Work Text:
You know the kid is a faggot the first time he opens his mouth to speak. You can read it all over his sniveling fucking face; you can smell it on him.
He introduces himself, as if you don’t know him by sight. Shane Hollander. Canada’s pride and joy; the teenage prodigy. He’s your age but he looks younger, freckled and acne-scarred with a thick, anxious neediness pouring off him in waves. You can taste it through your mouthful of smoke. It makes you sick, and it makes you angry.
He looks at you with his face all split open and childish and hopeful and you think about how easy it would be to break his nose. To feel the crunch of cartilage beneath your knuckles. He wouldn’t see it coming; he still thinks that you want to be his friend. He still thinks that the world wants to be his friend.
You don’t hit him, and you don’t shake his hand.
Not because he’s better on the ice than you, because he isn’t, and you see him realize it, sweating behind his helmet, mouth flapping like a fish. It’s because his parents are there in the bleachers, his mother model-thin and fuckable, his father misty-eyed and loving, and you know that he knows that they know that he’s doing his best out there regardless of how it all goes down, and that afterwards they’ll hug him and tell him how proud they are of him, their little boy, their angel.
Because as you watch him cut a long arc across the left wing he meets your eye and gives you a tight little smile, teeth straight and fucking Colombian white, thousands of dollars of orthodontia crammed into that bow shaped mouth, a mouth like a fucking girls’. He’s all healthy and solid and corn-fed, fucking syrup-fed, and you look at him and you know he’s never lost anything and he’s never, for a moment, gone without.
He had this world handed to him, silver fucking spoon and platter, and he’s still so nervous, and you’re still dragging him up and down the ice, and he’s still looking at you like you’re going to be his friend.
It makes you sick, and it makes you angry.
—
Two things happen to you the year you turn twelve. Your mother kills herself; you touch a girl for the first time. You know there’s something wrong inside you because these events somehow twist themselves together into one rotten living thing that sticks in your ribs. You see white pills and yellow vomit behind your eyelids when you fuck. The missing and the wanting feel the same, feverish and stomach-turning.
You have bad dreams. You watch weird porn. At fifteen you tell Svetlana that you like boys too and she laughs and says yeah, no shit. You knock her up and you sit in an awful fluorescent waiting room while she clings to your arm and afterwards you watch her sleep fitfully, her bony hands folded neatly over her empty stomach. In a different life you would have married her; in this one, you snort a rail off of your coach’s son’s hipbone. You crack a rib. You hold your newborn niece in your hands. You come to America. You learn the language. You win, and you keep winning.
You look at Hollander and you know that he will never touch a dead body. (She was still warm when you found her. She could have been sleeping.) He will never be hit across the face by his father, then hit again for flinching. He will never take ecstasy and wake up in a snowbank without a wallet or a phone. He will never admit what he is because he will never be honest with himself. He will never not be afraid.
It makes you sick, and it makes you hungry.
—
You want him in the way a wolf wants a lame rabbit; not because it’s satisfying, but because it’s easy. You know exactly how he’ll crumple. How he’ll say no without meaning it.
You know his type. Obsessive. Ritualistic. Calorie counter. Coconut water and himalayan sea salt and magnesium and making himself throw up before weigh-ins. Five hours a day in the gym working on a body that nobody ever sees. You know he’s never had his cock sucked. Probably never been kissed with tongue. Never loosened up a day in his life and now it’s everybody else’s problem, now it’s your problem, because you have to prize him open and teach him things about himself that he should already know and you have to listen to him whine and balk and sniffle while you do it.
It’s a favor. You’re putting him out of his misery. His leg is broken and he’s starving to death in the forest and you’re clamping down on his carotid and he’ll thank you for it, someday.
—
You can feel his eyes on you in the showers. You can feel his nervousness filling the whole room, echoing off the fucking walls. It irritates you, and it sets your teeth on edge. Your whole body hurts like a bruise. You’re tired and starving and dying for a smoke and instead of going up to your room to jack off and fall into bed and sleep for sixteen hours you’re crowding Shane Hollander back against cold ceramic while he gapes and blinks and stutters and shoves you weakly in the chest.
“What the fuck? What the fuck are you doing?” His voice is fever-pitched and grating and you push him hard, his firm shoulder bouncing off the tile.
“What does it look like I am doing?”
“Get off of me, you fucking– freak.”
“You are hard,” you note casually, sociably. His hand flies down to cover himself, fingers twitching, skin bright and blotchy. He has a nice little dick, red, cut, an easy mouthful. Cute.
“That’s not– I don’t– I’m not–”
“Not what? Not gay?”
“Not fucking doing this with you,” he deflects, not quickly enough. You see something pass over his face, something like terror.
“Doing what?”
“Having this fucking conversation.”
“Such a mouth on you, eh, mama’s boy?” Such a mouth – so full, so fucking red, pursed into a quivering pout. You want those lips wrapped around you. You want him until he chokes, gags, until he fucking pukes. You want him with tears on his face and his cock in his fist. You want him bleeding.
His eyes keep flicking back to the door. So on guard, so afraid. You grab him by the chin, hard. His skin is a hundred million degrees and you burn up all over while holding him in your palm.
“Stop this. Look at me.”
He does. Shaking like a leaf, breath coming in ragged little bursts, he looks at you, eyes narrowed and wet and hateful. It makes your cock throb.
“Don’t fucking touch me.” He’s speaking very quietly. As if that gives it any weight. As if it’ll convince you.
He moves to shoulder past you; you grab him by the wrist and wrench his arm back, pinning him. He’s strong but you’re stronger. You both know this.
His dick is trapped against your thigh. You feel it jump. You grin at him toothily; you lick your lips. He’s snarling, beautiful, on the verge of tears. You drag the flat of your tongue up his neck and feel him tremble. His breaths come loud and fast and hot against your cheek. Rivulets of water course down his face. His pupils are blown.
“You want me,” you say.
“I fucking hate you.”
“Yah, OK. But you want me.”
“I fucking don’t.”
“Play with your cock,” you say. His shoulders jump up around his ears when he gasps.
“Fuck you.”
“Show me how you do after your games.” You nip at his neck. “Does it turn you on? All those men around you? All sweating?”
His hips jerk unconsciously. You feel the slick catch of his cockhead against your skin. You feel his heartbeat pounding in his wrist.
“Turns me on,” you continue, dropping a heavy hand on his hip. “Feeling you rub your dick on me.”
His eyes glaze and his breath catches in a whine and you know you have him, right where you want him.
“Can you— fucking—” His lips are pulled back over his teeth like a wincing dog, like he’s in pain, in pain because he needs it so badly, needs you so badly.
“OK. Say it and I will.”
“Say what, asshole.”
“Tell me. Tell me you are faggot.”
“N— no. Fuck you.”
“Maybe I have wrong idea then.” You let go of him. He doesn't swing at you. He doesn’t move a muscle. “Goodnight, Hollander.”
You turn the water off; you reach for your towel; you call his bluff.
“Wait.”
You grin at the wall. You spin slowly on your heel to face him, to look him up and down, freckles standing out on his red face, muscles twitching in his hairless stomach.
“Yes?”
“You’re right, okay? You’re … right.”
“Right about?”
“Rozanov.” He’s looking at you with this frightened plaintive need written all over him. You’re so hard it’s terrible. “Please.”
“Please, what?”
You watch his throat work to swallow, Adam's apple lurching hard. You think he’s about to cry.
“I don’t– I can’t–” He drops his chin to his chest. “Don’t make me say it. Please.”
He looks so pathetic, so fucking sad, that all you can do is concede. You drop the towel; you shoulder him back beneath the weak spray of the shower and bite his earlobe. His moan shakes through you. He clutches at your ribs, hesitant fingers digging in like he’s afraid he’ll do it wrong, You thought it would feel good, breaking him down. You thought it would feel like another victory, but your stomach hurts, and his eyes are red and watering.
You can’t look at his face so you get a hand on his shoulder and push him down. He goes easily, thighs tensing and straining as his knees hit dirty tile. You can smell his shampoo, girly and herbal; of course he doesn’t use the shit they put in the locker rooms.
“I’ve never–” he mumbles. You hook a thumb in his plush mouth so you don’t have to hear him finish the sentence. It’s so fucking soft. Soft and warm and wet as any pussy you’ve ever felt. You feel out the ridges of his molars; you feel him moan. He grabs at your thighs, hands fisting and searching. You pull your thumb out with a lewd pop and see the string of saliva that trails with it, the gloss it puts on his lips.
He’s desperate and starving so you feed him your cock, one inch, two. It feels good, it feels better than it has any right to, and your head falls back against the tile despite yourself. You get a hand in his wet hair and pull. He sighs and keens and takes you further. You feel when you hit the back of his soft palate; you feel him gag, tightening around you. You look down to see the tears in his eyes, the spit on his chin. You roll your hips. He retches and shivers and keeps going.
You won’t last and you know it, and you cuff him around the skull as a warning. He looks up at you with those dark eyes and nods and puts his tongue out flat like an offering. You don’t come in his mouth. You finish on his face, his neck, just to see him wince, just to see him streaked in the evidence of what he is, what he’s done.
“Pretty,” you tell him. He blinks hard and fast. You’re so tired you might die.
He stands up shakily, legs buckling like a newborn foal. He drags a hand over his face, shakes what comes away down the drain with an ugly splat. You jerk him off with his eyes crushed closed and his nails digging half-moons into your forearm. It takes a minute, tops. He makes an awful wet sound in his throat when he comes, his forehead knocking against your shoulder.
The only noise in the room is the now-cold trickle of the shower and the layered cacophony of breaths. You give him a stilted little pat on the back because it seems like the thing to do and he wrenches away from you so fast that he almost falls. There are tears coursing silently down his face. He looks so mad. He looks like he wants to kill you.
Still, you’re not expecting it when he shoves you, so it knocks you off balance and sends you stumbling backwards.
“Fuck you, Rozanov.” He’s breathing so hard, so fast, red spots burning in his cheeks, snot running out of his nose.
“Already did,” you spit. You would hit him back if you had anything left. Instead, you dress robotically, clothes clinging to your still-wet skin. You don’t look at him. You ignore his muffled sobs. You walk back up to your room, legs like lead in the concrete stairwell, head pounding so badly that you can barely see. You vomit in the bathroom sink. You think of Hollander’s body under your hands, of his empty eyes, of the way he shook, of the way he said your name.
It makes you sick.