Blind Season

He doesn’t know what Crash needs him for, only that he does; chasing off cheapskates and directing hapless tricks to the right door, bringing him lighter fuel and tall cans of good beer, zigzag stacks of condoms, bags of crystal. Little stuff.

Crash’s busted face is bent low, shining and shadowed from the light spilling in from the parking lot outside. His big hands fumble with the fifty-cent lighter and Ginger steadies them.

(He used to have a big heavy engraved Zippo he said was his daddy’s from Vietnam, but that can’t be right — Ginger’s been around enough and seen enough shitty gimmick lighters burned in with slogans like BORN TO RAISE HELL, or BURY ME FACE DOWN SO THE WORLD CAN KISS MY ASS. He can’t be impressed any more by that kind of thing.)

The two of them keep the same hours. Real ride-all-night motherfuckers. Ginger has discovered speed, and finds it to be good; Crash lets him sleep it off there sometimes, on top of the sheets that still smell like sex, or propped up in the corner with his boots off. They talk about big plans in here, Ginger tells long limping stories about how he got initiated, Crash smokes himself drowsy and listens, or Crash will tie off and Ginger will keep him from nodding off by bitching about local politics with the confidence he’ll only half remember any given part of it. One of his immediate superiors got himself wasted by some newly minted kid sicario and left a void for Miles to slide into, easy as a missing piece — which means Ginger’s not likely to be missed just now. They’ll need him later. This is just R&R, not tactics.

Crash exhales a thin track of smoke and it spills against Ginger’s mouth. They’re side by side on the mattress, one of Crash’s hands bracketing Ginger’s face loosely, playing with the end of his braided beard.

“Don’t know why you come around here.” Slurred, drowsy.

His hair smells like burnt crystal, acrid, and like sweat. Ginger presses his mouth to the side of his head.

“It must be ‘cause you’re so goddamn pretty.”

“Well, maybe. That sounds as likely as anything.” Crash sits up a little, his undershirt sticking to his chest, the sharp bones in his shoulders standing out. He’s not young and he’s not old, he’s skinny with the bones showing in his face but with Crash you can’t picture him any other way — hard and mean and always ready.

Ginger sits up too, a damn sight more stiff from a week-old beating, waiting on Crash to show him out the door. But he’s gripping Ginger’s arm and shifting his hips, drawing him down, down, down

Crash is reliably game for just about anything — midnight excursions, stashing guns and chasing easy money, keeping watch. And if he makes a little scratch on the side screwing strangers from time to time Ginger can’t care, can’t think his way around it and so doesn’t try. It’s a protection that runs both ways — twice as many hands on a stash-house raid, twice as many eyes.

He still doesn’t know why he brings him things — maybe only for the pleasure of seeing him wrapped up in smoke and pleasantly vacant, or for the way he mouths at Ginger’s hand after doing a bump off the webbing between finger and thumb. Crash is loose-jointed and easy, too far-gone to care about anything other than a good time, but he moves like he’s got a devil in him — Ginger’s never met a man who didn’t like to fuck, but this dude Crash goes after it like he’ll never have enough.

Crash makes it easy for him this time, on his back and pulling Ginger down with his hands behind his neck, strangely gentle until their bodies have met — then it’s all bone against bone, chipped and smudged, a series of collisions. Rolling over in the bedsheets, a wasteland of unsmoked crumbs and plastic slips — Ginger’s mouthing against the welt of fresh ink that marks Crash’s chest, feeling him groan and cinch him tighter. In the right light his newest tattoo looks ancient and pagan, like Crash is some kind of long-haired druid priest burning herbs in the woods, like an old-time German Viking berserker. He picked it out for himself out of some book. It’s good.

“Fuck me, you’re big,” Crash says as he grabs a fistful through his jeans, abrupt enough that Ginger believes him — it’s nothing new but it gets him going anyway, grinding against Crash’s palm, laughing low.

“I bet you say that to everybody, don’t you.”

“Don’t need to. Flattery ain’t never been my strong suit. You’ve been holding out on me, Ginger.”

But he’s hard as a rock and rattling with electric energy, there are chemicals at the back of his throat. Belt buckle rattling and zipper tearing down, Ginger swears and Crash presses in — he pulls him loose, palming Ginger’s dick against his stomach. His jeans are slipping perilously down the ledge of his narrow hips, and his undershirt is struggling northward.

Their two bodies, aimless and close, Crash digging in against Ginger’s back as he guides him in again, easy — he tries to jerk himself off but Ginger turns his hand and does it for him.

Hips up, his back’s bent unnatural and his face is stiff, but Ginger keeps going — half-automatic, half-marveling at him like this. He looks like nobody else Ginger’s ever seen, grinding into him like he’s losing himself, and his hands carve through anything, like they leave a mark where they’ve been, his fingernails pressing dents in little crescent-moon tracks. His spread hands chart the span of Ginger’s back.

Ginger feels good being the one inside him, knowing this is his doing. Crash keeps making small sounds in his throat, eyes closed — his mouth’s a dark gash in his face but his teeth shine, sharp, and his eyes are hungry.

“You all right down there?” Ginger rakes a hand over his lean side, not knowing why, and Crash jerks his head in assent, makes a sound like yeah, yeah.

Well, all right, then. Easy fucking, hard and slow with a chemical haze blurring the edges of everything. He presses his face to Ginger’s throat, down to his shoulder, the soft part of his arm, and Ginger can feel the hard edge of teeth through his cheek. Ginger makes a fist in the soft brown curls at the back of Crash’s neck.

“Hope you won’t hold this against me,” Crash exhales, sucking bites down his neck to his shoulder, dragging out kisses that are sharp and red, while Ginger’s teeth are chattering and his tongue works inside his mouth and his gut is tight with knotted-up confused pleasure —he’s not inside him any more but rutting on him, trying to grind out sloppy satisfaction in the space at the top of Crash’s long legs, bumping sharp and clumsy against his hip.

(—and he’s not like them, not a part-time trick, a wrapped-up jackhammer fuck and a bloody smear wrapped up in trash bags and buried shallow, he’s something different to him; Ginger’s rock-solid, a good connection, he’s—)

He’s not awake to anything but the act of fucking until he puts up a hand to Crash’s chin and it comes away red. The blood is running freely now, blood down the end of Crash’s nose and painting his lip.

Crash straightens up, cracks his jaw wide and runs his tongue over his teeth in an animal motion.

“Hey, Ginger?”

“Fuck you, how am I gonna explain this?” But there’s laughter in his voice and he holds him closer, too high to hurt. He likes the way Crash says his name.

“I need you to do something, just for me now. Hold still.”

Holding still with Crash’s mouth on him, sharp teeth rubbing in the wound as he drinks and drinks. Ginger shuts his eyes and lets reality strobe away. It’s Crash moving against him now, he doesn’t have to move a muscle — just lie back and be eaten up.

It’s a sharp shuddering anticlimax and it gets lost in the rush of dampened pain, but Crash doesn’t pull away when he’s done. The two of them remain in a clinch — Ginger breathing hard, cursing, mouthing the top of Crash’s bent head, Crash loose and silent and outside of himself.

They lie there a little while, cold in their sweat, but it’s Crash who pulls loose first. He unfolds like a Halloween skeleton, loose-jointed and easy, rising from the bed — Ginger tries to shift but finds he can’t. He can hardly lift his arm on the bitten side, and it feels — wrong, weird, numb and aching both, like it’s somebody else’s dead arm stitched onto Ginger’s body. He can hardly lift his head.

“I’m not going to die, am I?” Like a joke, but not a joke; he’s still bleeding. His mouth is dry, his throat is sticking shut, like everything’s been wrung out of him.

Crash’s hand trails over him as he goes by, making his buzzed scalp prickle. “You’re a real trooper, Ginger. You’re not going to die.” Good words, and he wants to lean into them — can’t.

Crash props him up against his headboard and switches on the lamp; in the yellow light, his face has red smudges of color in the cheeks that weren’t there before. Ginger puts his fingers in the wound on his throat, fingering at the edges of stamped teethmarks with his good hand.

He knows what his friend is, he’s known for a month or two now and he’s not afraid. But fucked if he knows what to call it.

Crash comes back with a washcloth and a bottle of iodine, the sight of which makes Ginger sicker to his stomach than the bite did: “Sense memory,” Crash tells him real casually as he screws off the white plastic top and tips the bottle, like he knows what’s twisting Ginger’s gut. Memories of his grandmother’s house and what happened there, and of picking buckshot out of his calf by Zippo-light. But there’s no way he knows that; Ginger would never have told him.

Crash kneels at the edge of the mattress and dabs at him with his balled-up undershirt to clean the blood; he’s gone tender again, carefully attentive, like a brother. Ginger sucks a breath between his teeth and lets the cold swab of iodine happen to him.

The edges of the wound are already puckering together, pink. Crash kisses him with rust-stained fingers and Ginger’s mouth is full of the taste of himself.