Chapter Text
Miguel wakes up to a feeling like there’s an itch against his back—the pinprick feeling of someone watching him.
The guy is still there, then.
Soft rustling over his shoulder—noises of a body across the balmy motel room—seem to confirm the fact as Miguel blinks away his bleariness.
A lint pill-covered pillow scratches his cheek as he takes in the sand-textured white wall in front of him. The rest of the world lies at his back, where the sweat on his skin has cooled.
There’s a single, thin bed sheet draped over him like a blanket, covering his naked body—placed over his waist by somebody else.
Behind Miguel, he hears the sound of a seat creaking, and there’s a moment before he rolls over where he feels a jolt to his system—something like curiosity and cautious excitement mixing together.
“Didn’t expect you to stick around,” he admits as he turns, sitting up.
His eyes take a confusing moment to find the other man in the room, and in the process, his gaze flits over the rest of the drab but tidy space.
There’s an open window across the motel room that draws his eye because it’s open into an alleyway that is utterly devoid of light. Outside, it’s still night, opaque in its inky darkness.
Shit, Miguel thinks at the revelation, a rush of heat to his cheeks; he usually doesn’t pass out like that—doesn’t crash, pure exhaustion wiping him out after the rush of his orgasm. But he remembers… gasping. Remembers the sweet release of tension from his body, and the static roar, his tingling scalp. Falling dazedly onto the bed, gratification making his bones feel liquid.
A yellowish domed light in the center of the room beside the bed flickers, a couple of dead insects specking the glass from the inside. The bathroom, with its greenish fluorescent light that had cast his gaunt body in ugly shadow as he’d undressed to shower earlier, is a darkened doorway that Miguel peripherally observes as he swings his legs over the edge of the bed. And across the room, sitting in a wooden chair between the door and that window that had drawn Miguel’s eyes, is the man who’d introduced himself as Guerra.
Miguel stares, and Guerra stares back, gaze serene and dark.
He sits with one leg hiked up as he smokes a cigarette, elbow propped on his knee and his dick nestled soft in the dark hairs between his legs as he balances a stark white ashtray on his tan thigh.
He looks like a statue, lounging with all the stillness of a jaguar waiting to ambush, but blurry memories of ecstasy flash through Miguel’s mind in broad, impressionistic strokes, and he knows—the recollection of strong hands against his pliant body threatening to color his face—that Guerra hadn’t been at all slow and measured. Hadn’t been cold.
Holding Miguel’s gaze, the corner of Guerra’s mouth suddenly quirks up.
Frankly, he hadn’t been the one Miguel had set his hopes on at the top of the night, either. Nah, that honor had gone to an older blonde woman with big tits who he’d clocked as an American looking to have a good time down south. Guerra’s interest had come as a welcome surprise, though. Welcome, because a bigger guy than Miguel had zeroed in on the American, but he’s tired of sleeping on the streets, so the fact that Guerra’d been more than happy to play backup plan was lucky as hell. And he’s a surprise, too, because… Blowjobs for a quick buck? Yeah, Miguel had started to do that even before hopping the border. Has let a couple guys blow him, too, if that was their thing.
Ain’t proud of it, but who’s gonna tell?
Women take a lot longer to charm—to convince to take Miguel back somewhere with them, and if he pushes too hard, he knows his face is one that’ll stick out in their memory when they complain about him—and not in that ruggedly handsome way he’d always relied on growing up, either. Nah, there’s that scar on his face. Matches his FBI’s Most Wanted profile.
He hasn’t full on, like, slept with a guy since he was in high school, though, going out of his mind that summer stuck down in fucking Miami with his tía, and Guerra isn’t the type Miguel would’ve expected to approach him, anyway.
He hadn’t looked like the type, not even when he’d sidled up to Miguel at the bar—had asked him with an all too knowing smirk: How much?
Average height and build, long-haired and scruffy-faced, he’d been wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves ripped off, white tanktop sweat-stained beneath it. There’d been a peculiar scent around him, too. A smell of smoke—not cigarette, either, but similarly acrid, mixed with something faintly musty and herbal—wet and cool, like earth.
Miguel’d had half the mind to snort and push away from the counter at the question, his neck burning at the bluntness of it, but then Guerra had smiled and it had transformed his face, bringing out pleasant crow’s feet and narrowing his almond eyes into happy, familiar curves. The expression had made Miguel realise that the guy wasn’t much older than him, and there’d been something about that fact which had made him fucking homesick. Had swept away that instinct to blow the guy off.
“I paid for the room,” Guerra replies defiantly. “Why would I leave?” His voice is scratchy from smoke, gaze unwavering.
Above them, the ceiling light seems to buzz… or maybe that’s another insect, trapped inside the warmth of the glass, plinking against it with no concept of how it got inside—no idea how to escape.
The light flickers.
Miguel blinks.
Smoke curls around Guerra’s fingers as he takes another drag, the cherry of his cigarette glowing. “You’re not from here,” he prompts, waving the smoke away with his hand, wrist relaxed as he holds his cigarette loose between two fingers, palm upturned. He hugs his bent knee with his other arm, leaning forward a little now, tilting his head. “Where did you say again? Florida?”
Miguel hadn’t said, but knows his Spanish subtly marks him as a foreigner in this town—his accent Caribbean by way of the USA.
Most people he's run into just take it as a given that he’s a transplant. An American, come down to see the sights, or else here from the nearby city where he’s working. Overstayed his welcome, maybe. Stranded, perhaps, lacking a passport; maybe that’s why he’s relying on their kindness, Miguel guesses that some people tell themselves.
Sometimes, he spins a yarn about it. Usually, they don’t ask.
“Does it matter?” he says with a shake of his head now.
“Guess not,” Guerra says with amusement. “But you’re selling your ass in my town, so something went wrong.”
An understatement.
Miguel snorts and climbs to his feet, letting the blanket Guerra has placed over him slip away as he pads across the tile floor to where he’s sitting. He notes that Guerra observes his approach with a flicker of interest beneath that unbothered expression, and when he comes right up to tower over where he sits, the guy looks up with a faint smile, head tilting back against the wall beside him.
“I liked it more when we were talking about the World Cup,” Miguel says, snatching the stub of a cigarette from Guerra’s fingers and bringing it to his own mouth.
Guerra’s still-parted lips curve, eyes tracking Miguel’s movements in a way that Miguel imagines he can feel, just as he had that stare against his back. Then again, he’d felt that similar paranoia walking the rural roads under cover of night months earlier, and no one had been watching him then. “You’re more interesting than football.”
Miguel lifts his eyebrows—imagine that—as harsh smoke fills his lungs. The shit down here is cheap as hell, scraping through his chest and making his throat tight as he redirects, “Your town… you the boss around here or something?”
The corners of Guerra’s lips lift higher at the tease, exposing canines that look more pointed—wolfish—than Miguel remembers. Letting his hiked leg slide down, Guerra moves his ashtray onto the seat behind him as he perches forward instead, cornering Miguel into the V of his legs as he reaches out. His hands are warm and dry against Miguel’s hips, and he tugs him closer with intent.
“Around here?” Guerra says, indicating their immediate vicinity with a tilt of his head. He scans Miguel's face with that sly expression still firmly in place, mind clearly veering down a path that spells a continuation of their earlier fun, and Miguel smokes one slow drag after another, each breath getting easier as he regards Guerra in return.
He has an eyelid that droops a bit, but under the rough edges of his appearance, there’s a guy who could maybe clean up nice—who’s maybe even pretty, Miguel thinks, watching the blink of Guerra’s eyelashes.
He’s calm as Guerra smooths his hands around his sides and down over the curve of his ass. Not about to get spooked by some groping, though Miguel also doubts that’s what Guerra is trying to do.
Intimidate him, that is.
Nah. But there’s some guys—
Miguel’s done some analysing;
There’s some guys who want his mouth because they’ll take any mouth, and maybe there’s some bonus to it, getting head from a guy like him. Even slimmed down from the months on the lam, he’s a recognisable sort of handsome, if not necessarily a conventional kind. Miguel knows his lane. Has learned when the guy whose dick he takes into his mouth just wants to feel like hot shit.
Guerra’s not one of those guys.
Maricón.
Nicotine buzzes in Miguel’s head and under his skin, pushing back some of that haze from the shots Guerra’d bought him earlier.
Resting a hand on his shoulder to steady himself, Miguel squints down through the smoke that swirls between them and then disperses toward the window. “Should I take the silence for a yes?”
Guerra’s shoulders do a little rise and fall, and as the cigarette begins to reach Miguel’s fingertips, he gives it a pointed look and Guerra reaches back accommodatingly, grabbing the ashtray and holding it out to give Miguel somewhere to get rid of the thing.
Stubbing out the cig and blowing out that final stream of smoke, Miguel feels his lungs rejoice when the next breath comes in clean, and he’s struck by the consideration as Guerra twists to place the ashtray back on the seat
At the bar, he had bought Miguel food, too—not just drinks—like he could tell Miguel’s stomach went empty sometimes. Besides the sex and the chat, though, Miguel hadn’t been able to clock what it was that Guerra had wanted from him. Even now, it seems like there’s something else; he can’t shake the thought that Guerra is hovering. Fucking waiting for something to happen, as though the plan hadn’t been to simply open Miguel up with his mouth, fuck him hard against the sheets, and then dip.
What else?
Round two, at least. Surely.
Reaching out, Miguel’s hand curls under Guerra’s right arm. Pulling him out of his seat is as easy as a gentle squeeze of his bicep and a small guiding tug.
There’s intrigue in Guerra’s eyes as Miguel pushes him down by the shoulders—puts him on his knees.
The hands that had been reaching for his hips when Miguel grabbed Guerra now have reason more than ever to hold him there, and Guerra stares up, a pleasant smile on his lips as Miguel runs his fingers back through his hair—curves his hand down to cradle the nice angle of his jaw, thumb brushing the plush redness of Guerra’s lips and feeling the tickle of his mustache.
Miguel feels the soft kiss against his fingers right before he lets go, the brush of lips featherlight. “Suck me,” he says, and the gleam in Guerra’s eyes turns into an outright flame, lust coloring his expression the same way it had when Miguel had emerged nude from the shower earlier.
A quiet thrill swoops low through Miguel’s gut now as he watches Guerra’s fingers curl around his cock—watches him bring it soft into his mouth.
That easy.
His blood rushes south, the wet heat around his cock seeming to intensify as it hardens, growing more sensitive to the swirl of Guerra’s tongue and the firm hug of his lips.
First dick Miguel had ever sucked himself had been his friend Reynaldo’s—a kid he’d grown up with, competed with, picked up with girls with. That winter after he’d come back from Miami, there’d been a bit of a dry spell. Girl he’d maybe been seeing at the time, Maritza, was pissed at him for one reason or another, leaving him to instead spend a weekend high and drunk with his homeboys—or with just Rey, in the end, everyone else knocked the fuck out.
“I told him…” Miguel gasps as Guerra’s tongue flicks over the slit of his dick and he swallows him deep—takes him to the base with velvet ease. “Fuck… Said if worst came to—yeah, like that, sweetheart. I’d suck his dick, if he sucked mine. We’d known each other so long, you know? Ah—shit, that’s good.”
He can feel the occasional tickle of Guerra’s mustache hairs as he blows him—feels it especially as Guerra brings his mouth off of him to lift his dick and kiss down the shaft, to the base, sucking on his balls until it pulls a low groan out of him.
Blowing Reynaldo, leaning over on the couch with one hand still clutching a beer bottle, had been a wet affair. Miguel had spilled his fucking drink when the buck of Rey’s hips had hit the back of his throat, making him choke—scramble up to puke his guts up in the nearest receptable—someone’s shoe.
“Never got the blowjob back,” Miguel muses, not sure what’s prompted him to detail all of this—usually it’s the other guy rambling, but… it’d been easy to talk to Guerra at the bar, too, offering an edited version of all his travels which had brought him south to that moment before he could think better of it. The guy had seemed interested enough, anyhow, in the tales of hitchhiking and waiting for the cover of dark to move. The talking hadn’t put him off wanting to fuck Miguel. “Next day, acted like we didn’t remember.”
Guerra chuckles as he mouths along his dick, hands massaging warm circles up the back of his thighs and over his ass.
“Poor little Alvarez,” he murmurs, before swallowing Miguel down, the sweet, enveloping heat of his mouth unrelated to the sudden blaze Miguel feels light up over his skin.
His body stutters between pleasure and alarm as the air seems to leave the room—what little air there had been, anyway.
The night is still.
Grabbing Guerra’s shoulder, Miguel shoves him back with a dizzying drop of his heart into his stomach as he realises that this—this is where that odd, lingering atmosphere had been leading to.
Paranoia blossoms in his mind; the way Guerra had swept up to him down at the bar—it’d been no stroke of luck, had it?
“Who are you?”
Sitting back on his heels, Guerra licks his lips, eyes still trained on Miguel’s cock, one hand curled around the back of Miguel’s leg. The touch scalds now, and not so much in that pleasant way. “You don’t want me to finish taking care of that for you?” he asks softly, ignoring the question.
The huff of his breath feels somehow cool against Miguel’s wet, aching cock, and the flickering notion of Guerra’s mouth returning to his dick sounds like music to Miguel’s ears.
He shakes his head fiercely, feeling his pulse speed in a new way. “How the fuck do you know my name?”
The guy kneeling before him now? He’s never seen before tonight. He’s sure of it; would remember that face. Would remember the playful drawl that had teased him at the bar—those eyes that roam slowly over his body now. The tongue that darts out to swipe over his lips again, craving his cock.
And God, Miguel wants to give it to him. Wants to sink into his mouth and forget.
His mind flits through all the possibilities anyway, caution overriding his arousal. Had he said his name? Had there been a broadcast showing his picture recently? Are they searching for him this far south now? Could someone have sent Guerra? Does he know somebody?
Guerra leans in again, wordless, and his lips brush against Miguel’s cock, facial hair tickling delicate skin.
“Who are you?” Miguel demands again, voice tight as he tries to shift his stance. His weight goes from one foot to the other, but he can’t step back. Doesn’t want to, his breath short in his chest as he watches Guerra’s lips part more daringly around his dick again, sucking playful kisses up his length, having received no pushback.
“Nobody,” Guerra says calmly, turning his head to trail those soft, mouthing movements against Miguel’s thigh as his hand strokes up where his mouth had been. “You told me your name.”
Miguel stifles a groan, pleasure pushing up his spine—making him want to stand on his toes as Guerra squeezes his cock and licks a broad stripe up the junction of his bony hip, mouth then returning to his dick.
His head bobs, and Miguel can feel his confusion starting to settle complacently into lust, watching his erection slip in and out of Guerra’s skillful mouth.
“My last name?” he chokes out stubbornly.
Guerra grips his thighs—his hips—his ass, swallowing him deeper—eyelashes fluttering.
There’s a hum.
He pulls off wetly, breath ragged. “When I fucked you earlier.”
Miguel swallows hard.
The shine of spit on Guerra’s mouth seems to highlight the blushy redness of his lips, which curve as he strokes a hand over Miguel’s dick again, clearly enjoying taking measure of his arousal—thumbing the head of his cock and stringing away the pre-cum. “Asked if Miguel was your real name. You said yeah, remember? Miguel Alvarez. Or maybe you don’t recall.” He smirks. “You were distracted.”
Miguel bites the inside of his cheek, wishing he had another cigarette to take away the tense edge to his pleasure as Guerra takes him into his mouth again, the hollow of his cheeks highlighted by the overhead light.
Goddamn.
Fingers dig into Miguel’s ass cheeks as his hips sway with the bob of Guerra’s head—the suck of his mouth.
“Bullshit I told you,” Miguel rasps, and catches the upward flick of Guerra’s eyes through his lashes right before he reaches down, grabbing the guy by the sides of his head. He should push him off—get to the bottom of this—find out how fucked he is only:
He’s already been fucked, and he’d liked it. Liked Guerra’s cock pushing thick into him, driving him into the sheets. He’d fucking moaned for it. Moaned like a whore, gasping in pleasure with every thrust.
Fuck!
A moan rises into the air now, buzzing around his dick as Miguel thrusts rough into Guerra’s hot mouth—hears him gag wetly, body tensing and hands flying up to squeeze Miguel’s forearms without actually applying any force toward fending him off.
His jaw is slack for Miguel, tongue pressing up against his shaft as he fucks Guerra’s mouth, searching for—
“God.”
Something that’s not quite pleasure—is dirtier, darker—fills Miguel’s veins, and he—
Shit, he can’t do it, a frightening thrill to his actions that he doesn’t recognise—that makes him pull out, breathing hard. Saliva trails between his cock and Guerra’s mouth for a moment, the connection breaking a split second later.
“Tell me the truth,” he grits out.
Doesn’t fucking matter but he needs to hear it if shit’s going to go down like this. Wants to know who he’s fucking.
“God,” Guerra echoes instead, chuckling breathlessly as he wipes his mouth. “That’s a newer word.”
“What?” he says, and Guerra looks up.
Reaches up, seizing Miguel’s wrist before he can step away, startled.
His grip isn’t tight, anyway, but it seems to lock—pushes away the idea of wrenching free. “Oh, just forget it,” Guerra tells him, laughing and—
It’s an infectious kind of smile, one that comes with a tilt of his head and a lick of his lips. Pink lips. Flushed from—
Miguel feels his own blush heat a ring around his neck and he looks down.
He’s already hard.
“You want me to take care of that?” Guerra teases in a low voice, letting go of Miguel’s other hand as Miguel huffs through his nose, liking the sight of Guerra sitting back on his heels.
He shuffles closer, nodding his chin forward, anticipation crackling in his belly. “You gotta ask, sweetheart?”
Warm hands grasp the backs of Miguel’s thighs and he tilts his head as that sweet mouth surrounds him—soothes his aching need.
Frankly, Guerra hadn’t been the one Miguel had set his hopes on at the top of the night… He isn’t the type Miguel would’ve expected to approach him, either, but…
He’s familiar, in a way. Like a guy Miguel might’ve known back home. And they’d fucked, even though Miguel hasn’t slept with a guy since high school. That had been nice, too, Guerra pushing Miguel onto his back with a wicked grin.
Above him, the light flickers and the soft, wet sounds of Guerra’s mouth working him over.
What time is it? Miguel wonders with a dazed chuckle that swells into a gasp as the wet slide around him gains momentum.
He could sink into Guerra’s mouth forever.
“Shit, why don’t we make it two nights?” Miguel rasps, reaching down and threading his fingers through Guerra’s hair, absorbing the heat of his scalp.
“Why not three?”
Miguel laughs, knuckles paling where he braces the sink even as his body jolts forward with each thrust, his lower abdomen bumping up against the edge of the bathroom counter.
“Can you afford it?”
Chico licks the back of his neck, velvet tongue feeling almost cold against Miguel’s heated skin. “Can you?” he murmurs, and his eyes meet Miguel’s in the mirror, sly—molten with lust. “Could your body take it?”
Miguel can see his own face colored from the heat of it all—Christ, it’s hot, and he’s got that vanity still, even months away from Oz and half-starved at one point.
The arousal in his furrowed features is practically written in gold, dazzling, his lips parted to huff out his pleasure. He likes seeing himself like this—sure as hell beats the gaunt cheeks and wild, animalistic fear. Mexico’s been good to him.
Damn good.
Behind him, he sees Guerra leaning back, chest glimmering with sweat, and he grins, feeling deranged by his desire for the guy—watching his eyes drift down as he pulls back and drags Miguel’s ass out by his hips, biting his lip, exhilaration written in his own features.
Miguel groans at the stretch of his body—at the snap of Guerra’s hips, his cock filling him, throbbing inside of him. He hasn’t slept with a guy since high school but Guerra’s been making it plenty obvious that he’s been missing the fuck out.
“I’ll clear my schedule—we can find out,” he says, and Guerra laughs, his smoldering gaze snapping up to capture Miguel’s in their reflections as the sound of flesh slapping flesh grows sharp and rapid in the echoey bathroom.
Pap pap pap pap.
The friction burns good, running that tightrope between pain and bliss, and Miguel rides each thrust—clenches against Guerra and rocks back on his dick, bracing against the counter with his elbows now, a low moan drawing out of him.
His reflection falls out of view as his head dips between his shoulders and he feels the cooler air around the sink basin rising up to meet him.
Sweat drips from his face as Guerra slams forward—sends stars shooting into his vision.
“God,” Miguel gasps as he feels Guerra’s chest slick against his back, lips closing against the curve of his neck as pleasure pulses in his veins and—
“You’re not from here,” Guerra notes, rolling off Miguel but not going far.
They’re both fucking damp with sweat as they lie there on the bed, panting and staring up at the ceiling. The domed light flickers, glass speckled with dead insects.
Christ, Miguel thinks, dazed.
Guerra’d fucked him hard, too—hadn’t said much at all while he was pounding Miguel’s ass—nothing but a few firm, quiet instructions and muttered encouragement which, damn, shouldn’t have seemed as hot as it had, but hell, if there’s anything Miguel’s learned about being on the run, it’s that he’ll take good where he can get it.
Now it’s done and Guerra seems chattier, too. Softer, like getting off has unwound him, or maybe there’d been some anxiety to it, their sex a transaction. Now, he rolls on his side, propping himself up on his elbow and resting his head on his hand with a hint more of that easy familiarity from earlier, picking Guerra up at the at down the street. He peers down at Miguel, face still gorgeously flushed. “Where are you from? Florida?”
Miguel knows he must sound American, or at least from somewhere beyond this small town. He shakes his head, heaving a contented sigh and stretching his legs out with a groan. The elation of a fucking good orgasm is still coursing through his veins, and Guerra reaches out, playing with the mess splashed against his stomach.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You're in Mexico selling ass. Something went wrong,” Guerra points out, bringing a cum-covered hand to his mouth and licking his fingers.
Maricón.
Miguel stares and Guerra clearly senses his dumbfoundedness—may have been trying to provoke a reaction, even, because he flashes a wolfish grin and only places his hand against Miguel’s abdomen again, stroking over the muscle, doubling down.
“There’s no big story, though,” Miguel says after a beat.
Guerra looks dubious but doesn’t push. “Alright. Do you spend the night?” He’s offering. Giving Miguel a persuasive look, some of that charm creeping back in.
Fuck.
Miguel’s heart leaps. “It’ll cost a lot more,” he says first, as if he knows what he’s doing. As if he’s done something like this before.
Blowjobs for a quick buck? A lift? Yeah, he’d started to do that a while back. But he hasn’t fucked a guy for somewhere to sleep before. This is all brand fucking new.
Something had been different about Guerra, though; maybe it was because it hadn’t been until Miguel had spoken his price out loud that Guerra had even seemed to realise there would be a price. He’d hesitated before agreeing to pay. Now he’s offering a bed to sleep in.
“Name it.”
Miguel gets up on his own elbows, leaning over to Guerra’s ear to whisper the number, softening the blow with his most charming grin. “But we can have sex as many times as you want. Just want a couple hours of sleep.”
Guerra lifts his eyebrows. “Nah, don’t worry. I plan to sleep.” He cocks his head. “Deal. I’ll give you the money for just now—give you the rest in the morning,” he says, and rolls off the mattress, picking his way around the floor where their clothes are strewn and making a show of placing a wad of bills from his wallet into the pocket of Miguel’s jeans.
“Okay?” he says, letting the jeans drop back to the floor.
Miguel smiles a little, a bit of a flutter in his stomach as Guerra rejoins him on the bed, making the mattress dip. As rough as he looks—scruffy-faced, long-haired, a little unkempt even back at the bar—there’s a certain charisma to Guerra, too. He’d fucked Miguel hard, yes, but not without easing into it. Just likes it rough, Miguel supposes, though he immediately second guesses that assumption when Guerra crawls over him and leans in gently, pressing his face against Miguel’s neck, lips brushing his skin.
“Do you kiss?” he asks, breath tickling Miguel’s flesh.
His heart drums a happy beat. He’d missed that, during the brief foreplay, Guerra’s mouth exploring his body but never meeting his lips. “Sure.”
“Good,” Guerra says, though he doesn’t lift his head—presses soft kisses down Miguel’s neck to his collarbone instead, working him into a fuzzy warmth with soft nips and licks that trail down his chest.
He cleans off the rest of Miguel’s abdomen, which—
Should be gross but again only registers to Miguel as disturbingly erotic, his hand curving around the back of Guerra’s head as he laps the cum and sweat off his belly and then sucks a kiss below his navel, mouthing along where the dark hairs start to trail south.
Okay, Miguel supposes, lying flat again and humming his satisfaction as the caress of Guerra’s hands and mouth continue downward. So it’s going to be like this—sweet, like they’re a regular hook up. He guesses that’s what Guerra had wanted in the first place, anyway.
He had been the one to put money on the table—not that he regrets it, when Guerra’s clearly willing to pay, but…
“You’re really beautiful,” Guerra murmurs, his mustache tickling the soft skin on the inside of Miguel’s thigh as he gets down there, mouth on the sensitive skin, his cheek and then hair skimming past Miguel’s dick. “I bet you get that a lot, though.”
Breath catching in his chest, Miguel stares up at the ceiling. “Been a while,” he admits, and then groans as Guerra’s head turns, and his mouth envelops his cock. “Christ…”
There’s sweet, damp heat and it’s been so fucking long since he got his dick sucked, but he’s still goddamn spent—couldn’t get hard for the world, though the feeling of Guerra’s mouth around him feels damn good anyway. He has no doubt Guerra could probably suck his cock like a pro if only he was ready to get hard again, working his tongue and hand into it as he fondles Miguel’s balls and sucks his tip.
“Gimme a couple minutes, sweetheart,” Miguel says, to which Guerra chuckles, breath blowing cold against his damp dick before he crawls back up to lean over Miguel, hands planting to either side of his head.
The expression on his face is searching, so Miguel takes the moment to search back, observing the slight downward slant of Guerra’s right eye—the droop of his eyelid. He imagines he’d have made fun of the guy if they’d grown up on the same block. Shit, he wasn’t a good kid, and he’d had his own insecurities buried deep.
Guerra seems to be thinking along the same lines.
“Are you gay?” he says, which is not what Miguel expects at all.
His eyebrows shoot up.
“Or is it just for pay?” Guerra follows up, suddenly grinning, making it clear he doesn’t care either way, his head tilting as he sways a bit against his hands.
“What do you think?” They’re alone, but somehow discussing it aloud, without mincing words, make Miguel’s face feel hotter than it had when he was actually getting fucked up the ass.
Gay?
Shiiit.
“I think…” Guerra’s eyes roam fondly over Miguel’s face. “I think you like my mouth.”
Miguel grunts, soothed a little by the non-label of the answer. He won’t deny it, either, the memory of Guerra’s lips against his back accompanied by a wash of pleasure, slicked fingers slipping into his ass at the same time. “And your hands,” he offers.
“My cock?”
He swallows hard and then laughs, Guerra joining in, eyes twinkling in a way that stokes the warmth in Miguel’s belly. “Yeah, you’re, uh, you’re not bad with it. Definitely… left an impression.”
A leer crosses Guerra’s expression. “You don’t sound sure. Should I show you again?” he teases.
“Couple minutes,” Miguel reminds him.
“I got a couple of minutes.” Guerra says, and dips his head, kissing Miguel’s collar bone—sucking on the bony ridge as he lowers himself onto his elbows, mouth roving over Miguel’s chest again, words muffled against his skin.
“You’re so fucking sexy, you know that? You’re damn beautiful… Like a work of art, Miguel…”
Miguel chuckles, throat feeling tight as a prickle of excitement begins to build in him anew, spurred on by the heat of Guerra’s attention—his stream of murmured praise.
Soon enough:
“Look who’s fucking back,” Guerra crows.
Miguel snorts, covering his anticipation with a roll of his eyes as he gets on his elbows again and glances down at where Guerra is already readjusting his position, spreading his legs apart and kneeling in the V.
He looks fucking striking there which is another thing that…
Should be odd, right?
Miguel’s been with guys before, but he’s never exactly been attracted to them—just turned on by what they were doing. At least, that’s what he’s always figured. Not like he has a huge sample size to draw from.
Ariel had been pretty like a girl, long black hair highlighted brown from the Miami sun, clothes girlish, too; he’d even agreed that it barely counted—that fucking him was like sticking it in a girl, even when Miguel was on his knees sucking his cock. And Reynaldo’s been Miguel’s friend since they were seven years old—he doesn’t count, either, even if he’s not bad looking at all.
The men who’d paid Miguel before…
He hadn’t made any attempt to remember their faces.
But Guerra?
Yeah, Miguel likes the way he looks—especially here and now, situated between his legs, sun-browned skin still shades darker than Miguel’s own tan, body lightly muscled, and broad chest dusted with a sparse pattern of hair. He has hair long enough to to be tucked behind his ears—to fall over his shoulders, silky and dark, but he’s no Ariel. Not androgynously slender and waifish—not androgynous at all, with that whiskery goatee. Under the dim ceiling light, Guerra’s forehead and cheekbones are highlighted, the straight edge of his nose contrasting the roundness of his brow bone—the almond shape of his eyes.
There’s something almost pretty about him, even with the facial hair, but he’s a man, no wishy-washiness about it. No getting around it.
Miguel’s skin prickles as he sees Guerra produce a small blue bottle seemingly out of thin air and he shivers at the crisp snap of it opening, the idea of Guerra taking him again more than a little fucking appealing.
And by the dart of Guerra’s tongue out, swiping over his lips, Miguel knows he’s not alone in his anticipation.
He grins as Guerra shuffles closer and wedges his thighs under Miguel’s own, helping to tilt his hips open, and then leaning up first to finally—fucking finally!—kiss his mouth.
It’s an open-mouthed affair, casual and sloppy, like they’ve kissed a thousand times before—like Guerra’s lips belong against his lips and their tongues are well fucking acquainted.
Miguel’s heart soars and he cups Guerra’s neck, pressing eagerly into the kiss that leaves them both breathless. His lips buzz as Guerra presses their foreheads together, their noses brushing as he presses a finger down between Miguel’s legs.
The sound of his breath hitching rattles in the narrow space between their faces, and then Guerra’s kissing him again, mouth moving with a controlled mess as he pushes a slick finger into Miguel’s ass, arm trapped between their bodies.
Arousal spikes through Miguel—makes his toes curl. He’s still stretched out from before, and a proud thrill courses through him as he takes Guerra’s finger—Christ, fingers, Guerra quickly coaxing in another—with little more than a moan, that first burn of intrusion quickly melting into familiar, undeniable pleasure.
Miguel tilts his hips toward the pressure filling him, sighing against Guerra’s mouth as the crook of his fingers starts to hit that good spot he remembers. After the way Guerra had fucked him earlier, this has to be a fucking tease, designed to make him go a little crazy, accompanied this time around by the playful suck of Guerra’s lips around his tongue.
His breath ghosts over Miguel’s face when he breaks away, the heat trapped between their bodies quickly making his skin slick again.
“Taking it real good.” Guerra smirks.
Flushing, Miguel only nods, biting his lip as Guerra rubs inside his ass, wrist flicking, fingers twisting a little as he pushes in—strokes deep, to the knuckle.
“Like your touch, remember?” he says, trying to go for cocky. It’s always been difficult for him to be flippant during sex, though, and Guerra’s middle finger flicking against his G-spot leaves him twitching, his own grip on Guerra’s bicep tightening as that first taste of a scalp-tingling rush swells through him.
“What else? Remind me,” Guerra teases. His hand moves rhythmically, and there’s a look in his eyes that’s so fucking fond, it almost doesn’t make any sense.
Blood roars in Miguel’s ears, his eyes fixed on Guerra. “Uhh...” Knows what Guerra’s waiting for him to say, but he’s feeling damn shy about it, considering the fingers currently playing in his ass.
It’s just like—he’s not—
Well, maybe.
Miguel’s head swims, the sight of Guerra’s naked, waiting body below him gaining new appeal as his eyes catch on the movement of the hand not currently fingerfucking him.
It’s on Guerra’s dick, lazily stroking his erection.
“Say it.” Guerra pulls away—leaves Miguel clenching on nothing, breath stuttering.
Oh, what the hell.
“Fuck me,” he says at once, hips bucking needily, eyes fixed on the boner in Guerra’s grip, thoughts flooded in a lustful haze, remembering the weight and thickness of him inside earlier. “Want your cock inside of me.”
And he feels every bit a puto saying it, but then Guerra is climbing up on his knees, hands coming under his thighs to push his legs further up—make his spine curl as he holds Miguel behind the knees and he guides his cock down.
Guerra glances up to meet Miguel’s no doubt needy gaze as he teases the thick head of his cock against Miguel’s stretched hole, and their eyes lock.
Guerra’s own eyes are dark with lust—those dark pools the last thing Miguel properly notices before stars burst into his vision, Guerra fucking into him smooth—fucking to him deep, sinking into his body like a homecoming.
A strangled noise rises to Miguel’s lips as his breath leaves him, and it’s delicious agony, that pressure that pushes into him—fills him—pulls him into the riptide of a wonderful haze.
Blood wells up from his broken skin, gushing crimson and free—
He comes back around with a dizzy, euphoric feeling, sensing the tickle of Guerra’s gaze against his face even before he opens his eyes.
Even now, even after their shower together at the start of the evening, there’s still that funny, earthy smell to Guerra, like the wilderness he’d slunk through countless times to aid his escape to here. Like autumn decay.
Miguel breathes the scent in like he’s taking his first deep breath of fresh air.
“What do you do for a living?” he asks, opening his eyes. As expected, he comes nose to nose with Guerra, who grins, brown face shiny with the post-fuck glow.
“Are you looking for a different job, Miguelito?”
A hand curls above his head against the pillow, fingertips combing gently through his hair.
He rolls his eyes. “This ain’t my job.”
“No?”
“Don’t change the subject, man,” Miguel says. He’d rambled enough about himself earlier, and sure, maybe it’s the lingering afterglow talking, his mind currently tuned warmly in Guerra’s direction, but he wants to keep that intimacy going. “Just want to know more about you,” he supposes, glancing past Guerra to the window.
Still dark. Still night.
He’s glad.
“I was born further south, in a village in Chiapas,” Guerra tells him, mouth curving. “You know where Chiapas is?”
“Sure,” Miguel says vaguely. “Place with all the jungles.”
Guerra’s amusement grows, but he doesn’t call bullshit, gentle touch turning into a playful tap on the temple before he shifts onto an elbow and leans over Miguel. “My grandmother was a medicine woman—raised me after my parents died in a fire. When she passed… I left.” He touches Miguel’s hip, hand playfully tracing up the curve to his waist before he smooths his palm over his lower abdomen.
Miguel swallows hard, recognising the faint edge of rue in those words. “You travel a lot?”
“I have no anchor, yes.”
“Like me.”
Guerra snorts in agreement, drawing a circle against Miguel’s abdomen, eyes turned away, watching his finger.
Just as well—Miguel stares at Guerra’s profile without interruption, watching the flutter of his eyelashes with every blink.
“Yeah, except you’re going south, aren’t you? And I’m going north...”
Miguel shrugs. “You ever think about settling down, then? Get married or some shit? Start a family?”
He watches a soft crease come and go between Guerra’s brow before the guy glances back up, hand stilling as a curious expression comes over his face. “Is that what you’d like? A family?”
Miguel shrugs. “Yeah, man. I don’t know. Always… Nah, I mean.” His heart starts to thud, thinking about his baby—guilt rushing in. He hadn’t wanted his baby until it was too late. Growing up, the idea of family like that, a mommy and daddy and baby, had seemed so fucking abstract, he’d never given it much thought before the vague assumption that one day he would fulfill that step in life.
When Maritza told him she was pregnant, all he’d thought about had been himself. How it was too soon—how he’d barely fucking had enough time to kick around and do his own shit. Now he was supposed to be a father? Shit.
Clearing his throat, Miguel says, “Someday, you know?”
Being on the fucking lam as a escaped convict, he hadn’t exactly put much thought into it, either, still busy looking over his shoulder. He guesses, though… Yeah, maybe.
When there’s enough distance between him and Oz, if he finds the right girl…
Tangled up in bed with Guerra, though, it feels fucking ridiculous to be thinking about all that.
“What about you?” he says. “You want kiddos?”
Guerra snorts. “Nah,” he says, swift and easy in a way that Miguel has never understood.
“‘Cause you fuck guys?”
The amusement in Guerra’s eyes goes sharp, a leer crossing his face. “I didn’t hear any complaints,” he teases, deflecting.
“Don’t have any,” Miguel says. His bones feel liquid, body more hollowed out than usual after a good fuck, and he bites his lip to keep from grinning at the memory of Guerra inside of him, nailing him against the windowsill and making the ash fall from his cigarette and into the alley outside with each thrust.
Sitting at a bar earlier in the night, he hadn’t expected things to wind up here. His first plan—that pretty brunette girl with her gaggle of wide-eyed friends—had fallen through with a single whisper of My father would kill me if I brought a boy home.
There’d been something familiarly friendly about Guerra when he’d dropped into the seat beside Miguel, flashing a grin, though—had sort of reminded Miguel of the guys back home in the barrio, chill and chatty. And he’d been tired of sleeping on the street.
Why not fuck a guy?
Hadn’t done the deed since high school—blowjobs for a ride south—for money, didn’t count—and beyond the pragmatic aspect of Guerra being willing to open his wallet for Miguel—shit, once he’d realised Guerra was trying to make him laugh while they chatted at the bar—that he was being flirted with—he’d softened up a bit. Had figured he might actually enjoy the company and the sex.
If even a guy as handsome as you can strike out, where’s the hope for the rest of us?
Yeah, his ego had been the first part of him to take a liking to Guerra.
“The first time I saw you…” Guerra says after a moment, leaning over. His mouth finds Miguel’s chest—his collarbone, lips closing around the jutting bone, sucking.
Miguel huffs, feeling his heart starting to hammer in returning excitement as Guerra rolls closer, arm curving around his front, hugging him close as his mouth roams over his chest—up to his throat, sucking wet kisses and leaving a prickling impression everywhere he goes as he works Miguel back into a fuzzy warmth.
“Yeah?”
“Wanted you.”
Shit, Miguel hadn’t even noticed Guerra at first. Has no idea, even now, if he’d already been at that small, outdoor bar down the block with its deeply yellow lights and creaky white stand fans, or if he’d arrived later—had watched Miguel from afar as he’d danced by the old-timey jukebox with that girl who’d eventually admitted it wouldn’t be possible to go anywhere more private.
“Yeah?” The light feeling in his chest pulses warmly. “Why’s that?”
“You’re beautiful,” Guerra replies easily, and lifts his head, meeting Miguel’s eyes with a smirk.
He swallows hard—hasn’t heard something like that in a fucking while.
“Ain’t so bad yourself,” Miguel says.
Guerra has one eyelid that droops but it does little to mar his good looks, a kind of prettiness in the almond shape of his eyes and the round curve of his brow—the slope of his cheeks—the pout of his mouth.
A bit of Guerra’s hair is falling onto his forehead and so Miguel reaches up, pushing it back with the rest of his long locks, fingertips catching against Guerra’s jaw on the way down.
He gets the message loud and clear—tilts down to meet Miguel in a languid, open-mouthed kiss, their murmured conversation quickly replaced by the wet exchange of kisses.
It’s sweet—like they’re a regular hook-up, which is maybe what Guerra had thought they would be, flirting just to flirt and then seeming to hesitate when Miguel had brought up the topic of payment earlier.
Miguel doesn’t regret taking the guy’s money, though, even if the attention from Guerra flatters him more than from those other guys he’d sucked off or let suck him off. Maybe that’s why when, just as the slide of Guerra’s tongue against Miguel’s is making his dick twitch, he feels a swoop of disappointment as Guerra pulls away, turning and sitting up.
“What, you got somewhere else to be?” Miguel tries to sit up, too, staring at Guerra’s back, and finds—fuck, he’s wearier than expected, room running circles in front of his eyes as Guerra twists around and notices him—
Reaches out to grab his shoulder and steady him—lower him back to the bed.
“You should eat something before we go again,” Guerra says, smiling a little as he looms above Miguel again, cupping his cheek. “I took a lot out of you earlier.”
Miguel snorts, reaching up and holding the hand against his cheek. “Hey, man, any time.”
The words make Guerra beam, and he decides cheerfully, “I’ll get you some more food. Your blood sugar’s low.”
“What I get for drinking on an empty stomach,” Miguel agrees, rolling his eyes. It’s a fucking sweet gesture, he thinks privately, and it’ll mean he gets the bed all to himself for a bit of dozing.
As Guerra gets up and searches out his clothes from a pile on the floor, Miguel chews his lip, a sudden restlessness jittering in his gut. He doesn’t really want Guerra to go, petty as it may be. It’ll only be for a little bit, he admonishes himself even as he doubts, “Is anywhere still open?”
“The motel has a kitchen,” Guerra says.
“Is it open?”
Guerra snorts, zipping up his dusty chinos and strolling back over, resting one knee on the edge of the bed as he leans down and smirks. “For you, honey? I’ll find a way.”
And then he’s bending down for another kiss, him slow, Miguel eager and licking, reaching out to grasp the nape of Guerra’s neck as he tastes the inside of his mouth—feels the amused indulgence in how Guerra sucks on his lip like maybe he suspects that Miguel doesn’t usually kiss the guys he sees.
Like maybe he knows that this is different.
Miguel’s still using Guerra to make some coin, sure, but he genuinely likes the guy, too.
This could be something, he keeps thinking. This could be more than one night.
“I got a sweet tooth,” Miguel informs him, pulling back and folding his hands behind his head.
“Yes, my prince,” Guerra deadpans, though his eyes twinkle as he pushes off the bed again, heading for the door. “I’ll be back soon—don’t wander off.”
Miguel barks laughter at the idea, amusement still swirling after the door closes.
Above him, the ceiling light flickers and he squints up at the domed glass, which is speckled with dead insects.
Idly, he wonders how bugs always manage to get inside but never manage to find their way out again; don’t they remember how they got there?
Clearly fucking not.
There’s one dot up there that’s still moving, though, he realises.
“Good luck,” he tells it in English, looking away again after a few seconds, knowing it’s futile to expect it to escape.
Shit, maybe it likes being in there.
Down across from the foot of the bed, the bathroom door sits ajar, leading into the darkened room. Low blood sugar or not, he should probably take the opportunity to piss and clean up while Guerra’s out, Miguel thinks.
Common decency, right?
He can still get up and move around, anyway, just wearily. Sliding out of bed and onto his feet, the blood rush to his head has him wobbling in place for a moment, vision spotting in and out before coming back entirely.
Christ.
It’s a similar story as he staggers into the bathroom, flicking on the light and then narrowing his eyes against the glare of the green fluorescence.
An image flashes before Miguel’s eyes, forgotten a moment later—the feeling of déjà vu—not, he thinks, from having been here earlier, washing away the sweat from the evening, plunged into intimacy with Guerra shortly after arriving in the motel room.
It’s…
Well, he’s not sure.
He blinks, looking across the tile floor to the bathroom counter. It’s tidy except for a small wastebasket next to the counter, and Miguel stumbles over to the john and eventually just sits. Pisses like a girl, vertigo making the room wiggle around him even when he knows there’s no chance of him falling over.
“Goddamn,” he mutters into the echoey room, and then sits there some more, waiting for the world to stop spinning so wildly before he pushes back to his feet to wash up in the sink.
This time around, his body seems ready to accept the change in position. Only a couple spots in his eyes accompany him to the sink where he splashes water against his chest and neck and gets it all over the counter where—
Shit!
Miguel blinks, stares, and then shakes his head as he remembers a moment later that nah, he’d very much let Guerra peel him out of his ratty jeans and t-shirt in the main room. His shit is strewn across the floor at the foot of the bed, not on the counter like he’d suddenly been convinced.
Water still trickling down his skin, Miguel’s eyes snap down to the counter sitting level with his hips and he runs a palm along the rounded edge of the laminate counter, back and forth a couple of times, eyes taking in the beige rock pattern below—scanning even lower, over the tile floor beneath him and the wastebin near his feet, a small, empty blue bottle of some kind inside.
He’s still in the bathroom when he hears the door of the motel open, though the moisture on his skin has long dried.
“Miguel,” Guerra calls—rather, he sings. “I hope you like pineapple juice, because the bottled water was—yo.”
As Miguel leans in the doorway of the bathroom, Guerra’s grin turns into a blink of surprise. He’s got a white plastic bag with a yellow smiley face on it hanging loosely off his fingers, and he flings it and whatever is inside onto the bed as he sits at the end, laughing.
“What’s with the face?”
Miguel can imagine what Guerra’s looking at—can feel the furrow in his own brow, tension in his jaw as he frowns, unable to shake the suspicion that… what?
He’s not even sure.
But…
He thinks back to the start of the night—no—too far—
He thinks back to Guerra coming out of the motel office with a key and a grin, jingling it at Miguel and gesturing at him to hurry out of the shadows—to follow him to the outdoor stairs into the building.
Guerra’d gone to take a shower and Miguel had… joined him, after a few minutes of sitting boredly on the bed.
Had kept it cute under the spray.
Just touching, wet hands over soapy skin—getting a good look at Guerra’s body. His dick.
He hadn’t washed his hair—had tied it up off his neck, an escaped strand wet against the back of his neck when he’d turned, letting himself out first with a smirk. Giving Miguel that bit of privacy before he’d gotten dressed again, wondering why he’d bothered at all—was all going to come off again.
But maybe by then he’d been looking forward to it more—the getting undressed again. The tease of it all.
They’d finally kissed right there by the window, after the game of eye tag. Both furtively and openly checking each other out—smirking and looking away every time they caught the other.
Guerra’s mustache had prickled Miguel’s upper lip, his mouth soft.
They’d fucked there, too, eventually. Had done the deed as Miguel leaned out the window to smoke the cigarette offered to him some time in between making out and chatting some more about all kinds of dumb shit again. The World Cup. American tourists. Fucking Reynaldo, and how Miguel had given him a blowjob when they were teenagers.
Guerra had coaxed Miguel open with slicked fingers, mouth against his shoulder, asking him every step of the fucking way if he was okay before replacing his fingers with the thick heat of his cock. Their quiet, drifting murmurs had turned into Guerra’s growled encouragement and Miguel’s gasps, then, his body trembling against the pressure of Guerra’s every thrust, the dark window before them absorbing the noise.
Hadn’t been anything strange about it, Miguel thinks, hadn’t been anything eerie, only novel.
Fun, too.
He’d missed flirting that way Guerra had with him, all bumps of their shoulders and brushed fingers and knuckles—teasing touch, a lustful glint in his eyes under the spray of the shower.
He’d missed sex like theirs, exhilarating and just a little bit rough. Just a little bit unnerving, and then good. All good.
“I wasn’t gone that long,” Guerra teases, oblivious to the cogs whirring in Miguel’s mind as he leans back on his elbow and reaches for the plastic bag.
From inside, he pulls out a drink and something wrapped in tin foil, and then a plastic container of various colorful fruits, cubed and ready to eat.
Miguel drifts unsteadily up to the bed—puts a knee on the mattress by Guerra’s hip and just looks at him.
His face, the light dancing in his dark eyes.
Kind eyes, Miguel thinks, and the unsettled feeling in the back of his mind settles a bit as he reaches out to cradle that angular heart of Guerra’s face, tilting it up to kiss.
He feels Guerra’s delight—tastes his tongue—senses him putting the food in his hands aside as Miguel urges his mouth open, deepening that kiss. Kissing by the window, it’d been Guerra to lean in first, opening up that option before Miguel had really decided how he wanted to play it. Could’ve said no back then—could’ve said I don’t kiss, except that Guerra’s lips had been so soft, and it’d been so long since Miguel had kissed anyone beyond a few flirtatious pecks.
Guerra’s palms go sliding up Miguel’s naked back now, touch dragging dry but cool from handling the refrigerated items. Soothing.
Goosebumps ripple up Miguel’s back as he gradually pushes Guerra onto his back and leans over him, holding him down by the shoulders.
They break apart, breathing ragged, and contentment and desire glitters in Guerra’s eyes, his body utterly pliant as Miguel pushes his arms up over his head and holds his wrists there.
He almost feels bad ruining the image of Guerra’s satisfaction with it all, but he looms and presses his thumbs into Guerra’s wrists anyway, determined up until that moment the question he wants to ask gets stuck on his tongue.
How long have I been here?
None the wiser, Guerra chuckles, that warmth in his eyes shining up at Miguel—openness that had met him downstairs, too, looking past his unkempt appearance and his skin and bones—
Nah, Miguel may be a little lightheaded, but he’s fit—has bulk. Healthy muscle he’ll use if he has to.
“Oh, you’re ready to go again?” Guerra teases.
And there’s that paranoia still twisting in Miguel’s gut, but it’s fading, those thoughts of fuck, has his face been on TV recently? Does Guerra know who he is? Could someone have sent Guerra?
It’s fucking crazy, isn’t it? The notion that the fucking Federales or someone might have send a guy undercover to fuck him or—or something.
Who the fuck are you?
Also a stupid question.
“Think I’d better eat something first,” Miguel says shakily.
Guerra grins, eyes raking down Miguel’s body as he leans over Guerra’s head, fingers closing around that chilled bottle of pineapple juice before he sits back.
The drink is more like a mix with mango and orange, he finds, tastebuds meeting the tropical sweetness eagerly. He can’t remember the last time he ate, but he feels better almost instantly after the first few gulps, a reinvigorated feeling washing through him, Guerra’s hand massaging his thigh as he feels his Adam’s apple bob.
Chuckling, Guerra props himself up on an elbow and touches a hand to his chest next. “Slow down, sunshine. You’ll choke.”
Miguel swallows hard, chest heaving as he brings the bottle down and caps it, shivering a little at the mix of the chill and the acidic sweetness. “Whole night, right?” he says, glancing down.
A coy look creeps into Guerra’s expression, and that hand on Miguel’s chest slides down, stroking over the muscles of his abdomen. “Yeah.”
Nodding, he climbs off of Guerra, fingers tightening around the juice bottle like it might help him when his head still spins a little at the sudden movement. His balance returns pretty quickly, though. “Okay. Well, we can go as many rounds as you want, but I was at least a couple hours of sleep. And don’t fuck me while I’m out, either. You got proof you can cover it?”
Guerra snorts. “The cash I’ve thrown around already ain’t proof enough?”
“Nah.” Miguel reaches for the fruit container on the box, sitting on the bed beside Guerra as he lets out a dramatic sigh and fishes into his pocket, pulling out an old leather billfold.
“See?” He turns it left and right.
“Open it.” Miguel opens the plastic meanwhile, setting the juice aside to pinch up a mango wedge in his fingers. It’s slimy in his hands—wet as he brings it to his mouth, biting softly into the flesh.
Smirking, Guerra slips two fingers into the wallet, something playfully sexual about the way he stretches it open, presenting the contents to Miguel. “See?”
Chewing slowly, Miguel scans over the number and colors of the bills within.
“I’ll give you half upfront,” Guerra offers—plucks a bill for Miguel and flutters it in the air in front of him.
Miguel rolls his eyes, snatching it into his hand—snatching the next, and the next—
“Quit playing, man,” he says, snickering as Guerra begins throwing cash into his lap. He eats a sliced strawberry, grinning, and holds a piece of honeydew out to Guerra.
“Happy?” he says, shaking his head and stowing his wallet.
Miguel pretends to think as he chews, naked and covered in pesos. “Did you say something about going again?”
“I’ll let you get your energy up again before I take it from you.” Guerra replies, climbing up and turning, looking down at Miguel with a bit of a leer that makes him laugh as he eats.
The food has him in a better mood, the confusion in his mind clearing, paranoia dissipating. Why he’d thought Guerra—Guerra, the guy who’d bought him food and is going over to the window to smoke while he lets Miguel eat in peace—was suspicious is a mystery.
Wasn’t even Guerra he’d felt oddly towards, Miguel muses as he sets the fruit container on the bed and plucks up the money around him, wiping juice covered fingers against his thigh. It had simply been an unnerving feeling of déjà vu. A groundless sense that he’s been here before.
Must’ve been the doze, though.
Must’ve been that little black out after coming hard, throwing off his sense of time and space.
Across the room, Guerra is lighting up another cigarette, sitting statuesquely still in the wooden chair by the window.
Miguel gets up, feeling steadier on his feet now as he goes to where his pants are strewn on the ground and stuffs the wad of bills into the pocket, glancing up as he straightens up—catching Guerra’s appreciative stare.
“You’re not hungry?” Miguel asks, nodding toward the bed.
Guerra’s lips twist as smoke streams from his nose. “No,” he says. “How do you feel?”
Miguel grins, going over and sitting at the edge of the bed, picking up the fruit again, helping himself to a bit of kiwi. It’s tart. He feels his face pinch, and Guerra cackles.
“Besides that? Good. Better,” he says, adding quietly, “Thanks.”
“Guy like you should be sturdier on his feet,” Guerra teases, shrugging—It’s nothing. “The fuck’s all that muscle for otherwise?”
Miguel looks down at his body and snorts as he eats a piece of melon. Yeah, he’s firm muscle now, but… “You know, I was starving not too long ago,” he muses with a shake of his head. “This is a feast, man.” He regrets the slip a second later, but Guerra doesn’t pry.
“All the more reason to keep up your fucking health,” he declares instead. “It’s good you ain’t starving. The sex would suffer.”
Scoffing, Miguel glances back up to glimpse the twinkle in Guerra’s eye before he turns, searching out the white ash tray that’s sitting on the windowsill behind him.
“You’d have even less energy,” Guerra goes on, turning forward and hiking up one leg, placing the ash tray on his other thigh. “Wouldn’t be able to fuck me when I’m finished smoking this—”
Thunk!
The ashtray slides off the fabric of Guerra’s pants and crashes to the ground, breaking undramatically into three large pieces.
“Shit,” Guerra mutters, looking over the edge of his seat.
The sound of cracking ceramic rings in Miguel’s ears. “You want me to fuck you?”
Guerra looks back up, mouth curving. “Ain’t up to it?” he says, bringing his cigarette to his lips. He takes a deep drag, cheeks hollowing dramatically, mouth still pursed as he lets his hand fall away. Smoke floats from his mouth in a ring, the rest streaming from his nose as he breaks into a grin.
Slowly licking juice off his fingers, Miguel shrugs coolly, betraying none of that interest he feels flaring, heating the back of his neck. “Didn’t say that. Just making sure.” He closes the fruit container with a plastic snap—sets it aside, pushing to his feet. This time, the lightheadedness is minimal—will be entirely gone soon enough, he figures.
“That ain’t the usual request?”
Miguel shakes his head, fingertips skimming idly down the center of his abdomen. “Lucky first,” he says, like Guerra isn’t only the second guy he’s ever fucked, the first being during a teenage summer fling in Miami. And that guy had worn dresses sometimes, when it was just him and Miguel. Barely counted.
He strides over to Guerra, joining him at the window and breathing in his second hand smoke as Guerra shifts in the chair like there’s room enough for the both of them to sit there.
Yeah right.
Miguel just grins, though, pushing Guerra’s bent leg down and making sure to sidestep any shards of porcelain before he dumps himself sideways into the guy’s lap, throwing an arm across his shoulders for support.
“Miguelón,” he grunts, though he instantly wraps an arm around Miguel’s back nevertheless and leans back in the chair so Miguel can sit more comfortably in his lap as he switches his cigarette to his opposite hand.
“Speaking of,” Miguel says with a smirk, nodding his chin forward.
The cig is nearly a stub as Miguel reaches out and plucks it from Guerra’s lips, watching that tongue dart out Guerra watches him pull a deep drag and sigh smoke out through his nose.
The dry acridity burns his lungs and throat in a familiar way and as the smoke swirls between them, Miguel grins, feeling one of Guerra’s hands over to his abdomen, tracing his muscles—skimming up to the planes of his chest, fingers brushing over and teasing one of his nipples.
“When the cigarette is finished, right?”
“That’s right,” Guerra replies.
As the smoke clears, dissipating or drifting toward the window, Miguel can clearly see Guerra’s eyes traveling over his chest, down, sliding over his groin and up his thighs to his knees. His skin prickles warmly at the feeling of Guerra’s attention.
Christ, he really fucking likes the guy.
Miguel bites the inside of his cheek, trying not to smile and failing.
“You…” Guerra says in English, which makes Miguel snicker. “Fuck me. Soon.”
“What else can you say?” Miguel teases, and Guerra kisses his shoulder, the bristly hair of his goatee leaving that telltale buzz behind.
“Yes... No. Thank you… Hello.” Guerra nuzzles his face against the crook of Miguel’s neck, breathing in deeply as he hums, “Goodbye.”
Miguel frowns, extending his hand to flick ash onto the floor past Guerra’s legs. “Don’t need that one yet,” he says, and pinches the cig in between lips as he reaches down, tipping Guerra’s face up by the chin. “We still got a while.” And as he breathes in, inhaling cigarette smoke and that faintest, earthy scent that surrounds Guerra, the cigarette burns down to the filter.
Miguel holds it between them, smirking—Look what time it is.
Reaching past Guerra’s head to stamp out the stub against the windowsill for good measure, Miguel asks, “So, Guerra, sweetheart, you got another name? A Christian name, I mean?”
Guerra’s hand is back to caressing his abdomen, now trailing down his hip, too—up his thigh, resting on his knee as he shrugs. “Not a Christian one, no. Does it matter?”
Miguel shrugs in return as he settles back into Guerra’s lap, reaching with his now free hand to fiddle with a gold chain around Guerra’s neck. “Guess I just wanna know who I’m fucking.”
“You already know.” Guerra’s lips curl, his eyes scouring Miguel’s face. “You can call me Chico, though,” he offers.
“Chico,” Miguel repeats with a laugh.
“What?”
“Nah, it fits you, I guess.” Miguel shrugs again, grinning as he runs his finger back and forth along the thin gold chain around Chico’s neck. “Chico Guerra,” he murmurs, and tilts his head, hand curling around Chico’s necklace now—giving it a harsh tug. “Wanna bet I can make you forget it?” he teases, pulling Chico’s mouth to his.
He likes feeling Chico’s responding grin against his mouth, a curve before the hot, hungry exchange of lips of tongue smooths it away. Chico hums happily as their heads tilts and the limits of making out in a chair reveal themselves, Miguel tipping right out of his lap when Chico presses into one of their kisses, sucking on Miguel’s lip.
“Fuck!”
Chico’s arm tightens around his shoulder at the last second, but it only serves to soften Miguel’s slow, awkward tumble onto the floor.
Laughter rings between them, and the broken ceramic sits nearby, but Chico just follows Miguel to the hard ground and leans over him, capturing his mouth once more and drawing another sweet, deep kiss from him where he’s propped on one elbow, naked skin against the cool hardwood.
“Careful,” Miguel says, warning muffled against Guerra’s mouth.
It’s difficult not to be swept up with his enthusiasm.
Miguel clasps the back of his neck and holds him steady as they kiss some more and then Chico’s mouth slides down his jaw, lips trailing kisses down his neck—finding that spot behind his ear that’s so fucking sensitive.
Miguel gasps—huffs afterward, when the aroused sound rings in his ears, damning. “How ‘bout we take this to the bed?” he says, shivering as Chico’s teeth graze his skin. It sparks an unusual feeling of arousal in his belly, that hard scrape followed by Chico’s soft tongue.
Motherfucker has moves, Miguel thinks, sliding his hand down Chico’s spine and rubbing circles against his back, grinning.
And yeah, he guesses that someday, when there’s more distance between him and this evening, there’s a chance he’ll look back on it all as simple desperation or pragmatism—making a buck off Chico just like he had those guys who’d agreed to take him hundreds of miles on their routes, or give him a cab to sleep in after—but hell. He knows the truth in this moment; good and bad, being on the run has freed him from his old life—freed him from his own reputation—from the rules of what can or can’t be done.
Pressed against the windowsill earlier, Chico’s heat against his back, bulge grinding against his ass, that thought of Chico’s cock actually slipping inside as he’d smoked had gotten his own dick stirring.
It’s stirring now, too;
He’s a maricón. And it doesn’t fucking matter.
Miguel grins as Chico pulls away and makes moves to get up. “Careful,” he says again.
The shards at their feet are sidestepped as they climb to their feet, Chico holding Miguel’s hand.
“Not dizzy anymore?” he asks, thumb rubbing over Miguel’s knuckles.
“Nah.” Miguel’s good, his only swaying being the intentional tilt toward Chico to steal a few more rough kisses from him before tugging him across the room—pushing him onto the mattress first and then looking down at him. “Huh.”
Chico lays there where Miguel’s pushed him, legs hanging off the edge of the bed, hair pooled behind his head. “What?”
“Something ain’t right with this picture,” Miguel declares, climbing onto the bed and straddling Chico’s middle, hands sliding up, under his tank top. “Now what the fuck could it be?” Hands skimming over Chico’s warm skin Miguel bends down, pressing his face into the crook of his neck and breathing in that odd scent of the outdoors.
Forest floor.
He feels the expansion of Chico’s ribs as he inhales himself, breathing in Miguel in return, his arms sliding loose around his back. Miguel feels his lips curve as he rubs his face against Chico’s skin and he sucks a kiss against his jaw, against his throat, against his clavicle.
“Be easier to fuck me with my pants off,” Chico suggests, amused.
“Yeah, s’probably it.” Miguel says, and leans down, crushing his mouth against Chico’s and earning a soft groan from him, noise buzzing against his lips.
They kiss hungrily, Chico slowly shifting higher up the bed and Miguel following—grabbing his arm when he makes a move to pull his shirt off.
“Let me,” Miguel growls, catching his wrists and pinning them over his head until he feels Chico’s body yield to him as he licks back against his tongue, huffing amusement when Miguel sucks on his lower lip.
Spit trails between them as they part moments later and Miguel grins at the sound of their heavy panting—at the sight of Chico’s flushed face as he eases away from him only to get the overshirt off his shoulders—hike his tanktop up over his chest.
“You know it’s supposed to go over my head,” Guerra says, gazing up at him with that gorgeous expanse of his skin exposed, abdomen and chest undulating with every ragged breath he takes, his pants hugging low on his hips from their shifting around.
“Shut it.”
Miguel laughs, hands going magnetically to Guerra’s body at the same moment that Guerra reaches for him, shoulders lifting off the bed as Miguel bends down.
Their mouths meet in ravenous kisses as they grapple at each other, Chico trailing sparks against Miguel’s sides—squeezing his waist, tracing the ridges of those muscles around his ribs, and groping the broad expanse of his back, blunt nails dragging.
Hands slipping between them, Miguel plies at Chico’s chest, fondling the flat slope of his pecs and sliding his touch up and down the front of his body—over poking ribs and a softer belly. Chico’s hips arch up eagerly when Miguel dips his fingers below his waistband, but there are those pesky buttons he doesn’t want to deal with yet.
Miguel shifts instead, sitting back on his heels and moving to straddle Chico’s thighs as he lowers his head to pepper kisses down to his sternum—tilt his head to drag his mouth over the firm plane of his chest, nipping here and there—pressing his teeth into flesh.
A hand combs over his head, pulling a warm feeling up his spine.
“The first time I saw you…” Chico sighs. “I wanted you.”
Miguel smiles against Chico’s chest, teasing his nipple with his tongue, tracing the brown around it. “You told me already.”
“Yeah?”
“Mmhm.”
Chico’s hands find Miguel’s face, then, tilting his head up to meet his gaze, which is friendly if hard to read, lost in some thought Miguel can’t imagine. “Guess it’s been running together,” Chico says after that pause.
Miguel snorts, tilting closer, pressing his mouth gently to Chico’s and then urging his lips open, tracing the shape with his tongue before exploring inside.
That he likes kissing Chico is an understatement; he loves it—the warmth, the intimacy. He alternates playful and sincere in perfect measure, thumbing over Miguel’s cheekbone as their heads nod and tilt together with every languid exchange.
Miguel shivers and pulls away for air—
Smiles, as Chico’s mouth drifts to his chin and his jaw, waiting for that moment Miguel leans back down to capture his mouth again, lips closing around his tongue.
Laughter trembles between them, something hornier simmering just below their laidback fooling around. It makes the air seem to crackle—makes Miguel shift higher, advancing that next step to kneel over Chico’s waist and sit his weight back as he braces an arm beside Chico’s head to kiss him.
Chico’s hands massage slowly up and down his sides, inviting his body to rock with each petting motion, and Miguel’s dick drags against Chico’s exposed belly, the slow friction getting him hard as he sucks Chico’s lower lip into his mouth and then pulls away slowly, pressing a thumb to Chico’s chin as their eyes lock and Chico gives a little nod.
Miguel trails spit down into his open mouth, skin heating further as afterward, Chico’s eyes curve and he licks his lips, swallowing dutifully.
“You gonna put anything else in my mouth,” he says, trembling with silent laughter, his face flushed from the kissing, lips pink. “Or you just want me to lie here?”
Leaning back Miguel scoffs, pushing Chico’s rumpled tank top off over his head and then giving his shoulders a shove. “Yeah, stay there,” he says, dismissive because he knows he’s got Chico’s rapt attention under that lazy grin he’s wearing. Taking his time because he knows Chico won’t move, and because it’s no fucking secret, his own growing arousal, heaviness between his legs. His dick bobs stiffly as he gets up on his knees, shuffling around and looming over Chico.
“Stay here or stay still?” Chico asks innocently, though the grin he casts up at Miguel from between the V of his legs is anything but. “Cause I gotta warn you—I’m not good at staying still,” he says, his hand coming up to grasp the back of Miguel’s calf, eyes darting over Miguel’s body from his upside down, low angle view.
“Bullshit.”
Miguel smirks, dragging his dick over Chico’s smiling cheek and earning a scoff of disbelief, though a split second later, Chico’s mouth parts, tongue coming out as if to catch a taste of Miguel’s cock, defiant.
A thrill zings up Miguel’s spine, skin tingling.
“You can stay still as fuck,” he mutters, and there’s an image of Chico in his mind’s eye, sitting gorgeously nude across the room, striking in his stillness…
Miguel blinks, coming back to the feeling of Chico’s huffed laughter against his dick while he licks a bold, broad strip up the underside.
“But do you want me to?” Chico teases, lifting his head now and using one hand to gently lift Miguel’s erection—press it to his belly, as he brings his mouth to Miguel’s sack, mouthing at his balls—pressing his tongue right up against them and pushing a thick, electric current of arousal up his body.
Miguel feels his scalp tingle.
His breath hitches in his chest, and for a moment, he just sways, languishing in the soft suck—that attentive, swirling tongue and the erotic noises Chico’s mouth brings that raise the damn hairs all over his body. Make his nerves dance, anticipation an itch just under his skin.
“Whatever you want, sweetheart,” he breathes. “Your money.”
The remark has Chico pausing, hand on Miguel’s leg sliding up the bend, tugging on the back of his thigh as his eyes lock with Miguel’s.
Chico nods, and the act feels more permissive than instructive.
Letting out a rough breath, the next firm tug of Chico’s hand against his backside sends Miguel stretching eagerly forward, toward the growing bulge in Chico’s pants.
He braces one hand against the bed, and below him, he feels Chico’s hand curl around his cock, angling it down—playing it against his tongue.
Miguel shudders—feels his cock slipping into Chico’s mouth, deeper and deeper, and he rolls his hips, breath quickening as Chico’s lips hug his girth.
Pleasure washes over him and floods his own intentions with that surge of liquid heat. He leans over the tent in Chico's pants and presses his mouth against it, finding solid heat through thin fabric, mouthing along the shape of Chico’s erection as Chico moans around his cock.
The bob of his mouth quickens as if to urge Miguel on—invite him to do the same, which he’s more than happy to get to in his own time, measuring Chico’s arousal thoroughly through the fabric before he moves a hand to flick open the buttons—drag down the fly.
At his hips, Chico’s arms hug his ass and thighs for an anchor as he strains up, taking Miguel deeper—making his skin prickle—making Miguel’s hand shake just a little as he reaches to peel open Chico’s pants—pull his dick out, pushing down his underwear.
“Fuck.”
A sweet wave of dizziness sweeps through Miguel, saliva pooling in his mouth at the sight of Chico’s cock. It’s flushed with need, thick and dark and nestled in black hairs, a bead of pre-cum welling up at the tip. Miguel lowers his head, wanting to swallow Chico as deep as Chico is taking him currently, and lets out a fucking groan, pure want driving him forward.
He hasn’t…
Hasn’t looked forward to sucking cock since that time with Reynaldo, and he’s got a better idea of what the fuck he’s doing, now—can enjoy it as well as make it enjoyable as he takes Chico into his mouth—feels that heavy thickness, that mix of thin skin over firm length, and ventures to swallow him to the base.
His own dick is warm and wet in Chico’s mouth, and as Chico’s lips tighten around him, it feels like two puzzle pieces slotting together.
A powerful circuit of lust and arousal, closing.
Fucking heavenly.
A heady musk fills Miguel’s head as he braces forward again, taking Chico deeper, breathing him in and letting the complete entanglement of their bodies overwhelm his every sense—him in Chico and Chico in him, an intimacy in their connection that makes Miguel’s pulse race—makes him moan as the hairs under Chico’s belly tickle his nose—as the weight of Chico’s cock in his mouth stokes his arousal.
The faint bitter-saltiness of pre-cum mixes with his saliva, and Miguel’s face burns, head swimming with Chico’s taste, with his scent, his trembling feel, and that sound of the soft, wet sighs below Miguel as Chico sucks kisses against the base of his cock, fondling his balls with one hand while the other presses firm against his ass, nails digging when Miguel sucks Chico’s tip, swirling his tongue around the head.
Rough groans intermingle with the huffs of their breaths, and Miguel fucking aches as Chico’s mouth moves to his shaft, licking up the underside while his own dick throbs in Miguel’s mouth, head prodding the soft palate off his throat, challenging him not to choke.
“Oh, shit,” Chico gasps, and his hips pulse up, shallow but making Miguel’s eyes water nonetheless—making his insides both threaten to revolt and shudder with need. “Can you take it, Miguelito?”
He hums. His neck strains.
“Take it,” Chico says, and Miguel bobs his head fiercely, drool trickling from his mouth—making him slurp obscenely as he does what Chico says: takes it. Takes it good.
Chico moans, and there’s a moment before he guides Miguel’s cock back into his own mouth where his face is just pressed up against it, nose poking the junction of Miguel’s hip in a way that sparks dirty inspiration.
Goosebumps ripple up his back.
“Get up,” he says, phlegmy spit still stringing between his mouth and Chico’s dick as desire pushes him up on his knees, cock still half stuffed down Chico’s throat.
He looks sorry to let it slip from his shiny lips entirely, blinking in pink-faced confusion as Miguel pulls away and flops onto his back, giving his shoulder a push.
“Switch,” he explains.
Chico rolls up slowly, so Miguel adds, “Want you to sit on my face, sweetheart”—words which get Chico grinning in delighted surprise.
Satisfaction buzzes under Miguel’s skin.
In those short few seconds of him kicking off his pants and shoes and maneuvering his body over Miguel’s, Chico somehow manages to give off the impression of a man skipping for joy and it has Miguel chuckling in his own excitement as Chico kneels back over his chest, heavy cock dragging damply against him.
“Get me good and wet for your cock, okay?” Chico says smirking knowingly over his shoulder, the curve of his ass inviting Miguel to shift closer
“You just concentrate on keeping me hard,” Miguel retorts, licking his lips.
“Easy.” And Chico bends back down, curling a hand around Miguel’s dick and bringing it back to his mouth with a loud slurp, his wet heat familiar now.
Miguel doesn’t waste time, either, and even though—shit, even though he’s never eaten ass before—ex-girlfriend never let him—said it was nasty—said just ‘cause they did it in pornos didn’t mean anyone did it in real life—
He doesn’t hesitate.
Curls a hand around Chico’s hip and arches his own—half to buck into Chico’s mouth, and half to give himself room to shimmy down further—get himself where he wants to be before grabbing Chico’s cheeks and spreading them, tilting his ass down and licking right inside.
Easy, yeah.
He feels Chico shudder as much as he hears it in that enthusiastic moan around his dick.
Miguel licks again, laving over sparse, short hairs and delicate skin. He works the tip of his tongue around a tight muscle—tastes the tang of skin as he swirls his tongue over Chico’s hole.
“Fuck—”
Feels that swear huffed against his dick—feels Chico’s mustache and soft lips dragging against his shaft as he rocks back, letting his back arch low as he opens his hips wider, balls and cock rubbing against Miguel’s chest as his body trembles.
Excitement swells through Miguel at the show of gratification, and hell, he knows how to fuck with his tongue—ain’t that different, burying his face in Chico’s ass and grabbing him at the junction of his hips and thighs to pull him closer.
The strain in his neck eases when Chico leans back, and Miguel’s happy to lie flat again, tongue out as Chico slowly grinds down, riding his face and lulling Miguel into a lustful haze, his tongue skimming up against Chico again and again, tension in his own body twist tighter—
And tighter, until he’s panting hard and surging up, wanting to explore deeper—get Chico soaked.
Pre-cum dribbles over Miguel’s chest; he wears it as a badge of honor, humming as Chico’s mouth envelopes his own dick again.
He groans at an accidental scrape of teeth and presses his teeth to Chico’s ass cheek, hugging his waist and bucking up.
Chico gags—pulls away with a wet noise and slaps Miguel’s thigh.
“Bastard.” But then gets right back to sucking, moaning either because Miguel’s fingers are digging into his flesh, or because Miguel’s still mouthing eagerly at his hole, teasing the rim incessantly but withholding that thrust inside.
Rhythms synced, they pull away at the same time, Miguel flopping back to observe his handiwork while Chico turns his head to suck kisses down Miguel’s dick—to suck a kiss against Miguel’s inner thigh, that skim of his teeth against sensitive skin intentional this time.
Miguel grins, floating in what feels like a daze of warmth as he rides a hand down the curve of Chico’s lower back and over his ass, dragging his thumb against his hole—dipping the tip inside experimentally. He’s got the soft hair in Chico’s crack thoroughly matted with spit, that’s for sure, and he plays shallowly at the rim, watching the muscle flutter before leaning back up to kiss it—relax Chico’s clench.
“Easy, sweetheart.”
He tongues Chico’s hole again, smug pleasure washing through him at the way Chico moans for it—fucking whimpers as Miguel buries his face up between his cheeks once more, gripping his thighs and eating him out until his own jaw and tongue start to ache and Chico’s no longer sucking his cock, caught up in fucking himself back on Miguel’s tongue, fragmented encouragement mixing with the rattle of his breath.
“Oh, fuck, like that, yeah, Miguel—feels so—”
Heartbeat pounding in his ears, Miguel is thrumming with pure exhilaration by the time he gives Chico a gentle push away, gasping for air.
He doesn’t leave a second of hang time—swings a leg over Miguel to climb off and turn around, looking every bit as disheveled and horny as Miguel feels, his pupils blown, face glowing with exertion, and mouth pink and swollen as he grins, murmuring something Miguel doesn’t quite catch—isn’t even sure that it’s Spanish.
There’s no time to ask.
Back on his knees, facing Miguel, Chico leans down and licks the pre-cum off his chest with a broad swipe of his tongue, pushing it into Miguel’s mouth when he crushes their lips together again. That kiss turns into another—turns into another, disjointed and frantic, Chico cupping the back of Miguel’s neck as they trade spit, holding him close.
When he pulls away first, eyes glittering with desire, he squeezes Miguel’s nape, bringing heat to his cheeks.
“Yo, you’re nasty, you know that?” Miguel teases, licking his lips as Chico crawls further up the bed, pushing that old plastic bag and the food to the edge, out of the way.
“It’s good for you,” Chico retorts, laying back on his elbows.
And sure, it could be his enormous boner talking, but gazing down at him, Miguel thinks he’s the fucking hottest guy he’s ever seen—needs no prompting to follow him—to insert himself between his slender legs and tease his dick against his wet hole.
Pre-cum stringing from his cock head, adding to the slick, and glancing up, Miguel catches the tail end of Chico licking his lips, tongue slipping back into his mouth as he smirks.
“And don't tell me you don't get off on it, Alvarez,” he adds quietly, the curve of his mouth making Miguel want to pitch forward and kiss him again. His voice is all smoky grit, a rumble in his chest. “Can feel how wet you are…”
“Yeah,” he croaks, and then pauses, staring down at Chico with a sudden, belated jolt of surprise because When did he tell him his-?
Curving a hand encouragingly over Miguel’s shoulder, Chico misinterprets the hesitation. “Ain’t gonna hurt me,” he guarantees, and Miguel nods, relaxing as he pushes the head of his dick up into Chico, testing his resistance.
“Shit, you’re so tight.”
Crazy tight, Miguel thinks, slipping a finger up to rub inside—coax him open a little.
Everything about it makes him lightheaded, feeling like a horny teenager getting too ahead of himself to know what to do.
Chico lets out an impatient sound and strains sideways, that plastic bag rustling as he nabs a small, blue bottle from it that he hadn’t removed earlier. “Ain’t gonna hurt me,” he repeats with a sly look, handing the thing over.
Something about its presence tickles something in the back of Miguel’s mind.
“You use this earlier?” he asks, opening the lid immediately and squeezing lube into his hand.
He guesses Chico had used lube. Makes more sense than spit, in retrospect, but Miguel can’t exactly recall how they’d drifted from the window to the bed where he’d woken up from that daze, ass tinglingly sore… nevermind when Chico had thrown that first bottle into the trash.
“Wouldn’t want to hurt your virgin ass.”
Miguel snorts.
He can feel the impression of Chico’s cock inside of him even now, muscles clenched as he bends over Chico and lines his dick up. “Ain’t no virgin,” he says and, rutting against Chico’s hole again, slick now, the easy slide goes straight to his head, removing those thoughts of patience and easing in.
He slips into Chico’s tight heat, breath hissing out through his teeth as Chico’s body hugs him and below, his expression twitches gorgeously.
A strangled noise slips out of him, his chest rising as he arcs toward Miguel’s cock, his mouth soon opening and closing in mute rapture, hands dragging down Miguel’s chest, curling around his ribs in a bruising grip.
“Your ass feels amazing, man,” Miguel moans, fire flooding his veins. Sweat begins to pour off him in what feels like sheets; Chico’s body is an inferno. It sets him ablaze as he thrusts deeper—
Doesn’t stop until Chico’s head is tilted back and his throat is bared to him, fingernails pressing crescents into his flesh, legs hugging his hips.
It’s not enough; the brief impulse to dive forward—sink his teeth into Chico’s flesh—comes and goes.
He has to move. Soon. Faster. Harder.
Now now now now.
Groaning, Miguel forces himself to a stop.
Above them, the ceiling light flickers and he hears the plink plink plink of a fly hitting the glass in a panic.
“Okay?” he breathes, bending down to kiss Chico.
He gets a limp, delayed response, Chico’s eyelashes fluttering rapidly before he nods—offers a sweet, chaste little brush of lips before Miguel rises again, surveying the intersection of their bodies.
Even tanned under the sun, his skin is a couple shades lighter than Chico’s—makes it really obvious where his body ends and Chico’s begins.
Miguel tilts his hips back for a second—reveals more of his cock before watching it slide back into Chico, who clenches down just then, groaning fucking sensually, the sound swirling through Miguel’s head, making him dizzy.
Glancing back up, his eyes trail over Chico’s body, taking in every plane and ridge and curve—lingering on his erection, stiff against his belly. Still leaking steadily, untouched.
“I’m good,” Chico breathes, hands sliding around to Miguel’s back, urging him closer.
Miguel rolls his hips, smiling as Chico makes an affected noise and bites his lip. “Okay.” And then he’s sliding back further—thrusting deeper, putting his back into it to earn that clench of Chico’s ass—build out that beautiful friction that feeds fire right back into his belly.
They kiss messily, and Miguel loses himself in Chico’s embrace—in his arms, wrapping around him, blunt nails clawing up his back—and between Chico’s thighs, squeezing his hips so hard with every sweaty rock of their bodies that Miguel’s breath catches again and again.
“You free tomorrow?” he says, and Chico practically purrs in response—fucks himself back up against his thrusts and nips at his neck, teeth gently pressing against his throat as that low sound continues rumbling through him.
Christ, he really is purring.
Miguel huffs out a laugh and leans back, meeting Chico’s gaze and basking in his desire before kissing him again softly—letting their lips brush as he keeps the rhythm in his hips and feels his lower back beginning to sour.
“Let’s make it two nights,” he whispers under the blood roaring in his ears. He feels feverish—feels like he’s fucking soaring as he slows his thrusts—focuses of burying his cock deep and making Chico groan. “Wanna—fuck—stay in you forever.”
The touch, chest to chest, belly to belly, Chico’s cock squeezed between them as Miguel grinds against his ass.
Why not three?
He can practically hear the words spoken in Chico’s voice, but they never come.
“Can’t,” Chico gasps, head tilting back. His hands lift, cradling Miguel’s face as sweat runs down it, and Miguel pushes past his hands to kiss him again—taste his lips.
“You got somewhere to be?” he teases, ignoring his pang of disappointment as he draws back, straightening up and grasping Chico’s slippery legs as he begins fucking him again—a sharp pap pap pap ringing through the air with every jolt of their bodies.
Sweat glistens against Chico’s face and chest and soaks his hair as he grins up at Miguel in between twitching looks of ecstasy. “Nah, but you do,” he says, and Miguel’s hips stutter, a prickle against the back of his neck that comes and goes.
“What?”
Maybe it’s the fucking. Maybe it’s the being inside Chico—best feeling he’s had in fucking years—best sex, too. He doesn’t react with as much caution as he’d expect, though it’s weird as shit for Chico to say that—to say this, chuckling ruefully:
“Guess I couldn’t resist saying goodbye, you know?”
Swallowing hard, Miguel reaches between them, wrapping a hand around Chico’s cock. “The fuck you mean?”
The way he says it makes it sound like they’ve been together longer than a couple hours—like this was a long time coming or whatever.
Sliding a hand over Miguel’s clenched abdomen, Chico groans, arching his hips. “You were so fucking…weak. But you weren’t afraid, so I wanted to help you—give you a fighting chance,” he moans, and suddenly Miguel isn’t in the motel room anymore—is walking along a night round with a discombobulated feeling, feet dragging.
And then he’s in the shadows, watching the skeletal human with the pulsing, golden aura scurry through the edges of his town, unaware of who watches over him—unaware of the men with keen eyes organising a checkpoint on the other side of town, handing out photos.
The night vanishes, and Miguel fights toward the surface of his consciousness, past memories of sharp teeth tearing against his skin—blood spilling into Guerra’s mouth from his neck, from his wrist, from his thigh—
Below him, Guerra’s body remains tight around his cock, and Miguel gasps for air, finding himself back in the motel room he’s stumbled into again and again, always followed with a smile by—
“Who the fuck are you?” Miguel says, and he’s shaking, and he’s still got a hand curled around Guerra’s cock, stroking him off.
The fear comes, and then it washes away, and it’s just Guerra there, offering a reassuring smile, no different from the conspiratorial one that had met Miguel at the bar earlier—days ago. Weeks ago. Months?
“You know.”
“The fuck I do.” He slams his hips forward, squeezing Guerra’s cock, and feels him clench down hard—feels his hips roll up toward him, riding the thrust.
Miguel’s neck prickles.
God, who are you?
Who the fuck—
What do you want—
He’s asked some form of the question a dozen times before and received half a dozen answers.
Chico Guerra.
A man from Chiapas.
A grandson, a son, an orphan.
Nobody.
A man who’s sought him out every night at the same bar. Who’s led him into the motel—who’s watched him shower—helped him, touched him, fucked him lovedhimhealedhim—
Carmen.
The heavy scent of wet earth after the rain fills Miguel’s head as he releases Chico’s cock—wraps a hand around his throat instead, holding firm without pressing
The muscle in his forearm twitches.
Their bodies rock together and the knot in Chico’s throat works furiously against Miguel’s palm.
“You doing it right now?” he demands, panting.
“What?”
“Keeping me calm.”
Sweat trickles down his back.
Chico licks his lips, reaching up and gently holding Miguel’s hand over his throat. Peeling it away. Miguel lets him without a thought. “Yes,” he admits and Miguel snaps his hips forward. Chico hisses out a breath.
“The fuck are you?”
A bead of sweat runs up Chico’s forehead as he throws his head back, labored cackle turning into a groan at Miguel’s next thrust, harder now, the betrayal in his body melting into the merciless drive of his hips.
Nothing more.
Falling over Chico again, Miguel kisses him hard enough to bruise, biting his lip, drawing blood that spreads viscous and tangy between their mouths… the way it has so many times before.
A tingling sensation crawls over his skin as he traces Chico’s lips with his tongue, breathing in his air, rocking into him.
He’s fed on Chico’s blood just as Chico’s fed on his.
Pap pap pap pap.
The image of his bony self, ducking through inky streets in stolen clothes, burns in Miguel’s mind as he jerks away and stares down into Chico’s face.
Blood smears his kiss-swollen mouth and his expression is folded into one at the edge of rapture, mute and overwhelmed and fucking wrecked.
God, Miguel wants to fucking loathe him. Thinks he should, but he just—
Just fucks into him instead, pleasure shooting through his veins as he feels Chico’s legs lock behind him, keeping him close, urging him to grind deeper—torture that orgasm out.
It doesn’t take much.
Just their bodies sliding slick together for a few more beats. Just Miguel’s mouth against Chico’s throat, teeth pressing hard, but not hard enough to break skin.
Chico comes with a rumbling sound in his chest—with a spasm and a jerk of his hips. White spills between them and as Chico’s eyelids flutter, Miguel straightens up—collects a bloody kiss from his mouth before kneeling wide and tightening his grip on Chico’s hips.
“Ain’t done with you.”
He must sense the lack of relief, because he whimpers and tenses even before Miguel begins to rock back into him, hands sliding back to cup his ass.
Above: plink plink plink.
Below: Chico writhes, face contorting into a grimace before he relaxes around Miguel.
Fucking infuriating.
“Yet you don’t want me anymore?” he accuses, throat tightening as he glares into Chico’s edge of bliss and discomfort. Petulance and hurt is the closest he can manage to real hatred, he guesses, because he slows his hips when Chico’s whine is too sharp.
He can’t even fucking hurt him. Doesn’t want to.
Chico grunts, the noise sounding like disagreement as his tongue comes out—swipes over his bruised, split lip—or, not so split, on second glance, even though Miguel can still taste the blood on his own mouth—can taste a small piece of the vitality poured so fucking diligently back into his body, drop by drop.
“Want you plenty.”
“But you’re ditching me?” Goodbye he’d said.
“Kept you long enough already,” he says quietly. “Ain’t right.” He groans—sighs, head tilting back, his conflict flickering in his face, anguish under the pleasure. “You’re becoming like me.”
Miguel licks his lips again—tastes less—and below him, Chico jolts against him as he bucks his hips—fucks deep. “What’s wrong with that?” he growls, an ache in his chest that threatens to burst. Tear his heart right out.
What the fuck are you?
“It’s a curse, Miguelito,” he says. “Comes with a price. Ain’t cheap.”
“I’ll pay it.”
The first time—the very first time they’d met, Chico hadn’t slept with him at all. Had bought him dinner. Had taken him back to the motel to shower and sleep.
“What, you get off on this or something?” he’d asked hoarsely, warily eyeballing the man who’d called himself Guerra as he sat at the foot of the bed.
All fucking night, from the second he’d wandered out of the bar with a cigarette, offering it to Miguel—offering to buy his scrawny ass food, too—Guerra’d had that look in his eye.
Piercing.
Fixated.
He has it in his eyes now, molten like lava, smoldering—
Enamored.
And as Chico gives an overstimulated whine, arching toward Miguel, he feels his own muscles stiffen—feels that tight tug between his legs, an overwhelming need driving his final thrust forward.
Fuck the price.
In his memory, days and nights bleed together now, the same hours played out seemingly again and again in variations that all culminate in Chico pouring into him—drawing out of him.
Blood. Spit. Cum. Swapping life for life. Strengthening and strengthening.
Together.
Miguel chokes on the truth as it floods back to him, the ways that touch had persuaded him to forget—the ways that he’d opened his body to Guerra.
Had he wanted to? Or had that been persuasion, too?
He remembers their first kiss.
It’d been in the morning—that first morning, after he’d woken up to a mountain of food on the bed, and Guerra carefully explaining his choices—salty and sweet, because he hadn’t been sure which Miguel preferred.
“Shit, man. You trying to make me fall in love with you? ‘Cause it’s working,” Miguel had said, sitting up eagerly—hungrily. After the dinner Guerra had bought him, and after a deep, clean sleep, his appetite had greedily returned.
The look on Guerra’s face had been comical—wide-eyed and full of both wonder and alarm which had led to sputtered protests—a rare instance of him becoming flustered, though Miguel’d had no way of realising it at the time.
By then, his mouth had already been full of chocolate concha and he’d felt a strange giddiness swell from within at the sight of Guerra’s blush. “Aw. You’re sweet, y’know that?”
He’d never been blind to eyes that followed him, or ignorant of shy glances, and even if Guerra hadn’t actually touched him all night, he’d still had that look in his eye.
Maricón.
Shit, so what?
At the door, belly full and body clad in the cleaner clothes Guerra had mysteriously acquired for him along with the food, Miguel had grinned and turned to him, happy to show his appreciation, taking his face between his hands.
Why don’t we make it two nights?
Shit, why don’t we make it three?
Now, weeks later, Miguel shakes. Rocks forward desperately—doesn’t get how a guy can nurse him back to health and still do this to him—care for him and not care at all.
“I’ll pay it,” he says again, because he knows about steep prices.
Deals with God. Deals with the Devil.
Below him, Chico gasps, holding him in his eyes, looking at him like he’s the only thing that matters—like he’ll never let him stumble.
But ecstasy steals the breath from his lungs and Miguel does fall—topples over Chico and brings their mouths together once again, stealing kisses while he can—while he remembers—
Why not four?
Chico meets him indulgently, tongue slipping against his.
Why not forever?
“Fuck you,” Miguel bites out, because he knows the way it goes now—knows this time won’t be any different, but it will be the last.
Chico won’t let him pay for it.
But I want to remember—
The words never make it past his lips.
Chico’s hands grip his face, holding him steady as they clash, as hunger and greed make their teeth click and blood begins to flow over Miguel’s tongue again.
Guerra’s not sweet at all.
Fuck you, fuck you, he thinks, panting, and:
“You’re free,” Chico tells him. “Live a good fucking life, alright?”
And—
Chapter Text
“...Those Indians who are Nagualists adore their naguals, and look upon them as gods, and by their aid believe that they can foretell the future, discover hidden treasure, and fulfill their dishonest desires. [...] They instruct the child to deny God and His Blessed Mother, and warn him to have no fear, and not to make the sign of the cross. He is told to embrace his Nagual tenderly, which, by some diabolical art, presents itself in an affectionate manner even though it be a ferocious beast, like a lion or a tiger. Thus, with infernal cunning they persuade him that this Nagual is an angel of God, who will look after him and protect him...”
Francisco Núñez de la Vega,
Bishop of Chiapas
Constituciones Diocesanas del Obispado de Chiappa (1687)
*
Sunlight glares in Miguel’s eyes when he tries to open them, and he instinctively groans, scrubbing a hand over his face and rolling over, searching for shadows.
Fucking drank too much, he guesses, because he’s got that soreness in his muscles, and in the back of his mind, he thinks he might’ve been dreaming again about that guy—
Shit.
Either way, there’s a second when he sits up where he’s more than a little certain that he’ll open his eyes to a familiar bedroom with striped wallpaper and cover pages ripped out of magazines—
“Better get up, bro,” Velez sing-songs.
Miguel groans, rolling upright to the familiar sight of their drab pod instead.
No sunlight—just bright artificial light, and the shuffle of his cellie around the sink across the narrow room.
“Time is it?” Miguel groans. His head is fucking pounding, but that’s par for the course these days.
No such thing as a good night’s sleep in Oz.
“Count soon,” Velez says, tying his bandana around his head and glancing out the front of the pod. “Oh shit, look who’s coming…”
Right on cue, there’s a knock on the glass.
Mornings like these—when he’s slow to come to his senses? They’re no better than the ones after a sleepless night of tossing and turning. Worse, even, because for just that moment before he’d fully woken up, there’d been a sense that perhaps he wasn’t in motherfucking Oswald.
Then reality had set in all over again.
Hopping down from the top bunk and landing as heavily as he feels, limbs stiff, Miguel rubs sleep from his eyes and sighs as the pod door swings open and Torquemada sticks his head inside.
“Morales wants to talk after Count.”
“Ain’t interested,” he grunts, bending over to splash cold water on his face. Over the rush of the faucet, he hears Velez chiming in:
“What’s there to talk about?”
“I just deliver the message, sugarplum,” Torquemada drawls though, said message delivered, he continues to hover in the doorway as Miguel straightens up.
Water drips off his chin and glances over, noting the expectant hitch of Torquemada’s hand on his hip, even if Velez is blind to it.
“Jaime,” Miguel says, wiping his face on his hand towel. “Take a hike, man.”
Velez’s eyebrows shoot up, mouth opening in a protest that he swallows when Miguel shoots him a sharp look—one that reminds him who’s running shit between the two of them.
Letting out a huff, he heads out, shouldering past Torquemada and his smarmy chuckle.
There’s a beat where neither of them say anything; maybe Torquemada’s waiting for his cue, or maybe he’s gathering what he wants to say.
Not caring much either way, Miguel begins to brush his teeth in the silence, staring into the mirror with a dull gaze, examining the dark circles beneath his eyes.
“My offer still stands,” Torquemada says at last, stepping inside and letting the door shut behind him.
“Ain’t interested in that either,” Miguel replies around his toothbrush. He spits. “Still.” He turns on the sink, rinsing his toothbrush and cupping water to his mouth as he observes Torquemada edging closer in his periphery. By the time he straightens up, the guy is practically standing over his shoulder, and Miguel gives him a firm Fuck off glare; he’s no Morales—doesn’t turn a blind eye to Torquemada’s little games of physicality just because he’s got the supply and connections. “You can run back and tell the boss that, too, ‘cause unless you wanna try taking Jaime on, your little plan’s gonna sink like a rock.”
“I appreciate the warning,” Torquemada says, and leans against the wall by the sink as Miguel turns away, standing at the toilet to piss. “But actually, I came to sweeten the pot.”
There it is.
Miguel lets his stream fill the quiet in response, letting out a scoff.
“I got parole in a year,” he reminds the guy, shaking his dick and tucking it away again.
Torquemada starts to say something and is cut off by the flush of the toilet that Miguel waits to hit until he’s sure the guy’s about to talk.
Yeah, dick move.
The look on Torquemada’s face is expectedly irritated when Miguel turns around again, but the guy presses on anyway: “Well, that’s the thing, handsome. You might be out of here quicker than you think.”
“What do you mean?” He pauses at the sink again, and fuck—now Torquemada’s smirking, knowing he’s got Miguel’s interest piqued.
He gives a big, innocent shrug. “A little birdie told me the chair of the parole board is stepping down soon, that’s all. Word on the street is the new one’s got—shall we say—an open ear. To some voices.”
Miguel stares. “Yeah, you got a commissioner in your pocket. Right.”
Outside the pod, a buzzer drones.
“COUNT!” Rivera calls, voice muted but audible through the pod walls.
Miguel shoots Torquemada a last, dubious glance before heading past him, out onto the tier.
It’s a headache, this game of Chinese checkers that the tits trade in Oz has turned into.
Too many damn players, and for some reason, Torquemada wants Miguel to join in—be his lieutenant, once he pulls his little mutiny on his own leader.
Fuckin’ snake, Miguel thinks, and like it or not, checked out as he tries to fucking stay, he seems constantly on the precipice of being dragged back in.
Something about escaping for two years has half the guys in Oz thinking he’s some kind of genius, and while Miguel might’ve appreciated the admiration and sway once before, these days, months after his capture in Guatemala, the attention has worn thin.
As he steps out in front of the cell, Velez returns a moment later from socialising with Ricardo, Torquemada sashays past, throwing a sour look over his shoulder.
“What’d he want?” Velez asks as they watch the guy in all his violet pinstripe glory stalk back over to Morales’s side on the other end of the tier.
“Same old. Bring me over to the dark side,” Miguel deadpans.
Velez shakes his head, still openly staring after Torquemada long after Miguel’s own attention has shifted back to their immediate vicinity and the guys standing around them, bored. “Yo, you gotta watch your back around that cocksucker, bro.”
“Ain’t scared a’ him.”
On the main floor, Rivera begins to make rounds, calling out numbers as he goes, his voice ringing through the unit.
Miguel leans against the pod door, watching Torquemada lean over to speak into the ear of Morales, whose attention is trained to his left.
Nah, he’s not spooked by Torquemada one bit—doesn’t give much of a shit about the guy’s display—ain’t gonna fall for the performance; doesn’t see anything he wants there, and even now, with talk about greasing palms and getting Miguel paroled quicker, he’s not dumb enough to go putting his eggs in that basket.
“Yo, I don't get why Morales doesn’t whack him,” Velez mutters, not for the first time. “He knows Torquemada wants him out but he still keeps him around?”
“Maybe he gets off on it,” Miguel says wryly.
“Yeah, he’s probably getting his dick sucked…” Velez sneers, and continues gawking over there in that unsubtle way of his as Miguel yawns and shrugs, letting his head dip as Count progresses and he tries to zone out until it’s over.
When it is, Miguel swings around and returns to the pod to shave before breakfast while Velez does his last second preening over his shoulder.
“Hey, you think McManus is gonna put on the rest of that tape during rec?” Velez chatters. “Shit. He should play something actually interesting. Who cares about taxes, bro? Yo, when I’m outta here, I ain’t bothering with all that. Government can come find me—pry my cold hard cash out my cold dead hands.”
“They will,” Miguel mutters, mostly tuning the kid out. He’s long given up on snapping at him.
Out on the tier later, he joins the flow of inmates slowly migrating toward the gates of the cafeteria. It’s a familiar process and one he generally checks out during, the boredom of the slow shuffle making it easy for his mind to wander, or more often, blank.
Today, Miguel’s thoughts swirl in fragmented impressions and loose memories as he waits in the slop line and recalls the same wait hundreds of times before this one—standing around with Rodrigo, with Vasquez, with Hernandez, and with Jaime.
They’re hollow memories. Missing something.
You’re mildly depressed, Reimondo had said. It’s normal for men to grow detached in here. Come to Group. Talk it out.
Leaning against the metal railing at the turn of the line, Miguel scans the gradually filling cafeteria.
Some of the guys are gone now, and some remain; he remains. Almost like he’d never left.
“Yo, Morales is pissed at you guys, man.” Somehow, Ricardo’s cut into line with them—is nudging Velez and leaning over with a grin.
“What’d he want, anyway?” Jaime says.
“The usual, man. You guys belong with us, with El Norte.”
“Nah, me and Miguel—”
“Ain’t no we,” Miguel interjects flatly. It’s fucking routine at this point, though.
Velez keeps on running his mouth. “Yo, Morales is losing his touch. He’s looking weak, begging on his knees for Miguel’s attention,” he says, reaching over and whacking Miguel’s shoulder.
Ricardo snorts, crossing his arms and leaning back as Miguel glances over with the faint echo of annoyance. “Oh yeah? Lemme ask you something, Jaime.”
“What?”
“Who the fuck controls the tits around here? Morales, or fucking Alvarez? No offense, man.”
Miguel shrugs as Velez makes noises of protest and unfounded claims of biding our time.
When he’d returned to Oz to find that Hernandez had long been usurped by this Enrique Morales guy, he hadn’t exactly been torn up about it. Playing second to El Cid had hardly been a fucking walk in the park, but without the guy, it’d occurred to Miguel that he didn’t have to sink himself back into the gang.
He’d fucking tasted freedom—had been outside long enough to get used to a life away from the bullshit of Oz, even if being on the lam had made it only half an existence. Was still freedom.
Was still enough to pull him through Solitary—keep his head on straight, eye on the prize:
Parole.
Five more years added to his sentence, sure—three for the escape and two for the years he was gone—but he’s still got his parole.
Still got his fucking parole.
Miguel grits his teeth as the line inches forward and Ricardo and Velez continue chattering, now shooting the shit about something Ricardo’d overheard the hacks talking about before Count.
Black bear or something spotted along Route 7a between Morrisville and Oswald.
“Sure Action Three’ll be all over it today,” Velez says, nudging Miguel with his elbow.
He grunts vaguely in agreement, eyes drifting over the line in front of him—the faces of the servers scooping food onto trays—pausing to lean over to chat.
Chatting.
Everyone chats in Oz.
“Yo, them motherfuckers got too much time on their hands,” Ricardo comments, tilting closer to tell Miguel, “They had a field day when you and Busmalis escaped—bet they pray every night something happens in here they can report on.”
“Yo, when there was that sighting of you down in Mexico…” Velez starts to laugh. “Shit, bro! They almost sent Miah Wilkinson down to follow up.”
“I’d do her,” Ricardo says.
“Nah, man—the weather girl!”
“I’d do ‘em both. And Miss Sally. All night, baby.”
Velez sucks his teeth. “Man, you can have Miss Sally. She’s a hoe.”
“Fuck you! You wouldn’t bang Miss Sally, pendejo?!”
Miguel slides up toward the slop line, grabbing a tray as Ricardo and Velez bicker over his shoulder.
Breakfast is two triangles of plain toast, scrambled eggs, two breakfast sausages, and a cup of orange juice, putting it up there as a small feast already, but then O’Reily pulls out a tray as Miguel pushes his way to the eggs station and switches out his tray for one pre-prepared.
“The fuck’s this?” he says sharply, looking at the new tray with french toast, a large Denver omelette, double the breakfast sausages, and a small bowl of oatmeal.
O’Reily’s expression is dull, his whole being still somewhat subdued since Cyril’s execution a couple months earlier. “Fag’s got a crush, I guess. Lucky you.”
Miguel glances over his shoulder to where Torquemada’s standing in line with Morales, easy to spot with his height and his loud suit. Already watching on.
He gives a flutter of his fingers.
“Great.”
But Miguel’s not one to turn down free food—free protein, no less, shit.
“Jesus, he really wants you this time,” Velez laughs, following Miguel as he exits the line with his juice.
They split off from Ricardo at the cafeteria tables, Ricardo heading on toward the area already being claimed with El Norte members from Unit B.
“Wow,” Beecher comments as Miguel and Velez join the Others at their less favorable corner of the cafeteria, that noisy, busy corner right near the front.
Miguel gives a resigned shrug while Velez snickers.
“With Keller on Death Row again for killing Schillinger, you lookin’ for a new boyfriend? Torquemada’s putting out feelers.”
Beecher sips his OJ, grimacing. “Thanks, but I think that would make me El Norte’s prag, right?” he says dryly, a resentful bite behind his words at the idea—not that Velez seems to pick up on it.
Miguel ducks his head in the meantime, digging into the food on his tray without any input.
Apparently that doesn’t go without Velez’s notice, though. He nudges Miguel with his elbow as their section of the table fills up with the usual suspects—Busmalis and Rebadow, and Neema and Arif.
“Yo, what’s up with you today, bro?” Velez says. “You’re more zoned out than usual. Energy’s way low.”
Miguel looks up with a mouthful of french toast at the same time Torquemada and Morales stride by, the latter acting like Miguel doesn’t exist while Torquemada blows him a kiss.
Miguel’s eyes slide sideways. “So?” He frowns; easy for Velez to say someone’s energy is low, anyhow. The kid’s always wired and ready to go for no reason. Still thinks they’re going to do something any day now, despite evidence to the contrary and Miguel’s repeated reminders that they’re nothing—not a gang, not nothing.
Velez shakes his carton of juice, the ice shards inside slushing around loudly. “What is it, your time of month?” he jokes.
Goddammit.
Miguel puts his fork down, chewing slowly, and there’s a silence that falls over the table.
Velez quits snickering, blinking rapidly as his brain catches up with his mouth. “Yo, was a joke, bro. Sorry,” he says hastily.
Across the table, Neema clears his throat. “Are any of you signing up for the play?” he says, stilted, and with all the discomfort of someone who’s been recruited to pose the question.
Suzanne, Miguel guesses.
Arif and Rebadow glance at Beecher, but Velez scrapes his tray for scrambled eggs, wondering, “Yo, they’re still tryna do that after Keller shanked Schillinger’s ass last time?”
Busmalis nods, jumping in, “Querns said we can try again so long as there’s enough people to fill the roles and we keep the costs low.”
“That’ll be difficult with the play’s curse,” Rebadow muses.
Miguel looks over—observes everyone else do the same.
“What?” Rebadow gives a small shrug, scanning the table with a small expression of surprise. “You can’t deny that the production has had its difficulties. And it’s traditional for the Scottish Play to carry a curse.”
“The fuck you talkin’ about?” Velez snorts.
Beecher clears his throat. “You know what? It’ll give me something to take my mind off the appeal for my parole violation.”
“Yo, I can’t act,” Velez says, shaking his head and making a face.
“Suzanne could use stage crew, too,” Neema presses.
He’s got an intense, expectant stare, looking all around—and one that’s already gotten to Arif by the duck of his head—but even as the others make vague noises of Could be interesting, what without all the Aryans at rehearsals this time around, Miguel doesn’t cave.
Like hell he’s going to waste his time with that shit.
He eats his breakfast with single-minded focus—actually feels a bit full for once afterward—and rises in silence as the buzzer rings, signalling the end of mealtime and the beginning of another mindless day, where hours roll together, passing slow and fast all at once—echoes of days that have already passed before it.
Inevitably, down in the humid back room of the dress factory, Miguel stands over the final garments and presses them with the heavy, industrial steam iron before nodding at Fiona to take the fabric off for folding at her neighboring station.
She doesn’t talk to him every afternoon—not at first anyway, though he can tell by her multiple furtive glances that she’s revving up to something today. When she comes back with a stack of fresh boxes, her eyes catch his and he watches her tilt her head.
“Don’t tell me Torquemada put your ass up to something, too,” he says.
Fiona laughs. “Oh not me, darling,” she assures with a quick wave of her head. “You just seem in your head today, Miguel. More than usual, you know?”
Her too?
Picking up another crumpled dress from the growing pile below the chute into their room, Miguel quickly lays it out against the guides on his table. “Lot on my mind, I guess,” he lies. He doesn’t think much of anything during work—lets the monotony of his actions wash over him.
It’s funny, he guesses. When he first arrived at Oz, before his stint working in the hospital ward prior to his escape, he’d hated the dullness of work detail. The factory had fucking bored him to death, whereas scrubbing bedpans had been disgusting, but at least the coming and going of patients had been interesting.
There’d also been access to the pills El Norte had so desperately needed to keep afloat—keep the hermanos from feeling restless and pointless.
None of that shit means anything to Miguel now, though.
“Told you how I worked in a doll factory for a bit in Quetzaltenango, right?” he says as Fiona preps her boxes.
He irons the red fabric of the dresses they’ve been producing this quarter, movement practiced to the point of being second nature.
“Sure,” Fiona says. “That’s where they caught you.”
Miguel grimaces, because—well yeah. He’d made enough money in Mexico working at that bar, and slipping down into Guatemala hadn’t been nearly as difficult as he’d worried, but that’s probably where he’d gotten lax. Had made honest money, even if the nights had passed in half-drunken blurs, but doing so had gotten him attached to the idea of settling down.
He should’ve gone further, too, but the second he’d crossed the border, he’d wanted to go back.
And so he’d stopped, stupidly.
Hadn’t crossed that next border.
“What about it?” Fiona prompts gently.
Miguel glances up to see her looking down, pretending not to be too curious.
He almost smiles at that, focus returning to his ironing. “Nothing, I guess. This place kinda reminds of that one. Was boring and hot. Girl clothes everywhere you looked—long fucking hours, but shit. End a’ the day, you went home.” That little room he’d rented out back his floor manager’s home, anyway.
For a moment, he can almost see his old station at the factory from a thousand miles away, the little doll parts and bits of fabric strewn in front of him.
Why hadn’t he fucking kept going?
The other week, Neema had even mentioned offhand—had told him dryly that if he’d gone a little further—to Venezuela or Colombia or somewhere without an extradition treaty, he would’ve been safe.
Could’ve been free.
“Anything in your size there?” Fiona teases.
Miguel sucks in a sharp breath, moving his iron as the steam coming off it takes on a more smokey quality. The fabric is pale where he’d left the hot metal too long and he winces, tossing the dress toward the rejects bin.
“What?” he says, distracted as he looks back over.
She’s shaking her head—nevermind—and then they’re quiet, returning to the mechanical pressing and folding and moving dresses along for packaging until a buzzer sounds from the main warehouse and the door of their little room bursts open, a hack telling them to keep working—as if either of them had slacked off.
“What’s going on?” Miguel asks—catches a sharp whiff of something bitter—tangy—
Stomach churning—
“Just stay put!” the hack snaps.
An agonized scream rings out from somewhere behind him as he whirls around, the shut of the door clamping down on the nauseating wave of fucking blood like an airtight lid.
Miguel shudders, glancing toward Fiona, who’s clearly got a more iron stomach than him that morning, looking curious but otherwise unaffected.
Christ.
Ironing a couple more of the dresses in his pile, Miguel feels his heart thudding, adrenaline still unexpectedly racing through him long after the interruption. He sets his iron down as he glimpses Fiona rifling through her pocket; she’s got the right idea, already taking the opportunity to shirk her own duties as muffled sounds of some kind of chaos reigns on the main floor of the factory.
“Cigarette?” she offers, breaking their silence and waving a cigarette in the direction of the ceiling vent across the room. As she rounds her station, Miguel follows with a faint smile.
Leaning against the brick wall of the room, just under that fan pulling air up and outside, near the parking lot—if Miguel’s mental map of the prison is correct—they stand shoulder to shoulder, handing the cigarette back and forth.
Fiona’s red lipstick stains the paper in different spots and her red, manicured nails glint with the light from the overhead fluorescent fixtures every time she hands the cig back over, letting out a soft stream of smoke, head tilted up.
“You been here seven years, right?” Miguel says after a moment.
“Eight and three months, honey.” She flicks ash off the end of the cigarette before handing it back over and folding her hands behind her back against the wall.
“You keep your head down,” he muses. “You got parole coming up?”
He’s got the general idea of what any of the Em City Gays are in Oz for, everyone’s business eventually made common knowledge one way or the other; Masters is in for murder in the second; Pinkerton, armed robbery; Downing, grand larceny and reckless endangerment; and Fiona, aggravated assault and resisting arrest.
How much time does that carry?
“In March,” Fiona says with a nod. “My third.”
“Think you got a chance?” Miguel takes a drag of the cigarette. Feels the bitter smoke swirl in his lungs—go to his head. Something about smoking ever since he got dragged back relaxes him more than it used to. Lulls him into a hypnotic kind of calm.
In the humid pressing room, if he closes his eyes and tilts his head back against the brick, he can almost forget he’s in Oz.
Sometimes, anyway.
Today, the continued muffled shouts in the warehouse prevent that illusion entirely.
Miguel offers the cigarette back to Fiona but she shakes her head.
“I dunno. Sister Reimondo, bless her heart, you know? She thinks I got good chances. But I see how those commissioners look at me… rayos! I think they want me to do the full dime.” She gives a dark chuckle and Miguel blinks, looking over.
“What do you mean?” He hastily waves away the smoke that billows from his mouth in her direction with the question.
She arches her eyebrows at him. “They just don’t like what they see.”
Miguel looks at her—at her lined eyes and the powder he can see on her skin. Blush. Lipstick. Is that why?
“That’s fucked up. You ain’t been in trouble since you got here. That don’t count for something?”
Fiona shrugs. “We’ll have to see,” she says lightly, though her mouth curls, and Miguel can tell she’s pleased by his indignation. Flattered, maybe.
Fuck, he thinks, sucking in more smoke. Long as she doesn’t get any ideas about it…
And then, with a pang, he wonders if that’s the same ungenerous suspicion the commissioners meet Fiona with at her parole hearings and he looks at his feet, frowning.
Not like he… really has a problem with it. With her being queer or a tranny or whatever. He’s not even sure. Never asked.
Miguel clears his throat, but it’s Fiona who carries on the conversation.
“Well what about you, tough guy? What do you think your parole chances are looking like, huh? Now you, there’s a redemption story. I think they’ll like that,” Fiona muses. “You’ve been a real good boy.”
Miguel snorts, staring at the cigarette that’s down in a stub between his fingers. He brings it to his mouth anyway, sucking stubbornly. “Yeah, all of ten months.”
“Nothin’ to snub your nose at, sweetie,” Fiona says. “And besides the escape and riot, which wasn’t no one’s fault, you don’t got any disciplinary warnings. That’s good.”
“Nah. Punched Glynn back in the day,” Miguel says.
It feels like a lifetime ago and he suddenly grins at the memory, grinding the cigarette against the brick away and dropping it to the floor, kicking it out of sight.
“Oh that’s right,” Fiona recalls, and then lets out a small giggle. “Do you regret it?”
Miguel pushes off the wall. “Nah, he was bein’ a dick.”
“Uh-uh, now that’s not gonna get you paroled, Miguel,” Fiona tells him, wagging a finger at him. “You’re supposed to say you regret it all. You’ve learned how to deal with your temper!”
Miguel lingers on the spot. “You got regrets?”
Fiona shrugs, making a face as she pulls a compact mirror out of her pocket along with a tube of lipstick. “Girl, you bet.” She rolls her eyes and then glances at him, freezing a little. “Figure of speech.”
“Nah, ain’t that,” he says and offers his most winsome smile. “Got another cigarette?”
Smoking in the stairwell out in the North Wing tower later, Miguel’s already nursing a headache, pinching his cigarette with one hand and the bridge of his nose with the other when he hears the D-Block staircase creak open above him, the sound of chatter and heavy stomp of footsteps signalling the impending arrival of inmates from kitchen duty who are prepping for dinner.
“Yo, that’s bullshit!”
“Nah, serious. Heard it was a giant black panther, man—jumped out in the road and almost made Howell crash.”
“It was a black wolf. Ain’t no panthers in New York—oh, hey, Alvarez,” Poet says.
Miguel blows out smoke, nodding his chin hello and standing with a wince to make room as Poet and Rawls lug an scuffed metal table with a broken leg down the stairs.
Rawls, at the back of their two-person carry, strains his neck to look back over his shoulder. “What’d you hear?”
He squints, putting two and two together at the last second and rubbing his palm against his temple. “Oh, uh, black bear, right?”
They both shoot him a dubious look, shaking their heads as they make the corner and disappear, presumably heading toward the old storage unit in the basement.
“Black bear?”
“Wasn’t standin’ on no two hind legs… It was a panther!”
“Ain’t no jaguars in America, man!”
Miguel lowers himself back down the concrete, sitting there and watching smoke curl around his fingers as his cigarette burns. Something about watching the patterns of smoke soothes that headache that had started to form at the end of work detail—had followed him after lunch and through the gym, too.
Showers had helped, cold water against hot skin, but the humidity—
Had kept reminding him—memories flashing against his body.
Different time, different place.
He aches for the outside in a way that he hadn’t ever before. Comes in waves, he figures. Comes to him because his body had been steeped in the outdoors all those months.
The phantom scent of fallen leaves swirls through Miguel’s head along with the cigarette smoke—the memory just that bit clearer every time he pulls in a bitter lungful.
Escape.
He’d asked Busmalis in low tones about another attempt as soon as he’d gotten the chance, but two years away has changed a lot. The old fart is married now—doesn’t want to escape and ruin his chances of real freedom.
He doesn’t get it, Miguel supposes, pressing the heel of his palm against his left eye. Busmalis hadn’t made it more than a couple miles out of Oz.
Miguel?
He’d gotten so far, gone so long, that the days even blur in his memory—the paranoid trek south—on foot and hitchhiking where safe, when he could guarantee the driver would never speak a word about seeing him. A haze of thirst and starvation and desperate acts, and then one day:
Waking up as if from a dream, feeling rejuvenated and sober-minded.
Struck with a new purpose—new appreciation for the freedom he’d been wasting away.
Where the journey into Mexico has become a bit of a haze, Miguel remembers his path further south like it was yesterday.
He’d had a bit of cash by then—well, more than a bit. Had accumulated the bills like a magpie—enough to hang him two rides south, where he’d picked his way along a river that passed beneath a border checkpoint. Holding his ratty sneakers in his hands, he’d walked ankle-deep through a cool, dark creek, nodding hello at men and women and children riding rafts up in the opposite direction, them heading north, while he…
Had felt that flicker of doubt; maybe south wasn’t the way to go, after all.
With hindsight being 20/20, Miguel lets out a snort and brings his cigarette back to his mouth, shaking his head.
Should’ve gone further.
To the end of the world.
He inhales the smoke, closing his eyes, and imagines that the darkness is a night, far, far away…
*
In the evening, waiting for the buzzer to signal dinner, the story of the loose bear on Route 7a has everyone gathered with interest around the boob tube, utterly invested.
Fucking talk of the town all day.
Seeing the raptness of everyone’s attention at the TVs, Miguel has no doubt that there’s been money placed on the truth by now.
He watches Miah Wilkinson’s mouth move, the shapes suggesting twists and turns to the story as she stands out in the shallow snow in a field beside a nondescript curve in the highway up to Oswald.
Witness Describes Large Cat or Wolf, the lower graphic reads on the screen.
Seated over with the others and twisted in his seat, Velez holds up a pair of earphones, waving it in Miguel’s direction.
He shakes his head, shuffling the cards in his hands and looking down again right as a hand falls heavy against his shoulder from behind.
Flesh stinging from the clap, Miguel’s muscles tense.
“You weren’t in the usual haunts.” Torquemada says, chair scraping as he seats himself at Miguel’s side and scoots closer to boot. “Have you been hiding from me?” He sounds amused by the idea, and his knee knocks Miguel’s under the small recreation table, making Miguel wince and angle away.
“Fuck you want now?” He begins to lay out his game of Solitaire and in his periphery, he sees Torquemada lean closer before he hears—
“Hmm. So that’s what has Fiona so crabby,” Torquemada notes, a deep sigh following his sniffing. He tuts. “You really shouldn’t steal, you know. What’s a girl in here got besides her fags?” He chuckles at his own joke.
Miguel’s hand slows, fingers curling around a card at the top of his deck without placing it in a column on the table. “What do you want?” he repeats.
Torquemada hangs an elbow off the edge of the table, turning his body toward Miguel. “We didn’t finish our conversation this morning.”
“Nothing more to say,” Miguel says, resuming action with his hands.
Torquemada’s hand comes over to idly straighten the cards that Miguel is placing. “Isn’t there?” he murmurs, and Miguel suppresses a sigh.
Fucking should’ve thrown the food right back at O’Reily. “Nope. Yo—” He smacks away Torquemada’s hand—grabs his wrist when the fucker goes on trying to adjust his cards anyway, and it’s a bad fucking move, because getting his wrist squeezed only makes Torquemada grin like the cat who ate the canary. Miguel throws him a steely look—doesn’t back down. “Not interested.”
Torquemada’s smirk doesn’t fade. “You’d give up a chance at freedom?”
“Don’t want freedom with whatever strings you got attached to it,” Miguel snaps. He squeezes Torquemada’s wrist even tighter—until he sees the hint of a wince. Good—maybe the pain will impress the message: “And I don’t think I’m who you think I am, either, so whatever’s running through that fuckin’ piñata of a brain you got? Makin’ you think I’m the end-all be-all of your little plan to—whatever? Just drop it, aight? Forget your stupid plan, and forget roping my ass in with you.” With that, Miguel shoves Torquemada’s hand away —sees the curve of his mouth has finally vanished. “Shit, you got better luck tryin’ to get Jaime to be your second. Fuck you wanna fuck over Morales for anyway?”
It’s more than he’s ever bothered saying to Torquemada at any one time before, but he’s got that lingering headache, so shit, Miguel just wants to be left the fuck alone.
Focus on parole. Focus on getting out again—without a debt to pay for it—and then making a life…a good one.
Somewhere.
Miguel turns back to his game, cards all laid out, and frowns, itching for another fucking smoke, or maybe just itching.
He sends a sharp glare Torquemada’s way, the fucker’s presence compounding his bad mood at the reminder that he’s still years from freedom again. “M’playing here. You got anything else to say?”
The buzzer over the unit rings and Torquemada pushes back from the table, pursing his lips and giving Miguel a once over before rising to his feet.
Fuckin’ finally.
The peace is short-lived.
“Yo, what’d you say to him, man? Torquemada looks like he sat on his balls,” Velez says brightly, beelining over from the TV sitting area to join Miguel in heading to dinner.
Little shit never misses a beat to tag along at Miguel’s fucking heels.
He heaves a rough sigh. “You care so much, ask his ass.”
Velez laughs at the idea, making a face and clapping Miguel’s shoulder as they squeeze through the fates into the corridor to the cafeteria. “And put myself in the line of fire? Nah, bro, no way,” he jokes. “Ain’t no maricón.”
Something in Miguel bristles at the words, and he feels like that tension headache flare as he eyeballs the back of Torquemada’s blonde hair up ahead of them. “You afraid a’ him, Jaime?” he says, glancing over sharply. There’s a little more of a sneer in his delivery—a little bit more of that dark grit, his patience running thin.
Velez blinks as they filter into the cafeteria line and then leans away a little, like he’s standing too close to get a good perspective of Miguel’s whole deal. “Afraid?” he scoffs and then his eyes widen and he hisses, tilting close again and glancing over his shoulder. “Yo, I wasn’t calling you…”
Miguel shrugs, reaching out to pick up a tray, his simmering irritation lifting the usual filter on his words. “You’re chicken shit, I get it,” he says coolly. “S’why you follow my ass around. Too soft to run with the big boys, too yellow to make it alone. Right? Now Torquemada, he might be a fag, but at least he—”
Watching Velez’s brow furrow, his mouth starting to curl down, Miguel’s ready for the moment he lashes out;
Thwack!
A curled fist hits the plastic of Miguel’s tray—forces him to stumble back a step as Velez winces, shoulder falling and arm quickly deflating into a series of quick wrist shakes.
“Fuck!”
Miguel stares, lowering his tray again. “You try to hit me, man?”
“Yep,” says the Biker standing in line behind Velez, who clutches his knuckles in a pinched kind of pain, teeth bared.
“Shut the fuck up,” Velez snaps over his shoulder.
To Miguel’s left, he hears a metal spatula clanging noisily on a serving tray.
“Yo, Alvarez, keep it moving!” Pancamo calls as Velez quits wincing, straightening up and giving Miguel a cowed, rueful look.
He set his tray down on the line, still scowling—still reeling at the fact that the motherfucker actually swung.
The fuck!?
An old part of him would’ve taken his tray and broken it over the kid’s stupid head for it. He says so, calm as he collects his dinner rations from each station along the serving counter.
“I know. Fuck. Fuck, I’m sorry,” Velez huffs beside him. “Had to defend myself, bro. C’mon. You know how it is.”
He’s still tagging along too close, elbow bumping Miguel’s as one of the Homeboys places a scroop of yellow rice on his tray.
“Fuck that.” Miguel grabs a juice carton from the end of the line and glances over his shoulder, seeing Velez all slouchy behind him. Hitting the guy with his own tray still lingers as a possibility in his mind. Fuck! “Don’t follow me.”
“Miguel.” His eyes widen and he reaches out, grabbing Miguel’s bicep like he’s a fucking life line, shit.
Had he really let the kid get so clingy?
He’d been fucking ambivalent, coming out of the Hole to the kid’s enthusiastic talk about him and declining to join up in Morales’s El Norte being some big Fuck you. Had even been vaguely entertained by it all, because Miguel doesn’t have any problem with Morales or El Norte, despite whatever Velez has been imagining.
It’s been fucking months of this shit, though.
He’d thought the guy would wise up eventually—get it out of his damn head that it’s the two of them against El Norte or whatever.
Miguel lets Velez pull them to a stop just steps away from the line. “Nah,” he says harshly, meeting Velez’s pleading gaze. “Go sit your ass with El Norte where you belong, man. Fuckin’ tired of your bullshit right now.”
The hand on his arm jerks away as if by electric shock, and while Velez visibly sulks, Miguel’s word still holds weight, because he soon takes a step away, looking all sorry and shit as he turns his head and looks toward El Norte’s table across the room.
Miguel exhales roughly—turns on his heel and heads off in his own direction, feeling like a small weight has been lifted off his shoulders when Velez doesn’t follow.
Peace and quiet.
Dinner is Mexican, or so the kitchen would probably claim; a scoop of overcooked yellow rice, pulled chicken drenched in a ladle of black bean and corn chili—mostly corn—and then a square of lumpy flan.
Miguel is stabbing at the chicken as Rebadow sits down across from him.
“You’re on the rampage,” he observes.
“Yeah?”
Around them, the table is filled out with the rest of the Others, an empty-ish space to either side of Miguel as there’s nobody squeezing him for his space this evening.
Beecher and Neema are in some kind of nerdy law debate to the right, Arif jumping in from across the table to support Neema’s criticisms every once in a while. The sounds mean nothing to Miguel and wash over him without drawing his ire.
“Sending Velez back into the mouth of the wolf. Telling off Torquemada. Like them or not, you’re pushing everyone away.”
Miguel snorts, chewing a mouthful of tough, borderline gritty chicken. “Yeah? What about you? You want a shove, too?”
Rebadow shrugs. “I don’t count. I’m nobody,” he says.
Nobody.
Miguel looks up, a low swoop in his gut he doesn’t know how to characterise. Guilt, maybe?
He glances across the cafeteria toward the table where El Norte is gathered, Velez sitting between Torquemada and Ricardo, their backs to Miguel, who catches the eye of Morales instead.
Sees him give a curt nod.
He turns back to Rebadow. “So you’re telling me to knock it off? M’bein’ a dick?”
“Just observing. You’ve been back for months and haven’t rocked the boat,” Rebadow says, opening his milk carton. “But you took a lover during your escape—you miss what you had. It’s becoming untenable.”
Beside Rebadow, Busmalis glances over, curious, and Miguel pauses, a dry Must be something in the air stopped at the tip of his tongue.
“Now how’d you guess that?” He’s used to the old man’s psychic comments—has been amused by them over the years—but this one’s a little more than something he could’ve guessed by being a snoop.
Rebadow gives a small nod upward.
Right.
God.
Miguel snorts. “Wasn’t anything serious,” he says, shaking his head. “So you’re wrong about that.”
“Miguel, you heartbreaker,” Busmalis exclaims. “She probably misses you, too, you know.”
“Maybe.”
He hasn’t given Gala much thought, so he’s not lying there, regardless of what Rebadow thinks God told him. That afternoon the PNC officers had come knocking, he hadn’t led them on a short chase into an alley with a dead-end with any delusions about seeing her or the doll factory where they’d worked ever again.
A couple nights together after drinks with the other workers didn’t really constitute a fucking relationship, anyway; he’d been in town all of six months—had banged Gala only half as many times, so he’s also not lying when he says, “Think the big man’s giving you bad info, yo.”
“Maybe so, but you yearn nevertheless.”
Miguel blinks.
Doesn’t have an answer for that, a lump suddenly forming in his throat that doesn’t have much to do with the too-dry chicken.
He swallows hard against it, looking away.
Shit.
Of course he yearns!
“Who the fuck doesn’t?”
Sister Reimondo purses her lips, sitting back in her chair, glasses hanging around her neck.
“So tell me more about Tecolutla,” she says.
“What?”
Reimondo tilts her head. “When you escaped,” she says slowly, “You’ve said that a feeling led you to Tecolutla. That this was the town you stayed in the longest while you were in Mexico.”
“Yeah.”
She gestures, as if to say Well?
Should’ve known the nun would latch onto him letting that slip—that compulsion that had brought him into the beach town.
Miguel snorts, standing up after a moment and walking over to that grated window in the corner of her office.
It’s not much of a view through the clouded glass—just a visitor’s parking lot outside of the prison, but sometimes Miguel can see people coming and going, and he wonders about who they’ve come to see.
His own friends and family haven’t been by much lately. Mom, yeah, a couple weeks after he got out of Solitary. Yelling at him.
Maritza? Nah.
If she’s still his girl, she’s forgotten about it, and he guesses he hasn’t given her much reason to think otherwise, but he still…
In the back of his mind, he’s still waiting for her to come.
After everything, right? She should.
Miguel fingers the crisscrossing wires over the window. Clears his throat.
“Dream sometimes… about a street there. It’s always night,” he says, and then falls silent, that town square a few blocks in from the beach clear in his mind’s eye.
He can picture the wide streets—the low buildings lining them, colorful even in the dark. Shops with their metal garage doors down, while others are bright and open, lit foodstands and restaurants glowing like pockets of flame in the night, ceiling fans whipping through warm, balmy air, that hint of ocean fading further inland, overpowered by fragrant late night eateries and the free flow of liquor.
He’d stayed in Tecolutla for months—had finally come back to himself there after moving on autopilot for all those thousands of miles beforehand.
“I had a job there, you know?” Miguel says, blinking and refocusing on the snowy parking lot below. Counting the cars. Identifying the makes and models. “There was this bar. Chick who owned it felt bad for me.” He clears his throat again. “First real job I’ve ever had, you know? That wasn’t slinging dope and causing trouble, I mean. Or work detail in here.”
“You held a job in Guatemala, too,” Reimondo points out.
“Funny, right?”
Hazy nights in Tecolutla continue to weave in and out of Miguel’s memory, an itch in the back of his mind as each remembered scene fails to register as anything important, even as he tries to recall what’d been so special about that place.
He’d kept to himself there. Had slept on the street, in the beginning.
No money.
Then he’d slept with some guy he met near the beach—the last in the handful of men he’d ended up relying on, not that he’s going to mention all that shit to the Sister.
He’s not stupid.
Decisions he’d made to get where he wanted to go—be where he’d wanted to be—were a matter of pragmatism.
And why not fuck a guy?
Wouldn’t be the first time.
He hadn’t minded taking it up the ass, either, he’s pretty sure, though he remembers the drab motel room more than anything—the sheets, the flickering lights. Hadn’t made any effort to remember the specifics of the guys he’d hooked up with—was just business right?—but there’d been the heat of the body behind him, and the mouth on his shoulder, room wiggling before his eyes, his breath hitching with every…
Anyway, he’d had the money after that—a lot of it—and then…
Something.
Miguel squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again.
Finds the blankness remains, a black window in his mind, opaque as the starless night. He stares into it, calm; it’s not alarming—not scary, that dark hole.
So much had happened, and he’d been only half-living, running south. A part of him had split off; he just doesn’t remember it clearly.
It’s just what happened.
“Do you think being on the outside—having these experiences of real responsibility—real attempts at building a better life for yourself…”
Looking over his shoulder, Miguel sees Sister Reimondo doing that thing where she talks to the ceiling a bit, hands raised in front of her as if turning over an invisible ball as she more or less thinks aloud.
“Could it have been a part of you trying to turn back the clock? A representation of what could’ve been…” She claps her hands, looking over and meeting Miguel’s gaze with an intrigued one of her own. “A chance to prove you’re rehabilitated.”
Miguel lets go of the window grate, turning fully around again. “You’re saying it’s connected to my parole.”
Reimondo nods. “In looking toward the future, you need to acknowledge what you went through in those two years as a fugitive. As misguided as your escape was, Miguel, I think you realised something about yourself while you were out there.”
That I’m a fag?
“What?” he wonders.
At that Reimondo shrugs.
“Come on, Sister—”
“No, I really think that’s what you should focus your reflection on,” she says, holding up a hand toward his protest. “You’ve said so yourself—you’ve noticed a distance in yourself since your return. Your mind is still out there, Miguel, and you need to bring it back here. To yourself.” She touches a hand to her own chest for emphasis. “Parole is an option for you, but you need to show the parole board when the time comes that your time within these walls has been well spent.”
A reflexive scoff slips through Miguel’s lips, but he doesn’t have any smart remark to that, Sister Reimondo’s words striking a nauseating chord of recognition; his first time around in Oz—those couple years before his escape, he hadn’t been thinking about freedom in any meaningful way. Just as a thing that was being kept from him.
Hadn’t given any concrete thought to what he’d do once it was returned to him, but on the run, he’d been forced to make choices—had glimpsed what it was to run from the law—to really be fucking chased by it, when all most people had to do was abide by it.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Reimondo asks just as a loud knock on the office door signals the hack coming to collect him.
“Responsibility or whatever,” Miguel guesses, standing up.
“Yes.” She stands, too—walks him to the door like she always does. “Try to reflect on who you were out there, and who you want to be in here. Next month, I’d like to hear what you come up with,” she says, and Miguel continues nodding along like he knows what she means as he’s shuffled out. “I’ll see you at Group on Friday?”
“Yeah.”
Then he’s out in the hallway of her office with the hack tasked with walking him back to Em City, his ears ringing.
The route back to the unit is characteristically silent—Miguel doesn’t recognise the officer anyway. Gotta be one of the rookies that have been trickling in lately, some governmental incentive bringing in a rotation of new hirees; it hasn’t been uncommon to see some of the senior hacks being followed around by the trainees, but even some of the ones no longer being supervised seem green.
For instance:
“Ain’t gotta follow me in,” Miguel reminds the hack who brings him to the gate and then seems to just be hovering with him as the bars slide back. “You go back to Reimondo’s and hang around there.”
The hack blinks, face tingeing slightly pink before he makes a gruff sound, nods at the guys manning the keyroom, and then turns around to head back.
Inside Emerald City, there’s the customary bustle of yet another recreation hour, inmates moving between the laundry room, the main floor, break-off rooms, and the second tier.
El Norte is gathered up near the TVs as Miguel makes his way across the floor, and he spots Velez sitting with Ricardo at the edge of a card table where Morales is playing longana with Torquemada, Vasquez, and Ortiz.
He keeps moving.
Up the tier, back to his pod.
In the days since he told Velez to fuck off, the kid’s been keeping his distance outside of lockdown, so Miguel has no expectation that he’ll be disrupted as he pulls his shirt off over his head and lies down on his back pressing his hands over his eyes until the black behind his lids is joined by bursts of green and blue.
He groans.
Needs a fucking smoke, sessions with Sister Reimondo always leaving him off kilter no matter how shallow he tries to keep it.
One second, he’d been talking about thinking about asking for a transfer back to the hospital ward work detail to see Eduardo more again—next second, Sister Reimondo’d been asking him how he was getting along with the other inmates.
Fucking blabbermouth Beecher—had to have been him.
Sucking in a rough breath, Miguel pulls his hands down, opening his eyes right as there’s a knock on the glass at the front of the cell.
Rivera.
He pokes his head in—or rather, stands in the doorway, because he’s leading around some new guy, who’s just sort of hovering over his shoulder, staring in. “Alvarez, you got a visitor.”
Miguel sits up. “My girlfriend?” he says, and Rivera looks down at a clipboard in his hand. “Nah. It’s an… Escobales.”
Rey.
Snatching his shirt back up, Miguel pulls it over his head as he heads back out.
Of course, Rivera decides to put the new guy on the job, so then there’s some extra fucking around at the gate going through all the hoops to sign him out—shit the more senior hacks usually fill out later.
Miguel stands impatiently beside the gate as he watches Rivera supervise the new guy, another dumb fuck cabrón, El Cid would’ve said.
Guy hated the Latino hacks more than all the rest, though in Miguel’s eyes, they’re more or less all the same.
Fuckin’ hacks.
Once the new guy finally leads them out into the corridor, he proves chattier than the guy assigned to Reimondo’s office.
“¿Eres latino?” he says as they get going, Miguel leading the way, impatient because visiting hours are almost over and glad to set the pace.
He sighs.
“Let me guess. Boricua.” His English has the tiniest bit of a Mexican accent, throwing off Miguel’s initial judgement of the guy as some asshole like Rivera. Nah, if he’s an immigrant or whatever, that better accounts for his desire to chat, as well as the question he’d led with.
Probably talks Rivera’s ear off, too.
“Half,” Miguel says after a beat, deciding to keep the easy peace.
There’s a handful of hacks he can get along with, anyway—mainly the ones who don’t go out of their way to be dicks—and he can tell that this one’s trying to come across as one of the good ones—one of those who comes in thinking he can earn respect simply by being friendly.
“What’s the other half?” he asks.
“Cuban.”
Cocksuckers in Em City’ll be playing him like a fiddle in no time, Miguel thinks, glancing sideways at the hack.
He’s a dork—smiley and dumb.
Tecuanhuey, his name tag reads, the letters extra small to fit.
On second glance, he’s got to be around Miguel’s age, too—not bad looking—probably could’ve gotten hired elsewhere through sheer first impression, if he’d had other skills to speak of. Maybe he’d been hot shit back in the barrio growing up. Yeah, maybe he was popular with the ladies growing up, but now, coming to work at Oz? Ain't anything to boast about.
Sort of suave with the way he styles back his short black hair, tan skin smooth and features attractive enough—straight nose, bowed lip, dimple chin.
If he goes on cafeteria duty, Miguel knows, a couple assholes’ll probably call him a pretty boy just to get a measure of him by whether or not he goes for his baton over the catcalls.
“So should I beat them?” Tecuanhuey says with a wry smile, and when they turn their last corner up to the visiting room, he turns his head to look at Miguel, arching an eyebrow.
It’s as he does so that Miguel notes that the guy actually has an eyelid that droops a little, large, almond eyes mildly uneven.
Huh.
It doesn’t change much, noticing.
“Nah, maybe you’ll be okay,” Miguel says gruffly, looking away again, a little perturbed at the idea of finding a C.O hot.
Hell, but the small talk had helped redirect some of his restlessness.
Tecuanhuey sends him in through to be searched, and his mind jumps right back to the impending visit, the usual, casual humiliation of stripping down and bending over passing by in a blur, feet soon taking him down the hall with the windows, where he can glimpse Reynaldo through the blinds even before he reaches the door.
Reynaldo’s hunched over the visiting table in a large leather jacket, looking all blank and shit in a way that pushes a bubble of amusement up into Miguel’s chest.
He’s grinning by the time he walks through the doors into the hushed visiting room, Reynaldo catching sight of him and standing up.
“Yo,” Miguel says, and when he’s within arm’s length, he’s opening his own—going in for that fucking bear hug, squeezing Reynaldo hard and feeling him sway a little. “M’glad you came.”
There’s that scent of cold and pine on his jacket, the fragrance dipping under a familiar mix of hair product and aftershave—fragrances Miguel had forgotten were associated with Rey up until this very moment where he breathes in deep, relishing the solid warmth of another body.
The sound of Reynaldo clapping his back rings through the air and then he’s pushing Miguel back, giving him another pat. “S’good to you, too.” The smile on his face is fainter, but then, Reynaldo’s always had that slightly freaked-out look, visiting him in Oz.
The place makes him uncomfortable, or maybe it’s the seeing Miguel here, knowing it’s the only place he can find him.
As if thinking something along the same lines, as they sit at a nearby table, Reynaldo remarks, “Sure look better than you did the last time I was here—ain’t lost that tan, I see.”
The muscles in Miguel’s face ache; he can’t remember the last time he smiled so much. “Woulda swung by to visit you, but I figured the cops would be checking with all my, uh, known associates, you know?” he snickers, drumming his hands on the surface between them.
“You were gone for a while, man,” Reynaldo says, seeming to forget to smile back as his eyes roam over Miguel. “We all thought they’d never find you.”
“Aw. Worried about my ass?”
Blinking, Reynaldo sits back in his seat, hands folding under the table. “Nah, you can handle yourself.”
“That’s fuckin’ right,” he says, and feels his smile fading the longer he stares at Rey, whose left leg is starting to bounce as he remains leaning away. “Speakin’ of handling.” He nods his chin forward. “What’s with the face? You got something to tell me?”
That reluctant expression of discomfort remains firmly in place as Reynaldo glances around the room for a moment and then slowly sits forward again, licking his lips. “Look….”
Miguel’s heart sinks. “Aw, shit, what?”
For a moment, Rey just stares down at the table between them, lips curled in and pressed together in that way Miguel fucking knows spells bad news.
He reaches out, grabbing Reynaldo’s hand and sensing the way he stiffens at the contact, guilt there, clear as day, making the knot of his throat bob as he looks up slowly, meeting Miguel’s eyes with fear.
Fear of how he’ll react. Fear of his own truth—
Blood roars in Miguel’s ears, his own heart seeming to race as his mind’s eye fills the silence with his own vivid conclusions—
Miguel’s car, dark paint job gleaming in a stranger’s driveway, Maritza’s hand closing around his wrist and pulling him away, fingers lacing through his.
“Good fucking riddance.”
“You fuckin’ my girl?” Miguel says, fingers digging into Reynaldo’s wrist.
His eyes widen.
Christ, he’s so transparent.
“You sell my fuckin’ car, too?”
Reynaldo just stares, eyelashes fluttering and mouth gaping. “It just happened, Miguel,” he chokes out at last.
Even with his suspicions, the confirmation is like a slap to the face.
Fuck!
Miguel rises to his feet—hears the chair scrape behind him, metal legs managing to skirt loudly even over carpet. “Fuck, bro!”
Rey’s leaning forward again, a pleading note in his tone, though whether he’s pleading forgiveness or understanding, Miguel doesn’t know; “Look, I’m sorry, Miguel. I mean, I got no excuses, bro. What happened, it just happened…”
Towering over Rey, his thoughts are numb; he should be mad. He is mad. He’s furious, staring down at the guy—who’s always been like a brother to him—who’s never lied to him about nothing and—
Shit.
Practically the second he’d touched Reynaldo, he’d realised what he had come to tell him—that it was guilt and not regret that had brought him to Oz to self-snitch.
Miguel sits back down, feeling the heat that had risen in him rapidly falling again, even as the tension in his muscles remains and his chest feels like it’ll ache any moment now.
That his heart will break any moment now.
Reynaldo’s gawking at him like he can’t understand why Miguel hasn’t tried to strangle him yet, too, or maybe he’s still waiting for it—waiting for the lashing out—the thing Miguel would’ve done in the past. The thing that would’ve gotten him dragged out of the visiting room by the hacks—thrown into the Hole with a new mark on his disciplinary record for the parole board to judge.
No way.
“You cocksucker,” Miguel grits out, half-expecting his wrath to make a stronger appearance, too.
A tense silence settles between them when it doesn’t, and Reynaldo blinks owlishly at Miguel, looking paralysed, still leaned back in his seat from Miguel rounding on him.
When Miguel had come back to Oz, all his personal possessions had been locked up in storage—what hadn’t been tossed, anyway. The hacks had eventually given them back when he got out of Solitary—some of his old clothes, a photo of his baby, one with the baby and Ritz, and then an older one of Maritza all alone, at a house party, wearing a fuzzy hat and a tight black turtleneck.
Had either been a Christmas or New Year’s party where the photo was taken, but Miguel can’t remember exactly—not without asking her for confirmation.
Only, Maritza’s not here in front of him.
“You still doin’ her?” he says after a moment, rubbing salt in that wound, searching for some pain.
Something.
The wince and bow of Reynaldo’s head says it all. “Been wanting to visit, man, I swear. Tell you in person, you know? Man to man. I mean, we’ve known each other since we were kids,” he mutters, shoulders lifting for a moment. Then glances up again, eyes still scouring Miguel for a harsher reaction.
“Yeah.” And even if he hadn’t returned, he would’ve expected—would’ve trusted that Reynaldo wouldn’t—
Finally, some real anger flickers to life, though it’s snuffed out soon enough, replaced by numb—by shock;
“Miguel, Maritza’s pregnant,” Reynaldo says, finally seeming to find his balls and stare Miguel in the eyes. “That’s what I really came here to tell you, bro. I just found out the other week. She’s eight weeks—Miguel. Miguel!” he calls, because Miguel’s on his feet at those words, a knot in his chest falling heavy into the pit of his stomach.
He feels fucking nauseous.
Too far.
He could’ve sat there—
Could’ve—
Until time was up, he could’ve looked Rey in the eyes and—
“Can we just—” Reynaldo reaches out, grabbing Miguel’s hand like a mirror of Miguel’s own earlier action.
He jerks out of the grip.
“You were gone for two fucking years, bro,” Reynaldo blurts out, frustrated and still with that pleading edge, because he wants to have his cake and eat it, too.
Damn!
Miguel freezes, staring at Reynaldo, who makes no effort to reach out and grab him again.
Is standing firmly at a distance, looking guilty again.
“Miguel,” he tries again in a small voice, head tilting and hands lifting a little at his sides, palms up as if to say Come on.
Drop dead is what Miguel wants to spit, though a hack moving in from a corner of the room, pinging in his periphery, keeps his tongue still—keeps his hands to himself.
“Don’t fucking come back here,” he says instead, taking a step back and seeing Reynaldo’s shoulders slump.
It’s hardly enough, but—
His parole—
But—
He wants to see the motherfucker dead—wants to—wants—
Tecuanhuey is waiting outside of the cavity search room as Miguel tromps out, pushing down the hem of his shirt, limbs all feeling like lead now that the spike of his rage is beginning to cool again.
He doesn’t know why he can’t keep it up.
“Not the visit you were looking forward to, I guess,” the hack remarks, taking one look at Miguel and then nodding at him to walk ahead of him down the hall.
“Nah,” Miguel agrees hollowly, no energy to find the comment irritating, not even from a hack.
Fuck!
Tecuanhuey doesn’t break his stride—thankfully, doesn’t try to strike up any more small talk as they go, either, though in the silence, Miguel finds himself inexplicably itching to vent.
“Can you take me to Father Mukada’s office instead?” Miguel asks.
“It’s almost dinner.”
“So I can’t see the father?” Miguel snaps, looking over his shoulder even though he knows it’s only protocol; he’s counting on the rookie to maybe overlook that fact, but the guy’s not as big of a dork as he had originally thought.
Looking back with an unimpressed gaze, Tecuanhuey doesn’t make any indication that he’ll allow it. “Muévete, Miguel. No,” he adds as they come up on an intersection in front of the administration wing. “Take the left.”
Mukada’s office.
Miguel doesn’t turn back again as he registers the change in their route, but he does feel some of the tight emptiness in his chest start to ease at the idea of arriving at Mukada’s cramped office. Being within the safe walls.
The father had been kind to him when his baby was dying—had been there for him, and had forgiven him for not lifting a finger to help during the riot. He… Well, Miguel has no else else to tell, either way. No one who’ll listen and understand why it’s like a fucking shank to the chest—not Reynaldo fucking his girl behind his back, but that door closing for good.
A baby.
He’d thought he’d already gotten over shit—squared it all away—but sitting there, hearing Maritza’s knocked up again—
Fuck!
Miguel all but kicks open the door into the East Wing stairway, which is awash in the dim, orangish glow of an early winter sunset.
The creak of the door swinging violently open echoes up the cold tower, followed by the heavy sound of Tecuanhuey catching its weight as he follows close behind, footsteps near silent on the concrete steps.
Miguel doesn’t engage in the same effort, letting his heavy stomps ring as his breath frosts slightly on the air in front of him and A Block turns to B.
Two steps up toward D Block, the air turns electric and a high-pitched siren wails, distant and muffled from the drafty tower they’re standing in.
Shuffling to a stop, Miguel staring down between the railing and the window as the concrete stairwell reverberates with the sound of the muted buzzer, the alarm warped, ominous and droning.
Lockdown.
“Shit.”
Despite his quiet footfalls, Tecuanhuey is still a mere two steps below Miguel when he turns and sends a questioning look downward, wondering how a hack as green at Tecuanhuey—he’s been at Oz what, all of three days?—will handle the break in routine.
What he does is:
Leans against the railing, sunset highlighting him in gold, to fish a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of his pocket.
Miguel eyes his baton where his hip juts out, inspiration flashing through his mind—the vision of beating the guy’s lights out—quick, with a hard strike to the head before making his escape.
Why the hell not?
“You want a smoke, Alvarez?” Tecuanhuey’s voice snaps Miguel from his brief reverie. “Look like you could use one.”
He blinks, feeling a tension he hadn’t realised he was holding in his shoulders ease as he watches Tecuanhuey pack his Marbs against his palm. “Sure.”
Stepping one foot up on the step between them, Tecuanhuey extends the pack, shaking a stick up for him to pluck out—following up swiftly with a light.
Harsh smoke fills Miguel’s lungs and he straightens up with a snort, relaxing further.
“What?” Tecuanhuey says around his own cigarette. The glow of his lighter flame dances briefly against his cheek, and Miguel shakes his head, swallowing any words about Shit, smoked too much on the run and now I get cravings.
He’d smoked before Oz without ever getting hooked—but then, maybe he just hadn’t noticed, any withdrawal hidden by the fiending for H.
Anyway, the cigarette helps distract him from the chill of the stairwell, him in only his gray thermal. Miguel points his chin toward the hack’s name tag. “Teh-kwan-way, right?”
Tecuanhuey nods, smoke streaming from his nose as he hangs his arm over the railing beside him.
Sunlight colors the tips of his eyelashes yellow—wraps along the slope of his cheekbone, filling in the hollow of his cheek as he takes a drag of his cigarette.
“What’s that? Aztec or whatever?”
Arching an eyebrow, Tecuanhuey says something Miguel doesn’t register as meaning anything in particular, though it sounds like it might’ve been a question. “What?”
“I asked if you spoke Nahuatl.” He smiles a little.
Yeah, there’s that smile again.
Miguel wonders how long before this guy’ll be jaded like all the rest, because even the hacks can’t escape the soul-crushing atmosphere of Oswald. That’s just facts.
Looking toward the large, cloudy window that neighbors the staircase, Miguel examines the ambient sunlight shining in but offering no picture of what lies beyond. The window is close enough to reach out and touch, the gap between it and the staircase about the width of a leg. Poor insulation in Oz’s outer corridors aside, there’s no hiding the seep of winter here beside the glass, the chill and the smell of fresh air—a cold forest—lingering faintly under the cloud of cigarette smoke swirling around.
Elsewhere in the prison, Miguel imagines that S.O.R.T is storming into wherever the trouble is—that the other areas of activity have been frozen in the meantime.
A beeping noise breaks through the silence and Miguel looks back over to see Tecuanhuey unclipping the radio on his shirt, turning a knob that raises the volume on the staticky babble of other C.Os before murmuring softly, “Ten-four. This is Tecuanhuey. I’m taking an inmate back to Cell Block Five.”
Miguel takes a deeper drag of his cigarette, supposing he’ll be told to turn around and get a move on again—no Father Mukada today.
Turning the radio back off, though, Tecuanhuey only brings his own cigarette back up to his mouth, pulling in smoke and then blowing a careful ‘O’ up into the stairwell.
Miguel watches the ring float away and dissipate just as it reaches the well hole.
When he looks back down to Tecuanhuey, the guy flashes a smirk, looking real fucking pleased with himself and eyeing Miguel like he expects Miguel to be impressed, too.
Christ.
Miguel crosses his arms, tapping ash off the end of his cigarette as he processes the friendly overtures—the fucking smiles.
He might’ve liked the guy on the outside, he guesses, a pang of homesickness coming even as he remembers who it was who’d just come to see him—and what he’d had to say.
What, he’s nostalgic for those backstabbers?
“My girlfriend’s pregnant,” he finds himself revealing, staring down at his ratty work boots. Same ones he’d left behind when he’d joined Busmalis in his escape, wearing just a pair of hospital ward slippers after maneuvering his way into a bed. “Ex-girl, I guess,” he adds in a mumble, a twinge in his chest that doesn’t feel nearly painful enough.
Where’s the fucking heartbreak?
The words seem to give Tecuanhuey pause, anyway, or maybe he’s just processing the statement.
“Shit, that sucks, Alvarez.”
“S’what happens.” Miguel shrugs, bringing his dwindling cigarette to his mouth, head still bowed. “Fucker who came to visit me—my best friend growing up, you know?” He sighs out smoke, letting the story hang.
“It’s his?”
Miguel stares at the grim window panes again, the silence as his answer.
“What’re you gonna do?” Tecuanhuey wonders.
There’s a soft curiosity there that’s so genuine it makes the corner of Miguel’s mouth curve in sardonic amusement; how’d the guy ever make it through training?
Ain’t there some process for weeding out the soft ones?
“Whadayou think? I’m in here, baby. Can’t do anything—not gonna,” he says, decisively in case Tecuanhuey sees himself like some kind of Sister Pete or McManus, reaching inmates through their damn feelings. Taking another deep drag from the cig, Miguel stubs out the end against the chipped paint of the metal railing and glances over. “Ain’t you supposed to take me somewhere?”
“Nah, it’s cool.” Tecuanhuey is still leaning against the railing on the step below, getting the most out of his cigarette.
Unbothered.
“I escape again under your watch, you’re fucked,” Miguel says, not so much as a warning but as a joke.
“You don’t really seem like you’re trying to get outta here,” Tecuanhuey says as he blows out smoke, leaning away from the railing. He stubs out the end of his cig against the palm of his hand and tosses it to the ground, grit underfoot scratching as he takes a step up, onto the same ledge as Miguel, a hand curling around his elbow. “Gonna have to pencil in the padre for tomorrow, though.” His mouth quirks. “...Unless you want to confess your sins to me.”
Miguel sucks in a sharp breath, the instinct to scoff clashing with that honed skill of playing nice with the hacks—to not give them any reason to fuck with his parole.
He inhales damp, cold air and the stairwell’s strong undercurrent of musty concrete and dead leaves and blinks, abruptly aware that the hand on his arm is holding and not pulling, and that Tecuanhuey’s eyes are roaming over his face in a kind of idle survey.
Oh fuck.
It comes to him like a little static shock;
Zap!
The motherfucker’s fucking coming on to him.
Miguel sucks in another breath, his thoughts still racing at the revelation as Tecuanhuey tilts his head, a little twinkle in his eyes joining the lingering smirk.
Okay, so he’s a maricón, and maybe that’s why he’d come to Oz, too—to use that power that comes with the uniform to get his dick wet.
Wouldn’t be the first.
Ain’t like Miguel’s never been hit on by the pigs in here, either—Howell’s incessant desire to fuck in Solitary comes to mind—but he’ll be damned if he lets another hack touch him.
The faint smile on Tecuanhuey’s face fades.
“Nah,” Miguel says after another beat, gazing steadily at the guy, hoping his stare contains that bit of steel. Cigarettes and chat, he doesn’t mind, but: Don’t fuck with me. “I plead the fifth.”
He doesn’t really need to see Mukada anyway.
Just wanted to talk to… someone.
And somehow, over a cigarette, that person had become Tecuanhuey, who snorts now, levity returning as he gives Miguel’s arm a light pull before letting go, nodding breezily toward the lower landing. “Okay. Let’s get you to the cafeteria before dinner’s over, then,” he says, and it’s all so normal and dismissive that Miguel half wonders if he’d read it all wrong—read too far into it.
Couldn’t have, though.
He knows what he’d seen.
Knows when eyes are checking him out—when there’s something else behind the interest.
As Tecuanhuey moves away, he seems to leave that strong scent of the outdoors in his wake—fresh earth and green that Miguel had attributed to their proximity to the outer walls.
Déjà vu.
The phantom ocean breeze sweeps against Miguel’s face next, and as he takes a step forward, the world seems to tilt—
Warp—
And faintly, he hears the buzz of an insect—sees a black square ahead of him. An abyss. An absence that covers Tecuanhuey and blots him out, growing with every step that Miguel takes toward it—
Like the black maw of a beast, gaping wider and wider to receive him.
*
“It’s okay,” he rasps, and Miguel believes him, wrapped tightly in his arms and trapped under his heat.
A rhythm pulses in his ears.
The swish of their blood.
Over the other’s shoulder, a domed light flickers, and the sheets beneath Miguel are damp with sweat as he clutches back tightly, lower back straining as he pushes his hips up—surges into every slick slide of their bodies—every thrust inside of him.
“I got you.”
Miguel squeezes the body between his legs anyway—digs his nails into flesh as he huffs—gasps—the sounds trailing up into the night.
A hand strokes his thigh, soothing pets to take some of the edge off as he jolts, heart in his throat, fire licking his insides.
“I got you.”
It burns so good, he cries out, wordless—turns his head and presses his face to a sweaty throat—tastes salt. Wants to taste more, dragging his tongue against the warm flesh, feeling the life coursing below, singing a song that calls to him—invites him to sink his teeth in.
Taste.
“Do it—ain’t gonna hurt me.”
A hollow clench in Miguel’s stomach drives him forward—has him stretching his mouth, lips curling back, teeth bared.
Pleasure and thirst rack through him as the other writhes, an orgasmic gasp filling the quiet as his weight slumps, hot and wonderful.
And then there’s blood, filling Miguel’s mouth, thick like syrup—
And choking on dust, or spit, or maybe nothing at all, Miguel jerks awake, coughing fit ringing sharply through the cell, his chest aching with every empty convulsion.
In the dark, the tiny sliver of light spilling into the cell from the hack station seems like a thousand watts; Miguel rolls away, covering his face—covering his mouth, body shaking, heart racing.
There’s a fucking unbearable tickle in his throat, and Miguel turns back the other way, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and lurching toward the sink to cup water to his mouth.
Over his shoulder, the mattress groans, but if Velez is awake, he makes no indication, respecting the new distance between them even now—holding his fucking tongue.
Miguel drinks from his palm, that tightness in his lungs putting up a fight—making his shoulders and hand tremble as his body finally seems to get the message that he’s awake—that whatever had pulled him out of sleep, it’s over now, hazy flashes of—
What?
Shuddering, Miguel turns off the faucet, pressing his forehead to the knob as he clutches the sink basin, listening to the pounding of his own heart.
He’d been dreaming about that guy again—would bet everything on it, though he knows it’s useless to try and chase back the images behind his eyelids now that he’s awake again.
Nah, the guy’s a ghost. A phantom presence in his sleep—where he came from and for what purpose, Miguel doesn’t know.
Ain’t about to bring it up with anyone, either.
Straightening up, he rubs his still-damp hands over his face—lets the moisture cool his flushed skin as he wobbles over to the front of the cell, peering out into Emerald City for a moment.
There’s a hack patrolling further up the unit at the moment, silhouette shadow caught under one of the ceiling lights left on near the gate.
At the hack station, the guard sitting at the control panel spins in bored circles.
Tecuanhuey.
Miguel stares down at him and all his fidgety, restless energy, half expecting the guy to come to a sudden halt—turn and look directly at him.
He doesn’t.
Just keeps spinning, and then, in the morning, when the lights of Em City all come on at once, he’s gone, and standing at the glass watching him is a distant memory, clouded by a fitful attempt to return to sleep.
Miguel groans, rubbing his eyes as Velez washes up at the sink.
Another day.
Another mindless fucking day;
At breakfast, Arif and Beecher argue about Keller—about Beecher wanting to help him off Death Row again.
Sounds like he made his bed, Neema says, but he doesn’t believe in capital punishment, either, and helps and detracts from both arguments as Rebadow stares a hole into Miguel’s skull as he keeps his pounding head bowed.
“Miguel, you’re not looking so hot,” Busmalis points out.
“M’okay,” he mumbles.
“You should see Dr. Nathan.”
“You are looking a little pale there,” Beecher chimes in.
“You haven’t been sleeping well,” Rebadow says. “You’re not yourself.”
“Seems like himself to me,” Arif mutters.
“You know,” Neema muses, “My oldest, Shariq—”
“HEY,” Miguel bursts out, lifting his head and glaring around the table. “Can all you motherfuckers get off my dick for a second?!”
Their section of the table falls quiet, everyone peering back at him with various expressions of surprise.
Ain’t like him to yell. He’s been calm—focused on his parole.
Had been.
Arif and Neema are the first to react, one eyebrow going up and then the other, and their unimpressed stares finding each other in a silent, cutting exchange.
“Alright,” Beecher says slowly.
Miguel rises to his feet, blood rushing in his ears, his breakfast half eaten, food like ash in his mouth these days. “Whatever. Fuck this.”
“You got a cig?” Miguel asks.
Torquemada raises an eyebrow. “I don’t smoke,” he says, but he reaches into the pocket of his scrubs like there’s something there.
American Spirit greens.
“Yo, green your favorite color or something?”
Torquemada smirks faintly, leaning back against the wall as Miguel reaches out, plucking a stick out of the pack and bringing it to his nose.
He’s not a fan of menthols, but then, that’s all Morales smokes.
“It’s never let me down,” Torquemada drawls, putting the pack away and bringing out a lighter instead.
“Nah. Saving it for later.”
Loafing on the job is easier to do when there’s no smoke drifting all around to alert the nurses and hacks. Miguel tucks the cigarette carefully under the tongue of his shoe, straightening up and glancing around the private room that’s only half stripped, Torquemada’s motivation in remaking the bed clearly having waned halfway through his task.
Nah, he’s leaning by the narrow, grated window now, attention turning back to something outside, down in the concrete inner courtyard where the hacks go out for their own smoke breaks sometimes.
“Can I help you with something else, sugar?” Torquemada says dryly, when a few seconds tick by and neither of them have moved, nor said anything.
Since Miguel had told him off the other week, Torquemada’s kept his distance with astonishing dedication, no more than the odd wink sent Miguel’s way, no follow up—no pre-Count visits.
“Nah, guess I’m surprised, that’s all,” Miguel huffs.
“At?”
“You not taking this opportunity to get me into your schemes or whatever.”
Torquemada glances over, eyebrows pushing together for a moment before he gives a lazy sneer, gaze flicking back out the window.
Miguel steps closer, looking out, too, and seeing a—
“Shit! What the fuck is that?” he startles, pulse quickening as his mind replays the scene of a crowd gathered below, red and pink spattered wide across the icy concrete before them.
Blood.
A person—
No, a corpse.
“One of the hacks jumped off the roof,” Torquemada says, the corners of his mouth curling up.
Blinking rapidly, his initial shock settling, morbid curiosity pulls Miguel closer to the glass, that stain of red in his eyes fading as he looks upon the real deal again. He licks his lips, mouth dry. “Christ. Did you see him do it?”
“Her,” Torquemada corrects, the amusement in his voice seeming to feed off of Miguel’s reaction. “That smear down there is our darling Officer Howell.”
That small tinge of sympathy in Miguel’s horrified fascination vanishes. “Shiiit,” he says. “How’d she even get up there?”
“Roof access in the North Wing tower,” Torquemada supposes.
Below the window, Miguel can make out who he thinks is Querns, waving over people from the building who are carrying a stretcher, the other hacks crowding outside stepping back to make way.
“How the fuck can you tell that’s Howell?” Miguel says, squinting at the splattered mess. He supposes he can make out longish brown hair amidst the pulpy red, but there are other hacks it could be, and Howell’s never struck him as the jumping off the roof sort. “Yo, you think she was trying to get her freak on up there and someone pushed her?”
“Oh, she jumped,” Torquemada chuckles. “You didn’t see her face this morning?”
A blur of white appears in the courtyard—Dr. Nathan in her white coat, waving at the hacks to stop what they’re doing—don’t move the body, even though they’ve half scraped it off the ground and onto the stretcher, trailing bits behind at the cracked head.
Stomach beginning to churn a little, Miguel leans back, catching the gleam in Torquemada’s eye—the way one of his hands is pressed up gently to the window grate.
“You getting off on this?”
Torquemada clicks his tongue, eyes still trained outside. “You have to admit, sugar, it’s fascinating what’s been going on around here.”
Miguel frowns. “The fuck’s been going on?”
Another tongue click. “The omens, handsome,” Torquemada says, like it’s obvious. “The black wolf sighting—”
“Thought it was a jaguar—”
“The blood moon—the king’s downfall.”
“What?”
“The dead snake in the hack’s locker room. Now this…”
“The fuck are you talking about?” Miguel says, exasperation and bewilderment making him feel like his head is swelling.
What dead snake?
That look Torquemada throws him doesn’t help—says Haven’t you been paying attention to anything, pendejo?
“So…okay, so what? You think someone put a curse on Howell or some shit?” he scoffs.
“Downing thinks so,” Torquemada replies, gaze drifting back outside as he mutters, “Me? I’m not so superstitious... Oh, lovely—looks like they’re going to let her congeal out there after all…”
“What the fuck are you two doing?” A sharp rebuke swivels both of their heads in the direction of the door behind them, a hack standing there with a glower.
Shit.
Miguel’s usually battery about sensing when the hacks are coming. “A C.O fell off the roof,” he reports, pushing slowly away from the window.
The hack blinks, surprise taking him for a loop, after which he clears his throat and simply snaps Get back to work before pivoting away—hurrying, maybe, to go find out for himself what the hell just happened outside.
By dinner, word of Howell’s demise has completely permeated the topic of conversation, rumors already running rampant.
“Yo, I heard she was getting fucked up there, right? And one thrust—pow—she loses her balance,” Ricardo says as the chow line inches forward. “Falls over the edge, tits swinging.”
“Howell doesn’t have tits,” Morales drawls, leaning by the railing by the line and scanning ahead, clearly mentally eyeing how much longer he’ll have to be on his damn feet.
“Who was she fucking?” Velez ponders.
“Who ain’t she fucking?” Vasquez says.
“Cute theory and all, but she was all buttoned up, Carlito,” Torquemada interjects, standing smugly on the fact that he’d witnessed the fall firsthand—had seen her hurtling past the window of the hospital room he was tidying. “If anything, she was pushed.”
“Well then they’re never gonna find who did it,” Velez says. “That bitch had it coming… What do you think, Miguel?”
He glances over somewhat awkwardly, the overture stilted after the past days of half-ignoring each other, even while living in the same pod. The topic of Howell’s death has him giving up that trend in order to keep the conversation going.
Miguel gets it—there hasn’t been a C.O death since Metzger, years ago, and if there’s one thing everyone can appreciate, it’s a distraction from the monotony in Oz.
He shrugs.
“He thinks someone cursed her,” Torquemada says, standing in front of Velez and passing him a tray as they reach the front of the cafeteria line.
Velez passes it to Miguel, who catches that little flicker of annoyance at the edge of Torquemada’s expression as he slides his tray along the service counter.
Jesus.
“Cursed her? Like how?” Velez asks, voice going hushed as he peers wide-eyed at Miguel.
In his pause, Morales, Ricardo, Vasquez, and Torquemada move swiftly along the counter, racking up their scoops of baked beans, carrots, and rice.
“He’s bullshitting you,” Miguel replies, nodding at Velez to keep moving.
“Oh.”
At the very end of the line, there’s two little chocolate chip cookies with their milk—all-in-all, more bland than usual, if recent days are any indication, and nothing to feel any level of satisfaction over afterward.
“Hey,” Velez says, elbow knocking Miguel’s as he prepares to head off in his own direction. He nods toward El Norte’s table. “Sit with us, bro.”
Miguel glances over to where Morales is already sitting with a few of the other hermanos, Torquemada in the process of setting down his own tray and saying something in his ear. “Nah,” he says, offering that moment of hesitation. “Nah, but I’ll talk to you later, man.”
And he does.
Wasn’t ever, like, that pissed at Jaime—wasn’t planning on cold-shouldering him forever.
Lockdowns are less mind numbing, too, when there’s someone to break up the hours of silence with—someone to play cards with, even if it gets old pretty quick.
“What’s that?” Jaime says as Miguel pulls that cigarette out of the shoe.
He’d half forgotten about it—waves it at Jaime now. “Dessert.”
“Where’d you get that?” he asks as Miguel slides off the bunk they’d been playing cards and goes over to crouch by the toilet where he can flush the smoke down the bowl every now and then.
It won’t get rid of all the evidence, but the pods are air tight enough that the smoke won’t seep out in the meantime, and the hacks aren’t going to be starting rounds until after the shift change.
He’s got a couple minutes.
“Bummed it off Torquemada,” Miguel says, cursing and then going back over to the bed to search through his belongings.
He has a few loose matchsticks from poker—one with a green tip that’ll have to do, and he returns to the toilet to go about trying to strike a light with his fingernail.
“At work detail?”
“You see me hanging around his ass otherwise?” Miguel says, settling back into a crouch, the hard wall digging against his back as he leans there, fisting the striking match and holding his cigarette loose between his lips to concentrate.
Thwick!
Snap.
The head of the matchstick breaks off without igniting and Miguel groans.
“Hey, bro, just ask.” Jaime brightens up, climbing off the bed and pulling out his own things to dig around for something. He tosses it Miguel’s way.
A lighter.
“Thanks.”
This time, Miguel’s cig lights up smoothly and he tosses the light back as he draws in a lungful of minty smoke, head going light with it almost instantly.
“Christ, that’s strong,” he wheezes.
Jaime remains standing, leaning against the end of the bunk. “Was that before Howell jumped or after?”
“What?” Miguel looks at his cigarette, belatedly remembering to turn his head and blow smoke down into the toilet bowl, where it swirls off the water in those seconds before he flushes. “Oh, before,” he says, realising the conversation has meandered back to the stain on the concrete outside the prison again. “I mean, nah, after. Before I noticed—after she fell.”
“You see the cops show up, too?” Jaime folds his hands behind his back after a beat, just staring, though he shakes his head when Miguel offers the cigarette toward him.
“Yeah. Brought an ambulance around and shit. People swarming all around the yard. Then the news vans, you know? Shift was over before I saw anything else.”
“So you didn’t see Miah Wilkinson standing down there?” Jaime says, the corner of his mouth pulling up.
Miguel snorts, bringing the cigarette back up to his lips. “Nah.”
Hadn’t been looking, anyway, gaze drawn to the blood left behind once the body was taken away. It’d been almost pink in hue, diluted by the moisture on the cold ground.
Someone would probably be out with a hose to spray down the concrete the way the halls of Oz were sprayed down whenever blood was spilled, but that blood—it’d still been there when Miguel and Torquemada had turned back to their work.
“Yo, you know anything about a dead snake in the hacks’ locker room?” Miguel remembers suddenly.
Across the pod, Jaime climbs up onto the top bunk, turning to perch on the edge, legs swinging gently. “Snake?” He starts to make a face before his expression lights up. “Oh, you mean like two weeks ago? Yeah, there was like a garden snake or something. Curled up under Murphy’s bag, according to Rivera.”
Miguel frowns, tapping ash into the toilet bowl. “Wasn’t even Howell’s locker?”
“What, Alonzo say that?” Jaime says, shaking his head with a grin.
“He just said something about a snake. Omen or whatever. Something about the moon, too, you know?”
Jaime snickers. “Bro, he’s so full of shit—he doesn’t even believe in that shit. He’s trying to freak you out,” he says, looking like he’s on the cusp of adding something else before he suddenly clears his throat, looking into his lap. “But you know,” he eventually says. “He’s got balls, for a fag. You were right.”
Miguel blinks. Can’t remember ever saying that shit, but if it keeps Jaime out of trouble—keeps the peace, Jaime letting go of any notions of going up against Morales?
Hey.
Miguel shrugs, blowing out smoke and then startling a little when at the front of the pod, a hack sweeps into view.
Goddamn, the pod he and Jaime live in is dogshit for seeing who’s coming.
Tecuanhuey raises his eyebrows, rapping his knuckles against the glass and gesturing at Miguel to put out the cig.
“Cabrón…” Jaime mutters, looking over his shoulder.
For his part, Miguel just stares at Tecuanhuey. He hadn’t realised that the shift change had already occurred—hadn’t realised that it was almost lights out already—and wouldn’t have expected Tecuanhuey to pause on his rounds anyway.
Tonight, his hair isn’t as slicked back as it’d been when he first started out. It’s swept back looser, instead, looking soft, like he’s either made less of an effort to look tidy, or is making more of an effort to look at ease.
Night shift, away from the inmates, probably helps with the cockiness.
What the hell.
Miguel takes another, defiant drag of the cigarette and thinks he sees Tecuanhuey’s mouth twitch right before his eyes narrow and he taps the glass harder.
“Dick,” Miguel mouths.
Tecuanhuey bites his lower lip, the pressure leaving his mouth tinged pink when he lets go of it and hits the glass again.
“Damn, okay,” Miguel sneers, pulling in a final lungful of minty, bitter smoke before tossing the cigarette into the toilet and making a big show of getting to his feet and flushing.
“Fucking hacks,” Jaime commiserates, swinging his legs, his back toward the entrance, where he doesn’t catch that lingering hint of a smirk on Tecuanhuey’s face as he turns away to continue strolling down the tier.
“Yeah…” Miguel stares after the guy a strange feeling in the back of his mind—like a tickle—like there’s something that Tecuanhuey’s presence had reminded him of.
Something important.
He hasn’t talked to him since a short, uneventful exchange on the floor the day after Reynaldo’s visit, though, and there’s nothing about him that Miguel can think of that he would need to remember. He doesn’t know Tecuanhuey, and hasn’t gotten an opportunity to, either; some kind of schedule change has him on night shift now, arriving just before lockdown and then gone by Count.
Even if Tecuanhuey seems to think they’ve got some rapport or whatever, it’s nothing, really. Just his own inexperience.
Miguel’s cordial with plenty of hacks; Rivera, for one. Murphy. Gutierrez, before he quit...
Walking over to the front of the pod, Miguel hears Jaime jump down from the bunk and begin washing up behind him as the lights of Em City turn off. The switch from light to dark is always that little bit jarring, but Miguel doesn’t let it faze him—knows where to wait for his eyes to adjust.
In the meantime, the unit is illuminated by light refracted from the hack station and from up near the gate of the unit.
That must be where Tecuanhuey is, too, because Miguel doesn’t see any movement on the floor as he observes from his vantage point.
Across the way, he can see Bismilla and Afsana praying on the floor of their pod the way they always do around lights out, before midnight, and he knows that if he squeezed over to the right, he’d probably be able to see Beecher and Arif doing the same over in their pod, too. There’s shadows of movement in some of the other pods in Miguel’s current view—nothing of interest, though.
As the shadows begin to settle into familiar shapes, his gaze goes back down to the hack station and he notices Tecuanhuey melting out of the shadows—coming up the stairs with a hand resting against his belt.
When he stands like that, he looks like every other dickwad C.O.
Miguel’s not sure why he gives a shit.
Curiosity. Idleness.
He doesn’t move, either way, watching as Tecuanhuey nods at Armstrong and pulls out a seat at the control panels, his back to Miguel before he suddenly spins in his chair—rolls up to one side of the control panel and looks up.
Their eyes meet—or seem to—and then the hairs on the back of Miguel’s neck prickle. Even from a distance, he can make out the smirk that pulls across Tecuanhuey’s face.
Christ.
Yeah, it’s definitely Miguel he’s looking at then.
Glancing over his shoulder, Miguel notes that Jaime is already climbing up on his bunk, settling in for the night. He looks down again, and Tecuanhuey’s still watching.
Still, now, not fidgeting like he had the other night, bored and restless.
He sits motionless, damn near statuesque, one hand frozen forward, resting on the control panel.
Miguel blinks.
He really shouldn’t fucking encourage the asshole, he realises, quickly jerking away and slinking back into the shadows of his own pod.
Howell had been bad enough, even if she’d been surprisingly unpersistent once he’d told her to fuck off, get her hand off his dick. She’s dead now, too, and if Tecuanhuey tries that shit, he’ll have to die, too.
Yeah.
Splashing water from the sink onto his face, Miguel feels the heat on his skin warm the droplets trickling down his neck.
God, he thinks, and pulls the hem of his shirt up, covering his face—breathing in the fragrance of cigarette smoke still clinging to the fabric, and remembering, in the back of his mind, another scent, cold and fresh from the steps of a drafty stairwell.
Earthy.
Fuckin’ losing it.
Miguel pushes his shirt back down with a sharp exhale and turns on the faucet again, skin still feeling like static.
Rinse and repeat.
Rinse and repeat, until his shirt is soaked.
“Yo, what’re you doing?” Jaime whisper-shouts.
Miguel snorts, letting the latest splash of water drip off his face as he clutches the basin, searching for a feeling of groundedness.
Plink. Plink.
Droplets hit the metal rim, punctuating the silence between the uneven rattle of his breath.
“You good, Miguel?”
The mattress crackles behind him as Jaime shifts around. Miguel lifts his head, looking up into the mirror and seeing only a blurry shadow, light too low to make out any features.
“Yeah.” He straightens up, wiping the damp of his face against his shoulder, then pulling off his top and tossing it aside. “Got dizzy for a second.” Hot, is more like it. Got fucking hot over the idea of Tecuanhuey’s hand on his dick.
How’s that for fucked up?
One guy shows him a shred of fucking empathy—treats him normal—and he wants to roll over and spread his damn legs for him…
Miguel grabs his toothbrush, jamming it into his mouth and letting a globule of toothpaste burn his mouth and clear his mind.
And when he’s lying in bed later, and his eyes are closed, he sees a dim room, black all in the corner of his vision, and there’s skin in his mouth and a hand in his hair, holding the back of his head in place as he chokes—as he turns his head, gasping for air.
“It’s okay.”
Miguel rests his head against the warm junction of a thigh and hugs that leg, licking his lips. Tasting blood.
“You’re bleeding,” he mumbles, breath ragged. He drags his lips against the smooth jut of a hip, mouthing at tight skin over bone, searching for that thirst in him—
Not finding it.
Blood trickles sluggishly over his hand.
The gash is gone, soft skin inside the thigh knitted together again.
The fingers in his hair scratch soothingly over his scalp, petting strokes that ease the tension in his chest. “It’s good for you.”
“But why?” His pulse starts to race, because he knows the truth there. Sees it for himself, in the mirror. Meat on his bones again. “I mean, what the fuck are you?”
There’s laughter now, quiet and airy, and when Miguel finally looks up, gaze trailing up over smooth skin, he meets almond eyes lit by flames—
He gasps—
And then Jaime shakes him by the shoulders. “Come on! Oh shit.”
He’s coughing—chest catching again and again, insides in revolt—lungs seizing, stomach clenching, fire still dancing in front of his eyes, burning into his vision.
It was him—
Miguel spasms in the dark, every muscle in his body tense—aching worse than any charley horse as he rolls onto his side—curls in—hears Jaime slamming his hand on the glass, yelling for a hack to come.
It was him.
“Miguel.”
Tecuanhuey holds him—touches his face.
And then:
“Where’re going?” Miguel says hoarsely.
He’s stumbling upright again, head light, arms locked behind his back as he moves in and out of deep shadows.
Hospital ward.
He’d forgotten his shoes—is walking barefoot over cold concrete, the grip on his elbow firm, dragging him along the corridor.
Not to the hospital ward, but deeper into the labyrinth of the dormitory units, down the dimmed stairs into the basement level, where there’s hardly any light this time of day. Hack stations along the tunnel stand deserted.
“C’mon.” Tecuanhuey tugs him on when Miguel stumbles, blinking hard as they arrive at a door—storage room or something.
A utility closet.
Miguel’s never fucking been in this part of the prison before, and as he comes to his senses, he gets the additional one that not many come down here at all. When Tecuanhuey jerks open the door, it groans metallically, cold, musty air escaping from where Miguel finds himself pushed inside, into total darkness.
The door closes behind them with a loud, resounding clang and for a moment, they seem to stand in a void of time and space.
“What is this?” Miguel says, and those cuffs around his wrists start to feel more cutting than usual, the fact he’s standing there in pitch blackness with his arms behind his back and fucking Tecuanhuey God knows where keeping him on edge.
Fwoom.
Orangeish lights fade on with a sound akin to mechanical resistance, the squares of light along the exposed piping in the ceiling looking particularly old and unused.
Miguel turns around, eyes searching out Tecuanhuey—finding him standing two or so feet away, leaning against the door of the narrow room they’re standing in. A couple of dusty old desks like the ones in the classroom are pushed up in a nearby corner, a few unmarked cardboard boxes piled up to the ceiling, too, probably long forgotten.
There’s a look in Tecuanhuey’s eyes—dark and piercing—
A lump forms in Miguel’s throat.
Oh.
He jerks his arms, and the metal around his wrists cuts. “Okay.” His heart is thumping in his chest now, adrenaline spiking, and through it all, God, his skin is heating up with something far from dread.
The moment seems to last forever;
“You gonna take these cuffs off first?”
A tilts of his head, and Tecuanhuey purses his lips as if in thought, Miguel’s face flushing in the meantime, because there’s that anticipation crackling under his surface, yeah, and his nerves are already livewire.
He practically pops a boner when Tecuanhuey takes that first step toward him, overhead light dancing across his features as he approaches where Miguel is standing—coming closer and closer until there’s nowhere left to go.
The toes of his boots bump Miguel’s bare feet, hard.
This close, Miguel can smell the guy’s distinct odor of bitter smoke and dense loam—can see every pore on his face—every little scar and blemish and imperfection. He can see stubble, and a couple dots on Tecuanhuey’s face, and he can see that his lips look dry.
Watches as the pink of Tecuanhuey’s tongue dart out, wetting them.
His own throat sticks, pulse racing.
“You gonna try and escape?” Tecuanhuey asks, standing between Miguel and the door.
Miguel blinks—almost laughs, but settles on a short huff, swallowing hard after. “Is it up to me, man?”
“It could be,” he says quietly, mouth pursing a little after, his dark eyes roaming over Miguel—settling somewhere low.
Goosebumps ripple over his exposed skin.
“Tried escape,” Miguel says, voice catching. He stares at Tecuanhuey, and fuck, he’s really fucked in the head for looking forward to this, isn’t he? “Didn’t work out for me.”
“They found you.” Tecuanhuey takes a step closer, the hushed tone of his voice beginning to scrape as the hilt of his fucking baton meets Miguel’s hip.
“Yeah.”
A smile curls across Tecuanhuey’s mouth, and at their distance, his breath begins to ghost over Miguel’s face.
“So now you’re taking the honest route out?”
“Shit, why not?” Miguel chokes then, because he’s definitely hard now, and Tecuanhuey still hasn’t touched him, and he’s still just standing an inch or two away, eyes locked with his, their gazes level.
Mirth glimmers in Tecuanhuey’s eyes—not the usual cruel gleam of a hack, but something sly and indulgent.
“This is turning you on.” Tecuanhuey has the nerve to act surprised by it, eyebrows lifting like he isn’t the one who’s led Miguel down to this room.
Motherfucker.
“Sure as hell didn’t bring me here to ask about my parole,” Miguel snaps, hackles rising, the hard thump of his heart never slowing. He can practically feel it in the air—his own lust, leaking like electricity into water.
Touch me, he wants to dare Tecuanhuey.
It’ll be all violently over the second he does.
“See the way your ass looks at me,” he adds in a low, scratchy voice. “You wanna fuck, baby?”
Tecuanhuey tilts his head, attention caught, focus zeroed in on Miguel.
“Then let’s fuck.”
And then he takes a step back, and it’s the right thing to do, because the distance seems to startle Tecuanhuey.
He blinks, eyes sweeping the room, and Miguel takes another step back, barefoot over gritty, dusty cement until his palms bump the edge of what has to be one of the desks.
“Ain’t got all night.”
Now he’s bluffing a bit, and he guesses Tecuanhuey knows it, because it’s not like Miguel really has a say. He doesn’t know what fucking time it is—doesn’t know how long they have or who will notice. Who will care.
But he knows Tecuanhuey wants it too—that he’s not once denied it yet.
How could he?
“You chickening out now?” Miguel murmurs, cock aching, tented in his drawers.
Desperate.
“C’mon, chico. Bend me over this table like a man. S’what you wanted, right?”
“You’re fucking nuts, Alvarez,” Tecuanhuey says, but his scoff isn’t convincing, and the words are barely off his tongue before he’s striding forward, reclaiming the space Miguel had carved out.
He’s got no desire to keep up the act, either; an infectious grin explodes across his face as he grasps Miguel by the hips—whirls him around and slams him down.
Bent him over the desk, dust tickling his nose and feeling gritty against his bare chest, Miguel grins, too, anticipation coursing through his veins as Tecuanhuey pushes his boxers down to his knees, the elastic momentarily catching on his erection.
Miguel groans.
“Ain’t the only one who wants it,” Tecuanhuey points out, voice silky and low. Fucking smug.
His hand is rough, smacking Miguel’s ass and squeezing—hitting—making Miguel twitch—grunt—and then soothing the sting with his palm.
“Whatever,” Miguel breathes.
“No,” Tecuanhuey says, but doesn’t elaborate as he kisses Miguel back, that first touch of his lips scorching against Miguel’s shoulder—burning so bright it lights up centers in Miguel’s brain that he didn’t even know were fucking there.
Déjà vu.
A shiver runs up his spine as everything all begins to unfurl with terrifying fluidity, the weight of Tecuanhuey draped over him, heavy.
Tecuanhuey grinds against his ass, teasing, and the fabric of his uniform pants scratches Miguel as he relishes the feeling of the growing bulge on the other side.
He’s never been here before but—
Somehow, he feels at ease with this touch.
With Tecuanhuey’s hand slipping around his hip, fingers curling around his cock and making him jerks and shudder.
His breath hitches as—
The room spins and he’s staring at a domed light—
He focuses on a cinderblock wall opposite him, his cheekbone digging against that desk, shoulders aching as Tecuanhuey holds him down with a hand between his shoulder blades.
“You know, Officer Howell said you were a tough one,” Tecuanhuey huffs, hand still stroking firm along his cock, gathering the pre-cum that’s got to be stringing damn near to the floor.
“Nah, m’easy,” Miguel rasps, feverish at the sound of Tecuanhuey’s belt being undone behind him, and then impatient, because Tecuanhuey’s letting go of him, and only his thighs are brushing the back of Miguel’s, and then not even that.
The loss of contact pulls him a little out of his heady daze—gets him straining to look over his shoulder.
“She didn’t force you?”
“Who?” Miguel’s mind is moving a thousand thoughts a second, and none of them in the direction that Tecuanhuey has suddenly veered toward. “Who gives a shit? Yo, fuck her. Make me yours, baby. Quiero que me hagas tuyo…”
Yeah, he’s babbling, aggressively needy. Snapping with it.
Can’t even think straight—never been so insatiable in his damn life, and in the back of his head, Miguel wonders what it means—
Where did this come from?
He’d thought, fleetingly, sure, the guy was hot. Fuck. He’s half-maricón or whatever—won’t go shouting it from the rooftops, but he won’t deny it, either.
It’d been a good thing on the outside.
There, he hadn’t remembered the faces, but he knows he hadn’t hated all of it. And now he wants it—wants it like he used to want things far worse for him.
Wants Tecuanhuey like it’s what he’s owed, flesh hungry.
He should be dripping in shame—should be awash with self-disgust—a fucking hack of all people, and he doesn’t even know the asshole’s first name!—but instead, Miguel just squirms impatiently.
Rearing for it like a bitch in heat.
“Please,” Miguel spits after a moment, because maybe that’s what the guy wants—the power trip. Feet sliding against the concrete, the legs of the desk screech below him as he rocks against it, making one edge lift, though there’s nowhere to go, a wall on the other side. “Come on, baby.”
“It’s okay.”
He feels a hand against his ass a second later—feels a finger slipping slick between his cheeks, rubbing.
Pressing into him.
Making him gasp, a shock of desire rocketing through him. He throbs.
“Just stick it in,” he moans. “God, just fucking do it.”
There’s a soft snort behind him, and Tecuanhuey’s finger presses further into him—testing—slicking, not exploring—
Good.
Miguel feels Tecuanhuey’s dick next, and it’s heavy, and thick, and everything Miguel had hoped for—everything he remembers—
“Yeah, baby, right there. Come on.” The sound of his panted breaths reverberates loudly between his face and the desk as the head of Tecuanhuey’s cock teases his hole.
Then he’s pushing in, and Miguel’s cursing loudly, saliva pooling in his mouth, adding a wet edge to his growled words. “Fuck!”
It burns—threatens to split him open, but damn if it doesn’t turn him on, too, and damn if all he knows isn’t the roar of blood in his ears and the soft jingle of Tecuanhuey’s loosened belt around his knees, clanking with each rock of his hips as he quickly falls into a steady rhythm.
“Fuck—fuck—yeah, like that, baby—like that, chico—”
Each thrust of his cock is its own thrill, layering and layering, friction so good—better when Miguel clenches and hears Tecuanhuey’s breath catch—feels his hand smack sharp against his ass, groping his ass—his back—palm riding his spine, hand wicking the sweat off his back.
“Tocarme,” Miguel moans—feels his own arousal hanging heavy and neglected as he writhes—as he pushes back impatiently, meeting the slam of Tecuanhuey’s body.
At the order, Miguel feels him reach around and tease his fingers against his tip—a mere, sticky brush before Tecuanhuey touches his flat belly instead.
“Fuck!”
Laughter, airy and familiar, ghosts over Miguel’s skin, and he bites his lip hard, resentfully swallowing his next moan.
“What, you didn’t like that?” Tecuanhuey leans over close, buried excruciatingly, wonderfully deep in Miguel’s ass as he kisses the back of his neck and gropes the taut muscles of his abdomen.
Miguel clenches hard as pain shoots through his shoulders, his arms crushed between them. He wants the cuffs off. “I want…” He groans.
More.
“Tell me what to do, Miguelito,” Tecuanhuey teases, and Miguel bucks back against him ineffectually, his ragged breathing matching the sounds in his ear, humid huffs brushing over his burning skin.
Sweat trickles down the side of his face, and he finds he’s grinning madly against the desk, out of his mind.
To hell with the cuffs.
“Just fuck me,” Miguel growls, and Tecuanhuey rolls his hips, the act sending heat right up Miguel’s spine. “Again. Keep fucking me, asshole.”
Cackling, Tecuanhuey obeys, rocking rhythmically into Miguel—making him shudder as the friction of his cock builds that breathless exhilaration in him—pushes a suspicion in the back of his mind to the front.
“Tecuanhuey.” Miguel’s head swims.
“Hm?” Lips suck softly on the nape of his neck, teeth grazing his skin as Tecuanhuey fucks into him with tender, measured motions—makes him groan in pain as well as pleasure as metal digs into his wrists and Tecuanhuey’s hand slides down to his cock again.
Sparks fly off his skin at that firm grip stroking him off in fluid rhythm with his thrusts, and for once, the world tilts and remains sharp afterward, like the whirlwind of lust has swept away a film that’s been covering Miguel’s eyes.
He thinks he gets it now.
“Harder, baby,” he says, and Tecuanhuey kisses the nape of his neck one last time before leaning up to oblige—to move to grip Miguel’s hips hard enough to bruise as he—
“God—”
Jolting upright, Miguel opens his eyes to darkness, drenched in sweat and still half hard, dick not on the way up, but on the way down, cum cooling sticky in his boxers.
He lurches over in a dizzy—feels his stomach clenching—and above him, Velez gives a faint, unhappy groan.
Scrambling out of bed, Miguel nearly falls flat on his face when his ankle catches in the twist of his sheets and he goes pitching forward, the air of the pod cold on his damp skin as he hurtles to the ground.
Flashes of a dream swirl in his head.
Fire and pleasure and—
His hands fly out to catch himself, and then those thoughts of body heat—of a sweet mouth, of erotic touch—they vanish.
“Shit,” Miguel chokes out in horror.
Light floods into Emerald City at the same time that his eyes fall on the black smeared over his hands—which isn’t actually black, either, but bright, fucking crimson.
Blood—
The scent thick and tangy in the air.
The scene wavers; Miguel’s stomach rolls—heaves, as the instant spike of horror through his veins hits a boiling point—brings red pouring out past his lips in one violent twist of his insides.
Blood—
It splatters against concrete, painting the gray red—red like his drenched front—like his stained skin, color mixed with sweat trailing all the way down his chest—
“Oh Christ.”
His hands leave prints against the cement, pink spittle still stringing from his mouth as he leaps away from his own mess, cold dread grabbing him by the throat—forcing him to look back—to the blood speckling the sheets in his bed, but not soaking them—not like in the bunk above, where red is dyeing Jaime’s pillow dark—
Where his skin is pale and waxy, and his eyes are glassy, staring long.
Chapter Text
There’s a photo on the wall—a painting, or a laminate.
Miguel doesn’t know.
It’s a forest, though, brilliant shafts of sunlight shining down through the hazy blue sky above a woodland of skinny evergreens and pine trees.
Eyes glazing past the scripture written bold and black under the nucleus of light, Miguel’s focus falls to the dark creek running along the bottom of the image, bordered by damp rocks.
On the opposite wall, a secondhand of a clock rhythmically ticks.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Father Mukada blows out a stream of smoke, patiently accompanying Miguel in the quiet.
His own cigarette is collecting ash that falls to the carpet as Miguel rips his gaze away from the painting and leans forward in his seat, sliding his free hand up his thigh—gripping his knee.
“Ain’t like I…” His voice scrapes out of him, cacophonous in Mukada’s tranquil office. He trails off, wincing, and brings his cigarette to his lips as an excuse to go quiet again. Inhaling harsh smoke, he hears the faint, leather creak of Mukada’s chair as he sits forward, probably toward the white ashtray at the center of his desk.
“Miguel,” he says slowly. “As useful as it would be at times, I can’t read your mind.”
“Yeah, probably for the best,” Miguel says after another beat. He snorts, looking up, and then heaves a sigh, meeting Mukada’s furrowed expression.
Concern. Caution.
He’s been getting that a lot these days.
“Reimondo, you know—she says my head’s not here. Says I’m…” He waves his hand around in the air, cigarette smoke swirling. He blinks, hand coming to a still in the air in front of him. Staring at the smoke curling over his fingers, Miguel slowly brings his hand back down, swallowing hard. “I’ve just been…”
Mukada stubs his cigarette out and Miguel stares at the lingering wisps rising out of the ashes.
“Just trying to focus on my parole. Get outta here.”
Silence.
“But my window’s starting to close, Father,” Miguel mutters. “I can feel it. S’like…” He swallows hard. “You know, ever since I learned Maritza’s knocked up again, I’ve just been going left and right. You know? Up and down—”
“Maritza’s pregnant again?” Mukada interrupts, frowning.
Nodding, Miguel clears his throat. “Yeah, I guess we… I guess we broke up. When I was out there, you know?” He lets out a huff, saying it aloud making it real all over again. “And I guess if it was just that, right? Maybe it wouldn’t hurt. ‘Cause I get it. But it’s the baby, too, and—like God’s taunting me, you know? And with what happened the other night. Feels like I’m slipping backwards. I—”
A sharp pain at his fingertips, Miguel startles, realising his cigarette has burned to the filter—scorched him.
He hisses, flinging it to the ground and quickly stamping it out.
“Sorry.” Wincing, Miguel ducks his head, staring down at the murky-colored carpet between his feet, littered in ash now.
Above him, he hears a short exhale.
There’s a beat.
“You tried to get Jaime Velez help, Miguel,” Mukada says firmly. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened to him.”
Miguel gives a tepid nod, feeling tension slowly tightening behind his eyes. When he closes them—when he brings his hands up, pressing the heels of his palms against his sockets, it’s crimson that he sees in the dark.
He swallows hard and sits up straighter, heaving a sigh. “So what? I just pray for him? Hope he wakes up?”
Mukada presses his lips together, giving Miguel a look that’s worriedly assessing.
“I’ll be keeping him in my prayers,” the father says. “And I’m sure Jaime’ll appreciate your prayers, too. But Miguel…” He’s shaking his head a little now, and Miguel wonders if Mukada is ever aware that he does that—that he precedes tough words with that pitying gesture. “You can’t let this be part of an excuse to start standing still. You have to keep looking forward—for your own sake, you understand?”
Incredulity brings a scoff to Miguel’s lips. Makes his head spin a little. “Ain’t makin’ excuses. Ain’t standing still.”
Shit.
Mukada raises his eyebrows. “Well, good,” he says, and then leans forward at his desk, crossing his arms over the table as if to say What else do you need from me then?
Miguel bites his lip, rising to his feet before pausing. “Can I get another cigarette?” he says, and in the hallway outside of Mukada’s office, he’s tucking the Bollard in his pocket as Tecuanhuey pushes off the wall.
“Feeling better?” he says, not quite a drawl as he waves Miguel in front of him.
Miguel snorts, glad to be ahead of Tecuanhuey, even if it means paranoidly feeling that prickle of eyes against his back. At least this way, his expression—the drift of his own gaze—stays hidden. “You ain’t Catholic, huh?”
“You know, I always wonder what you people talk about in there.”
“What do you mean, ‘you people’?”
Fucked, Miguel supposes, that he’s happy for a chance to bristle at something.
“Catholics,” Tecuanhuey says, amusement in his tone.
Miguel can’t help but glance over his shoulder, catching that matching flash of mirth in Tecuanhuey’s expression. Shuffling to a stop, he waits for Tecuanhuey to walk up on him before starting again, half a mind to speed up again, while the other half prefers being able to sense Tecuanhuey in his periphery instead.
“Mukada, he has a bad habit,” Miguel says. “You don’t want your head shrunk, you go to him. Can bum a cig, too, if he feels sorry for your ass.”
“And he feels sorry for you?”
“We got a history. He’s been there for me.” Miguel stares down at his shoes as they walk, confessions bubbling to his lips.
I had a baby, you know. A son.
He doesn’t say it—Christ, why would he?
Only, with Maritza moving on and shit, it’s like soon, what if he’s the only one who thinks about him?
“Anyway, ain’t like it’s any a’ your business either way,” Miguel says gruffly. He sees Tecuanhuey’s head turn toward him out of the corner of his eye, but he just looks ahead, observing as they pass another hack lazily escorting Gougeon in the direction they’d come.
The hack nods at Tecuanhuey, who doesn’t pipe up again until they’re coming up on the library.
“Ain’t my business, but you told me—so you made it my business.” There’s no accusation there. Curiosity, instead. Friendliness.
Warmth blooms in Miguel’s chest—fuck—and he suppresses the urge to clear his throat. “Yeah, well… You’re a nosy motherfucker, you know? Had to give you something.”
Tecuanhuey snickers. “I appreciate the crumbs, Alvarez. Really shakes up the routine.”
“You’re bored now ‘cause you just got off night duty, but you wait, man,” Miguel tells him, glancing over. “You’ll be beggin’ to be sitting in that chair spinning circles at midnight again.” He catches Tecuanhuey’s grin at the same time he registers he’s smirking a little himself, defenses falling despite his efforts.
“Yeah?” Jutting his chin forward, Tecuanhuey doesn’t give Miguel a chance to look away, his own eyes gleaming. “Maybe you should come back and be a C.O once you get out. Seem to have a lot of pointers.”
“Nah, just for you, baby,” Miguel retorts. Like he’d ever come back to Oz voluntarily.
Tecuanhuey gives him another entertained look, though, and something about it makes Miguel clear his throat, picking up the pace a bit as they come up on the gate to Em City and Tecuanhuey gets on his radio to have the keyroom open up for them.
“Alright. Be a good boy in there,” he says once the buzzer rings and the bars start sliding back.
Miguel glances over his shoulder, certain by the way that swaying step back Tecuanhuey takes that if it weren’t for the fact that they’re where everyone can see, he might’ve given him a friendly clap on the shoulder.
Thank Christ he’s got the sense not to, Miguel decides firmly—like he needs accusatory whispers of hack’s bitch on his head as well as everything else.
Everything else…
Striding back into Em City, Miguel realises that hell, for a second, talking to Tecuanhuey, he’d almost forgotten about waking up covered in Jaime’s blood.
The awareness filters back into him as he traverses the unit, though, eyes dragging against him, suspicion cast his way like fucking rocks.
Miguel keeps his chin up—briefly weighs the option of just beelining up the tier to his pod, where just that morning McManus had asked him to help pack up Jaime shit for storage, or making his way over to the recreation table where he can see Beecher, Arif, and Neema playing cards.
He could sit down and act fucking normal.
Act like he ain’t losing his shit—having these fucking dreams.
Losing his mind, suspicions festering in the back of his mind. Being unsure of what’s real.
“Congratulations—the big man wants to talk to you.”
In the end, a third option presents itself, Torquemada and Ricardo popping up to flank Miguel halfway across the unit, the former’s long arm draping around his shoulder and steering him around the hack station, toward the computer room behind the stairs.
The proximity of Torquemada’s body clouds Miguel’s head with whatever cologne he’s wearing that day—something citrus and salty, with an undercurrent jasmine and rosemary.
It’s overpowering.
Miguel wrinkles his nose, walking stiffly. “Nothing to talk about.”
Already, though, he can see Morales sitting inside the green-tinted room by himself, his large body hunched toward one of the computers, one hand on the keyboard and the other on his mouse.
“Then this will be quick and painless, won’t it?” Torquemada says.
Ricardo opens the door and then Miguel feels a hard fucking squeeze against the back of his neck as Torquemada bodies him into the room like he’s tossing out the trash.
The door swings shut behind him, and Miguel catches his footing after a short stumble, scowling over his shoulder.
Standing like a fucking tree on the other side the glass, Torquemada flutters his fingers—go on.
Miguel lets out a huff of incredulity as, over his shoulder, Morales drawls, “Miguel.”
Caught now.
Easier just to go through with it.
Suppressing a sigh, he turns. “Enrique,” he replies, and strides over to the bank of computers, pulling out the empty chair beside Morales and angling it toward him before dropping down and slumping back. “You wanted to talk?”
Morales glances out of the corner of his eye and then pauses the game he’s playing—Tomb Raider, Miguel thinks. “I’ll keep this short,” he says, pleasant and business-like as he rests his elbow on the table and twists to look at Miguel. His eyes are steely, no doubt assessing every little reaction as he continues, “Velez was a nobody. Whether or not he pulls out of this coma they say he fell into after ripping his own throat open, I don’t really give a fuck. But I got another problem; according to the doc, he O.Ded.”
Miguel blinks. Doesn’t let that surprise sit long. “So?” he says flatly.
Morales’s eyes scan his face. “So, he didn’t get his supply from any of my men. Which means someone else sold him Destiny.”
“Nah, I talked to him that night,” Miguel says after a moment. “Wasn’t high. Who told you he O.Ded?”
Irritation twitches across Morales’s expression, his brow briefly furrowing. “What do you know?”
Pushing back in his chair, Miguel gives a big shrug, his thoughts racing even as he insists, “Nothin’. M’just saying—he didn’t seem high at lights out.”
But if Dr. Nathan had said otherwise, then that means there’d been tests, right?
“You see his chart?”
“He didn’t say nothing to you about another supply?” Morales presses, and Miguel gives another shrug, gesturing helplessly for emphasis.
“Shit, ask your lieutenant, man. His supply, right?” he says. With what he can deduce of Morales’s real concern here anyway, Torquemada seems like the obvious fucker to look at. “I mean, you gotta be blind and dumb if you don’t think that asshole’s trying to pull the rug out from under your feet, no offense. If anyone’s dealing secretly on the side, it’s him.” Miguel pushes to his feet. “And I don’t want anything to do with this either way.”
“You hear anything, you tell me,” Morales says, raising his voice.
He’s acting big, letting the comment about Torquemada slide, Miguel supposes.
He presses his lips together as he pivots back toward the door, seeing Torquemada and Ricardo still posted up outside. “Sure, whatever,” he throws over his shoulder.
Back outside, Ricardo hangs back, joined by Ortiz as Torquemada tags along with Miguel, falling in step with him, much to his chagrin.
“Still trying to drag me down with you, huh?” Miguel snaps.
“No, sugar, that’s the thing.” There’s a hand on his bicep, dragging him to a stop just below the hack station. “Jaime doesn’t do tits.”
Miguel looks up—looks Torquemada in the eye. “Let go.”
“And I checked—I can’t find his blood tests.” Torquemada’s hand drops back down to his side as Miguel turns, continuing on his way even as he’s aware of his persistent shadow. “So what happened?”
Taking a wide circle around the TV area to reach the stairs, Miguel gets up to the third step—just high enough where he can tower over Torquemada as he grips the railings to either side of himself and fences the guy out, steeling his mind for a moment. After the exchange with Morales—fucker doesn’t even give a shit—this, the continued prying, is unexpected.
Torquemada’s own line of inquiry, then.
Because of course; despite being a loner, Miguel’s still got a line of jackasses wanting him to answer to them. “I woke up and he was lying in his own blood,” he says after a beat. “Tried to stop the bleeding with my sheets and then I went to get help, ‘cause they’d unlocked for Count.”
Torquemada’s eyes flick up and down, searching his face, and Miguel tilts his head.
“The fuck is it to you?” he adds, jutting his chin forward with a scoff. A tension is beginning to form behind his eyes, and he wants nothing more than to turn around and go lie down in his fucking pod, away from the noise—away from the stares and the questions. He thinks about the stain on his pod floor, though, and swallows hard. “What, you have a crush on him, man? What? Like you care?”
“Not at all, handsome,” Torquemada sneers at once, sliding back a step and turning away almost compulsively, his body starting to slink away even as he looks back over his shoulder, eyes narrowed, gaze trailing.
Miguel straightens up, flipping the bird as he whirls around himself and continues stomping up the tier himself.
Christ.
His heart is racing, images beginning to flash behind his eyes, triggered by those fucking needling questions.
And what the fuck is this about O.Ding?
Kid wasn’t hooked on Destiny or the like, as far as Miguel was aware; smoked a joint or two since they’d been cellmates and that was it.
Reaching the pod, Miguel stands in the entrance for a moment, all that urgency and wanting to get back and just crash on his bunk leaving him as soon as he takes in the sight of the dim cell. He feels a sense of claustrophobia in the emptiness instead, Jaime’s bed stripped, the only lingering evidence of his presence now a barely-there stain on the concrete floor.
Forcing a step inside, the cell soon falls into the peculiar, airtight silence that Miguel’s grown used to, the door falling shut behind him.
He stands back against the glass, headache growing.
If Jaime O.Ded, then…
Miguel swallows hard.
In a way, that’s good, right?
Because he’d started to suspect—
Because it’d almost seemed like—
Sucking in a deep, bitter breath, Miguel revels in the way his cigarette looks between his fingers, sunlight wrapping over his skin.
It’s cold up here, on the roof, and in between the more stubborn snowy patches from the first flurries of the season, the ground is covered in layers of bird shit and dark weather stains—ugly as hell to look at—but it’s worth it for the fresh air.
“You don’t get vertigo, man?” he calls, watching Tecuanhuey smoke atop the short rooftop ledge, legs bent up and ankle casually crossed.
“Do you?” Tecuanhuey says, words shaped by the cigarette in his own mouth.
Miguel snorts, getting to his feet and walking over—crouching beside him on the icy stone just below the one-foot. He doesn’t follow Tecuanhuey’s gaze down to the ground several floors below them—looks instead up at his face—at his cheeks and nose, tinged pink from the cold, neither of them dressed for the deepening winter.
“You ever meet Howell?” Miguel asks.
Tecuanhuey glances over, removing the cigarette from his mouth and tapping ash over the edge of the roof.
The white flutters down through the air in a poor imitation of snow.
“Knew of her, that’s all,” Tecuanhuey says.
“Some of the other guys think she was pushed. Wasn’t really the suicide type, you know?”
Tecuanhuey gives a neutral hum, squinting a little against the glare of the sun. “How do you know?”
Miguel blinks and then shrugs. “Shit, I don’t know. She was a tough bitch. Just don’t seem like her. ”
Tecuanhuey smiles a little, looking out over the view again.
From their vantage point, Miguel can see far beyond the old watchtowers—far beyond the prison walls, to the highway beyond, and the evergreen forest on the other side of it.
Oswald’s in the middle of nowhere, really.
The ride up from his sentencing hearing feels like a thousand years ago, but Miguel remembers how he’d slumped against the prison bus window, bandana around his head acting like a thin shield between him and the chilled glass as he’d watched the forest blur by on the winding highway.
It’d been spring when he arrived at Oz, and every time he’s been outside since then has been winter.
He points. “When I escaped, I went that way,” he remembers. “Heart was beating like a fucking drum, man. I was wired. Fucking adrenaline musta carried me the first couple miles away from this place.”
Even poorly dressed for the temperature, he’d barely felt the cold of the winter night that day, his body like a machine, tuned to the singular mission of escape.
Freedom.
Miguel takes a deep breath of relatively clean air, his and Tecuanhuey’s smoke blowing back behind them. “Yo, when you get off work and you change back to your regular clothes—go back outside…” he says slowly, watching Tecuanhuey gaze toward where he’d pointed. “I mean, it’s gotta feel like waking up from a dream, right, man?”
Tecuanhuey licks his lips and grins, looking over. “Is that how it felt for you?”
Miguel shrugs—thinks about the blur south.
Tecolutla.
The warm nights there might as well have been out of a different lifetime.
Shivering, Miguel brings his cigarette back to his lips and chuckles darkly. “Yeah, I guess so. This place, you know? Shit don’t feel real.” He watches Tecuanhuey watch him, his smile still lingering, and he feels his skin starting to heat. He looks down, blowing out smoke and clearing his throat. “Anyway, s’boring as hell here. What do you do when you leave? You got a girlfriend or wife or whatever?”
The corners of Tecuanhuey’s mouth never dip. “Nah.”
Miguel blinks. “Oh.”
“What, were you hoping for a cute story or some shit?”
He shrugs—starts to say, Nah, just wanted to know about you, I guess—when Tecuanhuey smirks.
“Okay. I got a girlfriend. Her name is…”
“Mary,” Miguel offers.
“Maria.”
He rolls his eyes. “Whatever, man—”
“We were high school sweethearts,” Tecuanhuey continues, pausing only to bring his cigarette to his lips and tilt his head back. For a moment, his cheeks hollow and his mouth forms an O, though the ring of smoke he blows out quickly disperses on the breeze. “We’re saving up for a house. That’s why I took this job. Better pay.” He tosses his cigarette over the side of the building with a flick of his wrist and then leans back on his hands, looking at Miguel. “What else?”
“She like it, you working all these hours?” Miguel snickers. There’s a flutter in his chest that he calms by sucking on his cig.
Tecuanhuey’s eyes comb over his face, his lower lip curling in with amusement for a moment before he answers. “She didn’t like the night shift, but that was just temporary. Covering for Benson.”
“But you’re here all day instead now.”
Tecuanhuey shrugs. “She has a job, too.” He grins. “Besides, what do they say? Absence makes the cock grow harder?”
Miguel snorts, looking away. “Shit, that’s one thing I wouldn’t let go to waste if I was you. I’d leave here each night and fuck just about any chick, man. You don’t know what’s good till you lose it,” he says.
“Nah, you horny motherfuckers still find a way to fuck,” Tecuanhuey points out.
“I haven’t. I mean, I don’t do that shit,” Miguel says immediately.
His mouth gets dry at the mention, and it almost feels like a lie coming out of him, even though it’s not; he hasn’t fucked in Oz, murky dreams playing out his pent up desires proof of that. The thought of some of them, though—Christ—has him damn near flushing red, and he’s grateful for something to do with his hands and mouth, even though that cover is dwindling fast.
They’re talking about fucking, Miguel keeps thinking, and while it’s a topic so prevalent and mundane in Oz normally, now it suddenly feeling dangerous.
“Wouldn’t want it on your record,” Tecuanhuey says with an approving nod.
“Nah.”
“Oh, you mean no one’s caught your eye yet?” He smirks.
“Nah, I mean—yo, fuck off,” Miguel says, groaning. He’s smoked to the very limit, though, so all he can do is stub his cigarette out now and flick it over the roof—watch it soar through the air. Somehow, he doesn’t lose sight of it in the descent, tracking it all the way down to the dead grass far below where they’re sitting, patches of ice and snow melt covering the ground.
Miguel stares down the distance for a moment. “Whatever.” He clears his throat, looking back over to see Tecuanhuey’s carefully listening expression. “Ain’t makin’ no one my prag, that’s all I’m saying. My hand’s alright.”
The split of Tecuanhuey’s grin across his face comes like the flip of a switch, and he cackles, reaching out suddenly to grab Miguel’s wrist—startling him—making him remember that they’re sitting at the edge of a roof, even if Tecuanhuey doesn’t tug him forward.
The world wavers in Miguel’s periphery—leaves him feeling unbalanced as Tecuanhuey lifts his hand and inspects it.
“Pretty hands for a boxer,” he teases. He’s got rough hands himself—broad fingers that are red from the cold, veins that stick out under his skin.
Miguel huffs, about to pull his hand away when something stops him—
Tecuanhuey, his hand moving up to pinch Miguel’s knuckles instead, gently squeezing his fingers, both of their hands frigid.
Not numb, though.
Miguel’s not numb.
“What about you?” he blurts as his hand slowly drifts into Tecuanhuey’s lap, his other hand now massaging his hand, too. “You think you’d last in this shithole without sex? No Marias in here, baby. Mario maybe.”
Tecuanhuey turns his hand over, seeming to inspect his palm now, a thumb brushing over the calluses on his skin as his mouth curves. “Fucking a guy don’t count?”
Heat prickles along Miguel’s back. “Not what I said.”
Tecuanhuey snorts. “So what’re you asking?” he mutters. There’s no disgruntlement there, though, just playfulness—fucking smugness, enjoying the gutter their conversation is swirling down.
Indulging in it.
Miguel pulls his hand out of Tecuanhuey’s grip as he begins to finger the blunt edges of his nails, the act bringing his gaze back up—landing on Miguel with that same chill, uninterrupted.
“You’d fuck a guy, wouldn’t you?”
Tecuanhuey tilts his head.
He doesn’t exactly look panicked or caught—rather, he stares steadily at Miguel, waiting for his next words.
“I mean.” He shrugs. “You wanna fuck me.” Right? he doesn’t ask.
Laughing, Tecuanhuey pushes to his feet. “Yeah, sure,” he says, chuckling and making that line between truth and denial in his tease fucking hard to distinguish. For a second, he looms—towers over Miguel where he sits and makes the roof feel small with his grin and the shake of his head.
Miguel’s palms itch. His mouth goes dry, senses attuned to Tecuanhuey—watching. Waiting.
Then Tecuanhuey quirks an eyebrow, nodding back toward the roof access as if to say Smoke break’s over, Alvarez, and it’s fucking all in his mind again. “You still got that headache?”
“Nah. Thanks, man.” Miguel takes the dismissal in stride, rising to his feet after Tecuanhuey and rubbing his icy hands together as he watches Tecuanhuey brush off his pants and smooth down his tie.
“Okay,” Tecuanhuey says, rolling back his shoulders and reaching out. He laughs again, inexplicably, and his arm snakes across Miguel’s shoulders in a friendly gesture, hand clapping the back of his skull in a familiar pat that briefly tilts their faces closer.
Should piss Miguel off—getting manhandled or whatever, but.
It’s hard to get mad at it.
Miguel finds himself smiling a little as they walk back to the stairs into Oz, Tecuanhuey’s touch sliding away once they reach the door.
His head buzzes—doesn’t ache with that tension like before but just—
Hell.
What are they doing?
He pauses in the doorway as Tecuanhuey leans there, waiting for him to head down first. The staircase below is dim compared to the bright afternoon, the sun coming down to kiss Tecuanhuey’s face, wrapping his features in a soft white light.
“Go on, man. You got nowhere else to go,” Tecuanhuey says, amused. His ears are red, and Miguel guesses his must be, too, at this point.
“Yo, how’d you know I box?”
Tecuanhuey grins. “Everyone knows Miguel Alvarez boxes,” he replies easily.
Miguel blinks. “Oh.” And he guesses he can’t exactly argue that, and Tecuanhuey is starting to playfully tap his foot, so he just scoffs and stomps down inside, wondering why his heart is beating harder than it should—then knowing why.
He’d wanted Tecuanhuey to kiss him.
He’d wanted something to come out of all that. Talking about sex. Talking about fucking guys.
That’s where it had seemed like it was going, right? He knows the signals—the cues. Fucking knows when he’s being flirted with and Tecuanhuey does flirt with him, if not always in words then with his eyes, always fucking carressing Miguel with that soft, twinkling gaze and the playful lick of his lips.
But.
Nothing.
Things hadn’t morphed into one of his dreams at all, Tecuanhuey eager there—Tecuanhuey’s chuckle indulgent against his skin there.
Hands holding his—pushing his wrists up over his head and pinning him against the bed, their fingers lacing as their tongues tangle.
He doesn’t deny his lust—doesn’t deny Miguel’s either, leaning back after sucking his lip to grin and murmur, “¿Qué va a ser hoy?”
What will it be today?
As if there’s been days before. As if there’ll be days after.
Miguel grins, warm under Chico’s touch as his mouth skims his neck—travels down his chest, licking and nipping.
What about this? he says. What about this?
And his hands slip out of Miguel’s as he continues, his palms moving to map down Miguel’s sides instead, following his own slow slide, bodies slipping together.
That, Miguel smirks, and gasps, sitting up on his elbows for a moment before sighing and falling back again, enveloped in damp heat.
Chico’s tongue swirls over his flesh and his hair is soft and silky between Miguel’s fingers as he moans—as his chest lifts, toes curling in pleasure—
Waking up to the buzzer for Count, Miguel groans, sitting upright and squinting across the empty pod. There’s a toothbrush in his mouth as Rivera goes walking by, and he’s still half asleep by the time he sets his tray down at breakfast.
“You look like crap,” Beecher comments.
Miguel grunts, squinting down at his tray.
Canned greenbeans and mashed potatoes with a lumpy gravy for breakfast. Pancamo must be losing it.
“Rough night.” he replies.
“Nightmares?” Beecher’s nosy, but at least Miguel can truthfully shake his head at that.
Nah, he’s lucky enough not to get many nightmares in Oz. But he’d dreamt of Tecolutla—a dingy motel there—a domed light on the ceiling that he’d stared up at as Tecuanhuey went down on him—and he’s not exactly going to admit to that.
Clearing his throat, Miguel shrugs, poking at his food. “Slept weird,” he mutters, glad when the arrival of Arif and Neema pivots the conversation in a different direction.
Namely, Arif picking up where he’d seemingly left off during a different conversation, launching into a lecture designed to dissuade Beecher from going to visit Keller on Death Row again.
“He’s a poison, Beecher,” Arif concludes. “You should focus on your parole and your children, not your feelings. The Qur’an says that—”
“Zahir, enough,” Neema interrupts, leaning across the table and laying it out with a hand flat against the table between them. “Tobias. This Keller guy is a bottle of Jim Beam. You’re an alcoholic.”
Arif presses his lips together, looking irritated as Neema leans back again, opening his milk carton. “We all know you can handle your drink. To a point.” He shakes his head. “Schillinger may be gone, but so are the past eleven months you could’ve been spending with Holly. Is now really the time to be reaching for the bottle?”
Beecher ducks his head, staring hard at his tray, corners of his mouth turned down.
“You should fuck him,” Miguel says.
Beecher’s eyes lift again, slowly, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing.
“Alvarez,” Arif snaps.
He shrugs. “Nah, I listen to this back and forth shit every fucking day, man. Yo, Beecher, just get in there, bribe Lopresti, and fuck Keller, man. That’s all there is to it, right? What?” He ignores the looks from Arif and Neema, nodding across the table. “You said so yourself like a dozen times. You don’t love his ass no more. But you want him. So just fuck him—” He rolls his hips for emphasis below the table—“and then fuck him, man. Let his ass fry.”
Beecher’s mouth forms a thin line. “My relationship with Keller wasn’t just about sex, Miguel.”
Suddenly, the cardboard flavored mashed potatoes taste even worse than normal. Miguel tosses his fork down, standing up as Busmalis and Rebadow arrive at the table. “Yeah, well. I got nothing, then.”
“Exactly,” Arif exclaims, turning back to Beecher. “Do not fuck Keller.”
Shrugging, Miguel picks up his tray and holds it out to Rebadow and Busmalis. “You want any of this?”
He’s still got an orange and piece of toast along with his poked-at mashed potatoes and greenbeans, and Rebadow shakes his head while Busmalis reaches for the orange.
“Miguel,” Beecher calls as he turns to leave. “Wait—I wanted to ask you something.”
And later, the surgical lube packet for Beecher’s nasty plans against his hip, Miguel ducks by the private room in the infirmary, greeted first by the steady beep of a machine and then by Dr. Nathan.
He freezes, hand still on the door, one foot over the threshold.
“Miguel. What’re you doing here?” Dr. Nathan says, surprised as she looks up from the clipboard she’s making notes on.
Miguel clears his throat. “I just—you know, wanted to see how he was doing.”
Dr. Nathan nods after a moment, sighing and glancing back down at the bed in front of her. “Well, still comatose,” she says. “But his vitals are normal, and he’s shown signs of normal brain activity.”
When she doesn’t tell him to get lost, Miguel shuffles closer.
Jaime’s lying there at a bit of an incline, eyes taped shut and a tube running under his nose, gauze still padding his neck. Someone’s long gone and cleaned up the blood and Jaime’s wearing one of the hospital gowns, tucked in under one of the scratchy blue blankets to his chest and a couple of wires twisting out from under his collar, running into the nearby heart monitor.
Miguel stares for a moment, hovering across from Dr. Nathan at the foot of the bed.
“You were the one who found him, weren’t you?” she says softly.
He blinks. “Looks like he’s sleeping,” he says instead. “You know when he might-?”
She’s shaking her head, flipping the page on her clipboard and looking at something there. “It’s a bit of a mystery actually,” she says resignedly. “With a blood transfusion, we were able to stabilise Velez’s condition, but…”
Last Miguel had seen of Jaime had been Tecuanhuey and Armstrong helping to move him onto a stretcher.
His eyes had rolled back in his head by then—he’d looked… dead.
“Is it like…” Miguel clears his throat, looking away from Jaime’s motionless features. “‘Cause he overdosed or whatever?”
Nathan blinks. “Overdosed?” She blinks again, looking past her clipboard, down at Jaime. “Oh—yes. It’s always likely,” she says vaguely. Suddenly, she glances back up. “You should get back to work, Miguel.”
“Yeah, just…” He looks from her to Jaime and shrugs.
She hadn’t sounded so sure about that overdose, he keeps thinking as he strolls back down the ward later.
Almost like…
The hairs on the back of Miguel’s neck prickle a little, and he finds his nosy ass slipping into the doctor’s office after a quick glance up the ward to check that Dr. Nathan still hadn’t emerged from Jaime’s room.
He’s an old hand at rifling through the medical files, too—had searched his own out once out of curiosity, and Jaime, his record filed under V, is in the bottom filing cabinet in the corner of Dr. Nathan’s office. Ducking behind her desk, Miguel is easily hidden from any casual glance through the fencing around the office, and at this point in the shift, the hacks are slacking off anyway and the nurses are busy with rounds.
Flipping open Jaime’s file, Miguel skims past the physicals—notes with some surprise a shellfish allergy—and skips over notes on a minor incident from last year, a photo of Jaime’s scowl and his bloody nose attached to the sheet. The notes on his neck injury are already there—a single page write up from Benchley Memorial and a copy of his brain scan, as far as Miguel can tell.
No special drug screening papers besides one from months ago.
Miguel blinks, flipping back to the report on Jaime’s neck injury and reading more carefully, crouching lower behind the desk as he hears someone up the ward starting to make some kind of fuss.
At last, he finds a small note of it, written in the same curly font as the rest of the notes, but squeezed in like an afterthought—and as if at a later time, the pen strokes distinct from the rest of the notes.
Indications of a drug overdose—
Miguel frowns, flipping the file closed and returning it to the records cabinet just as the commotion beyond the office grows.
He’s not sure what it fucking means, only that the look on Dr. Nathan’s face had been strangely distant and…
Climbing to his feet, Miguel scrubs a hand over his face and closes his eyes for a moment, half-expecting a headache to emerge out of the buzz of static in his head. He hadn’t let his eyes linger on the photo of Jaime’s throat, but he can still see it anyway—the shredded skin—the rich, dark red smears. Oozing blood.
Jaime overdosing and doing that to himself is almost as unbelievable as the idea that Miguel had done it in his sleep.
Only…
Miguel waits some more—for the headache—for the flip of his stomach.
Nothing.
He opens his eyes, listening as the pissed off patient’s yelling outside is dwarfed by the scream of another inmate who’s being admitted right at that moment, the rush of nurses and Dr. Nathan running over visible from where Miguel’s standing.
“What’re you doing?”
His gaze snaps to the doorway where Torquemada is standing in his scrubs, staring with suspicion, the expression narrowing his eyes and giving him a grimmer than normal appearance.
“Nothing.”
The screams outside continue as Miguel strides forward, shouldering past Torquemada and back out onto the main floor where he has a better view of the guy from Gen Pop laid out on a gurney.
Nurses and hacks hold him down as Dr. Nathan attempts to look at what has to be a shank wound to his side. Blood soaks his clothes, flashes of crimson appearing through the gaps in the bodies surrounding the guy as they push the gurney over to a wall and Dr. Nathan yells instructions to the nurses.
A curtain goes up, blue sheet clanking metallicly in its rings as a nurse pulls it closed around them.
“Jaime didn’t scream, did he?” Torquemada muses.
He’s floated over to Miguel’s shoulder—is watching him carefully.
The coppery scent of blood lingers in the air, where the inmate’s wordless screams soon turn to pointed curses. Dr. Nathan’s yelling at the guy to let her work, which has to mean it’s not that serious—he’s just a screamer.
“Nah.” Miguel says, glancing over. It clicks then; the overdose is his out. “Musta been too high to feel the pain.”
*
“...And this just in, a local Morrisville man phoned Animal Control authorities late yesterday evening after sighting what he described to be a quote—black panther—unquote—roaming the woods out behind his home. The man, Owen Klein, a retired science teacher, said that he shot at the creature as it made its escape from the edge of his property and believes he may have hit it in the hind leg. Miah Wilkinson has more. Miah?”
“Thanks, Harry. Yes, I’m here at the last known sighting of what many are beginning to call the Route 7a Beast. If you’ll remember, the creature was first spotted about two and a half weeks ago and since then locals have been divided as to the species of the animal, with some claiming bear while others believe it to be a wolf. Now, I spoke with Mr. Klein, who was adamant that what he saw was a black panther. Of course, wildlife experts say that black panthers, or melanated jaguars, are not native to New York, though it’s possible that a western mountain lion may have traveled to the state. Earlier today, I also spoke with Dr. Angie Costello, chair of the Department of Biology at Kaufman-Ferber. She told me that under the unclear lighting conditions, the dark fur of a mountain lion may have appeared darker, but Harry, regardless of the animal’s identity, authorities are warning locals to keep their distance…”
“God, I’d do her.”
“Shh!”
“Don’t shush me, asswipe.”
“Yo! I’m trying to hear this!”
As the assholes gathered around the TVs begin to squabble, Miguel just presses his headphones closer to his ears, eyes trained on the screen where Miah Wilkinson is standing, wrapped up in a thick navy coat and black earmuffs, out by the rushing highway.
She’s talking more about the guy Owen Klein, and reporting his version of events, when the TVs flicker and suddenly Miguel’s sitting up at the sticky counter of an outdoor lounge, watching a small TV over the bar as large ceiling fans thwip thwip thwip through the air.
Miguel blinks, looking around a colorful bar and grill with wooden tables and plastic chairs occupied by a whole range of ages and genders, though mostly shades of brown—Latino. Sunlight filters in from the large, open front of the pavilion, where Miguel can see a street that borders the rocky stairs down to an open beach, people dressed for swimming coming and going.
He blinks.
Two seats over, there’s a white blonde woman sitting at the bar and digging into a barbecue with a pint of beer and a basket of fries to her left. Her hair is in stiff, half-wet tangles, sand mixed into some of the locks and her beach cover-up doing little to hide her tiny bikini.
“Have you tried talking to her or do you just like to look?” the teasing Spanish in his ear has Miguel turning his head and—
It’s Tecuanhuey, or—
Him with longer hair and a goatee, anyway, grinning toothily as he slides onto the stool beside Miguel, his leg bumping Miguel’s under the counter.
They’re both wearing shorts. It’s hot out and Miguel’s forgone his shirt, proud to have regained some of his old lean bulk—no longer an eye sore.
Tecuanhuey is wearing a thin, off-white t-shirt with blue around the collar and on the sleeves, the shoulders soaked with water that must’ve dripped from his long hair. As their eyes meet, Tecuanhuey nods his chin forward.
“Ok, what do you want? On me.”
Miguel grins. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, order away, sunshine,” he says, and even though they’re outside today—and even though Miguel’s only known him for a few days—he wants to tilt over and stick his tongue straight down the guy’s throat.
It’s not just the generosity, either—a couple tacos and beer is hardly a show of great indulgence—but rather, it’s the warmth in his tone. The fondness in his eyes when he says sunshine—mi sol.
“I was thinking pork tacos and beer. Or do you want shots?” Miguel adds, a memory of tequila trickling down Tecuanhuey’s throat under dimmer lighting flashing through his mind, making him smirk.
Tecuanhuey licks his lips. “Ain’t it a little early for shots?”
He shrugs. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I know the way back to the motel—tuck you in real nice,” he says, leaning over and bumping Tecuanhuey’s shoulder as he laughs.
“Oh, I see. Your ass wants me blackout on my back.”
Miguel feels a pleased flush creeping up his neck under the twinkling amusement in Tecunahuey’s gaze. “Wouldn’t do nothing,” he assures, and then lets his voice drop. “Unless you want me to.”
Tecuanhuey snorts. “Ain’t a lightweight,” he says, and then leans over, arm draping around Miguel’s shoulder and rough hand squeezing the nape of his neck. “We’ll see who ends up on his back,” he adds in a growl, face coming right up to Miguel’s and breath tickling his ear, making him giggle as he snakes his own arm around Tecuanhuey’s waist.
The white woman nearby glances over with a tinge of judgement but Miguel just grins, complaining loudly as he feels a quick smash of lips against his cheek, the aggressive action there just enough to hide the true affection as Miguel shoves Tecuanhuey away.
“Yo, come on, man!”
Tecuanhuey sucks his teeth. “Hey, I’m paying. You should be kissing my sweet ass,” he declares, and Miguel’s ears ring.
Sitting in front of the TVs, they continue to ring, the babble of the talk around him muted and indistinct.
Tecuanhuey, he thinks, and stands up, pulling the headphones off his head, which feels light.
Everything feels light—like he’s floating as he backs out of the seating area.
“Woah, you okay?”
Fiona, catching his arm when he nearly bowls her over trying to extract himself from the crowd.
Her eyebrows push together, concern floating in and out of his focus, and someone’s saying Nice going, Alvarez, because in his periphery, there’s a chair knocked over on the ground.
Funny.
He hadn’t heard it.
“Miguel—” Fiona waves a hand in front of his face.
Don’t bother, girl, he’s smacked.
“M’okay,” he says. Thinks he smiles, tapping her shoulder, assuring, “It’s fine.”
The fantasy of Tecuanhuey with him in Tecolutla skips and repeats through his mind like a bad record, distorting in the same places every time and then skipping back to dim lighting and the taste of liquor passing between their mouths, Miguel climbing over Tecuanhuey on a bed—pushing him onto his back and kissing his throat, feeling the warmth of his skin against his face.
Then the sunny bar and grill smashes in again and there’s faint music—savory food—cold beer. Shots. His face warming with the drink and the attention. Tecuanhuey smiling at him—putting an arm heavy and comfortable around him, hugging him close as he murmurs in his ear:
“How about we get out of here?”
Miguel blinks—finds himself standing dumbly under the greenish lights of the computer lab, one foot forward as if to remind himself to sit down.
He does so, eventually, waking up the computer and clicking around almost absently. The web browser launches slowly, and all the while Miguel keeps thinking about the taste of Tecuanhuey on his lips. A little sweet. A little bitter.
And that scent, under the alcohol and the ocean salt—
Something cooler and earthy. Lingering.
Always lingering.
“So I have a theory,” Miguel says eventually, folding his hands over his stomach. “Wanna hear it?”
Blowing out some smoke, Mukada gestures broadly as if to say Go ahead.
Miguel’s mouth feels dry even without smoking—he’d rejected the offer, already keyed up enough—and he crosses his ankles, slumped back in his seat. “Something happened when I was out there,” he says. “On the run, you know? Only, I had to forget about it.”
Tick.
Tick.
Mukada blinks rapidly; whatever he thought Miguel would say, this isn’t it. He leans forward slowly, frown deepening. “What would you have had to forget?” he says carefully, grinding out his cigarette in the ashtray in front of him, a show of true focus.
“That’s the thing. I’ve only been getting bits and pieces the last couple months. It’s like, you know, amnesia or whatever.”
“Bits and pieces like what?”
Miguel stretches his arms over his head, feeling the tightness extend through his core as he tilts back. Glances over his shoulder to the closed door of the office.
“Like what, Miguel? What happened?”
Miguel straightens up again, letting his arms drop down with a heavy sigh. “That’s the thing,” he says, and on the other side of the desk, Mukada presses his lips together, eyebrows flattening. “But anyway, that’s why my mind’s stuck there. Like Reimondo says, you know? Shit, you’re looking at me like I’m crazy.”
Clearing his throat, Mukada sits back from where he’d started really leaning forward with a pinched expression. “I guess I’m just trying to understand,” he says slowly. “Why this theory all the sudden, Miguel?”
Miguel nods. “‘Cause I remembered something, you know? Something I forgot.” He pauses—not just for Mukada to nod, but to listen himself. Listen to the tick tick tick, and past it, to the distant white noise beyond the smoky office. “Father, we all got guardian angels, right? That’s… in the Bible, right? I mean, I looked, and it’s there.”
“Yes,” Mukada says patiently. “The Parable of the Lost Sheep.”
Tick.
Tick.
“Look, where’s this going, Miguel?”
He chews his lip. “I met mine in Mexico, I think. My guardian angel, you know?”
Mukada blinks.
Crazy pills, Miguel thinks suddenly. He doesn’t want to take crazy pills. “I wanna go back to Em City,” he declares, standing.
Christ!
“Hold on—Miguel,” Mukada calls. “Miguel, stop.”
Halfway to the door, he shuffles to a stop and turns. “I’m not fucking crazy.”
Standing behind his desk now, hands on the table, Mukada gives a huff. “I know that, Miguel,” he says exasperatedly. “What did you remember about this guardian angel? I mean, are you saying… it made you forget something that happened in Mexico? Was it to protect you?”
Miguel’s pulse spikes. “I don’t—see, that’s what I don’t know,” he replies, every successive word from his mouth feeling absurd, even though when he’d laid out all the pieces in his head, it’d made a sick kind of sense. “I have these dreams where I’m… And that night, with Jaime. I think…”
It was me.
I did that.
The words stick in his throat.
“Miguel,” Mukada says firmly, walking out from behind his desk. His voice is low, determined as he walks over—determined to drag out the truth. “Did you give him the drugs? Is that why you’ve been feeling guilty?”
He’s just looking in the wrong direction.
Standing there stiffly, Miguel slowly shakes his head, watching Mukada come to a stop just in front of him. He clears his throat. Forces the words out, feeling his body clench up as if in a final effort to keep the truth from coming out. “I don’t think Jaime hurt himself, you know? I’ve been having these dreams. About drinking blood—” Not just that, but he’s not about to say what else to Mukada, regardless of the solution that suddenly bursts into his mind—the realisation of how he can take it all back. No crazy pills, guaranteed. “And I think this guardian angel, you know? He doesn’t want me to remember that. That I’ve done it. That I… that I did it before. Father, I think I drank Jaime’s blood that night.”
There.
His confession, permanent now if it turns out he really is just a fucking bug.
Mukada’s slightly gaping at him and Miguel waits—waits for the father’s eyes to scan over him, searching for shreds of his sanity maybe, as he swallows hard for what he’s about to do.
It helps, then, when suddenly Mukada reaches out, putting a hand on his shoulder first.
“We’ll figure this out, Miguel,” he says.
He asks for God to look over Miguel and guide him. He prays for Jesus’s light to fill Miguel’s lost soul. The Parable of the Lost Sheep. Miguel, the lost sheep. He needs to speak with Pete. They need to consult with Glo. Miguel needs help. God help him. Miguel, the lost sheep. This may be out of his hands. This—
Miguel blinks. “I know,” he says—focuses on Mukada as he reaches up to grasp the hand on his shoulder. “Father—you know what?” And this, he thinks grimly, is something he remembers all too well. “Forget it, okay?”
Miguel. Glad to see he still comes to service…
Mukada nods as Miguel lets go, and for a moment, he sways a little where he stands, eyes roving around the room in a daze before focusing again, fixing on the clock.
Tick.
Tick.
A lump forms in Miguel’s throat, watching Mukada’s eyes trail back to him, concern still there.
“Is there anything else?” he asks mildly, giving Miguel a final pat on the shoulder before stepping back.
“Nah,” he rasps. “Thanks, though.”
And, nodding, Mukada gives a faint smile as Miguel heads over to the door. “I’ll see you at service this Sunday?” he calls.
“Yeah, Father,” Miguel replies, half-spooked as the success of his fucking gamble sinks in.
Why had it worked? How had he done that?
But he opens the door and the answer is standing there, Tecuanhuey in all black, leaning against the wall in the hallway outside.
He straightens up to attention, flashing a smile that makes his eyes crinkle at the corners as he meets Miguel’s eyes—shows his teeth, canines gleaming.
“Feel better?”
*
He’s limping as they head down the hall.
Miguel observes without surprise, watching in his periphery for a couple moments of silence as Tecuanhuey moves beside him. “You’re hurt,” he points out after they’re past the busier intersection of the corridors near the dormitory units. “Still coming in for work, though. Now that’s dedication, baby,” he says when Tecuanhuey only hums in acknowledgement.
“Some pendejo took a swipe at me on my day off,” Tecuanhuey replies, like Can you believe it? He takes lead as they reach the North Wing tower, where he then he smiles and waves Miguel ahead of him.
In the icy stairwell, the mild unevenness of Tecuanhuey’s gait becomes an outright stagger.
Miguel nods, nerves jittering because he may not have the full picture—nah, that’s still out of reach—but if Mukada’s any indication, he has an idea of how to uncover it. “It hurt?” he says. Tries to keep the tremor out of his voice, but doesn’t know if it still manages to creep in.
The sound of Tecuanhuey’s laughter reverberates dryly through the cold air. “Like a motherfucker, man,” he says. “But I’m okay,” he adds, flashing a quick smile.
“Never been shot before,” Miguel muses. “Been shanked, though. Think it hurts about the same?”
Their footsteps echo, sometimes in sync, sometimes out of it, and while Tecuanhuey sways with every step up—seems to be drawing on the momentum from leaning on what must be his good side—his pace never slows as they ascend landing after landing.
“Shot?” He’s got a look of perfect confusion when Miguel looks over, and as they reach the top of the tower, Tecuanhuey turns toward Miguel with curiosity.
“Yeah, shot,” Miguel returns. “It made the fucking news, tecuani.”
Tecuanhuey’s good—doesn't miss a beat as he snorts. “What made the news? Me?” he says, teasing, “You coming down with something?”
“Don’t fucking touch me, man,” Miguel says, because there’s a faint smile tugging up the corners of Tecuanhuey’s mouth and he’s taking a step forward as if to feel Miguel’s forehead. “Know how you roll.”
What he’d done to Mukada, he’s now certain Tecuanhuey’s done to him before, the Forget mes woven somewhere in between the memories that have begun to bleed into his dreams regardless.
He’d fucking known Tecuanhuey down in Mexico.
Had probably fucked him.
Miguel’s heartbeat runs wild as Tecuanhuey raises his eyebrows, bemused smile growing.
“Okay, relax,” he says, lowering his hand and reaching into his pocket instead.
There’s that key he’s pilfered from God only knows where and rather than address the hand Miguel’s shown him, he uses it to unlock the creaky metal door that leads into another, narrower, dark and chilly spiral staircase up to the roof.
“You still want up?” Tecuanhuey asks, gesturing. He puts his palms up, too. “Ain’t gonna touch you,” he adds, and Miguel thinks there’s a fucking smirk there as he slides past, taking the steps two at a time.
Pushing out into the fresh air, his thoughts are swirling with suspicion and frustration—fucking anticipation and impatience.
He’s trying to get to the fucking bottom of shit and Tecuanhuey’s choosing to play dumb.
Outside, the sky is a blanket of gray clouds just pale enough to still glare in Miguel’s eyes. The wintry air nips immediately at his face, but he’s wised up, at least—is wearing a hoodie over his long sleeves now, and only shivers a little as the fresh air sweeps his body.
He takes a deep breath in, tasting that cold—that faint scent of ozone left over by the snowfall in recent days.
White blankets the roof as Miguel crunches across it over to the raised ledge.
So what if Tecuanhuey clings to his façade? It won’t hold up once Miguel gets his hands on him.
Tell me everything, he imagines commanding. Tell me what you are—tell me why you’re here. Tell me what you did to me.
“Ain’t fucking stupid, you know,” he calls over his shoulder as the familiar horizon beyond Oswald comes into sight. Snow crunches behind him, and Miguel pushes on, weighing what he wants to say, guessing that Tecuanhuey had heard all that shit from Mukada’s office. “Knew it was weird, me liking you. Can’t stand hacks.”
But Tecuanhuey’s no hack, and the dreams—they’re more than that.
Were real, once.
“Why did you follow me to Oz, Tecuanhuey?” Miguel demands, turning around sharply to see—
Nothing.
Startling, he stares back the way he came, his eyes meeting only a spacious white roof, his tracks through the snow the only pair he—
WHAM.
A blur of black in his periphery is the only warning Miguel gets in his distraction, and it comes too late, registering just a split second before something large and heavy slams into his side—sends him flying. Air punched out of his lungs, he hits the ground, tumbling several feet across snow until he rolls to a stop, cold against his back and adrenaline spiking through his veins.
The world continues to spin, a jumble of wiggling shapes and colors, namely gray—the sky—as—
Oh Christ—
Black—inky black—fills his view, something heavy crushing his body as the strong odor of wet earth and dead leaves washes over him and silky fur brushes up against his front.
A damp, hot breath blows against his face and Miguel feels his eyes widen as large, amber eyes flash back at him and the broad, fierce face of a black jaguar hovers unmistakably and terrifyingly close.
Its long, yellowing fangs gleam in Miguel’s direction, thick whiskers pricking against his hands as he tries to push away—scramble back.
The shadow lurches with him, a powerful jaw opening, the beast lunging with a growl.
Miguel shouts.
The thing has him by the front of the hoodie like it plans to maul him, and he’s tossed up effortlessly, his back hitting the ledge of the roof, empty air behind his head as the jaguar advances again.
“STOP, CHICO!”
Over the roar of blood in his ears, Miguel can hear his own panicked shouts as he’s dragged and pushed—grasped and released—
“Fuck!” he screams, because with another shove, snow-covered concrete swings above his head, the weight against his lower half tenuous, leaving him to hang half over the edge of the roof as any desire to kick and hit his way out of this completely escapes him.
Miguel goes stiff, paralysed with the breathless terror that any fucking second, the thing will let him go—let him drop.
He squeezes his eyes shut, heartbeat in his ears as he tells himself it’s a fucking dream—just another dream—
Thu-thump. Thu-thump.
And then he’s being pulled back, relief a short burst of warmth through his body as his lower back digs into stone, his abdomen strains, and his feet touch solid ground again.
An airy chuckle drifts above him.
Miguel’s eyes snap open to a world that makes more sense—but only marginally, Tecuanhuey looming above him, undeniably human now as he pins down Miguel’s lower half and lets his head and shoulders and much of his upper body continue to dangle over the side of the roof, just less precariously now.
“You think I’m your guardian angel?” Tecuanhuey purrs, smirking.
You’re something. Tecuani—means jaguar, don’t it?
Miguel’s mouth is dry and gaping, none of these words coming out, though, the results of his digging around folding into the silence as his breath runs ragged and blood slowly rushes to his head. The revelation that this is no dream—that his suspicions are confirmed, trickles into the forefront of his mind at the same time he feels a pressure beginning to build behind his eyes. His core burns in the meantime, his instinct caught between wanting to struggle to pull himself up, and refusing to writhe under Tecuanhuey’s grasp and risk sending himself plummeting to his own fucking death.
“Nah,” Miguel finally manages after a moment where Tecuanhuey just smiles pleasantly down at him, short hair ruffling lightly with a gentle breeze that blows past them both. “But you—”
She had walked over to the short ledge and had put a boot up onto it to peer over the side before looking back with a doubtful expression.
“Go ahead,” he’d smiled.
She was an eyesore—vapid malignance and selfish depravity—and she’d touched what belonged to him.
“That’s a long fucking drop,” she’d said, scrunching her face.
He’d shrugged. “Nah, it’s okay.”
Better off dead.
She’d been a satisfying smear on the wet stone.
“You told Howell to jump,” Miguel chokes out. “Did that for my ass.”
Tecuanhuey tilts his head, smirking a little, pleased in a way that speeds up Miguel’s pulse.
“Does it scare you?”
Miguel’s fingertips grasp at the edge of the roof, an illusion of security there. Like he might actually be able to hold on.
Staring up at the man who’s not a man, at the guy who knows him but who he doesn’t know—hasn’t been allowed to—Miguel swallows hard. “Fuck Howell,” he replies.
Tecuanhuey licks his lips and Miguel’s stomach flips. Somehow, he knows in the back of his mind, or under his skin, what he’s going to say before he says it:
“Do I scare you, Miguel?”
He’s not as fucking confident in his answer, is the thing.
The wind blows through Tecuanhuey’s hair and his tie slips from his clip, fluttering on the wind between them.
“You ain’t gonna drop me,” Miguel says tightly.
Tecuanhuey raises an eyebrow. “Oh yeah?” And as if to call the bluff, he starts to lean off Miguel’s legs—lets the slide of gravity take over, Miguel’s hand slipping off the edge of the building, arms flailing above his head and heart jumping into his throat with despair because—
“Fuck you—”
As fast as it all begins to go wrong, Tecuanhuey grabs Miguel by the calves and heaves him back up onto the edge of the roof, firmer this time, leaning against his shins with casual ease. “Fuck me?” he says. The glint in his eyes as he surveys Miguel’s reactions carries a mischievous delight that Miguel wants to slap right off his face.
Instead, he continues to dangle, face flushing—or maybe that’s just the blood all pooling with gravity, making his head swim as he reaches up and tries to hold the side of the building again. “See?” he retorts, wincing internally at the breathlessness in his voice. “Fucking asshole. Let me up.”
Tecuanhuey stares down at him, just grinning, breath frosting in the air in front of him and no signs in him that he’ll be pulling Miguel up any time soon, or that being discovered is something he isn’t enjoying immensely.
Miguel manages to touch his fingertips to a hand that’s grasping the front of his thigh, but before he can even open his mouth, Tecuanhuey clicks his tongue.
“Oh, that ain’t gonna work on me, sunshine,” he says and with an uncomfortable lurch, Miguel’s looking down at himself through another’s eyes and knows it to be true.
He’s no match—
He’s just a mortal—
He’s upside down again a second later, body jerking, a rough gasp shaking out of him as he blinks in shock.
“See?”
Miguel holds Tecuanhuey’s hand anyway. “Fuck you. Let me up.”
The corner of his eyes crinkle. “You dream of drinking blood, huh?” Tecuanhuey goads instead.
“Yeah.” The hem of Miguel’s sweater slips down as he struggles, cold air slipping over his exposed abdomen as Tecuanhuey hums and his gaze seems to linger on the slip of skin.
“What else?”
Over Tecuanhuey’s head, the swathes of gray clouds are swiftly moving, the wind picking up.
There’s a lump in Miguel’s throat, but he answers anyway—saying the part he hadn’t been willing to tell Mukada. “You.” He stares hard.
“Yeah?” Tecuanhuey’s gaze is piercing in return.
“Bein’ with you.”
In the doorway of the motel—on he knees beside a window—slipping under the lukewarm spray of a relaxing shower, washing away salt and sand and molding himself around another slippery body—
Daylight peaking in through a shaded window—
Tecuanhuey’s fingers slick inside of him, stoking his desire—
Day in, day out—
Blood flowing over his tongue—
Even now, Miguel’s dick stirs.
Tecuanhuey glances down, letting out a bark of laughter.
“Oh, muscle memory,” he says, and Christ, he wants Miguel, that flickering connection a two way mirror, Miguel seeing perfectly into Tecuanhuey’s mind, too. Feeling their lust compound.
Mutual yearning.
“Let me up,” Miguel rasps, and then Tecuanhuey’s hauling him further up, the ache in his abdomen souring with the respite in tension, lactic acid flooding his stiff muscles as the pressure in his head eases, too.
He glimpses the roof beyond Tecuanhuey once more—sees the world upright—and next thing he knows, the wind is leaving him again and Tecuanhuey’s mouth is crashing against his.
Kissing him.
Caving to that need.
Miguel sways, still half-sprawled well at the edge of the building as his racing mind catches up to the clash of teeth and the scorching press of his lips—the taste of Tecuanhuey on his tongue and the soft, smooth cold of his face.
Kissing him.
An undisguised groan escapes Miguel’s throat as he reaches out, neck straining, teeth grazing Tecunahuey’s lip as his hand finds that strip of fabric at his neck and he winds it around his knuckles like athletic wrap. No thought in his head and anticipation in his belly, he uses that grip to reel Tecuanhuey to him—urge his mouth open to lick inside before he surges up—
And stops.
A hand rests there against his chest, keeping him down when he leans an elbow against the ledge of the roof—tries to rise out of the snow.
The hairs on the back of Miguel’s neck prickle but he pushes up against the hand again anyway, nipping at Tecuanhuey’s mouth—stealing another kiss before he’s forced back down, icy ledge beneath his shoulders.
“What,” Miguel snaps, impatient for more—for action. He doesn’t move except to blink, though, his chest rising and falling rapidly under Tecuanhuey’s firm palm. Residual panic and lust and desperation keep his body hot as he lies there in the snow right at the edge of the building. “You don’t want me anymore?” Staring up at Tecuanhuey, the face of the feline that’d trapped him under its heavy body just minutes earlier feels like a fever dream. But the scent is the same—
And he wonders if Tecuanhuey knows that.
If he knows the little details that burrow under Miguel’s skin—carve themselves into his bones—would need to be fucking sanded away if Tecuanhuey really wanted to truly get away with it—remove himself entirely from Miguel’s memory.
Even just the loss of his lips against Miguel’s brings back the chill now, and the more Miguel remembers, the less he wants to give it up again.
How dare Tecuanhuey.
How dare he make him forget.
The pink in his face as he straddles Miguel’s legs isn’t from just the weather, though, and Miguel feels his irritation settling a bit at the realisation: Tecuanhuey doesn’t very much like making him forget, either.
One hand sliding to Miguel’s crotch, palming the bulge there—making Miguel hiss out a breath, his skin tingling—Tecuanhuey tilts his head and licks his lips. Lips his chops, more like.
“Want you plenty.”
His eyes are falling on him for the first time in months, catching sight of him from across the unit—the furrow of his brow—his distant gaze. He’s feeling a jitter, talking to him again, hearing his rasp—watching his mouth shape each word. Brown eyes, flicking toward him, fingertips brushing, cigarettes trading hands, a skim of flesh, scorching—
Miguel leans attractively close, eyelashes trembling, brushing his cheeks, his head bowed toward the flicker of flame, orange glowing against his skin—
He’s standing—
At the glass, staring back from the other side, impassive and just out of reach.
Beautiful. Untouchable.
Sure as hell not untouchable now.
Miguel gives a feverish laugh as Tecuanhuey’s hands curve around his waist, pushing him easily up to sitting on the ledge, where the snow’s already been disturbed, wet against his pants and against the heel of his palms as he leans back—
And jolts in alarm, abruptly cognizant that there’s fucking nothing there behind him, his fingers folding over the edge of the roof.
“Jesus.”
His heart thumps wildly in his chest, adrenaline spiking and mingling with his arousal, and then he’s not thinking much about the height or the danger.
Everything feels hot but Miguel shivers, locked in Tecuanhuey’s gaze as he kneels in the V of his legs, icy fingers brushing the bare skin of his lower belly as he unbuttons Miguel’s pants, all eager, precise movements.
The cold air barely registers.
Nah, the chill comes and goes as Tecuanhuey’s eyes finally flick away—move down, to where he soon follows, head dipping. His breath comes humid and warm through the fabric of Miguel’s boxers, and his body blocks out the cold as he nuzzles close.
Damn near kills Miguel with the anticipation.
“C’mon, baby—”
His breath catches in his chest, a soft groan rising to his lips the second he feels that gentle weight of Tecuanhuey’s lips against his dick. Then they part, mouth sliding along the outline of his cock, and Miguel bites his lip to swallow back that second noise.
His hips twitch, each second of Tecuanhuey’s deliberate tease tending the heat in his core that’s already looking to erupt.
A cold hand creeps under Miguel’s hoodie—makes him buck his hips as Tecuanhuey grasps his side, holding him steady with one hand as he pulls down the elastic of his underwear with the other—gets it just down enough to pull his dick and balls out—to lean down and slowly sucking kisses at the base of his cock, cold cheek brushing the shaft.
“Fuck,” Miguel says, the biting cold on his dick, and then damp heat;
After dropping those kisses, Tecuanhuey lifts his head—swallows him down without missing a beat.
“Oh fuck.”
A thrill shoots up Miguel’s spine—leaves a trail of heat.
It’s everything he expects, falling into place, and everything he’d yearned for—
Real now.
Happening, so good.
Goosebumps ripple over his flesh at the swing from cold to warm—at that return into shuttered memory, and for a moment, Miguel’s vision blurs and he can’t think straight at all.
Can’t do anything but to suck in a sigh and whimper quietly, pushing gently up into the heat—needing it. Needing more.
Tecuanhuey delivers, sucking, tongue swirling.
As the initial shock of lust and excitement settles over Miguel, he’s able to blink and look down, focusing on the top of Tecuanhuey’s head, to where he lifts a hand and touches soft hair, fingers carding through chilled, product-stiff strands before settling against the warm skin below.
The touch grounds; following the slow bob of Tecuanhuey’s head, Miguel’s able to anchor himself to some sense of awareness even as the silky slide of tongue and lips over his dick lulls him into an intoxicating haze of pleasure.
Everything else is numb, but this he feels, a fire roaring to life under his skin as Tecuanhuey’s mouth hugs his cock and he sucks and licks, soft wet noises accompanying his mouth and that hand under Miguel’s hoodie now skin-warmed, massaging steadily, back and forth, back and forth.
Miguel moans low, arching toward Tecuanhuey’s mouth and digging his nails in against Tecuanhuey’s scalp—feeling how it tightens the slide of his mouth down his dick—makes him run the tip of his tongue firm up against the underside of his shaft.
A rough sound rises up, muffled.
Pleasure washes through Miguel and his fingers twist into Tecuanhuey’s short strands as he takes him down deep, groaning again.
The sound buzzes through Miguel.
“God, you love it, don’t you?” he pants.
Tecuanhuey holds himself there in his throat, soft palate pressing against the sensitive head of Miguel’s dick—tip of his nose bumping Miguel’s belly as he sighs a breath out through his nose and then swallows, seemingly just to let Miguel feel his throat working from the inside.
It’s wet as Tecuanhuey retreats, saliva stringing from his mouth, but he leans down again and laps at Miguel’s cock, cleaning up, sucking kisses all over his length before taking it back into his mouth again, an eager slurp ringing through the quiet.
Miguel starts to tilt back—wants a better fucking view of Tecuanhuey’s mouth around his dick, okay?—when he feels nails dig into his side and the hand resting on his knee presses down hard.
Tecuanhuey hums, a sing-song uh-uh around Miguel’s cock that brings a strangled laugh to his throat, blood roaring in his ears as his brain catches up to his actions.
Miguel glances over his shoulder to the distant world below and lets out a huff, swallowing hard.
Christ.
“Fucking trying to kill me?” he says.
Tecuanhuey sucks his cock to that enthusiastic rhythm, inhaling wetly here and there and making hot little noises of satisfaction as he ignores Miguel.
Dick.
Tightening his grip on the back of the guy’s head, Miguel slowly forces him down—keeps him there, feeling Tecuanhuey acquiesce as he rolls his hips up—thrusts slowly into his mouth and past the tiny gagging noises, pleasure mixing with a darker thrill as he relishes that illusion of control.
Yeah, illusion.
Ain’t lost on him that Tecuanhuey could throw him off with ease. Toss him over the edge of the building if he wanted, dick still hard.
But he also knows Tecuanhuey doesn’t want that.
Not even a little bit.
“Tell me the truth,” Miguel grits out suddenly, moving his hand from the back of Tecuanhuey’s skull to his neck instead. He squeezes the cold skin, his own palm warm, and lets Tecuanhuey off his dick, a jolt of lust shooting through him at the sight of the flushed face that tilts up toward him—that pink, messy mouth. “Why did you follow me here?”
He has questions—a fucking lot of them—and as Tecuanhuey’s touch—his pretty mouth—makes those dreams feel real—gives those distant memories back that feeling of having been reality—his need for answers starts to grow.
Can’t settle for ignorance anymore, because this is good and he knows Tecuanhuey can feel it, too, so if they’d had this once before, then why the fuck would Tecuanhuey ever let him go?
Why would he make him forget?
Tecuanhuey’s dark eyes dart back down to his cock, now exposed and frigid in the air between them, but still throbbing, aching more in the cold, even, blood pumping hard.
“Just tell me,” Miguel says, words falling in a harsh whisper that nonetheless carries loudly in the thin winter air.
Tecuanhuey’s eyes smolder, desire blown wide and open in his gaze.
They had gone to the beach together one day—waded out in the ocean together, swimming beyond the tourists and past where their toes could still drag in the sand beneath them. Paddling in place, Miguel’s hand had found Chico’s under the water, fingers snagging his to pull him closer—bring them bobbing on the water together, Miguel grinning wide as his face occasionally dipped under the waves and he spit out the sea water, trading playful barbs with Chico about anything and everything.
What did he want to do later?
Where did he want to eat?
As if the body remembered what the mind forgot, Miguel hadn’t so much as glanced toward the beach before pressing a salty kiss to Chico’s mouth, soft and chaste, a smug gleam in his brown eyes at Chico’s stare.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t want me to,” he’d said, cocky and smirking as he’d swum idly away. Floating on his back, the sun had shined down on his slim, weather-worn body as he’d rode the waves.
And Chico had never been much of a fan of the sun—rarely human during the day, usually sleeping—but seeing the way Miguel had glowed on the water, his aura indiscernible because he was the light—the light to Chico's shadow—it had made more sense, then, why humans loved it enough to worship.
“C’mon, float with me, man,” Miguel had called, splashing a hand on the soft waves beside him and grinning when Chico had swum closer to take it.
The salt water had buoyed them that afternoon, their hands floating clasped on the sea between them, and then later, swinging together in the warm evening air as they’d strolled up a lonely street to an old motel.
The sun had been setting by then, but Miguel had glowed ever-bright in Chico’s eyes, and then below him, sprawled out on the sheets making their beautiful noises, fingers tangling with Chico’s against the bed.
“Wanted to see you again,” Tecuanhuey says simply, and it’s like a knife to the chest.
A knife that twists.
Leaves a lump in Miguel’s throat and a rash of prickling skin at the back of his neck as he watches Tecuanhuey lean back down and warm his dick with his mouth again.
Resentment poisons his excitement—tightens his jaw and makes him jam the tip of his tongue against the back of his teeth as his pleasure mounts regardless, spitefully overwhelming with every additional bob of Tecuanhuey’s head—every soft suck around his tip and circle of his tongue over his cock head.
That’s the part that stings: Tecuanhuey likes him.
Miguel’s dreams speak of something warm; even memories of the flow of blood into his mouth aren’t frightening, but wrapped in a sense of security and comfort—
A fuzzy recollection: Tecuanhuey coaxing him into bringing his lips to his sluggishly bleeding neck, telling him it’d be alright. That it would be good for him. Heal him faster. Make him stronger.
Didn’t he want that?
Miguel moans, pumping into Tecuanhuey’s mouth, joining the increasing rhythm of his suck as his breaths grow short and the bitter ache of his desire spreads into his chest.
“M’close—”
Tecuanhuey hums—mouth doesn’t leave Miguel’s—and when he comes, his hips jerk off the concrete and he teeters toward the edge of the building for a moment—tilts his head back and stares at the gray expanse above him, face hot and blood pounding in his ears.
God, he thinks he says, but he’s never been further from Him.
Far away.
In a forest, watching his grandmother’s hut burn, the row of clergymen and the villagers looking on.
Sinking into the green and down onto all fours to escape—keep running—as the decades melt away and the forest shrinks and buildings climb toward the sky. A war here and there. New soldiers, new weaponry.
Men and women, coming and going, leaving him and being left by him.
And then a pulsing, golden light through the dark, unaware but soon to be. Soon to be his—his prey—his project.
Then there’s that orgasmic little pressure drop through his body, and Miguel sways where he sits, mind clearer than it’s ever been.
Below him, Tecuanhuey swallows him down one last time before dragging his mouth off with a slow suck that ends in a tidy little pop. He pulls off, giving a satisfied chirp and above Miguel, the clouds continue to move swiftly with the wind.
His head buzzes hollowly, thoughts half there, half worlds and lives away.
Distantly, he’s aware of Tecuanhuey tucking his dick away for him—climbing over his lap after and kissing a lazy trail up his neck, mouth soft and indulgent against the sensitive skin of his throat.
Finding spots that make him gasp, easy.
When fingers brush his cheek, turning his face back down, he finally looks, blinking to find Tecuanhuey’s face so close.
To see him in such vivid detail—the intensity in his eyes and the mirth in his gaze before he leans closer. Presses his lips against Miguel’s, soft and gentle, that lingering taste of himself snapping Miguel from his daze.
He seizes the front of Tecuanhuey's shirt, clutching him closer and deepening their kisses into a rough exploration of tongue—a clashing of teeth, a pawing of hands.
Fuck, he’d missed this—and ain’t that funny? Missing something that up until a day ago, he hadn’t known had even happened.
All that pent up longing, simmering in his blood.
Miguel pours it out—feels anger rise up with it—slip into the surge of his desire. He bites down just to hear Tecuanhuey moan—just to know the sound again, just to taste—
They sway at the edge of the roof and when Tecuanhuey rocks against Miguel, he shoves him back, hard.
It’s not just the danger. Not caution.
“Fuck.”
It’s that tang on his tongue—that taste that shouldn’t be familiar. Shouldn’t excite the way it does—shouldn’t invigorate.
Heart thumping, Miguel staggers to his feet, pulling up his fly as Tecuanhuey winces from the ground and draws up a leg.
He rests his arm against his knee and scrubs his hand over his mouth, panting and blinking down at his palm as his tongue comes out to swipe the bloody nick in his lip. “You really gotta quit kissing with teeth, Miguelito,” he says, and looks up—beams like a fucking psycho—
Grinning—laughing.
Miguel kisses him again at the doorway and then leans there, holding the wood behind him, not just for support, it feels like, but to keep his hands to his damn self.
“You got a… I don’t know, a number? I mean, know you don’t got a landline, but—”
Guerra’s shaking his head, smiling ruefully. “Fun while it lasted, you know?”
But it’s time to say goodbye.
A week together—fucking good sex, good company.
Guerra had said at the beginning, he’s headed north, and going their separate ways is for the best, anyway. Miguel shouldn’t linger. Shouldn’t let his guard down.
They share a look—Hey, it happens—and Miguel swallows down a lump in his throat, giving a short laugh. Crazy. He’s gonna miss the guy. “Good meeting you.”
Guerra’s got that secretive little smile in his eyes as he presses his lips together, nodding. Always looking like he’s got a fucking secret. “Take care of yourself, asshole.”
Miguel snorts, pushing off the doorframe and squinting outside into the sunny stairwell beyond the motel room. “Yeah, I will,” he says. He’s got a long way farther south and—
“Wait.” Guerra follows him out of the room—meets Miguel at the top of the stairs and grabs his arm, pulling him in again as he smirks—knew the fucker was going to get clingy—
Blinks and—
His stomach grumbles as he walks into town at sunset.
Been moving for what feels like years, walking through a blur of countryside and small towns. Patchy roads and dusty ditches.
This latest town turns out to be a bigger one, colorful buildings with newer looking paint the further toward downtown that he walks. An ocean breeze blows balmy over his face as he makes his way slowly past restaurant after restaurant, glancing inside at the crowds and skipping past the ones with too many white faces.
He doesn’t know when the last time his face has been broadcast on televisions, but he’s wary even now. Knows even with the weight he’s lost—the tan he’s gained—that scar on his face leaves him easy to recognise. Matches his FBI’s Most Wanted profile.
But he’s hungry, and he’s got about ten fucking pesos to his name, so it’s time to pony up and charm the pants off some sad sack. Get a place to sleep, if nothing else.
He’s tired of sleeping on the streets.
Is happy when the guy at the outdoor bar he slips into sidles up to him before the restaurant owner can kick him out.
The guy’s been staring since he walked in—doesn’t even pretend otherwise, the creep.
Only.
He smiles and offers to buy Miguel a meal.
“Yeah?” he says gruffly.
The guy smiles a little, waving at a server. “Figure it’ll help you forgive me for gawking at you.”
Miguel blinks—softens a little, looking the guy up and down. He’s pretty okay looking. Young, Long, dark hair and a goatee. Slim face, big almond eyes—one with a droopy eyelid, but it’s okay, too. Doesn’t exactly look like a maricón, except that when Miguel says, “Yeah, why were you?”
He replies with an easy shrug—a smile like he’s not afraid to get hit: “‘Cause I think you’re beautiful. And I didn’t want to look away.”
It all comes rushing back—wave after wave, building into a tsunami-like force that threatens to bowl Miguel over where he stands.
He takes another step back, feeling as though he’s been punched squarely in the chest, his ears ringing.
If he’d forgotten about the cold before, it’s unmistakable now, sinking into his bones, numbing his body, and burning his skin.
Weeks. Months.
A fucking thousand heartbreaks at once, and Chico just stares at him with that callous smirk.
Like he hadn’t tricked Miguel. Like he hadn’t seduced him a thousand times. Abandoned him a thousand more.
A coward.
Using his fucking mind tricks. Spinning lies. Mollifying rage with a convenient touch.
Miguel had—
He lets out an angry, broken laugh.
Finally, Chico’s starting to catch on to this storm of emotions in him, eyebrows climbing up his forehead, smile fading. “What?” he says, still sitting there in the trampled snow.
He hasn’t realised.
Miguel gives a violent shake of his head, reaching up pressing a hand to his temple. “I fucking loved you,” he bursts out—chokes out, because that’s all he can say. Like a broken record: “I loved you.” Skipping and skipping, unable to reach his next line.
Wanted to be with you. Wanted you.
Should’ve meant something. Should’ve counted for something.
Chico blinks, slow, and maybe there’s a twinge there—a stricken flicker of remorse or guilt. Maybe Miguel’s imagining it.
Watching Chico climb to his feet, straightening his tie and put his hands out, there’s an acrid taste on his tongue.
“Miguel.”
Don’t be angry.
There’s no keeping him calm this time around, though—too much space between them.
Not enough.
Miguel’s hands curl into fists at his sides and he glares stonily as Chico steps closer, his own eyes deceitfully earnest.
“It’s not—”
THWACK.
No words—he lets Chico feel his fury—his hatred. Delivers it in one strong hook to the jaw that sends Chico spinning, stumbling back toward the edge of the roof and onto the ground just before the ledge.
Miguel’s knuckles sting following the blow, the moment coming and going in a smooth, almost unremarkable burst of aggression. Even the low grunt of Chico’s surprise hangs longer in the air than the sound of Miguel’s fist meeting his flesh.
Pained.
Good.
Shoulders hunched and frost clouding the air in front of him, Chico raises his head, his expression there immediately taking some of the wind out from under Miguel’s newly found wings.
Christ.
Wide-eyed and lips parted, there’s really nothing there that should draw Miguel in, except that it does anyway; he looks at Chico’s shock—the way he reaches up, touching a hand to his own jaw, and there’s just something there in his eyes that fucking shatters his anger.
He wants to kiss Chico again.
No.
Maybe.
The faltering fire of his wrath must show, or else Chico fucking approves somehow, because the corner of Chico’s mouth starts to curve once his initial astonishment passes.
Miguel’s heart does a traitorous fucking lurch, blood thundering in his ears as memories cloud his mind—kick up a humiliating, silt-like haze that folds back into contempt.
He’d been a fucking game, he reminds himself.
“Don’t know why you followed me here,” he says harshly, shoving down that yearning—stamping it out underfoot with the brutal disdain it deserves. “But you fuck with my head again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
That, at least, he believes to be true.
He could do it. Could make Chico bleed. Could hurt him.
No skin off his nose, right? After everything?
He could do it.
He could.
Then Chico’s tongue darts out—swipes across his blood-encrusted lip as he nods and—
Miguel’s mouth waters, heat dropping through him.
Muscle memory, that’s all.
He spits out a curse and spins on his heel, Chico’s laughter echoing in his ears.
tawd on Chapter 1 Sat 19 Jul 2025 04:15PM UTC
Comment Actions
9cbffs on Chapter 1 Sun 20 Jul 2025 10:59AM UTC
Last Edited Sun 20 Jul 2025 11:07AM UTC
Comment Actions
wawamouse on Chapter 1 Tue 22 Jul 2025 11:51PM UTC
Comment Actions
Leeleenobody on Chapter 1 Sun 20 Jul 2025 07:40PM UTC
Comment Actions
wawamouse on Chapter 1 Tue 22 Jul 2025 11:47PM UTC
Comment Actions
9cbffs on Chapter 1 Fri 08 Aug 2025 09:55AM UTC
Comment Actions
MyHouseTheClouds on Chapter 1 Tue 22 Jul 2025 10:25PM UTC
Comment Actions
wawamouse on Chapter 1 Tue 22 Jul 2025 11:43PM UTC
Comment Actions
Raidana on Chapter 1 Tue 29 Jul 2025 03:03AM UTC
Comment Actions
wawamouse on Chapter 1 Tue 29 Jul 2025 03:25AM UTC
Comment Actions
9cbffs on Chapter 2 Fri 08 Aug 2025 08:40AM UTC
Comment Actions
9cbffs on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Aug 2025 12:39PM UTC
Comment Actions
Leeleenobody on Chapter 2 Tue 12 Aug 2025 05:23PM UTC
Comment Actions