Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 15.

Quitting fear.

What are you so afraid of?

Chapter 15. Quitting fear.

Time, like a spool of thread, unravels in unpredictable ways and pools at Marshall’s feet. As though he never came down from the high, days, weeks, maybe months pass and he loses track of their passing, maybe even wants to. Shepherd Maya’s words have taken up residence in the gaps of his mind and fill in the spaces where fear once resided. He gives into the flow, the push and pull, the movement of the universe. And now that he’s given in, he can see that there is no linear time, only a linear perspective. In actuality, things move forward, backward, side to side, in endless concentric circles. He sinks his roots into the land of Pleasant Farm and finds that maybe those roots have always been here. Maybe his spirit was always here. Like Maya, maybe this is where he was always meant to go. It is catharsis—there’s no other word for it. Marshall is home.

And then there’s Jamie, sweet Jamie and his soft hands and thick lips and fluttering hands. They are always kissing. In bed, in the morning, by the stream at lunch, over pots of steaming veggies. Kissing becomes their primary language. Marshall learns words he never knew existed in the space beneath Jamie’s tongue, in the taste of his spit, in the tiny breaths that pass between open mouths and hot grins, there is so much said that it is practically overwhelming. They spend every spare moment together that they can manage to scrounge. The work is endless and the needs of the colony constant but time is no longer a meaningful factor to Marshall.

In the evenings, after communal dinner, he takes his spool of thread and binds his body to Jamie’s with the thin fabric and when they roll in the leaves by the lake, when they sit on the roof and talk or not talk, when their hands clasp in bed and they are too giddy to sleep, time does not pass them by but holds them together so that they are two spirits in infinite closeness. Every moment with this quiet, beautiful boy is like a gift from the land that they even get to be here together. Marshall no longer just loves but is in love and the feeling is so expansive and consuming that he loses track of everything but the closeness and the kissing and the silent language.

And yet—and this is where Marshall gets a bit lost, a bit muddled in his own frustration—they have not yet had sex. And it’s not for a lack of desire. It takes all but the thought of Jamie’s lips reaching toward his, hands on his waist, for his dick to stand at full attention beneath his dress. Marshall’s hands have explored every clothed inch of Jamie’s body. The subtle masculine curves of his hips, the divots below his abdomen, the giving firmness of his ass, the taut and flexible muscles in his thighs. They’ve rolled in the grass and weeds, tangled their tongues, hips rolling into hips until they were both aching for release, for animalistic thrusting, growls and moans and sticky sweet eruptions.

But somehow they have come to an impasse, one that fills Marshall with the same sort of male frustration that turns men into machines built to rage. Because no matter how close they come, how tightly pressed their bodies, however inseparable their souls, the idea of baring his naked self to a person who sees him right down to his bones sends a paralytic agent through his veins so intense it feels as though reality comes crashing back down with a vengeance. Time floods back in like a cracked dam’s release and suddenly there is something else to do, someone they forgot to meet, a task that must be done now or everything will come to a halt.

Marshall cannot piece it together. He’s had sex with so many people he’s lost count. From friends to strangers to inappropriately older men, Marshall has been having and been proficient at sex since he was fifteen years old. And it has always come easy to him. These people seem to seek him out, offer a hand and within a few short exchanges he is inside of them and he is feeling pleasure and then it is over and he is happy to have done what is expected of him and his awesome penis. The need he feels to fill and be filled by Jamie is like a hunger bordering on starvation.

Why can’t he just fucking fuck?

This is something that Lana has taken great interest in. Perhaps because her own sex life is deeply satisfactory or because Marshall and Jamie are a beautiful couple who would look even prettier having gay sex. Though her main attraction is always and endlessly Shepherd Maya, she has picked up more than a few consorts who she is more than happy to tell you about. But the question always comes back to Marshall and why he cannot fuck.

Jamie and Beaver left the cabin early one morning and so it was just Marshall and Lana in separate beds staring at the ceiling. Marshall was hard, but this was not out of the ordinary.

“What do you feel when you’re making out? Like, what is your gut instinct?” Lana posed, trying to look bored, picking at her fingernails. She’s been gaining weight since they arrived—they all had, the food was abundant and Jamie’s cooking too irresistible to turn down a second helping—but she in particular had been getting rather round in the face, always a bit rosy-cheeked and it suited her. The constant sex gave her a serene sort of glow.

“Well,” Marshall had said, “My gut instinct is to take my dick out and fuck his throat until he cries and then lick the tears from his face after I cum inside him.”

Lana nodded, logically. “And when you make a move to take your dick out, what then?”

Marshall opened and closed his mouth. He had his hand up his dress and was holding his balls as if to protect them from embarrassment. “Well, then I am filled with a fear so deep and intense I think I might throw up.”

“And if I told you that you are afraid of true vulnerability, how does that make you feel?”

Marshall frowned. “I’ve been vulnerable plenty of times. I’ve been vulnerable with you.”

She turned her head and the smile smacked across her face was an eerie imitation of Maya’s. “But you don’t love me, darling. Not like that.”

Marshall soothed his balls. “I don’t want to be scared of being loved. It makes me feel like a child.”

“You can’t will the fear away, baby. Eventually you gotta confront it head on. Quit cold turkey. You might go through some growing pains about it.” She sat up, put her elbows on her knees like a youth pastor. “Quitting fear ain’t much different from quitting drugs. It’s just another thing used to keep people from getting close in a real way. Might make you shake and throw up and shit your pants but you gotta get it out, Marzipan. And soon, before your almost-lover grows tired of the avoidance.”

That conversation must have been weeks ago by now and Marshall had begun to notice the glint of impatience seeding its way into Lana’s bright eyes. She, like almost every other woman in the colony, had begun to regard him with an air of urgency that said, now or never, buddy, and it’s gotta be now. Was that all it was? Are all of the women just waiting for Marshall and Jamie to fuck? He can’t imagine why they might care. Everyone seems to be having sex with one another like a giant polycule, the web of connections too intricate for anyone to untangle. Whether or not that is the source of the colony’s impatience, Marshall feels it, imposes it on himself so even he is impatient with himself and the invented pressure only makes it feel more impossible to fuck his friend. How can he be vulnerable with a single person when it feels like letting an entire colony of women into him as well?

With no alternatives left, he has decided to turn to the source, the concealer of impatience but likely the inventor of it.

She’s meditating on the ancestral stump when he enters her hut. From the stillness of her lidded eyes, he can tell she is somewhere deep inside of herself. Rain falls lightly outside, pitter pattering on the hut’s canopy. Sandalwood incense burns at the north, southeast and southwest directions. He doesn’t want to interrupt her journey and so he sits at Shepherd Maya’s feet and waits.

It must be another hour or two before her eyes flutter open and she looks entirely unsurprised to find Marshall’s hulking frame waiting patiently below her. She uncrosses her legs, lets her feet fall from the stump and press softly into a bed of moss. “Marshall, how can I help you?”

“Well, uh.” He’s had two hours to prepare and still he stumbles over his words, embarrassed to have to share them at all. “So I’m—I’m having trouble letting go of some fear.”

“Mmm,” she hums as if she didn’t already sense his worries in the air. “Fear is natural. Fear is real. You can move through it, work with it, but never let it go entirely. It is human instinct to fear things so that we may survive them.”

Marshall twists his mouth into a puckered asshole. “I don’t…the thing I fear won’t kill me, I don’t think. I feel like I can’t survive without it, not because of it.”

“Love,” Maya muses and Marshall nods compliantly. “Tell me, Marshall.” She stands now and paces the room slowly. “What love have you seen in your life?”

He considers this for what he knows is too long. He is searching. “I think that Mr. Obama really loves Michelle. What they have is very beautiful.”

Maya is only slightly amused and the amusement might be false. “Your parents did not love each other.”

“They did,” he says because he believes it. “It was a very bad love. But it was love.”

“And what about you? Did they love you?”

A cold breeze cuts across the lake and ripples the fabric of the hut. Winter is creeping in and it’s gotten cold enough that they’ve all taken to wearing big sweaters over thicker dresses and wool socks. Most of the work lately is final harvests, drying and freezing food to last the winter, preparing for snow, gathering wood to fill hearths.

“My pa did not think it was right for a man to love another man, family or not. And my mother was too high to love anything but the high itself.”

Her face is filled with a sad understanding that could be mistaken for empathy. “Who has loved you, Marshall?”

He hesitates. “No one.”

“And who have you loved?”

“Everyone,” he says without thinking, the words bitter and real on his tongue. “I love everyone. I think people are cool, even when they suck. Sometimes especially when they suck.”

Maya does not seem surprised. “Love,” she begins, almost as though chanting and her words come rhythmically, “love is no ordinary thing. It’s a kind of magic, a force as powerful as the earth when it shakes, the sky when it howls and weeps, the ocean when it crashes and submerges. It’s also very simple. It is a door. And it is either open or it is closed. Someone closed your door a long time ago. And so even though you may love everyone, you cannot give out that love through a closed door and it cannot be handed back to you. When the door is closed, the magic is lost, the connection severed and the spirit isolated. You must open your door, Marshall.”

He understands but he does not like his understanding. “How do I open my door, Shepherd?”

She grins and though her teeth are straight and orderly, there is something shark-like about the lines of her mouth. “With an axe, my dear. Beat that door to pieces. Tear it apart with your bare hands if you have to. And do it quickly. Before it seals shut forever.”

The fear that floods his chest then is supernatural. It is a moving thing even worse than the paralysis of wanting to bare himself to Jamie. It is a commanding fear. It wrenches his adrenal gland in sharp, rough palms, floods his veins with panic and demands an answer: fight or flight. A primal, wriggling thing is adrenaline. Fight or flight? The widening of Maya’s eyes, the wind that cuts through the tent with urgency, the fear that wrestles his limbs. It leaves him no option.

Marshall is running across the colony. He’s never moved so quickly in his life and he does not slow. Not for idling cows or shuffling women. Not for Beaver and his milk stacked precariously on his cart or the sharp rocks puncturing the soles of his feet. His legs are the axe and with every pump of his thick thighs, he is breaking the door into tiny wooden shards. He runs with swinging, angular arms and heaving lungs because if he stops, he can see it: he drops the ax, his door locks forever, he is never able to feel real love, Jamie gives him up for someone more capable. It's so clear, so impertinent, so unavoidable. And so he runs and runs and when he stumbles through the doors to the Big House and takes Jamie by the wrist, spatula still in hand, he drags him outside and he keeps running with Jamie in tow, all confusion but little protest and once more he refuses to stop until they are inside their empty cabin, bolts the door, panting and heaving and red in the cheeks, stinging from the cold, he grabs Jamie’s face like the handle of an ax and in one gasping breath, he says, “Tell me what you want me to do to you. Say it and mean it and I will do it.”

The surprise on Jamie’s face is shadowed only by his deep desire for the man clutching his face with prickling cold fingers. “I want you to fuck me, Marshall. I want you to tell me you love me while you do it because you do love me and I love you.”

Wood splinters and splays in a thousand directions. Marshall’s blood pumps so hard his veins might burst.

“Yeah, I can do that,” he says.

The permission, spoken and clear, is all the door needed to be blown permanently off of its hinges. They dissolve into a flurry of removing clothes, falling over one another in a competition to see who can plant the most kisses on the most bare plots of skin that each has been dreaming of for months and years and eons. But Marshall has been asked to complete a task and with the unbridled force of his body, he wins with ease. He’s got his lips around Jamie’s throat. He's tonguing the place beneath his arm where sweat has been gathering all the day long. He’s sucking the dark hairs on his chest, tonguing his soft brown nipples, feeling the muscles of his stomach pulsing and shifting against his mouth. Marshall is greedy and hungry. He is brimming with uninhibited want, overflowing in the spit that he drags across Jamie’s thighs. Jamie is a writhing thing made of hot breath and hard muscles, low groans and primal hands pulling at Marshall’s hair to keep himself from floating away in it all entirely. Marshall is a mouth and fingers and tiny lungs, a frenzy of movement, intent on touching all of this boy at once, inhaling him, devouring him, leaving nothing behind but himself.

Jamie below is all hair and length and sweat and pulse. He thrusts into Marshall’s throat. Marshall hooks his thick fingers into Jamie. Their eyes lock, their eyes emit, their eyes speak. Jamie cums before they can even get really started and Marshall swallows him greedily, happily, golden ichor in his veins. Jamie’s moans say more than his words ever have. They are unplanned, erratic, lightning before thunder, a salve to the fear that Marshall cannot love and pleasure at the same time—but he can, oh he can. He can press his wide lips into the hairy crease of Jamie’s thigh and whisper a thousand words at once, he can bury his hot face in Jamie’s ass and open him with his practiced tongue. He can deliver the taste of Jamie with his tongue and he can latch his own eyes onto Jamie’s and he can whisper, “I love you,” and “please, please, please,” and “I want you.” He can lay his palms bare and pull this boy into him, put himself into this boy and the love can coexist with the pleasure and there is no word large enough to convey the meaning of releasing into this boy with every part of them connected, every piece of himself shared.

They collapse into a deluge of hurried ‘I love you’s and second winds and the smell of sweat and more, more, more because too much is never enough when you’ve finally let yourself feel it all without restraint, without fear, with sheer desire and mutual obsession. Marshall winds time’s thread around himself and plunges it inside Jamie so they are never-ending, without limit, contiguous in their love.

In a tangle of sheets hours later, Marshall will kiss Jamie’s forehead. In the stream of hot shower water, Jamie will fall to his knees. At the communal dinner table, their bare feet will caress and entice. In the burst dam of their desire, they will no longer be able to resist their need. In the comfort of the dark night, they will hold and they will rest. So lost is Marshall in his love that he will hardly notice the lifted impatience on the women’s faces at dinner. The plotting gaze of June. The shark tooth grin of Maya.

In the dull hours after midnight, Marshall will feel a flutter of a kiss on his cheek and Lana’s bittersweet voice against his ear, her breath cold like the first frost as she whispers, “Good job, baby. Your spirit is ready.” And he will feel his heart breathe warmth into his chest because he no longer feels like two separate people but one unified force of passion and compassion, one spirit. Ready.

And in the soft gray light of dawn, he will wake to many faces hanging over his, one minty palm against his mouth and a thousand fibers of rope binding him to this place forevermore.

nothing left to cry about

Previous chapter. Next chapter.

Table of contents.

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