But now, alone with the Blueboy, Michael pushed the memory away, rolled on a condom then rolled on top, letting his weight sink the kid’s shoulders deep into the bed. The Blueboy lifted his feet and locked them behind Michael’s head.
Michael tried to lose himself in their closeness. Inside the Blueboy, he felt powerful and sure. His hands skimmed the subtle scallop of the boy’s ribs, skin cool to the touch but warming as blood moved fast beneath. Michael liked the feel of the boy below, the tickle of leg hair along his sides, its silken floss. Michael pushed harder.
When Michael woke the next morning, the Blueboy was gone. Michael rose and latched his door, walked to the kitchen. An empty container of orange juice sat on the counter. A faint sprinkling of confectioner sugar snowflaked the cutting board by the sink. Michael opened his fridge to find his box of Pepperidge Farm donuts half empty. Eggs untouched, Stroehmann loaf twist-tied tight. Michael looked in his cookie jar for the last of his cash and his stash. Both still there.
*
A month later, Michael saw the Blueboy again. The kid had shown up hours early for the night trade, and sat smoking cigarettes atop the low brick ledge that walled in the E-Z Lot across from Michael’s building. Michael was coming back from the pharmacy, a bag full of pills and herbal tea tucked into the pocket of his jacket. The headlights of a Saturn leaving the lot flickered across the kid’s features, leaving them aglow in the fading autumn light. The black and Blueboy this time—the kid’s left eye a swollen shiner that made Michael wince in sympathy.
What the hell happened? he asked.
The kid shrugged.
Michael sat down beside him. I never got your name last time.
The kid twisted his mouth into a sneer. What do you want it to be? All pretense, though; tears welling up in his mismatched eyes.
Michael sighed. Want some tea?
Michael got the kid’s story that night, though never his name. He remained the Blueboy, though with a few details sketched in: Since the death of his parents in an expressway car crash, he had lived with his older brother and sister-in-law in the family house in Devil’s Pocket, a rough ramshackle neighborhood in south Philadelphia tucked along the Schuylkill River. The kid had become homeless, however, at the end of summer when his brother found his journal. A guidance counselor had urged the Blueboy to use it to write out his feelings about his parents’ accident. But soon the journal became a reservoir for other things—drawings of a boy in English class, experimental sonnets. Each entry grew bolder than the last as plural pronouns gave way to “he’s” and “him’s,” incriminating words that signified a handsome jock the Blueboy had a crush on. The journal was the Blueboy’s soul until his brother discovered it, screaming how it pissed on the memory of their mother and father, a point he drummed in with fists.
He had no choice but to run away. For a while after the weather got cold, the Blueboy’s sister-in-law slipped him in the back door come nightfall, let him hide in the cellar behind the water heater. But two days ago the Blueboy’s brother had found out, gave them both a beating they wouldn’t soon forget.
Some iced part inside Michael cracked and slid free upon hearing the story. The stranger’s words awakened images of his own father. The last time Michael had seen him alive was the summer following his sophomore year of college. An older man Michael had met at a Jersey mall kept calling the house, prompting Michael’s father to ask point blank whether his only son was a faggot. Michael had snapped yes, the word blade-sharp on his tongue. The only thing that saved Michael from a trip to the emergency room that day was the sudden wail of his mother standing in his open bedroom door. Both Michael and his father froze as the small woman jerked her head forward then flung it back again and again against the wooden doorjamb in a vain effort to beat her son’s confession from her brain.
Now Michael’s father had lain dead two years from a burst coronary. At his sister’s request, Michael had gone to the funeral, held at the old Catholic church where he had once been an altar boy. He felt underdressed in his jeans and wool blazer, his general lack of sympathy. He was shocked to see how old his mother had grown since he walked out of her life, no light in her eyes as she stiffened inside his hug. When Michael’s sister invited him home after the service, Michael had nodded, Sure. But he had come by train and felt awkward asking relatives he hadn’t seen in years for a lift. No one offered. In the end he walked the half-mile back to the station alone and returned to the city without telling his mother and sister good-bye. In the month that followed, Michael’s sister called three times, offering Pollyanna clichés: Time to heal, make a fresh start, let bygones be bygones. But she and her husband now lived in Florida; what good would any truce do?
Michael pushed his family from his head, concentrated on the boy sitting on his bed blowing steam off his second cup of whiskeyed chamomile. Lamplight from the nightstand colored the boy’s bruised eye deep violet. Beautiful, Michael thought. He reached out, ran his finger across the wound. The boy flinched at the contact. Blue eyes skirted Michael’s own, tight black pupils dazed by clear sky, darkening to iced ultramarine.
The Blueboy exhaled slowly, fear of violence passing. He rubbed a drop of tea spilled on his denims. Michael sat down on the bed, fingertips brushing the hair above the kid’s ear. The bruise was a continent Michael could lose himself in, the boy a body welcoming comfort.
Michael wanted to weigh their needs against each other’s, but no scale existed for such things. Senses took over, bending him forward, brushing his lips over the boy’s smoother set. No need to explain himself, his father, the virus in his blood. His body its own obvious motive.
Michael pulled back to steady his senses. In the brief moment it took to set their tea cups by the phone, words pushed up inside him. He wanted to tell the Blueboy he was sick inside, perhaps always so. But when he turned back, the Blueboy was already pulling his shirt over his head, dropping it to the floor, a mixture of desire and resignation on his face.
The sight of the boy bare-chested and blooming stole the breath from Michael’s lungs, drowned confession’s slim second chance. Michael shoved the Blueboy down, worked his fingers into the grooves of the boy’s ribs, clutching smooth skin. The kid’s eyes glazed over then flickered shut, arms reaching for the headboard.
The boy’s flawed beauty astounded Michael. Something tight loosened inside him, but it wasn’t love, Michael wouldn’t let it be. The thought saddened him. He drew a slow breath, amazed that his body was capable of even deeper vulnerabilities than illness. He swallowed hard and shivered.
Inside Michael’s gut, desire curled—a ball of cottonmouths. He pulled off their clothes, hooked the Blueboy’s legs over his shoulders. A part of him wanted to slide red and raw into the boy’s ass, shoot those cottonmouths deep. But blood and sperm, especially his, couldn’t offer such communion. He rolled on a condom, and again, another.
Less resistance this time. The Blueboy bit his lip, scrunched his eyes in his damaged face, his body not yet fully broken in. His ass, rhythmic and ringed, clenched the shaft of Michael’s cock. Perhaps if Michael fucked the Blueboy hard enough, he could lose himself inside the kid. He didn’t want to think his own thoughts anymore. He wanted to rip off layered latex and feel his body let go, regardless of the consequence. The boy bucked, like he wanted to come but couldn’t. Michael’s fingers squeezed the kid’s shoulders hard enough to leave marks. He hunched forward, found the head of the kid’s dick and tongued it to his mouth. The Blueboy gasped, body convulsing. Michael pushed harder and felt tension in his gut uncoil, shooting up and out.