This is a sort of prequel/companion to "Faeries". I was thinking of {sort of} the same characters in this. Just tossing it in here just because. And that's it. Hope someone gets a kick out of this stuff and your eyes don't gloss over bored.

"The Quiet Ones"

I don't know why I had gone to the club. I don't belong in those places. I don't belong in places where people are young and hip. Hip? Does anyone even say that anymore? I'm too young even to use a word like 'hip'. I have many words, but they all fail me when I'm as out of place as this.

All around me are young bodies. They look mature, but lithe and young. Some are vacant. Vacant stares, drug induced openness that waits only to be filled. I am not like them. I sip on a drink, but only for something to do. I am out of place. Painfully so. I wear my ordinary, everyday clothes. Jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket. They are acceptable clothes. Somehow I manage to wear them so they make me look like a refuge from the 1950s. I don't even have a hot rod. I rode my feet to this place. My apartment's not far away. I pass here all the time and I never come in. Tonight, for some reason, I felt impelled to stop. To wait in the long line alone. I didn't think the doorman would let me in, or perhaps I wouldn't even have tried. But he did. I wonder if it's because they have a nerd quota, or perhaps I'm just so nondescript his eyes couldn't even take me in.

I'm thankful for my invisibility now, here at the edge of the room, at the edge of everything. No one seems to even notice me. I am not, as I might be in some places, a target. No, here I am not even worthy of notice. These are people with a purpose. To be somewhere else, to do something else, and they have a time limit. Dawn. The creatures of the night ignore the day creature lost and confused in their midst.

All except one. He sees me and I see him. We have a 'moment'. Shit, that sounds ridiculous, but I don't know how else to put it. The moment itself is even more ridiculous than my word for it: I catch his eyes, and, I can't be certain but I suppose my jaw dropped open. His eyes fixed on mine. A bright, clear otherworldly blue they are, his eyes. They are not vacant. But they wait to be filled, to be dived into. You could swim in his eyes. They turn from piercing to laughing in one beat of my heart. His mouth opens. A belated laugh, noiseless over the din of the music. Then he turns, returning his attention to his dance partner, a pretty girl who looks wan and wanting. She's sweaty and bedraggled from the hunt for him. She woos him with her hips and eyes. They state the obvious. She is wanting. She is willing. I get the impression he is clean, some how unaffected and uninfected by her wanting. She is not his quarry. She won't get what she wants from him. They whirl around and are lost in the crowd.

I sink further out. Further away. I creep through the people like I'm tiptoeing through a forest. I avoid cracking the branches. I try not to get scratched by the thorns. I don't want the wild things to smell my fear. Fear? No. Disappointment. I want to be one of them. I do. I want to be a beautiful thing, wanted, desired. I want to hunt and be hunted. But no. I am only some drab anthropologist, sitting on the sidelines with a crooked smile. Put me behind a lawnmower in the hot June sun and I'm the boy next door. Invite me in for a drink, Mrs. Robinson. I'm younger and older than them all at once. And they are the same to me. I'll never be like them. My youth will fade. I'll never be the hunter or the hunted. I will watch, and grow gray. I will find some kind of solace in my solitude. The lack of drama in my life. The dullness of it fuels the words on the page. Maybe someday, someone will read what I've written and wonder just what goes on inside the quiet ones.

I order myself another drink. Something hard and straight. There's lots of that going around in this place. I am neither. The drink will have to suffice. The amber colored liquid goes down my throat hot. It makes me gasp. It revives me enough to stay standing a bit longer. To stay here and inoculate myself against this place and these people. Then, then next time I walk by here, I can say, "Been there, done that." I won't have to wonder. I will have my fill of this sort of life. I'll rest assured that it's not for me. I'll go home to my books. The ones I consume like water and wine. The ones I write. The words I pad my life with. The insulation of my soul.

"You have a nice smile," he says. I turn to look. He is talking to me. Words fail me. I stammer something. Thanks? My crooked, tight little smile flashes at him.

"You do too," I say. He does. He smiles with a sort of wide-openness that does not fit his face. His face - his face is as otherworldly as his eyes. If I write him - if, no, when; I know I will write him - he will be an elf. A fairy. A sidhe. He will be beautiful and ugly, male and female, old and young. Eternal. Dangerous and safe.

What is it he sees in my eyes? He gazes intently at me. The same flat blue stare as he did before. When we had our 'moment'. Then the eyes go mischievous again. The smile widens into a gaping laugh. I'm riveted by those eyes for a moment. Then I blush and look away. Whatever other words I have in me are caught in my throat. They are trapped. Constricted. Everything in me feels it is pulling inward. My breath is trapped in me. My heartbeat catches on itself.

He leans over. He has long dark hair. It's tucked behind his ears. A few strands escape and tickle my face as he whispers in my ear.

"Do you want to get out of here?" he asks. His voice drips like honey. I nod. I nod an eager child's nod. A child ready for an excursion to some new, strange playground. I gulp down my drink. He leans back, sitting down on a barstool, waiting for me to finish. He leans an elbow on the bar. I amuse him. He smiles. Not the wide open smile, but a small, tight, halfway smile, a little like my own. He looks childlike, feminine. He chews a nail, as if he were nervous, but I suspect he is not. If I could hear his heart, would it be a steady beat? A strong undercurrent, like the thump of the music? Mine is a top, wobbling, spinning out of control. I feel numb. I am my heart galloping along. I am my lungs holding a breath of stale air, I am my stomach, fiery warm from the alcohol and tightly clamped down on itself. Everything else is numb. Hands feet cock lips. My eyes are stuck on him. I can only see him. My vision dims and he is the only light I can see.

I can tell a laugh is in him. It tickles him from the inside. His smile twitches at the corner. He reaches up to brush his hair back. Behind the cover of his forearm the smile flexes itself. A muscle contracting so it can fully relax. The gesture finished, the smile is gone. I'm reminded of a mime, wiping the smile off their face. His mouth is serious now. As serious as his pink pouty lips can be, when they are itching to laugh. Or fuck. At least, that's what I'm hoping for.

Some of the sensations in my body come back. The heat of the drink rushes through my blood, fills my cock. This dislodges the words, the breath caught in my throat. I clear my throat of the last of the searing alcohol. I swallow nothing.

"Are you ready to go?" he asks.

All I can do is nod. He leaves, weaving his way through the crowd. They part before him. Not much, but enough to permit him to pass relatively unscathed. He's part of this thing. This entity of the young and very much alive. It's a living thing. An ocean. An organism. He passes through it like an atom, a cell of the whole, on its way to perform it's appointed task. I think for a moment I am a cancer, and he is a t-cell. He will wrap around me and consume me. I want to die and be digested. I want to live here, if only as some spark of energy. If only as what's left of my dying. My quiet life of words seems inadequate. At this moment I am one of them, even if it's only a trick to lure out the unsuspecting mutation. The thing that shouldn't be.

Why do I think these things? Why do I think at all? It is only a confused mass of words and feeling that can't get out. The whole night has been right and wrong. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be doing this. I am not like them. He can't want me.

He heads to the door, leaving a trail for me to follow. I am pulled along in his wake. He looks back once to make sure I am following. His eyes catch mine. They aren't laughing anymore. They make silent promises. He smiles. He smiles as you'd smile at a stray dog you wanted to feed. Reassuring. I hurry to catch up with him. The crowd lets me through and then closes the path behind me. There's no going back. And I don't want to.

I am a hungry stray and I am starving.

My apartment is nothing. My car is nothing. We pass it by, as we walk the few blocks from the club to my tenement.

"That's my car," I point it out. It's a '78 Volkswagen Rabbit. It has a top cruising speed of about 45 miles per hour. It goes forever on a tank of gas. Diesel, I should say. It lets you know what it prefers for fuel by generously belching out tainted smoky fumes. We have an agreement: I walk, and it leaves me in peace.

"Uh huh," my new friend says. He seems grateful to be on his feet.

My apartment is also a random thing. I feel dissociated from it. It's a leftover from a roommate. She left and I didn't. We were lovers, for what it's worth, which isn't much. An apartment full of furniture. Broken down, secondhand furniture. It's the bits and pieces of her cast off life, and the lives of brothers, cousins, friends, even parents before her. I never thought of how ugly this place was until I brought him here. I don't even know his name. A nameless one is perusing my apartment, and suddenly I am filled with the desire to apologize because I just don't care. Or at least I didn't care until now. I'm embarrassed now to be a squatter in my own life.

I turn away from him to lock the door and take my jacket off. I turn again to take his and he's disappeared. He emerges from the bathroom and ducks into my bedroom. Now he's the anthropologist. Or maybe I should say archaeologist. My apartment resembles the ruins of a college dorm room circa 1975. Right down to the lava lamp on the TV.

"You do most of your living in here, don't you?" a bemused voice comes from my bedroom. I don't have to go in to see what he's talking about. I go anyway. I don't know whether I should be apologizing, hurrying in to scoop away my life, such as it is, or if I should be strutting in proudly. Surveying the one landscape of life I seem to have conquered. The imaginary one.

I go to my bedroom, in a manner that's something between a strut and an apologetic scurry. He's at my desk, as I thought he'd be. I have a typewriter on it. For looks, only. It's a Royal, 1920s vintage. It's keys stick up porcupine-like. A dead porcupine, feet up on a hot Texas highway. It has long since expired, long before I came by it. I like the looks of the letters, the keys. Black on white, neatly circled in green metal. My own instrument is nothing but a black box. It's silent, closed. It hardly looks like anything. Sometimes I think of it like the black box on an airplane. If I die, they will come into my apartment, and they will look for the black box of my laptop. They'll crack it open, and look for my secrets. That is, if anyone cares enough to look.

Die? Did I say die? Suicide is what I mean. I think of it, in lonely hours, walking. Walking somewhere with a purpose and walking nowhere with no purpose. In coffee shops. In the library, on red chairs, when the book on my lap fails to get my interest or the bum hiding out from the cold snores too damn loudly. But I never, ever think of it when I am writing. No, if this thing gets me - for that's what it feels like, some lean, mean spectre slipping in all the cracks in my life - if it gets me, my black box will be of no use to whomever's curious enough to read whatever I hadn't finished and printed.

In this age of electronics, I have a habit of printing whatever gets finished. I would say I finish maybe fifty percent of what I start. I like to print it out. I think it spurs me on to write more, to keep digging down to get at whatever I'm trying to say. I dig myself out of the hole I'm in by burying myself. Funny, isn't it?

My new friend doesn't seem to think so. At first he flashes me an uncertain little smile. I only shrug. I offer no explanation. He's right, of course. I do most of my living in front of that desk. Or in front of the TV, with my laptop perched on my lap. My only real living feels like it happens when I write. Everything else is just gray static. It's the noise in which the stories ferment. I trip on something in the real world and it clicks a key in the vista of my imagination. I follow the thread, never knowing where it will lead.

For once, though, life surpasses art. I though he would have turned away by now. I thought my mumbled apology that we would have to walk would have sent him elsewhere. I thought my throat-clearing, alternated with dead silence would have driven him off. But he only followed me. Followed me at my elbow, seeming lost in thoughts of his own, while I look on him in wonder. He notices my wonder at him, but it only amuses him. It's only at the edge of his awareness. Do girls look at him like this? With a sort of preteen glow in their eyes? Maybe. Maybe they look at him with lust. Or maybe the girls who dare to look at him are a heck of a lot cooler than I am. I realize I'm infatuated with him. I am as infatuated with him as I am with a phrase, a bit of poetry passing through my head in a dream, or on the subway, or in a restaurant. I scribble it with whatever I can, on whatever I can. I scratch it on my arm with a fingernail, if I have to. Such things fade. You only get these keys, these bits, in flashes. You have to grab at them. The brass ring only comes around once in a while. I grab them all. Nickel and brass alike. I've gotten good at listening for them. I've gotten good at catching them as life whirls me around once more into the tumult of everyday existence.

It occurs to me that maybe the urge to go into the club was a ring. A bit of spontaneous awareness. I have stepped into my own story. I didn't realize until now what a nerd, what a loser, what a drag I am. If you were watching a movie, you'd peg me as the killer or the pervert right away. You know, it's always the quiet ones.

He was such a nice boy. He used to cut the grass.

He reaches out and brushes his fingertips over the papers. Some are bound, some are not. Some are loose, some in folders. He thumbs the corners of a screenplay. The page numbers flash by. One hundred and twenty pages. Dialogue and action neat and purposeful. I stand here with nothing to say and nothing to do but watch him.

"James Olstander," he reads. He mouths the address as he silently reads it.

"That's here. That's you," he says. I nod.

"This is yours. All these are yours?" he asks.

"Yes," I say. Somehow it seems to me as if we're walking in a graveyard. He's come upon the graves of my dead children. He's just realized who's they are as he reads the stone. That's the tone in which his questions seem to come. Not in wonderment. Golly gee! Wow, you're a writer! Was that what I was expecting? Whatever I was expecting, I don't get it. He kneels down by the desk and casually lifts the lid off a battered old Xerox box. It's the coffin to more corpses. Bound and unbound. Covered and uncovered. A mass grave for the discarded bits of my imagination. Whole lives are lived in that box. Strangers meet. Worlds collide.

"Are you some kind of a freak, James?" he asks. The question is said with a combination of amusement, and uncertainty. He's beginning to suspect what the moviegoers have known all along. It's always the quiet ones.

I smile the crooked little smile he complimented before. If he runs, so be it. I have no right to him anyway. He's out of my league. He's from a different planet.

"Yes, I'm very freaky," I say. I shoot for an ominous tone. I raise an eyebrow for good measure. The effect this has is to render him temporarily incapacitated with a gale of laughter. I wait out the storm.

"Do you smoke?" he says.

"Only when I write," I say. I open the desk drawer and toss him an open pack. I've got a couple cartons in there. I don't like getting caught short.

"What's your name?" I ask.

"Michael," he says. He lights up the cigarette. He takes a drag off it before his hand makes a pass back through his hair, combing the unruly mass of it back off his face. He's a bit windblown and ragged from our walk home. The air was chilled. On a different day - perhaps even only a week ago - it would have been the sort of air that smelled of incipient rain. Today, the breeze had the edge of cold and the bite of impending snow. I pass him. On my way I toss the lid of the Xerox box back into place. I peek out the edge of the drawn curtains. They're drab. I swear they're dusty. How the heck do curtains get dusty? And how'd I never notice it before?

"It's snowing out," I confirm my suspicions. "Do you need a ride home? I know Jack doesn't look like much, but he's better than the subway. Or the bus."

I myself would rather walk, than take my chances with the bus or the subway. There's a particular brand of weird that hangs out in subways tunnels, and rides the bus. I walk until my feet are sore, or I strike a pact with Jack.

Jack, I say to him, get me where I'm going. Just this once. Please don't make me take the fucking bus.

"Jack?" Michael repeats me. "Oh, I get it. Jack Rabbit. Cute."

Cute. Jack Rabbit. Who the hell am I? I want to set fire to my writing and lay in it. My own funeral pyre. How stupid am I? It's a miracle I've ever gotten laid.

"Cute?" I say it aloud. The word just hits the wall of me and bounces back at him. He volleys it back.

"Yeah, cute," he says. He smiles. A half smile that threatens to open wide. It's reassuring. I smile back at him. My smile that can never hold up more that half my mouth at a time. He smiles and smokes. Internally he laughs, at some private joke. It's me, I know. I'm used to being somebody's joke. But the laugh in his eyes, that doesn't quite make it out his mouth, it doesn't bother me. There's no cruelty. Only amusement. Jack Rabbit. Cute.

He finishes the cigarette and tamps it out in the ashtray.

"You don't have much to say, do you James?" he says. I shrug. I guess I don't, I almost say. I think better of it.

"I do, but it's all in writing. Stories. Real people, uh, no. I don't know what to say to real people. Unless we're talking about writing, I guess." This is my explanation of my silence. In my head, it sounded better. In my head, it was wisdom. Life wisdom put into words. The words fail and it's just a stuttering, lonely writer giving himself absolution, a stranger bearing witness.

Michael nods solemnly, thoughtfully regarding the cigarette he's mashing into a twisted white oblivion. Then he looks up at me.

"You're cute, James. You know that, don't you?" he says. The corner of his lip twitches in amusement. I wonder, I run over my words again. A quick rewind. Did they come out right? I second guess myself. Did I accidentally stammer out something along the lines of, you're the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen. I want to fuck you. Better yet, I want you to fuck me. I want to you fuck me 'til I can't stand it anymore. I want you to fuck me 'til I scream out Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. 'Til I holler out all the names of the Apostles too. The Archangels. Raphael, Gabriel, Oriel, Michael. I want to cry out the names of everyone from Heaven and Hell and everyone in between. I want to FUCK and BE FUCKED. By YOU. Michael.

"Uhh." That's it. That's all I can manage. My knees are weak. I am hoping, with a wordless, breathless hope that cute equals Yes, James, I am going to fuck you until you beg for mercy and cry for more, all at once.

He takes a step closer to me. We're facing each other. He reaches out and puts and arm around my waist. He steps closer. We're breathing each other's air. Then he closes the distance with me. We're body to body. I am aware of every point on my body that touches him. My body presses forward into his, wanting more of him. I embrace him. He kisses me, or I kiss him. I don't really know who started it, that first kiss. I don't think it really matters, but in some way, I'd like to think it was me. Me, grabbing at, and getting, that brass ring.

The carousel spins around again. The world is a blur of noise and motion. I'm dizzy...The kiss is a river. It sweeps me away and drags me under. It dragged me under. The words that are always with me, they bob to the surface, ride the eddies, then they too are pulled under. For once in my life, there is silence instead of the endless stream of dialogue. There is nothing left but me - right here, right now in this moment.

I stand steady against the flood of this kiss. Then I drop down to my knees. I'm tugging at the button and the zipper of his pants with trembling fingers. Slowly undressing, kissing all the way down - if that was the fantasy, it's abandoned in favor of the reality. I'm on my knees. They crack on my hard, carpetless floor. My fingers aren't working quite right. He has to help me. He deftly unbuttons his pants, unzips and slips them down over his slip hips. The bones of his hips are a handhold on my reality. I lick the length of him and suck him in. He sucks his breath in. It's the wind. The wind blowing over me in this valley I've fallen into. I'm lost. I'm in a dream.

A dream. I look up. He's looking down at me. His jacket has slipped down over his shoulders. He bites his lip. He reaches out to me, cupping my head in the palm of his hand, pulling me closer with a moan of delight. He runs his fingers through my hair and pulls me in again. His touch is as soothing as a mother's. I feel like I'm sucking my first meal out of him.

I want to live, I want to breath, I want to eat, I want to fuck. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. Let me live here a while. Let me suck the sounds of pleasure out of you. Make a noise. I want to know you're alive.

"Jesus," he mumbles. I have no words. I have no breath. I have the whole of him in me. I sacrifice my breath for his pleasure. At least for a while. As long as I can. I pull back and gasp for my breath. The little sounds he's making and the fingers running through my hair make me take a breath and swallow him again. It's like diving under the river. Let me drown a little. I want to see what's on the bottom. I want to swim to the other side of the lake.

He grips my hair and pulls me away from him. I look up. Without words. I'm empty. I'm waiting for him to fill me. He pulls me over to my bed. He scoots back onto in, laying down. He pulls me along. He kisses me again. He reaches between us to unzip my jeans and push them down. He takes my cock in his hand. He strokes me and I want it, but I don't. I whimper and whine at him.

"No," I protest. I push his hand away.

"What do you want?" he whispers in my ear.

"Fuck me," I say. I bite his neck. His ear. He pulls back a bit. Looks me in the eye. Kisses me. Asks me.

"Do you have anything?" he says. Rubbers? Lube? Yeah, I've got it all.

"Nightstand," is all I manage to say. He rolls over to fish around in my nightstand. He finds what we need. He starts undressing. His jacket drops to the floor.

"No," I say. "Don't worry about that." I sit up and move to the edge of the bed. He pauses and watches me. I undress for him. Yeah, I want to be naked. But I find I don't give a fuck whether he is or not. I slide off the edge of the bed and kneel there, waiting for him, half-braced on the bed.

He gets off the bed and kneels behind me. I wait, listening to him rip the rubber open with his teeth. Silence, more or less. Anonymous sounds of him getting ready. Then his hands are on my hips. His fingers wander up my back. Affectionately?

"You want it just like this?" he asks softly.

How did I want it, when I brought him up here? What little fantasy was I writing in my head? It doesn't matter. Doesn't much matter until the pencil hits the paper. I grab the ring. I go where it takes me.

I nod. I mumble my assent. He has one hand on my back as the other guides his cock into me. It hurts. Some. More than that is pleasure. Where are all the words I thought I'd be screaming? There's nothing but mute pleasure. He fucks me. Gently at first. Then in a frenzy of our bodies slapping together. He pushes me forward 'til I'm rubbing roughly against my bed. The friction gets me off. I come, spasming around his cock, shooting my seed onto my drab old quilt. Faded flowers. Pollinated. He pauses just a moment, as the last of my pleasure twitches out and through me. Then he takes my hips in his hands and fucks me hard. My pleasure has subsided but there's a sort of pleasure I get through him. I feel his orgasm almost like I felt my own. I observe it and feel it, and take it into myself all at the same time.

I like it. I love it. I love listening, and waiting. I like receiving. This is my writing. The Universe coming into me. It lets me feel the pleasure in it's own creation. The Universe is in this one stranger today. It has possessed him, and come to visit me. It wants me to share in the unfolding of itself.

"Are you alright, James?" he asks, after a shared time of gasping for breath, before we finally come apart.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Better than fine," I say, laughing a little.

"Ok. You looked like you were somewhere else for a minute there," he says.

"No. I was here," I say. It makes me happy. I was here. Only here. At least for a moment. And I've got nothing to say about it. He can't understand it, and I don't feel like talking about it just now. I crawl back onto the bed. He's undressing. I look at him, wondering what he's up to. I'd like to fuck again, but sometimes once is enough. He catches me looking.

"Did you want me to go?" he asks. I shake my head no.

"That's good, because I think the only place I'm going right now is to sleep," he says. He crawls into bed, yanking on the covers so I'll join him. I do. He arranges himself behind me, curling up into my back. I feel awkward for a second. Then I relax. Our breathing falls into rhythm. He mumbles something to me before we fall asleep.

"What?" I ask.

"It's always the quiet ones," he mumbles. I don't ask him what he means. I just smile and we fall asleep.