Free The Burning Plain by Michael Nava

heard of them,” he said, and told me their names.
    “The boys were all actors, like you?”
    “Porno stars mostly,” he said. “I found out that these guys basically use porn movies and skin magazines like catalogues. Anyway, the agent picked me. I was with him for a while, then with the director. After that, there were other people. I didn’t ask for money at first because I still thought I was using these guys to help me with my career, but one day I realized, this was my career, so I better get something from it.”
    “How long have you been at it?”
    “Going on three years,” he said. “That’s a long time, but I’m small and I look younger than I am. That kid brother look. Guys go crazy for it.” He smiled. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’re talking like this? Doesn’t it ruin the fantasy?”
    “It’s like you said at the restaurant, Alex, I don’t have to work tonight. You don’t, either.”
    “I’m getting out of the life,” he said quietly.
    “I’ve heard it’s hard,” I replied.
    “You don’t know how hard,” he said. “Most of the guys who hire me hate themselves for being gay, so they take it out on me.”
    I didn’t understand how literally he meant that until I saw the bruises on his back when he removed his shirt. We were in the bedroom. He had stopped me when I reached for the light, and the room was filled with the shadows. I was standing at the foot of the bed. He was facing me with his back to the mirror and I saw in the murky glass the angry slashes across his smooth dark skin. He kicked off his shoes, unbuttoned his pants, removed them, stood naked, approached me.
    “What happened to your back?”
    He stopped, saw Josh’s coat on the bed. “Was this his?”
    “Your back.”
    He slipped the coat on. “Do I look like him?”
    I forgot about the bruises. “Yes.”
    “Come here, Henry,” he said. “Remind me what it feels like when someone loves you.”
    I slipped my hands beneath the coat and stroked his back.
    We made love in darkness and in silence. It had been such a long time for me that at first it felt awkward as if my body was remembering the taboo against the nakedness of another man that had once kept me locked in my desire like a prisoner. I emptied my mind and let myself feel the body beside me, at once familiar and mysterious, mouth, chest, penis, thigh, until touch dissolved the barriers and we were one body. And then I became aware that the damp sheets beneath him smelled of Josh. I said, “Josh?” He opened his eyes and smiled at me. “It is me, Henry,” he said. It was Josh’s voice, and the eyes that held me in their gaze were Josh’s eyes. “How?” I asked. He lifted my hand to his lips, kissed it, and murmured, “This feels so good. Don’t stop.” I buried myself in him, closed my eyes and came in a scalding orgasm, a cauterizing orgasm that closed a wound inside of me. When I opened my eyes again, Alex was looking at me. I lay down beside him, afraid to speak.
    “He was here,” Alex whispered. He touched his chest. “I could feel him here.”
    “I thought I saw him in your eyes.”
    He shivered. “This is so spooky.”
    I held him. “Are you afraid?”
    “Not of Josh,” he said. “Because he’s gone, Henry. This time he’s really gone.”
    “I feel that, too. But you are afraid, aren’t you?”
    “I saw something.”
    “What?”
    “It was like he opened a door as he was leaving,” Alex said. “And just for a second I saw death.”
    “Is this him?” Alex asked. We were in the living room, waiting for his cab. I sat on the couch in a bathrobe, watching him pick up the urn with Josh’s ashes from the mantel. He was jittery, pacing the room, avoiding my eyes.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “‘Joshua Scott Mandel,’” he said, reading the plate on the urn. “Are you going to keep them like this, on your fireplace?”
    “It’s a long story.”
    He returned the urn to its place, glanced at his watch. “Where’s that