CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do with them,” Carver said, his brow knit.
“I’ll have to get over it, I guess. At least I have something to actually get over.
But I just….” He exhaled, then cleared his throat.
“I don’t know if they realize, uh… how much I thought, you know, that I was the problem.
And it turns out it was something where — yeah, I was the problem, but it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing I could have done.
” He paused. “Maybe I’m not making sense. ”
“You’re making sense.”
“And now I’m going back over it like, oh, maybe I could have — you know.”
“Could have what?”
Carver shrugged, then said in a light little tone, “Been easier.”
“Come on, dude. Come on.”
“They felt guilty, though. I didn’t realize they felt guilty. Maybe I could have killed them with kindness instead. Closed the gap. Maybe they would have felt bad for me.”
“Carv, look, I remember the shit you said after you hurt your shoulder, it was as real as you ever got with me about this, you said you —”
“I was on a lot of Percocet,” Carver interrupted.
“— you said you hoped they would feel bad. You were furious and you wanted them to feel guilty, and they didn’t.
Or at least they pretended not to.” Scott studied his face in profile as he appeared to absorb this.
“And I remember that made you even angrier, and then you kind of said, you know, fuck it, whatever, fuck them — at least for a little while.”
This little while, which began in October of their junior year, was when the two of them began smoking weed and fooling around. Carver stopped smoking weed second semester, out of concern for his grades, but they did not stop fooling around.
Carver gave Scott a warm sidelong glance as if he too was recalling this. “I was furious?”
“You were. You were really pissed.”
Scott could still remember the hot gush of Carver’s anger.
He was angry at his sling, angry at the pain he was in, angry about the sympathy and questions.
He hid it well but vented it to friends in private, Scott especially; Scott was overwhelmed by this anger but found it beautiful in its clarity.
He was a dumb teenage boy who longed to write music about the extremes of human emotion despite his youthful lack of experience with them, and here was one of them, an actually justified hatred of authority which he could study up close.
He never really knew what to say, but this didn’t seem to be an issue. Carver just wanted someone to listen, and Scott was surprised by how willing he was. He watched Carver excoriate his family as if watching lightning strike in a field.
“But I didn’t even know what I was angry about,” Carver said. “I was angry about the wrong thing.”
“It sounds like you were angry at the right thing without realizing. I mean, it was never about football, it was about — yeah.”
“Yeah,” Carver sighed, and appeared to get lost in thought.
Scott smoothed his hands over his own hair, pushing it back from his face, and waited.
“You know,” Carver said, “I was getting angry at them earlier, but for a lot of it, they were just pathetic. Like, broken-down and crying and shit. Normally they’d only be angry back, or cold.
I’ve never seen them pathetic. Now I’m back and forth between feeling sorry for them and wanting to beat them in the head with frying pans. ”
“Just take it one day at a time, I guess. All you can really do.”
Carver ran his tongue over his teeth. “I’m so fucking bad at that.”
“But it’s the easiest way to do it.”
“Not for me.”
“I can help,” Scott said.
Carver looked over at him, his eyes soft, and smiled again. “You want to help?”
“Yeah. Let me help.”
They leaned in toward each other, close enough to feel the warmth of each other’s breath, and Scott reached up to slowly unzip Carver’s hoodie.
Carver kissed him as he did this, a light little kiss that he placed on Scott’s mouth like a dollop of whipped cream.
Scott’s dick pulsed hard. In no way had he expected to get laid tonight.
He had written off all hopes of getting laid after Lillian interrupted their flirting on the balcony.
They turned to each other, and Scott gripped Carver’s jaw in one hand, relishing the heat of him. Carver’s eyes had the low-lidded sheen of lust. He was giving Scott that look he so enjoyed, the look which read almost as a dare.
Scott responded to this by pushing Carver down on the mattress then yanking his t-shirt up over his head and off of him.
He ran his hands down Carver’s chest and stomach, thumbing at his nipples, enjoying how soft and warm his body was to the touch.
Carver closed his eyes and stretched his head back, exposing his throat and making the tendons of his neck and his Adam’s apple stand out in sharp relief.
Scott leaned on and pressed a flurry of kisses to that lovely throat as he worked Carver’s running shorts and briefs off of him.
His short beard scraped the few hours of stubble on Carver’s neck.
Carver sat up enough to start undressing Scott back, shimmying his boxers off him.
Scott dispatched his tank top and lay back down across the mattress with Carver, stroking his hair with one hand while gathering both their semi-hard dicks in the other so he could grind them against each other.
This felt really, really good, like that first incredible stretch in the morning.
Carver inhaled and reached down to help him, and they both started to move their hips and thrust against each other.
“Scott,” Carver moaned, his voice rasping, and Scott’s dick throbbed. He wrapped his free arm around Carver, caging his body and pulling him closer.
With him in his arms, he felt the same thing he’d felt last night — that Carver really was a little too thin, his extremities of bone too close to the surface.
This felt like a sister to the frantic need Carver showed when Scott touched him; here was a man deprived.
If Carver let him hang around he could indulge him and sustain him, he could fuck him the way he liked to be fucked, he could hand Carver frying pans with which to beat people in the head.
He would do it, he knew he would. Even as he felt the leanness of Carver’s body with his hands he didn’t feel that Carver was delicate; he felt the opposite, that he was strong and vital but had spent decades wandering a barren landscape and finding ways to survive.
Scott wanted to give him what he needed and see who he could become.
They kissed each other more ravenously and rolled around on the mattress, bumping the sides of the van with their knees and elbows, scrabbling against each other for better angles from which to rub their dicks together.
Finally Scott realized this wasn’t enough friction for him and breathed into Carver’s ear, “Do you want to fuck again?” and Carver said, “Yeah, yeah.”
Scott pulled himself away with difficulty and scrambled around for his duffel bag.
He didn’t have lube, but he knew he had a little thing of Vaseline that he’d been using as lip balm, and he knew from experience that this could serve in a pinch.
He turned back to Carver and saw him lying there, naked and handsome and ghostly in the thin light, then dove on him again.
Carver slid his hands up the back of Scott’s neck and scraped his fingernails over his scalp as Scott worked fast to lube up his dick.
He was achingly hard now; Carver’s nuzzles and sounds were making him crazy.
“Just put it in,” Carver murmured in his ear. “You don’t need to finger me, not after last night.”
This made Scott’s dick throb so hard he had to clench his teeth. He pressed his face to the side of Carver’s head, taking a deep drag from his hair, which smelled like cologne and cigarette smoke.
“You good?” Carver teased.
“Stop talking before I come on you.”
“Come in me.” Carver reached down and took Scott’s dick in his hand, guiding him.
Scott felt his tip graze Carver’s asshole.
Entranced, he chased that sensation with the rest of himself, driving into him with one long, slow, wonderful stroke.
It was even easier than last night to slide in there, into that warm, loving embrace.
Carver moaned, grabbing him by the hair and arching into him, his own very erect dick rubbing Scott’s stomach.
Scott kissed him desperately, diving back for more the instant that the seal of their mouths broke.
Carver slowly brought his legs up, then crossed them behind Scott’s back and let out a new, higher-pitched kind of moan.
On pure instinct, Scott rolled him onto his side and reentered him from behind.
As Carver’s sweetest, deepest muscles yielded, he twisted his face into the mattress and passionately cried out Scott’s name, sending tingles up his spine and scalp.
He felt a little animal when he was with Carver, a little frantic and brutal.
This was what Carver wanted, and his desire for it was like a pair of jaws which dragged it from Scott.
He knew this was a good position, he could tell from the sounds Carver was making and the way he was bucking against him.
It was good for Scott too — Carver felt tighter this way.
He gripped Carver by the hair and began to fuck the hell out of him, worrying he was going too far but being rewarded with long, low moans and writhing.
Scott didn’t realize how good it was for him until he found himself on the verge of orgasm, backpedaling away from the edge.
Not yet, not yet. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to maintain equilibrium, but Carver was in his arms riding him like a jockey, and he only lasted for about another minute until he came in him with a great sigh.
“Come on,” Carver said, his voice thick with arousal.
“Sorry, sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, just make me come…”