Chapter 6
The Diner
“You ain’t never seen the like,” Robbie said.
Stephen glanced at him and blinked in surprise. How much had he said out loud?
“After my accident they said Dusty stole Pa’s shotgun and was gonna kill Drew,” Robbie continued. “Don’t know what stopped him, but Drew hightailed it outta town pretty quick. I think Mama might’ve given him some money or something, but I don’t ‘member it too well ‘cause of my accident.”
Sadly, Stephen knew this story too. It had taken Dusty a solid week to tell him that he had been trussed up naked in the barn while his older brother, Andrew, had ‘dominated’ him. When Drew had finished, he turned to Robbie for his turn. But Robbie, after witnessing the viciousness of the abuse on Dustin, had fled naked in a booming thunderstorm and gotten struck by lightning.
Hours after Robbie had been taken to the hospital, Stewart finally came into the barn and cut Dustin down, telling him to cowboy up as he fell to the ground. Unable to face his parents and hurt beyond his own ability to hide it, Dustin had run to the one person who had never failed him, Miss Emily. He was sixteen. Robbie was ten. It had taken Dustin a solid week to tell Stephen the story in full, and another three weeks for him to accept Stephen’s acceptance of it.
“Glad I don’t remember none of it,” Robbie said quietly. “’Member your letters, though. Wanna hear one?” he asked, grinning suspiciously.
“You memorized them?” Stephen asked.
“Sure, the only way to get Dusty outta one of his moods was to make him remember that someone loved him besides his dummy brother. Wanna hear one?” he prodded again.
“I.... yes. Okay.” But he didn’t; he knew every word, every inflection. Writing was what he did for a living and most of the letters he had written to Dustin had been the hardest words he had ever put on paper, every black drop of ink squeezed from his soul.
“Now my word ‘nouncing ain’t fancy as yours,” Robbie said, “but you get my meaning since you wrote it. Dusty sure liked them though, said you wrote them from somewhere deep in your heart which was why they was so fancy schmancy like poetry and all. He respected that about you; said you kept a journal to keep all your wisdom in one place.”
“He said that?” Stephen asked, caught off guard because he had never completely shared that aspect of himself. Of course Dustin knew about the journal, but Stephen had never shared any of that. Maybe Dustin had told Robbie about him being a writer and Robbie had confused the two.
“Hmmm. Let me think of a good one,” Robbie said as he sat up straighter and recited.
“‘
I sat and looked into your eyes a few weeks ago, Dustin. Or should I say that I looked through them? Tried to at least. I was in a café on the Cours Mirabeau
.’” Robbie grinned at him. “You like that? Dusty told me how to say it right. Now where was I? Oh yeah.
“‘
I was in a café on the Cours Mirabeau staring at the tourists in their gaudy unfitting clothes as they walked by eager to see the fabled home of Cezanne, and when I turned, you were there. Your eyes locked on an image far from Aix, and far from me.
You were close to the window, surrounded by rustic wooden chairs and dust motes gleaming in a sunlight that hinted at the dark red highlights of your hair. The bulge of the lens of your eye was clear and steady, floating above the blue of your iris like a silhouette riding the waves of a shadow.
I looked through your eyes with you, Dustin. Tried, from my perpendicular perspective, to capture the same images you caught. And I wondered as I looked with you, could I see from your perspective? Could I abandon the passion that you have and still nourish myself on the pain of that forfeiture? Could I hold my fear as the highest of my emotions and line all others up behind it?
I could not, and when I realized that, you were gone. The cup half empty, the croissant broken but otherwise untouched. Only the motes showed me the trail of your passage
.
And yet, here I am, still so desperately in love with you.
’
“Ha! What do you think? Pretty good, huh?” Robbie asked with enthusiasm.
“Very good,” Stephen answered, a weak smile trying to mask his desolation.
“He should’ve wrote back though,” Robbie said, his face crowded with concern. “That was wrong. He was trying to hide the lies that his heart couldn’t.”
Stephen studied him again. “That’s ....profound.”
Robbie shrugged. “Don’t know about that. It’s just true. Dusty was always worried about what all these gossip mongers thought instead of his own happiness, just like you said. He was so sad all the time. And when he weren’t sad he was mad. Except for your letters.” He seemed to think about Dustin’s self-made predicament a little longer and shook his head.
“You should’ve seen the blowout we had because of them letters. He was real mad,” Robbie continued. “See, we was arguing about Pa again, of course, and I told him he could just pack off and run back to U-rope with that woman that was always writing him.
“He said, ‘What do you know about it?’ all demanding like, so I knowed I hit a nerve.
“I said, ‘Those letters you keep getting, thinking nobody sees you sneaking to read. If she makes you so happy, then go. I don’t need no one to sit me.’ I was mad about this time and kept pushing it and he just blew like a hot beer can and told me you was a man.
“Well, you could’ve hit me with a horse. And when I really looked at him, I just knowed he’d been wanting to tell me for the longest; he was just scared that I’d act a fool. Couldn’t though, not against Dusty.
“He said to me, ‘And I don’t love him. We’re just friends.’
“And then I said, ‘Then you’re as dumb as I am, ‘cause you ain’t lying to no one but yourself. You just scared of loving him back is all.’ And I walked off home.” Robbie laughed. “Think I could’ve scraped half the dirt from the road with his jaw hanging down the way it was.
“Didn’t see him for about a week or so, then he finally stopped by with this new depot I’d been wanting and asked me to help him with it. He wouldn’t even get out of the truck. I had to walk over. But he didn’t want to talk about the depot, even I knew that.
“I asked him, I said, ‘Dusty, why you bothering yourself over such a small word as love? I don’t care who you love.’ I was resting my arms on his window by then and all he did was jerk his head for me to get in the truck.
“Pa was out working in the kennel, so I don’t know why he was so embarrassed about talking about it. He didn’t say nothing for the longest, we just drove and drove.
“Finally he said, ‘It ain’t right.’
“I asked him, ‘Who says?’
“‘Most folks,’ is what he told me. ‘Church goers.’ And I asked him, ‘You mean the same church goers don’t want me singing the praises of Jesus too loud?’
“He kind of smiled at that and said, ‘Them’s the ones.’
“And I said, ‘Hell, when you start worrying about what them heathen folk think anyway?’
“He just cut up laughing at me ‘cause I don’t never cuss. But he weren’t finished yet; we had lots of talking to do that day and most of it was about you. That’s when he started telling me about your letters. He loved you, Mr. Stephen. He had a hard time putting actions into words, but that didn’t change his heart none.”
Stephen frowned. Then why had Dustin left him so decimated in the flat back in London? Why had he abandoned his own feelings, his own heart? Bloody hell, why hadn’t he answered one single letter? But Stephen knew the answer to that already; the answer sat right in front of him and it shamed Stephen to think of all the anger, jealousy, and envy he had poured onto Robbie without ever having met him. How many times had he secretly wished that Robbie had not survived the lightning strike just so that he could have had Dustin for himself?
“It was probably good for him to talk to you,” he told Robbie quietly, hearing his own jealousy trying to creep into his words.
“You was what was good for him, Mr. Stephen. You. But Dusty didn’t think he could have none of it, didn’t think he was allowed,” Robbie said as he waved his hand around the diner, “this place being what it is and all.”
Stephen looked down at his hands and said nothing. There was nothing he could say. This
place
had ignorance ingrained into it. He had lost, Robbie had lost, and Dustin had lost most of all.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Stephen.”
Stephen looked up at him. “For what?”
Robbie drew a deep breath before he spoke. “For taking him from you,” he answered as he let the breath out. “He wouldn’t ever have come back here if it weren’t for me. And if he hadn’t come back, he wouldn’t be...” He shook his head and trailed off to silence.
“Robbie, you don’t have anything to apologize for,” Stephen said. “If anything, it should be me apologizing.” He looked out the window and kept talking, knowing the truth of his words even as he spoke them. “He wouldn’t have come back with me. This was all just a dream. You’re his brother; he had to come back because he loved you, not out of some sense of duty to you. If he was still...here, he’d be irate that I had come at all.” He turned and looked Robbie in the eye. “I think we both know that’s true.”
“’Spect so,” Robbie answered. “But that didn’t curb his real feelings for you, Mr. Stephen. One thing I always knowed about Dusty, he hated deep; but he loved even deeper, and that was what drove him, even if he didn’t like to admit it none. Especially ‘cause he didn’t like to admit it.”
Chapter 7
London
There was a hard and insistent banging on the door of the flat. Stephen looked at the clock on the nightstand and got up, not believing that any bloke he knew would be rude enough to be pounding on his door at this ungodly hour. Even his closest neighbors wouldn’t be that uncouth unless it was an extreme emergency, and then they would likely be screaming about it at the top of their lungs.
When he got to the door and looked through the spy hole he froze at the sight that greeted him.
Dustin had left the flat several weeks before, shouting accusations and screaming vile things about feeling abused and molested after they had spent their first night together. Stephen had been utterly demolished. Not only with the harshness of Dustin’s departure, but also because he had opened himself up so much and had mistakenly thought it reciprocated.
He had felt an odd connection with Dustin from the very onset. So odd that he had been unable to put his thoughts into words, an utter first for him. Their shared night had left him with the only blank spot in a journal decades long. The fact that most of that night had been in almost total silence, and in complete and unreserved intimacy, only added to the mystery behind that void and his attraction to the bloke.
He sighed, unlatched the locks, and slowly opened the door, completely unable to explain why he was willing to put himself through another potential confrontation. His view through the spyhole had told him that there were obviously still some issues that Dustin was dealing with, and though Stephen didn’t know the particulars, he also couldn’t deny the tears running down Dustin’s downturned face.
He stood with the door in his hand and waited for a moment, but it didn’t seem that Dustin was willing to raise his eyes any further than the floor. Just as he was about to reach out to him, Dustin looked up with a barren weight of self loathing in his eyes so heavy it made Stephen worry that if he reached out in compassion, Dustin would step back, spin away, and never return. So he let Dustin cry for a moment while they stared at one another; let the night kiss Dustin’s tears and pull the scabs on the cuts deep in his heart.
Stupid fucking wanker
, Stephen thought of himself. He realized why he opened the door now, he was already in love with this bloke, and that definitively couldn’t be explained.
How had Dustin’s needs on that first night so quickly and suddenly filled so deep a requisite in his own life? This wasn’t the usual longing for companionship that drove him out pub crawling. Their single night together had been beneath the surface of life, an invisible thing that Stephen couldn’t put his finger on, and he realized that was why he’d been unable to capture it in words. Maybe that was also why Dustin had run; maybe he had felt it too. And maybe it was that unseen thing that drove him back to Stephen’s flat again. Maybe.
But Stephen also understood that he couldn’t guide Dustin with this; couldn’t hold that nameless thing for him and could not steal all his misery away. He didn’t know how to do it for himself, so how could he do it for Dustin? Dustin had to grasp that reflection on his own and make it his reality. But that simple reflex was so hard for some people; so very hard...
“Dustin...”
The moment his name was out of Stephen’s mouth Dustin moved, smashing Stephen’s body face first into the wall as he pivoted and pinned Stephen from behind. Stephen heard the quick snitch of a knife unfold and suddenly wondered if he would die there; die because of his own loneliness and the loneliness of a man whose soul ached with the arid sands of pain and regret.
When the knife point pressed against his back and slid down to cut through the light pajamas bottoms he wore, he stopped fighting. Dustin was small, but very fit, and combined with his military training Stephen knew that he was no match for him. He understood this, but he also realized that if he was going to die this night, the knife would have come straight in. It would have eviscerated him from the first slash and kept coming.
Immediately, he recognized that this wasn’t about his death, and it wasn’t about uncontrollable lust. This was something else. This was someone else’s hands, some ghost that lived and breathed inside of the man he had touched and made love to on their first night together. So Stephen let Dustin have his body, let him use it to release whatever demon had brought him to the door and put that piece of steel in his pocket.
He heard the knife hit the floor as Dustin fumbled with his own pants. Dustin had one leg inside his instep and his shoulder pressed firmly into Stephen’s back. He had Stephen immobilized against the wall and under complete control.
He kicked Stephen’s legs further apart when he got his own pants down, spat on his penis, spat once more into his hand to lightly lube up Stephen’s ass, then plunged in. In two strokes he was in to the hilt as Stephen yelped in pain and in a hot and previously unexplored lust.
Stephen had never been taken before, never been dominated like this. He quivered as he felt the curve of Dustin’s mouth on his back; moaned as Dustin chewed into the arc of his neck with each thrust. Dustin wasn’t large, but he wasn’t small either, and without understanding, Stephen knew that if he could get his hands behind him he would reach around and pull Dustin into him deeper, harder.
Dustin shifted, straddling Stephen as he pulled Stephen’s hips from the wall and began to pound into him mercilessly. Stephen whimpered under the weight of his thrusts, and it was all he could do without screaming out for more.
In minutes Dustin’s body tensed as his penis swelled and his plunging became frantic. With one final moan he shook, emptied himself into Stephen, and laid his head on Stephen’s back as he gasped for breath.
He clung there for a moment, his arms tight around Stephen’s torso before the sobbing began and he fell to the floor, his apologies running over Stephen so gently they were like desperate whispers.
Stephen breathed in raggedly, holding himself up against the wall and now on the verge of his own orgasm. He couldn’t be upset with Dustin. He had seen how hard it was for him to come back to the flat; saw it the second he opened the door and looked at his face. He had seen how repulsed Dustin was at himself for being there, how sickened he was at all the accusations he had hurled at Stephen when he left the first time, and how thoroughly disgusted he was at what he knew he was about to do.
He sat down beside Dustin and pulled him into an embrace. “Shhh,” he whispered. “No one’s hurt, Dustin. Shhh.” He sat with him and rocked Dustin in his arms without saying anything more. He’d never thought that love would be something that just popped up out of nowhere. He had always imagined it would be a gradual thing; something that first warmed his heart and his hands as it drew closer. But everything he wanted was here, everything contained within this broken, angry young man. Everything, if he could just figure out how to help him get it out without it killing them both first.
Later, when he had coaxed Dustin further into the flat and they had shed the rest of their clothes, Stephen lay on the bed and whimpered as Dustin covered him in a blanket of absolute passion. Dustin moved across his body as if he were apologizing with his touch; as if he were no longer on the world’s false stage and could simply sing the music his body so wanted to voice. Stephen wondered if this was how Dustin had felt beneath him that first night. Had he been in as much awe as Stephen was now? Did he feel that unexplainable, unprintable connection once again, like the strike on a chord buried deep in his core?
They finally settled into one shared breath as the sun came up. He reached for Dustin’s hands, kneading his coarse fingertips and tender palms with a gentle touch.
“What are you doing?” Dustin asked as he watched him.
Stephen smiled and brought Dustin’s palm to his lips and kissed it gently. “Looking inside you, feeling that beauty you try so hard to hide,” he answered as he cupped his cheek inside of Dustin’s hand and caressed his own face with it.
Dustin grew still and stared as Stephen kissed his palm again.
Looking back at Dustin, at his stillness, it was easy for Stephen to forget how hard Dustin appeared on the outside; how solid his emotional armor looked when you stood off at a distance; and how easy it was to get lost inside his hidden tragedy and not see what was beyond it.
It was right then, in that orange morning sun, that he had asked himself if Dustin would ever be able to look beyond what was curled inside of him; if he would ever be able to feel his own truth. Stephen knew the answer to that question instinctively, but deceived himself into believing that somehow he would be able to resurrect Dustin from his own ashes.
Only later, after Dustin had gone back to the States and left him completely desolate, did Stephen truly realize how foolish a notion that was, how ridiculous the sharp myth of love.