The Boy in the Rafters

Rain fell from the moon and made my body tingle to the sensation. I felt naked, standing in the middle of the empty street. My nipples were hard and as plain to see as if I weren't wearing my top at all. I shivered and quivered and gasped and opened my mouth to the falling sky water and heaved thick vapor on my exhale so hard I could see it floating above me like smoke. I felt everything matted to my body. My clothes. My hair. The eyes of the strangers passing by and glancing from under their umbrellas.

One particular stranger passed me by very closely and smiled as he did, brushing my skin warmly with his dry clothes as he folded his umbrella.

"Why didn't you stand under the awning?"

I stepped forward, pressed my body to his, and kissed him gently.

"What awning?" I asked as he finished unlocking his door from under a canvas frame shielding us from the rain.

"This one," he tried, but I shut him up with another kiss.

I dripped all over his wooden floors as I curiously poked around his apartment. I liked the high ceilings. Everything was made of these dingy umber bricks because it was older than the country it stood on.

"I like the archways," I said into the living room, facing away from my stranger as he procured a towel for me from the toilets.

"So does he." I followed his nod to the great wide rafters above. I saw a long, thin figure there resting high up above us on its back. I made out torn up, cuffed blue jeans. And a dirty orange hoodie.

"River, this is Baby."

Baby did nothing to acknowledge either of us. And the hour soon grew very late.

"Your fingers feel... fantastic inside me," I huffed into my stranger's ear. We were hid under the covers, as there were no bedrooms in this odd downtown apartment. We were quiet, out of respect for "Baby", that odd character who had yet to move from the rafters.

"I want the rest of you," I gasped. "Now."

My stranger's eyes ran up the walls to the thin, coffee-colored hand hanging limp from his ceiling. He hesitated, but then he began shuffling me around. He was going to slip inside me.

"Do you have a condom?" he asked, and my eyelids lowered on him. He found one in his own nightstand, and I slapped it from his hand. Hard. My stranger smiled nervously down at me. He peeled his own clothes from my body. His band tee, his boxers. And then the clothes from his own.

"I'm no good at being quiet," I smirked, my eyes dashing over in Baby's direction like his had earlier. "Is your roommate going to mind?"

"He's not my roommate," my stranger said, but smiled to the thought of him. "And I promise you he won't mind." A lovely uncut penis slipped inside me, and the words I'd conjured to form my retort became nothing but sweet, sweet moans of unprotected sex.

In the morning, I had double booked. I'd told my stranger I'd wait for him to return from his early bird shift. But my sneaky link was already promised morning sex before an anniversary date with his beloved. So I invited my old lover to come and dance with me in the sheets of my new one. I'd hate to say it to his face, but my stranger was simply not as gifted as my lover. Not all dances are the same, nor can you dance them all with all partners. I kissed my lover fiercely, like I might soon die if he'd not fuck me in the next 10 seconds. He carried me to the bed of another, and I felt his beautiful dark body fit the mysterious shadows of the odd loft apartment much better than the tamer, more ordinary option of the night before. I clawed my lover's back, making marks to match the many scars of many times before, and I winced and squealed as he stretched me farther than my stranger could. I liked putting him on a high shelf but one tier below my regular playboy. It felt powerful to know I had named him fun, but not as fun as he could be. As fun as my morning cheating fuck was.

I smiled hugely as I saw the competition in my lover's face. He knew he was stealing from another, even one who did not own me. I kissed his smug victorious grin. He was the champion, and he ought to be treated like it. He finished in me without asking, and our mess spilled into the sheets of another. And he grabbed his clothes and stole my rainy underwear and smelled them as he left. I hated when he did that, so he always did.

"These... smell amazing," I heard echo from the stairwell, before he disappeared to kiss his fiance. I kissed the air, smirking as I knew where his lips had just been. Then I nearly pissed the bed in fear when my kiss to the rafters echoed back down from them.

I had managed to calm down by the time my stranger returned from work. I didn't know what he did: I figured I should learn his name before I bothered to ask about that.

We sat on the couch, propping our legs up on a coffee table while we watched an old cowboy movie. My stranger wasn't into it, but I loved the costume design and old Italian orchestra, and my stranger was very into me.

I'd always wanted to fuck most of the heroes and outlaws. To be rescued from rape by some stoic sheriff, or stolen for love by an otherwise cruel, stone-hearted bandit. I had little preference for which.

My stranger crawled into bed and fell asleep, but the films kept rolling. So I sat on the couch alone and ate myself sick on cheap popcorn. A mighty thump fell next to me from the heavens, startling my bones and setting my heart to pounding fearfully. Baby lazily reached into my bowl and gripped the unbuttered confections. He used his other hand to carefully place individual flakes into his mouth one by one. And all the while, his eyes fixed on the television screen, and he did not blink.

I hadn't tried yet to speak to the guy. Nor had my stranger whilst I was there. If ever there was a time, it seemed to be now. I opened my mouth, and Baby lifted a hand suddenly, stopping me. A piece of popcorn was pinched in all his fingers. Confused to the point of stillness with my mouth still open, the Baby threw my snack right into it, then turned away from me. I couldn't help but get the impression he didn't want me to talk. So we watched the film. He rested his buzzed blonde head on my shoulder. I smelled it. Burned wood and rafter dust. Oddly not so bad a mix. Baby retaliated by slowly smelling my neck, from chin to clavicle. I wanted to laugh and push him off, but I felt oddly compelled to try and win this interaction somehow. There's no way Baby wasn't taunting me with that air kiss earlier. He had to have been saying, "You forgot about me, and I saw you fuck a cocky black man in my friend's bed. One word, and you're back out in the rain." I turned and looked at the dude. He was so thin and strange. His hoodie had large plastic letters melted onto the front in white. His name. Baby.

"Yeah, it's all we have to go on. Some tiny street punk dragged him to my party like 2 weeks ago and ditched him halfway into the night to go sleep with like 7 other girls at a pink-party. She never came back for him, and he never really left. But I like having him there. He doesn't talk or judge anyone, and I don't have to be alone."

We were having lunch at a little place around the corner from his apartment. A blessing from the heavens allowed it, as it had finally stopped raining for 15 seconds.

I was still wearing the stranger's clothes. I chewed into my bite of sandwich and raised my eyes and one of my brows to his assessment of the situation.

"Yeah, ok, he eats all my food and watches me fuck and masturbate. But I don't know. I think he's just one of those things that keeps life interesting."

We went back to his place, where I had now been living all week with nothing of my own. He left to visit loved ones that night, and I decided to try out this idea of masturbating while the rafter boy watched for myself.

I slipped my hand under the stranger's favorite t-shirt and spread my legs while I sat on the bed and leaned on the wall behind. I looked into my baby's eyes from across the apartment as he crouched halfway on a rafter and let one leg swing below him. Two fingers slipped inside me, and I moaned louder to make sure he could hear. Louder than I ever had before. It was so fake. I wanted him to touch himself, but he only watched. His eyes were fixed on the center of my thighs, and it made them warm. I felt his gaze tingle on me as laser vision attacked my labias' sensitive nerve endings. He made my pussy weep with the odd excitement of enticing a stranger without touching him. A stranger above and across the room, yet on another plane of the universe as he poised, unmoving, atop his precious rafter. I played for near an hour, and Baby watched for all that time. Those shark-like, empty, yet endlessly curious eyes never leaving that spot where I directed both our attentions and all my energies. I only did this once, but for weeks after, I was dying to fuck him.

My lover finished in me,

and I kissed his lips adieu.

My stranger tried his flavor

and for weeks, he never knew.

This place became my home.

I was left never alone.

Because

the boy in the rafters

was like me:

forgotten too.