Joe and Buzz (original) (raw)

More backstory! This time about Joe's prior significant relationship aka his first huge guycrush. Not worksafe.
Many thanks to hibem and devikun for beta!

Summer 1986

Buzz couldn’t wake up all the way, drifting somewhere just outside his own body, dizzy with more than just a hangover. Somebody had turned his bed around or maybe moved the magnetic pole while he slept and now he couldn’t find his way back.

Sunlight was beating down on his face, heavy, scratchy and smothering. There was a soft patch of shade near his ear and he tried to roll his head to cool more of his skin.

Moving grounded him to the place he was in, made him feel the cramp in his legs and cold pins and needles in his left arm. Something heavy was resting across it, squashing muscles and veins against the bone. Someone was breathing against his side and sweating into the lack of space between their shoulders.

Headache rippled through his brain in a wave of small explosions as he struggled to recall the night before. Hot quick tongue in his mouth, long hair splayed on his stomach, and then… then…

Joe.

He swallowed. His throat was lined with sandpaper on the inside. Yeah. They'd gone fishing. It was great. Nice evening, not too hot, nice spot Joe’d found, quiet and pretty. He couldn’t remember if they caught anything, though. If they did it probably wasn’t good for eating by now.

And then there was skinny dipping, chasing whiskey with beer they had cooling in the shallow water, smoky, useless fire they’d built on the sand, and then he'd said he was horny. And he was, so fucking horny, all that booze and stars and the sounds of river, and Joe laughing and shaking sand from his long black hair. Buzz said they should drive to town and pick up some girls. Or just one, he was fine sharing with Joe, Joe was his good buddy, c’mere lemme hug you. And then.

He opened one eye and tried to focus on Joe’s profile through his net of tangled hair. Joe’s mouth was open just a little, showing a flash of teeth between his dry lips. The one eye Buzz could see was shut, moving restlessly, the eyelid tinted blue with too much booze and too little sleep.

The weirdest part of it all was the part where Buzz failed to feel weird. All he felt was a throbbing headache and the fervent hope that they still had some beer left. Maybe the freaking out was still coming up.

His right arm was trapped between his somehow not naked hip – oh yeah, they'd put their pants back on after the swim because nobody wanted to get an assful of sand – and the heated wall of Joe’s rustbucket of a truck. He wriggled his hand free, scratched at his balls and brushed Joe’s hair away from their faces.

It would be a waste to freak out over something so small, because he really liked the guy. Since graduation his old friends had been slipping away, in a hurry to sell their best years for mortgages and pension plans, to get weighed down by wives and litters of brats. Nobody wanted to stop and just live, see the world, do something with their lives besides making the hamster wheel spin faster. All the jobs he'd tried so far were the same. Regulars were thoroughly zombified and spent what little brainpower they had left on figuring out how to work as little as possible without quite getting fired. Temping college kids sampled the life of a working man with squeamish fascination, like tourists wading through a Turkish marketplace. But Joe seemed alive, normal, fun; a tall lanky guy with a sleek black ponytail snaking down his back from under his hard hat. Quick smile, dark clever eyes, maybe Latino, or a half. He swore in Spanish when he dropped a beam. Buzz went over to say hi on Joe’s very first day at the site, not letting his expectations build up too much.

After he introduced himself, Joe had stared at him for a full minute, looking certifiably retarded and letting the mayo from his sandwich drip over his fingers. Buzz was just about to shrug and leave when he spoke.

They talked through their lunch break, and then for an hour after work, strolling back and forth between the two different bus stops they needed to wait at. He told Joe about his plan for travelling through all the states by hopping from one seasonal job to another. The plan still had holes and needed a lot of fine-tuning and some starting capital, but Joe listened avidly, though he said from the start that he wouldn’t be able to join in for at least another two years because of family stuff. After work he let his hair down and it had swayed in the breeze like the flapping wing of a blackbird, making Buzz feel cooler by association. Buzz drew a map in the dust by the bus stop and plotted a route, marking all the places he had dreamt about since he could remember. Oceans, mountains, deserts, lush forests up North. His game of Anywhere But Here, with realistic schedules and bus fares all figured out.

They hung out again the next day, and the day after, and then the weekend was rolling in and for once Buzz wasn’t looking forward to it. He longed to be twenty-one tomorrow, or better yet yesterday, so he could drag Joe to a bar downtown, blend with the local colour, drink pitchers of beer, breathe in second-hand smoke, and dream about everything they could do, all the faraway places they could see. But his fake ID was barely good enough for buying cheap liquor from dark, dingy convenience stores where the clerk wouldn’t let go of the shotgun even while ringing a purchase through.

“Hey, we could go fishing,” Joe'd said when he told him that. “I’ll bring the car and the gear, you try to score us some booze. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

At eight sharp Joe pulled up with a screech to where he was waiting on the sidewalk, with two six-packs and a bottle of the nastiest whiskey in the world concealed in his backpack. And now, in hindsight, he could explain his strange uneasy feeling when Joe’d leaned over, swung the door of the battered white truck open, grinned at him through the fall of his hair and said:

“Hop in, sailor.”

But then he'd hopped in and they drove through the Warehouse down to the river, out of the city, upstream where the air was soft and shuddering with the fading heat, and stopped on the sandy shore. He'd anchored the beer cans in the water and uncapped the whiskey while Joe chose a spot and set up his fishing rods. Joe thrust a barbed hook and a jar of something gross and squirming at Buzz, apparently expecting him to touch it and then kill it by impaling.

“Waaait. Since we’re not minors, don’t we need a fishing license or something?”

“Oh yeah,” said Joe, deflating a little. “Aw, come on, nobody ever comes here, we’ll be fine.”

And nobody did show up, and they'd had a hell of a good time, soaking their toes in the water and watching the sunset flow from orange to purple and then paint everything dusky monochrome, listening to their voices and laughter echo back from the mercury ripples of the river surface. And then there was the dark, and the impossibly high sky dotted with alien worlds, and cool water lapping at his naked skin. Alcohol burned in the pit of his stomach, making him want something he couldn’t name, want it so badly. And he was so horny. And apparently so was Joe, because he was sprawled across his chest, and his tongue was wriggling inside Buzz’s mouth, and his left hand was squeezing Buzz’s hardon through the wet denim, and fuck that was nice. Maybe they didn’t need that girl after all.

That sobered him up a little, but the constellations were swirling madly above, making it hard to see anything. Joe was shivering all over, probably cold after the swim, kissing Buzz’s stinky boozy mouth with his own stinky boozy one, his breath ragged and failing like he’d just ran a mile.

“What are you doing?” giggled Buzz, splaying his hands on Joe’s back to keep him warm and stop the shakes. “Man, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Nothing,” said Joe with a dumb queasy smile, and thumbed the button on Buzz’s jeans open. “Nothing.”

That felt even better, cooling air on his hot cock and Joe’s damp palm, and he wanted more kissing. He caught a fistful of hair swinging by his face, yanked it down and stuck his tongue right into the cool wetness of Joe’s mouth.

Joe moaned loudly, sending a ticklish wave through the roof of his mouth and the back of his throat. His cock was hard against Buzz’s hip and Buzz wanted to touch it – somehow it wasn’t enough to have his dick stroked when his hands were empty. But Joe pulled away and slid lower, or tried to before his arms buckled and he fell back down, laughing breathlessly.

“I can’t believe it,” he mumbled into Buzz’s chest, stroking open lips against Buzz's skin. “Buzz Lowell. Can’t fucking believe it.”

When did I tell you my last name, Buzz wanted to ask, but then Joe shifted again and wrapped his soft, soft mouth around Buzz’s overheated dick and all the stars went out at once.

It would've been so easy to imagine Joe was a girl while he crouched there, stroking Buzz’s balls and thighs, licking and sucking hungrily, sloppily, long hair curtaining his face from view. But Buzz couldn’t remember why he should want to imagine that. He threaded his fingers through Joe’s slick black locks and rubbed their silky coolness against his stomach as he came, feeling weightless, woozy and so happy.

Joe coughed, rinsed his mouth with beer and spat out in the sand.

“Sorry,” Buzz said. His tongue didn’t really want to move for anything except kissing. “Was gonna warn you. Just - uh.”

“’S okay.”

“You want one?” he asked, watching reflected starlight dance in Joe’s eyes.

“No,” Joe said after a pause and plucked weakly at the fly of his jeans. “I kinda. Um. Already. Wanna beer?”

Buzz sat up to take the offered can, and sand slithered down his back, peeling off his skin like aged plaster from a wall, falling in clumps off his wet hair.

“Well,” he said. “If you want one later, you know who to ask, yeah?”

Joe'd given him a bashful drunken grin and they had shared the last mouthfuls of whiskey, and after that everything was a fuzzy warm blur. He remembered huddling together by the dying fire, and later groping Joe’s firm ass in the truck bed, and something faintly salty on his tongue that he couldn’t really taste, too numbed by the booze.

Joe turned onto his side, sleepily kicking at the blanket, and settled again with his cheek squashed against Buzz’s shoulder. He looked different when he was asleep, without his usual smiles and swagger. Very pretty, a little sad. Much younger, barely sixteen, maybe.

“Son of a bitch,” said Buzz and yanked his captured arm from underneath Joe’s body. The kid jumped and bolted up, blinking at him in something close to horror.

“You’re Joe Rosario!” declared Buzz. “Fuck, can’t believe I didn’t recognise you. We went to school together! Don’t you remember me? You used to follow me around like a lost puppy. What was your actual name - Jesus?”

“Javier,” he said. He did look his age now, pale and gloomy, looking nauseous. “Yeah, I do.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

Joe grimaced and shrugged, staring down.

“Fuck. Little Joe Rosario. How old are you now?”

“Seventeen. Next month. I’ll be a junior this fall.”

“Right, yeah. So hey, how’s our lovely Miss Thompson? Still teaching Math and wearing skimpy sweaters?”

“Naw, she’s on maternity. She married that fireman guy.”

“I hate that fireman guy.”

“Yeah, we all hate him,” Joe said with a weak smile and started rummaging around for his pants. He was completely naked, and Buzz felt a little cheated that he couldn’t remember all of yesterday. Maybe it would come back to him.

He attempted to think back to his school days, but it all seemed so far away, small and dull compared to the now and the future. Fuck. Little Joe Rosario. The small skinny boy with unruly hair who cheered for him the loudest from the bleachers and trailed after him everywhere, trying to catch his eye. No matter how hard Buzz tried, he couldn’t quite match him up in his head with this cool long-haired guy who was taller than him by quite a few inches and had sucked his cock on a sandy beach, under the starry black sky.

He wondered if that’s what it was back then. If that, yesterday, wasn’t just a drunken stupid thing, but exactly what little Joe Rosario had wanted all along.

“Look, I didn’t mean to lie to you or anything,” said Joe, shaking out his sand-caked jeans. “I just thought if you knew who I was you wouldn’t want to hang out with me, ‘cause I’m this stupid little kid from school, you know?”

“Yeah, I get it, it’s all right.”

Joe gave a little embarrassed laugh and glanced sideways at Buzz’s open fly where his cock was peeking out, thick and half-hard. There was a shiny long black hair stuck to it, wound loosely around the head. Buzz plucked it off and blew it off his finger, watching it sail away on a gust of wind.

“I guess we got pretty drunk last night, huh,” said Joe philosophically.

“Yup. No big deal.”

“Yeah, no, totally.”

“So, wanna do it again before we head back?”

Joe’s sullen face lifted and lit up, blooming into a sweet, wicked, sexy grin.

“Sure.”