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It would be so easy to do it. There’s a hundred men out there who want him, a hundred thousand men with hungry eyes, hungry hands and hungrier mouths. To leave this room would be to relocate himself to the position of the prey; a position to be devoured.
Ash is so sick of being the thing that is used. Used and tossed aside, unwanted once more. He was born with a single, terrible, predetermined purpose, and his lack of fulfillment in such a job is tearing him apart from the inside out.
But he stays. He lies on Shorter’s bed, watching as the hours tumble past and night becomes day, day becomes noon, and noon becomes twilight.
The door opens. “Oh, hey,” Shorter says. “Glad to see you’re making yourself at home.”
Ash flinches, because what other response is expected of him? “Sorry.”
Shorter shrugs and the motion - languid, smooth, careless - makes everything in Ash’s body hurt. How easily he forgives. How easily he loves. How beautiful, to be able to give out such declarations with so much grace. “Doesn’t bother me.”
He tosses his apron in a corner, tugging his work shirt over his head and adding it onto the steadily growing pile of identical, smelly shirts. Ash wrinkles his nose. “Do laundry more often.”
“I’ll do your mom,” Shorter grumbles, then gestures to the bed. “May I?”
Ash nods, and Shorter offers a sweeping bow. “His majesty is generous today.”
“Fuck off .”
The bedsprings squeak under his added weight. The Wongs don’t have much - they’ve never had much, but they’ve always been willing to share. Always had more than enough to offer Ash a corner of their house, a spare plate to eat off, an oversized shirt and more than enough love to last a lifetime.
God has no place in this world but if he did, Ash thinks he would probably live somewhere within them. In their ginger-perfumed air and silent loving, declarations in feather touches and forehead kisses.
He really struck gold on this one, didn't he? Ash hasn’t been lucky very often, but he thinks these two must be a blessing. Something sacred.
Anybody else who held him like this has found themselves with a bullet in their brain and blood between their teeth, but Shorter?
He holds tighter because of it. Pulls Ash a little closer to his chest, presses a kiss to his temple (a plea to some nameless, faceless god of justice; do not let him fall any longer. Keep him safe. Keep him steady. As the deity tells him, you are doing all of that for me. ) and allows himself a moment of silent devotion; fingers grazing his pulse-points like prayer flags, like pages of the books he never did study.
Hands tangle in Ash’s hair. Penance. Stay here. Please.
“Tell me something good,” Ash whispers.
He hums. “When I went out for groceries today, I didn’t see the old lady at the side of the road.”
Ash turns. Jade meets opal, and Shorter holds back testimony. “I asked around.”
“And?”
“She got an apartment.”
Ash doesn’t smile, but the corners of his mouth turn up. “That’s good.”
“Yeah?” Shorter withdraws his hand, and Ash misses it immediately. USE ME. “Your turn, blondie.”
Ash swallows. I have nothing good to tell. Nothing worth sharing. No clever anecdotes or bites of good news. I have only myself to give, and you will not take that. You will not take me. “I saw a cat in an alley earlier.”
Shorter met Ash in a place crawling with creeps. Shorter met Ash when they were both small and scared and cold, and they clung to each other for comfort. It has never been clear who hangs on to whom tighter.
But - does that really matter?
“That’s good news, how?” Shorter raises an eyebrow.
“She had kittens.” Ash flicks his eyes away: I am so sorry. “Eight.”
Shorter can feel himself growing tired. Ash’s voice is like a hymnal he never got the chance to hear; sweet, soft, and gentle. “That’s a lot.”
“Mm-hmm.” Only the sun has dared to get this close before. Only the sun. “I used the last of my cash to get ‘em something to eat.”
Shorter lifts his head just barely, just enough to look Ash in the eye. You are always someone to me. “And?”
“I think I realized something,” Ash is slipping. “About how love is never what you want it to be.”
“When did you become a philosopher?” Shorter can feel himself absolutely fucking shattering. God, he is so sorry. Sorry he can’t do better. Sorry he isn’t enough.
“When I said sorry.”
“For what?”
Ash isn’t quite crying, but there is something glimmering in the corners of his eyes. His jaw is trembling. “To my coach.”
Shorter’s embrace feels safer than anywhere else Ash has been, anywhere he wants to be. “You don’t owe anyone an apology.”
His whole body is shaking. Ask me about love and I will tell you tales of violence. Ash is a hole within himself. “I wanted to go out today. I wanted to go out and work but I - I didn’t.”
“Really?” Shorter holds his breath.
“Yeah,” And it’s an admission. Guilty, guilty, guilty, baby I am sick from the inside out.
“That’s so good,” Shorter’s thumb grazes below his eyes. “Ash, buddy, that’s so good.”
“But it’s not,” he whispers. “It’s not.” Pray at my altar of sin and beg for salvation; beg for my hands on you.
“I’m proud of you, even if you can’t be.” Forgiveness isn’t something Shorter has ever lacked. Apologies pour from Ash’s lips like violence spills from Shorter’s hands, and maybe there’s something good there - something hanging in this precious balance of war, a forgery of someone else’s life.
All they have ever known of dreaming comes from the T.V.
“Tell me something good,” Ash begs, and Shorter can’t tell if he’s falling or flying.
He clears his throat, kisses Ash’s forehead. There will be music, he wants to say. There might be already, and we just lost the melody.
But instead, he begins a story.
“Sometime in the future - and who cares when, really, but I think it’ll be soon, we will get so far away from here that everything will seem like a bad dream.”
And there will be two rocking chairs on the porch and a third for the ghosts, and the sun will always shine and the summers will be glorious and the fields of wheat will glow gold in the dusk and they will be alive, alive, oh so very alive.
Hold tight, Ash thinks. I don’t want to let go. And he falls asleep, lulled by the fiction into a dreamless twilight.