R, m/m, angst
Crazy Eddie's Private Journals: The Heist
By Tiriel
Oh, boy. This time, I'm not even sure where to begin. So I'll just take a deep breath and tell it in order, the way it happened. If I can think clearly long enough.
Foster got a bee in his bonnet about this quatrain with a reference to thieves. So while I was doing a little research on a tip I got through the Paranoid Times site, he went and hooked up with some of his pals from the old days. Why he thought that they would be the thieves in the quatrain, I don't know. But it seems that he was right.
He was out of contact completely on this one--said that if he was always placing calls they'd think he'd sold them out. So I wrapped myself up in work. The lead turned out to be a dead end, but it kept me from missing him too much. And at least when he's not around I don't have to worry about what I say, about giving myself away.
Yesterday morning, he finally called. Said he'd meet me--well, I don't even feel comfortable recording a location here, in my private journal. Call me paranoid. Anyway, I met him yesterday evening near an airport. He doesn't usually fly, and when he called he was evasive about why he wanted to get back so quickly this time.
When he got into the car, he looked over at me and smiled. "It's good to really see you, Eddie."
"You too, man, you too." I began to drive back to the trailer. "So, uh, what happened back there? What was the deal?"
He sighed and leaned his elbow against the window, pressing his hand to his forehead. "Can we talk about it later?"
"Dead end? No luck on the quatrain?"
"Yes and no. I'd really rather save it for later." His tone was harsh.
"All right, all right. No need to bust an artery. That lead I was running down turned out to be bogus. No aliens, just some whacked-out small town conflicts. So, why the rush to get here? Are we on the trail of a hot tip?"
"No." He looked over at me. "Look, I'm sorry I snapped at you. It was a rough couple of days. Old friends, old memories, and the weapon turned out to be a total mindjob. We defeated it, but there was a price. I just wanted to get back home as soon as I could."
I kept my hands steady on the wheel by sheer force of will, I'm sure. He'd never used the word "home" to describe the trailer before. At least that was what I assumed he meant. We were sure as hell nowhere near Chicago. "Well, it's done now, buddy. You can save the rest of the story for whenever. Let's get you some food and some rest. You look beat."
"Thanks."
We drove the rest of the way in silence. I stopped to snag some grub, and we went back to the trailer. Over takeout Chinese, I decided to ask again. "You okay, man? You're pretty quiet."
"I lost a friend, Eddie. A friend I'd almost forgotten I had." He set his food aside and took a long drink from his coffee cup before he continued. "Richie and I grew up together. Started doing jobs together. We did everything together, he was there through all of it. We were closer to each other than anybody in those days. But it was his fault that I went to jail. I cursed him every day of those two years in county. And when I got out, I met Hannah, and I just never looked back at the old life. I never forgave him until now, and now he's dead."
Ah, yes, the jail time. More often than not, I've managed to forget that part of his past. Maybe because when I do think about it, my head goes to the prison movie place. As much as I'd like to think that Foster might be open to certain possibilities, I hate to think of him locked up in jail. Before I could speculate on just how close he and this Richie character might have been before Cade got sent up the river, I forced my mind into a sharp U-turn. Foster was upset. This was no time for me to fantasize about potential male-male adolescent grope sessions.
"I'm sorry. How did it happen?"
"It was the weapon. We weren't sent to steal it, we were sent to test it. It was a glowing thing in a briefcase, kind of a large egg shape. Somehow it put us in a trance or something and took us into an altered reality. We thought we were doing the job, I was picking locks, getting us from room to room, but it was like a maze and every room seemed to induce a different emotion. Richie died in one of those rooms. When we got out, he was dead for real." He looked down into his coffee cup like it held the answers to the great questions of the universe.
"How did it work?"
"I don't know. Some rooms you saw hallucinations, some just made you feel things. The machine vanished once we found our way out. I don't know anything else."
"Could you give me an example?"
He looked up at me, meeting my eyes sharply. "No."
I'd been wrapped up in the idea of a new gadget, and I'd forgotten his pain for a moment. "Well, if you think of anything else that's important, let me know. And if you need anything..."
"Just some sleep."
"Sure thing. Crash away. I'm going to check email." I turned off the lights and went to my desk. Honestly, I lost track of time. It was a couple of hours later when I heard it.
"Noooooo," he whimpered softly. I turned around to look. His hands were covering his face and he'd kicked off the covers. "Richie."
He's had nightmares before. Not very often, but he's had them. Who wouldn't, after all he's been through? I've always left him alone. He either wakes up right away, or they just seem to last a minute or so. Sure enough, he turned in his sleep and was quiet again for a little while. But then something happened that made this nightmare different, that pulled me to intervene where I hadn't before. He called my name.
"No, Eddie! Eddie!"
He called my name and I was there sitting next to him so quickly that I hardly knew I'd moved. "It's okay, I'm here." I touched his arm gently. "I'm here, Foster."
"Eddie!" He sat up and looked around, his eyes wild. Then he seemed to see me. He threw his arms around me, burying his face in my shoulder. "You're alive. You're alive."
I hugged him back. "Yes, of course I am. I'm fine. So are you."
He continued, his voice muffled against my shoulder. "You were dead. I saw you dead. I knew it wasn't real, I knew it was the machine, pulling out my worst fear, but I saw you. It was so real. You were dead."
As he started to sound a little calmer, I became aware of the way our bodies were pressed together. He'd stripped off his jeans after I'd turned my back, so he was wearing only a t-shirt and briefs. My senses were flooded with Cade Foster. The feeling of his hands on my back, and oh, his smell. I couldn't take it. I tried to shift away a little, but he held me tightly. His touch on my back had become more like a caress, and his lips were now turned against my neck, right against the vein. Then I felt his tongue, just for a second, a tiny lick against my pulse. In the light cast by the computer monitor, I could see the bulge pressing against the cotton of his briefs. He was hard.
I gulped air and patted firmly at his back. He had to still be at least half asleep. Like sleepwalking or something. And even if he wasn't, I was not going to take advantage of my best friend in one of his rare moments of emotional weakness. Who knew I was such a man of principle? Or cowardice. Or stupidity. "It's okay. I'm here. I'm alive. Wake up. Come on, Foster, wake up!" I could hear my voice verging on panic.
"Eddie," he said, and relaxed his arms.
I pulled back. "It's okay. You were having a nightmare. A bad one. It's all okay. You're safe."
He pulled the blanket back up to his waist.
"You all right, man?"
"Yeah, I think so." His eyes were wide.
"Want to talk about it?"
He cleared his throat. "No. Guess that Gua machine just fucked with my head a little more than I thought."
"Well, do you remember what you were dreaming? If there are residual effects from the weapon--"
"No, I'm fine. Go back to sleep, Eddie."
"Okay. But no more nightmares. You scared me, pal."
"I'll see what I can do." He turned over, I went back to the computer, and I've been trying to puzzle this out ever since.
He was in a rush to come "home." He had a nightmare where I was dead, something that he apparently hallucinated in that machine. He called it his "worst fear." All of that can be easily explained away. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. We are close friends. I might even venture to say best friends. I can't speak for him, but I know he's my best friend. He doesn't have anybody else who's in this fight with him every single day. So, he wanted to hurry back to get back to familiar surroundings after having his oldest friend die. And maybe he wanted to reassure himself that I really was okay. That all makes sense. The hug makes sense in the context of the nightmare. The boner, that could have been an effect of the intense dream, or of just having woken up. The lick was just him wetting his lips. There's no greater significance to any of it. I'll call that Possibility One.
Possibilities Two and Three are so hard to even think, because hope is dangerous, and these two possibilities have a major effect on my blood pressure. There's quite a bit of overlap, so I'll consider them together at first. He saw me dead in the machine, his "worst fear" not because I'm important to the cause or because I'm his friend, but because he cares for me. He hurried "home" entirely because he needed to see me alive, know for certain that I was okay. The nightmare brought back that fear, and his true feelings came out, so to speak. The caress, the lick, the erection, those were real and for me. Now here's where the possibilities diverge again. Possibility Two is that he was actually still mostly asleep and won't even remember doing such a thing, wasn't even fully aware of it at the time. Possibility Three is that he was awake and aware, and that the nightmare maybe just made him a little more willing to show his feelings.
Now if it's One, then I totally did the right thing. Business as usual, status quo. I lust, he goes on oblivious. If it's Two, he presumably won't remember what he said and did, except maybe as part of a dream, so we're fine there, too. There's a little hope there, but basically that's status quo, too. But if it's Three, if he was awake, and starting to make a move on me, distressed or not, then I basically rejected him. But at least he thinks I think he was still sleeping. God, when I finish writing this I think I need a good stiff drink. And that's not all that's stiff. My head is so full of what maybe could have happened...
Is it possible that I could be naked in that bed with him right now if I hadn't panicked? No. It must have been Possibility One. It has to have been. But, just in case, without getting my hopes up--yeah, right--I'll watch him more closely for a while. I've assumed he was still too much in love with Hannah to feel anything for anyone else, but it has been almost two years now since her death. I've assumed he was straight, but now there's the way he looked when he talked about Richie, and he did do time. I've assumed that even if he was interested in men, he wasn't interested in me, but maybe I've been making too many assumptions. Empirical evidence. Hard facts. Data. That's what I need. And now I'm going to devote some time to collecting it.
-More later, Eddie