On Him All the Time

On Him All the Time

on him all the time

This is a slash fanfic based the shorty story `The Mud Below' by Annie Proulx, found in the collection Close Range.

Playlist with all the songs mentioned in the story: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0fOuHqH2FLGeyHaM8AnpeW?si=b8db14c1c9bd4b37

Diamond hasn't broken anything, this time, but he's pulled or sprained just about everything.

He's thirty-three. He's an old fucker as far as the bone game's concerned. Makes the eyes bug out their heads when he keeps on turning up each year. He's heard there's bets, every show, on if it's gonna be his last. He still gets cheers and whistles from the crowds—his looks haven't rusted much, which helps, even if he's all broke up inside. He still catches a brace of bunnies now and then, though if truth be told these days he's usually too tired and sore to bother. But he can't help seeing in them all something of the aspect of vultures, holding their breath each round for the final pull, when the chamber comes up loaded.

It was in January of that year, on Fox Business or some shit he was only watching because changing the channel would require movement. He swam back to semi-consciousness in time to hear the suited jackass say, `So, Pearl Felts—is that how you say it? That's right? Why don't you tell us what it's like to be the youngest investor in North America to make—'

He hit the biggest button on the remote, so fast he didn't catch whatever crazy figure that googly-eyed journo cunt was gonna name, a million, a billion, a gajazillion, what the fuck ever, what the fuck difference does it make to Diamond. He trembles to remember it, and not just from the ill-advised painkiller cocktail sloshing through his system. It was like a damn ghost.

The motel—the first one he found that looked like the owners wouldn't care if he never left—is his home till he's healed up, or until he runs out of money for the room. He's too chicken to check his bank balance, but he's sure it'll be the second one first. He hadn't been winning many lately, and he was never a saver. Till then, it's bedrest and aspirin, the only prescription for cowboys without health insurance. Give it a few months, the sawbones said. Hibernate like an old grizzly.

Bears don't fuckin hibernate in summer, Diamond had growled and limped angrily away.

It could be worse. It only really hurts when he actually does something, which he tries not to. There's a convenience store attached to the motel which sells him all his worldly wants for prices which aren't too extortionate considering it's the only store for miles. The kid that works there's a queer who blushes and fumbles Diamond's change and won't meet his eyes half the time and the other half won't look away, all round-goggled like a moonstruck calf.

Still, it doesn't bother Diamond as it once would have; it annoys more than it disgusts and enrages not at all. Maybe it's the times, or maybe he's getting mellow with age, or maybe putting somebody else through the wringer loses its appeal when you've just been through it yourself. Or maybe he's just tired.

It could be worse. There's even a porn channel for when he's in the mood, which he tries not to be too often, given it's pay-per-view and blowing his load to supremely mediocre fuck-flicks is one thing, but blowing his budget another. There really isn't much else to do, though. Mostly he wallows and he broods. He sits by the back window that looks out from the highway to the wild Wyoming ranchland over the border. He watches the earth-swallowing sky and the wavering plains and the changeless mountains behind—the desolation that is his home. He even tries his hand at sketching some of it with a pencil and pad he bought at the store. It was an art he abandoned in high school, having calculated that a girly hobby was not a handicap he needed in addition to his height. For all the good it did. The sketches turn out flat and cartoonish, and he gives it up after a couple days. At one point, in a moment of desperation, he even attempts to read a book. He picks out the most lurid-looking of the smutty seventies paperbacks on the shelf under the reception desk, avoiding the leering eye of the wrinkled manageress, but has an allergic reaction to the first line. So, back to wallowing and wanking it is. The sensation of the minutes passing is unutterably strange. The hamster wheel of the rodeo circuit normally didn't give time for your balls to catch up to your prick, let alone to think about your life choices, whether the ones that lie ahead or behind. He hasn't thought about after, what happens when the money runs out, what happens if a miracle occurs and it doesn't, but the months do and haven't healed him. He's got a smorgasbord of painkillers and his old friend Jack Daniels, if it comes to that, and till it does he's not thinking about it.

The air-conditioner packs up a week in and the air is like swimming in ballsweat, like being in a sauna twenty-four seven. Like being back in Redsled. He mentions it at the reception desk a few times, gets a few variations of escalating nastiness on `Well, I don't know what you expect me to do about it', then drops it. The official policy, according to a laminated card on the lobby wall, is against extended stays, and he doesn't wanna push his luck. Especially not with the money the way it is. In the mornings he visits the antediluvian swimming pool to see if anyone's shat in it yet (they always have), and thereafter spends the highpoint of the hot days in a semi-secluded corner of the lobby, working his way through the stacks of magazines, skimming through the many adverts and fewer articles for chicks, watching dusty travellers depart and the other deadbeats who haunt the place drift in from wherever they spend their worn-out days. He carefully dog-ears the pages with good pictures, and when the manageress vanishes ponderously into a backroom for her lunch hour, he jerks off into the trashcan, his come hitting the metal with a tinny thud, like rain on an iron roof. It feels clean and good, like he's expelling bad blood through his dick. At the end of the afternoon something tawny and titted—the owner's niece or cousin's daughter; he forgets what—flounces past, and his eye follows. His evaluation is purely theoretical; that morning he just about passed out reaching round to scrub his back in the shower, and he's decided sex—the real kind—isn't on the agenda till next month at the earliest.

Goddamn he needs it, though, now the riding isn't taking his all out of him. He even finds himself sizing up the queer behind the counter when the kid turns round to fetch a pack of Lucky Strikes down from a shelf, standing on tip-toe to show off a pair of firm cheeks like the two halves of a melon. From behind he could almost be a twiggy, dudeish kind of chick, with his thin freckled shoulders and long fall of cherry-toned hair. He stands on tip-toe, fumbling to the back of the shelf, and the mounds strain against the thin polyester of his shorts.

Now that, Diamond thinks as the boy gropes for his cigarettes, is an ass I'd stuff like a Christmas turkey. Two whole fists, right up to the elbow.

Diamond takes the smokes from the kid's love-slick hand, and then, on a whim, walks off without paying, bouncing half a hard-on in his jeans. The kid doesn't say anything, and Diamond doesn't look back. When he gets back to the room he comes into the sink, thinking about splitting that melon.

As he's wringing out the last cloudy dribbles, the phone on the bedside table rings.

When he picks up there's a woman's voice, unfamiliar. `Am I speaking to Diamond Felts?'

`Yeah,' Diamond grunts, too fuzzed from his orgasm high to be wary. `Who's this?'

But the woman hangs up without answering.

Come the month's end he's starfished on the bed, tv off, mind still thrumming, horny and hard, but too sleepy to do more than fumble at his cock. Multiple aches across his body have subsumed into one unhappy nimbus of discomfort that he knows will at the lightest provocation kindle into pain. In the next room the radio is playing country music. Diamond always hated country music.

He's angry about the noise and the aircon and his injuries, and morose about the lack of sex and lack of work and lack of money, and anxious about all of it, a wide net of worry that drags in past and present and most of all the future, or rather the lack of any discernible trace of one. He hates the idea of crawling back broke and battered to his mother, but knows that's what it may come to, should both wallet and nerve fail him. His mind at midnight is familiar ground by now. His thoughts have the astringent taste gum acquired when you'd been chewing it too long. He wants to sleep and be rid of it all for five hours, maybe six, but dreads the prospect of the next day as one dreads a tooth extraction.

While strung between these unhappy poles, there's a knocking at the door that sends him several inches out of his skin. 1:13, the alarm clock blinks at him.

Meanwhile the knocking is loud, aggressive and hasn't stopped. From another room, maybe the one that's blaring Tom T. Hall, there comes a loud but hazy injunction to put a cock in it, or maybe a sock. Whoever's at the door rattles the handle instead.

Diamond goes over enemies made, debts outstanding. Nothing leaps to mind. There's a pistol in the drawer of the bedside table. He hadn't figured he'd have to use it on anybody else.

`I know you're in there, Diamond. Open the door.' A man's voice. Young-ish? It doesn't sound like a junkie with an ice-pick. A junkie with an ice-pick wouldn't know his name. A sheriff? He can't remember doing anything illegal recently. Immoral and of dubious taste, sure, but nothing worthy of a midnight arrest.

Unless it wasn't something he did recently.

His blood chills, despite the tropical climate of the room, remembering how he had tangled legs with the unwilling wife of Myron Sasser in that bullish first year when he'd been hard-up enough to fuck a hole in a brick wall. Remembering that stranger on the phone. Could it be the long arm of the law has at last been twisted into action on that account? But surely not. If that shoe was going to drop, it would have done so years ago.

Or maybe it's the motel, come to toss him out. Maybe his check has finally bounced, and this is the knock he's been waiting for.

If that is what it is, no point putting it off. The sooner he finds out who's there, the sooner he can either get rid of him, or be got rid of himself. Diamond lurches out of bed and goes for the door, then remembers he's not dressed. He digs through his bag for his blue silk bathrobe, a memento from flusher days that he hasn't yet had to wear in this wet furnace.

`Yeah, all right, I'm coming. Jesus, keep your nuts on.'

He's barely slotted the key in the lock and twisted it when the door shoves open, in his unsteady state almost knocking him on his ass. He blinks into the buzzing blue outdoor light, and a man is there. The haunted feeling is even more strong, though this man and his brother look so little alike he wouldn't have known him if it hadn't seen him on tv. But who the fuck else would be showing up at his motel room at one in the morning?

He has their mother's colouring—except his hair's blond with brown streaks, and short, styled city-slick. He has their father's height—six foot three, if Diamond had to guess. A full foot on him. Fucking figures, don't it. Still kinda beanpoley, but that seems to go with the grey suit that fits him too well to have come off a rack. The only thing he shares with Diamond is the hazel in his eyes. And the look on his face when he drops his suitcase just inside the door and says, `Hi, fuckhead.' Yeah, Diamond knows that look.

So. It's been thirteen years. Diamond didn't visit once. What the fuck does he say?

`How'd you find me?'

Pearl tilts his head to one side, one hand still in his pocket. The light pouring in around his head is too bright for Diamond's blinking eyes to make out much of his expression. Then, instead of speaking he half-sings, half-whispers along to the song that's playing.

`If you love somebody enough
You'll follow wherever they go
That's how I got to Memphis
That's how I got to Memphis.

Somehow never thought I'd find you this close to home.'

`That don't answer the question.'

`No, it don't.' The way he says it, mimicking Diamond's roughneck way of talking, Diamond's ninety percent sure he's mocking him, but there's something else too, in the inflection of his voice, the intensity of his gaze. Something worse. Or maybe better.

He tries a different question. `Why now?'

`It's how long it took, to hunt you down. To get the kind of resources in life I needed to do this right. You musta seen me on the news, right?'

`Never watch it.'

`Yeah, that figures,' Pearl mutters, looking down, his face falling into shadow.

`Wait, Pearl, I -- do what right?'

Instead of answering Pearl moves out of the light, into Diamond's space. The skin of his face is smooth and tight as latex, but there's blue smudges below his eyes and little ellipses around the downturned corners of his mouth. He looks so childishly serious, it would be almost comical. If it weren't so serious.

`You look fucking awful.'

The corner of Diamond's mouth lifts into a half-grin despite the pounding in his heart. `I feel worse.'

Pearl reaches out like he wants to touch Diamond's face, but hesitates, his fingertips hovering inches from his skin.

`You always did bruise up easy.' His voice is wistful, with a strange undercurrent that almost sounds like envy. Almost all the Wyo has been smoothed out of his accent.

Abruptly, Pearl wheels round to shut the door. He turns the key and slips it into an inside pocket of his jacket. Diamond is about to ask what the fuck he thinks he's doing with his key when he says, without looking back, `Why don't I give you a massage, take the edge off it for ya?' His tone has suddenly warmed by several degrees, but underneath the forced friendliness is a strong suggestion that this is not an offer Diamond can refuse.

His temples tighten--the preliminary stage of a motherfucker of a migraine. It's all too much for one in the morning. He almost wishes it had been a sheriff. `A massage? What?'

Pearl swings back to face him, scrutinising him again, closer than before. `You grew your hair out.'

Diamond shrugs, for some reason defensive. `It's a change.'

Pearl slides his fingers through the roots and holds the side of Diamond's skull. `Longer reins.'

Diamond's not sure he likes the implications there, or the way his brother's touching him, but doesn't push him away. He's too tired to fight, and, he realises, doesn't want to. He doesn't want to fight his baby brother. What he wants, but can't admit to wanting, is to ravel back those thirteen twisted years to the day when Pearl had said, Diamond, you can't go yet, and Diamond had gone anyway, following the footsteps of his father before him, and felt bad about it but not bad enough, not as bad as Pearl clearly did, and has, and does. He's driven how far to find him? And after thirteen years he shows up with a hi and wants to give Diamond a massage? This can't be it. Pearl may not be saying much that makes sense, but his eyes haven't left him once. Diamond doesn't have a good feeling about this. But he doesn't exactly have a bad one, either. He had a dream once—not the weirdest he's had, though there was dancing and galaxies and spiders, but the most unsettling, because the emotion it left him with was one he still doesn't know how to name. Something between anticipation and apprehension. No longer knowing what is going to happen, or what to expect. No hopes, no fears, just waiting, ready to cross the threshold.

Pearl breathes in, leans in and Diamond tenses.

There's a sudden, startling sound from somewhere close by. A shrill electronic rendition of Für Elise. Pearl slides a tiny silver cellphone from his hip pocket and flips it open. As he speaks he looks straight at Diamond. 'Yeah, no, I've got him.' He might be talking about a runaway dog.

`Is that who called me?' Diamond asks. For an irrational second he wonders if the woman was Pearl's girlfriend. Fuck, for all he knows she's his wife.

Pearl snaps the phone shut and slides it back into his pocket. Diamond starts to pull away, needing space to think, to breathe, to begin to process the weirdness of it all and Pearl's grip on his head tightens, then relaxes. He brushes past Diamond to stand aimlessly in the middle of the room, his hands clenching on air. `Christ, it's like a bathhouse.' His cheeks are already glowing pink, and there's a bead curtain of sweat draped over his forehead when he glances over his shoulder at Diamond, who hasn't moved.

`You know, massages generally work better if you take your clothes off.' His brother is trying so hard to sound like he's not freaking out, and failing so abysmally. And why is he fixated on the massage thing? Why doesn't he cry or hug him or punch him or something?

`Pearl, are you okay?'

Pearl looks at Diamond like that was the stupid question teachers tried to convince you didn't exist. Diamond has to tamp down a defensive `What?' Then Pearl blows out an irritated breath. `Just--do what I tell you, Diamond. Please, do what I fucking tell you. I can't— you have no idea how fucking hard I'm--'

What are you talking about? His mind goes to the key in Pearl's jacket and then to the pistol in the drawer, and then to the possibility, looking more and more like a probability, that Pearl is here to hurt him, maybe even kill him. And if so, he accepts it. I'm sorry, little brother.

Not sure what else to do or to say, Diamond does what Pearl told him. He turns his back to his brother and tugs off the robe, then stands with the silk bunched in his hands, facing the closed door, conscious of his dinged-up body as he hasn't been since he was standing in the doctor's office.

`Shit. That brahma really fucked you up, didn't he?'

Now he knows Pearl is looking at him, and a sizzling grid of electricity moves over his back, raising hairs up to the nape of his neck. Leaving a prickly feeling like cobwebs on the skin. The spiders again.

He turns around and Pearl lifts an eyebrow so blond it's barely there. `You need to take it all off. Have you even had a massage before?'

Diamond snorts. `Yeah.' Something in that syllable must be sufficient innuendo, because Pearl's face goes stony like a mountain in spring.

`Are you seriously—and I've just fucking got here, like--whatever. Just take your fucking clothes off. All of them.'

Diamond's only wearing his boxers and while he normally cares no more for modesty than the next cowboy, his brother's weird insistence on getting him naked is just that. He scratches the back of his neck and Pearl huffs again. `For God's sake, we're brothers.'

Exactly, Diamond wants to say, but doesn't, because it won't make sense. Why should he be self-conscious around Pearl? Hasn't he changed enough of his diapers? Yet he knows down to his bones this is different. This man is not the boy he knew.

While Diamond dithers Pearl slips out of his jacket and carefully drapes it over the back of a chair. His belt, shirt, shoes (creased black sneakers, the kind a highschool kid would wear) and trousers follow. His body is slender, but not soft, sort of like the car parked outside, the one Diamond glimpsed before the door crashed shut, shining like platinum in the moonlight, like money nobody staying here has ever in their wildest lottery-winning daydreams imagined.

Diamond wants to say he doesn't see why Pearl needs to strip off as well, but his brother's been acting like he's not sure whether he wants Diamond dead or the bull that put him halfway there and Diamond, in all honesty, is gunning for the latter. And it is about as hot as the inside of Satan's ass.

When Pearl drops his pants Diamond sees he hasn't been shortchanged anywhere, either—if anything has been longchanged, wonders if their mother ever told him as much. Diamond tries not to gawk, but the heft of his cock in his shiny satin briefs is kind of...aggressive. Christ, is he hard? Or is he just that big?

`You take those boxers off or I will,' Pearl says, not joking.

In the end Pearl has to, because when Diamond curls over to pull them down, he straightens up immediately, lip bitten white from the effort of not screaming. Pearl's hands are deft, and disconcertingly strong.

Once they're off Diamond turns away to cover himself and Pearl, after an odd moment when his hands seem to catch on his thighs, lets him go. He lies spread out on the bed, naked, on his front. Pearl climbs on, knees astride Diamond's thighs. `Fuck, you're short,' he blurts out, as if he's actually surprised.

`Just noticed?' Diamond says in a tone he tries to keep coolly sardonic, though Pearl must feel his whole body tensing up, hear the humiliation in his voice.

`No, I just... You were taller than me when you—when I last saw you, that's all. God.' There's wonder in how he says it, and something else Diamond can't name, except that it's not contempt. Still, it rankles.

`It ain't catching if that's what you're worried about', Diamond darts out, like the flick of a viper's tongue.

`What? No, that's not—'

Pearl leans down, and when his breath blows past his ear, wafts round to his nose, Diamond, used to loud, violent drunks, realises his brother is damn near warped out of his mind, has been the whole time. Which makes things make at least a little more sense. And makes this even less of a good idea than he thought. Fuck, he wishes he were more awake to deal with this.

`Didn't mean it like that', Pearl mumbles. But whatever worth this non-apology has is immediately voided when he squeezes the spots above Diamonds hips where all the road food and soda goes. `Got a little chub on ya, big bro.

`Called tactical padding,' Diamond yawns in reply, though his cheeks burn.

Pearl shifts further down Diamond's body. There's a moist warmth and then a kind of sharp pinch north of his left hip, and when he jerks around Pearl is lifting his mouth off the red ring-brand he just made.

`You just bite me?'

`Yeah.'

`What the fuck.'

Pearl shrugs. `Wanted to.'

`You—wh—'

`Lie back down. I'll do your shoulders now.'

Pearl doesn't say anything for a while. His hands keep working, gentle, responsive to Diamond's grunts when it feels good or curses when it hurts like a stick up his prick. Diamond doesn't believe in physical therapy any more than he believes in the psycho kind, has never had a massage that didn't jump straight to the happy ending. But under his brother's smooth, sure hands, like the slow working of a miracle the pain fades and the pleasure brightens. Diamond is so thankful his erection is buried in eiderdown. He hopes to God Pearl doesn't tell him to turn over.

After a bit Pearl shuffles back down the bed, hands resting just above Diamond's ass, kneading the flesh in mini-circles. When Diamond twists around to look at him again, he's gazing around the room as if seeing it in all its shitty glory for the first time.

`Just how many sluts have you screwed in places like this?'

It's a rhetorical question, but Pearl's voice is low and tight, and Diamond feels for some reason like he owes his brother an apology.

`Don't know.'

The hands move down to his ass; fingers dig in, sparks earthing through Diamond's dick into the mattress.

`Yeah. Guess you wouldn't.'

To distract himself from his own embarrassment, Diamond mumbles, `How come you even know how to do this?'

Pearl exhales. `I imagined doing this. You'd be all sore after a ride, and I'd bring you home and lay you down and make it all feel better. Then when I was sixteen they had these classes in high school.'

Kind of a weird fucking thing to imagine there, buddy.

Diamond is so close to sleep he's not sure whether what he hears next is truly what he hears, or what some twisted piece of his mind thinks he wants to.

`So damn hung up on you, Diamond. Since forever I been hung up on you.'

`No', Diamond says, twitching his head from side to side, but even as he denies it he knows it's true.

After a pause he sighs and says, `Go to sleep, Di. We can talk in the morning.'

Up till now Pearl had been kneeling upright, so he wasn't actually sitting on Diamond. But now he must figure Diamond is close enough to oblivion he no longer needs to, because he settles down onto Diamond's ass. There's something long and warm and hard riding up the small of his back, and Diamond's last thought as he falls into the dark is, shit, is that his dick?

Diamond wakes up because someone is fucking him.

Whoever it is is bigger than him, which isn't hard (but he is, so fucking hard amid the pliant interior of Diamond's body) -- and may just have started—must have, there's no way anyone could sleep through the kind of asspounding he's getting—but is hammering away like he's been at it all night.

Whoever it is? Is he renting his ass by the hour now? Who the fuck could it be? It's Pearl. Of fucking course it's Pearl.

The man groans, and the voice is unmistakable. As if he needed the confirmation. Because when it's family you know, no matter how much time it's been. And just like that his veins ice over.

He has a man's virile member in his behind and he has never. Never even thought. And not just a man. His brother. His baby brother Pearl.

But maybe because it is Pearl, or maybe it's just cause his dick is fat as a fucking power pole (girth, not length, is what counts, he read in one of those chick magazines, though Pearl, from the feel of it, has plenty of both) it isn't horrible. In fact, it feels fucking good.

If Diamond had ever thought of buttsex at all, it was along the lines of queers can't be all that sissy, cause holy hell that shit's gotta hurt like a passing a stone. And despite the clichés, Diamond's never thought of sex as anything like rodeo. Women are too small, too soft. Not enough meat on them; not enough muscle. Nothing like bulls, if anything like riding fucking marshmallows. But this is different. Pearl may make his living juggling numbers but his body's hard-built and strong. With the state Diamond's in, he feels like the soft one. And he doesn't hate it as he ought to.

Yes, having a very large and very hard penis moving very fast in his ass does hurt, and not just a little, but the pain is so insignificant compared to the rest of how it feels, the catch and drag over his stretched-out sphincter, hips pummelling his asscheeks, rhythm like a steam drill, hands compulsively smoothing up and down his sides.

It's hot, so hot he's being slowly stifled, the only point of coolness the metal band of Pearl's wristwatch scrubbing over his ribs. Pearl's bulk, slim though it is, is forcing him into the mattress with each backbreaking lunge. Yet he feels very light, as if the weight of Pearl's body is the only thing keeping him from floating away.

`Fuck, Diamond.'

Whether this is an exclamation or merely a summary of the situation, Diamond isn't sure. He stopped being sure about anything when Pearl walked in.

Pearl's head drops down as he slams in, right up to his fuckin throat by the feel of it and Diamond gets a sinusful of expensive cologne Pearl's too young for, and chokes.

`You awake, Di?'

Diamond grunts in reply. Pearl stops moving and Diamond thinks he's gonna pull out, but instead he slams in harder, drives in deeper, shocking words out of him.

`Jesus, Pearl. If you were that fuckin horny you coulda asked for a handjob.'

`Diamond, I spent months driving around just about every podunk town in the state to find this stinking motel, and it wasn't for a fuckin handjob.'

That same weightless, giddy feeling is back, and a heaviness building behind his balls like floodwater in a dam. He had no idea someone could do this to another person just with the words coming out their mouth. `You figure you got a right to somethin, then? A right to me?'

`Damn straight I do.'

`Damn straight don't got nothin to do with it. Hell, straight ain't even in the picture—'

Normal people would have put a hand over Diamond's mouth if they wanted to shut him up. Pearl stuffs four fingers down his throat.

`Shut up and take my cock, you mouthy shit. Feel that, those are my fuckin balls up in your taint. Brewin up a mighty load for ya, boy.'

And for whatever reason, being called `boy' in that still-boyish voice sort of flips something over inside his head. Holy shit. Is this the same kid who'd been scandalised when Diamond said `calf-slobber pie'?

Diamond's rode this ride long enough he's pretty much got fucking down to an art. There's no artistry to this, to how his brother fucks him, just raw need and the dammed-up lust of decades finally breaking loose, and Diamond's holding on to what he can to keep from being swept away.

In and out and in in in, chest chafing against his back, arm around his neck and ragged hot breath in his hair and his brother is railing the absolute fuck out of him, pumping like he plans to die tomorrow. Diamond winces at a thrust that feels like it lands somewhere under his ribcage, and because he has to assert some sort of control over the situation he says, `Don't mind—unh--doing it with a midget?'

`Don't mind? Diamond, if you knew what you do to me. If you knew what your runty little ass does to me. You'd run a fuckin mile.'

Diamond shrugs as best he can while lying down, keeping his voice cool as one of their mother's slimy cucumber salads, ignoring the drumming of his heart. `Am I running?'

Pearl cinches both arms around him and comes to a rest balls-deep in his behind. Cock swelling and contracting in sync with the pounding in his chest. Diamond's own firm length wedged at an uncomfortable yet pleasurable angle between himself and the mattress. `You stupid little fucker', he growls, only slightly out of breath. `Love ya so damn much.'

Diamond gets a twinge that isn't in his back this time. It should be him holding Pearl in his arms and saying that. It should be him taking care of his baby brother.

In the interlude of their coupling there is music. The radio is still playing next door. His grandpa, Diamond remembers distantly, couldn't sleep without it.

It's Johnny Cash, the only country singer he can stand to listen to, and for a moment his deep baritone, like steak on a black eye, raw yet soothing, fills the space that words cannot.

Oh, I never got over those blue eyes

I see them everywhere...

Diamond closes his hazel eyes, feeling wetness behind the lids, and then on the back of his neck. He reaches around to cradle Pearl's head, tightness in his throat, pressure behind his eyes.

Pearl's words are half-audible vibrations of piercing closeness, mumbled straight to the heart. The brush of lips against his skin is somehow even more intimate than the throbbing of the cock in his ass. 'I was so mad at you. So fucking mad you can't--'

He smooths Pearl's hair, soft like duckling down, soft as his skin had been as a baby. 'Shhh. Shhh, it's okay, kiddo. It's okay, sweetie.'

'Wanted to hurt you, Di. Wanted to--'

He chokes off once again, shaking his head under Diamond's stroking hand, which isn't too steady itself. When he finally calms himself to the point of speech, his voice is deep and raw with a truth that wounds worse than bitterness. `Thirteen damn years and you weren't there.'

Diamond cries. Jesus, when did he last cry and it wasn't from a bust rib but what lay behind them? Damn, but he feels like shit, and not just because the drugs are wearing off and he's literally getting fucked in the ass.

Now it's Pearl's turn to play comforter, moving his hips again, slowly building up to that incandescent point of pleasure. `Listen—listen, Di. Here's the good news: we've got all the years that're left. All of em, and we're gonna be together through em all, because—' Pearl sounds desperate and young, yet terrifying in his determination for all that. `Because if you think I'm gonna let you outta my sight ever again, you—' Pearl slams in scary-deep and squirts, blowing out what feels like gallons of come, and let's that finish his point for him.

Diamond is jerked awake by the sound of a door slamming. There's a pause, then a soft, annoyed, `Shit.'

When Pearl sees Diamond's awake he comes over and sits on the bed. `Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you.'

By the sallow light of day Diamond can tell Pearl is no longer roostered. He wonders what that means. What last night meant. Are they going to pretend nothing happened? He gropes for something to test the waters.

'The aircon's working', he says, realising as he says it that it is. The room doesn't feel like a pressure cooker anymore.

'I spoke to the management.'

`Fuck, I did that. Really all it took?'

Pearl's elisive shrug indicates it probably took something more than that, but Diamond doesn't push. He's too grateful for the incredible, miraculous coolness.

He ought to say thank you, but the words won't come. His mind is a maze and his mouth is a desert.

He gets his smokes from the bedside drawer. The pistol is gone. He decides this too he won't mention as long as Pearl doesn't.

When he lights up Pearl wrinkles his nose. 'You started smoking.'

Diamond takes a long drag and blows a gritty cloud his way, feeling a teasing mood unexpectedly take hold.

Pearl's nose wrinkles more. 'Have to get you off those.'

While Diamond smokes he rustles angrily through the cupboards and the assorted trash scattered around the room. `There is not a scrap of food in this place.' He whirls around to glare at Diamond. `When the fuck did you last eat?'

`Uhh...' Diamond tries to remember. He's sure it was sometime in the last three days.

Pearl gives a disbelieving huff and moves over to kick at the empty bottles clustered in the corner. `Oh, yeah. Yeah, I see. Fucking great. You can't live off smoke and whiskey, Di. Jeez, between this and riding bulls, it's a wonder I found you in a motel and not a cemetery.' He sounds genuinely angry about it and Diamond genuinely feels bad, though fuck knows why he should. It's his life, ain't it? If he screws it up, no skin off anybody else's nose. Or so he thought.

'Do you even drink, Pearl?'

'No.'

'Drugs?'

'No.'

'Come on, all rich people do drugs.'

'Not me.'

'Jesus. You don't drink, don't smoke, don't get high, don't fuck. What the fuck do you do?'

`I did you last night.' Pearl throws it out like a challenge, pushing back his shoulders and setting his jaw. His face is so young but the expression it wears is so grown up it hurts to look at. It's like seeing double: the boy who is the only brother Diamond ever knew, and this man who walked out of his past a stranger and means to stay. This man who fucked him and apparently isn't ashamed to own it. Thirteen years. The thing is, he hadn't thought about it, or her, or him. That's why it worked. Cowboys are made for riding and rutting, not thinking. His mind is like a nest of tumbleweeds; the more he tries to unraddle things, the more tangled up they get.

After a beat Pearl's stance softens. `Before that? Make money. Think about you.'

Diamond raises the cigarette to his mouth with a jittery hand. `Huh. What a sad fuckin existence.'

Pearl doesn't say anything, just regards him steadily, and after a beat Diamond's own words hit him like a blast of buckshot. The cigarette burns down to an ashy stub between his fingers as he sits and stares. It's like his insides are being hollowed out with an invisible ice cream scoop. Is this what it feels like to feel another person's pain? He's known few things worse.

He hears rather than sees Pearl pad over to the bed. `I'm gonna go get some food, okay.'

Diamond clears his throat, not looking up. `Okay.'

There's a sigh, then Pearl squeezes the back of his neck and drops a kiss in his hair. `I'm really happy to see you again, Di.'

Pearl moves away, and he hears the door open, but it doesn't close. When he raises his head, Pearl is standing in the doorway, hesitating with his hand on the handle. `I'm gonna lock the door behind me, okay. I know I really shouldn't, in case there's a fire or something, but I just--I can't.'

`It's okay, Pearl.' Nothing is okay, not now and not what happened last night, but maybe if he pretends otherwise the act will become real.

Pearl massages his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger, looking pained. `And in future if—whenever you go out, I need to know where and how long and basically I don't want you going out on your own—without me, I mean. Little things like restroom stops are okay, I guess—even then I'd rather go in with you, or—and y'know, I know what this sounds like, but...' Pearl drops his hand and heaves out a heavy breath, still talking to somewhere high on the back wall. `It's like, I just found you, y'know? And you really didn't fucking make it easy. And I know you're on board with it now, or at least you seem to be, but I can't, I just can't risk fucking—anything, and boy, if you did try to go AWOL, that would _really—_but anyway, let's not go there. You know I fell asleep last night imagining hunting down every other person you had sex with and murdering them, like some frickin psycho? But anyway, the point is, this is how it's gonna be for— a while. Until I can be okay with it not being that way. So­—so, that's how it is. And I will not be arguing about it with you. So.'

`I understand. I understand, buddy. Truly.'

Pearl exhales again. `Okay. I'm going now. I wrote my number on that paper on the table if you need it. See ya, honey.'

The door crashes shut.

Honey? It's what a fifties housewife would call her husband. It's so weird. Pearl is so weird. And adorable. Also completely insane, because holy shit what the fuck? But even his paranoid obsession is somehow—whatever. It makes Diamond feel good, to know someone cares about him—needs him, that much. It's been...forever since he had anybody to miss him when he was gone.

He finishes a couple more Lucky Strikes, then pops some painstoppers, because he's definitely gonna need them after his impromptu midnight workout. Then he swills a mouthful of Jack and brushes his teeth because neither nicotine nor fentanyl are what you want to taste, or be tasting of, first thing in the morning.

After taking a piss he takes the opportunity to open Pearl's suitcase because he's curious, shoot him. What does a multi-whatever carry in his luggage anyway?

The suitcase is a tasteful dark leather, the fancy kind that has a combination lock on it. Four numbers. He tries the year Pearl was born, then the year he was born. Then he tries the year he left home for good, and that does it.

It turns out a multi-whatever carries pretty much the same shit as everybody else: clothes, toiletries, some electronics. Except it all looks plush like it came out of the pages of an airport catalogue. One thing stands out, or rather several things, neatly folded and tucked into a side pocket all on their own. White and blue star-spangled bandannas, each an identical twin to the one Diamond lost in that jackleg bar outside Greybull.

Just as Diamond's trying to parse this unexpected discovery there's a snick of a key in the lock. Diamond drops the kerchief like it's the business end of a branding iron, and dives back into bed.

Pearl strides in with two paper cups in a cardboard cupholder in one hand and two plastic bags hanging off each arm. `What're you still doing in bed, big boy?' He sets the coffee down, shrugs off the bags and then his clothes.

Diamond blinks. `Another massage?' he asks dubiously.

Pearl gives him a sly grin from under a fluffy curtain of freshly-tousled hair. `Nah. I just like being naked around you.'

`You a nudist or somethin?'

`Somethin.' He exhales as his briefs come off and he gives his schlong a couple tugs. `Really I just like makin you look at my dick.'

He strides toward the bed, and Diamond is definitely looking. Even dangling soft it's about the size Diamond's is hard, and Diamond is no shrunken violet. But Pearl is apparently lucky enough to be a shower and a grower. He'd swear it gets fatter with each swing, and his butthole puckers up. But Pearl doesn't flip him over for another ass-blasting. Instead, he rolls Diamond out of the sheets, hands him a scorching cup of coffee wrapped in napkins, and sets him up on the bed with a mountain of pillows under his back. Pearl takes a sip from his cup, makes a face and tips the rest in the toilet. It is terrible coffee, but Diamond drinks it. Something tells him he's going to need every scrap of energy he has to deal with his brother. But for now he seems to be in caregiver (as opposed to comegiver) mode. When Diamond's stomach makes a disturbing liquid sound Pearl heats a Kraft mac and cheese in the microwave Diamond's paying extra for and watches him eat it. Diamond watches him back, sitting on the bed still ass-naked (Diamond has his boxers on, to protect his delicates from molten pasta fragments as much as modesty), not a hair on his cheek or his chest, hardly a one on his balls, holding his fat fuck-ready dick like God screwed it on personally.

Cocky little shit. Did I look like that?

`You getting off watching me eat?'

`Could get off watchin you do jest bout anythang, sweetpea,' Pearl says, putting on a dumb cowboy twang, but also sounding like he means it. `Sich a durn purdy thang.'

Diamond rolls his eyes even as his heart kinda melts a little.

So Pearl watches Diamond eat, and Diamond watches Pearl jerk off while he watches him eat. He tries not to stare too openly, but it's hard. It is hard, and massive, which he already knew, but seeing it is something else. It's a fine long thing, sleek and powerful like Pearl's body, like the Mercedes parked outside. He doesn't know if it's the drugs or if he really was a fag all along, but it has a presence all its own. Everything about it mesmerises: the way it sways slightly to one side, the glistening clear fluid pooling at the tip. The ripple of the skin as Pearl's hand moves up and down. The smell. Fuck, Diamond can smell it from the other end of the bed. He carries on eating, but has to move the tray off his lap.

Diamond's gotten down to the last sodden dregs when Pearl says, "Hey, hold up.' He plucks the plastic tray out of his hand, holds it under his prick, which he rattles furiously for a second and then fucking comes in the mac n cheese.

He hands the tray back to Diamond, who takes it automatically. He stares at the slimy come-coated pasta.

`Well, go on. I made that for you, so you better finish it.' Pearl's face and voice are deadpan, but his eyes are bright.

Diamond is speechless. It's one of those things where the outrage and incredulity are so great he doesn't even know where to start, so he doesn't start at all. Instead he eats it. He doesn't have a clue what mac n come tastes like, and after his first bite he still doesn't because the taste doesn't even register, but even though the food is half-cold it feels like fire all the way down. All the way down. What the fuck has his brother done to him that this kind of disgusting shit makes him feel this way?

He can't answer that, so he chews, and swallows, and when it's all gone he licks out the tray. He licks out the tray, thoroughly, noisily, until it's so clean you'd think it went through a dishwasher. He still doesn't have words, but if Pearls so much as pokes him he's gonna cream his boxers. He thinks he can guess what he does with those neckerchiefs.

Pearl doesn't touch him. Instead, he asks, `Was it good?' in the most innocent voice you ever heard.

Diamond licks his lips thoughtfully, then says, `Better than Momma's cooking.'

Pearl yaps out a laugh, and he's already turning Diamond over on his stomach.

`Pearl, wait, we gotta talk.'

`We can talk.'

`Not with your fuckin dick in my ass!'

`Well, why not, shorty?'

`Pearl.'

`Di, babe, I gotta, I'm so fuckin hard for you right now.

`That is exactly what we're needing to talk about.'

Pearl plumps back on the bed with a huff, suddenly pettish like a kid told he can't ride the plastic broncs at the mall. `Fucking what?'

`Fucking me when I was asleep is what. Last night, what you did was...' Forcible entry is what comes to his lips. Another ghost from the past. He swallows.

Pearl casts his eyes down, looking troubled. `I wasn't gonna. I just got so—and you were so...' He lets out a torrential exhalation. When he looks up not an atom of doubt is in his face. `Who the fuck am I kidding? Yeah, I raped you, Diamond. I came halfway across the country to rape you. And I'm not sorry about it.'

Diamond is taking very few breaths, feeling things draw to a point. `Why not?'

`Thirteen fucking years is why not.'

`That don't make any sense', he says. It does, though. The mirk of his mind has distilled into an uncomfortable clarity.

`I didn't know any other way to show you. Would you have listened to a lecture? Held your heart while I got down on my knees? Thought so.'

Pearl seems so sure of this and Diamond's not sure of anything anymore—the few certainties he held were demolished along with his rectal virginity. So, for now he's willing to let it be. Who would have thought being buttrammed by your kid brother beat slowly rotting into dust in a dead-end motel?

Diamond lies down for his little brother and it feels all right. Pearl parts his thighs and works himself inside him, and very soon it feels much more.

In the end it's not till the afternoon that they have the inevitable fight. Not about the sex, but about rodeo. Because giving up his ass is one thing. Giving up the only life he's ever wanted...

`You are going to kill yourself. And you're a bigger fool than even Momma thought if you think I'm going to let that happen.'

`Don't see how it's any a your business,' Diamond shoots back, like he is eighteen and having this conversation with their mother again.

But he's thirty-three, and Pearl, who is not their mother, leans in till Diamond has nowhere to look but his hazel eyes, the twins of his own, and says, very low and precise as a shiv between the ribs, `Di, if I have to buy out every rodeo between here and Canada to stop you, I will.'

`You that rich?'

`I'm gonna be.'

`I ain't going back to her. `

Pearl rolls his eyes and Diamond can blink again. `You fuckin idiot. Of course not. You're going back with me.'

`You care that much?' He means it to sound callous, but finds when he says it his face is running down tears.

`Yes. Yes, you fucking idiot. Christ sake. Could you never have asked me that before?'

Diamond doesn't know what to say to that. His chest thumps like his old enemy beating at the doors of his brain, but it's not that at all, something completely different, something the opposite of it, something he as yet has no name for. `What you said before. I never had a woman in one of these places for more than two hours at a time. Never wanted to. Guess now I know why.'

Pearl nods, takes the explanation as no more than his due, but takes it.

`What about—' Diamond starts, then pauses, because this is painful, though God knows why it should be. `What about you?'

Pearl looks at him a way a kid brother has no right to. `Diamond,' and all at once he sounds like their mother lecturing him, `because of you I haven't fucked anything but my own hand. Ever. I know you were a virgin till you were, like, twenty, but I'm twenty-three years old and those are some serious blue balls to carry, man.'

`I was nineteen, you little shit', Diamond mumbles, but he's too caught up on what he's hearing to inject more than token venom into it. Stunned by just how serious about this whole incest (Jesus, that fuckin word, but there's no way around it) business his brother is.

`Put everything into my work. Thought, if I couldn't have you, I might as well have every fucking thing else.' Pearl's chuckle has more than a tinge of desperation. `Fuckin fool. Should have known it'd never work.'

The guilt works into Diamond like a surgical knife, slow, precise, and necessary, shredding away his pride, and cussed stubbornness, leaving intact his love, leaving him open to the change his brother is bent on bringing to his life.

`Anyhow, now I've got you. You hear me, I've fucking got you. So you'd best buckle in, cowboy, because this is gonna be a long fuckin ride.'

Diamond breaks up laughing, which turns into cussing when his brother shoves into him, too inexperienced to really know what he's doing, but sweet as cherry pie all the same. And, moreover, he's as good as his word.

They do it every which way, including some Diamond has never even imagined. From the back, from the front, from the side. Cowgirl, appropriately; doggystyle, spooning. Lying, sitting, kneeling. Diamond on top, which is tiring, or on bottom, which is suffocating. It's good, though. It's all good.

Pearl is careful at first to make sure his limbs are arranged so they're not hurting him, but once he's sure, away they go. For someone who was a virgin until last night, he's remarkably creative in bed. Thank God for young'ns and their internet porn.

Come suppertime he's sitting on Pearl's thighs, Pearl with his hair pulled taut in his hand like a roper, bending the arc of his back until he's sure his spine will snap with each brutal, driving thrust. Goddamn, he fucks like a beast.

Pearl's body is pleasantly warm against his, and the light fuzz on his legs sends tingles down his cock. There's no way he could pretend it was a woman, and no way he wants to, not now. Pearl is tireless, but Diamond ain't bucking off till he does.

While Pearl's nailing him like the Dow-Jones depends on it, Diamond thinks about how their mother hated his rough talk around her precious polished little Pearl. Thinks about the fact that this is the biggest fuck you to her he's thought of since rodeo. Doing it. Doing Pearl. Doing my big baby brother. Actually, Momma, he's doin me. And he does me real fuckin good, too.

Fuck, he wishes she could see them now, wishes they were at home, making it on the dinner table before her frosted-bitch glare, her precious gold-rimmed plates shattered on the floor.

That thought of their mother's disapproval, stupid and petty as it is, rids Diamond of any remaining inhibitions. He takes just as hard and just as greedily as Pearl gives, now. He puts some slut into it, rolls his ass like he's getting paid and at the same time constricts so Pearl comes with a cry, all the fresh-squeezed juice squirting up his inner walls, and Diamond for once feels like his name.

It's the same euphoric charge as when's he's riding a bull, but a million times hotter, a million times brighter, and it doesn't die away, but grows all through the night, as Pearl holds him and kisses him and loves him until he wonders that the sheets don't catch fire off his joy.

Diamond wakes in the night, hurting and alone.

`Prrrl?' he rasps into the stale silence. His mouth stings as it does when he's been chewing the inside of his cheek in his sleep.

There's no answer, and the anxiety comes gushing back down his throat. He goes corpse-stiff on the mattress.

`Pearl?' he says again, praying to gods he doesn't believe in that it's not true, that all of it wasn't just some cruel drink-drug-dream. Because if it was he doesn't know if he can cope, this time. It'll be one divine comedy that crawled too far. His mind reels from Pearl, sitting cosy and content in his big city townhouse, never thinking once of the deadbeat big brother who walked out on him, to the pills on the bedside table and the pistol that's still in the drawer.

`Here, man.' A voice, light but scratchy with sleep, says, and it's Pearl, it's his brother, in the room, on the bed behind him, already moving a hot possessive hand over his thigh.

`Thank fuck', he says, too relieved to be embarrassed.

`Told ya, not getting rid of me. Not even if you try.'

Thank fuck for that, too, he thinks, but doesn't say. He rubs into Pearl's Pearl, trying to say it without words. Pearl reels him in and holds him while Diamond breathes deep and thinks. Thinks about what it'll mean to have someone on the back of his saddle for the rest of the ride, and what it'll mean to let that someone hold the reins. What it'll mean to never do rodeo again. To live in one place. To get his kicks in a bedroom, not an arena. To not be alone.

`Only for you, Pearl', he mumbles. `Couldn't give it up for nobody else.'

If somebody slurred that at him at three in the morning with no context he wouldn't have a fucking clue, but Pearl seems to get it, if the long kiss to the nape of his neck is any kind of answer.

In the morning Diamond, struck by the lately unfamiliar reek of sex, stumbles to the bathroom for a long shower. Pearl stumbles in a little while later and makes it longer.

Diamond, when he steps out of the bathroom, the slipperiness of Pearl's come inside him, the sting of Pearl's teeth on his neck and arms and chest and back and thighs, feels a kind of way he hasn't since he was eighteen and shaking out of his skin with horniness, sort of like being in the foothills of an orgasm all the time. He feels like he can do anything, like anything could happen and whatever it is will feel good as fuck. His cock is still heavy and semi-horizontal; the feel of his hands brushing over his own body is a turn-on. He wants to stick fingers in his ass to feel where Pearl fucked him. Fuck. Whatever Pearl had he's caught it, swallowed it like a pound packet of Viagra. It's like he's young again, like a goddamn honeymoon. His old stone heart is shattering with love.

For the first time he wants to screw someone he actually likes as a person. He actually cares about someone other than himself, and what's more that someone cares about him back, just as hard, if not harder. And it's Pearl. Fucking Pearl his kid brother, whose diapers he changed, whose boo-boos and cheeks he kissed when other kids weren't around, who he loves so much, who he always loved as he never did any thing or one else, and now sees killing that love killed the best part of him. But here he is, Little League Lazarus. Apparently those holy boogers had something after all.

It's too much good luck to really believe in. But maybe he could try to, just for a little while. Maybe it doesn't have to end in the mud after all.

Pearl, when he steps out, is naked, supple and soft. Their eyes meet and in about five seconds he's not so soft anymore. Diamond tries to say it with his look, what he can't just yet with his lips, and sees an answering need smoulder in his brother's face. Pearl throws his towel over the ceiling lamp, takes a flying bound across the room (thank fuck it's carpet), bowls Diamond onto the bed, breath knocked out, and in no time at all they're at it all over again.

Diamond says, laughing through the bastard ache in his belly. `How we ever gonna get to—to wherever the fuck you wanna take me? We ain't never leaving this damn motel.'

Pearl, shower-shiny and grunting like a slut in season, says, `Your fucking fault, you bitch. Just too fucking tiny and cute and fuckable. Goddamn.'

He bashes his teeth against Diamond's shoulder, his legs tremble and all the gunk Diamond washed out is getting speedily replaced. But even that doesn't slow down Pearl much. He dumps, and carries right on pumping.

Diamond is truly feeling it now. Going from anal virgin to bareback pro in twenty-four hours is a little too much, even for an old rodeo hand. He's pretty sure his colon has cockburn.

`You sure you didn't take nothin?'

`Nothing but you, babe. Your face and that ass and that sexy little stink could keep me going for days.'

`Fuck you talking bout, stink? I just showered, you asshole.'

Pearl shakes his head, and his shoulders shake too, jarring Diamond's chin.

`Don't mean that. Mean you. You dumb bitch. Don't you know you got a smell? Everybody does.'

`Like what?'

`Like saddle leather. Like sulphur. Like animal, a little bit. Like everything good in the world. Like something that was made special for me.'

`In your head, freak.'

Pearl sort of shrugs without shrugging. `Probably. But God it makes my dick hard. You know when that started? The smell thing, I mean, not you, you were pretty much forever. "All rodeo cowboys got a little tang to em," you said, and fuck if that wasn't true. You did reek, like, urgh, gross, but also like my dick was gonna explode if I didn't get it in you that fuckin minute. Wanted to make you stink of me. Was fuckin this close to jerking off under the table. Me and Momma had a fight about changing your sheets after you left.'

`Like I said,' Diamond murmurs happily. `Freak.'

He snuffles up to Pearl's neck and pulls a long, theatrical sniff. `Last night you just stunk a that shitty cologne.'

Pearl lets out an indignant and highly undignified squawk. `You know how much that cost, you broke-ass sunavubitch?'

`You wait till you got hairs on your chest to use that shit, boy.' Diamond licks a slow stripe up the aforementioned hairless chest, maybe stops to nibble here and there. Then he puts his nose to Pearl's shoulder, enjoying the feel of satiny skin stretched over bone, and sniffs again. `Now you just smell like jizz.'

`You blueballed me so long, I'm probably at least 70% jizz,' Pearl says mournfully.

`That I can believe,' Diamond says. `Well, git pumpin.'

He's loose enough now that discomfort is quickly transmuted into fire-sparking friction. There's no resistance to Pearl's thrusts except how tightly Diamond has him clamped to his body. With Diamond's arms on his back and feet on his ass, Pearl has to struggle to get out of him, and if Diamond had his way he never would. He can't believe he went his whole life without this.

It's their first time in missionary position, and Diamond decides he likes it. Not just for the mutuality of it, but the way he feels smothered by Pearl, surrounded by him even as he surrounds him, engulfed in his smell and taste and inadvertent sounds of pleasure, the crittery movements of his body. He can't exactly look Pearl in the face, but he can hear him so clearly, feel every mint-scented breath.

Yeah, fuckin get in there, boy, he thinks. Fuckin load me up and don't stop, you brotherfucking son of a bitch.

He won't say he's never wondered what it would be like to have intercourse with a bull—and any rider who does is lying. It'd have to be something like this, something like surfing on lava, like diving with sharks or dancing with tigers. Mainlining lightning or trying to chug the Great Lakes through a straw. Not knowing if it'll ever end and not wanting it to. Not knowing if you'll survive and not caring if you don't. He white-knuckles Pearl's shoulderblades, cock spitting wads into the tight grinding space between their abs, feeling filled up to his eyes, feeling slain and sated and so destroyed with love he cries out for the terror and glory of it.

When Pearl finally rolls off him Diamond stays on his back for a while, feeling like he got rear-ended by a freight train, but in a good way. The next-door radio is at the tail end of a shrieky female number, which mercifully fades out to a grandfatherly male voice. `It is twelve minutes to one pee em, folks, and you are listnin to Shereton County Radio, for all the greatest classic country hits. Stay tuned and stay indoors, folks, tomorra is shapin up to be one hell of a storm...'

Is it still that early? Feels like they've been fucking for years. He slips gingerly off the bed and after stamping out the pins-and-needles in his legs, starts to hobble to the bathroom for the second shower of the day. Bandy-legged, like he's come off the back of a real bad bull, but at the same time clenching his buttcheeks to keep from watering the linoleum with his brother's come. Feels like a whole damn sperm reservoir sloshing in his bowel. Weirdest feeling in the world, and that includes everything that's happened this weekend. Sexy as fuck, though.

A half groan, half growl comes from behind. `Oh, jeez, don't stand up.'

`Why?'

`Cause it shows how little you are, and I just wanna jump on you.'

Diamond is still stopped in his tracks, even after all that's transpired. He turns around to see his brother's head half-raised off the scrunched-up sheets, predatory like an alligator with only its glittering eyes above water. `You are one cracked-up cookie, Pearl.'

Pearl blinks, and blushes, and Diamond feels a little bad, but he's just not goddamn used to it. That is, he's used to being eyed by women, but a dude is a different ball-game. Literally. Is this what chicks feel like? It's weird. Good, and crazy hot, but weird. Watching Pearl's eyes following his ass. Noticing Pearl's arm snaking between his body and the mattress and knowing exactly where his hand is. Looking at Pearl. Looking at Pearl looking at him. A prickle, which he'd call the last of the pins and needles if he didn't know better, runs up his legs to the place where they join. He has an inkling he'll get used to it in not much time at all.

After showering, Diamond slings his warbag onto the now-vacant bed. He considers his comedrenched boxers, the only pair he can find, and his bathrobe in turn, but in the end decides to go with Pearl's no-clothes programme. It is his brother, after all. Besides, anything he puts on is liable to be ripped off again in short order.

He walks briskly around the room, does some stretches, not too sluttily, though it's hard not to feel slutty when your everything is hanging out all over the place. He will admit he makes his squats a little more dramatic than they have to be. Though he doesn't do too many of those—they're dangerous for multiple reasons. He feels moderately fine, which is better than he's felt in ages. `Phew. Fuck, I feel good. Power a sexual healing, huh?'

`Don't heal too fast,' Pearl says darkly, like he can think of some ways to retard the process. `Don't want you running round like you used to. Remember who you belong to.'

Diamond smirks and saunters over to put an elbow on Pearl's shoulder where he's sitting at the table with a bowl of dry cereal shaped like little horseshoes and a laptop computer that matches his phone, and his car, checking stocks and flights simultaneously. He cocks a hip where his erection is growing. `You wanna put a chain on me, Pearly-pie? How about a collar? Or an ear-tag, maybe, seeing I'm a cowboy. A cattle brand? Can put one on my ass.'

`Put it on your face, douchewhistle. Right in the middle of your forehead so all the buckle bitches know to keep the fuck off. And I'll put a fucking GPS tracker up your goddamn ass.'

Diamond bellows with laughter but Pearl is white-faced serious. `And you were a cowboy. You're not going back to that, and you are not leaving me again.'

The chair scrapes back and Pearl surges up, bearing Diamond down onto the bed in something like a combo of a tango and a football tackle. His hard-on (does this kid ever go down?) is sliding into Diamond's ass before his back even hits the mattress.

Diamond carries on sort of chucklesnorting through the winces, because at this point Pearl's limitless libido is more comical than anything, but his brother is in no playful mood. Each thrust is like a slug to the guts and it feels like wrestling as much as fucking, legs and arms grappling as Diamond tries to move and Pearl doesn't let him. When Pearl goes in too deep, or at an alarming angle, Diamond grits his teeth and thumps him in the side, and Pearl retaliates by going in harder and deeper, with a bite on the neck or a mean tug of the hair. Diamond could never see the appeal of doing it with dudes before, but fuck knows he couldn't do this shit with even the ruggedest of the cowgirls he's picked up. This is like rutting roughstock, and Diamond already knows he could never go back even if Pearl was inclined to let him. Which, he seems set on making clear, he isn't.

`Seriously, Diamond, if I have to buy a fuckin island and stick you on it, I fuckin will.'

`Shit, you got me. I'm allergic to water.'

`Apart from those fuckin hot springs.'

`Yeah, so long as your island's got those, I guess.'

Some of the irritation bleeds out of Pearl's eyes and he crooks a half-grin, pausing halfway up Diamond's ass-chute. `You like those things, don't you?'

There's a something in his smile that makes Diamond peer up suspiciously.

`Wanna know something, big bro?' Pearl puts just enough mocking twang on the big that Diamond knows the wind-up's intentional, feels the stinging little coil of heat that's gotta end with either his butt on a bull, his fist in someone's face or his cock in someone's cunt. Or, in this case, someone's cock in his cunt.

`What, you little shit?'

`I used to follow you there, sometimes. Watch you.'

`Where?'

`From inside the old maintenance shed. Prettiest sight I ever saw was you lying back on those rocks with your eyes closed, skin all rosy-red and dripping. Goddamn.' And the little shit actually twitches inside him, like he's gonna come again just from the memory.

He heaves Diamond up, spins him round in the air and throws back down again, sending him face-first into the open warbag, all without his dick ever fully exiting his ass. Diamond is glad his rather unmanly shrieks are muffled by the--thankfully soft and cotton-based-- contents of the bag.

Pearl carries on talking, which apparently he's able to do in the middle of sex. He barely sounds flustered. `You know, I never meant to fall in love with my big brother. Complete fuckin accident. Pain in the ass, to be honest, since you totally ruined chicks for me. I wasn't even old enough to know what I was gonna miss out on! But when I saw you in there, looking like every wet dream I ever had... I just couldn't help myself.'

`What? You gonna tell me you jerked off?

If Pearl had made this confession before—fuck, if Diamond had caught him-- he would have flipped the fuck out. But now—God it's fucked, but maybe the thought of his kid brother spying on him, perving on him, makes him chub up just a lot.

`Almost did, once. But I got too scared. I waited till you left then got in the water and jizzed in it. Thought that next time you'd be swimming in my splooge.'

`Not—nh—how it works, dipshit.'

`I always jerked off at home, though, after.'

Pearl's hips are slapping his butt so hard it's like being spanked. Diamond, for his part, is so hard he feels ready to drill a hole in the mattress.

`Do I need to fuckin hear this?'

`When you were gone I jerked off in your bed, bitch.'

`You fuckin didn't.' Holy hell this is crazy and also he's about to come.

`And came on your fucking pillow. Came in your clothes, your underwear—put em on and came in em—on those fuckin slutty-ass rodeo posters—'

`I never sent you any posters.' He bites down on the nearest thing in reach to keep from making any more embarrassing noises. Jesus_fuck_ he's never had sex this good. He's holding on to the sheets for dear life, grinding down on the cloth between his teeth. A particularly punishing thrust jars his eyes wide open, and he sees that what he has in his mouth is the too-small t-shirt he gave Pearl and Pearl threw back in his face. He'd carried it in the bottom of his suitcase all these years and miles, and never thought to wonder why.

`I bought em. Paid for em and came for em. That big slutty shirtless one I put on the ceiling for when I jerked off at night. Came so hard once I actually hit it, too. Fuck, you tight-assed little whore. On your school photos, on your shitty cd collection.'

`You dirty bastard,' Diamond says, clutching the shirt to his face, telling himself, don't cry.

`Yeah, well. It's not like you were home.'

Pearl suddenly punches him in the arm, and between that burst of pain, and the fat cock ballwrecking his prostate, Diamond's brain gets some very mixed messages that probably don't bode well for the dynamics of their relationship, but bode extremely well for his impending hands-free orgasm.

Pearl jerks out, in-between deep-dick plunges that rock Diamond's whole body, `Fuck you for leaving. Fuck you for never coming home. Fuck you for—for making me watch you tear yourself up on that goddamn tv. Fuck you for making me wait twenty-three goddamn years for this.'

`Shut up and actually do it then, you little shit,' Diamond rasps, coming into cotton already damp from his pooled sweat. `Like you fuckin mean it.' Pearl, for once, does what he's told.

Diamond wakes to that mingled pain and pleasure, exhaustion and excitement which has become his default state in the two days since Pearl showed up. When he concentrates he can isolate and examine the soreness in the individual parts of his body, down to the joints in each finger. When he lets go he's swamped by it, feels it battering him back into unconsciousness. But it's a good kind of ache. He feels—maybe not at peace with the world, but at least a truce, which is as good as it's ever got with him.

Somebody comes over to stand by the bed. `Sup, shortness.'

`Mmm.' He moves by slow inches until his cheek is resting against Pearl's leg, with a hand cupped inside his knee. He's too sleepy to open his eyes, but the tangibility of his brother's presence soothes the raw things inside him better than any miracle medicine. Everything hurts but as long as Pearl is there he can stand it.

He breathes in, breathes out Pearl Pearl Pearl. No cologne, this time, and no come­­—yet. Just his flesh and blood. Nose on knee, then a hand on his hair. Not moving, just touching. Loving. This is something else new. Something he never knew was missing till he found it. A thirst he never felt till it was quenched. Not just for sex, but everything that comes before, after, underneath and around it. The little loving things he could never see the point of with the women who heated his bed for a couple hours every other night. And of course he didn't. There was no point, with strangers who didn't look past your tall hat and shiny buckle, who would open their bodies to you for one night and never show up in your life again.

He opens his mouth and rubs his tongue over the creased skin, the infinitesimal invisible hairs. Mmm.

`Are you seriously making out with my kneecap? That has to be a first.'

The knee, Diamond reflects, is probably the least sexy part of a person. It's hard to think of a piece of anatomy that would come lower down, if someone were making a list. Yet to him every part of Pearl is precious beyond price.

A heavy sigh goes out of Pearl and he slowly crumples forward onto the bed, ending up curled over Diamond's head with his crotch in his face. He's still wearing boxers, but Diamond kind of likes his tackle bundled up in fabric like this, forming a nice compact package. Well, maybe not so compact. With his nose between Pearl's cloth-bound nuts the shaft is pulsing over his forehead. It's overwhelming and perfect. Mind-numbing in the best way. In this moment Pearl is all his world. All his senses—touch, taste, sight, sound and smell, are absorbed in the centre of his vitality, the fountainhead of his virility. Mmm.

Pearl strokes his neck. `You don't have to get up.'

`Need a shower', he mumbles, trying to work his tongue up the leg of Pearl's briefs.

`Okay. I'll get one going for you. Can I fuck you first, please?'

`Mmhmm,' Diamond hums, deciding this fine morning he wants Pearl in his mouth, since that hasn't happened yet, which is fucking ridiculous. God, he's drooling. But Pearl is already prying his ass open.

`God, fine,' he bites through the burn, and then moans at the soothing sting when Pearl slides in. He's not that upset. There'll be plenty of time, after all. Plenty of time for everything.

When Diamond makes it out of bed a couple hours later he yawns, stretches, whacks his head and cracks his joints, body stiff as a teenager's cumrag. Not an inapt comparison, given he's got dried or drying jism in just about every orifice, up to and including his ears. His nostrils are full of the blank biochemical smell of semen. Pearl had opted for a facial the last time, and it went everywhere.

`Jesus fuck', he moans, rolling his shoulder. Pearl had accidentally slammed it into the headboard while he was doing him on his side, holding his legs open like a pair of scissors.

He looks over his shoulder to find his brother's watching, cause he always is. `Guess I could have gone easier on ya,' he says, not really offering an apology.

`I ride bulls for a living', Diamond scoffs, because he doesn't need one, and Pearl nods, a small grin twisting slope of his face.

After he's showered all the crusty spermflakes off (turns out there's a reason ejaculation is supposed to happen inside the body. Hair and dried come are a nasty combination; getting it out of his pubes takes forever and he practically has to chisel his buttcheeks apart), he puts on his robe because he really isn't up for another round. But when he emerges from the bathroom Pearl is sitting at the table, working, which apparently means wearing a suit—this one more of a steel blue. It looks good on him, yet Diamond can see now that he wears it the way he sits and moves­—in the too-careful manner of those to whom wealth is still a novelty. It yanks at his heart-strings and gentles them by turn. He's glad to know Pearl isn't too far out of Diamond's world. But Pearl deserved everything. Everything he's earned and more, the world, the moon. He deserves Diamond. After all of it, he deserves his brother back.

Because he doesn't have anything to do, and because he can, he leans on Pearl's shoulders and watches him work. It blows his mind that he doesn't even have a proper job, that he does all this with a phone and a laptop. He squints at the screen, eyes getting lost among a million miniscule charts and flashing numbers.

`So, you're uh, what, looking to diversify your portfolio?' Trying to pretend he has a clue what he's talking about.

Pearl turns around and bites at his jaw, and it hurts and makes Diamond's dick get hard. Then he kisses where he bit, and makes Diamond's heart go soft. `You're so fuckin funny', Pearl says, half sarcastic and half affectionate.

`Fuck the shut up. Wait.'

Pearl lets out one of his old barks of laughter, more of a thunderclap now his voice has dropped. He hooks an arm around Diamond's back and tangles another in his hair, and yanks him mouth-to-mouth. Diamond's lips part for him without even meaning to, and Pearl shoves his tongue all the way in. He has a long one. It strokes down the middle of Diamond's tongue, then the tendons on the underside, then over his gums and all around his mouth, as if mapping out the territory, or maybe marking it. All the while Diamond makes little helpless noises. It's still so new to be this passive, to let himself be used like a woman. He feels like he's about to soil his two-hundred-dollar robe, and doesn't care if he does. Just from making out. Christ.

Pearl appears to be in the same state, if the stiff bulge straining the thin material of his pants is anything to go by. Pressed this close, Diamond can feel how excited Pearl is, how turned-on Diamond makes him. And fuck if it ain't mutual. This is proper kissing, the kind that pulls in the whole body, the kind he could never stomach with girls. But he can sure as hell get used to it with Pearl. It's like a kind of sex in its own right, Pearl using his mouth-cock to fuck Diamonds mouth-cunt, and when they reluctantly relinquish each other's mouths it leaves Diamond feeling a little bit more in love than when they started.

`Where in hell did a virgin learn to swap spit like that?' he gasps, though he realises it's kind of a ridiculous question, given kissing takes far less skill than fucking, and Pearl clearly has that down pat.

`I've practised.'

That was not the answer he was expecting. `Practised? With who?'

Pearl ducks his head, face lighting up red like an adorable Christmas decoration. `Cut your face out of a poster, stuck it on one of Momma's mannequins. I used to cover the mouth with clingfilm.'

Diamond imagines pubescent Pearl fake-making it with a mannequin wearing his face. He shakes himself. `Hell, you are crazy. Jesus.' Then he tugs Pearl in for another kiss to let him know he's down with that kind of crazy.

When they break apart again a string of spit stretches between them for a second before snapping. Diamond's whole face is buzzing with heat, and Pearl, hair dishevelled, cheeks bright and eyes dancing, looks so happy it's hard to bear. Like staring down the sun. Diamond drops his eyes to the computer screen. `Rich too, huh? Talk about a bad fuckin combination.'

`Yeah, I've done pretty good, I guess. Got lucky a lot in the beginning, which helps.' Pearl slips his hand up inside Diamond's shirt to stroke his nipple. `You wanna see how much I've got in my bank account right now?'

`Don't mean nothin to me.'

Pearl leans back for an assessing look, steadying Diamond in his lap with a hand on his hip. `Now, that's a funny thing to hear coming from a cowboy. Isn't rodeo all about riding the big bulls, getting the big bucks?'

`It was never about money,' Diamond says. Pearl's head cocks a question, but he leaves it at that.

He turns back to the laptop and Diamond presses close to his side, kneading his palms over the alternating firmness of muscle and yielding flesh. `I don't give a rancid shit how much you got,' he whispers fiercely.

Tiny beads of moisture appear in the corners of Pearl's eyes, but Diamond kisses them away before they can fall.

A little later they're eating lunch, courtesy of the convenience store's TV dinner chest, while next door Johnny Cash's mother calls him home for supper from the back steps of the old home place. Diamond wonders if there is anyone in the room at all. So far he hasn't heard any sound of human life. Only the swan songs of stars as desiccated as the plastic-packed meal Pearl microwaved with such loving care. It's so soulless and nothing-tasting it reminds Diamond of his old home place. You'd think they'd at least have a MacDonald's or something.

They're squeezed together on one side of the small pinewood table with its broken-off corners and scored varnish. Diamond has his right leg draped over Pearl's. Pearl has a stiffy and it tickles the inside of Diamond's knee every time he flexes it.

He chews a shred of dehydrated chicken parm and forces it down with a healthy dose of Jack. `You still see her?' No need to say who.

`Yeah, every once in a while—Thanksgiving, Christmas. She's still living in Redsled. Retired, still in that same pokey little house. I offered to buy her a place anywhere she wanted, but after all that she didn't want to move. It was hard enough getting her to give up the store.' Pearl shook his head. `If you can believe it. People are funny.'

Diamond thinks that remark is kind of funny coming from his brother, but says_,_ 'I guess that man Moore is living with her.'

Pearl gives him a measuring kind of look, conveying both amusement and rebuke. `He died six years back. Brain cancer. I take care of her now. Not that she needs much taking care of.'

`She must be mighty proud of you. Her favourite.' Her perfect creation. He can tell he's unsuccessful in keeping the bitterness out of his voice from the way Pearl stiffens. Without actually moving away he seems to recede from Diamond's touch.

So, this is still a sore spot. In a way it's good to know there are some lines not even he can cross without fearing the consequences.

`She does miss you, Diamond.'

`You mean she never stops bitching about me.'

`She hoped—'

`I know what she hoped for me, Pearl. Better than you. It wasn't rodeo. And it sure as hell wasn't this either.' He gestures between them, then fixes Pearl with a straight look. `And you're gonna have to reckon with that if we're gonna proceed down this track you've laid out.'

`We're not gonna tell her!'

Diamond rolls his eyes. `I know that. Heh. Part of me'd like to, though. Just to see the l--'

`You make me angry, talking about our mother this way, Di.'

`I know I do. And you're gonna have to reckon with that too if—'

Pearl shoves Diamond off him, standing so quickly his chair thuds to the floor. `You are gonna have to reckon with my right fist if you don't shut up, Di.'

Diamond raises his eyebrows, giving Pearl an appraising look. He's a Wyo—not about to be scared off by a little hands-on handling. If anything, it reassures him that he hasn't gone belly-up for a milksop.

Pearl drops his balled fists and stomps away, looking exasperated. Diamond sidles up to him and smooches his naked shoulder. `Atta boy.'

Pearl shudders. `Fuck's sake, don't say that after I just threatened to punch you, Di. Christ, you're as fucked as me.'

Diamond knuckles a fist into his side. `You think I'm scared a you? You think I can't take whatever you throw out and come back with more? I ride wild animals ten times my weight for a living, Pearl. Been doing it since before your friggin nuts dropped. Don't you never forget that about me.'

Pearl turns to look at him then, and his face has not a scrap of softness in it. `I won't.'

Diamond drops his bathrobe, and then to his knees.

A half hour later finds Diamond on the floor with his head between Pearl's legs, since it was about damn time he found out properly how his brother tastes. His technique takes a little polishing, since this isn't something he'd done even with women. He doesn't think he's that bad; if anything the problem is Pearl's just too fuckin big, and Diamond told him as much. But, in spite of his best efforts, a couple times there were teeth, and the third time a canine caught under the flare of the head and Pearl got up from the chair cursing, forgot he had his pants around his ankles and tripped over, and Diamond had to crawl on top of him and shower every inch of his body with remorseful kisses before he'd sit down again.

Then there was the problem of pace. While he was warming up Diamond told Pearl to keep his hands by his side if he didn't want his dick chewed off. But Pearl isn't one to sit back and let someone else take the lead, and in truth Diamond wouldn't like him if he was. So Pearl's hands are on his head, using his hair for riggin, and Diamond's hands are on Pearl's thighs. Not on his cock—didn't come all this way for a fucking handjob he said, and apparently meant it quite literally. Diamond's gonna take him down to the root or choke himself trying. At first it was a struggle between them: Pearl inclined to use his brother's eminently fuckable face as a second asscunt, a mere hole for his pleasure; Diamond having, in addition to a gag reflex, a powerful need to breathe every once in a while. But gradually they work out a rough kind of rhythm, one where Diamond isn't in danger of passing out or spewing up, but there's still an element of unpredictability, a frisson of animal panic that makes it all the hotter.

Having ironed out those early kinks, Diamond is gliding up and down like a men's room pro. He's already decided he likes it even more than assfucking, since in the first place he has more control, and in the second there's less risk of fatally rupturing something. And the feel of it, of that huge hunk of fuckmeat ramming into his face, is a category all its own. He didn't tell Pearl, but he spilled into the carpet the second the head hit the back of his throat.

The only issue is Pearl's hands, or rather his left wrist. The cold metal of Pearl's gold-accented Rolex makes him shiver every time it touches him. He pulls off with a slurp, fed up after the segmented band jags nastily in his hair.

'Gimme that thing.'

`What?' Pearl's pupils are blown wide and his mouth is hanging slightly open. In another context Diamond would say he was drunk again. Or maybe drugged. And fuck, Diamond loves that he did that to him, with nothing but his mouth and a river's worth of spit. It's like a sweeter flavour of revenge.

Diamond sucks a gelatinous gob of come out of the dusty blond haystack of his pubes, something that ordinarily would make him retch, but in the moment feels deliciously dirty. Pearl already came, almost as soon as Diamond put his mouth on him, but, as he's discovering, with Pearl the first blowout ain't nothing but a warm-up.

He spits out a short kinky hair. `That fucking freezing piece of shit watch.'

Pearl holds out his arm with a dimpled smile and lets Diamond unclasp it.

'How much this little piece of bling fuckin cost, huh?'

Pearl starts to answer, then hisses as Diamond loops it around the base of his cock. He has to fold out the extending clasp thingy to get it to go round, and he can't close it without pinching off Pearl's bloodflow.

'Your cock is thicker than your wrist,' Diamond observes, fascinated, and oddly proud, as if Pearl had grown his megaschlong as a science fair project. Pearl's hand drops down to nest in his hair, and Diamond nuzzles against it. He pulls back when he feels something else scratch his cheek. There's a thin blue-and-white-patterned macramé bracelet, somewhat worn, around his wrist. It had been hidden by the Rolex.

When Diamond glances up, questioning, Pearl gazes back through warm, half-lidded eyes. `Remember, my third birthday?'

`What?'

`That was your present. A friendship bracelet.'

Diamond looks at the bracelet. `Oh. Shit, I forgot all about that.'

A dreadlocked hippy girl who'd moved from Nevada had made it and given it to him and there was obviously no way in hell he, a fourteen-year-old highschool freshman, was gonna wear a friggin bracelet, where did she think they were, California? So, with the cunning selfishness of youth he'd decided to kill two saps with one stone and fob it off on his baby brother, because when kids are that little you can give them a cardboard box for their birthday and they love it. And Pearl had loved it. He was just at the age when he could be trusted not to choke on anything small enough to fit in his mouth, and he'd worn it everywhere, even in the bath, though the stupid thing kept slipping off his chubby wrist. Pearl's cock pokes his Adam's apple, and Diamond sits back on the floor, a milky sensation of nausea crawling up his throat.

Pearl lets him go, still watching, face sealed up, eyes alert and focussed. Clockwork ticking between his balls. `I didn't.'

`You remember back that far?'

'I remember everything. I wear it all the time.'

'Wow.' Diamond rubs his jaw, feeling suicidal with guilt. He's just remembered he's turning thirty-four tomorrow.

He gets up and walks to the window. Dark clouds are marshalling toward the mountains in long, soldierly columns. The sky has a dim cast, like night is setting in early. Even from inside he can tell it's got cold. The air is charged with the imminence of lightning.

`This ain't right.'

`Diamond,' Pearl says, tone mounting to a warning as he clips the watch back on his wrist.

`But it ain't, Pearl! It just ain't. Darlin, I swear to God I love you more than I love bein alive but I can't like this, I can't, I'm gonna go nutso.'

Pearl halters him in his arms, automatically making the soothing sounds, the soothing motions. But Diamond can feel his body simmering with tension, muscles tight with barely-controlled agitation. After a few seconds he bursts out, over Diamond's head, as if Diamond isn't there, or has gone deaf, `God fucking dammit. I thought we were over this.'

`How, Pearl? How am I supposed to get over you bein my brother? Jesus, I held you when you were a friggin baby. I held you and you were crying all over the place and I thought you were kinda lame, but then. Then you stopped crying, and looked at me with those big stupid eyes and I promised that I was gonna protect you no matter what, always love you, always take care of you. Never leave you or let anything hurt you.'

Pearl rears up and spikes his eyes with a look that is at once loving and merciless. `But you did, Diamond. You did.'

Diamond's shoulders start to quiver, and his lungs squeeze in on his heart; he knows with a sick sense of vertigo he's on the edge of a bad one.

But Pearl's arms are around him, warm and known and endlessly strong, and gradually the feeling fades. It occurs to him that he never got anxious when he was with Pearl.

Pearl kisses his forehead. When he speaks his voice is soft and clear. `If you need time, you need time. That's fine. I can be patient—we've got the rest of our lives, after all. But be smart—I know you are, Di, even if sometimes you pretend not to be. Don't make this a fight. Because you won't win.'

Diamond nods, and Pearl squeezes his ass approvingly. `Now hold still,' he says, and Diamond becomes conscious of his still very much a boner hot against his belly.

He tries to turn, but Pearl hauls him back with an arm wrapped around his chest while the other yanks furiously at his cock. `I said hold fuckin still.'

Pearl breathes hard, hand moving at the speed of light. After a few seconds he snorts like a bull and there's a wet splatter over Diamond's lower back. He keeps his head turned to the side, refusing to look while Pearl humps his slick cock, still oozing slime, over his hips, ass and thighs.

When Pearl releases him he slumps to the floor below the window, back to the wall. The radio in the next room has fallen silent. Pearl moves around the room with a quiet intensity that Diamond can already read as rage, folding clothes and putting trash in the empty shopping bags. They'd planned to leave today.

'I really like these.'

Diamond glances over to see Pearl holding the sketchpad he bought and discarded. From the way he's intently studying each page he realises he means it, isn't just saying it like most people. He'd probably love them just as much if Diamond had jizzed onto the paper, but still. There's a kind of lurch in his chest, like vertigo again, but this time the good kind, like the beginning of a theme park ride, and some little bastard gremlin is using his heart for a harp.

Seen this way, nude, side-on, one leg slightly in front of the other, head hanging over the pad and hair hanging over his head, Pearl looks like some fair barbarian slave an ancient sculptor would use as a model. His build and profile are perfect; only the long plump curve of his cock violates the classical proportions. When Diamond drew it had never been people, but suddenly he wants to try.

Their eyes meet. Diamond looks down again, feeling the glow in his cheeks. Goddamn but he ain't used to this, and the is he not a man and thy brother part is somehow the least of it. He's offroading now, into undiscovered country.

Pearl drops down in front of him, legs neatly tucked under his haunches. 'Did you know our mother was raped?'

Diamond raises his head with a jolt, as if startled out of sleep, but gives no answer.

`That's why you don't look like me, Diamond. That's why it took thirteen years for her to have another kid after you.'

Neither of them speaks for a while after this, Pearl thinking that his brother with that brooding, pale look on his face made the prettiest picture he'd ever seen, one that deserved to hang in a white-domed museum in Washington, not some dusty Western round-up of rodeo's forgotten hits. Also one he never wants anybody else to see. Diamond hearing like the voice of the dead, what you cost me.

'Why're you puttin this on me?' He raises his nails to his mouth, needing to gnaw his way to the quick of things.

Pearl gently pulls his hand down again. 'I'm trying to take something off of you, Di. Something you've been carrying too long.'

From outside there's a noise like a jet passing overhead. Diamond closes his eyes, thinking hopelessly that suicide would have been the simpler route.

`Come on. Up.'

Diamond doesn't move, so Pearl picks him up and wrangles him where he wants him while Diamond bucks and balks. If Pearl's bent on keeping him he's gonna get the whole package. He doesn't reckon on making this easy.

Pearl pummels him into position, gropes his cheeks apart and when the warhead breaches him all the fight goes out in one raw breath. He tells himself, this is real and this is now. Forget about what was before and what comes after. The past is past and the future has yet to be written. He has his brother at his back and before him only earth and sky.

Pearl's shoulders and chest lean heavily into him while his hips snap back and forth, aiming straight ahead as if trying to punch through Diamond's belly-button, squeezing the maximum possible pleasure from the shortest possible movements. He can't seem to drag himself away.

While Diamond's mind may be a muddle, his body has no such reservations. His prick fattens on the windowsill into a semi-chub, the tip painting precum on the cool glass.

`Fuck,' Pearl mutters, forming a momentary mist on the window. 'You don't see that in New York.'

Far away, beyond the plains, the sky is one vast cloud. As they watch, it breaks out in teats like a cow's udder, and tornados touch down on the mountaintops: three, four, five of them in a row, rising in alien towers from the ominous brown hummocks. This corner of the state is right on the edge of tornado alley, if Diamond recalls his 5th grade geography right. From so far off they hardly seem to move at all, more like pictures of tornadoes than the real thing.

`Reckon they'll come down to us?' Pearl asks, sounding excited at the thought, or maybe just about to shoot.

'Better not. I ain't fixin to die with a dick in my ass', Diamond says, and Pearl puts his head on his shoulder, jostling him with his silent laughter. 'Well, that's too bad, honeybunch, cause I plan to die fucking you.'

'You fuckin freak.'

'Want my last moment to be coming in your fat little ass, big bro.' Pearl puts his hands on Diamond's tits and grinds in deep, and Diamond can feel his balls pulse as he unloads inside him.

The window jitters in the frame. The tornadoes have widened by what must be yards, and two of them have merged, the twin vortices bending into thin, attenuated threads, lifting their feet off the ground and twining around each other in a kind of courtship dance, one that has an odd stateliness to it, for all their fury. He is once more conscious that there's nothing that stands between him and them. Nothing between the whirlwind and his brother but his small, broken body.

Pearl is conscious only of the snug warmth flexing around his shaft, the fragility and strength cradled in his hands. He feels endless and omnipotent, his stones bigger than mountains, his spear the weapon of worlds, his rapture bursting out of him with a force to carve a new Grand Canyon, each pearl of lifegiving sperm the seed of galaxies. Breathing in the Diamond smell, coming with all his might and vowing that if the black sky rolls down, he will stand between the storm and his big brother and weather all the winds of the West on his arms.

Feedback of any kind is always appreciated! You can send comments to tillwehavefaces777@gmail.com or find me (and more of my works) at my AO3 (ArchiveOfOurOwn) profile: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tillwehavefaces