Archive of Our Own

Last night I dreamt I had forgotten my name

'Cause I had sold my soul but awoke just the same

I'm so lonely

I wish I was the moon tonight

-Neko Case

At nine 9 p.m., Gale slips into the furthest stool on the right in the furthest edge of the twenty-four-hour diner on the corner. It sits across from the rest stop and diagonal from a liquor store, the trifecta mecca of transients and travelers. It is his favorite twenty-four-hour diner of the handful on offer, at least within walking distance. The waitress knows him, she gets him a ginger beer and a single slice of cherry pie– two fingers wide, a drizzle of honey, a dollop of cool whip. A black coffee will come later. Maple syrup, instead of sugar. 

The pie is eaten first, scarfed as slowly as possible, elbows on the table, fork held like a shovel, licked clean, smoothed spotless by greedy lips. Gale eats it like it’s the first time. 

It isn’t. It’s not even the fifth. 

As he suckles the spoon, he surveys the options ahead of him. Jukebox, bathroom, another slice of pie. The man in the corner watching how Gale’s lips go to the neck, across the flat spread of the back, until the edge the metal pieces no longer cutting into the corners of his mouth. 

He lives in the city that’s not the city. The overflowing guts, the shitty run-off, the suburbs that could be, if they bothered to gentrify. Acid runoff and sad brown parks and houses designed for nicety, only nobody took into account the highways belching gas weaving between neighborhoods-turned-ghost towns. Lots of them are rentals, many of them are abandoned. Most of them used to not be covered in soot.

Ugly, if you cared enough to call it so. 

Gale slips off his stool, red vinyl slipping against his dark slacks. His shirt is blue like his eyes, sleeves rolled, belted high at his waist, toothpick tin a flash in his breast pocket, shoes army surplus. He chooses the bathroom, slips into the stall on the end, leaves it unlocked and smiles when he hears the door open. 

It’s a Saturday night, they have to make quick work, even if the waitresses always have an understanding of the type of joint this is. 

The man pays Gale two dollars to let him fuck Gale and come across his back.

The next, a dollar for a handjob, around back where there’s a picnic area looking out over the highway. Gale looks at the city lights and imagines they’re stars.

The third wants to fuck him again, three dollars offered. Gale doesn’t come. 

The following sucks his cock and he does.

Gale returns to the booth six dollars and seventy-five cents richer and spends a dollar of it on another slice of pie. Sips his maple coffee and leaves a little after two.

The next week it’s a new set of truckers and traveling businessmen and the cast-offs from the city, coming for something slower and no less sleazy. The war is supposed to be ending soon, and Gale can’t look at a newspaper without seeing the names Eisenhower and Li Kenong . 

He makes four dollars, a blowjob, two handjobs. A man who wanted to jerk off in the driver’s seat while watching as Gale eats a slice of pie real slow.

The last one Gale minds the most.

On the following Saturday, Gale sits himself on the right side, just to switch it up. Orders a blueberry pie, just until the nausea over cherry fades. Gets his ginger beer and decides to leave it at that. 

There’s a cop here tonight and Gale might be a fool but he’s got no intention of spending the night in Jail. 

Gale orders blackberry the next time, and finds he likes the richness better than blueberries. Likes the way the coolwhip turns pink with its juices, vivid and bright. 

There’s a man two seats down from him. He’s a trucker by uniform; wide-brimmed, thick-fabriced hat, heavy flannel over broad, rounded shoulders. A few days stubble, a mustache that looks a touch more permanent. A scar through his brow, eyes small, slim, and nose a main feature over soft lips. Strong jaw. A heavy, weighty body. 

He’s drinking a coffee, pouring his own sweetener from a flask, wiping up the liquid with a broad palm and licking the drops off. A stack of pancakes, carbs and sugar and oozing syrup, butter, whip-cream, and a pair of strawberries sweating away. He’s watching Gale.

Gale sucks the sugar from his spoon.

The trucker has blue eyes, dark like dusk, lined and sunburnt and covered with a few freckles here and there. He eats like it’s a task, not a pleasure, occasionally glancing to the TV playing a baseball game. Seems like he cares more about that than his meal, nodding to himself now and then in approval. Chomps like a horse, doesn’t clap or swear like some of the men around them. But always, his eyes return to Gale. 

When he finishes– Gale long done with his own food– the trucker wipes his face carefully with a napkin, drops it onto his plate where the syrup sticks stringy to the paper, pulls a few dollars from his wallet, and drops them beside his clean plate. He leaves without getting his change, the door tinkling at his departure. 

It’s as good as an alarm, Gale giving him a respectable thirty-second head start before sauntering out after. He doesn’t leave any payment. The waitress knows he will be back.

Cigarette smoke like the yellow brick road, Gale follows it to the left, around to the corner of the diner, where the trucker’s broad frame pulls the paper from his lips, tossing a pack of Marlboros in the other.

They eye each other for a moment, Gale confirming, the trucker sliding his gaze over his body like the back of a hand dragging tenderly down a lover’s cheek. 

“Come on,” Gale says, jerking his head around the corner, back to the sitting area. 

There’s a bench, set back towards the thin strip of woods, a sharp drop off into the causeway below where the angle is so steep the trees grow nearly parallel to the ground. Their branches shade the bench from prying eyes, so long as they don’t get too close. Gale takes one side of the bench, this trucker the other, curls peeking out from under his cap. Dark brown, when there’s light to see them by. Now they’re inky blue-black, a little gold from the city lights. 

He doesn’t reach for Gale. Sits instead with his hands clasped between his knees, staring out at the city, body heavy, silence heavy, thoughts heavy enough Gale thinks he might be able to reach out and cup them, if he dared. 

Not rude enough to check his watch, Gale tracks the passage of time by the slow slip of the stars across the sky. A half hour, an hour.

It’s cold, but not enough to be uncomfortable. The sound of trucks from the truck stop drifting past, people coming and going from the diner, occasional boisterous voices from the liquor store. The world moves around the two men, as they remain still. 

At an hour and a half, the trucker inhales, pulling out of his hunched-over position and rubbing his face a few, slow times. 

“What’s your name?” 

Gale’s tongue is as numb as the rest of him. “Buck.”

A flash of white teeth, grin crooked, incisor a little popped out. “Well how ‘bout that. They call me Bucky.” 

“How about that,” Gale agrees.

Bucky examines Gale. He’s got a shrewd gaze. Clever, problem-solving eyes. Smart enough Gale doesn’t like him. 

“What do I owe you?” 

“Two dollars,” Gale says automatically, before he can say something different, like I didn’t give you anything.  

John pulls his wallet out. He smells a little sour, too many days in the cab of a truck, a little salty, yeasty, hair that’s been marinating in the crevices of a body and drinking in the moisture. He drops a pair of crumpled fives on the bench, knocks his knuckles on the backrest like punctuation and heads across the parking lot. Gale watches him come to the intersection, waiting at the stoplight until it’s safe to cross, back to the truck stop and into the gloom. 

It’s not until he hears the rumble of an engine, the quiet purr of a big rig and the flash of headlights going by that he reaches for the ten dollars, smoothing them out flat and then folding them in half, tucking the bills into his back pocket. 

Heads inside, pays for his pie, and his coffee, and decides to call it an early night. 

Bucky’s circuit must be a month-long route, because the next time he’s back is exactly four Saturdays later. He’s already there when Gale walks in, same hat, different flannel. Coffee, pie, flask wetting his bottom lip. Gale can smell it on him, leather and sweat and sweet whiskey. In Gale’s spot, forcing him not to be outdone, their elbows brush as he takes a seat beside. 

“Wondered if you’d be here,” Bucky says, nudging a blackberry pie Gale’s way. There’s no ring on his finger, which means far less than it should. 

“You paid me too much,” Gale says, picking up his fork, nodding as the waitress brings him his ginger beer.

“Never go into negotiation as a career, Buck.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Bucky smiles, shoves a too-large bite of pancake into his mouth and chews. 

Again, he finishes, drops his napkin, and leaves without taking his change. This time Gale gives him forty seconds, just to leave him wondering if he’ll even follow. But he does, and Bucky doesn’t seem surprised, smoking his Marlboro blacks, shitty tarry cigarettes all acid and glue. The shit even Gale knows rots your lungs.

Again, they do not speak, side-by-side on the bench in silence. Bucky with his head bowed like he’s praying. Gale watching the stars. 

Oddly, he is hard. 

And again, after a few hours, Bucky stands and pulls a five and two ones from his pocket, leaving them on the bench beside Gale. 

“Safe travels,” Gale tells him. 

Bucky grins. “Don’t count on it.”

In the month between, Gale goes three times, makes twenty dollars, two from men who want him on his knees, three from a full coupling, fingers in his mouth, his hair, grasping at his body like they might pull off pieces to take with them as souvenirs. He fucks one man, for ten dollars, and the man who likes watching him eat comes back. Gale ignores him, this time. 

When Bucky shows up, Gale is just admitting to himself he was waiting. 

“Something don’t work right?” he asks, as Bucky slides into the booth Gale had, expectantly, surreptitiously, claimed.

“Hello, how are you,” Bucky answers. “How was your travels? Oh good? That’s good to hear, Bucky.” 

Gale sips his ginger beer, using it to hide his grin. The orange light above them buzzes softly, the waitress humming along to the jukebox playing Near You by Francis Craig. 

“I ain’t gonna laugh, if there is something.” 

Bucky squints at him, and somehow still makes it seem like he’s smiling. He waits until the waitress comes to take his order– pancakes, syrup, whipped cream, and strawberries. Coffee black, not filled all the way so Bucky can add his own flavor. 

“There’s two places God don’t judge, Buck,” he says as the waitress comes with his coffee, the pot already brewed. Tips his flask into the dark surface. “In the comfort of one’s own bathroom, and a twenty-four-hour establishment.” 

“Didn’t take you for a man of religion.”

A flash of a smile, hidden behind the sip from the cheap ceramic coffee cup. “Never was given much of a choice.”

“His eyes closed outside, too?”

“Let him look.”

“Even if we ain’t doing anything wrong?”

“You don’t think?”

Gale stabs his fork into his pie. 

Bucky sits with him for two hours that night. Pays him twelve bucks. Gale jerks himself off to the memory of syrup clinging to Bucky’s mustache. He’s gonna have to choose a new sweetener for his coffee.

Gale’s job lets him go and he starts coming to the diner on Thursdays as well. Decides to cut the pie out of his budget. Keeps getting maple syrup in his coffee, because he can handle changing only so many things. 

New hat this time, Gale almost doesn’t recognize Bucky when he enters, but only so many men in the world carry their broadness with so much ease. 

“No pie?” Bucky asks him, lifting onto the stool seat with one asscheek, jeans tight around his hips. 

He’s handsome. He’s the sort of guy Gale would fuck for free, if he ever did that. 

“Going on a diet.”

“Nonsense,” Bucky says, flagging down the waitress with two fingers. “Scarcity mindset will kill ya, Buck.” 

Pancakes. Pie. Coffee. Gale takes his meal first this time, something about Bucky tells him they’re going to be out on that bench a while. It’s fine, the summer is in full swing, sticky, humid, like a quick dip in a pool or a brisk jog. Sweat beads Gale’s top lip, he licks it off and tastes sugar. 

Instead of slumped forward, Bucky’s gone the opposite way, body sprawled ass half off the bench, neck resting uncomfortably on the wooden backrest. His lashes are short but thick, cheeks shiny with grease and sweat, curls plastered to his forehead, cap between his hands. He sits, breathes, a soft nasal whistle to it like his nose has been broken once or twice. 

Gale thinks about offering him a blowjob, free of charge alongside the silence. He wonders what Bucky’s laugh sounds like.

At some point– Gale isn’t really sure how– he realizes John is weeping. Maybe he just smells the salt on the air. 

It freezes Gale, terrifies and confuses him. He’s had men weep before. Crying because they have a wife and child at home, crying because they know this is all they get in life– stolen moments of intimacy paid for with bills meant for other sorts of cheap thrills. Cigarettes, a cold beer, maybe a drop of something illicit and chemical, if they were desperate enough. Gale’s body enough of a substitute for something like romance. They didn’t much move him anymore, not in any way that penetrates deep, and he thinks maybe he’s gone cold, somewhere along the road of his life. But Bucky isn’t crying like any of those men. His weeping is silent, calm, like a quiet stream through the woods rather than any sort of onslaught. There isn’t anything dangerous to it. 

When Bucky stands, announcing the end of their vigil, Gale stays sitting as usual, watching the other man stretch, shirt lifting from his workman’s jeans, a whorl of hair below the small of his back, a scar, here and there. Strange, pockmarked nicks, like nothing Gale’s encountered before. Bucky glances over his shoulder at Gale, the bottom of his face hidden by the meat of his shoulder. The tag on his shirt is flipped, Gale can see the name written there. John E.

Ten dollars this time. A five, three ones, a two-dollar bill. 

“You queer?” Gale asks him.

“Sure,” John shrugs. “Mostly lonely, though.”

Gale flinches, and then finds himself shockingly angry. 

“It’s too much,” he snaps, flicking the bills back at John. “Keep your money.”

“You do this with anyone else?” Gale asks him the next month. 

“Used to,” John admits, and Gale isn’t sure why that admission stings. 

“Not anymore?”

John shrugs, wiggles his fork through the pancake until he cuts himself off a typical, too-large bite. “None of them are as good at sitting as you.” 

It sounds like some sort of joke, or mockery, but John says it with a serious face. 

He doesn’t cry this time. But he pays Gale nine whole dollars anyways. 

“If you ever do want something,” Gale says, holding the bills in his hand, “I won’t ask extra.”

John grins at him, crooked, sweet. “I’m flattered, Buck.”

John isn’t his only date. Gale’s still making money on his knees, in the bathroom stalls, on the bench where he thinks of John the entire time he lets this blond-haired trucker suck him off, moaning. He gives it to him good, hand on his sweaty locks, thin at the top and the sides, and looks at the painted metal beyond. He hates this the most. It’s harder to fake it when he doesn’t feel like making things happen. The men can taste it, or taste the lack thereof. Sometimes they don’t care, and it’s a relief to Gale, in some ways, to not be cared about. 

“Did you fight in the war?” John asks him.

Gale works his jaw over a toothpick, fighting off the bone-deep tiredness threatening to pull him under. “Is that what you are? A soldier?”

John huffs a laugh, quiet to himself ‘ is that what I am ? ’ Louder, he says, “I drive trucks.”

“Born behind the wheel were you? Got those scars from a sunburn?”

“Don’t you know it’s bad form to ask a client personal details?”

“Were you a coward?”

It’s intentionally inflammatory, but instead of bristling John laughs, body relaxing into a sleazy slump. He’s big, big in a way one didn’t notice at first. Always tall, but the width of him shocking as Gale compares the side of their thighs, side-by-side on the bench. He thinks he would be good to fuck, if he felt so inclined. 

“You didn’t fight, did you?” John smiles. “A man who fought would never ask me that.”

“Does that offend you?”

“The question or your service?”

Gale shrugs.

John hums, lighting up a cigarette and letting it dangle from his fingers, arm draped across the back of the bench, thumb rubbing the ball of Gale’s shoulder. His hair will smell like cigarettes tonight, when he lies down to sleep. “No, to both.” 

Gale could turn his head, catch John’s thumb between his lips and give it a slow suck and savor. Taste the flavor of him; engine oil and salt and pancake syrup. Take him down until his palm pokes his throat and see if it would make Gale feel anything. He does no such thing. 

“What about you?” John counters. “Were you a coward? Or did they know you were bent?”

Cruelty for cruelty, the blow doesn’t sting because it’s been well matched.

“Conscientious objector,” Gale says.

John makes a face.

“It means–”

“I know what it means.” 

Gale works his jaw, looks out over the highway and breathes in John’s awful cigarettes. “When the courts denied my petition, I still refused, so they threw me in jail for the duration of the war.”

“That’s exactly what I fought for. People behind bars for havin’ goddamn opinions.” 

“Is that why you joined up?”

John huffs a laugh, arm coming around Gale’s shoulders, body leaning across his chest to take a pull of his cigarette– Gale finds himself in an unexpected pseudo-embrace. “No,” he says, smoke pouring from his mouth in a flood, “hell no, there wasn’t a thing noble or patriotic about me. Just some shitass twenty-year-old, barely gotten his dick wet or knew what living life meant. I was so fucking eager to go over there and do some good killin’ I didn’t even consider there’d be people dying too.”

“Quite an oversight.”

John’s eyes crinkle up like a cat’s. “You’re funny, Buck, you know that.” 

“That why you cry?” 

“Maybe you’re so beautiful I weep tears of joy.”

Gale fixes him a look, ignores the flush on his cheeks. He’s been called pretty enough times by enough people to know it is likely objectively true. But John says it like he isn’t trying to get anything from Gale, or like he isn’t taking anything. Unabashed, John gives him a shrug.

“I dunno why I cry. Maybe just ‘cause I can. I’ve paid you, so you can’t go away. And you don’t know me so you can’t judge me.”

“Ain’t that what confessions’s for?” 

“I can start callin’ you father, if that makes you feel better.”

“Jesus, John.” 

John starts and Gale realizes his peek at the nametag wasn’t something John had intended, wasn’t something that had been offered. It was stolen, taken, coveted away into Gales lexicon of this strange man beside him. Bucky is a character, John the man beneath. Somewhere, they’d crossed over from one to the other.

“My name is Gale,” he offers, as benediction and maybe an apology, even if it wasn’t like he’d gone snooping. John’s carelessness wasn’t his sin. 

John ashes his cigarette, and Gale has the inane idea to lick it up off the asphalt, still smoking and overheated. He doesn’t know where it comes from, or why. He’s feeling a lot of things, and nothing at all, at the same time. Maybe he’s just so numb to touch it’ll take only something extreme to shock his system back to life. 

John surveys him, face shadowed in the evening and dyed orange by the streetlamps. Gale understands, quite quickly, that John hadn’t just been a foot soldier. He’d been something special, someone important. He carries himself like he knows real responsibility. Gale wonders how many people he’s seen die. 

“How much do I owe you, Gale?” 

“I don’t need it, you know.” 

John pauses, bills half pulled from his wallet, crisp and clean like they’re fresh from the bank. “Christ, you really need to learn how to negotiate.” 

Gale shrugs.

“What do you with the money?”

Body numb, strange, small feeling. Like he’s a schoolboy back in the pews, like he’s awaiting the switch from his mother for misbehaving again, like he’s laying awake at night, hearing the doorknob turn and pretending to be asleep.

“Tuck it between the pages of my bible,” he says tonelessly. “I don’t spend a cent of it.”

It’s beginning to get cold now, frost in the mornings when Gale wakes and breath clouding the air as he walks to the diner. It’s enough to deter some of the travelers but nothing stops a regular and Gale frequents the bathroom with familiar truckers and roadtrippers and tries the new key lime pie with polite approval. John starts wearing a heavy pale sheepskin jacket that’s stained and dingy and disgusting and sets Gale’s skin crawling. But it’s warm as the devil, Gale can feel it as their arms press together on the bench, breath a drift of crystals between them, John’s cigarette smoke a darker, lazier cloud filtering through. 

He’s crying again. Gale can smell the salt of his tears on the air and it’s doing strange things to his gut again. Twisting him hot and cold and desperate and terrified and he’s so hard it feels like an illness, a wound, a pulsing artery bleeding out between his legs. Everything wrong with him and only the beginning, it’s John’s big bulk beside him, the way his shoulders shake with the sobs that snaps his tolerance finally. 

John’s neck is thick under his hand, muscled and wiry with hair in need of a wash. 

His face is wet, sticky, snot and phlegm and tears– John wasn’t the sort who was a pretty crier, when he really got going. It’s a combination of salty and thick, John’s tongue sweeter, milder, soft with maple syrup and whiskey made from corn. Still, shocked at first, then moving against Gale’s own, licking his drippings from Gale’s teeth, from his chin as they meet for the first time. 

John is still crying. 

Gale bites the fat well of his bottom lip and gets the full wet exhale of John’s gasp. He’s matching Gale’s position, a heavy hand on the back of Gale’s neck, fingers twitching with faint pleasure. 

Unaware there was a second breaking to be had, Gale breaks all the same, fumbling for his belt with shaking, frigid hands. Cups his palm around his cock to keep it warm and jerks himself off in rough, ragged strokes. It’s vicious, mean, an orgasm he yanks from himself with hungry teeth and determination. He’s making choked, horrible little noises, whimpers if he had the humility to call them that. It’s his pleasure to feel, and he holds it tight in his fist as John kisses him gently through it. 

Panting, sweating under his jacket, Gale wipes his hand in the dirt until it’s dry, frost clinging to his skin until it melts. 

John’s breathing heavy too, composing himself, dragging an open-palmed hand across his mouth, his nose, wiping away the mess. Adjusts himself in his pants as he stands and reaches for his wallet with hands that visibly shake. 

He pays Gale ten dollars. 

Winter gets real mean, cold even for Wisconsin, and Gale finds himself less motivated to make the trek all the way out to the diner, let alone service patrons on his knees in the ice and slush. He spends a miserable few months holed up inside, working at the local cannery and eying the roads, wondering if John is alright. 

If he’s safe, if he’s still drinking, and still traveling his routes.

If he’s still showing up at the diner, once a month, and ordering his pancakes with too much syrup. 

If he misses Gale. 

Gale isn’t exactly sure that he misses John. But he doesn’t much like the idea of someone else sitting there, listening to the man cry. 

Christmas passes in a strange, cold haze, his birthday limping in the lonely aftermath. He has nobody to call, nobody to call him, and as a gift he gets himself a new pair of shoes, some expensive cologne. Tries not to feel like a fucking pansy for enjoying it. For wondering if John will like it, when– if– they see each other when the snow thaws. 

Not a warm day when Gale returns to the diner, but a walkable day, a day where the ice is pale instead of black and he risks neither broken limb nor neck to venture down the road, breath puffing about him and body hungry for pie and coffee and something to else to wake him up a bit. His mouth is empty, too clean, scrubbed by toothbrush over and over again without any foulness to chase away. He’s not ready for it, but he is hungry, and he hopes perhaps he’ll be lucky and John will be the only man whose title and name line up together tonight.

It’s not a strong hope, Gale didn’t work in extremes like that. Wouldn’t allow himself the risk of disappointment. John’s route could have changed, he could have slipped in a fiery crash somewhere on the icy roads of the Midwest. He could have found some other boy in some other twenty-four-hour diner who was better at sitting than Gale was. Even still, when the doorbell greets him cheerfully, he can not help but look around the patrons for a sign of curly hair, crooked smile, blue eyes and a heaping stack of pancakes. 

The diner is empty, except for a couple with their young child tucked in the corner booth, the father's eyes watchful, and two older truckers flirting with the uninterested waitress. There’s a man with a gold tooth on a barstool, yellow smile flashing at him. 

No John. 

Swallowing disappointment, Gale sits himself in an empty booth and waits. 

John, or someone else, there will be customers eventually. 

Two more weeks of Gale haunting the diner, going through the motions of his work and spitting white into the bathroom sink, into the dead leaves out behind the diner. He never takes them to the bench– it feels special now, sacred. That’s for him and John. 

Winter passes with slow chill, grey and colorless with barely any snow but plenty of rain and even more ice that thaws and mixes with the filth on the sides of the road until it’s all brown and grey and black.

The missing he feels for John isn’t a cerebral sort of missing. It’s something physical, the way his body in motion feels like there should be another one in motion beside it. Someone across from him in the booth eating pancakes with a coffee more Irish than caffeine, a heavy jacket and a sweat-stained cap and a heavy bulk that was as unthreatening as it was big. Gale misses John like he missed the summer, missed the sunlight. Like he misses behind a little boy and camping out in the Tetons, tracing the stars with his fingers and learning if he sat still enough, for long enough, the birds would take seeds from his hand. 

Something about the bell tinkling that night is different– even though it couldn't be. Gale knows before he looks up, as John takes his cap off his head, hand running through curls that had been cut short, looking the same as he did nearly six months ago.

He spots Gale quickly, and the grin that splits his face is like the dawn breaking. It shivers something in Gale, and he hides it with a sip of his coffee as John leans one elbow on the counter to put in his order. Gale pretends to read yesterday morning's paper as John saunters over, draping himself into the opposite booth seat. His foot knocks against Gale’s under the table. He smells like cigarettes and whiskey and day-old clothes. 

Gale’s mouth waters. 

“Fancy meeting you here, Buck,” John says.

“Thought maybe your route changed,” Gale answers. 

The waitress comes over– a stack of pancakes and a black coffee and a slice of cherry pie that she places in front of Gale. He picks up the fork and then pauses, looking over at John who just smiles, wiggling his fork down between the soft layers of pancake until he has a bite dripping with syrup and sugar. He groans when he takes a bite, like these rest stop bisquick pancakes were any special sort from any other diner's fare. 

“Did– for a bit,” John says around his meal, manners an afterthought. “Got real acquainted with Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, even.”

“Not a fan of winter?”

“Not anymore.” 

Gale doesn’t know what to say to that. “Welcome back,” he finally says around his coffee. Slips the tines of his fork into the negligible resistance of the pie and drags the steaming inner guts off the metal with slow savor. 

The jukebox plays Patsy Cline, John’s fork scrapes the ceramic plate clean, one finger dragging through the plate like he couldn’t bear to waste a drop. Gale eats to the last crumb too, wetting his pinky to pick them up one by one. Jail food held no candle a fresh-baked dessert, and he never quite forgot the first meal he’d had out. He wasn’t about to waste any good flavor ever again. But John cleans his plate like a man starving. 

“Wasn’t sure if you’d be here,” John says quietly, wiping his hands on his napkin and crumpling it between one fist. 

“I’m always around,” Gale answers. 

Blue eyes track over his face, shrewd and intelligent. There’s something about them that gets Gale thinking there’s a whole other slice of John that’s a bit cold. A bit scary. John smiles crooked, knowing, and drops his napkin onto the plate. By the time Gale is finished watching the white paper unfurl from its crumpled state, stretching out in its new freedom, the bell has already announced John’s departure from the diner. Gale gives him a heartbeat or two more, just enough to suck the last of the pie from his fork, before following behind. 

It feels a bit like the first time, the way Gale steps out of the diner and looks to his left, finding John stood at the corner, cigarette in mouth, lighter in hand. There’s a design carved on the metal surface, a pair of angel wings, that John keeps rubbing his thumb over again and again, smoking like the end of the cigarette was the intent. The cloud puffs around him, drifting across his shoulders and out into the night as he looks over at Gale. Nods his head towards the bench with a raised eyebrow. 

They fall into step together, shoulders brushing as they head to their spot.

Gale expects it to be an explosion, an avalanche or onslaught, John’s hands on his body and his heavy frame a sweaty, meaty press. His mouth sour, whiskey and fried food and pancakes. Gale’s skin prickles in sick anticipation, his body perking up, stiffening. It’s not that he’s eager for it, but he thinks he’d welcome anything John gave him in that moment. As they walk he keeps waiting for the moment, the crescendo, and when they sit and Gale holds his breath, feeling the soft brush of John’s knee against his own where John has allowed his thighs to sprawl open. Waits.

John lights a second cigarette.

Gale sits there like a puppet, a child, a church boy, hands tucked in his lap and knees folded together. Breathing slow because the other option is too quick and uneven. John’s presence is a heavy, welcome weight– Gale has missed the way he displaced the air. 

He remembers the taste of John’s mouth. Licks his lower lip and listens to John smoke. Smells the salt of John’s tears as he cries quietly. When Gale looks over, he can see them running into the seam of John’s lips before he locks them away, placing the cigarette back between his teeth. Gale wonders if he’s crying over a woman, over a child or brother or father. 

If what Gale did with the other men in the diner bathroom wasn’t romance, what was letting John cry beside him on a bench considered?

Gale doesn’t reach out to John, but when John finally cries himself dry he stands and squeezes a damp thumb and forefinger across Gale’s cheeks and jaws so gently it feels like a punch. 

He can smell the salt residue of tears on John’s fingers, left behind on his own skin, chilling until it dries in a tight film over his stubble. Gale looks up, gaze chasing John’s hand, seeking out his eyes, finding them red-rimmed, tired, hazy and a little bit drunk as he takes a healthy swig of his flask. The scene is familiar, childhood memory and Gale squeezes his thighs tighter together, squeezes his fingers between the clutch of them. 

“Thanks, Buck,” John says, pulling his wallet out, coordinated despite his drunkeness. Hidden well in only the way drunkards and terrified men could. 

“You don’t have to pay me,” Gale says, “We’re not doing anything.”

John clucks his tongue, “You keep sayin’ that you’re gonna hurt my feelings, Buck.” He pauses, “Gale.” Draws the word out like he was testing it, remembering how it felt.

Gale flushes hot. 

He sits in his excuse for an apartment. 

Bare bones even for a bachelor. Two chairs– mismatched– a wooden table, a bookshelf with books but no photos, a bed shoved into one corner with a nightstand he picked up off the corner and muscled home. Another book, napkin bookmark sticking out of the top like a tongue. His bible, beginning to get fat with cash. A nest egg, an escape fund. Gale’s got nowhere to run to and nothing to run from but imprisonment does that to a man. Makes it hard to trust the ground beneath his feet. 

John had given him a two-dollar bill, pressed between a five and three ones. The bill is crumpled like it had been balled up, a blue ink stain over Hamilton, a lipstick smudge on one edge. Two corners ragged, torn. A beat-up piece of paper.

He smooths a thumb over, trying to lie the dollar flat, but it springs back up stubbornly.  

“Gave you my lucky deuce by accident I realized,” John says, smoke pouring from his mouth. 

He was chatty tonight, full of words and warm music. If Gale pressed his ear to John’s chest he could almost think he’d hear a jazz band, playing faintly away in the echo of that big ribcage. John had been humming earlier, off-tune and awful. Drumming his fingers on the plastic table as he ate, leg jiggling restlessly. It left Gale on edge– not a feeling of danger but that feeling of anticipation again. Like they were waiting for something. Some explosion. 

“I can give it back,” he says, slipping a toothpick between his own lips and staring at his own dim reflection in the silver case.

John shakes his head. Shakes it again, shrugs a shoulder, “Nah. Nah, keep it. Might save your life one day, you know? Didn’t save nobody else but saved me, maybe. Maybe it’ll save you.” 

“You think I need savin’, Bucky?” 

Blue eyes black in the night, John slides his gaze over to Gale like a bruise. It aches slightly just the same way. A slow perusal, a quiet once-over. Again, Gale is struck with the knowledge that John would be an incredible fuck. John purses his lips, leans his head back on his neck like a broken marionette and then puffs out a chuckle. Soft, breathless, only the lightest click of sound to it besides the exhale. “Fuck, Gale, you can’t ask a Catholic that.”

Gale has the two-dollar bill in his pocket. Folds it over his fingers, “Seems like a pretty well-traveled bill.”

John smiles with teeth, gleaming wetly up at the night sky. “A kiss from a woman in England, a pen borrowed from a friend, and two missions with nobody dead,” he says sing-song. 

“If it’s so important to you–”

“Buck,” John says tenderly, “Keep it. Tuck it into your little Bible for me. Let God face it.” 

“He got somethin’ to answer for?” 

John laughs again softly, bringing the cigarette to his teeth, “Got a whole laundry list of things.”

Finding himself smiling too, somehow, Gale shakes his head out into the thin line of trees between them and the highway below. Gasoline coats his tongue, sweet and deadly, “Isn’t that what being Catholic is for?”

A heavy hand finds itself to the back of Gale’s neck, squeezing and shaking in companionable amusement. 

Heat steals over the weather, seeping through the windows no matter how Gale draped wet rags over his fans to try to move and cool the air. The sweat has nowhere to go. It clings to him in a damp film except where he drapes a wet t-shirt around his neck, water trickling into the collar of his vest. It leaves him itchy, restless, pacing his apartment hiding from the sun until it’s well behind the horizon, temperatures lowering only barely. But enough for him to venture outside, down to the diner where he orders a chilled slice of lemon meringue. Too hot for coffee, he gets a sweating bottle of ginger beer instead, parks himself in the opposite corner to his and John’s booth and eats slow, scanning the patrons. 

It’s not a night where he could expect John, and the pickings are slim. Two older truckers, plaid and worn caps and sun–lined faces like this is the first time they’ve been indoors in years. A couple of priests talking quietly on counter stools. The waitress, who had taken to calling Gale pumpkin even though he’s sure he’s older than she is. 

Gale smashes the soft curd against the roof of his mouth, letting the sour sweetness fill his mouth. 

The bell above the diner chimes and for a single moment Gale thinks it is John that walks through the door. But it’s only a man of similar height, similar breadth of shoulder. He has straight hair, and a shorter face, and a nose a little less beaky. When he smiles at the waitress there’s far too few wrinkles to the expression. 

But the way his eyes glance over Gale– catch, and hold, and then give him the faintest once over– is as obvious as a neon sign. Gale slips the spoon between his lips again and holds his gaze for a heartbeat too long before flicking to the restroom. The man, a youth more so, quirks a quiet smile. He might be Gale’s age but maybe a touch younger or at the very least a body a little less lived in. It presses hard and firm against Gale when he slips through the bathroom door a few minutes behind Gale’s own exit. Up against the wall, faintly damp, tile sticking to Gale’s cheek grossly. The black line level with his mouth fogs with the rapid pace of his breaths. 

“What’s your name?” The man breathes against his ear, already hard and ready, hands dragging over Gale’s chest, over his stomach, pressing into the hollow of it to feel the muscle. Fondles his cock in an open palms grab that pinches his balls between groping fingers. 

“What do you want?” he asks.

“Stick it in me.” The man says in a rush, whispered terror. 

He laps at Gale’s jaw, his neck, sticks his nose into Gale’s hair where he inhales deeply, exhales on a groan and goes for Gale’s belt. Gale lets him, panting and half hard, skin alive like an acid burn. He wants to touch, and be touched, and the sentiment is mirrored, his single-night lover pressing as close as possible. It’s just bodies against bodies with no other motivation but the need to be felt. Then he pushes off the wall, his cheek unsticking like velcro. The grime of it clings to him, creeping along his skin further than that single point of contact. 

Gale maneuvers them to the opposite wall, the stranger bent over against the sink where the lights make him look younger, a little desperate. Gale’s desperate too, grinding against the slack-covered ass presented to him, his belt and zipper hanging open so the wet spot in his briefs catches, fabric on fabric. The other man groans, head dropping forward and fingers white knuckling on the sink and Gale goes for the belt, fingers faster, clinical, tugs both waistbands down in one easy grip and spits. 

Watches the flinch, and shiver as he smooths it around the muscle. Presses in slow. Works his teeth over the fat of his bottom lip as he feels the body beneath him try to suck the digit deeper. Rubs a hand over one asscheek, feeling the faint tickle of hair, sparse and shockingly light for how dark the hair was atop the man’s head, around the root of his cock and brushing against the knuckle pressing into his hole. John’s body would be hairier– Gale knows this intrinsically. A bit of age to him, a little extra time given to grow into himself. Maybe not overly so, but more than this youthful fuzz. He wonders if John would bend for him. Smile at him in the mirror, eyes dark and blye and mustache twisting in a smirk. 

Gale squeezes the waist beneath his hand, tapered and muscular. Opens him with slow proficiency, one finger, then two, three. Spits again. Gale had never named a price but there’s time, and part of him thinks maybe this is bordering a bit closer to pleasure than business for once. And if not pleasure than at the very least scratching an itch he didn’t mean to develop.

He’s hard. It’s enough. 

Gale spits for a third time, slicking the way as much as possible against the man's entrance, holding him steady with the other hand.

He flinches. “Wait–”

Gale pauses, pulls back, looking up to catch the brown eyes looking at him in the mirror, underlined by blushing cheeks and a faint glimmer of sweat. “This your first time?” he asks.

Flushing, awkward and shy despite the angry red cock hanging between his legs, the man nods. Gale stares at him in the mirror, hair hanging awkwardly out of its careful style.

“What do I call you?” 

The man beneath his hand, body unlike the glimpses of John’s that Gale had seen under heavy jackets and thick jeans, hesitates. Every time he breathes the heated center of him kisses the head of Gale’s cock. 

“Dave.” 

There’s a ring on his finger, gold and glinting in the unforgiving light of the bathroom overhead. 

Gale exhales slowly, gentles his voice just a bit, “Okay, Dave. Just relax and I’ll take it easy on you, alright?”

He fucks Dave slow. Not like a lover would, but maybe like a friend. Like he cared to make it more than just okay. Makes it more than just okay, breathing hot and heavy on the back of his neck, hands on his hips, up his sides, around between his legs to give him a fist to buck into. Gale comes across his back like coffee spilling over a table, white droplets slipping over pale sides in streaks. 

There’s a photo of a smiling woman and a beaming little girl with ribboned curls in his wallet when he pulls it out, pinches a twenty from the depths and is careful not to let their skin touch when Gale takes it. 

“Do you like it?”

 John offers him a cigarette and Gale shakes his head. “It?”

“You know,” John shakes his head, raises a hand, the sort of bashfulness to his question speaking of a respectable upbringing. “What you do.”

“Fuck men for money.” 

“Only some of them.”

Gale smiles, “Only some of them,” he agrees. Pause and considers the question, opting for a toothpick to clean out the bits of pie stuck between his teeth rather than the sweet allure of tobacco. “I don’t think about whether I like it. I just do it.” 

“Is it that hard to find steady work around here?” 

“I have a job,” Gale admits, “I told you, it’s not about the money.”

John’s knee is pressed against Gale’s own, a warm point of contact in the chill of the night air. It’s late enough now that even the oppressive summer heat has leeched away and Gale thinks he will be cold, once John leaves back to his rig. He expects John to be surprised by the admission, maybe taken aback or even disgusted. Gale isn’t sure still if John even prefers the company men, if that night hadn’t just been placation, an extra bit of thanks extended to Gale for listening to him cry now and then– for sitting with him the rest of the times. What a trick that would be. 

“So what’s it about?” Smoke clouds around John, acrid, cancerous. 

It was a new thing, them saying that smoking could kill you, and Gale wasn’t quite sure he believed it– but they said that about liquor too and he knew that one to be true. John smoked the way he drank– that is, as if he knew the rumors too. Breathing in right now feels like kissing John, layers of smoke and whiskey and maple syrup. Beneath it coffee, mouth coming up on in being need of a brush, lunch and breakfast, coffee again. Beneath it all John himself, musky, human, spit and sweat and something unnameably sweet. If Gale licked enough he might eventually get to the center. 

Gale sighs out, “I don’t know, Bucky.” 

“You don’t know?”

“Why do you pay a stranger to listen to you cry once a month?”

John huffs out a laugh, then looks down at his hand, curls it slowly and then lifts it, turning to Gale and pushing his knuckles into the cleft of it in an affectionate push. His thumb brushes against Gale’s bottom lip, syrup and cigarette ash and leather. 

“If someone socked you,” John asks, “you’d really just take it?”

Gale almost laughs. “You threatenin’ me?”

“You know I’m not.”

“Yeah, I’d take it, John.” 

Eyes on him, mouth twisting, scrunching, John’s eyes were so clever when they weren’t hazed with liquor, red from weeping. He’d had to have been handsome in uniform, trim and dashing and in charge. There was no chance he had been just an average soldier, a man without authority. He carried himself too well, owned the space around him with too much awareness, spoke without insecurity, like a man accustomed to being listened to. And his eyes, smart and shrewd in an unfair pairing to the handsome body he drove about. John had been someone, once. Was someone, still, when he wanted to be. 

“What if someone came at you with a knife? A gun? You’d just stand there?” John’s voice comes sharp, angry, eye contact like the sights of a rifle Gale’s only ever held once. He’s the deer right caught in the crosshairs. 

“I’d hope they wouldn’t.” 

“Christ,” John curses, tosses his cigarette to the dark and immediately pulls another. “You’re a goddamn loon, Gale.” 

“And bent.”

“Christ,” John repeats, laughing, shoulders shaking, cigarette shaking, “Jesus Christ.” He puts a hand over his face.

And then he’s crying, shoulders shaking, cigarette shaking.

“Let me take you out of here.”

Gale pulls his eyes from his coffee– black, a splash of maple syrup, a lipstick print on the corner of the napkin because the waitress is new, doesn’t know better yet. He would, only he feels bad taking a woman’s hard-earned money. She’s got a ring on her finger too, and a delicate charm bracelet higher up, girlish and sweet. She’ll be around for a while, making eyes at him, until she gets pregnant enough to quit, and his regular waitress will come back. It’s the man who wanted to watch him eat, face shiny with sweat, chest puffed with self-importance, dressed in a suit two seasons old but still well made. Money but not a lot. More than before. 

Gale slips his coffee, “I’m waitin’ for someone, sorry.” 

He makes an amused noise, voice confident, “You don’t have anyone coming for you.” 

Gale taps his finger on the porcelain handle of his mug, fitting a toothpick between his lips and rolling it from one corner to the other. Truth and untruth. Not so much coming as paths crossing, a regular scheduled meeting that had nothing to do with any personal calendar of Gale’s. The error wasn’t in that anyone was coming, only that it was for him. 

“I said I was waitin’,” he says mildly.

“Do you sing, Buck?” 

Gale pauses, pie halfway to his mouth. “Not well,” he lies. 

“I sing pretty good,” John says. 

His foot is tapping to the radio playing behind the counter.

“Please don’t,” Gale begs calmly. 

John’s eyes sparkle. He’s halfway to tipsy, cheeks flushed, the pores wide and shiny across the apex of his cheekbones. There’s a cut on his nose, across the bridge and purpling slightly around the edges. Smells of coffee, cologne, cigarettes, John. He’s smiling, grinning, eyes like a cats the way they curve, boyish except where age creases the smile into his cheeks, the corners of his eyes. “ Oh ,” he sings, “ Bernadine, Bernadine, come away with me now in the rocket-propelled machine. ”

Syrup and confectionary sugar on Gale’s lips. He licks them clean.

“ We'll come home by the way of a drive-in spa, just a little this side of Shangri-La. ”

“You’re gonna get us banned, Bucky.”

He fucks another man who looks like John. Tries not to think that he looks like John, as he bends for him. And it’s not intentional–accident and ill timing– that there’s a shallow leftover pool of water in the base of the sink as Gale’s face is pressed down. Chokes on his first inhale, sputtering and flinching. But the way his body tenses, locking tight with panic– sends the man over the edge, and he fills Gale hot and sticky as Gale chokes for air. 

He apologizes after, sheepish and quiet, as Gale rubs the bloodshot from his eyes, and pays Gale an extra five dollars for the trouble. 

The heat gets hotter. The cannery lets him go, lets all of them go, shutting down production to be moved offshore, or so the rumors from a guy Gale’s never even spoken to go. He thinks about taking his business down to the public bathrooms in the park, but the area is more dangerous, the police more frequent. He’s got a good set up at the diner, so he prepares to tighten his belt again and counts out the crumpled bills of his nest egg, just in case.  

Pie guy approaches him twice more, and Gale rebuffs him twice, watching the puff up and deflation each time as his ego is bruised by the rejections. 

He takes the waitress into the bathroom and gives her his mouth, because she seemed sad, and she agrees on two free coffees a shift rather than he taking her money. Two weeks later shes pregnant and gone. 

There’s a young family who spends a week in the motel nearby, a broken-down car trapping them. Gale leaves them to their own, goes just to people watch, but the little girl stares at him with big eyes until he offers her a smile and she giggles. 

The Jukebox is playing Aretha when John swings on in, sleeves short and tight around his biceps, smelling of sour labor sweat and cologne. Gale watches him give himself a whores bath in the restroom sink, water and seap catching on his sparse chest hair, darkening around his belt when he unbuckles it to swab a cloth around his groin. “Missed you last month,” John says, grinning over his shoulder, muscles flexing as he wrings the rag out into the sink.

Body nothing like the bodies in porno magazines carefully diguised as fitness mags, bodies waxed and trimmed and glistening. His skin was pale, bruised under the bathroom lights, stretch marks around his shoulders, the underside of his arms, rising from where his pants sit low on his hips. There’s scars on his back and shoulders, chunks taken out and healed over in shiny, flat red warping lines. It takes away none of his handsomeness, nor does the grey beginning to shoot through his hair, paling the hair around his nipples. He wasn’t old yet, body just changing, thickening from youth to something that suited his frame better, filled his bones with respectable weight. 

“I got things to do besides sitting around here looking pretty,” Gale says dryly, putting a toothpick between his teeth rather than his lips, bites down until it skitters to safety in the gap between his canines. 

“Is that so?” John says with a wink, wiping his hands dry and grabbing for his shirt. It clings to the wet spots on his torso, then is hidden by the pale red button-up he shugs on atop. The gash on his nose is long healed, nothing more than a white line left behind and a faint pinkness. “Worried somethin’ had happened to you.”

“Something’s always happening to me.”

John’s knuckles brush against Gale’s jaw as he goes by, another gentle punch of affection, and true to his word Gale doesn’t defend against it, skin tingling in soft firecrackers at the touch. He follows in John’s footsteps, no need to pretend not to be leaving together, not when nothing untoward had happened– just a catch-up between old friends. 

Their coffees are at the table, as well as John’s pancakes and syrup. And Gale’s pie, though there’s a second slice beside John’s spot as well.

“What’s the occasion?” Gale asks, sliding into the booth, picking up his fork. 

John shrugs, smelling like water and wet hair and damp skin, and a hint of baby-powder-esque soap. “Can’t a man try something new?” 

Gale’s mouth twitches, he slips a bite of pie between his lips. There’s another baseball game playing on the screen, John running through the stats with Gale as if he knew what the numbers meant. Gale lets him, polishing his plate, finishing his coffee, watching John eat his own slice in no more than four bites, cherry innards stuck to one corner of his mouth like blood, cool whip on his mustache in a sticky white smear. He licks it with his tongue, leaving glistening spit and crumbs behind that are wiped with a napkin, tossed to the pile of their plates with a satisfied sigh. 

“You know,” He says, "I don't even like sweets.” 

“Then why the hell’d you eat the pie, Bucky?”

John shrugs, “Wanted to see why you liked it so much.” 

Soft fizzing pop, like soda gone almost fully flat, only it’s a feeling in Gale’s veins rather than his mouth, “And?” 

The leather of the booth creaks as John leans forward, licks his thumb, and wipes a glob of cherry from the corner of Gale’s mouth. 

“Ain’t half bad.”

Tonight is fresh off a rainstorm, and the smell of wet asphalt and moist dirt and a little bit of rotting food from the trash mix together in a fascinating, offensive bouquet. Getting later in the year now, temperatures beginning to chill from their peak, goosebumps on Gale’s arm as John smokes, fingers trembling where they wrap around the cigarette. The exhale is just as shaky, wet, damper than the air, John always cried silently aside from his breathing, at least when he really got going. Gale can’t remember the last time he cried himself, can’t remember the last time anyone ever said a man should be crying, let alone to another man in public. But John doesn’t seem to care about the decorum of it, and Gale is either past that point or John is a special exception to his discomfort. 

Most of what he feels is fascination. A strange, sick arousal that had little to do with his cock. More like he wanted to stick his fingers inside John, poke around until he found whatever made him function. Like the frogs they were forced to dissect in high school. It was something to do with the war, probably, something to do with this time of year– the turn of the season. The crying was every time now, longer, less amusement in John’s eyes. A haunted, hunted look to him. It’s always there, even when he smiled, but it’s beginning to creep into his shoulders now, the way he eyes every person who passes him in the booth. He sat with his back to the wall, gaze on the door when it wasn’t on Gale himself. 

Gale thinks it was much the same the year previous– he just didn’t know the map of John well enough yet to see it. 

John wipes his face silently, breathing only slightly shaky. 

Gale leans his head back to the sky, rainclouds whisping away to nothing, showing a strip of dark above them, pale edges fading into thousands of stars– so many Gale would lose track long before he counted them all. He tilts his face towards John, “See that?” 

He waits for John to look at him, before tipping his chin back towards the heavens. Waits for John to obey the silent command to look up before turning his eyes back to the stars. 

“That’s the Perseids,” he says.

“Stars,” John says bluntly. 

“No,” Gale tilts his head to a bright streak, red and gold and white hot, blinking across their view before burning to nothing, “See that?” 

The quiet sound of John swallowing, “Yeah.” 

“Perseids. Yearly meteor shower,” Gale says quietly, “Rock’s burning up in the atmosphere– mostly. Only the tiniest handful actually make it to the ground.” 

“Tiniest handful,” John echoes, sounding strange. “How ‘bout that, huh?” 

“That’s how some scientists think we got here,” Gale adds, arms crossed over his belly, feeling the rise and fall of his own breathing. The air feels warm at his shoulder, warm where John sits inches away. “Carried here by a meteorite lucky enough to reach the ground. Millions of years ago.” 

“So what, you’re saying we’re rock people?”

“Meteor people,” Gale corrects, “Aliens, unwitting astronauts.”

“Pilots,” John supplies. 

“We would have been nothin’ but cells. Matter that knew how to grow and change. Stardust with the chance to form a heartbeat– someday.” 

“Must have been peaceful,” John muses, exhaling slowly, “Nothin’ here. Except rock people.” 

“Yeah,” Gale agrees, “I bet it was, Bucky.” 

John’s hand, cigarette smoke and cologne and maple syrup, rests heavy on the back of Gale’s neck, squeezing and massaging until Gale’s head rolls slightly with the force of it. The back of John’s knuckles drag against his jaw and Gale closes his eyes, savors the scrape of them, rough callouses on rough stubble. 

“You like the stars, huh?”

Gale opens his eyes. There’s another meteorite streaking across the sky, “I read a lot.”

“About stars.” 

“Among other things.” 

“You ever think about flying?” 

Gale almost laughs. Shrugs instead. 

“You’d like it, I think,” John says. Tilts his flask into his mouth– Gale can hear the familiar slosh of it, the sound embedded in his mind long before he ever met the man. “You’d be one hell of a pilot, Buck.” 

“Is that what you were?” Gale dares to ask, “A pilot?” 

John sips his flask again. Shrugs. 

It gets colder. 

Gale struggles to find respectable work. Struggles to pay his rent, even when he begins dipping into the pages of his bible, pulling out carefully flattened bills that smell of maple syrup and cigarettes. For a while he works a job with some bricklayers, thinking it can’t be that far off from the oil field work of his youth. And it isn’t in a way, all mindless manual labor, brain off, hands moving, the sun on the back of his neck and dark grime under his nails that he spends every night picking clean. It re-roughs his hands, dusts his skin gold, coaxes out the small kiss of freckles across his nose and cheeks and adds a bit of muscle back to his lean body. 

He’s growing old– or at least older– his body aching like he didn’t remember it used to. 

But the real issue is the quiet listlessness that starts somewhere in his stomach and slowly spreads to his chest. The repetition is soothing until it becomes numbing, like staring at endless cans at the cannery, like days spent sat in a prison cell staring at the cracked wall, lying about his charges and waiting to be the very first or very last to shower– just in case. Successful, most of the time.

It weighs him down, like a future trudging forward on a single, bleak road. 

And it’s an easy decision to just not show up one day. Nobody even calls. His income suffers again, but Gale has other avenues, if he feels like taking the fork in the road.

There’s a community out there– men who do what he does for business or pleasure or sometimes both. Sometimes he sees them on late-night walks, out and about at the parks, the speakeasies, at bars catering to bikers but suspiciously missing the feminine company. And perhaps it’s vanity, upbringing, a small kernel of shame left, but Gale feels little kinship with them. Makes no effort to make friends, share territory, share tips. But he hears things. Rumors of police raids to be watchful for, particular cars or faces to steer clear of. 

Gale hears of it, when a man goes missing and a body turns up– takes notice when they appear with busted lips, bruised eyes, broken cheekbones, limps to their steps that spoke of a deeper hurt. 

He knew what could happen and had not gone himself unscathed. 

Luck’s never been his strong point, and maybe John had been onto something. Gale had left John’s lucky deuce at home that night, just so he didn’t accidentally spend it. 

Thunderclouds threaten every step of Gale’s walk to the diner, cutting out any view of the stars save for a few, teasing gaps that are slowly swallowed up by condensation-heavy clouds. Every time the door opens it brings the electric, gasoline-petrichor scent of polluted rain. Gale sits in the corner and watches mist gathering on the windows that never breaks to full rain. He takes two men to the bathroom, one behind the building, his knees dampening slightly on the concrete, the condensation fluffing his hair the more hands are dragged through it. 

Savors his cherry pie slow, letting the sweet flavor wash away the taste of anything else. 

John was due back next week, maybe the week after– sometimes things were delayed. Rarely was he early, but once or twice there’d been a surprise meeting, enough that Gale waits well into the late night before deciding that likely John isn’t going to be patroning the diner tonight. 

The storm has yet to break when Gale finishes his pie, reaches for his wallet to pull out a few bills he really shouldn’t part with. Hears the soft sound of a body shifting into the booth seat across from him and looks up to see a small stack of bills on the table in front of him. Enough to pay for his dinner, tip, and then something extra atop. Not much, but enough that Gale goes very still.

“You should buy another slice,” the man who liked to watch him eat says, “Meet me at my car.”

Gale’s eyes flick to his face. Berry bright eyes, color high on his cheeks, hair blonde and scraggly. He’s traded his suit for something better fitting. It makes him look younger, the glasses on his face make him look older. There’s something starved about him, something deeply, disconcertingly unremarkable about him. Like a leech in human skin. Cold and bloodless and entirely indistinguishable from any other face on the street. 

Gale reaches for the money, pockets the extra and uses the rest to pay for his meal, buy one more slice– “for the road, please, ma’am.” 

He gets blackberry, the purple smears of its innards shockingly bright on the cardboard container. 

The storm still doesn’t break as he walks out to the idling car.

He eats the pie slow, sucks it from the fingers that the other man dips into the frosting. Laps up the chunky, going cold jelly innards, holds the unfamiliar arm to lick the drippings off his wrist, eyes on the open interest on his subject's face. A soft smile curls over his face, open-mouthed, wet, lecherous, it’s the pie being eaten by Gale, Gale being eaten by his hungry gaze. When he reaches for the car door it doesn’t really shock him when the man reaches out to hold it shut. Doesn’t shock Gale when he tries to push him off, movements quick, jerky. 

None of it shocks him.

None of it shocks him. 

He watches the windows fog up, pie still sticky on his lips, in his mouth, the container upturned on the car floor and thinks about John’s shocked ire, at how far Gale’s convictions of nonviolence ran.

You’d really just take it?

Gale huffs a laugh, or maybe it’s just pushed from him, fucked out of him. He reaches behind him and grabs at his date for the night’s hair, tugging hard on the strands. Thinks probably it’ll end the whole business quicker. 

It does. 

When John shows up next week Gale was almost hoping he wouldn't. Could have simply not gone to the diner, if he really wanted. But that isn’t an option, not really. It would be like asking a bird to stop singing, a mouse to not run from a cat, a dog not to howl at the sound of thunder. It had simply become Gale’s nature. John walks in and Gale catches his eye and John slides into the booth across from him and they order their meals and they sit in silence and John watches him with dark curious eyes and asks no questions and Gale orders the fucking vanilla ice cream instead of any pie. And John notices, of course he does, he’s got clever eyes, he’s got a military record that was likely something to be admired for all that he won’t talk about it. He notices and says nothing. 

They sit out on the bench and John smokes quietly and says nothing and Gale chases the toothpick around his mouth with his tongue and tries to convince himself he breathes easier with John here with him. He isn’t sure if he does.

But his lungs are moving. 

They move as he looks up at the sky, looks down at the highway below, cars rushing by.

It never did rain that night, not until long after Gale had gotten home and washed himself clean inside and out, laid out in bed staring at the ceiling and listening to the thunder rumbling above.

“What would you do if I jumped from here?” Gale asks.

John glances at him, leans over the drop-off, down the cliff and to the highway below, “What would I do?”

“Would you follow me?”

John takes a swig of his drink, the liquid sloshing sickeningly. “I dunno,” he says, “Ask me next time.”

Gale blows him, tears mixing with the trickle of his spit, drool down his cock, precome, sweat. Musty and sticky and John’s hand heavy on the back of his neck, silent, body vibrating, flexing, thumb massaging. Gale jerks himself off harsh, quick, fist over head again and again like a punishment. 

John tastes like salt in his mouth, the folds of his body– inner thigh, underside of stomach, the creases where hip met groin– smell musky with the perfume of a traveler. It fills Gale’s nose same as the prickle of his pubic hair. John’s orgasm is silent, but Gale can feel the flutter of his belly, the throb of his heartbeat against Gale’s tongue.

Again, Gale asks him next month. Goosebumps at the back of his neck as the fading summer breeze tugs on it. 

“What would you do if I jumped?”

John’s drunk, amused, expecting the question. His thigh is heavy and warm pressed against Gale’s own, Gale wants him. 

John leans over the edge again, gives it a longer consideration, “Hell of a distance to fall, Buck.”

The third time Gale asks John shakes his head, takes Gales thumb between his fingers and shakes that too.

“Tell you what, Buck,” he says, “You jump and I’ll jump with you. How about that?”

“I don’t want you to jump, Bucky.” 

John’s eyes glitter, a crooked smile at his mouth. There’s scars on his face that Gale doesn’t know the story to. Sometimes he walked funny, like his balance wasn’t quite right. Not the way Gale was walking funny– a different sort of hurt. 

“You’re a real loony,” John says.

“And bent,” Gale says.

It feels less like a joke this time. John doesn’t cry this time.

In 1941, like hundreds of thousands of other men, in the wake of Peal Harbor and the headlines of a war everyone knew was inevitable but were simply waiting for the government to decide it was the most worthwhile time for them, Gale marches himself down to the recruitment office and asks to join the United States Army. 

“I want to join,” Gale says, “but I won’t hold a rifle.”

“You won’t hold a rifle?” they ask him.

“Son,” they tell him, a familiar condescension, “every man must carry a rifle.”

“I won’t take a life,” Gale says.

“This is the army,” they say, “the whole point is takin’ lives.” 

“I won’t,” Gale tells them. 

“You will,” they say, “You will when the draft comes for you and it’s war or jail.” 

The draft comes for him, and he stands in front of the courts and stands by his convictions, stands tall and firm and perhaps maybe not proud but at the very least steady atop his ground. There’s nobody in the seats behind him, Gale faces it alone.

“I’ll serve– I’ll heal, or cook, or drive your trucks,” he says, “But I won’t kill, I won’t hold a rifle.” 

“While you may not kill, you have to hold a rifle. Every man must be trained with one.” 

“I won’t,” Gale tells them. 

They give him the full five years– an example made, a warning to others. 

Gale bears it.

John’s wearing a jacket tonight, a soft plaid wool thing that looks like a blanket. 

It rasps softly against Gale’s arm as they sit, watching their breaths cloud in front of him. The days are still warm, but the nights have begun to grow chill. Gale had left his jacket at home, wanting to feel the bite of the cold, something to wake himself up, to pull him from the dream of daytime and into the waking reality that was the diner, him on his knees, coffee with maple syrup, a ginger beer. Vanilla ice cream that he licks from his lips. 

John.

“Not gonna ask me about jumping this time?” he asks Gale, fingers smelling of smoke where they reach out and knock gentle knuckles against his jaw. 

Gale almost smiles.

“Figured it was getting a little old.” 

“Good,” John drains his flask, tosses it out in a shining metal arc until it hits the highway down below. They both watch it for long moments, battered back and forth by passing trucks and cars, their wheels swallowing it up and spitting it back out until finally the bright flash vanishes. “Left my parachute in Europe.” 

“Oversight, there.” 

John puffs a laugh, “You’re tellin’ me, Buck.” 

The night goes from chill to cold, temperatures creeping in with icy fingers. It seems to rot something inside John, his face going waxier, flatter. He drinks straight from the bottle, brown paper bag crinkled to fabric softness beneath his large fingers. A quiet, melancholy drunkard– once he moved past the drunk that made him want to sing. Gale’s never known him sober, never known him anything but a sheet or two the wind, three by the time he left with a lighter wallet and a salt-chapped face. He cried silently, and came with barely more than a grunt but his body shook like a train rattling over loose tracks. His hand was big as Gale’s face, his body bigger than all of Gale. 

He was infinitely, shockingly gentle. 

Gale watches him put a cigarette between his lips and fail to spark the lighter, hands shaking from cold and something else. Leans over after a moment, plucking the lighter from John and flicking the wheel until a bright flame leaps up. It gilds the corners of John’s face in gold, his hair amber, as he leans in to light it, lashes casting a shadow on his eyelids. They spread delicately, and Gale can’t tell if John’s eyes are closed, or simply downcast. Gale doesn’t have the lighter in his lap, but John does have to bend for it and it piques something in Gale. Not arousal, or at least not the kind that hardens his body, stiffens his cock. Heat in his gut, a buzzing behind his teeth. It stills him. 

Smoke pours from John’s exhale. 

The moment breaks.

He pulls away and takes the lighter back, fingers soft, chill, against Gale’s hands. 

“Take me with you,” Gale says. “When you go on your new route. Let me come with you.” 

John pauses, cigarette halfway to his mouth and stares at Gale. Then one corner of his mouth curves up, “What, be my copilot?” 

Gale’s heart is in his throat. He feels.

He feels.

Something.

At nine p.m. Gale slips into the booth he and John had silently claimed as their own, at the far wall of the twenty-four-hour diner on the corner. John’s seat faces the door, and Gale’s faces a black and white photograph on the wall of some race horse the owner must have once bet and won on. Diagonal to the lights of the liqour store– the store where John always stocked up, and across from the rest stop where several big rigs sleep as dark silhouettes against the city lights. A quiet haven for people coming and going, lights cutting through the night now and then. Trucks coming, trucks leaving. 

One of them will be John. 

The waitress brings him his usual– a ginger beer, a bowl of vanilla ice cream, drizzled with honey. The black coffee with maple syrup will come later. If John takes long enough that Gale needs it.

He eats the ice cream first, spoon scraping quietly against the bottom of the bowl, blending in with the quiet hum of the rest of the diner in quiet music. He eats it with slow savor, a taste he’s long familiar with. Takes in the juke box as he cleans his spoon between his lips, and the bathroom, and the small array of customers frequenting the store. Takes them in, and considers nothing further about them. It’s not them he’s here for. 

The bell tinkles above the door and Gale looks up, spoon between his lips and smiles. Doesn’t move as John ambles his way over to the booth, an expression on his face almost like he hadn’t expected Gale to be there.

Cheeks red from the cold, the plaid of his cap matching the plaid of the plaid of his heavy jacket, he smiles down at Gale. “Hey.”

Gale pops the spoon from his mouth, “Hey.”

“I gotta be about a hundred miles south of here by noon tomorrow, so if you still want to come…” he trails off, eyes looking at the empty space beside Gale. Looking for a bag maybe, or some sort of bundle of belongings, precious items. 

“It’s just me,” Gale says.

John’s face creases into a smile.

He leaves his plate and mug stacked at the end of the table, John’s two-dollar bill as a tip in the center of the table. Walks across the diner parking lot, past their bench with John– shoulders breathing, steps nearly in tune, breath clouding behind them in a trail. Across the street, glancing for oncoming trucks and into the slumber yard of metal beasts, footsteps echoing against their metal sides. John navigates easily to the back of the lot on the edge of this part of the city that was barely considered so. The industrial edges, the place for transients and unwanteds and those just simply looking to disappear. 

It had always been ugly. To call it anything else would be charitable. 

But Gale went here to disappear, and had done exactly that for the last decade and change since the war ended, since he was freed from his punishment. Let himself fade into the smog and the quiet and the night. Now he was leaving instead.

“Step into my office, Buck,” John says.