come as you are

The glass-block window is broken and a weedy tendril has pierced its way through to the interior, hanging down in search of the shower stream. There’s sand in the drain, little gems of broken glass. Johnny stares at them and lets the water run.

He’s gotten used to it, the good ache of full-body exertion that lingers in his body — no amount of time in the gym or Bureau-mandated lap swims can bring that kind of hangover, sharp enough to be almost pleasant. Bodhi must be good friends with that feeling, the afterburn from pushing your body to the brink — he philosophizes it, makes it spiritual, Tantric, wild. Johnny can’t see it that way yet but he’s beginning to make out the shape of what that would mean. More localized aches punctuate it too — the long shallow scrapes marking both his shins, the split knuckles, the dull strained feeling along his ribs where his lungs heaved too forcefully against their constraints. He can still feel the recoil running up his arms.

Pain’s part of the program. Pain lets you know you’re still breathing. Braced against the tiles, Johnny lets himself exhale.

He killed a man today. He did it for Bodhi, and he didn’t even think about it. He robbed a bank today and they’re going to be showing his face on the nightly news all the way back in Cleveland. They are so many kinds of fucked for this, but right now it’s hard to care. It doesn’t register that the door has opened until there’s cool air licking at his legs, and Bodhi is already there behind him, on the verge.

Johnny doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing. There’s a gun in the upper left-hand drawer in the battered sink vanity that looks straight out of the Seventies — just a couple steps, but Bodhi’s in the way. Bodhi’s here to hustle him off someplace else, shove him into another Jeep, and shuttle him off onto another Cessna heading God-knows-where, or he’s here to put him through his paces. If he’d meant to kill him he’d have done it earlier.

“Thought you might’ve drowned in here. You good, Utah?”

Johnny shakes his head, spitting water. “Just thinking. Turning over my options.”

Federal prison or six in the chest — not much of a choice. Bodhi slips into the tiled shower behind him, and without thinking, Johnny shifts to allow him in. From a man who doesn’t believe in violence — what a crock of shit — it’s nonetheless an unsettling gesture. Naked or not, he’s daring him to say something, daring him to cringe away.

Bodhi’s voice comes softer now, quiet enough that the running water nearly drowns him out, but his tone is unforgettable. “So what’s it going to be? Are you with me?”

He can feel Bodhi’s hand there against the middle of his back. Bodhi wants to pretend it’s no different now, that there’s nothing different now that he’s done this to him, but it’s never going to be the same.

“You know what I am. What I was.” Johnny flicks back the hair from his face, squaring his shoulders — in preparation for what, it’d be hard to say.

“That’s not what I asked. Are you with me, Johnny?”

Bodhi’s hand is on the back of his neck now, the heel of it resting against the top ridge of the spine. He could hurt him if he wanted to, bare hands and all. He’d know where to hit to lay Johnny out, to leave him breathless with pain and soaking wet, naked and unarmed. He hasn’t hit him yet. Maybe he never will.

“Who says you’re the one I’m worried about?”

“You’re not really thinking about my boys in the other room, are you? I’m here with you now.”

“Less than twelve hours ago you showed me a video of a friend of yours about to cut my ex-girlfriend’s fingers off. I rob a fucking bank, you call off your fucking mechanism, now we’re even. What do you want me to do?”

“I’m a man of my word. Tyler’s tougher than she looks, and Rosie’s a pussycat. Don’t worry about her.”

“She fired a gun at me, man, I’m pretty fucking sure she’s done with me. That’s not what I’m talking about. Federal fugitives don’t have great life expectancies, and there are a lot of people in the Bureau who’d like to see me eat shit right about now. You really want to take me on?"

“What were you thinking when you joined the FBI?”

“Keep going like that and you’re going to make me change my mind.”

“You studied law, right? With all that shit and football too, you could’ve been the biggest hot-shot defense attorney in Cleveland, but you came crawling to Quantico. Why’d you turn Fed?”

Johnny’s jaw tightens. “Just to fuck with guys like you. Hey, why’d you start robbing banks?”

Bodhi presses him to the wall — more macho he-man bullshit but his fingers lace with Johnny’s, spreading them apart, and he can feel the calluses of his palms. “You know what I think? I think you get off on this shit, Johnny. You fucked up your knee, washed out of the NCAA, and thought you might as well get some thrills while you could still walk.”

“The FBI recruited me,” Johnny snarls, twisting his hands into fists and feeling Bodhi cinch him there in place. “I didn’t come crawling to anybody.”

“Still. You felt something today, didn’t you?”

“We shot a guy today.” What was he anyway, the poor bastard, an ex-cop? And Johnny Utah had been the one to fire the shot. Call it a reflex, but he knows better — he hadn’t been thinking like a federal agent, he’d been thinking like a bank robber. All on camera.

Bodhi’s voice is dangerously close, dangerously soft. “That’s not what I asked. I saw you out there, you were fucking electric. You can’t fake that, Johnny. You were loving it.”

“What do you want me to say?” Johnny’s own voice is heavy in his throat. He’s angry with him, gut-deep angry, but he’s hungry too.

“There’s a time to let go. Surrender control and let nature take you, riding the fear and the terror, letting it carry you. It’s a religious experience. You’re not pretending anymore. Come here.”

Johnny turns away, but Bodhi’s hands are on him — some kind of embrace, like the kiss of death, only Johnny won’t fight it. No macho play-fighting, no witnesses. The two of them were meant to collide like this, maybe, him and this man whose real name he’ll never know, who took him up 13,000 feet and let him think he was going to let him fall.

Johnny presses his face to the shower tile. Bodhi’s about as sturdy as a brick wall, his thick leg sliding between Johnny’s thighs, and he can lean back into the weight of his body, let the pressure of another body settle him. If he were going to kill him, he wouldn’t do it like this. It’s finally starting to settle in that, apart from Bodhi, Johnny is now completely alone.

No partner, no backup, no gun, no badge. Bodhi kisses the flat plane of his shoulder, the top jut of his spine, the suntanned place on the back of Johnny’s neck where the soft hairs lay flat. Like he’s mapping him, while his hands find the naked body beneath him and follow every line. His cock is hard, and Johnny can feel the slick press of it against his ass. Call him eager.

“Bet you do this with all the boys,” Johnny says, reaching back and tugging Bodhi’s head by the hair — Bodhi kisses him hard and deep, and he tastes like salt.

(That first night at Bodhi’s place — Bodhi would have joined him and Tyler if Johnny had only asked, and if he’d been anyone else Johnny would have asked him, if he’d been some hippie lawyer with a fucked-up ACL and not a federal agent. If he’d been anybody else. Now he’s nothing at all.)

“Are you in?” Bodhi asks against his mouth. There are worse ways to persuade somebody.

“Come on and fuck me,” Johnny breathes — the shower spray is hitting him in the eyes, and his hair is tangling over his forehead.

Bodhi looks like some pagan god, and looking at him even out of the corner of your eye feels like looking into the sun. Johnny shuts his eyes. Surrender, hell. He’s not surrendering to anyone, and he never has. Their embrace is more like a struggle, teeth knocking and tongues jostling, fingertips gripping bruise-deep on the nearest plane of muscle. Bodhi slips spit-slick fingers inside him, opening him up — and the pain is the kind you push on through, the good kind of pain that tells you you’re onto something.

No one’s ever done this to him. Bodhi’s so goddamn beautiful and Johnny wants to bash his fucking face in for what he’s done to him, he wants to see him get pulped — never once has he seen him wipe out and eat shit, gash himself open on the rocks, get the wind knocked out of him. Like he’s just fucking perfect. Like he’s made for this. The modern savage, man. Johnny wants to see him ruined.

Johnny grinds back against him, panting and spitting water, and Bodhi rocks into the pressure of his body — he’s got an incredible thick cock and every rolling thrust feels like it’s opening Johnny up deeper. If he thinks this is going to break him, if he thinks it’ll make him forget the cocaine-sharp thrill of urgency and the way it felt to put a bullet in a living body — then he hasn’t learned a thing about Johnny yet. This is a competition and Johnny’s going to win it. If Bodhi pushes, he’s going to push back.

Bodhi knows his weak spot and instead of fighting dirty, he compensates for it, lifting Johnny back against himself so his fucked-up leg never holds more weight than it can handle. Johnny hates it. The tension is twisting in the pit of him, as he struggles against Bodhi and against what his own body wants. He’s never been fucked like this before, and it’s like this man called Bodhi is everywhere at once, in him and on him and around him — he’s fucking him and jerking him off in slow deliberate strokes and sucking slow bruises on the side of his neck.

Johnny grips him bruisingly tight, hanging on to Bodhi so tightly that his muscles tremble — all while his pulse pounds in his ears and in his throat and in his cock, blood surging like the waves with too much force to be denied. The sharp sting of water against his closed-tight eyelids, the cramping muscles and the bruises, the dull throb of imminent climax — it’s all too much.

When Johnny breaks he’s raw-voiced and breathless and he comes so hard he’s seeing spots. Bodhi guides him through it, like a force of nature carrying him through to the end.

Afterward, Johnny rests against the tiled wall, feeling the water evaporate from his skin — feeling the weak light from the broken window, illumination without warmth. Bodhi’s body is warm, and his stubbled jaw presses against Johnny’s shoulder.

***

Afterward, Johnny dresses himself and rakes through his hair with his fingers — the fresh shirt must be a donation from one of the guys, printed with the name of some roadside dive in Byron Bay. He can feel Bodhi watching him as he buttons up his jeans.

“Where are we? If I’m going to be in on this, I ought to know.”

“You don’t want to know that, Johnny. You don’t need to think about it. Just enjoy yourself. Be present.” Bodhi grasps him by the shoulder when he passes by, and Johnny reaches up to take his wrist.

Johnny pads barefoot through empty rooms, passing all the detritus of move-in day — duffel bags, pristine boards, a lonely bikini top left lying on the tile floor like a casualty of war. The other three have their girls who come and go, and now Bodhi has Johnny.

He’ll figure out the perimeter of this safe house or compound or whatever it’s supposed to be, and get his bearings off of that. You don’t have to be some kind of Navy SEAL to know they’re somewhere on the Costa Esmeralda: brutal waves and gorgeous beaches, palm trees and motorbikes. The property has the weathered luxury of some midcentury crook’s love nest, outgrown and discarded. It’s hot, he’s in the middle of nowhere with no badge and no gun and a shitty grasp of the language, surrounded by federal fugitives, one of whom, it so happens, just screwed him in the en suite bathroom. But Johnny would be lying if he said it wasn’t beautiful country. They’re a long way from Ohio — hell, they’re a long way from L.A.

Call it a vacation. The Bureau doesn’t really do downtime, you can’t leave your work behind when you clock out and expect to get anywhere — Johnny hasn’t taken a single day off since he started, not even a sick day. And now he’s in the lap of luxury, here in some decayed coastal fuck-pad with all of Bodhi’s boys.

The only thing keeping it from looking like any other overpriced rental is the sightlines — no big sliding-glass doors out onto the patio like something out of The Golden Girls, all plausible deniability and iron grates with the locks still hanging open. The stairs down to the back terrace are steep, and navigating them is practically an extreme sport in its own right — God knows what it’s like when you’re good and drunk. Johnny steps out into the humid evening dark and under his feet, the bricks are still hot from the day’s sun.

“Welcome to Mexico, Johnny,” Grommet calls out, “don’t drink the water.” The other two are just watching him.

He’s seen that look before, rattled sons of bitches nursing the mix of adrenaline and unease that comes after a big operation. Somebody’s cut the plastic rings on a six-pack of beers, Roach is laid out bare-legged on a Turkish towel, taking down a Mossberg 590, and Nathaniel is smoking a joint, but they’re all giving him stony looks like just another outsider. They won’t take him back until Bodhi gives them the sign. Maybe not even then — that’s the test of how far that charisma will take him.

Johnny Utah crosses down to the edge where brick meets sandy soil and looks out at the water. The waves are dark like wine where the light’s begun to fade out, and the southerly winds cut through the lingering warmth, roughing him up and pulling at him like a pair of hands. There’s still good odds of dying out here — if Feds swarm the place and turn a busted-up vacation villa into a bloodbath, it won’t be some shooting gallery, the Ex-Presidents are going to come out swinging. Which one of them, he can wonder now, picked the name — it doesn’t seem like Bodhi’s speed.

It’s strange to think he knew him that way before he met him, that he knew the sound of his voice and the shape of his body, the way Bodhi moves — he must have replayed those security tapes a thousand times, turning a voice without a face into a profile of a criminal, hammering out Pappas’ weird hunch into a viable theory. Agent Pappas must be pretty fucked now. He’s going to get reamed for this, and yet Johnny can’t find it in himself to care.

Maybe he’s a hostage, maybe he’s a guest. Maybe he’s one of the gang. Nathaniel pauses smoking just long enough to turn his head, following Johnny with his eyes. “Are you in or out, G-man?”

“In,” Johnny says curtly.

“Hey, congratulations. Maybe you can be Kennedy.” Roach pantomimes a magic-bullet headshot with one hand, the sound of red mist scattering.

Johnny turns and watches the waves break over the sand. He can still feel it on his body, that mix of sex and violence, like a bruise. Maybe what happened between them isn’t the kind of thing that only happens one time. Johnny’s going to stick around and find out. He’s blown up his entire fucking life to go be a beach-bum bank robber, but at least the sex will be good.

Bodhi follows him down, from the open gate to the brick patio to the scrubby grass at the edge overlooking the water. Johnny listens to his footsteps as he approaches.

“Johnny’s with us,” Bodhi says, not to him but to the rest of them. “We talked it out.” He drapes his arm over Johnny’s shoulders; his open shirt is still damp, his chest broad and powerful, and the weight of that touch is strangely persuasive. He’s put his hands on Johnny before in front of the other guys, plenty of times, but this time it’s like he’s claiming him.

The guys’ faces are stony and unreadable; no doubt the adrenaline sweat of the day’s events has already dried up, and they’re stuck coming down. No one wants to be the first to question their leader.

“Bodhi, are we good? They’re not tailing us?” Roach’s voice is unexpectedly plaintive, and he looks incredibly young all of a sudden, they all do — like a bunch of kids playing around with guns. Maybe it never felt real to them until now.

“First thing tomorrow, man, we’re going to be out there, when the water’s still dark. You’re going to watch the sun come up, and you’re going to see waves like you’ve never seen. Utah’s coming with us.” The way he talks to his boys, it’s like the sound of his voice draws them in closer, sobers them up. The way these guys all listen to him — how could you not?

Bodhi grips him a little tighter, daring one of them to challenge him, daring somebody to say something. Johnny scans the breaking waves and doesn’t say a thing.