“You think you’re so fucking clever, don’t you.”
“I’m pretty proud of myself,” Kasse replied, all rough throat, clarion mind. When he grabbed his lover with his guillotine hands all tangled in his rope burn hair—when he clipped his cables, bonecrushed, rushtoothed in his wingless adrenaline hush, he was clear, he was quartz. What had Eo begged for? Where was the end game in his treachery?
His malfeasance magnificent, he smiled—grifter grin, thief tongued, malevolent. He gripped him, spine and arch, and took his rightful place in that alcove he loved to core out, splinter and ash and stone. Kasse dug his burrow deep every time he made his way home, always treated his boy like he’d be staying through the storm.
Eoran shoved the inert explosive aside, obstructive bother below his lewd comfort, and rest his forearms in its place atop the box he was folded over.
“Fuck,” he said in a manner like yes.
“Aah,“ he softly sighed in a shade more fitting for an expletive.
“Oh, Kasse…” It seemed as though the bloodwright’s songs of praise were given new meanings, new shapes, new life in the spaces between them, consecrated and complete again, finally, again.
He was a silken sheet of a boy hewn from the bones of his ancestors, sand watchers and snake-mouthed sanguinists. He always draped in a beautiful bend for that beast behind, summoned perfect exponents in summation of his lover’s entropic resonance.
“I’m going to fucking kill you for this,” he moaned, luteneck long in his head’s rearward tilt. “I’m going to get in your body and bathe in your blood, take that pride from your heart and make it my own, drink you down until there’s nothing left. Fuck—I’m going to suck you dry.” Three words became six, nine. Three more, and then three more—fifteen times.
“Yes—” he sighed like fuck.
“Come fucking get it—” he crooned, syrup-song so honey sweet.
Whatever he was, he was never more tangible than these insolent moments. He wrung his hands round his lover’s spine, index fingers looped tight round the branches of his lowest floating ribs, both thumbs flat and parallel on the spiked ridges of every glass body vertebra down his lumbar line, ossuary mouthed in a decorative whine.
“I’ll quench your embers.”
Come on Eo:
Get in my body
bathe in my blood
fuck me to pieces,
if you can turn us around,
you fucking wretch.
“You’re the pride in my heart—it’s you it’s fucking you—”
he soughed, so obsolete. “A-ah—fuck, take me and
let me—oh gods, let me be the pride in yours.”
fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, thirty.
“Not now—“ Eoran whispered, an afterimage of a partially articulate mess, his slack-lipped splendor of obscene gluttony, his mouth a jumble of moans containing consonants that should not sound so good together. “Nnk, fuck, not now. Not when I want you so fucking bad, not when I’ve been waiting.”
But that meant—
“Later.” He breathed deep in his lungs, growl shaking the respirations of his com/decom/compressing, impressions pressed up into the lacing his lover wove between his spikebone trellis, his receptacular chestframe. “I’ll come for you later, my love.”
It was a promise kept to the very core of him, that sacred effigy the boy above him always broke, that unimportant thing Eo always brought back, after he’d pieced it poorly back together, and asked it to be smashed again.
“You’ll come for me,” Kasse persisted softly, spinning his resplendent victim’s golden words into black tar thread, red letter mouth, needle eyed wraith constantly darning, always on the mend. “You always come for me.”
he was a monstrous creature, ephemeral wave,
mayfly strung on their daybreak stranding—
he couldn’t tell their game from their goading,
their vulgar loathing from their frightful vanitas.
he, upstart soothsayer, every sequence a high
impact bonecast he scryed in loving detail, in
violence, love strained fauna in Eoran’s brushfire.
“Then tell me when.”
Eoran groaned, ether boy with an air of poison in his spine tracing fever through his toxic branching, his pnictide body paramagnetic to that collection of electrons overlaying him. Kasse and Eoran were always shifting, they were always reorganizing—over-under never stable, cosmic to cramped in unkept milliseconds.
The bloodwright put on a big show in his struggle for power and control, but he loved being like this: etiolated in his lover’s suffocating smoke, fucked half-senseless and out of control like it was a commodity he’d overindulged in, bent over and battered, bruised and bloody before the only person who saw through the mirror-trap of all his anthracite faceting.
“Kiss me, Kasse, and tell me when.”
he was sharp in his tightline relief, upright first
with Eo soon to follow. he corset laced his fingers in a ladder across his lover’s throat, bowed him in a stark sicklemoon shape, ivory form so perfectly contorted in the velvet gunpowder dusk. Kasse ran his nose along the sharp penumbral contour of Eoran’s jawline, the high plane of his cheek, with his lover’s damp curls draped akimbo all across his trapezoid, collarbone, shoulder.
he pressed him harder than before, so
deeply distressed—how he feared for his
boy’s safety, feared for his lover’s
fucking life. this phantom’s
gallow haunting would
be the death of this
beautiful thing he
clasped tight in
his cruel hands.
“Eo—fuck, Eo—”
Thirty-six, forty-five, fifty-one.
“Gods—fuCK—“
Eoran’s eyes closed. His grip readjusted, fumbling and blindish in his unseeing state, wrapping fingers up in the tendrils of Kasse’s hair spilling over his own anatomy; a waterfall of black that terminated somewhere, in the gaping maw of some greedy shadow creeping around their shuffling ankles.
“Aah—“
That compass boy breathed with his directions all awry, his cardinal north a vertical plane, his east-west asunder, his south unnavigable for all its incautious splay. Twisted in his waxing phase, that falcate scrap was happy to be hung in the darkness of his executioner’s sky, noose neck braided through with the most beautiful collection of bones, spread lips huffing starlight from his gallows perch, dead or alive.
“I could keep you this way for days,” came his cruel claim, boldly slurred tempo marcato punctuated in the reverb luftpause left trailing every iliac strike, every collision’s illicit shrike trill. How he loved the inanimate noise Eoran’s throat laid out in kinesodic threnody, his pretty mouth ajar in disregard of their stowaway instability, both boys so precarious behind steel doors, triple bolts. “I could seal that fucking door—aah, lock it down so no one could save you. I could fuck you to the edge and pull you back so many times you cease human function, Eo, fuck—”
“I don’t think it’s me you’d—ha-h—have to worry about.” Eoran croaked along his scythe-form strain, wrestling with his ability to make sentences from the constriction of his diaphragm taut along his backward arch. “He’d come looking for you, you know. He’d come find you…”
Avoidance was either a degree of safety or disdain. The melody in his response rang like a playful volley returned, telltale lips blatant in a half-curl, perhaps deserving of the cruelty he reprehensibly luxuriated in.
“If you’re going to hide me away, put me in a hole in the ground.
Bury me where they can’t find my—f u c k—ing body.
Gods—kill me proper, Kasse,
do it—
ah—
so right.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Kasse said when he pulled him tighter back, lovelace fingers shifting till his grasp was singular, stranglehold tight above the slow swallow taunting of his laryngeal prominence. “Don’t bring him here—”
how his hips threatened murder
how his body threatened death
how his hand drifted down to
stroke a replay of his fucking in
millisecond lag, obverse
direction, inverse key.
“—Fuck you Eo, a-a-ah—it’s just you and me, you and me, he doesn’t belong here.”
Kasse was all teeth searching for a vein to break.
“—nnh,” was all the acknowledgement that followed,
barely full of any recognition,
ivory-strung body threatening to break,
mathematics of his arch all fucking wrong; he was
keystone slipping
parabola crumbling
silenced and stiff
in his crescent malfunction
his quadratic values unreal in
axial mobocracy.
eoran breathed in hangman’s morse
stifled heliograph
fluttering lashes in his
cockeyed agony mishandled
along the landscape of his
boyfriend’s angles, his
bed of knives that the navigator
was content to consistently
rest himself against
spread himself over
cut himself along
anon
ad mortem
ad lucem
ad quod damnum
ad undas
ad unum
he was stricken, a wounded thing, so well slandered by word of mouth he didn’t want to hear the wind anymore. it didn’t matter how love was prime, lust and desire on the top note, he only heard vengeance in the tritone sighing up through their desperate avenue. it didn’t matter how sweet the groundwater was when he wrung the snakes silent at the bottom of the well. he wasn’t hearing despite all his listenings, this noose handed hatchetman ever promising capital fulfillment.
he followed their combined biology
trespasser in private function, in
singular sensation augmented to
fit a pair. he breathed harder
knowing eo couldn’t, he
gasped louder in eo’s absence
to fill all the spaces his out loud
fifty-four, sixty-three, seventy-five
had left behind.
“come,” he begged,
“come for me,” like eo’s collapse was
the key to end all their suffering
“please,” he whined when he worshipped
all tongue and teeth and barathrum moans
“because you’re mine,” he breathed like fractures
riddled his lungs. “because you’ll always be mine.”
eighty-one, eighty-four, ninety-nine, one-oh-eight.
one hundred and five, one hundred and two, ninety
he cracked, glass body
vase fragile, precious metal
picked up, polished, and crushed
by the atrocious hands of that beautiful
boy reflected in his obsidian surface, his
silver skin, his sweat-marked brow. his chest
heaved in a farce of pacification because the sensation
was there, the sensation of air, but he was slowly suffocating
without really knowing, his blood tricked by that system supplanted
over his own laid line by line, detail by detail, piece by piece and pinion-pulsed,
efficient machine donning dual disasters, siamese bodies in a salacious overlapping.
eighty-seven, seventy-eight, sixty-six
it was the rush, the roil, familiar,
feral, feasting on sensations within
musculature shared, combinate catastrophe;
the sensation of drowning, the delight of choking—
the culmination of his most human wants or needs translated
into the most vile quaking, a shiver in the shadows, a shiv in his
systemic symbiote’s side. he could barely move. if he was honest, he
feared his own breaking but he broke all the same, time and time again,
tumbling headlong into infinity and looking side-eyed at his silvered eternity.
where was the sense in pearls before swine if the value of everything was arbitrary?
they were always trampled underfoot, they were always turning toward each other with teeth bared.
fifty-seven, forty-two, thirty-three
he was always throwing his gems into the mud,
milkstone melody, moonstone pitched and shattered
into a thousand marbled pieces catching glimmers in the dying light.
filthy, careless.
free, but for a moment.
“It’s just you and me,” Kasse repeated, hand sloppy in it’s descent from his beloved’s throat. He remained, wasp-breathed, where a smarter man would have frantically planned his escape, in too deep and drowning in a storm surge that refused to abate; there was no way back to the froth of their sterling sea.
He held on—what else would he do?
If there was retaliation in his future
he’d take it standing, proud, spitting
his ignominy back in Eoran’s mouth
wearing nothing but his rakeshamed
grin. That’s why this was beautiful—
he’d take his death willingly if it was Eoran who dealt the hand.
He held him tight to his longline body, eyes closed in the absence of a hood on his execution’s eve. That awful thing, corrosive trickster, continued a slow stroke up and down the remnants of their orgasm combined, a maddening overextension of their tandem exhaustion.
“I love you,” he crooned, even though it wouldn’t save him.
twenty-one, fifteen, three.
“I love you,” Eoran echoed in the vapors of a lustsigh, chest warmed by a full breath, full heart. He straightened his spine and righted his view. His eyes full of naught traced the contours of his mess with a small amount of lackluster annoyance at the infeasibility of ‘later’ in such a secure area.
He didn’t really need to worry though, did he?
He was owed.
He could collect what was due.
Eoran only ever charted minor paths away from that boy he adored. He drew himself away, centimeters, inches, twisting on his toes to catch his lover in the fade of his debauched miasma, that gorgeous thing ever ravished, so ravishing. He was a soft voice in a sharp stare, contrasts collected in a sublime balance that was more natural product of his moodiness than something carefully crafted.
“You’re going to clean that up,” he demanded as though the implied now had the same cadence as please.
“What?”
Kasse was always so charming when he didn’t understand what was expected of him, when he begged for clarity with his brow so lax, his gaze so adoring he only saw his lover in soft focus,
all but forgetting the nature of the debt he owed,
the dark implications later whispered up his back.
He was most beautiful in the wake of their violence, in the moments where he forgot what he was, where he’d gone—living only in the immediate moment where he was Eo’s, only Eo’s, and he was complete,
he was enough.
“We can clean up in a minute,” Kasse murmured into his kiss, always heat seeking, incising his words with innocent teeth, guiltless tongue.
Eoran lifted a palm to Kasse’s chest, dipped his head away from those penitent lips.
“Not we. You. Now. NOW!” He was more direct, barked like this world was his; like he’d crawled to the apex of their summit, fought hard and earned his right to scream his orders down upon his saccharine fiefdom. The bloodwright was consistently high energy, constantly plotting his return to reign, a potentate dazzled by the adrenaline within his own claim to power.
Hands moving to land hard upon Kasse’s shoulders, he switched their places in a vile wraparound, a circumnavigational velocity played out in a spin that flung the boy toward the crate that had been forced into their equation.
Kasse growled when he hit the crate, quick to hitch his unzipped pants up in preparation for a fight. “Fuck you,” he spat back, so quick to turn I love you on its head, to discolour his softer side with their fetish for conflict. He was streaked in warpaint black, striped orange by the creeping flicker of the streetlights, a voyeur’s jealous mark on his maverick hide.
“Fucking make me,” he cooed, a taunt intended to rile.
“Come on—” he turned to meet his attacker’s approach.
“I’d love to see you try.”
He really fucking would.
“Haven’t you had enough blood?” Eoran tilted his head in a mockery of exasperation, line of his lips bent into a pout that only served to enforce the swell of his arrogance. Despite whatever immediate answer he would be given, the engineer knew that when they wrestled it would only lead to more wrestling. Escalation was support pillar in their erotic eye-for-eye games, and Eoran would never let that boy down except from the highest cliff face—where he could peer over the edge and see just how charming his lover looked dashed upon the ground’s bed of rocks.
He was brimming with bastard adoration when he lunged at Kasse, hands seeking a grip of skin, a dash of flesh disrupting the ambient ochre around them.
Mongrel brat didn’t have to fight fair, but he did—always preferring his better bred lover’s bruising touch over a clean escape.
“Fuck you,” he seethed, eyetooth venom sharp in his scramble against capture, always so violently opposed to captivity. His apprehension was a matter of time, a logical conclusion, all their airspace so compact, all their struggles so vainglorious in their small world epics, their love but a blip in a universe of greater prose—
but Gods, how this was all that mattered,
this was the only thing that mattered.
Kasse fell back to the edge of the crate, laughing with his joy masked as mockery. Inevitably, the boy slipped to the floor when his support shifted taking Eoran down with him.
There was never enough blood:
Eoran should’ve known that by now.
It went: body, then face. Eoran’s hand reached out in their careening collapse, steady against his lover’s torso as they settled in a pool of legs, skin against trousers, chest to chest. He watched Kasse with a quiet admiration, subsurface to the tide of light scattered by the narrow window over yon, then gripped him by the jaw and kissed him with the fever roused from all the vigor still raging in its chokewrap ‘round that Ossan boy’s bones.
He was fluid over Kasse’s shape, dynamic in his stream-soft slipping—shins to concrete, knees bent, split across 18B’s waist and rising like a long night from their impossible horizon. Parting remained sweet sorrow and Eoran stretched long above the adjunct, sitting still.
Maybe he was momentarily assuaged, comfortable in the familiarity of his bareness enough to entertain a temporary ceasefire. Maybe he just wanted to know:
“Do you know how much I love you?”
“No.” Kasse suffered the lie with a coarse quisling breath, a traitor’s mirth decorating his bait mouth in rumours and deceits. He was a conceited thing, a preening thing—so well aware of his deception’s pretty reflection as he watched himself play prisoner on Eoran’s retina, watched himself don that illusory drape of beauty over his rotten soul.
He’d been created with this flaw: esurine body all ribs and longing with a starved mind, hungry heart so terrified of his empty bed.
So long as there was a thread of flesh left hanging from Eoran’s bones,
Kasse would happily feast.
He smiled, duochrome,
truth and forgery a vitriol
slip of saliva gleaming on
his portmanteau lip.
“But you’ll show me, won’t you E-o-ra-n?”