Talker (7 page)

He was about to ease up on the clutch when Jed stopped him with a question.

“Does Tate know?”

Brian couldn’t look at him. “Know what?”

“How you feel about him?”

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Brian shook his head and shrugged. “It’s not like I can tell him now.” Then they both heard the sirens, and Jed stepped back from the car so he could drive away.

He’d stopped on the way home to throw up.

That night, when Tate got home, Brian had rewrapped his bleeding knuckles and put on a hand-me-down shirt with the sleeves pul ed past his fingertips. It had been late January—he’d been ready to complain about the cold.

But Tate had been dazed, shel -shocked, exhausted from keeping it together in the press of bodies and loud noises from the club, and he didn’t notice the knuckles, not even when the bandages went away and there were only scabs left. All he was real y capable of in those first days was doing his homework or sitting on the couch watching television anyway.

Brian would sit with him, homework or no homework, and put food in his hands and nag him until he ate. Brian would make sure not to turn the hal light off at night, and to go into Tate’s room before he went to bed to see if Tate was sleeping or needed to talk.

A lot of the times he was sure Tate pretended to sleep, but sometimes he would say a few words. Apparently, he saved all his talking for work.

BRIAN had fal en quiet at his aunt’s question about consequences for the fucker who’d hurt Tate. At her prompting, he jerked out of his reverie.

“Don’t worry, Aunt Lyndie. He… he’s not going to come near Tate again.”

Lyndie raised her eyebrows then. “O kay, baby. G ood for you.”

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Brian shrugged. “Didn’t help much,” he muttered, and she reached out and covered his hands—battered with scars, but not hurting—and said, “Did it help you?”

A slow smile crossed Brian’s face, and he had to concede that it had.

“O kay,” Lyndie said after a moment. “So, what’s the plan?”

Brian’s smile faded. He had one. O h, definitely, he had a plan.

But he wasn’t really excited about it. He outlined it in its barest points, and Lyndie nodded.

“So, the grand romantic gesture, huh?”

Brian shrugged, and then swal owed, showing exactly how nervous he really was. “I’ve never been good at them,” he admitted.

He’d tried once with Virginia, and she’d ended up getting sick and he’d had to take Tate to the restaurant instead. He and Tate had a very good time, and Brian hadn’t minded—even then—that people thought they were a couple, but it was a sad romantic gesture when the intended victim stayed home with the flu and the stand-in wouldn’t recognize that he was the real deal after all.

The look Lyndie sent him over her iced tea was very, very serious. “Baby, I think you’re going to have to commit to this one full-out. I don’t think this kid’s got many more chances in him.”

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P a rt V III

Sounding Love

BRIAN couldn’t look at himself in the rearview mirror on the way back down to Sacramento. It was too distracting.

Lyndie had helped him, even breaking out her own makeup reserves and the E lmer’s glue and some henna dye she’d been saving for tinting her own black tresses. The result was someone he didn’t recognize in the mirror, and he real y hoped he didn’t have to break out of the closet ever again. He was fine with being gay, thank you, but he’d never signed on to be a reject from a Ramones cover band.

His hair was dyed red at the ends, and spiked flat on the top of his head. Lyndie had trimmed it more, so that the hennaed ends separated like eyelashes, and the whole thing was so unlikely a part of Brian’s appearance that he didn’t even see it when he caught himself in the mirror. He had other things to worry about.

His eyes were black. His aunt had used an entire pencil of eyeliner, making it look like he’d closed his eyes and someone had spray-stenciled a raccoon mask over his face. She hadn’t used powder to whiten him—his complexion was pretty pale as it was—

but she had given him two ibuprofen and an ice cube and pierced his ears. Three times. And his nose. O nce—but that was plenty.

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She’d been considering safety pins in them, but she’d gone into her old jewelry box instead and come up with six diamond studs—two of them real—and one onyx stud for his nose. She’d also been happy to find some peppermint oil and alcohol to soothe and disinfect the whole works, and he’d held an icepack to his face while she’d done his hair and eyes.

His shirt was blinding.

Neon-pink polyester. He wasn’t sure which era it was from—

seventies, eighties, sometime in the future, he had no idea. But it had a wide lapel collar and black buttons, and it went real y wel with the black-checkered golf pants that had come out of the neighbor’s stash of hand-me-downs as wel . And the golf pants looked much better pegged (thank you again, Aunt Lyndie) and shortened in the crotch and stuffed into combat boots that (unlike the others in the club) had actually seen real combat.

How’m I doing, Virginia? Am I sel ing it to the world?

More importantly, would he sel it to Talker?

He could only hope.

It was dark by the time he got back to Sacramento, and G atsby’s Nick was hopping—it was crowded enough that Jed almost didn’t notice him until he was halfway inside.

“Brian?” There was some shock, some incredulity, but no laughter. Brian put Jed on the short list of people he’d beat someone up for.

“Hey, Jed.” Brian smiled weakly, and Jed cocked his head, seeing right through him.

“You’re here to stop Talker, aren’t you?”

Brian looked away and put his hands in the pockets of the golf pants. They were so tight he was sure Jed could probably look hard Talker |
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and see that he’d been circumcised, so he was glad Jed didn’t swing his way. “Someone has to,” he muttered.

Jed nodded. “You’re right. He’s gonna lose his job if this shit doesn’t stop.”

Brian looked inside the club—lots of male bodies dancing (a few females, there with friends)—lots of snuggling and pressing together, lots of noise and a swelter of heat and motion and light.

He couldn’t help himself. He shuddered. Talker would fit right in here, but not Brian.

“You wouldn’t know if it’s started yet. Tonight, I mean?”

Jed shook his head. “He gets off about an hour before we close down—that’s when he’s been doing his bathroom thing.”

Brian looked at his watch and shuddered. O h G od. That was two hours. He had to sit in there for two hours, with sweaty palms and a real dislike for grunge-metal/techno-pop hybrid music, while strange men tried to grab his ass? (He was not being vain. He’d been groped twice while he’d stopped and talked to Jed.)

“I can wait in the car,” he said decisively, turning to walk away, and Jed stopped him with a hard-fingered hand on the arm.

“But if you do that, I can’t buy you dinner and tel you when he’s going in to the bathroom,” Jed said softly, and Brian swallowed.

“I don’t need dinner,” he lied. He’d left Lyndie’s before dinner (after saying hi to her boyfriend, of course, and wishing them both well), and he had maybe five dollars in his pocket. F ive dollars might buy him an iced tea—if he flirted nicely with the bartender.

“Sure you do. I’ve got some comps, take one.”

Brian swal owed, swal owed again, final y got his pride down in a lump. “O kay,” he muttered. “Thanks.”

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Jed flashed a hand at the other bouncer to say he’d be back in a minute, then escorted Brian through that press of bodies.

F ollowing Jed was actual y okay—he was like the ice-breaking prow of a great ship, except the ice was hot and sweaty and dancing in rhythm to the same beat that seemed to jerk Talker away from reality on a daily basis.

Brian was parked in a corner of the bar, back in the shadows, and Jed was back in a minute with a salad and a sandwich—and a pitcher of soda.

“He doesn’t work this section,” Jed hollered into his ear over the noise. “O dds are good he won’t see you. You let Trace here”—

a nod at a handsome man with reddish hair, standing behind the bar—“take care of you, and wait. I’l keep an eye out for him and let you know when his shift is done.”

Brian wanted to just shut up and huddle in the corner, but he had to ask one major favor. “Jed….” He looked at the guy helplessly. “Jed, I’ve got to be the first one in there, ’kay?”

Jed nodded with understanding, putting a heavy hand on Brian’s shoulder before he turned to leave. Brian was going to have a hard enough time doing what he needed to without facing the smell of another man’s semen in the damned toilet stall.

He watched the people for a little while, wondering what was wrong with him that he couldn’t participate in the dance. He just liked things simple, he thought, eyeing the crowd dispassionately.

He liked his simple apartment (although he wouldn’t have minded a slightly better quality of simple). He liked the routine of going to school and working. He liked that his passions were things that kept him alone or with the one or two people who mattered. In fact, the only thing in his life that was complicated was Tate Walker, and he liked that al this simplicity gave him the strength to be exactly what Talker needed.

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With a sigh, he turned from the crowd to his dinner. When he was done with that, he gave the bartender his plates and borrowed a pen, then turned his attention to the stack of napkins in front of him. He spent an hour trying to write out what he wanted to say, but he had never been good with words. Al he could manage to scrawl was I love you, and he was pretty sure he’d already proven that simple truths were not going to do it.

He’d catch glimpses of Tate, trotting through the crowd. At one point he ran by without his ever-present tub of glasses or stack of dishes in his arms and a number of people sort of shanghaied him onto the dance floor. Tate spent a few moments there, lost in Neutral Milk Hotel and “Song Against Sex.” F or a time he disappeared, al owing his body to move with theirs, surrounded by other people grinding up against him, and while Brian thought it might have been something he would have enjoyed before the

“date,” his face was strained when he finally fought himself clear.

O h, Talker—no wonder you’re exhausted.

Brian had thought his friend was fearless from the first time Tate sat down next to him on a bus and started to talk about Placebo and Rufus Wainwright and The Doves. Now he knew the true extent of Talker’s bravery, and his own cowardice dug claws in his chest and shrieked.

I’m sorry, Tate. I should have been more like you.

But he was going to make up for that tonight.

He worked in a restaurant—he recognized the rhythm of finishing your shift, fil ing your condiments, cleaning the nooks and crannies that were expressly the ownership of employee X in station Y. Brian stopped his fruitless rough drafts and watched as Tate performed his closing duties with the efficiency of a Roomba.

He zombied from place to place, cleaning what he was supposed to, but… but the music was missing, Brian thought with an ache in Talker |
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his chest. Tate, who used to hear music in his head in the silence of the shower, now couldn’t hear the music pounding through his feet in a club dedicated to music.

He watched Tate disappear behind the bar, watched him come back without his apron, watched him walk into the bathroom.

He didn’t need to watch Jed as he stepped in front of the swinging door with a “C losed for C leaning” sign to know that was his cue.

Nobody had noticed him sitting in the corner, and he didn’t notice anybody as he crossed the dance floor to the bathrooms like a fletched pink arrow, but apparently there were people, because when he got to the bathroom, Jed was glaring at phantoms behind his back and shaking his head.

“Man,” Jed muttered as he walked up, “we have got to get you out of here, straight boy—everybody wants a piece of you tonight.”

“Jed?” Brian said with a quirk of his lips.

“Yeah?”

“You know I ain’t straight.”

Jed nodded his head. “Now go prove it,” he said, bowing Brian into the bathroom like it was the grand bal room of the F antabulous Kingdom of G ay.

It was a bathroom. Bright lights made him blink after the dark strobe rainbow of the club, but other than that? Tiny beige tiles, four stal s, and a long trough: they were men, they’d seen the equipment, hiding it was silly—and made certain aspects of flirting a little more difficult.

Brian looked down and saw Tate’s combat boots in the far stall, the one next to the handicapped stall. He parked himself in the stall next door and waited for the farce to begin.

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“Hey, brother,” Tate said, next to him. His voice, stripped of the makeup and the tattoos and the attitude, sounded surprisingly naked.

Brian grunted. His voice was usual y pretty deep—he figured if he kept to grunts and minimal conversation, Tate wouldn’t recognize him. He hoped, anyway.

“You want to get off?” Tate’s voice shook. O h fuck. His fucking voice shook. Brian was going to end it right there. No. No I don’t want to get off. I don’t want to be a faceless stranger to you! I want you to know you’re loved!

But then Tate started to talk, and the vulnerability and sadness dropped out of his voice, and al that was left was the boy Brian had known—the flirty, sexy one, who craved the touch of skin on skin.

“So, you like to top? I’m a bottom myself. I’ve got this fantasy—you want to hear it?”

Yes. O h C hrist forgive me, yes. His grunt must have conveyed the idea—he hoped so. It was involuntary.

“Now, see, the thing is”—and like that, Tate became Talker, and Talker became dreamy—“the thing is, I like it… I’ll do anything for it. C an you imagine the guy of your dreams, on his knees in front of you, his hands behind his back as he takes your cock into his mouth to the back of his throat? That’s me. I don’t need too much foreplay—but I do like to play with your body. C an I move my hands now?”