Once upon a time, there was a boy named Marshall, who loved his little brother very much.
His brother was named Justin, but he called him Baby Jay because it was street, and after he told his brother that, Baby Jay wouldn't answer to anything else. Marshall didn't have a street name that stuck. He always thought that something would just come to him when the time was right.
They lived poor, like a lot of people in stories that start with Once upon a time, and they had a mother who wasn't wicked, but weak. She smoked pot and snorted coke sometimes, and about twice a year she took all the money from her children's savings accounts (about fifty dollars, usually) and gambled on machines at the local bar. Once she won enough to buy them both a video game machine.
Their stepfathers were sometimes wicked. Marshall never got used to which one didn't like sissies and which one wouldn't take any lip, which one was forgetful when he drank and then thought you stole his money and which one got friendly and gave you quarters, so he got hit a lot. Sometimes they sat him on their laps while they smoked a lot of cigarettes and played cards, which was bad, but good too, and sometimes they made him smoke the cigarettes or take sips of their beers. Once his mother made him breathe some of the smoke from her bong so he'd fall asleep, but he didn't, and he got to hear sex for the first time. It sounded scary.
He learned not to let any of his stepdads, even the not-wicked ones, hug him, or put him into his bed. Some of them poked him with weird bumps when they picked him up, and even though he didn't know why, he was sure that was wrong. He thought that Baby Jay was probably too little to mind if he got poked, but he put him to bed anyway, gave him his baths, fed him bologna on Wonder Bread. He didn't like other people touching Baby Jay.
He was always a sturdy kid, and even though he knew at eleven that he'd never get BIG big, he was sure that someday he wouldn't have to worry about protecting him and Baby Jay. He imagined little kids pushing Baby Jay down on the pavement and ripping his bookbag, and his pretend hands went into fists and his pretend eyes got hard and pow! and bang! and he made them bleed. Made them cry. Made them sorry. And Baby Jay climbed into his arms and kissed him like he always did when Marshall put him to bed, and sighed his sleepy sigh. Marshall was the happiest big brother in the world.
Maybe it was because Marshall didn't kiss or hug anyone else that he had so much kissing and hugging to spare for Baby Jay. Or maybe it was because Baby Jay hugged him first, fairly swarmed up him, clung to his leg, hung from his neck and shrieked with delight when he came home from school. Baby Jay wouldn't have understood not hugging and kissing, just the way he didn't understand Marshall having to do homework or wanting to sit by himself and kick viciously at the dirt, pretending it was a bully's head. Baby Jay's kisses made Marshall's face hurt less when someone hit him, too, and his hugs got rid of the closed-up thing that happened to his lungs sometimes.
He was fun to hug and kiss back, too. When Marshall kissed his belly, Baby Jay giggled so hard that he farted and then giggled more, and his face turned bright red and his legs drummed Marshall's sides, until finally he was crying with laughter and Marshall could barely hold him. If their mother's head hurt that day and she yelled at them to shut up, both of them would make their eyes comically wide and try to laugh with no sound, like they were on a muted TV.
They kissed when Marshall picked him up from preschool the first day. He didn't mean to, because his ass would have been grass if somebody who wasn't his Grandmother kissed him at school, but he was so relieved to see Baby Jay that he couldn't help it. Baby Jay was so little, and kids were so mean. What if the teachers didn't watch him and he fell? What if some guy gave him money to get in a van? He picked Baby Jay up and kissed his still-plump September-cold cheek and rubbed his chin on fine gold curls and his stomach growled. He hadn't been able to eat all day.
Their kisses goodnight were the best, though. Baby Jay snugged his legs around Marshall's waist and his arms around his neck, and Marshall carried him to his bedroom, feeling like he thought a pregnant lady would. Like he wanted to reach around Baby Jay and rub his back and wonder what he was going to come out like.
Marshall sat down still holding him and made up nonsense rhymes about the people in their neighborhood. He had Rasta cows and ghetto snakes and dogs that spoke Yiddish. Baby Jay drowsed and woke with a heavy-headed start, his hands clutching Marshall's shoulders. He mumbled something, usually an echo of whatever Marshall said last but sometimes just a random word, and kissed Marshall's neck and drifted off again.
Marshall always returned the kisses promptly to the crown of Baby Jay's head, which smelled of Johnson's No Tears or lemon dish soap, depending how much money there was that month.
If he put Baby Jay down before he was completely out, he would startle awake and lie there on the covers, eyes big and mouth tight, too brave to beg Marshall to stay. Marshall hated that. He wuld go to bed when his mother noticed and yelled at him, but if he knew Baby Jay was still awake in his room he would lie there for hours, staring at the sweep of lights from the interstate.
Something odd happened to Marshall when he turned thirteen. He noticed he couldn't say 'I love you' to all the people he did before. Maybe the desire to say it disappeared a little every year, but he just hadn't paid attention--the old guy who ran b-ball games on the lot two blocks down, his mother's latest boyfriend, Jesus, his favorite teachers.
He thought it went away because he was expected to say it when no one cared if it was true. He didn't stop loving his mother, even though she got high and called him things and told him she didn't want him. It was more like he was waiting, through longer and lonelier silences, to hear her say it back.
He could still tell Baby Jay, though. Sometimes they sat for an hour at the kitchen table digging spoons into one bowl of soggy Apple Jacks, whispering it with harder and harder squeezes, softer and ticklier tickles, I love you more, no I love you more, no, I love you. He loved Baby Jay more than Jesus, he thought one day, and it made him sad and happy at once, because he remembered loving Jesus a lot.
Baby Jay worked out with Marshall when he got a little older. Marshall couldn't afford weights like in a gym, so he improvised by filling milk jugs with water. They only weighed eight pounds, but after lifting them up and down, up and down, up and down for twenty minutes, his thirteen-year-old biceps trembled and he bit back swears. Baby Jay used silver cans of welfare corn, the big family-sized ones, and trembled and swore too, much more bravely than Marshall. Marshall was awed by the strength in his little body, the focus in his eyes, his fierce grin. Baby Jay's strength was so much more practical than his, a willow's, not an oak's. A storm wouldn't splinter him.
Marshall had a deal with his mother's live-ins. They could hit him, but not in front of Baby Jay. If they tried, he would call Child Welfare and scream everything from rape to ritual sacrifice, and if they touched Baby Jay...well, he didn't talk about that. It was better not to warn people bigger than you that you were going to kill them.
He planned it all out in a notebook, though. He would shoot them both, his mother and her boyfriend, and burn down the house, and he and Baby Jay would hitch to Mexico. Most of the boyfriends had guns.
When he turned fifteen, he gave up and stopped saying "I love you" to his mother completely. He forgot he had ever said it to Jesus, and would hotly deny he had if anyone asked. They didn't.
He dated a girl who went to his school. She had long swingy dark hair and wore black eyeliner and dressed in short skirts. She made out with him in the front seat of her mother's car for forty five minutes and told him "it's okay", and he wasn't sure what she meant until she pulled at his fly button.
He put his hands on her breasts and let her unzip him, and while they were kissing he pictured their baby. A thin, sweating girl with a shock of red hair, squalling in the living room of an apartment with pressboard paneling and windows sealed with Scotch tape. He imagined hitting this now-girl, then-woman and hating her while the baby watched from her Goodwill playpen.
He smelled the girl's gum and her Aqua-Net and her pussy musk as he pushed up her skirt. Her breasts felt slack in his hands, already withering, like he was. He couldn't. He couldn't.
She stroked him for a while, rough and unskilled with anger. Her nails were too long. He looked at the little divets in the custom roof and tried to think of anything that turned him on, but his mind kept wandering. She laughed finally, in a way that was probably meant to be kind but wasn't, and he slapped her cheek. He knew he could never have loved her.
He stopped in Baby Jay's room that night. He wasn't sure if he should, but he needed to. He sat on his little brother's bed and ran his fingers over him--not *on* him, but over and around and above him, feeling his warmth and smelling his sweet milky breath. He kissed him on the forehead, on the nose, on the chin, and then, hesitantly, on the lips. They were wet and unbearably soft. He kissed them again.
He lay down beside Baby Jay. Not on the bed, he wasn't weird, but on the floor in a pile of dirty clothes. They all smelled like his brother.
When he woke up, he was scratchy and damp inside his jeans. He went and took a piss and stuffed them to the bottom of the hamper.
He tried to stay away from Baby Jay for a little while, but it was so hard that he was pretty sure Baby Jay didn't even notice before he gave up. They went to the playground one afternoon after school and tried to smoosh each other in hugs, and then Marshall scooped him up and leaned him backward until his head almost touched the ground. The giggles all stopped up in Baby Jay's throat and when he straightened up again, his eyes were wet and shining. He was the most beautiful thing Marshall had ever seen.
"Love you," Baby Jay said, pillowing his head on Marshall's chest. "Love you love you loveyou."
Marshall opened his mouth and nothing came out. His throat ached like cancer when he stroked his brother's hair.
He didn't kiss Baby Jay to sleep the next two nights. He thought he might be coming down with something. His throat hurt so bad he couldn't swallow and his stomach cramped, and he kept falling asleep on his back and having bad dreams. On the third day, his mother slapped Baby Jay for being a brat and he screamed back that he couldn't sleep, and Marshall turned up his headphones. The something crept into his lungs, and he kept choking when he breathed.
At the end of the week, he blinked awake to find Baby Jay standing next to his bed. He wasn't surprised to see him. There was a sort of dreamy inevitability in the way he pushed into the bed and under the covers, folded around Marshall with a deep, satisfied sigh.
"Kiss me," he murmured. "Kiss me 'night. I can't sleep if you don't. Please, M. Please."
He rubbed Baby Jay's back, shifting so they spooned more comfortably. Baby Jay was soft and heavy and hot with approaching sleep, and he was bigger than Marshall remembered him. Knobby long legs and thin corded arms and bony hips. His skin was richly smooth, a luxury to Marshall's abraded fingertips.
"Kiss me," Baby Jay whispered. He kissed Marshall's neck in demonstration, kissed his jaw. Innocently, God, *innocently*. "C'mon. I can't sleep."
Marshall looked at the ceiling. He'd forgotten how to pray, but for the first time in a while, he wanted to. He wasn't strong enough to fight this by himself. He kissed Baby Jay's forehead twice, hard, like he was scratching an itch, and Baby Jay canted his chin up so he caught the next one on his lips.
He'd never gotten hard faster. It hurt, like his dick was on a leash. He knew Baby Jay felt it by the way he shifted his weight. His eyes, when Marshall dared to seek them, were sleepy and curious. "Wha's that?"
"Don't worry about it," Marshall said, voice cracking with desperation. "Get off me, okay? Go back to bed."
Baby Jay squirmed so Marshall's cock bumped his inner thigh, then rubbed his knee absently up and down against it, intrigued by the unfamiliar texture. "Don' wanna go back to bed. Like it with you."
"Jesus Christ," Marshall said. He couldn't feel his hands on Baby Jay's shoulders. All the power seemed to have gone out of them. His arms weighed a thousand pounds.
"Mmm," Baby Jay sighed. He rolled over, so Marshall's erection dug into his hollow belly, and knotted his arms around Marshall's neck familiarly. He always babbled on the precipice of sleep. "M. Emem. Emenemenemenem."
"That's me," Marshall said softly, taking Baby Jay's hips in his hands. "M and M. Who are you?"
"Mmm. Baby. Baby Jay Mathers."
Marshall arched upward, a sweet, slow glide. Baby Jay squirmed, but didn't shift. The friction was exquisite. "That's right, Baby Jay. And who loves you?"
"...you do..."
"Yeah," Marshall breathed, "yeah, I do, I do."
He stroked himself against Baby Jay's belly, one dazzling bloom of pleasure yielding a dozen jagged petals. They licked, burned, drew back. Baby Jay's lips moved on his shoulder, either kissing or talking in his sleep, and Marshall cupped his curly head. Bliss, bliss, this wrongness he's meant for. One in body again, one in blood and whatever fluids they share. He would never let anyone claim him now, his baby, his Baby Jay.
The orgasm cramped around him like a car wreck and he shot free. Too numb yet to bleed. Baby Jay sprawled on top of him, out like a light.
He lay there until the come dried on his stomach and legs, then eased Baby Jay off him and went to the bathroom. He thought of nothing at all between the bright lime walls, in the corpse-white of naked fluorescent tubing. He ate a handful of aspirin, maybe thirty of them, and retched when they hit the back of his throat. He threw up in the tub.
When he got back to the bed, he knelt and looked at Baby Jay. He'd already taken over Marshall's bed fearlessly, arms and legs to the four corners and little quick puffs of breath popping on his lips. His face was serene.
Marshall took his pillow and held it over Baby Jay's face, so lightly that he sneezed and rubbed at his nose with his fist. Considered what Baby Jay might remember tomorrow, considered what damage he'd done and what more he might do. Considered what, of two evils, he'd rather remember.
The bed blurred into a blob of moonlight, and something tickled his own nose and dripped on the sheets.
Finally he tucked the pillow under his arm. He spent the night with his feet hanging off the end of Baby Jay's bed, sleeping the gray-white featureless sleep that would characterize his life.
The next time Baby Jay touched him, he called him a little faggot and shoved him into the coffee table. It took three weeks to make sure he'd never try again, three weeks of Baby Jay sobbing Why, why, WHY, Emem, why? with tears blotching his cheeks, three weeks of his mother shouting at Baby Jay to grow up, three weeks that ended when Baby Jay screamed I hate you.
He seemed to mean it. His eyes weren't hurt anymore when he looked at Marshall, weren't puzzled, weren't pleading. He was forgetting how to love. He was growing up.