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At first, you barely even recognize him: the Cronus who walks up your driveway is a far cry from the Cronus you were expecting. You eye the crew cut and feel more than a little embarrassed: on some level he left by his own volition, so that he would entirely unchanged by the forces seems like an absurd idea. Still. The Cronus you remember only ever lets Porrim cut his hair, rather than risking that it would ever get too short.
He looks good, though. It is deeply unfair because armed forces issued khakis should not be flattering on anyone to you, let alone the guy whose idea of dressing nice used to be the tee with the fewest stains and the darkest of the three pairs of jeans he owned. Nonetheless, his shoulders fill out the shirt and the sleazy grin is the same and not only is he physically present to you for the first time in ages, but he seems more tangible than ever. There is a physicality to his body, an intimate understanding in you that if you reach out to touch him, his body will resist the light force of your hand. He embraces you.
The embrace makes your knees weak and you resist temptation to interrogate yourself why, instead revelling in the truth of that compact, living, human body and the tenderness with which it presses you against it. You hug him back. His scent is strangely unoffensive – no layers of hair products, daddy’s cologne, remnants of women's’ perfumes, leather, and body-shop – just soapy after-shave and hand-rolled Mercury light. You feel dizzy. “Chief,” he says, pulling back and making you catch yourself wishing he would stay put a bit longer. “It’s been a while.”
A while indeed. You had always assumed Cronus’ rebellion was mostly superficial, but you had not expected him to be so willing to walk straight into the gaping maw of the war machine. If you had a palatable distaste for the armed forces before, Cronus being devoured by them made the whole issue feel a lot more personal. Not that you would ever, in a million years, let him know. “Well”, he had said, “my pops fought in the pacific, figured I should repay somehow,” and then giving you the whole list of rational arguments. You may have been raised by your commie (social democrat at most) brother, but you operate under no delusions that Cronus’ attitude would be rarer than yours. Looking at him as the two of you walk home, though, you may be willing to cut the forces some slack for this one: not only is he looking great, but he feels distinctively older.
“That’s right,” he says, pausing in the doorway as you welcome him into your house. “You live alone now, right?” Maybe you seem older to him in the same way he does to you. You realize that the only room he can call his own is the one he put together for a teenager neither of you have seen in a long while.
You remember to answer: “Yeah.” Taking his bag, you give him a smile. “It’s pretty cool.”
Cronus looks around the house and picks up the thread where he dropped it. He will naturally fill the silence if no one else does and you are happy to let him. “I’ve been reading Kerouac,” he says, seemingly as much to your notebooks as to you. “Really made me homesick. You’ve read Kerouac?” By which he means On the Road – you have obviously read On the Road. You try not to beg him to tell you all his by now well-dated opinions on beat literature. His voice is warm and the curve of his lips brings you back to cigarettes and car radios and orange soda and the still-warm pavement of summer nights and that’s when you realize that he is here again. He is in your kitchen. He is asking if you have read Kerouac. He rounds topics like homesickness and new friendships like you can read his mind so he would rather not waste time on such boring minutia and instead get to the good stuff, the deep cuts, the thing you build friendships around. Friendships of the “hey, I’m coming home, meet me at the station?”-kind. You watch him with your hand on the fridge door.
Eventually, you interrupt him. Ask what he wants to drink. “It’s like Beelzebub’s asscrack here-“
Cronus laughs and all you want to do is make him laugh. Let the laughter spill all over the floor so you can scoop it up and bottle it and save it for when he inevitably leaves again. “Yeah,” he says, “whatever you’re having.”
Once Cronus is in your porch-couch, his shirt unbuttoned and his body sprawling and stretching and slumping, he stops being quite so shocking to look at. It is still his body after all, even if it is more present, more alive and inhabited than you have ever seen it. Or maybe you are just finding it more difficult to look away. Your hands run along the condensation on the glass bottle, then feeling it cold against your lips and helping to ground you. He scratches at his neck, on some level still just your jackass friend who once got dumped three times in a week by the same girl and who you have seen almost get in a fist fight about Jerry Lee Lewis. He takes the beer bottle from his lips with a sigh and looks out over this: your backyard, junkyard, Strider-kingdom. You tell him about your own life, listen to his anecdotes and military stories, his feelings and thoughts on returning home to his father and his fears about the future.
Personally, you try not to talk about the future. This is your general modus operandi these days, but Cronus especially you would rather not talk to about how your brother has “invested” half his savings into fallout shelters, or about how Roxy is the new pen-pal of something like three men with the title of “Doctor” who are all trying to convince her to join them in projects with severe confidentiality routines and “nuclear” in the title. Instead you thread lightly and tell him about how you got offered a scholarship for studies at the MIT. His eyes go wide. “Tell me you took it.”
“It was courtesy of Pentagon,” you say, pursing your lips and tracing the paper label peeling under your fingers. “I’d love to get into it but I dunno that it’s worth moving and I’d rather not be indebted to the military complex.”
“Is that really how scholarships work?”
You shrug. “No such thing as a free lunch. I’m not down with the army. Maybe some of us have to be, but I-“
“I’m not ‘down’ with the army.”
His reply is immediate. You raise an eyebrow and give a pointed look at the unbuttoned khaki shirt and the dog tag hanging over his- his dog tag. You tear your eyes from his collar bones. “So you want out?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I thought you were a patriot.”
“I’m a pacifist.”
Cronus face is tense as he takes another sip. In the distance, you hear sirens. “Since when?” Cronus shrugs. He puts the bottle down and pulls out a tobacco kit, rolling himself a cigarette. You watch in silence. It is a motion he has clearly become intimately familiar with to the point of mindless routine. He lights up and leans back in the sun-bleached couch. His fingertips brush over your shoulder for a moment.
The sun sets. It turns the sky peach and the dry heat of day fades into something almost pleasant. In your shared silence you hear barking dogs, cars, and playing children echo over the fences and backyards. There used to be a restlessness in the air between you. “Let’s go somewhere,” Cronus would say. “Let’s do something.” You would always be happy to go with him anywhere, if not for his sake, then for the sake of muffling your inner monologue. Or on a different note, for those moments when he became aware of the outer edges of his reach and you got the chance to remind him of his endless potential, when you could tell him all the things he could be and feel his future like clay in your hands.
Now it is just the two of you. You feel strangely at ease with it: no shame in observing him as he smokes and weighs the bottle between the digits of his fingers, no pitiful itch to take him and mould him into something. Something better, something impressive, something important. Those delicious glimmers of potential underneath the scuffed surface, that no one else seemed able to catch on to, appear to you as more gleaming than ever.
The promise is still there, though it seems as if he is aware of it now. It was never yours to sculpt, as much as you would imagine that that was why he came to you - because you made him better. Cronus looks as lost as always, really, only now with his hair cropped tight and stubble on his cheek and newfound muscles under his skin, which makes the idea seem childish. You could never have made him into this. He is more beautiful than ever.
“Pops was right, though,” he says, dropping the cigarette butt into the now empty bottle. “It’s been good for me.”
“I was wondering where the bulk came from.” You lean back, feel his arm resting on the top of the sofa.
“It’s not just physical,” Cronus snorts. “Just… all around. I mean it still sucks but I’ve learned a lot.”
“Like what?”
“Routine, discipline,” he shrugs, then nods towards your boots – calf high black leather, steel toe cap. Usually you will switch into sneakers when you leave the shop – “Care for equipment. I’m not gonna lie, I’m a terrible homemaker, but after this? At least my boots will last me a lifetime.”
You realize he is right. The leather is a far cry from the pristinely smooth pitch it was when you first got the pair almost a year ago, something you had not noticed until now. “I’ve been cleaning them,” you lie, trying not to feel embarrassed that the thought never struck you. You have never paid so much for a piece of clothing and you did not even think about maintenance. Cronus straightens out, his fingers brushing over your shoulders again as he moves.
“I’ll show you.”
Cronus kneels in front of you. It throws you completely. He tosses the military issue button up aside and is left in a white tank top. When he lifts your foot into his lap, your brain freezes and your heart catches in your throat. The laces glide over his fingers as he undoes them, which gives you an excuse to watch his hands and though you have just done a complete return to form with the racing of your mind, the decisive confidence in his motions is something new. You have no idea how to handle this.
By the time you regain some semblance of presence, he has taken a rag to clean off the lace-less boots, which you are still wearing. First with a dry rag, then having dampened it, his hands firm and precise as he lathers up soap and rubs it over the material. You feel his hands through the leather. He begins to tell you about what he is doing, but soon you are both quiet again. His expression carries a focus that seems novel to you: as far as you can remember, Cronus has always been rather meandering and directionless. Maybe it is an illusion. Maybe shoe-shining is the one thing he has picked up on and become truly confident about. Even so, if that is the case, he carries it well. You force yourself to relax properly. He lifts your foot to his shoulder, where your heel leaves a crescent-moon shaped mark on the white cotton.
His eyes meet yours. Endless lonely nights, hot showers, and bored mornings rise to the top of your mind. Despite this, you meet his eyes through the shades, repressing the creeping suspicion that you are an open book. A smile trace over his face as he returns focus to your boots. He wipes them down, dirty water running down his forearms and dripping from his elbows onto the khaki pants. The residue of daylight seems to linger on his skin, attaching itself to the sudden presence of life in his body and making him glow. Another flash of a memory: Cronus leaning on the hood of your car in the moonlight, desperately describing how he wishes he could be someone for real, instead of just pretending. You remember the cold, blue light bounced off from him like he was the ocean. Now his skin devours the warm light.
There are things you have imagined doing to Cronus. Some of these things, as much as you would prefer not to admit it, are entirely understandable. As inconceivable and queer and filthy as they are, they are also concrete and rational desires, sensed by millions of men before you. This is something you know to be true, much like how some people seem to have a conviction of God: you have found no proof, but all other options seem absurd and impossible.
Then there are the things that resist description. They are inoffensive and by extension, paradoxically, far more private and terrifying. Ordinary actions that make you blush down to your knees if you spend too long contemplating them. Whatever man had the honour of whipping Cronus into shape, you envy him profoundly. Kneeling before you, he guides you, inviting you into this pretend-world where you hold all the strings and make all the calls.
Cronus hesitates. “You doing alright, chief?” You nod in response. He seems to wait for you to change your mind for a moment before he continues: “I left the grease and shine inside, I’ll be back in a second- you want anything from inside?” You shake your head and watch the streaks on his forearms where dirty water had run just moments ago. He gets up and disappears inside. You break through the surface, realizing you had just forgotten to breathe.
He must be doing it on purpose. There is no way he just happened to tap into the one thing that apparently makes your stomach transform into an ageless beast, clawing your insides to shreds in the pure agony of being at the cusp of what you have barely ever admitted to longing for. There must be an agenda. A plan. An intent. If there is no such thing, the two of you might as well exist on different planes of the universe, so foreign to one another are the meanings of the things you say and do. When he returns, he gives you a smile that makes the veil between those two worlds shimmer and dissolve.
Kneeling again he opens the tin in his hands and scoops out what looks like something he used to put in his hair. “See,” he says, “leather is a living material, boss.” He smears the grease over his fingers and if you were not entirely hypnotised you would look away. “If you don’t care for it and keep it moisturised, it’ll crack.” He lifts your foot back into his lap. Your other foot ends up resting on his shoulder. When you drop it onto him, he yields ever so slightly, but gives you no other reaction. “Body warmth melts the oils”, he explains as he rubs his hands together to warm the grease, before his fingertips run over the leather to leave glossy trails on the matte black. You feel his hand through the leather as he smears it out over the surface, working the grease into the boot, firmly taking your heel in one hand as he strokes the outside of your foot. His touch runs up along the back of your ankle and you shiver when he returns to using his fingertips to follow the seams.
The grease comes up over his arms. The leather feels thinner by each touch. The warmth of his hands penetrates through the boots and makes the material soft and compliant with his touches. Soon, they seem more like a barrier of formality than the tools protecting your feet in a grimy and busy auto shop. Cronus gaze is focused and intent.
“Cronus?”
“The seams are where you’re most likely to get cracks, see, and that’s pretty much impossible to…” He trails off. You watch beads of sweat form on his forehead. He seems to notice that you have spotted that and laughs. “What?”
“Don’t overheat.”
You think he might be blushing. “I’ve had worse. And anyway it’s past dusk, so it’s only gonna get cooler, right? Bet the body shop’s been a bitch, though.”
You force a laugh. “Yeah. Honestly thinking I’d just work naked if I could get away with it. I’m pretty sick of doing laundry every day.”
“Still prefer this to Florida. Not as humid.” You feel his thumb over the back of your heel as you nod. Things are steadily coming to a point of no return – a territory of mutual but unacknowledged awareness. You haven’t seen each other in what feels like years and now he is engaging you in this strange game of foot rubs and talking about the weather. Then he asks for your other foot and you realize that he stopped because you do, in fact, have two feet. You offer him your right foot, your left falling to rest by his thigh as he pulls more grease onto his fingers. He lifts it into his lap, this time looking up at you, indeed glowing as if he absorbed those last rays of sun. Same movements as before, you feel him through the leather: fingers, palm, fingertips. The electricity at the small of your back is the only clue that this is something actually quite far outside of any interaction that would be expected between the two of you. His calm and patience feel foreign to you. You who have been missing him to the point of pain, even as you would not admit it, even looking past the hunger that has steadily grown within you for the past few years.
“You shine your shoes a lot, then?” You say it like you are trying to diffuse the tension. It is actually a bit of a surprise of a question to you: suppose you just opened your mouth to see what would come out.
“Well, I’ve done my mates’ and some of my superiors’ ones too, sometimes.”
“I thought the point was that you did it yourself.”
Cronus shrugs. His voice is soft as he speaks. “There’s a whole lotta things you’re supposed to do or not supposed to do.” He shifts his weight, making the old planks in the porch (that you have been meaning to replace since before Dave moved out) creak a little. “If I’m offering, being generous, anyone wanna take me up on it? If they say yes, please, then that’s their deal.” You drift towards an image of Cronus, bent over the boots of some officer looking man, shivering a little. “Which they do. I’m good, I’m fast-“
“This is fast?”
This makes him pause. He looks up at you and you immediately clock his expression of trying to cover up doubt: an effort from him which you are more than familiar with. Then he looks back down and the dark eyelashes shields his gaze. He wipes excess grease off on his tank top. “Not even a little, boss.”
For a moment, the two of you stay like that, with your one foot in his lap and the other resting along the side of his thigh. In the twilight you hear a radio in the distance. Cronus too looks out into the evening. It all makes you feel a bit dazed, having you wish you could see this from the outside, just to get out of your brain spinning in circles trying to re-define what you and Cronus even are. If you are anything. Failing to resist an impulse, your leg stretches out a little, the sole of your boot pressing against the front of Cronus’ pants. You feel the slight resistance of his body and it stops you. He meets your eyes. Neither of you say anything. Cronus remains still, hands resting at his sides, his gaze unleashing a current which rush through your body and you release him from the pressure. For the first time since you saw him, the tension exists not solely within you, but between you and Cronus. You feel the warmth of his hand brush against the leg resting at his side. When he breathes, he swings between shallow and shivering breaths and deep, hungry ones. You taste metal.
I missed you. I think you are beautiful. I want you. Stay with me, please.
You manage to break the silence: “Are you…?”
It takes a second, but then he looks relieved, shaking his head. “No. I mean, I’d like to do a second pass. Shine them, too. If I may.”
If I may.
He is asking you for something else, but you cannot manage to read what that is. Instinctually, you think it might be about sex, but frankly you are not sure you even want it to be about sex. Not this, not like that. You nod, tell him “go ahead” while trying to not let the newfound tension of the scene ruin it for you.
Cronus breaks the eye contact. He shifts his stance a little wider, making the porch creak once more, which invites you to move your feet between his thighs. He is quicker with this second pass and the firm caress of his hands melts into your feet like the grease into the leather. He finishes one foot and lifts it to his shoulder. For a moment his focus seems to you almost like devotion: as if your body is not yours but a towering monument to your presence, a structure which he tends to, one piece at a time. He leans down with his brows furrowed. A short movement and you could kick his teeth in.
“You’ve been doing this for your superiors?”
“Some of them.”
His hands are filthy up to his elbows. “Tell me why?”
You can see him glance up at you through dark lashes, taking his time measuring what kind of response you might be looking for, hands still at work. “I like to feel useful,” he eventually decides on. You nod again. “Good way to show… servitude, I guess?”
“So a career thing?”
Cronus snorts. “Not really. Ain’t no one getting promoted by shining shoes. It’s an easy way to make people like you, though. Makes them happy. At least if you ask the right people.” You wait for him to continue. “It’s a good way to show…”
He trails off. You feel his body resting against yours. He is still there. Maybe you are reading things into this, all the same, what else can you do? Gently, you press your heel into his shoulder, making him look up at you again. You wait on your words but the time seems to be immediately devoured between the two of you. It has been so long since last. Your mouth is dry once you finish weighing on your words. “You were going to shine them, too, Cronus.”
In the distance, you hear laughter, as well as some generic pop song playing on the radio. Cronus nods. “I was.”
Cronus rubs the black back into your boots. This time making you wonder if maybe you are the one who is in control. His tank top becoming increasingly dirty with dust and shoeshine and flecks of water, you wonder if the weight of your free foot in his lap feels as heavy to him as it does to you. Does he itch to come closer in the same way you do?
The two of you have embraced before. You have seen him cry and you have seen him burn with rage. Yet, having him on the ground before you seem intimate to you in a wholly new way. You always liked it when he cried, it made you feel important in a way he never could tell you, you always hoped it would make him feel like you saw and understood him. Perhaps this is his version of that. No matter what it is, it is not enough. The fantasies trickling through your mind you dare not touch at the risk of the image of his lips on your boot becoming vivid enough that you will have difficulty remembering what actually happened. Are his knees bruised, his eyes blue through the dark lashes, is there reverence in the way he speaks to you? Maybe you are making it all up.
You stretch out your leg again, press your sole against him to feel that he is still there, testing to see if he will leave from this thing the two of you are building once given the chance. He shifts, but does not pull back, does not stop working. You try and see if his hands are steady.
When Cronus pauses you turn your foot, the sole twisting against the khaki of his pants, leaving black marks. He looks up at you and his gaze is a flicker, perhaps a sparkle, his tongue wets his lips. “Are you finished?” Your voice comes out so authoritative it surprises, almost embarrasses you. His reaction is subtle but undeniable. You find yourself continuing rather than waiting for his reply. “You did a good job-“ Hold.
What are you doing?
Eyes filled with anticipation watch you carefully. You let the time stretch out between you, feed the both of you across months of not being together that you had not even thought about until now. Peering out at you is the restless insecurity, the hunger that you recognize from so long ago. He offered to help you clean once and you had to show him how to best use the mop. It had filled with you with a white-hot jumble of anger, pride, and power. Now he has returned to you, on his knees, offering himself again but this time with the keen awareness of what he might provide.
He is pliable this time. You push and he follows, moulding under your touch, making you want to push more. His body is more solid this time, will it again begin to creak and crack under the pressure if you give him enough? There is a balancing point, the very edge, where he will embrace your force completely without breaking.
“Lace them for me.”
One step closer.
Thinly veiled relief cross Cronus’ face. He looks back down at your shoes and you see his lips move but forget to listen. “What?” Your voice comes out sharp and demanding, as if it is the most natural thing in the world.
“Sir. Yes, sir.”
Behind the shades, your eyes go wide. Cronus sits still, watching you with a subdued kind of humour, trying to gauge your reaction. When you nod he bows his head again, goes back to working. You had expected resistance but instead he leaves you fumbling mid-air. Sir.
Cronus disappears into the leather. He catches any tiny move you make and holds a steady grip on your boot as he de-tangle the laces. He is beautiful. He sees right through you.
“Cronus?”
“Sir.” You swallow dry.
“Your dad is an officer or something, right.”
He does not correct you. “In the navy, yes, sir.”
“…Is that the path you’re taking?”
He threads the laces in silence though you spot a smile. “I think there are men in this world cut out for some jobs, sir. Some people make for good leaders.” Cronus’ voice is the only thing that matters in your life. You want to know everything he has to say, about everything. “I am not one of them, sir.”
For some reason it punches the air straight out of you, bringing out a painful sense of tenderness and intimacy that makes you wish he was not actually good at this, that he was a sobbing mess once more with you wrapping an arm around his shoulders and telling him that the world is just out there waiting for him. Your brain is swimming and all you know is that you want him to stay with you forever. “When did you realize that?”
Seconds stretching out between you. “It’s been a process. I think it’s natural to want someone else take the wheel every so often, maybe I figured that was truer for me than most people.”
“You told me about that,” you recall, suddenly, as a conversation about one of his almost-girlfriends flashes across your mind’s eye. “Is that what this is about?”
This.
Whatever this is. Cronus looks at his arms, then up over you, bottom to top and back. “Well,” he begins, “I’m not gonna pretend like I have it all figured out. What I did realize is that when other people are in charge, it’s like I can finally focus on the other stuff. The important stuff, maybe. Like my mind shuts up and I can do something that isn’t damage control.” He seeks the words, looking at you like he is expecting you to fill in, but you wait him out. “…So there is that. But it’s also like- It was some breathing room and maybe I realized some other things. I don’t- I wish someone else could tell me what to do, I was tired of being young and radical and making my own way, because every way I’ve found has kinda sucked, but I also feel like maybe there isn’t any way back now.”
He has wrapped the final set of laces around his hand, pulling them over his knuckles to find the midpoint, then threading them into your boot. “Suppose there are some people I don’t mind bossing me around. Suppose I trust you to know what kinda things I better chose for myself.”
Cronus is wrong. You have no idea and if it was up to you, he would probably be clay in your hands. Yet, he trusts you. Suddenly, this is about so much more than your stupid crush. “I didn’t boss… I haven’t told you what to do. For any of this.”
“You kinda did. Eventually.”
You want to ask him more, though you manage to shape no questions in your mind, and anyway there are no answers you really want or need right now. He laces up the last few eyelets and the only thing you want is to hold him. In silent stillness with your heads resting against one another’s body, breathing steady and allowing this to fixate as a proper memory in your mind’s eye. “You don’t have to tie them.” It is another attempt to reach that edge, but you cannot find it anymore, if you ever could. Cronus nods.
The two of you sit in silence. The air grows cool. The heat remains in your body, the sunlight still glowing on Cronus’ skin. “Hey,” you try, “do you want to sleep on the couch or in my room?”