"Silence and Cold" -- DVD Commentary
For thorne_scratch. Next up, "Dreaming Myself Deep."
Silence and Cold
Cold in life's throws, I'll fall asleep for you
Cold in life's throws, I only ask you turn away
Cold in life's throws, I'll fall asleep for you
Cold in life's throws, I only ask you turn
As they seep... into me, oh, my beautiful one, now
Your sins into me
Oh, my beautiful one
Your sins into me
As a rapturous voice escapes, I will tremble a prayer
And I'll beg for forgiveness
(Your sins into me)
Your sins into me...
AFI - "Silver and Cold"
So, where to start? How about with the fact that I know better than to preface my fics with song bits and yet I seem to have done so here? Hmm. Anyway. This fic was, more than any other fic I'd written up to this point, an exercise. I had been extremely inspired by the Olympics, but that was finally wearing off and plus, it was February. I hate February. I hated this particular February especially. I had moved out of my parents house in November; I had started working at the Home of the Aardvarks and was just hating it, and I was seriously questioning my writing ability. thorne_scratch posted a story that was stylistically interesting to me and I wanted to see if I could challenge myself to write something more specifically visceral than anything I'd tried before. And hence, this story was born
I wrote it in two sittings, mostly in my bedroom, freezing to death, watching the snow fall.
Aaron’s fingers trace silly designs on the cold, wet glass of the window. A baby’s foot, a lopsided smiley face, a backwards iH to greet the people passing by. They don’t notice him, though. They’re all wrapped up in their ski jackets and their knit scarves and their beanies and their narrow, narrow lives. All except for the guy leaning on the lamppost with the cowboy hat on. Aaron squints at him - his contacts are hurting him in Aspen’s high, dry air - and thinks that perhaps the city council pays the man to stand there like that. With his sheepskin coat and his hat and the scuffed tips of boots barely visible under the cuffs of worn jeans, he could be actually be the Marlboro man (in the time Aaron has been in the mountains he has heard the area referred to variously as God’s Country, Big Sky Country, and Marlboro Country). The man, hunching into his coat and ambling away now, adds a feeling of sad authenticity to the sparkling little town full of stars on skis.
First sentences have always been vital to me. This one was no exception. It was all I had for a while, and I still like it. I also like "narrow, narrow lives;" although, I'd probably change "perhaps" to "maybe" in the city council sentence.
When Michael gets up, he bumps the table and spills Aaron’s coffee and some drops hit his hand. “Ouch,” Aaron mumbles to himself, more out of habit than pain, and Michael doesn’t even notice. Aaron wonders for the tenth, or maybe the fifteenth, time if Michael knows where he is or whom he’s with.
This is progressing just how I wanted it to. With, um, jagged apathy. I wanted it to be apparent immediately that there was very little emotional investment (on the surface) from either character.
“Where are you going?” he asks Michael, not really caring. He has the local paper and he’s reading an article about a skier who used to play football but left the game for the money. The story unduly fascinates Aaron. He’s always been an individual sportsman, but for a while, he had as much of a team as one can have in swimming. Of course, he’s given that all up now. Given it up for money, which is something that Brendan and Ian say that they understand but their eyes tell him something different. They think, and Aaron knows this because he knows them, that he’s sold out. That he’s banking on his looks now as much as his talent and that he’s not much better than a whore because of it. Not much better than Michael or Thorpe. But this kid, the kid in the paper in front of him, left a team and a school and a state all behind. Left stadiums full of screaming fans - something that Michael doesn’t even always have - for cold and silence and money.
Jeremy Bloom! I doubt anyone got that reference, and maybe that's a bad thing? I don't know. I was obsessed with him at the time, and I think the direction it takes the narrative is okay -- we get a little bit into Aaron's head -- but it could have been edited down. The Connecting Theme is there, which is good. But I use "whore" and I wouldn't now. It's jarring.
Aaron thinks he’s beautiful.
“Did you hear me?” Michael asks, his voice flat, like he’s trying to disguise an accent or an emotion.
“No.”
“I’m going back to the lodge. There are too many people here.”
Michael’s agoraphobia worries Aaron in an abstract way, the way he worries about the twinges of pain he gets in his shoulders sometimes or about how convincing his smile will be at Lenny’s wedding.
Lenny/Aaron!
“Do you want me to come with you?” Aaron asks, not caring either way. He’s wasting his spring break in a ski town, surrounded by strangers, all because he saw something he shouldn’t have one afternoon in Athens. He’s discharging an obligation and he can’t do it sitting alone watching the snow fall.
Michael doesn’t answer right away, but the tremor in his hand - the one that rests on the newspaper now over the skier’s face - betrays his anxiety.
“Never mind, Mike,” he says, getting up and shrugging into a coat that he bought especially for the trip. He likes spending his money, if not in the extravagant ways that Michael does, and the swish of the shiny fabric makes him happy for a moment. “Let’s go.”
One of my favorite things to do from the time I started to write in this fandom was to compare and contrast these two. Also, hey, the plot thickens.
Aaron never knew, or perhaps never considered, what a soothing smell woodsmoke was. But as it is everywhere in Aspen, he’s getting to like it - like the way it clings to his clothes and to Michael’s hair. He thinks that because Michael smells of woodsmoke and shampoo when he climbs into Aaron’s bed at night rather than chlorine or alcohol, it makes this different somehow than the long nights after Athens when he was forced to remember what the rest of the world had forgotten: Michael Phelps was nineteen. Just a kid. Not a god. He bled; he cried.
Oh god, the angst. So here I'm trying to build story without making anything too obvious. I think I'm okay up to the paragraph below, then things start to get forced and false sounding.
More than that, he was guilty of letting his overwhelming pride get the better of him. Of rubbing his wealth and his success in the wrong faces, and now he was paying for his sins. Paying and paying.
*
This night begins like all the others, with Aaron reminding Michael to brush his teeth, helping him find the right pills and take them in the right order and then tucking him into his own bed.
It’s always a relief to them both with the Xanax kicks in and Michael stops shaking and biting his lip. Sometimes he’ll sleep right away and leave Aaron to watch Letterman with the volume turned down or to catch a glimpse of himself looking young and smiling on VHI. He gets to know the late night lineup on most of the channels pretty well. He doesn’t sleep much because there’s not a lock on the medicine cabinet and his greatest fear - besides someone finding them - is that he’ll find Michael the way he did on their fist night in the mountains, with the bottle of pills in his hand and a dark, closed look on his face.
So, now I've made Michael suicidal. Like everything else about this story, though, I wanted it to be understated. I think I managed that.
“Are you going to call your mother?” he asks Michael as he watches him slide a little white pill under his tongue, unconsciously counting the remainder, just to be sure.
Michael thinks about it and nods. It takes a little while for him to find his cell phone under the piles of clothes he leaves littered about the room and then a little longer for him to actually dial the number but Aaron is patient. He doesn’t want Michael’s mother calling the police. He can’t imagine how he’d explain living in a room in Michael Phelps over their spring break, when they are supposed to be someplace like Miami, especially with the state that Michael’s in.
Michael’s conversation with his mother is short but fairly lucid and Aaron is relieved. It’s a good sign. Maybe he’ll be able to sleep tonight without Michael appearing ghostlike beside him in the dark, staring with wide, terrified eyes. His hope is unfounded and Michael is beside him, clinging to him, before Kimmel is over. He’s reliving his nightmare over and over and Aaron is no psychologist. He has no idea how to break the cycle or how to turn the record off repeat. He hoped, after it happened, after the night that the hot, drunk and resentful men decided to prove to themselves and to Michael that he was human after all, that Michael would get professional help. But Michael never did beyond going begging for pills. He latched onto Aaron instead because Aaron was there at the end and because Aaron didn’t turn away.
This is rushed. The transition to Michael appearing in bed and the exposition. The story (like all my plots) came at me in pieces and was secondary to setting the scene and the mood. So we end up with a three line explanation of what's wrong with Michael (he was gang-raped) and why Aaron cares (he doesn't, but he was there). Actually, that's not true -- in the paragraph below I try to explain more about Aaron's motivation, which becomes, I hope, a larger part of the story than the rape itself.
It was because of that, because Aaron had been there at the end, that he had come when Michael emailed him. He had borne witness to something terrible and now, because it hadn’t happened to him, because he has never felt that kind of pain or been forced to face that kind of shame, that he has to assuage his own guilt by caring for Michael in his silence and in the cold.
The bond is there and it’s strong but strange. The bond between witness and victim. The bond between rivals pales between that forged in dirt and blood and silence.
I'm torn here. I like the idea of the reiterating the Connecting Theme, but the paragraph is a little purple.
Aaron says the same thing that he always does, night after night. “You should talk to someone.” He says it into Michael’s hair or into his shoulder or even to his back, but he always says it.
And Michael always answers the same way. “Could you tell someone? Could you say it?”
Of course not. It doesn’t happen to men.
So after Aaron says what he has to, he asks something easier. “Does your back hurt?”
And Michael always tells him that it does and lets Aaron push his shirt up and rub at the knotted muscles there. All day long Michael will let no one, including Aaron touch him, but late at night when the memories are cutting him, he can let Aaron rub his back and Aaron wonders if it helps.
This night is no different, Michael’s skin is damp and Aaron’s fingers slip and slide over his back. It’s awkward trying to do this laying on his side, but Aaron’s learned not to lean over Michael because it scares him.
“Who was that boy?” Michael mumbles into the pillow, sounding like he doesn’t care.
“What boy?” Aaron says, honestly confused.
“That one in the paper. The one you kept looking at.” This is said so quietly that Aaron has to strain over the murmur of the TV to hear.
He slides his hand over Michael’s spine, trying to keep his touch light and impersonal while he thinks. “The skier?” At Michael’s nod, he goes on. “Just some kid. A kid who gave up playing football so he could ski.”
“For the money,” Michael says, more clearly. That’s something that Aaron imagines that Michael can understand. Money is simple. If you don’t have it - you want it. If you have it - you buy shit with it.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “For the money.” It’s not that simple for Aaron, of course and he’s uncomfortable with his new status. He doesn’t feel like he belongs in Aspen, and doesn’t understand how a kid from Baltimore can shake off his roots like Michael has and mingle so easily with the glittering snow bunnies.
Michael shifts under his hand and looks up at him and it’s the first time that’s ever happened. Aaron doesn’t know what Michael thinks about when he comes to his bed at night or when he touches him like this - so platonically, so brotherly - but Michael never looks at him while he does it, never acknowledges him.
“Why were you looking at him that way, Aaron?”
Aaron, very spitefully, wants to say, because if he were here in my bed instead of you, than I’d be getting fucked instead of rubbing your back like you’re a goddamned five year old. He knows his anger is misplaced and that it’s there, smoldering, because he doesn’t know how to deal with Michael’s pain and he doesn’t think that he should have to. And because, deep inside, he was caught up the Myth of Michael and when he realized that Michael was just a boy he became a little bitter. Like when he discovered that there wasn’t a Santa Claus.
Yeah, so this is me and Aaron and probably you all asking why the hell Aaron is there again, as well as a not so subtle hint that this Aaron is into guys.
“Because he’s attractive,” Aaron admits, as a compromise to himself.
“Would you sleep with him?” Michael wonders, seeming to try out the idea and Aaron feels like he’s wandered into a minefield.
“Yes.” He’s terrified of what Michael will ask him next because the conversation it playing out like a bad script in his head. Aaron knew that it might come to this point, that there might be a time when Michael wondered if men could love each other without pain and if Aaron was the one to tell him about it.
“Would you sleep with me?”
“Yes.”
Now we're getting into tricky, but one would assume inevitable, territory. It's clear now that Michael got raped; that Aaron feels that it was maybe a little Michael's fault, but since he saw the whole thing and he's into dudes (which we now know as well), he has some kind of reason to take care of Michael. Even though he doesn't like him and feels disillusioned by him. Obviously, this equals h/c sex, right? Hmm.
Michael seems to sink into the mattress and the room becomes too hot for Aaron. He kicks the blankets off and lets the cool, dry air play over the skin of his legs, giving him goose bumps. He can feel Michael looking at him and it’s a look that he hates. It’s why he’s almost given up on women. They’re either voracious in bed, demanding things he can’t give, pleasure he doesn’t understand, or they lay under him terrified of his size and his masculinity. They tremble and wince and flinch and whimper and he has to move slower than he’s accustomed and touch them with more gentleness than he usually possesses, guiding their hands to him and reassuring them in quiet tones that, yes their bodies are meant for this - they can take him - it won’t hurt.
I don't remember how people reacted to this -- is it too much? I think it's honest and I still like it. It's Aaron's POV, not mine, obviously, and it echoes conversations I've had and I wanted to try to capture in context.
That's the look Michael is giving him and Aaron doesn’t know if he has it in him to go through the ritual. Touch this . . . it can’t hurt you - I won’t hurt you. But Michael’s hand is on his chest and that light touch, the first he’s ever had from Michael, arouses him more than he thinks is appropriate. He catches Michael’s hand and presses it over his heart. “Don’t. This isn’t what you want. It’s some kind of reaction. Some syndrome or something.”
At the same time we know the sex is coming, Aaron isn't so sure he wants it, or that Michael really does and to make sure we don't venture into taking advantage of the victim twice, Aaron is sure to -- not to ask, he's not like that -- but to tell Michael that he's fucked up, at least.
All Michael does is breathe deeply; he doesn’t move. He waits and it works. Aaron has been too long without even jacking off and maybe if he gets Michael off tonight it’ll shake something loose and Michael can start to heal. Sexual healing or something. It sounds ridiculous and dangerous, but Aaron moves Michael’s hand down his chest and belly until he thinks that Michael has to pull away but he doesn’t. He touches Aaron gently, almost as if the whole thing is something foreign to him.
Okay. Here's where it gets tricky again. As an author, you (I) don't want to get caught writing that ugly romance novel trope about The Healing Power of Cock, yes? But, since it's extremely limited 3rd person, I'm just giving you Aaron's POV, and, yeah, he's thinking along those lines, but doesn't that fit? Hasn't he already proven that he's kind of a jackass?
“I won’t hurt you,” Aaron says by rote. “It won’t hurt you.” As if his cock is a separate organism from his body. But isn’t it? He wonders. Men - and women too - often separate men from their penises. “You’re thinking with your dick again, aren’t you?” they accuse. So, perhaps it does have a mind of its own, and a life of its own. A will to hurt when it should please.
Could have edited out everything after the second sentence here.
He tries again, holding himself still on his elbow next to Michael, trying not to intimidate, not to frighten, even if Michael is bigger than he is. “It’s just like yours.”
There’s no way to know if Michael believes him because the fire is dying and in the flickering light Michael’s expression is inscrutable. So for minutes, the only sound is Jimmy laughing at himself on the TV and Michael’s slow breaths as he runs his fingers over Aaron. By the time Jimmy’s musical guest is screaming, “You had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend,” Aaron is dizzy from holding his breath and holding so still. His muscles are beginning to shake and all he wants, really, is to run into the bathroom, wash a handful of Michael’s pills down with the bottle of Hennessey that he keeps in his gym bag and then take a cold shower.
Why does Aaron have a bottle of Hennessey? My god. How random is that?
When Michael’s hand leaves him, all Aaron feels is relief. He’s hard, but he can sleep with a hard on; he’s done it before and if the he can get through tonight with just feeling a little grouchy in the morning rather than feeling like a child molester, than he’ll be eternally grateful to god and all the angels. But Michael’s started touching himself, as if taking Aaron’s mumbled, half-hearted assurances seriously. He’s comparing Aaron’s body to his own. He’s wondering, Aaron is sure, how it works. Two men, together because they want to be.
There's my comparison kink again. Subtle, but there.Also, Aaron is redeeming himself momentarily, and maybe he shouldn't have. It seems a little out of character, the "god and all the angels" line especially.
Aaron moves slowly when he makes his decision. He pushes himself down the bed until he’s staring at Michael’s stomach. He can do this, at least. He can do this for Michael and it should be enough. After all, girls do it; at some point Michael has to have gotten head from some willing woman. It won’t be foreign, Aaron tells himself as he pulls Michael’s boxers down. It won’t be weird. Michael won’t freak out. Still, he keeps his eyes open and he’s prepared to run when he touches his tongue to Michael’s cock.
Nothing. Michael doesn’t move or make a sound.
And all the time that Aaron works him with his tongue and his lips - until his jaw feels like it’s going to lock and his chin and his neck are wet with spit and precome - Michael doesn’t say anything. If Aaron hadn’t done this before, if he hadn’t sucked a lot of dick in his life, he wouldn’t have known when Michael was about to come, and Aaron isn’t the swallowing kind. Of course, if he hadn’t been the dick-sucking kind then he wouldn’t have been in the part of Athens that he was that fateful, fateful night when he saw what he did - a boy’s curiosity and belief in his own sudden immortality gone wrong - and he wouldn't have suddenly become responsible for the life of an American hero, a stranger, a hurt boy. It all comes down to having a cock in his mouth, really. And that’s ironic, he really did think.
I like what this is saying, and I like the first two sentences. I just don't like the way I say the rest of it. "Fateful, fateful night?" No. And we could have done without the Alanis ref.
It’s the tiny tremor in the muscle of Michael’s thigh and the sudden tension under the soft skin in his mouth that gives it away. Aaron has only a second before he has a mouthful of Michael’s bitter come. When he looks up, Michael is staring back down at him through slitted eyes, and his face is no softer, no less distant than it had been before.
Aaron shrugs, leans to the side and keeping his eyes on Michael he spits into the fireplace.
Ah. And one of my favorite things that I've written. Ever. If I could have every character that I write that gives head spit come into a fireplace, I would.
As he wipes his mouth and chin with the back of his hand, he thinks he sees Michael smile.
*
Aaron’s gym bag is within reach, not far from where he sits on the floor with his back to the wall, and he feels daring. Like this night, in the middle of nowhere caught between Michael’s silence and cold, he can step a little closer to the edge than usual, swim farther out than he should, cut a little deeper.
The whiskey washes the taste of Michael’s come out of his mouth and burns its way into Aaron’s stomach. Warding off the cold. Filling up the silence.
The Connecting Theme with a side of Emo.
“Can I?” Michael asks, holding his hand out like a child.
“No,” Aaron answers, and his tone is sharper than he meant it to be. Chastened, Michael withdraws his hand and lays down with his head pillowed on his arm, watching Aaron warily.
“You’re already stoned. I’m surprised you could get it up with all the shit you take.” And Aaron isn’t proud of what he’s saying, but it’s the cold and the booze and the blowjob talking and he’s not sure that he can stop it now.
He must have surprised Michael into honesty though, either that or getting great head loosened him up, because he doesn’t lapse back into silence. He nods and then mutters, “You’re right. I haven’t been hard in a long time. Not with . . .” He waves a hand toward the bathroom and the pills that Aaron had convinced him that he needed. He’s never told anyone what happened, and Aaron only knows what he saw: blood, bruises and tears. Nothing, it turned out, that couldn’t be hidden. But after he stopped swimming and took up drinking, Aaron talked him into seeing somebody just to get something to keep him from looking so longingly at sharp objects. It had been working, mostly.
Until now. Until the long winter took its toll and Michael called Aaron away from his beaches and his beer and his friends to come to a place where the air was too thin to draw a proper breath and the walls of snow created echoing canyons.
Aaron thinks about what Michael just said and grips the neck of his bottle tighter. “You’re not taking them all are you?”
Michael shakes his head and stretches, burying his feet in the blankets. “If I want to swim again I can’t be a walking pharmacy.”
“Do you want to swim again?”
So this: lazy or compelling? Being raped violates your very core, why shouldn't it disrupt your identity -- in this case, for Michael, swimming? Or, since it is so disruptive, you may take solace in the familiar, the routine -- in this case, for Michael, swimming. My spin has more to do, again, with Aaron's issues with Michael, and his secret blame for Michael for what happened to him. When I say that below that not even being a cock-sucking drunk will make him a true asshole, I (Aaron) am lying. He is. Right there, he is. Again, too much?
There’s more to that question than just a problem of a desire to compete and Aaron is sure that Michael knows it. Michael was punished for being who he was - for doing what he did and what he loved - and he’s not recovered from that. The question should be: “Can you swim again?” but not even whiskey in his belly, come on his chin and a throbbing, clicking jaw, will make Aaron into a true asshole. He won’t ask that. He won’t ask if Michael can ever believe in himself again. He won’t ask exactly what it is inside of Michael that's broken, because then he might be asked to fix it, and he’s not strong enough to do that.
“Yes,” Michael says and there’s a hint of emotion in the word. A glimmer; a possibility that he’s not dead. “I want to swim.”
Aaron hears him, but he hears a the echo of desire in his voice and he wonders if it’s for the sport or if it’s for sex, companionship, love, all the things that being violated has taken from him.
The fire crackles and Aaron jumps and then smiles at how tense he’s become. He sticks his tongue into the bottle mouth and pretends it’s somewhere else - warmer, with slick, soft walls. Maybe what he and Michael need, really, are a couple of women. They may be completely incomprehensible to Aaron, but they are good in situations like this; they’re naturally caring, nurturing and sympathetic. They know when and how to touch someone who’s been hurt and they know the right things to say. And, most importantly, they understand fear. Aaron had thought about it earlier, but it keeps coming back. There are predatory women, but many of them live in fear - fear of him, of Michael, of men and their dicks. A woman could relate to Michael where Aaron can’t. Who knows? Maybe for one night, Aaron needs that soft, giving kind of comfort too.
Michael has been watching Aaron tongue the bottle, and Aaron can’t help but act up a little, just for him. Rimming the glass lip, letting the amber drops burn his mouth.
“Can . . .” Michael looks unsure what he wants to ask but then comes to a decision. “Can you do that to me?”
Backed myself into a corner now, didn’t I? Aaron tells himself, even as he nods. “D’you want me to?” ‘Cause it usually leads to fucking, he thinks.
Unsure, Michael just rolls away from the edge of the bed, making room again for Aaron. They lay in silence for a while with Aaron just barely brushing his hand over Michael’s hair, imitating a soothing motion that his mother had used when he was scared and fretful as a child. His own erection, flagging after sitting on the cold floor, is reviving with Michael’s proximity and Aaron reaches down to touch himself, more to readjust than anything, but Michael’s hand on his arm stops him before can remove his hand.
“Keep going. I wanna see you make yourself come.”
There is enormous power in words; Aaron knows that. And to hear Michael, in that flat, lisping voice, tell him to jack off, strikes a very deep chord. He pulls his boxers all the way down, and begins to move his hand on his cock, slowly to start, the way he always does. Michael gets up after a minute and then comes back with a little bottle of lotion from the bathroom. It’s lavender scented; that scent, mixed with the harsh smell of whiskey and smoke, is a combination that Aaron knows he’ll never forget.
Michael changed the TV station when he got up and now it’s on MTV2, and Aaron finds himself with a handful of purple lotion, jacking himself off while Davey Havok stands on the railing of a bridge and screams, Your sins into me, oh my beautiful one. Michael hasn’t taken his eyes off Aaron, and Aaron finds a side of himself that must have been buried deep. He finds that he likes to be watched like this, pleasuring himself.
Pleasuring himself? What?
He pushes it; he steps across the boundaries of his and Michael’s relationship and falls, with Davey, over the bridge into the cold, your sins into me. But he’s not quiet about it. He can’t help the noises he makes, the grunts, the growls, the gasps, as he slides two fingers inside of himself. He almost laughs when he sees Michael’s eyes widen. The thought is forming in his head then; Aaron can see it. He spreads his legs and looks at Michael thoughtfully. “Fuck me,” he says, and it carries over the TV. The room is cold, but no longer so silent.
Now Aaron thinks that Michael has sinned somehow and it's Aaron's job to play the martyr. I thought I was a little more subtle that this; apparently not. I was so focused on mood (I wanted you to smell the smoke and the lavender and focus on how incongruous that was with the situation) that I let the plot get heavy-handed.
It’s unnerving when Michael is suddenly over him and then pushing into him with more force and eagerness than finesse. For once, Aaron is afraid, afraid that Michael will snap and hurt him, take out all those long months of silence on Aaron, on Aaron’s clean, unviolated body. But it doesn’t last; Michael is just inexperienced and nervous. Once Aaron wills his body to relax, to take Michael inside of him, it’s not so bad.
Michael doesn’t know what to do with his hands, and Aaron has to help him place them on either side of his shoulders and then he has to catch Michael’s hips and steady his rhythm. Time seems to stretch on endlessly, and Aaron no longer has to wonder about the vacant look on the women’s faces that he's fucked: it’s boredom. It’s a wish to be elsewhere, anywhere that your body isn’t being used as a tool to satisfy someone else’s rage, fear, or need.
Experimenting with bad sex -- no real Healing Power of Cock, here -- and I like the last line there. It's something I've tried to work on (out?) in fic since.
When it’s over, Michael pulls out of him and sits with his back to the headboard, looking a little crazy. There’s nothing that Aaron can say, nothing that Michael wants to hear. Instead, Aaron starts to get up and is stopped by Michael’s hand on his chest.
“Don’t.”
“I need to clean up.” Aaron says it quietly, not trying to provoke Michael. But Michael isn’t looking for a fight. He holds Aaron in place with the hand on his chest and puts his other hand between Aaron’s legs, pushing them apart and then trailing a finger across his inner thigh and then higher.
This may have been the only place that I was actually trying to write something vaguely, weirdly, sexy.
Breath is a precious commodity suddenly, and the silence is back and it’s deafening. Aaron’s cock aches from being denied release twice, and his thighs, where Michael’s hand is, are wet with come and lavender lotion. Your sins into me, Aaron thinks.
“Leave it,” Michael tells him, and when he moves his hand to touch Aaron’s cock, it’s with more assurance than anything he’s done in months, it seems. Aaron’s never been one to play games; he’s never understood the appeal. But to try to sleep with Michael’s come inside him, on him, making him wet and sticky, is enough to finally bring him off in Michael’s hand.
When Michael presses his hand to Aaron’s mouth, Aaron understands that it’s a punishment for what he did earlier, for spitting into the fire. He puts up with it, swallows the salt and the bitterness, because it’s the old Michael, the vindictive, competitive, selfish Michael that does things like that, and Aaron’s pleased that he’s back, if only for a moment.
I maybe should have ended the fic here, or at the very least after the next paragraph. I don't like the ending as it is.
He’s taken on Michael’s sins, taken them in, every way that he can and he hopes that it’s penance enough for being a witness to Michael’s pain. He hopes it’s enough to compensate for the fact that he can sleep while Michael’s nights are filled with ghosts.
When Michael came in him, he spoke, he ranted, he cried a little. The silence is broken and Aaron can feel the heat in the room, despite the fact the fire is dead.
And that's it. I was working on technique -- on creating atmosphere -- and the plot got away from me and turned troublesome. Like I said, it was a classic Colorado February when everything is dead and ugly and bitter cold, and I wanted to convey that. I needed to get the swimmers to Colorado somehow, and Michael freaking out and wanting to go to Aspen sounded reasonable to me. I just needed a reason for him to freak out. Way back, in August or September of 2004, I'd started writing an epic non-con Ian/Michael in which Ian "saves" Michael after something similar happens. Only, I think it's Aaron that gets too forceful with him. Something. Anyway. Again, I tied swimming and power and sex and water together and in it, instead of healing sex, Ian teaches Michael to swim again. I liked to play with that theme too: the idea that Michael was secretly afraid of drowning, drowning imagery, etc. Anyway, I cannibalized that fic a little here, only I twisted it beyond all recognition.
At the center of this fic is, ostensibly, this rape that I never clearly address, and yet I have Aaron, this main character that is supposed to be the sympathetic comfort-giver in the classic h/c scenario, and he's reacting in all the wrong ways. He's blaming; he's enabling; he's lost and disillusioned in regard to his life (personal and professional) since he since he went pro, and he's just a little misogynist. Also, he's aroused by Michael's vulnerability and even though that bothers him, it's not enough to stop him from having sex with him.
In the long run, this fic was a huge turning point for me, technique-wise. I think the changes in my writing style become very evident, post "Silence and Cold" with the NBA slash that I started writing that summer. Also, it signifies closure for me and marks the end of my swimslashing (until next summer), except for "Change Your Latitude," which was a ficathon piece.
~end~
Songs:
AFI - "Silver and Cold"
The Killers- "Somebody Told Me"
Silence and Cold
Cold in life's throws, I'll fall asleep for you
Cold in life's throws, I only ask you turn away
Cold in life's throws, I'll fall asleep for you
Cold in life's throws, I only ask you turn
As they seep... into me, oh, my beautiful one, now
Your sins into me
Oh, my beautiful one
Your sins into me
As a rapturous voice escapes, I will tremble a prayer
And I'll beg for forgiveness
(Your sins into me)
Your sins into me...
AFI - "Silver and Cold"
So, where to start? How about with the fact that I know better than to preface my fics with song bits and yet I seem to have done so here? Hmm. Anyway. This fic was, more than any other fic I'd written up to this point, an exercise. I had been extremely inspired by the Olympics, but that was finally wearing off and plus, it was February. I hate February. I hated this particular February especially. I had moved out of my parents house in November; I had started working at the Home of the Aardvarks and was just hating it, and I was seriously questioning my writing ability. thorne_scratch posted a story that was stylistically interesting to me and I wanted to see if I could challenge myself to write something more specifically visceral than anything I'd tried before. And hence, this story was born
I wrote it in two sittings, mostly in my bedroom, freezing to death, watching the snow fall.
Aaron’s fingers trace silly designs on the cold, wet glass of the window. A baby’s foot, a lopsided smiley face, a backwards iH to greet the people passing by. They don’t notice him, though. They’re all wrapped up in their ski jackets and their knit scarves and their beanies and their narrow, narrow lives. All except for the guy leaning on the lamppost with the cowboy hat on. Aaron squints at him - his contacts are hurting him in Aspen’s high, dry air - and thinks that perhaps the city council pays the man to stand there like that. With his sheepskin coat and his hat and the scuffed tips of boots barely visible under the cuffs of worn jeans, he could be actually be the Marlboro man (in the time Aaron has been in the mountains he has heard the area referred to variously as God’s Country, Big Sky Country, and Marlboro Country). The man, hunching into his coat and ambling away now, adds a feeling of sad authenticity to the sparkling little town full of stars on skis.
First sentences have always been vital to me. This one was no exception. It was all I had for a while, and I still like it. I also like "narrow, narrow lives;" although, I'd probably change "perhaps" to "maybe" in the city council sentence.
When Michael gets up, he bumps the table and spills Aaron’s coffee and some drops hit his hand. “Ouch,” Aaron mumbles to himself, more out of habit than pain, and Michael doesn’t even notice. Aaron wonders for the tenth, or maybe the fifteenth, time if Michael knows where he is or whom he’s with.
This is progressing just how I wanted it to. With, um, jagged apathy. I wanted it to be apparent immediately that there was very little emotional investment (on the surface) from either character.
“Where are you going?” he asks Michael, not really caring. He has the local paper and he’s reading an article about a skier who used to play football but left the game for the money. The story unduly fascinates Aaron. He’s always been an individual sportsman, but for a while, he had as much of a team as one can have in swimming. Of course, he’s given that all up now. Given it up for money, which is something that Brendan and Ian say that they understand but their eyes tell him something different. They think, and Aaron knows this because he knows them, that he’s sold out. That he’s banking on his looks now as much as his talent and that he’s not much better than a whore because of it. Not much better than Michael or Thorpe. But this kid, the kid in the paper in front of him, left a team and a school and a state all behind. Left stadiums full of screaming fans - something that Michael doesn’t even always have - for cold and silence and money.
Jeremy Bloom! I doubt anyone got that reference, and maybe that's a bad thing? I don't know. I was obsessed with him at the time, and I think the direction it takes the narrative is okay -- we get a little bit into Aaron's head -- but it could have been edited down. The Connecting Theme is there, which is good. But I use "whore" and I wouldn't now. It's jarring.
Aaron thinks he’s beautiful.
“Did you hear me?” Michael asks, his voice flat, like he’s trying to disguise an accent or an emotion.
“No.”
“I’m going back to the lodge. There are too many people here.”
Michael’s agoraphobia worries Aaron in an abstract way, the way he worries about the twinges of pain he gets in his shoulders sometimes or about how convincing his smile will be at Lenny’s wedding.
Lenny/Aaron!
“Do you want me to come with you?” Aaron asks, not caring either way. He’s wasting his spring break in a ski town, surrounded by strangers, all because he saw something he shouldn’t have one afternoon in Athens. He’s discharging an obligation and he can’t do it sitting alone watching the snow fall.
Michael doesn’t answer right away, but the tremor in his hand - the one that rests on the newspaper now over the skier’s face - betrays his anxiety.
“Never mind, Mike,” he says, getting up and shrugging into a coat that he bought especially for the trip. He likes spending his money, if not in the extravagant ways that Michael does, and the swish of the shiny fabric makes him happy for a moment. “Let’s go.”
One of my favorite things to do from the time I started to write in this fandom was to compare and contrast these two. Also, hey, the plot thickens.
Aaron never knew, or perhaps never considered, what a soothing smell woodsmoke was. But as it is everywhere in Aspen, he’s getting to like it - like the way it clings to his clothes and to Michael’s hair. He thinks that because Michael smells of woodsmoke and shampoo when he climbs into Aaron’s bed at night rather than chlorine or alcohol, it makes this different somehow than the long nights after Athens when he was forced to remember what the rest of the world had forgotten: Michael Phelps was nineteen. Just a kid. Not a god. He bled; he cried.
Oh god, the angst. So here I'm trying to build story without making anything too obvious. I think I'm okay up to the paragraph below, then things start to get forced and false sounding.
More than that, he was guilty of letting his overwhelming pride get the better of him. Of rubbing his wealth and his success in the wrong faces, and now he was paying for his sins. Paying and paying.
*
This night begins like all the others, with Aaron reminding Michael to brush his teeth, helping him find the right pills and take them in the right order and then tucking him into his own bed.
It’s always a relief to them both with the Xanax kicks in and Michael stops shaking and biting his lip. Sometimes he’ll sleep right away and leave Aaron to watch Letterman with the volume turned down or to catch a glimpse of himself looking young and smiling on VHI. He gets to know the late night lineup on most of the channels pretty well. He doesn’t sleep much because there’s not a lock on the medicine cabinet and his greatest fear - besides someone finding them - is that he’ll find Michael the way he did on their fist night in the mountains, with the bottle of pills in his hand and a dark, closed look on his face.
So, now I've made Michael suicidal. Like everything else about this story, though, I wanted it to be understated. I think I managed that.
“Are you going to call your mother?” he asks Michael as he watches him slide a little white pill under his tongue, unconsciously counting the remainder, just to be sure.
Michael thinks about it and nods. It takes a little while for him to find his cell phone under the piles of clothes he leaves littered about the room and then a little longer for him to actually dial the number but Aaron is patient. He doesn’t want Michael’s mother calling the police. He can’t imagine how he’d explain living in a room in Michael Phelps over their spring break, when they are supposed to be someplace like Miami, especially with the state that Michael’s in.
Michael’s conversation with his mother is short but fairly lucid and Aaron is relieved. It’s a good sign. Maybe he’ll be able to sleep tonight without Michael appearing ghostlike beside him in the dark, staring with wide, terrified eyes. His hope is unfounded and Michael is beside him, clinging to him, before Kimmel is over. He’s reliving his nightmare over and over and Aaron is no psychologist. He has no idea how to break the cycle or how to turn the record off repeat. He hoped, after it happened, after the night that the hot, drunk and resentful men decided to prove to themselves and to Michael that he was human after all, that Michael would get professional help. But Michael never did beyond going begging for pills. He latched onto Aaron instead because Aaron was there at the end and because Aaron didn’t turn away.
This is rushed. The transition to Michael appearing in bed and the exposition. The story (like all my plots) came at me in pieces and was secondary to setting the scene and the mood. So we end up with a three line explanation of what's wrong with Michael (he was gang-raped) and why Aaron cares (he doesn't, but he was there). Actually, that's not true -- in the paragraph below I try to explain more about Aaron's motivation, which becomes, I hope, a larger part of the story than the rape itself.
It was because of that, because Aaron had been there at the end, that he had come when Michael emailed him. He had borne witness to something terrible and now, because it hadn’t happened to him, because he has never felt that kind of pain or been forced to face that kind of shame, that he has to assuage his own guilt by caring for Michael in his silence and in the cold.
The bond is there and it’s strong but strange. The bond between witness and victim. The bond between rivals pales between that forged in dirt and blood and silence.
I'm torn here. I like the idea of the reiterating the Connecting Theme, but the paragraph is a little purple.
Aaron says the same thing that he always does, night after night. “You should talk to someone.” He says it into Michael’s hair or into his shoulder or even to his back, but he always says it.
And Michael always answers the same way. “Could you tell someone? Could you say it?”
Of course not. It doesn’t happen to men.
So after Aaron says what he has to, he asks something easier. “Does your back hurt?”
And Michael always tells him that it does and lets Aaron push his shirt up and rub at the knotted muscles there. All day long Michael will let no one, including Aaron touch him, but late at night when the memories are cutting him, he can let Aaron rub his back and Aaron wonders if it helps.
This night is no different, Michael’s skin is damp and Aaron’s fingers slip and slide over his back. It’s awkward trying to do this laying on his side, but Aaron’s learned not to lean over Michael because it scares him.
“Who was that boy?” Michael mumbles into the pillow, sounding like he doesn’t care.
“What boy?” Aaron says, honestly confused.
“That one in the paper. The one you kept looking at.” This is said so quietly that Aaron has to strain over the murmur of the TV to hear.
He slides his hand over Michael’s spine, trying to keep his touch light and impersonal while he thinks. “The skier?” At Michael’s nod, he goes on. “Just some kid. A kid who gave up playing football so he could ski.”
“For the money,” Michael says, more clearly. That’s something that Aaron imagines that Michael can understand. Money is simple. If you don’t have it - you want it. If you have it - you buy shit with it.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “For the money.” It’s not that simple for Aaron, of course and he’s uncomfortable with his new status. He doesn’t feel like he belongs in Aspen, and doesn’t understand how a kid from Baltimore can shake off his roots like Michael has and mingle so easily with the glittering snow bunnies.
Michael shifts under his hand and looks up at him and it’s the first time that’s ever happened. Aaron doesn’t know what Michael thinks about when he comes to his bed at night or when he touches him like this - so platonically, so brotherly - but Michael never looks at him while he does it, never acknowledges him.
“Why were you looking at him that way, Aaron?”
Aaron, very spitefully, wants to say, because if he were here in my bed instead of you, than I’d be getting fucked instead of rubbing your back like you’re a goddamned five year old. He knows his anger is misplaced and that it’s there, smoldering, because he doesn’t know how to deal with Michael’s pain and he doesn’t think that he should have to. And because, deep inside, he was caught up the Myth of Michael and when he realized that Michael was just a boy he became a little bitter. Like when he discovered that there wasn’t a Santa Claus.
Yeah, so this is me and Aaron and probably you all asking why the hell Aaron is there again, as well as a not so subtle hint that this Aaron is into guys.
“Because he’s attractive,” Aaron admits, as a compromise to himself.
“Would you sleep with him?” Michael wonders, seeming to try out the idea and Aaron feels like he’s wandered into a minefield.
“Yes.” He’s terrified of what Michael will ask him next because the conversation it playing out like a bad script in his head. Aaron knew that it might come to this point, that there might be a time when Michael wondered if men could love each other without pain and if Aaron was the one to tell him about it.
“Would you sleep with me?”
“Yes.”
Now we're getting into tricky, but one would assume inevitable, territory. It's clear now that Michael got raped; that Aaron feels that it was maybe a little Michael's fault, but since he saw the whole thing and he's into dudes (which we now know as well), he has some kind of reason to take care of Michael. Even though he doesn't like him and feels disillusioned by him. Obviously, this equals h/c sex, right? Hmm.
Michael seems to sink into the mattress and the room becomes too hot for Aaron. He kicks the blankets off and lets the cool, dry air play over the skin of his legs, giving him goose bumps. He can feel Michael looking at him and it’s a look that he hates. It’s why he’s almost given up on women. They’re either voracious in bed, demanding things he can’t give, pleasure he doesn’t understand, or they lay under him terrified of his size and his masculinity. They tremble and wince and flinch and whimper and he has to move slower than he’s accustomed and touch them with more gentleness than he usually possesses, guiding their hands to him and reassuring them in quiet tones that, yes their bodies are meant for this - they can take him - it won’t hurt.
I don't remember how people reacted to this -- is it too much? I think it's honest and I still like it. It's Aaron's POV, not mine, obviously, and it echoes conversations I've had and I wanted to try to capture in context.
That's the look Michael is giving him and Aaron doesn’t know if he has it in him to go through the ritual. Touch this . . . it can’t hurt you - I won’t hurt you. But Michael’s hand is on his chest and that light touch, the first he’s ever had from Michael, arouses him more than he thinks is appropriate. He catches Michael’s hand and presses it over his heart. “Don’t. This isn’t what you want. It’s some kind of reaction. Some syndrome or something.”
At the same time we know the sex is coming, Aaron isn't so sure he wants it, or that Michael really does and to make sure we don't venture into taking advantage of the victim twice, Aaron is sure to -- not to ask, he's not like that -- but to tell Michael that he's fucked up, at least.
All Michael does is breathe deeply; he doesn’t move. He waits and it works. Aaron has been too long without even jacking off and maybe if he gets Michael off tonight it’ll shake something loose and Michael can start to heal. Sexual healing or something. It sounds ridiculous and dangerous, but Aaron moves Michael’s hand down his chest and belly until he thinks that Michael has to pull away but he doesn’t. He touches Aaron gently, almost as if the whole thing is something foreign to him.
Okay. Here's where it gets tricky again. As an author, you (I) don't want to get caught writing that ugly romance novel trope about The Healing Power of Cock, yes? But, since it's extremely limited 3rd person, I'm just giving you Aaron's POV, and, yeah, he's thinking along those lines, but doesn't that fit? Hasn't he already proven that he's kind of a jackass?
“I won’t hurt you,” Aaron says by rote. “It won’t hurt you.” As if his cock is a separate organism from his body. But isn’t it? He wonders. Men - and women too - often separate men from their penises. “You’re thinking with your dick again, aren’t you?” they accuse. So, perhaps it does have a mind of its own, and a life of its own. A will to hurt when it should please.
Could have edited out everything after the second sentence here.
He tries again, holding himself still on his elbow next to Michael, trying not to intimidate, not to frighten, even if Michael is bigger than he is. “It’s just like yours.”
There’s no way to know if Michael believes him because the fire is dying and in the flickering light Michael’s expression is inscrutable. So for minutes, the only sound is Jimmy laughing at himself on the TV and Michael’s slow breaths as he runs his fingers over Aaron. By the time Jimmy’s musical guest is screaming, “You had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend,” Aaron is dizzy from holding his breath and holding so still. His muscles are beginning to shake and all he wants, really, is to run into the bathroom, wash a handful of Michael’s pills down with the bottle of Hennessey that he keeps in his gym bag and then take a cold shower.
Why does Aaron have a bottle of Hennessey? My god. How random is that?
When Michael’s hand leaves him, all Aaron feels is relief. He’s hard, but he can sleep with a hard on; he’s done it before and if the he can get through tonight with just feeling a little grouchy in the morning rather than feeling like a child molester, than he’ll be eternally grateful to god and all the angels. But Michael’s started touching himself, as if taking Aaron’s mumbled, half-hearted assurances seriously. He’s comparing Aaron’s body to his own. He’s wondering, Aaron is sure, how it works. Two men, together because they want to be.
There's my comparison kink again. Subtle, but there.Also, Aaron is redeeming himself momentarily, and maybe he shouldn't have. It seems a little out of character, the "god and all the angels" line especially.
Aaron moves slowly when he makes his decision. He pushes himself down the bed until he’s staring at Michael’s stomach. He can do this, at least. He can do this for Michael and it should be enough. After all, girls do it; at some point Michael has to have gotten head from some willing woman. It won’t be foreign, Aaron tells himself as he pulls Michael’s boxers down. It won’t be weird. Michael won’t freak out. Still, he keeps his eyes open and he’s prepared to run when he touches his tongue to Michael’s cock.
Nothing. Michael doesn’t move or make a sound.
And all the time that Aaron works him with his tongue and his lips - until his jaw feels like it’s going to lock and his chin and his neck are wet with spit and precome - Michael doesn’t say anything. If Aaron hadn’t done this before, if he hadn’t sucked a lot of dick in his life, he wouldn’t have known when Michael was about to come, and Aaron isn’t the swallowing kind. Of course, if he hadn’t been the dick-sucking kind then he wouldn’t have been in the part of Athens that he was that fateful, fateful night when he saw what he did - a boy’s curiosity and belief in his own sudden immortality gone wrong - and he wouldn't have suddenly become responsible for the life of an American hero, a stranger, a hurt boy. It all comes down to having a cock in his mouth, really. And that’s ironic, he really did think.
I like what this is saying, and I like the first two sentences. I just don't like the way I say the rest of it. "Fateful, fateful night?" No. And we could have done without the Alanis ref.
It’s the tiny tremor in the muscle of Michael’s thigh and the sudden tension under the soft skin in his mouth that gives it away. Aaron has only a second before he has a mouthful of Michael’s bitter come. When he looks up, Michael is staring back down at him through slitted eyes, and his face is no softer, no less distant than it had been before.
Aaron shrugs, leans to the side and keeping his eyes on Michael he spits into the fireplace.
Ah. And one of my favorite things that I've written. Ever. If I could have every character that I write that gives head spit come into a fireplace, I would.
As he wipes his mouth and chin with the back of his hand, he thinks he sees Michael smile.
*
Aaron’s gym bag is within reach, not far from where he sits on the floor with his back to the wall, and he feels daring. Like this night, in the middle of nowhere caught between Michael’s silence and cold, he can step a little closer to the edge than usual, swim farther out than he should, cut a little deeper.
The whiskey washes the taste of Michael’s come out of his mouth and burns its way into Aaron’s stomach. Warding off the cold. Filling up the silence.
The Connecting Theme with a side of Emo.
“Can I?” Michael asks, holding his hand out like a child.
“No,” Aaron answers, and his tone is sharper than he meant it to be. Chastened, Michael withdraws his hand and lays down with his head pillowed on his arm, watching Aaron warily.
“You’re already stoned. I’m surprised you could get it up with all the shit you take.” And Aaron isn’t proud of what he’s saying, but it’s the cold and the booze and the blowjob talking and he’s not sure that he can stop it now.
He must have surprised Michael into honesty though, either that or getting great head loosened him up, because he doesn’t lapse back into silence. He nods and then mutters, “You’re right. I haven’t been hard in a long time. Not with . . .” He waves a hand toward the bathroom and the pills that Aaron had convinced him that he needed. He’s never told anyone what happened, and Aaron only knows what he saw: blood, bruises and tears. Nothing, it turned out, that couldn’t be hidden. But after he stopped swimming and took up drinking, Aaron talked him into seeing somebody just to get something to keep him from looking so longingly at sharp objects. It had been working, mostly.
Until now. Until the long winter took its toll and Michael called Aaron away from his beaches and his beer and his friends to come to a place where the air was too thin to draw a proper breath and the walls of snow created echoing canyons.
Aaron thinks about what Michael just said and grips the neck of his bottle tighter. “You’re not taking them all are you?”
Michael shakes his head and stretches, burying his feet in the blankets. “If I want to swim again I can’t be a walking pharmacy.”
“Do you want to swim again?”
So this: lazy or compelling? Being raped violates your very core, why shouldn't it disrupt your identity -- in this case, for Michael, swimming? Or, since it is so disruptive, you may take solace in the familiar, the routine -- in this case, for Michael, swimming. My spin has more to do, again, with Aaron's issues with Michael, and his secret blame for Michael for what happened to him. When I say that below that not even being a cock-sucking drunk will make him a true asshole, I (Aaron) am lying. He is. Right there, he is. Again, too much?
There’s more to that question than just a problem of a desire to compete and Aaron is sure that Michael knows it. Michael was punished for being who he was - for doing what he did and what he loved - and he’s not recovered from that. The question should be: “Can you swim again?” but not even whiskey in his belly, come on his chin and a throbbing, clicking jaw, will make Aaron into a true asshole. He won’t ask that. He won’t ask if Michael can ever believe in himself again. He won’t ask exactly what it is inside of Michael that's broken, because then he might be asked to fix it, and he’s not strong enough to do that.
“Yes,” Michael says and there’s a hint of emotion in the word. A glimmer; a possibility that he’s not dead. “I want to swim.”
Aaron hears him, but he hears a the echo of desire in his voice and he wonders if it’s for the sport or if it’s for sex, companionship, love, all the things that being violated has taken from him.
The fire crackles and Aaron jumps and then smiles at how tense he’s become. He sticks his tongue into the bottle mouth and pretends it’s somewhere else - warmer, with slick, soft walls. Maybe what he and Michael need, really, are a couple of women. They may be completely incomprehensible to Aaron, but they are good in situations like this; they’re naturally caring, nurturing and sympathetic. They know when and how to touch someone who’s been hurt and they know the right things to say. And, most importantly, they understand fear. Aaron had thought about it earlier, but it keeps coming back. There are predatory women, but many of them live in fear - fear of him, of Michael, of men and their dicks. A woman could relate to Michael where Aaron can’t. Who knows? Maybe for one night, Aaron needs that soft, giving kind of comfort too.
Michael has been watching Aaron tongue the bottle, and Aaron can’t help but act up a little, just for him. Rimming the glass lip, letting the amber drops burn his mouth.
“Can . . .” Michael looks unsure what he wants to ask but then comes to a decision. “Can you do that to me?”
Backed myself into a corner now, didn’t I? Aaron tells himself, even as he nods. “D’you want me to?” ‘Cause it usually leads to fucking, he thinks.
Unsure, Michael just rolls away from the edge of the bed, making room again for Aaron. They lay in silence for a while with Aaron just barely brushing his hand over Michael’s hair, imitating a soothing motion that his mother had used when he was scared and fretful as a child. His own erection, flagging after sitting on the cold floor, is reviving with Michael’s proximity and Aaron reaches down to touch himself, more to readjust than anything, but Michael’s hand on his arm stops him before can remove his hand.
“Keep going. I wanna see you make yourself come.”
There is enormous power in words; Aaron knows that. And to hear Michael, in that flat, lisping voice, tell him to jack off, strikes a very deep chord. He pulls his boxers all the way down, and begins to move his hand on his cock, slowly to start, the way he always does. Michael gets up after a minute and then comes back with a little bottle of lotion from the bathroom. It’s lavender scented; that scent, mixed with the harsh smell of whiskey and smoke, is a combination that Aaron knows he’ll never forget.
Michael changed the TV station when he got up and now it’s on MTV2, and Aaron finds himself with a handful of purple lotion, jacking himself off while Davey Havok stands on the railing of a bridge and screams, Your sins into me, oh my beautiful one. Michael hasn’t taken his eyes off Aaron, and Aaron finds a side of himself that must have been buried deep. He finds that he likes to be watched like this, pleasuring himself.
Pleasuring himself? What?
He pushes it; he steps across the boundaries of his and Michael’s relationship and falls, with Davey, over the bridge into the cold, your sins into me. But he’s not quiet about it. He can’t help the noises he makes, the grunts, the growls, the gasps, as he slides two fingers inside of himself. He almost laughs when he sees Michael’s eyes widen. The thought is forming in his head then; Aaron can see it. He spreads his legs and looks at Michael thoughtfully. “Fuck me,” he says, and it carries over the TV. The room is cold, but no longer so silent.
Now Aaron thinks that Michael has sinned somehow and it's Aaron's job to play the martyr. I thought I was a little more subtle that this; apparently not. I was so focused on mood (I wanted you to smell the smoke and the lavender and focus on how incongruous that was with the situation) that I let the plot get heavy-handed.
It’s unnerving when Michael is suddenly over him and then pushing into him with more force and eagerness than finesse. For once, Aaron is afraid, afraid that Michael will snap and hurt him, take out all those long months of silence on Aaron, on Aaron’s clean, unviolated body. But it doesn’t last; Michael is just inexperienced and nervous. Once Aaron wills his body to relax, to take Michael inside of him, it’s not so bad.
Michael doesn’t know what to do with his hands, and Aaron has to help him place them on either side of his shoulders and then he has to catch Michael’s hips and steady his rhythm. Time seems to stretch on endlessly, and Aaron no longer has to wonder about the vacant look on the women’s faces that he's fucked: it’s boredom. It’s a wish to be elsewhere, anywhere that your body isn’t being used as a tool to satisfy someone else’s rage, fear, or need.
Experimenting with bad sex -- no real Healing Power of Cock, here -- and I like the last line there. It's something I've tried to work on (out?) in fic since.
When it’s over, Michael pulls out of him and sits with his back to the headboard, looking a little crazy. There’s nothing that Aaron can say, nothing that Michael wants to hear. Instead, Aaron starts to get up and is stopped by Michael’s hand on his chest.
“Don’t.”
“I need to clean up.” Aaron says it quietly, not trying to provoke Michael. But Michael isn’t looking for a fight. He holds Aaron in place with the hand on his chest and puts his other hand between Aaron’s legs, pushing them apart and then trailing a finger across his inner thigh and then higher.
This may have been the only place that I was actually trying to write something vaguely, weirdly, sexy.
Breath is a precious commodity suddenly, and the silence is back and it’s deafening. Aaron’s cock aches from being denied release twice, and his thighs, where Michael’s hand is, are wet with come and lavender lotion. Your sins into me, Aaron thinks.
“Leave it,” Michael tells him, and when he moves his hand to touch Aaron’s cock, it’s with more assurance than anything he’s done in months, it seems. Aaron’s never been one to play games; he’s never understood the appeal. But to try to sleep with Michael’s come inside him, on him, making him wet and sticky, is enough to finally bring him off in Michael’s hand.
When Michael presses his hand to Aaron’s mouth, Aaron understands that it’s a punishment for what he did earlier, for spitting into the fire. He puts up with it, swallows the salt and the bitterness, because it’s the old Michael, the vindictive, competitive, selfish Michael that does things like that, and Aaron’s pleased that he’s back, if only for a moment.
I maybe should have ended the fic here, or at the very least after the next paragraph. I don't like the ending as it is.
He’s taken on Michael’s sins, taken them in, every way that he can and he hopes that it’s penance enough for being a witness to Michael’s pain. He hopes it’s enough to compensate for the fact that he can sleep while Michael’s nights are filled with ghosts.
When Michael came in him, he spoke, he ranted, he cried a little. The silence is broken and Aaron can feel the heat in the room, despite the fact the fire is dead.
And that's it. I was working on technique -- on creating atmosphere -- and the plot got away from me and turned troublesome. Like I said, it was a classic Colorado February when everything is dead and ugly and bitter cold, and I wanted to convey that. I needed to get the swimmers to Colorado somehow, and Michael freaking out and wanting to go to Aspen sounded reasonable to me. I just needed a reason for him to freak out. Way back, in August or September of 2004, I'd started writing an epic non-con Ian/Michael in which Ian "saves" Michael after something similar happens. Only, I think it's Aaron that gets too forceful with him. Something. Anyway. Again, I tied swimming and power and sex and water together and in it, instead of healing sex, Ian teaches Michael to swim again. I liked to play with that theme too: the idea that Michael was secretly afraid of drowning, drowning imagery, etc. Anyway, I cannibalized that fic a little here, only I twisted it beyond all recognition.
At the center of this fic is, ostensibly, this rape that I never clearly address, and yet I have Aaron, this main character that is supposed to be the sympathetic comfort-giver in the classic h/c scenario, and he's reacting in all the wrong ways. He's blaming; he's enabling; he's lost and disillusioned in regard to his life (personal and professional) since he since he went pro, and he's just a little misogynist. Also, he's aroused by Michael's vulnerability and even though that bothers him, it's not enough to stop him from having sex with him.
In the long run, this fic was a huge turning point for me, technique-wise. I think the changes in my writing style become very evident, post "Silence and Cold" with the NBA slash that I started writing that summer. Also, it signifies closure for me and marks the end of my swimslashing (until next summer), except for "Change Your Latitude," which was a ficathon piece.
~end~
Songs:
AFI - "Silver and Cold"
The Killers- "Somebody Told Me"