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Nate awakens to the creak of the handle, followed by the dull whoosh of the door swinging open.
Or does he?
He isn't sure what he had just awoken to, could be anything, like a vague sense of things falling out of place, probably just the body signaling something or other. A need for excretion, consumption, more oxygen, fucking, like, anything.
It's pitch dark. He doesn't need to piss, isn't thirsty, isn't hungry. He can't see if the door's really open. Does he just feel like it is? And more importantly, is he still dreaming? He could be. He's had that before, door falling open, slithering, flowing currents of something, always unspecified and unnerving. Not always. Sometimes it's not a something but a someone.
Since his dad started inviting himself into Nate's bed, motels have mostly been missing from his dreams. His mind seemed to have quieted down some. What you imagine is always worse than the real thing, dread demands a larger space than what is allocated to it under ideal conditions, than what it deserves... Dread is gaseous. No fixed shape or volume, moves to fill everything.
Being touched, getting fucked by his father, that's real and solid. Anticipation was almost worse.
He turns on the bedside lamp. Now, this, it's something he wouldn't even have imagined.
"Can I... Uh..."
Cal shuffles in the doorway and picks at the latch-bolt. Either he bothered to throw on a shirt before visiting or he's gotten in the habit of not sleeping in the least amount of clothes Mom is comfortable with. When she let slip the word 'divorce' during a routine argument the other day, that must have made an impression, he's almost cleaning up his act, one could say... Someone, somewhere in the world, could say that, probably. If you ask Nate, it's a particularly ridiculous and clumsy farce, no effort. There isn't even an act, nothing to reform, that’s how bad he is at it. At this pretend shit. The part he barely bothers to play. Sometimes Nate feels like everyone moves through life on predetermined tracks, doing what their mechanism allows them to do, like the dancers and woodsmen and whatever else is on those fuck ugly cuckoo clocks... Maybe he'll campaign for that divorce. Cal repeats himself.
"Can I..." —he gestures towards the bed with a jerk of his head— "Y'know."
Wow. It's the first time he literally waits for Nate to invite him in. Vampire-like, except Nate knows that in his situation, saying no doesn't exactly mean he's staying safe inside.
He's a sucker. No reason not to get a little annoying with it.
"Are you insane? Close it. Are you fucking insane?"
His father is still wearing that dumb fucking face on his face, so he must not have been clear enough.
"What's she gonna think when she wakes up? And the off chance that she comes to check on me or something? You're gonna say that you, what, hopped in for a cuddle?"
After a half spit-out, half swallowed-down scoff, like Cal knows he shouldn't even consider Nate's metric for what's a good idea and what's a bad idea and yet he can't prevent the warning from reaching him, or prevent himself from acting like a teenager who's just been scolded, he does answer.
"She'll just think I— I had to be on-site early. Or that I'm out cheating on her, why do you care? Besides, I'll be up and out of here before she's up."
I care because she's my mother, and you are cheating on her.
"Don't overthink it. Please." Cal pauses, then blurts out: "You can watch me set the alarm?"
It's so startling, a fucking alarm. It's Nate's turn to do that mean little scoff colored by weariness. He massages his forehead. As if under-thinking didn't pause, like, way more of a threat. And it's the implications that they are anywhere within the realm of thinking, of reason, still within the pale, that bothers him, because this is not about who thinks what. There's only self-interest and resignation. Caving in, not compromise. Spinning it as something to think over, to debate, to present arguments for and against, when they both know what operating on pure instinct is... That's fucking insulting.
Besides, if he dared to admit there was any love, that would be simple, animal, undiluted, too. Non-negotiable.
He feels insulted, he feels like a fool. It's the hundred thousandth time. By now, the feeling has its usual way of passing quickly. The river, through him, and the bed it has made.
He notices Cal's still just beyond his doorstep (because he did close the door gently, so the whispering has no chance of reaching anyone, like Nate wanted, so Nate made it necessary for him to step inside, so he invited him in), not any further. Someone who didn’t know his father so well would say he listened and waited to be allowed inside, to have this part of Nate’s life, this night, this closeness, these square inches of his bed. He’s not sure of what he knows. The Cal who is patient on the periphery of his room could be the one who wanted to help with a stupid fifth grade science project so bad he superglued his fingers together, or he could be the one who waits before pouncing.
You make do with what you have, Nate supposes. A little is still something. And getting a hundred thousand opportunities to forgive, that’s nice, in its own way, right?
He lifts the other side of the blanket up and turns away, just for good measure. Turns the light off. Just to show that he intends to sleep sometime that night.
He doesn’t look at his father’s face as he settles in and blows out a relieved sigh. The short hair at Nate’s nape dances with it, so they’re close, evidently too close like this. Nate spends several long minutes drifting towards sleep, coasting on the surface of unconsciousness, before the hand snaking around his bare waist tears him from the cool, crushed velvet ocean he had almost managed to sink into.
Fingertips sear his skin. He turns around, makes a fuss. Cal only lifts his hand for the duration of Nate’s (very deliberate) squirming, then carefully sets it back down a little lower, at his hip. Nate is inclined to push it away. He does not.
They’re now face to face. It matters little, no cause for unease or excitement or anything in between, because it seems that whichever way he’s facing, it’s always towards his father.
Nate wants to knock the sharpest part of his elbow into that sensitive space between two of Cal’s ribs. Wants to say something. Some kind of complaint or curse word, frustration is right on the tip of his tongue, but all he can manage is some huffing, nostrils flaring.
The moon must be on the fuller side. Or his eyes have already adjusted to the dark, because he can make out the features in front of him with no difficulty. The smallest hint of a smile, almost shy. Under-eye bags. Frown lines. Lips he knows the taste of. His wrists are then encircled by Cal’s hands.
Worst part is, well, it’s comforting to be shackled.
Cal lightly presses circles into his skin with his thumbs. Like he’s doing one of those hand massages for headaches. One part of you is kneaded and another part is affected. This is something Nate feels elsewhere, too. Deep inside. Annoying. The place where his shoulder and neck meet is stroked next and he feels this overwhelming compulsion to correct the moment; kill the discrepancy. Cal sometimes says he ruins things.
“That’s what you came here to do, right? I know you want to. Just ask,” Nate drawls. He grasps Cal’s hand that had been rubbing over his neck and squeezes with enough force to make it hurt. He knows Dad, being the old and self-centered fuck that he is, needs a little time to digest. He waits and watches the emotions as they strain against each other behind Cal’s eyes. “Say it. Say it, tell me to suck you off. Slip your hand into my boxers.” The commands leaving his mouth in slow whispers are as assured as they are immodest. “Come on, you don’t need me to give you ideas. You want it.”
He doesn’t get the satisfaction of a reply. Doesn’t get to provoke his father into lying blatantly or get him to disclose any filthy intentions.
Shit isn’t even moving along, not even a hand on his dick or anything, fuck. Nate’s hand does fall into Cal’s hold again, though. He feels for the wounds near Nate’s nails, tiny raw hollows, the hollowed bits of meat and the stiff, dry, thick skin where it’s healing. There are fresh ones, Cal finds them and seems to inspect them, even though there isn’t enough light to really look.
“I told you to stop doing this,” he says, simple and neutral.
For a second, it sounds like he means “ruining things” and not skin picking. But of course he did, he says that, knocks on the table when Nate’s doing it, puts on a stern look, at times even snaps his fingers, which never fails to make Nate feel like a routinely misbehaving pet. Fuck that.
“Why don’t you tell me a hundred more times, see if the hundredth is what does the trick,” he jabs. Really, it’s like, what does Cal think? When he’s not there to snap and knock and scold Nate better, it happens all the same. You shouldn’t have to enforce a solution again and again, and if there’s still that pressure inside that causes the compulsion then—
Cal lifting one torn-up finger to his mouth and beginning to nurse on it leaves Nate dumbfounded.
He must be tasting blood. There’s gotta be blood in his mouth, at least a faint taste. Nate’s blood.
Against his better judgment (without judgment, more like, since that part of his brain has just shut off, fried itself, out of order currently), Nate’s turned on. Having the places where he’s pink and open licked, his father tonguing his wounds, it’s positively surreal.
He hardly knows what to do with this. When Cal's not telling him what to do, or at least signing off on what he's doing, he can get a little lost. Or very. Depending. When it started, Cal would get a thrill out of dismembering him, grinding his previously constructed sense of self down to dust. Nate knows that's what he wanted, the experience he would look for again and again, because it's what Nate would get out of the sex he had at least half the time. Stripping them down to the base, where people are most themselves. It's something violent, but violence is selling it short. Maybe it's an overflow of self-hatred on his father's part or it's way simpler than even that, but maybe the reason Cal wanted to dismember him is because he understands.
Cal would rummage around, take whichever parts of the machinery he wanted, replace them, take and replace and take without replacing, until Nate didn't know what he was. Why wouldn't he feel desolate, then, if Dad has abandoned his little project of fucking him up? When he asks if he can come in and lay down, when he isn't degrading and humiliating Nate right away, when he eases off Nate's fingers and kisses them reverently and waits for Nate to believe they're not going to do anything unless he wants it—how's he supposed to deal?
He'd rather go back to Cal just fucking him raw. This scares him. But if he can't have control, stability might be the next best thing, and he hasn't learned to abandon the need for that one yet...
He doesn't like the way his father's looking at him. And holding him. They'll go back to "raw" and "dry" and "humiliating" and "depraved" soon, he's sure. He knows. Cal can't go too long without taking him apart (or taking something apart; Nate is probably just satisfying his wish for his own importance when he imagines that it's personal). He can't go too long, because that's not the man he is.
The spit on Nate's hand has dried for the most part. He slides out of bed without a word and heads to the bathroom. Water, soap, lather, rinse, repeat two more times, he only barely stops himself from going for five or more. Just until he feels clean.
When he's standing by the side of his own bed again, his dad welcomes him back wordlessly. Nate lets him be the big spoon, this once.