licking batteries

some cherry coke gets me in the face and somehow that’s more erotic than anything he could intentionally do to me

[Cover pic: Jeff Buckley shot by Gie Knaeps, 1994]

Right now, he tastes like cherry Coke and Nicorette gum.

I wish I meant that in a sweet way, like trying to be romantic about the pretty boy you’re fucking, waxing poetic about how good his come tastes, but no, it’s not that. I don’t mind cherry Coke and I guess I’m glad he’s quit smoking but I’m getting sick of it and his come tastes worse than it ever did before.

When we met, it was nothing but beer and coffee and cigarettes. Staples, essentials, signatures. Any sane person would consider these new circumstances as being insurmountably preferable to anything that came before.

I don’t like that I’m attracted to the harsher parts of him; that would mean that I’m also attracted to the nerve pills and the razorblades he mummifies in toilet paper before putting them in the trash. It would also mean that I like the easy, borderline flirtatious tone of his voice when he goes in for his biannual blood draw and asks the nurse if she wants him to have a go, after she’s missed his sunken little veins twice already. I do, in some ways, like how easy he is to rope into a fight and how it’s so much worse after even the tiniest of bumps.

I’d grown fond of how perfectly disgusting he tasted before.

Maybe it’s a placebo effect, I think to myself while I’m brushing at the back of my tongue to get the taste to go away. It can’t have changed that much. But the rest of him has, so why not this? I spit and my saliva is stringy, foamy with toothpaste and flecked with blood.

I go back to bed and he’s smacking away at another glob of Nicorette and I tell him he’s not a fucking cheerleader, that he doesn’t have to chew so loud, loud enough that it sounds like skin on skin, like porn. He grins and tries to blow a bubble with it which, evidently, means it almost winds up in my hair as it shoots out of his mouth. He snickers and picks it up off the sheets and shoves it straight back into his mouth, lint and all. He says I’ve got a look on my face like I’ve just licked a battery.

You would know.

He was hotter when he was smoking, limbs syrup-slow and head leaned back against the wall, smiling sleepily at me through grey-blue clouds and running a hand back through his hair. I know the smoke made me cough sometimes and he’d have to get up to crack the window and ruin it anyway, but I liked the way his eyes would slip halfway closed. Now, he just looks tweaky and desperate and not at all like I’ve just sucked the life out of him. It’s emasculating.

It’s only been two weeks. He won’t dare have a beer because it makes him want to smoke. It’s the first time in a long time that he’s tried to seriously commit to something and it would be cruel to take it away when he needs something to latch onto so he doesn’t scream. The fridge is full of cherry Coke and it’ll be a few minutes before he gets up to go and get one, instead of opening the window, instead of staying bare-assed and fucking present. He always puts his boxers on to go downstairs and so by extension, he never sleeps naked anymore because he never bothers taking them off again. It almost feels like he’s keeping something from me in there. Maybe he’s using suppositories. How the fuck should I know?

Because he’s not drinking, we’re not going out. We went out for Chinese a few nights ago and he sulked because they didn’t have cherry Coke, not even Coke at all but Pepsi, and he ate almost an entire duck to himself, picking the meat apart with his fingers. He knows how much I despise him for eating a carcass in front of me and he’d already apologised countless times. It’s not about the duck, anyway.

There’d been a show I wanted to go to and he refused to come with me because he couldn’t feel a bass line in his feet without having something and so I’d gone alone and, having nothing to do without him, left early. There was something eerie about leaving a club by myself, without his jaw swinging and his babbling in my ear, without his bones crunching against somebody else’s, without the spray of blood.

It’s been so long since I saw him in a fight. The last time had been glorious, but I never told him that because it was my job to chastise him and make him feel like a dick, even if it was a skinhead he’d kicked the shit out of, even if he had had that much blood on his hands that he had been able to smear a messy red triangle onto the front of his t-shirt and rejoice, loudly, about how much he loved America.

He threw the t-shirt in the trash on the walk home, the blood having turned a rusty pink in the summer air. I’d considered telling him it was something close to modern art and that his dad would probably love to keep it. But if I had, he would have snickered and mumbled biohazard into my mouth when he kissed me, gums and lips and nose leaking red. So I pretended to sulk and I let him chuck it away and he walked home shirtless, jacket slung over his shoulder like a comic book character, some kind of Nazi-fighting, Generation-X James Dean, nipple rings thudding against his ribs.

I was the biohazard now, never mind the pink triangle of blood.

That was why he’d cut out smoking. The doctors had danced around speaking plainly and told me in several flowery, gentle ways that I could die from even the tiniest infection, and so he had said it was best he avoid giving me bronchitis. I told him that wasn’t how bronchitis worked but he shrugged and mumbled something about pneumonia and dashed his half-empty pack of Parliaments off the pier. He’d wanted, I think, to make it seem nonchalant and maybe romantic but there was a little too much force behind the pelt, like he was trying to skip stones. I made him go and get them. I watched him pick the wet mulch of the cardboard apart as he walked to a garbage can in his sad, sodden boots and I caught the way he rubbed at his eyes with his shoulder like an exhausted, wounded toddler who’d dropped his ice cream on the floor.

He hadn’t cried in front of me, not up-close. He’d sniffled a little in the doctor’s office but he’d pulled it together to talk me through the blood draw so I didn’t pass out. I’d glanced at the vial and gagged and complained that I was going to fucking run out of the stuff but he crammed the sucker in my mouth before I could say anything else. It took me three days to work up to finally weeping about it all, and since then it’s been a recurring thing, just never when he’s around. When he leaves I cry, when I leave he cries, taking turns on the misery-go-round.

The cherry Coke was a lifeline much like the Nicorette, I guess; his own personal Eucharist. He doesn’t pray anymore. I didn’t have any lifelines, apart from him, the solace of his weird-but-not-so-weird-tasting ejaculate and his eyes, bugging out on all the sugar. I wanted the old him back. The sugar created a veil through which I couldn’t reach him because he could hardly sit still, some kind of jittery ghost with blue Skittles for eyes. He’d stopped chewing his nails only because doing so was sandwiched with excessive handwashing (biohazards, I guess) and his skin was falling apart and maybe his teeth hurt. Maybe he had cavities.

Can I have a cigarette?

He’s one leg into his boxers and almost falls over, hopping a little and stopping to glare at me.

What?

If I’d known I was going to miss it so much I would have stuck my tongue down his throat to taste it before he marched me into the doctor’s office to our conjoined doom.

You heard me. He tuts at me and starts to laugh, a figment of his former self, blushing and head-shaking.

Gonna pretend I didn’t. It was a strange thing to say. I don’t have any, anyway, idiot.

He goes downstairs for his stupid cherry Coke and I’ve got maybe forty-five seconds to ransack the bedroom and flip the mattress and unfold all his t-shirts to find them. It only takes me twenty because they’re buried under the condoms (free, thanks to you, my wretched little disease) in the nightstand. The pack’s not been opened and there’s a pang of guilt, just for a moment. He was probably waiting until I died to take the cellophane off.

I snap the lighter closed and stare into his eyes as I breathe it back, just as the can of soda cracks open, and he stares at me. I can’t help but feel it’s the same way a vampire might look at a nubile blonde, but there isn’t a vampire living or make-believe that would want a taste of me. I don’t cough, I just swallow the cough that wants to flutter out of me and beat it down with more smoke until the lightheadedness takes me and I want to throw up. It tastes like shit and I can’t believe I’ve been romanticising it in my head the way I have. It’s been two years since I smoked anything that didn’t have weed in it.

He’s strangely beautiful in a repulsive way, gawking all slack-jawed at me with the gum stuck to the steel in his mouth. I doubt it tastes like much of anything anymore. I picture him getting scouted for an anti-smoking infomercial and I suck down a little harder.

Gimme that.

He plucks it out of my mouth and I want to laugh but I start coughing instead even as I grapple with him for the stupid little thing, but he tuts at me and shoves it inside the brimming soda can, slamming it down defiantly on the nightstand, syrupy brown fizz shooting out, speckled with ash and dripping down the sides. I’m in the splash zone so some cherry Coke gets me in the face and somehow that’s more erotic than anything he could intentionally do to me.

Have you gone completely fucking insane?

The coughing subsides enough for me to finally laugh and he smacks sharply, impulsive and somehow neat, at the back of my head. There he is. He’s breathing in the smoke left on the air and his tongue is in my mouth, mumbling something about a death wish.