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i did not forgive them
There's always some truth and some exaggeration to feelings.
Charles feels how his ribcage is concaved like the inside of a bowl, hears the steady drip of a leaking faucet echoing hollowly. The alcohol is going down all wrong, the skin behind his ears is melting and one of his bracelets keeps snagging on a scab on his wristbone.
The synth of the bass creates pitfalls for his desires to fall into, easy and familiar, but Charles’ vision rebels and tumbles instead in the direction of Max.
His vision flickers back to the Styrian hills like it always has in the past months. It’s like a curtain shutters before his eyes and everything around him swells and his palms become sticky with leftover rage. Then the tunnel vision falls down and Charles can see a titillating posture, a grating laugh; bloodied knuckles around a tall glass, around the curve of a wheel.
Charle’s relationship with forgiveness is almost as fickle as his grasp on people throughout his life. It almost seems fitting that they are entwined so viscerally. He’s been told that forgiveness is unique to the individual, that there isn’t really a set emotional process you need to overcome and come on top of. He doesn’t know what forgiveness entails for him – he doesn’t know if he has been forgiven, he doesn’t know if he has forgiven. Maybe because it’s a continuous process – wake up, forcefully shed the filmy layer of dust and grief that has stuck to your skin during the night, eat, race, sleep. Repeat.
Austria comes and goes but Charles stays. He blinks and suddenly, he is surrounded by the last dregs of summer, people grazing the fringes of his space like vestiges. The only steady, unblinking thing is Max.
He feels like one day he has put this thing behind them, but another it has a vice-like grip on his insides again. One day he is the lighthouse and one day he is the sea out for blood.
Sometimes, he may become the shore, letting waves crash and crash onto him until he erodes in an act of self-admonishment. Sometimes, he finds himself victim to his feelings of inferiority, of mortality, and finds himself willing to forgive in order to mend, to find stability, to not have to face the empty space in front of him.
But in this case, he sees the sunkissed sheen of Max’s skin and Charles wants to tear him asunder, dig his thumbs into the notches of his clavicle and pull him apart until all the pretend stitches they share amongst the two of them spool apart at their feet. He wants to dig his fingers under bone until he can rewire Max in a way that only Charles will know how to push, until he finds a way to make Max forget how to pull Charles in return.
“Busy night?” Max’s too hearty voice asks too close for comfort.
Charles doesn’t quite shake the grime off of him. He isn’t ready to let go just yet.
“Quite calm, actually,” he lies through his teeth.
“Really?” Max’s voice pitches up. His eyes do a quick once over, dragging like sandpaper over Charles’ skin, and the corners of his mouth twitch upwards. “Why do you look so troubled then?”
“Maybe because you’re here troubling me.”
“Can you blame me?” Max pushes further into his personal space under the pretence of putting his glass on the bartop behind Charles. His arms box him in, the inside of his biceps dragging across the damp skin on Charles’ shoulders and he would’ve felt claustrophobic if he wasn’t used to breathing inside a cage. Sandalwood and gasoline. “You’re too easy.”
“Stop implying things you know jack shit about.”
“Why?” Max hooks a finger in one of Charles’ belt loops and twists it around. Pulls and lets their knees knock into each other. “Does it make you wanna prove me wrong?”
Max’s light sage shirt strains across his chest and he has someone else’s tie across his shoulders like a parody of a boa. Charles grips the end of it until his fingers turn white, winds it around his fist and rests it there; doesn’t pull because he has no grasp over anything yet.
“What are you doing?” A veiled provocation.
“Nothing,” Charles answers automatically, half-present, eyes zeroed onto the topography of Max’s throat, the slight shifts of muscles under skin like currents.
“It doesn’t feel like nothing.”
Charles licks his lips and gets a grasp on himself, pulling himself closer with practised nonchalance. “What does it feel like?” Charles asks just for show, the words trickling like an oil spill in the curve between shoulder and neck.
“Like you want to tear me apart,” says Max and his voice pitches downwards, trying to keep this dirty little secret within the confines of their bodies.
Charles laughs breathlessly. “Maybe we might finally agree on something.”
“And what exactly are we agreeing on?” Max asks and slots a thumb under Charles’ chin, applying pressure and trying to catch his gaze with his own, red phosphorus and a matchstick.
Charles dislodges the unwanted finger with a flick of his head and looks up on his own, leaning backwards and away. He sees Max chase subconsciously after him and he almost smiles. “That you need to compensate for bothering me.”
“Only for that?”
“Let’s start with something you can actually manage first.”
Max’s eyes narrow imperceptibly and there’s this bubbling hysteria coating Charles’ insides like tar, swelling at the back of his throat like a sore. He feels salt coat his palms and he is out for anything else but self-sacrifice. He wants to weave his fingers into Max’s belt loops and claim, take hold of Max’s heartstrings and pull them taut until they snap like the veins of a piano, like branches, like everything they could’ve been if they were a bit less addicted to destroying each other.
Austria may have pulled the stitches of a festering wound apart, but what Max did and didn’t do opened a chasm somewhere between the third and fourth rib that Charles doesn’t, can’t forgive him for. Because now, rather than moving on, Charles wants – he wants to dig, he wants to desecrate, he wants to roll bronzed flesh between his teeth. He wants to suffer and feel vindicated for it.
He could go home. Or he could finally see what it takes to get Max to shut his mouth.
“Where are we going?” Max asks almost as if he could pinpoint the coordinates of the precipice in Charles’ eyes. Instead of an answer, Charles loops the tie across Max’s neck until it resembles a leash and pulls him into the half-light.
Later, when he has Max’s mouth on him, Charles briefly entertains the notion of forgiveness with hands landlocking fistfuls of dirty blonde hair. With his knees intact and his back sinking into the fogged-up mirror, he almost feels like he has taken back control. There isn’t an empty space in front of him and he almost dulls the angle of his shoulders, the blade of his bloodlust. He sees stars in front of his eyes and remembers indulgence is exposure too.
The gnawing hole begs to be fed nonetheless.
Charles cannot forgive him for that.
—
i still can't remember
Max can’t tell exactly how it started, but he could tell where they were most likely headed towards.
Another few months and everything in between that finds them like this – splayed over the marble tiles and the glass railings of a rooftop, limbs contorted unwisely and numb from the alcohol. They have abandoned their shoes and their pant legs are soaked from dipping their shins into the pool, the fabric now dragging heavily across the sensitive skin of Max’s ankles. The sounds from the party that a friend of a friend of a friend is hosting sound so distorted that Max is almost convinced it’s his own head that was actually submerged underwater.
Their drinks are long gone, downed and forgotten about, and his phone is most likely dead. Max is busy peeling the label of his empty beer bottle, only succeeding in getting uneven chunks soaked with condensation under his nails, when Charles raises a hand to rub at the back of his neck for the sixth time in the past—Max has no idea how much time has passed. This time he scratches angrily across his nape, further tenderizing the skin there into raw meat. His elbow bumps into the bony peak of Max’s shoulder again and again and the bone there feels whittled.
“You good?” Max can’t help but nag him.
When Charles gets drunk he starts vibrating at a frequency that his body can’t keep up with, always on the move, always tearing clothes at the seams and clawing at skin, searching for something, anything. Max is the complete opposite – lethargic or simply just settled, finally given the opportunity to exist in the present rather than feel things in passing. He lets himself float, lets himself be desecrated when he looks at Charles’ eyes in the darkness and only sees the colour of soil over a grave.
There’s intimacy in inevitability.
“No, forgot to take the tag off this stupid shirt. It’s been bothering me the whole fucking night,” he brings his hand up again, reconsiders and balls it into a fist on top of his thigh. “Do you have a light?”
“I don’t smoke.”
Charles rolls his eyes. “No shit. Worth a try though.”
Max’s head is no more muddled than usual when he leaves the beer bottle to clatter noisily to the ground and swings a leg over in a foxlike arc to straddle Charles’ indecently spread legs. The bottle rolls somewhere close to the railing and the half-unwound label snags on the floor.
“Can I help you?” Charles asks haughtily, but his fingers find their way to the meat of Max’s thighs. Max rolls through the motions with them, finding his balance and settling in more comfortably. Charles’ hands aren’t applying any tension, just resting there, but Max can feel how they are slick with intentions.
“No, but you can help yourself,” Max answers and takes the back collar of the shirt between his fingers, twists and rolls it through just to make the scratchy paper drag across different parts of Charles’ skin. “Just take it off.”
“Well, now that you’ve suggested it I don’t want to.”
“You’re so fucking difficult,” Max snickers but his laugh catches onto the protruding edge of derision.
“As if you’re that fucking easy,” Charles spits out like an accusation, like a lamentation. He rolls his shoulders like he wants to scratch between his shoulder blades again but he doesn’t take his hands off of Max’s thighs.
Max tries to not rise to the bait. “I’m easy where it matters,” he corrects and puts a finger to Charles’ lips. He feels them twitch beneath it, feel them part infinitesimally like a reflex. Easy and reliable. Max has the impulse to push on Charles’ tongue until he swallows it and all the words stored as ammunition there.
Charles bares his teeth and almost manages to sink them into Max’s finger if he hadn’t moved fast enough. “More like you’re easy when it suits you.”
“And you’re not?”
It’s them against the dangerous tilt of the world, the few visible stars in the sky falling from under each other until they burn into ashes. It’s them against each other, the horizon and the angle of their unspoken words sharp and digging into the soft flesh under Max’s ribcage. He runs his tongue over the backs of his teeth and tastes scorched earth.
“You know,” Max starts and he doesn’t know where he is going with this. He leans forward, following the curve of their own gravitational field, and Charles’ hands glide up until they encircle his waist, responsive and helplessly eager. “I think I’m falling in love with you,” ends up slipping from his lips with a surprising amount of calculation for how faded he feels.
It’s cruel and it strips Charles bare as much as it does Max. He chooses to believe that his knife is blunt, but at the end of the day, a blade remains a blade. He looks into Charles’ eyes and Max swears they flash red for a second.
He actively feels Charles’ hands dig into his hipbones, pressing like he’s trying to rearrange the viscera there. Max feels the suppressed violence in his gut – both Charles’ and his own. There are going to be traces of lavender thumbprints on his skin tomorrow, radioactive and commemorative.
“Is that a threat?” Charles’ voice doesn’t waver and neither does his grip. If he didn’t know him, Max’s brain would’ve scrambled from the mixed signals.
Max comes even closer, presser even further into the bruising shackles of Charles’ hands. “Don’t tell me you feel threatened by something that we both know was inevitable,” he taunts and cocks his head to the side.
“What do you want me to say to that?” Charles almost spits from under his gritted teeth and there it is – the waver, the leak.
Max finds it amusing that Charles tries so hard to resist. They are both guilty of falling way too easily into each other like they are starved for time and meaning, but Charles is usually the first one to fall into their back-and-forths like it’s a game where he needs a head start. It’s a classic case of dissonance between words and actions and overcompensating as a result.
“You don’t need to say anything,” Max stifles his laugh by trying to pierce the tip of his tongue with his right canine. Their exhales touch and melt into one another, their lips separated by mere whispers of distance. The way in which one corner of his mouth lifts up tells the unsaid I already know cocked like a gun at the back of Max’s mouth.
Charles sees this little mercy and even the alcohol isn’t enough to mellow the way his jaw clicks out of place. Max hears his own laughter before he feels it.
It’s a win and the familiar shape of it fits like a glove, smears gold on his gums, but lately, it keeps bringing an acrid aftertaste like an unwelcome guest. And what is this bitterness born out of? The need for more? Something as simple as greed, lascivious and terminal?
Max traces the edges of it and feels a double-edged sword with both estuaries pointed at his gut. He lingers on the edge of it just like he lingers on the sharp points of Charles’ jaw. He isn’t the only one who has invited the bitterness into the space between them but he willingly plunged into its jaws with the knowledge that he will never come out alive. Blood beads on his fingertips and he smears it around, claiming.
And at some point, the bitterness started turning into a thorny kind of resignation.
It isn’t quite surrender that spills from Charles’ eyes; it never will be, but it's something close enough to it. His grip on Max’s waist doesn’t falter but his fingers start drawing little circles around Max’s hipbones, tension seeping off of them bit by bit. Conversely, Max’s breath falters.
“How long do you think it would take for us to start lying to each other?” Charles asks without looking at him.
Max laughs, surprised and carefree as a consequence. “Why the hell would we lie to each other?”
They’ve already seen each other at their ugliest, at their barest. Indulging, burning out and running the other way is a well-known triage, not something to be afraid of. Their touches are like an isotope created in the dark and its half-life lasts only until dawn.
Charles doesn’t say anything and it leaves claw marks in his wake. Max closes the distance between them instead with a quiet sort of desperation, a simple and well-worn act.
I don’t remember why I hate you, Max thinks and feels the chlorine and the remnants of wet paper coagulate under his nails. I still don’t remember why I love you follows like a confession devoid of shame and filled to the brink with resignation. He kisses Charles and Charles kisses back and Max wishes that was all there was to it.
—
i was lying
Charles is used to the jarring sensation of his back being pushed against a metaphorical wall, a fogged-up mirror, an unforgiving mattress that cradles the shape of it for a night. The sheets are too scratchy and he feels more than sees the imprint of stale neon-coloured snapdragons on the back of his eyelids when he looks at Max and senses something that should’ve stayed a mirage.
This isn’t Charles being kind to himself but sometimes it’s too difficult to even be reasonable with himself. He inhales and feels smoke behind his eyes, feels his pant legs gradually getting soaked with chlorine-tinted water where they hang off the bed.
Charles figures out way too late that this push and pull is something that cannot be uprooted or rewired; it has become a stone fit for weathering, their indulgence in it an act of haloclasty. Now, his heart is perforated like a honeycomb, the gnarly viscera of his feelings seeping out like bubbling acid. And Charles is sick enough with it to welcome this, wants the ground from under their feet to melt away until they are falling even further, even deeper, even lower.
Their clasped hands join as one, pressed against both of their clavicles like a flower between the pages of a book, revered and still constricted. Hurt in the pursuit of beauty, hurt in a cage of misplaced sentimentality.
Martyrdom is not holy in and of itself – it has to be made holy. And Charles is scooping his heart out at the altar not to give himself over, but to seek hurt and retribution; to feel someone else hammer the nails into his wrists and feel justified to scream until he is pure again.
“Charles,” Max whispers with an urgency incongruous with the soft light threatening to spill over from the window. The shape that his name takes in Max’s mouth sounds almost unwelcome outside of the darkness they have curated, almost like it’s painful to say and a tendril of twisted satisfaction slithers across Charles’ throat. Something more tender crawls across his temples.
If they keep leaving does that mean they are not in love?
Would that be so bad?
Dawn begins staining the corners of the room like a reminder.
“Just one more kiss,” Charles lies and the answer to his prayer is an echo.
—
Max looks at the faint outline of them transcribed against the window, pinched between the harsh overhead light and the persistent tendrils of dawn. The rising sun feels almost ominous – another day of unresolved touches, another night cut too short before it risks becoming tender past a point of no return.
People need a shovel or a trophy to love him and Max has made peace with that in the same way he has made peace with the fact that he is inexplicably linked to a festering wound. It’s an innate reflex to look for comfort and Max is too tired to admonish himself every time he reaches over the fence and gets burned from the borrowed warmth. In this life, they have to sell their souls to people who will never take responsibility for how they will inevitably twist them. They are only left with the byproducts of dreams – dangerous highs, dangerous lows, and this perennial fucking hunger.
To keep love around, to keep even the pretend of it afloat, they both need to be winning and Max knows that in this sport, in this calling they have chosen and been chosen for, that is as close to impossible as it gets.
If he plunges his hands into everything they have managed to demolish between each other, he will be able to extrude the con, the hint and the poison. Healer and executioner, patient zero and right-hand-man, he wouldn’t know which is which and Max will swallow them all anyways, will spill the aftertaste between two gaping jaws and two gaping hearts.
Wandering fingertips going nowhere, open mouths spilling only distilled air between each other, calcified touches that are too tender for what they are, what they should be—
“Max,” Charles breaths out and the name folds in on itself, catching on the end of Charles’ trachea like the moans Max coaxes out of him with their particular brand of violence-turned-care. They stick to Max’s skin like bruises.
No one has said Max’s name like it’s something sweet for the taking. Light on the exhale, heavy on their shoulders. Max puts a hand on Charles' neck and digs his thumb into the dip of his collarbone, presses and tries to breathe through it.
You’re the only one who truly understands me becomes both a blessing and a curse. Max feels the warmth of Charles’ fingers sneaking around his waist, feels the coldness of his touch under his skin. Too much proximity, too much distance.
His jaw clicks in and out of place when he comes up for air and smiles at Charles.
“Just one more kiss,” he echoes with half a mind and half a heart.