Games Boys Play (19 page)

“Isn’t it the things we don’t do that we regret the most?” Brian tightened his grip. This thing was true, what he was saying, trite as it sounded.

Dylan gave a humorless smile. “Yeah. Well. I’m not sure that applies to play-kidnapping your best friend.”

“I think it’s covered by the same policy. Dyl.” He slid his hand down Dylan’s arm. The arm turned in his fingers, palm up. “I really don’t want to stop.” His thumb came to rest in the circle tattooed on Dylan’s wrist, the both of them looking at it. Dylan’s pulse beat just beneath Brian’s thumb—or maybe it was his own pulse. Maybe it was both their pulses, beating in sync, inside this circle.

Dylan gently lifted Brian’s thumb and slipped his wrist free.

“Why’d you go along with it anyway?” Brian asked. “I mean, we both know why
I
agreed to do it. I like being tied up so much I’ll do it myself. But why’d you do it? Have you done it before?”

“Not in years and years. It’s like I told you—cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers.” He took a hit off the cigarette, facing the railing again, looking at the building across the way. “I used to love that shit. Then we grew out of it. Started listening to music, chasing girls.” He looked at Brian. “I would have still played those games, though, if anyone else had wanted to. I guess eventually I forgot about them, you know? Aside from the occasional…I don’t know”—he waved a hand—“the occasional fantasy after seeing something in a movie or something.”

“What kind of fantasy? Like with a girlfriend or something?”

“Nah. See, that’s why I thought…you know, that we could do this. I couldn’t hit a woman anyway.” He smiled a little, an almost painful one. “She may want it and like it—like you, she may really like it—but I have a hard enough time being an asshole to
you
. Well, not being an asshole. I can do that. It’s the afterward, the second-guessing. That makes me feel like I really was an asshole.” He shook his head.

“Hey,” Brian said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Stop with the asshole shit.”

Dylan said, “The girls back then, they weren’t the bad guys—or the cops. They were the fair maidens you rescued from the bad guys. Or from the Indians, or the cowboys. Whoever. You did whatever you had to, to the
guy
, so you could save the girl. Well, that was the plan anyway.”

“You sound like it didn’t work out.”

He smiled, a better one this time. “We’d get so into our plotting and planning and one-upping each other, we’d forget there were girls we were trying to save or steal or whatever, and they’d get tired of waiting for one of us to come to the rescue and go find better things to do.”

Brian smiled at the thought of the girls tromping off, completely unnoticed by the boys with their heads together, planning.

Dylan shrugged. “It wasn’t about the girls anyway. It was about the game. And what about you? How’d you start?”

Brian drew in a long breath. “Good question.”

“Babysitter tied you up?”

“No, it was a cartoon. I don’t remember what exactly. I just remember wanting to recreate the scene. Like,
really
wanting to. I found a jump rope, but I didn’t know how to tie a knot. So it didn’t work very well.”

Dylan laughed.

“Yeah, I just laid on the ground and pretended. I used to want to be tied to the railroad tracks. I don’t remember where I saw that either. Maybe another cartoon. And then when I was old enough to tie knots— Remember how they’d have those traps in cartoons, where if someone stepped into a loop of rope,
boi-inng
, he was dragged up and hung upside down from a tree branch?”

“Sure.”

“I didn’t bother trying to figure out the trap part, but I did learn that if you tie one end of a rope around your ankles, throw it over a branch, lie down on the ground, and pull on the other end of the rope—”

“You break the branch?”

“That could happen too. What happened to me is I found out you can only lift so much of yourself by yourself. I could get my legs and hips off the ground, but no matter how much I pulled on the rope, there was no way my back and shoulders were going up.”

“I guess you hadn’t met pulleys yet.”

“It was probably a good thing. If I let go of the rope, I’d have come crashing down on my head.”

“Did you not have friends when you were a kid?”

“Yeah, but you and your friends did different things than me and mine. I’m jealous of you and your friends. You got toy guns and everything.”

“What’d you guys do?”

“Shit. What
did
we do?” Brian laughed. “
Legend of Zelda?
Street hockey. Transformers. Apparently not a lot of stuff that called for imagination. Or rope.”

“Or plastic handcuffs.”

“Those either. I did have a pair, though! I cuffed myself to a porch railing one time, at a friend’s house. I mean, he wasn’t home. His family had gone out for the day, so they weren’t answering the door, and there I was with nothing to do and a pair of handcuffs. It was only after I snapped them closed that I realized the key was back in my room.”

“Whoops,” Dylan said.

“Yeah. So that was a thrill for a couple minutes. But plastic handcuffs…even when you’re seven, they don’t really hold up.”

“No. I had a few sets that didn’t last long with our games. Bicycle chains and locks, now…”

Bicycle chains and locks
. His envy of Dylan’s childhood grew that much more. Pushing his hands in his pockets, he said, “There was this one time I was playing in a cardboard box, kind of a big, rectangular one. I’d gone in the top and pulled the flaps closed, and I was moving around inside, kind of rocking it back and forth. I rocked too hard, and it fell over, which wouldn’t have been a problem except it fell over with the flaps pushed against the foundation of the house. Again, it only took a couple minutes to get out of, but, man. The panic.
During
the panic, I was freaked out, but afterward, I just wanted to be trapped places.”

“You’re the kind of kid they changed refrigerator doors because of.”

“Probably, yeah. The kind of kid that caused them to start putting release levers on the inside of car trunks. Anyway. It wasn’t normal, so I kept my mouth shut about it.”

“So it’s pretty much always been just you by yourself.”

Brian shrugged.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, you know.”

He nodded, digging his hands deeper into his pockets. “Yeah. I know.” After a moment, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with either of us.” He bumped shoulders with Dylan. “You want something to drink?”

They headed back in and settled on the couch with beers. The shadowy areas were darker than before, the lighted area cozier.

“So what was supposed to happen, if ‘those guys’ showed up and picked me up?” Brian asked.

Dylan shrugged. “Hadn’t figured that out. I guess they were just going to sell you.”

“Why me, though?”

Dylan looked at him like he was losing his mind.

“I mean, not in real life why me, but in the story—why would I be worth selling?”

“I don’t know. Did you owe anyone money?”

“I don’t know.”

“Gambling debts? That sort of thing?”

“I don’t know. Don’t they just beat the shit out of you if you owe money? I mean, on
The Sopranos
, they muscle you into liquidating everything you can get your hands on, till you’re bled dry. So if I owed money, they’d have just sent someone here to beat the shit out of me, and he’d have walked out of here with a guitar in each hand, saying he’d be back tomorrow.”

“What about the Russians?” Dylan suggested.

“The Russian mob?”

“Yeah.”

“I think I saw a movie with Viggo Mortensen where he was in the Russian mafia.”

“Yeah, I remember that, vaguely. Maybe they—whoever they are—were kidnapping you to force you to play private shows, to bring in money to pay your debt.”

“That’s kind of lame. Like there’s a big demand for underground shows put on by just the bass player from Attack from Space?”

Dylan shrugged. “Maybe it’s not music they want you to perform.”

“Ouch.”

“Maybe there’s money in general in trafficking famous—or famous-
ish
—”

“Slightly known.”

“Slightly known musicians. All it takes is one person with money who sees a photo in a magazine or a video on YouTube and says, ‘That’s the one I want you to get for me.’”

“And then you show up at my door.”

“And then I show up at your door. And what happens to you after I pass you along to the interested buyer—” Dylan spread his hands. Not his concern or his interest.

“You’d think you’d hear about random famous-ish people disappearing.”

Dylan shrugged. “Maybe you’re not paying enough attention to the news.”

“Okay. So I was going to be packed off to some unknown buyer. Then my order was canceled.”

“Yep.”

Brian leaned against the back of the couch, pulling at his lip, thinking.

Dylan said, “Of course, that doesn’t mean someone doesn’t think there’s still money to be made off you. Just because this one buyer canceled…”

“Especially if this particular someone is frustrated with the way the people he’s been working for have been running their business?”

“That’s definitely incentive to strike out on his own.”

There was silence for a while, each of them letting that thought sink in.

When they went to speak, it was at the same time.

“Go ahead,” Dylan said.

“I was just going to say, again, that I don’t want to stop.”

“I was going to say that if we’re gonna keep doing this…” Dylan drew in a deep breath. Let it out. “Fuck. We really shouldn’t be doing this, but if we’re going to, we should look at the rules again.”

Brian grinned and sat up. “Yes.”

Dylan counted them off on his fingers. “Nothing around your neck. No handcuffs on your wrists. No maiming or killing. Anything new to add?”

“No obsessing over the worry that you’ve done something wrong.”

“Fuck off. Seriously, we’ve done this a few times now—is there anything you want to add?”

“No, seriously, you’re not allowed to obsess over that shit. If you ask me if things are fine, and I say they’re fine, the new rule is, you believe me. And vice versa.”

Dylan sighed.

“Okay, fine,” Brian said. “Online, I see a lot of people who are into humiliation, forced feminization and stuff. You know, where you’re made to wear women’s clothes and act submissive? I wouldn’t look good in fishnets and a wig—”

“Oh, come on.” Dylan put on a mock-disappointed expression.

“And I’m not particularly subservient, so, you know, if you were expecting to get me to bring you your slippers and cigarettes on my hands and knees, that isn’t going to happen.”

Dylan stretched his arms over his head, smiling. “I like a challenge. But I’m with you on the fishnets and wig. Especially with that five o’clock shadow of yours.” He rubbed his own chin.

“Right, and you’ve seen my legs. It would be ridiculous. No diapers, either. I’m not into the adult baby stuff. Cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, that’s all good. Keep it to basic guy stuff.”

“Right.”

“So.” Brian spread his hands. “That’s all I’ve got. Is that what you wanted?”

“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I like knowing where the boundaries are, even when they’re way outside what I would have even thought of. Because trust me, I wasn’t going to be buying adult diapers anytime soon.” He grinned.

Brian shrugged. “I just read other people talking about it, see it in stories. It doesn’t do anything for me. I’m not saying don’t force me to do anything—I mean, like the gag, yeah, force me to open my mouth and let you push it in. I don’t know.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know how you’re supposed to figure out which things are okay and which aren’t, but so far you haven’t stumbled on something that isn’t. I mean, I guess you just follow along the storyline: what would make sense happening with this? You know, maybe there’s a storyline that involves fishnets and a wig, where if it came down to that, I’d buy into it. Probably not diapers, though,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, you never know…but probably not.”

Dylan laughed.

“So, does that help?”

“No.” He laughed again. “No, okay, it helps some. There are still things…I don’t know which side of the line they fall on.”

Brian shrugged. “So ask.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“Do you want to turn off the light?” He was kidding—unless Dylan thought it would help.

“I want to go suck down another cigarette.”

“Go on.” He headed for the bathroom while Dylan headed for the balcony. When Brian joined him outside a few minutes later, Dylan was looking at the sky, a lazy cloud of smoke drifting away from him.

“Some people,” Brian said, “like to be put in trash cans and have garbage—like, really gross garbage, food and stuff—dumped over their heads.” He clasped Dylan’s shoulder. “I am not one of those people.”

“Good to know.”

“I
can
see the appeal, though, of being forced into a trash bin, tied up at the bottom so you can’t get out, and rolled out to the curb to wait for the garbage truck.” Crossing his arms, he cocked a hip against the railing. “Kind of the same ‘imminent danger’ thing as being tied to the railroad tracks. And you should really ask about the things you’re not sure of, while I’m still in the mood to answer embarrassing questions, because I can’t promise this will last.” Unless overturning the rocks that hid his darkest secrets was the price he had to pay to keep Dylan from putting an end to it. Then he’d answer any fucking question Dylan had.

Dylan nodded, took a drag. Contemplated the cigarette between his fingers.

Brian turned and looked off at the balconies across the courtyard.

“What would they be buying you for?” Dylan asked. “I’m not necessarily asking you to answer that question. I mean, there aren’t a lot of reasons to buy someone. ‘So you can clean their house’ probably isn’t it.”

Brian tried to keep a measured voice as he said, “Right. So. What
are
you asking?”

Dylan looked side-eyed at him, and Brian had a realization: this wasn’t how it worked. They hadn’t hashed shit out before any of the other times they’d done this. Talking about limits in general, fine, but he didn’t want to know what to expect. What would he have vetoed if he’d been asked ahead of time? So before Dylan could speak, he cut him off with, “Wait. Don’t tell me.”