Summary: Artem finally gets a glimpse of the real Jeff
Notes:
Sorry for not updating this in months. I got a bad case of writer's block. Then, wouldn't you know it, I listened to Sleep Token again and started getting inspiration!
January is a bad mental health month for me, so I will try my best. In the meantime, here's more.
Milwaukee, 1994
(I was more than just a body in your passenger seat,
And you were more than just somebody I was destined to meet.
I see you go half-blind when you're looking at me,
But I am.
Between the secondhand smoke and the glass on the street,
You gave me nothing whatsoever but a reason to leave.
You say you want me, but you know I'm not what you need,
But I am.)
Now it was Artem’s time for rage.
He chews his cheek until it feels like it might bleed. Bleed like his father’s face did as he lay dying in the rubble.
Was this karma? Had he not paid enough?
They had taken the bus up to Chicago for the weekend. They were in one of its bath houses. Very similar to the banyas he had been to in the old country, with one glaring exception: these seemed designed not for the purposes of health, but clearly as a means to get sex. He was witnessing a bit of the quid pro quo ritual between Jeff and an attractive black man at the moment.
“Relax,” Jeff had said on the ride over, “just let me do the talking. I’ve been doing this for years.”
Artem had mostly sat in a sullen silence, staring out the window. He didn’t know why he kept bothering with this man. He didn’t know why he had come back. They had yet to discuss the incident before his departure, and likely never would. Artem wasn’t sure if he had forgiven him for it, or had just been swept back up into his stupid, blind infatuation. Could he call it love if he had never known the touch of another man? Was that why he stayed?
But then, as Jeff snoozed next to him, and he examined the contours of his face, he thought back to their many conversations.
Jeff was prone to cuddling and opening up about his past post-coitus. Artem assumed that he needed to fill the space lest he feel vulnerable, or he was still riding the high of orgasm. Either way, it was the only time he pulled back the mask.
“When I was a kid, maybe eight years old,” he had explained in hushed tones, his hands absently wandering across Artem’s still-warm skin, “I invented a game.”
“What was it called?”
“Infinity Land. The goal was to get to the middle of a spiral before you could get kicked out.”
Artem had sighed and playfully rolled his eyes. “It’s so obvious, Jeffrey. Such a mirror into your psychology.”
From what he knew about Jeff, his life had been hastily constructed out of a string of abandonments with very little glue of human connection to maintain cohesion. His mother had been institutionalized and taken away from him; later, she had snatched up his brother and left. His father had been a workaholic and had been largely emotionally and physically absent. Artem’s tragedy lay in how he had been very close to his family, and losing all of them had given him trauma; Jeffrey’s, rather, originated from all his loved ones being beyond his reach. Even his beloved grandmother had never met the full him, only known him closeted. He doubted she would take it well. He had only had some short, stilted conversations with his parents on his homosexuality. His mother was welcoming and supportive; his father saw it as another issue to address, as if it were a disease like his alcoholism. Although Artem had also never acknowledged his orientation with his family, he had considered them open-minded enough to be supportive, had he had the chance to talk it out.
But Jeff just needed to be less selfish. He didn’t mind giving everything to him sexually, simply because he had no one else. Was that the only reason why? If he had anywhere else to go, if he knew anyone else who were gay, either here or back home, would he go to them instead?
No, it wasn’t just that. It couldn’t be. Jeff had gotten him a new job within the last few months. Despite how they had parted ways, Jeff had been a good employee at the chocolate plant. Artem had had transferrable skills in sales, so he had qualified to man the register at the Ambrosia retail store downtown. Jeff didn’t want him to know the same destitution he had known back in Kyiv. Jeff did care.
“Gosh, you are gorgeous,” Jeff complimented the man, who was warming up to the idea of going off with them.
“Wait until you get his head between your legs, friend,” Artem remarked towards them. “Then you will know heaven.”
The man and Jeff paused, one looking perplexed and the second looking panicked.
“Who’s this skinny foreign dude talkin’ like he knows you?” the potential conquest quipped.
With a nonchalant chuckle, Artem replied, “I’m his boyfriend. We share you for a time. Isn’t that what was discussed?”
Jeff suddenly looked blank and embarrassed. “Is that alright?” he asked him.
“Uhh… I don’t know, man. I’m not that much into that shit. You better try elsewhere.”
Jeff shot a stony glare over to Artem and did not speak to him for the rest of their stint at the bathhouse.
Back in the hotel, he was still cold and silent. They went to their separate beds and turned out the lights. After some fumbling under the sheets—Jeff was likely touching himself to relieve his pent-up needs—things went still. Artem tried not to cry.
The next morning, Artem found a note hastily scribbled on hotel stationary left under a used coffee mug on the table.
“Went out for a few things. Lunch together?”
Just like that, all seemed well.
Jeff apologized over their meals. He said that he was trying to find someone else, a stranger, to put up with his dark appetite. He was starting to feel a little guilty for what he inflicted on a willing partner.
“You could have told me, Jeff,” Artem said with a smidge of annoyance in his voice. “But I do not resent you.”
“You sure?”
Artem considered telling the truth for a moment, but then swallowed it down. “No.”
That night, they went out drinking to a club. It was unlike anything Artem had ever experienced.
Yes, there were rave clubs. During college, he had once taken a trip to Moscow with some friends and gotten absolutely shitfaced on vodka and dragged off into a dance hall. There, a friend he had thought had homosexual inclinations had drunkenly come onto him, and they had made out and dry-humped in a back alleyway. It was the closest he had ever come to sexual activity with another man. Something about the driving beats and the bumping and grinding of bodies in these places was very arousing. And yet in this place, men were almost naked, openly rubbing on one another on the dance floor. Suddenly, the drinks weren’t the only thing Artem found intoxicating.
This time, a menage a trois had successfully gotten off the ground. Both Artem and another stranger knelt worshipfully in front of Jeffrey, sinfully and salaciously rubbing their faces against the excited tent in his pants.
“You seen it?” the stranger asked Artem, grinning. “He gotta big cock?”
“Tremendous,” Artem replied with a wink.
Jeff, now extricating himself, cooed towards the men at his feet. “I love it when men want me.”
The stranger leaned in and prepared to place his lips over the head, when Jeff stopped him by holding up his finger.
“If you want it, you promise you do something for me.”
“Sure thing, beefcake, anything you want.”
With a long and lustful gaze downwards, Jeff disclosed his needs.
“You let me listen to your heartbeat.”
It was a small concession that the stranger did not know the context of, but Artem knew.
(When you sit there, acting like you know me,
Acting like you only brought me here to get below me.
Never mind the death threats, parting at the door.
We'd rather be six feet under than be lonely.)
That was all that he remembered for a while.
He awoke to a dreadful vision that, at first, he refused to acknowledge as reality.
The man, who, mere (minutes? Hours? Days?) had been completely, vivaciously alive, was now dead. He was beginning to lose his color and warmth. There was a tremendous gash in his throat, and his eyes were rolled up to the whites. There were bite marks over his collarbones, his biceps, and rib cage. One of his nipples was missing, the areola rendered to a bloody shred.
Then, there was Jeff in the doorway. He was shirtless, wearing his glasses, and wiping what appeared to be blood off his chin with a rag.
He sighed deeply.
“You weren’t supposed to see that.”
