ballad of the self-loading pistol

“You’re lucky she wasn’t a better shot. Etta’d skin me alive if she knew I let another woman bump you off.”

And not a bad-looking one, at that, a lady bandit and the territorial type. He hadn’t been in a position to appreciate the novelty of it at the time, but it was almost charming. The way of the future. It figures he’d find him like this, hatless and sprawled out on a bed, wrists tied to the headboard, worked over by a woman. It’d serve him right to leave him there, only he’d be bound to get splinters. Butch tosses down the Kid’s gun belt — not carelessly, exactly — and gets to work.

“Lucky I only caught a ricochet.” Sundance is grimacing. The bullet must have come too close for comfort.

“Well, we can both agree you’re lucky. Now quit griping and let me take a look at you.”

He’s been lightly perforated at worst — blood, bruises, bullet grazes, aching ribs, but none of the worst things a bullet can do to a man. The Kid shifts his long legs apart — the bullet skipped across the denim, leaving a blood-crusted tear across the inside of his thigh, fringed in white threads. He’s trembling, and he’s not happy about it. Underneath his clothes he must be papered in bruises, but Butch doesn’t want to think about what’s underneath his clothes. The biggest bruise must have been being disarmed in the first place.

The Sundance Kid winces when Butch daubs at the blood from his temple — a knife blade must have skipped just shy of his scalp, and his blond hair is looking suspiciously dark. There’s a bath in their future, and a scolding. The Kid’s been bludgeoned, stabbed, shot, and dragged behind a horse, and he can’t take a little medical attention? Next he’ll be saying he can’t stand the sound of gunfire.

Cassidy fumbles for a pulse in the soft part of Sundance’s leg, just north of the inseam, and Sundance kicks him.

“Hey!”

“Relax—”

“Untie me first. I can’t stand being trussed up like this.”

“Keep your shirt on. Last time I saw you, you were telling me you wanted to knock my teeth down my throat. I won’t risk it.”

“You know I’d never really do that, don’t you?” The sardonic edge to the Kid’s voice undercuts his intentions somewhat. A lot of things got said, the last time the two of them saw one another. There’s no sheets on the bed, only a sorry threadbare blanket; Butch tears off a strip and makes do. One of the old wounds must have opened up again — there’s an angry red spot the size of a silver dollar pressing through his undershirt, on the opposite side from the worst of the mess that’s already fading to mud-brown. Butch bundles up his coat and thrusts it under Sundance’s injured leg to prop up the knee, not without complaint.

“You’ll be fit to walk on it in the morning.” More of a hopeful assertion than a doctor’s diagnosis, but the odds are good, anyway. “Not that it won’t hurt, but it won’t give out on you either.”

Sundance makes a perfectly expressive face. He hasn’t lost so much blood that he can’t roll his eyes. “Thanks, doc. Now untie me already.”

Butch Cassidy props himself up on his elbows, struggling not to sink into the broken-down mattress, and digs out his pocket knife. The ropes won’t come away easily — more like shoelaces, when it comes down to it, but enough to do the trick for a single sorry-assed outlaw. Hanging over the Kid and sawing away, he can get a good look at his face. There’s something about the eyes that never carries over in a photograph, some queer depth that’s more than just color.

The Kid rubs at the marks on his wrists ruefully. Butch tries to ease his arms down to his sides, stiff as they are, and meets little resistance. The fine hairs on the backs of his arms are standing up, as if they’re in a cold room — his nipples are standing through his undershirt, and the soft vertical line of his chest leads to the hollow at the base of his throat.

He must notice the way his eyes are lingering on him. A man might not appreciate that.

It happens in the time it takes for a man to catch his breath. Those keen eyes are fixed on him without flickering away. Not even glancing at the door, though perhaps he should be, it’s still ajar by a good six inches and even knowing they’re good and alone it makes Cassidy itch to know it. He claps him on the neck with one of his hands, squinting at him over the shoulder like he’s studying him good and hard in return, and the scrape of those eyes on him must be revenge for his clumsy doctoring. Butch can only glance down at his blunt fingers. He doesn’t shrug out of the touch.

“What in God’s name are you staring for?” It’s the most he’s heard out of him in quite a while, and he sounds mad as hell without even raising his voice. But his head is straining back, the long suntanned line of the Kid’s neck is bare — his adam’s apple is jumping in his throat as he swallows,

“I thought you were dead, remember? I owe you one.”

“Well, you were half-right.”

Sundance seizes his wrist, and for a moment it’s enough to spook him. He pulls him down almost indolently to his level, and kisses him on the mouth.

Out of all the kisses in recorded history, it might not make the list for most fragrant or best-choreographed — twisted back over the shoulder like that, with teeth knocking together and clumsy hands going everywhere — but for unbridled passion it’s a solid contender. The connection between them comes like a shock, and it sends every other thought skittering away from Butch’s mind — here they are, the pair of them, and they might as well.

Butch rubs at his mouth. “That’s one way of saying thanks. You never did that before, what’s been keeping you?”

“You’re a son of a bitch,” Sundance says, not without affection. “That’s why.”

If this’d happened some other time, the Kid would have had a marked advantage — and the prospect of his displeasure would have been too much, the dread that with one scornful noise through gritted teeth it’d be over and their friendship would have suffered an indelible wound. The kind of thing you don’t talk about but that’s bound to come out as a grievance eventually. Now they’re both on the level. Now it’s just the pair of them mashing faces and pressing close to each other. The Kid reaches back to feel at him, making his cock stir — his hands run reverently down the outside of his thighs. As a gesture it’s hard to mistake.

“I knew I’d find you,” Butch says. “One way or or another. Just follow the string of dazzled onlookers, and there you are. You’re lucky they didn’t start charging admission at the door, just to come in and see you. I knew I’d find you.”

“You always do.”

Even if he wanted to shake him, he never could. The fellow’s like a bad penny. Sundance nuzzles him lazily, like the two of them are lying on silk sheets someplace in the middle of a sunbeam and not crammed together in a cool dark room that once housed strings of peppers or sacks of potatoes.

“You need a shave, you know that?”

His cheek’s like sandpaper, and he scuffs his stubble over Butch’s mouth out of sheer spite. He sucks a kiss from the underside of his jaw, spooning against his back — Butch shifts his weight against his ass and Sundance makes a sound, not quite pain but certainly recognition of the state they’re both in. Gunplay does funny things to a man — not every time, of course, or the West would be a queerer place, but the flush of relief now that he knows his partner’s alive instead of torn up beyond repair has settled squarely in his crotch. Sundance is perfumed with gunmetal and sweat, familiar smells that have become stranger at close range — the smell of another man’s skin, faint and low. When he mouths at him he can taste blood — unless it’s the taste of powder.

He grabs onto the Kid’s hips and levers himself close. It wouldn’t be terribly sportsmanlike to throw him down and screw him, not with three bullet holes in him and a straw mattress. He’s done worse in worse places, but still. His hand slips past the Kid’s waistband, finding the shallow warm place where stomach meets hip — the backs of his fingers rest there for a moment as the amazement of what he’s doing registers. Not giving another man a perfunctory helping hand, but cleaving this close to him, free to do whatever he liked with him.

“Don’t tease me,” Sundance says, warningly.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

The pair of them go about stiffly maneuvering with more enthusiasm than grace — he can bury his face in the damp crook of the Kid’s neck and hook his leg around for leverage. Knees knocking knees, hands making fists in shirttails — beneath Sundance’s shirttails are those narrow hips of his, and the soft warm place at the base of his spine, and the slope of his ass. For all the beating it’s taken, his body is still an impossible machine, barrel-chested with real power in his legs. In another life maybe he’d be a sailor, or some great brawler.

Butch could look at him for hours, but it’s better to touch. His hands pass over him, like a piano player gropes the keys. Touching him like this is touching him in another way — not assessing him, but just another exploit. He could suck him ragged, if he’d let him. He’s beautiful this way, he’s all made out of rubbed gold, and the bloodstained places just set it off for better effect.

Sundance kicks his coat off the bed, and rolls over.

God help him, he hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s doing with this man but he knows what it is he wants to do. He wants to make him gasp. He wants to bring the color back into his face. The Kid lifts his hips against him in a scrape of denim — he’s favoring his wounded leg, and who can blame him, but the lewd edge to the gesture is unmistakable.

The bandage is slipping loose from Sundance’s leg but when Cassidy fumbles out to re-tie it Sundance thrusts against him and wedges one lean thigh between his knees. Butch finds a little friction and works at it a while, there at the inside of his partner’s leg — his hard-on is becoming unmanageable, but there’s precious few soft places to be had on his partner’s body and he responds greedily.

Sooner or later they both get a bright idea, and it’s two sets of hands fumbling at belts and the buttons of the Kid’s fly, enough contact and concerted effort to make the hard-on they’re trying to liberate seem like an afterthought. Butch could make a joke out of that — it taking two men to find the thing in the first place — but he’d rather not. The Sundance Kid has plenty to work with. His cock is heavy in Butch’s hand, flushing with blood — he cups at his balls and feels his stifled groan, almost more than he can hear it.

The shaft of it fits in the crook of Butch’s hand, already slickening — he won’t have to spit in his palm or take a break to forage, impromptu is best. Chest to chest, and overlapping hip to hip. No tricks, no funny business. It’d be downright ungentlemanly not to, so he pulls him off in long slow strokes — not the quick practiced motion of men who spend a great deal of time alone, but urgently and a little unsteady despite his deliberation. They’ve got plenty of time — hell, they’re already running late, but they’re alone and they’re both men and a shootout has a funny way of getting your blood pumping even if it’s resolutely an anticlimax. God willing, their climactic shootout hasn’t come yet, and it’ll never happen.

If Sundance were a woman, it’d be a lousy thing to do, screwing each other silly like this — rubbing each other raw like a couple of novices in a hayloft — but he’s the farthest thing from it, and his rapacious hands leave every inch of Butch feeling clawed. Sundance makes fists in the collar of his shirt, threatening to pull it off over his head — patience has never been one of his strong suits, but Etta’s never complained, it’s only when his fingernails scrape tracks through the nape of Butch’s neck that it starts to cross over into too much. He quickens his pace when he feels him coming to the edge — he can feel it in his own groin, he can feel the muscles of the Kid’s thighs go taut with anticipation, he can hear it in his breathing.

“That’s it,” he says hoarsely, but his eyes have glanced away — he’s staring somewhere else, past Butch’s shoulder at some pockmark or divot on the far wall. He’s present, but he’s thinking of someplace else.

He shifts his grip, and breaks his promise — teasing with his thumb at the slippery head of his cock, rough skin against tender skin, tracing a wet pearl of seed. He can’t help grinding his erection against the Kid’s leg, just to get enough relief to clear his head for what ought to be done now. It could be like this every night — not the bruises and the life-or-death struggles, but the pair of them, and Etta too, her cool softness to offset their roughness. They’d have to invest in a bigger bed.

The Kid spills into his hand, in an electric wash — he smells like a desert thunderstorm, and his whole body goes slack when he’s blown his load, as if he’s been relieved of some terrible effort. It’s flattering, really. They lie there for a moment like that, still face to face, breathing.

After a while, Butch lifts his head, and begins to say, “Say, do you know what we should do now?” But he never gets to tell Sundance what they should do next, because Sundance slings an arm over his shoulders and kisses him on the mouth again, bruisingly hard — with that kind of strength he’s bound to make a full recovery. The mustache is a questionable addition to the whole process, but by this point Butch has started to grow fond of the damn thing. They carry on like that until the pair of them are left tired and pliable, strategically rubbed raw. There’s no more room on the mattress than there was before, but the pair of them hang close to each other, breathing the smell of each other, the smell of gunsmoke.