F4: Life in Suspension

His hands caught up both of my breasts, the finger twisting the piercing till I cried out. That seemed to fuel his desire. His thrusts came hard then harder again. I felt myself being forced open around him and loved the agony even while I wanted to cry from it.

Tear were indeed forming in my eyes, but they had nothing to do with the familiar pain of sex. I felt not Albert's hard hands but Others. Long nails should be raking my tits, digging into my shoulders, holding me in place while a far more experienced cock plowed me. The hot breath on my neck should be scented with wine and that ridiculously hot curry chicken Gabriel loved so much.

I felt Albert when he began to cum. It was not the orgasmic cry of my lover, but the harsh sounds of a lustful youth. I pushed back on him even as he was trying to gather breath. I drove myself up, impaling my body on his softening length and then I clamped down on him as hard as I could.

"Just hold it there. Let it last. Don't try and pull out." I whispered to him as I let the wet pillowcase slip from between my teeth. "That felt wonderful, Albert, but there is no need to rush. We have all night to play."

Panting for breath, he did as I said for a long time,and then ever so slowly I felt him slipping out. As I turned, I made sure my thigh covered my cock. He might like the idea of being with a TS, but the reality of it was very different after you have just cum. Certainly for your first time. I cannot count the men that, upon seeing my cock, have suddenly discover they had some place to urgently be.

I feared that Albert might be the same. I didn't want him to leave. I needed... I needed... A warm "John" with a hard cock, a bottle of champagne, enough coke to kill a rockstar...

A friend in the dark.

Albert?

Not as good as, but then what in this world is?

* * * *

With the half grand of his new keeping my older money company, I parted ways with Albert. He was meeting his fiancee at the train station, and they were going to continue on up to New York together. I teased him that she was going to be such a lucky girl to have a big strong man that could show her just how to suck a cock.

He had blushed.

Closets are so... Adorable!

I had no trouble spotting my cousin BethAnn. The big-breasted black woman waiting on the platform for me could have been my Aunty D, not her daughter. She looked around, as the train disembarked its passengers, but never once let her eyes come to rest on me till I was standing almost on her toes. It took her two double takes to accept what she was seeing.

"Oh My Sweet Lord! I am not believing what I my eyes is seeing. Oh, hell no, this ain't right. No man should look that damn sexy in a dress. And what the hell you been living on? Air? Everyone else in this family looks like Granna fucked the Michelin man."

Laughing, I wrapped her chubby body up in a fierce hug. She held me tight, whispering a name to me that I no longer answer to. We were both dripping tears on each other as the minutes passed, and neither would relinquish the hug.

"Your titties are squashing my titties, boy. Now done turn me loose, already." She finally managed to get me to agree to that, but not at the first complaint. Then she was back up against me, but this time it was her arms around me as I totally broke down.

Through the gasping sobs I managed to tell her about Gabriel, what had happened to him. Even how close I had come to following him, although why I told her that, I don't know. It earned me a pop to the side of my head. Then a kiss on the cheek.

Her husbands car was not new. It was not even nice to look at, being more rust and faded paint than original pale blue, but it ran. Which was all that BethAnn told me mattered. Either way, it got us where we were going, which was a place I thought that I would never go back too.

Macon, Georgia had changed in the time since I had been gone, but then so had I. Nothing stays the same forever, least of all small towns. The people get recycled, more like cans than bottles. Crushed first. I could see examples of that in progress as we drove through old neighborhoods. Places that had once been, well, to me at that time, filled with rich homes were now all but slums. Most with a half dozen cars in the front yard. A yard that, in most cases, hadn't seen a mower since I left.

My jaw dropped when we passed the old high school. The windows were boarded up but the signs of a major fire were still everywhere. The trees that had once leaned against it were all dead on one side.

"When did that happen?" I asked.

"Couple years back. They said it was the old wiring. I think it's funny that the new school's construction funds turned up just weeks latter, when they had been telling us there wasn't money for a new school. You know what else..."

The rest of the way to her house was a gossip fest about people I didn't even half remember and a tirade about local politics and who was the most crooked. It passed the time at least.

Her husband, Harles Tomas, well, to say that he hated me on sight was putting it mildly. He, however, voiced only one complaint then got told to shut his fool mouth or she would shut it for him. With a frying pan!

Her children, however, didn't know quite what to make of me. Especially since BethAnn would not call me Alexus.

It was those kids though that made me come to realize that no matter what, no matter how hard this life could get, there was always going to be some small bit of pure innocence.

"Are you playing dress-up?" asked my little third cousin.

She asked that question, with her head tilted as if to consider what she saw. When I smiled and nodded she went to her room and came back with two old dolls and a set of plastic tea cups. That was how I, dressed in my glamorous best, found myself having "coffee" with her and her two 'fashion model' friends.

"Why Coffee? Why not tea?" I asked, smiling.

"Only queers like my brother Kyle drink tea," she said just as plain as plain.

When I looked up to find BethAnn standing there with her hand over her mouth, I smiled.

"Who told you that?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

"Daddy." She lifted the little teapot. "Would you like more coffee?"

I placed my hand over the cup in front of me, like I would have in my favorite coffee house.

"No thank you, hun. I would rather have tea."

* * * *

The night air was filled with the rusty harp sound of cicadas, "katydids" as my Granna called them, but the human noise continued on far past that point. I wanted silence.

Harles, it appeared, was a cop show junky and his favorite was S.V.U. New York. I could take only so much of it when the episode he was watching featured a young girl, raped,by her father, to make her not a lesbian. BethAnn's husband muttered something under his breath about that being the only way to end that kind of perversion.

I had to get out that house.

The night air was the warm sultry blanket that is the south in the spring. It enfolded me, in tight arms of humidity that made me uncomfortable, but then the breeze that blew across my face was so like a hairdryer that I had to just close my eyes and enjoy it.

The slap of the screen door broke my meditation. My cousin looked at me then offered me a cigarette. It had been years since I had smoked something that wasn't illegal, but what the hell. The nicotine rush was a good buzz in itself.

"What did she mean?" I asked when the silence grew.

BethAnn knew what I was talking about because she took my arm and led me away from the house to a tall tree nearby. There were dozens of old kitchen chairs under it and an old oil drum that showed the signs of hundreds of fires. It stank of old ashes, and the ground around it had a littler of cheap liquor bottles. I looked at her till she gave a mighty sigh.

"My son Kyle is gay. He's not Harles's child. He's from my first marriage. Harles did raise him though for the most part." She hugged herself as if cold despite the heat, the tree's heavy branches blocked the breeze that I had been enjoying. "He told us two weeks ago. That he was gay. He just said it out the blue like. Harles... well, he didn't take it well, not well at all. He and Kyle nearly got into a fight and then, when I stopped it, he told Kyle to leave. To leave and not come back."

"Where did he go?" I asked.

"He has friends in Atlanta. He went to stay with them. Gay friends." Her voice left nothing to the imagination about what she thought her son was doing there. I could see in her eyes the imagined orgies of male flesh, that she envisioned her son was a part of. Given it was Atlanta, she could be right.

But for some reason I... I don't know. I guess I had always thought I had the monopoly of weird in this family. I pictured her son, having never seen him, as some younger version of myself. A version that lacked a Gabriel.

The ache of my loss returned ten fold. How my lost lover would have laughed to hear my thoughts now. Me... wanting to charge to the rescue, to defend this blood of my blood from the pain of the world, to guide him in the ways of the world. Who was I, his father? Looking at the womanly curves of my cousin, I think back to old emotions, lusts, and memories I had once carried. For her. Those were from those strange years when I had not known just what I wanted, but knew that what I had was not it.

It had been a crush. Nothing more than that. But still...

"I'm going to go to Atlanta to see if I can contact some old friends of my own." I told her looking towards her house where I could hear her husband laughing. "Want me to see if I can find him?"

"I know where he is staying. I have the address. If you would check up on him I would love that. I'm worried about him."

"Of course you are. You're his mother. It's what they are supposed to do." I smiled at her as she looked up at me. "I just wish that mine had taken the time to worry about me."

My cousin was in my arms then. She hugged me tight, then led me over to one of the chairs. Over the next hour she told me things I had not known. Things that I had never known. The years that my mother had worried herself nearly into the hospital over what was happening to me. The drunken confessions of shame that she had shared with BethAnn's mom. Aunty Ds had called her a fool and made her promise to track me down and call me, but then as soon as my mom would sober up she would recount it all. I was a pervert. The ultimate shame of her life. The son she did not speak of.

It hurt. Of course it did.

BethAnn made me promise to go talk to her before I left.

Before I left? Was it that clear to my cousin that I could never say here? This was no longer home to me. The streets and the night life I had lived for so long were already calling to me.

Her husband laughed again, then started calling for her to get him a beer.

She left me there under that tree alone with the darkest of thoughts. I listened to the rusty harped bugs and wished. Oh, how I wished. What I wished for I can't recall, but I know it was for more than the life I had.

* * * *

That I found Kyle in club Traxx was no surprise. That he was being the best man at a wedding was.

I felt the eyes on me as I walked in. Some of them were nice, some where not so nice. I was a TS in a gay club, to more than a few here I was a traitor to both sides of the fence.

But I looked hot.

Alexus Mano Leia could look nothing but hot as I descended upon the city of my second birth. If you know they are going to look, then look like a goddess walking among them. My silky black hair, the only thing my father ever gave me, was out from under my normal wig. Styled till I gleamed with glitter and promises, I moved into the crowd looking for my intended prey.

More than a few hands took a free feel that earned them a flirty look and a blown kiss, no matter the gender.

A young man, who wanted the world to think he was a gangster, decided that I had the body he was looking for. His friends gave him hell when I shut him down. He was a child of another generation, not that I don't like young as the delighted Albert found out, but I didn't feel like teaching tonight. From what I could see just by the way he moved, he had a lot to learn.

A far-more-refined man I allowed to buy me a drink. He was the type of gentleman panther I would normally love to feel against my back, but not tonight. Tonight I was here for Kyle.

He was younger than I had thought he would be, or maybe that was just me feeling my own years. He didn't look like his mother, and given that I had never seen his father I had nothing to judge him by but himself. He was... a child of the hip hop generation. Dressed to impress a much younger piece of hotness. He stood so very tall up there as he helped a friend seal the holy bonds of matrimony.

I watched, enjoying the scene. Then I began to wish that it wasn't two strangers up there but that it was me and Gabr... It hit me hard then. Turning away from the happy scene, I went to the bar and ordered enough gin and juice to bathe in. I was sipping my way through my second big glass when I heard the I do's and the crowd cheered the kiss. A slow tear ran down my cheek.

Why was I here? To help a third cousin I didn't even know? What was I doing? What was I going to say? And from the looks of things he was doing alright. Why should I interfere?

Looking over the top of my glass I watched the happy couple and the wedding party being toasted. Kyle had a rather handsome young man under his arm. A little twinky for my taste, but then who am I to talk.

Suddenly, I had to get out of there. The feel of the place wasn't mine. It was as strange to me as being in a white country and western bar would have been. I headed out the door and into the light drizzle, wishing I hadn't come here. There was nothing for me here. Nothing left in this city that had once been my home.

I opened my umbrella, to protect my hair, by habit.

The bottle of pills in an anonymous hotel room... why didn't I take them? I could be happy now, by his side getting ready to go live another life or to just dwell there together in whatever version of heaven that would let us in.

Why my feet took me there I don't know. When I stood before the darkened windows and the chain locked rosewood doors I just stared, numbly. Club 708... my god the memories that began in this place. Now it was cold, the music dead. The inside probably smelled of old makeup, sweat, and latex still, but I could feel that its heart had stopped. The dancers and players drifted off to some other dance... some other place to play. Did I want to go find those?

Why bother? Gabriel was dead. My love was dead. My heart was as dead as the music in the old club. It was dead and cold, and just like the club all I had left was blackened windows, chained shut doors and a fading smell of old makeup... sweat... and latex.

Turning away from that one more lost piece of my happy past, to go and maybe find a dry place to let it all fall away, I stopped.

He was young. Young and getting his dress soaked with rain. His wig was something bought in a second hand store. Something your mother might wear when it took to long to fix her hair. His dress was nice enough, but worn too many times. The new was long gone from it.

I could tell he didn't know how to walk in those heels he was wearing. He could hardly stand in them.

As I watched a white van pulled up next to him and he leaned into the window. I didn't need to hear what he was telling the driver I could imagine it far better. I saw that the back windows of the van were covered. So were the side.

Stepping quickly on those wet sidewalks, I was by his side when his hand went for the door handle. Mine got there first, and I blocked him even as my umbrella covered him, taking him out of the rain.

I looked in the van at the driver. I smiled at him.

"Drive off real nice and slow like, and I'll not fill the back of this heap with nine millimeter. You understand me? Sugar pie?"

The driver got the hint and eased away. When I looked to the young man, I saw that he was mad at me. I smiled at this. So innocent.

"What the hell did you do that...?" he began.

"Never! Get. Into. A. Van!" I stressed each word with a poke to his chest. "If you don't know the driver, hell even if you do know the driver. If you can't see who is in the back of that thing, you never do it!"

He was mad at me still. I could see that maybe I had gotten him to thinking, but he was still angry.

"How much? For your time there, sweety? How much you asking?" I let my eyes play across that tender face. With the right hand at work he could be... "And what is your name?"

"You a cop?" he asked, suddenly suspicious.

"Finally he thinks." Reaching to my blouse I pulled it to the side and showed him my pierced nipple. The heavy breast falling free of the deep cut cleavage easily. "Want to search me for a wire?"

His eyes were drawn to my chest like he had glued them there.

"I'm... I'm... Candy Luscious. I'm fifty dollars an hour?"

Oh, my god.

I had to hide my smile, but even as I tried to do that, I saw him get madder.

"You just cost me fifty bucks!"

Tucking my boob back in I pull my money clip from the other side. I pulled a fifty from it, but held it away from him.

"How about if you give this to me, Candy and I show you how to earn two thousand a night? How about two thousand an hour? Would that be worth fifty bucks to you, Candy?"

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"Let's get out the rain, and I'll tell you. There is a place down the street here. Come on, I'll buy you a cup of coffee." I told him putting the fifty back for now.

"I prefer tea," he said after a half sneeze.

Smiling, I handed him a bit of perfumed silk.

"Of course you do." I said.

We talked long into the night, then I made a call and we got a limo ride to a place I know. The man that lives there loves to be generous. He didn't even mind that I woke him up when I called but... But together, with me showing Candy how to do everything, we made up for his lack of sleep.

His generosity gave us the security deposit. We moved into the apartment the next day, then went furniture shopping. Then, when everything was perfect there, we went clothes shopping for Candy. By the time I was done, she was fierce.

And in love with me. I saw it in her eyes.

As I watched her trying on a dress I imagined I felt a hand on my shoulder. I laid my fingers atop it and wished I could feel those gentle hands once more.

Goodbye, Gabriel. I'll teach him well.

Like you did me.