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If there was one thing John had, it was steady hands. Needed them for years for occult nonsense, and for doing bad Sex Pistols covers alone in his bedroom past midnight. Currently, with nails colored a deep blue in permanent marker, they were occupied in carefully lining Gary Lester’s eyes in kohl. He dug into his rubbish bag of assorted makeup he’d either nicked from the chemist’s while buying a carton of cigarettes, or from his sister’s dresser years ago. Tongue sticking out in concentration, and almost making Gary burst into laughter at the sight, they both sat cross-legged on Gary’s mattress. They’d been hard at work for the past half-hour after his university classes, lightly stoned, on John’s insistence that he’d make a pretty girl.
“Stay fucking still! You want me to accidentally stab you in your sodding eye with mascara?” John grumbled. “Trust me, from experience, s’not a fun time. You’ll be crying black for days.”
“Dunno, sounds kinda metal.”
“Sod off and look at yourself, you twat.”
John held up the broken lid of an ancient lunchbox that had been spit-shined enough to see your face in. He grinned, clearly proud of his handiwork; lined eyes with a somewhat-competent wing, a bit of blush, and blotted lipstick made the man look almost feminine in the low light.
Gary frowned.
“I look like a ruddy ponce.”
“Kinda the point, mate. Congratulations,” John laughed warm and light, in the way that often made Gary wonder if he was as much of a cold-hearted bastard as he’d have the world believe. “Pretty as any girl, like I said, and you have me t’ thank. Currently accepting your gratitude in anal sex, or large-denomination pound notes. Preferably both. At the same time.”
Groaning, and swallowing down the too honest answer of “anything you want, Johnny,” Gary playfully shoved the idiot in question. John, of course, had to retaliate, and so on, until they were rolling about the bed like particularly randy feral cats. Eventually though, the play fighting came to an end with the pair of them lying side-by-side, both shamelessly half-hard and chests heaving.
“Did you always know you were a queer?” Gary hummed quizzically after a moment as he propped himself up onto an elbow. “I mean, like, since you were a kid an’ all? Don’t think I did.”
“Before I popped your cherry, you mean,” John supplied helpfully in return, waggling his eyebrows until they both burst into yet another fit of shared laughter. The record player nearby skipped, leaving John to give it a good, hard kick with a gangly leg to get it started again.
“Come off it. ‘M being serious,” he tried once again, prodding the other boy through one of the rips in his ridiculously worn t-shirt. “You’ve never told me. Curious, is all. Nothing else to it.” His ribs stood in sharp relief through pale skin, and Gary trailed a thumb over the bone in the futile hope of properly fattening him up in an instant. There wasn’t anyone else around who cared about him enough to put some food into his belly on a regular basis, save maybe Chas Chandler.
John, in response, snuck Gary’s hand under his shirt in earnest from where he lay. His splayed palm was blessedly cold against his own skin that seemed to perpetually burn bright-hot from within. He liked to think of it as his own hellfire, something life couldn’t snuff out or diminish. His. Just like how he cradled his spellbooks in his arms once he was sure everyone in the house had long gone to bed.
“Me? Don’t be daft, Gaz,” he snorted. “Me dad made it clear from the start that he knew everything was wrong with me. Including me being a ponce an’ all. He knew before I did. ‘Least I found out early though, eh? Saved myself a good bit of confusion as to why I got off to my maths teacher just as often as I tried to sneak into the girls changing rooms’ at school. Beat me black and blue when the teacher reported me for being a little flirt, not so much when I got reported for the second one.”
Gary’s hand froze in its exploration of John’s chest. A somewhat despairingly sad expression played across his face; he never enjoyed just how flippantly the other boy spoke about his shit excuse for a father.
“Hey, don’t give me that look. An’ none of your snotty crying either, else you’ll ruin all my hard work,” John cautioned, drawing his own hand up to encourage Gary’s just near his belt. He squeezed reassuringly. “Wasn’t all bad, like I said. My sister knew too. Was always sweet about it, think she had a couple lesbian mates. Didn’t say anything about nicking her makeup when I wanted, an’ left me a bunch of books that weren’t queer enough for our dad to notice. Dorian Gray was always my favorite.”
Gary scrunched up his face in a desperate attempt to wrack his brain back to sixth form, replying, “Wasn’t that the one that ends like a horror film? The poof stabs loads of people, lots of blood and magic shit?”
“See, that was the best bit!” John beamed excitedly while wiggling his feet a bit from where they hung off the bed. “All the hedonism, an’ sex, an’ the fancy dress… Oh, I loved it. Anyone who says the classics are boring can eat me.”
"You really are something else, Johnny,” Gary sighed with a shake of his head as the other boy stuck out his tongue petulantly. “Only you would get off to that twisted shit.”
“Me? ‘Twisted?’” John purred with his back arching off the bed in a perfect curve of lazy feline motion disguised as a stretch. His eyes grew lidded and he blinked up in his direction with long, tawny-colored lashes. Gary felt hypnotized. Hell, he might’ve been. “I’m not the one who took me out back of that pub last week just to jerk off against my ass, then run back to your mates. Had to wash those jeans three times just t’ get the spunk out, asshole.”
“An’ who was the one who kept—“ he paused in order to illustrate the crass gesture in question, tongue poking into the inside of his cheek and all— “doing that across the room when you knew I’d be looking? Perv.”
In an instant, and with the kind of assured grace that came from experience, John hauled himself up to sit astride Gary’s hips. He swayed absently to the up-tempo beat of the record, which only served to aggravate the tents in their trousers. Plus, his head tilted curiously as if reading his every thought, or just becoming more of the vaguely feral thing he already was. There was no question who was the prettiest, makeup or no, and John knew it too. In an arrogant sort of way, which Gary wasn’t sure was better or worse. His hands thumbed hopelessly affectionate circles into John’s hips.
“You ever given any honest thought to being, I dunno, a normal bloke? For once in your life?”
John gave the sort of look that was on the absolutely killer end of flirtatious and just about knocked Gary breathless. There was something questioning in it too. Almost hurt, in the right light. It passed as quickly as he could blink.
John grinned with sharp, almost inhuman teeth, asking faux-innocently: “Why? You’d want me t’ be?”
A long beat.
“Not particularly.”
“Kiss me then, you bastard.”
* * *
Gary’s downstairs neighbors were about a minute away from calling in a domestic dispute, what with all the unfamiliar, male-sounding wild shrieking, before the distinct thump of a headboard rhythmically banging against a wall set their lips curling in disgust.
The lipstick stains never did wash out of Gary’s sheets after that night.
Not that he tried particularly hard to get them out in the first place.