slap myself to waking but now it's too late
helen's prompt (= brilliance, I assume goes without saying): i've been thinking for awhile about psychic ballplayers. knowing where the ball's coming from/going to next, and that evolves into knowing which one of your teammates wants to fuck you.
and i said, um, yes. a thousand times yes.
8425 words in the classic style.
This Kind of Equation
By Candle Beck
Very early in his rookie year, Bobby Crosby started hearing voices.
Here he was standing in with two on and two out, the bat brought a few inches off his shoulder, feet set as wide as his shoulders. The count was two-and-one and he was sitting dead red, vision cranked up high looking for fastballs, and no kind of breaking stuff could scare him right now.
The fans murmured all around like a feeble rain. There was a hole on the right side with the first baseman holding Miller on, and Crosby was tensely aware of it, thinking, opposite field, thinking, quick bat quick bat quick bat.
And then he was thinking, cutter inside, except he wasn't thinking that, had no reason at all to think that.
It just kind of appeared in his brain.
Crosby shook it off. The pitcher let his shoulders fall on a breath, checked the runners, and threw a fastball with wicked spin blurring the stitches and turning the ball into this faint bloodstained thing. Crosby was swinging, dead red and all, and the pitch cut hard and in, buried itself under his hands.
Two-and-two now, and Crosby stepped back, rattled his head in his helmet. He asked the umpire if the pitch would have been called in the zone and Diaz shook his head, so Crosby felt kinda ticked. From up the third baseline he could hear Ron Washington chattering nonstop, "Attaboy, attababe, wait for your pitch, make him throw it." Some girl in the stands was keening his name over and over again, "Bobbeee! C'mon, Bobbeee!"
Crosby stepped back in. He clonked the bat into the back of his helmet, trying to find the moment again. The pitcher hawked dark brown into the dirt, scowling dangerously but Crosby didn't care. He didn't care about the guy's face.
The pitcher shook off a couple of signs, and then sudden and sharp in Crosby's mind:
what the fuck jimmy what do you want
Crosby blinked, terribly thrown, and he half-shouted, "Time, Laz, gimme time," without taking his eyes off the pitcher, heard Diaz bark, "Time!" and hopped out of the box.
He pulled off his helmet, screwing a knuckle into his ear. Wandered onto the grass, and here came Wash down the line, talking a mile a minute and clapping his stiff-fingered hands.
"How ya doin', huh, you feelin' all right? You got this one, I know you got this motherfucker, you see that hole on the right side, little punch is all it's gonna need."
Crosby nodded, peering into his helmet like maybe there was a twisted radio antenna in there or something. There wasn't, just pieces of gray foam rubber coming unstuck from the plastic.
"Y'all right, kid?" Washington asked. "Lookin' a little ghostly there."
"I'm good," Crosby said, putting a steady look in his eyes. "Just lookin' forward to this triple I'm about to hit."
Washington grinned huge, single gold tooth shining. "That's what I wanna hear, you come see me over here, attaboy."
Crosby got back in the box, dug at the dirt with his spikes. The catcher angled a mean look up at him through his mask.
"'bout ready now, princess?"
"Soon as you suck my dick," Crosby answered without looking back, eyes focused on the pitcher, bent at the waist and glaring.
And exploding in his mind, bursting all furious and colored like neon, Crosby heard, fuckin' bush league cunt eat some fuckin' dirt, and Crosby's eyes were huge, baffled and terrified as he started ducking before the ball left the pitcher's hand, dropping into a neat crouch as the pitch sailed harmlessly overhead.
He whipped a look at the catcher, who was staring back, big white eyes behind metal and dust.
"How-" the catcher started to say, and then stopped himself, scrunching his face into an ill-tempered scowl as he tossed the ball back to the pitcher. "Next one's coming down your fuckin' throat."
Crosby didn't answer. He was ridiculously freaked out right now.
He didn't want to get back in the box because that was where it kept happening, but he didn't have a whole lot of options. He was so on edge waiting for that creepy spectral voice to speak up in his mind again, he took one of the ugliest cuts of his brief career on another cutter, felt like he'd almost sprained his ribcage. There was the falling sound of thousands of people sighing in disappointment at once, and Crosby kinda staggered away from the plate, reeling.
Mark Ellis brought his glove and cap from the bench, gave him a narrow searching look as they walked out together. "Not so sharp, rook."
"I know," Crosby answered absently. He was staring into the visitor's dugout, where he could see the catcher unbuckling his shin guards, sweat-dark hair plastered to his forehead.
"You seen that cutter, seen it like four times now, you just gotta quit swinging at it."
"I know," he said again, not really listening. He was trying to read the catcher's mind.
He was trying to read the catcher's mind some more.
But it didn't work, only Crosby's own mess of disjointed thoughts, piling and layering one on top of another. Ellis served him a painless punch on the arm and jogged over to second. Crosby booted the first warm-up grounder Scott Hatteberg hurled sidearm to him, took a weird staggering half-step and missed the good hop and Chavez was calling from third base:
"Goddamn, kid, get it together,"
and Crosby thought that that was probably good advice.
*
Later that night he was pretty drunk.
Back home, Crosby sat out back by the swimming pool with Rich Harden and Mark Mulder both near at hand, patio chairs flanked around him and a well-traveled boombox thrumming dance remixes in the background. Crosby was morosely buzzed, trying to forget how they'd lost the game, probably about forty percent his fault because he couldn't get a two-out hit with men in scoring position.
Nobody would ever say that in so many words, of course, but Crosby was learning to read between the lines.
"An' you know," Mulder said, legs stretched out in front of him long and straight. "I'm not saying this is gonna work on every girl. But most girls? No freakin' doubt."
He was showing them his volunteer firefighter card that he kept in his wallet next to his American Express. Harden had a lopsided smile on his face, tapping his fingers along with the bass line.
"You don't bring it up yourself," Mulder explained. "You just go to pay for the drinks and then, whoops, you accidentally pull out your firefighter card instead. Guaranteed to get her tits on you in like five seconds."
"Wait a minute," Harden said, banked laugh in his voice. "You're saying firefighter beats ballplayer?"
"No, I'm saying firefighter plus ballplayer can't be topped. It's like, she was probably gonna sleep with me anyway, but now she's gonna sleep with me at least three times as much."
Harden huffed in amusement, sharp-cornered smirk on his face. "Is that thing even real?"
"Of course it is." Mulder sounded affronted, folding his wallet back up. "I mean, it was eight years ago. And I only did it for a summer, and I didn't actually get to put out any fires, per se, but still."
"Ridiculous," Harden said, which was Harden's general response to everything, had been for as long as Crosby had known him.
A little moment of quiet fell, and Crosby was just the right kinda drunk, halfway between here and there, and he asked with genuine curiosity, "Have you guys ever been able to hear what someone else was thinking?"
There was a pause, perfectly timed for effect, and then Mulder and Harden both burst out laughing. Mulder plastered a hand over his face because he looked really dorky when he was laughing that hard, all loose gaping mouth and smashed eyes. Harden put his beer on the patio and grabbed the back of Crosby's neck.
"Are you high right now? You can tell me," Harden said with an engaging grin.
"No." Crosby tried to twitch Harden's hand away, but he wouldn't go. "I'm asking for scientific reasons."
"Okay, new question. How high are you right now?"
Crosby knocked him off, took a sullen drink of beer, glowering at the soft-rocking blue of the swimming pool. Mulder was only just settling down, snickering and coughing.
"Just 'no' woulda worked fine," Crosby muttered. He hadn't really expected anything different. He was halfway to convincing himself that it had all been some weird acoustic thing, a fan pitching his voice just right or a radio signal bouncing off the catcher's fillings. The explanation was probably totally rational and he'd laugh at how dumb he'd been if he could just figure out what it was.
Mulder cuffed his head. "Hearing voices, huh? They got pills for that kinda thing, you know."
"Shut up," Crosby said, slumping. "Totally missing the point. I mean, like. You know how sometimes you can figure out what a pitcher's going to throw next, and it's not even 'cause he threw it in the same count earlier or you rolled over on it last time or whatever, it's just 'cause you know. Like seeing the future or something: slider. Curveball. Cutter. Or whatever. I didn't. Obviously I didn't mean it literally."
Harden snorted, shook his head. "Can you bend spoons, too?"
Crosby kicked him, swallowed past a thick wedge in his throat. "You suck."
"Who told you that, one of your psychic friends?" Mulder asked with a sweetly mocking smile, and so Crosby had to kick him too.
"Hate you guys," he said low, chin near his chest. Maybe it was too dark for them to see that Crosby wasn't fucking around, or maybe they just didn't care.
Harden tossed an arm around Crosby's shoulders, even though it was really too warm out here for that. "You can't just leave the door wide open like that, Bobby."
"Not with you fuckers for friends, that's for goddamn sure."
"Well, yeah. Duh." Harden flicked at his ear and Crosby batted him away, a little distracted trying to figure out if the dim static filling his head was white noise from his brain or someone else's.
"I'm gettin' another," Mulder said, getting to his feet. He twisted his back to make his spine pop, and Crosby winced because he'd never known anybody to have such a poppable spine as Mark Mulder. "You want?"
"Yeah," Harden said, casually bracing his elbow on Crosby's shoulder, resting his head on his hand. Crosby didn't bother shrugging him off because Harden was clearly in a handsy drunken mood, which happened from time to time and so Crosby was just going to go with it, but then:
stop touching him.
Crosby jerked his eyes up, caught Mulder's mouth thin and his eyes hard, a black hateful blur wrenching through Mulder's mind for a split second before he stamped it ruthlessly down. Crosby had this feeling of being shoved away.
Mulder said, "What about you, rook?" and his face was easy and clear, and after a moment Crosby thought he must have been imagining it. It was just because he was thinking about it, chiseling out a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Yeah, thanks," he said, voice kinda scraped up.
Mulder went inside and it was quiet, the rare shush of cars on the main road, a faraway barking dog. Harden's elbow dug into Crosby's shoulder like a very dull blade.
"Did you really read somebody's mind, Bobby?" Harden asked eventually, and it sounded solemn, half-nervous, but Crosby wasn't falling for it, wasn't setting himself up for another round of ridicule.
"Of course not," he answered, managing to sound more amused than scared out of his mind. "Don't be stupid."
*
Maybe something like this used to happen a long time ago.
Maybe he was ten years old, still young for Little League but Bobby was just miles better than every other kid out there. He could outrun anyone, hit dingers over the high school gym, peg the ball from the fence to the plate straight as a clothesline. He was the only one who knew how to throw a slider.
It was mostly expected of him, considering who his father was, the way Bobby had been steeped in baseball since before he could speak. Down here in Southern California the game was a lifelong fever, a desperate infection that latched on to certain kids, switched the red of their blood out for Dodger blue. Sandlots were churches, reverent packs of dust-covered children by turns hushed and exultant. Bobby couldn't really understand anything else; the world was very difficult and complicated until he had a bat in his hands.
No one thought it was strange, the things Bobby could do on the dirt and grass, and so he didn't either. Sometimes he got that crystallized awareness of what the pitcher was going to throw next, and he'd look to the outside corner, wait on a weak-breaking curveball with a gleeful smile on his face. Staring in at the batter from short, he'd read the jittery anticipation of an attempt to bunt for a base hit, hissing to the third baseman, "Crash, crash," and they learned to listen to him because Bobby was almost always right.
He thought it was just part of it. Ballplayers were always talking about instinct, having the feel, knowing the game better than by heart, and Bobby figured this was what all that stuff meant. Nothing was ever properly explained to him when he was that young.
And then one afternoon he was sitting on the bench next to the assistant coach, Matt K.'s college-aged Uncle Kyle that all the guys liked better than Coach Carl. Bobby was showing off a little, kinda dimly infatuated with Matt's uncle, who was all tall and lanky with a mop of brown hair lightened dark gold by the constant sunlight, stuffed under his red cap. Bobby said, "The pitcher's thinking about throwing a curve."
Kyle nodded. "Good time for it, two strikes already."
Bobby stretched feelers from his mind, parsing out the jumble of thoughts emanating vaguely from the pitcher.
"Ha, he's worried he's gonna bounce it and look stupid," Bobby said.
Kyle grinned. "You think so, huh."
"No, for real." Bobby was smiling back, twisty little warm feeling in his stomach because he'd made Kyle grin. He tocked his spikes happily on the cement floor of the dugout. "He's totally freaking out."
Kyle laughed through his nose, palming Bobby's cap and slanting the brim over his eyes. Bobby couldn't see the field but he didn't care, blushing fiercely and smiling, jamming his skinny elbow into Kyle's side.
"'m tellin' you," Bobby said, jerking his cap up to see the pitcher predictably fling the curveball into the ground, not even the dirt but bouncing hard and dying in the grass. The kid covered his face with his glove, hunching his shoulders.
"See, see." Bobby landed a bunch of harmless punches on Kyle's arm, jumping in his seat. "And now he's thinking about how he hates pitching and he wishes he could play shortstop instead."
Kyle's hand, big on top of Bobby's cap, pressed down for a second, and when Bobby looked up Kyle was looking at him with his eyes thin and curious even though he was still half-smiling. Bobby felt a quick bolt of fear, wondering if he'd done something dumb by accident again.
"Did he tell you he likes shortstop better? I didn't know you knew him."
"What?" Bobby scratched his nose, face scrunched. "I never even seen that guy before. That's just, that's what he's thinking. Um. You know?"
But Kyle didn't know. The last traces of amusement faded from his face, replaced by something awfully similar to worry, a tautness around the eyes. Bobby got a very bad feeling, having no idea what he'd done wrong.
"Bobby, what do you mean that's what he's thinking?" Kyle asked in a weirdly gentle tone that freaked him out worse than anything else.
Bobby's little brain was racing, whorls and corkscrews. He's stumbled upon another one of those things he hadn't known was off-limits, like that time he was six and asked his dad what a motherfucker was and got sent to his room without dinner. Bobby cast about frantically, backtracking best he could.
"I mean, that was like the worst curveball ever, I would wanna quit pitching too. But that would never happen 'cause I can throw a way better curve than that. You seen me thrown my curve, right?"
And Kyle was grinning again, tugging at Bobby's cap brim and then laying his arm along the back of the bench. "Yeah, I seen it, buddy."
"It's way better than his, right?"
"Oh, no doubt."
Bobby beamed, giddy feeling back in his chest, dodged a bullet and won another grin. He was nervous in the back of his mind, realizing with slow-building clarity that there was something alien about him, something not as it should be. He crammed that thought down deep in his recesses, sneaking glances at Kyle's face, rough from a couple days unshaven and Bobby was wondering what that might feel like, how many more years before he'd know.
He kept his mouth shut after that. He tried to stop hearing what went on in other people's heads, wanting no part of it, not if it made him some kind of freak, something unnatural. After awhile the diffuse static of extraneous thoughts started to recede, and by the time he made varsity his freshman year of high school it had been muffled to sensing the next pitch, the moment he should break for second base on a steal, whether the batter was looking to pull or go oppo.
So Bobby decided once again that it was just baseball. It was just because he was as good as everybody had always said. It wasn't only in his body, his hands and fast-snapping hips--it coursed all through him, surer than blood. That kind of thinking got him all the way through college and the minors, but now here he was a major league baseball player and suddenly ten years old and half-crazy again.
*
Tonight they spent on an airplane. They were all of them red-eyed and muddled from the steady stream of beers retrieved from the cooler they'd fit into the exit row, seatbelts cinched across and over the top. The flight attendants didn't really like that, but they let it slide. Ballplayers were always easier to deal with when they had a buzz on.
Crosby was way in back, stretched out across three seats with his legs bent in the aisle. He was playing Zito's Gameboy Color, dark teal plastic all beat up and chipped at the edges because it had gone everywhere Zito had for the past six years. Zito was in the row directly in front, also laid out with his legs getting in everybody's way, and they passed the game back and forth, talked in fits and starts through the seats.
"Your high scores are pitiful," Crosby said.
"You're pitiful," Zito replied, a pretty lousy comeback but he was distracted, leafing through the SkyMall catalog in between his turns. "I think I'm gonna buy this floating pool table."
"A pool table that goes in the pool? Even you are not lame enough to own such a thing."
"Oh, I think I'm plenty lame enough. I'd have to get a place with a pool, though."
Crosby's race car spun out and ran off the edge of a cliff, exploding in a bright brief flower of orange. He swore, poked the game through the crack between the seats until Zito took it. Crosby bent his legs, set his socked feet on the armrest. He picked at the tear in the knee of his jeans, hearing his mom in his head telling him not to pull at it, that'd only make it worse.
"Is there anything good to do in Toronto?" Crosby asked, because he'd never been before.
"Oh sure," Zito said, and then Crosby thought he said something more but it was lost in the constant flooding engine noise. Zito had a tendency to mumble, anyway.
"Examples, please," Crosby said.
"Well, once I got really drunk at this improv comedy club and ended up laughing so hard I threw up."
"Dude. Seriously gross."
"It was an interesting night all around," Zito said agreeably. Stuff like that never seemed to bother him, like he was completely immune to humiliation. Zito spent so much time in bars where no one knew him, and he didn't give a fuck what happened in front of people he'd never see again. He saved all of his phobias for the diamond.
"Anything less totally disgusting you can recommend?"
"Canadian girls are pretty cool," Zito said, and then Crosby caught a jagged scrap, a mess of words and images, ellie with that hot fuckin' tattoo, and a woman's naked body, pale and perfect in the bedside light, a gracefully snaking vine of roses inked across one smooth hip. Big hand wide open on her trembling stomach, coffee-colored birthmark hooked over his wrist.
Crosby immediately dug his fingers into his eyes, hard enough that the red-blooming pain filled his brain and knocked out everything else. There were some things he was entirely okay not knowing, and number one on that list was whatever the hell Barry Zito got up to with girls.
It took him a second to remember to be freaked out for more fundamental reasons. This thing, this distant frequency, he had to figure out a way to lose it for good. It was all right as long as it was just for baseball, but Crosby was smart enough to know that the ability to actually hear what other people were thinking could only backfire and result in devastation. People were cruel inside their own heads, though that wasn't really the right word because cruelty required a victim, and if no one knew no one could get hurt.
Crosby didn't want to know. And if none of this was real, if he was just going literally insane, he didn't want to know that either.
"Hey, rookie," Zito said tensely and too loud, indicating that it was not the first time.
Crosby jerked, looked up to see Zito's hand with the game in it sticking up over the top of the seat. Crosby took it, fingers feeling numb. One of Zito's eyes squinted at him suspiciously through the crack, eyebrow pulled down.
"You space out like that a lot? Because that shit's gonna get annoying."
Scowling at the game, Crosby felt the tattered undercurrent of Zito's thoughts tickling at the back of his mind, an uneven drone that he tried to bury under the engine noise, the chainsaw sound of Rhodes snoring across the aisle.
"What, you afraid to lose your spot as the team flake?" Crosby sneered.
"Watch yourself, punk. And give me my motherfucking game back, you've lost your privileges."
"Take it," Crosby snapped, irrationally upset for no reason he could put his finger on. He chucked the game over the seat and hear it ricochet, thump on the floor, and Zito shouted at Crosby, "Son of a bitch, you tryin' to break it," and then Hudson was hollering from a few rows up, "I am going to break the both of you if you don't shut your fuckin' mouths 'cause some of us are trying to fuckin' sleep."
There was a pause, a brief smatter of laughter, and like three other guys saying in unison, "Thank you Timmy."
Crosby heard Zito huff and slump back down. Crosby covered his face with both his hands, breathing out hot and careful against his palms. This whole thing was getting less and less good. He wanted to fill his ears with wax but he didn't think that would work.
He was starting to think that maybe nothing would work. There was something impossibly wrong with him. Either he was going crazy or developing some kind of helpless telepathy.
There was no way this was going to end well.
*
They got back home and Crosby was at least three times as exhausted as he'd ever been in his life. He wanted to blame it on the ungodly length of the major league season, the culminating drain of jet lag on top of jet lag on top of a double-header. All that was probably true, but then there were the walls he'd erected in his mind, the line of effort pressed between his eyebrows whenever he was speaking to someone else, great bolts of concentration dedicated to keeping at bay the fractured mutter of everything left unspoken. He could do it, just barely hold it back, and he would have been fairly encouraged if he weren't so goddamned tired.
So he let Mark Mulder take him out drinking after they lost to the Indians, knowing that it was stupid on a couple of different levels but well past the point of caring. He just wanted a night off.
Mulder took him to some place in Walnut Creek, trendy as fuck with all the girls in painted-on dresses, tidal-wave hair sprayed into stiff submission. Crosby had a headache; he'd had a headache for about a month now, ever since the voices had gotten loud again. He threw back every drink Mulder handed him without even asking what it was.
Mulder, on the other side of the tall little table where they were standing, hiked an eyebrow when Crosby stopped grimacing with each shot.
"Gettin' better at that, rook," he said, bestowing a smile that was half pride and half condescension. Crosby scowled.
"My name's Bobby, you know," Crosby told him shortly, flexing his fingers around the glass.
Mulder looked kinda surprised, his mouth curling at the edge. "Not this year, it ain't."
"'Ain't' isn't a word," Crosby muttered.
"Oh, excuse me, Mr. Grammar." Mulder reached across to thomp him on the arm. "I ain't real smart like some people."
Crosby's scowl deepened, his eyebrows beetling down and the pressure somehow spiked the pain in his head, making him wince. He was drunk now, or almost drunk, or so drunk he was kinda sober. He couldn't really tell.
"I want another," he said to the melting ice in the glass.
"Of course you do, drunky," Mulder answered indulgently, and straightened up from where he'd had one elbow on the table, scanning for a waitress. "Gonna end up carrying you home."
Nodding, his neck feeling overly loose, Crosby wasn't looking at Mulder, wasn't properly maintaining his protective walls, and he caught a momentary flash from Mulder's mind, a still-life image of Mulder with Crosby's limp body draped over his shoulder, and Mulder was thinking about how heavy Crosby would be, how he'd wrap his arm around Crosby's legs and feel the strength in his thighs.
Crosby flinched, his face heating in a rush and his hand tightening compulsively on the glass. He snuck a sideways glance at Mulder, saw him staring back with a sleepily intent look on his face. Crosby's flush deepened, spread down his whole body. He struggled to get the wall back up, frantically imagining bricks and mortar and flesh-tearing iron spikes on top.
There was a moment of fraught silence, though of course there wasn't any such thing as silence in this place, all horrendous techno remixes of eighties songs and shiny-faced scenesters cackling laughter like flamingos whipped into a frenzy. Crosby clutched at the edge of the table, his mind a ferocious whirl.
Then there was a fresh drink in front of him, something sparkling and wine-dark with a a skinny black straw, and Crosby pulled at it like an elixir, the thing that would bring him back to life. The good blur of it overcame him, and his concentration faltered, stumbled hard. He looked up, caught Mulder staring at his mouth.
And Mulder was thinking about Crosby sucking him off.
It came in that disjointed flutter, a fuzzy-edged image of Bobby on his knees in a men's room stall, Mulder's huge hand cupped around his jaw, thumbing his mouth open. And then the scene jumped ahead a few minutes and Mulder was thinking about fucking Bobby's mouth, rocking his hips and holding the back of Bobby's head, watching his dick slide in hard, come out slick and even harder. Mulder's mind filled up with the words take it, take it, imagining Bobby's face tipped back, his eyes enormous and damp and bluer than they were in real life. Everything about him was better in Mulder's head than it was in real life.
Then Mulder thought like a bellow, like cannon fire: NO.
Crosby dropped his drink. It bounced off the lip of the table and soaked the front of his shirt, shockingly cold and making him jump back. He bumped into a toolish guy with gelled hair and a popped collar, who tossed him back into the table and it would have been a disaster but Mulder was there, steadying the table from the other side and looking exasperated but amused.
"Jesus, manage yourself," Mulder said, and reached to take Crosby's shoulder, help him catch his balance, but Crosby jerked away, saw Mulder's eyes flash indignation, heard Mulder thinking:
the fuck how fuckin drunk,
and then Crosby slammed a door on it, flattened his full weight as a barricade. Mulder was confused, the unhinged strands of lust that had been weaving together in his brain disintegrating under a smog of self-loathing that felt devastatingly familiar. Crosby wrenched his head side to side, scrubbing at his face with his hands.
He didn't want to suck Mulder's dick. He didn't want Mulder's hand heavy on his shoulder, pressing him down to his knees. He didn't want Mulder's thumb to trace his lips, push just barely inside. He didn't want Mulder to moan his name, didn't want to look up to see Mulder looking down.
But Crosby couldn't read his own mind, couldn't understand the hot clutch in his chest or the sinking thick thing happening in his stomach. He had this awful suspicion that no matter how bad he wanted to believe it, none of that stuff was actually true.
"Get outta here," Crosby mumbled into his palms.
"What?"
"Gotta. Gotta get outta here," he said. The music was unfathomably loud, thumping tangibly at his frontal lobe.
Suddenly Mulder had a hand on his arm, and when Crosby tried to pull away Mulder didn't let him, tugging his hands away from his face. Crosby blinked at Mulder, who was smirking and looking only faintly concerned.
And Mulder was thinking, take him home, all to myself, and Crosby was scared in every way he knew how.
Mulder fought through the crowd, hand twisted in Crosby's collar so they wouldn't get separated. Getting outside was like stepping into a meat locker, a vicious shiver wracking through Crosby's body, so bad that he didn't notice Mulder hooking an arm around his shoulders. Mulder's face was turned away, searching for a cab, and Crosby was staring up at him, his equilibrium completely gone and all his walls fallen.
Mulder was thinking about how warm Bobby was, liking the way they fit together, the way Bobby's arms were lined with muscle, the way his shirt slid and stuck to the thin patches of sweat. Mulder was thinking in shreds, half-repressed swatches of bending Bobby over the hood of the beautiful black Jaguar parked across the street, Bobby's cheek flush to the gleaming metal, panting breath shaped as brief little fogs. Mulder was thinking about yanking Bobby's jeans down just far enough, both of them still fully-dressed and Mulder fucking him fast and raw with both hands gripping his bare hips, teeth possessive as hell on the nape of Bobby's neck.
"Holy shit, Mark," Crosby heard himself saying, his mind feeling exploded, overflowing. The sidewalk was melting, the streetlights transformed into slow-motion eclipses.
Mulder had managed to acquire a cab, and he shoved Crosby in ahead of him. Crosby went skidding across the seat, clawing and finding no purchase. He clung to the door, watching bug-eyed and terrified as Mulder folded in with all his incredible length, his long long arm stretching across the back of the seat as he told the cabbie their address.
Mulder was kinda smiling, bitter and rueful like a mean secret, like the latest dirty fantasy even now unraveling in his mind: Mulder on their couch back home and Crosby astride his lap without a shirt on, grinding down on him and licking his throat when Mulder's head fell back.
And Mulder didn't want to be thinking it. He was trying to smash it down, chanting no no no so fast the word lost meaning and became empty sound. This thick gray weave suffocated Mulder's thoughts, jammed his signal but Crosby was still able to make it out, muzzy and broken up like a dying radio. Mulder wanted him so badly the very idea of it shimmered.
"You're gay?" Bobby asked, all drunk and incredulous.
Mulder's whole body twitched. His head snapped around and he gaped at Crosby, panic rioting in his eyes and all through his mind: i'm not, not, i'm just, just just just, how'd he fucking, not fucking gay, can he see it, jesus fuck, gonna tell everybody, how the fuck did he know.
Crosby shrunk back against the cab door, bombarded. Mulder's eyes were huge and furious, the rest of his face perfectly still.
"Who the fuck told you that," Mulder said, flat and not like a question at all.
Crosby shook his head, a taste like pennies cutting sharp in his mouth and he recognized it as adrenaline, wondering if Mulder was going to kick the shit out of him now.
"Nobody, I just. I. Um." Crosby trailed off. He was desperately trying to get the wall rebuilt, but the stones were foam rubber, slippery as greased ice. He was so goddamn drunk, not just going insane anymore but smack-dab in the middle of it.
"What the fuck, man," Mulder said in a defensive tone, glassy edge to his voice, slanted fearful eyes darting glances at him.
Crosby trembled for no reason. He canted his head against the filthy window, breathing through his teeth. His heart was jackhammering, battering against his ribs.
"Hey," Mulder bit off, grabbing Crosby's arm, and Mulder was thinking, please bobby don't, don't, and Crosby didn't know what that meant.
He didn't know anything, except that Mulder called him Bobby inside his head, and suddenly that seemed like the most important thing in the world.
Crosby turned on him, eyebrows shooting up, mouth cocking open. "It, it's okay, Mark."
"No, it's not," and Mulder's head was crammed with flashbulbs and tabloid headlines, a disgusted sneer on Billy Beane's face, his mother collapsed at the kitchen table weeping. "Really not fucking okay for you to go around saying shit like that to people when, when-"
"No, no," Crosby said, holding up his hands helplessly. "I mean, it's okay 'cause, 'cause maybe I am too. Maybe just a little, I mean."
"You shut your goddamn mouth," Mulder hissed. The whites of his eyes skittered like rabbits.
He pushed Crosby away but there wasn't anywhere for him to go, just the window crank digging into his back and making him wonder from a thousand miles away where the fuck they found a cab without automatic windows. It was like high school again, all that weird stuff that used to happen in the backs of cars, always jamming his knee on something, gouged half to death by the loose seat belts.
Mulder had moved away from him, now staring resolutely out his own window, his mouth carved in a damaging shape. His hands were wrung together, knuckles standing out in sharp relief like his grip on a baseball bat. It was only by the most extreme force of will that Crosby managed to keep the merciless tirade of Mulder's thoughts clear of his own.
Crosby gazed out his own window, punch-drunk and regular drunk and turned on as fuck, this persistent buzzing heat pulsing between the two of them and Crosby's mouth was sand dry. His head hurt so bad.
He thought maybe he was only feeling it so strong because of the fucked-up misfire that was happening in his brain. People couldn't experience shit like this and be expected to withstand. This couldn't be what they meant when they said temptation.
Somehow, they made it home.
Crosby stumbled out on the grass, stood watching Mulder paying the cabbie, one hand braced on the car. Rather belatedly Crosby realized that that whole last scene, all the various scandals that had very nearly occurred had very nearly occurred with a total stranger in the front seat. There was a quick jackspring of hope in his chest, thinking maybe that was why Mulder had pushed him away, not on accounta he didn't want to, because he really obviously wanted to, but maybe just the witness, maybe now that they were alone-
Crosby turned away and smacked himself hard across the face, a clarifying shock of pain as if he'd found himself nodding at the wheel. Mulder made a cut-off sound behind him, and the cab rumbled away into the shadows of the tree cover.
Somehow, they made it inside.
Water straight from the tap, feeling vaguely primeval and drinking like an animal. It was a good enough reason not to look at Mulder, who sorta lurked in the kitchen doorway, absently tugging open the highest button on his shirt, pulling the tail free of his belt. He was searching for things to do with his hands, Crosby could tell. Crosby could sympathize.
Crosby swiped his wet mouth on his sleeve, grabbed onto the counter as if it could serve as some kind of shield.
Mulder was still looking at him, deeply hooded, obscure and colored just like the sky about a half-hour shy of dawn. Everything was low-lit.
"Tell me why you said that, Bobby," Mulder said, and a shudder rattled through Crosby. He shook his head a little, feeling kinda stunned.
"Um, which part?"
Mulder wrapped his hand around the doorframe, squeezing so the lines of his arm stood out clear. "The part about me, you little fuck."
"Hey," Crosby said weakly. That was a bit harsh, he felt.
Mulder made a slashing motion with his free hand, mad look on his face. "You fuckin' answer me."
"Jesus." Crosby looked at the floor, swallowed hard. "Because you want to fuck me. It's okay," he hastened to assure, wondering if he'd be doing that for the rest of his goddamn career. "Like I said. I'm down with it and all."
There was a ragged exhale from Mulder's direction, and Crosby stole a look. Mulder's face was tilted down, shadows all over him, and without intending to Crosby was snatching pictures out of his mind again, blood and ink sketches of every sweaty thing Mulder wanted to do to him and the hell he was certain would follow directly after. It made Crosby want to laugh out loud, or run, or go give him a hug or something.
Then Mulder thought very clearly, a pinpoint beam of light cutting through: i can't bobby you do it you you you, and Crosby was moving for him without thought, his mind wiped clean and Mulder's too, just static as the distance between them closed.
Mulder's eyes got huge and he went totally still. Crosby put a hand on Mulder's shoulder, then the side of his neck, sliding fingers into his short hair and pressing down just enough. He caught Mulder's mouth with his own, half-open on a terrified breath, and Crosby scraped his teeth over Mulder's lower lip, licked across his tongue and pushed his hand up the back of Mulder's head, holding him in place.
Mulder groaned, sounding shocked, and clutched at Crosby's hip. Crosby's whole body kinda twitched into Mulder's and now they were standing pressed against each other, still kissing like maybe one of them was dying tomorrow. Mulder was frenetic, overeager and desperate as a middle schooler, somehow brand-new at it again. He gnawed at the line of Crosby's jaw, came back to his mouth to suck on his tongue, and Crosby had both arms around his neck now, hands locked on his own elbows because he was barely hanging on.
And Mulder liked it so much. His mind was capsizing with how much he liked it, how good Crosby's mouth tasted and how insanely hot it was to feel Crosby going hard against his hip, and then suddenly Mulder was thinking in a smothering rush:
gay gay gay fuck man you're so fucking,
and he wrenched away from Crosby, gasping in huge panicked whoops. Mulder tried to shove Crosby off him, wild-eyed and drowning inside, and Crosby wouldn't let him go.
"No," he said, stumbling after him when Mulder jerked away. Crosby went with Mulder's momentum and got his weight behind it, crushing Mulder against the wall. "Don't," Crosby said, pressed his lips to Mulder's ear and held him down with his body.
"Bobby," Mulder said, and he probably didn't mean to moan just then. He probably didn't mean to plaster his hands on Bobby's sides without pushing him away.
"Just, just," and Crosby didn't know what he could say, he couldn't just talk Mulder into being okay with it, but he dropped a hand to hook in Mulder's belt and that seemed to help. Mulder sucked in a breath, shivered all over, his head tipped way back on the wall.
"Don't freak out," Crosby mumbled, licking at Mulder's throat, the rough of his cheek. "None of the stuff that you think is right."
"You, f-fuck you," and Mulder was stammering, his hands spread wide on Crosby's back and Crosby didn't think he was even aware of it. "You don't know."
"I do," Crosby insisted, kissed him again. Mulder kissed him back, helpless. "Tell you all about it someday but for now just, here," and then Crosby stuck his hand down Mulder's pants.
Happily, it turned out that was a sure-fire way to get Mulder to stop thinking altogether.
THE END
Endnotes: Title is from the Mountain Goats' song 'Distant Stations,' which is probably not about telepathy but certainly should be:
i saw the sky break.
i threw a rock at a crow who was playing in the mulch of some rose bushes by the motel office.
missed him by a good yard or two.
i sang old songs from nowhere.
los angeles.
albuquerque.
i said a small prayer for the poor and the naked and the hungry.
and i prayed real hard for you.
i waited for you, but i never told you where i was.
it was you who taught me how to write this kind of equation.
i waited on the steps for you,
and i hid in the bushes whenever a car pulled into the parking lot.
you taught me how to listen to these distant stations.
distant stations.
Y'all know I love nothing better than old school Mulder/Crosby from 2004, unless it's old school Mulder/Crosby from 2004 with bonus mental powers! Ah, nebulously-explained supernatural plot devices.
Ha, for some reason Zito wants to be written as all hella straight recently. I don't know what is up with that! Wishful thinking, I suppose.
Totally irresolute ending, I know, but then, I am a terribly irresolute person.
Also, fuck you dodger blue (now I feel better).