(no subject)
1: to be a stranger.
0°
Heathrow feels the same as LAX and the two of them feel like every other airport that he's ever been in; they're nothing places, designed to facilitate onwards movement. Carrying a backpack on each shoulder, Brad walks smoothly down featureless white hallways. He gains speed with each moving walkway. It's not that he has a particular place to be - he's just done with being here.
He buys his ticket for the train into London from a smiling kid in a navy jacket. He shifts the weight of his bags and presses his ear-buds into place. He listens to a song that he doesn't remember putting on his iPod. Standing waiting for the train, he turns on his camera and methodically deletes every photo of Juli or Matt still saved on the memory. It's petty and it makes him feel like shit but at least he's doing something and it's measureable and it's done.
The train is almost silent when it arrives. It's so quick that he's gone before he's even got time to sit down.
Nobody checks his ticket.
*
Reporter’s been living in London for so long that he’s started to pick up bad habits; he uses ridiculous curse words and leaves shitty tips. Some clichés become clichés because, at the root, they’re basically true. They drink beer in a bar in Camden; Reporter idly scrawls in a notebook and Brad keeps his eyes on the door, feeling neat and out of place.
“So what’s the plan, Brad?” asks the Scribe, asks Evan Wright, who filed a piece for Rolling Stone two years ago and pretty much made his name on the back of it. Brad wishes that he had that kind of journalistic luck; he longs to ship out to somewhere like Iraq or Afghanistan and shoot shit that actually matters, events that are actually relevant instead of music that just thinks it is. There are revolutions going off like cluster-bombs. Sometimes, Brad feels it almost painfully: the need to document a generation and not just follow in its wake.
And Johnny Rotten’s selling real estate in California; Joe Strummer’s in the ground. Punk died while none of them were paying attention.
At some point, they stopped being young.
“There is no plan,” he says, finally. “But I think I’ll go south. Pick up a bike and go.”
“Then what?”
“You sound like you’re preparing to write a piece on me.”
Reporter gives him a very definite look.
“It’s a conversation, Colbert. People have them every day.”
Brad finds himself smiling before he means to. He knows that nobody back home is waiting
to read about him.
“I honestly don’t know,” he says. “I’ve done the U.K. I’ve done Dublin.” He’s in no mood for James Joyce.
“Paris is nice?”
“Fuck Paris.”
“Amsterdam?”
Brad shrugs; unlike a lot of guys in his life of work, he’s not really into weed. HIs body is a temple (bullshit). He’s always preferred it when his head is clear.
“Venice is a fun town.”
He thinks about it. He has no particular problem with Italy and it would be a long drive down; good roads but not too straight. He suspects that what he needs now is a bike underneath him and the wind too loud to think past. He thinks it would probably be best if there was no room in his head for her at all. No room for either of them.
He nods.
“I could try Venice,” he says. He drains the last of his beer; it’s his turn to go to the bar. The girl who’s working is tall and skinny, her hair shaved to a soft buzz, silver rings decorating her lip and eyebrow. She’s got beautiful sleeve tattoos on both arms. She looks like a person done entirely in coloured ink, like an illustration from an art book. She leans across the bar when she talks to him, her Clash t-shirt strategically ripped to show the shadows between her breasts.
“What brings you to Camden?” she asks him.
“Just passing through,” he says, picking up the beers and leaving a solid tip behind.
More than any other time in his life, he feels transparent and alone.
#15: one girl, cloth in hand, wiping down a long, dull bar. Little colour in the shot except for the ink on her arms. “All of This is Imaginary - London”.
*
12° East:
#22: standing water and reflected buildings at the edge of St Mark's Square. One pair of boots reflected in the lower right corner.
Venice is not all that it's cracked up to be. For a start, it's freezing; the wind blows in off the water and howls along the Grand Canal. He wears layers under his leather and still finds himself tight and chill. On the Rialto, he stops at a stall loaded down with thick wool scarves and paws through the heavy contents of the table until he comes up with a slouchy grey knit watch-cap that he pays for with a five Euro note and pulls down over his short hair.
So at least his ears are warm.
He eats in a tiny restaurant with the menu written only in Italian; prawns fried in oil with garlic and chilli, baby octopus with ink sauce and polenta. He drinks red wine, espresso and Grappa and leaves a generous tip. It's a short walk back to the Rialto, glowing green in the night, and deserted now that the tourists have gone back to hotels in Trieste and the stall-keepers have gone back home to their food and their families. Brad walks slowly with his camera in his hand and his knuckles reddened and sore. He pauses and takes a picture of a girl standing in a doorway, smoking a cigarette, her head tilted so that her hair slips across her eyes. As he lowers his camera, she catches sight of him. She raises the hand holding the cigarette and waves to him. She smiles.
He thinks that he smiles back.
By the time St Mark's square opens up in from of him, he's cold enough to be pissed off about it and he almost turns right around and goes back to his hotel. Something makes him stay. During the day, the piazza is almost unbearable, thronged with tourists and pigeons, edged with overpriced coffee-shops and bars. He went into the Doge's palace and took photographs, stood for a moment on the Bridge of Sighs. He felt nothing so much as lonely and punch-drunk.
At midnight, though, the whole character of the place is different. It's deserted; even the pigeons are gone. There's no sound but the scuff of his boots as he crosses the paving stones. The lights are reflecting in the standing water that's started to creep in. Earlier, an Italian waiter told him that, in a matter of days, the whole square would be under water. It's been happening for years.
Somehow, Brad finds it comforting to think that some things never change.
He's standing roughly in the middle of the square, head tipped back, looking up at the Campanile when he realises that he's not actually alone. Folded into a corner, knees drawn up and head down, there's a kid writing in a notebook. In the weak light, Brad can make out pea-coat and striped scarf. There's a hat discarded on the step next to him. Hair pushed into fingered furrows.
Brad's got his camera up before he even knows what he's doing.
(The picture ends up blurry and off-centre, more scarf than face, hands, notebook, pen and the reflection of boots in the standing water).
He clears his throat and lowers his camera, embarrassed. It's in his muscle memory, learned for a thousand repetitions. He takes pictures quicker than he thinks.
"Sorry," he says.
He corrects himself on 'kid' as soon as the other guy looks up; there's something about his posture that made him look younger than he clearly is. He's got one of those open faces, under short, neat hair, wool pulled up under the point of his chin. He looks at the camera and then he smiles.
Brad finds himself distracted.
"Can I see it?"
Brad thinks about saying no, being precious about it because he hasn't even looked at it himself yet and because, sometimes, he likes to pretend that he's an artist. He finds himself sitting down on the step, working his camera with quick, practised fingers. He finds the photo and turns the camera to show the view-screen. It's not a good shot; the focus is off, the light is wrong. On a normal day, he'd delete it out of hand but, today, something makes him keep it. And he lets the guy look.
"I like it," says the other guy, closing his notebook and covering it with both hands. As an afterthought, he reaches out and snags his hat, pulling it down over his curling hair, before he reaches out and offers Brad his hand.
"I'm Nate," he says, and there's a flicker of that smile again. "Nate Fick."
"Brad." He takes Nate's hand, shakes. Nate's fingers are long and chill. Brad doesn't examine the fact that he finds himself faintly unwilling to let go. He blames it on his bruised heart and the fact that Nate is close and warm and has a gorgeous smile.
He's a fucking idiot.
They sit in silence for a moment; it's the uneasy silent of strangers who've put themselves in each other's company and find themselves not quite able to find something to say. A group of college-age kids, not much younger than Nate, go traipsing across the square, linked arm in arm, trailing scarves and coat-tails. Brad watches them go and then he turns to look at Nate, who's got this distant look on his face.
"Fuck it," says Brad, seized by the desire to do something that's nothing to do with Juli or Matt or the letter that's still in his pocket. "Do you want to go get coffee or something?"
Right after he's said it, he's struck by the fact that he might have done something completely and utterly ridiculous.
But Nate's already slipping his notebook into his bag.
"Sure," he says. "Let's go."
Brad pushes to his feet and holds out his hand.
*
Over coffee in a little place with half the chairs on the tables already, Brad learns the basics. Nate is twenty-five, he's from Baltimore, he's an only child but there are a lot of cousins. He's been at Harvard for a year, studying for a PhD but, recently, he's lost faith in himself and what the fuck he's trying to achieve so he’s signed out of his life, sabbatical for a year, going to figure it all out. They've told him that he'll be allowed to come back; he’s assured of this. He's been in Italy for a week, in Venice for a day, and he's already sick of being alone in shitty hotels.
(He says all of this in a rush, voice low, diction clear and precise. He cradles his cafe corretto with graceful, long fingered hands. Brad finds his own fingers itching for his camera again).
"Bored yet?" Nate asks. Brad's amazed to shake his head; he's not. For twelve years, him and Juli were on and off and, sometimes, there were girls but, more often, guys like Nate, young and luminous in little ways. Girls who weren't Juli never really did it for Brad, maybe never would again but, when he realises that he's still attracted to guys like Nate, he takes it as a good sign.
Of course, for all he knows, Nate Fick is straight as an arrow.
After coffee, they move on to beer, Peroni in frosted bottles; Brad tries not to be distracted by the way that Nate's mouth fits against the green glass. They shoot the shit; Brad talks about the ride down through France and how much he now hates anything French. He watches as Nate methodically shreds the labels from every bottle on the table. The owner brings over cocktails, virulent red, served in squat, heavy glasses, sharp with bitters and Campari.
When asked what they are, he just shrugs and says, "Venetian."
Brad watches the way that Nate's full lips purse because he takes another swallow.
"I don't know what I'm doing here," admits Nate. "I miss knowing what the fuck I'm doing."
"We all feel like that, sometimes," says Brad, lifting his glass and draining off what's left, diluted by melting ice. "Why the fuck do you think I'm in fucking Venice trying to figure out how far my bank-account can get me?"
Nate tilts his head and his cheeks are flushed with how much he's had to drink and Brad wants to lean across the table and brush that hair back from his eyes.
"Why are you here?" Nate asks, and Brad isn't sure if he means in-country or in-bar or at-this-table-right-here. He shifts in his chair, outside of his knee brushing the inside of Nate's. He's looking Nate straight in the eye but he's sure he feels Nate's legs shift wider apart.
"I'm looking for something I didn't have before," he says, and it's half the truth, and it's enough.
The owner apologises politely; it's past time for him to close. Nate pulls out his wallet but, in the end, it's Brad who pays. Outside, Nate's standing with his back to the wall, shoulders hunched, chin buried in his scarf. On impulse, Brad leans in against him with one shoulder, ducks his head. The chill tip of his nose grazes Nate's cheek. Nate turns his head. Brad breathes in before he kisses him, chill lips to chill lips. There's a moment's hesitation before he feels Nate kiss him back.
So not straight as an arrow then.
They stay there, crushed into a corner, kissing hard with Nate’s hands chill against the sides of Brad's neck. Nate kisses like he’s hungry, like he’s desperate for it, the full length of his body pressed against Brad’s. Their boots scuff against each other. Brad stops noticing how fucking cold it is. He pushes forward against Nate’s body, shoves with his hips and, for a moment, regrets all of the layers of clothes that they’re both wearing against the cold.
When they break the kiss because they have to, because both of them are breathless, Nate rests his forehead against Brad’s and he’s breathless and flushed, laughing a little, both of them in beanies with red noses, pressed together like teenagers.
“Come on,” says Nate, snagging Brad’s gloved hand in his. “I want to show you something.”
They end up back in St Mark’s square. On a whim, Brad pulls his coat open and Nate slips his hands inside, fingers linked in the small of Brad’s back. Close together, half inside each other’s coats, they share body-heat and Brad can only blame so much on what they drank. He looks at Nate; Nate looks up.
“St Mark wasn’t always the patron saint of Venice,” he says, and Brad follows his eye-line to the statues on the columns with their backs to the canal. “They had St Theodore.” He points and Brad follows his eye.
“What the fuck is that with him?”
“That,” says Nate, sounding pretty amused, “is a crocodile. Modelled by someone who had never seen a crocodile.”
“Why does he have a crocodile?”
Nate shrugs and his arms tighten a little.
“I’ve never figured that out.” He starts to pull away from Brad, hands dragging against his waist. “I should be getting back.”
Brad surprises himself by leaning in and taking another kiss, slower and deeper, this time, his lips lingering against Nate’s until after he’s done.
“You don’t have to,” he murmurs. “My room’s big enough for two.”
He concentrates on how far he feels from Juli, right then.
Just for a moment.
*
Just inside the doorway of the hotel room, he leans his weight against Nate, cradles his face in his hands and presses against him with his hips. Nate sucks on his bottom lip, his hands already on Brad’s hips. They’re both wearing so many layers, both wrapped up so, so tight. There’s a heat to Nate that Brad wasn’t anticipating; he let the damp cold distract him. He pulls away from Nate for long enough to shrug out of his jacket. Nate’s pea-coat hits the floor. Brad unwinds his scarf and brushes his fingers against the unguarded skin of Nate’s throat.
“I don’t know anything about you,” he murmurs, pulling Nate out of his sweater, starting to work on the buttons of his shirt. Underneath, Nate is pale and smooth.
“I told you my whole fucking life story,” he says, breathless, laughing against his bitten lip.
But that’s just biography and it doesn’t count for shit.
He twists his fingers around Nate’s, tugs him away from the wall. His jeans ride low on his hipbones. Under all of the layers of clothes it was difficult to tell the shape of Nate but now Brad’s got him half-bare, he can’t stop looking. He trails his fingers up over Nate’s ribs and grazed his thumb against one of Nate’s nipples.
Their hips jerk together.
It’s on the tip of Brad’s tongue to ask Nate what and how he likes but he catches himself at the last moment. He shifts, presses his hand against the outline of Nate’s hard cock through his jeans. He rubs his fingers against Nate’s hard-on and watches the faint flush start to rise in his cheeks. He takes a step forward and presses Nate backwards towards the bed.
It’s amazing how willingly Nate goes.
On the edge of the bed, they finish the job of stripping each other down to skin. Brad watches as Nate bends his head and grazes his lips against the butterfly tattooed on his bicep. His sister’s got the exact same thing. It was her way of making him feel more connected, the year he went to find his birth-mother and came straight back home again.
He pushes his fingers into Nate’s hair and pulls him into a warm, slow kiss. His hand rests against Nate’s chest, palm against the racing of Nate’s heart.
They lie down together, side by side on the bed. They lean in closer until the tips of their noses touch, until Brad can feel Nate’s breath against his lips. In the square, he’d imagined something rough and hard, Nate shoved up against the wall, Nate’s thigh pulled up against his hip, buried balls deep in Nate’s body and rushing towards something head-long.
And this is nothing like that at all.
He shifts his hips, his thigh pressing between Nate’s, his fingers grazing down the flat of Nate’s belly. Nate’s fingers follow the curve of Brad’s spine and down, dipping into the cleft of his ass. Brad’s hips press forward and his cock grazes against Nate’s. He closes his eyes and breathes against Nate’s mouth and can’t imagine anything better in the world.
*
They’re on the boat early. It’s only a ten minute ride to the first island but Brad’s never been interested in crafts, not glass or lace. He hangs back while Nate walks down the street ahead of him. He raises his camera as though he’ll take a photograph of Nate standing on a bridge, looking down at the water, but he doesn’t. He keeps replaying last night in his mind. He can’t help but wish that he’d walked away instead of having breakfast with Nate that morning. It all feels too much like backsliding; it all feels a little close to everything that he’s running away from. Nate keeps glancing at him like he knows that something’s wrong. Brad turns his back and takes a photograph of the houses of the sky.
They don’t stay on Murano or Burano for long.
Back on the boat, the fog is white and tight and everywhere. Sounds come back dull and somehow cold. There is a space between where Brad’s gloves end and the cuffs of his coat begin and his skin feels tight and strange, like his wrists are marooned or something. Turned half away from Nate, he leans his chill chin on his chill wrist and squints across the water to where a little craft is going very slowly. None of the boats are going very quickly but that little boat is moving so gradually that everything will already have happened by the time that it gets anywhere. Brad sympathises. He shoves her hands deep down into her coat pockets and scowls at the back of the seat in front.
At his side, Nate is silent.
They’re the last ones off the boat. Brad’s fingers twitches at his side and he almost takes Nate’s hand but he stops himself at the last minute. It was one fuck and companionship the next day, deal fucking done. He doesn’t need it to be anything more that. He’s not sure that he could take it.
There’s a path that curves in a wide semi-circle. Gravel crunches under the soles of their boots. They walk close enough that their shoulders bump together. He doesn’t pull away.
“They stole St. Mark,” says Nate, glancing over at Brad when he says it. “From Alexandria. And then St. Mark stole Venice from St. Theodore.”
Brad finds himself grinning.
“Pretty fucking ninja,” he says.
There’s a sudden scudding shower and they run, round the hedges and over the bridges and past the rock that’s just a rock and up the Cathedral steps. After dashing, they take a moment, both of them breathing hard and grinning. Nate reaches out and pulls off his hat and then he leans in and grazes his mouth with a soft kiss. Brad doesn’t pull away.
He has no idea what he wants here but he knows that Nate Fick is part of it.
The Cathedral is pretty fucking beautiful and he finds himself staring up at the mosaic of the Madonna veiled in black and gold. He was raised Jewish but his parents…never really bothered. He’s never really seen the point of religion. He’s always preferred to trust in himself.
“I was raised Catholic,” says Nate, walking down the aisle and, inexplicably, he’s carrying a tabby cat in his arms. He scratches it behind the ears. It purrs and pushes its skull into the cup of his hand. He pauses, bends his head to read a plastic plaque.
“Says here that they stole the mosaic from Byzantium,” he says. “They didn’t bother to measure the gap.”
“…Which is why she’s got no feet,” says Brad, head tilted to one side.
Not quite so fucking ninja.
He sits there for a moment, watching Nate with the cat before he realises that what’s really trying to do is work out the way to ask Nate to sit down.
Sweetheart. Come here and sit beside me.
*
He walks Nate back to his hotel. They don’t hold hands but they do hook their fingers around each other for a few seconds at a time and then they let them go. It’s not like he hasn’t fucked anybody but Juli; it’s more that he has fucked anyone that mattered and all of this is so surprising.
Nate Fick is an unknown quality.
Brad’s never really trusted an unknown quality.
The hotel is part of an old monastery. In an archway, Nate pulls him close by the lapels of his coat and kisses the side of his face. Brad’s lips tighten like they’re waiting. He brushes his fingers through Nate’s short hair, combing it back from his forehead.
“Stay,” says Nate, a little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“I shouldn’t,” says Brad, because he has no idea where this is leading and he’s not ready and he tries not to be an asshole. He tries so, so hard.
“But you will,” says Nate.
*
He ends up on his knees, hands on Nate’s hips, kissing down over the press of his dick against his jeans. He hooks the tips of his fingers over Nate’s waistband, pressing against warm skin. Fingers brush over his hair and he smiles, mouth open. He moves one hand, tracing his fingers back along the seam of Nate’s jeans, pressing firm against his perineum, rubbing against the cleft of his ass. He heard Nate’s breath catch and then Nate’s hands were there, unbuttoning and unzipping his own fly, spreading his pants around his hips.
“How many guys have sucked your dick?” asks Brad, pulling at the top of Nate’s underwear. White cotton, of course.
Above him, looking down, Nate blushes. It’s pretty fucking endearing.
“Enough,” he says.
Brad doesn’t have anything else to say. He closes his eyes and slides his mouth down over the first inch of Nate’s dick. It’s another thing that’s got nothing to do with anything that he ever did with Juli. He doesn’t want romance and he doesn’t really want connections. The girl he’s loved since high school’s just broken his heart and what he needs now is the weight of Nate’s dick on his tongue, the way he shifts his hips and presses one hand across his mouth to keep from moaning.
Because they’re in an old monastery. There’s something sweet about that that aches in the pit of his belly.
Goddamn.
He doesn’t take his time over it. He doesn’t mean to linger. He pushes his hands down the back of Nate’s pants, squeezes the firm muscle of his ass, presses the tips of his fingers against his asshole. With no lube, he doesn’t go any further than that but it’s enough to make Nate squirm. Brad shoves a hand down inside his own pants, wraps his fingers around his dick and jerks slowly, an infuriating counter-rhythm to the slide of his mouth on Nate. There’s the finest tremble that starts in Nate’s hips and his hands but that’s the only warning that Brad gets before he comes over Brad’s tongue. He swallows it straight down.
He stays on his knees, his head resting against Nate’s belly, eyes closed, and it doesn’t take long before he’s finished, wiping his hand on his t-shirt.
“I wanted to do that,” says Nate and Brad doesn’t have the words to say yeah, but this wasn’t about you.
Not long after that, Nate’s asleep, curled on his side with his knees drawn up and Brad pulls his camera out of his messenger bag. In the morning, there’ll be a conversation, a decision to stick with Nate for a while which will make him neither happy nor sad. It’s forward movement. It’s momentum. He’ll go back to his hotel in a borrowed t-shirt and pick up his bag and go.
#71: A body and a white sheet. Shoulder like a mountain. Chin tucked down towards the chest. The side of a beautiful face. White skin in an otherwise dark room, picked out in flash.
No miracles here but something else instead.
*
>> part 2