Earlier that day he had sat in the ESCape Internet Café, plotting his hike, and chatting with his Texan online BDSM Daddy about God, and suicide, forgiveness, and getting a cock cage and losing the key forever. Outside the city had been drowning in that week-long summer rain, flushing tourists and locals from the streets like dog turds.
{I love you, son. Take Care.}
Yeah, right.
Ponyboy he had met one week before, on the fringe of the fringe of the fringe. The boy had only been in the pub because his partner in crime had made a little extra selling smack. The band had used the bar for a stage. When they came on, Ponyboy had already been so smashed that he had to crawl along the blackened wood, between the combat boots of his mates. Once, the boy observed, the guitarist accidentally stomped on Ponyboy’s hand hard enough to break the pinkie. Ponyboy hadn’t even noticed until long after the show.
They both know it is a good-bye fuck. They boy doesn’t say anything. The backpack and the poncho say everything for him. Ponyboy holds him from behind, one arm around the boy’s neck. Without warning he rams a bottle of vodka into the boy’s mouth, bruising and bloodying the lips, clinking the glass neck painfully against the teeth.
“Suck it like piss from my cock.”
The boy gulps frantically, but still a lot runs over his face and chest. Ponyboy makes fucking motions with the bottle.
“What if I don’t let you go?”
Ponyboy lowers the bottle. The downpour eases up. The boy is coughing. Vodka is burning in his throat. He tries to mumble around the bottleneck. “Who asked you to?” It comes out “Oo’ashk’doo’oo?”
“So you will stay with me?”
Ponyboy has resumed skullfucking and drowning him. This time he doesn’t let up for the answer. Choking and spluttering the boy shakes his head. The motion makes him dizzy.
Later, when they lie on the dirty grey crumpled sheets of the bed, Ponyboy forces a kiss on the boy. With one hand he keeps the boy’s nose pinched shut, hard enough to impress a deep purple crescent-shaped mark in the ala of the nose. His mouth seals that of the boy. They share a lot of tongue, the chemical aftertaste of the cheap vodka, the bitterness of Ponyboy’s shot, and the air from Ponyboy’s lungs. The boy is not allowed to draw any outside breath. It takes a bit of practice to synchronize their lungs, but after a while it becomes almost natural.
“I want to beat you.” Ponyboy keeps one hand clamped across the boy’s mouth and nose. “I want to beat your cock and balls.”
He has to stretch to reach his torn jeans on the offal strewn floor, to dig out the pack of fags and the lighter. The splint that keeps his taped pinkie and ring finger stiff and straight hinders him. As the air runs out the boy begins to quirm. Ponyboy puts one fag into his mouth and lights it, one handed.
“I’m not asking you, okay? Just saying.”
Ponyboy looks into the boy’s face, checks his eyes. Is it for panic or for permission? The boy is bucking now, jerking on the rope keeping his wrists behind his back, and trying to twist his face out from under the hand. Ponyboy lifts it for a moment and blows smoke into the boy’s gasping mouth before clamping it shut again.
The funeral was about the most depressing thing you could imagine. The blue-grey morning never had a chance of becoming a bright day. He had made his mum buy him a black suit and a white shirt. He had bought the tie from his own money, a cheap, plastic looking strip of black nylon, that flapped ridiculously in the cold wind. His mum only realized that he had put on the fire engine red chucks when they stepped out of the taxi in front of the cemetery gate.
“They were her favourites.” He couldn’t understand how this wouldn’t explain his decision. His mum couldn’t understand how he could think it would. But short of making him go on socks there wasn’t anything she could do. He relished every ridge of frozen ground, every pebble, and most of all the cruel frost biting him through the thin rubber soles. After all, it was the same cold ground that would eat her up now.
The rod is thin and whistles impressively in the air. Physically the pain is worse than anything the boy has experienced in his life until then. Ponyboy has rammed three socks so deep into his throat that he has to concentrate all through the beating to keep from throwing up. Because of the sweat, the vodka, the snot, and the saliva the duct tape doesn’t stick very well. A corner comes lose and flaps under his nose in rhythm with his ragged, mucus-clogged breath.
The ropes and knots hold, but at the height of his thrashing, he breaks the frame of the bookshelves Ponyboy has tied him too. As he collapses, Ponyboy stands above him, out of breath, rod in hand, and looks down onto him and all the books and the stacks and stacks of classical sheet paper that have avalanched to the floor. It is Ponyboy who looks beaten.
The boy finally loses his battle with the vodka and the gag reflex and pukes through his nose and in funny little seeping squirts past the loosening duct tape and socks. The pain in his sinuses makes him sob.
That night when he first had seen the fucked up Ponyboy crawl around on the bar, screaming slurred lyrics into a crowd that smelled of wet dog, that night, too, had ended in vomit. Ponyboy had suddenly puked all over the bar, the draft levers, and the patrons in the front row. The pub’s owner had dragged him away by the ankle and tossed him out into the rainy night like an unwieldy and smelly bin bag. The boy, tuned on beyond belief, had followed and had helped Ponyboy to his feet and brought him to his flat, while the rest of the band partied on.
When his online BDSM Daddy had attempted suicide, ten years ago, after his wife had discovered his queer, sadistic, pedophile fantasies and had left him, he had been visited by an angel.
{I took a whole bottle of sleeping pills. I actually felt my breathing come to a crawl… and then an angel appeared to me and held my hand… and I called my friend John. I still don’t know how I did it to this day. }
{Wow} was all the boy could think of typing. He didn’t believe a word.
{John came and took me to the ER.}
{A real angel?}
{Yeah.}
{What did it look like?}
{It was just a glowing figure of light. I could actually make his face out. It was shaped like a human that just glowed. It was a bright light.}
When the boy had tried to kill himself, there had been no light. Just cold and darkness.
{God must really love you. }
{Yeah, he does.}
The boy thought: I hope he is lying.
Ponyboy doesn’t remove the vomit soaked gag. He kneels down next to the boy, amidst the books and crumpled, soiled sheet music. He puts his index finger first against one, then against the other nostril of the boy, allowing him to blow the vomit from his nose. They use all natural lubricant only.
The corner of a hardcover biography of Allen Ginsberg is poking painfully into the boy’s abdomen. His limp, flogged cock burns terribly. His nasal grunts are high and short, like the squeals of a terrified but badly winded pig. Ponyboy has to laugh. The boy feels very tired. Everything begins to blur.
“Nobody knows you are here, right?”
The boy grunts and tries to nod in affirmation.
“Nobody’d know if you died here? I’d be scott free?”
The boy’s heart picks up some speed. His cock begins to stiffen again.
And then Ponyboy stops. He lifts his body up slightly, remaining on elbows and knees, his cock in the boy’s pussy. Ponyboy gently reaches onto the bed next to him and takes up the roll of duct tape. He begins wrapping it around the boys head, tight, like a mask, beginning with the chin and working himself up. Before he closes off the nose, he says:
“I’ll take if off, when I’ve come. Not before.”
The boy expect him to continue rutting, but Ponyboy remains still. The boy understands. He has to do the work. The panic is delicious. It is the first real emotion that truly fills him since being caught in Leeds. These days it seems that fear is the only thing that can still do that. Tied up as he is, the shifting drifts of books and sheet paper underneath, it is hard to get a good rocking motion. Ponyboy remains still. Only his breathing quickens a little.
“It should be you.” That was the last thing he had shouted at his father, pointing at the open grave. “It should have been you in there, not her.” They were separated afterwards, and the boy was made to sit in a small, dark room in the chapel, while they tried to recapture the illusion of dignity outside.
For a while he earnestly tries to milk Ponyboy, but the booze, and the lack of oxygen, and his burning cock, and that damned Ginsberg biography keep distracting him. He enjoys the panic for all it is worth, doubting that Ponyboy’s smack can be anywhere as good as his adrenalin, but eventually that, too, runs out.
When he had run away, he had had to promise his online Daddy that he wouldn’t do {anything stupid}. The banality of the euphemism had annoyed him.
He remembers listening to Childhood’s End together with Jonas, and the first time Hendrik had kissed him, with bloody lips. He remembers how beautiful Ponyboy had looked, on all fours, on that bar, when the vomit had hung from his chin in glistening, oatmeal-coloured strings. He thinks of the Highlands he wants to see, and of the never-ending rain. It hadn’t rained during the funeral, but later, when he had been told of the car accident, it had rained then.
It is a conscious decision when he stops bucking and jerking and frantically whipping his face across the detritus underneath to dislodge the tape. Against his instinct, his body’s screams for oxygen, he makes himself lie still. He only turns his head as far as he can, so that the duct tape pulls on the skin of his face like on an ill-fitting ski mask. Through somewhat slitted eyes he looks up at Ponyboy’s questioning expression.
Let it happen, he tries to say with his eyes.
His vision is fading, the world is being sucked away into a narrowing grey tube, but he thinks he can still see the sudden understanding flood Ponyboy’s own eyes, followed by a tidal wave of lust. Through the ringing in his ears he hears Ponyboy groan. Without moving at all, except for a slight shiver running through him, Ponyboy comes.
At once Ponyboy rips away the duct tape and pulls out the soaked socks. More vomit runs out. Ponyboy kisses him, blowing breath into his starved lungs. For a while they kiss and share the air again. Then Ponyboy drags the tied-up boy up onto the bed to spoon, and reaches around, and jerks him off. The boy’s malnourished tummy, his thighs and above all his cock are bruised and ribbed with seeping welts.
They won’t speak another word. Ponyboy will release him from his bonds, and they will both fall asleep. In the morning the boy will sneak out and head for the Highlands.
But now, as he comes, twisting like from a cramp, his semen shot with blood, he imagines the explosion, the fire and smoke made up in part of burning, shredded bits of his father. The thick rigid pillar of the bridge (reaching across a highway glassy with black ice from the sudden rain), the roiling cloud rising above it, red with flame, and white with smoke and ash, smearing the dirty, grey sheet of the empty February sky.
