Free Out of the Blues by Mercy Celeste

touch him.
    I didn’t. I sat down on the legless sofa and sprawled. Using the floor as a table I watched Mason dance and wondered if he was doing that on purpose. Seducing me. He looked up at the dim light in the high ceiling and I saw the shimmer of old grief in his eyes.
    “I found him, you know,” he said softly when the first song was over. “Harper stayed for cheer practice. I came home and he was just sitting in that chair.” He pointed to a recliner over by the fireplace. “He looked like he was asleep. This record was in the stereo. It was the one he released a year or so after he married Arden.” He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. That would have been around seven maybe eight years ago if I remembered correctly. “He was diagnosed with colon cancer and opted not to do anything about it. He didn’t tell anyone. He let his body consume him and neither one of us paid enough attention to know he was dying.”
    “No wonder you never came back,” I said because there were places I could never go back to. Hell, I was living in a house that hurt me to even look at, but I couldn’t sell it because I’d lose the only link I had left with my mother. I picked the bottle up and drained it, finding what was left of the alcohol in the dregs at the bottom.
    “That and a few other reasons.” He stopped swaying to the music and came over to sprawl on the sofa with me, his legs eating up more of the hardwood floor than mine did. He let out a long sigh as a blast of wind hit the side of the house. The electricity shimmered and winked. “We should go back before this storm really gets going.”
    “We should,” I agreed. I wanted one more of the horse piss beers before I braved the rain. He didn’t move. I didn’t either.
    I leaned my head on the back of the sofa and listened to the music. Letting my demons out would be a mistake. I was already walking the perimeter of the cage playing with the lock.
    “Do you want to fuck me?”
    I choked on my tongue at the question. He sounded bored. It sounded put on, his boredom, his indifference.
    “No.” I didn’t lie. I didn’t want to fuck him. I wanted him to bend me over the arm of the sofa and hold me down and make me sweat out all of my demons.
    “Okay,” he said. He sounded…indifferent. Completely indifferent, as if it didn’t matter if I did. Would he let me if I’d said yes?
    “I wouldn’t have let you.” He shifted on the sofa and I had to fight not to react when his head landed on my thigh.
    “I guess that answers your question, so why ask?” I waited for him to drape his feet over the arm of the sofa. His shoes hit the floor and I took that as permission to kick mine off.
    “I don’t know.” He looked up at me, his gaze grazing mine and then drifting on to the ceiling and the old Edison style lightbulb that swung high up in the rafters. “I thought that’s what you’d want. I thought that would be your…thing.”
    “Ah,” I said as I kicked off my left shoe. I shifted my hip and bent my leg under his head until he rested on my inner thigh. “No.”
    “Because I’m straight?”
    “Because you’re not willing,” I said, thinking of all the straight guys I’d been with. The ones I’d fucked so I wouldn’t get the reputation for being a fag. Only fags liked to be fucked. I closed my eyes and remembered it was a straight Marine who taught me how to deep throat a dick. Because that’s what we did to get us through. You could fuck any guy you wanted, sometimes unwilling. As long as you didn’t get caught liking it too much and then you were out.
    “You give good head.”
    “Speaking of head, I thought you had to take a piss?” I brushed his hair from his face for something to do. The music was getting to me.
    He laughed, his eyes crinkling at the edges as he did. I was surprised at how deep his voice was when he let his guard down.
    “Guess I forgot.”
    “How do you forget a thing like needing to piss?” I pulled the elastic band