The burn was an itch, a switch, a twitch and he sing-songed anticipation, knowing it was just a matter of time for his keeper to skim a slice or two or three from his back or his ass. In some ways it was more satisfying than muscles clutching and releasing, lifting and pitching, growing the piles, stabbing and turning…

…releasing rank and fragrant and he’d learned to love it, more than the scent of new and the sound of light breaking faith with night, the tin roof shedding its sheen of moisture to drip drip drip into rain barrels that fed the stock when the sky forgot.

It reminded him of home. Razor wired and chain-linked, he’d found refuge and companionship. Lost himself to the slick slide of narrow gauge, the quick prick or agonizing pushback, and then the rush, stinging hot it’d course and branch, and the tingle would consume him until he forgot what he never had.

Now…

Then was good…

Now, the then of it, was pain and euphoria and being fucked over, steel-toed and rolled and unzipped and plugged, and cum coated concrete streaked ebon-red, left to die another day.

He craved that now, he sucked in remembrance, holding tight to it slipping away. The more he died, the more he lived. On the city grates, embraced in steam and disdain and Jimmy Chos accelerating, giving wide birth…

He stank.

Not with fear for what was coming, not with the expectation for learning yet another lesson at the right hand of a god who didn’t give a flying fuck for sinners or saints or the throwaways abandoned in ceramic tile coated with filth and debris and ugly secrets held tight.

He stank with longing, with wanting what he’d never, ever be. Not here with the silos and the good book and tight minds minding tight beliefs about right and proper and the way of things.

Alex knew the way of things, how it was, alone and lost, the war zones littered with throwaways—the children of the damned, forever graced with the mistakes of others, made to pay day in, day out and learning to cope.

The man, his keeper, had dropped him off, bid him stay put for the duration. Alex looked at the parking area on pot-holed gravel and brittle weeds and puddles of oil, looked at the lines of make do and metal wearing rust with determination.

And pride. If he had to give the endless horizon its due, it was pride of place, of righteousness he’d never earned or learned or yearned for, not where the ground under your feet buckled from heat and rivulets of piss and worse trafficked the cracks, marking territory.

When that didn’t work, blood worked better.

Alex shuffled toward an ancient farm truck, the tailgate down, paint spalled, bent at the corners so it no longer closed. He skittered onto it, testing his weight against its imminent collapse, accepting the odd creak as acceptance.

The night wrapped him in sludge, humidity thick with despair, and he thought on the man in the basement with the dancers and his obligation to pick and choose for a purpose that made no sense if he wasn’t staying.

But that was the problem. He had nowhere else to go, no one else to be, nothing from his past preceded the nothing of his future.

And if he was free to pick and choose…

There was that man, the tall man with the cock straining against thumbs so thick and blunt he felt them ridging his ass, spreading the cheeks, splitting him apart. Invading him.

Spit pooled in his mouth.

Alex accepted the little death, when he rose, rolling off too small, too narrow, too short, cum- and sweat-soaked sheets and thinned cotton transparent to chill and heat and everything in-between. Silence and the blessed relief of slapping a palm against ancient pine and buckling under teeth piercing a lip steel-trapped in joy and splendor. Fisting, fast, furious…

Eyes squinted, inhaling in great ugly gasps and rasps, knowing wanting wishing hoping they’d find him, there, just like that. Exposed, naked, thick and defiant, his lungs huffing fuck you fuck you fuck you…

Fuck me…

Please, oh god oh god oh god, please fuck me…

The hand stayed his frantic motion, cupping him, squeezing harsh, unrelenting, like he knew, he knew and he picked it up, he picked up the movement, the man, knowing how, understanding.

The zipper ripped at his flesh and he cringed without wanting to. The hand ripped him, took him to now, to then, to palms slapping scarred pine walls in the sludge of heat and the filth in his mind…

A thumb, the thumb, the one coddling and stroking and tempting, the one saying fuck me, that thumb grazed his chin, pressuring it up and back, and tendons bulged with exposure as the thumb indented until his cock screamed with agony and pumped against metal and muscle, and he broke silence with silence, head thrown back, mouth agape, spittle and cum and sweat undammed…

…damned, damned forever, for now, for then.

The big man backed away, backlit by thin, transparent flickers from gauzy rays seeping across pockmarked gravel, and the light of the righteous warred with the dark of his soul and the salvation of the flesh.

His flesh.

Alex wept…