His hand is curled into a loose fist like a thousand pound weight on the back of your neck. You wake up sprawled in his lap, face-down, shitty television and canned laughter and ax body spray. The lights are off. The crease between his thighs is thin white, stark, but muted where it reaches you. You’re careful not to change the way you breathe, careful not to end this, so you don’t have to sit up, so you don’t have to laugh it off. “Hey man, your dick is right next to my face.” White jeans, the seams with their pattern pressed into your cheek. “Nah, it’s fine, it happens.”

It happens. It was probably your fault, anyway – falling asleep face down on his lap. This sort of fuck-up has Dave Strider written all over it. You took something, maybe, or he gave you something, for your tolerance, and you fought up on the roof, high out of your mind, sweated it out, and then you crawled into his lap like a needy little kid, and he grabbed the hair at the nape of your neck and he –

It’s warm, through his jeans. Everything is warm. It’s Texas-hot outside, but his dick is humid heat, it’s like a goddamn steam room. It’s like a brand against your face, cattle iron, marking you his. You let the bile spread across your tongue from the back of your throat, endless and sour. You can’t swallow, he’ll know you’re awake – is he toying with you? Would he?

You’re the one making it weird. You’re the one making it gay. You’re the one making it into something that starts with I and ends with Bro in handcuffs. You’re asleep. Your shoulders are relaxed, but not too relaxed, you know better than to show your underbelly to him, he raised you better than that. You’re not sweating where his hand is touching your skin. You’re not thinking about it.

The people on the TV laugh, voices stark and fake and far away. Shadows jump. You’re cooler than Larry the goddamn Cucumber. It’s fine. It’s just you, it’s just him. He wouldn’t fuck with you like that. You’re lulled back to sleep by the dull roar of the box fan and the nauseous lurch of your heart in your chest, side to side somehow, capsizing. It’s what you imagine being on a boat would be like.

He strokes your undercut, down to where it tapers off into skin, leather and calloused fingertips. It must be two or three in the morning, and it takes you a second to remember that you’re not in bed, that you fell asleep here, that he’s the ocean you were smelling, that you’ve never drowned before. All those little revelations add up to several seconds of remembering things, before the noticing can begin.

It’s early. He’s playing with your hair, downright paternal. It feels like an ironic charade of fatherhood, vaguely sleazy. You can see it from outside your body: Bro’s sharp shades, inverted reruns, time running backwards and unspooling, you across his lap. You’re nauseous, like that time you got heat stroke and puked down the front of Bro’s white polo shirt, it’s that same lurch in your stomach, or maybe somewhere further down – further back. It’s salt and sweat and his tacky leather gloves, his big palm, his thumb plowing furrows into your hair. You’re lax, ragdoll physics, rolling with his flat strokes across the back of your skull. You’re roadkill baking out in the sun. He’s pawing at you, rolling you over his dick, and you’re breaking down the center, brittle. It’s hard to breathe, now that you’re thinking about it, the air is too humid and whatever he gave you still has you fucked up, a bit too far to the side, slanting sideways. You can feel your heartbeat in your dick.

You remember crawling onto him, onto the couch, when you were little and you couldn’t sleep, waking up and padding down the hall in a panic and pushing Lil Cal to one side of Bro so you could shove yourself into his armpit, so you could hide your face somewhere safe. This reminds you of his heartbeat, strong and steady, lulling you back to sleep. He smelled like machine oil. He smelled like bodies, his own and others – like sweat, a view outside the porthole. You’d balance on a precarious tower of breezeblocks to look out the window during the day.

“That’s Housten, little man.” The sun hurt your eyes, peeled off your skin, dripped down the back of your shirt. “You own this city.”

You had a nightmare where he killed you for the cameras, and your face was on a milk carton even though no one would know you had been there-and-gone in the first place, and you were just the right age to want to jump off of the roof about it, because every time you closed your eyes, you didn’t see your ground-beef body, just your bare face looking like a little kid’s on the side of the carton, looking like a mugshot, looking like some some schmuck’s school photo. You were staring straight ahead, a practiced blank.

There’s still time. You see yourself sitting up. “Hey man, your dick is right next to my face.” sweat on the nape of your neck. He’s still touching you; never stopped. You can’t hear the TV over the static in your ears. “Nah, it’s fine,” your jaw is rubber. “It happens.”

You’ve seen yourself from outside before, but not quite like this. You realized that you did a shit job of hiding your surprise, when you saw Bro’s recordings played back. You’d jump and wince and your breath would hitch and your face would go blank, but not the way Bro’s did, because in the videos, it’s obvious that you’re out of your depth, and that your hand is shaking so bad that you couldn’t even cut butter with your katana without fucking up and cutting yourself, and it shows up even though the feed is grainy.

It took you a while to understand that you were looking at porn, at shit people like Bro got their rocks off to. There’s nothing you have to say about that. You don’t think about it, if you can help it, except for sometimes when you’re about to come, and it makes you that panicked, frantic flavor of horny that puts you outside yourself. The Dave you see from outside is the milk carton boy, the boy on the screen, watched by a million faceless men with their flies open, and that Dave squirms like an animal in heat, puts on a show, worms in his stomach, the apples that rotted in his closet before he knew that he couldn’t save them for later forever. Dave pulls at his limp dick until it chafes, mindless. Needy.

You saw yourself from outside that time when you watched afterschool specials with the pill dissolving under your tongue, picking at whatever you could pull out of the couch cushions where they were threadbare. He’d held the back of your neck until your brain went heady-numb and the world had dissolved into fractals that you had put down into music as soon as you could stand again.

“Hey, man, your dick is in my face. I can smell you.

“Hey, man.

“It’s fine.” It’s pathetic. “It’s not like I can stop you.” It’s got you hot and writhing, face-down, you’re hard against your thigh, how long has it been? Somewhere between five minutes and a lifetime. You’re five years old again, grabby hands and apple juice-sticky, GoGurt on your chin. Thumb cut on a throwing star. The solidity of Bro, the pillar of the known universe, larger than life. Your skin over your skull in the here-and-now, cheek over teeth, it can’t be a satisfying grind for him, but he likes them limp, he likes them asleep, he likes them foam, round, you’re still baby fat where it matters. You’re cold down the back and molten down the front – sweat dries funny, dries you into place, makes the fan’s chill seem sinister down low on your spine. He rolls your cheek against his dick. You think he comes. Your eyes are itchy. His jeans are rough. His dick pulses in his pants, and he’s still.

It wasn’t really that bad. The worst part is that you’re still so hard you’re nauseous, or so nauseous you’re hard, and you’re too tipsy and oxygen-deprived to untangle the if-what-whys, and your throat is scratchy and cotton-stuffed like you’re trying not to cry. He must know you’re not asleep. It’s probably part of the game. Your mouth tastes like puke. You can’t gag, can’t cough, can’t choke. You’re still. You’re asleep, you were never awake. You slept through the night.

You both know it’s a lie.

Late-night reruns filter back into the unraveling net where you end and the living room begins, and at some point while you’re still numb and pliant, the sun begins to rise, filling the room without leaving space for you to breathe. It’s later – earlier – than you thought. Your back is as hot as your front by the time Bro lifts you so you’re straddling his hip, like you weigh nothing at all, and carries you to your room. He must feel you, jabbing up against his side. No matter how he wants to lift you, it’s an undeniable fact that you’re not as small as you used to be. It doesn’t matter, either way – you both have years worth of practice ignoring your body, whether it be hot, cold, hungry, or hard. He lays you out on your mattress, arranges you as he likes as though he’s setting up for a scene. You’re limp for him. Your eyes are closed. He presses his chapped lips against your temple like he used to back before you could hold a sword, and then he’s gone, and you’re drenched head-to-toe in feverish sweat dried clammy, but you don’t flinch, not once.

You keep time by the pulse of blood in your dick. One. Two. Three thousand. Four. One. You wait. You don’t quite know what you’re waiting for. You’re still out of it, the pieces of you all jumbled together in a puzzle box missing most of its pieces. You squash pieces of him in to compensate. The door slams shut mid-morning, but you think you see him through the window when you finally give in, curled into fetal position with both hands between your legs. Your cheeks are sticky when you come, panting like you’ve run a marathon. You wonder if he’ll like what he sees, when he watches the footage later. If he’ll keep it to himself.