Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

AT THE GREY NOTE

CONCLUSION

Even Logan was yawning his head off now. It was still summer, and outside Sunny could see the night take on that particular blue that warned of approaching morning.

“No one’s driving back to anywhere,” Dan said, decisively. “Dave can stay with me across the hall.”

“And Sunny can stay with us,” Burt said, yawning, but Sunny felt Burt’s hand on his thigh under the card table.

“If he’d like,” Logan said, standing up stretching so that his tee shirt lifted and Sunny could see his flat belly, see the navel and the hair that went down to the snap of his jeans. The bed under the window was big, and Sunny remembered his feelings for Logan when he first saw him, his admiration for Burt’s beauty and his mind. He remembered when Dan had left him with the guitar, and as Dan and David departed, he remembered Logan saying: “You wanna show us what you got?”

“On this guitar?”

Logan grinning at him, shrugging. “Or anywhere else.”

So, his body thrumming, his penis going firm in his jeans while Burt rubbed his thigh, Sunny said, “I would like.”

Burt began turning off lights, blowing out candles, and Logan began opening up windows and lifting shades. The early morning air came in and the deep blue of dawn painted the semi dark room. Theirs did not look toward the street, but behind the building to a stretch of land ending at a fence of trees,

With no self consciousness, Logan stretched, yawned, lifed up his shirt and then unbuttoned his pants and was naked underneath. In the semi dark he was tall and beautiful and hairy, and the hair of his head stuck up. His penis rose a little, and he moved to the bed, turning back covers. Burt had undressed in fluid movements and was smooth and brown and young looking and he waited for Sunny to climb into bed before him. No one told him to strip and no one told him not too, but Sunny felt foolish leaving his clothes on, and he felt free when he was naked as them both and climbed into bed between them.

As easily as they went from guitar to philosophy and sipping Scotch to smoking, they went to fitting themselves together. Of course a husband and a husband who made way for this would have figured something out, and maybe Burt knew that Sunny had seen Logan first, been curious about him the whole night, for in the not morning he turned his back and pressed his buttocks to Suuny, not so much in invitation as to press him to Logan. Sunny was a little afraid, less bold that he thought he was. He’d been with boys like him, even Mitch, slight and smooth. Logan’s tallness, his sureness, his hairiness almost alarmed Sunny, the hardness of his cock, that friendly, winking, philosophical man, unnerved him, and he realized the nerves were thrills, and that he could not turn back from a thrill as he embraced Logan under the covers and Logan embraced him, belly, to belly, hands running along flesh, mouths tinged by cigarette smoke and Scotch met, lips and tongues pressed, the fire stoked all night rising. It was only now that Burt turned and pressed himself to Sunny, stroking him tenderly, like a parent in the dark, kissing the back of his neck, running hands through his hair. Logan’s kisses went from Sunny to Burt, to Sunny again, and Sunny turned to reach for Burt as well, pressing on him kisses.

The respect which had made initial shyness was replaced by a reverential need, and in the heat of this love, Sunny went to his hands and knees. He knew they would have what they needed. He felt a finger with something slick expertly swipe through his ass, a brown bottle was pressed to his nose, and Burt directed, “sniff,” and his head and his body went giddy with the fumes as suddenly he felt Logan pressing inside him, and he opened up his mouth and almost shouted with the relief of it, the knowledge that he’d wanted this man to fuck him since he’d seen him. The sky went from rich blue to pale pink and grey while that room was filled with the sounds of the creaking bed and the outcries of sex, while Logan held onto his hips and, grunting, swearing, pushed into him. Sunny pressed back like an expert, and they fitted themselves together There was, as the sun rose, no personality, just feeling, just essence, just being, As Sunny lay down for him, and Logan slammed into him, they both exhausted themselves until the moment when Logan rose up, screaming with the force of his ejaculation, and Sunny felt his back showered by slick heat.

Quietly, unsteady on his long feet, Logan rose and returned, wiping Sunny down and the three of them lay in the bed, and Logan looked shy and exhausted, his temples damp, his face flushed.

They were contented and innocent, but not shy, and Sunny was harder than he’d ever been. His assholed ached. The sun was coming from the east, but they had no east window here, so the light was inoffensive. Quietly, sniffing from that dizzying brown bottle, reaching into his pocket for a condom because he couldn’t trust himself to pull out, massaging the lube from the tube he saw, Sunny fitted himself inside Burt, and they both sighed. As Logan rose and went about the apartment, as the smell off coffee brewing came to his nose, Sunny and Burt picked up a rhythm and as the bed went heavy with the weight of Logan lying back down, Sunny’s neck and back arched with the surprise of orgasm, and his cock jumped as his balls drained, and in a forceful shower he was coming, body shaking, he was coming.

There were cups of coffee around the bed and cigarettes smoked, and the room with open windows and air coming in smelled faintly of the striving bodies of men, A text had come from David saying he and Dan were just waking up and would come over at eleven, and Sunny vaguely wondered why they would text first. He wondered if they knew what was happening here. In the new morning, while Logan and Burt lay on their backs in bed, Sunny rose from one to the other, riding them hard, his eyes and mouth wide open, sometimes looking down in determination, sometimes staring up at the slowly twirling ceiling fan. Toward the end, Burt groaned and turned him over and plowed him harder than Logan ever had. He felt Burt coming in him, and as if it was too much seed, Burt’s explosion in him, triggered a staggering explosion in Sunny. Fucked, ejaculated in, he fucked the pillow under him and spilled his seed all over those linens.

Alexander Kominsky tilted his face to the beat of the hot shower water. Burt was scrubbing his back and shoulders, his lower back, going lower, then Sunny opened his mouth for water, spat it out and turned around, moving Burt to the shower and washing him. Before they moved to let Logan through, Burt washing his back, Sunny his front. Now and again washing turned to tasting and fooling around, but they came out one by one, drying vigorously, dressing and going for new cups of coffee and cigarettes. Burt brought out a coffee cake they were halfway through when David and Dan arrived.

They were all together till it was near noon, and Logan stood up and swore, cigarette dangling from his lip, “I gotta pick up the kid.”

“I have to go check on the lunch crowd,” Burt said.

“Well, then,” Dan decided, “it’s time to part ways for a time.”

He took Sunny aside and handed him a clutch of spiral notebooks, old and worn, Along with them was a much better looking new journal and Dan said, “This will tell you more than you are asking. Be careful.”

“Is this all about…” After the joy of last night, this particular subject seemed strange and unreal. Sunny whispered, “Them?”

“It’s mostly about me. You’ll get to know me. But they are in it. You can skip ahead to… the good part if you wish.”

Sunny nodded, his golden curls falling in his face.

“Be careful,” Dan said again. Then he said, “Dave, I’ll see you soon,” and was out the door.

“Will we see you again?” Burt asked. He and Logan looked at Sunny more levelly than anyone ever had.

“Soon?” Logan raised an eyebrow.

Sunny’s body flooded with heat.

“Yes.”

The day was hot and full of sun, and as David drove them back to Glencastle on the freeway, Sunny said, “You all have a good night?”

“Yeah. We caught up with sutff, and went and dug up those notebooks.”

“You’re not going to go digging any further?”

“You’ve dug enough for the both of us, and if what Dan says is true, then that digging is above my pay grade… Above my every grade.”

“It was good of you to not come early,” Sunny said.

“Yeah.”

“And text ahead of time.”

“Yup.”

“Did you think something was going on?”

“I think you just told me you were gay and you kept looking at that Logan all night, and he and his husband were looking at you. And they seemed to want to keep you. That’s all I know.”

Sunny relaxed into his body. He could still feel Logan and Burt throbbing in him, their fingertips, their kisses pressing gently on him, their limbs sliding over his. His body remembered the movements of sex, flesh fitting flesh.

“What people do when doors are closed is personal,” David said. “It’s their business. You might even say it’s sacred.”

“I like you, Dave Lawry.”

David grinned from the corner of his mouth and switched lanes.

“I like you too, Alexander Kominsky.

“What are you plans now?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sunny said. “I should have some plans. I think I’m going to stay here for a bit.”

“Well,” David said, almost blandly, “We’re glad to have you.”

Once it was established Sunny was staying in town, David told him, “You should pull your shit out of that motel and stay with me till you find a place.”

David had been a supremely lonely human being back in Lassador, and last night was the first time he’d felt like a human being in a while. Having someone like Sunny around would do him good, and Sunny agreed to it.

“If you drive straight through Lassador, how far is Rawlston from Glencastle?”

“More than it takes on the expressway. Rawlston’s on the eastern edge of Lassador, and that’s barely Lassador at all.”

Sunny nodded. He wanted to learn what had happened to Blake. He wanted to read these journals. He wanted to go back to the apartment and sleep in Logan and Burt’s bed.

“Should we get Chinese tonight?” Sunny wondered.

“Uh, we could. I haven’t thought about it.”

“Well, since we’re roomies and all…”

“We’re temporary roomies,” David said.

“But roomies all the same. Anyway, if I want to learn more about these folks—“

“Did Dan not give you a talking to?”

“I think the talking to Dan gave me is not the same talking to he gave you.”

David did not ask what that meant, but already Sunny was picturing himself getting a job at the Grey Note and perhaps now and again staying with his new friends while he tried to learn the truth. It wasn’t impossible.

“Do you want to read with me?” Sunny asked, opening up Dan’s notebooks?

“What?” David belched lightly, beer in hand, and stretched out on the couch in jeans and a tee shirt. He wasn’t bad looking. Sunny sort of wished Dave was bi.

“No,” Dave said. “That would be weird for me.”

Sunny, crunching on an egg roll, opening up the last of the notebooks. He had numbered them, and he was reading Dan’s surprisingly neat handwriting….

“We are in a mortuary,” the man said simply. “Stenger and Stenger’s. Germantown.”

Dan turned his face in horror from the man who lay on the tray not far from him, and Carter said, “Why are you horrified? A few moments ago you were as dead as he is. You were not merely sleeping. You were a corpse, my good Daniel. Have been one for the better part of a day.”

 I nodded. There was no time to be scared. There was only time to learn.

“Who made me?” I asked. “Who is she?”

Carter said, “Rosamunde Court.”

 

Sunny slammed shut the notebook.

“Wha?” David turned to him, looking down his long sharp nose in concern.

“Rosamunde Court.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

Rather than answer, Sunny continued reading:

 

“And you are part of her court now. She will tell you all. She has come to the land of Ohio to meet her uncle and his court and defeat them. You have been enlisted to her side and, I believe, you will make a very good soldier.”

 

“A soldier,” Sunny murmured. He almost believed it and more than believed it at the same time. He looked at the other notebooks before him and knew that, despite his desire to know the end, there was one accurate place to begin, and it was the beginning.