She flashed an uncertain smile. "I'm okay."
"Shit!" Kid let his head drop with a bark of laughter. "I'm tired, that's what I am." He closed his eyes, and a breath later heard them making movements. His own groin, still engorged, was numbing. I bet I'm going to wake up with cramps under my balls, he thought, and didn't care. Denny touched his shoulder, tugged a little. So he rolled back against them. Denny made another breathy sound, and hugged Kid tightly, suddenly pushed his face against Kid's neck. "Hey…!" He caught the boy, who was giggling all panty like a puppy (like her, he remembered, when she had first fallen against him). He moved his hand down the hard flank till his knuckles touched her softer one. "Go to sleep or something." Denny took his face away, and Kid worked his arm beneath her neck (her hair was much crisper than the boy's, and the back of her neck was moist and hot; his own, moist and cooling) and felt comfortable enough to let himself drift. Drifting, he realized how loud Denny's breath was and listened for hers. It was slower and farther away. Then, after a time that might have been sleep, it was faster. He reached for her, only brushed her, he thought: A strangeness, hey, and beautiful. His lips, drying, had adhered to one another. They tore apart with the breath and the mumbled word: beautiful. Released, he fell away into sleep.
He woke in annoyance that turned immediately to pleasure. Somebody was blowing him. He grinned on the darkness of his lids, reached down through three levels of thought. Lanya? No, this other girl. His hand glanced from bone under soft hair to hit the hard, tight shoulder. Denny grunted.
"What you doing?" Kid asked. He rolled his head left, then right on the creased blanket, then again with his eyes open. The girl was gone.
Denny said, "You were asleep all the time with a God-damn hard-on. I was just—" Kid locked his fingers in Denny's hair and pulled his head down.
"That's what you started doing and you ain't finished me yet."
Denny dropped his mouth again.
Kid moved one fist out in the blanket beside his face, hoping it was still warm from her. One fantasy memory of Denny's face between her legs and his penis thrust between them… he moved from fantasy and lay, with his mouth opened, his head back, each muscle loosening; Denny held Kid's balls while he sucked; and that felt good. Kid held the boy's sides with his legs. And came. It was something like hot oil poured in cotton (cotton into flame; flame, out beneath water. Water and ashes and ashes washed through him); "Come on up here."
Denny lay down on Kid's chest.
Kid rubbed his back, dry and papery as before. He wanted to say thanks, but decided it would be silly, so he squeezed Denny's shoulder instead.
"Your come tastes different from mine," Denny said.
"Yeah?" Kid closed his eyes.
"It's more, you know, liquid. And there's more of it."
"I'm bigger than you."
"And it's more bitter."
"You know," Kid said, "you're a pretty funny little guy. Where'd your girl friend go?"
"She got—"
Somebody came into the room, moved something below them, turned.
Kid looked down across the blanket as a nondescript top-of-a-head left through the doorway.
"— got up a little while ago and went out." Denny's fist uncurled on Kid's shoulder.
"Oh. You two do this a lot?"
"Huh?"
"Drag people into bed all the time?"
"Not like this."
"Like how?"
"I don't know. It's her idea, most of the time. She's my best friend here."
Kid nodded, his chin tapping the top of Denny's head. "Is she a scorpion too?"
"Naw. She's not a member. Not like Filament. Or Lady of Spain. She just likes to hang around with them." He shifted. "I mean us. I bring guys around for her sometimes. As long as she lets me watch. A couple of times I messed around with the guys, just a little. But not like… well, what we did."
"You like messing around with her too?"
Denny shrugged. "I don't know. I guess so. But I never done that before. I mean get inside."
Kid laughed.
"Sometimes she'd tell me I should, but I never did. It just embarrassed me, you know? I couldn't keep it hard, I mean before."
"Oh." Kid tried not to smile, even though Denny could not see it.
"I can get guys for her two or three times a week, sometimes. She says she don't wanna be one guy's girl friend."
"She likes two at a time? I can dig it."
"Maybe." Denny moved a little. "We do anything together, any old crazy thing, you know? If I told her to do something real crazy, like go up in an old building where there might be people hiding with guns, she'd do it. We found all sorts of junk. In old buildings. There's lots of stuff around."
Kid crossed his arms over Denny's back; the warm mouth brushed his chest.
"I like to watch her make it with guys," Denny said. "When I blew you, were you thinking about her?"
"You'd like that, wouldn't you? No, I wasn't. I mean only a little at first."
"I don't care what you were thinking about," Denny said. "You think you know an awful lot about what I like, huh?"
Now Kid shrugged. "I think I like you. How's that?" Relaxing from the shrug, he began to laugh. "You want to suck it, sit on it, that's fine by me. Now you're going to turn around and run off and look all scared and wide-eyed at me every time we see each other from now on, huh? But I want to make love to you, sometime. Just you."
"Like I was a girl?"
Kid sighed. "Yeah. If you want to put it that way."
"I'd like that."
"I know you would." He cuffed the back of Denny's head with his hand.
"When you jerk off, do you do that like what I did?"
"Huh?"
"You know. Eat it."
"Oh. No. I've tasted my own a couple of times. Hell, I guess I ate it once or twice, just to see."
"I do it all the time," Denny said, with resolve. "How did you know I did?"
"I've just known other people who did that too, and… well. I don't know."
"Oh."
"Is she going to come back?" Kid asked.
Denny shrugged.
"Oh," Kid said again and thought he'd been saying that a lot. So he closed his eyes.
He listened for people moving around the house, thinking it must be growing late in the morning. Something — Denny's elbow — hit the side of his head, and he realized he was waking up after drifting off again.
He opened his eyes and pushed himself to sitting position. Denny lay curled away from him. Kid breathed deeply; his head was heavy with the detritus of pleasure. He rubbed his shoulder and it tingled, paused at the chain that crossed the hair on his chest. It still held: from a very long time ago, a waking and a sleeping and a waking, he recalled the blond Mexican who had surprised him in the street. Kid frowned, and began to reach around for his clothes.
He had to go to the bathroom, for one thing. His head ached slightly, and his mouth tasted like unflavored gelatin, solid around tongue and teeth. He looked for his pants, stopped, put his hand on Denny's buttock. A face, he thought, hatcheted on the obstetric line. Cheeks, he thought, sucked in with astonishment. If you hang around, I'm going to tear it up. Denny rubbed his nose and was probably awake but not moving.
Kid pulled on his pants, dragged his vest and his boot over the edge of the platform. The people in the sleeping bags were still there. Bending to put on his vest, he found his flanks sore; he leaned on the jamb to put on his boot, and for the first time in a while wished he had a second. (A vision of his own hands crumbling dirt between them, the dirt falling on water.) He stepped into the hallway.
The tan shade and the warmth in Denny's loft had intimated a false summer.
The sky beyond a dirty window pane high on the hall wall was stormy. The bathroom door opened: not Thirteen's girl friend, but Thirteen himself. His long hair was bushy from sleep. "Hey I didn't know you was around here?" Thirteen nodded heavily, his voice roughened by fatigue. "Ain't seen you in a couple of days." Kid went into the bathroom and while he urinated, busied himself not thinking about when the last time he had actually seen Thirteen was. He ground his fist against his sore side and reflected: it probably isn't possible to really fuck yourself to death. Punching his tongue into bitter corners of his mouth, he squinted out the window. Stormy?