Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

Note: The only thing about have a full world in your head and frequent characters crossing over is that now and again, because two stories may be running at the same time, or because one story may give away things in another, I will change the names of crossover characters for a while. That has happened so far in this one with Burt and Logan, the owners of the Grey Note, and since there is no longer a reason for doing that, they have gone back to their actual names. 

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E  I  G  H  T

RECORD SHOPS AND

RESTAURANTS

AND MEETINGS

AT

NIGHT

CONTINUED

Before they parted, Tanitha frankly asked, “What’s your number?”

As David told her, she took out her phone and dialed it, and David’s phone began ringing. He pulled it from his side pocket.

“And now you know that is me,” she said. “So when you’ve apologized to this woman, then you can call me up and let me know how it went.”

David Lawry didn’t want to get ahead of himself, it was only that as he went back through his memory he could not remember a time he had been in love before, a time when he had looked with anticipation to picking up the phone and calling someone. That night, when he returned home he even felt a little foolish for this, wondering if the afternoon had been a dream, of if he had imagined something with this woman, this TANITHA that had not really been, but he sat on his couch, eager and nervous, feet pulled under him and he called her, and almost instantly she answered, and there was that voice, light and deep at once, welcoming.

“David!”

“Tan… Tanitha.”

“Tan,” she said. “I like it. I like it when you call me that.”

“I thought it was too forward.”

“No.”

“I mean, I don’t really like most people calling me Dave.”

“Well, you aren’t a Dave. Not really. You’re definitely a David.”

“That’s what I keep telling people.”

“Ah,” she said, “but what you called to tell me…?”

“Is… I did go up to Lassador. I did it. It was good. To say what a nut I’d been, how sorry I was, how ashamed I was, and that was why I left.  She was good about it.”

“Do you think you all will get back together.”

“Uh…” David said, remembering his time with Claire, but choosing not to dwell on the memory, “it wasn’t that kind of relationship. I’m not sure it was…. Founded in health.”

Tanitha laughed pleasantly, “I’ve had a few of those.”

“Besides…. I did it so I could tell you I did it….. so we could go out again.”

“Well!”

“I mean I needed to make things right with Claire, and you really seemed to want me to.”

“I did. I wouldn’t have gone out with you if you hadn’t.”

“But you will go out with me now?”

“I certainly will.”

“And this time a proper date. One at night.”

“Oh,” Tanitha laughed so deep down in her throat it was almost a gurgle.

“Night is my favorite time.”

Sunny woke up long enough to be aware of his surroundings, be glad of them, and go back to sleep. The open window, the whir of the air conditioner and the soft blanket made the perfect weather, and he hugged the pillow as he pressed his body against Nehru’s and his back into Brad, feeling the tall man’s arm encompass them both.

He had worked late last night. They all had, and so he knew there would be no getting up early this morning. Sometimes you just wanted this: sleep and closeness. Despite what Sunny had thought of Ohio, these days he was glad he had come.

As he had told David, and David had learned, Sunny was not the kind of person to sit around thinking about doing a thing when he could simply do it. While he had read Dan’s journal, he looked for work, but it was early on when Daniel said something about 4848 Brummel that Sunny realized:

“They’re here.”

The vampires were right here, or at least some of them were. He even had an address. He found Brummel Street and rode his motorcycle up and down it, unable to find 4848. But that was what Dan’s journal had said. Ah, but this was unhelpful. It was like writing that the Easter Bunny lived in an invisible house on Fill in the Blank Lane, and then going to that street, seeing no house and saying, well there’s your proof.

Sunny had parked the bike, and gone walking up and down Brummel as if that would help matters. Traveling slower would show him the house. It didn’t and he rode back to Dave’s apartment, but Dave was at work.

Work? Well, he needed to work, and if he worked here, then he wouldn’t meet the people who had changed Dan or killed Blake. No, these  folks here, in a house he couldn’t find, seemed to be Dan’s friends, seemed to be against this Rosamunde and her group. Dan had awoken in Stenger and Stengers in Germantown. The murders had occurred at the university a mile or two up the road from there. The people he was looking for, they were in Lassador. So that was where he would work, and he would get out of David’s hair, not that David complained, but he had certainly not planned to have a twenty two year old beach bum living with him.

He and Dave had gone up to Rawlston and that night His Daughter Charlie was playing bluegrass and while they drank, Nehru said, “Well, Dan’s gone for a while.”

“Where?”

Nehru shrugged.

“He does his thing. We haven’t seen him in weeks. You can stay in his place if you want.”

“I’d say you could work here,” Brad said, “but people should never work where they shit—”

“Isn’t that—”

“Trust me,” Brad said, “I know what I mean. Port Royal down the street needs a server if you’d like. I’ll call the manager, it would be yours by the end of the day.”

“How much is the apartment?” Sunny wondered.

“Get this, guy!” Brad said. “Dan’s paid up till next year, so I guess that means for you it’s free.”

So he would not work in Lassador, but this was close, and he preferred Rawlston anyway. His very first night at Port Royal he’d returned to the apartments over the Grey Note as the place was shutting down. Nehru was already upstairs, and the clippers were out.

“I cut my son’s hair,” he said.

Taking his hand through his thick golden locks and lifting them up, Sunny said, “Do you think you could cut mine, too? Maybe?”

And so, patiently, slowly, Nehru had cut off Sunny’s hair and was buzzing it when Brad came up, stretched, yawned and said, “It’s nice you have your own place, but why don’t we all take a shower and go to bed like a junior pack of sardines?”

In the dark semi morning they laughed and whispered while they made love.

“Mustn’t get too loud for the kid…. “

“But he’s no stranger to noise. No need to be soooo quiet.”

Sunny called home to let his mother know he’d found a place. He called her every night. After all, each was all the other had. He had reported to her that he was gay now. He spoke of making new friends. The bit about vampires he kept to himself.

“I think I’ll just stay out here for a while. It’s nicer than I thought,” he said. “And I need a change.”

“You think you’ll be gone long?” she kept her voice neutral.

Avery had missed her son, but she wasn’t the kind of person who wouldn’t want him to have his adventures.

“Not too long,” he told her. “No matter what happens.”

As much as he loved his mother, and as open as they were, he said nothing about the nights he spent in Brad and Nehru’s bed. He didn’t really know how to talk about that. Sex was never fun to him. The word fun was lighthearted. It was for sitcoms and foosball. The level of naked intensity which he’d always encountered in the bedroom, but especially with other men and definitely now with these two, was the opposite of lighthearted. Their words were lighthearted, their invitations, the way Brad and Nehru conducted their lives and opened up their home to hospitality. But their discussions about life, about poetry or music, philosophy or politics, were rarely lighthearted and what took place in the night, hands clasped, bodies shaking, perspiration dripping down the forehead, making a line for the nose, finding the place of absolute O, intense bliss in the other, was nothing like lighthearted.

Early one morning, while the kid slept in the room down the hall, the three of them lay shaking, chests heaving, sweat drying from their bodies, gently caressing each other in the wake of one climax and on the way to another.

“I feel like…” Nehru murmured while Sunny lay in his arms, “every time we do this, we’re discovering something. It’s like reaching a place I’ve never been before.”

Sunny did not ask what that place was as Nehru stroked the waves of his now short hair. His eyes followed the hair up Brad’s chest, watched Brad looking up at the ceiling in a daze, smoke from his cigarette rising from his volcanic nostrils.

“Why name it?” Brad whispered as if reading his mind. “If Columbus had just discovered San Salvador instead of trying to call it India, America would be a very different place.”

Sunny’s ass ached way down deep from from Brad, and his orgasm had come with Nehru. When Nehru stroked him, it moved all through his cells, and when Brad spoke, it seemed to rumble in his rectum.

“So what… if everytime we fuck we go to a different country?” Brad said.

“We fuck it up in the naming.”

Sunny agreed with that because he knew he had come here for a reason, and yet every day he went to work at Port Royal and every night he came back to this apartment showing  no signs of learning anything more about Blake’s killers. Indeed the whole idea of Blake began to fade, and Dan—who was off on tour—seemed to be a distant memory, a story, really.

Brad and Nehru were open people. They always invited, never forced, and many nights were asleep or still downstairs when Sunny came home. Tonight they were up and Sunny showered and came over and then, as if they were any lovers, they stripped and went to bed falling into sleep, and Nehru said, “We should say a prayer or light incense or something.”

“Prayer’s good,” Sunny said. “I used to be religious.”

“Well, I think prayer is good too,” Brad said, “but I think Nehru’s talking about that kid they found near Germantown.”

“In Lassador?”

“Yeah,” Brad said, turning on his side.

“He was only about twenty-three, I think,” Nehru said. “Throat crushed.”

“I heard no blood.”

“From where?” Nehru asked Brad.

As Sunny went rigid, Brad said, “I can’t remember—”

“Probably heard it from one of those strung out fuckers in His Daughter Charlie.”

“Maybe,” Brad allowed, “but if it’s true then that means the Vampire Killer’s back.”

“Well fuck vampires and fuck vampire killers,” Nehru said and turned to go to sleep.

But Sunny could not sleep.

I am a forester of this land
As you may plainly see,
It's the mantle of your maidenhead
That I would have from thee.

 

“Ohhhh!.... Ohhhh! Oh, my God! Oh my God. Fuck! Fucccck!”

The bedroom window opened to unmown grass and a half empty parking lot, a safe space for screaming. Sunny had been gripping the window ledge, but gave up and simply laid over it, moaning and shouting while Brad fucked him.

 

He's taken her by the milk-white hand,
And by the leylan sleeve,
He's lain her down upon her back
And asked no man's leave.

 

At first he’d worried about the kid on the other side of the apartment, what he would hear, but if Brad didn’t care, if Nehru only lay half awake and half interested, he’d take it. He’s asked for this. He had lain tenderly curled in Brad’s arms just a half hour agp, and Brad had been stroking his hair, kissing him, telling him he seemed troubled, asking what he could do.

“Fuck the shit out of me,” Sunny said. “Be rough as possible.”

He knew at first Brad was reluctant. Brad was a tender lover, a tender man, someone who made love alongside his husband while they sang to him.

 

He rode and she ran
A long summer day,
Until they came by the river
That's commonly called the Tay.

 

It had taken some time to get here, where he lay against the window and Brad, tongue between his lips, grasped his hips and kept slamming into him like a piston.  When Brad finally came, Sunny turned around and they had a gentler sex on the carpet beneath the window, and then Sunny shuddered and sighed while whatever had been deep in him rumbled out and spilled across Brad’s chest.

“I needed that,” he murmured. “God knows I needed that.”