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Summer is fluid time dragging out an IV bag, stretch-drip despite the dry air and you see him more often. Maybe heat clogs the trash air of his city and crime sticks in the thin tubes. Angry people are angry people cooking on hot concrete, Gotham’s afternoons belong to someone else and you don’t ask. What appetite survives hot garbage? You breathe in the desert and don’t think, what horizon is the sun under? Coming or going, with faces to forget. This is one of those visits you don’t talk about: the beetle-black plane in the middle of nowhere. Makes you a little nauseous. The sweeps of shape like the sand eroded it into place, and still, it doesn’t belong here.
He’s in the plane, coming or going with faces to forget: his face, to forget. You like to forget, find it new under the mask. It has too many angles. He’s ugly head-on, too blank. Dazed, is it before or after? You’re landing, you’re boarding: of course it’s before. After the hot garbage and concrete, though. You take him outside, waving away his plane like a dish you’d rather skip.
It’s before. You’re all but starving.
“Where are we going?”
“Getting some air.” You take him down his own steps, let him lead and pull him back. “Let’s sit.” He wrestles with the sense of prelude and follows. “Long night.” You have them too: he nods and decides what to do with his hands. Your hips are friendly on the step. It’s enough, but he wouldn’t know. Bodies are objects subject to actions, but that’s after, after—
You don’t know how to deal with bodies as bodies, yet. You don’t really want to. In a moment more static than this, he confessed how they could be like wax figures. You disagree, never find that kind of stillness around here. Certainly not with him, his hands remembering how to hold your hands, specifically. He probably keeps a catalog in his head, where bodies are subject to actions and wouldn’t he be careful, with his? Different pressures and postures for victims, suspects, family, girlfriend, and now, now you. What he does when the categories overlap, you don’t want to know. Wrestles with preludes, probably. “Jaime--”
Laughing, you steer him right by pulling on his gauntlets. Get those off, get to the rest. Why does undressing him feel like an ending? “I’m okay, I’m—”
“—you know how I am,” that’s why—you don’t care what time it is or how he holds your hands. Just that he does, and nods with your forehead touching his forehead. Up this close it doesn’t matter what he looks like: he has nice eyes, even or especially when he’s a little dazed. He’s dazed by your closeness, that’s better, like he doesn’t know what to do with the smell of you either. You’re not a wax statue, you’re larger-than-life and humming with another. Humming with night air and, yes, adrenaline. He knows how it is, adjusts his grip a little tighter. The armor is right there, it doesn’t hurt, but it feels more than it did before. It’s sluggish summer and you want to be impressed, like he could help you fill the extra space you’re taking up. “Tim.”
“Yes?”
“Kiss me already.”
“Okay.” It’s dark, not cold, but he feels cool to the touch. You’re too warm, he herds you a bit with his mouth and you herd back. You’re calm but not calm, you press and press and let him push when you press too hard. Dry dry world but the inside of his mouth is wet, the outside of his mouth when you’re done with it. But you’re not done with it, he’d let you kiss him for hours. You have kissed him for hours: his body is a vessel that carries every action beyond its instance, less empty than it is shallow. When they laid the coils to form his sides, they didn’t lay enough. You give what you want to give and he never asks for more, overflows and pushes you off. You touch him too much, and he says “Okay, okay” into your mouth and opens his tunic.
“I just—”
“I know. It’s a stress reaction, it’s okay.”
Tension shakes through your hands and twists your mouth. The armor won’t come off: your heart isn’t in it when you tell the scarab to force it, and he doesn’t. “Jaime.”
“Tim,” you echo, and laugh. The sound skips beats and you’re just breathing. He’s telling you to breathe, scarab’s making you and there are too many voices easing you through the night. Lean back, watch him and he won’t touch you now. His naked hands tracing the shapes of your face in front of it, where your voice starts to have a sound that you can’t hear. Time is a fluid drip and the scarab pressing your buttons: reyes reyes reyes and you wake up, slow. “Really long night,” you whisper to his bad side, and his hands make contact.
“You get used to them.”
“No you don’t—”
He looks down. “Yeah.” Relief is the other drip, scarab slowing your heart until it can peel the armor back. Sun missing but you feel like you’ve just flown too close. He’s so cold, so plastic under the drape of your body and his spine bows to the steps with no complaint. He wouldn’t: it’s all you want to do. Your heart picks up your hairs stand up and you want to be mean. You never wanted to be a hero, there’s something to prove with bad behavior and something to invite from the plastic on his legs but when you bite he gasps and just says, okay, again. Your head knows he’s being good to you and your body knows he can be better, and the scarab knows the exact moment his heart paces your own. The rest of you is on an iv drip letting the rest roam in the dark while it recovers. He didn’t have to be honest, he could have made you believe.
You just like to argue.
“We should go up.”
“No, down.”
An elbow to your side, his hands push your chest careful not to tip you, but they push hard. “I’m not having sex on the ground just because you’re upset.”
Your laughter is real this time. “I could stop being upset.” You could, the words salve your insides the last bit, fill your space up and tell you this is not you. Too much you, touching too close to him. “I’m okay now.”
“You’re naked.”
“Well I was going for naked, pendejo.”
“And I’m going for solid walls and heated seats, pendejo.”
“Your accent is still so bad.”
“Your criticism is still uninvited.”
“Your face is uninvited—” He lowers you inches at a time back onto him, smoothing out your name with his mouth. It’s not heart-stopping but your breathe holds, holds you stupid. You’re shaken, satisfied, far from. A body is a, is subject to—his mouth on your mouth and the scarab tracking your vitals. You need to calm down. “Shut up.” I didn’t— “Not you,” and kiss again, and forget faces drowned or turned to dust. Holes in livestock and crying parents, their children’s bodies subject to absence, and you can never tell them just how far a person can be from home. But you’re okay, you’ll sleep solid in the next few hours and you’re solid in the knowledge of it right now. Tragedy is factual, but in a warmer way than he knows: a vertical weave holding joy in place. This is a horizontal moment, the shock of his belt making you laugh when you catch the clasp wrong. “Ouch.”
“It does that.”
Mocking him is too comforting, you don’t indulge until he tells you, again, to get up and climb the stairs. One deep breath of the dark desert and you even out. Spread slow on your insides til you’re—hungry, some kind of default. It’s warm in the plane. The filtered air waters your eyes. “I want elote.”
Tim snakes his belt on a counter, “It’s four in the morning.”
“Not here.”
“It’s two in the morning.” He leans his head one way, creaks it the other. You try it to hear the inside of your neck grind on itself, wonder why he does that. It just hurts.
“You don’t have real food here. You don’t even have real airplane food.” The seats are heated though, and angle with your body when you stop holding it up. With your head pressed to the back and your eyes closed, you could just sleep, forget the rest.
Tim couldn’t. One eye opens when he idly kicks your ankles. There he is, one big shadow, his cape tickling the open side of your calves. In the moment, he seems bigger than you. He isn’t much smaller. He isn’t much anything. Tim is almosts: almost cold, almost cute. Itches you can’t scratch. You close your eye and feel the metal floor on your naked heels, the sweep of his cape changing as he works it off. It pools over your feet and drafts your ankles. His boots are rough. You can feel his weight redistribute as he undresses. Just to the tights. Rash-red tunic on the floor, hits your knees on the way down and his hands follow, pulling your legs up to his hips. Time brings the urgency back down the drip, shakes your laughter. It’s not funny, leaning him into your lap and scratching your fingers into his hair. “Is this what you wanted?” He’s small again, and: you love him when he’s genuine.
“Yeah.” Lead with your eyes, both of you tracking the other. He means it you mean it and there’s no meanness to yes, or your hands pulling his hair, or his teeth on your lip. You can smell a gunfight on him, but without it he’s a sweaty teenager, he’s plastic. He tastes like a protein bar left on the shelf too long. You’ve got claws for hands, you’re hanging desperate and he’s laughing at you. It’s not funny, it’s not funny—his hands pressing up your thighs until the hair stands up and your voice doesn’t shake at all now: that’s a moan. “You are so—“
“Shut up.”
“You shut up.”
“Shut up,” and he’s dead serious until you start giggling. Your friends ask you why and it’s all insufficient evidence: he makes this face, he has these eyelashes, the lowest and shortest laugh. Dismissed and Brenda would say with prejudice: no new point would make this make sense. You wouldn’t just tell them, he flies to the desert when I’m sad and jerks me off in a heated airplane seat.
Traci was just as capable of getting around. Maybe more.
You’re already a little raw so the moment of missing her doesn’t trip you. She was your last girlfriend and that means something, even if she didn’t die, even if you didn’t push her away. It’s just a moment, with Tim hissing through his teeth. The only other time he makes a noise that physical is when he’s in pain. I’m sorry finally drags the laugh from him, drags just stop talking, drags his hands up your thighs. One more kiss with his hands pinning your hips, the density of him pressing you before he slides down your body to put hand to dick to mouth. The shock isn’t a shock but it drops the bottom of your stomach: you cry out. His hair curtains the view, but you don’t need the show tonight. Gather up the sides and cup his ears like handles, showing him how you want it. No fluid time leaking from hot trash, get it up get it off get it, get it—
He’s got it, digging his hands back into the soft hollow of your hips and making it quick. Too hard, too rough: you close your eyes and let the pain mesh with the edge of pleasure but also other pain. No questions, no sadness—you’re not here to be sad—but you can let him be a sloppy mouth in your lap and fingernails in your thighs and work yourself backwards to work yourself up. His hands pushing you into a door, his too-cold mouth when he’s been chewing ice in the theater, hickeys on your sides that watered your eyes. When you lift your arms to ride the shirt hem up he never looks, but he’s on his knees for you now, sucking your dick into his throat and sucking at that, coughing, and a little more, and—
Okay, okay. He tries again, your eyes are open now to the mess of him. No one’s breath is steady now: he holds it behind his grimace and jerks a little with each cough, working you with his hand and glaring down your laughter. Who’s laughing, your shoulders mime and his eyes slit. He’s bad hair and pride between your legs, while you tense them up and push with the balls of your feet to peel yourself up from the chair. Sometimes it’s the work that gets you off, he’s there but you’re thinking of a time he wasn’t, a time he was and it’s just nice to feel a hand with your own digging into contoured leather and plastic and the muscles of your legs straining under your skin. You want to feel your heart beating too fast and your chest heaving, like you’ve spent the night running to this place.
Just, without the running part—
“Come on,” come on, his breath catching while yours won’t and he squeezes your dick with his terrible hands: too small, too rough, too strong. It sounds like getting punched in the stomach but feels a lot better. With your head tipped back, he’s a hand, he’s a voice. He barely knows how to talk to you with his hands to himself, but he strikes you as someone who likes to talk. The sound of his voice is an indulgence he saves for computers, for this plane.
That’s alright. You hate the east-coast whine of it. Cuff his arm with your thigh to shut it off and think about him gagged. Gagged and mean with his hand right there, right there—
The sound you make doesn’t have a name yet. Scarab works on suggestions and you work on getting off before any more voices enter the scene: plant your feet and get him to counter your hips. You’re sweating out of your skin and okay with that. Out of your skin means out of your life and out of this night. Why don’t you call up his dad and skip another year in a matter of hours. Skip another year in the next two minutes, this tense tenser tensest pull isn’t unlike time travel or taking the armor off. Not that he lets you appreciate the comparison, jerking you harder. He’d never go for a gag but the meanness is right there, his ugly humor is squinting at you while you rush back into your body and smack his hand away from your junk. He wipes his hand stick-sliding on your thigh. “Ugh.
“Romance is dead. You just murdered it.”
No laugh, but his brows lift. Every indication that he’s fine til his attention slides sideways. It isn’t in you to follow his gaze, melted down and poured into his chair. Waiting was a theme you’d accepted before the imposition of him. Time can drip drag snap and you’ll let him wake up with grey hairs in the next year. You’re okay now.
Whether or not he is doesn’t weigh on you tonight. You need to sleep on it, shower on it, sit down and eat with it. “Tomorrow,” you groan, like you’re asking the clock for another hour without light. There’s still a beat before he looks at you. Sit up, scrub your face. “You should come back, tomorrow. Come to dinner.”
You get a hum. Roll your eyes for him, sit up a little more and pat out a hold on his face, for you. That you needed him mean doesn’t mean you want to be: you can shrug him off and kiss him soundly on the cheek, slowly at the mouth. Kill him with kindness can be your favorite game: you lick the taste from his mouth and laugh. When he tenses you just say no, don’t explain. Back in your skin and back in your head, you know your own cruelty, and you know when you’re not. It’s a kind of confidence he can pour back into you at the end of the night: if you can handle him, you can handle anyone. There will be no tears or temper at the casa, with your hands soft on his arms and your body holding the secret of how he feels when he does melt, does just go under. Under you, under your hands: you find the floor with your feet and roll your body out of the chair to fold him back over his cape. You’re going to have him on his costume, on a pile of plastic and nomex and you have to laugh again. This life makes you as giddy as it does tired. One can feed the other, and he squirms under you without a word.
“I lied,” you hush. “Romance survived long enough for you to kill it with your pinche jock.” He hits you in the shoulder and glares: you open your arms and suspend your giggling weight chest-to-chest. His guard digs into your hip like another part of his skeleton. “You would leave it on,” you think aloud, sliding your arms on the floor and pushing up. Kill him with kindness just to kill him, sometimes, with his nose wrinkling your favorite way and your hands undressing him from the boots up. You watch for the relief when the jock comes off, and laugh at that too.
“Someone’s in a better mood.”
“I was going to say that!” Or not, but you wish you had enough to slap his thigh. His spine folds a little the wrong way and you feel giddy again. You just flipped part of a puzzle the right way. It goes back to the pile when you do it again: he shows his teeth in a question you can’t answer. “Shut up,” you mutter, licking one hand and arranging his legs over your lap with the other.
His teeth are still out when you make the first pull. “What?”
“I still have to give my report.” His attention slides again, hot with resentment.
You suck the air through your teeth. Click, and your hand moves him out of it. He lifts his head, bites his lip. “You’ve got a four hour flight to compose yourself, asshole.” He would leave it on, leave his guard up, put Batman from his head into yours after he’s taken you apart and put you back with come fingerprinted to your skin. You’ll get him back. You’ll stroke his spine off his cape like you’re pulling him from pooled tar, and no powers of deduction can put Batman in a moment like that. “Relax.” You draw the word out til it rumbles your throat and you’re hissing at him, leaning close and broadcasting intent. He stays flushed, he just stays, curling or uncurling to your touch. You kiss him again, a nice long hum through a nice long kiss: don’t worry get happy get--yeah when he shakes out his hips and smacks his heels on the floor. Traci was small but curved and her body knew how to curve, moved slower. Tim rattles like an old door, moves on hinges. He’s a wire and you pluck him til a sound vibrates up his throat.
“Why are you doing this?” The question you can’t answer is the funniest joke you’ve ever heard: laughing lets you pretend you understand the context, don’t care, don’t understand the why. Why is easy, your boyfriend is a loser. He holds questions and lips and air in his teeth, grinds them up and swallows more than he spits. Why are you doing this, why are you doing this, of all—
“Should I stop?” That makes him arch, speaking of context and grinding teeth, but at least his lips are free: should you? He can only be this annoying on purpose, when he was doing so well before. You watch his mouth for the twitch, his eyes for the roll and his hips right behind. His heels clap the floor, you give him a squeeze and stroke him lazy, make him settle down and work up with impatience flattening his face. The expression is so foreign you try it with your own face, push your nose down til he catches you and huffs it away. You’ll never get him out of his skin: you could rattle him off his hinges with his come hitting the back of your throat, and he’d still make that fucking face. Ask you to hand him his shoes and get them when you go sullen.
Laugh it off. You’re in that kind of mood and impossible is just a word when you’re back from the dead with a nuclear weapons factory married to your spine. Not all bodies are just bodies, not all ears are just ears, when you can kiss the skin beneath them and suck a trail of clues down his neck. He takes that too, for all his embarrassment. “Deduce that, asshole,” and there’s the twitch, there’s the smile. There’s a real person in there somewhere, reward that guy with a steadier pace, feel his breath hitch with your head on his chest, his hands in your hair. When he pushes you down, you butt his hands up and grin. Should you, you mock, and come on is just another whine. “Saying no to things won’t make you him.” The words come out and the context comes with them. You did get it, with his eyes turning to the wall. You can’t get him out of his skin and you can’t make him stay in it either.
You can invite him back to it, though. “Tim.”
He swivels. You’ve lost pace and stumble him back into it, watch his breath hiccup—the flash of a spit-bubble popping at the back of his mouth. That’s death: bodies that can’t react.
Bodies that aren’t there to react, that’s—
a lot of things. You wonder where she is, and he’s not the only one stepping out of himself tonight. All you can do is make it a nicer place to be, thorough strokes on the arc of your wrist, a natural twist and his legs twisting around your waist as he gets into it. You take a chance on his thigh again, slap a little higher and the shock bounces him. His head makes a solid sound on the floor and his mouth make a solid ow to choke on. It’s not the pain you meant to give, but he’ll make do, stimming his head on the floor like it makes his hips jump tandem, with his fingernails digging new seams in your knees. There’s nothing fluid about this time, about him. You know why he’s closing his eyes and holding his breath, but you wonder what he’s thinking about. Surely you, with your thumb poised for the upstroke and forcing the air out of him.
That’s probably all anyone’s ever wanted from him. His attention.
“Tim—“
The slap to your knee says not now, and you feel that, feel giddy for that. “Yeah, yeah,” your arm starts to sour in agreement: time becomes a solid weight on you both and you’re not that strong without the scarab. Just strong enough, to hold the pose and stroke him faster, choke him with a kiss and feel the grateful sound trapped in his mouth. Finally, some sign of it as his ankles tighten up at your back and lock you in. The angle is familiar enough to hurt your voice and bow you in: you’re parenthesis citing this night in an essay on the relativity of distance and he puts the period right after with the last bang of his head and a mother without the fuck.
Maybe the fuck, in the gut-drag sigh he slumps under. His arms move and abort, because he’s weird and making it weird and you can feel that. Something stiff sitting in his shoulders and pulling strings. He has to breathe, but you kiss first: one more for the road and one more still.
You’re forehead to forehead, his eyes slit and dazed on more than closeness. Rub your brows together raising them, lowering his with annoyance and when he turns his face you follow. That’s the thing with language, punctuation: you have to start what you finish, and some things need an opposite to close. “Let’s go to Denny’s,” you mash to the side of his mouth: so sleepy he mouths it with you.
He bites the nearest fold in his cape and speaks through his teeth: “As who?”
“If I say ourselves you’ll wear the cape, won’t you.”
When his mouth twitches for the smile, you feel it pull your mouth to match. “Put like that, I have to.”