Needle Freak, page 15
Jack let go of him. “I was just trying to—I only wanted…” He stopped, took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay.”
He had wanted to make him feel better. He had wanted to erase that wretched look on his face and make him forget. Instead, Jack had forgotten who Shane was to him and what that meant for them, the lines inherent in a fraternal relationship that he hadn’t lived with for half his life. He knew Shane was his brother, but that was just a word to someone who didn’t have a brother and Jack Handy didn’t have a brother. Jack Donovan did though and that meant that this should not have happened and could not happen.
Jack ran his tongue over his bottom lip and tried to banish the rising, slow-burn arousal he felt. After only one kiss, he wanted more. It had only taken one kiss.
“I’m sorry, Shane,” Jack said.
Shane shook his head and got up. Then he paced at the end of the sofa before disappearing into the kitchen out of sight.
Jack looked down at Hank sitting by the easy chair and found the dog looking back at him. He let his tongue loll out and it looked like he was grinning.
“It’s not funny,” Jack muttered.
The dog continued to grin. It’s a little funny.
“Shut up,” Jack said.
In the kitchen, the fridge opened and closed and Shane opened a beer can.
Jack sighed and got up. He was tempted to go into the kitchen after him. To talk about it or apologize again or something. Instead, he went back to bed.
Chapter 11
Jack got paid on Fridays like everyone else and without a drug habit or any other significant vices he found himself saving money just because he didn’t have anything to spend it on. He had offered to help Shane pay the bills early on, but Shane had summarily dismissed the idea, though he sometimes let Jack go in to pay for the gas at the gas station. It left Jack with a lot of pocket money.
He asked Mark to give him a tattoo.
“Okay, wait,” Mark said after Jack tried to describe for him what he wanted. He even provided Mark with a drawing, but it only seemed to confuse him. He pointed to it. “You want this? Seriously?”
“Um.” Embarrassed, Jack wanted to take the drawing back. It was supposed to be a monkey with wings and he had never intended it as anything but a visual aid for what he was trying to describe, but the look on Mark’s face let him know that he had failed all around. “No, I just…”
“Okay, okay,” Mark said, gesturing with one hand like he was scrubbing the bad vibes from the air. “Don’t be offended, man. But look, what’s it supposed to be?”
“A flying monkey,” Jack said.
“What, like The Wizard of Oz?” Mark asked. “That’s awesome. Why didn’t you just say that?”
“Oh. I thought I did,” Jack said.
Mark took the pad with Jack’s drawing on it, flipped to a clean sheet of paper and picked up a pen. “Where do you want it?”
“On my back,” Jack said.
Mark glanced up at him with raised brows and smiled. “Makes sense.”
“Like… on the back of my shoulder though.”
Mark nodded and began to draw. “You want the little hat and vest thing like in the movie?”
“Not… No, I don’t think so. Like a real monkey, only with wings.”
Mark made a sound to acknowledge what he said and continued to draw. The pen moved for five minutes then he flipped the pad around to show Jack what he’d come up with. It was a line drawing of a langur monkey with wings, drawn to look like it was clinging to the paper. On Jack, it would appear to be holding onto the back of his shoulder.
Jack smiled. “Yes, like that.”
“Cool,” Mark said. “Let me work on it and show you again later. That okay?”
“Yes,” Jack said.
“Might use a different type of monkey though,” Mark said. “I mean, we can do the white. I got this one a couple years ago, see?” He pulled the sleeve of his shirt up to show Jack a tattoo. Mark had a lot of tattoos, but the one he pointed out was a white bull’s head wearing a wreath of flowers around its ears. The white stood out starkly in his tanned skin. “So, yeah, we can do that, but you’re pretty white already. So maybe something else so it stands out, you know?”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Just not anything like a proboscis monkey.”
“Like those ones with the weird noses?” Mark asked. He grinned. “No way, dude. That would be funny, but not really… I mean, I get it, so I’ll look and then you can look and if you don’t like it, we’ll do something else. That cool?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “That’s cool.”
Shane came through the back door into the house then. The screen door banged closed and Hank made a beeline for the kitchen to greet Mark, which he did by jumping up on him and mouthing at his hands while making excited whining sounds. His long whip tail thrashed so vigorously that Shane stepped back to avoid it as he approached the table.
“What are you doing?” he asked Jack. He looked down at the drawing on the notepad. “What’s this?”
“It’s a monkey,” Jack said.
Shane smiled. “Obviously.”
“He wants a tattoo,” Mark said. Hank had become bored sniffing him and took a break to go over to his food dish and check it. Mark sat back down. “I said I’d do it.”
“It has wings,” Shane said.
Mark shrugged and pointed at Shane’s arm and the lion tattoo there. “I’m sensing a theme here,” he said.
Shane looked down at his own arm then frowned down at the flying monkey. “Huh,” he said. He went to the fridge. “You want a drink or anything?” he asked Mark.
“I’m good. I have to go anyway,” Mark said. “I’m telling you, man, you should really let me do something about that lion of yours. It isn’t one of my best. I was still learning and it’s kind of a mess.”
“I like it,” Shane said. He cracked open a beer and leaned back against the refrigerator.
“At least let me touch it up,” Mark said. “No charge.”
Shane took a drink of his beer. “Maybe when you’re done with his if you want. I’ll drop by on my day off and you can do whatever. It’s really not that bad.”
“Oh, I want,” Mark said.
Shane rolled his eyes. “If it means that much to you.”
“Awesome.” Mark stood to go, giving Hank a farewell pat on his broad head. “Catch you guys later.”
Mark left and Shane and Jack didn’t move or say anything for a few minutes. Shane drank his beer and Jack looked at the monkey drawing. He petted Hank and the dog sniffed him hopefully, but left them alone when no treats or scraps of food were forthcoming. The silence stretched out and it wasn’t comfortable like Jack was used to. Shane wasn’t a big talker anyway and neither was Jack, so being in a room with him while neither of them said anything was not uncommon, but the silences between them since Jack had kissed him had changed. They were tense; expectant.
He wished things would go back to the way they had been before, but he couldn’t honestly say that, given the chance to take back the kiss, he would have. It would have been a lie.
“Shane, I—”
“You want Popeye’s for dinner?” Shane asked.
Jack sighed, picked up his notebook and stood up. He started to leave, but then he stopped, turned back and forced himself to look at his brother. He wanted to pretend nothing was wrong; fine, Jack could do that. “Let’s get the spicy chicken,” he said.
Shane smiled and stood away from the fridge, hand already in his pocket for his keys. “Sure, if you want to singe the skin off your tongue, we can do that,” he said. “You coming?”
Jack didn’t expect the invitation—he’d thought going for food was really Shane’s excuse to leave again and get away from him. He put the notebook down and went with Shane out to the truck. Hank tried to follow them, but Shane made him stay inside and closed the door on him.
They drove into town and went through the drive-thru at Popeye’s. Shane said that they gave people better pieces of chicken in the drive-thru than if they went inside. Inside, if they didn’t like the look of you, you might get a bucket full of wings that had been too long under the heating lamp. Jack didn’t know how true that was, but they got a bucket of fried chicken and biscuits, took them home and ate while watching TV. They had beer with it and shared the food with Hank.
After dinner, Shane sat outside on the porch steps and drank some more. He didn’t say anything to Jack about the kiss, but Jack knew he was thinking about it. He had been thinking about it for days. That worried him because he didn’t understand why. If he was trying to decide something, what might that mean for Jack?
If Shane had gone on like nothing had happened, Jack would have forgotten about it. It had been a kiss and sure, it had been an inappropriate kiss, but a kiss was nothing. To his mind, there was nothing to think about, no decision to be made about it. Nothing had to change. Shane though, Shane was brooding.
It got dark and Shane continued to sit out on the porch, the light from the open door and windows on his back casting his shadow long across the driveway. The love bugs had all died, their corpses mashed into the dirt and swept away until spring when they came back again. Jack stood in the doorway and watched lightning bugs appear out over the yard. Blinking little lights bobbing in the darkness like the lures of angler fish. His shadow stood long on the porch and the porch rail beside Shane. Shane finished his beer, crushed the can and set it aside. His lighter lit up his face for an instant as he lit a cigarette.
“Jack, come here,” Shane said.
Jack hesitated then opened the screen door and went out onto the porch. Shane offered him the cigarette and he took it and leaned against the railing to smoke.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” Shane said.
“Why?” Jack asked.
“It was… I’ll be more quiet next time. Or I’ll go outside. I won’t bother you,” Shane said.
“Why?” Jack asked again. He held the cigarette out for him to take it back. “Shane.”
Shane took it and flicked ash off it. “It’s not your problem,” he said. “You got your own shit to deal with.”
Jack laughed incredulously. Shane gave him a sharp, hurt look for that, but he just shook his head. “I do. I got my own shit to deal with,” Jack agreed. “But you deal with it, too. I’m not supposed to have anything to do with your problems though? That’s kind of… I don’t know, one-sided.”
“It’s not your business,” Shane said. “It’s mine.”
“You are my business,” Jack said, a little annoyed now by Shane’s presumption. He didn’t mean anything by it, he reminded himself, but it was kind of patronizing. “You accept that when shit happens to me, you help me. You take care of me or whatever. So, I do the same for you. That’s how this works.”
“No, it isn’t,” Shane said.
“Oh, yeah? Well, it’s going to,” Jack said.
Shane frowned at him. Then he cast his gaze back to the yard and the lightning bugs and smoked the rest of his cigarette. “You shouldn’t kiss me, you know,” he said after a while. “I know you’re not… I mean, we aren’t…” He sighed and flicked the cigarette out into the yard. It hissed and went out in the wet grass. “We’re fucked up. There’s no way we could not be, right? But we—you—know better.”
“I said I’m sorry,” Jack said. “What else do you want me to say? I’m sorry, Shane.”
“Just don’t do it again,” Shane said.
Jack crossed his arms over his chest and looked out at the yard with Shane. In the dark, beyond the city lights, the nighttime was made up of shadows. The sky was dark grey, just this side of black, and the trees and shrubbery were black all around, the wind made the Spanish moss drift through the air like the hair of some Halloween witch. Standing in the middle of it without a light to guide you, it was disorienting. The lightning bugs bobbed through it like fairies sent to lead travelers to their deaths.
“Jack?” Shane said.
Jack glanced down at him. “Yeah, I heard you,” he said.
“And?”
“Fine. I won’t.”
Shane nodded and stood up. He wasn’t very relieved by Jack’s answer, but there was nothing Jack could do about that.
That night Jack fell asleep with the windows open, the crickets and cicadas chirring and chirping, the breeze smelled of swampy decay, oleander and sweet olive. Shane didn’t go to bed for a long time and the TV was on. It wasn’t loud, but he could hear the muffled sound of television voices through the wall. Then Shane went to his room and turned on music. Rock music that made the insects fall silent and listen.
Sometime in the night, Jack woke to stillness and quiet and rolled over to reach for the glass of water on his nightstand. He didn’t turn on the lamp, he could see enough by moonlight. He happened to glance toward the door as he lifted the glass to his mouth and saw Shane standing there, the bedroom door open. He had looked in to check on him and that was what had awakened Jack.
Jack set the glass of water down and sat up. “Shane?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
Shane cast his eyes down to the floor and didn’t say anything for a long time. Jack waited. Finally he said, “It happened again.”
“A nightmare?”
“Yeah. This time it was… Hal. It was you. I couldn’t… You were screaming.”
“I never screamed.” Jack had been as quiet as he could be because Hal had threatened him with things if he wasn’t; horrible things. “I bit my lips bloody. My arm, the pillows, whatever I could so I wouldn’t.”
Shane winced. “Yeah, well… it’s just a dream.”
“What else happened?”
“I couldn’t make him stop. I couldn’t get there.”
Jack scratched his arm, felt the pebbles of scars inside his elbow catch on his fingernails. “Come here,” he said. He scooted over in the bed to make room for Shane and patted the mattress beside him. “Lay down.”
Shane shook his head. “No, Jack. I can’t. We can’t—”
“Not for that,” Jack said. “Just lay down. You used to do it for me all the time.”
“We’re not little kids anymore,” Shane said, but he moved toward the bed anyway.
“You weren’t a little kid then, either,” Jack said. “Just lay down. I promise I won’t try to fuck you.”
“Jack,” Shane said, shocked.
Jack just laughed. “Whatever. Lay down, all right?”
Shane sat down on the side of the bed, but he didn’t lie down right away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I told you I wouldn’t do this shit, but here I am do—”
“It’s okay,” Jack said. “Will you stop it?”
Shane sighed and carefully lay down on the bed, but he kept his distance. Jack rolled onto his side and put a hand out to rest it on one of Shane’s tense shoulders. It made him flinch.
“It’s going to be Halloween pretty soon, you know,” Jack said, ignoring his reaction to him. “We should get candy. Maybe some of those glowing jack-o’-lantern lights. You know, like the Christmas lights? I always liked Halloween.”
Jack didn’t like most holidays. Mostly because he was excluded from them and had no reason to celebrate or anyone to celebrate with. That was different now. Now there was Shane and Shane had a few friends who were quickly becoming Jack’s friends, too. Holidays might be—or could be—different. He had always liked Halloween because of the sweets and the costumes and the lack of religion. There was no baby Jesus surrounded by wise men and angels, there was no martyr Jesus on the cross, no Jesus risen from the dead, not even sexy housebreaking Jesus was invited to Halloween parties. There was candy and there were masks and no one had to be anything they didn’t want to be, least of all themselves.
“We can do that. Not a lot of kids come out here trick-or-treating though,” Shane said. The normal conversation did calm him and he became less stiff on the bed. “Too far out of town in the middle of nowhere. The neighbor kids might come, I guess, if we put up decorations.”
“We can carve pumpkins,” Jack said, liking the idea the more he thought about it. “I haven’t done that since I was ten, I think.”
Shane smiled. “All right,” he said.
“Shane?”
“What?”
“Are you going to freak if I touch you?”
Shane was quiet while he considered it. “No,” he finally decided.
“Good,” Jack said. He shifted over to him on the bed and lay against his back. Waiting for Shane to jerk away from him or bolt, he put his arm around him, but Shane didn’t do anything more than tense up briefly. “Okay?”
“We’re spooning,” Shane said, amused.
Jack smiled. “Yes, we are. You know what else?”
“What’s that?”
“You’re the little spoon.”
Shane laughed. “Goodnight, Jack.”
Chapter 12
Shane got talked into going to a friend’s party that Halloween. Some guy who worked for him named Chris had gotten married that spring and his wife had bought decorations and candy and was making him dress up as the Mad Hatter to her Alice. So technically it was Shane’s friend’s wife’s Halloween party. Shane didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want to be rude and Chris seemed like he could really do with some moral support. Shane bought a plastic skeleton mask at the gas station in town, wore a black hoodie and told Jack he would be home before midnight.
Jack bought Halloween candy and put it out in a bowl by the door. He had bought pumpkins and they had each carved one, but one of the neighbor kids in the area had stolen them the night before Halloween and they had seen the shattered remains on the road the next day when they went in to the shop. Jack had talked about decorating, but they had never gotten the chance to actually do it. There weren’t that many people who took their kids door to door anymore anyway, Shane told him. There were even less who took their kids to doors like theirs, way out in the countryside.
In other words, Jack shouldn’t expect many trick-or-treaters.
When Shane still hadn’t come home by eleven and Jack had gotten bored waiting for costumed children who never arrived, he turned off the lights on the porch and sat down to watch a movie. There was an 80s horror movie marathon on TV, so he watched the first half of Friday the 13th and fell asleep.
