Friday is fucking hot. The progression throughout the week to "fucking hot" has been a slow one. Monday started off merely hot as Hell; from there it had edged into "hot as the sweat between the Earl's fat rolls" and then spiked into "hot as the burning sensation Cross feels when he takes a piss" territory, which Jasdero had giggled over for all of Wednesday; Thursday had continued the theme by being "hot as stupid Cross's stupid bastard red hair after we set fire to it." Every hour spent in the heat of a Georgia August made Cross more stupid and more of a bastard, Devit had decided that night, when the sweat evaporating off his drenched body was his only reprieve even as the cheap little clock struck two and the sun had been down for hours.
But Friday, Friday is fucking hot. Fucking hot is what you get when Devit is too hot to come up with anything witty, too hot to want to speak, to breathe his hot wet air into their hot wet room at the Hotwet Inn in Humidtown, Georgia. If Cross had ever really been in this backwater asscrack, and Devit doubts that he was, because why start being anywhere they'd been told he'd be now—if Cross had ever been staying here, he is long gone by now. It's hard to care when it's body temperature outside. That is what it feels like in their two-bed one-bath personal sauna: a body, humidity so thick it's like being suspended in a huge vein, the bloodstream. Hot as the blood in Cross's . . . the blood rushing to his diseased dick when he . . . the blood pouring out of his throat when Jasdevi . . .
No, it isn't coming to him. Fuck it. It's too hot.
Devit summons the energy to scoop another ice cube out of his glass, watches it melt in his palm and leak through his fingers. It's a pleasant surprise that anything solid is left in the glass at all, fifteen whole minutes after he'd refilled it. Wednesday they'd tried to materialize unmeltable ice, which was a disaster; although they'd managed it after some mental coordination, the stuff just didn't do much but stick to your tongue and feel dry and awkward in your mouth. It had been everything they'd imagined and nothing they'd expected. It's no good, not the same, when it's not shrinking between your lips and pouring down your body like a cold clean sweat, Devit thinks, watching a trickle of icy water pool in his navel and dam up on the way to ruining his leather pants.
Their imaginations are good, though, even if the unmeltable ice was not. Devit's imagination is good. He lies back on the bed and uses it now, eyes closed against the afternoon sun peeking through the drawn drapes; it is too hot even to share a bed, as they always do. They'd huddled together against the cold under one blanket in Siberia, a cold so harsh it felt like a tangible weight on the chest and shoulders. Siberia had been seven months ago. Devit palms the ice cube against his neck and calls back that memory—the feeling, stepping outside that little inn halfway around the world into the bitter night, boots sinking into the snow up to the fringe, mascara freezing in his lashes before he could blink, that he could reach out into the empty air and come back with a solid chunk of cold gripped between his finger and thumb. The Siberian landscape had reminded Devit of the fancy ice cubes at Cyril's cocktail parties. The cubes would have berries, flower petals, anything that was colorful and edible frozen inside of them for show, because it was elegant. Siberia in February was just like a blueberry living in a solid, frozen, crystalline wall, sealed off from the warmth of the rest of the world pushing in against it.
They'd been made to stay in Siberia for an entire week, even after figuring out on the third day that Cross was no longer there. Devit had cursed both Cross and the Earl up and down and sideways and blue for that for a month afterward, and only now, fishing for another ice cube with one dripping hand, does he reconsider that.
This cube is smaller than the last, half melted already, but it's something, and Devit slides it down his chest with a grateful sigh. The cold wet trail it leaves in its wake trickles down his sides and soaks into the mattress pad; the sheets are beginning to cling and itch, but Devit doesn't give a shit. He entertains a brief fantasy of Jasdero and himself freezing themselves solid with a Blue Bomb and can't decide whether he's more afraid that it'd kill them or that it wouldn't. Then his water-swollen fingertips glide with the last sliver of ice over his nipple, and Devit cracks open his eyes to watch it stiffen into a hard peak. A thrill of mingled ice-cold and belly-warm, not clammy, sweaty warm but a pleasant itchy heat to distract from it, crawls across his skin and sinks into his muscles.
The last of that ice cube melts away. Devit pauses to dry his hands on the bedsheets before plucking open his pants. He has enough experience with very tight leather to know when it's about to become uncomfortable, and his cock is already nudging against the laces of his fly. Hitching his pants down his hips and thighs, freeing himself of the slick leather, Devit is primed for the bliss of cool air on his bare skin—but there is no cool air to be had in Humidtown, Georgia, only the barely-breathable soup that feels like a woolen sheet draped over his body. It's no wonder he's getting an erection; an icicle to the eye socket could probably get him hard right now, the cold is that much of a relief. Once he's naked on the bed, Devit snaps up another ice cube, smaller still than the last but oh, it's enough, and circles his other nipple with it, hissing through his teeth. He wants to think of beautiful women and bouncing breasts, warm thighs straddling his hips the way they do in the pictures he's seen, and his imagination is good but for the first time in his life it's not good enough and all that comes to him is faceless bodiless cold cold cold, but then in no time at all he's fully erect anyway and the rest of the ice slips away liquid through his fingers and onto his chest.
When he half-sits up to fumble for another cube—though by now they're more shapeless lumps—he spares a glance at Jasdero, sprawled out on the bed across the room. Jasdero is well out of the heat and into the realm of unconsciousness; he has not moved at all in the last hour, too beaten down by the weather to toss and turn, and his back is thankfully still to Devit's bed. His hair lies damp and matted against his pillow like coiled yellow snakes, though the last time Devit had called Jasdero's hair "yellow," Jasdero had pouted for an entire hour before he could be distracted. Golden, he called it. Jasdero is big on hair. The look of their combined form is largely Jasdero's fault, although Devit can't complain; it certainly isn't a bad look, even if it is better suited for a girl, and he'd been surprised just how useful having what amounted to infinite hands could be.
He lets his mind wander in that direction, slicking another lump of barely-there ice across his chest and down his belly. Jasdevi could have blown the whole cup of it at once, a dozen cubes curled in squirming locks of his hair and pressed to his skin, and conjured up ten more cups with a thought when they'd all melted away. Hair like icy cool fingertips skimming over his heartbeat, tracing over the lines of his hips—but Jasdevi doesn't do this kind of thing, of course, at least, Devit doesn't think he—they—does. Do. The situation is complicated, and Devit's memories of himself and Jasdero when they're like that resemble dreams more than real recollection, but they are both in there when they do it, a perfect ideal whole, and associating that with coils of hair and ice or his own wet hands between his own spread legs is—impossible. As good as Devit's imagination is, he can't think of Jasdevi in this position: naked on a cheap hotel bed; sweat beading on his lip and forehead and trickling into his hair, which is spilling onto the floor like an oversized sheet; heels digging into the mattress to hold his legs open wide. His hands are cool as they slide over his thighs, not cold enough to be uncomfortable by the time they skim over his cock, tracing the vein with a fingertip, two fingertips. The cup of ice is too melted now to do much else with but trace idle shapes in water over the hard curves of his muscles. When he takes his cock in his fist there's a new, familiar heat that begins curled up in his belly and stretches, cat-like, into his chest and legs; a tendril of hair creeps up his chest to sweep tiny pools of collected water into a sheen of fine droplets, evaporating off of the blood-warmth of his skin. He pumps his erection once, twice, and fuck, it's hot, it's getting hotter, his skin tacky with vanishing moisture and tight over his hipbones.
His thumb skims away the warm fluid gathering on the head of his cock. Two thick locks of hair loop around his thighs, holding them apart, lifting his legs; a third cups and strokes and tugs his balls like a soft, practiced hand. The hand on his cock answers, tightening its grip and quickening its pace. And then a finger's-width of hair creeps lower, circling, threatening to press inside, and the heat rises in his rolling belly when he feels it and it's not that he's gay, nothing like that, not that he'd had any luck with anyone of any sort, but God, fuck, what must that be like, to be filled all up with someone else? To be connected, to be finished? It's always so hard to remember afterward. So he lets it happen, he opens himself up for it, and even though it's not the same the muggy hotel air feels almost cool against the spreading warmth of his body straining up into nothing. Heavy droplets roll down his sides and sink into the bed when he arches his back and bears down, filling himself; he lets a whine escape his lips. It burns, and it's good. Something inside of him sends fire through every nerve and vein every time he rocks against it, and he can't help but rock, hips squirming back and forth and up into his pumping fist all at once. His lips part and then close as if seeking the body on top of him, but there is no one there, only the empty cool of the air, which will have to do. He is full, he is connected, he is two hearts beating in time. The hand on his cock is fast and rough enough to—but then it's too much, the slow burn inside of him rising to a boil, the sheets clinging to his hips with his sweat when he thrusts once, twice, comes hotly over his fist, sucks in a shuddering lungful of air when his back hits the soaked bed.
Jasdero begins stirring almost immediately, and Devit can feel panic rising in him like the stuff in a thermometer, but his cock is soft by the time Jasdero rolls over, and it's far from the first time Jasdero has seen him naked; in a sense, they see one another naked every time they look into the mirror after a shower. There's no shame in it. Devit gropes for the glass of ice—water now—and dumps most of what remains over his sticky hand, half deliberately and half because he's still shaking. It'll do in a pinch, either way. Jasdero watches the slosh of the water out of the glass and comes to the only reasonable conclusion:
"Hee! Devi is all sweaty and weak because his ice disappeared! Melted, melted! All gone away! Dero will help him make more!"
And finally Devit has his breath back, though he's so sticky that he feels like he's been welded to the cheap bedclothes with chewed-up gum, or maybe like he's the gum itself, and Jasdero really did have some fucking good ideas sometimes. "Yeah—yeah! Forget pussy little ice cubes! Jasdero, we're Blue Bombing this place to the fucking ground, yeah? We'll ice down this whole hellhole of a town! If Cross isn't here anymore, we'll at least make sure he never comes back!"
Jasdero meets his eyes and grins wickedly. It's the same grin Devit can feel forming on his own face, and he feels finished, complete.
"After I take a cold shower," he adds.