Release(32)

And Enzo definitely didn’t have the butt of a dancer.

“You’re so beautiful,” Adam whispered, even quieter than Linus had. “You’re so fucking beautiful, Linus.” Linus kissed him again on the chest. Adam scooped up Linus’s face in his hands. “No, I mean it.” He ran his thumbs gently across Linus’s cheeks, under the lower edge of his spectacles – which he amusingly kept on, both of them liking it, Linus in particular liking being able to see – and down around Linus’s lips.

“Wish I was tall enough to kiss you properly like this,” Linus said.

“What you’re doing right now is pretty good on its own.”

Taking the encouragement, Linus pushed again. And again. “Faster?” he asked.

Adam nodded. Yeah, faster was pretty good, all right.

And this, this was the rebuke to the Wades of the world, this was what Wade would never understand. Marty neither. Not even Enzo most of the time, now that Adam thought about it. There was so much more to it than just the body. The body was important, obviously, but in their different ways, neither Wade with his sleaze, nor Marty in his refusal to imagine beyond himself, nor Enzo in his just-friends retrospective boundary, none of them could see past the body. So many people couldn’t when it wasn’t society’s usual combo.

But here, now, again, this was more than the body, or the mind, or the personality. It wasn’t holy, that was a whole other mess, but it was something that could be touched only here. He’d touched it – to various degrees and from various angles – with Enzo a few times, with Philip Matheson, even with Larry from the teen choir. But nowhere like how he could touch it with Linus.

Then why–? Why why why–

Look at Linus, look at him there, look at the cute whorl of hair where it parted on the crown of his head, look at the hand that ran across Adam’s stomach, look at the skin at the bend of his elbow where the fold gave him a little tan line. Just look at him. Look at him loving Adam.

“I love you,” Adam said. He said it to Linus.

Linus gave him a mischievous wink. “Doesn’t count when you say it during sex.” But then Linus noticed the tears squeezing out of Adam’s eyes on either side and, with gentleness, brushed them away. “Adam?”

“Please don’t leave me unloved,” Adam answered, and cried some more, ashamed.





“The blame,” the Queen says again. “I keep looking for it. Where is it? Where is the blame?”

The faun moves around her to try and calm this Sarah, who continues to weep, her fear obviously growing that this may not, after all, be a drug dream. He does this not out of compassion, for he can smell her weakness from here, but because this person has some hold, some claim on the spirit that traps his Queen. Strong enough to make it release her for a moment, and if he can make the release happen again–

“Where is the blame?” the Queen keeps asking.

Sarah stares back at the Queen, her red eyes wide, unburning as this spirit again masks the Queen’s full glory.

At least he knows she is in there still. Strong and magnificent.

He will not miss his chance a second time.



“I find a strand of it in myself,” the Queen hears herself say. “I do find it there.”

But then she thinks, feels, reaches out, and knowing exactly what blame is – a human construct, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-blinding – she can find further strands of it, emanating in all directions, for blame is something that is shared but denied in equal measure.

“And yes,” she says to Sarah, “I find a strand in you.”

She sees that Sarah is afraid of this sentence, but welcomes it, too, a woman used to the burden of blame, secretly wanting it even if it kills her, because at least it is familiar.

“But so much less than what you think binds you,” the Queen says. “The bigger strand is within me and yet again that is not even the biggest portion.”

Like a cloud parting, Sarah finally seems to see, to really see.

“Is it…?” Sarah sits up, shock stilling her convulsions, stilling even the pain in her eyes, for she now looks at her friend, her friend who was murdered. “Is it really you?”

And she takes the Queen’s hand.





The faun leaps.





“It’s all right,” Linus said, holding him a few minutes later, curved against him in the bed, breathing into the bend of his neck.

“I don’t even know,” Adam said. “I really don’t.”

“Wade, probably.”

“God, don’t say his name.”

“Anything happening at home?”

“Marty got a girl pregnant.”

Linus sat all the way up for that. “I beg your pardon? Why wasn’t that the first thing you said when you walked in the door?”

“Wade, remember? And Angela.”

“Well, as remarkable as the news that Marty’s not a virgin actually is, that’s not really enough to make you cry. Is it?”

“No.”

“What’s up then, babe?”

Adam wished he knew. Everything was always so clear in books and movies. Everyone always knew their reasons. But real life was such a mess. Just look at today so far. The release with Linus was so wonderful – and though they were currently in an interruption, what they’d been leading to had pulled so strong on his heart – and yeah, the thing with Wade and Angela leaving and the tension at home and the still-pending afternoon at the church to help out his dad, and– “It’s Enzo, isn’t it?” Linus said, just a little bit too quietly.