Dystocia

Blair bit the inside of his cheek to keep his temper in check and followed Jim inside their building, leaving behind the ozone and late traffic, and a cool grey sky that matched the sidewalks. The silence seemed to accumulate with every step and gathered further force as they stood waiting for the elevator. He could tell Jim's own temper was towing at its leash, and Blair felt a strong desire to be elsewhere or to punch the man somewhere tender in a way that would grab his attention. Unwise. Once Jim got started it would never stop. Jim could go a month, maybe two on an even keel, appearing to let things slide, pretending to mellow with time, but all the while a patented Ellison bender was rising like a tide. It was long overdue.

Up the elevator, the metal ticking and creaking, the floors sliding by, no words. Staticky shifts of their clothes, Jim's jeans and his, dark grey of the elevator, black of Jim's sweater, an absence of light. The walk to the loft door, Jim wordlessly twisting the key, pushing in, never letting his eyes turn towards Blair. Straight to the fridge for a beer, mainly, Blair suspected, just so he'd have something in his hands to keep from punching things. He never looked like he intended to punch Blair, but maybe the broad gestures with beer bottles and the wadding of dish towels helped. He'd never fully flipped, and long ago Blair had learned not to worry that he would.

But today he was cranked up and ready to pop loose a few rounds. Blair watched the muscles in Jim's broad back flex as he bent into the fridge, straightened up, twisted the beer cap off the bottle. When Jim abruptly let the beer cap fly with a sharp, snapping ping into the sink, Blair grabbed a breath of air with startling force.

"Jesus, Jim," he began, but never got the sentence out.

"Don't even start," Jim said, turning, staring at him with basilisk force, his face stone except for where his jaw twitched once.

Blair held up his hands in a warding, appeasing gesture, but it wasn't without a touch of mockery and Jim didn't miss it.

"You never learn, you really never learn, do you, Sandburg?"

"Oh, man." Blair's hands rose further, fingers manically stretching the hair from each temple as if this could withdraw the spirits of headache that had been massing for the past few hours. He roughly shook two handfuls of curls, unconscious of the wild results. "Jim. Cool it." A poor excuse for guide talk, but Blair wasn't primed to offer soothing. "I could tell it was a toy gun."

"You could not," Jim said flatly.

Blair stared. "Yes, I could," he said, flicking off each word with a little jab of his chin.

Jim visibly seethed and popped. "Blair, even seasoned, veteran cops--"

"Oh, yeah." Blair gestured into the air, made a derisive sucking sound with his teeth. Yadda, yadda. Here we go.

"--can't tell the difference in the heat of the moment."

"There was no heat, Jim. I looked. I could tell. It was plastic. I whacked him with a baguette. He ran. End of story."

"Whacked him with a baguette." Jim put the beer down, leaned on the counter with both arms extended and vibrating with tension. He dipped his gaze to study the countertop and his voice was deceptively even.

Blair compressed his lips and gave the crown of Jim's bent head a taunting look. In their disputes, as a rule, Blair sincerely weighed Jim's point while arguing his own. Now they weren't debating, though. Right now Jim's strident paternalism was shredding Blair's last nerve and his saintly halo invited egging on. "I told you. It was stale, it was hard. I knocked the gun right out of his hands."

"Yeah. With a baguette." Jim raised his head, a snake lifting.

"Yeah. With a baguette." Double dare you, thought Blair.

"With a baguette, Sandburg!" Jim unbent to his full height, and made a sharp, helpless gesture with his hands not unlike a man measuring the fish that got away. Or the length of a baguette. "Are you insane?"

"I must be. I'm standing here while you second-guess my amazing heroics when I could be taking a hot shower. Did you ever think of saying thank you?"

"Thank you? Thank you?"

"Thank you, Chief, for saving the day. Thank you, Sandburg, for foiling some jacked-up junkie's terrorization of innocent convenience store clerks." Blair was starting to get on a rhetorical roll, his head bouncing side to side, but Jim cut him short.

"And let's just talk about that." He came around the counter, obviously unable to take it any longer, looming into Blair's space. "You had no idea what that guy was hopped up on. He could have been seeing little green men, could have had a knife, a real gun. You got within two feet of him and practically begged him to blow you away."

"You're wigging out, Jim," Blair said, looking up into Jim's blue eyes, watching them spark and blink furiously and then widen as Blair's comment dashed over him like cool thrown water.

"Excuse me?" Jim said, cocking his head politely.

"It's over. Why can't you let it go?"

Jim stared at him as if looking at some new animal he'd never seen, as if just discovering a freak of nature flourishing in his garden. And then he slid out a smile, a tiny, crooked, knowing smile designed to get under even the thickest skin and crawl around there and make its host insane with irritation. "Ah," he said, and turned away.

Blair raised his right arm into a fist and smacked the other into his crooked elbow. He wasn't Italian, but the message was the same.

"I heard that."

"I knew those mighty sentinel senses were good for something."

Jim was back at the counter, distance reestablished, fondling his beer bottle, but it wasn't over. This dance was familiar. Jim could draw his unspoken commentary out for days if Blair let him get away with it. Only brutal goading or patient, careful chipping could pry out whatever the hell it was he had to say. Blair was in no mood to spend the next three days coaxing a thirty-seven year old man to bare his chest.

"Cut to the chase, Jim. Say what you have to say."

"What makes you think I have anything to say?"

Blair moved to the counter, leaned in toward Jim across its width. "You are such a dick!"

Jim tried to look unimpressed, but he always betrayed the depths of his disturbance when Blair took the offensive. Jim's face reflected a sudden shift from simple anger to a more complex kind of anger, a deeper level of antagonism.

It was then that Blair knew, with a sudden, zen-like sense of arrowing into the heart of the matter, that he could hit his mark. Every moment had its own unique beauty. He pressed his palms to the counter, held Jim's eyes. "You're a manipulative, cranky son-of-a-bitch whose biological clock is screaming with frustrated daddyhood and if you don't wipe that smug look off your face and tell me what the hell ah is supposed to mean, I'm going to put on Rusted Root and turn the fucking dial to ten and play it until your ears bleed."

By the end of this sentence Jim's face had tightened with effort and a flush of heat had lit up under his taut muscles. You want to know what ah means?" He nodded as he asked, and Blair nodded back.

"Yeah." Blair was nodding, Jim was nodding, their eyes narrowed, their faces lifted in challenge and fuming with banked ire.

"It means that if you'd had a father, you would have learned better, because he would have belted your ass every time you pulled some stupid stunt, some stupid dumb-ass shit-ass stunt like you did today."

"Whoa." Blair straightened up. Jim was nodding again, eyes never leaving him. Blair laughed, a cracked laugh of amazement. "Say that again."

"You heard me."

"No, say that again."

Jim let himself be worked and wound up to a pitch again with almost cooperative satisfaction. "What do you want me to say? You want me to say it again? You need a fucking spanking, Sandburg. If you'd ever for once in your life had to answer to authority rather than being coddled with some new-age hippie feel-good excuse for--for--"

"A mother?" Blair's voice was cool.

Jim backed off just enough to avoid the edge. "Naomi's a great lady. She didn't have any way of knowing you'd turn out to be a flake."

Blair was nodding, still nodding. He felt like one of those nodding dolls, head bobbing in perpetual motion, unable to control its tilting, specious agreement. "Uh huh. Uh huh, right. You know, Jim, whenever one adult man tells another adult man he needs a spanking, I think there's some serious subtext to be examined here--what do you think?"

Blair raised his brows and watched Jim's face go blank as he processed, and processed, and processed, for three long heartbeats, and then his stunned eyes seemed to turn themselves inside out with insight and his face turned beet-red in a sort of marvelous, revelatory way. Blair hadn't known Jim could turn that deep and rich a color.

Blair could have watched Jim struggle on the pin for hours, it was that good, but Jim turned away, walking into the living room, beer abandoned. Blair had half-expected him to flee the apartment, but this was better; Jim's off-balanced retreat only spurred Blair to dog him further. He flanked and followed Jim, staying on the fringes with some furniture between them.

"Hey, I'm an understanding kind of guy," Blair said, flipping his prattle switch on, stitching away with the needle, clumsy but determined to provoke. "I'm flexible, I'm open-minded. Your average love child for the nineties, right, Jim? So maybe I haven't done all the scenes, seen all there is to see, but I've read about it, caught it on the net. Rented the videos. You want to sublimate those homoerotic buddy-buddy impulses of yours, work out some of the kinks, make sure I'm housebroken for the next psychotic baby-raping serial killer who comes along?"

Jim turned, stared at him. Their eyes met and a pause prolonged itself weirdly.

Blair swallowed. "You want to spank me, Jim?" He said the words at last, in a lower voice and with a flat curiosity that didn't betray his interior. He pretended nonchalance, but he felt reckless, his pulse a cartwheel, his heart a small, grotesque thing uncoiling to soak up the spotlight--the heat, the glare, the horrified audience. His throat sung a little, aching from a current that hummed under his words. He shaved off a curl of air with the edge of his jaw. "You want? Hey, go ahead, I'll let you."

Jim closed his eyes, silent.

"Work out your aggressions, Jim. What's a little domestic discipline between friends?" Blair had been swaying foot by foot closer to Jim as he spoke, a boxer easing into his opponent's perimeter.

Jim opened his eyes to find Blair near and looked trapped. "Back off," he said, holding up his hand.

Blair stopped, flicked his lashes as he eyed Jim appraisingly. Jim was giving him profile, staring off at a focused spot of nothingness, but his body had rooted in place like a tree. Blair's head lowered a notch, and then drooped further until his hair began to gently slide forward. The nape of his neck cooled. His clothes dragged at him, dust motes buffeted the air around them, and he could sense every joule of energy from Jim's flesh. As the seconds ticked by and they both said nothing and the nothing grew, the cogs of Blair's brain reawakened slowly, grinding away his wild chaff and leaving him dreadful. He'd felt all degrees of shame before in his life, had done and said things he'd regretted almost instantly. But now--this joyride was going to cost him. He'd just invited another guy to spank him. Invited Jim, his roommate, his friend. Also his research subject, whom he'd spent years cultivating, for whatever that was worth. Already, Blair was searching for some spin to put on this, to make a joke of it, so that Jim's eyes would lighten with relief.

He didn't know if he could meet Jim's eyes.

But with that thought, and with a crick in his neck, Blair braved himself and looked up at last. And as if this were a switch releasing him to freedom, Jim broke and moved away toward the door.

"Jim--" Blair sent the call out, but it went unanswered, and Jim went out the door, jacket in hand, gun still holstered in the small of his back, probably on his way back to the station to fill the evening hours with the mindless tap of typing while the phones rang steadily in the background and the voices of detectives rose and fell in dry, skeptical duets with sullen felons, and lawyers swung in with their leather briefcases and the expensive crunch of their uniformly black shoes.

Blair slumped. He stewed and went to the bathroom and lingered there in the soothing cool tile. He came out and made soup and propped his cheek on his hand while he ate it and then cleaned the dishes religiously. He paced, twitched, and frowned at the corners of tables and at the angles of the couches and the color of the sky outside the window glass. He decided to clean the apartment, and began to swipe at a counter, and then decided not to clean the apartment, and then did it anyway. He carefully vacuumed and dusted, his forehead taut with concentration, and he straightened things that in the large, cosmic scheme of things didn't need straightening. He never got around to turning on the stereo or even the TV for accompaniment. The loft's astringent silence had an inertia, swallowing all sound so that Blair didn't notice when he occasionally fed the void with his quiet mutters. The lamps made a muted geometry of triangular glows; the couches had a stuffed, intrusive presence; everything fit together neatly and too well, which didn't usually bother him much but tonight did. The bowl of apples, the sigil of the warehouse door, the tasseled peppers on the kitchen wall. Art, art, everywhere he looked. It asked for chaos, which is why chaos crept out from the corners.

Eventually, there was nothing more that could be cleaned, not without investing a crazed amount of energy into the task. He wasn't about to pull out the refrigerator or flip up couches, so he went to his room and stared inside at its tatty rug and tweaked books, the fetishes of memory and travel, and the batik bedspread he'd had for seven years. His furniture issued a crowded, inadequate statement that Blair had never registered before now. He looked around his room with fresh, brooding eyes. He wondered why the hell he was sleeping on a futon at his age. It had never struck him before that this might be inappropriate for a grown man. Rest came with its moments of discomfort--a lot of them, actually--but the futon's undemanding nature, its foldedness and lightness, had compensated for the aches. Now, it just looked flimsy, significant of latent poverty rather than collegiate slack.

"No wonder Jim thinks I'm a flake," he murmured, with a detached measure of disgust and insight. "Hmmm." He was agreeing with himself and rubbing his jaw and wondering what to do with his room, his wardrobe, his life, when he heard the subdued clinks and scrapes of the far door opening. Blair's heart tumbled, ears strained, breath dropped. The key might have been scraping out the lock of his gut the way his body suddenly hollowed itself at the sound. Getting it over with was a good idea, but it still took a horse-pill of courage to walk out of his room and act as if he had that right, as if he could walk into Jim's living room and say,

"Hey, Jim." Blair cleared his throat and stuck his hands in his back pockets. He made himself stand still, and monitored Jim from a few safe yards of distance.

Jim was moving with the immersed focus of a man whose deck is tilting. He wasn't out of kilter, exactly, but he was taking his time negotiating each movement as if an unseen storm raged around him. He ignored Blair, either by choice or insensibility. When Blair came out, Jim had been just closing the door behind his entry, and while Blair watched now he turned with slow afterthought and bolted it. No menace there, just householder instincts cutting through the liquor-induced fog. Absorbed, he slid off a jacket that Blair couldn't recall him taking, and hung it carefully on the floor.

Blair raised one brow, opened his mouth, then closed it again with a tiny pop.

The keys followed the jacket, and then Jim was reaching behind himself with exaggerated caution. He fumbled for several moments, blinking, and finally managed to extract his gun, which he placed in the nearest kitchen drawer. With a direct awareness he hadn't broadcasted from the back, he turned from his task and met Blair's eyes.

Blair lost his voice for a moment, then caught hold of himself. "Hey, Jim," he said again, more warily.

Jim's face maneuvered around a few expressions, unexpectedly comical ones involving wry, pulley-lifted eyebrows and half-smiles, as if he hadn't worked its gears in a while and were trying to remember its job.

Guarded but game, Blair let one corner of his own lips rise. "Just a bit toasted, aren't we?"

"You been drinking, Junior?"

"Um, no, Jim. You have."

Jim smiled again, a polite reflex gone awry. "I'm aware of that, thanks."

It seemed as good a time as any. Blair shifted, approached, stopped and rested his hand briefly on the back of a dining room chair. "Listen, Jim, about earlier-I was way out of line. That was just, that was just way out there." His hand freed itself and he gestured with both, chopping at the air for punctuation. "That was not in the cards, that was like, jokers wild, man." He laughed, a token sound that conveyed his amazement at the earlier absurdity. He was letting it go and eager to take Jim with him into the free-fall of forgetfulness. "I don't even know how we got from A to B, but--"

Jim crossed his arms. "You asked me to spank you."

"Well, no, Jim, I may have invited you to spank me, but that was purely--"

It was the arm-crossing that had cued Blair to relax, and he'd done so, and maybe it was covert-ops training or maybe it was sentinel senses, six of one, half-dozen of the other, but Jim always seemed to know when an opponent was off-guard, and God there were times when Blair really, really hated a man who so perfectly embodied the Nietzschean Ubermensch, particularly now when he found himself being shoved over the edge of the dining room table. "Don't you dare--" he yelped, sprawling between two startled chairs, and while he was grabbing for leverage and trying to ensure that the family jewels didn't suffer a fatal impact, he felt the swat land across his ass.

"Fuck," he said in surprise. It hadn't hurt. The angle had been bad and the force weak--Jim, drunk, wasn't at peak coordination, or maybe he just hadn't been trying--but Blair was suffused with indignity. "Son of a bitch, get off of me," he barked, and aimed a stomping blow on Jim's instep, which was neatly removed from its path.

Jim grunted and leaned in. "So, you know you deserved that, right?"

His breath had a whiskey-wafting heat that would have been intriguing except that Blair wanted to do some damage to the breathing beast. "No, I don't know that. Get off." He struggled up and Jim let him-helped him, actually, until Blair shook him off with a glare. Anger was dancing in his body, atoms of it bouncing one against another, a liberating expansion of life energy, a wave of uncertainty. As soon as Blair got his balance back, he shoved Jim in the ribs. Jim swayed more than a tree should have, and frowned.

"Brat," he said.

Blair breathed raggedly, which allowed him to gape at Jim. He wanted to say, hello, Jim, hello? Reality calling. Instead, he took a deeper breath, hoping he'd be able to hear his own voice over the jackhammering pulse in his ears. "Okay, okay," he said, holding up his hands, feeling like this was all he did lately, a gesture to stop the mad traffic of a universe for which he was the karmic crossroads. "You've done it, it's finished, over, it's out of your system, I understand, I forgive, I'm letting go."

"Who says it's finished?"

"Yeah, heh," Blair said, ticked off and glowering at the suggestion of a new affront. "Just try it."

Jim nodded, serious but calm. "Okay."

Blair fought the good fight, but within less time than it took to loose a strong sneeze he found himself hoisted over Jim's shoulder and watching the floorboards slide under the living room carpet. He talked all the way to the couch, cajoling, threatening, reasoning, and put up enough of a struggle to keep Jim's pace at a grimly inefficient stagger.

"Come on, Jim, you are going to regret this in the worst way, man, I'm not even worried about me so much, but when you wake up tomorrow you're going to be punishing yourself for doing this, punishing yourself, Jim, and I am so out of here if you even let that hand land again, because I am not a karmic whipping boy and I don't have to put up with shit like this, I have no masochism to spare, and beatings really don't do it for me, I have no buttons for this regardless of what you might think, not that I have a clue what you're thinking and don't want to, Jim, Jim! You are a sucky research subject, man, you suck, I could've had monkeys, monkeys behave better than this, I've taken bullets for you--"

"Stop exaggerating."

"--Bullets, psychopaths, blowtorches, dropping me out a plane--" In the middle of his recitation, Blair was unbent and tossed on the couch. He immediately rolled and leapt for safety, but Jim hauled him back and turned their bodies, folding Blair in half somewhere along the way, and then they were falling, as Blair's weight propelled them onto the couch, where they landed in a rough and disgruntling tangle with Blair across Jim's knees.

Blair groaned, because steel thighs were a poor shelf for a man's small intestine. "Jim, this really sucks, this really, really sucks."

"Blair, shut up."

Blair closed his eyes and tried to spill himself off Jim's knees, but was unsuccessful, and part of the reason was his own cooperation; frustrated, he realized he was bracing himself on the floor with his hands to keep his balance. He loosened his muscles abruptly, but failed to fall. For several belly-aching seconds he rested awkwardly in place, then palmed the floor again with surrender.

"I thought we were friends, Jim," he said tiredly to the floor.

"Friends don't let friends drive drunk," Jim said.

Blair, hidden in a tangled canopy of himself, shook his head. The tassels of his hair reached out and clung to the carpet. "This is just one of the problems," he said, trying again to be reasonable. "You're completely wasted, man." He rocked a little, thinking Jim's grip might ease. "Your senses are probably out there circling the moon." He felt a hand stroke his back gently and sighed with hope. "Jim, come on, let me up."

"Why don't you ever get drunk?" Jim asked, as if this thought were something he'd been chewing on and now was the perfect time for an interrogation. Which maybe it was.

Blair dug both heels of his hands into the carpet and suppressed a snarl of exasperation. "I don't know. It's kind of hard for me to think right now."

"Why? All the blood's in your head." Jim started to laugh, as if he were truly tickled. The laugh turned into chuckles.

Sadist, Blair thought. A chuckling man was one of life's worst aggravations.

"There's a reason I never drink," Jim said conversationally, stroking Blair's ass.

The feel of Jim's hand derailed Blair's reply momentarily, then he managed to choke out, "Yeah, Jim, I get it. I get the whole one-beer-a-week thing now. And I applaud it."

"I thought maybe you don't drink because I don't drink. I mean, you drink, but you don't drink. You drink, but you don't drink much." Jim's voice mused, enchanted by its own chant.

"God, shut up," Blair mumbled, beginning to feel a desperate urge to turn the tables. He could stop this, he was pretty sure he could stop this, but if he didn't, if he really tried and failed, it might be uglier than if he'd never tried at all; less absurd, more serious.

Jim swatted him again.

It was almost a relief. After all, this was the goal of Jim's power trip. For the head of household to carry out his duty. To spank the child. Get on with it then, Blair thought readily, keyed to drift into his own center of resignation for the event. The odd thing was that this was actually making him understand what it must be like to have a father: to have a man you respect and thought you knew--a bigger man, a man with intimate influence on your life--suddenly take a sharp left turn and start treading water in the deep end. Growing up, Blair had heard stories from friends, barely credible tales of parental perversity, unhallowed disciplinary rituals, choler vented with sweeping, irrational gestures. He'd more or less managed to avoid such scenes. Naomi's men had been a beige background to his childhood, a to-and-fro of undemanding masculine company, each one of whom disappeared at the first sign of discord. Jim had been right. This was what he'd missed. And until now, he'd been damn lucky.

"Son of a bitch," Blair said, unable to find his center of resignation. He pounded the floor once with his left fist. Jim's hand dropped again, due south and hard enough to register everywhere. Blair's breath hitched and he set his jaw. He was pretzeled into breathlessness, face heated, hair densely masking his identity. And then one more sweet smack and suddenly he was right there, plugging into the moment. If anger had been an atom, now it was split. It spun his equilibrium. He would not get off on this. He would not, because Jim would not, and he had no intention of discovering at a mature twentysomething age that he liked to be disciplined by a good friend who was too drunk to know better. And yet that last, light wallop had connected a circuit and proved that his body was primed for shocks and sparks. Ouch. He swung his head over the floor in fighting shame. Come on, come on. This is so far from good we can't even see it from orbit.

"Had enough?" Jim asked, patting him.

"Fuck off," Blair said. The next blow scalded him, exhilarated him. Something undid itself behind his forehead. Pressure, release. Now he could sense the whispering millimeters between denim and flesh where Jim's hand had fallen. His skin was beginning to yield a sheen, there and all over. His shirt adhered to his back, swung loose from his chest. His nipples kissed hard at the air and ached for friction. Between his legs, between Jim's bolstering thighs, he blossomed. Antagonism had diffused in a race along blurred nerves and then reconcentrated in sharp knots at his chest and even more heavily in his groin. It didn't feel like anger any longer; he didn't know how to stay angry at Jim. His lips tingled. His spine arrowed a trickling heat to his ass. He braced himself better on the floor, offered himself, pushed against Jim's legs.

Jim, drunk or honest, caressed his back and the backs of his thighs. Strong hands held Blair and lazily traced him with a map of ownership. A thumb stroked along the seam of Blair's jeans until he hissed out a yes, and then dipped lower to fondle his balls through denim.

"I didn't think this was about sex," Blair said, pushing out the words, pitch lowered, his timbre now a violin, its straining need issuing from behind his ribs. He could hear himself too in the drumming wells of his ears, the husky, vibrating notes of a played body.

"You're all about sex," Jim said. His hand cupped and held one side of Blair's ass, then the other, as if measuring to compare.

"Oh, god." Blair's breath braided painfully between his words. "What are you doing, what are we doing here." He squeezed his eyes. "You're blitzed," he rasped. Being dragged by a salty, blood-warm undertow, he wanted to anchor himself in moral certainty. Jim was drunk; he couldn't take advantage of Jim.

Jim made a sound of response that didn't leave his throat, then said, "Yeah. . .you look good like this. I should have taken you over my knees a long time ago."

"Oh, god, do it," Blair demanded, waves of hot blood crashing into his scalp, his dick. He rocked, tried to aim his stifled cock into the furrow of Jim's thighs. He felt the other man's hand come down again and without warning Blair was close, twisting his hips and drilling against Jim's legs, while Jim's hand began to come down rhythmically at last, as if he knew Blair had reached the point where he needed the unstopping cadence, the urging force. "Oh god, oh god," Blair gasped, rocking wildly across Jim's legs, under the punishing hail, hair tendriled in his face, plaid flannel sliding down his back, everything loosened, the carpet biting into his hands and rubbing the floor, the rock of Jim's body shoving free of the earth, Jim touching the small of his back, his fingernails in the carpet aching, Jim breathing with effort, and worries thinning and thinning until they were boiled away in the heat in the cauldron of a place that obliterated thought.

And Jim didn't say anything, didn't have to, he did everything Blair needed, shifting the ledge of his legs apart, thwarting him, one hand sliding astray to fit itself to the nape of his neck like a hand-sized collar, fingers in the roots of his spilled hair, carding the thick curled wilderness of his skull, his other hand finding spots that sang, blazing scattered coins of pleasure on Blair's ass and in the crease between ass and thigh, and on the backs of his thighs, a place Blair hadn't noticed before. Buttons, buttons. He buttoned down the back. His dick prodded its confinement and his balls rose; he had nothing to rub against any more but now his nipples were being sawed back and forth on the ground of Jim's body and he didn't care how he looked or sounded, he flung a hand, grabbed the edge of the couch, begged, let me, let me, and then went there like a rocket.

He hung in space for a while, tethered only by his own oxygen, and then he began to drift back. "Jim, let me up," he said, as soon as he could recall how to speak. "Seriously. Nauseous."

Jim let him up immediately, manhandling him with unwieldy care until Blair was collapsed bonelessly across the couch, his head in Jim's lap. Cradled there, he passed into a twilight through which he could discern the surrounding landscape of Jim. The world faded and returned with the trick of forgetting, so that he'd slept, he must have, without awareness. Surfacing, he opened his eyes, saw the cliff of Jim's chest, the underside of his chin. The other man's head was tilted back, his eyes closed. He wasn't snoring, but he was close.

It was at this point that Blair should have come to his senses, but the slinky, replete weight of his own body distracted them. He stretched his toes, his feet, his calves. His abdomen ached, but fadingly. His ass had a lingering, radioactive glow. Melt down.

"So fucked," he said, in the vicinity of Jim's belt buckle. His throat was a honeycomb in which words buzzed like contented bees, and his lips and eyelids felt bee-stung on the radius of pleasure.

"Mmm," Jim said, then his head whipped up. Even from his vantage point Blair could tell Jim was disoriented and probably a bit unwell. He watched Jim's throat work several times before Jim cleared it and gave a half-second groan, all the protest he allowed himself. The body underneath Blair's head flexed and stilled; Jim looked down at him, studying him with an inexpressive facade that might have hidden regret or dismay or. . .or what, Blair had no idea. Jim was three miles deep from crust to heart; it was impossible to know how many layers of angst trapped his core.

"Up," Jim said succinctly, nudging upward at Blair's head with one big, cupped hand. Blair sat up and Jim disappeared from behind him, leaving an undulant wake of released couch cushions. Turning, Blair tracked Jim's progress. He settled into the couch and listened to the rush of water and the chambered squeaks of pipes from the bathroom. Concerned in an abstract, pity-the-drunk sort of way, he waited for muffled retching, but it didn't come, and Blair felt relief for both their sakes when Jim reappeared pale but mostly sober in the doorframe.

"Have some water," he suggested, and Jim went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and drank down half a liter of Cascade Pure without pausing.

"Bring me the rest," he said casually when Jim began to put the bottle back. He liked the obedient way Jim came to him. He slanted his lashes at Jim, a designing onnagata flirting behind his fan, then looked up to find that Jim was staring at his mouth instead. Wordlessly the bottle was handed over.

Blair searched his archives for a piece of timely and sensible advice. "Don't freak, Jim." Jim dropped onto the other couch as Blair finished off the water.

"You're the one who should be, Chief." Jim hunched forward, temples resting on the rigid vault of his fingers.

"Oh, yeah, well. I think I got more out of it than you did." Unthinkingly, Blair adjusted himself in the heated welter of his jeans, groping for one last aftershock. Residual ecstasy was a sticky thing; his fingers came away damp and musked.

Jim raised his head. His glare was a fraction of its usual strength, a pitiable semblance. "That doesn't matter."

"Hmm." Blair scratched an itch on his jaw, fingering his late-evening bristles with spunk-scented interest, not knowing quite what to say. "Sorry, Jim."

Jim's head fell back into his hands. A defeated sigh scaled down into a creaking hinge of a groan. "Don't sorry me, Sandburg. I whaled on you."

"Sure, okay. Take it easy."

"Stop, stop--" Jim had to sit up to gesture as he tried to grab the word out of the air. "Stop trying to--" He floundered helplessly, obviously more exasperated at his own aphasia than anything else.

"Uh, appease you? Ameliorate? Soothe?"

"Yes!"

"Okay. As long as you're okay with it."

"I'm not okay with it!" Jim's glare was starting to wax full again. He cast a baffled look down Blair's body and Blair could watch the process take place like he had so many times, the full sensor-sweep of a confused sentinel who's trying to read his environment, his prey, his foe. His mate.

"I'm okay with it," Blair offered.

"You shouldn't be."

Blair twisted in place, positioning himself more comfortably. "Yeah, probably not. But then again, between Naomi and anthropology, it's hard to have white-bread suburban hang-ups. She did all sorts of psychodrama and regression therapy at one point, still believes in ritual rebirthing, though I tell her I don't know how many times you can be reborn in one lifetime. I think it misses the point, myself. But there's plenty of Tantric, Taoist and Buddhist precedents for returning to the source, burning up some of your karma. Eliade called it the regressus ad uterum, and while I don't think he was talking about sexy spanking, you can make a case that the original trauma of birth itself is a barrier to that primordial bliss of origin. Birth, spankings. Hey." He cocked his head in interest, hands pausing in mid flow of an unnoticed symphony conduction. "I should tell this to my friend Erica. She has a sideline in this sort of thing." He caught himself and glanced at Jim, before he grinned and shrugged infinitesimally. "Academia isn't all dry theory."

"Apparently not. Don't know why I worried. You're incorrigible."

Blair almost felt bad for the man. "Hey, Jim, you weren't really trying to put the fear of God and Ellison in me." It stopped short of a question, but he gave Jim an earnest, searching study. "I'd know the difference."

Jim's blue eyes dipped away. "You were angry and you fought, and I used my strength against you. That's not me."

Blair didn't smile but his lips kindled as if they would, and then that flame grew still. He wished he could give Jim an explanation for everything that had happened, because he knew that was Jim's crutch; when Jim read, he looked ahead to the end of the story to see the killer's how and why, and then he read skeptically and critically through, hunting for inconsistencies. That, and motive. If Blair said now, things aren't and then they are, and change doesn't always happen in a second, sometimes it happened a year ago and you just didn't notice--that wouldn't explain a spanking or an orgasm in a way Jim found acceptable. And if Blair wanted to ensnare Jim now with a hundred threads of talk, weaving more haphazard analogies to carnal reincarnation, spinning more blarney--rites of intensification, Jim, decadence of myth--if he was willing, ready, to stretch for some bizarre but plausible relevance of spanking to sentinels that Jim would credit or try to. . .no. An anthropologist learns the language of his subject and respects its codes, and Jim's entire body spoke that this was not the time, this was not the moment for whims or conceits. So like a hacked translation of his own heart, Blair only said, "I wasn't afraid of you."

Jim had that baffled look again, as if he were hearing things only dogs hear and didn't know how to share the frequency. He inspected Blair's face quizzically for truth and then nodded, and it was hard to tell if he was convinced behind the mask. "Good." Abruptly he wiped his jaw, rose. "I'm going to bed."

"Oh?" Piqued and disappointed, Blair tried to compel Jim's attention, but Jim walked away and climbed the stairs, leaving Blair sitting on the couch, smoothing out his temptation to frown and picking at his frayed jean cuffs. Jim wasn't happy, wasn't letting it go. Jim was not about letting go. Blair often had a fascination for this quality, uniquely Jim, of tying himself to the mast of an experience, a person, a quest, with no thought for his own peace of mind. He let himself be buffeted, he took the blows. Trying to capture a photo image in his mind of Jim at six or seven, Blair wondered if he should be more concerned about the significance of spanking for the man.

Did Jim have a kink and did he hate this in himself? The question stretched Blair's imagination past its usually supple limits. He couldn't see that far into someone's interior; it wasn't natural. He was ready to go upstairs and prod the darkness of Jim, and see whether it helped, but doubted that Jim would welcome pillow talk about his childhood or his days in Vice or his women or Army buddies or whatever the hell weird shit he carried around with him, if any. And then it occurred to him that he could just climb the stairs and see what happened, what the hell, whatever came next it would probably be interesting. Jim might roll over and give him half the bed, might let him cuddle, might not think it strange at all.

Jim lay back on his bed. Words spoken hours ago still crawled on him and would not be shaken off. Acts had been performed with a rude, determined zest that carried him back half a lifetime, making him feel like a footballing frat-boy with no brains and no limits. He'd come to this but he had no idea how. Whiskey didn't explain everything.

Closing his eyes, Jim tried to keep the bed flat, and the floor under it. The world still had more spin than usual and his head kept expanding to its limits in a flu-like, discouraging way. Whiskey didn't explain everything, but it had been a long time since he'd gotten this drunk. Not since he met Sandburg; not since his senses caught up with him and kicked in. When he'd fled the scene earlier that evening and sought out a dim, bottled, greasy-wooded bar he'd once habited, he'd dived into the drink expecting the mix of alcohol and hypersensitivity to be more interesting, more of a train wreck. But he'd been unable to displace himself completely into the sentinel, where he could have gotten lost. Instead he'd remained too much in the world, come home, done things that felt ludicrous. . .inevitable. . .due. Things he didn't want to think about any longer. He wasn't a tragic hero. He was a man lying on his bed in the semi-dark, conscious of his hand on his stomach, unsatisfied, resenting how his clothes swaddled him but disinclined to move, listening to the gather of rain and the quiet sound of Sandburg's breathing rising from the well of the living room. Nothing was more than it should be, except in the usual way of things. His ears ached with the burden of hearing and his body spiked and fell as if in the midst of a high wind, but it was just the air around him. Existence.

Existence, its plot, was to wear you down by moments, and then by minutes. Hours, days, years. Habit. Jim, knowing he was plotted, stared up into the ceiling. By habit he tuned in to Sandburg's rhythms, the tiny hitches of self that meant the younger man was awake and aware, busy on some internal level, though merely sitting on the couch where Jim had left him. With concentration Jim could hear the scratched rise and fall of his lashes, and in that feathering and in his thoughtful breath was the irregular counterpoint to the beat of his heart, son-qo, a total concentration of sound which was his familiar body and whose effect resembled the hypnotic bump of a needle against old vinyl, son-qo, an eternal circular skip that was not static, the placeholder of a music that would never start or never stop. . . son-qo. . .son-qo. . .

. . .and this was what it was to zone or to balance on the edge of a zone in a long ascending prelude in which the wells of his ears expanded to capture the world and the wells of the world echoed every sound back as if canyons spoke to canyons, but in one canyon was always the thistle of a heartbeat. This is what it was to go further, to rise, to zone or to balance on the edge of a zone in a place that had no color and no heartbeat but his own and where the tone of his body was a thing long and grey and sloping like a pier sliding into the water on a morning utterly grey even to where the sea meets the horizon in the place where the line of the world recedes and where the lapping of the pilings has a serene and stony touch as they touch and touch again and in the center of this a movement, no, the thread and cry of a gull, a cry of a gull, a sound changing, lower, no, closer, lower, nearer, lower, erratic, annoying, in his face, beating like a flutter of wings in his face and an attack of sound, there, in his ears that forced him to dial it down, down. . . .

"Dial it down, Jim," said a voice, smooth and easy, reassuring. "Come on, back to earth, time to wake up."

Fingers padded and warm stroked one brow, touched the pulse at his hairline, cupped the side of his head. It was an intrusion meant to draw him back. It was drawing. Jim rose into awareness of this touch nearer than he'd usually allow. The hand grazing his temple seemed to have slid under his radar, come within his own electrical field. Heavy and close, it skimmed his cheek, taking the liberties of blessing, but its energy was hot and charged, a dense storm in the shape of a hand, and as it passed down one side of Jim's face, brushing the orbit of his right eye, desire slammed to the surface of the touched skin, zero to sixty, as if this were the only spot on his body that could hold sense.

Jim opened his eyes, but they were already open. Sight was stiff but returning. Jim focused and looked up into the serious, sensual face hanging above, a distinct and tangible presence from the charcoaled shadows of the unlit bedroom behind him. Light from the living room picked up the curves of those features. Sandburg. Always Sandburg he woke to. He was used to it, returning home to himself and finding Sandburg near. But now he was nearer; he hung over Jim like a concerned moon, his eyelids half-lowered, lips fuller than possible, everything about him composed in rough chiaroscuro: faint beard, mass of jesuitical hair, jawline knifing the shadowed architecture of his body. Jim saw each detail, sight untranslated. You didn't need a vocabulary for a man who had his own. And he was just a man, with changeable and youngish features, and if he had been a stranger, viewed fleetingly and without a name, hunkered down in an overcoat on a metro platform, he would have remained an unthreatening and unremarkable species of man, but he was closer than that. Here he was the strangely suitable moon of Jim's world, overlooking him with thoroughly seeing eyes, determining the tides of Jim's life. He was touchable.

Jim loathed himself.

"I'm turning the light on," Sandburg said.

"No," Jim rasped out, but it was too late, the illumination came on and sharpened everything. He squinted at Sandburg and hoped his face expressed his irritation.

"I've told you it's not good when you zone to sleep, Jim," Sandburg said reasonably.

"You've told me."

"It's all right for the rest of us, but you wander down the dark road and get lost. The last time it happened--"

"I know."

"--I couldn't get you up for nineteen hours."

Jim began moving his limbs, forcing himself out of granite immobility. "Have you ever heard of a sleep debt, Sandburg?"

"Yeah, my undergraduate loans are still in forbearance." The fine corners of Sandburg's mouth drew into small tildes of amusement, and he moved back, giving Jim room to sit up.

Jim shoved upright to lean against the railings. He rubbed one finger against the wing of his nose and nudged grit from his eye. When he blinked, there was Sandburg again, watching him, and it was like a window into the first sight of him, the wild mossed hair framing a deep regard that Jim couldn't shake, the wise eyes, the snubbed contours of his witchy face. He wanted to tell the demon to get out of his life, but it could never be. Spanking wasn't enough for a creature like this. Jim wasn't sure that anything would trick Sandburg into flitting away.

In the lamplight, in his bed. On his bed, that is. "Why'd you come up," Jim said, pretending to make a pointed question of it.

Sandburg shrugged, a lazy-looking, one-shouldered, appealing roll. "I called up but you didn't answer."

"Maybe I was ignoring you."

"Then I said I was taking your truck keys and asked if you wanted anything from the all-night doughnut shop."

"Oh."

There was a pause, the length of a Blair blink. "Do you want to talk about--"

"Jesus, Sandburg, what do you think." Jim screwed his gaze into the blinding halo of the bedside lamp, and the clock there. "It's almost two a.m." He avoided looking directly at the other man, but his peripheral vision plagued him and he could not block out the warm goblin on the edge of his bed. "I really need to sleep. I've got pre-trial with Kipnis at nine."

"That guy with the bolo tie and the weasel pelt on his head?"

"That guy."

"You need me there?"

"No, and that's not your job." Jim was finally forced to look at Sandburg. "Excuse me," he said, his eyes cutting the air between them into subtle hieroglyphics that asked, move, and asked a dozen other unsaid things. Instead of rising, Sandburg hitched back along the bed, giving Jim room. It prodded Jim's patience as if with a sharp stick, but he set his jaw and launched himself into a standing position that challenged his poise, then descended for another trip to the bathroom. Tired and tense, he dawdled there for several minutes longer than necessary, knowing his bed hadn't been vacated, and those minutes stretched until he forgot what he was doing hiding in the bright bathroom at two in the morning. On autopilot as he drifted in thought, he found himself stripping his clothes off without plan, so why not take a shower. Would save time in the morning.

Eons of sluicing heat later, during which he slid in and out of a waking sleep, he left the shower. He toweled himself dry and slung the towel round his hips, flicked off the bathroom light, the kitchen light as he passed by, trod silently through the darkened living room. At the bottom of the stairs he recalled leaving his clothes heaped in the bath, and thought, to hell with it. He padded up the stairs, towel drooping, into his shadowed aerie; on arrival he tossed the damp towel in the direction of the metal shelves, hoping it would snag there but not caring much if it fell. Fading fast, he rolled himself into bed and under his comforter with a fluid movement, without boxers or senses on, or one conscious care for anything in the world. And rolled further into a heated, burrowed body in his bed. In his bed, something moving beneath the bedding with self-absorbed hums and sighs as it got comfortable.

Jim woke up with a tiny jolt of panic, but from out of the darkness his face was being stroked by a thousand coronal threads of loose hair that seemed to have a life and volition of their own. "What are you doing here," he whispered, not knowing why he whispered unless it was to keep himself from waking up even more, into the necessity of action.

"Think I like your bed better."

I didn't invite you here, Jim thought. You're trouble, and you're a man. I like a smooth-limbed woman when I wake up in the morning, and their smells and their hair. Straight hair. Women. In his thoughts there was something like certainty. In his bed was just. . .reality. Real, male, an uncertainty, this perverse and touchable Blair Sandburg, hair strung with motes of carpet dust, flesh exuding sweat and temperament, the folds of his body like crumpled butterflies.

Jim searched for something to say that would banish Sandburg from his bed without argument, and then the other man's eyes slit open, a tentative expectation. They were both on the shore of sleep, listening to the rolling of its waves.

"I hit you," Jim whispered. The words hadn't meant to come.

"Trust me--" The sentence began, dry and seeded with humor, and its promise held, a sustaining note, so that Jim waited and waited for its closure, knowing there had to be more. The tone had been quiet, but sure and contrary, a schooling on the tip of the tongue that Jim needed to receive. Trust me, it won't happen twice. Trust me, I've had paper cuts that hurt worse. What would he say. Trust me, Jim, not everything is what it seems. He held open, waiting. The longer he waited, the more patience flowed in, pedestrian, the clock's electrical whir, erratic brushstrokes of rain on the window glass, prosecution in the morning, and the less strange it seemed that he might share his bed with the one who kept him tethered on an unfinished line.

He could wait like this. The sloping valley of their pillows tumbled their heads close and the center of Jim's forehead blazed with the ache of proximity. Nothing but breath and the subterranean heat of a bed between them. He accepted the gradual recognition of his own bedroom in the dark and had to admit it held nothing unusual. He laid a hand on Blair's hip, daring. Flannel boxers, trim shape, a wealth of heat and bone under the dune of his flank, along the shore. In the waves. . .it seemed so much work to go there and so much more work, now, not to go there. Wasted effort, not to go there. Deep water, there to go. . .now or later. . .why not. The slapping and the slapping of the waves was a new thing, stinging and heavy with salt. Not easy, this. Accidental, and uneasy, but he couldn't take the act back, and once you'd done this why would you ever want to. A slap and a breath, a slap and a slap. . . breathe, Sandburg. . .maybe this was like birth.

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