by Usagi Anami (兎あなみ)

(mirrors http://s2b2.livejournal.com/60235.html)

Jeremiah wakes up to a mouth crushed against his. A hand runs up his neck, gently squeezing his jaw open with thumb and forefinger. The kisses are just the way he likes them best: mouth open, but not gaping, with just enough tongue running along the inside of his mouth.

Without understanding why, Jeremiah instantly thinks of the stranger as male. The stranger’s free hand drags down his shoulder, the anonymous fingers grasping his nipple. Jeremiah moans through his teeth, struggling to keep quiet. The hand goes back and forth between his nipples, tugging and rolling, now rough, now gentle.

Now he nuzzles the sweet spot between Jeremiah’s shoulder and neck. Now he strokes the back of Jeremiah’s knee, a spot nearly as sensitive as his cock. The blood buzzes beneath Jeremiah’s skin. Jeremiah wonders how the stranger broke in without waking up Ezra, his roommate and best friend. But it never occurs to him to pull back from the stranger or to fight him off.

The stranger wasn’t his girlfriend Esther, and as much as he loved to entertain the idea when drunk, he has never been with a man before. But something about the stranger’s touch and kiss is too comfortable. It feels familiar and intimate in a way his pleasure-fogged mind can’t place. The answer sits, dreadfully heavy, on the tip of his tongue and the back of his mind.

He doesn’t resist, even when he feels an erection rubbing against his stomach.

The stranger latches his teeth onto Jeremiah’s throat and sucks hard. When the stranger tugs Jeremiah’s pants down he realizes the stranger is about his own height. Long hair drapes over the stranger’s face. The hair tickles Jeremiah’s stomach as the stranger licks and kisses down to his boxers.

The stranger takes the edge of Jeremiah’s boxers between his teeth. His cock is pulled free from the fabric slowly, like a banana being peeled. When the stranger sucks Jeremiah’s cock into his mouth, Jeremiah’s head pounds in sync with his fevered heartbeat.

Fingers cup his balls with just enough pressure for it not to hurt. When Jeremiah is right about to come, the stranger suddenly stops. His hot, wet breath surrounds the tip of Jeremiah’s cock. Now his tongue grazes the head, teasing, merciless, and making his cock dewy with pre-come.

He hears a lid popping open and the squishy sound of his lube bottle emptying. The lube in question was tangled in the bed sheets when he went to sleep, but the stranger must have found it. A wet, cold hand slips down his thighs. The middle finger curves, circling his ass, pushing at his entrance.

Too easily his muscles relax to take in the finger. His body is too eager, too easily accepting for a male stranger of ten minutes’ acquaintance. In no time at all a second finger squeezes inside.

The fingers pop out and the air feels cool against his ass. He should be afraid when the cock eases into him. He knows he should be afraid, but he isn’t.

It should hurt when the stranger starts fucking him. The stranger’s balls slap against his ass, his fingers squeezing the tip of Jeremiah’s cock. Jeremiah bucks back, biting his tongue to keep from howling.

It shouldn’t feel this good. The stranger has got to be going too fast, not giving his body time to adjust. He knows it should hurt, but it doesn’t. Before he can contemplate the full absurdity of his situation, his cock starts spraying into the stranger’s hand.

The stranger pulls out. As he rolls Jeremiah over, the stranger’s hair falls away. His grin glows in the darkness.

Jeremiah’s scream is swallowed up in a kiss. When the kiss is over he can’t hear what the stranger is whispering in his ear, but it doesn’t matter. He already knows.

—

A few months earlier:

“I fucking hate time travel,” Amos groans as he watches Ezra play Echo II: Tides of Time. “It doesn’t make any…”

The TV screen flashes as a dolphin makes his way through a water tube in the sky in an alternate future where evil aliens didn’t eat everything. His opponent is an airborne gigantic medusa jellyfish. The dolphin freezes mid-jump, a jellyfish tentacle floating above him like a string of massive purple beads.

Jeremiah pauses from his sketch of Ezra and smiles. Ezra is a full-time janitor with plans for retroviruses that will improve humanity. He has a thick build, a monobrow, and a full mustache and beard. He wears thick square-framed glasses. The shirt he’s wearing is made of a reflective silver material that has blinded innocent bystanders many a time. A mass of thick brown curls rests on his head in the shape of a cloud.

“I’m glad you brought that up, hun,” Jeremiah says, twirling the pencil in his fingers. His smile cracks open into a shit-eating grin.

Jeremiah is a skinny, muscular blonde who keeps his long hair in a tight ponytail. He’s a dishwasher who wants to be either an artist or a pirate. He alternates between going clean-shaven, sporting a sandy goatee, or wearing a modest beard and mustache. When he crawled out of bed this afternoon he was too lazy to put on anything except his gray silk kimono.

“I’m planning to write a comic where there are at least three instances of time travel in every issue. There’s going to be this sword that no one forged; it had just always existed…”

“But that it doesn’t make any…” Amos sputters, catching his hair in his fingers. Amos is a short brunette, clean-shaven and wide-eyed. He always wears black and has a look of pained resignation typical of martyrs. Perhaps to compliment his wardrobe, he aspires to be a poet while working at Quiznos.

“Makes perfect sense. You should totally do it, Jerry.” Ezra says.

“For the love of God, how can you say that?” Amos groans.

Jeremiah and Ezra have been heterosexual life mates since grade school. Amos, who met Ezra at college, never really unwound enough to adjust to the two’s sense of humor.

Ezra sniggers, adjusts his glasses, and resumes the game. The Sega Genesis hums, and the frantic clicking of buttons stabs into the silence. Amos sighs.

—

“Are you guys playing Timesplitters?”

On the screen three white bolts of energy erupt from the shooter’s hand. The writhing bolts slowly spin around and pick up a crate. The crate is slammed into a zombie’s head. When the zombie’s head pops off the bolts dip down to retrieve it. The head is used to smash another zombie’s head off, and then the cycle repeats itself.

Ezra nods. “Yeah, it’s pretty silly. There’s a part where you learn this password because your future self gives it to your past self, then the past self becomes the future self and gives it to your past self, so the password never actually came from anywhere.”

“Makes perfect sense.” Jeremiah adds.

Jeremiah smiles. The Playstation 2 hums and the game controller vibrates in Ezra’s hand. Amos groans.

—

“Hey, hun. Just though I’d let you know – I’m going to go back in time and have sex with myself in the ass. And then I’ll say, ‘If you didn’t like it, don’t do it’.”

Amos twitches and pauses Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Young Link is frozen, surrounded by a handful of little skeletons no taller than him. His sword is stuck in a horizontal mid-swing about to knock one skeleton’s head off.

Jeremiah smiles and tilts his head to the side.

“No way. That doesn’t make any sense because then you’d remember it happening. Because, because if you,” Amos points at Jeremiah, “already went back in time, then…”

“…Then you,” Amos smiles and puffs himself up. His finger jabs into Jeremiah’s chest, “would have the memory of it, since it happens in your past.”

A few sniggers from Ezra interrupt Amos’s soapbox. Amos seems to deflate, sinking into the sofa and his hands dropping back into his lap. From the kitchen stereo Ayreon’s The Final Experiment plays.

“It’s a paradox.” Amos finishes, head down. His hands wriggle in his lap, like he doesn’t know what to do with them.

“More than that, it’s a buttsex paradox.” Ezra says. The Nintendo 64 hums. Amos sighs and picks up the clunky controller.

—

Two days afterward:

“Did your neck get hit with a hammer?” Ezra says, poking the bruise on Jeremiah’s throat.

“Nice one!” Amos smiles and gives Jeremiah the thumbs up sign.

“Thanks, hun.” Jeremiah lies sprawled out on the couch, his beard a mess, his eyes glazed over. “Hey, hun…I just thought of something.”

“Yeah?” Amos hooks his hands behind his neck, rolling his head back.

“Supposing that I actually did go back in time and fuck myself in the ass…”

Standing on the balls of feet, Amos arches his back until something cracks. “Yeah?”

Ezra rolls his eyes and turns his attention back to playing Chrono Trigger.

“Okay, you pointed out that I would remember it happening,” Jeremiah scratches at his beard thoughtfully, “on account of it happening in the past.”

“Well, yeah, duh. It doesn’t take much thought to realize it doesn’t make sense.”

“No doubt, hun. However, what if at the time of our conversation I had not yet gone back in time?”

“What? If you go back in time, then it has already happened.”

“Sorry, hun. What I meant is that the point in time that I went back into was some time in the future after we had that conversation. That would still be my future self’s past. Which is why I would have no memory of it when we had that conversation.”

“Oh. Well…time travel still doesn’t make any sense. There would be no causality – no cause to begin the effect. You would go back in time and fuck yourself in the ass because you went back in time and fucked yourself in the ass. It’s like something giving birth to itself –”

“Makes perfect sense.” Jeremiah says, pulling a blanket over his face.

Amos shuts up for a long, long time.

—

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.

-T.S Eliot, Burnt Norton