Chapter Text
Viktor hates this time of year. The slurred, alcoholic season of January, clinical cold and growing resentful in the dark. Every morning he wakes up staring at the same water stain on his ceiling, the same broken mattress spring corkscrewing into the misshapen divots of his spine. He thinks, if the pneumonia doesn't kill me, the chronic boredom and a fistful of pills will . But this evening, as he shambles down the cobbles toward the tube station, hair sticking to his forehead and shoes filling up with rainwater, he is hounded by the treacherous hope that January will finally, finally, have something to offer him.
He packs onto his train with the rest of the rush hour crowd, pickled sardine tight in the leaky pull tab tin of the Zaun line carriage. Single mothers dragging sticky-faced toddlers by their wrists, grimacing grey business men patting the wrinkles out of their Italian cotton, the faceless mass of the minimum wage swaying in place. It is hustle and bustle and hellish for all of a few minutes, before the majority of commuters depart at their stops and only the stragglers bound for Entresol Station remain.
Not many people take this route, worming deep into the Lanes where the tunnel walls weep rust. When the carriage lights start to flicker, and Viktor is no longer pressed into the walls like caulking, he has a blessed forty minutes to relax.
Usually, he reads, buries himself in the collar of his blazer, plugs himself into his Walkman and holds his head below the waves of dirty grunge guitar riffs and shoegaze quavering. Sometimes, on the days where he pops a few more painkillers than his doctor would ever recommend in good consciousness, he slips away. Just a little. It's not quite sleep, not quite death - like the white-out of post-orgasm oblivion. Whatever the state between conception and birth is, that translucent amniotic half-life, Viktor finds it in the brief moments that he closes his eyes on the train home. These days, it's the only true rest he ever gets.
He would never tell anyone, but he thinks about killing himself a lot. He will crawl out of bed and pull on his work clothes - second-hand tweed, hand darned elbow-patch - and consider choking himself with his tie. He will shuffle to the kitchen and eat his breakfast - day old coffee on the boiler, dry toast on the grill - and refrain from throwing himself out of the third story window. He will take his medication - fluoxetine, oxycodone, a veritable rainbow of chalky multivitamins - and he will come very, very close to overdosing. But he doesn't. He never does. He feels the ache in his bones, the fog in his skull, and he accepts the pain, and he keeps living. Dying would be so much easier, but Viktor has always been a stubborn man, and if he is going to prove anybody wrong it's the God he doesn't believe in and the city that doesn't believe in him.
University teaching assistant found dead at thirty-two! The headline might read. Shocking suicide reveals dark underbelly of Piltover Academy's opioid abuse epidemic! The newspapers would be plastered with photos of his bony cadaver, waxy and concave as the bodies of Biblical saints seem in triptychs and stained glass. But those men are martyrs. Viktor would be another dead invalid to toss into the river, immortalised in print, once again, as a reminder of what happens to people who are not perfect.
Very few people are perfect. Though Viktor suspects he may have met one of those few today. It is that radiant visage, burnt into the back of his eyelids, that prevents him from grasping his few, treasured moments of daily commute slumber. God forbid he fall asleep to the rippling memory of Jayce Talis, only to awake to a public indecency charge.
Viktor pulls a notebook from his briefcase, tugs his headphones over his ears. RAW HAND...FEVER BLISTER...WATCH ME DISAPPEAR shatters like a wine glass hurled against the tympanic membrane, and he begins scrawling –
Jayce. Jayce Talis. Jayce Talis? Fucking golden age adroit pinup angel-faced perspicacious puppy-eyed alumni Renaissance man Gallileo incarnate probably a fucking teacher's pet JAYCE TALIS what the fuck kind of name is that anyway. Pretty boy. REAL pretty like flesh and bone and blood and warm warm warm pretty. Want to measure his skull with a calliper pretty. Scar on his eyebrow. Gap in his teeth. Want to stick my tongue between the gap in his teeth. Want to get MY teeth all over him, mark him up, leave him bruised, batter him around a little bit, he's big he can take it he's BIG did you fucking SEE that BODY? Wish I could have seen more of it. Wearing that stupid white linen suit, a WHITE suit. Official uniform of the soulless bastard but he's not one of those types, he doesn't seem like one of those types, GOD I hope he's not one of those types, I could never fuck one of those types.
The train carriage shunts to a sudden stop, jostling the last of its inhabitants out onto the platform until Viktor is the sole remaining passenger. His hand zigzags with the jolt, smudging his furious scribble of cyrillic, flatlining that poisonous stream of conscious and begging the question: now who said you have a chance in Hell of fucking him?
He is white knuckling, gripping the notebook so hard the paper is buckling beneath his chapped fingertips. On the floor, a puddle of grey rainwater has gathered about the tips of his shoes. It is like waking from a fever dream, a psychotic break, only to discover that the neck throbbing between your hands is that of an innocent bystander.
Viktor slides the notebook back into his briefcase. The train begins trundling forward towards its final stop. Viktor does not stop thinking about Jayce.
He thinks of him walking down the gloomy back alleys, what it would be like to push that big body up against the wall, sample the sap of Jayce's mouth, which probably tastes like black coffee and fresh fruit. They would be soaked and chilled to the bone both, but find warmth in the contours of each other’s bodies; an obsessive electric heat crackling like a live wire, twisting through the apertures of their open mouths, welding them together, twin high-maintenance machines doomed to system-failure the moment the connection fails. In the evening dark of a city punched out cold by winter, nobody would be any the wiser. The howling could be written off on stray dogs.
Even in the rickety old elevator in his apartment block, with its chess board tile and water-stained mirror splashback, the sliding grate that creaks and shudders, his fingers would find themselves down the front of Jayce's trousers, tangling in dark curls. He would demand he keep his eyes on his warped reflection opposite, watch his own face melt into agonised paroxysms of pleasure, deny him the freedom of release when the door clatters open once more. Not yet, we're not home yet.
Home hasn’t changed much since December, perhaps in some desperate attempt on Viktor’s part to pretend it is not, in fact, January. That time isn’t creeping on constantly, that he isn’t another year older. The unopened birthday cards, postmarked with ornate Slavic stamps in all manner of easter egg hues, collect dust on the doormat. The menorah’s nine candles, long since reduced to flaccid nubs of yellow wax, haunt the kitchen window in monastic procession.
He moves through the menial motions of solitary domesticity as he always does, like a tin soldier. Shoes toed off at the door, blazer hung to drip-dry on the coat hook, briefcase unpacked at the desk. He forks a fistful of sardines into a dish for the cat, who kneads at the damp hem of his trouser leg until he scratches that soft spot behind her ears. Soup bubbling on the stove, lamp humming in the corner, dirty clothes shed into the laundry hamper. The relentless turning of the wheel, everything as it always is. This dull, little life, unimportant and underscored with the constant toothache fug of chronic pain. Tonight that pain is secondary, nameless to the white-hot, foaming insistence of Jayce Jayce Jayce .
Jayce pushed up against the architrave, so compliant he becomes a feature of the infrastructure; Jayce bent over the kitchen counter, choking on chemical tap-water and scalding his wrists on the hob; Jayce on all fours in front of the sofa, elbows and knees rubbed bubblegum-pink raw; Jayce sat, waiting, watching, and whining, like a well-trained pup pushed to the very cusp of his limits, underneath Viktor's desk, between Viktor's thighs. The desk is but an arm’s reach from the bed, tucked away behind a tattered screen divider in the far corner of the room. He could have Jayce from boards to boxspring in one fell swoop: fuck one hole at the desk and another against the headboard. He wouldn’t stop until his entire shoebox of an apartment was stained top-to-toe with Jayce.
He has entertained himself with cruder fantasies, but the truth remains: Jayce had waltzed into Viktor’s life just that afternoon. It took him all of a few hours to become a man obsessed.
Picture this: it is January 15th 1992, the forecast calls for heavy rain this evening, and Viktor does not know the man who stands in the doorway of his office.
All beige linen and red silk, chocolate-black hair and tobacco-brown skin, eyes like oxidised pennies and lips like begonia petals. He is broad, chiselled, built like a racehorse, and he fills the margins of the door frame perfectly, as though the space sighed into shape just for him. The notebook under his arm is bursting at the very seams.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” The man ducks into the office - a mothy, windowless Rothko of a room that is winter dark at the height of July. “Are you Professor Heimerdinger’s assistant?”
Faces like this only seemed to exist on long dead Old Hollywood heartthrobs, bodies like this found only on faded Honcho centrefolds.
Viktor does not know this man. He would like to.
“I am. Is there something you need?”
His smile is bright but taught with anxiety. He holds himself as though he has been practising, as though he doesn’t know what to do with all that body. Viktor thinks, if he were to wrap his hand around that glistening tree trunk of a neck, he would feel the raging pulse of a terrified animal.
“I’m Jayce. Talis. The professor may have mentioned me? I know he’s away on business at the moment but…”
This Jayce Talis - drop-dead gorgeous, ostensibly intelligent, perfect stranger Jayce Talis - speaks of Professor Heimerdinger’s proposed alumni program; a series of talks and workshops, one-on-one tutoring with the students of the physics department, a veritable cornucopia of opportunities for Piltover University’s many brilliant young minds. It is typical of Heimerdinger to make such grand plans, only to leave Viktor to deal with them when plans grander still take precedence.
Sometimes, it is like being a human answering machine. When the professor can’t be reached, they come to his ever present automaton, rattling away in the bowels of the university, shovelling coal and trying not to choke on the smoke. Press a few buttons, rewind some cogs, untangle the tape, and you might be deigned a desultory response: Sorry the professor is busy today, sorry the professor can’t help you with that, sorry the professor would seemingly rather do anything than his own fucking job when he has the option to go gallivanting among the council elites and leave the educational shit shovelling to his second class citizen of an assistant -
Viktor, jaded, overworked, and in need of his fourth coffee of the day, must wade through the murky waters of his memory - and desk-strewn paperwork - before he finds, floating among the debris, a pearl of recollection. Shiny as the slightly crooked teeth sitting in Jayce Talis’s pretty little mouth.
“Ah, the guest lectures. Of course.” Wedged haphazardly into a softening manila folder, Heimerdinger’s anachronistic cursive reads JAN 92 / GUEST LECTURERS AND TEMPORARY TEACHING POSITIONS. “Quantum entanglement and superposition, hm? Interesting. You know what Einstein said about entanglement, I’m sure?”
“ Spooky action at a distance. Really lights a fire under your ass when the father of theoretical physics himself doubts your thesis statement.”
“If nothing else,” Viktor laughs. “Challenging Einstein certainly sets you apart.”
When he looks up from the mess on the desk, Jayce is studying him as though he is onion skin beneath a microscope.
“This is gonna sound crazy,” A hand extends. “but I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve met somewhere before..?”
Viktor observes the offered appendaged - broad, thick-fingered, dusted just so with fine, dark hair - before exchanging a curt shake. Jayce’s hands are working hands. Labouring hands. Cut through with fading scars and pale calluses. They would look nice bound.
“I assure you, Mr Talis, we haven’t met. I would remember.”
Yes, Viktor thinks , I would remember the moist warmth of the palm, the thickness of the wrist .
“Right, of course. What was your name?”
“It’s Viktor.” He turns to the door. “Come with me.”
Viktor’s office sulks in the university’s dark heart of mahogany and velvet, built sometime in the neo-Baroque boom of the 1910s, far removed from the imitation art deco renovations of the late sixties, where the lecture hall juts out into the grounds like a beautiful broken bone. It is little more than a five minute walk down the stairs, but Viktor feels Jayce’s gaze flickering over his back like a moth throwing itself, detrimentally, against a live bulb. By the time they are through the hall’s huge glass doors, Viktor is certain one or both of them may burst into flames.
“I used to love this hall.” Jayce says. “I first met the professor in this very room; An Introduction to Civil Engineering with Cecil B. Heimerdinger . Didn’t think I’d ever be back, let alone…y’know…be the one doing the preaching.”
Preaching is certainly the right word for it. The lecture hall has the impersonal nature of a megachurch, a so-called omphalos of knowledge turned austere in its gigantism, and Jayce seems to wander its aisles with the reverence of a choir boy. Viktor has always hated it. With its floor to ceiling windows and bisecting symmetry, flooding with sharp light like a huge translucent brain. Too bright, too open. Exposing. A metaphorical craniotomy where everybody, even the vessel, is the patient. Viktor does not like having his brain picked at, though he has a sudden, consuming desire to dissect Jayce’s.
“It must have left a good impression.” Viktor imagines a younger Jayce Talis, soft-jawed and starry-eyed, devouring knowledge with the appetite of Saturn in the delivery room. He squeezes the hilt of his cane on instinct, disappointed when the white beech does not resist.
“You can’t even imagine. It’s a shame he’ll be missing the talk.” At the lectern, Jayce looks once at his own hands, then the sea of empty seats, then, finally, he looks at Viktor. All the radiant light of that prismatic room seems to gather to him, settling about his head like a crown, a halo. Something like enlightenment shifts in his eyes and suddenly he cuts the figure of a prophet, more so than a preacher. “Oh my God.”
“Stage fright?”
“No, I…” Jayce stutters, pawing at the straining spine of his notebook. “I knew I recognised you from somewhere.”
This again. It is not enough for Viktor to lust biblically over this alumni, it seems he must too be reminded that - no matter how much he would like for it to be the case - he has not, in fact, ever met the man before. If Jayce insists on dragging the delusion around like a dead horse, then Viktor will have no choice but to beat it down, cane or otherwise, until it dies a second, more permanent, death.
“Ah, really Mr Talis, if we had met, I would know - “
“No - we haven’t. Met, that is, we haven’t met each other.” His face is maroon with giddy panic, the persimmons of his cheeks glowing. “You don’t know me - but I know you.”
“Maybe you are crazy.”
“Crazy, yeah, sure. Not as crazy as writing cult-classic fringe-theory though, right?” That carefully practised smile that Jayce had so valiantly mimed is gone, replaced by a real, tooth-bearing, lip-curling grin that threatens to split his face in two. His gums are spit-shine bright. “More esoteric than theoretic ? More at home among the likes of Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson than Darwin and Dawkins? Ring a bell?”
The bells - of which there are a Basilica worth - are hard to hear when the sanctum of Viktor’s skull is already ringing with the bitter familiarity of Jayce’s words. To think, they have the same scathing reviews memorised. Every last syllable. Viktor cannot shake them for being etched into his spine, coiled up like a giant centipede, blanched white by a subdermal life of blood disease and chemical imbalance. Why Jayce knows them, he can’t be sure. Although, he has an idea.
“Right. I see what’s happening here.” Viktor collapses into the front row and buries his head in his hands, cursing into the warm dark of his lap. Just his luck that the most beautiful man he’d ever seen would also be a sleeper-hit dickhead. “I’m surprised you would stoop for such low hanging fruit, I thought maybe you were above that, Hell, I was even starting to like you. But no, I understand I’m an easy man to mock. Failed writer, lunatic, cripple - I won’t bore you with the unabridged list. I’m sure it’s very entertaining to a physicist such as yourself to see just where I’ve ended up: shovelling shit out of an elitist academy’s intestines.”
“I wouldn’t call you a failed writer.” Jayce says quietly. “Not be pedantic but if you have written you are, by definition, a writer -”
“I wrote an overambitious thesis that mutated into an experimental essay that should have been left in the 80s along with John Lennon.”
If you had asked Viktor what his student thesis was about when it was first written, all those years ago, in that freezing cold, black mould riddled dorm room, he would have said “mutation, among other things” . After a year of revisions, burning through every sleepless night with the neurotic obsession of a man who will do all things autistically or not at all, it was more so about the other things . A swollen, monstrous rag of a theory, dripping with statistics and speculation alike, that he named Origin of Sickness . Published independently in 1985 to a bemusing lack of consensus, thrown violently between critics as either nonsensical or nonpareil, it had continued to evolve when Viktor realised he would never truly be happy with the result.
“You wrote a groundbreaking piece of literary non-fiction about the inextricable nature of human evolution and disability.” Jayce doesn’t miss a beat. “I wasn’t mocking you, Viktor. You have a way with words. I remember thinking anybody who didn’t get it must be an idiot.”
He still cannot bring himself to look at Jayce. It would be like staring directly into the sun.
“...how did you recognise me?”
“I own a first edition.” Patchy ink and halftone shadow, printed in the back half of pink Xerox zines passed around at indie science fairs and art events among the eclectic likes of punkish genealogy enthusiasts. His author portrait - smudged, staring dead-eyed past the disposable lens - had been taken in a barren office by a professor of little note and thinning hair who supported Viktor’s lofty endeavours for as long as he could have him on his knees when class wasn’t in session. It was a strange time in his life; hazy, substance addled, sworn to secrecy. He does not like thinking about it. “You’re a lot less blurry in person.”
Viktor finally looks up, then, meeting Jayce’s gaze. How many times, he wonders, has Jayce looked at that photograph? Tried fruitlessly to define the features among the fuzz of the misprints? Surely he must have some semblance of it committed to memory; the hollow eyes, the severe cheekbones, the crooked nose. How strange, that Viktor had been made to wait thirty-two years before ever laying eyes on Jayce Talis’s painfully perfect face, all the while his photocopy parallel had sat among the carrel of Jayce’s bookshelves for seven years. It made his stomach turn.
“The first edition is much more…”
Viktor’s kinder detractors had dubbed it “closer to science-fiction than science fact” , whilst those less committed to maintaining the illusion of civility took one almost-cursory glance at his author’s bio before devolving hideously into borderline conspiratorial fascistic outrage and bigotry.
“Radical?” Jayce’s grin borders on psychotic. Viktor wants to kiss it ‘til his teeth are red.
“ Challenging. ” He runs a hand through his hair. “I was a very troubled young man.”
“Most geniuses are.”
“Genius?”
“Genius.
Viktor smirks.
“What does that make you?”
“I…I was hoping you could tell me, actually.”
Again, Viktor finds himself wringing his cane like some poor creature’s neck, longing for the pleasant give of prickling skin. There were a lot of things he could tell Jayce.
“I don’t suppose you’re busy? I mean of course you are but…you’re his assistant. Only makes sense for you to sit in for him, right?” The demure way in which Jayce bows his head is very becoming of him, right down to the fidgeting hand that works feverishly at his scarlet tie.
“You are asking me to stay and listen to your lecture?”
“I’m face-to-face with my most admired contemporary. No shit, I want you to hear my lecture. Sue me.” The response is so sudden he almost chokes on it. “That is…if you can. I’d be honoured.”
“I’ll clear my schedule.”
Jayce Talis talks about quantum physics like he is composing a sonnet. But the long dead poets of the past could not even fathom what momentum and polarisation were, let alone elucidate them like this. Jayce slices the arterial wall of classical and quantum as casually as though it were warm butter, he a hot knife. He speaks of particle duets. Spatial proximity. Wave function collapse. Quivering, nebulous poetry. His voice is smooth, breathy; the kind of leather slick tone that seems tailor made to purr baby baby baby like it's all he knows how. But Jayce knows so very much - Viktor would gamble this man might know everything - and he strings it all up in golden constellations across the lecture hall for all to gaze upon: mouths agape, eyes gleaming in what could be wonder, could be lust. As far as Viktor is concerned, they are one in the same. Every now and then, Jayce will pause his impassioned speech to glance briefly into the audience, looking for Viktor among the shift and shadow - the room has grown gloomy as clouds thicken and roil outside, but he is sure that it cannot be much different to studying a blurry photograph - as if to say am I good? Am I good?
In the recesses of his brain, it is just the two of them; Jayce performs to the best of his ability for Viktor and Viktor alone. He is so very, very good.
Eighty minutes glide by like wine and when the talk comes to an end, Viktor feels as though he has been rudely awakened from a lovely dream. The atrium begins to rattle with rainfall the moment Jayce falls silent; the heavens themselves had been holding their breath, waiting on his every word.
"Thank you for your time." He says, eyes downcast to his notes, and descends from the lectern.
It is not unusual for a handful of dedicated students to remain long after a talk draws to a close, but Jayce is swarmed the moment his feet hit the boards. They gather around like lovestruck apostles, and Jayce answers every badgering question with a smile and a nod, yes no maybe I hope so , as he carves his way through the rabble. Of course they love him, of course they need to gather like scavengers. Who wouldn't? Brain or body or, God willing, both , even a slither would be sustenance enough. The hypocritical part of Viktor, an old and unpleasant animal, bares its teeth at the spectacle - unearned territorial instinct - before immediately rolling on its back when he notices Jayce crossing the threshold toward him.
He says nothing, simply comes to a halt before Viktor, arms spread in enquiry. Still desperate for that answer – was I good? Was I good?
Jayce has such a glow about him, like the gravitational pull of a newly birthed star. Viktor cannot help but grin as he is sucked into orbit.
"You've certainly piqued my interest."
"Is that all?" Jayce's smirk falters minutely.
No. Pique doesn't begin to cover it. If Viktor were a lesser man, he would have skinned Jayce alive already. Stripped him down to the very bone. Committed an act of senseless violence right in this hallowed hall of education and enlightenment. Let the whole student body bear witness and testify at the stand, lock him up and sentence him to death for his crimes. He would die satiated.
He looks at the flash of bronze skin that slides beneath Jayce's shirt cuffs and imagines what the thrum of his pulmonary system would feel like interwoven with his own. He constructs a delicate reverie in which he splits the epidermis with the grit of his teeth, tastes the salt and copper of sweat and blood, lets it soak into the walls of his mouth, scar-tissue twisted from a lifetime of compulsive chewing. If a coroner were to flay Viktor open like a human butterfly, they could scrape his gut for tissue and sequence Jayce's genetic code from the detritus.
Viktor stands. Were he to press himself against Jayce's body, the crown of his head would come to just below the jaw. That perfect angle, a fine edge softened by the gloss of day old stubble and sweet, squeezable puppy fat.
"No, no. Not at all." Viktor says. "I am extremely impressed, Mr Talis."
"Oh, please. Quit it with the formalities. Jayce is fine."
His smile is infectious.
"I am extremely impressed, Jayce. A way with words, as they say. .”
“What can I say, I learnt from the best.”
“Your second talk is tomorrow, yes?”
"Superposition, nine-thirty sharp.” Jayce lights up, as if he could glow any brighter. “Can I…expect to see you again?"
"You most certainly can. But, you’ll have to excuse me, I have a train to catch.” Above the stage, a huge copper-faced clock ticks sluggishly. “I’m sure you’re in need of a good night’s rest, as well. A well deserved one, at that.”
“Thank you.” Jayce says, as sincere as anyone ever has been. “Have a nice night, Viktor.”
“Good night, Jayce.”
And here, in Viktor’s wilting studio apartment, it is night. Somewhere, a single mournful church bell tolls. The moon is nowhere to be seen. It has been hours sitting at his desk, letting the soup grow cold, marking papers 'til his eyes burn, letting his mind wander to all those messy and morbid places. Viktor, as always, aches all over, but nowhere quite so profoundly as below the bite of his belt, where his cock has strained against the confines of his trouser buttons all night.
He drops his pen and begins unbuckling.
He takes himself in hand, sweat stinging in the sharp nocturnal cool, and conjures the image again: Jayce's face, narcotic, opioid liquid gold in the claustrophobic darkness beneath the desk. It has been a long time since Viktor has felt the need to set any kind of scene, usually it is enough to sit in the theatre of his mind and let the slideshow play. It is easy enough to get himself off to blown out snapshots of hookups past, murky memories and faceless flesh. But after today, he knows nothing else will do. Like a second hit of heroin - it is a myth, he learnt in his youth, strung out and euphoric, insensate on the sweaty bed of a lover whose name he cannot remember, that the first taste of junk is enough to have you hooked for life - Jayce, or the idea of Jayce, is in his veins and nothing else will ever compare.
The Jayce of his imagination is velvet smooth as he takes Viktor's cock into his mouth, nothing his own hand could ever hold a candle to.
He spits into his palm, works himself 'til the purpling glans is vivid and wet in the scattered streetlight glow. The sparse muscle in his abdomen begins to tighten like a pit of snakes. It hurts, the brass buttons and frayed hem of his fly mouthing toothily at the base of his cock, but he imagines Jayce may not be an experienced lover. Perhaps he would make a sloppy job of it, all haphazard molar and misplaced cuspid, more fauces than fellatio. Viktor wouldn't mind, no, he'd love it. The thought makes his legs begin to quiver: Jayce struggling with the heft of it, so naive in his brilliance as to think that he could take on such a task; never been with another man, never taken a cock, never felt like this. Biting off more than he can chew, sucking down more than he can swallow. What Viktor wouldn't give to choke that beautiful boy 'til he was red in the face.
He spits again. A hand is no replacement for a hole, but if it's warm and wet he can make it work. Just a little tighter here, a little smoother there, up -and- down , grasp and release. Viktor careens into his own grip, the prongs of his hip bones cracking against an imaginary mouth and – he ejaculates across his fingers with a hiss and a grunt, a shock of cold air to the lungs.
It never is the orgasm of a lifetime, is it? Post-masturbatory regret hangs like a corpse; swinging, stinking.
Feeling the semen beginning to cool against his skin, Viktor finds himself longing for the burn of a bedtime cigarette. He had smoked like a chimney stack once upon a time, before his lungs began to disintegrate and his doctor told him to quit the vile habit or stop turning up for his appointments, because she would refuse to see him. He remembers student life, kicking back on whatever bed would take him, sometimes strangers, sometimes lovers - but never that leering professor, who would only have him on desktops and against walls - passing a limp Laika back and forth until the roach burnt their lips, joking that, any moment now, police officers would come banging on the door, arresting them under sodomy charges and shipping them off to Siberia for five bleak, sexless years. It never happened. Though rumours certainly flew and Viktor was no stranger to dirty looks around campus. He'd found many of the boys who spat slurs at his back rather liked taking it from behind themselves.
See, the fags always find each other. That much is certain, no matter where in the world one happens to find himself. Be it sleepy suburbia or smouldering city, there will always be an open mouth, a willing hole, somebody to hear you cry and then lick the salt off your cheeks, front and back. Whether or not starry-eyed Jayce Talis counts himself among the ranks of covert queers, Viktor remains a dirty pervert who masturbated to the thought of a man he was known for little more than a handful of hours. His right hand is covered in cold semen, his left paralysed by cramp. His penis is cyanotic and soft against the inseam of his cord trousers. Somewhere across this cimmerian city, Jayce is fast asleep and none the wiser to his most-admired contemporary besmirching his good image, reducing him to a cocksucking sex object, in the name of self-gratification.
Viktor washes his hands clean in water so cold it turns his fingers blue, and sleeps like a dead dog.