still waters go stagnant

At the end of the night Adam asks him if he’d come to bed with him.

Adam says it pretty casually, setting aside an instrument that looks like the bastard child of a violin and a four-leaf clover and brushing by on his way to take the long-since-stopped record off the turntable and put it away in its sleeve. So casually, in fact, at first he thinks he’s misheard him. He’s had a beer and gotten a little baked while Adam’s watched him work, trying to get the hang of old equipment by what he remembers from YouTube tutorials and yellowing instruction manuals whose covers have bent into weird parabolas. Sometimes he’d reach over and snake a long white hand through Ian’s personal space to tug down a slider or hold down a switch, and Ian nearly choked, every goddamn time, though at least his boss was patient with him. Now Adam’s asking him to spend the night, and he feels like all the blood has opted to bail from his body.

“Seriously, man? Do you mean it?”

“Yeah. It’s at the end of the hall.” He tips his head a little, turned toward the door so his shaggy black hair tangling down over his face is the main expressive feature.

It still doesn’t seem right, and the pause that ensues is expansive and ugly – Ian stands there still gripping the beer bottle, looking back and forth stupidly between the hallway and where he stands now, trying to put together what he’s missing – if Adam doesn’t want him driving? If he’s got some kind of guest bedroom with a cot that’s going to unfold out of nowhere, or what, or if he means sex. Ian has slept on floors before, but if he’s being naive while a glamorous professional tries to put the move on, he’s going to feel like a real asshole.

Adam’s kind of a strange guy, and his self-imposed isolation aches like a smashed thumb. It must get lonely, Ian might once have thought, in a rotting old house with no neighbors and a backyard that packs of stray dogs camp out in every now and then. Maybe he doesn’t mean anything by it at all, and it’s Ian who’s being weird. Maybe they’ve reached that point, they’re there.

“To sleep?” he says, stupidly.

“For sex,” Adam says. “I’d find it very beneficial.”

In any case, Ian says yes. Why the hell not, right?

**

Adam’s bed is unmade and the dark striped topsheet is twisted into a rope. Once they’re there and in sight of it Ian takes a few stumble-steps toward him (glad he’s not crunching up any of Adam’s belongings beneath his feet or tripping on wires, only sticky-soft carpet) and expects something to break. He expects Adam to laugh his sheepish laugh and defuse his anxieties by saying something wry, making the whole deal a joke and reframing it into something easier to manage, but his eyes are lowered and his face dark.

His boss is a genius. He wouldn’t have stuck around like this for somebody he didn’t admire, or somebody he didn’t respect, or somebody who didn’t seem to respect him and everything he can do.

Adam tugs off his gloves. His long spidery hands are blunted here and there with calluses on the tips. Watching him gives plenty of time to think. It must be a rock star thing, or a borderline-Howard Hughes thing, the way he is about touching things. There’s no room in his carefully curated collection for oily smudges or sticky fingerprints in spilled beer, even if he’s willing to strew his million-dollar treasure hoard wherever there’s room for it. Ian knows he has a girlfriend, maybe a wife. She sends him stuff from time to time, like his equally shadowy benefactor, and sometimes he needs Ian’s help putting that stuff together.

(“She pays your bills, huh?” he’d asked him once, just as small talk as Adam swept away a heap of polaroids, all of the same white-haired woman, of indeterminate age but insanely glamorous. In some shots her eyes are red rings from the flash, and her mouth is open mid-laugh.

“You could say that, yeah.” )

What does that make this whole thing? This kind of invitation in an empty house with so much in it. He’s scared, and he’s curious, and maybe some part of him has been braced for this for a while – like he’s waiting for Adam’s legs to press against his when they’re side by side at the recording equipment, for Adam’s hand to just once settle on his crotch. It’s mean, and he doesn’t mean it – he doesn’t want to think about Adam that way, as being just as shitty and self-interested as everybody else around here. Adam isn’t selfish. He doesn’t want people to admire him. He doesn’t even want people to know about him. Half the time Ian doesn’t even think he needs him – there’s little things, sure, but with the Internet and everything (and he’s seen Adam’s jerry-rigged computer setup, though he doesn’t know how well the thing works) he could probably get by without a flesh-and-blood assistant to do his running around for him.

Maybe he gets lonely. A guy can be massively rich, with the hottest wife in the universe, and still get lonely.

“Where do you want me to sit?” Ian tugs on the hem of his shirt, trying not to look around too much but not able to help himself. It’s just as cluttered as the rest of the house, but the detritus seems more personal, more shaped around a bed with curtains that is obviously made for two people to sleep in. On one wall there’s a big montage spread of pictures in frames, but he can’t make much of faces in the yellow light and there’s more pressingly homely things to note – watercolors tacked to the wall, a shelf of burned CDs, two different tape decks. But overall, compared to the frenetic business of other spaces, it seems very spare.

“Er – anywhere, really. Take off your shoes, please. It’s all right – there’s no splinters.”

If the rest of the house is an exercise in pinpointing the fine line between bohemian completionism and hoarding, this little room is like the chamber of a heart. Ian shuffles off his shoes like he’s told, pleased to find the hardwood and carpet less rough after all than elsewhere in the house.

Adam takes a seat at the edge of the bed and motions for Ian to join him. It seems like a good idea, and he’s tired enough that his arms and legs feel heavy; he’s starting to feel some scrapes and bruises he hadn’t before. His wrists ache from an earlier obliging attempt to teach him how to play the violin or at least to hold it correctly, another thing Adam does well and there’s so many. It’s not drowsiness, exactly, but he leans into his boss’ body very naturally.

Ian’s arm falls against his side, and Adam sighs like he’s got a broken heart.

“Do you want to–” Ian starts.

Adam reaches back and kisses him, swift but teeth-clickingly firm. When they part, Ian rubs at his own raw mouth with both hands and feels his cheeks growing warm, wonders if Adam can tell. He almost certainly can, watching him like a lizard. Adam has what could be called an intelligent face, thin and bright-eyed, and it makes Ian feel with even more certainty that he himself must look incredibly stupid right now.

“I’ll pay you,” he says, close to Ian’s face. His voice is scarily low.

“No, no, you don’t have to do that, man, it’s cool–”

He doesn’t know if he should feel insulted, given that the Adam Method for dealing with any given obstacle involves a massive wad of hundreds and fifties, but his face feels even hotter, and the hair on the backs of his arms prickles. He’s never really been with a guy before, he hasn’t really wanted to be. But Adam’s probably right – it’s an extension of services. He should be feeling like a groupie, some underage idiot who’s kicked and elbowed their way backstage for the honor of sucking a rock star’s dick in a tour bus. Either blessed or used. Instead he feels like an acolyte.

The robe falls down from Adam’s shoulders, and he’s naked; Ian’s eyes go from his smooth shoulders to the shadows pooling in his collarbone and his navel and the smooth girdle of muscle that leads down from hip to groin. Dimples and hills, where the light catches. Ian doesn’t want to glance down, but he does anyway, as Adam settles down and folds his long broad legs.

Ian reaches up to touch his shoulders, maybe to rub away some of that weird whipcord tension if he can. Hs hands rest on either side of Adam’s neck, thumbing at the string of his necklace nervously like a freshman plucks at a bra strap; he stares down at his chest and his flat pale belly and Jesus, he’s beautiful.

“Don’t touch that,” Adam says, with a vague irritation. Ian understands it like an order; his hands drop to the bedsheets instead, thumbing at the cloth. Maybe he shouldn’t be here after all. He shouldn’t be here.

“Sorry–”

“It’s all right, you haven’t done any harm. It’s a keepsake, I’d just rather you didn’t fool around with it.”

He doesn’t say ‘keepsake’ like it’s a small thing. This is what’s too special for him to handle? Adam the rock and roll anchorite, with a gorgeous wonderful mysterious old firetrap of a house filled top to bottom with priceless instruments and equipment from all around the world, and this is where Ian screws up by going too far, and this is when Adam shuts his worries up with both hands on his face along his jaw.

Adam catches him up by his mouth and holds him there for a moment, covering his mouth with his own; they break and start again. The air laps coolly against his back and he realizes Adam has hitched up his shirt, that his fingers are creeping up the hollow track of his spine like he’s fingering the neck of a Stratocaster. A few more desperate kisses with hard scraping teeth – so hungry and so firm that Ian gets nervous, gets sure Adam can feel his pulse pounding in his mouth and identify the inexpert dance-floor fumbling of his lips – skin on skin and hands on bodies, the sounds of the mattress shifting under them with the ancient headboard creaking.

The last intelligent thought Ian has for a while, for a very generous value of intelligence, is: are people supposed to close the curtains on their four-poster beds when they’re having sex?

Pretty soon Ian is going to unbutton his jeans and Adam lends his assistance, cold fingers brushing just above his waistband. Pretty soon he’s sinking down with him against the bed and tossing his jeans on the floor, though it’s not like they need the space – he’s been in rattier apartments, this one is like a museum of every conceivable thing that is definitely rare and probably expensive. And the bed is huge. The sheets smell like lacquer and electrical discharge, the hot-rubber smell of an amp left plugged in too long, and something else, some church-basement smell half sacred and half profane. He knows better than to inhale too deeply, because hey, these are somebody’s bedsheets, but when he shuts his eyes it’s all he can think about – that Adam himself smells like electricity and candlewax. The pads of Adam’s fingertips brush over his hair, where his curls have formed one tightly waving mass. Like a Renaissance painting, he thinks, and he’d never think that about himself anywhere but here – the thought so foreign to himself that it’s like a spark that’s jumped, one body to the other. Adam’s whole house is like a sacred space, or maybe a tomb.

Adam’s wrists smell like resin. Ian leans into his touch blindly, and lets his hands go where they’d like. They hesitate for a moment against the side of his throat, the warm prickly seat where his pulse lives just below his jaw.

“Fuck,” he exhales sharply, and then louder again to nobody in particular, “fuck.”

Ian slides into his lap, like this is the only thing he knows how to do. His cock is the only part of him that seems to have any blood in it, blushing beneath Ian’s hands as it gets hard. He glances up into Adam’s eyes, hoping for some kind of instruction, and his face is a stiff mask of displeasure.

“What do you think you’re doing? I’m not wearing a condom yet.”

“So what? Hell, man, I mean, I don’t care.” He’s feeling dizzy, like the room’s started to fill up with old smoke, and the hunger’s building up to touch and be touched, but if that’s something Adam cares about, he wouldn’t have predicted it. Ian rocks against him a little, at an awkward pause still blatantly headed dick-ward.

“Maybe you should,” Adam says blackly, twisting away from him.

Suddenly a chill runs down him like cold water. Health-class visions of pills, lesions, needle-sticks. “I mean, I’m clean – and so are you, right? If you weren’t, you’d tell me. Forget it, man, we’re not, uh, in an alley–”

Adam’s black brows knit together, displeasure twisting his lip and making his eyes darken.

“I might be a liar. You’ve no idea where I’ve been, there’s all sorts of diseases out there, running amok, you should really– give me a moment, all right?”

It would be funny if he didn’t seem so damn scared. Ian smiles at him nervously, like a dog rolling over on its belly. “Okay, okay. Jesus, man, take your time.”

He reaches back with his long arms to cast around for a condom and does find one, a sliver of red foil stuck between the paper leaves of a tintype frame. Ian fumbles a little in slipping it on (and for a moment, trying to balance against Adam’s lap on the edge of the bed his feet touch the cold wood floor and Adam has to catch him about the waist to keep him from toppling) but once this condition is met and there’s a barrier in place (health class deja vu) a tension vanishes like a string snapping.

He’s never seen Adam smile, but there’s something of a similar species at work behind his eyes.

“Much better. Now get in my lap, or have I frightened you?”

Dark eyes like a whirlpool, like a steep flight of stairs and a bad fall. His voice is cool and clipped and something clouds it that could be concern, or some defect of the world-weary, that he’d expected this much all along. Ian doesn’t know how to tell him this is not the problem, though he’s scared out of his mind and humming with excitement, but it’s something a little worse than that – he’s afraid of embarrassing himself by letting his own eagerness show. Six hours ago Ian would have been shaking too bad to unzip his jeans; now Adam is palming his briefs down and he’s having to bite his lip and hope he doesn’t embarrass himself right now.

Leaning back, with his hair framing his face, Adam is more leonine than before; he pulls him forward on his lap by the wrist, and takes no time at all in opening him up. Ian’s out-of-state girlfriend taught him a lot of things about sex freshman year, but her hands had never been as sure as this, working him open with two long fingers and stretching firm circles with a deliberation that makes Ian’s whole body go stiff. It’s exquisite; it’s torture.

When he’s done that to his own satisfaction (and Ian’s embarrassed himself anyway by getting pre-come everywhere) Adam fucks himself slipperily between his legs – Ian doesn’t know what he’s lubed up with, and doesn’t really want to know, only cares that it feels good and he’s too dizzily eager to think, still aching and now sloppy-damp and wanting those fingers in his ass again so bad.

He sinks down on him, Adam’s hands easing him apart and down against his hips, and once he’s inside – first shallowly, while the muscles of his thighs tremble and his partner’s strange strength keeps him fixed. Adam is gentle with him – he doesn’t know why he expected anything less now, as if some part of him instinctively flinches from a higher order of animal. He’s holding back, and making every single thing about this excruciatingly deliberate.

“That’s good, very good.”

“Fuck–”

Sensation flares up like a match being struck and makes him squirm, the prickling pain of being stretched, but he doesn’t want it to stop– it must show on his face, as Adam soothes him in gentling him down. But it’s a hurt that is familiar from some dim corner of his memory and it’s twisted up in some kind of pleasure he doesn’t want to get rid of.

“You’re doing beautifully,” Adam says. There’s a strange kind of relish flickering in that one word, not beautiful in the way his heirloom Gibson is beautiful but a more dry kind of praise. Adam pulls his shirt off over his head and drags a hand down his soft chest, talking to him in a low voice as he grinds down deeper into it, but dragging himself back up happens with more difficulty every time, as his body adapts into a rhythm of faster sharper thrusts.

Ian catches his gaze directly only for a second, by total accident, and it snags him – Ian feels himself being pulled, drawn down into something darker and worse than he can handle. Just then, he can’t think of why not. He lets himself go quite happily into that darkness, working against him in long slow strokes. His legs are trembling. He tries to make it last.

When Adam comes inside him, it’s with a sharp full breath; he arches against him and stiffens, nose pressed to Ian’s shoulder. He can feel his lips part, splitting like a dry gash against his skin, but Adam does nothing, and Ian wonders if he was about to call out a name. And they sink down again to the bed like that, tumbling together with Adam’s sharp nose pressed to the nape of Ian’s neck.

He’s still stinging and slick, staggered by pleasure, when Adam lifts up and moves to give him a blowjob; Ian doesn’t remember much of it, only slumping back in the weird half-light barely able to breathe, Adam’s dark head laid across his lap, Adam’s mouth around him and his tongue catching against the spot right below the head of his dick, cool and damp and tireless. His broad back is smooth under Ian’s hands, and this moment could stretch on for hours, could take days – not thrusting or driving but being expertly made to work by touch and lips and tongue and hard white teeth alone.

“Thank you.” Adam says, voice thick, when he raises his head. In the dark his lips gleam damp and red.

They lie there for a while before they come apart; sweat cools on the back of Ian’s neck and Adam’s long stern face rests against the softness of his belly. Eventually they shift, like continental plates, into a position more suitable for actual rest. Maybe even for sleeping.

Ian isn’t sure if he actually nods off; he’s too exquisitely drained and rattling around on a rapidly fading buzz to sleep easily or to close his eyes without a pressing awareness of his bedmate’s body and the swelling silence that threatens to envelop them. He folds one arm under his head, and listens to the blood sing in his own ears.

**

“They nearly ran the Earl of Oxford out of town for buggering peasant boys,” Adam observes, coolly. The heel of his hand rests against Ian’s shoulder, like he’s holding a cigarette in his fingers, and he’s very still. His thumb traces one curl.

“Oh, yeah? They weren’t too keen on that stuff back then,” Ian says, hoarsely ghosted with laughter.

“Keener than you’d think.”

Ian wonders if that’s what he is, lying here in his own sweat with the ache of Adam still between his legs: buggered. Having been buggered. Or a peasant, trapped in the service of a cruel aristocratic master. Adam’s arm rests around him in an almost proprietary fashion, wreathing him against the pillow, but the bed’s cold and the room is quiet.

He wants to enjoy this part, but he can’t.

Over on Adam’s side of the bed, on the table on top of another stereo, there’s a photograph that shows a man and a woman. It’s so yellowed and smoky with age that Ian can’t make much else out in the low light. An heirloom, a souvenir from wherever Adam’s stuff comes from before it’s all sorted out into milk crates and uneven piles on the floor.

Adam’s fingers (on the hand that’s not stroking Ian’s hair) are twisting in the cord of his necklace distractedly, like he’s trying to remember a dream, and his lips are pressed together in a flat pale line.

Looking at him, Ian wants to say something, and it would be great if he knew the right thing to say. But even if he did, he doesn’t know if anything he could say would help.

“You’re thinking about her.” Whoever she is. Whoever Adam is, camping out on the dead edges of a living city. “Your girlfriend, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“This doesn’t have to be a thing– it doesn’t have to mean anything, I mean, not if that’s a problem. I like you, man, I admire you. I don’t want to give you any problems.”

It’s about as good as babbling into the void, because Adam doesn’t answer. His hands fall still.

“You still live where you used to, yeah? Where I set you up, you haven’t moved out?”

“Yeah.” Ian’s voice feels small in his own mouth, and cracked.

“You should go.”

Ian pulls away, incredibly aware of his own nakedness and not sure what to do about it. He doesn’t know where his phone is or what time it is and there’s a thing called responsibility that he really should be familiar with by now and oh god, oh fuck, is he going to lose his job–

With Ian gone from his side, Adam looks like he’s been dismantled; he’s quite still where he lies. One bloodless thin arm is loosely folded across his chest; his voice is low but alert, not drowsy, but even as he speaks his chest hardly seems to rise and fall. Ian wonders if he’s taken something he shouldn’t have, if there’s a pill bottle somewhere in the wreck of this bedroom – if he’ll be alright if Ian leaves him alone.

“I’m just gonna go now –

Adam doesn’t lift his head, or rally well enough even to sound angry with him. “Get the hell out.”

Ian slithers to the floor like a puddle of guilt and goes about slipping back into his jeans, plucking his tee shirt off the ground and trying to find his coat and underwear. He doesn’t look back before he goes and he trips over every fucking phone book and guitar case in that house before he makes it down the stairs.

It’s almost four in the morning when he finally leaves that house on its dead-end street, tripping over the curb and with his head swimming so badly he feels sure he shouldn’t drive. He gets back in his car anyway – the car Adam paid for – and drives until there are houses with lights on.

Bent over the steering wheel, throbbing with strange aches and acutely dizzy, it’s not regret that fills his head, but a strong sense of certainty – that he needs to get home badly, that he needs to get out of there so he can breathe again. That shouldn’t have happened. The next Monday or Wednesday or whenever his boss calls him up at 2 AM for music lessons or art supplies, he’s going to come running with whatever he needs as fast as he can manage, but if Adam asks him like that again, Ian doesn’t think he can say no.

**

Ian drives back to his beautiful apartment that smells like food and weed and in his dingy shower with the broken light in the ceiling he leans against the wall and tries to pinpoint where he aches. You never really know how drunk you are until you’re in the bathroom anyway, so he lets the water run while he finds out. His gums hurt – he washes his hands under the shower head and sticks a finger in his mouth to try to figure out what’s up, finds nothing but tender skin and a raw hurt. There’s a torn place at the corner of his lip, scratched by a fingernail or a tooth

The water pours down between his eyes; it goes from cold to hot without him even noticing. Ian palms between his legs, wincing now that the fun part’s done, and thinks about that bed, and those sheets.

By the time he’s dried off and in bed, he’s still thinking about those bedsheets tangled around his ankles. He’s still thinking about Adam’s ratty dark hair under his hands and the touch of his mouth.