He drifted back into his old routines in the village.
They weren't entirely the same as before the Day of the Dead, adapted to allow for the presence of Sands, but the differences were slight. He worked with the old men's guitars, shaping and sanding and treating the wood, moulding and teasing the quality of sound until the notes shimmered in air instead of only existing. He played for hours most days, proving the new guitars through the changing atmospherics or just exercising his own, familiar tones singing for him, and sometimes joining them himself, though his voice was too much out of practice now, and roughened. He settled into the old music and battled with the new melodies, untangling the possibilities and letting the song decide which was right.
Sometimes he was accompanied by a distinctively Sands-branded commentary; others he was wrapped in quiet, as Sands found his own places to be. El saw no reason to interfere with these choices - it had little effect on what he did, and Sands could do his thinking when and in whichever way worked best for him.
They always ended up back at the house in the evenings, with conversation or the lack of it mostly following the pattern of the day. He didn't mind which. He had rarely found silence awkward.
The routines brought him no more than the absence of void, but he didn't know how to go about making new ones.
He wondered if there was any hope he could be left to his peace this time. He didn't have that feeling from before, that knowledge through him that everything was wrong. But he had thought he was safe here once, and someone had still known, had given him to Sands.
"How much was I worth?" he asked. The house and Sands were still. The guitar filled its spaces, calm and melodic, old tunes familiar to him for so many years now. The evenings weren't yet warm enough for his hand to let him sit outside and play.
"Hmmm?" Sands sat in the armchair, with his back to him, and most people would have thought him half asleep.
"When you tracked me here. How much did that information cost you?"
Sands' voice was tapered when he next spoke, the deliberate shaping of words that gave away his interest. "Ah, that. I was wondering when you'd get around to asking." He tipped his head to one side, as if assessing, judging. "If it makes you feel any better, I killed the man who gave me the information."
He thought about that. It didn't make him feel better, no, beyond the vague relief of knowing that he would pass that information no further. But he certainly didn't feel bad about it. "It makes little difference now."
"Well, that makes you and the rest of the world who don't care too much either way. The fish probably liked him a lot more than anyone else ever did."
He ignored Sands' conversational sidetracking. "Are you going to tell me?"
Sands let the pause draw out before he gave him his answer. "Ten thousand."
"Dollars?"
"Well, ten thousand pesos won't buy you a sack of coffee beans." From this angle, El could barely see Sands' fingers tracing slow over the fabric of the chair. "It may interest you to know I thought someone with your skills was worth more. I offered fifty."
"Ten, fifty, what matters is that you could buy my life."
"Don't you think you're being just a touch dying swan here, El? I didn't want your life, I wanted you to do a job."
"And what happened to me afterwards wasn't important to you."
"Plan A involved me on a Brazilian beach with a bottle of tequila, so why would it be?"
Those answers would have made him angry once, but now they didn't stir him even as far as mild irritation. He'd known what he was going to hear; he expected no different from Sands.
He preferred it that he didn't try to lie to him.
"You know, of all things, I miss the booze," Sands said. "It would be nice just to have a drink or two sometime, but every time I think about it, I think about waking up with a gun to my head and it loses most of its appeal."
El huffed out air through his nose, amused. "Every time I look at you, I see you with a cigarette, and you say you're worried about staying alive?"
Sands shrugged. "I'm blind. If it ever comes to literally running for my life, I won't be kissing the dirt because of the state of my lungs."
El had no words to follow that.
Sands had no expectations of growing old, and it seemed no illusions about the situations he would and wouldn't survive. El imagined him sitting him in the house in Culiacán and working through all the practical outcomes within days of waking up, carefully assessing what he would have to do to hang onto his life for as long as he could and what wouldn't matter.
"How far do you trust me?" he asked.
He half expected a sharp retort, but Sands actually paused, thinking about it. "I don't really know," he said eventually. "To a point, I guess."
"It's fairly safe here," El said. "As safe as it can be anywhere. If you want to drink one night, I can stay awake."
Sands drew on his cigarette, held it back, and shook his head slowly as he exhaled, hair drifting forward along the plastic frame. "Somehow I don't think it would be quite the same."
He wasn't surprised. Even if Sands accepted that to briefly hand over control of his safety under these circumstances wasn't such a big thing, his instincts wouldn't let him do it. He would be left with that same crawling feeling of wrongness that so disturbed El.
"No," he agreed quietly. "It wouldn't." Nothing ever was.
Sometimes their conversations would fall into a topic where Sands became truly animated - a classic Corvette or a certain type of food, sometimes a movie, though El was hardly up to date on those - and for a moment he would seem entirely normal, a man who spoke with enthusiasm and flowing hands about something he admired. But his ideas were particular, rigid, and the wrong prompt or question from El triggered the immediate return of his usual flat disdain.
When El simply stayed quiet and let him talk, watched him smile without edges or double meanings, it never lasted long either.
Even here, almost secure in a town he knew perfectly, Sands couldn't sustain a projection of normality. And for every conversation that was peaceful, amusing, there was another sharp and bitter that dragged up some of the old, spiked hatred.
Sands didn't compromise, and he didn't change. Anything he perceived as pressure was countered by drawling sarcasm, or occasionally by that low, even-voiced calm when he became truly vicious. And he saw threat to his personal integrity where it wasn't ever intended.
He hadn't been like this when they had stayed before.
Before he had been too busy learning, his every second driven by teaching himself to survive, preparing himself for revenge. He had a focus, one he completely accepted and gave himself to.
Now he was simply bored. He wasn't a man who could exist in a 'little backwater hovel', and El wasn't sure why he was still here. He couldn't return to America, but there were many places in Central and South America a man could hide, and ways to cross borders that involved money instead of paperwork.
El stayed because Mexico was his country. There was nothing holding Sands.
He waited over a week before he asked, timing it to one of those rare, quiet moods of Sands' when he got something close to the truth.
Sands took a long drag from his cigarette. "I could ask you the same question, El," he said, smoke twisting outwards with his words. "Why do you keep on coming back to this particular rat-hole? I'm really not seeing the big appeal."
El shrugged. "I have friends here."
Sands half-swallowed a noise that still left his reaction perfectly clear. "Ah, yes, those would be the ones who come knocking on your door to visit so often."
"They used to visit sometimes." He had no need to add the rest, that they no longer came because of Sands, that he had told them to stay away.
Sands didn't seem to move, but his body language changed entirely, a shift in the tone of his muscles almost more than his voice. "If you really gave so much as a horse's balls about any of these backward peasants, you'd head on out and leave them to get on with their henceforth much more peaceful lives." He tilted his head just barely, edge of eyebrow glimpsed above glasses. "How many times have the men with automatic weapons followed you here again? I'm starting to lose count."
Three now. Including the time that Sands had sent them for him.
"It's my home," he said.
Sands had his elbow on the table, rolling the cigarette he held slow between his thumb and forefinger. "You know, there's an idea I remember from back in the States, one that I heard around a few times in various places. Something about how home isn't really a place, home is the people in it. And as I expect you've probably noticed, your people are gone." His face was expressionless, not even bothering with the mockery. "This isn't your home, El, it's your mausoleum, just waiting for you to die along with the rest of them."
Sometimes Sands' truth was acid and bitter; more so when it bore the stripped bones of reality within it.
He had nothing here. He knew that. But it didn't mean he wanted to leave. "Then I can have no home any more," he said. He had thought it would be painful but it was only flat, a statement of a truth he had known for too long. "So here is as good as anywhere else."
"Or anywhere else is as good as here," Sands switched instantly. "Somewhere nobody comes looking for El Mariachi." His voice dipped into liquid black, spreading oil-thick and slow. "Or maybe you like them to come looking. Maybe all you really want is the justification, a reason for you to go out and find some more people to kill."
His teeth pressed and scraped, rough, a pulse through the bone. "That is you, not me."
The corner of Sands' mouth twitched into something that might have been a smile, had it lasted. "Oh, no. I can find my own reasons, I don't need to wait around and have them handed to me."
It seemed to El that that was exactly what Sands was doing.
His eyes wandered over the familiarity of his kitchen; dark stains of years on the paintwork above the stove, battered wood low on the cupboards where Loída had bashed her toys into them while she played. His normality was here, to the extent that he could ever hold onto it. "If you are right about this place, if it is everything you say, then it's more reason for you not to stay."
Sands' cigarette had been burning through as they talked, column of grey ash lengthening unseen at his fingers, and it crumbled and spun to the floor with the tiny shiver of his hand. "There's a lot of places I could go. I just can't think of a reason why I'd want to go to any of them." He spoke the words casually, but not right, something almost desperate slanting through the chinks between.
El resolved not to use those odd moods to pry in future.
But he no longer lived with the suspicion that Sands might turn on him. He couldn't remember the last time Sands had referred to him with that drawling, sharp 'my friend' that meant anything but. He had called Ramírez that, but he no longer turned it on El.
He knew that he was still using Sands to avoid looking at the emptiness that made up most of his life. Sands gave him a focus – before, watching him adapt, now, simply trying to work out what the man was thinking. He suspected that Sands was to some degree using this place he despised to ignore that same echoing absence of anything else.
So he began to watch Sands with intent, to study and plan. It was a useful distraction for himself to keep the past from eating at his days, and he hoped to find Sands another spark now that revenge was gone.
He made no more guitars when Sands kept his distance; he watched.
Sands' own patterns in some ways weren't much changed. He sat in the square, listening, as he had before, but the obsessive edge was gone from it. It was a habit, an unthinking precaution, not a drive.
He was restless and shifting, tiny movements and alterations in muscle tone instead of disciplined stillness.
The children weren't so wary of Sands as they had once been, the exclusion zone around him still there, but shrunken, irregular. They ignored him now, their initial scared excitement at staring from a distance long since worn off.
It was hard to keep believing in the bogeyman, when he sat there day after day in full view in the sunshine and did nothing.
El wondered again about the boy at the house, what Sands could have done to generate that depth of loyalty from him. The interactions between the two of them still puzzled him - Sands had treated the child with near-constant contempt. Yet he had also told the family to leave, had been angry when the boy had almost said too much.
He shifted his attention to the children.
He watched their games, how they played, who organised and who followed, who started disputes and who calmed them, filtering everything he saw with his knowledge of their backgrounds and family history.
He focussed on an eleven-year-old girl whose mother had died several years before, leaving her playing a maternal role to three younger children. She was astonishingly mature for her age, a rare combination of practicality and caring, and most importantly she knew how to follow the instructions that mattered.
He talked to her one evening, sitting together in the gentle sunlight, fingers running through some of her favourite tunes as she named them. Many of the children liked to hear him play for them, but he couldn't bring himself to do it often.
"I wonder if you could help me with a problem I have," he said.
She looked up at him, bright, instant curiosity. "What? How?"
"I'm worried about Señor Sands," he told her. "He's very sad."
Her enormous eyes widened further. "Why is he sad?"
"Lots of reasons. Because he had to leave his home, and people in Mexico don't like him."
Sands wasn't going to be liked anywhere, and didn't want to be, but he would probably prefer it if he could live in civilisation without being shot at. "I think he gets lonely sometimes, and he might like someone besides me to talk to."
"You want me to talk to him?" She was quick as well as earnest; he couldn't have made a better choice.
"Would you, Elena?" he asked gently. "You know, sometimes he's not very nice. He gets angry because he's unhappy, and he says things he doesn't really mean." Flashing back to the house in Culiacán, and here he was again telling appalling lies to children because of Sands.
"I know," she said, quick smile full of crooked teeth. "Like when I tell Carlito he needs a bath, and he says he hates me, and I know he doesn't."
"A little bit like that," he said, smiling back, her impact irresistible and almost a pain. "So don't worry too much if he calls you names, okay? I'd like it if we could help him between us."
"Because he's your friend," she said, with all the seriousness of fact only someone her age could manage.
No, he wasn't, but he couldn't begin to explain what he was. "Yes. But right now there's just one person who's unhappy. It won't help if you end up sad too, so if he says anything you don't like, anything at all that upsets you, I want you to just walk away, do you see? Sometimes he's better left alone, so you can go back to your friends and forget about him. Will you promise me that, Elena?" Stress on her name telling her how important this was.
She nodded at him, her eyes huge and dedicated. "I promise."
He stalked Sands even more closely through the next day and a half, hovering back a hundred metres or so whenever Sands went anywhere without him.
Sands spent a lot of time walking now, following the roads further out of the town, guided by the border between flattened dirt and rougher soil and grass. He still walked fast and confident, but with his steps slightly altered, more of a slide than a lift, finding and avoiding the twigs that fell to the road.
El stood beneath the trees when he turned to come back, watching the tilt of his head as he tracked every sound from the birds, from the breeze, held his breathing stilled when he passed.
On the second day, Elena looked up from her winning hop in the ongoing game of rayuela, and spotted Sands sitting further along the square beneath one of the young trees. She scampered over and flopped down beside him, looked up at him with that vivid smile that had clawed at El's heart and Sands couldn't see. The scattered shadows of leaves swayed over her face, but he could see her lips moving fast, chattering away a greeting, and then more.
Sands didn't turn to her, face fixed level on the horizon, but he did talk in return.
El burned to know what was being said, but he would never get close enough to listen without Sands knowing he was there, and exactly why.
Several minutes passed, and some kind of rather broken conversation continued, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. Elena had lost her smile, more thoughtful now, and she was doing most of the talking. A final short comment from Sands, and she stood up and walked away, back to the other children, her face incredibly serious.
El watched her go, his anger curling deep with every one of her short steps.
Whatever Sands had said to her, he wanted to beat his brains from his skull for it.
Doing that wouldn't change his own fault in it.
She called aside some of the other children jumping the lines scratched in the dirt, pulling them into the quiet huddle that meant conspiracy. Sudden flash of his own childhood, himself and César with a gang of the other neighbourhood boys plotting out the most dubious schemes to make money. The ideas were always doomed, and it never stopped them.
He'd wanted so little then, but it had been more than he could have.
He could do no better in anything he tried, even now.
The tangle of dark hair broke apart, all the children turning to look across at Sands. Elena marched off towards him, her expression and her stride absolutely determined, the others straggling after her.
Oh.
He hadn't actually told her not to involve any of the other children; he'd thought she would understand that much.
This wasn't going to go well.
Elena dropped into her place beside Sands, the others forming a circle, sprawled around him in the dirt.
A few months ago, he would have had a pistol in his hand watching this.
He wished he knew what was going on.
He wasn't the only one. The parents of some of those children were watching too, staring over at Sands and then looking to him, as if he should know what was happening, what to do.
He avoided their eyes, fixed on the group by the tree.
He could see when Sands was talking, Elena and a couple of the others, but some of the children had their backs to him. He couldn't even tell now if the conversation was ongoing, or fractured and uncertain.
He wondered what Sands was saying. He would be teaching them some interesting language, if only incidentally.
He hoped he wasn't discussing life philosophies.
Sands lounged back against the tree, his legs stretching out with knees slightly bent, the image of his body completely relaxed. But his hands rested still on his thighs, missing the gestures and movements that went with simple conversation, and his head shifted a few degrees too far, a little too often. El knew that closer, he would catch the slight twitch at the edge of Sands' lips as he found the answer he expected, the brief deepening of the lines in his forehead as something caught his interest and he switched his angles.
His only consolation was that none of the children seemed obviously upset. Thoughtful, yes, maybe... confused.
It took longer than he would have guessed, and in the end it was Sands who stood and walked away.
El was already moving to follow him when he saw the madness of it, Sands too alert and interested, too suspecting right now for him to have a hope.
He went to the guitar stalls instead and sanded the wood, the quick, repetitive movements wearing down some of the burn of waiting, of wanting to be somewhere else.
It was inevitable that evening, the words coming between forkfuls of rice. "El, have you by any strange chance set the village brats on me? Those idiot peasants' bastards seem to have had a somewhat striking change of heart."
El shrugged in an obvious rustle of cloth, neutral tones practiced and ready. "They were asking about you. I said I didn't think you would shoot them."
"Oh, you could have said quite a bit more than that. You certainly did before." Sands was smiling faintly, a twitching curve of his lips that didn't settle. "It's interesting that you should have been so reticent this time."
He speared a piece of chicken too hard, high screech of tines. "They're harmless."
"Obviously."
It was impressive how much derision Sands could drawl through a single word, and he breathed slow to keep the humour from his voice. "So it doesn't matter if they talk to you."
"Harmless doesn't mean the little brats aren't annoying. There's not one of them could match the brains of a one-trip pack-mule." Sands flicked his head, a noise and a gesture highly suggestive of spitting, but didn't actually do it, which was good because it meant El didn't have to hit him. "Turn them loose in a city, and they'd be hooking for their fixes inside a week."
It wasn't so surprising.
Sands had talked with contempt all those months ago about a city and an existence that hardened the youngest of children to death and bloodshed. But it was that enforced practicality and sense for survival that had allowed Sands to tolerate the boy at all.
He still wasn't sure if Sands had no time for people who didn't meet his standards, or simply no time for people he couldn't see a way to use.
But the boy had been unharmed while Sands had expected to die.
"You should tell them to fuck off again, El," Sands went on, "because if you don't then I will, and I'm sure you'll find a nicer way to express it."
It was, in many ways, a relief.
He gave Elena a wooden doll he'd carved and jointed together with the help of one of the guitar makers, and explained to her that Señor Sands was still too sad to want to talk much. She understood, knowing too much of grief and its forms, and gave the doll to her sister.
Everything about her made him ache.
He didn't want to ache. He'd done that too much.
He gave up on people, and thought about getting Sands a dog.
He saw him approached by the dogs that wandered the town while he sat in the square sometimes, and he patted and scratched at them absently before they wandered off again. Maybe he didn't actively like dogs, but he didn't dislike them, and training one would eat through much of his time. And an animal wouldn't care about Sands' ever-unpleasant way of expressing himself either.
A dog would be unpredictable, though, would lie around in different places for Sands to trip over. He knew that blind people did keep dogs, so it must be possible to train them not to do that. But if Sands was to train it himself, the period between would be difficult.
In the end, it was the concept of blind people and dogs that stopped him. He could see in his mind the moment when Sands imagined he was giving him a dog to act as his eyes, and he thought he might have found the one thing that could still make Sands want to shoot him. And the dog.
His possibilities reduced to inanimate objects, he saw how little there was in his town.
He'd always known that, and it had never bothered him. He didn't need anything more than he had.
It was easier to live that way when the choices had been taken from you, but it was an attitude that would hang from Sands, drowning him, ill-fitting and shapeless as an old widow's dresses.
Skimming back over months of casual conversation and passing references left him with books as something missing from Sands' life now that could still be replaced.
Sands had been surprised by El's knowledge of books, which had made him smile for another small secret he still kept. He hadn't always been fond of books - growing up, they'd been something of an obligation, a very poor second to his music - until he'd married a woman who adored them. Carolina had wanted to bring literature to an entire town, but she had settled for one mariachi.
He could fix the lack of books in a single day - one trip to the big stores in Durango, and there would be audio books of every kind.
He didn't suggest it.
Books would fix nothing, band-aids to a brain-shot, the futility of it all dragging him into laughter, black and bitter.
His instincts were back with him, whispering through his nerves and his blood that something was coming.
He could hear it all around the edges, all the time, a ticking that itched in his head, shivered unbroken through his sleep to leave him unrested and sense-dazzled, inputs stretching crimson-vivid and inescapable as stress hormones drove to compensate.
It came from Sands.
He coiled across El's chairs in the evenings even as his body and limbs sprawled.
His gestures flared and exaggerated as his muscles strung tauter, subtle alterations to the outline of him as he walked, the way he sat. He twisted his cigarette ends into the base of the ashtray, crushing and shredding the fibres, every sensation of it close and too familiar, identical vibrations triggered all through El like sympathetic strings.
Sands still checked himself with the villagers, but barely. He held a semblance of politeness in Spanish when he spoke it - his usage perfect even as colloquial, though always with the undeniable American accent El had guessed at so many months before - but he knew exactly which people around him spoke English and how well. Watching Sands release a small amount of his frustrations by eloquently and smilingly insulting the people he lived among disturbed him. Not the petty exploitation of their ignorance, which was minor by the standards of such things, but as a symptom.
El had too much knowledge of what a bored Sands was capable of.
Sands had to leave, and soon.
El didn't say it.
He trailed him constantly, both of them Sands' walking dead, haunting the town and each other.
He watched him pace the town and the roof through the lengthening heat, watched him shift and quiver in tight, tiny motions. He watched the sweat swell at his hairline, trickle down over his temple to be lost in the dark plastic curving back to his ear, and saw pure nitroglycerine.
Sands would overhear, eventually, someone talking about his mariachi shadow, and El waited for the confrontation, breathless, eager.
Because the ticking was also within himself.
Something was coming, and before he had turned to hunting it, but now there was nothing to hunt.
There was only Sands, who should be gone.
He still played in the evenings, when Sands was there, within sight, within reach, eyes drawn over him as his fingers flowed and faltered over the strings, pressure catching at his hands.
"El, have you ever considered learning to think with your brain instead of your hands? It's like a fucking taiko band starts up the second you stop twanging."
Sands' face was empty, plaster-fixed as the words ended.
El wondered vaguely what taiko was, but he stilled the rhythm in his fingers, splaying them flat over the warmth of the wood. "The hands are only an outlet," he said. "If the hands need to think, you make mistakes. The guns, the music, it's the same thing." He slid his fingers back to the stretched wires, soft notes, uncaged from immobility.
"Then would you mind sticking a cork in your goddamn outlet? I can live with the guitar, but the drums are a bit too fucking much."
It was gone, the amused flicker that lived with the spite.
He had a better idea about taiko now, though.
"At least I give myself an outlet," he said. "I'd recommend it."
"Well, that's just what I need, advice from the great El Mariachi on how to waste my life hiding in the sewers of Mexico."
"You asked my advice once."
"And you think that's an open invitation? When I'm willing to declare myself dead and rejoice in the peasant lifestyle like you, you'll know because I'll borrow a needle and stitch on some chains."
He understood it, the loss of the humour, because he felt its change in himself, growing closer to lashing out in response to comments that would have amused him just weeks before. Frustration clawed through his patience, and it had never been strong in the beginning.
He stopped playing and laid the guitar on the table beside him.
Whatever was coming, this wasn't it.
He went to his bedroom, closed the door quietly. Laid his head back to the wood, solid against the curve of his skull.
Ran his hand down over his shirt to the cloth at his groin, stroking.
He did this more often now, his tensions easing out along with the memories.
So many memories of her over so few years; the confident, ever-teasing owner of the bookstore, the aggressively determined woman who had fled with him from both their pasts, unshaken, the one who had shed everything to make a life with him here in a town that held so little, and been happy to do it.
His hand slow over himself, his eyes closed, fabric ridged against his fingertips and Carolina's scent and smile so bright in his mind. The orange dress she'd worn that first day, the long tails that swayed around her legs as she walked, his lips on her skin as he opened the buttons over her breasts.
Buckle and zip parted, and only his own fingers and the tepid air to touch.
It wasn't the same. It wouldn't ever be anything like the same as having her there, having her hair flow around him as she shook her head and laughed. The hair she had cursed loud and often as untameable and he'd never seen as anything but beautiful.
He moved to stretch out over the bed, his face turning into the pillows as he slid his hand up along the line of hair to his stomach, pushing his shirt away. Any trace of her had been gone for so long, but he still used the same washing powder she'd always demanded, their bed still carrying something of the scent he knew from when they had shared it.
The press of the mattress against his ribs, the encircling rhythm of his fingers and the brush of his thumb, the sound of her giggling as noses bumped or her nail caught in his hair, his breath starting to choke as his hips and hand moved faster.
It didn't take long.
When he lay afterwards, still, the ticking through his head was distanced, deadened, though the effect didn't last.
He wiped himself on a tissue and walked out to the bathroom, washing his hands slowly, heated water and soft soap, the bubbles sucked away, spinning.
Sands was stretched lazily across the armchair, elbow resting on the arm as he smoked.
"You know, they say you'll go blind doing that. You must have heard, a good Catholic boy like you." He twitched his fingers deliberately, embers drifting into the ashtray below his hand. "You should go out and get yourself a girlfriend, then I can listen to my own personal porno flick instead."
He took his guitar from the table and leaned his hip against the edge, the temptation to laugh smooth and brittle. "I don't think that's likely."
"Come on, El, why not? It can't be that hard to pick up some cute young mule-brained piece of ass around here; you were pretty enough to manage that much the last time I looked, or could have been, scrubbed of a few layers of dust." He kinked one edge of his mouth into a not-smile. "And I hope you're not going to go off on some self-pity jag about how everybody dies, because that would be just too B-movie cliché."
His fingers rippled over the strings, chords to check tuning a habit though it had been much less than an hour. "I was thinking more that I share my house with a murderer with no morals. And sometimes men with guns come here for me, and people die." His hands wandered into a song, an old one he'd used to warm up for decades, movement with no thought. "The women I know don't seem to like those things."
Sands laughed, oddly real for the words that followed. "Forgive me, El, for not sharing your pain on this one. But since I am that freaky little sociopath, oh and not to mention the whole inconvenient eyes in a pickle jar thing, I think my chances of getting laid have to be a bit worse than yours."
"If I wanted to 'get laid' as you say, I could."
"What, no quick fucks for the great Mariachi?" Sands grinned wide, lilting the words so dramatically he was almost singing. "Too much romance in your soul?"
El stopped playing, not liking the way Sands' mockery tracked the rhythm, corrupted the sound. "That's not why." He'd had sex that way, knew it could be good. But that attitude belonged to the cities, not to small country towns where it could never be anonymous or easy. "I know all these people," he said. "I see them every day."
And he really wouldn't want to face Father Ríos when he heard he was sleeping with the women here on casual terms.
"Well, it's starting to sound like we're the both of us equally screwed, or more unfortunately, not." Sands gave him that even, balanced smile that missed innocence only because of the man who wore it. "Hell, maybe we should just jerk each other off. It's one step up from always doing it yourself."
He let the words roll out unstressed, casual, the opportunity there for El to brush it away, to ignore it the way he ignored Sands' overly-spiced threats.
Except it wasn't, something taut in the long sprawl of his body over the chair.
And El didn't.
He never touched Sands. Had never attempted to after that first panicked reaction at the boy's house. Except for when you drugged him and hit him, of course, his guilt insisted on whispering.
All these months with the man sharing his house, all the conversations wandering between viciously probing and genuinely comfortable, all the long practice sessions with Sands' pistols before they went after Montejo, and he allowed Sands a bullet-thick barrier around him that he never tested. He took absolute care not to let his hand reach for a plate when Sands did, curled his feet out of the way when it seemed Sands might brush against him as he walked past his chair.
It had never bothered him that he had to do these things; he had some hint in his imagination of just how paranoid and prone to over-reaction he might become, living under threat without his sight. It was simple caution.
The casual invitation to touch now rocked him, and not just because it was sexual.
Sands stretched himself out, crossing his feet at the ankles and leaning his head to one side to rest on his fist, relaxed and arrogant in the silence. "What's the matter, El? Too shocked even to hit me? I was really hoping for some kind of reaction, because just being ignored puts one dinger of a hollow-point into the old male ego."
He saw it all then. Where this was going if he didn't choose to stop it, where it had always been going. Other people moving things around him, the world shifting, and he was too busy thinking about the now to see it.
It was possible he hadn't wanted to look.
He saw it all now.
Or he thought it was all...
He turned and walked out.