For my sweet potato, Mrs. Sillypants, who only laughed a little bit when I proclaimed my deep and earnest desire to sing "Hopelessly Devoted to You" at a karaoke bar populated entirely by drunken Japanese businessmen who think I'm Jimmy Somerville.

(Actually, I should do "Anarchy in the U.K.". Anytime someone who looks like me claims to be either the Antichrist or an anarchist, it's always good for big laughs.)

Additionally, I'd like to extend my sincere thanks to the makers of Excedrin and Tanqueray Dry Gin-- although I should say here and now that I wasn't drunk off my ass every time I sat down to work on this-- as well as the fine, fine people responsible for BearShare. I know it's wrong to download copyrighted materials without compensating their creators in any way, shape, or form, but I assure you that if I could afford to pay for every CD I want, I would.

SPECIAL NOTE: there are a few lines in the story which are similar but not identical to a few lines from a story by the Rhipodon Society, Overheard in a Liverpool Pub . I wrote the lines before I read the story, and if I were a better person I would change them, but to me they're important to the conversation-- although I admit that the conversation itself isn't important.

REGULAR NOTE: My name is Little Bongo, I sing my little songo, whenever I sit down to write, my stories are too longo… This story is ever so slightly longer than strictly necessary, given that the whole thing takes place in an eight-hour time frame and nothing much happens in that time. But if you like my stuff generally, probably you won't be bothered by that at all. If you don't, you'll come away from this thinking that I'm a self-indulgent dickweed completely in love with my own voice. If that's the case, don't come crying to me. I tried to tell you.




World's Biggest World II:
I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper
by Mallory Klohn


Wakefulness came quickly to Vince Tyler. He tended to be a bit dopey, mornings, especially if he'd had a shag the night before, but there were certain forces in the universe that were unstoppable, undeniable, veritable juggernauts, rolling merrily along and crushing all who dared to stand against them.

They were gods, elements, destiny: things so powerful that to even attempt to defy them would be insanity on a grand scale, but they were also Stuart Jones, who leapt out of bed each morning exactly as if he hadn't spent the previous night tempting mortality in a thousand ways, and who had no sympathy whatsoever for people who preferred to lie in.

"Oi, Vince," he said loudly, giving his friend a good thump in the back, "you can't sleep all bloody day. They've got a busload of Jehovah's Witnesses or some fucking thing coming in at half-three."

Vince squirmed away from him and pulled the blanket over his head, grumbling, "They have not. Even the Jehovah's Witnesses want no part of this godforsaken hellhole."

"Seems to suit you well enough," said Stuart. He yanked the blanket down to Vince's waist.

"Fuck off," Vince said, tugging the blanket back and burrowing in deeper. The room hadn't seemed so cold the night before; what with one thing and another it had been almost balmy, actually, but it was Ice Station bloody Zebra now.

That was backwoods motels for you; it wasn't enough to let the cleaning slide, it wasn't enough to allow the rooms to deteriorate so badly that they had all the charm of a condemned orphanage. No, the owners of such establishments weren't content till they'd turned off the heat at night and dressed their fragrant mattresses with thin blankets, as well. If a single one had been in possession of anything resembling a slogan, it likely would've been something like Get Out-- And Don't Come Back.

"You can't start bugging me just 'cause you've shagged the only other hearing person within a thousand-mile radius."

It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it instantly; provoking Stuart was never a good idea, especially when he wanted something, but Vince wasn't sure exactly how he'd slipped up till he felt Stuart slide down on the bed, spooning up behind him. It was too late, then; Stuart draped his arms around him and rubbed up against him, sighing contentedly.

"Could shag you," he said softly. "I was up half the night thinking about it."

"Give over," Vince said, elbowing him in the ribs.

"I was," he insisted. "I was thinking, if you turn on like that for a wank ..." Stuart coaxed him closer and licked the shell of his ear, making him shiver. "Could do me," he purred. "Shag me blind, good and hard, leave me with a limp and a smile, yeah, would you like that?"

For perhaps ten seconds, Vince stayed put and said nothing, helpless to do anything but absorb the feel of Stuart wrapped around him, a delicious, tingly, roaming sort of heat that stuttered along his nerves while Stuart thrust against him lazily, teasing his nipples, dropping light kisses on his shoulders.

He had no doubt that Stuart was only taking the piss, that he wanted Vince out of bed, that he'd abandoned bullying in favor of seduction to get the job done-- no one had ever accused him of being slow to make a decision-- but Stuart was as hard as Vince himself was by then, and making sure that Vince could feel every inch, hear every slight sound he made when he moved just so...

But he'd see it through, if need be; Vince didn't doubt that, either. Shag or be shagged, Jehovah's Witnesses be damned. He wasn't a bluffer, Stuart. He was prepared to follow through with swift and merciless action on any threat he made. It was all the same to him, because he was a bastard and a dangerous, dangerous man, though hardly ever in a conventional sort of way.

This, in the end, was what finally spooked Vince; he was out of bed in an instant. Stuart started giggling before his feet even hit the floor.

"Get back here, you prick-teasing bastard," said Stuart.

"Fuck off." Vince stomped into the bathroom and slammed the door.

"Half an hour," Stuart called after him, "or I'm leaving you here."

"Be sure to send a postcard," Vince called back. "You cunt."


*** *** ***


Vince glanced at Stuart and silently cursed his name for what seemed like the thousandth time that day.

No sooner had he got Vince out of the motel than he'd sweet-talked him into doing the driving, slipped into the passenger seat and fallen asleep.

Vince might've changed enough to drop everything and run off with Stuart like the alternate ending to Casablanca , he might've changed enough to nick a chocolate bar from a filling station shop and not let the guilt drive him to drop the $1.79 in the post the following morning, but he hadn't changed enough to wake his best mate out of sheer spite when the poor sod so clearly needed the rest.

Whatever he'd said, he couldn't have been thinking about shagging Vince all night, but something had kept him up. He never looked knackered, the way normal people did, but it wasn't like him to admit that he wasn't precisely on form, let alone beg off driving.

He had no objection to Vince's driving, even when it landed them at the threshold of a butter sculpture exhibition. It was just that he preferred to think himself invulnerable. It didn't matter that Vince knew better; it didn't matter that Vince knew anything, apparently. Vince didn't count. How many times had he heard that rubbish, over the years? For how many different reasons?

Vince never saw things coming until they were right bloody there, that was his major problem.

He'd skived off in school most of the time, better things to think about, and where had that got him? A budding career as Manchester's best-looking stockboy. (Mind you, he'd never been particularly ambitious in that respect, but surely he could've managed something a bit more impressive. Suicide bombers had more admirers than Vince did.)

He'd quit his job, abandoned his flat, his friends, his family, he'd fled Manchester with Stuart, driven off into the sunset headed towards god knew what, and yeah, he'd been thinking about it for years, but that was the point, wasn't it? He'd only been thinking. The doing of it had come over him like a sneeze: quick, easy, unexpected. Assistant manager one moment, fugitive the next. He hadn't had a clue.

Until he'd met Stuart that first time, in physical education of all things, he'd never even suspected that he was gay. It had just happened . He'd walked into the locker room and found Stuart sitting on a bench by himself, fourteen years old and openly sizing up Lionel Calder's arse while Lionel had been bent over, rummaging through his knapsack.

Vince had stared at Stuart, then, unable to believe his own eyes-- to attract Lionel Calder's attention for any reason invited nothing but pain and degradation-- and he'd been about to try to divert Stuart somehow when Stuart had looked up at him, caught him looking, really. Eyes dark, mouth parted just slightly while he'd licked his lips, he'd grinned at Vince, completely unrepentant, completely unconcerned, and in that moment he'd seemed like the only thing Vince had ever really wanted in his life.

He'd had an awakening, some twat had told him, years later. A sodding awakening . It sounded like the sort of thing the yoga people did. Somehow having this particular term for it was even more humiliating than had been the realization, at age fourteen, that he'd known less than nothing at a time in his life when everyone else had already known everything.

Late bloomer, halfwit-- they both amounted to the same thing, in the end.

He'd never really believed that Stuart fancied him until he'd grabbed him the night before. Stuart had had men who were uglier than him, fatter, older, dumber, duller, he'd had men Vince wouldn't shag on a bet on the eve of Armageddon, but Vince himself? No chance.

Vince still had nights, often, when he caught Stuart at just the right instant, when he wanted Stuart so badly that he'd have given up everything he loved in life and consigned his soul to the fiery pits of hell for one night with him, one hour. For ages, on those nights, Stuart hadn't looked at him at all unless his glass was empty or he needed a lift.

But now he had. Out of nowhere.

That wasn't the way these things tended to go, was it? He was supposed to wait till Vince was on his deathbed, or one of them had to move to Jakarta and the other couldn't follow, or else he wasn't supposed to change his mind at all. Like practically everything else, unrequited love had rules.

A part of Vince dismissed the whole thing as a mercy fuck, just as he'd been dismissing Stuart's casual flirtation since they'd left Manchester, but however he felt about it, he knew better.

Nobody kissed like that just because they wanted to get it over with. Stuart could be a bastard, the worst person Vince had ever met, he could be so cruel and vicious that it stopped Vince's heart, but he didn't think Stuart would shag him just because he could, because he wanted to.

(That was daft, though, wasn't it? Stuart did things all the time just because he could and he wanted to, never looking any further ahead than the next thirty minutes. The streets of Manchester would've been paved with corpses if he could've killed that many people and gotten away with it.)

It hadn't come out at all like Vince had thought it might. It'd been brilliant, yeah. Brilliant, fantastic, assorted other superlatives. He'd felt light-headed after, could barely think who he was or how he'd come to be naked and plastered against the wall at the Royal Canadian Museum of Appalling Bathrooms.

His whole body had been singing the praises of Stuart Jones, and why not? It'd been a wank, when all was said and done, just a wank , for Christ's sake, and with ten or twelve hours and a hundred miles between then and now, Vince had achieved some perspective on the subject, but at the time, it'd felt like Stuart had reshaped the fabric of the universe.

And what had Vince given him in return? A bit of a snog. A bald patch at the back of his head where he'd tugged Stuart's hair the hardest. A hand-shaped bruise on his wrist. He'd felt bad enough about all this before Stuart had coaxed him into bed and wrapped himself around Vince like his rich, chocolaty coating, but after?

After, Vince had fallen asleep. His last words to his best mate after their first real sex had been "Fuck off." He supposed that that was more or less right in keeping with the general shape of their friendship and so completely appropriate, but it offended his sense of occasion.

He'd always thought it would change everything, him and Stuart shagging, always. He'd never see Stuart again, or they'd be at each other's throats all the time, or else-- and this seemed so pie-in-the-sky that it embarrassed him to admit he'd thought about it-- they'd find some way to sort it out.

Stuart would stop crossing himself whenever someone thought him Vince's boyfriend, Vince would stop waiting for Stuart to realize that he was shagging a carnival freak and chuck him out, and both of them would stop circling each other like wary dogs whenever something threatened their truce, because they wouldn't have a truce then, would they?

God knew what they were doing now.

He'd gone stomping off into the bathroom, completely narked at Stuart and deeply embarrassed, but by the time he'd come out again, he'd forgotten about it, and Stuart had been flipping through one of their many, many map books, trying to decide which was the best route to Vancouver.

It had been a close call. Stuart had been telling the truth about the Jehovah's Witnesses, and once Vince had learned this for himself, he'd been desperate to get Stuart into the Jeep and out of town before they arrived, not because he harbored a grudge against Jehovah's Witnesses, especially, but because he knew Stuart was mad for men in lovely suits.

Stuart might cop off with some other bloke-- sod might; he would, sooner or later-- but Vince didn't have to make it easy for him.

He glanced at Stuart again. It was quite remarkable, actually; he hadn't known anyone could bend like that in a car, let alone sleep. But there he was, in an abandoned sprawl that suggested either absolute faith in Vince's driving or absolute disinterest in his own well-being. His left side was braced against the door, his arm bent to hold his head in place, and his leg bent so completely that his foot was propped up against the seat.

Vince supposed he was meant to think that Stuart's only thought had been for his own comfort, but there was no denying that this posture displayed him to his best advantage, at least while he was clothed. And if ever there was a soul who was absolutely aware of just how to display himself to his best advantage, it was Stuart, who didn't seem to have a bad side.

Still, he must do, mustn't he? If the gods had seen fit to bestow upon Stuart Jones a body that was perfect in every possible way, to every eye, from every angle, that could only mean that the gods were either very cruel or completely daft. Neither option appealed to Vince in the slightest.

Stuart had given fire to the fantasies of scores of men, yeah, but he'd also left scores of men weeping on the sidewalk in the pouring rain. How in god's name could such a man be a gift to mankind?

If he remembered his shags at all after, he remembered their faces, their arses, their cocks, their quirks. Vince was his chronicler, painstakingly recording the bloody illuminated verses of Stuart's sex life so that Stuart himself was left free to shag his way across the earth, never looking back.

You'd think between the two of them it'd be Stuart who was the most interested in interdimensional space travel, Stuart, who'd had everyone.

He'd be the last and best Dr. Who, the slinky, sexy one, straight out of the most ridiculous of all fan fiction-- Vince's favorite kind, if for the wrong reasons-- the one who had some fantastic alien bloke waiting for him on every planet in the galaxy, and who wanted nothing more out of life than to discover the perfect fuck, no matter how far he had to go to find it.

The pub tales alone would be worth the aggravation.

Vince shook his head. He was going mad. He was going mad, and finally, finally, he was lucid enough to recognize it. He'd heard of road rage and highway hypnosis, but there was a third, lesser-known, deadlier driving-related mental illness, a sick and twisted cousin to cabin fever:

Cooped up in a car for too long with nobody to keep them company, people went dodgy on you.

It was the only logical explanation for songs like "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall". If you weren't mad enough to write it and you weren't mad enough to sing it, then someone else surely would be, and by the time they got to Bottle #57, you'd be mad enough to slaughter everyone in the car and still have enough homicidal mania left over for the hapless sods at the next truck stop.

Mind you, whoever'd written the bloody song ought to've been slaughtered on general principles. Crimes against humanity, something like that.

"Stuart," Vince murmured, nudging him with his elbow.

Stuart smiled faintly. "Mm, yeah..." he sighed, squirming a little in his seat, just enough to make Vince squirm as well.

He knew he was safe with Vince, that was the problem. He knew Vince wouldn't wake him even if he went mad for real, started clawing at the bugs under his skin or shouting at the flaming rhinos that had materialized in the back seat and hadn't spared him so much as a terse greeting before they'd started criticizing his driving.

If he woke Stuart from a sound sleep simply because he was lonely, he'd be wallowing in the same sewer of moral turpitude that had led Stuart to sweet-talk him into driving in the first place. Vince wasn't above wallowing in sewers of moral turpitude himself, but in times of uncertainty it helped him to have a clearer definition of who was who and what was what. Stuart had already accepted the Complete Bastard role, and that left Vince taking the high road. Again.

He'd scarcely begun griping to himself about it when he spotted a young woman at the side of the road, hitchhiking. She was plain, and pregnant, and obviously desperate-- millions of miles away from anything, in the waning daylight, with nothing but a flimsy plastic shopping bag full of clothes to her name, how could she be anything else?

Probably all she'd want to talk about was the boyfriend-- of course there was a boyfriend-- and Stuart would beat Vince half to death if she was still in the car when he woke, but anything had to be better than sullying the good name of Dr. Who and all he stood for with the likes of Stuart Jones.

Vince pulled over.

"Thank you," the girl said, climbing into the back seat. "Thank you so much."

"Yeah," said Vince. "Just, would you mind keeping it down a bit? I don't want to wake him."

She peered at Stuart curiously over the headrest. "Jeez," she said, taking in Stuart's pose, "what's his deal?"

"He's a bit daft," Vince said sadly. "Came off his motorbike when he was fourteen. Pulling stunts for his girlfriend." Vince shook his head. "Brain damage, poor sod. Can't even feed himself now."

He hadn't meant to say anything so preposterous, and he certainly hadn't expected her to believe it; to him, even setting aside his considerable bias, Stuart was plainly sleeping, if in a shameless, sociopathic sort of way.

But the woman said, "Looks like," and sat back in her seat. "What are you, his caregiver or something?"

Because Vince was lonely, and because he felt suddenly that whatever tragedy had befallen this woman, she could use a little excitement, a little distraction, he said, "Yeah." Then he reached back to shake her hand. "Vince."

"Judy."

"He's Stuart."

She wrinkled her nose delicately. "Does he talk?"

"Oh yeah." Vince pulled back out onto the highway, relaxing into his story now that he was more certain that the next phrase out of her mouth wasn't going to have anything to do with the particular circle of hell reserved for filthy liars who delighted in taking advantage of gullible pregnant hitchhikers. "He has these phases-- fugues, his mum called them-- rest her soul. Sounds normal, but he's, like, psychic. Starts saying all-sorts."

Her eyes widened. "No."

"Yeah," he said, affecting a sort of rueful bemusement. "This one time, we must've been fifteen, or sixteen. We were watching some film on telly, I forget which-- I think it was The Eyes of Laura Mars, actually. Awful film. Just bloody awful." Vince caught her expression in the rearview mirror; she wasn't as charmed by his asides as some. "Any road, he just starts talking, right, rabbiting on about the blue man, I must mind the blue man. I dunno what in hell he's talking about."

It was a sort of alchemy, lying. One part truth and eight or nine parts fabrication made for a believable story-- and a memorable one, more often than not-- with scarcely any effort at all. Vince wasn't above playing on his looks when the occasion called for it, as it clearly did now. He looked like he wouldn't lie to a man with a gun who wanted him to say that evolution was a lie and that man had actually been created by intelligent ferrets from the future, using nothing more than plasticine, steel wool, and common household cleanser.

Judy might've been unimpressed by his story to begin with, but she was riveted now.

"I forgot about it," he went on. "You would, wouldn't you? Days passed. Weeks. Then I'm in this club, Madness, and this bloke starts chatting me up. Fantastic, except for this bloody suit he's got on, this terrifying double-breasted suit, all in royal blue. And it's fuzzy, right, and he hasn't even got a shirt on underneath. It's the worst thing in the world."

"Wait--" she frowned at him. "You're gay?"

Vince glanced at her again, startled. He couldn't remember the last time he'd just come out with it like that. He wasn't sure he ever had-- not to a stranger, any road.

"Yeah," he said eventually.

He watched her reassess him, changing her perceptions, her demeanor. He supposed it made a difference to her; taking a lift from a strange anyone was scary enough without taking it from someone who might turn out to be a refugee from I Spit On Your Grave. Taking one from a gay man probably implied a certain amount of security, to her, however tenuous.

Vince always hoped people would take it in stride, treat it the same way they'd treat any other difference between them-- eye color, favorite brand of crisps, that sort of thing-- but he didn't have to switch on the news to know how naïve that was. Any road, it was his car, for all intents and purposes. He wasn't likely to boot her out if she got twitchy with him, but neither did he have to just take it.

"My sister's called Judy," he offered. "Judith, actually. My half-sister. She's lovely, she's--"

She flicked a hand at him dismissively. "So then what happened?"

He glanced at her again, trying to decide how far to go. Chances were she didn't believe a word of it anyway-- being pregnant and stranded somewhere between The Middle of Nowhere and New Middle of Nowhere didn't necessarily mean she'd fallen off the Stupid Tree and hit every branch on the way down-- but it would be so much nicer if she had done, if there were some way he could just go on and have her eat it up like cake.

He'd have a pub tale about a pub tale, in the end. Sadly, he sensed this was not to be.

"Uh, right," he said eventually, clearing his throat. "Yeah. He, uh, gets me home, right, and his whole flat's done up like the bloody Pearly Gates Gift Shop and Newsagents. Oil paintings of Jesus on every wall. Jesus performing heart surgery. Jesus driving an ice cream truck. Jesus playing poker with the Apostles after the Last Supper.

"Jesus had the worst hand in the lot," he said with a soft laugh, "imagine that. He's got neon crucifixes, glow-in-the-dark figurines of the Blessed Virgin, he's even got a bloody hook rug depicting Jesus standing barefoot in the snow outside Santa Claus's house, looking like the end of the world is nigh.

"'Course, Jesus always looks like that, doesn't he? You never see him just having a laugh, or doing the crossword in The People's Friend, something like that. Even when he's poncing about in a meadow with lions and unicorns and the entire bloody cast of a United Nations holiday pageant, he always looks like he knows he's in for it later on."

In spite of everything, Vince was embarrassed once he realized that he'd been poncing about a bit himself. Now it wasn't a question of whether she'd believe his story so much as whether it mattered either way. It was quite possible that the only reason she hadn't flung herself out of the car was that it was still slightly more hazardous to her health than was sticking with him and enduring whatever he might come up with next. But only slightly.

Still, she hadn't said anything. Either she'd been bored into catatonia or she was patiently waiting him out, hoping there was a point to all this.

"You all right?" Vince asked her.

"Yeah. Go on."

"Okay," he said happily. "So I'm thrown a bit off-balance, right, I mean, sometimes you meet a bloke who's a bit camp, he's got every episode of The Golden Girls on tape and he watches the lot during Dental Health Month, something like that, but this bloke is a fucking disaster. So I lock myself in the toilet, thinking I've bought myself some time, I'll jump out the window, fake a heart attack, something, but then I notice he's got something taped to his medicine chest. It's the Apostle's Creed."

"What is the Apostle's Creed?" Judy asked.

"I don't bloody know. I only say it was the Apostle's Creed 'cause that's what it said at the top of the page. It could've been the lyrics to 'Good Morning Starshine' for all I know. The thing is, right, that's when it came to me: he wasn't trying to be funny."

"Oh no," she said.

"Oh yes," said Vince. "And then I couldn't do anything, 'cause I was completely terrified, I just knew this bloke was going to cry after we shagged--"

"You were going to have sex with him anyway?"

"Oh, if you'd only seen him," said Vince, smiling reminiscently. "Any road, I come out of the toilet, right, I'm thinking he'll be kneeling by the bed, begging forgiveness for the heinous and unholy act he's about to commit, but instead he's at the kitchen table. He's got thousands of felt pens and 'The Holy Bible Coloring Book'. Turns out he isn't gay at all, he just goes out clubbing, trying to tell us the Good News." He smiled faintly. "Half the time, we thought he was selling E. Poor sod."

She cocked her head at him. "What did you do?"

"I colored the Holy Bible," he confessed. "Even did this dot-to-dot page, it just had a great big cross on it, with a caption, said ONE DAY SOME BAD MEN KILLED JESUS." He sighed. "I've still got that somewhere."

Judy said nothing, just watched him in the rearview.

"Sorry," said Vince. "I'm a twat, aren't I, going on like that? I haven't even asked you where you're going."

She cast a moody glance out her window. "I'll let you know when we get there," she said eventually.

He'd been hoping for something a bit more specific-- a country, at least-- but he didn't want to press her. If she started crying, he'd do anything to stop her, even if it meant Stuart pitching him out of the car, even if he had to carry her on his back to whatever destination she had in mind.

Vince had lost count of the things he wanted to do and see while he was out adventuring with Stuart; weird or wonderful, strange or stupid, mad or dull or completely lovely, if it crossed his mind, it went on the list. Stuart hadn't turned him down yet, but Vince wasn't daft enough to think that he'd even once agreed to something he honestly didn't want any part of. He was sure to balk at driving Judy god-knew-where to do god-knew-what.

(Vince wasn't keen on that himself. Every minute she was in the car, she was a minute closer to giving birth in the car.)

It had taken some doing to persuade Stuart to take Vince along on this trip-- not a lot of doing, mind you, but some. Perhaps he'd only wanted to satisfy himself that Vince wasn't just tagging along again as he always had.

It was the first truly optimistic thought Vince had had since he'd fallen asleep the night before.

"We might have to part ways a bit before that," he said. "Dunno where we're going, exactly, but it's a hell of a long way from here."


*** *** ***


Stuart woke straight away when an unfriendly hand plunged into his hair and yanked him back against the headrest. "What the fuck?" he snarled.

In the next instant, he felt a knife at his throat. Fucking hell. He tried to relax while he unfolded himself, tried not to struggle, but it wasn't easy. With his head pulled back, his throat was stretched out, exposed, vulnerable. Whoever it was who'd attacked him, they could carve the bloody Bhagavad-Gita on his neck if they felt like it and they had clever hands.

He was going to get cut, sooner or later, he knew that, and he intended to do whatever he could to make it later, but god only knew what his attacker had in mind, and he still had Vince to contend with.

He hadn't reacted at all like Stuart would've thought he would. He'd turned instantly when Stuart shouted, jerking the car wildly, but he'd righted it immediately, devoting his attention to his driving. He was white-knuckling it now, yeah, and eerily silent, but apart from that, you'd have thought all he'd heard was a pebble striking the windscreen: something to be acknowledged and disregarded.

Stuart wanted to thump him one; he almost wanted it more than he wanted the knife away from his throat. Any sudden move he made was likely to be misinterpreted, though, and if he absolutely had to die that day, he wanted to put it off till he'd had a chance to tell Vince that it was all his fault, one more time. Stuart owed him that much.

"You picked up a fucking hitchhiker?" he snarled.

"She looked all right," Vince said apologetically. "She's pregnant."

He wouldn't throw his fag ends out the window because there were signs posted, he slowed down for the threat of wildlife because there were signs posted, but he saw three hundred million signs about hitchhikers and he said Bugger that all to hell, she's pregnant.

"Can you kill him instead?" Stuart asked the carjacker. "I'll restrain him for you."

"Shut up," she said, nudging him with the knife. "Stop the car."

It was maddening. The best they could hope for was that they'd be stranded in the arctic wilderness without so much between them as a packet of chewing gum that was meant to fight cavities and whiten the teeth at the same time that it protected one against the heartbreak of gingivitis.

Next best: only one of them would die, and the other could take his clothes, cut him up for road snacks, and hope he came across another Good Samaritan.

Third best didn't bear thinking about.

He might've fought the carjacker for the knife if it'd just been him in the car, but he wasn't about to take that kind of chance with Vince sitting less than three feet away. Vince hadn't even removed his seatbelt yet, the twat, and why? Because there were signs posted.

No matter what happened now, they were fucked, at least for a bit, and Stuart had to just sit back and leave it?

"Vince," he said. Vince shot him a hopeful look, obviously expecting some sort of guidance, but Stuart only grinned at him, a mad and evil grin summoned up from the depths of his mad and evil heart, and said, "Punch it."

"Right, yeah, okay," said Vince, rolling his eyes. "We're in Canada, Stuart. If we didn't die in a car crash, you'd get your throat cut, I'd be in prison for reckless endangerment and assorted traffic violations, and she'd get whiplash, file a civic suit against me, take my life savings and move to-- where would you go, Judy?" he asked her.

"Barcelona," she replied, without hesitation.

"There you have it," said Vince. "You're dead, I'm writing the unauthorized sequel to bloody De Profundis, and our assailant's living the high life in Barcelona."

"She'll never get that far on twenty quid."

"Oh, fuck off."

Vince pulled over slowly, taking care not to jar the Jeep again now that it was obvious to one and all that doing so could cut Stuart's throat for him. Then he shut off the engine, unfastened his seatbelt, and turned to glare at the woman in the back seat-- Judy, apparently, and this brightened Stuart's outlook somewhat; surely even Vince couldn't have gotten himself on a first-name basis with a cold-blooded killer mid-felony-- all in a tremendously deliberate fashion that advertised his state of mind more clearly than anything else ever could've done: he was furious.

Anger refined Stuart, it lent clarity to his thoughts, gave him a sense of purpose that was often otherwise lacking in his life, but Vince allowed himself to become truly furious so seldom that he tended to make a hash of it, striking out at everyone and acting so irrationally that nobody could take him seriously even when they knew he'd make them pay for that, one way or another.

"Right," Vince said to Judy, "what's next?"

"Get out."

Some things never changed. Stuart didn't doubt that there would never come a time in Vince's life when he wouldn't fall for a half-decent sob story. That was Vince, he'd let himself believe anything if you dressed it up enough. Sometimes now he surprised Stuart, though. Sometimes the line between them blurred, sometimes they met each other halfway, Vince a bit harder, Stuart a bit softer.


Press the button, dematerialize, step out, new planet.


For example, where once in such a situation Vince would've leapt out of the car without giving it another thought-- a perfectly sensible reaction that Stuart himself might've had if Judy had attacked Vince instead-- now he stayed where he was, his jaw set in a stubborn line.

"Vince," Stuart said. "What are you doing?"

He wouldn't look Stuart in the eye-- a serious handicap for Stuart, who couldn't even turn his head without killing himself-- but he looked everywhere else: the blade of the knife, Judy's hand, still clenched in Stuart's hair, Judy herself, the stretch of road they were on. He never made an important decision without talking to Stuart first, he thought he was rubbish at it, but now, of all times, he was giving it a go.

"I'm staying."

The pair of them were straight out of the sort of soppy melodramas Vince had made him sit through on Sunday afternoons when they'd nothing better to do: Vince wanted to stay with him so he wouldn't have to face his undoubtedly unspeakable fate alone, and Stuart wanted to get him out of the car so that at least one of them would have some slim chance for survival.

It was the most humiliating experience of Stuart's life.

"For fuck's sake--"

"Shut up," said Judy. She leaned forward in her seat and rubbed her cheek against his, lightly tracing his throat with the tip of the knife. She smelled of the sort of cheap, spicy perfume they kept out in the open at the chemists' because they didn't care especially if anybody robbed it. Her grip never faltered at all. "I don't want to kill him," she told Vince, "but I will if I have to."

"Oh my god," said Vince, with genuine horror. "I didn't think anyone said that in real life."

It struck Stuart then that everything Judy was doing, she was doing for Vince's benefit. He still wouldn't look at Stuart, and it wasn't because he didn't want to risk finding out firsthand whether or not looks could kill.

It was because Stuart winced whenever Judy gave his hair a good yank-- he couldn't help it, it bloody hurt -- because she hadn't cut Stuart yet, but the way she toyed with the knife suggested that she was the type to make a day of it, because he was helpless, and although he was making a sincere effort to keep his mouth shut, as bidden, his rage was building by the second, and that had to show in his expression as well.

Judy didn't give a toss about Stuart, but she had a hell of a problem with Vince.

When the cut finally came, he didn't notice it straight away; it was shallow, not too long; the feel of it was nearly indistinguishable from the feel of the knife just teasing his skin. He mightn't have noticed it at all, too much of his focus spent on a variety of related subjects, but even if he hadn't felt his blood trickling down the side of his neck, Vince's expression would've given it away: he looked shattered.

"Doesn't look like much, does it?" she said, stroking Stuart's throat with the knife. "Still, if I do it often enough..."

In spite of himself, Stuart was fidgeting now, trying to distract himself. He honestly didn't think Judy was prepared to kill either of them, but there was no mistaking her for one of god's saner people, and anyway, whatever humorous aspects the situation had had to begin with, they'd faded considerably when the bitch had actually cut him.

It was the knife that made him nervous, he realized, not the woman wielding it. Strange, to think she could've threatened him with a gun or a mace, something like that, and he mightn't have taken it so badly.

"Fuck off with that, will ya?" he said, batting at her with his hand. "I think he takes your point."

He died a thousand deaths in the next instant while he imagined all the many terrible point/knife puns Vince might choose to make, but Vince just watched the knife, silently, hardly breathing, while its blade slid almost languidly up and down Stuart's throat. Anyone else would've gotten out of the car as soon as she'd cut Stuart, but not Vince, he had something else in mind. It chilled Stuart to think that he had no idea what that might be.

"Vince," Stuart prompted. Vince didn't blink. "Oi, Vince."

Judy wrenched Stuart's head back viciously, straining his jaw, and brought the knife up hard against his jugular. "Listen, buddy," she said to Vince, "think about what you're doing. Do you really think you have a chance, here? Do you really think I'm just gonna, what, get out of the car and walk?"

"Vince," Stuart bit out, struggling to keep his voice even. "Get out of the fucking car."

"Fuck off, Stuart," he said. "I'm staying."

"Jesus Christ, do you want me dead? You get out, then she chucks me out. That's the way it's meant to go, Vince, it's a fucking tradition. All she wants is the car." Vince didn't even blink. "Get out of the car, Vince," Stuart growled. "Get out of the car."

Still Vince didn't move.

"Wow," Judy laughed, "it's like a long-distance commercial co-sponsored by Satan and the GLAAD. Your boyfriend's being held hostage in Canada," she said smarmily, "you're working on your tan at Muscle Beach. When you can't be with him at his time of need, dial 10-10-666 and save."

"He's not my boyfriend," Vince said irritably.

"Oh, that's right, he's a brain-damaged psychic who uses his special gift to warn you against going home with strange men."

Stuart closed his eyes and tried not to imagine the lavish funeral which was certain to come after this.

Vince wasn't going to try to talk their way out of this; Stuart saw that now. He wasn't going to fight Judy for the knife, he wasn't even going to get out of the fucking car. This wasn't about bloody devotion. Now, of all times, he'd decided to live up to his end of the bargain they'd struck that rainy afternoon on Canal Street.


No passengers, Vince. You let me down and I'll kill you.

Not if I kill you first.


The trouble was, Vince wasn't quite so experienced as Stuart at mad bastarddom. There was a trick to it, you had to make it your own, apply a certain amount of subtlety, add the odd personal touch to distinguish yourself from the many other lunatics you were sure to encounter, sooner or later.

Practically anyone could become a garden-variety mad bastard if they made a little effort, but you really had to give it your all if you wanted people to refer to you as "Oh, yeah, that crazy fucker" in an affectionate tone. Vince was no more prepared to accept his Mad Bastard mantle than Stuart was to join the scrum at the Great Rugby Game of Accomplished Liars.

Stuart lied well and often, but brevity was the heart and soul of his success. Vince was more liable to employ a sort of dazzle camouflage, lying so lengthily and colorfully that people just bought it, because how in god's name could he be making it all up? His wide-eyed innocence-- however much he faked it-- made his tales all the more plausible.

"Listen," he said now. "Why don't you boot him out? Take me instead. He's a pain in the arse, Stuart, you'd have to kill him sooner or later, and I'm sure you're in loads of trouble as it is."

"Fuck off, Vince," Stuart growled.

"You see that? Maybe he's not as daft as I said, but he's got something wrong with him, hasn't he? Look at him," he said, waving a hand at Stuart. "You've cut his throat and he's still giving me stick."

Judy slid forward in her seat and peered at Stuart with real interest. "You'd leave him?"

"In a heartbeat," Vince answered for him. "He's a complete wanker."

Right, that tears it.

In the time he'd been traveling with Vince, Stuart had tapped previously unsuspected reserves of tolerance. It had never seemed like a particularly good idea to let Vince have his way back in Manchester, when such an indulgence might've landed Stuart at a science fiction convention, or a potluck supper, or a miniature golf course, or his parents' house.

Now, though, Vince's options were both greatly limited and greatly expanded. He couldn't drag Stuart to every excruciatingly horrible social occasion in England, so he dragged him to scenic points of interest and roadside attractions instead. This was no great hardship for Stuart; Vince happy was Vince tractable, and as Stuart had said many, many times since they'd left town, they had loads of time.

Any road, there was never that element of obligation attached to it, and that appealed to Stuart more than anything.

If Vince wanted to be a hard man, or an adventurer, if he wanted to be camp, or a nutter, or a slut, if he wanted to be childish, or silly, or superior, or anything other than what he'd always been, he just was, because he felt he could be, now, he only had Stuart to look after. Stuart didn't give a toss whether Vince looked after him or not, and never had done.

It was nice, yeah, but the sun would continue to rise and set whether or not Stuart had someone trailing along behind him making sure he wasn't putting anyone in psychotherapy. No storm-chaser ever prevented a tornado.

Now he gave Vince a look he was sure to recognize, his only warning-- too little and too late-- that things were about to get ugly, that he was done fucking around, that there would be no apologies.

It was surreal, something Stuart knew he'd remember the rest of his life.

Everything seemed unimportant, now: their location, their situation, all of it. Something passed between them, something, some understanding, some acceptance, the same as it'd always done. They could've been anywhere, doing anything, they could've been back home or somewhere else entirely, and it would've been just the same.


All those dependents of yours.

They'll survive.

And I won't?

You might not.


"This is bollocks," Stuart said disgustedly. "And you're a fucking twat, Vince. You're a twat for picking up some nutter with a fucking machete in her handbag, you're a twat for not even bloody spotting that she was a nutter till she cut my fucking throat, you're a twat for stopping when she said, and you're a twat for arguing with her-- with both of us!-- now. You're a miserable fucking twat. You've always been a twat, and you'll always be a twat. You'll be a twat in the fucking afterlife."

By the time Stuart was done with him, Vince looked thoroughly demoralized. Bit by bit, his bravado had been leeched away, till he looked beaten and shamed, and he stared at the blood trickling down Stuart's neck as if he'd cut Stuart himself and he intended to beseech the local authorities to give him the death penalty before he even placed his one telephone call.

Then he looked Stuart in the eye, gave him a look that could've meant anything: he might've thought Stuart was trying to save his own life, might've thought he was trying to save Vince's. Might've thought he meant it, that he thought Vince was a disaster of a human being and Stuart couldn't have chosen a worse traveling companion if he'd invited Sid Vicious along and left him in charge of the gun and a sackful of crack.

Might've felt that way about Stuart.

Without another word to anyone, Vince opened his door and climbed out. He posted himself at the side of the road, shoulders hunched, head down, eyes up, as if he didn't want to look at Stuart, but he didn't dare look away.

"Fucking hell," Stuart muttered.

Now, finally, Judy let go of his hair. It was all he could do not to pull away; the knife was still as close as it'd always been, but his neck was sore and his scalp throbbed, for some reason.

"I can't believe you even have blood," she said. "You're an asshole, man."

"Can I have my bag, at least?" Vince shouted. "It's bloody cold out. And I'm asthmatic, if I don't have my inhaler I could die right here."

She nudged Stuart with the knife. "Is that true?"

He snorted. "Chance'd be a fine thing. He's got more wind in him than the Three Tenors."

"Come on," Vince said when she didn't react straight away, "give me a fighting chance, at least."

"What's in the bag?" she asked Stuart curiously.

They both had luggage in the boot, but they had overnight bags in the back seat, as well, keeping the essentials at hand for convenience's sake. He'd never given any thought to what Vince might consider essential, but he could imagine it easily enough:

Toiletries, certainly, and condoms and lube-- he'd want all that stuff in his bag in the event that they should suffer a car fire or some other unlikely catastrophe and he met a good-looking fireman who wasn't feeling chatty-- a packet of hard butterscotch candies, one or two disposable cameras, his little photo album, and an assortment of hideous shirts made of the sort of man-made fibers that could survive any calamity without suffering a single crease.

Vince was a twat, yeah, but he was an exceptionally practical twat.

"Carry-on stuff," Stuart said eventually.

"I can always check," she warned him.

"I know that, don't I?"

With the ease of long experience, she climbed into the driver's seat, never taking her eyes off of Stuart, nor moving the knife a fraction of a centimeter away from his throat, not even when she yanked a throw pillow out from under her blouse and tossed it at his feet.

He didn't want to break eye contact with her, but he couldn't help himself; it was the most hideous throw pillow he'd ever seen. It was peach corduroy, with a huge patch sewn on the front, a huge, flowery, embroidered patch that was bordered by tiny embroidered mutant kittens. It bore the legend CUT THE SASS AND PARK YOUR ASS, rendered in jagged pink script.

"All right, swami," she said when she was settled behind the wheel, "your turn."

He could fight her now; he wanted to, oh Christ, he wanted to, but there was Vince, in plain sight, looking like he was queued up at the gates of hell for a quick dip in the lake of fire. Judy wasn't likely to pack it in without a fuss, and Stuart wasn't at his best, what with one thing and another. He preferred not to even consider failure, but what choice did he have?

"I'll run him down," Judy said matter-of-factly. "He could be out here for days before anybody finds him, if they find him at all."

If Judy could run him down, leave him broken and bleeding, grieving for his friend and awaiting an ugly demise, it'd be a miracle, an actual ring-the-Pope-and-alert-the-press miracle.

Vince had a way of transmitting certain of his mental illnesses to everyone: friends, lovers, complete strangers. He had a guilty conscience and a martyr complex, and they were among the world's more lethal contagions.

Strange and incomprehensible as it might seem to human logic, there were people who despised him, yet even they weren't immune; it was next to impossible to do him any lasting harm. He never meant anyone ill for any reason, and it rendered him defenseless, but at the same time, it brought out the protective instincts in nearly everyone he met.

Still, Judy'd cut Stuart once, might've done it again if things had dragged out much longer. She mightn't run Vince down, but Stuart knew for certain that she was capable of giving him a good shove.

"Here," she said. slinging Vince's bag onto Stuart's lap. "Take this with you."

Stuart smirked. "What about my bag?"

"I'm keeping that. I'm betting you're the one with the traveler's checks." She glanced at Vince quickly, wrinkling her nose. "And the nice shirts."

The shirt Vince had on was by no means the ugliest in his collection, but it certainly didn't compare to anything Stuart had. Its ugliness was indefinable. It wasn't quite the pattern-- a mishmash of diamonds and paisley-- it wasn't quite the color-- a menacing and disturbing combination of gray, taupe, and olive green-- and it wasn't the fabric-- something flame-retardant and just a bit on the shiny side.

All of these elements combined to give it that special something that identified it as the sort of shirt Vince would chose when he went out shopping but his heart wasn't in it, the sort of shirt that demanded the question: does he like it, or is he sending himself up?

"He's got some nice ones," said Stuart.

He did, too. He had a lot of terrifying shirts like this one, yeah, shirts that put blokes off completely, shirts that his looks and personality couldn't hope to overcome. He bought them deliberately, Stuart was sure, to wear when he didn't feel like a shag, didn't feel like making nice with some bloke for even as long as it'd take to wank him off in the toilets and send him on his way.

But he had nice shirts as well, shirts that emphasized his coloring, flattered his frame, transformed him from Good Old Vince into the bloke he idolized, the man you remembered for the rest of your life. He knew he looked fantastic in them, too. He blushed beautifully when someone mentioned it to him, but he knew it, he carried himself differently, expectantly.

"I don't give a rat's ass," Judy said. "Just get out of the car."

He looked at Vince again.

He was in agony, anyone could see that. He had to know that Stuart was thinking things over, had to be thinking that Stuart might cock things up even worse than he himself had, that their last conversation might've already come and gone, a terrible conversation, at that, and that if that were the case, it'd haunt him for the rest of his life.

Stuart had never expected for his decisions to be informed by his feelings for another person; he'd long since adopted a cavalier sort of attitude, every man for himself and bugger the lot if they didn't care for the outcome. Any other approach was unthinkable, but it'd happened anyway, and now that it had, he found that he didn't care for it any more than he'd have cared for any other embarrassing ailment: erectile difficulty, inflamed hemorrhoids, genital warts…

Still, he got out of the car.

Judy sped off as soon as he cleared the door. When she was a reasonable distance away, Vince snatched the bag out of Stuart's hands, fell to his knees and tore open the bag's zipper.

"Vince," Stuart growled, dividing his attention between the rapidly departing Jeep and Vince's frantic search through the bag. "What the fuck are you doing now?"

Vince gave him a nasty look and yanked out the gun.

Smirking, Stuart held up his hands. "This is fucking brilliant. I've been robbed twice before lunch. This isn't even a nice place to visit."

"Shut your face," said Vince. He leapt to his feet and took an aggressive stance in the middle of the road. Then he squinted into the distance, his expression grim and intent as he took the gun in both hands and aimed it squarely at the Jeep.

How the gun had made its way into Vince's bag, Stuart couldn't begin to imagine. Vince had taken a crazy risk for it; he must've known full well that Judy might want to take a look inside the bag, his pathetic asthma story being, well, pathetic. He'd most likely known that Judy would ask Stuart what was inside it, had certainly known that Stuart had had no clue about the gun.

He'd worked it out, weighed his options, and taken the chance to end all chances. It was astounding.

"Jesus Christ," Stuart breathed, "I think I'm in love."

Vince ignored him.

He squeezed off three shots in total; two went wild, but one punctured a back tire. He cast Stuart a smug, triumphant sort of grin, but it faded quickly when the Jeep entered into a spectacular tailspin that only ended when the car collided with a telephone pole.

The ensuing silence was by no means absolute; it was broken every so often, now by distant birdcall, now by the gentle breeze that disturbed the long grass at the road's shoulder, now by Vince, breathing "Oh my god, oh my god…"

For what seemed like an age, they just stared at the wreck, not moving, not even thinking, really. Stuart had guessed this might happen, but he was an optimist at heart, however cynical he was at precisely the same time.

He'd thought Judy might pull over and make a break for it on foot after Vince had fired the first shot. It would've been the clever thing to do, and besides that, it had a symmetry to it that appealed to him: Vince does something mad and it works out well.

Vince doing something mad and killing three people instead of one as a result would've been negative reinforcement at its worst, even if one of the fatalities had been a deranged, knife-wielding bitch with appalling taste in parlor accents.

As it was, Vince had done something mad and landed them somewhere in between the best and the worst: Limbo, by way of an actual town called One-Horse.

A thin plume of smoke spiraled up from the general direction of the Jeep's engine, and Stuart was prepared to label the situation a grave misfortune, but he upgraded it to a tragedy when Judy climbed out of the car, apparently unharmed, and pelted off into the woods, empty-handed.

"Bloody hell," Vince said in hushed tones. "She's got a baby."

"She hasn't," said Stuart.

"What if she gives birth out here," said Vince, wide-eyed. "You know, like, whelps it in the forest?"

"She'll leave him out there," Stuart said. "And he'll be raised by wild dogs, nurse off a bitch and everything, yeah? They'll find him in ten years' time, dressed all in bark and tearing rabbit meat straight off the carcass with his teeth. When they capture him, he won't speak a word of English, except for the phrase Get out of the fucking car, Vince. A complete mystery to one and all. It'll be printed up in psychiatric journals."

Vince elbowed him in the side. "I'm serious, Stuart, she's just tiny, who knows how close she is? Women used to die in childbirth, all the time, and why? 'Cause of situations like this." He blinked. "Well, not exactly like this…"

He might've argued with Vince all afternoon-- now that the balance of his life had been returned to him, he was prepared to be magnanimous with everyone for a few hours, at least-- but the sight of the wrecked Jeep raised the specter of Mrs. Perry's Jaguar, erupting in flames.

It was all very well and good to blow up somebody else's car-- apart from the car itself, the only thing Stuart had seen in it that might've had some value to Alex's mum was the crocheted tissue-box cover in the back window-- but Stuart had his own possessions to think about.

"She's not gonna give birth anywhere," he said impatiently. "She had a pillow stuffed up her blouse. Yanked it out as soon as you left." Vince still looked skeptical. "For fuck's sake, Vince, go and see for yourself, I'm sure she's left it behind. It's the ugliest fucking thing I've ever seen in my life. If I hadn't watched her pull it out, I'd have thought it was yours."

"Shit." Vince rubbed the back of his neck, smiling sheepishly. "Sorry."

Stuart grinned and shook his head, spreading his arms wide to encompass the devastation Vince had wrought. "Sorry?"

"What else should I say?" Vince demanded. "You've said it all, haven't you, you bastard? You've got yourself another pub tale, We Were Carjacked by a Backwoods Psychotic Who Wanted to Try Whittling on Human Flesh, but what's she got? Have you thought of that? I Carjacked Two Gay Men from the British Isles. One was Mad, the Other was Daft, and the Pair of Them Couldn't be Arsed to Pay the Slightest Attention to the Matter at Hand, Because They Were Too Busy Bitching at Each Other About Absolutely Nothing. We've set the gay rights movement back thousands of years."

"I'm just sick about it," said Stuart. "Come on, we'd better collect our gear before the bloody car blows up. It's bound to, isn't it?"

"You're the expert," Vince said absently. Suddenly he glanced down at the gun, still in his hand, and forgotten till now. "What am I meant to do with this? I can't put it back in the bag, it's useless if it's tucked away…"

"Stick it down your trousers," Stuart advised him. "Nobody'll ever look there."

"Watch it." Vince reached around behind him and slid the gun down the back of his trousers. "Less temptation this way," he explained, smiling faintly.

"How the hell did it turn up in your bag in the first place? That's what I want to know." Vince said nothing. "Come on," he prompted, poking Vince in the belly. "Let's have it."

"I took it with me into the filling station shop," Vince said heavily. "The car was cold when I woke up, and it didn't occur to me straight away that you might've left me out there to die while you shagged the attendant. I thought you'd got yourself in a jam. You do that."

"Oh, I do that, do I?" he teased.

"Look, just leave it, all right?" Vince tried to head for the car, but Stuart wasn't having it.

"Hang about," he said, grabbing Vince's wrist. "Why'd you keep it, then?"

"I didn't keep it, Stuart," he said. "I just haven't had a chance to put it back. You've been on me every minute, I knew you'd take the piss if you saw me--"

Stuart frowned. "So?"

"All right, Stuart, fine, I confess: I wanted it with me in the event that you should force me to shoot you, 'cause by last night, it was starting to look like you would do, eventually, I'd have to put you down like a rabid dog. Can't say why I haven't done it yet, I haven't had the bloody thing for twelve hours and already you've given me ample justification…" He trailed off slowly, his expression all surprise and dismay.

"Oh, Christ, what is it now?"

"I'm a bit useless, that's all. Here." His hand shot out to cup Stuart's jaw, and the touch couldn't have been kinder, but Stuart jerked back a bit all the same; an involuntary act, his ordeal with Judy still fresh in his mind. "Easy," Vince murmured, coaxing Stuart's chin up.

He had to've been able to see more than enough as he was, but still he crouched down to take a closer look, treating Stuart to the picture-postcard view of the back of his head. He smelled like apples and tobacco, not an unpleasant combination at all, sharp and sweet, and he chuffed a breath down Stuart's shirt every now and again while he fussed over him, poking and stroking and muttering to himself.

Stuart laughed softly. He was half-hard already; by the time Vince was done with him, it'd be fuck or die.

It was like Vince had never touched him before and he'd always been dying for it. It wasn't sexy, especially, but it had an electric quality to it, the sort of innocent touch that fired the imagination nevertheless, that led one down a dark and marvelous path to a place where that touch might not be so innocent, so careful.

It was an aspect of Vince's obsessive nature that he'd never even considered till the night before, but since then, carjacking not withstanding, he'd thought of nothing else. Vince lost in a fine sexual haze, in a fuck, all his many quirks and idiosyncrasies stripped away, leaving nothing behind but a crabby, selfish heap of want.

He liked Vince's quirks, and more than that, he depended on them-- from time to time-- to keep him grounded, to keep him sane. It was just that when it came to a shag, good-natured bitching wasn't the kind of talk he liked to hear.

"Have to get this clean," Vince said. "Don't want infection to set in. Mind you, gangrene's no threat to your brain. We should have a first aid kit, though, you never know what could happen--"

"Vince," he said, sliding a hand up and down Vince's arm.

"Mm..?"

"You fancy a shag?"

Vince leapt back, staring at Stuart incredulously, as if he'd been asked whether he fancied being tortured to death on his birthday. "No."

"Bollocks," said Stuart, closing the distance between them. "If you could see yourself right now..."

The thing was, he hadn't looked like he fancied a shag especially until Stuart had said so. Now he had that look again, just as he'd had in the bathroom the night before, that hungry, resentful look, as though Stuart alone was responsible for his happiness, and he trampled on it for kicks.

"You never even touched me," Stuart reminded him.

"And I'm not going to, you bastard," Vince said.

He sounded like he'd never been more insulted in his life, but his gaze swallowed Stuart whole, starting with his hair and lingering only slightly longer at his throat than at his face before it slid down, slowly, taking in chest and arms and narrow hips before it stopped where his cock filled out his jeans.

After sixteen years' acquaintance, nothing Stuart said or did should've shocked him anymore; nevertheless, he looked scandalized. "For Christ's sake, Stuart, we're stranded in the middle of bloody nowhere, we don't even know what if anything that woman's left behind, and then we've got a bloody marathon ahead of us--"

Stuart took his head in both hands and yanked him in for a kiss. Vince moaned into his mouth, gave himself up instantly, sucking on Stuart's tongue, plunging his hands into Stuart's hair and grabbing on tight, unmindful of the cruel injustice it had already suffered that day.

Growling low in his throat, Stuart grabbed Vince's hips and ground against him, ground hard . He'd come in seconds if they kept this up, and so would Vince, by the feel, but Vince seemed no more bothered about this than Stuart himself was.

Arousal always thrummed just beneath the surface, for him, as constant and natural as any other involuntary bodily function. It'd been easy enough to maintain in the past; he might have a shag, or a wank, might even forget about it, come to that.

Having one particular shag in mind had been a novel experience to begin with, but as Vince had turned him down, time and again, Stuart had formed a whole new outlook on his past refusal to allow himself to be drawn into such entanglements:

He'd been the smartest man on earth.

Since then he'd become the saddest man on earth, chasing after Vince as he was, all but begging him for a shag. Should've told him to sod off after the first time he'd said no; instead he'd shrugged, fucked off to another club, and found himself a bloke who hadn't even thought of saying no, because he hadn't had a reason.

Stuart tried not to examine his behavior too closely, but he found himself at loose ends from time to time, waiting for Vince to come out of the shower, waiting for Vince to finish his tour of the Spam Museum, waiting for Vince to what fucking ever. Times like those, he sometimes asked himself whether his newfound passion for Vince had anything at all to do with the fact that Vince alone of all men had ever rejected him. Repeatedly.

Now, though, with Vince clinging to him, grinding on him, moaning helplessly whenever Stuart touched him just so, he didn't give a toss about how it'd happened, or why. He'd gotten what he wanted, and that was everything.

"It's adrenaline, this," Vince gasped when Stuart broke away to lick his jaw. "Snatched back from the gaping maw of death and all that."

Stuart grinned and wiggled his hips. "So?"

"So we can't just shag at the side of the road while our lives are in jeopardy. If we die out here, we'll haunt this place till the end of time. I don't care how long that is, Stuart, this place is never going to be nice."

"That's not it," he said roughly, tracing Vince's mouth with his tongue before stealing another kiss. "You want a big do. Great big bed strewn with rose petals, candlelight, string quartet off in the corner playing bloody 'Moonglow'--"

Vince pushed him away, grumbling, "Fuck off."

"Fuck me," he giggled, "You do." Vince started stalking off toward the Jeep. "Vince, be reasonable, where the fuck are we going to find frankincense to burn in this part of the world?"

"You always have to take the piss, don't you?" Vince said. "You always have to be a cunt about things."

"For fuck's sake, we can't start standing on ceremony now." Vince kept walking. "Vince!" Still nothing. "Fuck off, then," he muttered. He tried to rake through his hair with his hands, but he hit a snarl almost instantly. "Shit." He could just guess what it looked like, now; suddenly Vince's silence on the subject seemed ominous.

Cursing darkly, Stuart snatched up Vince's bag and followed him, slowly, thinking things through. By the time he made it to the Jeep, Vince had already unloaded half their gear: an intimidating, mountainous formation of luggage that dwarfed the Jeep and promised an ugly, ugly walk into town.

Stuart strode straight past it and parked himself in front of the driver's side mirror, examining the ruin of his hair. "Aw, Christ, will you look at that?"

He'd seen it looking worse, of course; after a bad night, a bout with a malicious stylist, a fantastic shag, but always before there'd been the immediate promise of salvation. He didn't spend half the time on his hair that Vince did on his own, but there was a certain amount of preparation involved-- machinery, chemicals, and so on. It could be days before he saw any of that stuff again, and experience had taught him that time would not be kind.

"Yes, that is the real tragedy of the afternoon, isn't it?" Vince growled, slinging another bag out of the boot and onto the pile. "The Jeep's buggered, yeah, we'll probably die of exposure, or starvation, or boredom, but heaven forfend that anything should disturb the glossy perfection of your hairstyle."

"Given the choice," Stuart said calmly, flicking a curl back into place, "would you rather worry about what grubs taste like and if freezing to death is really as peaceful as they say, or whether or not anyone's gonna call you Buckwheat in the next twenty-four hours?"

"Someone has to worry about it."

Sighing explosively, Stuart stood up and turned to face him. Vince was humiliated and angry, but he was also completely turned on, in spite of everything. It wouldn't take more than a word or a touch now for Vince to give himself up again. He had that look about him, like he'd let Stuart bend him over the hood of the Jeep and shag him senseless in front of god all his creatures, making only a token objection if he made any objection at all.

And then he'd dedicate the rest of his life to making Stuart pay for doing it.

"Vince," he said. "Worry about the grubs when you're feeling peckish. Worry about freezing to death when the sun goes down. It's two o'clock in the afternoon, for fuck's sake, and it's nowhere near as cold out as you said. If you have to worry about something now, if it's a compulsion, like, worry about whether or not the bloke who picks us up is gonna want you to suck him off. Then worry about what he looks like."

Vince dropped the bag in his hands and turned to glare at Stuart. His expression was an elaborate mishmash of emotions, ranging from passion to anger to frustration to resignation. He could've had a go at Stuart over a thousand things-- though they had a long day ahead of them and it'd only just gotten started, already Stuart had damned his soul afresh at least six times-- but he took a page from Stuart's book, tilting his head thoughtfully to consider the matter at hand.

"He'd want you to do it, wouldn't he?" he said. "You look like you're up for anything. 'Specially now," he added, nodding vaguely at Stuart's sexual disarray. "And you would, 'cause you are, and you don't give a toss what they look like."

Stuart grinned at him lazily. "If that were true, I'd have shagged you ages ago. It's old age, this. Vision's shot, going senile, getting desperate, suddenly even you look like the sum of a thousand dreams."

"I always did," Vince muttered, returning to his labors. "'S not my fault you're so dense."


*** *** ***


"Jesus Christ, is it a fucking clown car? We didn't have this many bags when we left."

Vince patted his shoulder sympathetically and tried not to smile. "We only had your bags when we left," he said. "I've accumulated one or two things since then."

"One or two," Stuart said snidely, booting one of the bags. "You're a junk magnet, Vince. One bag of clothing, one bag of toiletries, six bags of souvenir thimbles, twelve bags of matchbooks, seventeen bags of travel brochures--"

"These are mine," Vince said, indicating a humble selection of bags that he'd left off to the side. They numbered four in total, including the one he'd had in the back seat. "Those," he said, pointing at the sky-scraping pile next to the Jeep, "are yours."

Stuart's eyes widened. "They're not."

"I'd have said something sooner," Vince said kindly, "only I felt sorry for you. The number of things you can't live without is heartbreaking."

"I don't need anything," Stuart declared.

"Just this ashtray," he said. "And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp--"

"Zip it, will ya?"

He started pacing, circling his mound of luggage as if he meant to attack it when the moment was right.

Vince had seen him do it before-- under different circumstances, of course. He did all his best thinking when he was mobile, prowling, and woe betide the unfortunate soul that should interrupt the process.

Not that Vince ever would; Stuart was lovely like that, eyes flashing, limbs swinging in that easy way he had, sharp and fluid at the same time. What he came up with all depended on his state of mind, a thousand answers to a single question, but Vince never worried much over which it might turn out to be. With very rare exceptions, Stuart had a maddening affinity for good ideas.

It was Vince-- slow and steady and usually well-intentioned-- who could start out giving someone directions to the public library and wind up causing an international incident. He had only to glance at the Jeep's crumpled front end to be reminded of that.

Still, though.

How was he meant to guess that Judy'd had a pillow stuffed up her blouse? It was April, yeah, but spring was obviously an abstract concept in northern Canada. With the amount of clothing necessary to survive a walk to the corner for a carton of milk, everyone looked pregnant. And what sort of person could've driven past a stranded pregnant woman, anyway?

(Stuart, he supposed. He wouldn't have hesitated, if Vince had been sleeping. If Vince had been awake, he'd still have driven past Judy, only then he'd have argued with Vince for as long as it took to silence him, long after Judy was no more than a hazy memory for the pair of them.)

Maybe Vince wasn't a twat in all the many and varied ways that Stuart had said, but there was no denying that the blame for this situation lay squarely with him. If he hadn't picked Judy up, if he'd gotten out when she said…

He'd tried to put things right twice, tried to think what Stuart might've done, and how had that worked out? Stuart with his throat cut, and the Jeep smashed and smoking. Granted, that all might've happened anyway with Stuart in charge, if for different reasons, but to Vince, the blame lay entirely with himself once again. He could no more have thought like Stuart than Stuart could've thought like him. They'd never have gotten on so well otherwise.

Mind you, Stuart hadn't been seriously harmed, and the Jeep was headed for the garage rather than the scrap yard, but a little sunshine and a low body count didn't change the fact that he wouldn't have had to look on the bright side at all if he hadn't stopped the car in the first place.

Stuart didn't seem that bothered about it, any road. He'd flared up a bit in the car, yeah, but afterward he'd been positively cheerful. Who else could've declared his love to a man who was about to shoot out the tire on his car, leaving him stranded in a region of the world in which people regularly stepped outside to get the morning paper and found the town alcoholic frozen to death on their front lawns?

Vince sat down on the long grass at the road's shoulder, then thought better of it and sprawled out on his back. "You fancy a shag?" Do I hell.

It was the altitude, had to be. Like Vince's own, Stuart's brain was getting only a fraction of the oxygen it needed to function normally. This was the result: he wasn't all that pissed off at Vince, he wasn't worried especially about what would become of them. He just wanted to know whether he still looked shaggable and how the fuck they were meant to transport all his many bags into One-Horse.

One-Horse, for Christ's sake. They couldn't take all his bags with them. A place like that, the bags would block out the sun and plunge the town into eternal darkness.

"Right," said Stuart, flopping down beside him. "We leave the bags in the car and we start walking. Sooner or later somebody'll stop, or we'll make it into town. It's not that far, twenty miles at most. They won't have a garage, but they'll know where to find one."

"We can't just leave it, Stuart. What if she comes back?"

"You really think she's gonna fuck with you after what you've done? She's a knife-wielding carjacker, yeah, but you're the gun-toting psychotic who smashed his own car to stop her taking it."

"You don't have to sound so bloody chuffed about it," he said irritably. "We're stranded now."

"So's she," he said. "She hasn't even got her scary pillow, has she? We still have all our gear, and the car, once it's mended. We'd have had fuck-all if you'd let her go. We haven't even got religion."

"I've got religion," Vince declared. "I'm a Mixologist. Never go anywhere without my Barman's Bible."

"Mm," Stuart agreed. "And like half the other zealots in the world, you've never actually read your holy text. Hence your world-famous Dregs of the Drinks Cabinet, your world-famous Toilet-Cleanser and Tonic, your world-famous--"

"Fuck off," said Vince. "You always drank them, didn't you?"

"It was either that or your world-famous Terrifying Tap Water. Live baby alligators in every glass."

"You could've fucked off home. Could've brought your own liquor if you were that bothered about it."

"I wasn't," he said simply. "Don't you know that?"

Vince turned a bit to look at him. He was smiling faintly, seemingly oblivious to anything but the vast expanse of sky that to Vince seemed at once too close and far away. He'd quite liked the night sky, all those stars, all that space, but now that he'd taken a good look at it in the daytime, all he saw was thunderbolts and funnel clouds, floods and droughts and a multitude of other acts of god that might strike people from a hundred walks of life, but change each one of them in exactly the same way.

"It's a bit creepy, isn't it?" Vince said. "All that sky."

Stuart met his eyes, still smiling, and gave him that look again, that weird look he'd given Vince in the bathroom the night before, fathomless and inscrutable. The sunlight brought out the gray in his eyes, the sheen of his hair, the creamy quality of his skin…

Vince never got tired of looking at him. It was sad and shallow, but he was willing to stand the cost. He liked the Northern Lights till the cold set in, he liked the Great Pyramids till he started to burn, he liked the mountains of Tibet except for the climbing, but no matter what happened with Stuart, Vince never got tired of looking at him.

Life was filled with moments like this, simple ones, plain ones, moments that nevertheless possessed a sort of rough perfection, a momentousness that burned itself into the memory so that no matter where you went or what you did for the rest of your life, a sight or a smell or a sound would take you straight back there.

Any time that he ever saw a sky so clear that he could see the corona around the sun, any time he ever smelled trees, the smell of a great mass of trees all stretched up to the sky in those first weeks of spring, any time he ever felt the wind whipping his face, he'd think of this: lying in the grass with Stuart, their future uncertain in every sense, neither of them really giving a toss.

Still, someone had to break the silence, cut the connection. For once, it was Stuart.

"Look," he said, "the Jeep's not gonna explode, nobody's coming, nobody's gonna rob our bags. Why don't we leave them in the car, worry about the lot when the truck brings it in?"

Vince glanced at Stuart's mass of bags and sighed. "Dunno why you couldn't have thought of that before I unloaded everything."

"I was thinking about something else," he said slyly, slanting Vince a sultry look. "And I fancied watching you. Got me going something chronic, all that power, all those muscles--"

Vince cuffed him. "Fuck off."

"Raw animal magnetism," he went on. "Watching you move, I saw an echo of the past, burly Englishmen slinging luggage back in caveman times--"

"One more word out of you," Vince said menacingly, "just one, mind you, and you can sling your own bloody luggage, you bastard."

"I would've done anyway," said Stuart. "You only started 'cause you were hoping I kept my aftershave in with my shirts. Ruin the lot, I come begging, next thing, we're one of those scary couples in matching warm-up suits."

"We aren't a couple."

"Oh, sod off, Vince, you know better." Vince looked away. "You and your bloody ceremony, you think that means anything? People get married every day, it's nothing to them half the time, you think ceremony is important?"

"I don't," he insisted. "I just-- Listen." Vince came to his feet and loomed over him, hands on hips. "Let's just leave it for now, yeah? 'Cause you're right, we've got more pressing concerns. And we've got loads of time, that's what you're always saying, isn't it? We don't have to hash this all out right here."

For a second it looked like Stuart was going to pursue it, but it seemed he didn't mind leaving it for now, or else he didn't want to know what Vince might've said. He just grinned and said, "Hang about, did you just say I'm right?"

Vince rolled his eyes. "I've said it before."

"Only when I've said something that would've been obvious to anyone," he said, crossing his arms beneath his head. His shirttails came loose from his waistband, revealing a tempting patch of smooth white skin. "It's raining out, for example. You can't get high from sniffing fabric softener. Cows say moo."

"Tell you what," said Vince. "You just stay where you are, and I'll start walking. When I get to One-Horse, I'll tell them there's a dead man lying in the grass on the outskirts of town, and he didn't die in a car crash, or freeze to death, no, nothing like that, he bloody asphyxiated from running at the mouth."

"Like you'd leave your bags lying on the road like that," said Stuart. "Someone might come along, some shiftless marauder with a fondness for hideous shirts and aftershave that'd strip the paint off an ocean liner, and then where would you be? Naked and afraid."

He tilted his head back to get a better look at Vince. The cut on his throat stood out all the more, and Vince's argument was destroyed then and there, but Stuart didn't know that, or didn't care.

"Mind you," he said, "naked and afraid is still an improvement over dressed and afraid. D'you know, you get your shirt off, you look like you've got dishonorable intentions."

"That's because I have, Stuart," Vince said wearily.

"Yeah, but you look it, then," said Stuart. "I've seen you with some bloke, half-shagging him on the dance floor, hands on his arse, tongue down his throat, still you look like any second you're gonna stop and ask him if he saw that program about life-saving pets on BBC Two."

It didn't bother him that he'd done it, but it mortified him to think that anybody'd noticed, especially Stuart, who never gave his attention to anything anyone did unless he thought it might be worth one or two sarky remarks over lunch the next day.

As rarely as people seemed to notice Vince, he'd come to imagine that they didn't notice him at all, and that, he knew, was a big mistake. Somebody noticed everyone, it was like the food chain. People ignored Vince, yeah, but he ignored other people in turn, and they ignored other people… Still, it didn't quite fit that Stuart would be one of the people on the next rung down.

"When the hell have you ever found the time to watch me snogging some bloke?" Vince demanded.

"Oh, I made time," he said silkily. "It's not like it's a regular occurrence, is it? It's like a meteor shower, or a lunar eclipse, something like that. People all over the planet are tuned in to watch, united in marveling over an event that only takes place once every seventy-six years. And you can't even see it then unless you're living in Kenya or something."

"Just be thankful that I've already given you the gun."

Stuart rolled to his side, pulled the gun out from his waistband, and offered it to Vince, smiling the same smug, arrogant smile he always wore whenever he was absolutely sure of an outcome that would've been in doubt for anyone else on earth.

It was a smile that had provoked a number of reactions in Vince over the years, outright admiration chief among them-- humility had no place in Stuart's life; it would've been obscene, almost insulting-- but when Vince took the gun from him and saw that smile falter, he was nevertheless filled with pure, malicious satisfaction.

"I won't kill you now," Vince said darkly, "But it's on the roster."

Stuart shook his head sadly. "Oh, you spoiled it."

"Too much?" Stuart nodded. "Should've kept my mouth shut, yeah?"

"You take the gun, stick it in your waistband. Don't break eye contact, let it stretch out till the other bloke's sweating. And for fuck's sake, don't laugh."

"I wouldn't," Vince protested.

"You would, you're the saddest man on earth. Right. So, when he's seconds away from pissing himself, then you turn and you walk away. Only you don't just walk, you sort of stalk, like you could turn around and plug him any minute."

"Oh, I'd like to see you try to pull that off," Vince snickered. "Stuart Jones: High Plains Drifter?" Stuart glared at him. "Stuart, seriously. You've a lovely walk, I could watch you all afternoon, but if you want to strike fear into the hearts of men, you'll have to stick to the steely glare bit and hope the other bloke cracks first and makes a break for it."


*** *** ***


They'd been walking for a bit, perhaps a mile, no more. Almost from the moment they'd started out, Stuart had spoken less and less, whether out of irritation or distraction, Vince couldn't say.

"Look on the bright side," Vince said after a time. "It's a lovely day."

"You always think it's a lovely day," Stuart said. "Frogs could fall from the sky and the ground could burst into flames, and still you'd think it was a lovely bloody day."

"Would not," Vince protested. "Bit different, maybe. Besides, I'd feel bad about all those frogs. Be bad enough to plummet to your death without catching fire on the way down." He turned and grinned at Stuart. "God, imagine the road report. Traffic's a bit heavy on Route 71, there's ten-foot flames coming up from the ground and thousands of frogs exploding like hand grenades for a two-mile stretch between Been There and Done That."

"You're such a twat, Vince."

"Oh god, turn the page, Stuart. Surely there's at least one more word in your vast lexicon of insulting profanity that describes me just as well."

Stuart gave him a considering look, then shook his head.


*** *** ***


"Right, okay," said Vince, "what's your first question?"

Stuart seemed to be thinking this over, but then he said, "What the fuck have I ever done to you?"

"Oh, don't do that, don't," Vince said, bumping hips with him. "I'd die of natural causes before I made it to the Cs."

"Give it a rest, will ya? If you're gonna act like a doormat, you can't start complaining when people put the boots to you."

"What the hell is that?" Vince said indignantly. "Chicken Soup for the Soul in the Gas Chamber?"

Stuart rolled his eyes. "I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know."

"Oh, so it's all my fault, is it? It isn't your fault you're a bastard, it's my fault for putting up with it?"

"Yeah. What did you think, you're not responsible 'cause we're mates, or 'cause you wanna fuck me? Crimes of passion, the heart has its reasons, that sort of thing, yeah? You think I owe you something 'cause you love me?"

He didn't say it angrily; if anything, he looked terribly amused by the very idea. Love came cheaply to Stuart Jones. It mightn't last, it mightn't matter, but love it was. Some people might've stayed home, let themselves go. Some people might've formed a cult and taken over the world. Stuart did what he liked, pleased himself, and left it up to the people who drifted in and out of his orbit to do the same.

Sometimes when he was really off his face, he likened himself to a god. Vince invariably asked him why he hadn't made himself a bit taller in that case, but by the time Stuart laid claim to deity, he was far, far beyond any but the rudest understanding of human speech.

"No," Vince said eventually. "Just, like, if I can't complain when people treat me like a doormat, you can't complain when people treat you like a bastard. Because you are, Stuart, you're a right fucking bastard."

Stuart took it in stride. "Fair enough," he said. "I mistreat you 'cause I'm a bastard, and you let me 'cause you're a doormat."

Vince scowled at him. "'S not that simple."

"It will be by the time it's a two-part miniseries."

"Oh, no, don't sell yourself short, Stuart. I'm sure they'd give you at least six episodes."

"What about you?"

"I didn't want to tell you," he said confidentially. "But it doesn't matter how many episodes I'm in. You'd be the dark horse, sexy, mysterious, bit of a wild card, but it's always the sweet one has the most fans. Crowd-pleaser, yeah?" He grinned. "Mind you, get together all the people you've pleased, you've got quite a crowd in your own right."

"I should have a convention," he said. "ShagCon 2000. I'd have to stretch it out over three or four days, maybe a week, just so everyone could make it and I wouldn't have to turn anyone away. I reckon I could pack the Conference Centre."

Vince was so enchanted by the idea that it didn't occur to him to make any sort of critical comment. "You'd have the Vinceologists on one side, Stuartarians on the other, and in the middle…" He paused for dramatic effect. "The Calvinists."

"I'm not having bloody Calvinists at my convention."

"You don't understand," Vince said pityingly. "The Calvinists, right, they wouldn't be actual Calvinists, irresistible grace and all that. It'd be a joke, play on words, actually they'd be obsessed with your boxers. They'd have a slogan, something borrowed, something cheesy." His eyebrows shot up. "Yeah, like, Nothing comes between me and his Calvins."

After some time, Stuart said, "I'm not sure what's scarier: the idea that people might do that, or the obvious fact that you know all about it."

"I'm telling you for your own good," said Vince. "You keep making a spectacle of yourself like you do, sooner or later you'll be signing t-shirts for the Stuart Jones Estrogen Brigade."

Stuart stared at him. "Estrogen."

"Don't take it so hard," said Vince. "I'll be signing boxes of tissues."


*** *** ***


"Come on," Vince wheedled. "One question. That's all I'm asking."

"I've got three."

Vince narrowed his eyes. "All right."

"One: who invented Twenty Questions? Two: is he still living? Three: if so, where can I find him? I'd like a word."

"What's your first question relating to what I'm thinking of?" Vince said exasperatedly.

Stuart gave him a nasty smile. "How many times did Hazel drop you on your head when you were growing up?"

"What's your first question relating to what I'm thinking of that might conceivably lead you to guess what I'm thinking of?"

"Would you care to guess what I'm thinking of?" Stuart asked politely. "I'll give you a hint, shall I? It's lethal, and it can't be detected in autopsy."

"Have to pass the time somehow," Vince grumbled.

Stuart came to an abrupt halt and rounded on him, saying evenly, "Vince. When have we ever had trouble passing the bloody time? We're in the nick, drunk and disorderly, yeah? Fifteen years old, parents on the way, god knows what'll happen. You can't last another second without debating the merits of having Toto compose the score for Dune."

"Stuart, it was bloody Toto. D'you even know who would've been worse than that?"

Stuart was silent.

"There you have it," Vince said triumphantly. "Nobody's worse than Toto, they're a fucking abomination."

"I shagged the bass player," he said.

Vince gaped at him. "You never."

"I did," he said, laughing. "Least he said he was the bass player. Dunno who'd lie about it, even in the eighties."

"You never said."

"Well, you had the right of it, didn't you? It's one thing to admit you play bass in Toto, but it's something else entirely to admit you shagged the bloke."

"Like that's ever stopped you," Vince scoffed. "Oi, Vince," he said, managing a passable impression of Stuart's faint Irish accent, "I shagged a mass murderer at the Coldplay concert at Slane. I shagged a televangelist at the Summit for Spirituality in Munich. I shagged Ricky Martin in the toilets at Flex."

He grinned. "Everyone's shagged Ricky Martin in the toilets at Flex."

"Oh, sod off, he's never even been to Manchester."

Stuart gave him a thoughtful look. "Right, everyone but you."


*** *** ***


"What was I supposed to do, Stuart? Get out of the car and leave you with her?"

"Yes! For fuck's sake, Vince, didn't you notice that she had something in mind? If she'd wanted to kill me she'd have done it straight away, she wouldn't have let you prattle on for god knows how long, she wouldn't have let you befriend her."

"Might've done," he offered. "Might've been a sadist, like."

"No self-respecting sadist is gonna sit through your interminable stories just for the questionable satisfaction of fucking you over. Even masochists don't have that kind of time."

"I don't see you checking your watch."

"I'm a hedonist," he said breezily. "And I like you."

"And Judy didn't," Vince concluded.

"Not at all."

"I told her I'm gay," said Vince. "You think that was it?"

"Vince, you said I have brain damage." He stopped where he was and struck a pose. "Do I look brain-damaged to you?"

Vince rolled his eyes. "It isn't really noticeable till you start talking."


*** *** ***


"Listen, Stuart," said Vince, his patience wearing thin, "the sooner you ask your questions, the sooner you'll have it over and done with."

"My turn," Stuart said darkly. "Then I'm meant to think of something you can guess."

"So?"

"So you'd be rubbish at it. You'd try to second-guess me, but then you'd think I'd think of that and you'd try to third-guess me. Next thing, you're catatonic from the strain. Or else you'd find some way to twist it all around so you could have a go at me."

"I would not."

"Yes you would," Stuart insisted. "I've met aged nuns more forgiving than you."

"When have you ever known me to hold a grudge?"

Stuart snorted. "When have I not?"

"When?"

"Oh, Christ," Stuart growled, throwing up his hands. "Fine. You're twelve years old, you've smashed your ten-quid pedal bike into a brand new Mercedes, banged it up all to hell. Its owner finds you lying on the ground, takes you inside, patches you up, feeds you lunch, never breathes a word about damages. What's her name?"

"I don't remember," Vince mumbled.

"Right. Age fourteen, there's a bloke at the Empire Cinema, sneaks us into restricted films just 'cause he likes you. He doesn't want a shag, he just likes you. What's his name?"

"I don't remember."

"Right. Year twelve, chemistry, we're lab partners, yeah? Directly in front of us sits a bloke who torments you when you're alone, messes you about, calls you Mince. What's his name?"

Oliver Gilbert, it'd been, but it wouldn't do to tell Stuart so. "What difference does it make?" he said lamely. "That doesn't prove anything, Stuart. It's not as if you know their names."

"Of course I bloody don't," said Stuart. "But you're supposed to be Mister Personality, aren't you, the fucking master of ceremonies at god's banquet, yeah? You love everyone, everyone loves you, but if you don't get enough cheese on your pizza, no power on earth can change your mind about the diabolical bastard who's responsible."

"That pizza was an affront to pizzas everywhere," Vince defended. "It wasn't just the cheese, Stuart, it was the death's head mushrooms they used for topping, it was the bologna slices they attempted to pass off as pepperoni, it was the crust you could've used to saw through a thick length of lead pipe-- that was the same pizza they serve to inmates in Turkish prisons, Stuart, it was the pizza that says I hate you and want you to die." He clocked Stuart's expression and sighed. "I'm just making it worse, aren't I?"


*** *** ***


Intellectually, Vince had always known that they'd still be walking when the sun went down, that they would, eventually, have to start worrying about freezing to death. Neither of them was especially enticed by roomy clothing, so it wasn't as if they could double up on trousers.

Just as well; it only would've slowed them down. Stuart had set the pace early on, a brisk sort of stroll, neither rushing nor dallying. He'd accepted that they'd be walking for quite some time, had adjusted his gait accordingly. It was Vince who kept looking for cars.

Miles and miles of all that scenic nothing, and god only knew what questionable charms awaited them in One-Horse, a town so small that they wouldn't have known it even existed if they hadn't spotted its name on a road sign. For all they knew, they'd be spending the night in someone's carpark. And they'd have to break in first.

Sooner or later they would run out of things to talk about, sooner or later their overnight bags would start to feel like sacks of stones. They'd slow down. Four or five hours more of walking ahead of them, but they'd want to stop for a bit, ten minutes, no more. Vince would convince Stuart to take a short nap-- he still looked fantastic, injuries not withstanding, but there was a hunch to his shoulders that Vince didn't like at all-- but Vince'd be knackered as well, and what else could go wrong, after all they'd been through?

Next thing, they'd both be dead of hypothermia, and it'd start snowing.

By the time Vince really did spot a set of headlights in the distance, he was so convinced of his and Stuart's awful, icy fate that he thought he was hallucinating.

"Stuart," Vince said in hushed tones.

He cast an irritated look over his shoulder. "What?"

"D'you think anybody ever has, like, coldstroke? D'you think if you get cold enough, you might get some sort of cold-related brain fever?"

"Sounds like," said Stuart. "I keep telling you to try buying a jumper once in a while--"

Vince cuffed his shoulder. "Shut your face. Look."

Stuart squinted off into the distance. "It's a pick-up truck," he said colorlessly.

"So?"

"So one of us is gonna have to sit with the bloody gear-shift between his legs-- that'd be you-- and the other'll be treated to a majestic view of the twilight sky through the impressive gaps between the driver's teeth."

"You'd rather walk another ten miles?"

"I'd rather walk, full stop. The Ministry of Tourism brags on the trees, the Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountains. They never mention that Canada's greatest natural resource is functional psychotics."

"They're trying to discourage immigration," Vince said sagely. "You must've greased every palm from here to the International Date Line."

"Fuck off."

"Fuck off yourself," said Vince. "You're just as sick of walking as I am." He dropped his bag on the ground and stationed himself so that the driver would have to swerve around him or run him down if he didn't want to stop. "How long've I known you? An eternity. Still you can't bear to have me thinking you have any feelings at all."

By now the driver had to've seen Vince, but he wasn't slowing down.

"Get off the road, you twat. He's not gonna stop," said Stuart.

"He will."

The truck screeched to a stop less than a foot away from where Vince was standing. It was a rusted-out Ford, blue, exactly the sort of vehicle you'd be driving if you were on your way to dispose of a corpse you weren't meant to have. Even with the windows up and the door shut, Vince could hear the stereo, playing country music loudly enough to shake the ground beneath his feet, loudly enough to make him fear for the structural integrity of his internal organs.

The driver himself was illuminated only by the dim light from his dashboard. It fanned the flames of Vince's imagination, till the driver looked even more like an inbred psychotic than he probably was. He grinned at Vince in the darkness, revealing at least six rows of healthy teeth. The better to eat me with.

"Go on, then," Stuart said maliciously. "Ask him for a lift."

"It's ten miles, Stuart," said Vince, creeping toward the driver's window.

The driver turned down the stereo before he rolled down the window; it gave Vince hope. "What the hell happened to you, buddy?"

"Engine trouble," said Vince. "Nice truck. Really, it's really nice. I've never seen a dashboard hula Jesus before. You expect a hula girl, or a normal Jesus, but there he is, playing a ukulele, shaking his naughty bits in a grass skirt. It's quite remarkable."

"And you'll go on remarking till we're all dead," Stuart muttered.

"Shut your face," said Vince.

"My mom makes them," said the driver. "She does them personal, too. She did hula Jesus with a rifle for the Gun Club."

It took every ounce of will that Vince possessed not to ask where he might buy one for himself. "You don't say?" he grinned. "We might have more in common than you'd think." He extended his hand. "I'm Vince, and that angry bloke's Stuart."

"I'm Dave."

"Nice to meet you," said Vince. "I don't suppose you'd mind driving us into town?"


*** *** ***


Stuart unlocked the door to their hotel room, then stood back to let Vince have the first look. His plans had been only twenty minutes in the making, but once made, they'd cemented themselves in his mind, clear, perfect, brilliant, and absolutely irreversible. He'd sooner have castrated himself without the benefit of anesthesia than turned back on this now.

Vince's reaction was vital; he'd known that instantly. Anything might become of them now. Tensions mounting, expectations blowing up into god knew what, both of them terribly moody people, in their own ways, only seldom landing on the same page when all was said and done. This was it, he'd crossed this bridge when he'd grabbed Vince the night before.

It might be fantastic, might be nothing special, might be a disaster, but no matter how the night turned out, he was absolutely certain of how it would begin, and that memory he would carry with him always, into the brightest twilights and the darkest dawns, into heaven and hell and a thousand places in between.

"Fucking hellfire!" Vince squeaked, backing out of the room so abruptly that he bumped into Stuart and the pair of them fell against the wall. He scrambled away just as quickly, glancing down the hallway and back through the doorway with deep and obvious distrust.

"Something wrong?" Stuart asked him pleasantly. "I asked for the Bridal Suite, I thought you'd appreciate it."

Vince's eyebrows shot up. "You asked for that?"

"They had brochures in the lobby, I had a look while you were out retrieving our gear. We could've had the Prime Minister's Suite, or the Shannon Tweed Room, they've got one around back where Loverboy got arrested during their The Kid is Hot Tonight Tour-- apparently they robbed two hundred quid worth of lumberjack sandwiches and tried to flush the lot down the toilet--"

"You asked for that." He still wouldn't turn enough to put even the doorway in his line of sight.

"Best I could do on such short notice," he said.

Vince had trouble accepting this. "You walked into a hotel lobby in a mining town with a population of twenty-five," he said carefully, "and requested the Bridal Suite for yourself and your male traveling companion."

"Some companion," Stuart scoffed. "Good job you've never volunteered your services at a convalescent home, you'd find yourself up on criminal charges before you finished your first round of backgammon."

Together they crossed over to the doorway and peered inside.

The Bridal Suite at the One-Horse Motor Inn was proof positive that in the wrong hands, anything could be buggered up.

It had obviously been designed with style in mind somewhere in the mid-60's, and maintained devotedly all along, but it was less clear whether the owners were trying for camp or it was purely incidental, the natural result of maintaining a room created during a time in Western Civilization when polyester was a miracle fabric, women wore frosted eye shadow and go-go boots, and people listened to Yma Sumac and Julie London without a trace of a Martini Smirk.

It had a sort of we-can-always-get-a-divorce feel to it, something between romance and practicality that suggested that rather than singing one another to sleep after the lovin', at least one half of the happy couple would rise from bed-- naked, and still a bit sweaty-- to have a look at the Financial Times. Undeniably, though, there was a seamy underbelly to this seamy underbelly, an impression of apathetic junkies performing in porn films for scandalously small sums of money.

The carpet, walls, and bucket chairs were all done in precisely the same shade of cornflower blue, but the coarse love seat near the room's only window was white, and the huge canopy waterbed that dominated the room-- frame to duvet, pillows and all-- was a particularly unappealing shade of brown.

Here and there throughout the room, red silhouettes of Cupid were pasted to the wall in a careless fashion which suggested that at any moment they might take flight, piercing the heart for real and leaving the room's occupants in a crumpled, bleeding heap on the floor next to the clear black plastic coffee table which displayed a fanned assortment of takeout menus, all of which advertised the only restaurant in town: Lucky Jumbo Meats and Video.

Any one of these things would've been enough to identify the room as one of the seven circles of hell, but there was one thing more that set it apart from other appalling hotel rooms, that identified it, in fact, as the appalling hotel room that all other appalling hotel rooms could only aspire to become, the vengeful god of appalling hotel rooms:

The godawful painting that hung on one otherwise bare wall.

Quite apart from the general space-age bachelor-pad theme of the room, it was a sensitive, sepia-toned rendering of what appeared to be a topless and especially plump Sarah Brightman, with straightened hair and a basket of skunk cabbage, glancing demurely over one bare shoulder as if to say, "Yes, this room really is quite terrifying, isn't it? But here! You can almost spot my nipple."

Clearly this was small comfort to Vince, who had absolutely no interest in spotting Sarah Brightman's nipple, and, apparently, an uncommonly violent reaction to ornamental bedside candelabras.

"I know what you're thinking," said Stuart. "It must've cost the earth, I went to all this trouble, now it's like you owe me something." Vince, very close now, gave him a dark look. "And you do," he went on. "We're on this fantastic trip, I've paid for practically everything, we always do whatever you wanna do, yeah? I let you railroad me into anything, and what have you ever given me in return?"

"I'll pop you one in the goolies, for starters, how would you like that?" Vince jabbed him in the side with his elbow to bring his point home. "I dunno, though." He walked into the room and looked it over a bit more thoroughly than he had when he'd fled it at the outset. "'S sort of endearing, isn't it?"

He set his bag down next to the bathroom and turned around, slowly, his mood brightening visibly every time his gaze lit upon some new decorative atrocity. He grinned at Stuart then, grinned at him like a kid, and Stuart couldn't help grinning back. It'd taken Vince a bit to catch on, but now that he had, there'd be no stopping him.

"It's like, A Clockwork Orange," he declared. "Only it's blue, and there aren't any violent juvenile sex offenders about." He cocked his head at Stuart. "Present company excepted."

"Fuck off," Stuart said easily, brushing past Vince to fling himself down on the waterbed. It was a touch too warm, and the duvet was matted and worn, but by that time, he could've flung himself down on a rockpile and he wouldn't have given a toss. All that mattered was that they weren't outside, they weren't in any obvious danger, and they weren't bloody walking.

The romance of walking was another of the myths that'd been blown all to hell since they'd left Manchester.

First, the endless heart-stopping adventure of a road trip-- so far, at least, it'd tended to be one day of endless heart-stopping adventure book-ended on both sides by five or six days of endless mind-numbing tedium. If he'd been traveling with anyone but Vince, he'd have killed them by now. If he'd been traveling alone, he'd have killed himself.

Walking was something else. People walked all the time. They walked for the sake of walking, they walked their children or their pets, they went out cruising… People went hiking, they power-walked in shopping centres, they couldn't get enough of it. When all else failed, they bought treadmills and walked in place.

It was all supposed to be very uplifting to the spirit, an opportunity to take life a little more slowly, spend some time with the eternal self, absorb the charming minutiae of everyday life that were so often overlooked in the rush to do things.

But it was like anything else, walking. Conditions didn't have to be optimal to make it bearable, but mile four of their journey had looked much the same as mile three. The cold was distracting, and once the sun had gone down, there was no absorbing the bloody minutiae of everyday life anymore, because they couldn't see a fucking thing, and anyway, Stuart preferred to think that frostbite and snow blindness weren't a part of anyone's everyday life.

No one he cared to meet, any road.

But perhaps the various ordeals he'd suffered that day had soured his outlook.

Between the pair of them, they'd figured it out: he'd slept a little better than two hours, all told, before Judy'd attacked him. They'd been good hours, yeah, he wouldn't have traded them for the world, but they'd hardly prepared him for the day he'd had: carjackers and shootouts and long-distance walking, capped off by an exciting truck ride with Vince's new best mate, an affable bounty hunter who kept locks of hair from his successful arrests in a tacklebox which Stuart had been obliged to carry on his lap for the duration of the drive, because it was too valuable to leave in the back.

All that, and Stuart hadn't had a scrap to eat since the night before. It was a miracle that the day hadn't ended in tragedy, even he could see that, but when he should've asked for a nice, sensible room with two nice, sensible beds, he'd asked for the Bridal Suite instead. It wasn't his fault; as soon as he'd clapped eyes on the photographs, he'd known where they'd be spending the night.

"Stuart, you can't sleep now," Vince said. "We've got to get that cut clean."

"Just wet a washcloth and come swab me off," he mumbled, closing his eyes. "It'll keep till morning."

He came awake with a start when he felt the washcloth swiping at his throat.

"Sorry," said Vince, smiling affectionately. "Just me. Didn't mean to wake you." He urged Stuart's head back just that much more, wiping him off diligently. "I can't really tell what it looks like, in this light. If you'd just shift over a bit--"

Stuart snatched the washcloth out of his hand and tossed it across the room. "Sleep with me," he said, before Vince could even open his mouth to say something about Stuart's wound, or the carpet, or the rising cost of petroleum-based sandwich spreads.

"It's not gone seven yet," Vince protested.

"Walk on the wild side, Vince. Take a nap."

"I dunno," he said with a self-effacing smile. "It's so decadent."

"Right up there with caviar vindaloo," Stuart agreed, coaxing him onto his back. Vince gave in easily, letting Stuart mold him and shape him to his own satisfaction. He was never hard to manipulate when Stuart touched him, and he mightn't have been quite so tired as Stuart was, but he certainly wasn't in any shape to argue against doing something he wanted and needed.

Before long, Stuart was half on top of him, half curled around him, and well on his way back to sleep, blessed sleep.

"One day," Stuart said dimly, "I'm gonna ask you to sleep with me, and you're just gonna do it. No argument, no hesitation, no poncing about over what I mean exactly."

"One day," Vince replied, "I'm going to get into bed with you, and you're just going to shut your face and go to sleep."

It was hours before he woke again. He could feel it, he was so relaxed, so content, he barely even registered the mirror on the underside of the waterbed's canopy, cut in the same Cupid shape that dominated the room. He might've gone straight back to sleep, but Vince had left the bed some time before, it seemed. He was dressed in fresh clothing and seated beside the coffee table, tying his shoes.

"Got an assignation with the bounty hunter, have you?"

"It's nearly ten-thirty," said Vince.

Clearly this should've meant something to Stuart. It didn't. "So?"

Vince sighed. "The restaurant closes at eleven."

"So?"

"So you've got to eat something Stuart, it's a fine line between sleek and consumptive. You can't be so thick as to think they've got room service in this place."

"Room service," Stuart said plaintively, sprawling out on his back. "Christ, I can't even remember the last time we stopped at a hotel that had room service."

"It was three days ago," said Vince. "Calgary. And as long as we're on the subject, you should know that there's something sick and perverted about your obsession with room service which I only pray I'll never understand."

"You won't," Stuart assured him. "You can't. You apologize to those room service blokes as if you've burned down their houses and slaughtered their children."

"It's weird, room service," said Vince. "Someone serves you in a restaurant, right, that's something else, you've gone somewhere, you've made an effort, it's a setting. Room service, there's a bed right there, you could be standing there naked with bloody Indian Superman on the telly and suspicious objects on the carpet, and still they'd present your penne rosé as if you were pressed and polished and asking about the Bordeaux."

Stuart was intrigued. "What sort of suspicious objects?"

"Go back to sleep," Vince sighed, heading for the door, "or take a shower or something. I have no clue how much hot water we've got, but I tried to save some for you."

"Could've saved more if you'd had a bath instead," said Stuart. He knew as well as Vince did that the bathtub was a heart-shaped monstrosity dotted with ancient rubber flowers that were just ragged enough to give the impression of big cartoon bullet holes.

"Don't blame me when your bones shred that mattress and you drown." Vince walked out and slammed the door shut behind him, adding, "You bastard."


*** *** ***


When Stuart emerged from the bathroom, he discovered that there was much more to Lucky Jumbo Meats and Video than just meats and videos. Vince had brought sandwiches, yeah, and bottles of what could only be something vile, but somehow he'd managed to track down several large candles as well, big yellow candles in quaint clay pots.

These he'd placed in strategic locations throughout the room so that it was possible to get around without having to make use of the obnoxious overhead light. Now the room looked merely seedy rather than absolutely horrible, a soft focus sort of effect.

He'd switched on the telly, forsaking what few poxy channels were on offer in favor of something that captivated Stuart's attention completely while he tried to identify it and accept it: it appeared to be a closed-circuit view of the front door to the hotel. Inexplicably, this image was accompanied by the soothing sound of soft-rock favorites.

Stuart cast Vince an uncertain look. "Is that--"

"The Front Door Channel, yeah." At the very least, he sounded suitably mortified. "It's the daftest thing I've ever seen. Still, the music's…" Vince's voice trailed off when the music swelled in the background, the soaring finale to "Caribbean Queen". "Well," he said, his tone rich with mortification. "The music's dreadful, isn't it? But it was that, Country Music Television, something called Neon Rider, or this."

He switched off the telly, and for an instant, all Stuart heard was a perfect, welcome silence, but then he caught it, the precise reason why Vince looked so bleak and violated: the blokes in the room across the hall-- each of them one shot short of alcohol poisoning-- were yodeling.

And it wasn't the comical, e-i-e-i-o sort of yodeling which people sang in the interests of rubbishing genuine yodeling, that would've been damning enough. This was genuine yodeling, an art that had been lost for countless good reasons, revived for a drunken one-night engagement.

Vince switched the telly on again before Stuart was forced to beg him to do it.

He might've been more appreciative of all that Vince had done to improve the room, ineffectual though it was, but at the only possible moment during which he could've salvaged Vince's pride and set the night off to a respectable start, he realized what was bugging him about the candles.

It was the scent, there was something about it that was familiar to him, something he'd always associated with bruised vanity, unfortunate ointments, and painful itching: they were citronella candles, he realized.

With that realization came the grin that infuriated Vince without fail, the grin, he was sure, which had led Vince to call him a right fucking bastard, out of nowhere. He couldn't help it, though, didn't even try. Anyone who burned citronella candles for mood lighting deserved a good, sound bollocking, and if it was Stuart's lot to deliver that bollocking, then deliver it he would.

"I've heard that the mosquitoes are unusually large in this part of the world," he said, "but I never imagined that they were big enough to carry off a grown man."

"It was all they had," Vince grumbled.

"No, no, don't get upset, I'm quite excited about this," Stuart went on. "We could open a ranch up here, hire out tame mosquitoes to take tourists on trips through the mountains."

"Stuart. Fuck off."

He couldn't make much of Vince's expression in the relative darkness, but there was no mistaking his tone. He was even more embarrassed about the candles than he was about the Front Door Channel, and rightly so.

He was embarrassed about having bought any candles, embarrassed that they were citronella candles, probably even embarrassed for having bought so many-- eight of the bloody things, like he was one of those sad schizophrenic blokes Stuart had seen on a documentary once, filled with the absolute conviction that they needed all four hundred of the laminated placemats they'd robbed from some manky department store.

It wouldn't take much now to put him off; one false move and he'd be calling the front desk to request a camp bed.

"It's lovely," Stuart said quietly, placing a gentle kiss on Vince's cheek. "Honestly. Between the mosquito repellent and your deft marksmanship, I've never felt safer."

Vince turned sharply, as if to leave Stuart standing there, as if to stomp off as he so often did, fed up with Stuart and beyond caring how he felt about it, but at the last second, he seemed to think better of it. He turned back to Stuart and opened his mouth to say something further, something grim and furious, it was right there in his eyes, but he made a fatal mistake: in the interest of coming up with something really nasty, he looked Stuart up and down.

It was only then, apparently, that he noticed that Stuart was naked.

"Oh my god," he said, covering his eyes with his hands. "Four thousand bags of clothes, and still you can never find a pair of trousers."

Stuart smirked. "Only 'cause you're always robbing them for your collection of Folded Things." He reached out and tried to pull Vince's hands away, but Vince was that much quicker. "Vince, for fuck's sake, it's nothing you haven't seen before."

Vince ignored him. "I left them where I found them," he defended. Stuart's trousers had been crumpled on the floor next to a chair; now they were folded neatly on the chair itself. "Or rather close by."

"That's for camping, Vince," Stuart said with exquisite condescension. "But I suppose this explains your colorful shirts and your passion for open flames."

"Camping," he said heavily. "I'm going to have a heart attack."

"The One-Horse Motor Inn," said Stuart, making another failed play for Vince's hands. "If the man-made fibers don't kill you, one of our guests surely will."

"Listen, Stuart… I want you to understand something, it's important, it's--" He shook his head and took his hands away from his face. He tried to look at Stuart, but his hands twitched, as if they were seconds away from covering his eyes again, and his gaze was fixed on an ambiguous stain on the carpet. "God, I'm so sad," he said, scowling.

Stuart got in close, so close that they were almost pressed together, backing Vince up against the wall to cut off every avenue of escape. His plan was a simple one: if Vince was to be distracted by Stuart's nudity now, first he'd have to make a sincere effort to see it. It was head and shoulders or the rest of the room. Now he'd either start talking or abandon any attempt to speak at all; either one would be a blessing for them both.

"Stuart," he said in a soft, soft voice, stroking Stuart's cheek with the back of his hand. "Think about what's happened to us today. You'll tell people all about it, no matter where we go from here, our first time, right? Imagine telling someone. We started out all right, bit of sniping, nothing extraordinary, but then you fell asleep and I picked up a carjacker."

He nuzzled Stuart's ear, murmuring, "A crazy carjacker with a machete in her handbag. It was only a hunting knife and a shopping bag, but it'll be a machete when you tell it, won't it?" Stuart tilted his head to give Vince better access to his neck, and Vince took full advantage, kissing his jaw, stroking his throat. His touch was so hesitant now, so reverent, and yet so sure, it made Stuart shiver.

"Vince."

"Shh," he said, easing one arm around Stuart's waist. "She took you hostage, wasn't enough to nick the car, she wanted to wind me up a bit. So she teased you with the knife, said a lot of scary things." He smiled in the darkness. "But she fucked with the wrong blokes."

Stuart traced the buttons of Vince's shirt with one hand, flicked a few open around the middle, slid a hand inside. Vince gasped. "Such a twat," Stuart said.

"I'm getting to that bit," Vince said hoarsely, eyes squeezed shut while Stuart pinched his nipple.

"Vince…" he sighed, straining closer. Vince held him at bay.

"We started scrapping, right, I was mortified, you were pissed off. Both of us off our heads. You started shouting at me, saying all-sorts. I got out of the car. What strange force compelled me, after all that? You might never know. But she let you out as well, and just when you thought the whole sorry situation was a complete cock-up, I produced the gun and shot out one of the tires on the Jeep. Seemed like a good idea till the car got smashed. Still, it can be fixed, and we have all our gear.

"We sorted it out, started walking. Miracle of miracles, someone picked us up only ten miles in, drove us to town. He was a bit strange, yeah, and maybe he had a taste for human flesh, but at least he didn't tell us about it."

Now he released Stuart, reluctantly, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Then we checked into some utterly forgettable hotel room and shagged like rabbits. The end."

"Vince," he said, shaking his head, "we could leave right now and you wouldn't forget this hotel room."

"That isn't the point," he said. "It's romantic, this. Making the best of a bad situation. And you did the same bloody thing I did. I know you think I'm pathetic, I know you were only taking the piss, I'm not stupid, but now, when you tell this story, it'll have a nice finish." He wrinkled his nose. "Or a comical one, depending on how you decide to tell it."

Stuart closed the distance between them, pressed himself up against Vince, wrapped around him. "I wasn't taking the piss," he murmured, his mouth only a fraction apart from Vince's. "And I'm not gonna tell anyone."

Vince looked stunned. "Oh."

They were both on the simmer, but for the time being, it seemed Vince was as content as Stuart to just tread water, savor the moment, let it gain its own momentum. It was odd, this. Vince grew more and more relaxed, eyes darkening, muscles loosening, but Stuart was quite the reverse, fairly crackling with energy.

Vince slid one hand down to cup Stuart's arse, the other up around the back of his neck, fitting Stuart against him as if he'd done it hundreds of times. Stuart supposed he had, if in a slightly different context. They'd always enjoyed dancing together.

"Everyone's going to know anyway," Vince said eventually. "That lot don't miss a trick."

"Everyone's gonna guess," said Stuart. "Fuck them, they'll think what they like. Hearts and flowers, whips and chains, who gives a toss?" He gave Vince a speculative look. "Did you want me to tell?"

"Maybe a little," he said eventually.

"You of all people should know, it's nothing, shagging me. I've had everyone. How many men have had you?"

"Three," said Vince. "Two, actually. I had one of them twice."

"I'll make you forget them both," Stuart purred.

"Big man."

When they kissed again, it was nothing like it'd been before, frantic, like the plane was going down.

Stuart took his time with Vince, and Vince let him, now, moving against him languidly, moaning low in his throat, his urgency burned away and replaced by deep and abiding need. Stuart nipped at his mouth, sucked on his tongue, licked his lips, and Vince gave it all back, making no move to take it further, not even to strip off his own clothing.

"Mm, you're fantastic," said Stuart, kissing him again.

Vince's knees buckled, and he slid down the wall, taking Stuart with him. When they hit the floor, Stuart straddled his hips, taking his mouth again, grinding against him. Working the last of Vince's buttons free, he parted the shirt wide, half down his shoulders. Then he got to work on Vince's trousers.

"Stuart," Vince gasped. "We can't shag here."

Stuart yanked Vince's belt free and tossed it over his shoulder. "We can."

"There's a bed right there."

"It's brown. Lift up." Vince obliged him, and Stuart bared him to his thighs. The sight stopped him dead. "Oh, look at you," he breathed.

"Piss off."

"No, look."

There he was, looking like he had dishonorable intentions. He was completely disheveled, his head thrown back against the wall, his hair sticking up even more than usual, eyes dark, lips swollen, the shadow of a beard along his jaw, chest gleaming with sweat, his cock hard and straining… Gone was the buttoned-up, buttoned-down Vince that Stuart always known; this was his secret identity.

Having looked, as bidden, Vince looked up at Stuart and grinned. "Blimey."

"Fucking fantastic." Stuart took Vince's cock in hand, and Vince twisted up into his fist, moaning his name. "Easy," Stuart soothed, wanking him slowly, licking his throat. "Where's your bag?"

"Dunno," he said miserably. Between Stuart and the position of his clothing, he was helpless to do much of anything but take what he was given. "Miles away."

Stuart cast a quick look around the room, finally spotting Vince's bag sitting next to the coffee table. He climbed to his feet slowly, cold suddenly after soaking up so much of Vince's warmth.

"Don't move," he said, striding across the room to Vince's bag.

"Stuart--"

"I mean it," he said. "Don't you go shucking your trousers or something. I want you just like that."

After what seemed like an age, Stuart found Vince's condoms and lube-- both in economy size, though whether out of optimism or frugality, Stuart didn't care to consider-- and returned to him, straddling his hips again.

"I can't move," Vince complained.

Stuart dragged his tongue along the column of Vince's throat, provoking a whimper when it ended in a wet kiss. "I'll give you one hand," he said. "Which is it to be?"

Vince rolled his eyes. "Surprise me."

Stuart freed Vince's left arm. "Here," he said, prodding Vince with the lubricant tube. "Slick me up."

Vince looked down at the tube, swallowing carefully. "I, um--"

"For fuck's sake, Vince," he said, grabbing Vince's hand and squirting lube on his palm, "Make a decision."

"I have," he said. "It's just--" He looked up at Stuart with anguished eyes. "I can't--"

He kissed Vince again, slow and deep. "It's all right," he said with a crooked smile when he was done. "It's all right. We'll start slow, yeah?"

He took Vince's hand and wrapped around his cock, stroking himself tightly, slowly. He held himself back, kept still, kept quiet, let Vince take control. It was powerfully sexy to him, this, both of them restrained, one way or another, Vince exploring him so tentatively, like he was half-afraid he'd make a hash of it, half-amazed that he could make a hash of it. Before long, Vince was improvising, squeezing when he felt like it, getting a bit rougher when Stuart urged him into it.

He was perfect, attentive, responsive, he wanked Stuart off as if he knew what Stuart wanted before Stuart knew it himself, that strange telepathy they shared finally put to some practical use. He made no attempt to free himself, to pull Stuart closer. He wanted to watch, Stuart knew, he'd always stared at Stuart like he was one of the really brilliant wonders of the world. Now there was so much more to see, and he was taking it all in with greedy, lustful eyes.

The pleasure Stuart felt was so keen it was almost prickly, it sent off sparks inside him, partly, he knew, the result of having been teased nearly to this point twice already that day without any sort of resolution, but he didn't care, he'd have it now, he would, Vince had stepped over the line, was wanking him off with an authority that Stuart hadn't even guessed at.

"Vince," he gasped, thrusting harder. "Ohh…"

"Christ," Vince growled, his touch just shy of brutal now. "You're killing me. No bloody wonder I didn't think to touch you, I must've known I'd have to pack a lunch."

Stuart grinned and held on, matching Vince's pace, moaning loudly with each snap of his hips. He could've lasted an age, as long as he liked, practically, though not without some cost to his peace of mind. Vince, though. Vince was straining beneath him, not so far from coming, himself, and Stuart wasn't helping, didn't want to. He let his head fall back, let his eyes drift shut, let his back arch each time he bucked into Vince's hand. He knew exactly how he looked, like that; he'd seen it dozens of times. It was Vince who'd never seen it before.

"Bastard."

Stuart plunged his hand into Vince's hair and pulled him forward, kissing him hotly. "Slick me up."

Vince blinked at him. "Okay." As soon as he let go of Stuart's cock, Stuart began stroking it himself, laughing softly at Vince's expression, all lust and disgust. Somehow Vince overcame it and held out his free hand for more lube. "Let's have it, then."

"You want the other one free as well?" Stuart gasped.

"You want the other one free, you slut."

"Have it your way." He squirted lube onto Vince's palm and shifted up a bit to give him better access.

"My way? I'll tell you a little something about my way, Stuart, it…" he trailed off when his fingers slid inside Stuart slowly, so slowly, and Stuart stilled, sighing, waiting for Vince to get all the way in, as far as he could go, just far enough. When Vince's fingers brushed against his prostate, he broke out in a sweat, shuddering, his eyes squeezed shut.

"Oh my god," Vince breathed.

"Vince, stop," he said, beyond stopping himself.

Vince kept stroking him, bending his head to take one of Stuart's nipples in his mouth, biting it sharply before he soothed it with his tongue.

"I mean it, Vince," Stuart gasped, "I'm gonna come."

"Serve you right if you did," he said, licking Stuart's collarbone, but he let him go.

Stuart snatched up a condom and tore it open, rolling it down Vince's cock. "Last chance," he said mockingly, meeting Vince's eyes. "It's not sex if you don't come."

"Who's to say I will?" Vince said. "I'm not that bothered, actually."

Stuart braced himself against Vince's shoulders and started easing himself down onto Vince's cock. He'd as good as promised to take it slow, and he'd fully intended to follow through, but Vince bucked up hard, shoved all the way in, arching up and moaning low in his throat.

"This is what happens when you give a gun to the wrong sort of person," Stuart gasped delightedly. "They get all tough on you."

Vince wrenched his other arm free and grabbed Stuart's hips, putting him exactly where he wanted him, shoving him up and yanking him down, hard and fast. Stuart rocked with him, let Vince take him wherever he wanted to go, because Vince was perfect, Vince was fantastic, Vince really knew how to make the best of a bad situation.

He hardly seemed aware of Stuart now, so lost was he in sensation, he just kept working his hips and Stuart's as if they all belonged to him. Then he said, "Kiss me," only that, but it was so earnest, so desperate…

Stuart bent to kiss him, made a meal of him, really, growling into his mouth, sucking on it, nipping at his lips, but his change in position was a change in position for Vince as well, and he began to thrust still deeper, still faster, till even kissing was beyond them both.

Vince came first, stiffening beneath Stuart and arching against the wall, running with sweat and moaning like mad, and it did Stuart in as well. He clutched Vince close as spasm after spasm wracked him, stealing his breath away, making him see stars. When it was over, they just lay like that for a bit, catching their breaths, Vince crushed against the wall with his arms looped loosely around Stuart's waist, stroking his back, Stuart draped over him bonelessly, kissing his neck.

Then someone started thumping on the door.

"Who the hell is that?" Stuart demanded.

"The yodelers," said Vince, awed. "Oh my god, we've disturbed the yodelers."

They started giggling, and kept on doing till the irate yodeler finally gave up on them and left. The moment might've turned awkward, then; Vince might've taken note of their situation, their surroundings, and become deeply embarrassed about it all. Stuart might've taken note of that look on Vince's face, open adoration, complete devotion, and assumed, correctly, that it was already far too late to be thinking of fleeing him.

But they kissed again, in open defiance of the yodelers, they kissed as if they'd only just gotten started, and when they parted, finally, Vince grinned up at Stuart, goofily, and said, "So, what d'you fancy doing tomorrow?"


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