It was really difficult to give a damn what Phil did or didn't write to him with Nelson Oliver perched on top of him.
"Shh." Nelson placed a fingertip on Tim's lips. Tim felt a shock of sensation that began at the point where Nelson's finger touched his mouth, then crept down his spine and coalesced deep in his nuts. They shifted, and his dick felt heavy. Just from that touch. And probably the fact that someone as hot as Nelson was straddling him.
Nelson leaned in, put his mouth to Tim's ear, and said, "Just listen."
Tim nodded. What would he say? Please, don't stop? Or even worse, what he'd almost said to Javier earlier...that incriminating phrase was straining to bust out, too.
"Tim...you're a great guy."
Oh.
Uh oh.
"I like you," Nelson said. He pushed himself up and touched Tim's forehead in the dark, and traced the shape of his brow. "I do."
This isn't going to be pretty.
Tim held his breath...because breathing might result in begging Nelson not to say whatever he was building up to, and making an even bigger fool of himself. Maybe he projected that need desperately enough that Nelson somehow felt it, because instead of going on, of adding the ubiquitous "let's just be friends" line-which Phil hadn't even bothered to give lip service to-Nelson leaned in again, closed the narrow gap between them, and covered Tim's mouth with his.
Nelson's lips pried Tim's open effortlessly, and his tongue slid in, sure as always. It roved along the edges of his teeth now, snuck in for a taste of his tongue, exploring with a gentle touch. Tim felt his breath catch and willed it to just be normal and not give him away. Because nothing was more pathetic than going all sappy over a "thanks, but no thanks" type of goodbye kiss.
Nelson cupped Tim's jaw as he drew away from the languid kiss, and sighed to himself. Tim steeled himself for the words, hoping they'd be as gentle as the kiss had been, but knowing that no matter how carefully Nelson chose them, they'd still sting in the fresh wound that Phil's email had left behind. And Nelson said, "I'm not a total dick, you know. You and me, this is...." He paused, searched for a way to put it, then went on. "I was thinking you'd call me later, we could hang out and stuff. After whatever's going on out there...whatever this cluster-fuck outside is...sorts itself out. I mean, if you even want to. No pressure."
Tim replayed the words in his mind to make sure he'd heard what he thought he heard (the Nelson Oliver asking him out?) and he said, "Yeah." He even sounded normal. Probably.
"Okay." Nelson ran his fingers over the curve of Tim's shoulder, down the front of his shirt. Grazed his nipple-again, as if by accident. As if Nelson had sex-seeking magnets in his fingertips. Tim started getting hard-and Nelson obviously felt it. He smiled to himself and shifted his hips to settle himself more firmly on the bulge. "I have a rubber on me, y'know."
Tim's breath caught. "I don't think, without lube...."
"Which is where your first aid kit comes in. Antibacterial salve? That's a no-no, breaks down latex. Antibacterial cream, though...that'll work."
Nelson dug in the pocket of his flannel shirt and held up a small tube. Too dark to read it, but Tim was sure he knew what he was talking about. And also, Tim realized....
He'd been planning this.
Why? Beyond the fact that Nelson didn't know the meaning of the word inhibited. Not that Tim would ask. It would sound like he was fishing for a compliment. Still, he couldn't help but wonder.
Nelson tipped forward and pressed his whole body to Tim's, chest to chest, and said in his ear, "You dig it, right? Getting fucked? 'Cos I have it on good authority that the Voice of Reason is a wicked-nasty bottom boy."
Tim stiffened-his whole body, not just his dick. Which seemed immune to how mortified he felt.
"Don't worry, Javier didn't tell me. You couldn't waterboard a secret out of that guy. I saw one of your dirty chats-so hot." He caught Tim's earlobe between his teeth, raked it with delicious pressure, and then slipped his tongue inside, thrusting, wet...a promise of what he wanted to do with the antibacterial cream. Tim felt a damp spot form beside the fly of his jeans. When Nelson was done fucking Tim's ear with his tongue, his words were a cool tickle against the wetness he'd left behind. "And I felt your ass clenching around my finger when you shot down my throat."
Tim was careful not to whimper.
Nelson dismounted and offered Tim a hand up. Tim took it, too overtired and dazed to question it. As Nelson led him to the bathroom, he saw Randy asleep on the other couch. What if it had been Javier in the room with them? And anyway, what about Javier?
Would sleeping with Nelson, and only Nelson, amount to cheating on Javier?
Tim's head spun as Nelson pulled him into the bathroom, closed the door quietly, and locked it behind them. Nelson turned on the light. Now, bathed in the fluorescent brightness, he looked as worn out as Tim felt. Still sexy, though-it would take a lot more than hollow circles under the eyes and a few days of reddish-gold stubble to detract from his appeal. If anything, Nelson wore his wear-and-tear proudly, like a guitar player rolling off the bus after the last leg of a year-long tour.
He peeled off his shirts. The bruise he'd picked up across his collarbone at the riot was going green, and his tattoos were stark beneath the harsh bathroom light. "That whole master-slave thing never really floated my boat," he said. "It always seemed like a put-on to me...but watching you, watching him, I get it now. It's hotter than I thought it would be, probably 'cos you're both so real about it." He unbuttoned his fly and pushed down his jeans. "Even though that's your top kink, I won't be the one to order you around. It's not my thing."
No? Funny, how Nelson didn't realize that waking Tim up in the middle of the night, dragging him into the bathroom and waiting for him to suck his dick was the very same thing, just without words.
Tim sank to his knees, grasped Nelson's cock by the root, and took it into his mouth. The tang of long days without the comfort of a shower or a change of clothes spread over his tongue-and he liked it. A wicked-nasty bottom boy? He liked being called that, too.
Phil would never have invited Tim to suck him off without a scrupulous shower first. And he would never, ever have called him something so provocatively raunchy.
Fuck Phil.
Nelson settled his hands on Tim's head and stroked his hair while Tim jacked him off and sucked him, hand and mouth working while he listened for the change in Nelson's breathing, felt for the shift in his stance, the tension in his thighs, that told Tim what he liked. Nelson muttered encouragement under his breath while Tim worked his cock, a steady stream of "mm"s and "yeah"s. When Nelson grabbed Tim's hair, Tim almost worried he'd finish Nelson off sooner than either of them wanted it to happen, but instead Nelson told him, "I think I'd better sit down."
Tim flipped down the toilet seat and Nelson sat, knees splayed wide, and encouraged him to pick up exactly where he'd left off. The stiffness had flagged a bit while they repositioned, but that was nothing unusual. Hopefully. Because Nelson really was into this, wasn't he? He sounded like he was. "Your mouth is awesome. Yeah. Suck it just like that...."
Tim went deeper, adjusted the angle of his strokes, and began petting Nelson's balls with his other hand. There. Everything was fine. Nelson was probably just tired. Everyone was tired. Tim's performance had absolutely no bearing on....
"Hey, can you hit the light?"
Tim pulled off and considered slinking back into the other room.
"What's with the long face?" Nelson gave a small laugh. "Oh, I get it, you think I want it dark in here so I can pretend you're the straight guy with the cute ass who works over at the newsstand. Nothing like that, Mr. Reason, you're plenty hot...it's just the fluorescent light. The glare is killing me."
It was a bright light, as bathroom lights tended to be. Bright enough to shave by, to pick splinters out of fingers...or to notice that Nelson really didn't look so good. "Another migraine?"
"Wha-no, it can't be. Not this soon after my last pill. I'm still flush with happy-juice."
Tim looked hard at Nelson. It wasn't just unflattering lighting or the strain of a long day. He was definitely pale. "Maybe you should take another pill, just to be sure."
"Timmy-boy, do you know how much they cost? No, of course you don't. Why would you? Peritriptan is a premium medication. There are a couple of other types of migraine drugs on the market, and for most of the cases, they work. Not for me. But for enough of 'em that the creeps who make the rules can call the only meds that do me any good a patented designer drug that's considered to be in the same category as a tummy tuck or a coke habit. Medically unnecessary, not covered by any stripe of insurance, and each and every pill sets me back a cool two grand."
"Oh." That didn't seem right. How could insurance deny coverage on a medication if it was the only thing that gave him some relief? Tim was about to say as much, but then he noticed a pale blue blood vessel pulsing on Nelson's temple. "You've got a, um..." he gestured toward his own temple. "Thing."
"Fuck." Nelson stood, jeans around his ankles, and stumbled to the sink to look in the mirror. "It's too soon. I just took the last dose the day before yesterday."
"Is it dangerous to take more?"
"No, it's not dangerous, it's just...it doesn't make sense." Nelson clipped off the last word quickly and squeezed his eyes shut tight, cringing. "Unless I was exposed to some new kind of trigger. Who knows...I probably shouldn't have tried that cigar. Or the bourbon."
Tim pulled up Nelson's underwear and jeans-couldn't quite manage to button them, but it seemed more dignified than leaving them for him to trip on-and held him by the hips to steady him. "Maybe stress has something to do with it. But whatever caused it, I think you should take one."
"It's my last pill."
"So? It won't do you any good to save it. You need it now. We'll figure out a way to get another one later. A grant, or a loan, or something." Right, phones were down, riot squads were roaming the street, and Tim thought he could just track down a medical grant for a designer drug. Brilliant.
Nelson squeezed the edge of the sink. His knuckles went white. Tim's eyes kept going back to the mirror's reflection of the vein throbbing on his temple. "Where is it?"
"Pocket."
Tim slipped his hand into Nelson's jeans. The inside of the pocket was hot, and his thigh felt hard on the other side of the thin pocket fabric. His fingers closed on a couple of plasticky packets. A condom-the condom, which would have been plunging in and out of his ass if things had gone to plan-and a pill packaged in a single, massively-expensive dose. Nelson turned himself around to face Tim, and said, "Don't drop it."
"I won't." Tim's hands were steady. He tore open the packet and tipped the single pill into his palm. It was a small, white oblong. Two thousand dollars. You could get a really good server for two thousand dollars. Heck, his truck had only cost six. The price of three pills. No wonder Nelson's apartment was so crowded.
Nelson took the pill from Tim's hand and swallowed it. Tim pulled a paper cup from a dispenser on the wall and filled it with a few swallows of tap water. Nelson took it and drank. And then he sagged, pressing his face into Tim's shoulder.
Exactly like Javier had, earlier that day.
"When will it put you to sleep?"
"Soon enough. Especially since I'm hardly over the last high." Nelson turned his head and let his lips play over Tim's throat. Exactly like Javier had. "I'm sorry. I really did wanna rock your world."
Wanted to?
He was.
Chapter 25.
Some people don't recall their dreams. Nelson usually remembered. He dreamt about food more often than most people did, since he'd tasted so many things that the general population didn't know existed as anything other than chemical compounds and flavorings. He dreamt about drinking and smoking, and getting laid. He dreamt he could fly.
He'd heard many people's dreams involved being back in school again, facing a pop quiz that would comprise their entire grade-and they didn't know the answer to a single question.
Nelson usually aced pop quizzes. Even in dreams.
While Nelson was capable of dreaming when his serotonin-saturated brain reveled in its latest dose of Peritriptan, he found himself hanging, instead, on the verge of sleep, the knife-edge between conscious and subconscious, as Tim carted him into the office, tossed Javier off the fold-out sofa sleeper, and tucked him in beside Marianne. In this state of floaty, semi-high lucidity, Nelson found himself chewing through his problems of the day.
That thing with Tim had taken a weird turn, but considering the fact that talking it out with him wasn't an option at the moment, there was nothing to be done about it now.
The bizarre hydrogen-carbon chain that had been introduced into the existing manna formula was another matter. Nelson took a look around. He was lying in a field of alfalfa. The horizon stretched for miles and miles and miles in each direction. It was impossibly flat. It should have been green, but there was something off-kilter about it, discolored and red. The horizon listed to one side.
Was it possible to really connect with the field, to figure out what was wrong? He closed his eyes and reached toward the alfalfa with his mind, and when he opened his eyes again, he was naked. He'd heard that other people were embarrassed when they discovered their subconscious selves had no clothing to hide behind. Nelson felt no shame over being naked. He plucked a few hydrogen atoms from a chain around his biceps, and some carbon from the top of his thigh, and floated them in the air, allowing them to configure themselves the way the brain trust at Canaan Products had arranged them before they inserted the compound, secretly, into the existing manna supply.
Vaguely, he was aware that the pain in his head was excruciating. Hooray for serotonin.
Which was a hormone.
Well, duh. That was like saying "red" was a color.
The hydrogen-carbon chain lit up red, and revolved slowly as it hung there in front of Nelson's eyes. It was a lot prettier now in serotonin-land than it had been on paper. It wasn't a very long chain, either. Maybe he could have it tattooed around his ring finger. That'd be cool. And if he ever needed to go on a hoity-toity job interview, he could wear his dumb Columbia class ring over it. Unless he'd already sold it. Thanks to the serotonin, some real-world details were a little fuzzy.
The red hydrogen-carbon chain appeared around Nelson's finger. He held up his hand to admire it, but found it didn't look half as cool as he'd thought it would. Damn. It wouldn't be the first bad decision he'd ever made in his life, but by and large, he'd had pretty good luck with tattoos.
His finger began to throb. Not in the way a new tattoo itches and stings, either, but a sort of pulsing pain, like a migraine. He felt his temple pound sympathetically.
As if the hydrogen-carbon chain had something to do with his headache.
Could the chain be the trigger? Maybe so. He didn't eat much manna, usually. The things b ngoai cooked were a hell of a lot more interesting than those jellied slabs of alfalfa, plus it honored her to have that strange American boy chowing down beside her daughter and her grandson and appreciating the actual food she went through such great effort to procure and prepare. Lately, though, his intake of manna had been a lot higher than usual. He'd been eating manna all day long at the job fair, and not just any kind of manna. Canaan Products manna. Experimental Canaan Products manna.
Okay, so that explained the first headache, but what about the second one, so close on its heels? That was Park Avenue manna. The tattoo on his ring finger throbbed harder, and even started to pinch, as if it was cutting off the circulation.
How much did Nelson know about Park Avenue manna? Admittedly, not much. Maybe they were a subsidiary of Canaan. Or maybe they bought their raw manna from Canaan, where it was processed cheaply, on a large scale. Then they could simply flavor it with their bizarre attempt at umami, mark it up a few hundred percent, and put the Park Avenue name on it. The details were unimportant. What mattered was the trigger. And Nelson knew in his gut that he'd just polished off yet another damn plate of trigger.
Serotonin. Hormones. The hydrogen-carbon chain. Squeezing his finger. Blocking his circulation. Blocking. Hormone.
Blocking.
Blood burst from his throbbing fingertip. It sprayed into the air and hovered there in tiny globules that shifted into the shapes of the formulas he'd been hashing out all day-and he saw the hydrogen-carbon chain. And he saw how it could fit itself over a hormone receptor-a leptin receptor-and stop people from getting full.
And maybe, for people like Nelson, people with tweaky brains, it didn't do the serotonin receptors any favors, either.
Sleep was out of the question for Javier. The first time Nelson had drugged away his migraine, they'd been practically strangers. But now? Now, what were they? Co-conspirators? Friends?
Lovers?
Nelson said something in Vietnamese that sounded like, "umami," and poked his forefinger at the air above him as if he was trying to write on it. His eyes were half-open. Maybe he saw, maybe he didn't.
"That's creepy," Marianne said. She lay on one side of Nelson and Javier on the other. He almost reached out to stroke Nelson's hair, but then second-guessed the gesture. He'd ingrained it in himself not to show affection for other men in front of women. But Marianne wasn't poor Beatriz. He wouldn't be betraying her by touching Nelson.
He reached for Nelson's hair and stopped himself again. The migraine. It would be selfish of him to go making it worse just to worry at Nelson's blond hair like a superstitious villager stroking a charm vial.
He settled for resting his hand on Nelson's shoulder, which hardly seemed enough.
Nelson mumbled something else, and Marianne said, "Is he talking about carbon?"
Javier glanced down toward the allotrope tattoo on Nelson's hip he'd traced so tenderly with his tongue. Funny, how quickly things changed. Though he supposed if a smoldering hunk of shrapnel in the eye hadn't yet taught him that, nothing would.
"Maybe it's not so bad," Marianne said. "I mean, it's kind of like being drunk. Right?"
"Most people can choose whether they want to take a drink. And how many."
They'd found a decorative throw in the closet. It still smelled like the plastic bag it had been stored in. Marianne tucked it more securely around Nelson's shoulders. "I know. I just thought it might make us feel better to think of it like-"
Music startled them so suddenly that they both flinched away from Nelson in shock. It came from Nelson's pocket, a ringtone made up of a few distorted power chords. After a brief moment of disorientation, both Javier and Marianne yanked down the blanket and attempted to grab the phone. It was in the pocket on Javier's side, so he caught it. The name that showed on the readout was "Stinkfoot," but the small picture that popped up was the man from the morgue, Kevin-smiling, with a beer in his hand. So happy and relaxed Javier wouldn't have recognized him, but for his crooked glasses, and his wedding ring.
Javier took the call. "Kevin-it's Javier. We met...at your job, yesterday. With Nelson." He'd almost lost his cool with the word morgue on the tip of his tongue, and the thought that Kevin might very well be calling to tell them Tuyet's body was in the latest shipment.
"Where's Nelson?" Kevin said.
Javier's stomach sank. Kevin sounded like he was on the verge of losing it, too. "He got another migraine and he took his-"
"Oh God." A pause, in which Javier waited for Kevin to expand on whatever he meant to say. And then, "Oh God," again.