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Chapter Text

He had been undecided, apathetic even, about committing to undergraduate studies until the moment he understood the encompassing breadth of his father’s scandal. At the point when reporters and lawyers began to swarm the house and their every move, when friends began to distance themselves from him socially, when even his online world became encroached upon by digital spies, it became clear: Lochlan Ratliff must keep himself occupied.

It was unfortunate that the Ratliff’s generations-long commitment to excusivity precluded him from applying to any third or fourth choice universities, anything out of state and therefore potentially out of sight. But the lesson he had learned once already, and was destined to learn several more times in the coming months and years, was that mistakes once made could not be mourned in inaction. Life, as it were, would continue; decisions must continue to be made, and avoidance was a tool which must be used sparingly and with intention. If some thoughts begged attention but must be avoided, some lingering nightly urges which scalded the backs of eyelids and led to scrubbing hands til they bled raw, then other thoughts and activities must take their place. A void would not be tolerated.

Of his two options, he chose the most rigorous, exceptionally difficult program into which he had been admitted, with the aim of immersing himself so completely in his studies that the media circus surrounding his family name could be sufficiently drowned out: the Structural Engineering and Mechanics program at Duke University.

School had always been something of a buoy for Lochlan. Especially once his siblings had both moved away and left him in the massive drafty Ratliff manor, alone with no one but the help and his mother’s occasional afternoon guests, he found himself invigorated most by intellectual pursuits. He could become engrossed in any subject at all—art, literature, chemistry, calculus—but in those lonely high school years found that the more challenging the subject, the more rewarding its study.

He suspected the society he would find among engineering students would consist of fellow waifish etudiants with little to no interest in tabloid gossip, or at the very least pragmatic types with little to gain from his continued persecution. As his father sat in custody, bail remanded after his avoidant stunt in Thailand, trial not set to begin until the new year; as the months rolled with their family headless and flailing for lost prestige, he found himself craving continually not for friends and allies, but for four years of hearty, antisocial distraction.

--

Timothy lacked any reason til now to discern between the many kinds of incarceration this great country had on offer. Prison was to him simply a place unfortunates went, regardless of the length of their stay, the requisite level of security, or even the incepting reason for their detainment. It would not have made any difference to understand the distinctions between county and state, jail and penitentiary, but he is now and forever saddled with the information. Until the state sees fit to offer him a narrow window of opportunity in which he must surely, his lawyers bid, plead guilty, the white-painted cinderblocks and iron bars which enclose him class a jail. This means the ponderous drip which echoes through the hall outside his cell, the rabid itinerant neighbors he shares slop with at mealtimes, the flickering fluorescents which pervade every corner of this oppressive labyrinth, are temporary. His lawyers insist that federal facilities of the type he is likely to inhabit longterm are cleaner, kinder than the Durham County Jail. He is coming to understand that such degrees of habitability can only be appreciated from without. From within, regardless of name, a jail is a jail is a jail.

--

Lochlan was already eminently familiar with the campus, so he could not share in the wide-eyed adoration of his fellow freshman as they thronged for orientation, gawking at the storied ancient buildings, furrowing brows at laminated maps scrunched in sweaty hands. He slid between them with ease, navigating to the appropriate folding tables to sign in, receive dorm keys, hand in his vaccine attestation.

He had not brought his belongings just yet. Though the Ratliffs lost their permanent residence two months ago and were in a continual shuffle from relative to relative, they remained ever in the Triangle area and he felt no sense of urgency to move his things in just now, especially not in this din. Eschewing his mother’s request to accompany him, he took an Uber and came alone, partly in an attempt to lose any paparazzi or undercover police who may be tailing him, partly because he knew how Victoria would embarrassingly fawn over the loss of her youngest babe. He hoped to forestall that scene as long as possible.

Sparks of bitterness flickered in him as he was buffeted to and fro by clumsy teens. It was a bitter time in his life, to be sure—his very attendance at this college, though so oft promised him by his legacy heritage and previously immense wealth, was under no uncertain scrutiny. And these people, his classmates, these unwashed hundreds who poured in and out of doors like flies, he could not help but think that they did not belong here. They came as visitors to be installed only temporarily. They could escape, flee, at a moment’s notice and neither the institution itself nor the annals of history would blink at their absence. Their names did not line plaques of notable alumni, and would never be stricken from record in shame.

Lochlan often longed for an invisibility that he could never achieve. The strangling possessiveness of his siblings meant his home was never truly his, not first, not in any way that affected the outcome of things. The strictured polish of the country club meant that the slightest indiscretion would reverberate, transmute, tarnish one’s reputation for all time. And now, worst of all, between the advisement of lawyers, the occasional intrusive questioning from reporters posing as would-be confidants, and the notices received from the college itself which insinuated unspoken qualifications of his stay here, his time at Duke University promised to be equally and painfully as visible as ever.

If he could not be invisible, he yearned at least to emulate the eager hopefulness he saw around him. He wandered the booths of student organizations beckoning new students to join their ranks, tentative soft-cheeked virgins with their insignificant hobbies. Never much of a joiner he, they almost all bored him. He had participated in extra curriculars as a matter of course, a box to be checked on the path toward collegiate acceptance. That was all done with now.

It was by accident, he thought, certainly not a conscious choice on his part, that he found himself in front of the Center for Gender and Sexuality table. He had paused to right himself, knowing the location quite well but the sheer humid swarm of parents hauling their children’s belongings in black trash bags and rubbermaids made orienting oneself, ironically, quite difficult.

He stood only for a moment, obscured by a gaggle of pierced and colorful newcomers who resembled, if only a bit younger, the pierced and colorful students manning the booth itself. He blushed by association, ever desiring to remain unknown, unknowable.

He was aware, perhaps too aware, of his own sexual proclivities, but despite being born into a generation of sexual freedom, was not permitted to openly explore them. The Ratliffs were a clan which still spoke of certain uncles as “confirmed bachelors,” with no motivation to further examine the subject. Unlike Piper, Lochlan would not give cause to interrogate this practice, finding it easier to keep private needs private. In any case, Piper’s six month foray into lesbianism capitulated to bisexuality and neither brazenly claimed identity ever culminated in so much as bringing a girl home to dinner. Lochlan knew that if he were to indulge himself, there would be no such easy retreat.

The depravity of all homosexual desire was only affirmed by his first sexual act, forever coupling thoughts and deeds that should have remained ever apart. It would be well enough to Lochlan if he never fucked another man so long as he lived.

An image at that table stuck in his mind and followed him the rest of the afternoon, all the way back to the guest room he currently occupied at his cousin’s second home. At first it made him want to burst into inappropriate, mean laughter, but as the hours passed and the image persisted, the derision gave way to a newly horrific thought.

The vision was, simply, a bowl full of plastic pins emblazoned with pronouns. It made him think of the ladyboys in Thailand, dreadfully obvious in their difference, fooling no one. These little round discs threw up pathetic wards against lifetimes, aeons of human wiring associating word and body by gender. Could a group of acne ridden teenagers with bleeding tattoos win out over entire languages, the very nature of our biology?

As he lay in bed—the last night he would ever lay in this particular bed—the question in answer became: could everything which has led you to this moment, this awful moment of consequences of the sins of your elders, those very people who should have prepared you better for this life, should all of that remain unquestioned?

Are you not, Lochlan Ratliff, desirous of escaping the assignments your body has been given? Are you not, by association, by lineage, always one of them?

--

Saxon was impotent. Unable to bed any Thai beauties. Unwilling to stop his virginal brother from pleasuring him. Powerless to prevent federal agents from toting his father away seconds after landfall. Ignorant to the legal proceedings that would follow. And most disastrously to his fragile ego, so incompetent at his place of work that he was questioned for a mere fifteen minutes by authorities and discharged summarily without any followup. He held no position of authority at his father’s firm, and at the time of their seizure, had quite literally no clients to lose. He felt worse about how uninvolved he had been in the whole scheme than at the sudden loss of his patriarch. He could not even attest to what crimes had been committed, against whom, and to what dollar amounts. The remaining leadership at the firm had no love for their employer’s pigheaded, domineering son, and while they asked many of his peers to aid in the feeble attempt to assure clients that their funds need not be pulled with such haste, Saxon was simply asked to take a leave of absence that, as the year unfurled, even one oblivious as he could realize would never end.

--

His solo orientation adventure only managed to stave off his mother’s antics for one day. That next morning she glided into Lochlan’s room, watching him pack his belongings and recollecting with pride the similar process she had undergone with his siblings. Victoria asked multiple times if he would like assistance, which of course she herself would not be providing but would call upon the cousin-in-residence or phone his siblings. Lochlan refused.

He only had so many belongings to begin with. A backpack of electronics, a suitcase of clothes, an overnight bag of toiletries, and a hamper. He remembered how Piper had brought an entire bedroom’s worth of decorations to college—fairy lights, patterned tapestry, hand woven floor rug—how Saxon slung Duke pennants and posters bought well before he ever applied. Lochlan had memorabilia in his room, certainly, figurines of video game characters, framed photos from family vacations past, a bulletin board tacked up with movie tickets. He felt rather freed at the prospect of leaving them all behind.

East campus being less swamped this morning but only slightly so, his mother struggled to find a parking spot and eventually double parked, wishing Lochlan goodbye in the street rather than seeing him up to his room. She felt positively frazzled about it but for Lochlan, aside from the anxious feeling of holding up traffic, it was the best case scenario. He puzzled at his mother’s tears anyway; she was holed up less than half an hour from here, and they were torturously twined together in anticipation for Timothy’s trial, the family group chat a dismal and continual slew of lawyerly updates. It was not as if they would never speak again.

So Lochlan trundled, bags in tow, down the row of identical brick buildings with their columnate maws. Though these houses are among the oldest the campus has to offer, with less amenities than the further west cluster of first-year residence halls, he was grateful to be here. This inward facing courtyard, a clear green sea with Georgian faces in synchronous mirror to each other. It reminded him of the quiet opulence of his youth; the details not illustrative, no romantic sculptures or baroque filigrees, no plastic McMansion pretenders, only clean, white, ancient fixtures in neat periodicity.

The inside of his dormitory of course lacked any of the beauty of its external faces. White cinderblocks and chintzy drop-ceilings. Implacable dull washed cement floor. Factory-made wooden beds and dressers being shoved to and fro by his eager housemates. Ugly, but ultimately bearable. He was not here to languish in these rooms, and expected he would spend as much time as possible in libraries and labs.

He knew his roommate was already well settled. An Albanian named Severin, who he had been put in contact with by Student Life in July, and who had arrived the week prior, as was customary for international students. They had exchanged perfunctory texts about timing, one or two questions about plans of study and interests. Severin was among the elite few recruited for the Blue Devils basketball team, which was plan of study enough. Lochlan was ambivalent about the prospect of sharing his room with a man who would be, effectively, an on-campus celebrity. To one part, it kept the spotlight off him, ensured that his roommate would be too busy in his own affairs to bother Lochlan too much about what he got up to off campus, and meant as well that they would likely have little to no social circle in common. It also meant however that Severin had a great deal to lose, should he find himself too proximal to the tempest of ill omen that surrounded the Ratliffs. Lochlan knew that athletes could be cruel, demeaning, single-minded beasts, and he feared he might ever be in the shadow of the wrath of one presumably far stronger (and straighter) than he.

All this Lochlan had prepared for. Potential awkwardness, hostility, cultural misunderstanding. What he had not prepared for was the sight of the man as he swung open the bedroom door; shirtless, boxers riding high above the waistline of his jeans, sifting through a pile of laundry on the bed he had clearly claimed. Severin was exceedingly tall—6’6”, he would come to be told in later conversations—with all the athleticism one would expect of his station, lithe taut muscles up his arms and veritable cum gutters lining his abdomen. Oh he was a unique creature, surely, with distinctly European teeth and accent, wide set brown eyes, mop of blonde hair a touch too long, but as Severin offered him affable pleasantries, he could not escape the similarities he saw there, in that twist of neck and chiseled face, to Saxon.

It was not long before Severin completed his laundry, got dressed, and hopped off to practice, and the time could not come soon enough, for Lochlan found himself in a mounting frenzy at the sudden vision. Saxon who he had avoided at all costs, whose gaze he could never find in those hollow moments when the family gathered to discuss their father’s fate. Saxon who he did not want to think of, did not want to picture, did not want to be the cause of the heat rising in his gut. Saxon who he would now see, think of, every time he woke in the morning, seeing that masculine figure with the sharp adam’s apple snoring beside him. Saxon who sneered at him with as much regularity now as he smiled before, whose smile he would picture in Severin’s without meaning to. Saxon who whispered impure deeds into his ear for years, crumbling any hope of a solid moral foundation within him.

It was Saxon’s fault then, it had to be, when Lochlan, not minutes after his newly minted roommate departed, ran his hands along Severin’s clean sheets. Blue jersey, shiny and inorganic. Saxon’s fault that he imagined what this bed would see during Severin’s tenure, what it had seen already, the decades of Gomorrhic teenagers squeaking mattresses and leaking fluids (perhaps Saxon himself had fucked on this bed, his freshman year not a decade ago, perhaps there was some trace of him to be sucked out of the seams). Saxon’s fault that he pressed up against the bedpost, that it felt easier to grind against a hopelessly hard unfeeling thing than to touch himself, to let himself be touched, to seek real and vital human communion ever again. Saxon’s fault, ever and always, that the mixture of pain, pressure, violent corners, resistance, and desperation which he nearly required for sexual gratification now could not be left behind as easily as his adolescent possessions. Saxon’s shark-grimaced fault that his first act as a resident of the prestigious Duke University was rocking with animal need into the wooden post of Severin’s bed until he came.

Chapter Text

Of his heavily stacked menu of coursework, Lochlan relished his history of architecture class most. There was a feeling of exclusivity to it; on account of his exceeding success on his AP exams he was one of the only engineering freshmen eligible to take electives in their first semester and therefore the only one of his year in the class. More than the welcome change of cohort, he enjoyed the contrast to his other, more technical studies, and how it freed his mind to wander, to acquire a new glossary which he could apply to the world which enfolded him. No longer simply equations relegated to Cartesian space, physics had material and purpose. Study made real, but not so real as to approach those human subjects which already plagued his personal life.

It gave him a visual distraction from his on campus notoriety, already far more bearable than his final semester in high school yet still persistent. For every glance or whisper on a quad, he could look skyward to the dormers reflecting the sharp blue September sky, or count the quoins lacing up corners like grommets. Rude questions from across the lecture hall were answered with a rote smirk and shrug while the higher processors of his mind traced cornices and moldings, watched shadows fall from pillars and sunbeams leak through fanlights.

There was no news on his father’s trial anyway, no gossip to share with prying would-be acquaintances. Victoria called him to check in and lament every few days. Piper, oddly, texted him quite frequently. He couldn’t tell if she was feeling nostalgic for her own college days not so long past, or if she was secretly hoping something would happen to him, some miraculous change to come over his person and remake him in a closer shape to her own. Saxon was as ever a hangnail on the family group chat, a number that would never reply to him directly.

Severin made no note of Lochlan’s situation, if he knew of it at all. His classes were jammed into the early morning hours so that his evenings were free for what seemed to be endless practices and team bonding activities. When Lochlan saw him, which was rare, it was freshly wet from the shower, dripping and breathless, flopping his too-long body immediately onto his bed to sleep as long as time would allow.

And Lochlan had tried, really and honestly tried, not to recreate that nasty indiscretion of his first day. It was made difficult by Severin’s easy demeanor. He laughed often, asked Lochy questions about his day in his stilted English, seemed overall to be living his own personal dream, impenetrably happy. To be in proximity to such an oblivious and kind soul, and to see only a toxic phantom beneath, was a curse that led Lochlan to repeat himself in ever more lurid ways; pilfering Severin’s shorts from his laundry, rubbing them all over his body to evaluate the texture, the smell, imagine a mingling of bodies he had no desire to make actual; showering immediately after him, feeling every inch of tile with his tongue, pumping Severin’s body wash in ungodly globs which he let trail over his fingers, over his neck, into all his hollows; inserting errant writing utensils left atop Severin’s desk into his mouth, coating them with himself.

The activity was unstoppable, like some sickness advanced at the opportunity to pilot his body when it was not public-facing. All he could hope was that Severin would not notice, or that he would notice, and that Lochlan’s shame would be so great that he could stop, finally, forever, and that somehow this second witnessing in disgust would efface the first.

--

There are certain things Piper would never blame her father for. He had provided her the life she needed, craved, and how could she begrudge that, whatever its cost? She was not angry that he stole from his clients; the whole business of investment was fraught with ethical blight from the outset. She understood when he scoffed at her eccentric spiritual beliefs. They were of different stations in life and different generations, and Piper strove to be nothing if not tolerant. But lately she began to ponder his lectures on work ethic, oft lobbed at her and her siblings over the dinner table. Surely there was some administrative drudgery behind the scenes, but as the man in charge, his work always seemed to be inextricable from his leisure. He could claim to be working while eating a five star dinner in Beijing. He could golf on a weekday afternoon and have long talks over cigars in his study with his associates. As Piper labored long, underpaid hours at her first real job—a job, she suspected, realer than any her father had ever had—she did begrudge him the air of a lie he had fed her for so long.

--

The point arrived quite early in the year when Lochlan’s perversity spilled a touch too far, and when Severin, out of awkwardness or shame or sheer heterosexual obliviousness, let it.

It was a Thursday, he would always remember because his chemistry lab began at a horrid early hour on Friday, so he had gone to sleep at ten. Severin stumbled home some time after midnight with a girl in tow, and seemed, based on the murmurs passed between the two of them, to not realize that Lochlan was present, only sleeping and still beneath his comforter.

Oh, to be granted that long sought gift of invisibility at the worst possible moment.

Fairness to Severin, Lochlan had been out late many nights recently, falling asleep in a comfortable library lounge chair and not waking until the early hours when cleaning staff began to hum through the place with vacuums. So it was a reasonable assumption, in the dark, in the furor of drunkenness which his slurred voice seemed to indicate he currently inhabited, that the room was free and open to liaisons of a private nature.

Lochlan awoke the instant the door clicked open, and remained awake through their whispers which trailed into moans, slick mouthed kisses, rustling, fumbling clothes. It precipitated so quickly he felt unable to alert them to his presence, though he knew he should. He would certainly be seen the villain in this encounter, a lecher laying in wait. Remaining silent was no better an option, but it was all his feeble body could do.

Remaining still however eluded him. He hardened under the oppressive, disgusting sounds. Lochlan had no taste for women, not after his first foray, and as Severin began what must be fingering a very wet vagina, the combination of nausea and arousal peaked in him.

He had been robbed of any sense of pride at conquering his own virginity from the moment he recalled how it had occurred, and in the long months that followed, he began to feel ever queasier about the feminine involvement in his deflowering. Chloe, that elder vixen, was so eager to seduce him, scarcely a man grown then, and so ready to allow him, even encouraging with her eyes and laughter, to touch his brother for her own amusement. It was wrong, misogynistic, in the parlance of those gender studies fools who often crossed his mind, to think of all women as extensions of her, to see the vagina as a rank sea to drown in. But circumstances did not allow him to feel any other way.

All men were evil tempters, were Saxon after a fashion, eminently desirable but not desiring him back—or if they did, if they were “out and proud,” they held no thrall, no challenge, and somewhere at the back of his mind his conservative upbringing told him that they, like him, held only a loose claim on manhood. All women were Chloe, soft enough to suffocate and concealing within their bosoms a private joke of which Lochlan knew, somehow, he was always the object. His hand was his enemy, could not be trusted to provide pleasure, only sourness, only filth. The sounds he heard now, creaking, moaning, groping, fumbling, giggling, brought him back to the sea, that ecstasy he never should have experienced, could never allow his body to experience again.

Head and body hidden under his comforter, that hand which betrayed him pulled his phone from beneath his pillow.

A cell phone is a miraculous thing; though it is the portal to much unease, to ecological disasters and school shootings, to news about his father both true and fabricated, it was at this time the only place where he could see Saxon exactly as he wished.

To see Saxon in person (as he had to, was unable to avoid) was to be grated against the rough surface of his own wrongdoing. To continually hope and continually have that hope dashed. But to see Saxon as he lived in the annals of his instagram was to take on the guise of a passive, unrelated observer. That carousel of images illustrated Saxon as he wished to be seen primarily by those shiny iridescent creatures known as women; as if plucked from the pages of a magazine, Saxon lay himself before them handsome, rich, ever-smiling, magnetic. And in the time before their fatal tryst, Lochlan had been privy to his close friends stories, which were a deeper fishhook still; portraits from a low angle which revealed the delicate ridges of his oblique muscles in dim light, mirror selfies parading shirts unbuttoned to deep vee, eras of chest hair and wax, stubble and shining jaw, cut and bulk and every measured ounce between.

Lochlan had not masturbated to these pictures, had not even acknowledged his feeling toward them as attraction per se, but he saved them unthinking all the same. All Lochlan knew, his whole life, his whole youth, was being the object of Saxon’s attention. Was it so wrong to savor that feeling? To scrapbook his adoration when it was made so freely available? Now, when he was presumably thrown from the circle of such images, he knew beyond all doubt that it was wrong to have kept them, but nevertheless that hidden folder which resided deep in the bowels of his phone called to his traitorous hand, and it answered with ready aplomb.

Severin and his girl were properly fornicating now, an unmistakeable rhythm. Lochlan’s headphones were in his desk, too far to reach to drown them out, if that was what he wanted at all. Some part of him must be enjoying the soundtrack to his reverie on his brother’s body, sounds he did not have to make or participate in, but could appreciate at a safe distance.

This phone, this window to the vision of his brother he would never again have, was such a gift. He brought it to his mouth, frozen on an image of Saxon in his bathing suit, thighs roasting in the sun, and licked the screen, tongue lolling slow along every part of skin that was now only pixels, too close to see. Pixels, like voyeurism, are safe. Not capable of injury to self or other.

(And hadn’t he tried, yes of course he had, the other means of pleasure this device could offer him; reddits lined with thick engorgements; cam streams of muscled bodies who could whisper his name for pennies; apps where men promised filth in text that they could never hope to deliver. All this held no allure for it was rightfully intended to be consumed. Purpose made for the generic hole. Moreover it was ephemeral, always disappearing up into infinity. There was no exclusivity. No memory. Not like this storied folder which was his alone. His personal collection. No one, he thought, savored Saxon this much, held such an extensive archive of his body in their pocket.)

The action triggered the screen to flick to another picture, Saxon suited in the dark, a flute of champagne dangling from his fingertips and a tipsy blush across his face. The realization that he could manipulate the screen thus, select his pornography in the very act of enjoying it, caused him to salivate harder, drool leaking out the corner of his mouth onto his pillow, the images on the screen distorted in the slime trail he left there.

Severin was close, he could feel it by the upward winding pitch and cadence of his voice. Had it been long enough? Was the girl underneath him satisfied? Had Severin done this before, and how many times? Was Severin, in this moment, the experienced girlfucker Saxon had always posed himself to be, or was he the eager and naïve Lochlan, who barely wanted to exist at all, performing out of rote obligation?

If Lochlan could not achieve release too, he would surely do something stupid. Groan, pant, whimper. He needed something altogether more while there was still noise to cover him. He shoved his pajamas down enough to free his cock, ready, damp and straining. With one hand he cradled the phone and the rotating wheel of Saxons no longer meant for his eyes, and with the other he pressed his needy length into the screen made smooth and wet from his spit. Each jerk with his careful quiet hands was a swipe across the screen, sometimes only half-borne, causing Saxon to glitch forward and back. He was at the club, bottle service girl in his lap. He was in his bed snuggling a pillow with pouting lips. He was at the beach, smile more blinding than the sun. He was in bed again. He was in Lochy’s bed. Safer now, better than before. Lochy could fuck that smile off his face and back again. Severin would help. Severin was helping. Severin who did not know what Lochlan’s hands were doing, what his mouth and cock had done to his belongings for weeks.

Must there always be some edge of disgust which leads Lochlan over the edge into orgasm? Must Saxon or some stand-in for him always be there? He hoped not. He would rather cut the desire out of his body than endure this forever.

But Severin came with a dramatic bark, and so did he, stifling his own noise with teeth sunk deep into his lip, and for now at least, it was over. The girl parted with a kiss and Lochlan lay there quietly in his stickiness. Severin shuffled to the bathroom and back. His feet paused in the space between their beds and breath caught. What had appeared a mere lump of bedding before was made plainly man-shaped to him now, it seemed. Lochlan pretended to be asleep, and in coming days pretended not to have heard anything, but the pretense was thin. It would erode, as all things must.

--

Victoria was fond of her psychiatrist’s office. She wasn’t bothered by any medical facility, really, but her doctor in particular had such lovely taste. An elegant and splendid fern by the window. A faint aroma of lavender and vanilla. Real leather chairs with a sumptuous soft feel. Even the doctor made her smile with his crinkly blue eyes and silver hair. Her usual comfort in this space made her distress at his utterance far worse. Your insurance coverage has been suspended. It wasn’t as if she was visiting for recreation, for god’s sake. Her husband was rotting in a frigid jail cell alongside murderers and rapists. Her youngest son just left her alone in borrowed rooms with no company but her relatives’ pity. If she had anxiety before, what she had now was akin to sheer desperation. She pleaded, nearly flailed at his feet for at least one last session, gratis. After all her devotion to him as a patient, couldn’t he help her in some way? At his denial, the ease of the setting curdled into disdain. She left with head held high in the waiting room despite her teary eyes, and decided she never liked lavender much anyway.

--

Lochlan resolved to take a leave of absence. The stain of his father’s shame, his own internal bruise about the night of the Full Moon Party, he had thought he could bear them out. He was a practiced dissociator, ever gaining more tools, ever improving his ability to fade into the background, but after what he had done with, or rather near, Severin, he knew he was rotted through. No amount of academic bleach could cleanse him.

It had only been two days since, and he and Severin had seen each other less than twenty minutes in that time, but compressed into those interactions was a profound anxiety which followed him into the classroom, leading his eyes from their usual impersonal hallowed corners to the faces of his fellow students—could they see the mark of sin within him? Were they so different after all, screen-addled as his generation was, and did they partake in similar weird rituals of the night? Had Severin told someone, one of the very students in this room, so that he was surrounded with jackals merely holding their laughter until he was out of earshot?

He wasn’t sure what the first step on the road to such an endeavor, dropping out, would be, as far as a formal institutional process, but it would surely mean he would need to return to rooming with his mother, and so sooner or later, he must notify her.

When he called Victoria, she needled through his prevarication with keen intuition. He had only tried to ask how long she would be staying at the cousins’, and what her next destination would be, but that question gave way to his true purpose, which she guessed outright.

“Don’t give up just yet, sweetie. Your father would be devastated.”

He was nonplussed at the subject of how his father would feel, given that Timothy’s approval or disapproval was quite literally buried behind yards of concrete, unable to affect him in the flesh. It was when she began proposing remedies that Lochlan knew he had gone too far, that he ought to have just quietly walked away from campus and not confessed anything at all.

“I’d bet my life Saxon has some good advice for how to get through those first-year blues. You oughta give him a call.”

Lochlan did not want to bother Saxon, he insisted; he knew Saxon’s grief at their father’s incarceration and the subsequent kneecapping of his firm was far greater than his, so the excuse was not entirely a false one. Saxon was well and truly in no position to be offering advice or any form of cheering up, least of all to him.

Ultimately it did not matter whether Victoria agreed with Lochlan’s assessment. Even when he prevaricated, said he would stick it out after all, he was only feeling a little down and talking to her had already ameliorated his mood greatly, when she agreed conspiratorially to not tell Saxon about this little misstep, he knew that it was too late. She would tell him. Of course she would.

The inevitable text from Saxon, the first sent directly to him since they arrived home from Thailand, sitting there on the face of this portal to depravity he had only recently unlocked to its fullest, was electric in its simplicity.

Mom said you want to drop out? Pussy

And less than two minutes later, thankfully leaving Lochlan little time to contemplate how to respond, he followed:

U need to get out of your head. Hit the gym w me Sat morn

No question there, no offer which provided the possibility for denial. You need to.

Lochlan had not properly entered a gym since the last time he was in Saxon’s orbit. It provided him no joy, no relief, but served as a violent thrust back into a body which was oft as alien to him as a molting exoskeleton to his true soul, lodged somewhere deep within. The sanctum of the mind was his usual escape—yet, as he sat now, reading his brother’s texts under the table in the CAD lab, having just a few hours ago considered giving his studies up altogether, he wondered if it was time to try again. To see if his body could be made into something new, whether the exertion under steel bars in sweaty mirrored spandex-filled rooms would allow him, if only for a time, the opportunity to dumb himself, quiet the sharpness of his need.

A half-second’s imagining of he and Saxon in that fortress of meat made it clear that “hitting the gym” may cause more problems than it would solve. But Saxon would not suffer argument, he already knew. Besides, though he didn’t often allow himself to think this way, his interior architecture strong in its defense, Lochlan’s guilt over Severin had cracked open a thought from deep within his vault of insecurity; hadn’t Lochlan made him suffer enough?

Chapter Text

“Here. Start with stretches and ten minutes of cardio. Bike, treadmill, or rope. Your choice. And then follow that to the letter.”

Saxon thrusted a printout of exercises, complete with diagrams, into Lochlan’s hands, and then walked off. Saxon had offered to pick him up but Lochlan declined, not wanting the awkward silence the car ride would inevitably hold. He took the campus shuttle as far as it would take him and walked the rest of the way. It took him a long time, meaning he had to get up very early to meet Saxon’s stringent 8 AM appointment.

Then he had to blink his tired eyes into focus on this piece of paper. It looked as if Saxon had built it himself, typed it on his home word processor and fished pictures from the internet. Lochlan couldn’t exactly tell, being that he hadn’t worked out in ages, but it seemed a punishing regimen. Too many reps for him, certainly.

But if Saxon had wanted to give him options, to discuss the matter, he would have. He clearly preferred to end the conversation as quickly as possible, which is why he shoved earbuds in and stomped onto a treadmill without a second glance at Lochlan.

It left him to stand alone in this temple. Saxon’s place of worship. Pump as prayer. Muscle the priestly garb of the true initiate. Lochlan was ever an apostate to this congregation, and it showed. He started toward the long row of treadmills but hesitated, not wanting to be too close to Saxon. He considered jumping rope but did not know where such things were stored, and felt anxious at the prospect of asking the front desk attendant. He flitted, eyes darting from place to place, feeling as if he might be smote by a rack of metal plates at any moment.

He made his way to the stationary bike. To Saxon’s specifications, he rode it for ten minutes exactly by the little digital timer on its handlebars. He took more of a leisurely pace than the plump and bulging bodybuilder to his right, the yoga girlboss across from him. Was he supposed to be in competition with them? Were they supposed to ignore each other altogether? How could he be true to his body, and to these machines which were extensions of it, if he was so observed?

Saxon was long departed from his treadmill by the time Lochlan finished, now lost somewhere in the din. Whatever he did, whatever sweat ran beneath his oversized tanktop, Lochlan would have to imagine it. Saxon did not want him to see.

So, heart racing, he forded a path to his next assignment; the ab bench. The suffering was the point, he reminded himself. The palpitations in his chest did not portend danger. Some people considered this a form of recreation and relaxation. Everyone around him, this minor mob of sweat cultists, liked the feeling of animation unto near collapse. Even so he feared making a wrong move among them, as though like skittish horses they could not be disturbed, lest they kick him to the ground.

He had to remember, before Saxon, wherever he was, caught him fumbling, how to adjust the bench to the proper position. The worksheet had him beginning with decline situps, which required him to lower the bench to a slant. His hands glanced over the steel frame, taking note of the mechanisms which held it together, allowed it to move. An elegant if simple machine which, not unlike a freshman dorm mattress, would see the sweat of thousands of people in its lifetime. Its plastic cushions already bore wear and scratches where the stuffing threatened to break through. An experienced beast, to whom Lochlan would ever be a pathetic fledgling.

As he lowered himself into position he wondered if he could even do one situp, let alone three reps of fifteen. He pictured Saxon again, faceless congregant in the grey sea of fluorescents and athleisure wear. Though he longed for the view, he accepted with gratitude the fact that Saxon could not see him back, that he could not witness what was about to be an embarrassing spectacle.

Lochlan was stronger than he remembered. The first set, though dizzying, was accomplished. He lay in repose between, the world upside down, blood rushing to his temples. Perhaps the means of mastering his body and all its perversity lay here after all—the place he and Saxon could share the the macabre, greasy spectacle where body meets object, together yet apart.

All three sets accomplished, his stomach ached. Yet the unfeeling paper held many more torments. Weighted Russian twists. Back extensions. By the time he made it to the glute bridges, his entire body flamed, he felt nauseous, delicate to every touch. He had to cut down the number of reps or his legs would give out underneath him.

And there, like a horrid spectre, appeared Saxon.

“You’re supposed to do twenty. That was only ten.”

Though Saxon’s skin was covered in a sheen of sweat, his breathing was even. Whatever activity he engaged in that caused him to wear gripping fingerless gloves and a hat to keep his hair out of his face, it didn’t phase him as much as Lochlan’s routine, which had him quivering and panting without cessation. Or perhaps Saxon was only half working himself, sitting somewhere behind a water cooler to watch Lochlan struggle.

Lochlan protested through heaving breaths. He lay flat on some neoprene mat on the floor now, so there was a steeple of distance between him and Saxon. His words fell on deaf ears.

“You wanna have the body of a teenage girl for the rest of your life? Man up and give me another ten.”

Saxon stayed for the remainder of this exercise, watching Lochlan thrust upward, the thin veneer of distance and a metal plate between them. So, some small facts confirmed then. Saxon wanted to witness this in its every detail, so much so that he abandoned his own practice, paused what was undoubtedly a perfectly and precisely timed workout, to stand here flexing and glowering, watching Lochy push his hips up exactly ten more times.

And then with a huff through his nose and nothing else, Saxon returned to his own station, wherever that may be. Thereafter, however slowly he had to do it, however much he struggled, Lochlan followed the rest of the worksheet as written. At the end of the dizzying process he had to be helped back into standing by a nearby patron. He simply could not get up off the ground on his own. The humidity on his face was a mixture of sweat and, yes, tears, from the pain and effort.

Saxon stood waiting for him nearby, finished with his own no doubt much more complex exercises with far greater weights, and clapped him on the back as he led him to the showers. The hair on the back of Lochlan’s neck raised as he realized they would be getting naked, showering, in adjacent stalls with little more than a curtain between them. But he realized with relief that his body was too exhausted to be aroused. Even his mind could not muster the energy to picture what Saxon’s body would look like just there, glistening under the spray and steam.

So in some twisted way, Saxon had been right. Living only in his mind, Lochlan would always have additional sexual energy to misspend. He must make time, he thought, to keep at this practice on campus. He must thank Saxon for the job well done and dismiss him, so that they could stay well enough apart.

But as ever, Lochlan’s body was not his own to direct. Perhaps he felt such affinity, such ease with the inanimate world because he himself was merely a doll to be tugged and posed.

“You did good today dude. See you again next week.”

--

Piper was trying Catholicism these days. She was not openly admitting that to her coworkers, many of whom were marginalized in such a way that they probably did not get on too well with the Vatican. But the white gold bracelet she now wore, a confirmation present from her grandfather which still fit her slender wrist, which sparkled in the sunlight through the stained glass, was proof enough that she was never cut out for Buddhism. She was reticent to return to the evangelical baptist congregation of her youth. Evangelism had such a foul imperialist reputation. Catholicism, at least, had the prettiest churches. It had ceremony and ritual. And though she had yet to try it, Catholicism offered absolution in the easy, human form of confession. She planned, when the droning service ended, to walk into that ornate wooden box and purge herself clean. She had some illogical but deeply rooted idea that it would help her father. Perhaps the reasoning was that if God the father forgave her, he might forgive Timothy too. The problem she worried over as the collection plate passed under her nose was that she did not know exactly what sin was hers to confess.

--

Midterms approached and then arrived. For all but one of his classes, this was no trouble. Lochlan would study in the library until he fell asleep. Returning to his own bed these days left him more awake and uneasy than ever. He did not know how Severin felt about what Lochlan had overheard, and he did not intend to find out.

Lochlan's year-long Projects in Design seminar required that students write a five page essay detailing an engineering project which they would design and build throughout the course of their freshman year. The pressure to choose something substantial yet achievable was enormous. Their professor had provided a list of suggestions of practical needs provided by various professors and staff around campus. The Sustainable Food Project’s on campus greenhouse needed repair and refurbishing. The science building needed wheelchair accessible desks which could fold and stow away easily. The AV staff had a host of suggestions from simple electronics repair to designing new conference call equipment fit for large lecture halls. Students were encouraged to collaborate in groups for more complex ideas, and if proposing a new idea not listed on the ledger of available suggestions, to partner with at least one campus department or student organization.

Lochlan felt largely unmotivated by any of the available options, but his recent reentry to the world of exercise made him circle around the one listed request from the Brodie Recreation Center.

Integration of smart gym equipment with university student profiles and payment processing.

Not exactly a thrilling concept. He had hoped to build something, not to rearrange buckets of code and email back and forth with dull systems administrators for permissions to various levels of student data. But it was something he could do on his own, not needing to rely on any other students. The head of the Rec Center readily agreed to sign off on his paper. The work was tedious enough, trawling through lines of sprawling unwieldy ancient programs, that he would, as was his main goal in life, keep busy. If he squinted his mind’s eye, there was even a sort of voyeuristic charm to plumbing the depths of Duke’s infrastructure, seeing into the eye that peers out at all its subjects.

Even in this time of reconnecting with his body (witting and unwitting), Lochlan was never what he would call spiritual. Not like Saxon with his steadfast devotions to gains both capital and muscular, or Piper with her reverence for anything which opposed those same concepts. Yet somewhere within him he had this feeling that there was another idea yet to come to him. A project within, aside, counter to, or in addition to this, which had yet to reveal itself. Something which connected to whatever deeper nature drove him to lick Severin’s desk chair when he was away.

But certainly, whatever that idea was and would be, it would not arrive in time for this paper to be turned in. And, he would laugh to himself in his late night writing hours, he doubted his desire for an Engineering of Perversion would gain sanction from any university authorities.

--

Drumming his fingers on the conference table, Saxon considered for the first time how he had never flirted out of real desperation. He had felt that way in his younger years, like his loins might explode if he didn’t secure a woman to bed that very instant, but that was the fervor of youth, not base need. Whatever lender walked through that door, whoever he would beg to let him remortgage his condo (bought and signed over by Timothy; he had thought it at the time a reward for hard work, only later realizing its true purpose was likely to get him out of the house), he wondered if his Southern charm might buy him some credibility, a few points off the interest. He didn’t look good on paper (no income, assets only recently unfrozen), but in person, well, he always did. Flattery would be easiest if this was some dowager who hadn’t heard a sexual line since her girlhood days. As it happened, an older man walked through the door who looked, god help him, not unlike his father. His stomach turned, but the desperation remained. A sweet smile could still be good currency. Nut up or shut up.

--

Despite himself, despite all his predilection for overwork, and even in the throes of midterms, Lochlan did actually make friends. His chemistry lab partners, a girl from his art history course, a handful of people from his dorm. They shared lunches in the dining hall and kept each other awake in all night essay writing sessions. They quietly knew about the predicament with his father and pretended not to mind when photographers tailed him, sometimes even opening space for him to bitch about it. He was not one much for bitching, especially when he had far worse secrets than anything pertaining to his father which he would not afford to spill, but the opportunity was nice.

And again, despite his wish to remain as antisocial as possible, those housemate friends did successfully urge him into attending the most preeminent fraternity Halloween party.

He should have known that it would end in disaster. Maybe he did. He went anyway.

It began in the dorms, pregaming with ill-got bottom shelf liquor and assembling costumes. Lochlan had not prepared or purchased anything. Buying a costume, with his funds as limited as they were, felt frivolous, if he had even had the time or desire to select one. The friend with the liquor, whose room hosted them, had idly suggested that her clothing might fit him, if he simply wanted to crossdress.

And then others had assented, Oh Lochlan you would look so pretty as a girl, Just try it on at least, Come on dude, you gotta wear something.

So he let himself, as ever, be molded, undressed and remade in the image of another. He emptied his mind and became a vessel—someone else’s Project in Design, the engineered facsimile of femininity; lips painted red, lashes plumped and curled, cheeks met with breathless blush and sparkles. The dress they fit him in was all grey, thankfully not some garish drag, but more utilitarian, a waterproof fabric with cargo pockets on the front. Its spaghetti straps revealed collarbones slathered in highlighter. The fit was good, bodice clinging to his thin chest, waist puffed out in ruche, giving him the illusion of hips.

The question of shoes was difficult. Lochlan’s grotty sneakers were unfit, illusion ruining. None of the girls present had feet large enough to accommodate him. As his friends discussed him, ever tipsier, rushing to and from various rooms to select potential options, he regarded himself in the mirror hung on the closet door. His hair had grown out in these months on campus, he hadn’t realized. The eyes batting at him in reflection were so crowded by mascara he scarcely looked like himself. He looked soft, hazy, like he could float on the sea of the night. He looked, for lack of better words to come to his increasingly drunken mind, like a girl.

Someone found him black platforms which he managed to squeeze his feet into, which made the window of calf below the hem of his dress even more voluptuous, that musculature Saxon was rebuilding in him finally on display.

Damn him, thinking of Saxon even in this moment.

Switching locations, diving into the chaotic hedonism of the party, made the depth of Lochlan’s inebriety take hold. The night became nothing but flashes of skin, burning sensations of shots in the throat, strobing lights and plastic vampire teeth. He would remember laughing a lot, laughing at unfunny jokes, putting his hand on friends’ shoulders as they laughed together, laughing too loud with his mouth all the way open.

The heavy feeling of makeup on his face, the unfamiliarity of the loose dress on his legs, transformed him. He was no longer little boy Lochlan, the quiet engineer. He was some unnameable, unknowable woman, here only for a night. What she saw through her eyes, what she did with her lips, did not reflect upon Lochlan. It belonged to her, to now, to the spirits which annually thread the gap of All Hallow’s Eve.

He would not remember everything he did, or how he was deposited back to his room, but he would remember what he found there. Severin, a little drunk himself, wiping green greasepaint off with a towel.

Lochlan laughed still. She laughed, this spirit who possessed him. They laughed together. Severin laughed. Stories and feelings of the night superseded the awkward undertone that the harsh light of day would inevitably leave.

She found herself asking if she looked good, like a real girl, like the girl he brought home the other night. Oh she’s only teasing, she found herself saying to his upset expression, she didn’t mind. She wasn’t jealous. She leaned her head against the wall behind Lochlan’s bed. Found herself letting her legs fall open. Found herself remembering—do you want to have the body of a teenage girl the rest of your life? Found herself tracing fingers along that soft open thigh in question mark. Found Severin gulping hard, not looking away, not saying anything. Found herself too quickly on her knees making a promise that no one would find out.

Lochlan had never done this. Of the many objects plastic and wood which he had deepthroated in the past several months, he had never consumed one of flesh. But he was, he thought, a vessel this night. Something to be filled, modified, trained to force a twitch and groan. He was her vessel, whoever she was. Perhaps she had done this before. Perhaps she would do it again.

The glimpse of that golden halo and muscled body above him, the mouth opening wide in pleasure and shame. Lochlan’s own stiffness threatening, begging to be used. He would not oblige his own body, but its insistence made this dual persona illusion slip. He could no longer pretend to be anything other than greedy, selfish Lochlan, when met body to body. He craved some mediator, some anonymity which lipstick alone could not provide.

Oh of course he dutifully finished the task, sucking Severin to completion (not necessarily due to skill, perhaps just due to Severin’s inexperience and the surprise of it all). He muttered something afterward, something ill fitting to his mouth like good job bro, to placate the shameful tears accruing in Severin’s eyes.

It was only when he drifted to half-sleep much later, face half-washed, his roommate’s cum still staining the edge of his mouth, that he thought: don’t they have something like that? A stall where pleasure and effacement meet? Where body becomes object, receptacle, with no preamble or awkward conclusion? Where he could be anything, anyone, receive anything, with the promised kiss of metal between him and the nameless other? What do they call that again?

Chapter Text

He woke with the phrase burgeoning in his bruised throat. Visions from 240p porn clips he watched in middle school, jokes he only half understood from old queens online.

Glory hole.

Before Lochlan even opened his eyes he knew he had to figure out if they still existed, if he could find one, if he could make himself go through with it. Becoming part of such a thing.

But then his eyes did open, and the first order of business became dealing with the hulking, sobbing body on the bed across from him, worrying its great hands together.

It looked as if Severin had been waiting for him to rise.

“Lock-lan, I am so sorry.”

The words were so unexpected he was almost not sure he heard them correctly. He was still blinking sleep and crusted eyeliner out of his vision as he sat up. Severin continued.

“I don’t know what happened. I never want to hurt you. You’re good guy. My friend.”

The shocks kept coming in new directions. Lochlan was distinctly not a good guy, not where Severin was concerned. His gut roiled from last night’s alcohol and the memory of how he had huffed the very shorts Severin now wears not days ago while pressing the heel of his hand into his crotch. Severin had nothing to be sorry for, and no reason to call him friend.

“You’re okay?”

Lochlan examined his body. Still clad in the dress from last night but unable to call up the feeling of who he had been in it. He could remember as if seen on a television screen the images of her floating, her laughing, her lips tweaking into a wanting smile at Severin who could only watch agog. He remembered absolutely everything that happened between them, from the pull of his zipper to Severin hiding his reddening face in his shoulder when he came.

He nodded in assent that yes, he was fine. This seemed to offer some sort of permission to Severin’s lip to pout, tears to spring anew into the already worn tracks on his face, and for a needier, more personal plea to spill from him.

“You can’t tell anyone. I lose my scholarship. They send me home.”

For a half beat Lochlan thought Severin was living in some backward moralist world. This was not BYU, not Russia. Were there anti-homosexuality laws in Albania? You couldn’t get kicked off a college basketball team in this country for getting head from a man in a dress.

But it clicked together, the wringing hands, the guilt, the fear. Severin thought himself an aggressor through the haze of his half-memory. Perhaps he could not imagine why a man of his own volition would suck another man off without any reciprocation, without coercion. Perhaps he heard one too many lectures on the dangers of intoxication and consent, read one too many stories of college athletes fumbling their entire careers over a sexual assault charge.

The power Lochlan held in this moment flashed across his mind. He really could ruin this boy’s life, this boy he wanted and simultaneously did not want. This boy who did not want him back even in the moment he had him. This boy who scraped open and salved over the wound of Saxon in his heart.

But if anything made it clear that Severin was not Saxon, not even close, it was the devastation that hung on his body in that fragile November morning. Though he was far more massive and charismatic (if in a less biting way), he was altogether younger. Still Lochlan’s age but, in depravity such as this, less experienced, and so younger. Out of sheer childlike earnestness he did not try to escape what had happened, did not forestall the conversation. He spoke with his heart and all his vulnerability on his sleeve and begged Lochlan for forgiveness he did not need.

It was revolting.

“Sev, there’s nothing to tell anyone because nothing happened. You understand?”

Severin blinked in confusion twice, but Lochlan’s expression was clear enough in its insinuation to break through the barrier. He nodded and wiped his eyes.

In a fashion very familiar to Lochlan, they never spoke of it again, but in another, unfamiliar way, it was Severin who seemed altogether changed by the experience, while Lochlan put it behind him forever.

--

A mother knows that her children will never understand the lengths she goes to in order to protect them. Victoria knew how they saw her, a dotty disaffected ghost, someone in need of constant assistance. But it wasn’t Timothy who begged and scraped with distant relatives for a place to stay when their properties were seized. It wasn’t Saxon who salvaged reputations with acquaintances in hopes of future favor. It wasn’t Piper who navigated to just the right gathering at just the right time to secure a Thanksgiving invitation for the family. Whatever they might think of her, her children who were adults grown but still in so many ways children, the truth of the matter was that Victoria Ratliff played the game of society with generational expertise. When this scandal was all over, as she perhaps foolishly prayed it would be soon, then she would reckon with the trashiness of her mooching. Then she would find a way to pay back those who had helped her, or to bring social ruin to those who denied her. But for now, by God, whatever debasement it took, she would make sure that her children never knew a holiday lacking in splendor.

--

Lochlan had never more wished to be a fag in the 1970s than as he scoured reddit, and whatever app he could stomach long enough to forge conversation, to find still extant and active glory holes. He understood that to give away the location of such a place publicly or to a stranger online devalued its rarity, but long gone were the days of trusted word of mouth networks and clandestine blue booklets. This was his best idea and his only hope.

Aside from the few “private” glory holes advertised in people’s homes and backyard dungeons (a concept which made his mouth pucker and wrists itch), there were several locations at bars that he would not be able to scout outright because of his age. Of course he could try it anyway, don a croptop and wink at the bouncer and hope for the best, but he doubted he had the confidence to carry off such a maneuver.

His remaining options were only two; an adult bookstore and a sex toy shop. The barriers to actually engaging in the desired experience were many. It was possible, if not likely, that these glory holes were no longer active, and there was a minor chance that he might be apprehended for solicitation or public indecency for trying it. He also did not know, again despite quite a deep dive on the internet, the etiquette of such a place. The store had its hours of operation, but when was the glory hole frequented? Was one expected to advertise their presence somewhere, to the store clerk perhaps, or online to attract willing cocks? What if another open mouth was already in the stall when he arrived?

The toy shop was not far. He had been once actually, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, with his high school friends as a gag. The memory felt so far away now, those friends long gone to colleges far away. One of them had actually said to him, when he returned from his ill fated vacation to the dismal remainder of his final semester, that his family were leeches.

(It devastated him at the time, but it was also the beginning of many admonishments to come from his peers which would feel oddly hollow. They were all private school kids with palatial homes. This particular friend’s father was a former fighter pilot no doubt responsible for killing dozens of civilians in the Middle East. At least Timothy Ratliff had leeched off those who, it could be said, deserved it.)

So it was a distinctly different visit this time. No longer snickering at oversized floppy dildos and comedic porn parody titles. Alone. Nervously hard. Shaggy curls, oversized clothes lifted from free piles in the halls of his dorm. Unrecognizable from the naïve, clean-cut boy he had been less than a year ago.

Upon entry he nodded at the shopkeep and kept his eyes up, searching for the bathroom sign. He could not help but notice, along the way, lingerie designed to fit a body like his. Cages and other tools of denial. Insertables meant to look like household objects. All things which he could imagine himself exploring in some alternate universe, but in this world, they befell the same fate as his attempts at hooking up, at masturbating; he needed it to be wrong somehow. He needed it, to be sure, sex could not be avoided, but the closer his libido reached toward something identifiable, something which could be shared with others, the more repugnant he felt.

Lochlan entered the tiny restroom at the far back of the store, only to find the rightmost stall changed from how it was advertised. Over what must have once been a hole, a square aluminum patch had been screwed into place, with a tiny handwritten sign above it, indicating that the store did not condone acts of public fornication on the premises.

While it was a thwarting of a kind, it was educational. It displayed an aesthetics of erasure, a DIY architecture which made plain its history while also obscuring it. Despite the store’s expansive and inclusive nature, its flagrant sexuality, it nevertheless partook in the puritanical shunting of the sexual act away from the public eye.

Lochlan snapped a few photos of the scene and returned to campus, eagerly awaiting a day when he would have enough time to attempt the bookstore in Raleigh. He noticed himself daydreaming on the sensation of Severin’s girth in his mouth as he chewed on erasers in class, or let a fork linger too long on his tongue at meals. Once he even whipped off his shirt in a stall at the science building and pressed his whole chest against the wall of it, cravIng the relief of the cool aluminum from the ever upward spiraling heat of arousal in his body.

He would be disappointed again when he made the long, boring journey by bus to Raleigh, but in a way he could not have anticipated. The bookstore housed not a glory hole per se, but booths in a back room where debaucheries could be shared through a window and a slot (he had not yet begun iterating on the smart gym features for the rec center but the idea felt oddly resonant, some narrow partition which both witnessed your body and consumed its data each to varying degrees). He understood that often people would arrive in pairs or small groups to share such a space, and that to come alone was a gamble, as there was not a steady stream of clientele looking for one particular experience.

What he found, upon finally locating the back room and opening the heavy black curtain to the booths, was a woman. Red hair no doubt from a box dye, dark roots growing in underneath. Forehead lined with a single crease that suggested her age was no younger than 38. He could practically smell the cigarettes on her through the glass.

She looked as surprised to see him as he did her.

“Well, ain’t you a sweet young thing.”

The words marked him deep.

Yes and no, he thought, I am a thing to be used but not like this. Not by you.

--

Timothy could have taught courses on economics, but here and now he was little more than a student to the capitalism of the incarcerated. The commissary was, in essence, the federal reserve, which set the standard by which all other deals were made. And yet, as in life outside, there were some market pressures which could not be predicted or regulated. People extorted him out of his pittance of ramen noodles and toothpaste at a far greater rate than others because he was presumed wealthy. So then, a sort of graded tax system, managed by the populace at large, independent of the global scheme of governance. It wouldn’t have mattered, likely, if he told them “All the money that I made, that I inherited, is gone and will never be returned to me. This plastic packet of noodles I have because my son, who I lied to for years, who I never put any faith in, who lost his job because of me, borrowed against his apartment to pay my lawyer fees and send me cash. And by the way, he’s not answering my phone calls lately. So could you leave me alone? Could you just fucking leave me alone?”

--

The search and subsequent frustration left Lochlan ravenous. He had such a clear desire but no target for it, no outlet. In the wake of his disastrous conversation with Severin, even the allure of the gentle giant’s belongings had worn off. This left Lochlan’s mouth biting down harder on his lips, his fingernails, anything to keep his mind off the pressure constantly building in his dick.

This distracted, aroused state is no doubt why Lochlan forgot his alarm the Saturday morning before Thanksgiving, missing his standing gym date with his brother. Saxon, never one to be kept waiting or to let weakness slide, found his way inside the dormitory and slammed open the door without so much as a knock.

“Up and at em Lochy, gotta get that pump.”

Lochlan sat stock upright, as did Severin, both of whom had been fast asleep. This meant that Saxon and Severin, much to Lochlan’s horror, became acquainted then, as Lochlan dressed in his gym clothes and packed his bag for the family Thanksgiving extravaganza. He had classes still this upcoming week, but had been made to promise by Victoria that he would stay with them at her friend Annabelle’s house for as much time as possible, because she missed him so dearly.

Saxon guessed Severin for a basketball player immediately due to his height, no doubt.

“Hey, don’t choke out there. I’ve got money on you guys.”

Sports gambling would be an idiotic activity for most people with dwindling resources, but Duke was at this time the winningest team in the division, so it was a fairly safe bet, all things considered.

In the car on the way to the gym, as Lochlan wiped his face, still waking, Saxon made use of that brutal incisiveness that Lochlan had so narrowly avoided these last few months, keeping their time together very strictly limited to exercise in their own personal quarters.

“What was his deal? He was all skittish around you.”

Lochlan tried not to give anything away, which was impossible. He should have come up with a plausible lie, something Saxon would not want to discuss at length, something that would not reveal any untoward information. But just now he couldn’t think of anything, and his heart and groin were forging an alliance against him to throb uncontrollably.

Saxon’s look, observing him being observed, seemed to glean more information than words could offer.

“On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know.”

Lochlan had grown more confident at the gym, stronger overall. He had graduated from Saxon’s paper worksheets to verbal commands he could execute by heart. Normally, they took to opposite ends of the gym so that they did not have to interact, presumably both aware of what it would mean to watch the other sweat and strain in such an environment.

Today, this particular morning, Lochlan was useless. Every touch of foam and iron was entirely too much. He wanted to gnaw on fiberglass cords, press his thumbs into digital displays until they cracked and made him bleed.

His eyes flitted against his will to Saxon, for whom it was an arm day, which was the worst kind of day to be watching him. Saxon lay supine as he bench pressed, the bell of his shorts leaving a gap of thigh exposed up along his hamstring and the shiny black fabric lovingly cradling the bulge which rested atop him. Lochlan could not make out Saxon’s expression from where he stood completing his third set of weighted squats, but he found himself superimposing it with ones he had made, brought forth, in Severin. A mixture of strain and pleasure, burn and release.

Lochlan tasted his own sweat on his lip. The smells and wetnesses of this place were their own torment, every surface and towel soaked with use, like he longed to be. And Saxon and his fellow devotees were so blissfully unsexual about it all. Repetitive pumping motions, grunts and whines for anyone to witness. This place was pornographic and he felt insane to be the only one affected by it.

When it was time to shower (he had gotten quicker at his work, not leaving Saxon much time to wait around for him), his quest came forth in his mind. Public baths, spas, yes even some gyms, were not immune to homosexual liaison. Such activities would not take place in the early morning rush, surely, but as Lochlan rode the surge of workout endorphins, as he watched his brother strip and enter a curtained stall, a rage and curiosity burbled up in him. If Saxon was so curious what had happened with Severin, if he was so intent on bringing Lochy to this continual reminder of his own body, this temple which only presumably made him a better fuck, a more desirable conquest, and if he wanted to keep Lochlan at Duke, where he was increasingly plagued by more unwise and dangerous sexual desires—

Feeling in some juvenile way like he was completing a stealth sequence in a video game, Lochlan waited for all eyes to be turned just the right direction before following after Saxon into his shower.

Saxon’s reflexes were good, but he was in the midst of sudsing his body, one hand holding a loofah to his armpit and the other held aloft to allow access, so he could not stop Lochlan from getting into his space, Lochlan’s hands from gripping his wet hair tight.

Lochlan knew he had no time, had to say something quickly and quietly before Saxon called out and shoved him tumbling out.

“You want to know what happened with me and my roommate?”

And then just as quickly, not waiting to see if the words were heard over the steam or understood in the confusion, he slid down Saxon’s soapy body to his knees. He’d only done this once before, but once was better practice than he had with Saxon last time.

He was fast enough, or Saxon was surprised or willing enough, that he got Saxon’s cock in his mouth without protest. There were still soap bubbles on it, a mixture of sour sweat and saponin that made his nostrils flare, but he had trained himself on unsavory flavors of late. Pens bit til the ink bled into his mouth. The taste of Severin’s shampoo.

Lochlan could not look up through the raining shower to see Saxon’s reaction. He imagined the journey he must have taken, wanting to pull Lochy off but then perhaps deciding he liked the feeling too much, or wondering whether he himself would be implicated in wrongdoing should he shove him out of here while obviously hardening, or if this was his plan all along, if he has been waiting for Lochy to catch up.

One hand roamed Saxon’s thigh, squeezing the twitching and flexing flesh (oh, see Saxon how my grip strength has improved), and another held the base of him to keep him steady while Lochlan bobbed, sloppy and imprecise. He would prefer it if Saxon fucked his face, holding him tight by the curls and gagging him like a fleshlight, but the particulars didn’t matter too much just now.

Saxon made no sound in approval or protest. Lochlan thought he heard a few hot breaths, but it could have been steam, an errant spray of water on tile. Saxon’s hands did not touch him at all except toward the end, when he was so fully engorged that Lochlan felt his throat plugged, jaw straining to stay wide open. Only then did Saxon yank his head back.

“Jesus. Stop, Lochy.”

Head finally pulled from beneath the shower’s relentless rain, Lochlan could look skyward to see Saxon’s expression. It was partly the overhead lighting casting dramatic shadows, but he knew the features beneath well enough to recognize anger when he saw it. It made him shudder and leak. What would Saxon do to him now? Was he a child to be chastised or a plaything to be thrown away?

Saxon shoved two fingers onto Lochlan’s tongue, holding his mouth open, and with his other hand tightly fisted the head of his cock. Saxon’s own mouth til now had been hard set, grinding his teeth no doubt, but Lochlan had seen once before what it meant when that mouth opened just a fraction, when his eyes fluttered uncontrollably. Lochlan would have kept his maw open anyway, even without Saxon’s fingers there, to receive the hot and viscous shot when it came. It painted his tongue, his nose, his lips. It was all washed away so quickly by the water, Lochy regretted that he could not take a picture of himself (a hole architecture of another kind, design made plain in the traces of human activity left behind).

The thunder of orgasm pounding through Saxon cock-first made him lean against the shower wall, eyes closed. Lochlan slid to his feet, grabbed his towel hanging just outside the curtain, and slipped out as quietly as he had entered.

It was only back in the car that Saxon unclenched enough to say anything.

“What the fuck was that?”

But then, as before, perhaps not really wanting an answer at all, he just continued talking.

“Don’t fucking do that again. People know me here.”

Lochlan repressed a smile. It was obviously not the right and proper kind of denial. Can I do it elsewhere Saxon? Somewhere people don’t know you? The implication was too obvious to point out. Lochlan nodded, ever acquiescent.

“And those shower floors are nasty dude, you probably got syphillis on your knees now or something.”

Lochlan laughed. He couldn’t help it. The Thanksgiving that would follow, perpetually overshadowing his birthday, which these days he did not mind (what was 19 anyway? what benefits did such an age confer? how could he celebrate growing older now when the last time he had done so, it marked a state change toward something far, far worse than he had ever known?), that week of gracious thank-yous to hosts he barely knew, of sharing rooms with other nerdy teenage boys, of eating opulent feasts one after the other, were full of nothing but laughter for him. All he had to do was look over the table at Saxon, whose avoidance of him would appear no different to how it had been to the casual observer, but whose the blush under the collar of his polo was plainly redder, just high enough for the keen eyed voyeur to notice, and a laugh, not derisive, but joyous, triumphant, would spring to his lips.

Convincing Saxon, obtaining him, had been the main event in his mind for so long, but it turned out to be easy. Effortless. Just like Severin had. And if these targets of much yearning were so easily conquered, Lochlan began to wonder what else he might accomplish—and if Saxon would like to watch.

Chapter Text

It was pitifully soon that the text came from Saxon.

Hey can you come over to help me w smth

Lochy was tempted to ignore him. Finals approached and it would serve Saxon so right, after all his cold steely avoidance, to receive some of it in return.

But Lochy craved the attention, and he needed the practice.

So there he was, on his knees again, this time in front of Saxon’s couch, Saxon’s head thrown back onto the cushion so he didn’t have to see what was happening. That was fine with Lochlan. Better almost. Closer to that fantasy he yearned to complete, the facelessness of it all.

Oh, and then he pulled off in realization.

“Could you get me a fake?”

Saxon, mid-moan, a string of drool lining his cheek, righted his head and furrowed his brow.

“Like, a fake ID. You had one in college.”

It was not a question. Lochlan knew full well that Saxon got his way into any place he pleased. He preened about his unfettered access, his VIP status. Lochlan didn’t even want all that, he didn’t want attention, didn’t want to flaunt money he barely had. He just wanted to get in the door.

Saxon slapped him lightly on the side of the head.

“I don’t know anyone who does that shit anymore. And, what the fuck man.”

He gestured to his dick, neglected between them. Not so much in impatience as in taboo—the thought that Lochlan would stop to converse in the midst of something which so clearly needed to go unspoken.

It was better for him too when it was efficient, mechanical. So he left it alone and completed his work. He was getting used to the taste, the technique, barrelling past his gag reflex, which was not as easy as girls in porn made it seem. He was mildly disgusted by the sensation of snot and spit and tears dripping down his face.

Saxon only complained once, check your teeth dude, which Lochlan quickly corrected. There were so many parts to keep track of, like a complex machine; stringy muscles like pistons, tongue an oscillating motor. To imagine his body a series of interlocking systems, disidentified from the person behind them, made the whole thing easier to bear.

All things considered, Saxon was easy to please, and came without too much delay. He dismissed Lochy with some amount of dissociation, like he was not quite sure if they should do something else—play a round of Fortnite? Order pizza? Lochlan understood the confusion. It was awkward to have to be together after. Easier for Saxon to order him an uber home.

He should have asked his friends about the fake to begin with. It’s only that he didn’t want the supposition that, once the false credentials were acquired, he would be clubbing with them. He had no desire to join a swaggering horde of freshmen, too confident in themselves, too unused to intoxication to hold their own. Such a retinue would increase his suspiciousness. His quest was a solitary one (well—in a manner of speaking).

It took some doing. Some amount of small talking and asking friends of friends that was decidedly outside of his comfort zone. When he finally found a trusted source, he learned it would take all the money his birthday had netted him to procure and would not be ready til the start of the new semester.

The waiting might have felt impossibly long had he not, in Saxon’s newfound debasement, a periodic outlet for his urges. Saxon was not keen to reciprocate, or at least he did not offer, and Lochlan would not ask, did not truly want a Saxon that embraced some twisted version of homosexuality. Saxon was desirable because of his indifference. He and Lochy were means to each others’ ends. Once or twice, Lochlan pressed himself into Saxon’s leg, seeking an amount of pressure and friction while he worked. Saxon let him, again, indifferent. Lochlan did not hump him, god forbid, and did not ejaculate into his pants. He considered it, and was certainly tempted, but the notion of sitting in sticky underwear for an entire car ride home was not agreeable.

It was greater pleasure than any orgasm when the text came again, pathetic in its obviosity. And the text always came again.

--

He started with Just here to hook up. Not looking for anything serious. Backspaced, tried short term open to lt if you’re hot and classy. Backspaced again. Saxon knew chicks hated that sort of thing. Women claimed to want honest men but couldn’t handle the honesty they received most times, and would never return it. It was always you seem nice but I’m not interested. Like what does that even mean? Not that he really wanted feedback, but like, it just didn’t feel genuine. Saxon told girls all the time exactly why they weren’t what he was looking for. They were never grateful for it in the moment but he was sure that, down the line, for the next guy, it would help that someone told them the honest to god truth. He looked up from the empty text box and, unfortunately, to his bedroom mirror, where he could see his face illuminated by the phone screen. The blue light shit made him look terrible, haggard, desperate. He thought: if honesty is such a virtue, Saxon, why not write what you’re really here for: Need to get laid asap so I can stop asking my brother to suck my dick.

--

He had been procrastinating on his Projects in Design final. It required him to draft a highly detailed construction plan complete with timeline and budget. Being that most of the equipment was already purchased and the systems all internal, there was not much budget to be required.

The only thing which got him to focus on finishing the budget was the realization that he could fib slightly. Claim he needed certain expensive softwares so he could utilize the funds allotted for his upcoming gay bar expeditions. He could forge receipts. He could pirate the software, if he really needed it. He knew that his classmates were requisitioning large sums of money for their building projects, so it should not look too amiss, in the grand scheme of large scale institutional budgeting.

Banking, once again, on being a background blip, barely noticeable to god’s all seeing eye. He was getting away with a lot lately. God had not struck him down yet.

One afternoon, frigid by North Carolinian standards, he bundled in one of his many ragged hoodies, trundled to Brodie, and was led to a storage room where they were holding the smart gym screens in situ, awaiting installation. Then, as this school seemed ever so confident to do, he was left alone in a private room with the very expensive and very powerful toys.

He had to figure out how they worked. What details of the body they could map, exactly. The school had grand designs that one day, data collected from these machines could be shared (with student permission, of course) to the health and wellness center to monitor the overall condition of the student body, and to flag any prominent concerns that arose. They did not expect Lochlan to figure this out, they had said, but if he had ideas as to how to start, they were welcome.

Even to a devoted watcher like Lochlan, the concept of being so perceived by the Duke panopticon felt disgusting. He plugged in the screen and navigated through the calibration wizard, moving his arms and legs as prompted. He imagined some dull eyed administrator filing down virile students into data for grant reporting. Having full view of some of the most perfect bodies they might ever see, and wasting it on impersonal bureaucracy.

He tested the limits of the calibration—how close to the edge of the screen the sensors would read, how high and wide. His loose clothing made the little parentheses which followed his body parts glitch. It needed hard edges, just a body and no more.

He stripped down to a tshirt and it seemed to work better. He watched the shirt ride up his body in mirror, saw the taut lines of his body revealed in every place Saxon had hewn them. He continually had to flick away his curls, too long now by far, a fringe which made him doglike and hid his gaze. He shivered, exposed to the air and to his own awareness of being watched, and watching. No one was seeing him now but there was, in this screened reflection, the perception of observation. That was good, and it was lacking too.

Looking at his own body became overwhelming. He flicked through settings until he found one that turned off the mirrored screen, instead leaving a gray mannequin-type figure in its place which followed his movements. No face. No curls. No muscles or eyes or mouth.

Oh.

Lochlan let himself move and be moved by this figure, his twin. Imagining the ease of it, being free in a blank void, being shapes only, no want, nothing wantable. This was, in a way, the exact process happening within him when his needs took hold. Mind mapping the pure exercise of tongue stretching to its limit. Sensors measuring moisture and pressure and heart rate and adjusting the resultant activities to match.

He could, he didn’t have time and it felt bold even for him, but he could have taken his exploration further. Strip nude and jerk off right there, see what those sensors made of it. Would the erection read as a fifth limb? Would the heart rate sensors spike a warning? How would a stain of cum spread across the camera’s eye change its resultant vision?

Questions which he would answer later. There was something here. He could do something incredible with this.

--

Frugal was not a word to describe Victoria. She hated the sound of it in her mouth, in her head. She preferred to think of her choice to limit the services received at the salon to just a manicure and haircut as strategic. Even in these financial dire straits, going entirely without beautification was not an option. The endeavor was never, as men might think, done out of sheer vanity, an exercise in pleasure. Never more critical was the ability to observe what goes on, overhear gossip from hairdressers across the way. There was no telling how useful such tidbits could be, tokens to be traded for survival. Being seen, in return, was equally crucial. If she went missing from the salon for weeks, the tide would turn against her, snark free to bite across the space where she usually sat. And there were always minutiae to consider; what nail color best bespoke a steadfast and capable wife? What time of day should she arrive to maximize her investment? Should she go in alone or pool resources, be seen as part of a flock? Timothy was never the only financier in the family. He just traded in a different capital.

--

Holiday break arrived and the Ratliffs were shunted to yet another extended relative’s property. This time, some cousin Lochlan scarcely remembered, whose second or third home was left empty while they vacationed in the Bahamas or Aruba or Venice or Dubai. They would have the run of the place, just the three of them.

The absence of Timothy was made far starker now than it had been at Thanksgiving. At such a festive gathering with so many in attendance, there was much distraction. This huge house rang hollow. There would be no one to carve the Christmas ham.

This only concerned Lochlan when the flat conversations of dinner arrived. Before that, his first moment entering the minor manse, he instantly and quite headily fell in love.

Lochlan had been in many such oversized houses. Some pristine, clean-lined and symmetrical, like the home of his birth. Some cobbled together as if computer generated, windows stuck on any old place, illogical dormers and ill-fitting nubs like alien nipples.

But never in any such building had he seen a spiral staircase such as this. Out of the finest historic fantasies it seemed, dark wood railing curling artfully around its newel posts, wide steps with the perfect rise, not too shallow even at their innermost edge, no overwrought carvings, no moldering stair rug, just fine ancient wood which twisted luxuriously for a full three storeys, and shining down upon it from the ceiling, an octagonal skylight as wide as Lochlan was tall.

It was everything in him to not fall to his knees then and there and simply stare for hours, watch the shadows cross from the window above, intersecting with banisters and stair edges; to run his hands up each post and smell each fine aged corner.

He permitted himself to touch, gently graze the railing as he deposited his things in an unclaimed bedroom. It appeared to have been recently polished, so smooth it felt and so bright it shone in every light that touched it.

Piper caught him staring.

“Crazy staircase right? Like, who do they think they are with this thing?”

He wanted to throttle her. This staircase does not belong to the people who own this building. This is a masterpiece which stands on its own. This is an artifact which should be preserved beyond time immemorial. How could she, in all her vain posturing toward enlightenment, not find it right here, in this very portal to the heavens?

Dinner passed slow. A takeout meal sumptuous in its breadth but still decanted from plastic containers. The Christmas feast to follow in coming days was discussed at length—apparently Piper had taken it upon herself to cook the entire thing, and was delegating a schedule of responsibilities to everyone, Victoria included, who seemed to take some offense at being ordered around like a common line cook.

Every now and then a gap would form. The metaphorical place left for Timothy, temporally measured. The skylight around which they spiraled.

Victoria, usually filled with inane chatter, let herself be affected by the loss.

“I wish one of you kids brought home a sweetie for Christmas one of these years. Someone decent.”

Lochlan had little insight into Piper’s personal life these days, so busy they were in their individual quarters, but it was a rare moment when all three siblings seemed to share in an equal shame. They had never been farther from normal courtship in their lives.

He had not planned, exactly, to do anything. He never did, really. But he knew, as he was coming to understand his own strange urges, that something would happen. He just did not know what form it would take.

It was an experiment, a slow unfolding surprise even to himself when, long after everyone went to their respective bedrooms, he padded to the staircase. It was perhaps even more beautiful in the moonlight than in the day—no sidelight from adjoining rooms to distract from its glory, just the pure focus of the silver night and the dark sheen of wood.

So slowly did he run his fingers all along that polished surface. Waxed even, perhaps? It left a certain oiliness when he rubbed his fingertips together. At the second floor, his whole hands then, palms sliding so hard they gained heat and friction and came away tacky. At the first floor, he rubbed his hands around the orb of the newel post, perfect marbling barely visible in the dim.

Lochlan was about to do something weird. Indescribably weird.

He took his clothes off. In the cold December night his nipples pebbled and gooseflesh ran across him, despite the flush he felt inside.

(Temperature sensors blinking in the corner of some imaginary heads up display.)

He hiked a leg over the banister just at its base, where the long curved wood met newel post.

(Grey weightless computer generated limbs going akimbo mirroring his every move.)

And Lochlan let himself, like he would not do with Saxon, or Severin, or anyone more sensible and safe, grind down. The smooth waxen surface against that space between his legs, just barely leaving that residue in its wake, the mark that it had touched him. The question of his cock, ever a problem, found its answer in warming surface of the railing below him which he could angle down into, hips arched violently, hands balancing on the newel post at the base of the stairs.

He let himself shake, hungry and horny and with a teenager’s stuttering speed, with the only eye to see him that skylight, perfect and immutable.

Except—

“Whaat?”

Was the sight of Saxon, shirtless, pajama pants riding low, pint of ice cream in one hand, welcome in this moment?

Three weeks ago perhaps he would have fallen off the banister outright and run screaming from the building, so ashamed that he would never return.

But the situation had changed, hadn’t it? That door ever so gently nudged open nigh a year ago in Thailand was now thrown from its hinges. Perhaps it was better for Saxon to see, well and finally, that what Lochlan was doing for him down on that plush living room rug of his was only part of the story. This was a better illustration than he could have offered in words.

So Lochlan did not stop. Eyes met, Saxon frozen there with mouth agape, and any sensible brother or human with requisite sensibility of shame would stop. Lochlan, rendered thing by his own wanting, naked and strange, kept fucking himself there in the light of the moon.

Saxon approached. He turned his eyes from Lochlan down to his ice cream, projecting something emotionally impervious while Lochlan convulsed and panted. When Saxon was oh so close, less than two feet perhaps, near enough to touch but blessedly not doing that, he lifted the spoon from his pint with a generous flourish and flipped it into his own mouth, drawing it out slow.

(A glint reflected in the spoon’s underside, the pearlescent leak beginning from inside Lochlan, pixels all in combinations of light and dark.)

The spoon returned to the pint a second time, and Saxon brought it up equally slowly toward Lochlan, who was truly whimpering, testing the patience of the sturdy construction with his fucking insatiable neediness.

Lochlan opened his mouth like he had done for Saxon so many times.

The spoon approached.

And at the last second, Saxon pulled it away.

“Ah.”

Just that little noise, a breathy sike at the back fo the throat which spelled brutal denial.

And Lochlan spilled, sending rivulets over the polish, dripping onto the stairs and yet further to the parquet foyer floor.

Lochlan’s curls were sweaty against his forehead now despite the cold, and he lay the whole mop of himself against the grand orb of the newel post as he trembled in recovery.

Saxon took the bite which he denied Lochlan and let out a snicker.

“You’re such a fucking freak.”

Then he adjusted himself in his pajamas and said in wonderment, off to the side, as if there were no one there to hear him at all:

“Why did that kinda make me hard though?”

Lochlan had no brain in that moment, rendered pure flat pleasure and grossness, but if he had, he might have expected Saxon to demand Lochlan resolve the arousal he had sparked. Maybe get on his knees and lick up the mess he made. Instead, Saxon appeared to chew on his thoughts as he took up the stairs, pint of ice cream in hand, and returned to his own bedroom, alone and offering no invitation to follow.

Chapter Text

Every gay bar, and there were not too many in the region, had its rumors. Exaggerated tales of back room orgies, be they heavenly or sadistic. Lochlan could not care which was true, he simply knew he must find out. Fake ID acquired shortly after the start of the spring semester, he would spend every evening, every ounce of free time, avoiding academic responsibility to the bitter end until he found what he sought.

What cruel god could deny so eager a pilgrim?

It was an older lecher who finally led him to his promised land (he chose not to think of the family group chat, the trial date which had definitely been announced therein, the age of the man taking his hand or the age of his father and how they compared, the confinement Lochlan sought and the confinement which doomed Timothy). A drink bought for the delicate twink at the bar turned into two, which loosened anxious Lochlan’s tongue to ask for what he really craved, which turned the foul man’s mouth into a wicked smile and a nod toward the back of the building.

It was happening. Really and truly.

Past the obvious bathrooms on the floor of the bar, there was another. The door was hidden around a corner and unlabelled. At best one might think it a staff bathroom, except again lacking label it could not be claimed as such. The door swung open to reveal a dingy, horrid-smelling room lit by a single red bulb with exactly two stalls.

The foul man was an afterthought at this point. Lochlan would have to suck him off, naturally, but it was the stall itself he would be observing while it happened. The portal between worlds was ugly, forged by crude weaponry and bound with layers of tape at its edges for safety.

The question of how best to sit he would not figure out immediately. Sitting on the toilet put him at an odd angle, having to crane his neck painfully. There was a tiny stool which put him at a better height but then how to face without pressing his knees into the aluminum?

Undoubtedly what followed was not his finest work. The man on the other side pulled out without cumming, grumbled something inaudible over the sound of the increasingly deafening club mix, and stormed out.

And Lochlan stayed right there. He tried every seating position he could until he found one that was the right mixture of comfortable and effective. He fingered the edges of the mass of tape around the hole. He tested how far he could push his lips and his tongue through, and what it felt like for his cheeks and nose to be flattened into the metal. If he pressed hard enough his nostrils flattened and the only passage for air was his throat, ready to be obliterated by whatever passed into it. If he pressed hard enough, he could imagine himself flat, barely extant. He could almost remember what it felt like to die.

Then there were the cocks. That first night, there was only one after the messianic lecher, but he would come back night after night for the full parade. Chief among the sensations was their taste. Similar, all, but distinct. Some cheesy, some antiseptic, some the pure and clean salt lick of sweat, some so rotten he had to hold his breath until it was over, vision blotting out with dizziness and lack of oxygen.

Then the feeling. The girths in his mouth, lengths down his throat. The ones so small he had to press forward and lick out as if it was a clitoris. Cut and uncut. Bent in the middle. The guys who shoved their balls through the hole.

There was no sound, everything washed in a perpetual climactic remix. There was no sight, eyes closed or otherwise too close to the flat grey steel.

Sometimes they would cum violent and stringy across his lips. Sometimes a thin trickle of sea water leaking onto his tongue. Sometimes they would keep it to themselves, pulling out just before the money shot, unable to seal the deal. Sometimes they would grow soft and sad of their own accord. He let himself accept whatever they gave.

He would remember being told to chug, over and over again. This is not what Saxon had meant, but it is what he made.

He sometimes received numbers written on sweaty pieces of paper through the hole afterward. He never pursued them. He never followed anyone out of that bathroom.

Once, he was tempted. A penis sprang through the hole fully and stiffly erect. Not unusual but a bit strong. The first touch of tongue to the head felt off somehow. Too smooth, not warm enough. Enveloping the head in his mouth made it clear: this was silicone. Insensitive, immovable, tasteless, biteable, perfectly always itself. He was not clear how to maneuver it for the pleasure of the wearer, but that was not really ever his concern. If he could have followed that strap and not the flesh attached to it, to worship and thank in equal objectification, he would have.

School became an afterthought. Saxon an unanswered text message. Every doorway a jaw opening to spit or to swallow. Every spoon that entered his mouth he had the urge to shove back as far as it would go, distend his cheek and suck it til it rusted. Every swooping O written in his notebook, every arched window, every beaker in the chemistry lab, every earring hanging off a girl’s earlobe—every hole was a temptation that made his wretched tongue circle his mouth til it was raw, til he could get there one more time, down on his knees in that red room, and clog himself til the red went black and brothers (and fathers) did not exist.

--

Piper visited her father dutifully every Saturday afternoon. Occasionally with Victoria, but never Saxon, never Lochlan. She had given up on nagging them. The first few times it was frightening. The guards were gruff, seeming to expect her to understand the rules without explaining them. Sign in at the front desk. Wait for the prisoner to be retrieved. Get patted down for contraband. Follow the guard with his swinging baton and holstered pistol to a cafeteria with a dozen other inmates and their family members all closely surveyed. Sometimes the visit was awkward. It’s not as if he had any exciting news to share. Even now that there was a trial date, and so close too, what was there to say about it? It was a foregone conclusion that he would plead guilty, that there was no foreseeable end to his imprisonment. He would be transferred to another facility farther away and Piper would have to learn the visitation rules there too, grow accustomed to its flavor of icy, hateful energy, and continue to practice metered empathy so that she could carry on the rest of her life without constantly sobbing. She understood why her brothers chose to avoid it.

--

Could Lochlan have just completed his pedantic final project and left well enough alone? Could he have created his monstrosity on the side, in private, with the money he squirrelled away and the university none the wiser?

Of course.

But where would the fun be in that?

So there he sat, a walk-in meeting with the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality to upend it all.

“I don’t believe we’ve met before. I’m Beryl, they/them.”

Ah. An opportunity, that. To ingratiate himself first and to try something else on. Like the woman he wore on Halloween. Like the hole he wears every night. He knew the words, he’s just never put them in that order.

“Lochlan. He/they.”

Perfunctory small talk, what are you studying, how can I help you. And then Lochlan spoke something into existence which he had never shared with another soul, and in so doing, talked for more at a stretch than he had in a long, long time.

“So I already chose a PiD final project and I’ve been working on it. But um, right around the time I had to choose I started going on sort of a gender and sexuality journey. Having to choose and set something this big in stone just when I was like, embracing fluidity, and at Brodie where I’m just thinking about bodies and presentation all day, it’s been kind of exhausting. I felt really pressured to choose something convenient, like coloring outside the lines wasn’t super encouraged. And that speaks to the whole heteronormativity of the engineering program, right? That like, every project has to be solution oriented rather than exploratory. So yeah just all that, I know it’s not traditionally done but I was hoping you might be open to sponsoring a last minute change to my PiD that’s not super functional per se but sort of a… queering of the assignment.”

The words. Queering. Heteronormativity. Borrowed lexicon from Piper, foreign to his mouth. Functional to a point. If they were true, that was accidental. Secondary. They hit their mark in Beryl, who encouraged him to continue.

“Thank you. So here are the plans I drew up. Um. Yeah take a look at that. It’s obviously got this element of like, bathrooms as politicized space for queer people. Also how queer spaces are at this intersection of like DIY and sex and the need for privacy, and the inverse of shame. So you get, from this part, like the hidden actor, which I would obviously be doing that. They’re projected in this almost panopticon way. Stripped down to just identity, no substance. And then this part is also motion controlled but more tactile and has the interactive piece. It’s the only place you can see inside so there’s like um. A vulnerability.”

His heart thudded. His dick went tight in his jeans. He watched an agent of this university, a professional in the academic desexualization of his perversions, examine the paper on which he had laid out a grotesquerie beyond all wild imaginings. Imagine it; these people sit in this glass-walled modern monstrosity day after day and render queerness, if that is what this is, if that is what he is, a dry and dickless facet of university politics. Would they let him remind them of their sodomite origins, or would they continue playing nice?

Moment of truth, then.

“First of all thank you for bringing this in. It’s really a privilege to get to hear your journey. I know freshman year can be a tough time for everyone and for queer people in a big institution, it can be even more daunting. So I hear your experience and I’m grateful to have received it. We do usually plan the rotating art exhibit a year in advance, so I’m not sure I can get this in that schedule for this year, but what we could do is host a temporary install, like a one-night gallery showing. Obviously no promises, I will have to run it by the rest of the team, but I just want to say personally, this is really exciting and important work. We rarely see student art that is so confrontational, and GCSD really aims to be a safe space for these conversations, so I am gonna do everything I can to help you sign off on this.”

Afterward he was buzzing, gleeful, manic, leaking into his pants. He immediately strode into the gender neutral bathroom off the lobby and jerked off twice in rapid succession. Once to relieve the built-up tension and a second time to hurt himself just a little.

--

Timothy was really trying not to be bitter about the fact that they hadn’t visited him on Christmas. He knew he didn’t deserve it, but it would have been a nice gesture. Hell, at the start of this whole thing he was the kind of man who would have been outraged at the disrespect. Didn’t he raise his children to honor their parents? To honor him? Didn’t his wife take vows to stand by him despite all hardship and strife? Hadn’t he lived a life that commanded respect from his colleagues and so-called friends? But months of isolation winnow the righteousness out of a man. He mostly wished he could have been saved the embarrassment of being one of the unloved few who did not rotate through the visitation room that day. Piper came on New Year’s Day bearing some home-baked cookies which the guards did permit him to eat. He had to press his tongue against his teeth as he cradled the red and gilded tin in his hands to prevent himself from asking her why didn’t they come and see me. Why don’t they ever come. There was no point in asking because they both knew the answer.

--

Lochlan couldn’t think of a reason why Chuck would need to see him in person. He wasn’t testifying. All he needed to do for the trial was shut up and look like a perfect son, and shutting up was more or less his specialty. But Mom had insisted. Chuck wants to check in with you before the big day. I’ll send a car.

The meaning of “sending a car” had changed dramatically from the pre-Thailand era, of course. It was just an uber, which he was grateful she was paying for because his bank account was all but drained from the high cost of gay cocktails and clandestine building materials. Besides, he could just imagine her face, the diatribe of accusations of trashiness that would follow if she knew he walked to their cousin’s house from the bus stop.

He had never really liked Chuck. Even before the arrest, seeing him meant that Timothy would be in a complex foul mood for hours. Seeing him now (in a sitting room just beyond the foyer he had sullied not weeks ago) brought back familiar feelings of childhood, of wondering why this strange bald man was upsetting his father.

He sunk deep in anxiety and leather couch cushions. Chuck asked Victoria to get them some coffee. She smiled and after a blinking moment of remembering there was no help to do such things for her, obliged, but Lochlan could tell she found the request demeaning.

“How you doing, son? How’s freshman year treating you?”

The paternal air made Lochlan want to vomit. Chuck may have classed a family friend by some definitions but this visit was clearly not social, and the veneer of affability was unbearably thin. His reply was not scathing, it was soft like a wounded animal. He could only get away with saying it because his mother was not in the room.

“Please don’t call me that.”

Chuck’s fat smile fell and he raised his hands in surrender.

“Fair enough.”

Chuck began a winding rap then. Timothy’s trial is coming up, we know this is a tough time for you and the siblings, there are certain expectations of the family. He kept mentioning “the siblings” and “the family” but there was no one else in the room. Victoria was taking her damn time making coffee—perhaps she didn’t remember how, or perhaps she didn’t want to be here for this conversation.

“So what I’m saying is, I remember how it is in college. You’re young, you’re partying, you’re experimenting.”

Experimenting. He might as well have called him a simpering fairy. Lochlan felt his knees draw together. Chuck surely did not mean that he “remembered” experimenting himself. It wasn’t said with that kind of innuendo. It was said with the pitying handwave of a straight man who avoided the concept of homosexuality at all costs.

“And it’s not about… You know, what a man gets up to in private is his own business.”

Clearly it’s not. The hot flush of fear rushing through Lochlan’s chest made him unable to predict what Chuck was going to say, what he was really talking about. He pictured some kind of security footage of himself fucking the banister, Saxon watching and laughing. Photos Saxon had taken of the top of his head slobbering around his crotch without his knowledge plucked from iCloud by subpoena. Severin somberly stepping onto the witness stand to cry big Slavic tears about how his roommate took advantage of him.

“But you’ve got to be careful out in public. They’ll use anything they can against us, and that includes underage drinking in um… Risqué establishments.”

The silence which followed was brief, punctuated by Victoria coming in with a rattling tray of three cups of coffee. The conversation continued, but really, it was over.

The only thing Lochlan could think was of course. Of course he had forgotten that anonymity and privacy were luxuries he could not afford. Of course the moment he began to explore something for himself, something which was not, for once, hopelessly embroiled in his family drama, it wound back around to torment him. Of course his newfound vice involved hiding and swallowing endlessly because here he was, being asked to hide, being asked to swallow whatever they fed him.

Part of him wanted to follow instructions and get the pat on the head for being a good boy. But he wasn’t anymore. Not good. Maybe not even—well. He refused to finish that thought. Anyway the head pats stopped long ago. He would get no special reward for abstaining from desire. Saxon taught him that once, and it was turning out to be ever more true.

It was equally laughable to be asked to “help” his father, who had gotten into this mess all on his own, who had summarily ruined Lochlan’s future and his present, and who was, no matter what Lochlan did in public or in private, staying in jail for a long time.

So of course Lochlan promised to be better. He would be better at hiding his face when he left campus. Better at spotting local reporters in cars across the street from the bar. Better at catching rides with friends. He would be better at hiding himself. Because he could never really be good.