Exquisite Corpse (15 page)

“Do you mind if I wash my face? I must look awful.”

Jay managed to speak through rigid lips. “Down the hall.”

Tran left the room. The urge abated a little. Jay felt a sharp pain in his hands, realized he had curled them into fists and was digging his nails deep into the palms. He rubbed his eyes, dabbed sweat off his forehead and upper lip.
Just what is going on here?
he wondered. This was the most dangerous guest he'd ever allowed in his house. Tran's parents might have kicked him out this morning, but they could easily be looking for him in a few days, if not a few hours.

The craving to possess such a beautiful creature was unavoidable. But listening to Tran's anguished story, Jay had almost found himself
liking
the kid. No one had ever talked so honestly to him before. He'd had boys who trusted him unquestioningly
out of stupidity, desperation, or both. He'd had boys who were openly suspicious of him from the moment they made contact until the moment they lost consciousness. But no one had ever weighed the options and made a conscious decision to trust him the way Tran seemed to have done.

Tran hadn't treated Jay like an easy trick or a potential sugar daddy, as most of the boys did. He had acted as if he were in the company of a friend. Jay had never had a live friend before, and he wasn't sure what to do with one. All his childhood playmates had shied away early, forced by their mothers to include him because he came from a good Uptown family, but always wary and frequently cruel.

His guests turned into friends after they were dead, but those friends were fathomable: they would always belong to him, because they could never leave. A living person had the option of walking away. Mummified heads and bleached bones couldn't even dream of such disloyalty. All Jay's boys became part of him. They would be with him forever, flesh of his flesh, loving him from the inside.

He sat quietly and waited for Tran to return.

Tran splashed cold water on his face and let it drip while he stared at himself in the huge mirror above the sink. Jay's bathroom was decorated entirely in black-and-white squares, tiny ones on the walls, big ones on the floor. The counter, sink, towels, shower curtain, and Jay's toothbrush (draining in a crystal glass) were black; the toilet and tub were of spotless white porcelain. The bottom of the sink was lightly beaded with water, but not so much as a stray hair sullied its gleaming surface. The bathroom contained no reading material, no visible grooming products except a bar of white soap, a roll of white toilet paper, and a matte-black shampoo bottle.

Tran thought of the family bathroom back home, its counter littered with his various hair products, skin potions, stray eyeliner
pencils, and the twins' bubblegum-flavored sparkle toothpaste. There were colorful towels, discarded T-shirts and underwear, an old foam cooler full of his brothers' tub toys in the corner. It looked decidedly lived in. But Tran could see no indications that a human being used this bathroom every day.

There were three drawers beneath the sink. Tran slid them open one by one. The top drawer contained toothpaste, a safety razor and a pricey-looking tube of shaving gel, a silver brush and comb, scissors, a deodorant stone. The middle one was empty. In the bottom drawer was a Ziploc bag full of something soft and multicolored. When Tran picked it up, he realized it was human hair of all shades and textures, some obviously dyed. He put it back hurriedly, feeling as if he'd stumbled onto a seedy secret.

There was a cabinet tucked away beneath the sink too, its edges flush with the rest of the wood, barely visible. He slipped his fingers into the recessed groove of its handle and it whispered open. Inside was a bucket full of water that smelled vaguely of disinfectant. Immersed in the water were several evil-looking sex toys: fleshy pink and glossy black, jellied latex and molded plastic, double-headed, double-pronged, ribbed, nubbed, and flared. After the bag of hair, the shock value of these was minimal. Still, Tran couldn't help but imagine Jay using one of the toys on him, murmuring in his ear, stroking the curve of his back, working the strange shape deep into his intestine.

He rinsed his mouth out with Jay's toothpaste and left the bathroom. Across the hall was the bedroom, a few candles flickering in its shadowed depths. He could see little more than an expanse of gleaming hardwood floor and a very large bed. As he came back down the hall, he noticed the arched entry way to the kitchen on his left. It too was dark, but looked as spotless and shiny as the bath.

He reentered the parlor, where Jay sat as rigid and motionless as Tran had left him. The candles bathed his face in
golden light. The smoke from the incense sticks swathed his head and upper body, made him look ethereal. His face in profile was as sternly serene as an angel's. Tran wanted to go to him, sit with him, continue what Luke had interrupted. But he couldn't make himself do it; he had no idea what Jay had thought of his outburst, or whether he was even welcome here.

He leaned against the doorjamb. Sudden shyness rose in his throat, threatened to choke him. “Do you still want me to pose for you?” he asked, so softly he wasn't sure Jay had heard him at first.

Jay stirred, but did not look at Tran. “No … not just now.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“That might be best.”

Not for me,
Trau thought. His heart sank; his balls ached. The bathroom had creeped him out a little—not the strange items in the drawer and cabinet so much as the total sterility of it, the difficulty of believing a man washed, shaved, crapped here every day. He'd heard the word on the street about Jay: the guy was an odd, cold fish; he would suck you off without ever looking you in the eyes; his house smelled funny. He was said to be very rich, with all the accompanying eccentricities. But Tran didn't care about that. The few times he'd spoken to Jay, he had sensed an aura of power under wraps, of utter control. This man would find out his deepest desires, and would be capable of twisting them into pain as well as pleasure.

He'd experienced a similar certainty when he met Luke, and he had been right. But while Luke's power was alpha-male raw, Jay's seemed infinitely refined.

He didn't want to leave. He wasn't sure he could stand to be turned out of an other place today. The picture of himself nestled in the pale curve of Jay's arms, sated with sex and ready for sleep, had sustained him for so long that now he could not imagine spending the night any other way.

Feeling like a manipulative little shit—an epithet Luke had once blessed him with—Tran stepped in front of Jay's chair,
unbuttoned his shirt, and let it whisper off his shoulders onto the rug. He felt Jay's eyes honing in on his bare chest. “I don't care if you take my picture,” he said. “I'll do anything you like. I just want to know you. Please don't make me go.”

Jay stood. He was about six inches taller than Tran, and his lankiness disguised a strong, wiry build. Tran wanted nothing more than to step into Jay's arms, press his face into Jay's chest, and wait to be ravished. But Jay only grasped Tran by the shoulders and stared into his face, looking half angry, half puzzled. “What is it you want here? What do you mean, you want to know me?
Why?”

“Because you fascinate me,” Tran told him honestly.

Jay sighed, let his hands drop, then slowly slid them back up Tran's bare ribcage. Tran's skin shuddered into gooseflesh at the touch. He forced himself to remain still, to let Jay do the touching for now. Jay wanted to be in charge, just as Luke always had.

Jay's thumbs grazed Tran's nipples, paused, then traced lazy circles around them. A small ecstatic whimper escaped Tran's throat. He let his head fall back, offering the smooth line of his throat to Jay in supplication. Jay's lips fastened on the V of his collarbone, moved up his throat and along his jawline, brushed his mouth. Then Jay pulled back, and his eyes were terrifying in their intensity, flecked with bright candlepoints, hazed with lust so urgent it bordered on pain.

“You better be ready for whatever happens,” he told Tran. His voice was full of dark promise.

“Anything,” Tran whispered.

In the candle-dark bedroom they kicked off their shoes, grabbed each other, and fell roughly onto the bed, wrestling, attacking, surrendering. Jay hooked his thumbs under the waistband of Tran's leggings and yanked them halfway down. They snagged on Tran's hard-on, then slipped over it.

He got his own pants undone, struggled out of them, and rolled on top of Tran, enfolding the boy's sleek limbs with his clumsy ones. “Your body feels so good,” Tran breathed in his ear. This threw Jay for a second: most boys didn't talk to him in bed, even when they were still conscious. He didn't know if he should answer or not.

He sought Tran's mouth and sealed it with his own, evading the issue entirely. Jay liked to kiss deep and rough; the slick membranes of a boy's mouth made him hungry. He sucked on Tran's lips until they were raw, invaded Tran's throat with his tongue. Tran wrapped skinny arms around him, scratched lightly at his back with sharp little nails. Their hips nudged and their legs intertwined. Jay's cock was so hard he thought it might rupture. What a boy, what a fabulously exquisite creature had come to him willingly,
willfully.
This must be a gift from whatever dark gods he appeased with his obsessions, a perfect bonbon he could rip into as he pleased …

Jay shied away from that line of thought. This boy was no gift. He was a drug dealer, for Christ's sake, a well-known face in the Quarter, a New Orleans native with family here. Harming him would be sheer folly. Never mind the entrancing fragility of his bones. Never mind how the taut expanse of his belly felt beneath Jay's hands, trembling with the secret movements of organs just below the surface.

Tran raised his arms above his head and arched his back, thrusting his ribcage up at Jay. The expression on his face was part fear, part naked arousal. His eyes and his wet mouth glittered in the semidarkness. As far as Jay was concerned, the kid might as well have the words PLEASE RIP ME OPEN scrawled on his chest in Magic Marker.

To distract himself from fantasies of viscera, Jay lowered his head and sucked one of Tran's nipples. It was as hard and brown as a cinnamon candy under his tongue. Tran's skin smelled of soap and some faint musk. Tran's fingers wandered through Jay's hair, urging his head lower. Jay avoided touching
the underside of the ribcage or any part of the abdomen. Instead he grabbed Tran by the hipbones, nature's perfect handles, and buried his face between Tran's legs. At once he was lost in a world of fragrant sweat, soft black hair tickling his eyelids, silk-rippled flesh throbbing against his lips. He licked a wet swath from the base of Tran's balls all the way to the head of his cock, then took the cock deep into his mouth.

The sensation of engorged tissue sliding over his tongue and filling up his throat was nearly too much to bear. Jay clawed at Tran's ass, at the scant meat of his thighs. Tran went very still; then a long shudder went through his body. “Jay—oh Jay I'm gonna come—don't swallow—ah—”

Tran tried to pull away. Jay seized those sharp hipbones again, forced his throat around the shaft of Tran's cock, getting it as deep in his mouth as it would go. When his gag reflex challenged him, Jay took a deep breath and willed it away. He might never taste this boy's blood or meat, but he would not be denied the salty savor of his sperm.

Here it came, spilling over the back of his tongue, dripping warm and faintly caustic down his throat. Tran was making unbelievable sounds: gasps, sobs, little shrieks. Jay swallowed again and again. Tran's come was thick, copious, and ever so slightly bitter. Jay imagined it brewing in the secret sacs and tubes of his testicles, rich with all the chemicals Tran had recently ingested, a heady concentrate. Spermatozoa, proteins, intoxicating extracts from the prostate and the Cowper's gland …

His erection was plaguing him again, shouting for attention. He moved up beside Tran, kissed his mouth and his eyelids, guided Tran's hand to his cock. Tran's fingers closed around it gratefully and moved up and down, gentle at first, then a little rough, squeezing, eager … then gentle again, painfully so. Whatever else this Luke character may have done to Tran, he had taught the kid to handle another man's penis with care and skill.

“You shouldn't have swallowed my come,” Tran murmured. “I told you …”

“I needed it.”

Something in Jay's tone shut Tran up. His hand kept rubbing, sliding, stroking. In another minute or two Jay would be on the verge of orgasm, and this worried him. Most of the boys who left his house unharmed were those he had only photographed. He had ended up in bed with a few, giving them what they wanted, sucking them off and letting them go. But no one ever survived once Jay had come.

A bloody haze began to creep into the edges of his vision. Waves of pleasure foamed in his brain. A dark gobbet of tissue hung from his mouth, slapping his chin … no, that was last night, that was memory.

“Fuck me,” Tran gasped. “I want you inside me.” He was up off the mattress, instinct leading him to the nightstand drawer and the box of lubricated condoms there (though not the gore-encrusted shrimp deveiner tucked away deep in the back). In a single practiced movement he tore one of the foil squares open, extracted the condom, and sheathed Jay's hard-on in a thin layer of latex.

Then Tran was on his back again, pulling his knees up to expose two heartbreaking half-moons of flesh with a molten pink eye at their center. The asshole hypnotized Jay, drew him in like a vortex. No one had ever voluntarily shown him their asshole before. The gesture impressed him as one of trust …
of choosing
to trust, like Tran's decision to talk to him in the first place.

But what had he told himself after Tran talked to him? Unpredictable. Dangerous. Off-limits. If he fucked this boy, he would surely kill him. And that would be so very bad for so many reasons.