Violet's Present Page 4

  Matt wasn’t going to cry in his dream, either. Instead, he kissed Joseph again. Tenderly at first, but soon his hunger grew. Joseph’s, too, because he grabbed Matt’s ass with both hands. Matt threaded his fingers into Joseph’s hair and held on, and then they were grinding their hips together and moaning into one another’s mouths.

  Matt had never been so very aroused so quickly. He and Joseph fumbled at belt buckles and buttons and zippers. There was no space for the kind of coupling they’d had back in Nebraska, and anyway, neither of them had the patience for that right now. As soon as their pants and boxers were pushed down their thighs, they crashed together again, Matt wrapping his long artist’s fingers around their cocks while Joseph fucked his mouth with his tongue. Matt pushed against Joseph’s shoulders with his free hand, so that Joseph was slammed back into a wall. It probably would have hurt, if Joseph had been paying attention. He’d probably have scratches and bruises on his ass in the morning. And although the small part of Matt’s brain that remained rational knew that the other man wasn’t real, he still felt a thrill of satisfaction knowing that Joseph would have a physical reminder of him the next day.

  Joseph’s fingers were digging into Matt’s ass-cheeks, and their cocks slid together wetly from precome. The need for friction, for just a little bit more, was driving Matt crazy.

  There was nothing romantic about their ruined little street. Shattered red roof tiles and splintered furniture lay strewn about, the detritus of broken homes and broken lives. The reek of blood and decay stained their uniforms, poisoned the air. But it didn’t matter, for a few minutes it just didn’t matter, because the two men who rutted and groaned and writhed against each other were alive.

  Chest against panting chest, bodies so close Matt could hardly tell where one ended and the other began, they rocked their hips and clenched their muscles. Just for those few stolen moments they tried to crawl into one another’s skin, to unite, to escape misery and pain and loneliness with a shared taste of ecstasy.

  Matt couldn’t even tell which of them came first.

  Afterward, they leaned shuddering against each other until their hearts and lungs slowed. When they pulled apart, Matt brought his hand to his mouth—fingers and palm sticky with their spend—and slowly, deliberately, licked it clean. Joseph watched, wide-eyed.

  They didn’t speak as they tucked themselves back into their pants and refastened everything. Joseph led them out of the tiny street and back to the ruined church. He pulled out a cigarette and a lighter and took a few puffs, then picked up his helmet and set it on his head. He slung his rifle strap over his shoulder. “I gotta wake up now,” he said.

  “I don’t. I can… I can stay here and maybe if something… if you—”

  Joseph shook his head. “Nah. You belong back with the palm trees and Rolls Royces and sandy beaches. You don’t belong here.”

  Matt knew he was right, but still he said, “Neither do you.”

  A tiny curl of lips, just the ghost of a smile. “So next time we do this, I’ll dream us in California, okay?”

  MATT woke up with the taste of ashes in his mouth and the scent of smoke on his skin. Dried semen flaked on his belly and in his pubic hair, making him itch. And when he padded into the bathroom to shower it all away, he caught a glimpse of his naked self in the mirror, and there were fingerprint-shaped bruises on his hips.

  He brooded over that for a few days.

  His mother was on one of her cruises, seven days of all-you-can-eat and origami towels on the bed and the company of her best friend, who shared her affinity for the seven seas. She called Matt the day after she returned and told him about how she’d parasailed in Cabo and bought earrings in Puerto Vallarta and even considered smuggling an extra bottle of Don Julio back into the States but chickened out.

  “That’s good, Mom, ’cause if you end up in a Mexican jail, I’m not bailing you out.”

  “Pfft. I’d only have to pay a fine.” She sounded happy, relaxed. “How are you doing, honey?”

  “I’m good. Hey Mom? Is there, um, any history of mental illness in the family?”

  Maybe it was the lingering effects of the margaritas, but she wasn’t alarmed. “Not really. Even your father’s side has their feet pretty firmly on the ground. Why? Were you planning a psychotic break?”

  “I hope not. But… no delusions?” No dreams so real the dreamer wakes up sticky and sore?

  “Mmm, no. Your father thought he could make a fortune in the stock market, but I think that was just stupidity, not insanity. Why the sudden concern with mental health, Matty?”

  “It’s nothing. I just… I had a couple of weird dreams with Aunt Violent in them—uh, Violet—and—”

  But his mother was laughing. “That was her nickname when she was a girl. Did she tell you that? All her brothers and cousins used to call her that. She said it used to drive her to distraction.”

  “Oh.” He glanced across the room toward the bookshelf. “Just a slip of the tongue, I guess.”

  “Well, maybe she wouldn’t have minded if you’d called her that. You were her favorite relative—she told me so herself. ‘Such a nice boy. So sweet and thoughtful.’”

  “That’s great, Mom. Nothing a guy likes to hear more than that the geriatric crowd thinks he’s nice.”

  She made an impatient little noise, and he smiled, picturing the exact look of fond irritation she’d have on her face. Nobody else in the whole world made that face at him. “Don’t be a brat,” she said. “She cared about you. Even when she was so sick, there at the end, she was worried about you. You needed someone to love, she said.”

  “Least she didn’t try to fix me up with Carl the gardener again.”

  He could tell when his mother laughed despite herself. “That really was awful, wasn’t it? I’m sorry, honey. We were trying to be helpful and supportive.”

  “I know. Thanks. I guess.”

  “Well, you should probably be thankful that Aunt Violet was bedridden at the end. She told me she planned to make sure you found the right man. Not that Brandon.”

  “Brandon’s ancient history,” he said, but his voice sounded far away, like it was someone else’s. “Hey Mom? I gotta go, okay?”

  “Impending hallucination?”

  “Maybe. Aren’t you worried about me?”

  “You’re an artist, dear. You’ve always had an active imagination. I’m not worried.”

  After the call disconnected, Matt spent several minutes standing in the middle of his living room, which seemed to be pitching from side to side, as if he were on his mother’s cruise ship during a storm. “Aunt Violent,” he finally whispered. Then he made his way—carefully—across the room and pulled the photo album from the shelf. He took the book to his drafting table and opened it to the only page that mattered. There was Joseph, young and serious in his brand-new uniform. Did he look like a guy who’d had sex in a shed a few days earlier? Matt couldn’t tell.

  He sat down and picked up a pencil, then opened his sketchbook to a blank page. He did a lot of his work on computers, of course, but he always began a project with old-fashioned graphite and wood pulp. His muse seemed to like that better.

  He didn’t have to look at the photo to draw the sharp cheekbones and square jaw, the slightly crooked nose, the full lips. In any case, the photo was no longer quite right, and the Joseph that he created on paper had long dirty hair and a grime-smudged face. He had tired circles under his eyes and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. His uniform had long since lost its pleats, and those smudges on his chest and legs—smudges formed by the edge of Matt’s pencil—they might have been mud or might have been something worse.

  But this Joseph wasn’t leaning up against a wrecked church. Instead, he sat on an Ikea couch in an Oakland apartment, with a shelf full of art books behind him and a bottle of Fat Tire in his hand. And despite the cigarette, his lips were slightly curled. Just the beginning of a smile, as if he were in the process of discovering something
wonderful.

  Matt put the pencil down and went to bed.

  MATT had never been a fan of war movies, but Brandon had once talked him into watching Saving Private Ryan on DVD. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and a forty-inch flat-screen TV had done nothing to prepare him for waves that washed red on the long beach, or the smell of gasoline and hot metal and thick smoke, or the roaring of engines and shouting of men, the startling bursts of machine guns and artillery. And the bodies that were slumped on the sand or floating in the shallows, those weren’t extras who would get up at the end of the day and change back to jeans and T-shirts and drive home for dinner; they were real people, real corpses.

  He stumbled unevenly across the damp beach, the sand giving beneath his boots. He suspected he should probably find some kind of shelter to cower behind, to avoid the flying bullets and shrieking shells, but that would only slow him down, and he didn’t know how long he had.

  His heart stuttered in his chest when he came across a broad-shouldered man sprawled prone on the sand, facedown in a puddle, dark hair flecked with debris. The man’s hands were trapped under his torso and his uniform was wet. He still wore a life belt around his waist—little good it had done him—and his gun was lying at his side. But when Matt gently turned the body over, the sightless eyes were brown instead of blue, the face unfamiliar.

  Matt’s relief left him feeling light-headed and guilty. This dead man was someone’s son. Maybe a brother, a lover, a father. He’d never again laugh over a dirty joke or listen to a baseball game, get sweaty mowing the lawn, whisper in his girl’s ear. Thousands of miles away, people’s lives were going to be shattered when they learned of his death, and then he’d be just another fading photo. But he wasn’t Joseph, and so Matt was glad.

  He couldn’t tell how long he searched—it seemed like forever—and still the battle raged around him and men died. Nobody paid him any attention, but he guessed that under the circumstances, anyone who wasn’t trying to kill you or didn’t need to be killed by you didn’t much matter.

  Eventually he found his way to a rough field hospital, up where the sand turned to small stones. A few small tents had been erected, but most of the patients seemed to be arranged on the ground outside. The stink here was terrible—blood and piss and shit and scorched flesh—and the sounds even worse: moans, screams, sobs, pleas.

  When Matt finally found the object of his search, he collapsed to his knees.

  Joseph was lying on a stretcher. Someone had wrapped cloth around his leg and ripped open his shirt to bandage the mess there, but dark blood had already saturated the white gauze and nobody was tending to him. The experienced medics must have abandoned him in favor of patients they might actually have some hope of saving.

  Joseph smiled up at Matt, red staining his teeth. “Was thinking… of you,” he said in a voice as thin and fragile as tissue paper. Every rattling breath was clearly a great effort.

  “Jojo,” Matt groaned and moved a lock of hair from his lover’s face.

  “It’s okay… doesn’t hurt. Can’t… feel anything.”

  Matt’s eyes burned, and his throat clenched with the effort not to cry. He looked at the awkward way Joseph’s unmoving hands were curled and decided to keep touching Joseph’s face, tiny little strokes of his fingertips, as if they could smooth injuries away. “God, Jojo.”

  Joseph was still smiling. “Finally… made it to… the beach…. But it’s still… Omaha.” His laugh sounded too much like a death rattle.

  “I love you, Jojo. You know that, don’t you? I don’t know how… how the hell all this…. But I love you.”

  “Good.” Joseph exhaled loudly and closed his eyes, and for a moment Matt didn’t expect him to inhale again. But he did and his lids fluttered open, his irises so startlingly light against the dirt and blood on his skin. “Me too…. Good old… Violent.”

  When you’re dying on a cold beach very far from home, the impossible becomes fully plausible. And when it’s the man you love who’s dying right in front of you, you can believe in anything.

  “Violent gave me a present too,” Matt said. “I plan to keep mine.”

  Joseph tried to smile, but his breath caught and his shoulders shuddered. His eyes went very, very wide.

  Matt wound long black hair around his fingers and hung on tight. “Stay with me, Jojo. Stick with me.” He made his voice very firm, as if he were an officer barking commands. “Stick with me.”

  “…’kay…” came the answer, just a whisper of a syllable on his very last breath.

  MATT woke up in his bed in Oakland with hot tears in his eyes. He didn’t want to wake up, not yet; he wanted just a few more moments with his Joseph. Maybe if he burrowed under the covers and—

  A startled shout almost sent him tumbling off the bed.

  Joseph was kneeling on the other side of the mattress, gasping in shock. He wore the tattered, dirty remains of his uniform, but his body was whole. Matt reached out tentatively to touch his chest. Joseph was alive and wonderfully, undeniably real.

  “W-w-what the fuck?” cried Joseph.

  Matt couldn’t find the words to respond, so he simply threw his arms around him and held him close.

  “Is… is this heaven?” Joseph whispered.

  Matt couldn’t help but laugh, remembering that scene in Field of Dreams. “No. It’s California.” God, Joseph was so solid in his embrace, so warm and good.

  “But… I was…. How…?”

  How could Matt explain when he really didn’t understand himself? “I love you, and Aunt Violent gave us a present, and… and you’re safe now. ’Cause I’m not letting you go.”

  Maybe Joseph liked that sentiment, because he clutched Matt just as hard as Matt held him and he hid his face against Matt’s neck. He was crying, but then so was Matt, and that was all right. It was a good time for tears.

  When their sobs died down, they pulled apart, and Matt rubbed a little at the tearstains on Joseph’s cheek.

  “Is this…. Am I dreaming?” Joseph asked, his gaze darting around Matt’s bedroom, taking in the TV screen, the iPhone dock with the digital clock, the framed prints of some of Matt’s drawings.

  Matt knew there would be long and complicated explanations: to Joseph, to Matt’s mom, to the authorities who issued paperwork, to everyone. He had no idea how he’d get through all of that. And Joseph was going to have a hard road ahead of him, adjusting to the fact that everyone he’d known was long gone, that he was in an unfamiliar city in an unfamiliar time, a time when everyday technology was beyond his wildest imagination. But he had good surprises waiting for him too: his war was over, the bad guys defeated. He had a world of choices ahead of him now, choices he’d never had back on the farm. He could go to college if he wanted to. He could be open about being gay, and while some threats and hatred remained, most people would just take it in stride. And Matt would be there with him the whole time, loving him.

  Maybe Joseph sensed some of what Matt was thinking, because while his eyes remained a little wild, he grabbed Matt’s hand and squeezed it tightly, a hint of a smile beginning to form at the corners of his mouth.

  “No more dreaming now, Jojo,” said Matt with an answering grin. “Thanks to Aunt Violent, we’re finally both wide awake.”

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  About the Author

  KIM FIELDING is very pleased every time someone calls her eclectic. She has migrated back and forth across the western two-thirds of the United States and currently lives in California, where she long ago ran out of bookshelf space. She’s a university professor who dreams of being able to travel and write full-time. She also dreams of having two perfectly behaved children, a husband who isn’t obsessed with football, and a house that cleans itself. Some dreams are more easily obtained than others.

  Kim can be found on her blogs:

  http://kfieldingwrites.blogspot.com/

  and

  http://www.goodreads.co
m/author/show/4105707.Kim_Fielding/blog

  and on Facebook:

  http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Kim-Fielding/286938444652579.

  Her e-mail is dephalqu@yahoo.com.

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  Copyright

  Violet’s Present ©Copyright Kim Fielding, 2012

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  4760 Preston Road

  Suite 244-149

  Frisco, TX 75034

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Art by Catt Ford

  This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. This eBook cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this eBook can be shared or reproduced without the express permission of the Publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press at: 4760 Preston Road, Suite 244-149, Frisco, TX 75034 http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  Released in the United States of America

  June 2012

  eBook Edition

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61372-652-5