Work Text:
A man went down to the crossroads looking for forgiveness, God, and the blues—not in that particular order—and found the Devil instead. So the Devil tuned his guitar and made him the best bluesman in the world, and all it cost was his soul, which was taking up too much room inside him anyway. (No great loss, the man would say later. A real bluesman only needs his guitar, and maybe a finger or two for picking it .)
Afterwards, the Devil and the man shared a cigarette, leaning up against the split-rail fence that ran along the road. The Devil wasn’t particularly handsome, too narrow in the shoulders and the color of wood ash all over, but the man kept looking at him out of the corner of his eye all the same.
“So what now?” he finally asked.
The Devil exhaled a mouthful of smoke. It smelled more like burning wood than tobacco, and it stayed too long, thick in the air.
“Why, Mr. Johnson,” the Devil said, the corner of his mouth curling like the smoke, “now is whatever you want.”
The man scoffed. “You do forgiveness?”
The Devil went suddenly very still, like an animal catching wind of a hunter. In that moment he looked animal too, nothing at all human in the way his eyes gleamed. But the man blinked and the moment was gone, the Devil was offering him the cigarette back again.
Their fingers brushed, and lingered, and the Devil’s hand was cold enough to burn. The man didn’t mind.
“Forgiveness is not my line of business,” the Devil said to that man at the crossroads. Then he added: “Though if you’d like to get on your knees, I would not object.”
The man at the crossroads looked away first, glad his skin was too dark to show a blush. Gazing off to where the horizon dipped below the hills, he lifted the cigarette to his lips and breathed in, filled his throat and lungs with the woodsmoke smell of it. (It’d be his voice people would remember, even when his short life was run through; a voice raw and high, desperate as a howl. Like he had hellhounds biting his heels already.)
“Already damned, right?” the man said quietly, more to himself than the Devil. “Hell-bound. No amount of churching can save anymore.”
The Devil didn’t answer. The Devil—not handsome, the color of wood ash—was silent as the man finished the cigarette, dropping the butt to the dust of the crossroads and grinding it out under his heel.
“What do I get in return?” the man asked.
“Per the terms of our agreement, Mr. Johnson,” the Devil said. His eyes were poison-yellow all of a sudden, a snake’s eyes. “Whatever you want.”
The man went slowly to to his knees.
.
.
.
Other times, the man at the crossroads isn't looking for God at all.
.
.
.
It’s the kind of hot that only happens south of the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Mississippi—it has texture. A weight. The hot is a physical thing, heavy and taking up space in the air; Johnny can practically feel it panting down the back of his neck. (It was, he thought later, afterwards, a crazy-making hot. No one could live in that and stay sane.)
He’s driving down Magnolia as fast as he dares, since his shit A/C still isn’t working and breaking the speed limit is the only way to get the air to move. Even the wind is hot, playing in and out of the cab. There’s something on the radio—music, he’d bet, but Johnny has barely enough attention enough to be certain. It’s impossible to think about anything in straight lines, really; every try turns into syrup.
That’s probably why Johnny blows past the turn onto Old Ashton without noticing the man on the crumbling stone fence, or how he lifts a hand to wave as Johnny goes by.
It takes another minute or two for Johnny’s head to catch up with the rest of him. He makes a questionable u-turn right there, his truck kicking up mud where his wheels hit grass.
Luckily, the Devil’s still there at the crossroads. Johnny’s technically on the wrong side of the road when he pulls to a stop, but there’s not much traffic on Magnolia anyhow. It’s a strange shift in perspective—with Johnny in his truck and the Devil still sitting on the wall, they’re practically the same height. Like that, Johnny can prop his arm on the window and smile, right at the Devil. (He suspects it’s a lazier, warmer grin than usual, the heat turning it to something liquid too.)
“Hey there.”
“Johnny,” the Devil says with a nod, and Johnny catches a flash of yellow eyes before they’re hidden again behind mirrored shades.
In the heat, the Devil’s stripped down to his shirtsleeves, jacket folded on the wall beside him. There’s some illicit thrill in seeing the usually starched-straight line of his collar curling. He’s left the top button undone, revealing half a sliver of skin that looks more like scales; Johnny can’t seem to tear his eyes away.
He’s never been sure if there’s rhyme or reason to the way the Devil looks, whether the snake eyes and scales are more real than the rest of him or less. (He thinks more, mostly because of that night at the Bellows, the way the Devil’s skin had skipped and rippled like there was something swimming underneath, too vast to see from the surface.) Sometimes, Johnny wonders what the Devil must actually look like, when he’s not dressed to put the locals at ease.
“Hold on now, are you...smoking?” Johnny asks suddenly, distracted by a tendril of white smoke curling up in the hollow of the Devil’s throat. Johnny frowns, and then looks the Devil up and down—he’s smoking all over, every place where his skin meets air. “That can’t be natural.”
“I believe the term is ‘sublimation’,” the Devil says dryly. “If you put a block of ice in the heat, sometimes it doesn’t bother with melting, just turns to steam. I told you, my part of town is cold, and...well, yours isn’t, at the moment.”
Johnny snorts. “You telling me that the state of Georgia is hotter than Hell?”
Johnny can’t see the Devil’s eyes behind his shades, but he gets the sense he’s rolling his eyes or would like to. The line of his mouth is flat and unimpressed either way; to see it makes Johnny grin, even wider this time.
“What are you doing here anyway?” Johnny asks.
The Devil hums a few bars of a song Johnny knows, and Johnny laughs. “Really? Down to the crossroads? You could have picked a better crossroads, no one’s ever around here.”
“You’re here,” the Devil says, and there’s something in his tone that makes Johnny go hot. Not that Johnny wasn’t, before (his shirt is sweat-stuck to the small of his back) but it’s a different sort of hot; this kind is urgent, has teeth. It makes Johnny want to—
Johnny swallows. “How’s it work, then?”
“How’s what work?”
“Well, here I am, a man at the crossroads. There you are, the Devil, looking to make a deal. How’s it work? What do you say?”
The Devil waves dismissive a hand, fingers trailing steam. “We did this before, Johnny, even if it was in a cornfield. You know how it works.”
“So that’s the Devil’s great trick, challenging drunk musicians to fiddle contests?” Johnny asks, and grins when the Devil scoffs. If it were cooler, if Johnny’s brain wasn’t liquid running between his ears while that strange, urgent hot prickled under his skin, he might not be taunting the Devil like this. He knows—on some level he knows , the smart thing would be to leave now, throw the truck into drive and leave the Devil to his empty crossroads.
But it’s so damn hot and Johnny keeps catching himself staring at the Devil’s undone collar, that slice of exposed throat.
“C’mon,” Johnny says, coaxes. “Here I am, a man at the crossroads. Show me what the Devil can do.”
The Devil is so still for so long that it seems like he’s turned into marble. Johnny’s about to take it back, try and laugh it off as a joke, when the Devil clears his throat and says: “You’ll need to get out of the truck.”
His voice shivers even in the heat, and Johnny’s already out of the cab and halfway to the Devil by the time his head catches up with him. He didn’t even bother with the keys, can hear the truck idling behind him as he walks into the grass.
He comes to stand a little ways from where the Devil is still perched on the wall. Johnny has to look up to take him in now, and something about the angle makes the Devil’s face foreign as a stranger’s, or not human at all—not animal either, just geometry put together like something approximating a person. (Johnny’s heart is beating a wild tattoo against his ribs, and his blood is loud in his ears and all of it is hot, hotter than the heat. He doesn’t know how he’ll get rid of all that unnecessary hot, get it out from under his skin before it burns him up entirely.)
Johnny blows a breath. “All right. What next?”
The Devil doesn’t come down from the wall so much as slither from it, twisting in a way that’s outside of the physics of the world Johnny inhabits. But then he’s there in the grass, standing in front of Johnny. He cocks his head slightly, and even behind the mirrored sunglasses Johnny can tell that he’s studying him; can feel the cold, dry brush of his eyes.
The Devil makes a low noise, a hmm, and then tucks his hands behind his back. He walks around Johnny in a wide circle, like a tailor fitting Johnny for a suit. Johnny can still feel the dry rasp of his gaze, trailing up Johnny’s back, then down his shoulder, lingering around his wrist. It’s—confusing, a different kind of prickling heat. Johnny keeps having to turn to look at him, wary of letting the Devil out of his sight for too long.
The Devil is standing directly behind him when he finally speaks. “First, I say, ‘Good afternoon, Johnny.’ I use their name; disquiets them, when I know it without us being introduced.”
“Do you want them...disquieted?”
“I want them to take what they are about to do seriously.”
Privately, Johnny thinks that the Devil just wants it clear from the start who’s in charge, but there’s no heat crazy-making enough to get him say that out loud. “Okay. So then I imagine they ask, ‘Are you the Devil?’”
“Only the brave ones,” the Devil says, making another circle around Johnny. “Most can’t bring themselves to say it, at least not in full. They ask, ‘Are you him?’ Or ‘Are you the one I’m here to see?’ Sometimes they say, ‘Are you…?’ and then trail into silence. I think it’s a hard thing for your kind, to say it.”
Johnny raises his eyebrows. “My kind?”
“People. Humans. It must be hard for them to confront who I am, what it means for them to be here.”
Johnny is getting dizzy trying to follow the Devil’s endless circling and just gives up, stares off into the distance where the shoulder of the road gives way to trees and overgrown brush. “I’d probably agree with that. Aren’t angels in the Bible always telling people to be not afraid? Greeting the Devil by name doesn’t seem any more comforting.”
The Devil is quiet for a minute, then says, “You’re too calm. You should be—anxious. Twitchy. People who come to me went through their last straw six miles back. They’re desperate. The crossroads are a story about a friend of a friend of a cousin, and they laughed when it was told, because times were good. Now, when they aren’t, whispers and stories are all that’s left. It makes people skittish, to be chasing down a thing that shouldn’t exist but for their desperation.”
“I’m not much of an actor, sorry,” Johnny says with a shrug.
The Devil hums thoughtfully and, without warning, lays a hand against the small of Johnny’s back.
Johnny’s whole body jerks. That the Devil is touching him doesn’t even register at first, just a plunging, sweeping cold; a cold with teeth and intent to swallow him whole. It takes Johnny a delirious minute to remember where he is and which way is up; another couple to understand why winter can press its fingers into his skin. He’s shaking, every nerve ending feeling like it’s been sharpened to a point and stripped bare. The result is something horribly alive, verging on the edge of pain.
“That’s better,” the Devil says, sounding pleased with himself.
The Devil is very, very close, and his hand is still there at the small of Johnny’s back, shedding cold and making Johnny tremble. If Johnny turns his head, he’ll be staring at that stripe of scales above the Devil’s wilted collar, and the smoke—the steam—the sublimation is everywhere, all around them both. It smells of wet and clinging and wrong, like leaves rotting underfoot. (Johnny wonders if the Devil burns when he touches Johnny, just as Johnny freezes at being touched; if Johnny, in all his humanness, is hot as Georgia and liable to turn ice to steam.)
“Now,” the Devil says, “you tell me what it is you want.”
“I—what?” Johnny rasps. The Devil’s stroking the line of Johnny’s spine with his thumb; Johnny’s not sure he notices.
“What it is you’ll sell your soul for, Johnny.”
Johnny shakes his head, dazed. “Don’t know. Never thought about it.”
“Never? You can’t think of one thing you’ve wanted, so badly and so long, you’d give up your immortal soul to have it?”
“World peace?” Johnny offers weakly, and the Devil chuckles.
“Not my line of business. Try again.”
Johnny swallows. “What do other people ask for?”
“Mm. The usual things. Money, fame, youth, power, beauty. Sex,” the Devil adds, and Johnny’s breathing stutters. The Devil keeps talking, as though he hasn’t noticed: “Though usually if you have some combination of the former, the latter follows.”
“What about suffering?”
“Plenty of suffering to go around, Johnny, people don’t usually ask for extra.”
Johnny huffs, and out of the corner of his eye he catches the Devil almost-smiling, the corner of his lipless mouth curved into something pleased. “You know what I mean. Not suffering, relief from suffering. Do people ask for that?”
The Devil is quiet for a moment. “Some of them do, yes.”
“Not your line of business?”
The Devil sighs, and he’s so close Johnny can feel his breath against his jaw. “No, I can relieve suffering, Johnny. But I relieve suffering the way a fifth of whiskey relieves suffering. I can take you away from it, I just make no guarantees about what you’ll find elsewhere. It’s usually just more suffering. Is that what you want?”
Johnny turns then, though it drags Devil’s hand across his hip and sends a fresh spike of cold up through his skin. The Devil’s expression is hard to read, though, and Johnny feels a flash of frustration at the mirrored sunglasses still hiding his eyes, his own distorted face reflected back at him.
Before he can think through what he’s doing, Johnny’s reaching out with both hands. Careful not to brush any of that too-pale skin, he pushes the Devil’s sunglasses up, until they sit on top of his shock of white hair. The temptation to stroke it, an absently-tender gesture, is so overwhelming Johnny is almost dizzy. “That’s better,” he murmurs instead, but there’s no disguising the tenderness in his voice.
The Devil’s eyes are poison-yellow, pupils slitted as a snake’s. His gaze doesn’t waver and he doesn’t blink, just looks evenly at Johnny as though waiting for his cue.
It’s not even a hungry look, nothing grasping or desirous in it. Just...intent.
“What else?”
The Devil blinks then. “What?”
“What else can you offer? I don’t want money or fame or power or relief from suffering—at least, not as much as I want my soul. So, what else?”
“I turned a stone into bread once.”
“Not hungry. What else?”
“All the kingdoms of the earth under your power.”
“No way am I qualified for that,” Johnny laughs, and even though his eyes soften, the Devil goes quiet, studying Johnny’s face.
“The best fiddler in the world,” he finally says. “I’ll make you the best to ever pick up a bow. The best known, the best loved, the best...they won’t talk about Bill Monroe anymore, except to say that he made way for you. Your name will outlast your sons, and their sons’ sons, and your music will never die. They will play your song forever, and you will never die.”
And Johnny—
There was a time he would have said yes to that and not thought twice. Would have been glad to sign his soul away on those terms, and maybe that would be his truck stalled out at Hickory and Brower instead of Louis’. Johnny suspects a lot of musicians would make that deal: when it comes down to it, they’re the sort of people who like getting up on stages, who spend their days trying to get people to listen.
(Find a musician claiming they don’t ever want to be famous, and Johnny will show you a liar.)
Johnny would have counted himself one of them, not too long ago. But then he made a bet with the Devil, who took to following him around afterwards; now it doesn't seem so important whether anyone else is paying attention when he plays.
Johnny sighs. “I told you before, twice now: I’m the best that’s ever been,” he says with a rueful smile. “As for the rest, that’s just fame, and I don’t care as much about that. Is that really it? That’s everything you offer?”
The Devil throws him a sharp look. “Most people are easier to tempt. They want things.”
“I want things,” Johnny protests, feeling offended on his own behalf. “Of course I want things. I just don’t know if I want them as much as my soul. Those are very high stakes, maybe you should try something else.”
The Devil laughs.
The Devil actually takes a step back and then another, he’s laughing so hard. Johnny’s never seen the Devil laugh, wasn’t actually sure he could do anything more than smirk, or maybe chuckle darkly. Only, here’s the proof otherwise: the Devil’s head thrown back as he laughs, and laughs, and laughs.
Without the Devil’s hands on him, Johnny’s plunged back into the hot—not just the warmth of Georgia rushing up, but that urgent heat under his skin reasserting itself, this time with claws and murderous intent. It comes on so suddenly Johnny can feel his heartbeat pick up, and the blood seems suddenly loud in his ears. (Half-delirious, Johnny finds himself staring at the Devil’s throat again. The sun flashes on the small scales along the length of it, white as the heart of a flame, only it’s Johnny who’s burning.)
Finally, the Devil sighs, shakes his head. “Well, I have to hand it to you, Johnny. You are the first person in the history of creation to suggest that I abandon my snares and wickedness in tempting mankind, and try something else.”
“You have your business, sure, but that can’t be everything you are. You must want something else. You must want…” He gives up. “Something.”
The Devil’s smile fades, replaced by that same intent expression. Only—there’s something under it now, a sharpened edge. An answer to the murderous heat under Johnny’s skin. (It’s so goddamn hot and still, Johnny shivers.)
“Once,” the Devil says, and then stops. After a moment, he clears his throat, says, “Once, I met a man at the crossroads. He got down on his knees for me.”
Johnny frowns. “He...what, he prayed?”
“After a fashion.”
It takes Johnny another minute to put that together with the way the Devil is looking at him. “Oh,” he says faintly. “That’s...the sort of kneeling you mean.”
“Mhm.”
“That’s…”
It’s been a while since Johnny fooled around with that bassist out of Atlanta, the one with an easy smile and a twang more cowboy than Fulton County. Even longer since the party Nina dragged him to—years and years, it’s been a while since Johnny even thought about it—where Johnny got drunk off weak beer trying to find the courage to sidle up to Jesse Henrys and ask, wanna get out of here? (In the end, Jesse had done the asking and taught Johnny how to suck a cock, then broke Johnny’s heart for the trouble.) Here and now Johnny’s not even certain if the mechanics of the thing translate, if the Devil has the same nerve endings, the same wanting. For all he knows, they’re thinking different things when the Devil says, kneel.
But Johnny would be lying if he said he wasn’t curious, more than curious. Interested. Later, he can blame it on the crazy-making Georgia hot, the kind that makes a man challenge the Devil to a fiddle contest in the first place. Now, he’s got that heat digging its claws into the underside of his skin and just wants to see if he can get the Devil to melt.
“All right,” Johnny says.
“All right?”
“That’s what I said,” Johnny says, grinning. “I don’t much go for religion, so it’s been a minute since I got on my knees for—well, anyone. But if that’s what you want…”
When the Devil grins, his eyeteeth are longer and sharper than any human’s ought to be. “All right, then. And in return?”
Johnny’s quiet for so long that the Devil seems to think he’s having second thoughts; he steps forward, his hand tentatively reaching out. “Johnny?”
“I’m just thinking. Trying to, anyway, but—I don’t know,” Johnny admits. He’d been so caught up in the promise of it, the heat and the hunger, he’d forgotten that part. “Is that important? We could just...I mean, I don’t really need anything in exchange, if it’s what you want.”
Every emotion goes out of the Devil’s face all at once, and the blankness is shocking. It’s Johnny’s turn to wonder if there are second thoughts being had. Maybe this was all part of that game, the teasing question of show me what the Devil can do—and Johnny’s the one who ruined things by going off-script, ignoring the rules.
“It...it is what you want, right?”
There’s an unexpected vulnerability to the Devil just then, his curling collar and his poison-yellow eyes wide and unblinking. He’s staring at Johnny like Johnny’s stopped making any sense and the Devil can’t find the thread, isn’t sure they’re even speaking the same language. (It’s endearing in a way that opens up a horrible tenderness in Johnny’s chest, a sucking wound just below his sternum.)
“Don’t you want…?” Johnny asks, taking a step nearer. This close, he can feel the Devil’s shedding cold, sublimating in the heat, and Johnny plays with one of the curls of smoke coming off the Devil’s wrist. It feels a little like the steam of a hot shower, that same barely-there pressure and wetness, but cold. Cold and slippery and filling up Johnny’s nose with the smell of rotting leaves. It’s the weirdest goddamn thing Johnny’s ever known and he smiles, just to himself. “You can take it back, if you don’t want—”
“No,” the Devil interrupts, a strange catch in his voice. “It’s—no one’s ever...not without something in exchange. There isn’t something you want?”
“I mean, if you feel strongly about it, maybe we can talk about you returning the favor. But no. If it’s what you want...that’s good enough for me.”
“That can’t be right.”
“I’ve made worse deals,” Johnny says lightly. He lets his fingers brush the Devil’s wrist instead of the cold-smoke swirls coming off it. The Devil’s skin is cold too, but dry. Smooth as snakeskin and and somehow still soft. Johnny traces the bump at his wrist, wondering why it doesn’t hurt the way the Devil touching him does. “I’m famous for that, making stupid deals. You know, once the Devil turned up in a cornfield and bet a fiddle of gold against my soul.”
“Did he,” the Devil murmurs.
“Mhm. I even took him up on it. In my defense, he was a handsome motherfucker.”
The Devil lets out a startled breath, something almost a laugh, punched out of him. “Don’t think I’ve been called that before,” he Devil says, but his voice has gone amused, dangerously close to fond. Johnny glances up at him from under his lashes and the Devil is almost-smiling, the corner of his lipless mouth tucked in and a softness to his poison eyes.
Johnny grins. Cocksure and easy as that first hot Georgia afternoon, crowing 'I’m the best that’s ever been!’ to the sky. His hand is still at the Devil’s wrist, and he can feel the Devil’s pulse, beating an inhuman, uneven rhythm under his fingers. “Wanna get out of here?” he asks.
“All right,” the Devil breathes.
“All right, then,” Johnny says.
(Johnny doesn’t break every speed limit in DeKalb County driving back to his apartment, but between the Devil’s eyes on him and the hard-pounding of blood in his ears, it’s a damn close thing.)
.
.
.
The Devil is in Johnny’s apartment, touching Johnny’s things with his too-pale hands, and the sight is so surreal can’t look away. It’s surreal to watch him pick up the notebook Johnny was scribbling in this morning, trying to transcribe a song he’d been dreaming about; surreal to watch the Devil set it down again, humming a few bars of that half-made song as he runs his palm along the line of the couch. It’s all the ordinariness of Johnny’s life, and yet there, stuck in the middle of it, is the Devil in his shirtsleeves.
There’s also, if Johnny’s being honest, an undeniable pleasure in it. He’s never really looked at the Devil, never had the chance to study him like this. From the doorway Johnny can admire all his sinuous lines, the way the Devil moves like something animal. (Not quite a snake, Johnny thinks, but definitely animal. Or maybe just not human, not human on some level that Johnny recognizes instinctually and in a way that makes the heat under his skin dig its claws in.)
“You’re watching me,” the Devil says quietly. He’s turned away, studying the cheap Pollock print on the wall.
“I am,” Johnny says, because he’s about to blow the Devil. There doesn’t seem much point in playing coy about wanting to. “You’re nice to watch.”
The Devil visibly preens, and Johnny can’t help a grin. He leans against the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest. “You act like nobody’s complimented you before.”
“‘That handsome devil’ usually refers to someone else.”
“Aw, poor Nick.”
“No sympathy for the Devil?” the Devil in question asks, something that might even be teasing in his voice, and Johnny laughs.
“Maybe a little. Enough to say a prayer or two for him.”
The Devil holds himself very still as Johnny approaches, and Johnny savors the thrill of being a predator too. (As though there’s anything he could actually do to the Devil, even if he wanted to.) From this close, the Devil’s face is an arrangement of shapes that won’t resolve into anything Johnny recognizes; it is surreal and horribly beautiful, just like the Devil humming Johnny’s music, touching Johnny’s things. A strangeness Johnny never expected to be able to hold.
“Do you have a plan?” The Devil asks, not quite suspicious, but Johnny feels a twinge of indignation anyway.
“Couch,” he decides there and then, tipping his head toward it.
“Your roommate—?” the Devil asks.
“Gone for the weekend; friend’s wedding in Augusta,” Johnny says.
“Mm.”
The Devil goes quiet when Johnny reaches for his belt, doing nothing but breathing as Johnny threads it back through the loops of his trousers. (Johnny lets it fall carelessly to the ground, but the Devil doesn’t seem to mind, not blinking, not looking away from Johnny’s face.) The Devil tries to undo his own fly, but Johnny pushes his hands away. “I like this part,” Johnny explains. “There’s something about undressing someone…It’s intimate, I guess.”
Johnny’s close enough to see the Devil’s throat work when he swallows.
His pants join the belt on the ground.
Johnny likes the way the Devil looks just then, just his wilted shirtsleeves and boxer briefs hugging the curve of his thighs. Just for the look of the thing, Johnny undoes the top few buttons of his shirt, letting it gape. The line of the Devil’s collarbone is a sweet temptation, and Johnny yields to it, runs his fingertip along it like a taut string. The Devil shivers like he’s been plucked.
“There,” Johnny says. “Like that to start out.”
“But—”
Johnny puts a hand on the Devil’s chest and gently pushes. He won’t pretend it’s not gratifying to watch the Devil give under him, taking one step back, then another, and the gracefully lowering himself to the couch. He splays his legs and arranges himself, revealing scales at the underside of his knees, more at his elbows. They’re white like the others, but they catch the light strangely, almost opalescent, shimmering like mother-of-pearl.
“Are you sure there’s nothing you want? No deal you’d like to make?” the Devil asks quietly as Johnny comes to stand between his legs.
He’s looking up at Johnny with a tenderness that sits oddly on his face. It exposes the underbelly of him, that same animal quality—an alien emotion trying to fit onto a human face and spilling over. Johnny’s not entirely sure what to make of that.
He reaches out and touches it gently, brushing his fingertips along the curve of the Devil’s jaw. If there’s something underneath his skin, divine or infernal, Johnny can’t feel it.
“Nah, I’m good,” Johnny says, and goes to his knees on the worn rug.
The Devil sucks in a sharp breath, and the hitch of his shoulders sends a thrill through Johnny—he always did enjoy that, the way a person looked at him just before he went down on them. Seeing all that wanting collected in their expressions, knowing he was the answer to the question it asked. Johnny’s never known anyone who wasn’t beautiful in that moment, looking at him that way.
Johnny can’t decide whether the Devil is beautiful: so exposed, his shirt collar gaping around a throat ringed with white scales, eyes wide and unblinking and the same yellow as a warning sign. A weak chin, with hair standing on end, and looking at Johnny with such obvious wanting. Johnny gets the sense the Devil should be ugly, with all that collected strangeness and neediness—and yet.
“Hey,” Johnny says. He rests his palms on the Devil’s legs, feeling the Devil tense at his touch. “I was right, you know.”
“About what?”
“You are a handsome motherfucker.”
The Devil smiles a little, but he’s staring at Johnny’s mouth with intent; Johnny nods. “Anything I should know?” he asks, idly brushing his thumbs over the soft inside of his thighs. The Devil doesn’t have any hair there, just more of that same smooth, dry skin, a sheen that catches the light when Johnny cocks his head. “Anything I shouldn’t do?”
“No. Just don’t—ah, use the Old Man’s name.”
It takes Johnny a minute to realize what he means, and then he laughs softly. “Fair enough. Though it should be hard to say much of anything with my mouth full.”
The Devil looks so scandalized that Johnny laughs again. “Here I am on my knees, and a joke about sucking your dick offends you?”
“No need to be crude, Johnny,” the Devil says with a primness that the Devil really shouldn’t be capable of. (That open wound of tenderness under Johnny’s breastbone aches sweetly.)
“If you’re against crude, you’re definitely not going to like what I do next.”
The Devil huffs. “I—”
Then the Devil makes a noise Johnny’s pretty sure a human throat can’t make, because Johnny’s started working his dick through his underwear.
“ Johnny,” the Devil says, but nothing else, and Johnny hums contentedly. The Devil has what feels like an ordinary cock, uncut and already half-hard; not quite warm through the fabric but not as cold as the rest of the Devil’s skin. Johnny wouldn’t have stopped if the Devil had something else under there, even something outside Johnny’s experience of bodies and their hows, but he might have had to reevaluate his plan.
As it is, Johnny leans in and mouths wetly at the line of the Devil’s dick. Even through the fabric, the smell so close makes Johnny delirious, plunged into something overwhelming he can’t place. (It’s not quite natural, but not entirely chemical either; Johnny just know it burns the inside of his nose, and fills his head up with static and heat.) The Devil makes a high-pitched noise, a bit birdlike, and it makes Johnny smile against the Devil’s bulge, pressing just the edge of his teeth against it.
“Johnny, that’s... Johnny ,” the Devil says, breathless, not quite babbling but close. Johnny leans back, still grinning to himself and plucking at the cloth of the Devil’s boxer briefs.
“You should take these off,” he drawls, looking up at the Devil through his eyelashes. Johnny’s high school girlfriend had called that expression a weapon of mass destruction; she’d accused him of using it to win arguments. (She’d only been right about half the time.)
The Devil breathes out in a shaky, too-quick exhalation of breath, nods. “All right, then.”
Johnny blinks when he looks back back down and the boxer briefs are gone. The Devil spreads his legs a little further, and there’s a new tension to the line of his body. He’s lifting his chin, fixing Johnny with a look that’s all bravado.
“Well?” he asks, and the uncertainty of it’s enough to stir the awful tenderness in Johnny’s breast again.
“A handsome motherfucker, I told you,” Johnny says, and he’d be horrified by the affection in his voice if he didn’t feel so much more of it.
He flashes the Devil a smile, and leans in, breathes warm and wet at the base of his dick, smiling when it jump and throbs. He isn’t fully hard yet, so Johnny spits into his hand and starts working the shaft, admiring how nicely it fits there in his palm, the breathless little noises the Devil makes, none of them quite human.
When his dick is fully hard, dribbling precum and fairly throbbing in Johnny’s hand, he backs off and dig his fingers into the Devil’s thighs; the Devil immediately sucks in a sharp breath, his hips jerking. When Johnny glances up at him, he’s got his eyes screwed shut, the muscle at his jaw tight.
“I have a question,” Johnny says, and the Devil makes a wounded noise.
“You waited until now to ask?” he says, his voice strangled.
“I did,” Johnny says. He lowers his head, and, shutting his eyes, rubs his cheek against the Devil’s thigh as a sort of apology. He can feel the Devil shaking beneath him, skin shivering where Johnny touches him. After a moment, Johnny feels the Devil’s hand come up and tentatively cradle the back of Johnny’s head.
It’s cold as winter where it brushes his skin, but Johnny can’t bring himself to mind.
He exhales. “Do I feel hot to you? Hot enough to burn? When you touch me, you’re freezing cold, so by that logic…”
The Devil exhales shakily, and Johnny can feel a cold finger skim the soft hollow behind his ear. “Not quite the word. You have a soul; I can feel it when I touch you, when—you touch me.”
“Yeah? What’s it feel like, then?”
The Devil says something in a language that definitely isn’t English. “It’s Greek,” he explains, sounding strained. “Burning—the burning of the sun. Fever-heat. A cauterized wound and the embers left over from a sacrifice.”
“Does it hurt?”
“ Yes,” the Devil bites out as Johnny lifts his head. “But Johnny—”
Johnny presses his mouth to the skin just over the Devil’s hip and hums; the Devil chokes out something desperate-sounding and pleading, again in a language Johnny doesn’t speak. He doesn’t think it’s Greek this time, though—the word sounds too much like music and Johnny can feel it in the air, in his head, whatever it is. It feels like the Devil, all cold and burning and surreal.
Johnny really does feel like a worshipper at prayer when he tilts his head back then, and takes in the Devil: terrible and too ugly and horribly beautiful above him.
“Tell me if I do something you don’t like,” Johnny says, and then bends his head and swallows as much of the Devil’s cock as he can take.
When the Devil lifted that glass of whiskey to Johnny’s mouth, he’d thought about the Catholics—how they believed a cracker and cheap cornerstore wine was really the body and blood, made real. Johnny always thought that was insane, wondered how anyone could believe it when the evidence was there on your tongue. But this is what they meant, this is what they were thinking of. They were thinking about this, the body and the blood, and the Devil’s cock tasting like salt.
The Devil is silent with Johnny’s mouth around him. Or maybe he’s babbling on some frequency Johnny can’t hear—when Johnny glances up at his face, his mouth is moving silently, in shapes Johnny doesn’t think are words. The hand Johnny can see is scrabbling at the smooth couch cushions, fingernails looking a little sharper than they ought to. His whole skin, the whole of him, ripples and shivers like something trying to stay and go at once.
The only warning Johnny has before he comes is a tightening of the Devil’s hand at the back of Johnny’s neck. Then he grabs a handful of Johnny's braids and jerks him up, so abruptly Johnny yelps. But whatever other protest he might have made dies against the Devil’s mouth. It’s bruising, too cold and too much all at once and Johnny makes a noise he’s never heard himself make, but it comes from deep in the pit of his chest.
It tastes like a flame, and the Devil sighs, pressing himself closer as though he can lick it from Johnny’s mouth with his forked tongue.
“Uh,” Johnny says, when the Devil finally pulls away. Johnny’s mouth feels like he’s been sucking on ice, pleasantly numb. “Did you—come?”
“Yes,” the Devil snarls. It is a snarl, his eyes somehow reflecting the low light filtering in through the window in a way they weren’t before; hard-bright as a wild animals’. He looks like he wants to eat Johnny whole. “Let me return the favor.”
“You don’t have to,” Johnny breathes, though he realizes a moment later that his dick is chafing against his jeans, and he’s half-grinding against the Devil’s knee.
“I want to, you said we could discuss it. Say I can.”
The Devil’s chill lingers in the soft wet of Johnny’s mouth, and he nods. “Sure,” he says dazedly. “Sure, whatever you want.”
Johnny doesn’t remember how they get to his bed, but suddenly they’re there. The Devil is on his hands and knees and looming over him, Johnny’s shirt rucked up to his armpits and a burning-cold hand pressed into the softness of his stomach. “Hey,” Johnny says, and the Devil’s eyes flick up—it’s horrible, to be the fixture of that gaze, all that power showing itself to Johnny like a stripped and sparking wire.
Johnny refuses to be responsible for the hot pulse of yes, oh yes, that goes through him at seeing it.
“Hey, be careful,” Johnny says, loosely wrapping a hand around the Devil’s wrist. It’s a study in contrast, how cold the Devil’s hand is on Johnny’s stomach and how mild he feels under Johnny’s fingers. “I bruise easy when it comes to you, remember?”
That overwhelming alien emotion passes across the Devil’s face. “I remember. And I’ll be gentle, you have my word.”
(Later, Johnny will wonder what the hell ungentle would have looked like, if Johnny would have even survived it.)
The Devil kisses him—mouth and throat and then clavicles, then lower, lower. It is like, Johnny thinks, being pinned to the bed by a whirlwind, except the whirlwind is cold and heavy and feels like a man even as it tears at your clothes from your skin. The sound is right, though, an inrush of wind and a groaning like something metal being torn up from the ground. The Devil’s hands are everywhere, and when he palms Johnny’s cock Johnny sobs, dropped into feeling so suddenly he convulses, every nerve ending aching at once like it’s been sharpened to a point and turned inward.
Johnny’s not sure it counts as pleasure, but there’s so much he doesn’t know what else to call it.
“You’re going to want to close your eyes, Johnny,” the Devil says. The hand that isn’t wrapped around Johnny’s cock is palming the struts of Johnny’s ribs; Johnny knows he’s staring but he can’t stop, can’t think about anything but how much paler the Devil’s hands seem set against Johnny’s skin. The inside of his wrists are marred by purple veins in a tangle.
“Johnny,” the Devil repeats, catching Johnny’s chin and forcing him to look up and meet the Devil’s gaze. That horrible, wounded tenderness is there, an answer to Johnny’s own. “Shut your eyes for me.”
Johnny makes a noise that might be a question, and the Devil leans down, nuzzles the junction of Johnny’s throat and his shoulder. (His mouth is cold against the hot pulse of Johnny’s skin.) Johnny feels rather than hears him murmur, “Please.”
Every instinct screams to keep his eyes open, not to let the Devil out of his sight.
Johnny shuts his eyes.
Later, he’ll realize that he was wrong back at the crossroads. He thought he could get the Devil to melt under his hands, like a rime of frost turned to water. But Johnny shuts his eyes and the Devil is too big all of a sudden, in the air and under Johnny’s ribs, his mouth sliding wetly around his dick. Johnny moans a string of words that aren’t any words at all, reaching for him—but he can’t grab hold and the Devil goes on spilling out of himself until everything Johnny can think or breathe or do is him and the answering heat under Johnny’s skin.
Johnny’s on the very edge of—when the Devil suddenly pulls back. Johnny whines, and tries to open his eyes, but the Devil’s hand comes up and covers them, his fingertips lingering on Johnny’s eyelids. “You don’t want to do that,” The Devil says, and his voice sounds wrecked, like Johnny’s been fucking his throat.
Johnny exhales, but his eyes stay shut. “Okay. Why’d you stop?”
“I want you to pray.”
“I—? But you said not to use the name...”
“Pray. To me.”
“Oh,” Johnny exhales, and he’s so hot it might as well be steam. The Devil feels like a stormfront moving against Johnny’s skin, remaking his body into a squall line. Though that makes a certain amount of sense: that between his Georgia-hot skin and the Devil’s touch, cold as Hell, the two of them are cooking up a storm. “How—oh, fuck,” he hisses, when the Devil suddenly swallows his cock again.
“Wish I could see you,” he babbles. The Devil's sucking his cock with a vengeance now, like Johnny's offended him somehow, and Johnny's going to die of the feeling. “I bet you look good, your skin and mine together, touching me, leaving bruises. You went down so easy, like a good drink, like—shit. Come on, please. Please. I’m so fucking close, all I want is your mouth, your mouth is so good. You’re perfect, please—”
The Devil moans around his cock, and the world goes still for a minute, every part of him, every atom holding its breath. Then Johnny’s coming, and it feels like a thunderhead bursting into rain.
“Would you like me to go?” the Devil asks afterwards, his voice seemingly very far away. Johnny tries to grope for him, to catch his wrist and hold him there, but Johnny can’t make any part of his body do what he wants. Sleep weights him down, and he drops his hand with a sigh.
“Stay,” he mumbles. “Just...yeah, stay. If you like.”
If the Devil gives any answer, Johnny’s fallen well asleep before he can hear it.
.
.
.
When Johnny wakes, it’s raining outside his window and the Devil is there in the bed beside him. He’s in his shirtsleeves and underwear again, Johnny’s beat up notebook propped up on his knees. (His bare legs look strangely vulnerable, even with the scales there at the underside, the twitch of muscles when Johnny reaches up and runs his fingers along the line of his thigh.)
“I’m finishing your tune,” the Devil says quietly, tapping the pen against the page. His eyes have gone human—a pale gold that’s almost colorless in the low light, and round pupils at the center of them. “You sing in your sleep, did you know that?”
“Mm, no. Feel like someone would have mentioned it before now, if I did.”
Johnny’s voice is rasping and sleep-slurred, and he’s still following the line of the Devil’s legs, dipping down to the curve of his ass and then up and over, fingertips brushing over the inside of his thigh. The Devil shudders.
“Not what I meant. You don’t sing aloud, but…” The Devil taps the blunt end of the pen against Johnny’s temple. “You make music even in your dreams.”
“You can listen to my dreams?” Johnny asks. He’s not sure how he feels about that, but he’s also not sure how to say so, here in this sweet half-darkness. He can still feel the places where the Devil put his hands; they keep sending little shocks of pleasure through him every time he shifts. “Not sure how I feel about that.”
“Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about it. I hear your song wherever you go,” the Devil says absently.
Johnny’s breath stutters in his chest. He stares up at the Devil for a long, long minute, but he doesn’t seem to notice, doesn’t even look up, his colorless eyes moving across the page with the pen. (The sweet, tender ache under Johnny’s breastbone flares to life, and throbs in time with his pulse.)
Johnny finally exhales, and tentatively sets his hand at the Devil’s knee, stroking the scales there with the pad if his thumb. “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”
“Mm. Are you sure—” The pen stops, and Johnny watches the Devil swallow, wet his lips with a forked tongue. “Are you sure there’s nothing you want? Nothing you would take, for…?”
“Nah, this is good,” Johnny says. He’s still stroking the Devil’s scales, and they shine faintly in the low light of the room. “I’m good.”
“That, I cannot deny,” the Devil murmurs, more to himself than to Johnny. After a few moments of comfortable silence, the Devil starts humming—it’s Johnny’s song, but different enough, stranger, that even Johnny doesn’t recognize it at the first. There’s more blue notes scattered throughout it now, whole bars that don’t sound like any kind of music Johnny’s ever heard. The Devil’s only just humming not-quite under his breath, but the sound it reverberates in Johnny’s head, through his skin; it seems to eat up the air. And there’s something...
“You can hum in four-part harmony,” Johnny realizes with a soft laugh. “All by yourself. That is some goddamn cheating .”
The Devil doesn’t stop, but a smile flickers over the corner of his mouth. (In the dusk of Johnny’s room, he really is so beautiful.)
Still laughing quietly to himself, Johnny shuts his eyes, and goes back to sleep.
.
.
.