The Stains Beneath Our Skin [mxm] ✔

2.1 | Chinese

Note: In Britain, most people refer to a Chinese takeaway restaurant as "the Chinese", so this is intentional colloquial language.

By the end of next week, it seemed as if rejecting that bright-eyed stranger at the bar had brought some kind of cosmic karma down on him.

After Redhawk finished fucking him, he'd picked up. Took the dope free in the end for a blowjob, which was exactly why all his dealers were women or at least a little gay. Not so bad on that front, but he'd stepped through his shitty, broken front door to find Jack waiting for him on the sofa. Coked to his eyeballs, horny 'cause that bird had ditched him halfway, and wouldn't take gotta wash first for an answer. He got his face right up in Casper's ass before he jerked back with betrayal crushing through his gorgeous face.

"Nah, fuck this, Cas," he'd said before he left. Once he'd finished shouting for about a quarter of an hour while Casper sat on the sofa with his head in his hands. "I fuckin' told you, baby. No more. Hope them tricks keep you warm at night."

They didn't. Casper became intimately familiar with that over the next week.

His boss rung him about an hour later, and Casper had answered high as a kite. Chewed him out in that disappointed father way that might have made his skin crawl if he hadn't been so far gone, and told him he was on probationary suspension.

"You're a good kid, Casper. I don't want to lose you, but I can't excuse this behaviour. Find your money some other way for a couple of weeks, kid. Come back the Saturday after next."

Two weeks. Rent was due in one and Casper had already been running short.

So he'd been a sleepy boy again. Reactivating the old accounts had made him sick. Actually sprint to the toilet sick as soon as he saw those soft-lit photos of his body, biting his lip and winding his fingers through his hair. Username: Roach Boy. Cheapest on the market.

The first call came after two hours, and Casper had an overnight booking lined up on his way over. Casper went to the hour in makeup and a skirt, and he came so quickly he had to give the old fuck ten minutes free.

After all, he deserved this.

And it all took him plummeting downhill so fast the bottom was lightyears gone. Maybe he took in money, but his drug use went through the roof. That week he slept about twelve hours combined and ate one meal a day.

Sunday, he gave himself a day off. His hands shook too badly to cook a hit or pour a drink and that had always been his timeout marker. Shitty day off really. He wanted to draw, but that was a fever dream. He wanted to read but his mind didn't work right and he held the book in front of his face for half an hour reading the same couple of pages over and over because he kept forgetting what happened. Coding wasn't even worth considering and it seemed too much like work anyway. He hadn't touched it for months because it was too much like a life he'd never have.

So he spent the day in a zombie-like fugue, half-asleep on the sofa beneath a blanket with his threadbare toy lion, Mackie, while he played all his comfort films and wondered why he couldn't cry. Would it make him feel better, sobbing into this blanket and letting out all this pain gnarled up inside his mind? Ease out the tangle of thorns on the salty tear-slick?

It didn't matter.

The night hung like a haze across the streets when Casper went out for food. The sky was supposed to be black at night, like velvet, but here it reached only a murky amber too much like rainclouds. When the line he'd had earlier wore off, his stomach had actually growled. Strange how positive it felt laying all those notes out on the table and budgeting them off for food and bills and rent and even some savings (and dope), and then his little stack of treat yourself, roach boy – a hundred to spend how he liked.