Chapter Twenty #2
failing to achieve for hours. He looked up, curious to see how Wes
would do it—understood, and tried to recoil.
He had
left it too late. He was nothing but grief and toxins. Not grief
for Bailey, not really—for Sasha, who wouldn't let Laurie save him
either, not with all the money and success in the world. “I've got
to go,” he mumbled, pushing back against Wes's shoulders. “Sasha's
coming out here if I don't. Got to stop him.”
Wesley
caught hold of his chin, lifted Laurie's mouth to within an inch of
his. “Forget Sasha. I'm all you've got now.”
Laurie
made it to his feet. He wasn't sure how. He was leaning on the
trailer's flank, both hands pressed to it for balance. The metal
was still hot to the touch, a day's stored-up energy radiating off.
Everything was so fucking hot, the air dry and dusty, unsustaining
to his heaving lungs. Two years ago on Birchwood Heath he'd lain in
frozen bracken, gasping Sasha's scent—oh, sweet wild sparks of ice
and fire, the beginning of everything. This was the end. Had he
punched Wes, found strength to thrust him away? Whatever he'd done
it didn't matter, because there was the bastard still. He rose up
in front of Laurie, briefly eclipsing the moon, and then he dropped
to his knees.
His
mouth was clumsy around Laurie's cock. He'd made an awkward job of
pulling his pants down too, and Laurie detachedly guessed that if
he did this with other guys at all, it was probably the other way
round. Should Laurie feel honoured? Dreadful amusement surged up in
him. This was the ultimate price for all his transformative gifts.
He could get out of his flesh and into someone else's with the
flicker, the tiniest effort of will. He should have known a time
would come when he couldn't get back in.
It
hardly mattered. Thrown clear of his own car crash, Laurie floated
five yards out from the struggling pair by the van. The flesh he'd
left behind him thrust and groaned, but that was only reflex—as
Nicole had reminded him, an animal response. Wesley could kneel
there and suck him off for a month of Sundays, and Laurie might get
hard—yes, was doing so, the beast rising to the bait—but the
chances of him coming, loaded up with downers and
tequila...
Where the hell was
Nicole? That was a weird anxiety to tug at Laurie
now, but it seemed important. He thought of Carmen's red nails. Red
nails, red lips, red sheets on a bed in the desert. A single red
eye, flashing and pulsating in the blackness between her trailer
and Wesley's...
Laurie
lost interest. So did Wes, as if at that exact same moment he had
finished what he'd come here to do. He sat back on his heels,
causing Laurie to smash back into himself as if dropped there from
a cliff. The landing was an awful one, like nothing he'd ever felt
before. He was keenly, crucially aware of every pore of
himself—every inch, especially his shrinking cock sliding back from
between Wesley's lips.
“Sorry about that, English boy,” Wesley said, wiping his mouth.
“I did try to warn you.” He got up, brushing dust off his knees.
“Here—you'd best sit down before you fall.” Quite tenderly he took
hold of Laurie's armpits, lowered him to the ground. He gave
Laurie's face a mocking, stinging pat, looked once more into the
darkness towards that red eye. He gave a low chuckle, nodded and
waved. And then he was gone.
***
Nicole
Delgado had taken Wesley's place. The world was slipping away from
Laurie, and he couldn't make much sense of her arrival. What did
she want of him? Were they still meant to be making love in the big
scarlet bed? A stir of the hot desert air reminded him that his zip
was down. He rectified this with hands almost too numb and clumsy
to obey him. “God, sorry,” he said fuzzily. “Did I miss my
cue?”
“Your cue? You're not at the Old Vic now.”
She
sounded amused. Distracted, too—more interested in the screen of
her mobile phone, which she was tilting critically back and forth.
“This isn't too bad, actually,” she said. “The night mode on the
camera's not terrific, but... Yeah. You look hot.”
Laurie
had begun to like Nicole. He'd liked her neat analysis of
reactionary role models for women, and he'd welcomed her advice on
movie sex. With the vaguest idea that the moving figures on the
screen might be part of his next lesson, he looked over her
shoulder.
The
recording was brief. Laurie saw himself in shades of silver and
black. His skin was pearlescent, his hair and eyes like coal. His
mouth was a passionate O. Wesley had been doing most of the work,
but he must have triggered something: the tiny silver Laurie thrust
his hips, writhed in what could have been protest or ecstasy. The
screen went dark.
Laurie
swallowed. He was too far gone to understand the implications, but
he felt the closing of a vicious net. Desert dust caught in his
throat. “What are you...” He paused, coughing. “What are you going
to do with it?”
“Going to? Nothing at all. Life moves
much faster than that around here. It's already done. I've loaded
it to YouTube. Sent a link to the news channel that broadcasts all
our scandals before we even have them.” She gave the phone a deft
flip into the air and caught it. “They'll love having something
real for once. It'll be viral by morning.”
Laurie
knew that there were desperate and urgent reasons why he should be
concerned about this. Beneath them ran one comfort, enough to keep
his heart thudding steadily for now in its bone cage: Sasha hardly
ever watched TV, certainly not the channels that broadcast little
acts of celebrity misbehaviour. You'd never catch him surfing the
net for gossip. Certain of this, Laurie was able to keep breath in
his lungs—nothing else mattered. Only a vague curiosity tugged him.
Yes, he'd liked Nicole—Wes too, for a drunken half minute when his
embrace had seemed kind. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Him setting me up. You... You filming it. Why?”
“Oh, right. He said he'd give you a warning, but I'm guessing
you ignored it. He knew Doug was gonna find a way to write him out
and make you the lead for Blood Moon
4. Wes is a jerk, but he's not stupid. And
Doug will do a lot to cover for an actor if he can—”
“Like Bailey?”
“Yeah. Paid his legal fees himself. Drugs are one thing. But
there's no way he can cover up a worldwide viral tape of Devlin
getting sucked off by another guy.”
This was
all perfectly sensible. As long as it was all about Devlin, Laurie
could even view it dispassionately. “But he wasn't on his
own—Devlin, I mean.” He shook his head to clear it and made the
moon dance. “I mean me.”
“You can barely see the back of Wesley's head. It could be any
guy. I thought about filming it differently and sending Wes down
too.” She smiled brightly. “Hey, I could've set the date back on my
phone and made out it was Bailey working away down there. He'd have
loved that. And it might give a reason to his parents and the
grieving world for why he took his life.”
Laurie had never in his life sworn at a woman. He turned to
Nicole, looked her in the face as best he could. “You
bitch.”
She
broke into laughter. “Oh, man, how much fun are you? I never got to
fuck with a Brit before. Don't worry—I'll leave little Bailey out
of it. I've got what I came for.”
“I don't understand.”
“What?” she said indulgently. “Come on, blue-eyed Laurie, just
as cute wasted as sober. It's a pity you're queer—I'd have had you
myself, and Wes could've held the camera. What can I explain to
you?”
“You hate Wes. Why not send him down too?”
“We would’ve lost the film. One guy dead, both his male leads
caught in an act of homosexual indecency—even Doug couldn't have
stopped that train wreck. You know, I'm almost the same age as Wes.
I've kept the weight off and I still look good, but I'm gonna be
thirty next year, for God's sake. I saw some rushes the other day
of one of my scenes with you. I can't pull it off. Hell, after one
of Doug's secret meetings I saw twenty teenage girls who looked a
teeny bit like Carmen Duprey trooping out of his casting
suite.”
“And you think you'd go next.”
“Right. You know Doug and his mighty morphing plots. There's
Devlin installed as lead vamp in the next movie, and... oh, I
dunno, suddenly Carmen turns out to have a cute younger sister who
looks just great with Laurie Fitzroy against a green screen. No
way, English boy. I do hate Wes. But the two of us built up
this Blood Moon juggernaut from nothing. We've both given it five years. We
want to see it through—and if you're gone, Doug will have no choice
but to zip Wes up in his fat-boy vest and keep me decently backlit
for one more film. There’s still a market for a role model like me.
I think there always will be. Do you see?”
Laurie
saw. His outer vision was failing, the drugs and the tequila
finally drawing his curtain down, so he turned with interest to
this new inner realm where Wes and Nicole sat, a tarot king and
queen on golden thrones, looking down onto a world where Laurie lay
in the mud with Bailey's corpse beside him in his arms. Nicole
moved her hands, and they were full of silver birds—birds made out
of mirror glass, whose shiny wings held black-and-white night
footage, tiny moving images of Laurie and Wes. She lifted her hands
high. Up went the birds in a flurry, thousands of them, circling
her head, seeking a direction.
“Laurie?”
He looked up. She must have left him and come back, although
he'd only been aware of the desert silence and moonlight. She had a
couple of blankets and a pillow in her hand. “You're right,” she
said, crouching beside him. “I am
a bitch, and I can't say I gave a rat's ass about
Bailey Price. But two corpses in two days is embarrassing even for
the Blood Moon set. Are you stoned enough to die of it?”
Laurie
shook his head again. This time the moon leapt right over him, and
his skull impacted gently with the pillow, a scent of desert dust
filling his nose. “No.”
“Well, there you go. Stay on your side like that, and if you
puke, don't choke.” She chuckled. “And that's the kindest thing I
ever said to a guy, so think yourself lucky.”
A
pressure came and went on Laurie's hair. Had she caressed him?
Laurie couldn't wonder about it for long: he was back in the
strange tarot landscape, watching the flock of glass birds. They
were fluttering with great energy now, and there were millions, not
thousands. They whirled into a spiral, vortexed up above Nicole's
head. In each of them, a bestial image of Laurie thrust its hips
and groaned. Nicole smiled. She clapped her upraised hands, and the
flock exploded outwards—up, down, in every direction, until she and
Wes were hidden in them, and the night was full of deadly silver
shards.