Cheap motels aplenty littered the edge of Greentown. Austin kept driving. He told the nav AI what he wanted and it piloted him there.
And while the low prefab buildings and neighborhoods slid by him, he tried not to think of anything—not Roan, not Grayson, and definitely not fucking JT. But you know how that works and he couldn’t think of anything else.
So, yeah, what had he expected when he showed up two years out of nowhere? Had he really expected JT to drop his jeans right there and bend over ready for him?
Well, yeah. Kinda, he had.
What Austin’d expected: JT bent facedown over the Corvette’s endless black hood; tight green ass thrust out over the fender for Austin to take; those heavy, swollen nuts ripe to blow; cock shoved straight down so Austin could see the skin-covered head of it leaking in streams. And a few centimeters above all of that: muscle-tight cheeks spread just enough to show JT’s little puckered hole, just a bit pink, glossy with spit and twitching, daring Austin to open him up.
Well, it wasn’t that crazy a thought, now was it? He’d brought him a damn car, after all.
The district was called Party Town for obvious reasons. He found a good parking space, street side, only a few blocks away from the bar, and that was fine because the walk would do him good.
Only a handful of humans or elves, but there were orcs everywhere, orcs going in, orcs coming out, crowds leaving restaurants, queuing for clubs, jaywalkers, street musicians, panhandlers. Bumper-to-bumper cars crawling along, taillights on and off, headlights flaring.
From the sidewalk, he fingered the car key (old-fashioned, not having any of the tech JT had) and popped the code on the security. Blue plasma arced over the Corvette and kept arcing like Borealis. Everyone slowed and gawked because it was just that pretty to watch. Just as pretty as Austin himself. Someone muttered, “Asshole,” jealous as fuck. Austin ignored them all, hands in his pockets. He sauntered along, small smug grin, their envy an aphrodisiac. Ignored the hate.
The buildings here were low, two stories, and their windows were filled with holo-adverts and the air with a riot of overlapping noise. Somewhere a band played; he could feel the vibrating bass in the air. He wove through the crowd. Orc women (always punk haircuts, small-breasted, and built like world-class weight lifters) gave him a flick of their gaze, licked lips and tusks, and turned their heads back to their men slowly, letting them know they’d lost their attention to an elf.
In one window he saw Roan: big-ass hazy crown of her afro, points of her ears sticking through, broad white smile against the brown of her face, butterflies in her hair. He stumbled, shocked.
But it was only an advert, and it wasn’t her anyway. It couldn’t be her. Roan had been dead two years.
Shouldn’t it have stopped after two years? Sure, right afterward, he’d thought he saw her everywhere, sure, right afterward. But now? Shouldn’t this have stopped, not grown even more common, nearly every day; common enough he worried he was going insane?
JT had told him to let her go, but he couldn’t do that. How could he? And how could JT have even asked Austin to let her go? She’d loved JT too. Loved him like a brother.
Austin saw half glimpses of her everywhere. Every dark-skinned woman with an afro became Roan. Every butterfly became the holo-decoration Roan had worn. He had gone insane, hadn’t he? And he watched the advert loop and loop again. But it still wasn’t Roan no matter how many times he watched it.
He knew the distraction he needed. There was the nightclub. Those orcs there, they’d clear his head. They’d appreciate him the way JT refused to.
The queue rippled when Austin’s glamour brushed it. Noses flared, chests puffed, arms crossed, and muscles flexed. Every one of those men struck some pose to say they weren’t to be fucked with and black eyes tracked him.
The bouncer at the door glittered with sex the way bouncers always did, like the job came with a glamour all its own. He wore a black T-shirt that said STAFF in what was meant to be block letters, except all the muscle underneath warped the letters out of shape. Austin ignored him, walked past, and that earned him a big green hand square in the middle of his chest.
“Felt your glamour a half a block away.” STAFF had a broken brick of a nose, like a cartoon mafia thug. It was a good look for an orc, and Austin wondered if he’d paid for it or if he’d been one of the lucky ones. (JT’s nose was as button as a Gerber baby’s. Or so Austin would have thought if he’d let himself think about JT.) “You’re trouble is what you are, and we don’t need that here.”
Austin cocked his head, puzzled, like that couldn’t be true. “Ain’t never been anyplace that didn’t need a little trouble now and again.”
STAFF leaned into Austin. He had good long tusks, the kind that made people joke about big hands and feet. He leaned in so close he almost grazed the skin of Austin’s neck, so close Austin thought the orc was gonna kiss him or what passed for a kiss when you had tusks in the way. His brick-shaped mafia nostrils flared. They said the smell of fear was to an orc like seventy-percent chocolate or oysters or pomegranates was to everyone else. STAFF didn’t smell anything but Ralph Lauren. “Not the crazy-fucker kind of trouble. The kind that don’t know when they should run.”
“I never run.” Austin took the hand off his chest. That hand was thick and heavy. He missed the pressure of it when it was gone.
He walked on past. STAFF didn’t stop him. Wasn’t an orc in that queue who complained.
“If I have to come for you—” STAFF called behind him, but Austin didn’t hear the rest of the promise.
It was an orc-only club in an orc ghetto-town lit for orc eyes, which meant hardly no lights at all, their eyes better than elves’. Strobes flickered, barely candlelight. Red and burnt orange washed the walls indirectly and made a hellish backdrop to the hulking silhouettes of a few hundred orcs, like this was the end of that remake of Apocalypse Now that had scared the shit out of everyone. The place smelled of orc-sweat and orc-sex so strongly the AC couldn’t clear it. Most elves couldn’t stand that smell. To Austin it was rich and sour like overturned earth, cured leather, leaf rot, and day-old gym shorts. It was incense, and this kind of place here was as close as Austin ever got to church.
Over the last two years, he’d come to places like this sometimes: orc-only bars where he’d stir up trouble. He’d pick a big one, one that looked like he could hurt Austin, and Austin would fuck him in the corner, or in the alley, or sometimes if he was drunk or high enough, he’d let them take him home and they’d make a whole night of it. (He only did that when he thought about JT. Like he wasn’t doing now.)
Look at those orcs around him: shirtless, T-shirts tucked in belts, sweat-sheen-polished malachite muscle chests, biceps bound in straining bands, cocks and nuts bound up tight in jeans and leather just waiting for an excuse to bust. That one there: a full set of four tusks a good ten centimeters long flashed under strobe light. That one: ten kilos of spiked body piercings glittered. That one: arms big around as Austin’s waist and crawling with bio-phosphorescent tattoos. And all of their eyes steamed red, hopped up on whatever party drug was in vogue this week. They’d eat Austin alive.
Well, that was the plan, wasn’t it?
The bartender bought Austin’s beer for him the way bartenders always did. Austin pressed through the crowd—back to back, chest to chest, cock to ass—and left a wake of unfocused lust behind him.
You wouldn’t think orcs could dance, would you, but they danced like you imagined they did now that you’ve imagined it: frantic like a mosh pit, packed in so tight they were slick with one another’s sweat. Austin circled around them, keeping distant because his glamour would turn that frenzy violent like a spark on gasoline. He kept to the cramped side spaces: places to talk if you didn’t mind shouting, places to grope if you didn’t mind an audience.
In one corner five younger orcs huddled tightly together, no gaps in the small circle they made of their bodies, intense and private, nothing but backs and bowed heads. They were jerking each other off, Austin knew. He stood at a table and watched them and wondered what they’d do with his glamour once they felt it.
A minute was all it took, and then their heads turned up and the five of them looked at one another more greedily than before, eyes all smoldering, and by some unspoken set of cues they picked one of the five—the littlest one, it always was—and shoved him down onto his knees amid them and the circle closed. Lucky little orc got to help out his friends. (The way JT should have done.) Austin smiled, proud of himself, like he was some rogue cupid who’d just made a match.
A heavy hand dropped onto his shoulder. “You’re a public menace. It’s time for you to go.” It was STAFF. No surprise. Austin had known from the first touch, that hand on Austin’s chest, that STAFF would be the one. Austin let STAFF steer him toward the door, knowing they’d never make it that far. He’d seen the orc’s eyes. They’d gone orange like they reflected candlelight from somewhere, but there were no candles. (JT’s would have gone orange with windblown sparks.)
And they didn’t make it that far. They made it three meters. STAFF spun Austin to face him, backed Austin hard into a wall, and pinned him there with his big hands on Austin’s shoulders. A lifetime of drawing a twenty-kilo bow and those hands still covered Austin’s shoulders.
STAFF was a good-looking orc—strong nose and jaw and brow, everything about him strong—and the candle-fire in his eyes danced crazy, deep in Austin’s glamour. He dragged his tusks across the skin of Austin’s neck. He nipped and pulled at flesh until it snapped free of his teeth. There’d be marks tomorrow. (Good. Marks would make JT know what he’d missed.) “Maybe I should teach you when to run,” STAFF said.
He took Austin’s hand and guided it to his crotch and the hard ridge that strained beneath black denim. Tusks grazed Austin’s neck again, up his throat into the soft underside of Austin’s chin, so he had to tilt his head back or be hurt. (JT’s tusks weren’t so long.) The orc sucked at Austin’s Adam’s apple, warm tongue, hot breath smelling faintly of spearmint. (JT didn’t chew gum.)
Austin threaded fingers through the orc’s hair, longer like younger orcs wore theirs and sticking out every which way, orc bedhead. He ran his hand over the fabric covering STAFF’s cock. (JT’s jeans would have been damp, not dry.) STAFF was orc sized, nothing special. (JT was anything but.) Austin felt a hard loop at the tip of him. He undid STAFF’s jeans and pulled the orc’s dick free. He was cut and had a Prince Albert, so Austin tugged on it good and sharp like what it was meant for. STAFF bowed his head and pressed his forehead against Austin’s chin. He sighed shakily.
“Why don’t you get on your knees and suck me off,” Austin said into the leaf-shaped, leaf-colored ear near his lips.
“No, we should go to my place.”
“No, right here.”
“I work here.”
“So everyone will know you sucked off an elf. And everyone will wonder who he was.”
Austin stroked the orc’s tusks with his thumb because he knew they liked that. What did that feel like? Not like having your teeth rubbed, he didn’t think. He ran his tongue along it. With his other thumb, he rubbed the bare head of the orc’s cock and played with the piercing. (JT needed a piercing like that. Imagine what that’d look like hidden under all that foreskin. JT needed a half-dozen piercings like that.)
STAFF raised his fire-glazed eyes to Austin. “This is elf magic what you’re doing to me, ain’t it? This is your glamour messing with my head.”
“Elf magic,” Austin agreed.
“This ain’t me.”
“Nope. You got no choice,” Austin agreed, happy to lie. A glamour amplified and elaborated; it didn’t create. But some people needed an excuse to misbehave, and Austin liked being an excuse to misbehave.
So STAFF sank to his knees. Orcs around them made space. STAFF fumbled at Austin’s belt and khakis. Austin unbuttoned his flowered shirt. He spread his legs as far as his fallen trousers would allow, clasped his hands behind his head, stretched, and leaned back against the wall. His shirt fell open. Hairless skin glared white. He grinned out at his admirers, perfect foxy V smile, as STAFF’s lips closed around his cock. There. Warm and snug. This was how it was supposed to be.
Here’s the Monet of it: Pale chest crisscrossed with paler scars, pale ears through mussed dark hair, a backdrop of darkness and fire. STAFF on his knees worshipping Austin’s perfect cock—a block of dark green blotted out by dark clothes, STAFF in white letters so contrasting, they glowed. A gray clearing around the two of them. Then their audience: hulking shadows all square shoulders and sharp spikes against hell lights, paired dots of glowing red eyes. Six pairs. A dozen. Two dozen, as more turned to watch.
The thunder of music seemed to dim until everyone could hear the squelch of spit as STAFF sucked. Austin fed on their attention, need, lust, and envy, some of it for Austin, some for STAFF, some for both of them and couldn’t decide if they’d rather be the elf or the orc.
“Is that Mikey?” one said.
“Shit, that’s Mikey.”
“Look at that.”
“Who’s the elf?”
Mikey, Austin thought. (It was JT’s name they should have been saying.)
One hand drifted down, fingers ready for the sharpness of JT’s close-cut sides, ready for the snapping bristle of the hair under his thumb, ready for it against his nuts, but found STAFF’s shaggy head instead. So his hand went elsewhere, where it wouldn’t remind him whose mouth he wasn’t fucking.
He twisted at his own nipple, dug nails into it like they were orc teeth. (Too blunt, too soft, too shallow by far.) One of the orcs watching stepped forward to help. Mikey gave him a stay-the-fuck-back kind of look. The orc did. (JT would have growled. JT’s eyes would have blazed. They’d have steamed. And every damn orc in that room would have stepped back, not just the one. JT would have made sure they all knew Austin’s body was his and no one else’s to touch.)
“Hey, Mikey, what’s he taste like?”
“I hear elves taste like blueberries.”
“I hear they taste like chicken.” Orc laughter rumbled like too much bass.
Orc dentata: thirty-four teeth. Tusks between the lower canines and first bicuspid: three to ten centimeters in length. First bicuspid: one to three centimeters in length. Typically only the tusks protrude from the lips when the mouth is closed. Upper canines, sometimes called fangs, two centimeters in length, a distal gap to allow room for the tusks to grow through. There was no reason to believe that orcs had evolved. There had only been orcs for a generation and a half. But evolutionary biologists said those teeth were made to hold and tear big meat.
They scraped Austin’s cock, jabbed at his thigh, and caught the skin of his balls, tiny jolts of pain to contrast against the soft, smooth warmth of STAFF’s lips and tongue. Austin watched the orc suck. He was good. He knew how to use his tongue. One big hand held Austin’s thigh for support. The other squeezed and pulled at his own pierced cock.
That cock would look good fucking JT. Maybe he had. This wasn’t a JT kind of place—a JT kind of place had pool tables that people used for playing pool—but Greentown was small enough, so it could be that STAFF and JT had met somewhere.
He thumped STAFF on the temple to get his attention. “You ever fuck an orc named JT?”
STAFF shrugged and shook his head, and a tusk jabbed at Austin.
“You should,” Austin said.
Yes, Mikey should. Mikey should slide that nice pierced cock into JT, seed him up good and slick, make JT ready so Austin could show them all how JT was really meant to be done. How you worked JT open. How you had to hold him down so he didn’t thrash so much.
“You can crash on the couch.”
No. That wasn’t the thought to be having now, not while all these orcs watched Austin take their doorway hero in the mouth. He pulled STAFF’s head down on him and the warmth of STAFF’s mouth took everything Austin had.
“I’ll get you some blankets.”
So now JT had his own bed (not one rented or stolen, but a bed all his own), his own house, his own job, and his own kid protégé, and Austin wasn’t welcome.
No, don’t think about JT. Think about this orc here. This perfectly good orc right here where JT should have been.
His hands knotted in hair that was too long and held STAFF down on him so tusks dug in deep. Well, fuck you, JT. Here’s what you’re fucking missing. It could have been you here on your knees with my cock deep down your throat. It could have been you these orcs were dreaming of. You they were hating jealous hate for. You they’d fight over when the fighting broke out (because fighting always broke out). Instead I’ll fuck all these orcs here, one after another, and the lucky ones can tell their friends it tastes like goddamn strawberries.
He pulled STAFF off him. Except STAFF wasn’t gasping for air the way Austin had meant for him to. Austin had gone soft.
Goddamn JT. This was all his fault.
“What’s wrong?” STAFF said, Austin’s pretty dick in his hand, trying to knead it back to life.
“I stole him a fucking Corvette, for Christ’s sake! What the hell else does he want?”
STAFF stopped stroking. “You stole a Corvette?”
Austin blinked. It was like someone had turned on the lights and all the magic of the place had been banished. Look at them all: dressed to intimidate, pierced to the nines. And not a one of those orcs looked as good as JT, not even Mikey the Doorman. And for all their pretending—all their piercings and patterned scars and tattoos and leather—not a one of them would be anywhere near as dangerous to fuck as JT was. And Mikey the Doorman on his knees with Austin’s cock in his hand . . . he was probably just a nice down-home guy, and who wanted one of those? Those were a dime a baker’s dozen. None of these orcs would feel as good as JT would. And one, or two, or a score of them, it wouldn’t scratch the itch he had now that he’d seen JT again, now that the memories of him weren’t two-years dimmed.
“You stole a Corvette?”
“Borrowed,” Austin said. “Bought. I mean bought. I bought him a Corvette. Like rich people do. I’m rich.”
“You know, if he’s your boyfriend or something and you two need a third—”
“He ain’t my goddamn boyfriend.”
“What is he, then?”
Well, how the hell was Austin supposed to know what JT was? What kind of dumb-ass question was that? He pulled his dick out of the orc’s hand and tucked it back in his khakis. “He’s just a stupid orc.”
STAFF looked confused and hurt. The candlelight in his eyes had died out, and Austin felt a bit guilty. “Look, it’s not you; it’s me.” Austin winced because that sounded shitty. “You were right. I shouldn’t have come here.” He shook his head in frustration and started for the door.
The worked-up audience tried to stop him. Hands dropped on him, black nails dug into his shirt and grabbed at his belt.
“You ain’t just walking off,” one said.
“Gotta finish what you started,” another said.
“You ain’t leaving till we’re done.”
He gave them that look: the cold, dead one that came from years of lying and killing, being lied to and betrayed. He said, “Don’t make this hard.”
And every damn one of them let go and stepped back.
To Mikey, still on his knees, Austin pitched, “You want a good fuck, you find JT and tell him Austin sent you.”
Out in the cool night, he gave one last glance to the window holo with its advert that wasn’t Roan. Tomorrow, everything would start to make sense. It would all come together and the world would be made right, just like it had been back then. He slid into the car he had stolen for JT and headed out of town, out into the desert where he belonged and should have gone to begin with.