Work Text:
As soon as you say come here bud I’m grinning in the dark. Groping slow and clumsy to plant my knees around your hips. I pull my shirt off because you like that, and I like it too, your warm hands feeling up my back. But when I reach for your shorts you pull me down so our chests are pressed together. You say not tonight, you’re too tired. You’re tired all the time now. You say you want to sleep. My face is burning but that’s fine too. It’s good and dark under your jaw but I can feel the shape of your ribs and there’s that charred smell again that gets me thinking about what happens when you’re gone. I thought I had practice. But there’s almost no color left in your beard and when I saw you the other night walking out the gas station you seemed so skinny and old and that trapdoor in my gut gave out. Like when you’d let go of me in the pool at the Y. You were so fast then. Calling my name and slipping away. When you picked me up I locked my arms around your neck and I held on all the way home. You used to say I was getting stronger, but no matter how hard I kicked I couldn’t catch you. This is how it happens: we’ll be in the woods and it’ll be dark and I’ll be too late. It’s been ten years since we last sparred so when the rugaru catches up he takes out a kidney or a chunk of your liver. You can live without a kidney or missing a chunk of liver, but there’s no making it out of a rugaru bite. I’ll have to strip you naked and wash you up and wrap you in an old bedsheet. I’ll have to burn you. But I won’t know what else to do. I’ll be standing at the fire alone, because I won’t know who to tell or what to say. For weeks after I’ll be drifting around and no one will know you or that you’re dead or that I’m missing you. And sooner or later I’ll get so sick of it I’ll have to call up Sam and tell him, and right away he’ll know it was my fault, with how I’ve been taking it easy on you. Maybe I’ll drive up to him. I’ll have the car all to myself. Maybe he’ll get in. Or maybe he’ll take a look and find it full of your stuff. Everywhere I go, I’ll have to take everything you leave behind. Books, guns, clothes, phones, boots, all that stuff. He’ll say Dean, there’s no room for anyone else, and I’ll say just wait. Already I’m trying. You hum and you touch my jaw to stop me grinding my teeth. I try to slow my breathing. I push my ear to your chest, look for your heartbeat, but it’s like listening through water.