Standing Still
Directly between the sun and earth, they stood. Drinking beer; piss-cheap beer, one knew. The other, having survived on nothing more than water, only knew that it made his nose run and his eyes water. He didn't want his companion to realize this.
Their car sat, broken-down, a few miles away; a tow truck allegedly on the way. There wasn't any real possible way that they'd make it to the Wheeling show; a setting sun painting them purple-pink shades as it drooped to collide with the ground.
One picked carefully at the drooping head of a sunflower, wondering if this untended patch of land would miss a seed or two. Carefully, he plucked a seed free, tucked it between his teeth, trying to shell it.
"You're going to ruin your smile that way."
He laughed at his companion's comment, "Only if ya bash at it with a wrench," He tapped at his teeth, "Porcelain caps, Kurt."
Kurt rose a brown brow, "I've been kissing you for a year now and I've never noticed. With all of the Skol you chew I should've guessed." He rubbed at his arms, trying to draw blood to the area; the lower the sun dipped, the colder he felt.
"The tow'll be here soon." He noted, tilting backward a bit on his heels, "Might as well enjoy this." Silently, Kurt appreciated the way the color of night reflected against his lover's bald head; golds and grays swirling with red. He nodded his head and sipped cautiously from his beer.
"Steve," He remarked, "Why did you ever leave the south, anyway?"
Steve shrugged, "It ain't all this nice. Besides, no one back home ever really got it."
"Mmm. The 'gay thing'?" Kurt murmured, and didn't even need Steve's confirmation as his lover plunged on.
"Hell, your mother likes me!" Steve barked out a laugh, "When I'm there, it makes me want to come out and stay out. She's better to me than mine ever was about the whole damn situation."
"Mom doesn't want to lose me," Kurt pointed out, "We're too close. After dad died, I was the only thing she had left. Your mother can afford not to care; she has other kids to kiss her ass through the golden years."
Steve knew the truth of this, but his mother walking from his life hurt deeply. Even then, as he approached his late thirties. Two daughters of his own reminded him clearly of what it was like to worship at the feet of the mater saint, celestial homemaker, washer of tears and wounds.
He acted as the sole support to them and, for all intensive purposes, were his daughter's mother and father. And, like Kurt, his children would grow up without dual-parent influence.
Realizing that now, standing under the defeated shoulder-stems of sunflowers on the wane, at the tip-end of autumn, was a burden. Kurt was blossoming under his influence, but it made an imbalance when he wouldn't come home with him. Semi-secret nights, under the cover of whispers anyone with nerve could hear, were slowly becoming unsatisfying.
"Hey," came his voice, "Don't think so hard. It's giving me a sympathetic migraine."
Hands unfolded across his back, transferring warmth up corridors of bone and nerve. Those arms fit around his torso in a way that suggested alchemy. He leaned his weight carefully, not wanting to hurt half-mended knees, vertebrae, but wanting the warmth and security of another body. All delicate gestures, but ones warmly accepted. Kurt felt the kiss of hot breath on his shaved neck, then the prickling scratch of a mustache on a bit of visible skin left to the mercy of cooling night air..
Twilight seemed no time to express urgency. For overstressed bones, worn minds, it was created, a time to mend.
Where they were ordained to arrive, world moved, electra on wires. But silences broached a ceasing in this miracle rest-stop. It would be enough to hang in the wind, without effort for anyone, like a wheat field and twilight, waving back to no one.