Fic: Disarray, Part II, (RDJude)
Robert knows a place in London, a place that Jude is oblivious to although he’s walked the street many times. It’s on the way to their gym. During the recent filming they’ve forced themselves to go separately, because work outs are always interrupted. Once Robert went down on him right in front of the room-length mirrors, and Jude watched himself squirm and gasp. There were other times, too, and other things, but Jude likes that one best. He could watch his calves clench as his toes curled.
Now Robert is in the area and driving with purpose. They are a month into filming, untouchable, ecstatic. Things are good. Things haven’t changed. London has wrapped itself in a still dark.
“Where are we headed?” Jude asks. He has to shout it above the radio, music he doesn’t know but with a bass line that matches the pulse of blood in his ears. Robert is quirky and eclectic, and his choice in music in no different.
“Surprise,” Robert says. He is grinning. He is not looking at him.
He parks and they walk a block or two to tenant buildings. Inside Robert leads him downstairs and they’re in a room with orange light and smoke and music, but the voices make the room thicker than anything. Bodies move and shimmer, shoulders and knees lit by small swinging ceiling lights.
No one says a word to them. Jude watches as bodies seem to part for Robert, who glides through with ease. He’s a shadow free from the wall. Jude follows.
There are more people, an exchange of words and hands. Jude feels fingers and hips glide across his body but there are no faces attached. He squints after Robert who pops something into his mouth and then turns, half a room way, and grins. The light sends shadows flittering like a flock of black birds over his face.
Jude follows further. It’s so crowded he can’t feel his feet. It’s as if he’s floating amid bodies, caught in the undercurrent of limbs, carried by the pulse of music and the spasmodic rhythm of lights. Hands glide along his ass and someone else brushes moist lips over his neck. He turns, trying to locate the source of touches, but there’s nothing other than shapes.
Then he’s jostled into Robert, and before he can say anything Robert grasps his face in his hands. He kisses him, lips parted, and his tongue deposits something smooth and round in Jude’s mouth. Jude hesitates for a second until Robert puts his hands against his neck, fingers rushing over his adam’s apple, a motion that encourages swallow, swallow, swallow.
Jude does. Robert grins, eyes already dark and places Jude has been only a handful of times, years ago. He’s embarrassed, suddenly, out of his element and feeling he shouldn’t be.
“In the back, I’ll meet you,” Robert says to him. He’s not bothering to be quiet. He never is about anything. His mouth is poised at Jude’s ear but the words come bounding out in huge, confident syllables.
Jude doesn’t know where he’s going, but he goes, twisting his body to make it through the crowd. He closes his eyes at the various touches. Someone drags nails across his chest and he turns, finding a woman in the crowd, her clothes rippling like silk or snakeskin, her hair long and black, her bangs obscuring her eyes. He stares as she moves in waves, every gesture dragging new color into the air. She’s liquid air. She kisses him, sucks at his lower lip. He feels her mouth merge again into his, then scatter across his face, his neck, like a million pieces of shattered glass falling cool and light over his skin.
Someone else presses to his back. He has a sudden impression that the other’s bones have slipped beneath his skin to mingle with his own.
It’s Robert’s voice floating in and out of his ear, Robert’s bones.
“Take her with us,” he whispers. He grips Jude’s hair and pulls him back for a kiss that misses his mouth, then leans over his shoulder to the kiss the woman undoing Jude’s belt.
***
London is misty the next day, an odd chill in the summer air. Jude has tiny white goosebumps rising beneath the hair of his arms. Robert does too. Jude saw them when Robert greeted him that day in costume, draping an arm around his shoulders.
“Have fun?” He smirks and winks.
Jude laughs but it comes out funny. He remembers the colors more than anything, and the movement of colors. He remembers how the room appeared to be rushing around him. He saw people pass him before they even began moving towards him.
He remembers the swell of colors that made the woman. Her skin was fields of peaches, hair like plums, breasts spilling sweet in his hands. Then he was inside her and Robert was, too, and he tried to find Robert’s eyes as they moved, but everything was wobbling color and lurching sound.
Afterwards he lost Robert in the rooms. He stayed and stumbled into bodies, refused them, and navigated through chaos. Someone began kissing his chest, his abdomen, lower, and he moaned aloud as a mouth took him fully into moisture and heat. He stood swaying in the flying daggers of colors. He gave himself over. Through the muddled brilliance, he caught a glimpse of Robert slipping into a bathroom, alone.
“You free tonight?” Robert asks later, between filming. His eyes are dark, wild. “I want you to try something with me.”
Jude shifts in his starch collar. “Be careful, Robert.”
“I know, I’m careful, I’m a fucking expert. Loosen up. Besides I’ll have you with me.”
“Can’t tonight,” Jude says. He lies without even thinking. “Promised the kids I’d take them out.”
“Start them young,” Robert says. “Pot at eight worked for me.” He laughs.
Jude watches him wander back on to set, biting on the stem of his pipe.
“Are you bored?” Jude says. Robert turns and for a second Jude hesitates. “Don’t be bored. There are things-other things-to do.”
Robert grins around his pipe. “Some more fun than others.”
***
Jude didn’t know Robert when he was heavily taking drugs. He didn’t know him when he was in jail. He didn’t meet the erratic Robert at all.
He wonders if this is what that Robert looks like.
“A spaceship,” Robert is saying.
Jude stands in Robert’s trailer, looking at the furniture covered in clothing props and Chinese take-out boxes and energy drinks with bolts of lightning on them.
“I’m building a spaceship.” He sniffs and wipes at his nose, then grins at his masterpiece. Crouching down, he extends his hands as if bestowing it with some magic only visible to him. “Want to go with me?”
“Robert.”
“Big universe, big stars of gaseous fuck. The bluer, the hotter.” Robert sits back on his heels. “Come on, strap in.”
“Robert, this isn’t funny,” Jude says.
“Clearly not,” Robert says. He composes himself with pinched fingers in front of his face, as if he is taking the universe and squeezing it into a tiny pinpoint. Then he releases and his face breaks into wrinkles. He laughs. “Come on, Jude. Judey Judey Judey Judey.”
Jude feels the room fragment around him. He stares at the haphazard mess intended for space travel, tells Robert to pull it together, and leaves without another word.
***
Robert disappears at night, sinks into the dark of London, and Jude spends his time in his flat, rearranging things that don’t need rearranging. While cleaning his drawer, he finds a g-string from Sienna he kept and stashed away. He lifts the silky material by a finger and examines it, an anthropologist with a skeleton. He considers throwing it out but then, on second thought, buries it back beneath his socks.
Jude’s asleep at nearly four in the morning when his mobile rings. It’s Robert, asking to be let up. Groggy and clad in briefs, wiping a hand over his face, Jude complies.
Once through the door Robert stumbles into his bedroom and throws himself spread eagle, back-down, on the mattress. He toes off one shoe, then another. His shirt is inside-out but Jude doesn’t say anything.
“Why didn’t you come with me?” Robert asks. He crosses his hands beneath his head. He’s sailing, afloat on some vast watery plane that Jude cannot see. “It’s-I have no words, you know, it’s just…” He sighs for a long while. “Heavy here” -he lifts an arm, a foot- “and free here.” He points to his temples, then runs a hand through his hair. “It’s not like before, you know, whatever bullshit you’re thinking. I’m not bored, I’m not some fiery spaceship Columbia waiting to fucking happen. I’m smart about it. I want this. I miss it sometimes.”
Jude wanders to the edge of the bed, standing between Robert’s spread legs. “You’re beginning to frighten me, Robert.”
Robert laughs quietly, as if remembering a joke from years ago. His eyes close. His head tilts back. He copies Jude’s accent, “There’s nothing to be frightened about, my dear, dear Watson. You’d know if you tried it.”
“I’m fine without, thank you.”
“Are you pissed? If you’re pissed stop being so fucking polite.” Robert opens his eyes under heavy lids, calm, somewhere Jude knows is inaccessible to him. “Come with me.”
“You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“My right to,” Robert says. Each word comes weighed. “If I want to. But this is not hurting. This is releasing. What I gave you that night” -he shakes his head slowly, each cheek taking a turn touching down to the bed- “doesn’t even compare to this, right now, this.”
The rock in Jude’s stomach has grown into a boulder. He kneels between Robert’s legs, then crawls over top of him.
A small part of his head says wait, think about it. What if he’s right? What if one slip-up is all he needs, a brief refresher and nothing more. No problem. No problem.
“Miss you,” Jude says in his ear. He presses his lips to his neck and flushed skin. He waits there for a pulse, and it comes, finally, in sluggish beats. Jude shuts his eyes tightly and runs kisses along Robert’s neck, then shoulders, then chest. He should be yelling. He should be furious. He’s heard the stories but somehow he thought it was over, that things are different now.
Robert cups Jude’s face in his hands, large and strong though slower now, and raises him so they’re face to face. Jude watches the shift of Robert’s lips and can tell he now has something in his mouth. Jude has a curiosity about Robert that has always, in every circumstance, left him defenseless. Without protest, Jude leans down to him and parts his lips, accepting.
Cool metal hits his tongue. He moves it around, hears the clink against his teeth. He can poke the tip of his tongue through the middle. He slips it out into his hand as Robert drags his teeth along Jude’s chest, threatening to leave marks.
Jude looks between the silver wedding band in his palm and the empty spot on Robert’s left hand.
Robert does things for the sake of reaction. Good or bad. He does it to push people, to test them, to learn about them.
“I know the limits. I know what would make her not stay.” Robert looks up at Jude, grabs his ass, pulls him down to him and grinds them together. “Would you stay?”
“I thought-” Jude swallows down a moan. He watches a wrinkle form between Robert’s brows. “I thought men were different.”
“You’re different.”
It’s not the answer Jude wants. Not now. He latches on to Robert’s waist and shoves him over to his stomach and tugs his pants down.
PART III