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Marty, of course, is drunk. Rust can tell from the tune he plays on the vinyl door, two steady knocks and the third a beat too late. He can envision Marty on the opposite side, his forehead leaning up against the false wood, eyes boring holes as if to see through it or more appropriately to vaporize it into nonexistence. He must be using his left hand, the right now bloodied at the knuckles—there is the sight of him, a few hours earlier, pressing the bag of already half-melted ice into the purple-yellow spots. This pose had made him appear much younger and much more cartoonish than usual, a frame straight from a comic book.
Rust contemplates not answering. He could leave it be, let the growling dog lie, but when he blinks from his position propped up against the dining table (hands pressed together between his thighs, staring at the sketched spiral pinned above the kitchen cut-out until it is burned onto the inside of his eyelids), he can practically see Marty bashing through the door, shoulder splintering the shitty jambs. He’s broken into three dozen apartments and houses across the Louisiana coastline, most of which Rust has personally witnessed. The pair of them have halted countless drug deals and marital spats and any other brand of unsavory interpersonal transaction; it will be just as easy for Marty to use that force here, in their own little crumbling scene of betrayals.
Rust finds himself rising to his feet despite himself. He drags himself down the hallway, boots still untied.
When he opens the door, he sees Marty exactly as he envisioned him: bull-headed, big-eyed, and fucked up beyond belief. Not that Rust can talk, with the half-finished Jack Daniels on the kitchen counter and the six-pack of Lone Stars scrunched into submission. Better than Rust, in fact, because at the very least he’s changed from the blood-stained button-down into a t-shirt that stretches thin across his chest, but he’s just as blurred and blind-angry as he was earlier. Rust sighs, tersely and through his nose, before turning on his heel and trailing down the hallway. “The fuck’re you doing here, Marty?”
“To finish,” he starts, then, when his foot catches the sill in a stumble, pauses abruptly, casting a wayward, irritated glance towards the lip of wood. He didn’t expect to be let in so easy, but Rust has always preferred to have his spats in private. “To finish what we fuckin’ started.”
“I’d slow your roll, cowboy. Not sure you want us to carry on.”
“Why’s that?” Marty slurs, running his fingertips along the wall which provokes a sound that sends shivers straight down Rust’s spine. “You fuckin’ afraid? Or you don’t think I could beat your ass?”
Rust turns around when reaching the threshold of the living room, propping himself up against the wooden table scattered with evidence. He should’ve packed it up by now—had intended to, really—but his hands had gone clammy by the second drink and he couldn’t find any good place to put what his life has quickly crumbled into. He presses his palms into the documents there, relishing in the sound of paper crumpling. “I told you you had a mean hook, man. You don’t need to go all machismo on me.”
“‘Don’t need to go all machismo on me’?” Marty echoes through a scoff. “You’re a prick.”
“Sure, I’m a prick and a bastard and a real son-of-a-bitch, but what did you want to get done here, huh? You wanted to come to my house, take me in a fight? What, kill me in my goddamn living room? Make me wish I was dead? None of this shit phases me, Marty. It doesn’t even fuckin’ surprise me. At a certain point, you’re nearly a parody of yourself.”
Within the second, Marty’s hands find Rust’s wife-beater, and with surprising dexterity, he has Rust pinned up against the wall, the crook of his highest vertebrae mussing the sketch of a devil’s knot that’s been taped there. Rust’s hands instinctually cover Marty’s, and if Rust wasn’t busy trying to stay upright, he’d snigger at the picture that they make, the perfect parallel to them seven years ago. Always back to them talking about the smell of pussy. If the Marty of then could see him now—a real bitch of an I told you so. “What the fuck did you say to me?” Marty breathes into the space between them, his grimace having turned grotesque in frustration. His mouth becomes very small, his pupils overblown and shiny.
It makes Rust nauseous with disgust. He tightens his grip on Marty’s hands, which are nearly vibrating with fury. He feels the slowly-scabbing skin of his knuckle, which so precisely collided with Rust’s cheekbone this morning. “What do you want, Marty? Me to say I’m sorry?”
Marty bites the inside of his mouth, the spot just to the right of his lips. It is this expression which always makes him look anxious, but also, for a fleeting moment, intelligent, like he’s thinking about something deeply and calculating his next step. An ugly cruelty rises in Rust’s throat at the sight of it: the fresco of Marty the fucking martyr. Rust could punch him as he did earlier, draw first blood this time, break bones and twist tendons. Rust could very easily, but he knows he won’t.
As if realizing how this expression makes him look (human, weak), Marty leans in very close and scowls. Inexplicably, incorrectly, their noses brush, touch feather-light. “You fucked my wife.”
Rust's never known when Marty wants him to reply and when he wants him to keep his mouth shut, not through eons of partnership and hours heaped upon hours of shared sights. It was always this which alluded him, this which made Marty want to knock his teeth in. For once, now, he knows Marty doesn’t want him to talk, just wants him to listen, even as he swallows down bile and sharp anger and burning jealousy, all of which Rust can smell upon his breath.
“You fuck her right here?” asks Marty very slowly, holding steady with his voice pitched low. “Right against the fuckin’ wall? Pull down her panties and take her?”
As if punched out of him, the air leaves Rust’s lungs. Over the past seven years, he has learned how to calculate every single goddamn move of Martin Hart, cataloged and stowed away each action and reaction to any given situation. If time were frozen, and the stimuli were known, Rust is sure he could write a formula to predict any of Marty’s next choices, sketch it to the page and conjure a mathematic representation of an aging cop. This, of course, throws the entire equation out the fucking window. For a moment, the hold Marty has on him feels almost like an embrace, and Marty presses into him so their arms are tangled together and holding against Rust’s chest. The pressure is harmless, but gnawing. Rust almost wants to pull him in and make him commit to it, make him forget how to fucking breathe.
“Not here,” Rust replies when he finds his voice. It sounds crackled, like he hasn’t spoken in hours or just finished a fourth cigarette. A more careful listener will note a quiver there, but Marty is not of such a class.
“Where?”
“Against the counter,” he says quietly, tilting his head towards the kitchen. “Just there.”
Slowly, as if they’re performing parts in a play, Marty drags Rust (who moves willingly, gone slack with the shock) from the wall and stops him on the countertop, nails still entangled in the stretching shirt. The fabric is going limp; he’ll have to toss it in the morning, already stained with whiskey and blood and the armpits gone yellowy with sweat. Rust braces himself just as he did then, grip tight around the beveled edge.
“What’d’ya do?” Marty asks through his teeth. “Ya kiss her?”
“Yeah,” Rust answers hollowly, staring at the ceiling. The back of his head hits the upper wall. He swallows hard. “Kissed her mouth, kissed her neck.”
Marty, with sobering smoothness, moves his left hand from Rust’s wife-beater to the side of his neck, holding him steady like he’s a horse about to buck.
Just as Maggie did, with the same firm surety, Marty starts mouthing wetly at Rust’s collarbone. The shared patterns of married couples, their consistent tics. It is over-warm and practiced, the kisses of a man who has laid a dozen women against a hundred surfaces, but Rust refuses to squirm. He won’t kiss Rust on the lips, because he’s a bastard and a coward, but he will leave a mark at the thinnest skin he can get ahold of and make it hurt. It will be invisible to everyone but Rust. His knee jerks when he realizes the theme of the day: branding once on Rust’s face (for the crowd, the staring men), a second time on his neck (for only Rust, in the privacy of his spinning apartment). Rust goes dizzy and nearly half-hard with it, and suddenly his stupid grey-toned Levi’s are straining with the attention.
“Did you enjoy it, when you fucked her?” Marty asks, dragging his teeth down Rust’s chest in aimless mouthing, pulling his hands up beneath his shirt. “Was it worth it, Rust?”
“The fuck am I supposed to say to that?”
“The truth, I reckon,” Marty grumbles as he twists his middle finger in the ribbed material of the wife-beater. When it gets too tight, Rust rolls his shoulders. “Was she good?”
There’s only one right answer here, he knows, even if it tastes sour like bile on his tongue. “Yeah,” he answers on an exhale to hide any dishonesty behind it, “Yeah, she was good.”
Marty grins, as sharklike as he can. The sweet little gap between his front teeth turns into something borderline nasty whenever he gets unkind, when he learns the difference between smiling and baring teeth. Rust doesn’t want to fucking look at him, the contorted remnant of him, the blind-drunk cuckold who wants nothing more than to smash every piece of glass against the closest wall. Bulls in china shops.
“I’m gonna fuck you, just like how you fucked my wife,” Marty grits out into the air beside Rust’s neck, words tickling the spot on his nape that makes him nearly shiver, “and you’re gonna fucking enjoy it.”
He holds there for a moment, the blood ringing in Rust’s ears loud enough to be heard across the whole apartment. Tinnitus, or faintness, or too much of a good thing echoing. Rust’s stomach has dropped in a low-falling swing and Marty stumbles away from him like he is burning heat, an open flame, which he very well might be. If Rust said he was feverish, said he felt like he was about to combust, would Marty press his hand to his forehead to take his temperature? He refuses to even conjure up the sight; it’ll make him tender. Fathers and their habits. These sorts of thoughts never get him anywhere.
Meanwhile, fifteen feet away, Marty sighs when he finds, in place of bedside tables framing Rust’s creaky mattress, a cheap cloth basket that’s full of bullshit: a pair of scissors, tax filings, an extra pillowcase, a sock that needs mending. He curses to himself as he sifts through it.
Rust wonders for a moment how Marty knew he’d get away with this, which part of him made it obvious that he would let Senior Detective Hart storm into his shoddy home and take him against the nearest flat surface. There’s a deeper soft spot to dig into there, the part of Senior Detective Hart that made him want to do that in the first place, but to Rust, in the orange-amber glow of late night in Lafayette, it is a perfectly coherent connection of puzzle pieces. Always Rust, always Marty. They’ll kill each other when the time is right, when they at last cross the final line.
Rust turns around to face the kitchen. Shakes his head, shuffles his feet. As if bashful that Marty will see him even though he’s looking into the basket, he stares at the ground as he’s dropping his jeans and briefs to the floor before stepping out of them gingerly and saying, “Don’t use your right hand. Don’t want an infection from your fucked-up knuckles.”
Marty barks out a laugh at that, loud and crude, from across the room. “Oh, now we’re carin' about shit like that?”
“It’s my asshole, prick,” Rust spits out, “I’m asking nicely.”
A moment plucked from elsewhere, from two different men or perhaps the same ones but without a gulf between them. Marty ignores him until he triumphantly holds up the tube of Astroglide, shaking it around for Rust to see. “I knew you had this shit somewhere.”
Rust deadpans, “I’ve had sex before, Marty.”
“Wouldn’t fucking know it, the way you live here like a monk,” Marty snaps, no real heat in it, while gesturing to the whole of the apartment. In the middle of this motion, he seems to realize what he’s doing—returning to normalcy, to simple bickering—and the little half-there smile on his face drops. He sets his jaw just as he always does before approaching perps or higher-ups in the force and crowds back into Rust’s space. His cock is pressing up against Rust’s ass, and Rust wonders, for a moment, if all that dick-swagger was well-earned.
The veneer and previously scoffed-at machismo drops for just a moment, in the falsified privacy of suspended eye contact. “This all right?” Marty asks to Rust’s back. This is the boy scout beneath the brat. Of course Marty would think to swallow down his own cruelty in the middle of a grand, sweeping performance of unkindness just to make himself feel better when he falls asleep drunkenly in a mere few hours from now. As he stares at the ceiling of a shitty motel room that tastes of menthols and week-old sweat, he will be comforted by his wherewithal to ask, he will say At the very least I didn’t make him. The selfishness of it; it makes Rust see red. It makes Rust want to tear Marty to pieces all over again.
Because the world is lightly spinning and Rust isn’t sure he has control over every limb in his body, least of all his tongue, he finds himself replying, softly, “It’s all right,” which at the very least breaks the hold of Martin Hart’s tender conscience and earns him an ass-squeeze that has Rust tumbling forward onto his elbows. Marty holds him there like he’s trying to split him into two, palms spread and fingernails digging. Crescent moons on pale skin. For a moment, Rust wonders if he will say something about this part of his body, will begin to verbally catalog Rust’s unwomanly aspects, but it never comes, just the silent and laser-like focus of Marty massaging him.
Rust wonders for a moment if Marty is going to fucking rim him, but he decides that would ultimately be categorized as outside the realms of play in this delightful little staging they’re putting on.
Instead, Marty drags one hand up Rust’s vertebrae, digging in, until his shirt is ridden up to his neck. Rust obliges with the silent request, grabbing it from his nape and tossing it sideways towards the nearby door. Is Marty making him remove it for the fact of its masculinity, its unmistakable implication, or so he can get better access to Rust’s skin to mark? Once it’s gone, Marty pulls his (uncharacteristically clean, well-kept) fingernails back down the expanse of Rust’s shoulders. There ought to be a threat in it but it lacks severity.
“Marty,” Rust says, as if in warning.
Marty dislikes very much being warned, more than most things. He uncaps the lube silently, staring daggers into the back of Rust’s head (precisely where a headache is blossoming), before he uses his right hand to grab the thickest part of Rust’s hair, causing him to tilt his head up in the very slightest, and his left to trace the curve of Rust’s ass. Rust clenches his teeth, but says nothing, the sharp pressure of where his hair follicles are straining making his mouth fall open. The voice comes out stiff, nearly menacing, but still Marty beneath it all:
“You treat my wife real nice, Rust? Finger-fuck her? Tongue her pussy? Make her moan?”
“Nah—nah,” Rust answers, faltering the moment a cold, slightly clumsy finger presses into him with a sharp inhale, “None of that. Didn’t do any of that.”
Marty’s mouth audibly twists into an ugly smile. “Real fuckin’ gentleman, you are,” he mutters, gathering Rust's hair in a tighter grip with one hand and adding a second finger (and his fingers are fucking thick, stout and meaty) with the other, “You just take her raw? Bet you didn’t last long. Bet you’d thought about fucking my wife before, finally settling a real hot wet dream of yours. Did she come for you? Did you make her come just on your cock?”
“No,” Rust manages, searching through hazy not-memories and drawing blanks. “I didn’t.”
“I fucking bet you didn’t,” Marty says, oddly. Like he can’t think of what else to say with that. Like he didn’t expect Rust to tell the truth and didn’t expect that to be the way it was. Rust, for a moment, has to know what Maggie said so deeply he nearly asks, begging to hear what words she used when describing what happened yesterday: he fucked me, I fucked him, we fucked.
When Marty adds a third finger and, miraculously, finds the right spot on his first goddamn try, Rust folds into himself over the counter, bracing on his elbows. He’s resisting the urge to whimper. Marty lets go of his hair easily, showing peculiar mercy. “You do this before?” Rust mutters in the space between his arms.
He doesn’t answer, shuffling with belt, popping open the lube again, and rubbing himself up; Rust knows the telltale noise of skin against skin. Conversationally, he adds, “Other than on yourself, when you’re fucking hot crazies. I heard all your locker room talk about taking it up the ass. You could never shut up about it.”
“A fuckin’ joke, man,” Marty says, and for a fleeting moment, it feels as if they have been suspended in time, maybe even dragged back to two days ago. A conversation to be had in the Cadillac, in the precinct, at the gruesome crime scene of the week. The sound of Marty closing the lube and sliding it on the counter is the only thing which breaks the illusion, and the hint of waver in his voice when he answers, “No, I ain’t done this fairy shit before.”
Rust, still, can’t hold his stupid tongue. “Nothing in college? Never ravish the prettiest outfielder at USL after practice?”
Marty pauses, no doubt worrying his lower lip. “Fuck off,” he replies, though there is no real bite there, and no real truth in it, either. He sidles his hips up behind Rust, tentative for a second, as if trying to find the best way to hold him, before he settles one hand on his shoulder and the other on his hip, right at where the skin is concrete-scratched and turning to a bruise. Rust hisses—he’d only cleaned it off with hydrogen peroxide earlier, didn’t have any bandages and probably wouldn’t have applied ‘em anyway if he did—and inclines his head.
“Where you fuckin’ threw me," he mutters.
“Sorry,” Marty replies, apathetically, then squeezes the wound once. Rust’s knees bend to the side like he’s gone bowlegged. The pain sends attention straight to his cock, due to all his synapses being crisscrossed to hell and back, and in the yellowy glow of the flickering fluorescents, Rust sees stars of purple and pink. He would try to hide his interest if he wasn’t already stripped bare, and now he can hear the way Marty’s stupid fucking smile takes over his face, the grin of a cat who’s gotten his prized canary.
For Rust’s excellent performance as tonight’s pretty plaything, Marty lines up behind him, shuffling his feet forward (awkwardly trapped by the confines of his jeans; a very mortal maneuver) and pressing in. Rust can’t see Marty’s cock, but he can feel it; Marty slides in slowly but surely, not stopping till he hits the hilt and they’re fully flush.
Rust thinks he might shatter.
“Fuuuck,” he breathes, sounding thoroughly run-through, “you weren’t kidding about the size of it.”
“Do I look like a fuckin’ liar?”
“Not right now, you don’t. Jesus Christ. Go slow.”
“Why?” Marty borderline purrs, right into the hollow of his ear, “Y’think I’m gonna break you?”
It is at this point that Marty starts to fuck him proper, sliding out slowly but snapping into him real quick like he is trying to break him. Despite all his big-man talk, he doesn’t shut his trap either, immediately lets out airy sighs and cut-off moans that he tries to suppress into the flesh of Rust’s shoulder.
When he hits Rust’s prostate, a godawful whimper is pulled from Rust’s throat before he can even realize it’s happening. He doubles over, burying his face into his arms, going stiff in every joint. He wishes to say something, to make Marty forget about the goddamn noise he’s just made, but he can’t find anything to say, so he just remains there, head burrowed as Marty fucks him, drawing a quiet rumble from chest.
After fifteen seconds of this, with no provocation, Marty takes Rust by the jaw, big hand across his mouth and chin. He squeezes hard and the print of his middle finger just reaches the bloodied spot on his cheekbone, which makes Rust wince, a tense little inhale through his teeth. If Rust looks down and strains his eyes, he’ll see where these knuckles of Marty’s are starting to bruise a hideous mottled shade of blue. “Look at me,” Marty says, and, when Rust tries to get out of his grip, “Fuckin’ look at me.”
Rust shifts so it doesn’t tax his neck too much and then stares right back at what he can catch of Marty’s eyeline, vision going cross-eyed with the beer and the angle and the tight churning in his stomach. “You make all the girls look at you?” he asks, nearly slurring. “You make them look you in the eye and call you sir?”
A harsh groan at the back of Marty’s throat which he tries to cut off. It doesn’t succeed; Rust has caught him. “Shut the fuck up,” he grinds out.
“Aw, naw, that doesn’t sound like you—I bet you like ‘em talkin’ and moaning, just to stroke your ego,” Rust retorts.
“I’d have you gagged,” Marty says, pushing down with the nail on the rawest spot of his cheek.
“I bet you would.”
At this, Marty takes his index and middle finger and shoves them past Rust’s parted lips. He jerks back instinctually, flattening himself wholly against the firm line of Marty’s torso, but he relents after a moment, unhinging his jaw and pressing his tongue between the fingers. Marty tastes disgusting, of sweat and leather and beer spilled over the edge of a bottle, of water-based lube and dirt and Rust’s dried blood. These are the fingers which threw the first punch and which hauled him across the parking lot, which nearly would’ve bashed his head in on the rear bumper of the Ford if he hadn’t been stopped. Behind his eyes, Rust sees sharp red, warm aluminum, spinning silver. He cants his hips closer to the counter, trying to find friction, but Marty won’t let him out of his grip. If he wasn’t busy holding himself up, he could get a hand on himself, but they’d likely both fall to the ground if he even tried.
Marty pushes deeper with his fingers, pressing hard against the bumpy expanse of Rust’s tongue, and doesn’t relent until he earns an honest-to-God gag from Rust, throat constricting and rejecting the intrusion (and its flavor) without Rust’s permission. The feel of it makes him go near crazy. When he lets go, Rust spits onto the counter, willing away the wretched taste and texture. Marty doesn’t seem to mind, has barely even noticed; his pace continues, and his hand hasn’t left Rust’s jaw, where it now traces a borderline sweet little line there with the thumb. Drawing a brushstroke, sparking the prickly stubble starting to take shape.
“What’d you call her?” Rust manages to say through increasingly ragged exhales, voice run raw like he’s been sucking cock, “When you fucked?”
Marty presses his forehead against Rust’s spine. “‘Honey’,” he answers through a groan, “‘Baby’, ‘sweetheart’—“
“Didn’t take you for a fucking sap,” Rust says, and he can feel the moment Marty processes that, the little insult there, and quick as a flash, he finds Marty’s fingers wrapped around his neck, pressing expertly against his mandible. Not only has Marty done this before, but he has done this during sex; this is the calculated precision of someone who knows where to hold and where to not. Pressure only upon the carotid artery, the windpipe protected by the curve of his thumb. The Adam’s apple makes him pause, a hard and firm weight where he normally expects smoothness, but he squeezes all the same. It makes Rust leer, an unabashed delight that he hopes is hidden by perspective.
“You’re so fuckin’ mouthy,” Marty snarls into his ear, “it’s like you want me to shut you up in every way I can.”
Rust ought to reply and keep the charming game going, but the dual pressures of Marty’s cock and his tightening grip have made Rust a little woozy. It feels just as good as that fucking coke he stole from the evidence locker, if not better; blissed-out lightheadedness, the sensation of being held, the tight burn of pleasure at every nerve-ending.
Idiotically, he hadn’t expected Marty to fuck like this. If this were accurate to yesterday, to the un-Biblical coupling of neighbor and wife, Marty would use Rust as a mere tool in pleasure, hold him down and fuck him until he came. Marty, for all his idiocy, refuses to give in so easily to his own mounting orgasm, instead seeks to figure out the ways he can make Rust twist in his arms. Marty is worse than Rust was: Marty wants to fucking torture him.
The room, its shadows, the straight flat planes of it, have become lopsided and tilted with the lack of oxygen. Delicious, the sensation of suppressing one’s fight-or-flight. Always toying with it however he can, because it is the most natural urge of all, to be presented with death and fight it. Rust is going to cry; Rust is going to die; Rust is going to have each of his atoms sever from each other and splatter all over the crime scene-covered walls, a billion billions sundered from their kin.
At last, Marty lets him go, dropping him back onto the counter. Rust’s head bows in reverence.
Just as air is coming in quick cycles through Rust’s howling lungs, life persevering against all odds, Marty growls against his neck (above the choking gasps, above the distant sound of crickets), “You’re gonna remember that I fuckin’ did this to you. I fucked you up then I fucked you.”
“Marty,” Rust groans, mostly to himself, and at last, Marty’s hand which was still ghosting over the line of his throat moves down to Rust’s cock, takes him so tight it’s like he’s getting fucking crushed. Rust holds his breath to keep from moaning, then, when Marty grips him proper, lets it all out in a rush. He’s sure they can hear it as far as Baton Rouge, or at the very least, next door.
Rust doesn’t stop, then, throwing the whole goddamn act out the window, he’s already a goner, and lets himself make every noise that’s been climbing its way up his throat, whining and whimpering like a fucking girl. Marty, the predictable prick that he is, likes that, and squeezes the head of Rust’s cock in the middle of stroking it. “That’s right, baby,” he grunts, “keep going. You’re all right. I’ve gotcha.”
It’s when Rust keens, needy and aching, tingling all over but particularly in his balls, which Marty has gripped so tight that Rust is seeing real-life spots, that Marty mutters, “Oh, fuck,” into the back of his neck and comes, hot and unexpected, right into Rust.
The last time Rust was filled up like this was more or less a literal age ago, and he wraps an awkward hand around Marty’s hips to hold him in. Rust tries to envision the look on Marty’s face when he realizes what Rust is doing, but it makes his head spin to even consider, so he closes his eyes and lets Marty jerk him hard. May as well make it hurt, punish him the crime of complying and the sin of liking it.
“C’mon, sweetheart,” Marty says against the gooseflesh rising at Rust’s neck, “you can come for me.”
It’s the kind of orgasm that Rust can feel in every single bone of his body, straight from his toes to his teeth, all ringing and shaking on a frequency still unarticulated. Getting fucked two times in the span of twenty-four hours makes him feel like a wire stretched thin between two crumbling posts, the remains of the Hart family tree, and, like a fucking trope, his knees actually give out as he comes into Marty’s awaiting hand. He can’t watch it, vision going black and white and dotted gold, but he can feel the creeping focus of Marty’s gaze on his cock as he does. Scientific curiosity, maybe, or even morbid fascination. The only other man who’s come in his wife’s cunt, as far as he knows. As far as he hopes, anyways.
Rust wants Marty to ask what Maggie did after. If she let him hold her. He will get to say the truth, get to say no, to say I couldn’t look at her, to say I threw your wife out onto the street. He had shouted at Maggie far worse than he had shouted at Marty in the precinct parking lot, far worse than he had in the seven years of absurd partnership, handled her like a cheap and cruel thing to be tossed aside. For a fleeting moment, he thought she would crumple like a can in his hands or perhaps blow away in the wind. She could never fathom the thought of weeping at Rust’s feet as such, but he had wondered if she would defy physics all the same.
The subsequent sanity following an orgasm is catching up on Marty much faster than it is on Rust; Rust, who stays leaned against his countertop in the nude and has to stop himself from making a sound when Marty removes his softening cock. He will remember the feeling of Marty’s cum leaking out of him until the day he’s dead and buried—the sound of it, Marty’s suppressed grunt. Rust watches Marty through his straining peripherals, how he, when freed, immediately rebuilds distance between them, trying to put himself back together and ignore the way Rust looks like he’s gonna burst at the seams on his own kitchen counter.
He wipes his hand on an overlong crumpled receipt from the liquor store on the dining table and clears his throat. In the light, he looks very young and very tired. The bruise settling upon his nose makes him dashing, like a rodeo cowboy with injuries from being thrown from his bull.
“Y’know, Rust,” Marty says in a put-upon casual tone as he buckles his belt, staring down at his own hands as they work, “in this story that you’re tellin' me, you’re not soundin’ like a very good lay.”
The implied next phrase: and you don’t seem like such a shit lay to me.
Rust blinks owlishly at him, at his downturned eyes. “I wasn’t,” he replies honestly, “I was out of my goddamn mind. Fucked on the juice and whatever else I could get my hands on.”
“What?”
“Christ, man, I’d drank half a bottle of corner-store vodka. I’m surprised I could get it up.” Quieter, a near mumble, “Surprised I remember it at all.”
“The fuck are you talking about?”
“The fuck are you talking about?”
Marty pauses and Rust looks at him. He realizes his mistake ten seconds too late, something he will blame on being blitzed out from the Jack Daniels and the post-choking dazedness and the orgasm that ripped through him like a damn tidal wave; there it is, that flash of deadly savagery. Rustin fucking Cohle, world-class philosopher, loses his mind after getting fucked, because there is Marty, now clenching his jaw, now tightening his fists. He could have left without another word, could’ve disappeared into the night smelling of sex and sweat and stale cigarettes and nothing else, but there is something dangerous in him, something that he thinks only Maggie has seen before, which puts a drop of cold metal down his spine.
“You absolute motherfucker,” Marty says, dark and low in a way that no longer tickles something deep in Rust’s gut but rather sets off alarm bells in the still-coherent part of his overworked and overdrugged brain, “You fucking bastard.”
“Marty,” Rust starts, but gets interrupted with a, “No, no. You shut the fuck up. You don’t get to say shit. Fucking Christ.” Rust watches a dozen expressions flash across his face—betrayal, loathing, hurt, anger. Always anger that wins out with Marty. “Where the fuck do you get off, man? You fuck my wife, get a couple of punches in, then say you barely fuckin’ remember it?”
“Marty,” Rust begins a second time, but stops before Marty even stops him, halted by the sound of Marty’s fist slamming on the haphazard dining table. The wooden tower topples over onto a bed of papers. The thud is soft. Useless, from the very first: hours upon hours of work for a sorry excuse of a law enforcement that has left him, and the young women of Louisiana, out to fucking dry. He wants to burn the whole lot of it, or, alternately, set the station on fire with every man inside. Maybe with Marty, maybe without.
He could do a great number of brutalities, Rust thinks with shining clarity. The both of them could.
Marty storms down the hallway, knocking nonsense over as he goes. Whether this is out of frustration or drunkenness or intentional hostility is a futile inquiry; the destruction is all the same. Rust moves to follow, but stops halfway there, feeling all of a sudden bare and cold in the gaping void of his living room. Marty in his day clothes, Rust stripped down to nothing, the empty expanse between them and the awaiting night hammering at the door.
“C’mon, Marty,” Rust says, for the sake of saying something.
“Fuck you, man,” Marty half-shouts (the neighbors will hear this, too, his raised and macho voice thrown across yards and through drywall). The whole ordeal of this would be swallowable, tolerable, perhaps even reasonable if not for the moment where Marty pauses, hand on the doorknob, where he simply looks at Rust, those sea-blue eyes piercing something—Rust is not sure what—and finding a secret there which disgusts him.
Rust wants him to say more, to take him back by the collar, to at the very least give him a parting punch (a black eye, perhaps, or a sprained rib, he knows Marty has these cruel and dirty kinds of violences in him), but the distance between them remains, just Marty’s gaze pinning Rust in place. When he’s finished looking, finished finding the thing that revolts him so deeply that he can’t even take another step closer, he swings open the door and pulls it so quickly behind him that Rust wonders if he hallucinated the entire ordeal if not for the echo in the apartment of an opening being shut.
There isn’t a moment where he thinks of following. A part of him wishes he had it in him, had the need to smooth the wrinkles and calm the storm, but it was never going to end any differently. Rust moves to rub his head, but winces when the pain is fresh rather than the dull, sweet stuff of hangovers and heaviness. His fingers draw away with blood, red and pulpy and shining in the light. Marty has reopened his wound. He will have to tend to it in his bathroom even as his hands shake and his vision goes blurry, unsteady with the pain and the cool press of tiles and the ringing hollowness of the space Marty left.
Maybe he won’t dress it at all, he thinks. Maybe he’ll just let it bleed.