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I. MELBOURNE/BEIJING
At FINA, by the pool, John stretched his arms across his chest and looked out at the eighteen hundred spectators filling the stands. His own face stared back at him from posters, T-shirts. A month before that, an interviewer from GQ described him as the rare sports personality capable of achieving mainstream celebrity. Gilman has the charm, the looks, the talent, and above all, the drive. A month later, he would make People’s 2006 Sexiest Man List.
At the next starting block over, France’s swimmer rotated his right arm. The diagonal text across his cap said SERGE in block letters.
John leaned across the space between them. It always put him in a good mood, the excitement before a race.
“Nervous?” he asked.
Serge’s arm froze in mid-air, his hand pointing up towards the ceiling. Through his goggles John could make out that wide-eyed look the younger swimmers always aimed at him.
“Yes.” The kid’s accent came through in one word. “Do you get nervous?”
“Of course I do,” John lied. Before a race it used to feel like everyone in the room already knew he was going to win, like all you had to do was see him to know it. He gestured vaguely. “Look at this place.”
The announcer began speaking over the tannoy system, and a few minutes later that was it - it was over. John won. One minute, fifty-three seconds and twenty-four milliseconds. Four full seconds between his time and Serge’s second-place finish.
Afterwards Serge pulled the divider separating their lanes down into the water.
He touched a hand to his chest. It was clear from the look in his eyes that he’d known not to anticipate any outcome other than this one. “C’est un honneur.”
In the aftermath of a win, John’s body didn’t have to do anything to stay afloat. The noise from the crowd, the sound of Coach Earv’s voice somewhere in the middle of it, whooping proudly, that humbled look on Serge’s face - all of it kept him buoyed.
John felt a surge of affection for him. For everyone. He put his hand over the one Serge had on the divider.
“Same here, buddy,” he said.
A year later, in the Beijing Water Cube, Serge beat him to gold by over four and a half seconds. John read this information on the giant arena scoreboard with everyone else in the world, then he calmly climbed out of the Olympic pool with the other swimmers, turned around, and tackled Serge back into the water, where he proceeded to shove the French fuck’s head under the surface as deeply as he could make it go for as long as he could hold it under.
Everything he had, he put into keeping Serge down there. Serge managed to bob up and suck in a few half-second spluttering breaths but John wrested him back under every time, bearing all his weight down on Serge’s head like an inflatable ball he could use to keep himself upright in the water. It lasted seconds, the smallest sliver of time, but over the years it’s stretched itself out in John’s head.
He can still picture how his hands looked holding Serge under. One gripping Serge’s left shoulder, one on the back of his head, fingers spread wide, curled around his shaved skull. The arch of his palm above the infinity symbol tattooed into the nape of Serge’s neck. He has dreams about the whole thing sometimes.
In dreams, no hands wrench him off of Serge’s back. No medics arrive, no security. Nobody else is there. It goes on and on. Serge keeps trying to fight him off. John gets to keep drowning him.
II. THE MEDAL
At the very last anger management session, John lingers in the church hall while the therapist stacks their chairs away. When he notices John standing there, watching him in silence, Hughie drops a chair to the floor with a loud clatter.
“John.” He rubs his palms on the legs of his jeans. “Uh. Hi.”
“Last session.” John clasps his hands behind his back. “Been quiet the last few weeks, don’t you think?”
Hughie looks as wary of him as ever. “You could say that.”
John looks around the miserable hall and thinks it’ll be nice never having to waste another hour of his time in here again. He turns back to Hughie, smiling with no teeth. And he’ll never have to talk to this little prick again, either.
His smile tightens, crinkling his nose. “Hey - you know who really used to liven this place up?”
Hughie must know because his face falls instantly.
“Butcher,” John says, hitting it hard.
Hughie rubs the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, he was extremely disruptive at all times.”
“So?” John raises his eyebrows and looks at him expectantly. “Any idea what happened with him?”
Hughie sighs. “Even if I did know where Butcher went - which I don’t, by the way, because why would he have told me anything when he had zero respect for me or what we’re trying to do here - but even if I did, you know I couldn’t tell you.” He looks at John unhappily. “I know you know that, John.”
It was a long-shot asking him. John knew that beforehand, but still, it pisses him off. Hughie pisses him off, with his little plastic fucking magenta folder tucked into one elbow and that exasperated expression he’s wearing. There’s no professional obligation for him to mask his dislike for John anymore. John can see it lining his whole face. He grits his teeth.
“I thought you might have something helpful to offer.” He holds up a finger. “This one time.”
“And how, exactly, would finding Butcher help you?”
Hughie’s voice is flat, challenging. The responding anger that flares through John is so absolute it clears every other thought from his head. He smiles again, hard, all teeth now.
He makes a head-first snap towards Hughie and almost collides with him; Hughie jerks back with huge eyes, panicked. He stumbles over the legs of the chair he dropped and falls squarely onto his ass. Sniveling little shit.
-
Three months ago at the Tap, that clusterfuck bar Butcher used to take him to, Butcher shoved him out the back door and into the alley, into the cold midnight air. He spun John around to face the wall and pressed up against him full-bodied, tipsy enough to have lost what little inhibitions he had sober, then he grunted into John’s ear and grinded against him through their clothes. Back then John still got turned on easily by how turned on he made Butcher, by the way Butcher pawed at him and rutted against him like he was desperate to get to fuck him even after months of having John on his cock a minimum of twice a week.
He rocked back against Butcher with his forearms firmly planted on the wall, the teal Italian wool of his coat rubbing up against flaking graffiti. Butcher had flipped the back of his coat up so there was one less layer between them while he rubbed himself against John’s ass. The whole thing was disgusting. It felt cheap, sleazy. It made John’s dick so hard he could barely think.
“You fucking animal,” he hissed under his breath, and Butcher jerked against him abruptly, tensed, and came.
He stifled a moan into the skin just behind John’s ear and held John close by the hips, thumbs hooked into his belt loops, grinding out his orgasm until he was done. His beard kept rasping against John’s neck and it kept making John shudder.
Minutes, all in all. Less than that.
“Fucking hell,” Butcher mumbled into his shoulder.
John aimed a tight smile back at him. He could feel Butcher’s unsteady breath on his cheek.
He pushed his ass back; Butcher made a disgruntled sound and angled his hips away. “Enjoy that? Some of us need more than a minute and a half and a little friction to get off.”
“Yeah?” Butcher breathed. His hands slid from John’s hips to his belt buckle and started unceremoniously yanking at it. “Since when?”
That was right after Butcher’s wife kicked him to the curb, during his month-long spree of fucking John, drinking too much, and getting the shit kicked out of him. The fun part of it, near the beginning. As it went on the whole thing got progressively more morbid until John debated calling their whole arrangement off.
At the tail end, he remembers coming off the living room treadmill and going to his bedroom to find Butcher sitting on the floor, half-dressed in his jeans with his back to the bottom of the bed, remembers thinking Butcher looked fucking ridiculous in his apartment, like a piece of furniture that was making the entire place look like shit just by being there.
“You run like you’re fucking demented,” Butcher told him.
John walked past him into the en-suite. “You need to leave.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Right fucking now.” He turned the shower on, knocking the power button hard, then came back into the bedroom to peel off his running clothes and drop them into the hamper. Butcher just sat there. John frowned at him in the mirror. “I’m serious. Go beg your wife to take you back or something. Do some of your private investigation bullshit. Get the fuck out.”
He caught his own reflection in the mirror and did a double-take at the attractive sheen of sweat on his body. Butcher watched him expressionlessly.
“I’ve been doing some investigating on you, y’know,” he said.
“Is that supposed to sound menacing? I was investigated. It was televised.”
“I’m not talking about Serge.”
Butcher rolled his head to the side and met his eyes.
“Or Stillwell’s husband,” he went on. “Or Maeve.”
Hearing those names come out of his mouth set John’s teeth on edge.
“You looked at my record. I knew that already,” he lied.
Maybe he’d suspected it once, but he hadn’t thought hard about it. There was nothing worse to most people than what he’d already unambiguously attempted to do in Beijing. Just what the fuck could a private investigator get access to, anyway? How was it legal for someone like Butcher to wield some kind of professional crowbar he could wrench people’s lives open with?
The corners of Butcher’s mouth pulled up. It was the first genuine looking anything on his face in weeks, that smug little gotcha smile. It cleared some of the glassiness from his eyes.
“This wasn’t on your record.” His voice rumbled with self-satisfaction. “This, I had to do some real digging around for.”
It seemed briefly possible that everything that had ever happened between them to lead to this moment was just some elaborate, humiliating ploy Butcher had concocted to trap him into this exact conversation. John’s throat went tight.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said automatically.
The conversation was bringing Butcher back to life. He rose from his slumped position against the bed, chest leading the movement, and came up onto his knees in front of John.
“Look at that face. Like a fuckin’ robot shutting down.” He tutted, shaking his head. “That’s a tell.”
There were two fresh nicks through his left eyebrow from whatever latest fight he'd thrown himself into and John thought about twisting one open on his thumbnail. At his sides his hands curled into fists.
The smile faded from Butcher’s face. “It made everything make sense, in a fucked kind of way. How far you’ll let me go.” He stared up at John unreadably. “You want punished. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re talking about,” John said through his teeth.
Butcher slid a hand around John’s wrist and pressed his thumb to the old scar beneath John’s palm. It was an unsettlingly gentle touch. John went rigid at it.
“Yeah,” Butcher said, “you do.”
The sound of the shower spray from the next room dissolved. John’s ears rang. The muscles by his mouth worked - he could feel them, twitching.
Slowly, Butcher leaned towards him, eyes trained on his. Closer and closer. John watched him, fists tightening unsteadily, mind turning clear. All the ways he’d ever fleetingly thought of hurting Butcher came back to him at once, and then Butcher bent his head to put his warm, wet mouth on the arch of John’s hipbone and suck the sweat on his skin.
John’s breath hitched, stomach tensing. He watched from above, half-lidded, as Butcher mapped an open-mouthed trail from his hip to his inner thigh, his hands coming up to grab John by the ass and curl around his twitching cock.
The contrast from their conversation to this made his head foggy. Butcher’s bottom teeth grazed a sensitive, fluttering muscle in his thigh and jolted some awareness back into him, and then he remembered to anticipate the same shit Butcher always liked pulling when he had his mouth near his cock - he’d make John wait, he’d make him desperate. Humiliate him. He’d bring John so fucking close in his mouth only to pull off of his cock and tell him in a gleeful rasp that if he wanted to get off, he’d have to confess what he’d done like a good fucking boy.
If he tried anything, John would hurt him as painfully as he could. He knew this with complete certainty as he watched the top of Butcher’s head moving down his body.
Butcher looked up and met his eyes. He took John into his mouth, that easy.
John swallowed down every sound that tried to make its way out of him. He kept his hands balled up at his sides, kept waiting for the inevitable turn it would take. He was achingly hard, close to coming, when Butcher pulled off his cock, just like John fucking knew he would.
Butcher kept a hand tight around the base of John’s leaking erection. John couldn’t see his face. He could just hear him panting. Butcher was going to say, look how wet you’re getting for me. Look how bad you fucking want it. Go on, then. Ask me nicely. And then John was going break his fucking nose.
Instead, Butcher leaned in and slid his mouth down over his cock again. As he bobbed his head back up he used the flat of his tongue to lap John’s precome up in one long, dragging sweep, and after, John heard the wet click his throat made when he swallowed it all down.
He closed his eyes, mouth falling open, fingers twitching at his sides. He almost came right fucking then.
His hips worked; Butcher let it happen, despite a firmly established rule against it. John tested another rule, uncurling his hands and sliding them into Butcher’s unruly hair, and Butcher made a gravelly, agreeable sound in his throat that felt so good around his cock John’s eyes rolled back.
There were no rules. This wasn’t a game, it wasn’t a punishment. This was all reward.
John moaned. He pulled Butcher down on his cock and fucked into his mouth and Butcher squeezed his ass in both hands and kept letting him, and all too soon he was coming, groaning, toes curling on the hardwood. He reached down hastily between them to slide his hand to Butcher’s neck and cup his Adam’s apple, to feel the mechanical workings of Butcher’s throat as he swallowed around him again and again. He had to grip Butcher’s hair, his shoulder, to stay upright, lightheaded.
His eyes drifted open to meet his own gaze in the mirror. He saw with a brief hyper-clarity: himself doubled-over Butcher’s kneeling body and his fist in Butcher’s hair; Butcher on his knees with his dick hard between his legs. Sex between them had never looked like that before.
Butcher left right after, even though John was just then finding himself to be amenable to his company again. He didn’t even let John return the favor first. He pulled on his shirt and his coat and headed for the door, slamming it shut behind him.
It was another three days before John realized his world-record medal was missing from the box stashed under his bed. By then, Butcher was long fucking gone.
III. SERGE/EARV
Serge writes an autobiography. John hears about it from his lawyer first - it did well in France, she says, and the English translation is on its way.
“I thought it would be good for you to know. It brings public attention back to - to what happened.”
Remembering Serge is still out there in the world puts him in an awful fucking mood. “Can I sue him or something?”
Ashley’s reception is shit. “Well, no. Not unless he lied about you in it.”
John doesn’t need to read Serge’s autobiography to know he probably didn’t lie about him in it. “Shouldn’t he have notified me before he wrote a fucking book I’m in? Doesn’t he need some kind of permission?”
“Technically that’s more of a courtesy thing than a legal necessity,” Ashley says, tinnily.
“So what the fuck is the purpose of this fucking phone call, Ashley?”
Whatever the answer is gets lost in a fuzz of audio. John hangs up on her by hurling his phone at the wall hard enough to crack the screen and the plaster.
He can feel it. He’s drawing closer to the edge of something. Knowing it’s happening has never been enough to stop him from heading towards it.
-
The last time he saw Serge was at Earving’s funeral in 2015.
In the days after Earv’s death, John felt much more forgiving towards him than he’d been in the years leading up to it. After mom left, when his father had refused to have him back on the estate, he’d lived in Earv’s cramped guest room for a time. After that, when John was half-blind from the eye infection that went on to destroy his athletic career, Earv had taken him to the optometrist. In the parking lot outside the hospital, he’d been the one to put the drops in John’s livid red left eye.
Earv had held the side of his face in his hand and guided his head back, his thumb gently pulling on John’s lower eyelid. He’d known without John saying anything, because John was not capable of saying anything then, that John was terrified of what it meant to need medicine, to need it urgently.
While Earv put the drops in, John stared at the framed photo that hung from Earv’s rearview mirror next to a set of plastic white rosary beads. Earv’s son on a bike with stabilizers, grinning, holding his hands up over his head. John had hated that picture growing up until he found out Earv’s son was dead. He’d been dead for years before they even met.
Looking at it then he felt an old mix of jealousy and resentment building in his throat. He glared at Earv’s kid’s face, vicious with pain, and thought, I’ve known him twice as long as you ever fucking will, and then Earv patted his cheek and told him, softly, “All good, J,” and John felt a guilt he’d never come close to again.
That moment is what he thought of as he watched Earv’s coffin lower into the ground. He swiped at his eye with his fingers, turning to check if anyone in the sparse group around him heard his giveaway sniff.
Serge was standing two feet away from him.
John’s grief twisted immediately into something else. He stood stock-still until the service was over, looking straight ahead. Remembered how his palm had once fit to the curve of Serge’s empty fucking skull.
The few other attendees drifted away gradually to leave him and Serge and a rock with Earv’s name on it. John turned his head incrementally and looked at Serge from the corner of his eye. Even if he hadn’t already heard Serge had a drug problem, that brief look would have made it clear - Serge looked gaunt and strange, agitated.
“What in God’s fucking name do you think you’re doing here?” John asked him.
Serge’s face twitched, nostrils wrinkling, lips pressing. He hadn’t looked John’s way yet. “Paying my respects.”
“You didn’t know him. You have no right.”
“Earving has been very kind to me. He sent me a letter before he passed, apologizing.”
John stared. “For what?”
Serge snapped around to look at him. Somehow his eyes were set deeper into his face than they’d been ten years ago, and his pupils were blown out, huge. John recoiled from him in disgust.
“For you,” Serge hissed. “John’s not well, he said. Sick. Sad. Your father did this and that. Burned you, hit you. Have some understanding, he said.” Serge looked John up and down and shook his head, his mouth curled. “I’ve tried. But I had a bastard for a father, too,” he leaned in until there was an inch between their faces, “and I’m not a fucking monster.”
John shoved his forehead against Serge’s without hesitation and sneered, “Just a fuckin’ junkie.”
Serge’s face twitched again, every little muscle under his waxen skin. His eyes turned pale. All his bravado faded in real time - one pushback, that was all it took, and he crumbled.
John looked around them. The cemetery was silent. Empty. He took Serge’s jacket collar in his hands.
“You came to see me,” he said, walking Serge backwards, “not Earving. You knew I’d be here. Of course I’d fucking be here.” He shoved Serge up against an obelisk headstone; Serge hit it with a jolt, eyes fluttering. How could a grown man look this afraid? John hadn’t even fucking hurt him yet. “Admit it. Admit it, you chickenshit fuck.”
Serge was struggling to get a breath in. John could hear every tiny aborted inhale he chuffed in and back out. He didn’t even try to push John away, to fight back at all. He stood with his hands pinned to his sides and looked at John with shiny, huge eyes.
John let him go. Serge slid down the gravestone and collapsed to the ground, gasping, clutching his chest.
He was so pathetic John couldn’t look at him. Instead he looked out at a headstone in the distance with an angel on it and muttered uncomfortably to himself, “Jesus Christ.”
“I thought maybe I wouldn’t be afraid of you anymore,” Serge wheezed, voice straining.
John glanced down at him. Serge’s head was bowed.
“I have dreams about what you did to me. I wake up and I can’t breathe.” He met John’s eyes, brows drawn, agonized looking. “Sometimes I’m hard.”
John looked at the bones trying to push their way out of his face. The cheap patchwork of tattoos covering his hands and neck. How hard his chest was still working. The way Serge looked that first time they met in Melbourne resurfaced in his mind, unbidden - some kid with a buzzcut and a slight gap between his front teeth. John blinked it away again.
“I guess we both enjoyed it, then,” he said.
Serge let out a sharp laugh. Then his face crumpled and he dropped his head into his hands.
John left him like that. He’d had enough. He doubts this anecdote made it into Serge’s book.
IV. BUTCHER
The morning Serge’s book is released, John stands at the living room window and stares out at the city, cold cup of coffee in hand, until someone knocks on the door.
His head instantly swivels around to face it. It brings him back to reality, how close a sound it is. He waits. The knock comes again, this time obnoxiously loud. John knows, immediately, who it is.
Butcher stands in the hallway, elbows resting on the sides of John’s doorway. He’s wearing the same ratty coat as always, the same unlaced boots, another fucking stupid shirt. The same as when he left, except his face - no new scars, for once, but he’s pale and exhausted looking. He’s lost weight. John can see it.
“You look like shit.” John looks him up and down appraisingly, pleased with what he finds. “You look ill.”
Butcher's voice is scratchy, low. “Gonna let me in or not?”
John sticks his head out of the doorway, into Butcher’s breathing space. Behind the door he grips the handle hard enough to hurt.
“Give it to me in the exact condition you took it in, right fucking now,” he says, “or I’ll make you eat your own crooked fucking teeth.”
“I have it,” Butcher says, and a tightness in John’s stomach eases. Butcher must pick up on it. He nods his head towards the apartment again. “In there.”
Maybe he thinks they’re still going to fuck after this. Maybe they will - John could use the distraction. He’d prefer fighting, but he’ll take fucking.
He lowers his voice. “You accused me of something serious and then you fucking disappeared.”
Butcher just snorts, bemused. “What, you think I went to the police?” He looks past John’s shoulder and says, “Knocking off your old man is about the only thing you’ve done I have any respect for.”
John hisses, “Can you shut the fuck up?” and lets him in.
Butcher drifts inside and starts strolling through the place, hands in his pockets, no sense of fucking urgency.
“Where is it? What the fuck were you doing with it?”
Butcher observes the chip in the wall where John hurled his phone, head tilted. “I needed it for a bit.”
“You needed it?”
“Collateral. Money.” He wanders over to John’s couch and sits down. “To go home.”
“Right, of course. You have to steal from me because you have nothing of value.”
Butcher’s nostrils flare. John expects him to take the bait, to get mean. He wants him to. Butcher just sniffs and casts his eyes down.
He reaches into his coat and pulls a ziplock bag out of his inside pocket, then he slides it open and pulls out John’s world-record gold by the ribbon. He sits it on the coffee table in front of him, eyes flicking up to John’s face. He must be able to see all the time that John’s spent imagining throttling him with it over the last few months in his expression.
John picks up his medal. It looks untarnished from the time away, but still, the stain of being in someone’s else’s possession is something he can feel when he holds it in his hand.
His fingers clench around it, the gold rim biting into his palm. His mind clears. There’s always been something purifying about how absolute his anger can feel.
He grips the medal as tightly as he can and strikes Butcher across the face with it, a hard, satisfying connection he feels all the way up his arm.
Butcher’s head flies back with it. He grunts on impact - the same pitiful animal sound John’s heard him make before when he was too close to coming to shut himself up.
He stays frozen in place, twisted to the side. The edge of the medal has cleaved through the skin of his temple. Bright red blood oozes from the wound from a trickle into a steady rush.
His eyes flick up to John’s. Even bleeding, there’s no give to him - he won’t fight back. John frowns down at him, annoyed. There’s barely anything here to take pleasure in hurting.
He tugs the collar of Butcher’s shirt between his fingers and uses it to wipe away the smeared blood on his medal, cleaning it meticulously, wordlessly, as he looks down into Butcher’s eyes. Butcher stares back at him. Blood drips from his beard and hits the leg of his jeans with a soft thump.
The medal gleams; John lets his ruined collar go. One of Butcher’s eyes twitches when his blood trails into his lashes.
“Don’t drip on my fucking carpet on your way out,” John tells him.
V. FLIP TURN
John expects the book to change something. All that changes is he starts seeing it all the fucking time like it’s following him around.
Everywhere it’s that same grainy black and white photo of Serge’s face in close-up, goggles on, with the meticulously shaped stubble that makes him look queer and that little fucking hoop earring to top it off. FLIP TURN. It’s been out for three weeks and it’s been on the New York Times Bestseller list for two of them - low on it, but still. Serge’s been promoting it on late night talk shows. Mark fucking Spitz wrote the blurb for the front cover.
John puts on his sunglasses and baseball cap - a look Butcher once called ‘Clark Cunt.’ In the privacy of a locked disabled bathroom at Barnes and Noble he flicks through the book, scanning every page for his name. It’s mostly just Serge’s upbringing, his father, his eventual substance abuse problems. Three hundred pages of blah-fucking-blah, boo-fucking-hoo. What an egotistical prick, John thinks, flicking past another dozen pages.
He lands on a white page with a photo of himself on it and stops. It’s him and Serge in the FINA pool, their hands stacked on top of each other over the pool divider. They’re grinning at each other. John squints at it, head tilted. He goes back a few pages and finds his name in the opening paragraph of chapter ten.
It says: I didn’t think I could beat Gilman until I did it.
John slams the book shut.
He holds the book between his hands for a moment, mind blank, then throws it into the toilet where it lands with a small splash.
He tears off two squares of toilet paper to use as a protective cover for his fingertips and holds down the flusher for as long as it can flush. Afterwards, he fixes his hair in the rusting mirror over the sink. He goes to leave and pauses, hand on the lock, to glance down into the toilet bowl.
Serge’s gray face looks back up at him. The book’s plastic jacket is shiny with water, one drop gleaming over his left eye. John flushes one more time on his way out for good measure.
-
He can’t get his head quiet, can’t get it under control. When he shows up at Butcher’s door, Butcher looks wholly unsurprised to find him standing there.
There's a slitted red line across Butcher’s temple from where John hit him a few weeks ago. It’s worth the trip just to see it.
Butcher doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t tell John to do anything. He just pushes the door all the way open and walks back inside. John enters, warily. He leans on Butcher’s paper-laden desk and observes Butcher as he pours two glasses of whiskey in the tiny kitchenette. He comes over and offers one out to John.
John’s eyes flick from the glass back to Butcher. He frowns.
Butcher still looks tired, not quite himself. “You want it, or not?”
“I want the only thing I come to this shithole for.” John digs his nails into the underside of the desk. He’s restless. All his frustration has no place to fucking go. “I don’t want to sit in here and throw back fucking whiskey with you, Jesus.”
“Suit yourself,” Butcher says, shrugging, and he finishes both glasses.
John is disgusted by him, by the smell of whiskey, by his apartment. He’s disgusted by himself for needing this. “I want the one fucking thing you’re good for.”
“Oh, right.” Butcher nods and smears whiskey from his chin onto the back of his hand. “Here we go. Want me to get angry? Hit you? Bend you over the desk? That it?”
“Yes,” John snaps. “Fucking obviously.”
Butcher gives him a weary once-over.
“I can’t be fucked,” he says.
John tries to figure out if it’s some kind of play. If Butcher is trying to get him to beg all on his own, without being told to. It takes a moment to realize that’s not the case.
“What the hell happened to you?” John asks, frowning.
Butcher leans on the desk, one hand still wrapped around one of the empty glasses. He rubs his eyes.
John rolls his eyes and gets up, muttering. “Christ, you’re a sad sack.”
On his way out he sees Serge’s gray face on the floor next to Butcher's bed and stops dead. Butcher comes up behind him.
“I’ll save you the read,” he says. “He goes to rehab, gets clean. Marries some nice paralympic runner from Japan. Does a bunch of charity shit. Surprisingly happy ending, all things considered.”
John stares at Serge’s upside down face, jaw tight. Then he turns to Butcher.
He reaches out, hand spread, and clenches his fingers around Butcher’s throat. Butcher’s eyes widen briefly, but that’s all the response gives. That’s all he does. John digs his thumb hard into the pulsing skin over an artery in his neck.
Color rushes to his face. John tightens his hold and steps closer, watching. Blood is stagnating under Butcher’s skin. It’s finding no direction to go in, it’s stopping. Butcher makes a strained sound, his Adam’s apple nudging into the unmoving arch of John’s hand. John can’t read the look on his face.
“You’d really do it,” Butcher rasps, “wouldn’t you?”
He’s choking, starting to shake with it. Doing nothing to stop it.
John lets him go as if repelled.
“You’re not worth it,” he says. He means it.
Butcher hunches over and rubs his throat, red-faced, gasping. He looks up at John with his eyes half shut and mouth hanging open. They’re both obviously hard.
In vague flashes John imagines Butcher bent over the desk, split open on his cock, grunting, moaning. Imagines Butcher wanting the thing he’d once told John in no uncertain terms was never going to happen - he’d pinned John down on the four thousand dollar rug in his apartment and straddled his hips and John had rocked up against the curve of his ass helplessly, unable to stop himself. That’s not how this works, Butcher told him, low-voiced, as pleased as ever to refuse John what he wanted.
He steps closer, closing the gap between them. He slides his hand between their bodies to squeeze Butcher’s dick tightly enough to make his teeth grit.
“What did you need it for, anyway?” John works the button of Butcher’s jeans open. “What was so fucking important that you had to crawl under my fucking bed to steal it from me?”
He drags the zipper down over the swell of Butcher’s cock. Butcher’s eyes flutter.
His voice is tight. “I gave it back.”
“No.” John shakes his head. Not this smart-ass shit, not this time.
Inspiration strikes him. He leans in and inches the tip of his nose along the length of Butcher’s with condescending affection, and Butcher’s whole face convulses with anger. John half-expects him to start swinging - he wouldn’t mind if he did, honestly - but he just gives John that scowling look, jaw set. A damp spot in his briefs begins to form against John’s palm. John is hit by a wave of intense pleasure, coiling in his stomach.
He keeps their noses touching. This close Butcher is just two black eyes and old scars. “Don’t be fucking cute with me. Answer the question.”
“My dad was dying,” Butcher grits out. “I went to see him.”
John’s had his hands all over Butcher’s ripped apart back - it’s like Jackson fucking Pollock abused him as a kid. “Because you love him so much, and you just had to say goodbye?”
“Because I wanted to do it myself.” And then, unable to meet John’s eyes, Butcher admits, “Like you did.”
John blinks. “And did you?”
Butcher looks at the floor, mouth pressed. His nostrils twitch.
“Couldn’t,” he confesses, quietly.
John is struck with genuine disappointment. “Oh.”
He isn’t even sure how Butcher knows about what he did. The entire year after he killed his father he waited for something to happen - and it never came. Nobody cared. All his life his father had made himself sound like the most important man in the country, and then he croaked and nobody gave enough of a shit to figure out how it happened. He’d gone off to die in their vacation house in the middle of nowhere and told his ex-wife, John’s ex-mom, to meet him there to be with him at the end. She hadn’t gone, of course. John - who had not been invited to the house, who only found out about his dad’s cancer through the family doctor on accident - had gone instead. He slipped inside one night and crushed dozens and dozens of his father’s pain pills into a glass of water, and when his dad woke up the next morning John put the glass to his mouth and held his nose shut until he drank every drop. Anything he coughed out, John made him drink back up.
Afterwards, everyone accepted that he was sick and old and he wanted out. That wasn’t the case - he’d fought John, as much as his broken old body could, up until the point that he started to die. Then he’d just stared up at John and had no choice but to let it happen to him.
Butcher squeezes his eyes shut. “Nothing to lose, and I come face to face with that cunt - and I don’t do anything."
He opens his eyes. Looks at John with disgust and admiration in equal measure.
The last time John saw him before he disappeared, Butcher told him he knew exactly what he’d done to his father and then he got on his knees and moaned around John’s dick. That hadn’t been part of some con. That had been driven by something real, by need.
The heat in his stomach spreads. John stops working Butcher’s cock through his underwear to palm at his own erection instead in long, indulgent strokes.
He lifts his other hand to cup the side of Butcher’s face and thumbs, delicately, across his cheekbone; Butcher scowls like he’s been struck. He looks like he wants to kill him for it. Now John knows he doesn’t have it in him. He never did.
He strokes Butcher’s face more gently than he knows Butcher can bear, then he tilts his head to the side and opens his mouth wide to rake his teeth along Butcher’s lips, biting across tender skin, until his top and bottom teeth click together at Butcher’s cupid’s bow, a punctuating little sound.
“Get on your knees,” John tells him, mouth curling, “and I’ll give you what you need.”
-
A month into fucking each other, back in Butcher’s dingy studio apartment, John blinked his eyes open slowly and frowned at the feeling of someone else pressed up against him, someone else’s skin sticking to his own with cool sweat. It took a moment to put the pieces together. It was Butcher, curled around his back, asleep, his arm thrown over John’s waist. His dick was soft against the back of John’s thigh - back then he didn’t even know Butcher’s dick could get soft. It was like having a total stranger on him. He was suddenly next to stale husband version of the guy who, the night before, had made John beg to get his throat fucked.
Disconcerted, he shifted away. He nudged Butcher’s arm off of him with his elbow and it hit the mattress limply. Butcher woke up with an inhale.
He must have realized what he’d done from how far he was on the wrong side of the bed, or the heat John’s body had left behind on him. He rolled back to his own side, putting enough distance between them to fit a third person.
“Thought you were someone else,” he mumbled after a moment.
“I figured.”
It was pitch black outside when John glanced at the apartment’s one small window. He lay there for another few minutes, wide awake, knowing Butcher was wide awake next to him. Then he got up to leave.
VI. EPILOGUE
He found out Coach Earving’s son was dead, and later that day, his father found out he’d then invited Earv to come to the estate for the holidays. He’d called Earv personally and told him there wasn’t space for him, then he’d ignored John until late that night when one of the maids shook John awake and told him Mister Gilman wanted to speak to him.
His father was drinking outside, alone. The only light came from the pool - it spilled blue over everything. Neon white lines were rippling across his face, distorting it in the dark.
When he saw John standing by the back doors he heaved a sigh and lit up a cigar, and when John asked if this was about Earving, his father did what he always did at the mention of Coach’s name - spat a laugh and shook his head.
“Stop.” The light of his cigar illuminated his face. John saw the deep lines by his mouth. The revulsion his father saved just for him. “Stop with this Uncle Earv shit. He’s not your fuckin’ uncle and you’re not five years old, John.”
“He doesn’t have any family,” John tried. It used to make his stomach ache to think of Earv living alone.
“That doesn’t make him yours.”
His father observed him for a while in silence, smoking. John clenched and unclenched his hands at his sides, tried and failed to make himself look back at him.
“I know,” his father said. “I know what you’re doing, kid.”
His father would always say that to him when he talked about Coach Earv. At thirteen John still didn’t understand what it meant. He didn’t know what it was that he was doing. As he got older he figured out that when his father said to him in that low voice, like it was a threat, I know what you’re doing, Johnny, he meant, you and your coach are trying to make me jealous - and by then John did know what he was doing, and he knew if his father said that, it was working.
“Come here,” his father said.
His rough voice, that whiskey-laced vacant look in his eyes. John recognised them both. He stood locked in place.
His father watched him and took one last long drag of his cigar.
The smoke drifted across his face. “Now, John.”
John went to him, bare feet on the damp pool tiles. His father didn’t look away from his face, didn’t blink, didn’t falter as he picked up John’s hand, turned it palm up, and ground the burning end of his cigar out on John’s skinny wrist until its every last ember went out.