| Eoran slid his leg up that phantom boy’s side searching for leverage in that cramped casket of coition they wallowed in, put his hand back on the ghost’s hip to hold him there, by the force of his need, to exhume every single inch of worthlessness from that scaffoldbone skeleton that was so skilled at retention, to bleach his ivory, to lick his wounds like he licked his neck paizogony long andpure agony lustfulto fill him with the bloodwright’s own abundancelike he always didlike he always would. |
Slipt soft to the tender terrain of his abdomen, Eoran’s tenacity turned briefly thoughtful, gentle like the plosives left in the back of his throat—millefleur, perfume a perfection
attar of rose and benzoin
ritual of aloeswood and animalism.
Hah—
Eoran kissed the slick line left by his rude appreciation
bendeficient as he pushed himself deeper into their mire
body shivering with delight in their heatstroking, their
cooperative tephrosis
Fuck,
oh, his forest fire fury
Kasse—
all his smoldering discomposure.
why?
whatever he was given, he squandered—whatever he heard in his echo chamber mind, fretting a ricochet forwent in foregoing, he returned in taciturn mimics, a shard of his lover’s mouth. he craved the simple comforts of sound for the sake of something to say to the void where he should’ve said naught. mouth wound, wounded by resolve, he tied his words till he was knotted, till he was a knot
in knots.
who was he to repeat what he found in the air between them? to take this broken audio, this analog strip of magnetic tape, the dim memory of a life lost to fosters and fill the gaps with his lover’s chloroform words? These sedative sullied utterances were redacted, revised
in regret.
what can’t i say?
why can’t i say it?
he dug deep with his eyes welded shut
grasp tight in the gaps of eo’s bones
between radius and ulna
anterior margin
interosseal
olecranon
bit back any sound
like a good boy should.
what can you say to me that i can’t say back?
who was he to follow eoran into the dark, callow pathfinder treading blind in pursuit of that footstep’s echo? who was he to think he could navigate a compass’ meandering heart? who was he to think he was valuable, worthy of that boy’s undivided attention?
who the fuck was he?
kasse was nothing,
no one, a ghost—
mayfly.
he recoiled,
agrise.
eoran receded
aiger
recalled
reversed, re
cursed
but kept by the bones.
It’s how I feel.
Why would you want to repeat my feelings back to me without knowing what they are?
What if you don’t feel the same way?
It was an unfair game and the navigator was aware of his advantage. His departure saw him settled beside his lover, darkness annotated by the gentle huffs spilling from his lips, emotion scrolling like punctuation beneath his skin in the shape of every hesitancy he could conjure—dashed and dotted, breakbar giving pause to his cantata of erstwhile erotica.
I’m sorry.
For all the times I’ve told you to be quiet, you would think I’d take my own advice.
Eo could barely see through the impenetrable shade of their silkswaddle coffin’s cover but he looked all the same. What were words? What was the difference between subsets of syllables and diction, phonetics and articulation when the feelings were true either way? Why was he struggling with this, to hide this in a cloak of snap-tongued sonancy?
“It means I love you. I told you that I love you.” His whisper was a slash through the silence between them despite its false edge intent, quick draw exacerbated by the rush of breath with which it was delivered.
It slipped, kinda. I mean, I’ve felt this way for a while, but—
I don’t want to scare you off or
force you away with things you’re not ready for.
Eoran reached out to stroke Kasse’s hair.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just…
Kasse, I’m in deep.
You’re not, though.
The words seemed to change the doomsday course of that boy’s idling heart. He who’d survived his lover’s tricks now wallowed adrift in the wellwater flooding their dugout hollow, mineral and clean, clotting his throat with too much prose. Kasse was alight, brighter now, a confidence in his want ignition switch sparked, evaporating every quarrel he had with his own self worth.
You’re not in at all.
Impish thing with that smirk no one could see, high on confessions in the gloom, shifted onto his back, escaped the restriction of his pants, battledress falling away in disfavoured omission to facilitate Kasse’s desperate need to remain claimed. Leash lashed, he begged his wayward compass return to his rightful place:
between his thighs,
in too deep.
“Say it again,” the ghost urged, entreated—near silent despite how recklessly he courted risk for reward. “With the words I understand, say it again.”
So, Eoran slid
skin slick with the night’s own stain
oil body, marble form, varicolor very hidden as his phantasmagoric touch palmed the diffusal of their boundaries in sightless surrender, motion-making rapid record of Kasse’s
here—arms—his there,
there—legs—right there.
The space was even more cramped like this and the bloodwright didn’t want to chance knocking himself against the undercarriage of the truck—but he made it work, used all those engineering classes, so focused on teaching him to destroy, to his advantage; used them to build something beautiful.
His love, his heart
beating, breath
tasted like diesel fumes and dust when he
held himself against the ozone of his lover’s afterstorm lips
catalytic corruption in his kiss like he was out to suffocate that boy’s clarity in the mire of his self-named filth.
“I love you,” Eoran sighed, spit-soaked song stumbling when he slipped back
inside.
If you want it again, you’re going to have to find it in my throat.
There was an unkempt fury in 18C’s thoughts when they reverberated through the hollows of their unseen spaces.
hand clamped over his mouth
wide open, screwed shut, tearing
him up just enough to watch
Eoran’s shoulder weave in and out
of his hazy field of view,
stricken from the record
inadmissible in daylight.
their friction was his rapture
their fracture a fiction, the
echo of 18C’s admission a
misericorde that ruptured
his heart, collapsed his
gutterlung with the weight of
his name
his name his name
a two syllable massacre pooling in his mouth, spectral howl an inverted alarm within the soundproof hollows of their cooperative boundary. his cement partition skins, tannery strips all hid, isolated the cursing of their lawless rutt. Kasse cloistered their obscene poetry in confined atarax, cataphract aura a hypervigil over the eerie stillness of the nocturnal desert.
kasse was terminal
fatally entwined
hanging by the throat
from his lover’s protean
noose, hangman instinct.
18B didn’t harbor a single
hope to survive, his only
reprieve in releasing
the throes of his
deathknell: his
heretic worship so
painful & stark & raucous.
he was a strident, belligerent song
something like a hymn, a resonant threnody
in absolute, trapped now in the
linguistic confusion of his
inconsolable lust.
eoran was a keratalgic trigger—kasse couldn’t fucking look at that beautiful face
laid out in sentisection, mauled in vividsanection
contrite in his inability
contritus to say the same
conterere words back, afraid
tetranein of the bloodrust tang in
teirein their melliloquent sulphate
substratum substratus a substrate
all torn out his all gave out
oh it all gave out, it all fucking
gave out
I love you too
he, undone
unkempt yet
kept whole
his unholy
epitaph
a statement
remarked, epitasis
like catastrophe
in stasis
eoran
i can’t
breathe
without
your lungs
filling mine.
you can
you will
eoran groveled.
gravedirt grimace, grime-goaded, gaumless malingerer left himself wide open, spilled himself until empty, until there was nothing left inside his darkness, nothing to hide, nothing abided; abode abandoned, all thoughts jettisoned for the weight of his feelings given meaning by his voice, that putrid dross his offering like ambergris—valuable, vile
skimming scum scorn saliferous sweetness spoke-plucked spoken said sad.
eoran groveled.
effulgent, effaced, defaced by his confession but holding it in, he felt in all colors, all flavors, rapid-scrolling, lubricant fast, catalog sharp-edged like a thousand little paper cuts into the conspiratorial splendor of their half-merged consciousness, gave himself away in echoes
elated enduring ecstatic ecliptic elanced entranced essorant esurient eupathic.
eoran groveled.
traced his nose along the bend of his lover’s neck to his shoulder like some etheromanic caitiff on the cusp of a binge, drew him to him at the hinge of their union tight like an inhale sharp like a knife slice spread along his hips in the throes of his simple act of worship, in his base act of intimacy. he found kasse’s bare backside and dug in, his grip
nascent needy nemaline nabalitic nocuous noctilucent narcotized nexal numinous.
eoran groveled.
he said nothing, had nothing to say that was not already said, content to let the staggered hipsway of his starving devotion spell colloquies into his brittle silence, every puncture an inhale every inhale an injury marked into the malleability of his core, tally-strung and struck through in a countdown hand-kept.
eoran groveled into that tomb-kept ghost
forehead to collarbone
breath metered like the rhyme of the sea
crashing .
receding
sapphire & .
sacred
scorched .
by his blackest sun
his entropic adoration
his magnetic dissipation
“—oh—, f-fuc—k—” kasse breathed, unable to see.
every night, Kasse Sejan dreams about Eoran Toriet. before Eo, he doesn’t dream—at least he says he doesn’t. sometimes, he is lying. most of the time, he just does not remember.
if recall can be automatic, so can deletion. he believes this right now. he will not believe this forever. someday he will believe that neither recall nor deletion are unconscious: he will believe that memory is a liability that can not be trusted.
when Kasse dreams about Eo, he does not dream of the present. he does not dream of their exploits in the military. he does not dream of the green house, or the abandoned school. he does not dream of fucking himself two stalls down with his name soundly lodged in Eoran’s throat. he doesn’t dream of popping commissary locks or exploring unused wings of the infirmary. these are things he’s living: these are not dreams.
he does not dream of the future. he never really thinks about where he and Eoran will be a month from now, a year, five years, ten. he doesn’t think of life back in Port Haven. he doesn’t dream of getting married, cannot imagine getting old. he doesn’t dream of their first apartment. he doesn’t dream of holding Eoran’s hand when they receive their discharge papers together.
no, Kasse dreams of alternate histories.
Kasse dreams of a time where he and Eo meet in highschool, where he has a family who rents an apartment in the same building as the Toriet clan. he plays out what it would have been like to grow up on the streets with him. Eo is a runaway, or he suffers some tragedy, or he is orphaned young—it’s always different. sometimes Eo replaces Lia. other times, they are both there. Kasse doesn’t know if he prefers 2s or 3s. he likes both, but knows the dreams tend to end badly when there’s 3. he dreams of meeting Eo in the streets of Holm. in this one, they are from different world. he dreams that despite this, Eo will see past how he lives and what he is to find who he is. he imagines Eo falling in love with this him, the filthy version of him, the him so full of shame the only eye contact he makes comes with rage in the afterimage.
he dreams every now and again that Eoran catches him, coerced into survival sex, bears witness, watches. in the dreams, Eoran comforts him, wraps him in his arms, kisses him despite where he’s been. in the nightmares, Eoran spits on him and calls him a whore.
he wishes more than anything that he’d met Eoran sooner.
“I want—”
to hear it,
he begged pulling Eoran’s mouth up to his,
accepted those groveling prayers into his mouth
answered with his own desperate searching
for a fucking gag order in his lover’s throat
even as he betrayed his every
dream and fantasy
nightmare and reverie
flashes of confession the ghost was unconscious to.
I’ve never heard any words more beautiful in my life.
“I love you,” Eoran gave unto that boy’s lips, unction like wisteria-waning, purple petals in all his sugartongued prose dying—edged in brown, sweet with expiration, too strong with moribund morbidity, chromatographic display of his heart rendered in the kaleidoscopic taste of that three piece breath; that dotdash admission of his ultimate weakness.
The further away they echoed from that moment so grounded, that moment they spent in the ground, the more unstable their iterations. Eoran was blind to all his possible pasts, fretting for all his uncertain futures. He was unsure if any combination of exactitudes in whatever out-of-time recreation of him would mold him into the shape of his current present, would carve him with the blade of experience to resemble what he is today. If he received less love as a child, would he still be so forthcoming as an adult? If he’d been a child of the streets, would he be a better soldier like Kasse? Probably, but would he also exhibit the breadth of care that made him uniquely himself? Eoran was doubtful he’d be the same boy in any other reverberation, made from any other shape, spilling sacred poetry from his lips, writing longform sonnets in the
fraying & climacteric
motion of his hips, working that boy like it was the only thing he was put on their shitty Earth to do. To do—him. To be—himself.
I love you.
He etches it into their bones. He carves it into their present, into their nebulous prison of thought scraped and disfigured, where the walls conform to the weight of his defacing in their interval space; the space where those two boys are nothing but pure, distilled crystal-clarity and rotgut introspection.
“H-ah—”
Right now, Eoran doesn’t care about the war.
“Ah—”
He doesn’t care about what the sun will bring.
“Fuck, Ka—”
He just wants that boy he’s grinding into, in their two-hour window of timelessness where his guard is left down and broken by Kasse’s every sharp avenue, glitterglass always littering the adjunct’s street-cut form. Where he can hold him and have him—the stuff of dreams made real.
He let a sigh softly brush against that boy’s cheek, effete even in his overlay.
Eoran could confess that Kasse is the only person he ever thinks about, the only person he ever looks at with any interest, with anything other than the placid annoyance he wears when he thinks no one is watching—but he thinks that Kasse is more observant than he lets on, so he doesn’t. He leaves the scattered pieces of himself a mess, he leaves his actions as reinforcements to be beheld. His puzzle has multitudes; he is, by nature, some assembly required.
Eoran knows he is a creature of endurance and he knows moments are made for passing. His past is set in stone, his future is a spiral he cannot see the end of, obscured in the bleariness of a vaseline lens.
But his now is right fucking there, ravishing and incomparable, and Eoran makes sure he feels it to his core, through his very foundation rattled by the mettle of the bloodwright’s transparent desire.
“I love you,” he said again
body racked by a fitful release
mouth on mouth to swallow
every scrap of Kasse’s air
too jealous to let even
the night have any
taste of his lover
too in love to
let any bit
of Kasse
escape
him.
“—fuck, I—”
Eoran was right:
Kasse shouldn’t just go around saying
shit he didn’t know the meaning of.