Different Song, Same Singer
"Sawing wood?"
Scott peers backward and into the eyes of a loving man. "No, rubbing it."
"Ahh, I should've known."
"I am whittling, and that's not funny." He holds up the block of wood, which almost resembles a man's face, if it were one wearing a very large wart.
Boards creek and shift as his lover crosses the porch and settles down beside him. The scent of coffee wafts over to his side, but Scott's preoccupied with sculpting the wood.
"So, how do you like my poppa's cabin?"
Scott shrugs, "It makes me want to use the world 'y'all" far too often for my own health."
"Y'all's two words, but you're welcome. Coffee?"
"No, I gotta get this right." A dog barks somewhere in the distance. The silence is enveloping, and he finds himself filling it in the dumbest possible way. "I never went anywhere like this with Jim."
Instantly, he wishes he could keep his tongue. Jeff winces beneath the blow of the words, as though the reminder had been lurking at the edge of happiness.
"Don't apologize." He holds his hands out in a defensive move, then returns to his coffee.
"No, I need to. Just a slip of the tongue."
Jealousy comes, unspoken, into Jeff's eyes. He had never seen the best of Scott and Jim's relationship, only witnessing worst parts, when the bourbon-fueled madness had fried away everything that had been good about their love. But Scott memorializes it as a ride, one that blurred in Scott's mind into scenes of hash pipes and bottles of Southern Comfort.
And the sex. Oh yes, the sex.
Thirty-eight had been a wake up call for him. He had always fantasized of a romantic fate for himself; a smiling mamba of a death, striking quickly and leaving him as a beautiful corpse. But the realization struck him that he wasn't going to die young like Hendrix or Morrison. Even at the clip he had been traveling, he would probably end up as old as Dylan one day. And didn't he want to spend the next twenty years with a functioning liver?
Jim saw, and sees, himself as being eighteen forever. There was, understandably, a conflict of interest.
The fights had been loud, occasionally violent, and carried out within full view of his WWE colleges. There was gossiping, of course, and whispered rumors. Scott detoxed, Jim went on his merry way, and both found themselves separated, farming fat fees from the independent scene.
Scott understands that it is better this way; better that he and Jim are broken up. Even during the best of times, they were poisonous to each other.
Though he thrills him in memory.
When last he heard, Jim was in a gutter outside of the bingo hall after a card, having a good laugh at someone's expense. But Scott's place isn't beside him.
Jeff Jarrett was another matter entirely. Fresh-faced, relatively free of drugs and alcohol, with a southern-rich family and a good head on his shoulders, Jeff makes Scott feel like a grown up. An equal, instead of an abettor.
And he brings a thrill with him that is entirely alien to Scott's experience.
"I'm not keeping you prisoner. If you want to go, you can go."
"You know that I love you. And I want to be here. Jim and I are done and finished." Jeff isn't the dramatic sort, but he's always been somewhat sensitive to what he's heard about Jim and Scott; that so-called "great love" of theirs.
"I know." But he doesn't.
"Bullshit." He closes the distance between them. "Let me prove it."
His heat is nothing like Jim's. Not better, different. More comforting. The freshness of him so different and appealing that he is enraptured.
When their lips touch, the world dissolves.