1984 Los Angeles, California

Your name is Dirk Strider, and today is your eighteenth birthday. At least, that's what you're telling the producer. It is an especially important birthday because it means you are finally old enough to consent to engaging in lewd sexual conduct, and even better, be filmed and paid for doing it. The contract is unsurprisingly imbalanced in the studio's favor, and you know that means anyone from Los Angeles to New York is liable to see your ass get reamed via VHS. For all you care, you could be signing away your soul. It's not like you have anything to lose.

You glance up as two men walk across the set in conversation, one naked. It's the one in the leather chest bondage and assless chaps that stops you in your tracks. He's like a sexy black Billy Idol on steroids. Wound tight, your eyes swivel from where they've settled on his chest and back to his face. His lips form words your ears don't hear. You stick your hand out on autopilot, staring past his focused gaze at the plaster wall behind him. His cheekbones are sculpted beneath skin smooth as dark chocolate and slicked with sweat.

"Equius Zahak," he says evenly, like you don't already know.

Three weeks ago flashes behind your eye like a broken mirror: fragments of a rap battle he schooled you in, the way his mouth felt around your cock. The last time you met Equius you were 21; hopefully he doesn't give away your lie. You refocus and get a good look at his face for what feels like the first time. His chin tilts downward almost immediately, dark blue eyes cast on tile. Breath caught in your throat, you almost choke through your make pretend introduction. Boy got you sprung.

"Dick Strider," you say, squeezing his palm. Equius coughs and it becomes clear that you've already made an ass of yourself. "Dirk Strider!" You can feel the blood coursing through your wrist as you pull away.

The naked dude standing beside Equius makes an awkward noise. "Um," he says, looking between the two of you.

The director breaks the two of you apart with a single glance, reminding you to save it for the screen. Someone fits you into an embarrassing costume, something young and stupid you expected but couldn't quite prepare for. It ends up on the floor almost immediately. Kissing is in the contract, someone reminds you with no discernable sympathy.

The scene itself is a catastrophe. Three takes in and you're still soft as a marshmallow. To be fair, you aren't used to playing bottom. Despite all your Rainbow Twink and My Little Fuckboy, you've always been the most turned on when you were doing the fucking. The producer tells you that it just means you haven't been fucked right. You've done a fair share of exploring on your own, but who are you to tell a porn grandaddy master like him? He says you aren't tall enough to top, but you'll never stop holding out for a last minute growth spurt.

"Cut!"

A couple more mistakes like this and they're going to cut you out entirely, pubescent looks and exotic orange eyes be damned. Equius eases back from where he was hovering over you, pressing you into a cheap mattress with tacky orange and white polka dot sheets. You inhale as desperately and discreetly as possible. Without your shades everything in the room appears unnaturally bright. Your eyes are dry and there's a headache blossoming between your temples.

"Fuck," you sigh, sitting up and resting your arms on your knees.

At least you aren't entirely naked. The g-string you're wearing is snug enough anyone in a fifty foot radius can probably see the vein in your flaccid dick. A heavy hand hovers above your shoulder.

"High stress situations often cause-"

You narrow your eyes and he quiets. "I know."

This isn't your first time at the rodeo, just your first time getting paid for it. Seconds play with the silence between you; people crossing the set like background noise, unnoticed and inconsequential. He drops to his knees in front of you, but he's still only a little below your eye level. You bounce nervously on the spring mattress. Equius inches forward, staring up at you. Your fingertips twitch at the look, you want to see him pushed so much further than this.

Everything is peaches and cream until he stretches across you, climbing back onto the bed to tower over your slighter frame. You're not stupid. You know you look like every fuckboy power fantasy: a natural blond barely brushing the age of consent with baby hair pubes. During the intro they made you tell the cameraman your "birthday" to further fetishize the angle that the day before today, your boypussy was illegal to stick it in.

Equius kisses you sloppy and hard, lips swallowing your own. His strong tongue dominates all the space in your mouth, wringing the first real rise from you when your hips twitch forward. You're playing up the virginal adolescent thing, because that's what sells. Whether or not you're an actual virgin? That's nobody's business but yours. His roaming hands halt above your navel.

"Have you ever-?"

You roll your eyes. "It's not like that," you tell him.

It's not like you can't take dick, is what you mean. His breath at your neck tickles you tense. The pressure in the room couldn't be cracked with a pickaxe; you can already feel your fingers cramping up. Equius keeps his head low, breathing heavily and nosing along your stomach.

"What, precisely, is it like?" Equius asks, voice barely above a whisper.

Are the mics even picking up on that? Are they supposed to? Don't people hate it when tops talk too much? You turn your head away and bury a fist in his dark hair.

"Let me up," you demand, fingers wrapped tight around one of the thick wrists caging you in.

"You want to..." he shudders, eyes fluttering shut as he rests his clothed, weighty erection against your thigh. "Ride me?"

"Slut wants to ride him," someone behind you announces loudly.

It makes you cringe but it's easy enough to ignore. Equius slides one arm under your shoulders and tightens his grip, rolling over and effortlessly pulling you on top of him. Your heart knocks into your chest, upside down, when he gropes you. He slips his hand through one of the legholes and squeezes your ass, meaty fingers crawling closer to your crack.

"Shit," you say, which the cameraman loves.

This actually feels really fucking good.

Equius lubes you up and spreads you apart like a virgin being touched for the very first time. The attention is nice, but mostly it's just a constant reminder of what's to come. He squeezes a second finger alongside the first and licks his way back into your mouth. He wiggles his fingers in your ass, heavy forearm warm against your back, pinning you to his chest as he stretches you out for his cock.

"Dirk," Equius says as he fingers you from behind. "Ride me."

The barely restrained control is kind of doing it for you. Maybe you could be a Vers. He cranes his neck to leave a shameless "please" in your ear, vibrating like a ripped car engine underneath you. Your muscles spasm as he lines himself up between your legs. You reach behind and take his cock in your hand and begin easing yourself down. The blunt tip breaches you with agonizing slowness, reshaping your insides to the dick opening you up.

Just when you think you can't take anymore, he sinks in deeper, nuzzling your balls with his pubes and bruising your hand in his grip. You try to pull yourself up and back down but it's nothing like what you can do alone in your bedroom, with nothing but silicone and an endless supply of porn. You're pathetically graceless. When you're finally settled on his rod he groans deep and bucks inside you.

"Giddyup," you say.

He snaps his hips like a mechanical bull, grunting as he plows you from below. The bed creaks, and the cameraman ducks down to get a better view of the penetration. Equius flips your positions when you aren't expecting it, pinning you with his frame and leaning down to lick along the length of your neck. Your nerves light up like electrical circuitry when he pulls your ankles over his shoulders and folds you in half in like a cheap lawn chair. You wheeze at the feeling of Equius finally bottoming out.

"Relax," he says, keeping your asshole spread as he thrusts inside you.

There's perspiration beading on his forehead and collecting at the tip of his chin. It breaks and falls against your tongue when you blink, bleary eyed and breathless. The overhead light on the ceiling is really starting to give you a headache. Equius boxes you in with his bulging biceps, shielding your vision from the light and your face from the over eager cameraman.

"Milk me," Equius gasps against your lips. "Milk me dry."

His jaw unhinges and thick, viscous liquid unloads like a waterfall. You don't know if milk is better or worse than what you expected. It's definitely whole fat, not skim or any of that watered down horseshit. It splashes against your face, eyelashes dewy with creamy raindrops, filling your nostrils and making it difficult to breathe. You never agreed to doing a facial.

You snap your mouth shut too slow, esophagus bruising under the pressure of the stream of liquid. Why are you hard? Your lungs inflate like well stretched balloons and your belly becomes distended and fat. Equius falls away while you're drowning, leaving you suspended in an ocean of white wrapped inside a black hole.

1999 Los Angeles, California

Someone is trying to break into your apartment. You hear the scream across the hallway, but your eyes won't open and you can't move. The deadbolt on the front door unlocks with a resounding click you could recognize in your sleep. The phone in the kitchen must be dangling by the cord, the piercing dial tone is reaching you from down the hallway in your bed. Then you hear the click and the familiar recording you took with Dave two weeks ago starts up.

"Hey, sup? Hello? Can you hear me? Hello? Nah, just fucking with you, chump. You've reached Bro-Stri and D-Bag. We're probably screening your call. Leave a message."

There's a long pause where you almost think the person on the other end of the line is going to hang up. In a perfect world, maybe. Your heartbeat is urgent and fast when the tape begins to roll.

"Dave?" says a high, female voice. "I should have known you were going to do this."

This is your unofficial introduction to Jade Harley, your little brother's future matrimonial dicksleeve. Halfway through the message you regain control of your eyelids, but by the time you seize out of bed everything has gone quiet. You can't be sure if that part was in real life, or in the dream. Sleeping has been like this on and off for as far back as you can remember (so about ten or eleven years old, maybe. Everything before fourth grade is a blur.)

The voice outside your bedroom continues. "So all I'm saying is, if you're going to send me really alarming emails after midnight, at least make sure you're sober when you do it, because…"

Sensation returns to your body a toe at a time, until you can snap your eyes open and reach for a weapon. Your room is still cloaked in darkness, hidden between two buildings and blackout blinds. You scan the room, clear it, and leap to the lightswitch before grabbing your sunglasses from the bedside table.

"This kind of stuff isn't a joke," she says. "Paranormal investigation is my job."

Would she just get off her high horse already? Paranormal investigation is less of a real job than anything you've heard to date, somewhere below McDonald's and working as one of Santa's elves. You silently twist the doorknob and peak through the sliver of space, blindingly bright compared to the dim glow from your room.

Fuck, your brain must have fried eggs in there. The racket wasn't the answering machine at all. There's a stranger standing in the cross-section between your living room and kitchen, having a heated conversation with your brother. Shit. There's a pile of katanas on the kitchen table. After two weeks of saying you'd do it, Dave finally took the hint and did it himself. Has that much time passed already?

"What about this situation have I not taken seriously?" Dave says, in an impressingly deadpan tone you taught him when he was still just a little appleseed.

Beside him is a girl an inch or so taller, rail thin, standing with her hand on her hip in front of the toaster oven. She's pointier than she is pretty, with big, round prescription glasses that keep sliding down the bridge of her pinched nose. She tucks a strand of jet black hair behind her ear and gives your brother a look you can decipher from here.

"Do I have to say it out loud?"

"Alright," Dave concedes. "Maybe the stuff about the clowns is a little far fetched, but that doesn't mean it's not true."

"So basically…" Her voice reminds you of biting into a piece of unripe honeydew. "You called me all the way out here with no evidence?"

Dave leans his elbow against the counter and bends one knee. "It depends on what you mean by evidence," he says salaciously.

You choose this exact moment to make your entrance, face full of fuck, feet full of warts. The girl in the long blue skirt turns to watch you cross the kitchen in nothing but your underwear. You consider grunting salutations but can't quite manage to muster up the effort when the time comes. When enough time passes that Dave can't bear the awkwardness, he coughs out an introduction.

"This is Jade," he says robotically. "Jade Harley." He turns to you, half automatic, half looking for guidance. "And this is my brother." He swallows hard. Your name doesn't belong in his mouth, and he knows it. "Dirk."

He fixes his bangs with a shake of his head, adjusts his shades, and shrugs, forcibly casual. Is he showing off for you, or her? And more to the point, why would it even matter?

"Bro," Dave says, but it isn't quite a question, so you don't bother answering.

The conversation stalls while you open the cabinet and rummage around for the Fruit Loops. Jade attempts a feeble wave when you open the fridge and reach for the plastic jug with a cow on it. Straight from the udder of life itself. You pour the milk into the bowl first, just to make a show of yourself.

"Is he okay?" Jade asks.

Your eyes might not work right but you can hear an ant stub its toe from two blocks down. Whatever you dreamed about last night left you with a craving for creamy white sustenance, like an orphaned baby calf. When you tilt the spout over the bowl nothing happens, but you can feel the weight of it unsticking inside the container. You knock the back and a chunk of coagulated milk plops into your bowl of cereal like the ending of a bad bukakke scene.

"This has never happened before," you joke. "Honest."

Jade chuckles, despite herself. "I told you the fridge was broken," Dave complains.

"No, you told me it was going to break. Last week. And now it's broken. So either you sabotaged it to make your hypothesis true by breaking it yourself, or you knew it was on it's way out to begin with. Anyone with eyes can tell it's been here since this apartment was erected."

"Erected," Dave repeats, giggling like a schoolgirl. "You got me," he says, pretending to be shot. It's way too early in the day for this shit. "This is all part of my elaborate scheme to get a fancier icebox."

You shove the jug of soured milk back into the fridge and scan the empty shelves for anything that isn't a condiment. Neither of you actually bought groceries, because you were saving the space for the swords your lackadaisical brother finally unpacked.

"Stop calling it an icebox," you grumble. "And go buy milk."

You fish a greasy credit card out from your tighty-whiteys and toss is to Dave. He catches it between two fingers and scrunches up his nose. Jade glances between the two of you, struggling to comprehend what just took place.

"So this is Harley?" You acknowledge at last, stuffing a handful of cereal in your mouth. "The chick from your wet dream?" Jade's eyebrows rise and her face hardens. "Are you two like, together now?" You dust off your hands so you can make use of actual air quotes. "An item."

"It wasn't a wet dream," Dave insists, but the damage is done. Jade is going to grill him about the details the entire way to the store. "Maybe it was a little damp," he admits sarcastically.

You shrug. "You've always been sleep cocking ever since I picked you up."

"Um…" Jade takes a deep breath. "What was that?"

"Sleepwalking, I said." You scratch your ass. "Ever since he was a kid. Lots of walking, not much talking."

"I was mute," Dave corrects spitefully. "Because you took me to that horrorterror circus and-"

"Yeah, you always were dramatic, even when you were little."

Dave signs "fuck you" and Jade laughs like she's following along. You leave the two of them standing in the kitchen and finish off the box of dry Fruit Loops alone in your room surrounded by puppets. Six hours later, and Dave still hasn't returned with the milk. You're starting to wonder if he ever will, or if he'll never come back just like your dad when he walked out on your mom all those years ago.

Kidding. You don't have that kind of a tragic backstory, and if you did, you wouldn't let it get to you. (Even more than that, you wouldn't conveniently reveal it in the narrative for the sake of anyone but yourself.) You settle on taking a shower but now you can't stop thinking about your nonexistent origin, standing under the water trying to focus on the grainy memories left in your head.

You open your mouth under the faucet water and your brain regurgitates last night's dream against the back of your skull. The thought of Equius' milky breath consumes you. Your feet end up twisted when you try to pull back the shower curtain, and you barely manage to stop an embarrassing fall by bracing yourself against the wall. You haven't thought about that day in years; you banished that part of your life to the shadowy place beyond the horizon line after the first time you held Dave in your arms.

Whatever happened to that guy anyway? There's no way Equius was his real name. You seal two waterproof bandaids over the warts on your feet, and sit down at your computer to do some digging. When you hit the spacebar with your thumbs there's more resistance than usual; the c key doesn't budge until you press harder, releasing a crunch. Some of the keys are slow to respond or sticky, leaving a string of nonsensical letters jumbled together in the address bar.

For a minute you think you've broken it, underestimated your own strength and cracked the part underneath. Then you spy it. A spider the size of a pinhead, blending in the darker part of the woodgrain on your desk. You smear it dead with your thumb and flip the keyboard upside while the internet boots up. You grab a spare from the bin under your desk and switch them out, reaching for the screwdriver on your keyring.

Bugs don't really bother you, but after a couple hours clicking links your paranoia gets the best of you, and you're convinced spiders have infested your electronics. The first search for Equius comes back hopeless, returning with pictures of horses or constellations, and once, a picture of a huge horse dick. None of this is what you're looking for. At least not now. You save the horse photo for later and dig through a list of old contacts from when you used to work in the industry.

Once the responses start trickling in he isn't all that hard to locate. Multiple people appear to have a variety links pertaining to the pornstar Equius Zahak. You're halfway through dismantling the keyboard when AOL finally loads one of them. It's an online state obituary listing, and right in the middle, between the last names Zagoorni and Zanbar, is Equius Zahak.

Deceased, since 1985.