He'd spent all of his life fighting damning definitions. This time it was really no different than all the rest – Scot, Mick, left footer, soldier, father, awlarse, husband, deadbeat, lager boy, criminal, bad news, outlaw. He'd paid for it, all of it. With his country, his freedom, his looks, his family, his sense of peace; his identity was the hardest won thing he wore. And he was still willing to fight the good fight - the anarchist in him - but he wasn't willing to pay for it anymore with a price that cut so close to the bone.
No, this time it was going to be different and labels be damned and consequences be damned. He wanted this. More than he'd wanted just about anything for just about as long as he could remember. And he didn't want much, had never allowed himself to do so, because at the end of all that wanting, after the having, there wasn't a helluva lot of keeping. He'd managed to hold onto his cut and his bike and that did things to a man's head and heart.
He wanted Juicey boy in the worst possible way. But it was the bit after the wanting that he found himself fantasizing about, for reasons he couldn't sort or straighten. There was something completely appealing to him in the other man's face, the tawny colour of his skin, the crooked grin, the downturned eyes that seemed to act more as pools than mirrors. For months he'd thought it was a fatherly feeling washing over him every time they were together or even the times he spent alone worrying about him. But once the dreams began he had to face a kind of truth - the feelings he had for the other man were far from fatherly or brotherly.
Some mornings he woke feeling as though he'd been sucked dry in the night. Other mornings he woke feeling as though he'd bled all his life's blood straight into his cock. And it was always the waking that left him in these states. Still paying for things he didn't actually own. Even if he only had them in his dreams. His eyes would open and he would remember he was alone. In his bed, his room, his house. And he'd reach for the pack of smokes on the bedside table and the invariable half-finished bottle of beer and he would smoke and finish the bottle and shove the butt inside. And slowly sit up, start his day.
The rougher mornings, struggling with finding himself alone after the heavy company in his dreams, he would roll over onto his stomach and pull the box of letters out from beneath the bed. Over a year's worth. Some short - simple lines truncated by loneliness and fear, others pages long - the boyish scrawl, the loud and clear manic feelings of being locked up. Chibs would randomly grab a letter. And immerse himself inside Juice's head.
The night he found out that Juice had tried to off himself was one of the most complicated nights of his life. He felt pummeled by emotions and wracked by physical desire. He'd already been wandering their world with the worst case of blue balls known to man. He was in a constant state of arousal around the younger man, desire thick and hard, longing so fierce it threatened to have him wrapping his body around the other man's body and bringing them both down to their knees.
The night of the day Kozik was blown to bloody smithereens pushed him to the edge of it all.
He had openly confronted Juice in the bathroom, his heart pounding hard enough to bruise his ribs from the inside out. He was wrestling with fear and desire and his blood was on fire. He wanted to be burnt in that fire. He wanted to purge Juice clean with it. If the boy was ready to play fast and loose with his own life, then all the gods be damned, he could play too.
He left the bathroom with his mouth dry and his heart heavy.
Then they had begun drinking. Tig was alternating between tears and rage and his heartbroken fury morphed into physical comfort that became a kind of dark orgy of men holding men. Tears wept into leather-clad shoulders, fists thrown and caught. Bottle after bottle killed dead, lain down on the bar, reaching for another, and the women steering clear until the night became pitched black and finally someone queued up the juke in the corner and girls reconvened and began dancing with each other and the men found themselves sprawled on couches and chairs, watching and still holding fast.
He himself was sprawled on one of the sofas, Tig on his right, Juice on his left and gyrating female bodies at the end of the tunnel of vision he was seeing out of one open eye. He had his arms slung around both men but it was Juice burrowing up under his armpit that he was focused on. As one song became another song, Juice's leg began bouncing in time and finally Tig leaned across his lap and Chibs couldn't say whether the other man's hand on his thigh was an invitation or not but Tig prodded Juice.
"If you're gonna dance sittin' down you might as well get up there and give us a man-show, man."
And Juice was plenty drunk enough to be encouraged and he leaned into Chibs' face and planted a sloppy kiss on the side of his scarred cheek and stood. "Alright. Yeah, I can do that." And Chibs brought a hand up to his face wondering what the hell that had been all about and Juice hauled himself up on top of the pool table and began a slow strip tease.
And this dragged Chibs right up to the edge and later he could leap but for now he was going to enjoy Juice's particular brand of gyration. The boy could move no question about it. An invisible fish hook seemed to be set somewhere deep in the middle of his hips, the line held fast by the music snaking out of the powerful speaker system. Tig squirmed beside him and he knew that they were both being affected by the dancing, Juice's body slowly revealed as he pulled the t-shirt over his head, smooth inked skin, taut over his bones and muscles. Chibs could be content watching him just shirtless, jeans slung low on his hips, tantalizing. But two girls quickly untied Juice's boots and he toed out of them, hips still swinging in a masculine arc that made promises he seemed to be completely oblivious to. Then his hands were on his belt, the fly of his jeans and Chibs slid lower into the sofa. Beside him, Tig catcalled and wolf whistled and Chibs was flushed with heat. And then Tig stood drunkenly, leveraging himself with a hand on Chibs thigh, and made his way towards Juice, his intent clear in the set of his shoulders, in his swagger and Chibs leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and cradled his head between his forearms because this was just something he was not going to watch. But he couldn't stopper his ears and suddenly he stood and Juice had stopped dancing and was looking at him through the smoke haze, through the air thick with sex, across the room, over Tig's head and Chibs turned and staggered away from it all.
Back in the bathroom where earlier he'd skirted a dangerous moment with Juice fast and tight in his arms. Wasn't the right moment, wasn't the right time, but now, drunk as a lord, the party raging noisily down the hall, he closed his eyes and remembered the moment. Took it to another place. And behind him the door opened and shut, the light switch flicked to off, and he knew without turning around that it could only be Tig or Juice.
He had one hand on the wall behind the commode, leaning forward, holding himself upright while his other hand attempted to direct his piss into the bowl, and now he had a man behind him breathing like a freight train.
"Aye?" he growled.
"It's me, just me."
Juice then and the piss slowed in his dick. "I cannae aim in the dark, boy."
A mumbled reply and he could hear the thickened sound in Juice's own voice.
Chibs nodded. And as he began to shake himself dry he stepped sideways and into his own undoing. Juice was suddenly there, hands on his shoulders, pushing him, hard, against the wall. And Chibs let himself be pushed, had wanted this for so long it felt as though he was pulling the younger man with him. He let go of his cock, back hitting the wall, hands reaching for Juice. And the next few moments were fierce and frantic and brotherly comfort was a long forgotten gesture from hours before. Now both men were raw and open and bleeding onto one another. Tears and saliva, mouths crashing and splitting lips, all the fear washing clean into the unknown.
And then Juice was on his knees and Chibs was arching his back off the wall, his head rolling hard against the sheetrock. Juice's hands were all over his belly, the waistband of his jeans, opening the material, cupping him, pulling his cock out and then that mouth. Just there and Chibs moaned loud and in the dark Juice laughed a low sound of satisfaction. It was too immediate too fast, hands flat palmed on the wall, moaning Juice's name and he reached down and hauled him up by his armpits, turning him, pressing the length of his body hard against Juice's body, pressing him flat back against the wall. He was holding him with the pressure of his hips, he brought his hands up and caught Juice's face and began kissing him, deep slow sucking kisses that stilled the younger man. The slow grind of Chibs' hips, his hands holding Juice's face, his head, still, the cat-like pressing of himself into the other man, and all the while working Juice's mouth with his own lips. Then he let his hands drop and moved them between their bodies and found Juice's waistband and pushed the jeans down enough to free his cock. He grabbed at both their dicks, still kissing, still holding him with his chest, his shoulders, and with a practiced movement jacked Juice to completion, the tip of his tongue hooked behind Juice's front teeth. And Juice moaned his name into his mouth and as though signaled, Chibs was coming in ropes. He let his head drop, his face in the bend of Juice's throat.
Juice had his arms up around Chibs' neck, forearms heavy on his shoulders and Chibs moved his hands to the other man's hips and they rested for a long moment. The room was spinning a bit and he opened his eyes and rolled his forehead against Juice's and whispered something in such a strong vernacular that he didn't even recognize the words himself, it was nonsense, and he smiled at the slurred speech. For the briefest sober glimmer in his drunken darkness he bit his tongue to keep damning words from rolling off it.
And finally, reluctantly, Chibs let go and stepped back, tucking himself into his pants, pulling his jeans up and quickly zipping and buckling. Done with that job, he kept his head lowered, looking at his hands in the dim light sliding in under the door. He could hear Juice attending to himself and he suddenly wanted everything and not anything. To be in his own house alone, in his own bed with this man, to be riding lone wolf, and side by side high in the Sierras, to be seated at the bar of the clubhouse chasing whiskey shooters, Juice beside him or the stool empty, in Church sidelong glances reassuring himself, in the dark, in the light, asleep, awake, drunk, and sober. Empty and fully loaded.
In the dark of the bathroom, lust an actual taste on his tongue, feeling Juice without actually needing his hands on him to do it, reeling from the booze and the sex, Chibs understood his longing. It wasn't all or nothing; he wanted all of it and none of it. He was done with the alternatives, the this or the that. There was no extreme measure he was willing to take to force things.
He wasn't willing to take it because he was no longer willing to give it up.
Into the dark, he whispered gruffly, "C'mere, boy." And he opened his arms and waited, on the edge of it all and in his mind he simply hunkered down and sat and let his legs dangle with the abyss beckoning below.