Jack stamped hard on his cigarette and stared at its little corpse on the floor of their apartment. He sat on the window seat—read, wide ledge—and stared out at the city. Somewhere in the city, someone was howling at the moon. It was probably some insane homeless person, hopped up on acid and junk but he closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the pane, wishing he was out in the fresh air. Somewhere out west like…New Mexico. Where was there in New Mexico? Albuquerque…that was where Bugs Bunny always made wrong turns. Santa Fe. Yeah. Him and David out there in the fresh hair and the sun and all of that space. He needed to get David away from the city. The scene was fucking them both up. David, especially. After Sarah died, he crashed and stopped eating. Jack had seen it as a coping method…until the pills came into the picture.
Jack glanced over at the bed where David lay curled up tightly in the blankets as if he were hiding like a little boy afraid of monsters to come creeping out from under the bed or out of the closets. Jack knew that there were no monsters in the apartment. At least, no real ones with claws and teeth and horns. There may be imaginary monsters with brown eyes and long brown hair—more like ghosts—that haunted blue-eyed boys and made them starve themselves. He remembered the night in that bed so long ago. Him, David and Sarah, locked up in a tight knot of naked limbs. Jack turned back to the window, pushing the memory away. But all of the other nights flooded into his mental eye like a low-budget porno flick. Jack rubbed his eyes tiredly. He didn't want to think about the past. That was the deal with the past. It had happened and nothing could change it. Dwelling and thinking about it just fucked you up more.
"Jack?" David rose up tiredly from the bed, eyes almost discernable in the dark.
He turned away from the window once more. "Hey, David. Go back to sleep."
He shook his head. "Why are you up?"
"Thinking," Jack shrugged.
"No, really," David smiled. "Why are you up?"
Even with the joke, David looked sick and tired and not at all like himself. Why couldn't they just get out of here? Away from ghost-monsters and the agency?
"Smoking," Jack indicated to the cigarette on the floor. "You need to get some sleep, Dave."
"I'm not tired," he replied like a little kid. "Besides, we don't have to go anywhere tomorrow. We can spend all day in bed."
He smiled again, this time it was coyly. He looked at the bed and then at Jack. Once again, this wasn't David. David never wanted to just fuck. He had been so reluctant that first night with the three of them. He had been so reluctant for any sex before and even more so afterwards. Jack always had to initiate and get far enough without any objections for it to happen.
"We have to go down to the agency," Jack explained. "Weasel wants to talk to us about hardcore again."
David's face darkened and he gripped the sheets.
"I'm not doing it," he practically spat.
"I know," Jack said. "But we have to tell the asshole that. Now, go back to sleep. We'll go out for lunch or something afterwards. You're getting too thin."
David ignored that comment and snailed up again in the sheets. Jack knew he should take his own advice and get some sleep but he was too nervous about David…as lame as that sounded. Part of him wanted to go into the bathroom, grab his diet pills and toss them right out of the window he was sitting by. Two things stopped him: 1) if David stopped taking those, he could move onto something worse and 2) those pills were pretty fucking expensive.
What Jack hated most about the agency—outside the obvious—was the fact that they had to walk by the pictures of Sarah when they came in. David always paused at the one…the one. The last one. The Sleeping Beauty shoot. David paused and looked at her. In the photo, Sarah had already been dead before the picture had been taken. He glanced at the camera boys who were sitting on crates, smoking and obviously not wanting to be there at seven thirty in the morning. Jack knew why he was looking. The taller, older camera boy—Morris—he had been the one in the shoot with Sarah. The one who had to kiss her. The one who noticed that she was oddly cold and not breathing. If it had affected him at all, he never showed it. His personality—shitty, though it was—hadn't changed. But he and his brother quit the hardcore shit after it. David turned back to the picture and folded his hands as if he were praying. Jack put a brief arm around him and went to find Weasel so he could tell him, again, that they weren't going to do the hardcore shit. That was when he heard it.
"Awww, Davey's sad," a sneering voice cooed.
Jack turned and saw just what he expected: the other camera boy, Oscar, walking around David, taunting him. He held his, heavy, black and silver camera in his hands, casually tossing it back and forth so it swung on the strap around his neck. Despite the fact that his brother was worse, Morris never taunted David about Sarah. Maybe because of the fact that he was the one who found her. Oscar, however, hadn't even been at the agency that day. And he knew about the three of them. A dangerous combination.
"Tell me, Davey," he taunted. "Do you miss your sister? Or do you just miss fucking her?"
Jack opened his mouth to say something, fists already clenching, but David beat him to it.
"I don't know," he said coldly. "It can't be the latter because we already have that, don't we? With you fucking your brother."
That was when Oscar whipped the camera into his face. David went down like a sack of bricks. There was a cut on his face. But Oscar wasn't finished. He jumped on him and started beating him with his camera.
"Take it back! Take it back!" he screamed but David was out cold.
Jack was over there in a second, ripping him off of David and shoving him to the cement floor. By that time, Morris had come over and was pulling him to his feet. The camera was in shambles: the film had popped out and a corner was covered in David's blood. Still, he clutched it like a sword.
"I'll fucking kill you!" Oscar yelled at the top of his lungs, pointing at David. "I'll fucking kill you, you fucking kike!"
That tore it. Jack elbowed him painfully right under the ribs.
"Don't say things you can't take back," he seethed in his face.
"Fuck off," Oscar spat in his face before he was successfully dragged off.
Then Jack had David to take care of. Meaning, he had to take him to the hospital. The hospital where there were no diet pills, no shoots and no memories tied to a bed about something that shouldn't have happened, not once, but again and again.