nice. Better than nice. Ryland reached beneath himself to palm at his crotch. He was wearing the packer that always made him look half-hard in tight jeans. Pushing on it stimulated his actual cock beneath, just a little.
He rocked between his hand and the heel of his foot, which pressed against his vulva from below as he buried his face in uncut-desk-leaner’s lap, his throat contracting around the head as it slid deep.
“Fuck, look at him.”
He let them move him, arrange him, pull him from one body to the next. There was a different cock in his mouth, then another. Fingers tracing his jaw, his throat, the shell of his ear. Someone’s thumb pressed against the corner of his mouth where he was stretched wide. He didn’t gag. He never gagged.
It should have bothered him, being passed around like this, treated like an object. That was the trick of the high: everything that should have been sharp was soft, everything that should have been cold was warm, everything that should have stopped him let him keep going. The noise in his head—the running commentary, the endless anxious mental math—clicked off like a light switch. It didn’t bother him. He liked it, actually. Objects didn’t have to think, didn’t have to make decisions, make phone calls, write a thesis. They didn’t have to be Ryland Grace all the time.
He was simply doing, a body among bodies, a mouth among mouths. Kissing, licking, sucking. Applied biology, sociology, physics. Bodies in motion stay in motion. A resting object stays at rest until it is moved by force. Force equals mass times acceleration.
He came up for air, panting, and someone wiped the spit from his chin with a thumb. “Open up, swetheart,” another voice said, not unkindly, and he opened, and another cock slid past his lips. He closed his eyes. Salty. Slick. The click of a belt buckle. He could still hear the music thumping upstairs, laughter, off-key singing, a chant. Something-something-omega.
Frats were weird.
There was a hand in his hair, guiding him faster. A low curse, then warmth spilling, flooding over his tongue and down his chin. He swallowed, or didn’t; the distinction seemed academic.
Another cock slid into his mouth easily, smaller, but with a leftward curve. It ran along his cheek before he tipped his head to accommodate.
“Fucking boomerang,” one of them laughed. “Tell him how you got that scar!”
Ryland didn’t listen to the story. Deep bass music vibrated his bones as he chased the buzz of a high. He felt so good, so taken care of as he was petted and told how pretty he was. No one called him a girl; they didn’t want a girl, they wanted him. Gosh, it was nice. (Was it? Apparently the bar for a good night was nobody misgendered you while you were sucking them off. Excellent. Civilization had really nailed it.)
Because there was always more cock to suck, it went on forever and ever. Floating, hazy. He dropped in and out of his happy place, but mostly in. He was so wet. Fuck, he was aching. He rocked a little harder against his foot. Maybe he could put his hand down his pants?
“D’you ever do anal?” someone panted in his ear. He was pressed up against Ryland’s back, hard again after coming down his throat earlier. How long had he been at it? Time was syrupy. “I’d love to fuck you. Look at you, Christ.”
Ryland shook his head, pulling off the cock in his mouth so he could speak. “No,” he said.
“Okay,” the guy said. It was freckles. “Let me know if you change your mind. You’d look great bouncing on my cock.”
“You’d look great bouncing on his, Jimmy!”
“Yeah, I would. I’m hot and you want me.”
“Oh, fuck off. Like you’d ever bottom!”
Ryland didn’t care about the politics of it at all. Topping, bottoming. Who cared? Apparently this was the great masculine hierarchy: determine who got fucked, then spend fifteen minutes insisting you weren’t the one who wanted to be fucked. Macho bullshit. (Ryland liked being fucked, sometimes, but not by any of these guys. Not even if they begged to touch his hole. He’d get a strap and do them, though, if they begged. Or just with his fingers.) Bodies were all just chemicals and nerve endings, and some of them were up the ass. Big whoop.
He went back to his sucking, fondling the heavy sack beneath his chin with one hand. The balls’ owner must have liked that; he grunted, pulling Ryland back by his hair to ejaculate on his face. Even that felt kind of nice.
There was a deep, rumbling laugh, and then another was holding his mouth open and sliding into his throat. “Yeah, take it,” someone whispered. “Just like that, cockslut.”
Ryland winced as a flash went off. The click was a single hard sound, like a bubble popping. He blinked away an aura as one of the guys who had been on the couch wound the wheel of a disposable Kodak forward, ch ch ch. He’d lost his glasses—they were on the desk, uncut-desk-leaner had taken them and set them aside carefully—and the guy was a blur.
For a moment the room was too bright, too loud, too real. The edges of everything went sharp and hot. Whatever. It didn’t matter. A picture of him on a roll of film. Most film was never developed, anyway. He’d read that somewhere. People forgot about them and they got destroyed, expired. What were the odds that this guy would bring it to the Walmart Photo Center and have them print it on a 5x7? And then what, scan it and upload it to the Internet? Bad lighting, anyway. Dim basement and a flash. He’d look terrible, not like himself at all. Fine fine fine. The moment of panic passed and the high rolled back in. He was floating again.
The night became like a roll of film, for a while—a series of warm, sliding images, disconnected and overlapping. A hand on the back of his neck. The taste of latex (he hadn’t seen a condom, but one of them had worn one). A voice saying good boy. (Not good girl, never good girl.) The pop of a beer can opening. Laughter, not cruel. The press of an open water bottle against his lips, offering him a sip in between. The one called Jimmy telling him to drink, asking him if he was okay. Yes. The tickle of someone’s pubic hair against his nose. A zipper. The wet sound of his own breathing. People walking in and out of the room.
At some point he was alone again, or not alone, but the room had quieted. He was on the floor, his back against the couch, his legs stretched out in front of him like a broken doll. His jaw ached. His throat felt raw. His lips were numb. He probed the edge of his mouth with his tongue and tasted blood, a faint copper thread he didn’t remember acquiring.
At some point, he’d humped someone’s leg long enough to orgasm, grinding down hard. He had been too far gone to worry that someone would notice. No one tried to take his pants off after the first time he’d batted hands away from his zipper. Everyone was really quite nice about it.
The high was fading. He was okay, though. His legs were shaky. He finished the water in the bottle. Someone patted him on the ass as he stumbled to the stairs. Friendly.
He got back to the apartment at six in the morning.
Marissa was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and the soft gray light from the window bleeding onto her face. She looked relieved when she saw him, for a moment, before her face twisted into a kind of exhausted fury that she was too tired to aim anywhere.
“The fuck, dude,” she said quietly.
Ryland stood in the doorway, one hand still on the doorknob, and tried to remember how to smile. His face felt like it belonged to someone else. “What?”
“You’ve got cum in your hair.” It wasn’t the first time he’d come home late, with semen in his hair. “And on your shirt.”
He looked down. His collar was… disgusting. Crusty. It was still wet in places, particularly the splatter across the words Don’t Be A d3x/dt3 on his chest.
“I was at a party,” he said lamely.
“I know exactly what you were doing.” Marissa was clearly trying to stay even, but it held a tremor. “Get over here.”
He went. His legs were heavy, his muscles loose and uncooperative, but he crossed the kitchen and sat in the chair beside her. She reached out and took his chin in her hand, turning his face toward the light. Her thumb brushed over the raw skin at the corner of his mouth. He flinched.
“Jesus, Ryland.”
She stood up abruptly and went to the bathroom. He could hear her banging around, then the water running. When she came back, she was holding a wide-toothed comb and a hand towel. She set the towel on the table and sat behind him.
“Stay still,” she said.
He stayed still.
She worked the comb through his hair, using the wet towel to clean it and the crusty residue. The feeling was hypnotic. The way the comb’s teeth rasped against his scalp, pulling gently. Even when it got stuck and hurt, the sensation brought him tingles. Marissa gathered the matted strands in her fingers and began to pick them apart, one by one.
Outside, it had begun to rain. Patter patter patter. Ryland loved the rain.
“You’re scaring me,” she said. The words were so quiet, he barely heard her. “You know that?”
His body was so heavy, so distant. But her hands were warm. Her hands were very warm. He wanted to fall asleep right there, in the kitchen chair, with the comb moving through his hair.
“I’m fine,” he murmured.
“You’re not.” The comb stopped moving, and he could have cried. He wanted to beg her to continue, to pet him, to tell him he was okay. “Don’t you dare do that thing where you say I’m fine and then go out and punish yourself. Throw yourself around like you don’t matter.” Her hands started moving again, and he relaxed.
“It’s not a punishment. It’s just fun. Consensual fun. Everyone does it.” Did they?
Marissa made a small, disbelieving sound. “Everyone?”
“You know what I mean. College. Parties. Hooking up.” He didn’t really do this, before. He’d been nose-in-a-book for the first two years, trying not to listen to Ben and Marissa going at it on the bottom bunk and pretending he had his headphones in to give them privacy, even after his iPod died. “It’s normal.”
He dated a couple of people. No one serious. Careful, always a bit worried about when he’d have to have The Conversation. Sometimes it was okay. Kevin had been okay, for a while. And Amber, though she only dated women now, which didn’t sit that nicely in his stomach.
“You can barely keep your eyes open. Are you high? You think it’s normal to—” She shook her head. “How many people did you let…?”
He honestly didn’t know. He shrugged.
“You’re going to get an STD. Or pregnant.” He snorted. As if. He didn’t do that with strangers. He’d only ever done that with Kevin, and with Amber’s strap. “Or killed. I mean it, this isn’t… it’s not normal college stuff. It’s self-harm.”
“I’m not doing myself harm,” he said as the comb found another dry, stiff knot. Self-harm implied an intention to cause pain. He wasn’t trying to hurt himself. Quite the opposite.
Marissa put the comb aside and worked at the knot with her fingers, gentle, unbelievably gentle, and Ryland sat there and let her, despite the burn rising in his throat, the sting behind his eyes.
“I’m not… I’m not suicidal. It’s just—it feels good. When it’s happening, it feels good. It makes the noise go away.” He wasn’t explaining it right. The words were weird in his mouth, clumsy on his tongue. “I don’t know. The part of my brain that never shuts up, finally… shuts up.”
“You’re using drugs and sex to self-medicate your autism?” she asked. “Or your grief?”
And there it was. Diagnosis by roommate. How convenient. No waiting list, no copay. He flushed red-hot. Like she knew anything about anything. Self-medicating.
Fuck, she’d been talking to Kevin. She had to be. Whispering behind his back, trying to make sense of poor, fucked-up Ryland. Those were his words in her mouth. His diagnosis of Ryland’s peculiarities, always giving him the tests and the questions. Pillow talk turning into Doctor Freud.
It had been fun at first. Working it all out. What was wrong with him. Nothing’s wrong with you. The shutting down, the flashes of anger, the freaking out. Overstimulation. Anxiety. Depression, maybe. On top of GID of course, because they were still calling it a disorder. All hail the almighty DSM-IV. (Kevin brought him little trinkets to hold onto when things got bad. Substitute this keychain for biting your nails or picking your skin; you can rub it, see, and it clicks. Just try, okay? For me? Warm drinks, the heaviest blanket he could find, compression via his own body. Sometimes he just needed to be held down to regulate.)
Fuck Kevin, always psychoanalyzing him. Finding all the little things he’d tucked under the rug to hide them from he world. Those were his things, his stuff. Not for sale.
“That’s not fair. And it’s not what I said—what I was saying.”
“I know.”
They stared at each other. Marissa sighed.
“I know,” she repeated. “And I know I can’t tell you what to do. I can’t make you stop ruining your amazing brain with drugs. I can’t make you feel like you’re worth more than a quick fuck in some closeted jock’s dank garage. You’re a grown-ass man and you make your own decisions. But I need you to know, it scares me.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “And if your uncle were here—”
“Don’t.”
Ryland’s voice was a warning. Dead men did not get to sit on the disciplinary committee.
“If your uncle saw what you were doing,” Marissa continued, her eyes blazing with a challenge. “He’d say you were being an idiot, and reckless, and wasting your potential.”
Ryland stood up from the table and went to his bedroom. He slammed the door so hard, it rattled the windows.
There was a hand on his shoulder, shaking gently. He felt weird. Tired, he was so tired. Ugh. His mouth was dry. His head was pounding. Hangover, his brain supplied helpfully. Somebody didn’t drink enough water last night.
Last night? Hm. Oh, another party. Right, yeah. That guy had texted him the address. The one with the tattoo. He’d been there, tattooed guy. Big, barrel-chested tattoo guy.
“Hey, buddy.” The shaking continued, a little more firmly. Hand on his shoulder, right. Go away, I’m sleeping. “Come on, wakey wakey. Open up.”
Oh, he was still at the party. He couldn’t hear the music. Odd. Okay, that was okay. He was tired, but he could just lie here and let it happen. He didn’t need to participate that much.
Ryland opened his mouth, letting his tongue loll out. It was a reflex so deeply ingrained by the weeks and months and hours before that his jaw dropped open and his throat relaxed without his brain ever being consulted. Open up. He waited for the heavy weight of a cock in his mouth, or maybe fingers. Sometimes it was fingers, first.
He didn’t expect the sound that came out of the guy’s mouth, which was a startled, breathy squeak.
“Oh, fuck no.” The voice cracked with alarm. “I meant your eyes. Jesus Christ dude, open your eyes.”
Ryland’s eyelids were glued shut with sleep and whatever else. Maybe bodily fluids. He forced them apart, and the world came together in blurry, shapeless pieces: a shelf of paperbacks, sunlight through a curtain that had seen better days, and a man standing over him, looking worried.
He was in a bedroom. He was on a bed, with sheets that were currently twisted around his legs. He was wearing a shirt, but no pants. Nothing from the waist down, except the sheet. He could feel it against his bare legs.
The man was familiar. A redhead, with a broad frame, a touch of sunburn on his cheeks. Freckles, he thought. I know you. Name name name. Let me know if you change your mind. About what? Anal. Soft hands, water bottle. Jimmy! The name surfaced from the murk.
“Ugh,” Ryland murmured. “Jimmy?”
Freckles looked relieved. “Yeah! Hi. Uh. Good morning?”
The light coming through the curtain was too bright. Ryland squinted, fumbling at the nightstand for his glasses. They weren’t there. He turned back to Jimmy, gesturing to his face. His tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth. How long had he been unconscious? Had he passed out? (Where were his pants? Uh oh, uh oh. Something was wrong here.)
“Your glasses are in the kitchen, where you—uh. Blew me.” Jimmy’s skin flushed impossibly redder, staining his throat and spreading up to his ears, into his hairline. Red to red. “You doing okay? You were really out of it, so I put you in here to sleep it off.”
Put him in here? In the bed, without pants? He tried to remember taking his pants off. Tried to remember. Think, Ryland. The kitchen, he remembered. The linoleum was that awful seventies baby-poo green. There had been a girl with Freckles—Jimmy—and they’d taken turns sucking Jimmy off and making out with each other. She had been blonde, wearing a corset-type top. Someone told them to stop being unsanitary in the kitchen. He remembered that. Unsanitary.
But then there was nothing.
Ryland felt a bubbling terror. Nothing, nothing. A blank wall after… after what? After he took a pill from… someone. Didn’t even look at it. He couldn’t remember anything past that point. It was like a brick wall. Why couldn’t he remember?
What did he take? When? How much? Just the one pill, or something else?
Jimmy was looking at him expectantly. Ryland wasn’t wearing pants. Data, inference, confirmation.
“Did we have sex?” asked, aiming for a neutral, unpanicked voice as he shifted, sitting up.
His body screamed before he could finish his thought. He hurt all over, but especially between his legs. A deep, specific ache in his vagina. He reached under the sheet and felt wetness, a sticky, gelatinous clump coming away from his hole. Touching it stung sharply, right at his entrance. Yep. Data, inference, confirmation.
“No, dude,” Jimmy was quick to reassure him. “I didn’t—we didn’t. I just tucked you in.”
He looked proud of himself, almost. What a Good Guy™. Ryland pulled his hand out from under the sheet and watched as Jimmy’s red face went white. It wasn’t just semen, but pinkish with blood. No wonder he hurt.
“Oh shit.”
Ryland stared at his fingers, ignoring Jimmy for the moment. He pressed them together and then pulled them apart, watching the strings of slime stretch between them before breaking. He felt cold. The panic was distant, tingling his skin. He couldn’t remember whose semen this was. If he’d spread his legs and pulled someone between them, or if…
Did it matter? If he didn’t remember, he was definitely not sober enough to make that decision. Right?
“I swear I didn’t fuck you,” Jimmy breathed, also staring at Ryland’s fingers. “You said you weren’t into anal, and I would never—I swear to fucking god, dude. Is that blood? You’re bleeding. Jesus. Should I call the cops? I don’t know who—there wasn’t even anyone around—”
Jimmy had no idea what was going on under the sheet, clearly. Babbling about anal. Not him, then.
Ryland wracked his brain, but it was frustratingly blank. God, he hated that. He hated not being able to remember. He always remembered details, he had such a good memory. His brain, his brain. He’d taken something bad, something that fucked with his memory? Or just knocked him out?
“I believe you,” Ryland said calmly. And he did believe him. Jimmy’s horror about the situation seemed genuine. “Do you have my phone? Go find my phone and call, uh. I need you to call…” He took a long, shuddering breath. “Marissa, my roommate. She’s on my speed dial as number three. Please. While I… get cleaned up and dressed.”
“Okay.” Jimmy’s voice was small. “I’m sorry, dude. I should’ve checked on you. I was really, really drunk. I passed out on the couch.”
“Not your fault.” He believed that. This guy was one of the nice ones. He’d brought him water. He’d tucked him into a bed when he seemed out of it. He hadn’t raped him.
Ryland closed his eyes. “Can you give me a minute?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll go get your glasses and find your phone, give you some privacy.” Jimmy practically ran from the room, muttering another strangled “Jesus.”
In and out, Ryland breathed. Every breath hurt a little less. He was okay. Was he? No, not really. He was lying to himself again. He was lying naked in a stranger’s bed. But he was alive, and not maimed, and he needed… what? Plan B, an STI test. And sleep. Somewhere safe to sleep this off. He was still so, so tired.
He found his boxers tangled in the sheets near his foot. His jeans on the floor. His packer under the bed. He stared at it. There was a knock on the door, tentative.
“I called your roommate and gave her the address,” Jimmy’s voice said through the door, not opening it. “She’s on her way.”
They’d barely spoken in three weeks. Anger had pulsed between them, slowly burning away their friendship. They orbited each other like planets in a solar system, never touching. Ate their meals at different times. Didn’t sit together in lectures. Didn’t take the same bus to campus. Sequestered themselves to their separate bedrooms. (Stellan’s ashes were still in the Ziplock, tucked in his closet. Couldn’t look at those, either. Shoved away, pushed down, swept under the rug of his subconscious.) He used the office to work. She took her laptop into her room. Left her rent check on the kitchen counter.
But she was coming anyway. She was on her way.
“When was your, ah. Last period?” Marissa asked, lowering her voice to a whisper on the last word.
The chairs were blue plastic and hard. Ryland felt like a kid waiting to go to the principal’s office. He didn’t want to touch anything. A bowl of condoms sat on a low table next to old copies of People and Men’s Health. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead like they were full of trapped insects.
He shrugged. “Dunno. Six months?” He didn’t get them very often. Not when he remembered to take his testosterone.
Marissa quietly filled in the form, balancing the clipboard on her knee. He handed her his College ID and his license. She knew most of the answers. Her left hand held his right, somewhat limply. It was cold and a bit sweaty. She hadn’t let go since she’d picked him up from that house. Ryland didn’t know what he’d do when she finally did.
He thought about calling Mike.
The thought hurt a little, like a pinch in his chest. Mike, with his kind eyes and his steady hands and the way he’d said I’m not leaving you, you know? Mike, who’d loved Stellan. Who had lost Stellan, too.
What would he say? What could he possibly say, if he hit the answering machine?
Hi, Mike. It’s Ryland. I know it’s been a while. I’m sorry I haven’t called or texted. I’m sitting in a clinic right now, waiting for a pill that will keep me from getting pregnant, because I had sex with someone while I was high, and I can’t remember what I said or did or wanted, and I’m scared, and I don’t know what to do.
He couldn’t say any of that. Mike had lost enough. Mike had carried enough on his shoulders. Ryland couldn’t bear the thought of being one more weight, one more grief, one more thing to worry about. One more problem for Mike to solve. Everyone needed a project.
But he wouldn’t make that call. No way.
Besides, he was too much of a coward to admit what had happened, even to himself. In his brain, the blank part, the blurry cloudy not-memory he kept trying to reconstruct, it was always he had sex. Probably, that was what had happened. Someone had come into the room, and he’d woken up and made grabby hands, needy sounds. Come fuck me. I want it. I need it. I’ve been aching for weeks, unsatisfied. I miss Kevin. I miss feeling wanted and sexy and having a warm body on top of mine, holding me down.
Maybe. Maybe he’d done something that embarrassing.
If not, well. He didn’t remember, anyway. And that was bad, but remembering was probably worse, right? His hand tightened around Marissa’s fingers.
“Ry?”
Marissa’s hair was pulled back in a messy bun. She looked exhausted. She’d probably been waiting up for him, her bedroom door cracked so she’d know when he got home. She hadn’t said as much, but he knew her. He knew how much she cared, even when she was mad at him. She’d warned him he was playing with fire. But she still came when he called, when some stranger called her using Ryland’s flip phone.
“I have to give this back to the receptionist,” she whispered.
He nodded and let go of her hand. She got up and turned in the form. He did not have a panic attack, or shut down, or cry. He blinked up at the tube TV in the corner, playing a news segment about Prop 8. Right, that. That, too. Coming up.
He should call Mike. He really should. He didn’t have to tell him anything about this. He could just say I’ve missed you, how about that egg cream?
“Grace Ryland?”
The receptionist looked startled when he rose from his seat. She squinted at the form and then back at him. “You’re here for a morning after pill?” she asked. She wasn’t loud, but Ryland felt like she was screaming his business everywhere. No one else in the waiting room was looking at him.
“Yes.”
“For… her?” She pointed to Marissa.
“No, for me.” He cleared his throat. “I was, uh.” He pointed to the relevant line on the form.
“Oh! I’m so sorry, Mister Grace.” She emphasized the mister a little too hard, but that was okay. It was okay. “Go on back and hop up on the table in Room 3.” She looked a little abashed. “Do you want to bring your support person in?”
The tension coiled in his gut released some of its pressure.
Support person. The words felt like a foreign language. Ryland turned them over in his mind, trying to find a place where they might fit. He’d spent the last year building a fortress of solitude around himself, brick by brick. A closed system, self-contained, self-sufficient. But apparently closed systems still leaked.
“Yeah, yes.” He nodded. “Yes, please.”
And then Marissa was at his side, her hand in his again. He would call Mike soon. He could do that. And maybe Kevin, someday. Maybe. And Jimmy had seemed like a nice guy. Maybe he’d like to hang out sometime, without exchanging bodily fluids. Ryland could use someone else looking out for him. A friend or two.
He was still figuring it all out.