Trin Read online

  But sweat trickles down the sides of his face because it’s hot in here, he’s hot, and he can’t get the damn hood open. He’s done this a million times, he doesn’t know why it’s not working all of a sudden, he’s found the release, he can feel it but can’t seem to open the goddamn hood—

  “Here.” Gerrick takes Trin’s arm to move him aside and Trin almost swoons from the touch. “It’s a little tricky, kid. You have to know what you’re doing…” He eases his fingers under the hood and his tongue comes out to touch the end of his moustache as he looks at the ceiling, fingers fumbling for the release. “Temperamental,” he says with a glance Trin’s way. “Like an old man. You just have to touch him right and—”

  The hood pops up an inch and Gerrick steps back, grinning. He winks at Trin. “You’ll get him up,” he finishes. Sweeping an arm at the open hood, he says, “All yours, boy. Trin, is it?”

  Trin nods. The hood is heavy—for a few scary moments he can’t seem to dislodge the thin metal rod that will hold it up for him, but finally the rust breaks away and he can prop the hood open. Peering into the maw, Trin catches his breath when Gerrick leans down beside him. He has to clear his throat twice before he’s able to speak. “The shocks?” he asks. Dimly he’s aware that he sounds as if he’s never seen a motor before.

  A firm hand encircles his elbow. “Trin,” Gerrick murmurs.

  When Trin turns, he finds the gunner right up on him, so close that he can see the sunburnt skin begin to flake on the man’s forehead. “Blain’s brother, right?” Those gray-green eyes look through him and Trin thinks, Blain who? “How’s that old bastard been?”

  “Alright,” Trin whispers.

  In his dreams of meeting the gunner one day, he never imagined that all they’d have to talk about was his brother. He always has a million questions for the others who come through here—“How do you know Gerrick?” and “Where’s he been running lately?” and “Tell me about the last time you met up with him, everything he said, every little detail.” And now that he’s confronted with the man, his tongue can’t even form the most rudimentary words. With those sure fingers on his arm, his brain is having a pretty hard time even thinking in language. At the moment he’s just a swirl of emotion inside.

  “Trin,” Gerrick says again.

  Hearing his name in that voice, Trin’s heart skips a beat.

  Those lips curve into an amused grin below the grey-blonde bristles of his moustache. “So you’re the one always asking after me, eh?”

  Footsteps puncture the moment as Aissa moves away from the truck. Trin’s gaze flickers to her as she comes around to where they stand—she sees that hand on his arm and hears the gunner’s soft words, and the look she gives them says she expected as much. “Going to get the hose,” she laughs, walking away. “Don’t mind me.”

  Gerrick sighs, an exasperated sound. He releases Trin’s elbow. Ghosts of his fingers linger on his skin.

  “How about tonight, kid?” he asks. Trin catches his breath and Gerrick shrugs. “I’ve heard the things you’ll do for a gunner who mentions my name. What I want to know is,” and his smile widens suggestively, his eyes brighten, “what’ll you do for me?”

  * * * *

  “What’d he say?” Aissa wants to know. She hounds Trin long after Gerrick has followed the other gunners into the waystation, leaving the dazed mech to stare into the shadowy depths of his run-gun engine. One word rings in Trin’s ears like the clatter of a wrench dropped to the concrete garage floor. Tonight. If Aissa would shut up long enough to let him gather his thoughts together, he could tell her what it is she wants to know. He said tonight.

  But when he mentions that he can’t get a word in for all her questions, she turns the hose on him.

  By the time he calls it a day, his hands are black with oil from changing the shocks. At the pump he has to scrub with stones to see his skin again. Aissa primes the handle as he rinses off, more than once splashing him out of spite, but he barely feels the water—his pants and shirt are damp and clammy from where she sprayed him earlier.

  “So,” she wants to know, letting the pump run dry, “you excited?”

  “No,” he lies. His heart flutters like a bird caught in his chest, and he gets dizzy if he turns his head too fast. There’s a barely perceptible quiver to his fingers that has nothing to do with the icy water running over them. He can picture himself walking down the darkened hall above the common room. He can imagine stopping in front of Gerrick’s door. He can even see himself inside, the pallet spread out like an invitation on the floor, the gunner standing beside it and smiling at him. What would you do, he asks in Trin’s mind, for me? Then he begins to take off his shirt, and somewhere between the first button and the last, Trin explodes.

  Flicking him with the last of the water as it rushes from the pump, Aissa declares, “You’re full of shit.”

  “What?” he wants to know.

  She shakes her head, her curls tumbling over her shoulders. “You’re already so worked up over him, Trini, that you ain’t gonna be any good in his pallet tonight.”

  “Maybe that’s not what he has in mind,” Trin pouts, though it’s surely what he has in mind and if he doesn’t get a piece of that man tonight, he’s going to be more than a little disappointed in the morning. He’ll be crushed. Still, it’s not really any of her business what he does with his clothes off, is it? “Maybe all he wants to do is talk.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Trin holds his hands up in her face and shakes them dry, splattering her with oil and water.

  “Eww!” One leg shoots out automatically to kick him in the shin. “If he wanted to talk, he could do it here. Stop it. Trin—”

  He drops his hands to his stomach, where they fist in a clean spot on his shirt. She lowers her voice to an intimate level and watches his fingers twist in the material. “All someone has to do is say his name,” she murmurs, “and you’re all too willing to bend over for them.”

  “That’s not true,” Trin protests, but he can’t meet her gaze. He’s never actually let any of the gunners fuck him just so he could hear Gerrick’s latest exploit. He’ll touch them, lick them, suck them, rim them, finger them, sure. Hands thrust into pants, lips on hard dicks, the taste of salty cum lingering in his mouth, that he’s done before, just to hear Gerrick’s name. But now he’s here. It’ll be the man himself tonight, no one else. Finally.

  The only other guy Trin’s ever put out for was a kid his own age, Monet, back before he even knew Gerrick existed. He was the darkest boy Trin ever met—his skin glistened in the sun like flints of obsidian, and his black eyes were red-rimmed slits in the high plains of his face. A beautiful boy who rode through Arens from one of the inposts, with thin copper wires tied to his wrists like bracelets and hoops piercing his ears, his eyebrow, his nipples. In the heat of summer six years ago he stood in the shade of one of the bay doors and watched Trin work on the run-gun trucks. When Trin came close enough, Monet told him, “You skittish but I like ya. Ever been with a boy before?”

  The answer was no, but Trin was fifteen and already lusted after the gunners. Any port in a storm, he thought at the time. He took Monet up to his room, a tiny closet space above the kitchens where he sleeps. He didn’t even wash up first. In his mind sex is his pallet hard on his knees and elbows, hot hands on his thighs, his hands and face grimy with oil and dirt. Sometimes, thinking on it, he almost comes remembering the heat alone.

  It’s been years since he last saw Monet. He frowns at his hands clenched in his shirt and recalls that the boy was killed by devlars two or three months after he left Arens. The creatures swarmed over him like bees, biting and scratching and digging into his flesh, hard skin, sinewy muscles. A gunner passing through told him it was over quick. “Devlars git ‘cha like that,” the man said, his hand on Trin’s knee beneath the table and steadily rising up his thigh, “you ain’t got one scream in ya before yer dead. A shame, really. Sexy boy. Dark.”

  Sensing a shift in his
mood, Aissa laughs brightly to distract him from his morbid thoughts. “If he asks, just tell him you were practicing,” she says. Then she gives him a saucy wink. “That’s what I told your brother.”

  Trin scrunches up his face. “I’m not hearing this,” he cries. Aissa and sex are incongruous in his mind. Add Blain in the picture and devlars eating him alive sounds almost pleasant. When Aissa starts to say something, he covers his ears with his hands. “I’m not!” he shouts, laughing himself. “I don’t want to know!”

  Aissa tugs at his arm so he’ll listen to her. “You’ll find out soon enough. After riding in hard off the wasteland, you don’t honestly think all he wants to do tonight is talk, do you? God, Trini, you’re not that naive.”

  * * * *

  In the waystation Trin watches Gerrick flirt with the girl who served his meal. She’s a leggy blonde with straight hair that falls to the small of her back and an annoying habit of leaning against the gunner when she laughs. Trin nurses a tepid cup of tinny water as he scowls at her in the mirror behind the bar.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Aissa tells him. She takes his cup and with a flick of her wrist, dumps the water into the sink. Then she refills the glass before setting it in front of him again. “If it bothers you that much, you go sit on his lap then. Otherwise stop brooding. He told you tonight, didn’t he?”

  That he did. Trin waits for him at the bar. One by one the other gunners find someone to accompany them upstairs, a chore girl whose shift has ended or one of the fans that crowded around the run-gun trucks earlier. As the night wears on, Gerrick notices a young man hanging around the jukebox, a few years older than Trin, and loses interest in the blonde.

  Dusty clothes mark this one as a bounder, probably riding from outpost to outpost to find work. He watches the gunner from the corner of his eye, Trin knows the guy knows Gerrick’s checking him out. When he goes to put his coin in the jukebox slot, he drops it, a deliberate move just so he has to bend over, and Gerrick makes an appreciative noise in the back of his throat at the way those dingy leather chaps frame a tight, denim clad ass.

  Trin hates him, too.

  A little before midnight, a lone gunner sidles up beside Trin and sets his stein down on the bar. He has grizzled sideburns and long graying hair that falls back from his face in flat, wide plaits. “I ain’t seen you looking,” he says, meeting Trin’s gaze in the mirror, “but I just thought I’d stop on by anyway, see if you might be interested. Your call.”

  Another night and Trin might move a little closer, touch the gunner’s forearm maybe, watch his finger trace a blue-black vein like a river winding over a map. Lowering his voice so the man would have to lean down to hear, looking up into that weathered face, he’d ask something along the lines of, “You ever run with Gerrick? I hear he was in Oriel last. You ain’t been out that way lately, have you?” Half the shit the gunners tell him is made up, Aissa’s said as much, pretty lies to get him upstairs, but as long as it might be true, Trin will take the chance.

  Except tonight he has other plans. With a sad smile at the gunner, he’s just about to say he’s sorry when a large hand claps him on the back and Gerrick’s laugh curls through him with a warmth like whiskey.

  “Find another boy,” he says. Trin likes the possessive fingers that rub into the base of his neck. “I’ve got dibs on this one.”

  The other gunner nods as if he expected as much and moves away.

  “Come on, kid,” Gerrick says.

  For a moment the hand tightens on his neck, but it falls away when Trin pushes back from the bar and slides off his stool. With a final look around the common room, Gerrick heads for the stairs. Following him, Trin can’t help but think that maybe he’s weighing his options. The bounder in the corner booth, the giggling blonde, or the starstruck boy behind him. Trin knows he’s not much to look at, skinny and tall, dusky skin that matches his drab hair, nothing pretty. Nothing that warrants a second glance.

  When Gerrick stops on the first step, Trin thinks he’s going to turn him away. He can almost hear the words aloud, “On second thought…”

  But the gunner gives him that smile he’s been dreaming about and asks him, “Do you have a room? Or should I get one?”

  Relief rushes through Trin, so poignant that it surprises him. “Last door on the right,” he says. Gerrick steps aside and lets him lead the way. “All the way down the hall.”

  Upstairs the only light illuminating the hallway comes from the window at the far end, where a neon sign stutters vacant outside the waystation. In the darkness where no one can see, Gerrick reaches out for Trin. He snags the back of Trin’s pants and his fingers slip into the waistband as he looms like a shadow behind him. His breath is hot and alcoholic and intoxicating on Trin’s cheek. “What’s your name again?” the gunner wants to know.

  Trin isn’t surprised he doesn’t remember. “Trin,” he says.

  Gerrick sighs it into his neck, “Trin.”

  Desire shoots through him, an arrow that stiffens his already half-hard dick into an uncomfortable rod crammed into the front of his jeans. The hand on his waist slips lower, smoothing over flesh that kindles to the touch. Gerrick, he thinks suddenly, and his step falters. The only thing holding him up is the arm around him, the body tight against his own. Sweet Christ, Gerrick!

  Then his brain shorts out and he’s nothing but a raw nerve, on edge, every sensation compounded tenfold. Each footstep is as loud as thunder to his ears and despite the darkness he can see the knots in the floor, the faint stucco texture of the walls, the very atoms that make up the air. His clothes chafe his skin. He suspects that the second he undresses, he’ll cum from the mere thought of sexing this man beside him. Finally, Gerrick.

  He’s so wound up that he almost walks past the door to his own room. Into the wall, that would look suave, or maybe take a tumble down the servant’s stairs that lead into the kitchen. Fortunately Gerrick stops him. “This it?”

  With a sheepish grin, Trin nods. “Yeah,” he sighs. He takes the doorknob and turns, suddenly coy. Backing up against the door, he looks at Gerrick—in the scant light, the gunner’s hair wisps around his head like a halo and his lips are just a thin, wet line beneath his moustache. No talking tonight. No prompting for another story. No crawling out of the pallet after his partner falls asleep, no going back to his room to jack off to the image of Gerrick in his head. The man is here with him, here. Trin can’t seem to remember how to keep breathing, and every few seconds he draws in a deep, quick breath like he’s trying to jumpstart his heart. Tightening his grip on the doorknob, he laughs breathlessly and admits, “I almost can’t believe you’re here.”

  The shadows shift on Gerrick’s face as the gunner smiles. “Nervous?” he purrs as he leans closer.

  Trin’s a little disappointed that sparks don’t light up the night where their bodies touch. A strong, gentle hand caresses his face, then trails down his throat, his chest, his arm, to gather around Trin’s fingers resting on the doorknob. Gerrick moves towards him, blocking out the light. He’s only a dark shape in the hall. His words tickle Trin’s lips when he speaks again, closer now, so close.

  “Don’t be nervous.”

  Trin’s eyes slip shut and he’s sure this is it, the kiss, one that erases every other man he’s been with before. Practice, he thinks, that’s all they were, just like Aissa said. They taught him where to touch, where to lick and suck, how to kiss and how to let his libido take over. Tonight he’ll use every trick he’s learned to do his damnedest to make Gerrick forget all others, as well, and in the morning he’ll be like look, this is how it is.

  I’ve wanted you for years now, he thinks as Gerrick leans down to kiss him. Each breath is full of the gunner’s sharp, sweaty scent, and Trin’s whole body hums with anticipation. I’m not saying it has to be love on your part but holy hell please just please give me a chance to show you that it could—

  Gerrick’s lips barely brush his, and then Trin stumbles into his room, the door falling aw
ay behind him.

  “Watch it,” Gerrick laughs, an arm around his waist to catch him. A thin blush heats Trin’s cheeks, God. He must look like a lovesick fool. He searches for something to say as the gunner breezes by him into the room.

  From the way Gerrick looks around and mutters, “Nice,” Trin knows it’s not.

  There’s a pallet on the floor, hastily made with patchwork blankets. Two pillows that didn’t quite make it under the covers lean against the wall at the head of the pallet. In one corner a stack of old wine crates hold the few clothes Trin owns, jeans and t-shirts mostly. From the top crate hangs an ancient leather jacket which used to be his brother’s, but Blain gave it to him when he gave up his guns. The zipper’s broken and the lining’s torn, but Trin wouldn’t trade it in for anything on the racks at the fiver across the street.

  Unbuttoning his shirt, Gerrick glances at the pallet, the crates, the one unshuttered window that looks out at the junkyard behind the waystation. “Kind of tight in here,” he says, stepping over the pallet to stand in front of the window. He drops his shirt to the floor in a rustle of sand and fabric and the broad expanse of his back gleams faintly in the low light. Unbuckling his belt, Gerrick unzips his jeans and rubs his hands down the small paunch of his lower belly. His fingers push his briefs down and though Trin can’t see anything from where he stands, he can imagine all too well what Gerrick’s toying with as he looks out over the rusted cars and scrapped metal below. With a laugh, the gunner adds, “Just the way I like it. Close the door, kid.”

  Trin can’t obey fast enough. The sound of the latch is loud in the quiet room and when he turns again, Gerrick’s pants gap at his crotch. One hand rubs into his briefs while the other smoothes over his stomach, still flat for all his years. A slow smile spreads across his face as he looks over his shoulder at Trin. “So you’re Blain’s baby brother,” he says, amused. “Where is the old goat anyhow?”