Hound Dog & Bean (12 page)

Bean smiled. He felt good.

The best he’d felt in he didn’t know how long. All it took was getting punched.

H.D.
STARED
at the bedroom ceiling, its surface cracked and water stained. That and the smell of mold told him it must leak, and leak a lot, when it rained.

Blue made a funny whimpering sound, and H.D. turned his head to look at the youth. Whatever had come to the boy/man in his dreams must already have passed—there was a contented smile on his face now.

Or maybe he just made weird noises.

H.D. rolled over and pushed up off the mattress—pushed up because it was on the floor. There were no box springs, but it wasn’t too terrible. H.D. had slept on worse. Hell, much worse in a home or two when he was in foster care. There were no sheets on this makeshift bed, but there was a blanket, and it was relatively clean. Maybe Blue hadn’t lived here long.

Blue. What the hell kind of name was that? Of course, Hillary wasn’t any better. What had possessed H.D.s mother to give him such a name? From what he could remember, she was sweet and loving and fun, even if the other kids made fun of her. That’s when he had begun to learn to fight—defending his mother’s honor against those mean kids. In the beginning, he’d lost far more fights than he’d won.

In the beginning.

When he was around eight, he had jumped a high school boy who’d called his mom a freak, and it had taken two people to pull him off. H.D. wound up getting a real beating when the pair held him down and let the older kid thrash him. But the other kid had nearly lost an earlobe. H.D. heard they had to sew it back on.

They left him alone after that. Or his mother anyway. No one dared say anything about her, at least when he was within earshot.

As for H.D., he didn’t remember a freak.

He remembered a woman with big black eyes and skin so pale it made the tattoos that ran up her right arm from wrist to shoulder stand out in gorgeous flashing colors. And beautiful black, black hair—like ropes.

She had laughed a lot and taken him to the park almost every day and sometimes decided to let him stay home from school. She had liked his company and would call the school and tell them he was sick whenever she wanted to spend the day with him. Then they would go get ice cream or sneak into a movie like
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
or
The Crow
or his very favorite,
Interview with the Vampire
. Oh, it had been thrilling—doing something they weren’t supposed to. And oh, how his heart had started slamming in his chest when Tom Cruise bit Brad Pitt—Louis. The look of ecstasy on Louis’s face. H.D. hadn’t understood the feelings that had rushed through his adolescent body, but now—in retrospect—he sure did, and it made him laugh. Even then he’d been a horny little hound dog.

His mother had called him her puppy. He remembered she would call him, and he would climb into her lap and she would pet him like a puppy. If he was upset, he would go to her and snuggle up to her on the couch (he could still see that couch in his mind—burgundy, stained) or on the bed. She would kiss him and say, “That’ll make it better,” and then she would sing to him. That had always made him feel better. He had loved her voice, and if he was lucky, she would get her battered guitar out from under the bed.

Sometimes she could be so sad, but he always made her smile. He would sing songs or dance or do card tricks that surely had been terrible and obvious. But she would clap and laugh and smile, and it was heaven.

No, she was not the kind of person to give him the name she had chosen to be mean. She must have liked the name.
Must
have.

So if the kid lying on that mattress really was named Blue, then maybe he had a mother who’d liked the name she had given him.

H.D. looked at his sleeping companion.

What am I doing here?
he wondered.

Glancing around the room, H.D. saw a tattered and torn Grateful Dead poster on one wall, and he wondered if the poster had been here before the room became occupied by the effervescent Blue. Did Blue even know who the Dead were?

Next to it was a much more recent poster for a newer group called Electric I. Time would tell if they were a one-album wonder. Their music was being played a lot on the radio, and it felt like what he would have expected someone Blue’s age (and with such a name) to listen to. Bright and full of energy.

Next to the “bed” was an old door, sans knob, lying on four cinderblocks, serving the purpose of a table.

It was covered with all kinds of crap:

Empty pop and beer cans (was Blue even old enough to drink?—not that it was any of H.D.’s business), and several Quick Trip cups.

Some of those weird rubber-band-like bracelets that were (mysteriously) all the rage right now (still!)—including a rainbow one.

A leather cock ring (and the titanium erection the kid had presented needed no such assistance—it must be purely for show).

Tattered paperback copies of
Stranger in a Strange Land
and
The Outsiders
(unusual combination, but at least both books were really good, and Blue actually read books).

A harmonica.

An iPod (even homeless kids had iPods, and wasn’t it pretty likely that Blue was homeless?).

Alanis Morissette’s
Jagged Little Pill
CD (what did he play it on, and was it perhaps released before the kid was even born?) as well as an
Avatar
DVD (and how did he watch that?).

Several condoms (packaged in round packets with gay themes—
Hurray for us, we have our own condoms now!
) including the discarded one they’d used so thoroughly not twenty minutes earlier.

And candles.

Oh God, yes, the candles. A good half-dozen on the door/table, plus the ones leading up the stairs and scattered around the foyer. There were a couple of boxes full of them and tales of how many Blue had to “leave behind.” Sand candles, votives, pillars of different contours, tapers, tea lights, and those shaped for holiday themes (Santas, snowmen, jack o’ lanterns, bunnies, turkeys), Disney characters, animals, stars, dragons and unicorns, and even some fashioned exactly like cocks—their textures suspiciously realistic.

Blue got very excited talking about those.

“They’re made from my own
molds
,” Blue told him conspiratorially—then giggled. “Molds that
I
made myself.” His eyes sparkled. “I get guys to pose for me.”

“Pose?”

Blue nodded. “I get a dude hard and then get him to stick his dick in a container of plaster of Paris. Then I dance sexy or jack off or whatever he wants so he stays hard until it does. The plaster. Gets hard.” Blue winked suggestively and chuckled with glee. “You’d be surprised how many guys will do it. I even have famous people.” He bobbed his head toward the Electric I poster and winked several more times (trying for shrewd but only making H.D. wonder if Blue were full of shit). “You wanna pose for me?”

As sinfully delightful as the idea was, H.D. declined. “Maybe next time,” he lied.

Then Blue was telling him about the rainbow candles—pulled one out of a box; one with six layers of different colors of wax. “Purple to red,” Blue explained very seriously. “Lots of people get it wrong. It starts with purple here on the bottom—” He pointed a long, slim finger. “—and it goes up to the top with red.”

H.D. didn’t know why Blue insisted the colors started at the “bottom” instead of the top, but he hoped it was a message. That message being that Blue was a bottom. It would be a crime against nature if he wasn’t. A crime against gay men as well….

“You gotta be careful you don’t get the colors mixed up,” Blue continued. “’Cuz you pour upside down, red first. I got it wrong the first time. Forgot I was gonna turn the candle over when I was done.”

Blue was talking faster and faster by that point, even though H.D. was trying to make out with him—to get him to shut up, if nothing else. But Blue wanted to tell him all about how he sold them at City Market downtown, and how much money he could ask for them since they were a top-grade, slow-melting wax. Then suddenly, it was all about his hair (H.D. had assured the kid he didn’t need to wash out his product because, after all, he saw Blue only had two one-gallon jugs of water and knew by this time the kid was a squatter in the old, abandoned house with no running water of its own), and Blue was wondering if he should “get” dreadlocks and then it was as if there were no commas at all when he talked, or even periods, and then it sounded as if there weren’t even spaces between the words and finally H.D. had just crammed his cock in Blue’s mouth to get him to shut the fuck up.

Thankfully, this delighted Blue, whose eyes grew wide with lust, and he showed H.D. what he could do with his mouth besides talk at superhuman speed. He was so good that soon H.D. was ready to bust a nut, and he pulled out because he didn’t plan to do so until he had a crack at that boy’s ass. Or his crack, so to speak. It was that shapely rear end that had hooked Hound Dog to begin with, and he wanted to see—
needed
to see by that point—if it was as pretty naked as it was covered in denim.

It was.

And then some.

Near perfection.

So H.D. shoved his face deep into that cleft, and after that, the only talking Blue was doing amounted to nothing but barely intelligible cries and curses and finally demands to be fucked. Fucked hard.

H.D. obliged him.

He flipped the kid over on his back and hoisted those long legs over his shoulders (the dusting of hair on them was not blond) and fucked him like it was the last and final time either of them ever would. Blue shouted and cried out so loud that a roommate (fellow squatter?) knocked on the bedroom door asking if Blue was okay, to which the kid had responded with a “Fuck yeah! Go away!”

When H.D. came, he came hard, with spots before his eyes, filling the condom Blue had insisted he didn’t need to wear. H.D. insisted otherwise.

“But I trust you” Blue had said.

“Don’t,” H.D. said and shoved his tongue in the kid’s mouth. “Don’t
ever
. Men are liars.”

Blue’s orgasm must have been pretty powerful as well, because with only a few jerks of H.D.’s hand, the kid was spraying himself as only a young man could. It was hot.

But now?

What am I doing here?

H.D. flashed on the image of Bean’s face—blue bruised stripes and all—and then cursed himself for it.

I could always just not go. Aaargghh!
No. That wouldn’t do. Bean worked just around the corner. What if he popped in to find out why H.D. hadn’t shown?

And dammit. A hound dog always keeps its word.

I’ll make dinner fast and get the fuck out
.

H.D. nodded.

After all, Bean was just a man. And as that famous ’70 s rock opera decreed, H.D.’d had so many men before. In many, many ways. So what the fuck was the big deal?

H.D. looked down at the sleeping kid. Pretty. Lucky to be pimple free, and he must have had good care in high school for there wasn’t a single pockmark to mar his flawless skin. H.D. was actually tempted to crawl back in bed with Blue and go to sleep—and where had
that
temptation come from? He cursed himself again.

So he slipped into his jeans and blouse and found his sandals and snuck out of the room and the house and into the night.

Just like a hound dog should.

W
HEN
B
EAN
looked in the mirror that morning, he winced.

Still, it could have been worse. Neither eye had swollen shut, and his face wasn’t ugly. But he did look a bit like a raccoon.

He felt okay though. No nausea. No terrible pain—just really sore. As long as he remembered not to touch his face, he’d be more or less okay.

Yeah. As long as I don’t touch my face. And how many times is it we’re “supposed” to touch our face in a day?
He’d read it somewhere.
Something like two thousand times? Or more even?

Bean looked in the mirror again. Leaned close. Squinted. The bruising reminded him more of that black stuff football players put under their eyes to reduce glare. Lord. But not even. Sure enough—as H.D. had predicted—the underside of his left eye was a bit darker than the other. A deep purple underscore. He sighed.

I will be some sight at the Bean
.

Of course, there was a shipment today. He could—no,
would
, stay next door roasting. Stay out of the public eye. Public
eye
? That was funny.

Except he wasn’t really laughing.

Bean went ahead and brushed his teeth, then stepped into the tub for a quick shower. He found even the water hitting his face hurt and titled his head so the spray was directed up top instead. It cleared out some of the fog anyway. After drying off, he saw the small brown bottle of oil H.D. had made for him and smiled. It had been nice of the guy. He was sweet. And sexy. And damn if for a moment there it hadn’t looked like something might be happening between them.

But God, that wouldn’t have been all that fun. Not last night anyway. Bean had still felt pretty shitty at the time. He didn’t feel
great
now. How good would the sex have been?

Yet still the thought made his cock start to shift, and Bean rolled his eyes at his own appendage.
Down boy. Down!
he thought and actually laughed. Sounded like he was talking to a dog. But that only made him think of H.D. all the more. How the guy worked at that no-kill animal shelter around the corner from The Shepherd’s Bean.

That reminded him of the empty dog bed he’d propped up in a corner in the kitchen and all the thinking he’d been doing about it maybe being time to get another dog.

It would certainly give him an excuse to see H.D. again.

Then he remembered.

H.D. was making dinner tonight!

Holy shit in a hand basket!