Talker (2 page)

It was apparently the right thing to say. Tate shrugged and flopped the stripe of long hair out of his eyes. Without the ponytail or the spikes or the eyeliner, he looked vulnerable and young. The curve of his lip was sensual and full—a thing Brian hadn’t noticed until this particular moment.

“Yeah, it hurt,” he said, as though the hurt didn’t matter. “I was a kid when it happened, you know?”

Brian nodded. “How little?”

Tate walked to his locker and started rooting around for clothes—camouflage jeans, combat boots, and a long-sleeved T-shirt, even though it was late May. “I was six. My mom fell asleep with a cigarette and a bottle of whiskey. The blanket I was sleeping on was soaked in it.”

O uch indeed.

“Your mom?”

“Didn’t live.”

“My folks too. C ar crash.”

Tate made one of those twitches, the ones that seemed to literal y yank him from one thought or time or place to the real, physical here and now. “The Newsies were a ragged army, poor orphans and runaways without direction… until one day, al that Talker |
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changed.” He said it with intonation, as though he was quoting something, and Brian felt thick and slow next to that quickness.

He’d always been slow to speak around Talker, but Talker didn’t seem to mind.

This time was no exception.

“I don’t understand,” he apologized, and Tate turned to him, enthusiasm written on his face like crayon on a wall.

“Newsies? You’ve never seen Newsies? It’s, like, the musical, before High School Musical, which was lame… man, you’ve got to see this movie—it’s awesome!”

“Uhm, okay.” Brian was blinking, hard, wondering how their conversation had ended up down such an exotic hal way when he hadn’t seen the turn, but then that’s where Tate took conversation.

If something got too close, he would take it in the opposite direction.

“I could bring it by your dorm—if you’ve got a computer, we could see it. You’d like it….” It was the first time in that year and a half of semi-acquaintanceship that they’d progressed into actual friendship. Best moment of Brian’s life.

“O kay.” Brian had a laptop—he and his aunt had put every spare penny they had into it. So far, he’d only used it to type papers and surf YouTube. He felt vaguely ashamed that he had no porn to speak of, but that didn’t seem to interest him right now.

“Uhm, that is, if you don’t mind a fag in your dorm room.” Tate had turned away. He made a show out of using the smal mirror in his locker to careful y place brazen blue eyeliner around his eyes.

Brian realized with some shock that Tate was talking about himself. He also realized that he was terrified Brian would agree with him.

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“Don’t have many friends,” he said honestly. “C an’t afford to be choosy.” He paused and watched as Tate’s shoulders straightened a little, the twitchy hunch to them gone with Brian’s open acceptance. “But I don’t like it when people call them names.”

“Them?” Tate turned around with wide-open, decorated eyes, as though daring Brian to deny who he was.

“My friends.”

Tate nodded then, and flushed. “Right. O kay.” He smiled.

Brian had come to know that smile with the prominent canines and crowded bottom bite very wel . But Tate’s smile was luminous—

pure and shining, especial y now—and Brian realized with a lump in his throat that, for this moment at least, he was needed. Tate Walker needed him as a friend as no one else had perhaps needed Brian in his life.

It was so easy after that.

Brian’s shoulder had final y blown while practicing the shot put.

He’d lost his scholarship and had to take a job to get through school, and they’d moved in together shortly after that.

Hey, Brian—where you living if you can’t live in the dorms?

Don’t know—gotta find an apartment.

Here—my friend on X Street just gave up a second-floor dump. It’s a shitty neighborhood, but it’s got two bedrooms, and it’s right behind a Starbucks, so we can pirate their Wi-F i.

We?

Wel … if you don’t mind a roommate who likes guys.

No—not at all.

Although Tate never said so, he gave up his dorm because Brian was his best friend, and he didn’t want to lose the ability to Talker |
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just wander down the hal and throw a movie in the laptop while Brian was trying to pound out a paper.

Both of them got restaurant jobs: Tate as a bar-back at G atsby’s Nick, a flamboyant gay bar, and Brian waiting tables at O live G arden. Tate stil had his scholarship, but neither of them had much money. Their apartment was crappy, their furniture was second hand, and when they weren’t filching restaurant food, they lived on Top Ramen and fried potatoes.

Brian couldn’t remember being happier.

AND now, after two and a half years of friendship, Brian couldn’t believe he’d heard right.

This was Tate’s new hobby?

“You’re doing what?” he asked quietly, when the echo of his unexpected outburst had died down.

Tate shook himself out and danced on his toes. The tile under his feet crackled and broke down into even smal er fragments before he answered.

“It’s no big deal.”

“It’s not stamp collecting! What is it you’re doing again?”

“You know, I’m… I’m talking.”

“Yeah, I heard that,” Brian growled. He was running with Tate for company, since he was no longer on the team. He liked running, though. He liked spending time with Tate when he was free from all the stuff that bound him to the earth in the painful way of iron manacles. Right now, though, he wasn’t sure he could make the trip down to the riverfront bike trail because he was too damned mad and in too much shock. His shoe dangled from his finger by Talker |
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the lace, and for a second he thought about using it to bludgeon his roommate until Tate came to his senses.

“You’re going into the bathroom stal s after work and talking to guys until they come. You said that. A phone-sex operator, but in person. You said that too. What you didn’t say”—he had to pause because his voice made a sound like a gravel driveway underfoot—

“was why in G od’s name you would put yourself in danger like that!”

O h shit. There went his voice—but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t. O h G od…. Tate was just so vulnerable.

“It’s not that dangerous,” Tate maintained earnestly. “Honest, Brian. I don’t even have to see them. It’s like… I don’t know. It’s powerful!” He looked up then. He didn’t have on his eyeliner yet, and his hair wasn’t spiked, so it was just… his eyes. They were ink-dark, and hurt, and he had a clench to his chin, like he was going to power through the pain. That was how Tate met each day.

“Powerful,” Brian echoed, his voice a hollow void.

“Yeah, it’s like… you know. I can have the sex, but I don’t have to… to put anything on the line. People walk away happy, but they can’t hurt me. Don’t you see? It’s perfect.”

Brian dropped his shoe there on the floor of their entryway, and sank down on the cracked tile after it, pulling his knees to his chest and pushing his longish, wheat-colored hair out of his eyes with a sweaty palm.

“Yeah, it’s perfect,” he muttered. It made perfect sense. Tate had been so hurt, so many times. His body was literally twitching with the need to be loved, but his heart… his heart couldn’t take one more wormwood-flavored grind through the mood-processor.

“C ome on, Brian,” Tate said, crouching down next to him. He put an easy hand on Brian’s shoulder because he thought Brian was straight, Brian was no threat to him, Brian couldn’t possibly Talker |
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hurt him that way, and Brian met that dark-eyed, clenched-jaw look of trust with a throat so tight he could hardly breathe.

“I mean,” Tate said softly, “it’s not like you can do this for me, you know? You’re the best friend a guy could have, but… I… I real y want someone.” He stood up and danced away to the industrial-techno-popping rhythm of his heart. “I’m just so lonely,”

he said nakedly, and Brian was final y able to get the words out.

“But I love you,” he rasped, and Tate bent down and patted him on the head like a child or a cat or something.

“Wel , yeah, but we both know it’s not the way I need.” His voice choked at that, and before Brian could contradict him, explain the trope that Tate had locked him into as surely as a girl in a manga book, he said, “Here. I’ve got to go… I’l just go alone…

I’ll… I’ll shower at work… bye….”

Brian tried hard to scramble after him, but he put al his weight on his bad shoulder and when his vision cleared from the mask of black spots in front of it, Tate was long gone. Brian had been a decathlete. Tate had been a distance sprinter, and they had more than half a dozen different trails to choose from between the city streets and the riverfront bike trail. The odds of actual y catching up to him when he was in this mood were as thin as the scar tissue on Tate’s healing heart.

Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit….

Brian found himself on his ass again as scalding tears slid in the salty dust coating his knees.

“But it is the way you need,” he whispered. It is, Tate. It’s just exactly what you need. But Tate wouldn’t listen to him—not now.

Not after all Brian had seen, or the way Tate had laid his heart bare because he thought Brian was “safe.” O h G od—now that Tate really needed Brian-the-lover, how could Brian get him to trust Brian-the-friend?

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P a rt III

O ld Lovers

BRIAN had a date with Virginia the first night Tate had tried to have sex. He remembered that—the date.

He’d been having sex pretty steadily since his senior year in homeschooling. He was a pretty kid—he knew that in a detached way. Wheat-colored hair, blue eyes, all-American-boy freckles, and a wide, smiling mouth—between that and the body, which was honed because he liked the exercise and not because he liked the muscles—well, girls had been following him into bed with impunity, and he hadn’t minded. He liked girls, liked pleasing them, so he was pretty good in bed (when they could find one—often, he was pretty good in his car), but the whole affair seemed… curiously passionless to him. There had been no pounding or sweating or dedication to the act. The whole gimme gimme gimme gotta have it ba-bee thing seemed to be missing, and it hadn’t been until he’d lived with Tate that he’d begun to figure out why.

Since moving in with Tate, he’d become obsessed with the crease of Tate’s thigh, the one leading from his hip to his groin.

Maybe it was because Tate’s private parts were always casually hidden when he came out of the shower or was dressing, but that particular place just… captured Brian’s attention in the oddest way.

Was Tate’s cock long? Thick? Did it hang heavy when he got out of the shower? Were there scars? (Poor baby, let there not be Talker |
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scars!) Were there piercings? Was the hair the same dark, inky color as the hair on his head?

And that wasn’t the only part of Tate’s body that seemed to have captured Brian’s attention, either. The slope of his back, the indentation of his waist, the subtle placement of smal , secret moles on his unscarred shoulder… suddenly, Brian was thinking of these things as he fell asleep at night. He was dreaming of them, and waking up with a hand on his hard cock and sweat-sticky skin, unable to tel the details of the dreams, just that they made his heart pound in his groin and his breath come in strangled pants from his chest.

He began to have some suspicions that he wasn’t as straight as he’d thought he was, but it wasn’t until Tate came home that night, al excited about an upcoming late-night date with another bar-back, that Brian real y knew that his roommate meant more to him than his girlfriend.

Tate hadn’t had sex yet. It had been a painful admission to Brian one night after Virginia had left. He’d “fooled around” a little; lots of kissing at parties, some groping or “frotting” as he cal ed it, but no… no skin on skin. No intimacy. No having his body enveloped by another’s and feeling cared for. Loved.

O f course those hadn’t been his words, but he’d been so transparent—at least to Brian.

Tate’s father had called once in the nine or so months since they’d been roommates. Tate was sparing with his family history, but apparently dear ol’ dad had been declared incompetent as a parent, and Tate had spent a lot of years in foster care. That was, he admitted candidly, how he got his scholarship—the big pity card, as he cal ed it. Apparently, that didn’t stop “Dad” from inflicting as much damage as he could, even long distance.

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The cal had come on Tate’s birthday. Tate had picked up the phone, listened for a moment, and said, “Yes, Dad. Still gay.”

Brian had heard the pejorative word on the other end of the phone even from across the room. It echoed from the walls as Tate put the receiver gently back into the charger.

Brian had walked across the room, grabbed Tate’s hand, and said, “C ’mon.”

“Where we going?”

“Dinner. It’s your birthday.”

“You don’t have any money!” Brian was perpetual y broke—no scholarship, no cash, just that simple.

“Don’t care.” Brian had needed to hit his aunt up for Top Ramen money and potatoes from the garden that week, but he didn’t care. It was worth it to take Tate to Red Robin and treat him to a hamburger, talk about music that Brian had never heard of, get the waiters to sing to him over a melting bal of ice cream, and make the memory of that word fade forever by lingering for an hour over the bottomless pit of fries.

So he’d thought his obsession might just be compassion, fascination for someone who was so damned tough and so damned hurt both at the same time, until Tate brought home Blaize with a Z, who had a shaved head and sparkly green eye shadow and gauges as big as a quarter in his earlobes.

He also had a full, lush mouth, and sweet, prominent clavicles, and his gangly arms and a long, trim waist. It was easy to see a lot of that because he wore a fishnet tank top with his ripped jeans.