Julien hates the noise of the radio while they drive, so he keeps it shut off, even if Simon wants badly for music to cut through the noise of the tires bumping over the loose earth of the plains.
‘Ain’t nothin’ but static out here,’ Julien says, and Simon believes him. They’re so far from the world that he misses the way that power lines break up all that great blue sky. Still, he wants to hear static just to know it’s not just him and Julien alone in the world.
Night times are silent, on the run. They stay so far away with cities and people that Simon begins to get homesick for light pollution, for the background noise that comes with people stacked up on top of each other.
‘Ain’t bugs meant to be noisy?’ he asks, and Julien’s laugh stirs his hair.
‘We’re the only bugs here,’ he replies, and Simon wants static, he wants power lines, he wants asphalt and peanut butter jelly sandwiches on white bread. An ice-cold bottle of Coke too. So cold it makes the glass frosty. In the evenings the sinking sun casts their shadows impossibly long across the bare scrub ground, and the fire that Julien cooks over kisses his features more tenderly than Simon thinks he ever could.
He tries. He runs his fingers through Julien’s curls; stiff with sweat and with the dust from the always-open car window. Kisses him until he forgets about static, about sandwiches, about the trill of grasshoppers outside his bedroom window back home. About the mugshot he came face-to-face with when buying gas; Julien in the car keeping a low profile behind a pair of sunglasses. The car creaks under them, axles groaning as they fall into each other and out the other side. Julien is like a pit that Simon can’t stop searching for the bottom of. His fingers keep scraping thin air.
‘We’ll get a house with a wraparound porch.’ Julien’s cigarette rasps as he draws on it, the only light for miles around. His thumb soothes at Simon’s bare waist. ‘We’ll go to Canada, but then we’ll start missin’ hot summers so we’ll come back. Not home. We’ll go see a state we’ve never seen before —’
Right behind his ear, Julien smells like sweat, dirt, warm skin. Simon tucks his nose up against the smell; that smell of animals, of fangs. It makes his eyelids feel heavy, makes his heart slow in his chest. Sometimes he’s the rabbit Julien has caught in his headlights, but sometimes Simon’s sure they’re the same creature.
‘– And I’ll take up fishin’, keep us fed. You’ll write all about us, and when we die we’ll send it to the newspaper. We’ll be legends.’
‘Who’s gonna die first?’ Simon asks.
Julien’s head turns. Simon only knows because it upsets him from that space full of sweet teeth behind Julien’s ear. ‘We’ll go out together,’ he murmurs.
Simon’s so accustomed to life on the move that it’s strange when they stop. His body still feels like it’s moving even as he lies squashed up next to Julien in the backseat. The vinyl sticking to him as the sun shoulders its way over the horizon and the car grows hot. Julien shifts in his sleep, his stubbled face sweet and lax, pressed into Simon’s armpit. Simon swipes at the drool at the corner of his mouth. The collar of his white tee is ragged and thin.
‘Wake up,’ he murmurs. ‘Wake up, wake up.’
Julien slits one green eye open. Then he shows Simon all his teeth.
Simon wonders what made Julien like this. He wonders who made Julien like this. Who had put a gun in the hand of a man who smells like an animal afraid? Simon watches Julien pace from his seat perched on the hot hood of the car, the man a manic slip of energy all squeezed into blue denim. The gun is wedged into his back pocket, where a normal person might carry a pack of smokes.
Three nights ago, he held Simon to his chest as they swayed to a crackly song on the car’s radio.
The headlights catching them, blinding him. An old love song; better than static, better than tires on hot dirt. Simon’s heart so big in his chest it was hard to breathe around. Julien’s hands holding his, both of them shuffling through some facsimile of a dance neither of them really knew. The dance wasn’t important. No, what was important was the way Julien held him. Like something precious, like he couldn’t bear to put even an inch of space between their bodies.
‘Wish I could write a song,’ Julien breathed, mouth to Simon’s ear, his warm cheek pressed to Simon’s own. Stubble, softness. ‘Wish I could tell you how I feel.’ Their hearts beat against each other through their shirts. Simon was barefoot, sandy dirt between his toes.
‘Then tell me,’ Simon whispered back, and Julien didn’t say anything more. But when Simon touched his cheek after they broke apart, it was wet with tears. There’s always been something sweet as poison tucked away behind Julien’s molars. Simon thinks it’s made in his big open heart.
Julien isn’t inhuman. Simon thinks Julien’s so completely human that it must hurt him, that it must make him ache. He pushes the car up to eighty and Simon watches him drive, watches his fingers flex on the steering wheel. He’s killed three men, Simon tells himself. He’ll kill more if he feels like it. The car is full of the smell of the outside. Creosote, hanging heavy over everything, heavier even than Julien’s cigarette smoke.
‘Does it hurt?’ Simon asks, and Julien glances at him. Curls tossed askew by the wind vibrating through the car.
His cigarette wobbles in his mouth as he replies. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘Hurting people.’
Julien tosses his head back to laugh. But he never smiles, only bares his teeth.
Alice Rogers is a Welsh writer who recently graduated with an MSc in Creative Writing from The University of Edinburgh. She specialises in American historical fiction with LGBT+ themes. Find Alice at @dimecharm.
