Chapter 36 #3
“I am, I am,” Dante insisted, his smile enormous.
“Listen.” He opened his mouth, held a long, high note, then did a grito that made Tadeo burst out laughing, so hard that he doubled over, almost kicking over the beer he’d set down.
“You laugh because you’re jealous.” Hiccuping, the soldier curled forward, then stumbled onto his feet.
“So, dance? If you want to dance, then dance.”
“What? With you? Like we’re gay?” Tadeo was still laughing, but he shook his head. “No. No, you didn’t let me finish. I can’t dance. I dance… like a girl. I dance like a girl.”
Dante reached, took him by the shirt. “Well, I’ll dance like a girl with you.”
‘I did. My dad would teach me to dance. He said he’d always wanted a daughter, so that he could dance with her on her 15th.
I wasn’t a daughter, but for a moment, I could make myself think so, to make my father happy.
He was a good man, and I thought he deserved it.
He deserved to have a child that he could love.
’ Trembling, Tadeo walked as Dante pulled him along, and when he breathed, he almost choked on a slight evening humidity.
When the soldier brought him into the gathering of a dozen or two, mostly middle-aged, dancing, he took Tadeo’s hand, and he spun around under it — like a woman would.
Dante pulled himself close, afterward, and Tadeo tripped only to latch onto Dante at the same time the soldier latched onto him.
‘You’re sweaty,’ Tadeo wanted to say, but he drew in trembling breaths instead, allowing the scent of Dante’s exhaustion and the liquor on his breath to lap at his face.
When they began to spin together to the music, Tadeo tried not to instinctively do what he’d learned as a child, to twirl or move his hips femininely.
Except, Dante did; he rolled his body, rolled his waist, bright and giggling drunkenly, and stared up at the taller man without any shame.
There might’ve been a hundred eyes on them; certainly, there were whispers, and some taunts and jeers.
But it was the end of the world, so no one did a thing about the two boys dancing away. The band played louder.
Abruptly, Tadeo tried to dip Dante, but they both stumbled, Tadeo nearly falling over the other’s frightened, cursing self before the two howled with laughter.
Wheezing, grinning, their hands found each other again, tighter, returned to holding their bodies together, then spinning.
Their surroundings blurred as they did, and in the haze, they could only see each other.
‘I’ve never danced with another guy,’ Dante wanted to say.
‘I wanted to. In the college.’ He’d laughed about it with Joana, but his heart painfully pumped with the memory of his soldier training.
The hazings where they’d mocked him for his erection while they fucked his mouth.
First time he’d fallen in love with a man.
‘But fucking was just about power to them.’ And humiliation.
‘I have it tough enough.’ They’d call him a faggot for enjoying it, and they’d called him every foul synonym for indigenous for existing.
‘I was happy to forget about it, find a girl one day, and feel like a man. But here we are, here you are.’
Tadeo was drunk enough not to think of the past, to not associate the musk of another man, or his touch, with anything horrible — briefly, briefly.
Briefly, he could act like being close to another man was so new to him.
In a way, it was. It wasn’t like before.
He trembled, and he was feeling the flush of his face trickle down to his core, pulsing.
For the first time maybe, arousal didn’t make his blood run cold or his breath ripped out of him like an intestine.
“Dante, I’m— I’m gonna fucking fall, güey—” Dante laughed again, and then without warning, he reached for Tadeo’s dark-brown hair.
Still dancing, still spinning to the upbeat old song, the two men crashed their lips together, mouths molding imperfectly, tilting, trying again, trying again, intent to force their bodies together despite destiny, body, God, blood.
Their teeth bashed, scraped on their already-cracked lips, and their eyes were half-shut, tired from all the liquor but refusing to sleep and think that, for any second, this kiss was a dream.
A sudden, high trumpet shocked them away from each other, and they both twisted their heads in the direction of the band, but it’d seemed unrelated — the musician having tripped over his feet briefly.
And so Tadeo and Dante, slow, dropped the heavy fear from their shoulders, turned back to each other, both their cheeks pinked.
Dante was quicker to recover; he laughed warmly, and then he took Tadeo’s arm, squeezed it.
“One more drink,” Dante whispered. “Just one.”
Tadeo swallowed shakily, but the ends of his lips were twitching upward, unsure of smiling.
“We’re already drunk enough, aren’t we?” But when Dante took off, Tadeo followed him.
He continued following even after the soldier reached yet another cooler, took out an ice-cold glass bottle, then ran off again.
“Where are you going?!” he called, but followed, followed.
‘It’s the least I can do after you followed me down to Hell.
’ As Dante swerved into a street, then hopped over a fence into an abandoned restaurant with outside seating, the soldier made his way over to a plastic table, plopped down onto it.
Tadeo reached him soon enough, and before he could even speak, Dante had already grabbed him by the throat, tugged him down into another kiss.
Grunting against the soldier’s mouth, Tadeo felt as Dante shoved the cold beer in between the tenting at their groins.
The alcohol’s wetness at the seam of his jeans sent a harsh shiver up Tadeo’s spine, and he rolled his face back, biting down a noise of startled pleasure.
But the snickering soldier simply took the chance to bring his mouth to the anti-Christ’s bared neck.
Pursing his lips, Dante suckled, then licked up Tadeo’s rosary beads.
Setting a fist down on the table, Tadeo felt his skin everywhere suddenly strain; the grotesque thing inside him — wrestling against his heart. “Dante, fuck, be careful—”
Dante grinned against his skin, then turned upwards to peck Tadeo’s mouth. “You think I’m scared?”
Tadeo murmured, “No, I think you’re stupid.” His breath caught and knotted, however, when Dante started rubbing the beer in between their mutual hardness. “I could kill you,” he tried to say, claws starting to dig into the table. “Fuck. Dante, for fuck’s sake—”
Dante kissed him again. “Mwah.” He removed the bottle, finally, set it on the table, and then reached for the button and zipper of Tadeo’s jeans.
“Relax.” And the anti-Christ tried, gaze flickering down to watch the soldier slide his hand into his pants, take hold of him.
He grimaced before he could stop it, and he felt an abrupt whip of presentness that told him he was sobering up.
“I can’t—” Tadeo whispered, but he set his forehead against Dante’s, panting and panting. His hands were trembling. “I can’t relax.” The soldier’s touch froze, and he glanced at the anti-Christ’s shutting eyes.
“Oh man,” said Dante, starting to hesitate. “Are you okay?”
‘Never.’ Tadeo knew he must look terrified, his breath unsteady, his eyes too wide, but he insisted, “I’m okay.
” Blindly, he reached, took the bottle that Dante had left on the table.
“I just need a little more of this.” Lifting it to his mouth, he downed it, welcoming the murky taste, hardly feeling the drops that rolled cold down his chin, his neck, to his white top.
Dante’s eyebrows curved. “Are you sure? I can stop. Or I can suck you off quick—”
“I’ve never— No one’s ever sucked me off.” ‘I want that and this,’ he wanted to say. ‘I want you more than anything.’
“Yeah, doesn’t seem like it,” Dante joked, and Tadeo laughed so weak that the soldier undoubtedly noticed it wasn’t the time for humor. “Here.” He brought his other hand to his own pants, and Tadeo watched the other man pull himself out, squeezed, pumped, then let out a strangled pleasure noise.
Setting the drink back down, Tadeo tried to crush the part of his mind that feared that noise.
‘Think of him,’ Tadeo urged himself. ‘Think of Dante.’ He’d tortured him.
He’d broken his hand. ‘Your moans remind me of your cries in pain.’ He kissed Dante now, and the soldier wrapped a hand around both their lengths.
Nervously, Tadeo drifted his clawed hand, put it over Dante’s just as he began stroking them both.
Hips aching, Tadeo gasped, raw and hoarse, but rolled them forward slowly, and Dante matched him with his own low moan.
They thrusted together, fucking each other steady.
Steady, grounding almost. And Tadeo’s eyes fluttered open a pinch, examining Dante — his squarer face, his darker hair, his nose, his long lashes, how his lips parted.
‘Fuck, I don’t want to be in love with you.
We shouldn’t do this.’ But his cries grew weaker, higher, and he just about whimpered at the swelling goodness, at the pulses of their cocks, the wet drag of skin.
The tips that kissed when they angled them right.
But no pain, no crying. Their bodies wept white sin, in just some minutes, and Tadeo hiccuped when the rush of it broke him open.
But no pain. No tears in his eyes. He wasn’t afraid, and nothing hurt.
Dante’s hold on their most delicate organs waned.
This thing really was delicate, like a flower that blooms toward the sun then wilts.
‘God’s imperfect design.’ All men with their posturing of strength, so weak between the legs.
Slumping, Tadeo dropped his own hand away from them and leaned over Dante, still on the table.
He hadn’t been asking for a hug, but the soldier lifted a hand, rubbed Tadeo’s back.
Pants for breath broke the silence, which was otherwise calm, comfortable.
“Are you,” Dante asked again, whispered, “okay?”
“Not really,” said Tadeo honestly, noting their stained jeans and shirts, as if stained with blood.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I should thank you. I never— I never told you how I died, Dante.” Tadeo pressed to Dante’s throat, warm and safe, though it shouldn’t be.
“It was soldiers. Like you. They raped me.” Rape — unambiguous; he wasn’t sure if he’d ever said it like that.
“And then they shot me in the head. But there’s something else— I—” He’d expected to choke up, to shatter from having kept it a secret for so long.
Dante said, “I saw a photo of your parents. Your grandfather recovered it from the rubble, and he showed it to me. Your parents and,” his voice growing delicate, “a daughter.”
Breath falling from his mouth, Tadeo felt a devastated smile forming slow. “It’s why I’ve always believed in God, Dante. I couldn’t understand why my body wasn’t mine. I felt like there was something so wrong with me that only God could be responsible.”