Talker (9 page)

“Well, thank G od—because if I had to do this every day, I real y would shave my head bald.” He’d been going to go for the hyperbole and say something about running his car off a cliff, but Tate was too fragile for hyperbole. No exaggerating things until smal shit didn’t hurt him anymore.

The showerhead was attached to a hose, and after washing (thank G od—his come had glued his underwear to his skin) he wrapped a towel around his waist while Tate scrubbed the glue and the henna and the hairspray out.

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It was curiously normal doing that—no different than any of the other times they’d shared the bathroom, one of them taking a pee and the other one in the shower, or Tate grooming while Brian either/or. It was almost like that other thing—the talking, the kiss, the emotional nakedness—hadn’t happened at all.

Brian had this thought, and then swung his now-limp strip of hair out of his eyes and grasped Tate’s wrist as he turned off the shower. “Thanks,” he whispered, and Tate looked at that hand on his tattooed wrist and then back up at Brian.

“My pleasure,” he said with a small smile.

Brian grinned quickly. “Will be.”

“Want me to help you with the studs?”

Brian grimaced, and then blushed. “O nly some of them. I, uhm, sort of like the idea of having two, you know?” Besides, the bottom two were real, and Lyndie had wanted him to keep them. It had felt like a blessing.

“I like the one in the nose,” Tate confessed, and Brian gave another quick grin.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll keep that one, ’kay?”

And Tate smiled shyly. “F or me?”

“I’d do anything for you.” Their eyes connected, and like that, the moment became intimate. Brian’s hand had never left Tate’s wrist and he rubbed his thumb over the thick blue veins of Tate’s pulse point. Because it was his thumb, he couldn’t tel whose heart was beating faster.

He swallowed hard, almost completely lost in Tate’s oak-gall-dark eyes. Tate blinked, and Brian noticed the vestiges of his Talker |
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makeup, stil smeared over his cheekbones, and he managed to be practical. “But you shower first,” he said, his breath coming quickly in his chest. “I’l make you some dinner. Lyndie sent food.”

“Lyndie?” With obvious reluctance, Tate straightened and they broke their physical connection.

“Who do you think did the hair and the piercings?”

Tate blinked at that, and Brian stepped out of the shower. His towel was pretty sodden, so, with a blushing glance at Tate, he hung it over the curtain rod and took one of the dry ones from the towel rack.

“Why?” Tate asked, and Brian was glad his back was turned as he wrapped the dry towel around his waist.

“Because I told her I loved you, and I was worried, and I’d told you repeatedly, but you weren’t seeing me. I had to find a way to make you see me.”

He turned back around and Tate had moved closer. “I see you now.”

“Loving you is about al I got in the way of interest,” Brian told him, to make sure he’d know. Because being roommates for almost a year might not have clued Tate in to how basical y boring his roommate was, right?

Tate nodded, never breaking his gaze, and put out a tentative hand to the middle of Brian’s chest. Brian’s skin felt like it rippled, shivering, and his groin and nipples tingled, and he was forced to close his eyes.

“I do that to you?” Tate asked, and he held himself very stil , like he doubted the answer.

“O h G od, yes,” Brian mumbled, and then managed to pull away. “Shower,” he begged. “Shower. G et the crap out of your hair.

Let me feed you. Let me take care of you. Please, Tate—I….” His Talker |
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cock gave a vicious throb and he remembered that whimpering sound he’d made in the bathroom at the club and contemplated making it again. “I want you so bad—but I want to talk, too, and I want… oh G od.” Tate was moving that hand in little circles, and his palm grazed Brian’s nipple and Brian reached out a steadying hand to Tate’s shoulder.

Tate laughed a little, breathlessly. It was a happy laugh, and Brian could tel he was impressed with his own power. G ood. That hand made another pass, and Tate’s thumb got brave around Brian’s nipple, and then Brian was impressed with Tate’s power too.

Which was why he grasped Tate’s wrist gently, and brought his scarred palm (Tate had taken off his glove to help Brian get the glue out of his hair) up to his mouth and gently kissed the palm.

Tate whimpered, just like Brian had.

“Tate?”

“Yeah?”

“All that shit I said in the club? About taking care of you?”

“Yeah?”

“I meant every word of that. Take a shower, and I’m going to make you some food, and then I’m going to touch you with my whole body. But I’m not going to do that now, okay?”

Tate nodded, a sort of wonder on his face, and Brian lowered his mouth, thinking once again that Tate’s lips were surprisingly soft. “I promise. I’m going to take such good care of you.”

The kiss was brief, and Brian forced himself to go put on a pair of sleep shorts and a T-shirt. As he walked out of the bathroom, though, he heard Tate start to sing “And our love would have soared, over treetops over rooftops.…” to himself, and Brian wanted to turn around and hug him just for that alone.

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O h G od, he’d missed hearing Talker sing.

He restrained himself, and got the food from his trunk and made them omelets (which he was real y good at), and by the time Tate came down the hal , wearing brightly colored Iron Man boxer shorts (he had a collection—he seemed to favor superheroes and Scooby-Doo) and nothing else, there was food on the table, and the last of their milk in two glasses, and a bunch of pinks and daffodils and buttercups that had been growing up around Lyndie’s little cabin that she’d cut and sent with Brian in a wet paper towel.

Brian had put them in a Big G ulp cup, because it was what they had, but they made the kitchen smel good, at least, and they made Tate smile.

Brian smiled back and ducked his head, shyly, and turned around to dry his hands on a kitchen towel that had once been a tapestry calendar. Without warning, he felt Tate’s arms creeping around his waist, and Tate’s bare chest pressed up around his back.

Brian brought his hand up to touch Tate’s hands, and Tate whispered, “Tell me I didn’t imagine it.”

“You didn’t imagine it.”

“Tell me it will be true in the morning.”

“It’s been true for the last nine months—hel , the last two and a half years—I don’t know why it would change now.”

Talker nodded, and rested his cheek against Brian’s shoulder.

“O kay. I can eat now.”

“G ood,” Brian said gruffly. “You’re getting too thin.”

They sat and ate, much like they used to, and Talker told him about work and about the new DJ and about the cooks in the back who kept trying out new shit that tasted exactly like shit, and then he stopped.

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“This is how it happened,” he said, looking at Brian. Brian stopped mid-bite and looked back.

“This is how what happened?”

“This is how I never knew. You just… you sit and listen. You never talk.”

“I only talk when I’ve got something to say,” Brian said logical y, not sure how to fix this. He was talking as much as he could, now—it had to be enough, right?

Talker nodded, and took a thoughtful bite of Brian’s omelet—

he’d cleaned his plate, and Brian stil had butterflies in his stomach.

“You know, I was thinking about C hristmas.”

Brian flushed. “My gift was pretty lame,” he apologized. When they’d moved in, they couldn’t afford both the PG &E and the SMUD

deposits. As a result, they’d had to make a choice between heat and light. They’d chosen light, and had spent much of their winter wrapped up in blankets. Brian had borrowed Lyndie’s sewing machine and a bunch of her old sheets and put together triple layers of old sheet, old fuzzy blanket from a thrift store, and another old sheet, and sewn it together into a sort of a poor man’s comforter, since he and Tate hadn’t ever seemed to get warm enough.

“It was perfect,” Tate said, and Brian doubted it. “I especially liked the list of music you put on the card, the shit you’d buy me when you had the money. That.… Jesus. But that wasn’t what I was thinking about.”

“Then what?”

“The tree.”

“What about it?”

“I mention to you once, in like two years, that I’ve never been in my own home with my own C hristmas tree, and one night I get Talker |
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back from work and you went out to your aunt’s and chopped down a tree. And you decorated it with club fliers and construction paper chains and popcorn and feather boas you got at the dol ar store.…”

Brian blushed again and Tate shook his head and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

“I’m so stupid,” Tate said, and Brian said, “That’s not true!”

right on top of him.

“No, I am—you’re always saying how stupid you are, but.…”

And now he wiped his face with his palm. “How could I look at that tree, and the blanket you made me, and al the times you cooked me dinner… how could I look at those things and not know you loved me? How could I.…” His voice broke. “O h G od, Brian—you told me that night, and I had so much noise going on in my head that I didn’t even listen!”

Brian couldn’t look at him. “I wasn’t talking enough,” he said, his voice rough and ashamed. “I… I was so used to wanting to be invisible—to liking it that way. I didn’t know how to make you see me. It’s my fault.…”

“Shut up.…”

“No, it’s my fault!” Brian looked up, and now he was doing a little bit of crying himself. Wel , he’d known it was coming. “It was my fault—”

“Shut up!”

“—if I’d been braver, like you—”

“I’m serious!”

And Brian found that he could yel if he needed to. “So am I, dammit!”

“I was an idiot!”

“And I was a coward!”

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“That’s not true!”

Brian broke completely. He found himself on his knees before Talker, taking his two hands, the sound and the crippled, and holding them to his cheeks.

“O h G od, Tate. It is. I was a coward. I was so afraid I was wrong, so afraid I’d hurt you worse by coming out than I would by being quiet. I keep thinking, I could have saved you… I swear, if I could have shouted it or… or done anything but watch you walk out that door with that guy and hope you would be okay!”

The wave of worry that had swel ed in his chest, made violent by silence and the horrible weeks spent watching Tate become someone quiet and alien and far away, that terrible sea-squall of pain, crashed out on them both. Brian found himself sobbing in Tate’s lap, seeking comfort like he never had in his life, not even when he was a child and his parents had died, leaving him bruised and frightened in the back of the car.

Talker was there for him. Tate’s arms came around his shoulders, and there they were, curled up in a little bal on the cheap kitchen chair, crying together for what they had both lost and both found, al in the circle of each other’s arms.

Tate’s hands came to frame Brian’s face, and Brian wasn’t sure what Tate was going to say then, because there was an utterly stil heartbeat, a held-breath time-stop between them, as they stared at each other in nakedness and absolution, and then the moment exploded in a kiss.

They left the plates on the table (a thing that didn’t happen often—there were rats as big as possums living in the Dumpster behind their apartment) and kissed, staggered, stumbled, and kissed some more. They ended up in Brian’s bed, because his was closer (and cleaner, but neither of them thought about that), and Tate’s hands were under Brian’s shirt and then the waistband of his Talker |
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shorts and Tate’s shorts were kicked to the floor, and their mouths were meshed and frantic and then.…

Tate made a wonderful, terrible sound, and it echoed in Brian’s mouth.

They were totally naked, and Brian was touching him, completely, covering Tate with Brian’s massier body, enfolding him in bulky shoulders, using al of his skin to simply, humanly, kindly touch the man he loved.

Brian thought his heart was going to burst through his chest.

G imme gimme gimme gimme gotta have it gotta have it need it need it need you need you need you need you need you need you….

“O h, G od, Tate, I need you!”

Tate tried to kiss down his jaw then, tried to be the “dream boy” of the bathroom fantasy, but even that wasn’t the dream boy Brian wanted. He trapped Tate with an arm under his armpit and kept him up even, face to face.

“Don’t leave me,” he murmured, grinding up against Tate. Tate swung a leg over his hip and they meshed together, grinding, as much of their skin touching as they could possibly manage.

“Don’t leave me,” Brian repeated, kissing Tate’s chin, his jaw, the corner of his mouth, his neck. “Don’t leave me, Tate… G od, I love you… don’t leave me.…”

Tate was puzzled, Brian knew, but he couldn’t help it. That fear… that terrible fear. Al those nights of checking his room, fearing the worst, of seeing Tate tighten within himself, the Talker inside him silenced by pain.…

“I’m here.…”

“Stay.…”

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They kissed some more and ground against each other, almost painfully, but it felt so good. No woman’s flesh had ever felt as good wrapped around Brian’s cock as Tate’s bare skin and pubic hair felt, chafing, pressing, rubbing.…

Brian had come earlier that night, and Tate… Tate had probably not come, even in the privacy of his room, for many months. He was hard… hard, pulsing and even Brian could feel the ache in him, the need.

Brian’s hand was inexpert, but he reached it down between them and grasped Tate firmly. He felt… much like Brian’s cock felt in his own hand, except for some roughness on one side, and there was always… always.…