To make up for the last stupid-short chapter, here is an incredibly long one. Enjoy.
I was on my way home in the morning after work with an arm-load of groceries. It had been a few weeks since Ray left. I was trying to go back to life as it was before he awoke, but it was hard. I knew it was bizarre, but I missed taking care of him. I missed seeing him, awake or asleep, on a daily basis. And there, in the emptiness of my life, he was waiting in the hall outside of my apartment, leaning against the wall, looking for all the world like I should be expecting him. He smiled that frustratingly self-satisfied smile and moved to help me with the groceries.
I handed them off to him, pleased and wary at the same time. I didn't let myself smile. Much. He was wearing what must have been the donated clothing. It was a fashion train-wreck, but he still looked like a prince, in jeans too long for him, with the cuffs rolled up and a belt keeping it on his hips, a worn sweatshirt in a distressing shade of green, and blue sneakers that must have been from the 70's. Still, he had a sense about him, a pride. I was impressed, watching him move. He looked so strong, considering how recently he had been a vegetable.
"What are you doing here?" I asked him. He followed me into my apartment. I looked around, as if seeing it for the first time. I wasn't proud of it.
"Homey." He commented, looking at the boxes and incompleteness of the place. I love sarcasm.
I pointed to the kitchen counter. I didn't have a table or chairs. "There is fine." He set them down and lingered there, glancing around curiously. "Ray, what are you doing here?" I finally asked. He smiled at me. As much as I enjoyed the sparks his smiles sent through me, I was quickly becoming conditioned to worry when I saw one.
He shrugged. "I'm supposed to be near you."
I sighed. "The angel thing again?"
He started taking groceries out of the bags and setting them on the counter. "I could lie to you, if you'd prefer." He offers with annoying cheer. I take the groceries out from in front of him, and finally grab the cans from his hands. He lets me take them. My fingers brush his as I do it.
"No, no, I just...I'm not really comfortable with this." I'm flushed, frustrated, aroused, and a little disturbed. The kitchen seems much too small for the two of us. He blinks at me as if he hasn't seen me before.
"Oh." He says, like he's finally understanding. He smiles and takes a step towards me, his hand covering mine on the counter. Even though I'm broader than him, certainly stronger, I feel trapped by the suddenness of the motion, the intensity of his gaze. I put a hand out against his chest, and he's warm through the sweatshirt.
"Ray." I say, licking my lips. "What are you doing?"
He smiles. "I just figured it out. Or part of it at least, why you're so touchy around me." I push him away, not wanting to hurt him, but needing more space. He steps back easily, looking puzzled. "You're upset." He comments. "You don't need to be. It's right." And he's so casual, so damn chipper.
I frowned. I felt anger rising through my stomach to my chest. "Look, I'm not the most social person. I didn't invite you here."
He laughs, but it's not unkind. "I think you're thinking of vampires? And I'm here because I'm meant to be."
I don't know what happens to me next. The anger in me swells to beyond the size that I can contain. I've never been in a fight. I've never hit anyone in my life. I clench my fist and I step forward and I punch him full-strength in the stomach. He doubles over, sinking to his knees on the floor, but there's no surprise on his face, no pain. "Was that meant to be?" and I'm screaming, but my voice seems far away.
He's so calm, and it's surreal how gentle his eyes are. He doesn't raise a hand to defend himself, he doesn't flinch away. Red films over my vision, and it's the memory of my brother's blood on my hands as he bled to death just close enough to touch, trapped with me in the mangled car, just too far away to help. I strike Ray again, kicking him as he tries to push himself up. I hear the wind go out of him, and his knees curl reflexively towards his midsection.
"And Rob's death? Was that meant to be?" and I'm kicking him again, and crying. I feel sick and dizzy and I'm clinging to the edge of the counter. Without aim, my shoe finds the sharp curve of his eyebrow, and there's blood in my memory and in my kitchen as I split his skin. "Tell me!" I demand, drawing back for another kick.
His eyes meet mine, and they're still gentle and full of pity. The drip of blood follows the curve of his cheekbone for a short distance before tracing down his pale cheek. I freeze. "Those were all choices, as far as I know." And he sounds so rational, and honest. "If I were kicking you, that would be predestined."
He tries to push himself to a sitting position again, and the horror of what I've done sinks into me. I've either beaten a mentally ill ex-patient of mine half to death, or I've assaulted a celestial being. In that moment I couldn't say which was more likely or evil. I want to throw up. I want to shoot myself. But there's no time for it. I'm suddenly aware that I'm easily strong enough to have done real damage.
"Oh god." I hear myself choking. "Oh god." I reach for his shoulder and he lets me touch him. "Lie down." I tell him, medical authority coming back into my voice. He sinks tiredly to the floor. I whip off my jacket and fold it under his head. "I need to call 911."
"It's okay." He tells me, reaching for my hand. I hesitate. Calling an EMT would mean the change of a lot of things in my life. Changes I probably deserved but didn't want. "I'm okay." And I half believe him, despite the fact that his eyebrow is bleeding in the way only a head-wound does, down his face to soak into the collar of his shirt.
He seems to be breathing fine, so broken ribs aren't an immediate concern. "I'm going to examine you." And it sounds ludicrous. "Tell me if anything hurts." I give him a napkin to hold on the eyebrow while I start the steady progression of touches that will tell me if anything is broken or ruptured.
The punch worried me most, but there was no swelling, no pressure. When I asked him if it hurt, all he would say was that it was tender. His eyes were sad, and the first hints of pain were lingering around them. His skin was so soft and warm under my fingers that it made me want to die all over again. I knelt above his head and gently manipulated his neck. I kicked his face. It boggled my mind. I couldn't imagine it, but I had done it. "Tender?"
"Some."
I eased his head back to the make-shift pillow and reached into a drawer and got out a kitchen knife. I didn't trust his ribs to stay put when I moved him. He watched me with complete faith as I opened his shirt from the hem to the bloody collar. He didn't flinch, but I did at the sight of the bruises. The right side of him was already darkening from just under his arm to his waist. I carefully and thoroughly checked for broken bones. It all seemed badly bruised, but nothing felt broken.
"I'll be right back." I warned him, and went into the living room, digging through never-unpacked boxes for the first-aid kit I used to carry in my trunk. One had been in Rob's trunk, too, for all the good it did.
When I get back to Ray, he's laying with his eyes closed, one hand protectively over his ribs, the other keeping pressure on his cut. I wet a towel, get a pair of butterfly-sutures out of the kit, and kneel by him again. He looks up at me, and I don't meet his eyes.
"I need to clean it and get it closed." He nods, and I gently move his hand aside. Fresh blood trickles out, and I clean it and get the closures on as fast and neat as I can. It looks good when I'm done, and I'm pleased by my work at least.
"I'll help you sit up, then I'm going to wrap your ribs. You'll be more comfortable that way." He nods again, and the strain is starting to show in small ways; the tightness of his lips, the thin line between his eyebrows. I get his ribs wrapped, then half-lift him to his feet. I try to help him without touching him, or at least not on the bruises. There's only one place for him to rest comfortably and warmly in the whole apartment, and that's my bed, so I take him there.
I remember the moments just before I struck him, and realize with a sharp new sense of loss that he had been flirting with me, making a pass at me in some strange sort of way. I help him into bed and cover him up. He looks so odd resting on non-hospital sheets.
"I am so sorry." I whisper, as he looks up at me. He catches my fingers in his, and I wont pull away.
"It was a choice," he says gently, "and a choice made cannot be unmade." Shame overwhelmed me. "But every moment is a chance to make a new choice, to accept the old choice and move forward. To move into being a better person." He releases my fingers. "I'm okay." He tells me again, and I know he doesn't mean that it makes what happened not real, or important. "I don't want any more doctors."
I nod, tight lipped. I felt cold, and dirty. I get him some aspirin, water, an ice-pack for his eye. I do all that I can, and then I cant bear to be there watching him hurt. "I'm going to go take a shower." I say, needing some excuse to leave the room. "Call me if you need me."
I go into the bathroom and turn on the shower. I strip naked, dropping my clothes on the floor. There's smears of blood on the sleeves of my shirt. I push it away out of sight. I step into the water and it's too hot, but I don't change it. My life seems to get heavier and heavier, and I sink to my knees, steam blurring my vision. I close my eyes and let the water stream over me, too overwhelmed to even think. Time passes. The water's heated at a communal boiler, and I've never known it to run out, so I don't even have that gauge to tell how long I've been there in the water.
The bathroom door opens and a spear of ice stabs through my chest. Fear that he needed me and I wasn't there...or that he reconsidered and called the police after I left him. "Ray?" I call, standing and opening the curtain.
I shouldn't have worried. He's standing in my bathroom, just the slightest curve in his otherwise proud posture betraying the pain he must be in. And he's naked except the elastic bandage I put around his ribs. He takes the stride towards the tub, and all I can do is stare. Another step brings him into the porcelain enclosure with me.
"Tell me to stop." He says, and it's a dare, a challenge. He takes a smaller step, and I give up ground to him. The tiled wall is like ice against my back. "Tell me to leave." He leans forward, and my throat refuses to let air out. My lips are parted, and he kisses them, strong, demanding, powerful. I yield myself to him. His fingers tangle in my hair, and with the slightest of motions he steps back, leaning against the shower wall under the towel rack and I move with him, kissing him back now. The last of the blood runs down his chest in a pink wash, thinner and thinner each second. The wrap around his ribs turns dark with the water.
He tips his head back and I kiss down his neck. I'm disoriented for a moment. It's like I'm fantasizing and having my fantasy fulfilled in the same moment. The tears of shame, sorrow, and joy blind me, and there is only the water and his body. He strokes my hair, and I sink to my knees. I take him in my mouth, and it's like the culmination of three years of foreplay.
I've had plenty of sex before this, and this is nothing like any sex I've ever known. I feel myself slipping away, dissolving in a sea of pleasure and desire. My entire body aches with the force of my erection. And nothing matters except pleasing him. He's pinned to the wall and I'm holding his hips between my hands, and my mouth is keeping him held there. He writhes in my grasp, crying out in ecstasy when some flick of my tongue or press of my lips overwhelms him with sensation. I know I'm not alone in my reaction.
One of his bare feet goes up on the corner of the tub, and I know I'm the only thing holding him up. I can reach behind him with one hand, and I do, pressing against him until he relaxes and my finger slips into his body. A ragged cry slips from between his lips, and his hips made small quick rocking motions against my mouth. I took him as deep as I could and then some, resisting the urge to choke on him.
With a harsh cry, he came, his hands holding me by my hair tight against him. Drown or swallow, so I swallowed, the thick rich essence of him pouring down my throat. He clenched reflexively around my finger. I realized I was still crying, or maybe crying anew. His fingers slowly relaxed their grip on my hair, and I felt him going weak in the knees as his strength left him. I gently disengaged, first my finger, then my mouth.
I held him by his hips, the side of my face resting against the flat of his stomach, and he gently stroked my hair.
"I love you." I whispered, unsure if he could hear me over the shower. My cock throbbed in time with my pulse, unsatisfied and demanding. I didn't care if he was crazy. I didn't care if he was a servant of the god who had taken my brother from me. His body in my arms made me feel whole, filled, in a way I hadn't in years, maybe not ever.
"I love you too." He whispered, long after I had assumed he hadn't heard me. He stood there, petting me gently, letting me hold him, for a long while. The maddening pressure of my desire slowly relaxed, enough that I could think clearly at least.
"Do you feel better?" he asked. I nodded a little and stood, making sure he had his balance before I stopped supporting him.
He smiled at me, touched my cheek. His face was starting to swell around the cut. "You need to put the ice back on that." I ignored the erection between my legs.
"Is it always like that?" he asked, once I had him wrapped in a new elastic bandage, covered in warm blankets and the ice-pack back on his eye. He seemed content to be naked between my sheets. I sure wasn't going to argue with him.
I slithered into bed beside him, careful to touch him gently. At his question, I shot him a puzzled look. "What do you mean?"
He smiled contentedly. "Mmm. Like that." Curiosity flickers across his features. "And how I did and you didn't."
I chuckled, rolling to face him, my chin at his shoulder. "You say that like you've never had a blowjob."
He shrugged. "I haven't." he hesitates, looking like he wants to add something.
"Never?" I recalculate his apparent age, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. Subtract the time he spent in the hospital. It's impossible to believe someone as beautiful as he was still virginal.
"I haven't had the um...equipment before this."
He watches me for my reaction. I watch me for my reaction too. No rise of anger, no sense of frustration. If he believes it, I can let him believe it. At least for today. Either way, I'm glad I was so giving to him. That I made his pleasure such a high priority.
"Then I'm very flattered to be your first, and no, it's not always like this. It's never been like this." I lightly touched his hair. Once I was allowed to be affectionate with him, I didn't want to stop.
"And the other part? The balance of pleasure?"
I shake my head. " Oh, that part. It shouldn't be that way every time, it can damage a relationship, but sleeping with a hard-on once wont kill me." He nodded, looking relaxed with the situation. "Besides, there's not much you can do in your condition. If there's another time that you want to do something for me...when you're feeling better, I wont say no."
"And you blame yourself for my condition." Sometimes he cut to the heart of a thing and there was no disputing it.
"I do." I replied. "I've never struck anyone in my whole life. I...I don't know what happened to me. I just felt so angry, and frightened. At...at Rob's funeral, everyone kept telling me that things happen for a reason, and God has a plan." I expected Ray to get tense as we talked about this, to shy away from me, but he didn't. He listened with quiet sincerity.
"I thought you were telling me the same thing. Maybe…" the ache of guilt returned, but softer this time. "I think maybe I believed you for a moment there. That there was a plan, and a planner, and tools…and I struck out against the tool."
I took the ice from where he held it against his cut and set it on a box by the bed. "Leave it off for five minutes." He nodded a little.
"Can I tell you what I know, what I believe about the way things are?" Ray asked me. He was cautious, but I think it was more worry about upsetting me than getting hit again.
I nodded.
He took a breath, centering his thoughts. "Okay. The Higher power created angels. I remember the moment of my creation. I know this is true. We were created without freewill, and there wasn't much for us to do except worship." He looks saddened. "But I guess being worshiped by angels is sort of like being told you're loved by a prostitute. So the Power made man, with free-will, and knew the love of their worship was real." Ray closes his eyes. "It hurt those of us who loved loyally. About a third rose up in rebellion. We thought we were so strong, at least inside, to make such a decision, to act on it, to suffer for it." The corner of his lips curve into a wry smile. "Except that it was impossible for us to rebel without will if the Power hadn't wanted us to. So clearly the rebellion was a farce, a way of putting the illusion of a two-sided battle on the board."
"Alone of us all, I was chosen to understand this. It makes existence very hard sometimes. I feel like the red checker on the chess board sometimes. I run, they hunt, the dance goes on."
I digested his words. "in the end, what's it all about, though? What's the point?" I rested my fingertips on his sternum, feeling him breathe, his heart beat.
"For me, or the higher power?"
"Either. Both."
"I can't claim to understand the Power. A lot of the time, it feels like a huge game of solitaire. The Celestial and the Fallen are pieces that are controlled. You humans are the random factors, choosing odd things at odd times, shaking up the predictability of the patterns."
I listened, fascinated in an abstract sort of way. I didn't exactly believe, but there was no point at which to break his theory apart.
"For myself, I have to believe the Power is working towards the greater good, that even the actions of the Fallen yield results that make more things better for more people than if they had not acted."
I frowned. "So your being with me is an act of charity meant to make the world better?"
He rolled over with a wince to face me. He cupped his hand gently around my cheek. "I believe my desire to be with you is guided by another hand, for another reason, but I feel only the affection, love and lust of it. My beliefs could be wrong. I could be just an amnesiac used car salesman from Jersey with delusions of grandeur, but my feelings would still be real, and true."
I chuckled at the thought of Ray selling used cars. If he could make a story like this seem almost plausible, it would be no stretch to get a buyer for that Pinto that's only been driven by a little old lady on Sundays.
"Does that help at all?"
I thought about it for a moment. "It does. In a lot of ways." He smiled, softly tired, and I realized how late the day was getting, and that I only had a few hours before my next shift. I ran my fingers through Ray's hair. It was getting long again, and this time I had no urge to trim it.
"You rest," I told him. "I'll stay awake and make sure you're okay."
"I am okay." He protested, but closed his eyes anyways. I watched him sleep for a long time, relaxing beside him as the sun went down. It was beautiful, the sunset shining like gold on his hair. I turned off my alarm clock before it could go off and wake him, and called in sick to work.