Nightcore
NC-17: Gay Sex
At five in the morning, before the sun comes up, the world is balanced on a razor's edge between night and light. Shadows rule like kings, liquid and deep, and the streets seem as cold and winding as any serpent. It's a dark sort of magic, casting its spell as most of society sleeps, a shrouded hour where a lucky few steal a last, sweet dream.
In fall you can find frost everywhere in the high and northern places, a cold tyrant whose iron rule turns flowers into brown shells and sharp burs, leaves into blood and gold.
So it is in the mountain town where I live as October approaches its brilliant zenith and the season shows its colors. If only I could bring myself to show mine.
I got into my battered grey Camaro and tossed a pint of cheap vodka on the passenger seat, my breath fogging in the car's chill. The windshield was webbed with ice crystals. Dawn's first fires in the eastern sky loaned them a rainbow glint.
It was a typical end to another graveyard shift, but I had made it to the weekend at least. It was Friday morning. I would drive home, get drunk and sleep through most of the day. Tonight...
You'll what? Sit in front of the T.V and drink? Read a book by the fire?
I thought about downtown, about a certain nightclub I had parked across from probably a thousand times on purpose. I could never quite bring myself to get out of the car and go inside.
Maybe on Halloween, I could wear a mask...
Part of me loathed my cowardice.
I pulled into the driveway a little past sunrise, the world shades of gold. My house is a pleasant white two story with a lawn that's crowded by aspen and juniper. Falling leaves fluttered down in the breeze, tumbled and rattled in the street.
Usually these are the moments I treasure most, when I'm most at peace. Not today. Today, for some reason, I felt restless. Today peace was elusive, a phantom in my life's opera, wearing a mask that hid something tortured and twisted.
As I shut the car door I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the window. A tired coyote in a gray racer jacket looked back at me, keys in one paw and the bottle of vodka in the other, a long, furless scar over his right eye.
When I was a kid my drunk step father t-boned someone with his pickup truck and I wasn't wearing my seatbelt. I wound up doing a Superman impression through the windshield, the force of the crash sending me over the other car and into the street in a storm of safety glass.
I should have died. I didn't, but I have some scars to remember it all by. There are also times when loud noises will remind me of it. The collision sounded almost exactly like what passengers hear when a jet liner's landing gear hits a runway.
I climbed the porch steps. I had put a few pumpkins on the railings but hadn't gotten around to carving them. I usually never do. They seemed to glow, fat and ribbed and brilliantly orange in the morning light.
Beyond the front door it's a ghost house. There's almost no furniture. The walls are blank. My contributions to interior decorating consist of an armada of bottles on the kitchen counter, a cot and some plastic bins for clothes to break the monotony in the bedroom and a small flat-screen T.V in the living room that has a couple of folding chairs for company. I hide my laptop in an air-conditioning vent in case someone breaks in while I'm not home.
My mother was a crack addict for some years and I grew up in bad neighborhoods. Even though she got over her drug problem she was never the same afterward. One condition that arose for her post drug apocalypse was what I believe to be hoarding, though I'm not completely sure. All I know is that she kept so much shit around she forced me to the other side of the spectrum. If you can't load your car in ten minutes with all your worldly possessions and be on your way you have too much.
I sat in one of the chairs and cracked open the pint, savored the cold, sour fire of Fleischmann's. I took the remote from the cup holder and turned on the T.V.
News anchor Anderson Cooper was talking about Ebola. Things were getting worse in Africa. FOX pundits were discussing the mysterious disappearance of North Korea's dictator. No one knew where he was. NBC was covering Ferguson. Ranks of riot police in crash helmets and gas masks beat nightsticks against their black, bulletproof shields.
I turned the news off after a couple of minutes, started pacing, kept on drinking until the room began to spin.
Somehow I found myself lying on the floor, the carpet of the living room becoming as magically mobile as the flying one of the thief prince Aladdin. It carried me up and away, over shifting sands of senselessness to a palace of luxurious oblivion.
There wasn't a princess waiting for me at the end of my rainbow (and of course there wouldn't be, not for you, because you're-) only the drained feeling I always get after waking up from a drinking binge. Alcoholics don't get hangovers usually, not in the conventional sense. I wasn't much of an exception.
I drifted over to the kitchen counter and found the bottle floating amidst the fleet of countless others. Only the dregs remained. I glanced at the stove clock and discovered I'd lost myself in another time warp, over seven hours had passed. The shadows of the house were long and sinuous in the light of the dying day that slipped through the blinds, late afternoon marching tirelessly towards dusk. Then, inevitably, would come night.
Night...night falling over Nightcore. The club is opening in an hour...
"Shut up," I snarled aloud, looking at the blank and sweeping emptiness of home, the sea of glass on the counter sparkling with a thousand colored stars in a sunbeam swirling with dust.
Before I realized it I had swept several bottles from the breakfast bar, my fangs bared and ears flat. Most of them shattered when they hit the kitchen tiles and my pulse was roaring. "I'm okay," I said to myself, sinking to my knees before the glittering shards like a supplicant paying penance, my voice echoing off the bare walls. "I'm just fine."
I wasn't though, and I knew it. It was eating me alive from the inside. Fantasy can't stand in for reality forever.
Nothing lasts forever.
I took a shower. I hoped steam and warmth would wash away my doubts, though as it turned out it didn't help at all.
Naked I stepped into flowing heat, my erection throbbing. I tried to ignore that, lathering my fur with shampoo, forcing myself to try and focus on nothing. It didn't work. Standing there wet and covered in froth all I could think of was sex.
There was a dream panther with me then, damp and lithe with dog tags around his neck, the intensity of his yellow eyes locking with mine as he pressed against me and the heaviness of his barbed dick brushed against my hip. I could smell his arousal, hear the beat of his heart as it started to race, feel his paw as he swept my tail aside and forced my legs apart.
"It only hurts at first," he promised breathily as he nuzzled my cheek, sliding his cock up my ass.
"Oh fuck," I whimpered, trapped between him and the shower wall, my muzzle meeting the slipperiness of the misty tiles.
He had a bar of soap in his paw, a concave and teal block of Dial. He started jerking me off with it, the slick wetness tracing fires of bubbly pleasure up and down from my sheath to my swollen tip. He timed his thrusts to the rhythm of his wrist and I realized he was right. It only hurt at first.
Tongue lolling, every muscle locked, I was lost in him. He fucked me faster, one arm around my neck, the soap bar gliding silkily over my balls as he purred in my ear. His dog tags jingled, tickling my back. "Why run from it?" he whispered, panting. "Don't you like it?"
"Yes," I whined, close to release. I started moving with him, breathing hard, his musk swirling around me. I looked back at him, saw him smile.
"Fuck yeah," the panther said, kissing me.
Shivering with the warmth, the excitement, I lost it. Reality returned.
I realized I stood alone in the humidity, the heat, the bar of soap in my own paw. It slipped from my shocked grip and landed in the tub with a waxy thud. My vision seemed to narrow until it was all I could see, the water washing away the bubbles and the hot, wet dream. I took a step back, touched my temple.
"No," I said softly, disbelieving. "No. That can't be. It was real. It was."
Some while later I toweled myself dry, glancing sidelong at myself in the foggy mirror, not truly trusting what I saw. There was the me I wanted to be...and the me that was, occupying the same space, the same dimension. The confliction was tearing me apart.
Tonight. Tonight I'll get out of the car and go inside, I promised myself, putting on fresh clothes and shrugging into my jacket.