Chapter 62: Chapter 62
The paperwork could wait until morning.
It stayed there for three days, a silent, square reproach in the center of the kitchen table. They orbited it, pouring coffee, toasting bread, saying nothing. The questions inside were landmines. Describe your childhood home. Detail your family’s conflict resolution strategies. What does stability mean to you?
On the fourth evening, Arthur came home with a bottle of single malt, its amber liquid catching the low light. He set it next to the application with a definitive clunk. Sam looked from the bottle to Arthur’s face. “Liquid courage?”
“Liquid silence,” Arthur corrected, fetching two tumblers. “I don’t want to think tonight. I just want to be with you. Loudly.”
They drank on the back porch as the sun bled out behind the firs. The whiskey was peat and smoke, a burning trail down the throat. They didn’t talk about the forms. They talked about Sam’s monstrous new vase, about Arthur’s client who wanted a house shaped like a wave, about nothing at all. Their laughter grew looser, sliding into one another. The world softened at the edges. The ledger, the forms, the ghosts of Morris Street receded, muffled under a warm, amber blanket.
When Arthur reached for Sam’s hand, his grip was sure, his skin warm. “Inside,” he said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through Sam’s bones.
The climb upstairs was unsteady, a shared stumble of synced inelegance. In the bedroom, Arthur pushed Sam back onto the bed, following him down in a tangle of limbs. Their kisses were sloppy, all wet heat and whiskey tang, tongues sliding without finesse. Arthur fumbled with Sam’s belt, his fingers thick and clumsy. “Get this the fuck off,” he muttered against Sam’s mouth, the words slurring just slightly.
They wrestled clothes off, fabric catching on elbows, socks lost to the dim corners. Naked, they sprawled on the cool duvet, two heavy, familiar bodies flushed with drink. Arthur crawled down Sam’s torso, his movements loose-limbed. He nuzzled the coarse hair at Sam’s groin, breathing him in—soap, salt, the faint musk of a day’s work. He didn’t tease. He took Sam’s half-hard cock into the wet heat of his mouth in one slow, deliberate swallow.
The sensation was electric, blurred at the edges by alcohol. Sam’s head thumped back, a groan tearing loose from his chest. “Fuck, Arthur.” Arthur hummed around him, the vibration singing up Sam’s spine. He worked him with a drunkard’s dedication, all deep, slurping pulls and noisy, obscene suction. Spit dripped down Sam’s balls, onto the sheet. The room smelled of sex and Scotch.
“Gonna make you come down my throat,” Arthur slurred, pulling off for a gasping breath, his lips slick and swollen. “Wanna taste it.” He dove back down, his pace becoming relentless, a sloppy, magnificent frenzy. Sam’s hips lifted off the bed, his hands fisting in Arthur’s hair, not guiding, just holding on. The pleasure was a hot, coiling wire, pulled taut by that expert, messy mouth.
“Art, I’m—I’m gonna,” Sam warned, his thighs trembling.
Arthur just took him deeper, his nose pressed into Sam’s pubic bone. Sam came with a shattered cry, pulsing thickly into that accepting warmth. Arthur swallowed convulsively, then collapsed beside him, panting, his own cock a painful, ruddy curve against his stomach.
Before Sam could even float down from the high, Arthur grasped him, rolling him onto his side. He pressed his back to Sam’s chest, their bodies aligned. He reached back, gripping Sam’s hip, guiding him. “C’mon,” he urged, his voice rough. “Frot against me. Get us both dirty.”
Sam, still liquid-boned from his orgasm and the booze, obeyed. He slid his cock into the hot crevice of Arthur’s ass cheeks, not entering, just sliding between them. He wrapped a slick hand around Arthur’s length from behind, fisting them together in a tight, clumsy channel. The angle was awkward, intensely intimate. They rocked, a slow, grinding, drunkard’s rhythm. Arthur’s head was thrown back on Sam’s shoulder, his breath hot and whiskey-sour against Sam’s neck.
“That’s it,” Arthur grunted. “Just like that. Messy.” Their movements grew frenetic, uncoordinated. The sound was raw: skin slapping skin, ragged breaths, the damp squelch of their joined flesh. Sam bit Arthur’s shoulder, hard, as the friction built again, a second, surprising wave cresting through his drunken haze.
“Come with me,” Sam panted. “Do it.”
Arthur’s body went rigid. A guttural, broken sound was punched from his lungs as he spurted over Sam’s fist, his release hot and copious. The clenching of his body, the feel of that wet heat, tipped Sam over a second later. He spilled again, a weaker but no less wrenching orgasm, his spend adding to the slick mess between them.
They lay there, stuck together, breathing in ragged, sour unison. The room spun gently. The high, murmuring buzz of the alcohol was still there, but underneath it, a deep, physical unease was beginning to root. Sam’s stomach churned. Arthur’s head throbbed in time with his heartbeat.
Much later, in the acidic blue of pre-dawn, Sam stumbled to the bathroom. He vomited whiskey and bitterness into the toilet, his body shaking. Arthur found him there on the cold tiles, forehead damp. He didn’t speak. He ran a washcloth under cool water, wringing it out, and pressed it to the back of Sam’s neck. The tenderness was an anchor.
Back in bed, the silence wasn’t comfortable. It was nauseated. Their bodies ached in a deep, cellular way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with abuse. The wanted oblivion had been achieved, and it felt hollow, an echo of their parents’ own desperate escapes.
As gray light filtered in, Sam spoke to the ceiling. “We can’t fill out those forms hungover.”
“No,” Arthur agreed, his voice sandpaper. His throat was raw from swallowed come and Scotch. He turned his head. Sam’s eyes were bloodshot, the skin underneath puffy and dark. He looked wrecked. Beautiful, and wrecked. “But maybe we have to write honestly. That sometimes the foundation is shaky. That sometimes the men who might be parents drink too much and fuck too hard trying to forget the calculations that made them.”
Sam’s hand found Arthur’s under the sheet. Their fingers, dry and cracked, laced together. “And that they always,” Sam whispered, “always clean up the mess together afterwards.”
The paperwork waited. The sun rose. Their heads pounded. But the grip between them, there in the soiled sheets, was multiplicative. It was the sum of every mistake, every repair, every chosen, messy collision. It was the only answer they had, and it had to be enough.
The paperwork could wait until morning. It waited through three more mornings, a silent white rectangle on the kitchen table that their eyes slid past while reaching for the coffee tin. The questions inside felt like traps dressed in bureaucratic language. Describe your childhood home. Detail your relationship with your parents. List significant traumatic events. How could they possibly translate the scent of Morris Street’s attic, the chemical taste of the logs, the seismic silence of their fathers, into the neat boxes of a county form?
“We could lie,” Sam said one evening, chopping onions with unnecessary force. “Write ‘stable, two-parent home, unconditional love.’ They want a fairy tale. We could give them the brochure version.”
Arthur watched him from the doorway, the tension in Sam’s shoulders a familiar topography. “We swore we’d never do that again,” he said quietly. “No more brochures.”
The knife stilled. Sam’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah.”
They opened the packet that weekend, armed with expensive pens and a bottle of bourbon. They worked at the dining table, the amber liquid glowing in their glasses under the pendant light. Arthur’s answers were clinical, pared down to bare facts: Father: Alex Carter. Mother: Emily Maxwell-Carter. Siblings: Benjamin, Eleanor. Sam’s script grew looped and aggressive, bleeding into the margins with annotations. ‘Significant trauma’—see attached addendum? Where do I even start? The concept was the trauma.
By the third glass, the room had softened at the edges. The weight of the task, of making their monstrous origin digestible for a social worker, felt absurd. Giddy. Sam kicked Arthur’s foot under the table. “Remember the bungalow? With Hank and… what was the other one?”
“Carl,” Arthur said, a slow smile spreading. The memory was no longer shameful, just a bizarre footnote. “You threw up in a hydrangea bush.”
“You sucked that guy’s dick on a porch swing,” Sam countered, his eyes bright with bourbon and challenge.
“You fucked me on a stranger’s linoleum floor.” Arthur took a long swallow, the burn down his throat a welcome distraction. “We were trying to erase ourselves.”
“Didn’t work.” Sam got up, a little unsteady, and came around the table. He stood behind Arthur’s chair, his hands sliding over Arthur’s shoulders, down his chest. His breath was warm and whiskey-scented against Arthur’s ear. “We’re still here. All our fucked-up, indelible parts.”
He turned Arthur’s chair, the legs scraping loud in the quiet house, and dropped to his knees. Arthur’s heart hammered, the alcohol buzzing in his veins, muting the usual careful filters. Sam’s hands went straight for his belt buckle, fumbling with the leather. He got the jeans open, yanked them and Arthur’s briefs down just enough to free his cock, which was already half-hard from the whiskey and the proximity and the raw history in Sam’s eyes.
“Sam,” Arthur breathed, but it wasn’t a protest.
Sam didn’t say a word. He leaned forward and took Arthur entirely into his mouth in one wet, deep glide. Arthur’s head thumped back against the chair, a groan tearing from him. The sensation was overwhelming—the hot, tight suction, the obscene wet sounds, the sheer animal fact of his husband on his knees, drunk and determined. Sam worked him with a sloppy, fervent intensity, his tongue flattening against the shaft, his throat relaxing to take him deeper on each downward plunge.
“Fuck, just like that,” Arthur slurred, his hands tangling in Sam’s hair, not guiding, just holding on. The room tilted pleasantly. He could feel the vibrations of Sam’s own choked groans. He looked down, saw Sam’s own erection straining against his jeans, a dark patch of pre-come already soaking through the denim. The sight, the utter filth of it, sent a jolt straight to his gut. “You’re gonna make me come down your throat.”
Sam pulled off with a gasp, a string of saliva connecting his lips to Arthur’s glistening tip. “Not yet,” he panted, his face flushed. “Want you inside me. Drunk. Want to feel it tomorrow.”
They staggered to the living room rug, the same rug from nights before, now witness to a different kind of collision. Clothes were shed in haphazard pulls and kicks. Sam shoved Arthur onto his back and straddled him, but instead of sinking down, he spit into his own hand and reached between them, wrapping his fist around both their cocks. He leaned down, his weight braced on one hand beside Arthur’s head, and began to grind against him, their lengths trapped together in that slick, tight tunnel of his fingers.
This was frotting, but it was a battle. A competitive, frantic, delicious slide. Sam’s hips pistonned, his cock dragging against Arthur’s with a friction that was almost painful, almost perfect. The air reeked of bourbon and sweat and sex. Arthur thrust upwards, meeting him stroke for brutal stroke, their bodies slapping together.
“Gonna fucking mark you,” Sam grunted, his rhythm erratically fast. “Gonna be so sore.”
“You first,” Arthur gasped, his orgasm coiling, a spring wound impossibly tight by the alcohol and the visceral, claiming pressure. He reached between them, cupping Sam’s balls, squeezing gently. Sam cried out, his back arching, and that was it. Arthur felt Sam’s cock pulse against his, a hot flood erupting between their stomachs. The convulsive clench of Sam’s body, the choked-off shout, triggered Arthur’s own release. He came in long, shuddering waves, his vision whiting out at the edges, adding his own spend to the mess smeared between them.
They collapsed. The ceiling spun. Arthur’s stomach lurched. Sam rolled off him with a muffled curse, pressing his forehead to the wool of the rug. “Oh god. The room.”
“Don’t move,” Arthur managed, swallowing against a surge of nausea. The blissful heat of orgasm was already curdling into something queasy and raw. The alcohol, which had burned away inhibition, now burned a hole in his gut.
The night descended into a slow, sickly rotation. They made it to the bathroom, taking turns retching into the cool porcelain of the toilet. The taste of bourbon and bile was a punishment. They drank water from the tap, splashed their faces, and stumbled back to bed, avoiding the living room and its sticky evidence. They didn’t speak. The space between them in the dark was charged not with anger, but with a shared, physical misery.
The morning was a gray slab of pain. Arthur’s head wasn’t just aching; it felt split, each pulse behind his eyes a nauseating hammer blow. His mouth was a dry crypt. His muscles, especially his thighs and abdomen, screamed with a deep, bruised ache from the frantic, drunken exertion. He turned his head on the pillow, a monumental effort, and saw Sam facing him, eyes open, pupils wide with suffering.
“My dick is chafed,” Sam croaked. “I think we sanded the skin off.”
A weak, pathetic laugh escaped Arthur. It hurt his throat. “Worth it.”
“Liar.” Sam inched closer, wincing. “My liver is filing for divorce.”
The aftermath was more than physical. As they nursed water and aspirin through the day, moving through the silent house like convalescents, a hollow echo lingered beneath the sickness. They had used each other’s bodies with a kind of frantic, obliterative hunger they hadn’t felt in years. It wasn’t the connected, loving sex of their marriage; it was a throwback, a regression to the garage, to the bungalow, to all the times they’d tried to fuck the confusion out of their bloodline. The foster application, with its demand for sanitized history, had triggered it.
“We can’t do that again,” Sam said quietly, late in the afternoon. He wasn’t talking about the drinking.
“I know,” Arthur said. He was staring at the empty bourbon bottle on the counter, a guilty sentinel. “It felt… old.”
“Yeah.”
They ordered bland soup for dinner. They cleaned the living room rug together, kneeling side-by-side, the chemical smell of cleaner cutting through the last traces of sex. The silence was thoughtful now, not sick. When they finally returned to the dining table, the application was still there.
Sam picked up his pen. He turned to a blank page at the back, not the provided form. He wrote, in his looping script, a single sentence: We are the children of a calculated beginning, and we have spent our lives learning how to choose each other, recklessly and deliberately, every day.
He slid the page to Arthur. Arthur read it. He took his own pen, and below Sam’s sentence, he wrote: Our home is not a perfect refuge. It is a chosen construction, built with the full knowledge of what can fracture, and fortified daily. We will not offer a child a fairy tale. We will offer them this true, sturdy thing.
They looked at each other. The headache was a dull throb. Their bodies ached. But the hollow echo was gone, filled with the solid weight of a shared, unvarnished truth. They would attach these pages. They would submit their messy, honest story. The paperwork was no longer a trap. It was just another part of the construction. Arthur reached for Sam’s hand, his thumb rubbing over the familiar knuckles, and they sat there in the quiet, gathering strength for what came next.
The paperwork could wait until morning. It waited, in fact, for three more weeks, a silent presence on the cluttered kitchen counter that they navigated around like a shy animal. They were masters of deferral, a skill learned from experts.
Life piled its mundane layers atop the question. Sam landed a commission for a series of large ceramic vessels for a hotel lobby, which meant long days shrouded in clay dust and the focused, volatile silence of his creative process. Arthur took on a renovation of a century-old library, losing himself in the smell of old paper and the puzzle of seismic retrofitting. They orbited each other in the evenings, tired and content, speaking in the shorthand of shared takeout and feet propped on the same coffee table. The foster application gathered a fine layer of dust, a coffee ring blooming like a brown sunrise on its cover page.
It was the anniversary of Leroy’s passing that undid them. They never marked the date officially, but their bodies remembered. The air in the house grew thick, their movements careful, as if navigating a room where the furniture had been silently rearranged. Arthur came home to find Sam sitting at the kitchen table, a bottle of expensive bourbon—Leroy’s favorite—already a third empty. Two glasses stood beside it, one full, one empty.
“He’d hate this maudlin shit,” Sam said, his voice already slurry at the edges. He didn’t look up.
“He’d drink the bottle with us,” Arthur corrected, hanging his coat with deliberate slowness. He joined Sam, pouring three fingers into the empty glass. The first swallow was fire, a welcome burn.
They didn’t talk about grief. They drank. They drank to Leroy’s booming laugh, to the safe harbor of his garage, to the single word—“Gravity”—that had absolved them. The bottle’s level sank. The world softened, blurred at the corners. Sam’s laughter became louder, looser. Arthur felt a liquid warmth in his limbs, a dissolving of the daily armor. The ghost in the room felt less like a haunting and more like a comfortable, familiar presence.
“Remember that time,” Sam slurred, pointing a wobbly finger, “he tried to teach us to change the oil and we just stared at the engine like it was a spaceship?”
“We were ten,” Arthur said, smiling into his glass. “It was a spaceship.”
Their laughter died, leaving a heavy, drunk silence. Sam’s eyes, glassy and dark, found Arthur’s. The look was a familiar trigger, a spark in the bourbon-soaked air. No words were needed. Sam stood, the chair legs screeching. He took Arthur’s hand, his grip firm and sure despite the alcohol. He led him, not to the bedroom, but to the living room rug before the cold fireplace. The same rug.
They undressed each other with a clumsy, urgent fervor, fingers fumbling on buttons, laughter bubbling up at a missed zipper. The room tilted pleasantly. Sam pushed Arthur down onto the thick wool, the world a gentle carousel. He knelt between Arthur’s splayed legs, his big hands running up Arthur’s thighs. Arthur’s head swam, the ceiling light a blurry halo.
“Just wanna make you feel good,” Sam mumbled, his breath hot against Arthur’s inner thigh. He took Arthur’s soft cock into his mouth without preamble, engulfing him in wet, relentless heat. The sensation was magnified, electric, stripped of all nuance by the alcohol. Arthur groaned, a deep, animal sound, his hips lifting off the rug. Sam worked him with a drunkard’s dedication, all sloppy, enthusiastic suction and roaming hands that squeezed Arthur’s ass, his balls, anything they could reach.
Arthur hardened swiftly in that warm, demanding mouth. His hands fisted in Sam’s hair, not guiding, just holding on as the room spun. “Suck me,” he grunted, the words thick. “Yeah, just like that, you fucking love it, don’t you?” Sam’s answering moan vibrated through him, a filthy, affirmative buzz. The pressure built, a coiling tightness in his gut, faster than usual, fueled by the bourbon and raw need. He could feel the edge approaching, a dizzying cliff.
“Gonna come,” Arthur warned, his voice tight.
Sam pulled off with a slick, obscene pop, a string of saliva connecting his lips to Arthur’s glistening tip. His own cock was fully erect, jutting thick and flushed. “Not yet,” he panted, his eyes unfocused but intense. “Want you with me.” He collapsed beside Arthur, their bodies rolling together on the rug, skin sliding against sweat-slick skin. Sam spat into his own hand, a clumsy, wet sound, and wrapped his fingers around both of them, squeezing them together in a tight, slippery fist.
The frotting was a frantic, grinding mess. Their movements were uncoordinated, driven by a drunken, desperate hunger for friction and connection. Arthur thrust upward into the hot tunnel of Sam’s grip, their cocks rubbing together, the head of his own slipping against Sam’s shaft. Precum mixed with spit, making the slide wetter, filthier. The sensory input was overwhelming: the scratch of the wool on his back, the heat of Sam’s body, the grunts and wet slaps of their collision, the sharp, boozy taste of Sam’s mouth when they kissed, all of it blurred into a single, blinding point of sensation.
“Fuck, Sam, fuck,” Arthur chanted, his rhythm dissolving into spasmodic jerks.
“Come on me,” Sam snarled, his hand a blur. “Get your fucking come all over me.”
The command, raw and base, shattered Arthur’s control. He cried out, a ragged, broken sound, as his orgasm slammed through him. Thick stripes of semen shot across his own stomach and Sam’s pumping fist. The violent clench of his body pushed Sam over the edge mere seconds later. Sam’s release erupted, hot and mingling with Arthur’s, his whole body seizing as he buried his face in Arthur’s neck with a choked-off roar.
They collapsed, a sticky, panting heap. The spinning room gradually slowed. The euphoria of the bourbon and the climax began its cruel, inexorable retreat, leaving a vacuum in its wake. Arthur became acutely aware of the hard floor beneath the rug, a dull throb starting behind his eyes. Sam shifted, letting out a low groan.
“Rug burn,” he mumbled. “Christ.”
“My head,” Arthur said, the words echoing in his skull. It wasn’t just the headache, though that was coming, a distant drumbeat of pain. It was a hollow, aching sadness seeping into the spaces the alcohol had vacated. The ghost of Leroy was gone, and they were just two middle-aged men, drunk and messy on the floor, their potential fatherhood papers gathering dust in the next room.
They hauled themselves upstairs, moving like old men, wincing at the light. They showered in silence, washing away the physical evidence, but the emotional residue clung. In bed, the space between them felt different. Not hostile, but charged with an unspoken verdict.
Sam lay on his back, an arm thrown over his eyes. “We’re a fucking cliché,” he said into the dark. “Getting drunk to avoid the hard stuff.”
“It worked for our fathers for decades,” Arthur replied, his voice flat. The truth of it hung in the air, acrid and undeniable. They had just recreated a hollow ritual, using each other’s bodies as a distraction from a decision they were too terrified to make. The sex, for all its heat, had been an escape, not a connection. It felt like a failure.
The morning was a gray, punishing affair. The headache was a given, a steel band tightening around their temples. But it was the nausea that was worse—a deep, roiling sickness that wasn’t just from the bourbon. It was the taste of cowardice. They moved around the kitchen like ghosts, avoiding the stack of paperwork that now seemed to glow with accusatory light.
Arthur finally spoke, his voice sandpaper. “We can’t do that again.”
“I know,” Sam said, staring into his black coffee. He didn’t mean the drinking. He meant the using. The running.
Arthur walked to the counter. He picked up the application, the coffee ring a brown stain over the words “Capacity for Care.” He didn’t open it. He simply held its weight in his hands. “This is the hard stuff,” he said.
Sam looked up, met his gaze. His eyes were bloodshot, exhausted, but clear. The drunken haze was gone, burned away by the harsh morning and the sharper shame. After a long moment, Sam gave a single, slow nod. It wasn’t agreement to fill it out. It was agreement to stop running. To face, sober and terrified, whatever answer they found inside themselves. The paperwork could no longer wait.