Craig was not a person who generally loved, and so had not built up a resistance to it in order to overpower the powerful vertigo of blatant acceptance and affection. Tweek Tweak was average height for a woman, less than average weight for either a man or a woman, and had spent his life so filled with fear the only other emotion he had room for was misery.
Craig loved Tweek voraciously, desperately, uncharacteristically, embarrassingly, constantly, and awkwardly. He spent his life attempting to keep himself from shaking his hips, bouncing on his heels, or baby talking Tweek's pale presence on his consciousness. His definition of attractive had shifted to fit Tweek like a rubber mold, rendering him monogamous, even in bible terms—he did not covet his neighbor's wife, daughter, son, or dog, but only the moments after he left for work when Tweek might take out the trash or mow the law, when the neighbor had a view from his window of Craig's concubine and Craig was so far away, looking at pictures taken with his shitty phone and sighing.
He found himself writing love notes, love songs, and dirty limericks in his head. His member rose spectacularly and without cause at the trace of Tweek's usual, common, but expertly mixed scents—the cigarettes fumes he hungrily devoured, sweet and sour sweat, watery coffee, and unscented shampoo, which actually smelled faintly like cologne and faintly like perfume, and which he had never known was so common a choice for a shampoo scent until his penis alerted him as to its presence like a tiny (crap, no, MASSIVE,) alarm.
Tweek, who washed his hands until the white skin peeled away in blooming circles, leaving blushed, raw spots behind that disrupted the pattern of his prints like abstract art, wore ridiculous floppy slippers around the house to keep the mites from getting between his toes, and showered with water so hot the skin of his back blanched and speckled, seemed to gain some nutritional benefit from semen enough that he tried to take it in almost half his orifices as often as he could. He ate dick, humped dick, held dick like a joystick, leaving his own dick or mouth or feet open for other activities. He seemed to have the vertebrae in his back owls had in their necks, and delightfully took advantage of that. Craig more often found himself fantasizing about coming home, have Tweek flip-flop to the door to be heaved up around the hips and spun around and laugh as loose, sloppy kisses were applied everywhere within reach of Craig's mouth than he fantasized about the exhausting bonding of their leaking bodies. He held conversations between the two of them in his head, asked head-Tweek advice and opinions, and then hugged head-Tweek tight until his coworkers walked by and he had to unwrap his arms from himself and let the smile fade back into the hollow, dead visage that was uniform in his career.
Craig's one problem, the snake in his Eden, the crap in his cornflakes, the minor matter he obsessed over incessantly, was Tweek's few moments of utter, sputtering mystery.
Craig worked most days, while Tweek worked most nights, which was a convenient schedule for Tweek and Craig and torturous for the both of them. Craig typically did not wake up when, as the sun rose, Tweek flopped face-first into the bed, struggled to regain his deserved portion of the blanket, and kicked his mattress territory free of limbs, so the few days when anything significant happened, he was not aware as it walked into his bedroom, but only once it had been pointed at his face for two hours.
When Craig blinked awake to the bleating of the alarm, there was an Uzi in his face.
It took him a moment to register the fact that there was an Uzi in his face, as he had never before been required to do so. He pulled back, up, and out, stood with his hands on his hips and leaned over the Uzi, which was connected to a familiar pale hand which was connected to a familiar pale wrist which disappeared under his own blanket. He plucked up the blanket to see the familiar pale face, scrunched up against light or nightmares or just for the sake of being scrunched up.
He manually unwrapped Tweek's forefinger from the trigger and pulled the gun away with hermetic delicacy, held it like a dead animal at arm's length to slowly spin and place it on the dresser, and returned to his original position, from which he could place a hand on the chest he loved that connected to the arm that connected to the hand that had held a gun in his face for who knows how long.
He awoke violently, whimpering and twitching and shooting forward. "Ooowhat?" His goggled eyes focused blearily on Craig's face, already moderately concerned.
"Uh, Tweek? Why did you have a gun?"
Tweek stared at his steadily for enough time for the both of them to be conscious of the ticking of the old-school clock out in the hall, before slowly enunciating, "What gun?"
"You—I guess you fell asleep with it? I woke up and you had your finger on the trigger of a gun."
Another long beat of silence passed. "No I didn't."
Craig now was silent, so struck by the certainty in Tweek's voice that he began to become convinced that maybe Tweek really hadn't had a gun in his hand in their bed. Tentatively, he suggested, "…Yes you did?"
"Craig, you're tired. Go back to sleep."
He almost did, twitching his knee upward to mount the bed, but stopped. "Look, that big gun on the dresser?" He pointed. "You were holding that."
Tweek craned his neck to look, sneering incredulously. "Just because you have an Uzi doesn't mean I woke up with it."
"Uzi? It's an Uzi? How do you even know that?"
The clock vocalized itself for seven ticks before Tweek clearly said, "Movies."
"How do you think I got it?"
"I don't know how you do things. Look, there's nothing to worry about. Nobody got shot. I'm tired, and I want to go to sleep." His shoulder jerked violently, and he mumbled.
"I-uh…" He had never been so afraid of his other—not for the gun, but for the manner in which he had completely and easily evaded giving Craig a single answer on such an answer-demanding topic.
Craig lived his dizzy life for a while, waking up once to find Tweek in a black beanie with painter's tape across the front bearing Spanish words written in magic marker, which he whipped off his beloved's head in a brief rage and jammed into the bottom drawer of the dresser.
The next moment his sanguine existence was perturbed by anything more exciting than Tweek buying a carpet cleaning machine, which looked like a complicated medical machine and left Craig stranded in room for hours while the carpet came back to the exact state it had been in before, but damper, was when the Spanish-speaking man called.
Tweek was just preparing to leave for work, his heavy messenger bag on his hip, a scarf on his shoulders and a pout on his face of such incredibly pathos Craig found his heart shattering, when the phone rang.
Craig picked it up from its position on the kitchen wall, uttered his typical hello in disinterest, and was treated with a long bout of Spanish.
Craig did not speak Spanish, did not watch the Spanish soap operas or talk to the Mexican workers who waited by the side of the road or eat at Mexican restaurants, and so understood no more than the words for the numbers one through five and hello, neither of which he recognized in the jabber.
"…What?"
It was repeated in a more rapid fervor.
Tweek was at his side now, the pout gone so quickly Craig disloyally suspected it was a fake, and grabbed the phone away from him without conveying interest in doing so beforehand.
Craig did not move, so that the man he spent his life with huddled in the curve of his shoulders and chest as he began a five-minute, highly gesticulated argument with whoever was on the other line completely in Spanish.
He hung up, grinned dopily and loveably, and wiggled away, before Craig grabbed the trailing tail of his scarf.
"You speak Spanish?"
"Uhh, I dabble."
"That—that was a very long very fast conversation—"
"Oh you know, once you know a few chords you can play half the songs in the world—same with Spanish!" He shrugged, stepping backwards through the hall and back toward the front door. "Aghk—hon I am so late, I have to go, I love you so much be back tomorrow morning!" And the door was closed before Craig had even realized he was no longer in the kitchen.
Craig lost his shitty job when his assumedly homophobic boss said something that he swore to God sounded a lot like "fag" and drilled him in the face. While discussing a law suit with whoever answered the number that belonged to the union, he learned that his boss had a gay daughter who he proudly boasted pictures and stories of to everyone he deemed worthy of personal stories, and that was why he had a picture of a Chinese baby on his desk—Craig had figured it was one of those half-assed funding deals.
"So, you know…dropped the ball on that one." He sat with his elbows on the kitchen table and his forehead in his hands. Tweek sat with his spine curved inward, hands between his knees, head cocked and shivering.
"I guess we can…I don't know, get loans? Maybe borrow from our parents or something…move into an apartment…" He sighed.
Tweek had been silent for some time now. "Craig, let's say I had a method of keeping us comfortable until you found a new job. Erk--This method isn't illegal, and has no repercussions, and all that needs to happen is you don't ask me about it."
Craig stared back. "I make like, three-quarters of our money, how would you—"
"That's a question."
Craig squeezed his lips into a tight line and thought of something that wasn't a question that would tip him off to this mysterious method, but after a moment, relented. "Al—alright, I guess I'd be game?"
Tweek came home the next day with a DVD player, a new mower, jeans in Craig's size without holes in the knees, enough name brand groceries to keep them fed for the next month, and a kitten named Indiana.
He shoved a finger into Craig's gaping mouth, cuddling the sleepy kitten up against Craig's chest with the other hand. "No questions."
It took ten minutes in the yellow pages and on the phone to discover that Tweek did not work in an all-night coffee shop.
He assaulted Tweek with this information when he crawled into bed, when the kitten scrabbled with drawn claws across his bare belly in terror and woke him up whimpering and confused. (He was starting to feel a new awkward love for this figure of sinew and course hair, one that inspired him with déjà vu for some other nonsexual love he had encountered, like lightening strikes in the same place.)
"'Course I do, I've worked there—what—thhhh—four years." He yawned, and his jaw cracked. "C'mon, I'm tired, scootchies."
Craig scootched obligingly. "No, I called the one you said you worked at, they thought I was kidding because of your stupid name, and there's one up in North Park that's open all night and they haven't heard of you either, no other coffee shops are open whenever you're gone."
Tweek snuggled into his shoulder. "Maybe I'm not that tired. I was thinking earlier, something kind of creative with peanut butter? We could try it out—"
"Tweek are you a hooker?"
"What!? Augh! No!"
"Do you deal drugs? Are you a pimp? Are you some kind of mule, I don't know, whatever you do, you can tell me, I won't be mad, I just need to know is all. This is driving me fucking psycho. I love you so much I'm afraid to let you know how much I love you sometimes, but you scare the hell out of me."
Tweek stared at him with open eyelids and closed eyes. His mouth was just slightly open, and remained only slightly opened to say, "I'm not doing anything illegal, and I'm not going to tell you what it is I'm doing. I'm not even tricking the system. I'm doing legitimate, difficult work that took a lot of training and that I cannot disclose to you for reasons of safety. I love you just as much as you love me, and I'm going to need you to trust me to do what's best for the both of us. I bought you a kitten."
Craig stared down at him past his nose and his chin, screwed up his face, and stuttered, "O-okay…"
"Okay?"
"Okay."
He kissed him on the forehead, checked to be sure there were no guns in his hands, and fell asleep almost instantly to the sound of the kitten yakking under the bed.
They put salt in cookies to make them sweeter.