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Mac recieves a nervous, mostly unintelligible call from Charlie late one Sunday afternoon, asking him to come over right away. It's a medical emergency, apparently, but there's also free pornography. Bored and with shit else to do, Mac decides hey, why not. He might need to burn his clothes after, but he likes Charlie - and porn - enough to sit in squalor now and again.
A short while later he's knocking on Charlie's apartment door, which swings open under the first rap of his knuckles. Nothing new there. He walks in and shuts the door behind him.
“Hey.”
Charlie grunts at him from the couch. He’s balled up on it, hugging his legs, watching the promised porn on a 12-inch TV set that he won in a fistfight with a homeless woman. His eyes are red-rimmed and watery. Nothing new there, either.
Mac invites himself to sit down, spreading out on the dirty cushions.
"What's up?"
Charlie turns to him.
“Y’know that time Frank said he pretended to have leprosy so that he could go and beg on the streets and get money to spend at the dog track?”
“Yeah?” says Mac uncertainly. Charlie is peering at him closely, his eyeballs starting out of his face like two mad pink marbles.
“D’you think he was pretending? To not have leprosy, I mean. Because I think I have it. I think I have leprosy.”
“Show me.”
Charlie rolls up the bottom of his sweater to reveal his doughy white stomach.
“Charlie, you've just got bran flakes stuck to you.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t eat them!”
Mac swipes the cereal out of Charlie’s hand so that it falls on the floor.
“You asshole!”
“It’s for your own good.”
Mac sits back while Charlie irritably stuffs an open bottle of Wite-Out up one nostril, inhaling wetly. A rising cacophony of tinny moaning and squealing radiates from the TV set.
“D’you have a boner yet?” says Mac conversationally.
“Naw.”
“Me neither. This TV is balls, man. I’ve seen bigger postage stamps. We might as well be watching ants fucking.”
“It was free. Quit whining.”
Mac takes in the scratches on Charlie’s face where the homeless woman tried to claw his eyes out, and decides to change the subject.
“So, uh, how’s it going with the waitress?”
“Great, really great,” replies Charlie earnestly.
“I see you’ve been busy cutting out pictures of her face over there.” Mac gestures to the scissors and the haphazard pile of clippings sat in a clear space amongst the trash on the coffee table.
“Oh, yeah.” Charlie picks up the nearest face and carefully applies a piece of sticky tape to the top. It’s a pretty picture, not a candid, most likely from a professional portrait.
“Where did you get these from?”
“Her apartment.”
“She gave them to you?”
“She left her window open. I would say that was a pretty clear invitation.”
“Uh-huh.”
Charlie rises from the couch and crosses over to the TV, where he reverently sticks the waitress’s face over the head of a blonde enthusiastically taking it doggy-style.
“Okay,” he says, straightening up, sounding pleased with himself.
“Okay,” echoes Mac slowly.
Charlie stoops over the coffee table again and holds up a dog-eared Victoria’s Secret catalogue, flipping through the pages for Mac. The majority of the models also have the waitress’s face pasted over them.
“Creative,” says Mac.
“It’s a work in progress,” concedes Charlie modestly.
“So have you dropped the three-word bomb on her yet?” ribs Mac, grinning.
Charlie looks at him quizzically, dropping the catalogue so that he can slowly count to three on one hand, mouthing each number.
“‘I-want-sex?’”
“No, Charlie.”
“‘I-can-make-furballs’.”
“That’s four.”
“‘Nude-spaghetti-fight’.”
“No.”
“Well, what?”
“‘I-love-you’!”
Charlie immediately crumples onto the couch, blushing furiously. Despite the fact that he smells like a gypsy cab and is as high as a kite, the sight of a lovestruck Charlie is adorable as hell.
“I need to get laid,” mutters Mac desperately through gritted teeth, still grinning.
“No, I haven’t said it,” Charlie laments, pressing his palms over his pink cheeks. “But I know that if I think ‘I love you’ hard enough, over and over again, my brain will transmit to her brain and she’ll get the message. I just hope that she doesn’t start wearing tinfoil hats. Then I’m done for.”
“It’ll happen,” reassures Mac, patting Charlie’s bare leg. It is not the time for Mac to be noticing that Charlie is sat wearing only a hole-riddled sweater and a pair of y-fronts, but he notices anyway, and doesn’t know what to think when the pain of prolonged involuntary abstinence rears its horrible, sexy head.
Charlie sighs deeply, leaning back to stare dreamily at the stained ceiling.
“I just can’t stop thinking about her.”
His eyes rove down to rest between Mac’s legs. “Hey!” he says, and the rictus grin fades from Mac’s face when he realises what Charlie is looking at. “I think it’s starting to work!”
They both turn back to the porno, where the change of scene means that the waitress’s face is now attached to a man’s rippling rear end.
“And look, me too!” crows Charlie, stuffing a hand excitedly into his y-fronts.
The waitress’s face drops off the screen altogether, as if in protest.
“Charlie, no!” cries Mac, recoiling, disgusted and helplessly turned on all at once. “Don’t beat off in front of me, Jesus!”
“Why not? This is a dude thing, right?”
“It is, maybe, but- but-”
Charlie is going pink all over, squirming a little. He’s cute. So stupidly cute. Mac’s internal struggle is clearly visible on his sweaty face, the spectral pendulum of horniness swinging indecisively between fuck or flight.
“Would you do something for me, Mac?” says Charlie quickly, a fantastic idea having suddenly gripped him, drawing his soft little legs up onto the couch, kneeling next to him. Another waitress face quivers in his one free hand. He holds it up, levels it with Mac’s head, and squints.
“Oh, hell no. This is sick.”
“Please.”
Mac considers, still crushed against one side of the couch like a cornered animal. It’s been too long. And he wants Charlie; or at least, his dick is telling him that him he does. And Charlie wants him, too, in some weird capacity. He’s scraped the bottom of barrels deeper than this.
“Ugh, all right,” he says at last, defeated. Charlie beams, tossing away the clipping and flinging one leg over so that he can sit in his lap. His butt wiggles eagerly against Mac’s knees.
“Okay, okay, so you’re the waitress.”
“Right,” says Mac, exasperated, needing this to be over very, very quickly.
“Can you do voices?”
“No.”
“Well then, can you say things like, things like, ‘don’t touch me’ and ‘you stink’ and ‘get bent’, like she does? All bossy like?”
“You’re into that?”
Charlie shrugs, suddenly bashful. Okay, so maybe Mac could get used to this after all.
“Just touch me and says those kinda things.”
“Roger that.”
Mac hooks his fingers into the off-white y-fronts and pulls them down just a little, slowly. Charlie makes a low, interested noise, fidgeting against his thighs. His skin is clammy. Mac stares around the room, makes sure the blinds are down and that the chain is on the front door; and then, unable to put it off any longer, grasps him with a weary sigh. Charlie tenses up, his chin dipping against his chest. His small hands wander blindly up Mac’s torso, giving his pecs an exploratory feel-up.
“Your tits aren’t big enough,” he says mournfully.
“Use your imagination, shitstick.”
“Fine, fine.”
Charlie seems to give up on the tit idea pretty fast, and opts instead to rest his hands on Mac’s shoulders. “Come on,” he says impatiently. “Say something. Pretend to be her.”
“Err… oh, Charlie, you’re so big… um…”
“That was total shit. You can do better than that!”
Mac fights the urge to slap him upside the head. “I’m the one doing you a favour! You have two choices: either shut up, or I’ll leave you to jerk off alone amongst the garbage like the pathetic loser you are.”
“Oh yeah,” says Charlie, perking up. “That’s good.”
“Really?”
Charlie squeezes his eyes shut, leaning into him. “Yeah. More.”
Mac looks over Charlie’s shoulder, searching for inspiration. The ugly dude in the porno is dishing out dirty talk of his own. “You’re filthy,” he growls, sweat shining on his bushy upper lip.
“You’re filthy,” Mac parrots, going square-eyed at the screen while Charlie twitches and makes a weird, constricted noise.
The volume of the porn is right up. A neighbour slaps open-palmed against the opposite wall.
“I want you to f-f-fuck me,” says Charlie in a strangled voice. Mac stares at him. He should have known that Charlie was a kinky little shit.
“I won’t fuck you unless you take a bath,” Mac scoffs, partially breaking character while he wishes belatedly that he’d put on the gloves he uses for washing dishes before deciding to touch Charlie anywhere.
“Okay,” sighs Charlie, oblivious, “I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you want.”
Mac smiles despite himself.
“Can I touch you, too?” asks Charlie suddenly, and Mac’s attention turns from the girl snarling lustily at him from the TV to Charlie in his lap, who is now gazing at him sweetly, chewing on his lower lip.
“Okay,” Mac says simply, disarmed.
“Thank you.”
This whole thing is some bizarro shit, but it’s really good bizarro shit, thinks Mac, letting Charlie unbutton and unzip him. He could make a habit out of this; watching bad porn off of stolen cable while Philadelphia drones behind the blinds and Charlie presses close to him, rubs off on him.
Charlie is making the sweetest little noises, like a kitten falling face-first into its first bowl of cream. It’s so precious he thinks he’s going to puke. Charlie’s fingernails are biting into the nape of his neck now. Mac blinks the sweat out of his eyes and lets his head fall back. Things are getting hazy. It’s good, very very good, and Mac takes back ever wanting this to be over at all.
“Kiss me,” hisses Charlie.
“Fuck off,” grunts Mac as Charlie tries to lean in, twisting out of the other’s trajectory while grabbing two greedy handfuls of ass. “Since when did you last clean your teeth?”
“Since I ate three packets of Junior Mints yesterday.”
“Really, Charlie? Really?”
It’s getting harder to speak. Mac gives up altogether, out of breath. Charlie jerks against him artlessly, looking at him through his eyelashes while gnawing at his bottom lip furiously, the furrows in his brow and the pinkness of his cheeks getting deeper with each passing second. The porno over his shoulder is reaching its own sweaty, undignified crescendo, and the sounds of their frenzied efforts begin to mingle with the disembodied moaning that fills the tiny, hot room.
Charlies reaches down and curls a hand around them both, holds on tight, his free hand bunching in the fabric of Mac’s collar. Mac pants through his nose, kisses Charlie’s scratchy cheek without thinking. “Oh God,” he breathes, suddenly panicked, overwhelmed, “oh God, oh God. I’m going to, um- God-”
“I love you,” gasps Charlie, and the moment leaves no room for Mac to be confused or horrified - he holds Charlie very tightly instead, and shuts his eyes, and says in his ear oh baby, I love you too - and then, and then - oh, almost -
It’s over.
The minutes pass. At length Mac awkwardly unwinds his arms from around Charlie’s middle, and Charlie slides gradually out of his lap, back to sitting on his side of the couch. There’s a strange, stunned silence between them.
The porn is finished, the closing shot of the actors laughing and joking together like some weird naked parody of an ending of Murder She Wrote.
“Thanks,” says Charlie.
“You’re welcome,” says Mac. He swallows, throat clicking. “I’m curious; at what point did you forget I was the waitress?”
“I didn’t,” says Charlie distantly, “I was thinking about her the entire time.”
“Uh-huh. So in your fantasy, the waitress has a wang and jizzes all over your sweater.”
“I guess so.”
“Well, I’m glad I could help,” says Mac, feeling slightly bitter without knowing why.
Charlie smiles, wiping dried correction fluid off his nose with the back of his sleeve.
“I’m going out,” announces Mac, getting up and glumly stuffing himself back into his pants. He stumps over to the door. “You want me to get anything?” He has no real intention of fulfilling any of Charlie’s requests.
“No, but if you see the waitress, could you tell her I said hi?”
“Right,” says Mac, and slams the door behind him.
Charlie listens to Mac’s footsteps retreating down the hall. He picks up the catalogue once more. “I love you," he tells each page. "I love you, I love you, I love you."
Down on the street, Mac winds his way towards the convenience store, mouthing along to something in his head, a new mantra if you will - hoping that somehow it'll reach as high as that ratty old apartment, hopes that Charlie’s brain will receive it, loud and clear.