LOTRPS: DM/EW: Vintage

Title: Vintage
Author: Wichetty G
Date: 8/14/05
Pairing: Dom/Lij
Rating:nc-17
Summary: AU. Two boys and a car.
A/N: Euphemisms are for the spinally challenged. This started with a dream. A dream about Dom and Orli (but I couldn't figure out how to work orli into this so this part is dom/lij) screwing on a black vinyl backseat of a car in a garage and Dom frantically looking around for lube, and considering, for a moment, cracking open a bottle of 10-w30. That would have been nasty and I told him to stop it and provided him with an alternative. (Lucid dreaming rocks) The last thing I saw before I woke up was the word “Vintage.” And so it began. After posting the first few pages of this story, the responses I got put ideas in my head, and within a few days, I had the skeleton of a small NOVEL and I continue to work on it. So if you've read this before it may be a bit different than you remember as I've tweaked it a lot, and it is longer. I attached a bit from the next scene after the car sex which may leave you hanging. So read that bit if you want. I'm actually pretty proud of the writing there, but there's no resolution since it's unfinished. If you want to avoid that pitfall, stop reading at the "~*~".
Disclaimer: None. I disclaim nothing. I will however claim that I have a sick imagination and that some supernatural fucking force made me write this. I dont know what it is but I hope it never leaves.
Thank you's for inspiration in no particular order: lisabellex ,kissing_athelas ,sumbitch ,abundantlyqueer ,crimsonhue , tabaqui , Mel...



Dom was the one always covered in black grease and yet somehow Lij was the one everyone called 'dirty'. 'Trashy' sounded more accurate to Dom, at least as a day-to-day adjective to descibe the young man. It was more than just his appearance. More than just ripped jeans that exposed too much skin, thin, holy teeshirts that you couldn't read anymore, messy uncut hair, and sneakers with bald soles and grey, abraded leather. Lij wore it like a purple heart. He was trashy in the best ways. Ways that remind Dom of cheap candy that turns your mouth colors, olive green thread-bare carpeting, walked on and vacuumed to death, beat-up old Camaros, sweat and glitter. He was a wriggling, giggling, shameless kind of trashy. It always made Dom smile because he understood it even if nobody else did, even if that was the only thing about Lij he understood. The need to be proud of something.

He was working on an old Firebird. Sixty-nine. Not an old Camaro, but possibly even trashier because of the condition. Reminded him of Lij, anyway. Despite the endless possibilities for attractive colors, this one was orange. A little rust but not too bad, considering. Tacky black racing stripe. Dull paint. Not that a glossy coat would have made up for the horrible color. The thing that made it worth keeping was the rag top (which was down now just for shits) and the near cherry interior. All black vinyl and hot as fuck it being late June and a million degrees in the shop. It needed absolutely everything. The guy who owned it had been doing the work himself but shouldn't have. Dom'd had the hood open for hours now, and earlier on the lift, he'd looked, gaped, shook his head, and set it back down on the floor. He almost considered handing this one off to his Uncle (loves the old ones) and just going back in the house to the olive and brown living room, sitting in front of the tv with a beer until it got cooler. It was Lij who made him stay.

He showed up out of the blue as he sometimes does, on foot, kicking up dust in the droughty lot; Dom's patient waiting room. Always with those god-damn lollipops. He'd forget his own addiction to dum-dums until Lij would show up with a pocket-full of the things and one in his mouth. He sometimes wondered if it didn't all stem directly from the sugar. Mm, probably not.

Lij got up on the back end of the car and it creaked and dipped dangerously under his weight. His eyes got big(ger) for a second and his lollipop stick flicked to the left quickly as he braced his hands on the hot metal, and then he chuckled a little when he decided the car wasn't going to collapse underneath him.

“This car's fucked,” Dom said by way of explanation.

Lij grinned salaciously and Dom could see the mushy pink middle of his lollipop stick between his teeth. Dom helplessly smiled back and shook his head, returning to the dark cave under the hood.

He leaned over the car, scraping corrosion off the battery contacts in hopes that he might someday be able to loosen them enough to disconnect the thing, all the while listening to Lij's candy clack against his teeth, and the radio in the office, not tuned into anything, just making soft dead air noises.

Dom tried to concentrate on what he was doing, but the sound of his sweat rolling in jerky prickles over his temple was deafening, and the crackle of the radio felt like static zipping up his arms from the old DieHard. He heard it as Lij's old lollipop stick hit the plastic garbage bag just behind him, and then the crinkle of waxed paper as Lij opened another one, stuck it in his mouth, warmed it up, and hummed over a gentle sigh. That was about the point at which Dom knew he wasn't going to get any more work done.

The car creaked loudly again and lurched upward as Lij slid off the back, and Dom flinched, raising a hand to the hood above his head just in case. Then there was a wet pop near his cheek, and Lij was next to him, hip against the fender. He could smell it. Root beer. And what other flavor was a more appropriate match for Lij? Dom opened his mouth like it was the the most natural thing in the world, eyes to Lij's, took the candy, and his mouth did that sharp clenching thing that your mouth does on the first taste of something super sweet. His cheeks ached for a moment. His salivary glands couldn't seem to catch up, and he stood up straight, bumping his head on the hood just a little, and pulled on the stick, finding it damn near lodged in his cheek. It popped out finally, and he licked all around his dry, sticky-sweet mouth before returning it to a more comfortably wet palate. His hands were filthy, he noticed. His fingers were blackened all over, the grease throwing his fingerprints and knuckles into sharp relief. They left a gray mark on the lollipop stick. Nothing new really. He was used to it. He only noticed because it might pose a problem in a moment.

Lij just looked at Dom as he sucked on his dum-dum, and that clenchy mouth thing came back. Lij's eyes were oil-fire blue and made Dom's chest and groin throb once in unison. He took a moment and studied his face. Never really got tired of looking at him; if he could drag his gaze away from those eyes long enough to appreciate the rest of him, that is. His slim body remained boyish and soft, only the breadth of his shoulders, strong calves and a slight roundness to his belly betrayed his adulthood. Dom could stand there and drink him in all day if the eyes didn't always call him back. How can something so glacially blue burn so hot? Burn right through him. He didn't have to say a word, and often didn't. Lij's greek lips twitched once and Dom wanted to rub the pad of his thumb over them, whisper into them, tell his lips to tell his eyes that they don't have to burn a circle of fire around him to protect him from Dom. Not necessary.

A cicada buzzed loud in a tree outside, signaling in case anyone had forgotten, that yes, the heat was oppressive and brutal this day, and something was going to have to give.

Dom's jaw hurt and he was covered in sweat, his hair sticking to his forehead. He popped out the candy again and gave it back to Lij. Lij took it with his teeth and his hands seemed to take that as an invitation and struck forward and found the zipper on Dom's blue, grease-stained, sweat-soaked, dirt-infused, yet washed-yesterday coveralls. Easy zip, they came down off his arms, below his hips and bunched there in nothing but a couple of seconds time. As Lij worked on his jeans with more than a hint of agitation, Dom mindlessly leaned in to get a taste of root beer on Lij's lips, his eyes unfocusing and drooping. An overabundance of sticky, sweet saliva, and Lij had to pause, yank the pop from his mouth and lob it toward a dusty corner of the shop so he could swallow and then continue to devour Dom's mouth with vehemence and struggle with the jeans on his hips. Dom stood there, leaning helplessly, arms out and away like a sunning bird, unable to touch anything with his blackened hands. He wasn't sure why he cared. Lij didn't care how dirty he got. Not now.

Lij got his jeans down around his ankles. Dom pulled the legs inside out in the process of trying to yank his sneakers out of them while Lij worked his own clothes like it was a race. He threw his red shirt over the hot metal of the car door while Dom picked his own shirt off with as few fingers and as little dirt transfer as possible. Dom's head reemerged and he saw the shirt and saw Lij with his bare ass against it, his cock pointing to the high sun, waiting for the command to turn around, and decided that wasn't what he wanted. He really didn't want to see the General Lee orange the whole time. It would just add a dimension of hillbilly to this ritual that he was not prepared to confront. Sex in a restored '69 Firebird was one thing, but staring at the rust bubbling the bottom of the door would just remind him of how not-restored the thing actually was. It felt like crossing a line. Maybe the Mason-Dixon, or maybe just something a little more abstract, imaginary, figmental, and subjectively 'in Dom's head.' He motioned for Lij to step away and he wrenched the car door open. It complained just as much as the springs in back. Lij dropped his shirt on the hot vinyl and crawled on hands and knees over the middle console and over to the passenger seat, hands settling on the passenger door. The seats were already pushed all the way back.

For a kid that walked everywhere all summer long and had a penchant for skinny-dipping, he was shockingly pale against the black. Pale and clean. He always was. It evinced how trashy he really was not. No dirty fingernails like Dom. No rough skin. No nicotene-stained teeth or untended scars. Even the bottoms of his feet would be rosy, not dark, if Dom could have seen them through his shoes and bunched jeans.

Seeing perfect, gorgeous, child-eyed, angelic, little Lij like this, hard and dripping, barely able to sit still long enough for Dom to get in the car with him; it was corruption at its best. Like watching, not even hearing, but seeing the most lewd obscenities fall from pink pristine lips; directed at him, instructions, demands. Up until very recently, Dom didn't even know he had a taste for such things. He wondered if Lij drew it out of him, like cannon-fire brings sunken things to the surface of the river water, or if Lij put it into him, stung him with it like a hornet. Or might it be more permanent? A pigment injected beneath the skin? It was hard to think of Lij in a permanent sense, he never planned farther ahead than five minutes. But the feeling, it felt like twisted metal sometimes. Irreparable.

Dom was about to climb in the driver's seat when he realized he was just going to have to get back out again. Lij wouldn't have even known he was gone if it weren't for the scrape of his shoes on the concrete floor. He was in the office in two strides with the bottle of baby oil he had hidden in the crack between the desk and the wall, and back in two more. He had put the bottle there after the last time Lij had accosted him while he was working. Even the bottle was grungy but that didn't matter, and he didn't worry about his hands on the inside of the car too much either, there wasn't anything there that wasn't already black, but thrumming and achingly hard and not thinking clearly, he still had a problem when he climbed in the driver's seat and looked at Lij's bare ass. Lij looked back at him, wondering what the hold up was. He rolled his eyes at Dom and took the bottle from him, smearing a little on himself and then grabbing Dom's cock with a handful of slick heat. Dom lurched at the contact but came back to himself with a double-take when Lij shut the cap on the bottle and tossed it into the back seat. He was going to have to remember to retrieve that.

Dom leaned forward, and once again this no hands thing was “fucking pants,” as his friend Bill would say. Once again, Lij was doing his job for him and held him tight as he backed his pink pucker onto Dom. Dom groaned and snatched at the steering wheel. Lij wasn't waiting or taking it easy or any of that today. He leaned forward a little and then backed into Dom again hard with a grunt. Dom gasped and the steering wheel turned in his fist. He could hear the grit of the tires pivoting on the cement floor until the wheel locked. Lij started panting as soon as he found a rhythm pounding against Dom and he started whispering those gorgeous vulgarities in between breaths.

Dom couldn't get a grip on this. His knees were up against the middle console, but his hands were nearly behind him, one on the wheel, one on the driver's headrest, and with Lij throwing himself onto him like a fucking slut, the sudden overload of sensation, the zinging going from his toes up into his sinuses and back, the unbelieveable tight heat around his cock, plus the physical weirdness of the position had him scrambling to stay upright. He grabbed at the other headrest and that was better, but now he was twisted and leaning over Lij, and Lij was making frustrated little sounds and trying to wiggle to get what he wanted from Dom's cock. What he needed to do, what they both need him to do, was take him by the hips.

His skin was just so white. Lij stopped his manic rocking for a spell and wrestled with his jeans in the seat until they lay crumpled on the floor. Dom caught his breath, the air he was sucking in was still somehow hotter than him though, and he wished for a fan or an ice pack or just something to wipe the tickling sweat off his back at this point. He wiped his face with his upper arm and looked down at his cock. Fucking purple. Lij put one foot on the floor then, dug the other knee into the crook of the seat, and Dom looked at his hands in the foreground on the backdrop of Lij's white back.

“Dom,” Lij murmured his need, just barely above a whisper. It sounded like the first drops of rain falling from an aching, dark sky, a straining dam about to burst in a silent canyon.

Dom placed his fingertips on Lij's shoulder blades and slid in easy. A slow experimental in and out made Lij moan all long and creaky like the car's rusty joints. A slight smile crept up on Dom's face and as he slid home again and all that wet silken flesh inside the boy squeezed around his cock head, making Dom's thoughts melt. He dragged his black fingers down Lij's back leaving ten long dirty streaks that moved and squirmed with the skin, and that was exactly it. Dom picked up the pace, sinking into the heat and the slippery fun with his hands wrapped around Lij's hips, leaving smudges all over that he couldn't take his eyes off of except when Lij did that thing that made him throw his head back and near convulse it was so good. He was pounding hard into him and Lij was whimpering every time he burried his cock in him to the hilt, but Dom still wanted more. He wanted to make Lij come and drown out the squeaking car and the buzzing radio an the damn cicadas. For a second he was going to reach down and grab Lij's cock but that was just not a good idea, he knew, even with no blood-flow to his brain. Lij would probably never bend over a car for him again if he had to use pumice soap on his dick to get it clean. Besides, Lij would do it himself if he wanted. He settled for another approach.

Dom moved his filthy hands up a bit, palms on Lij's buttocks, thumbs near the crack, ever so gently spreading as Dom fucked him. The slight change allowed just a fraction more depth and he shivvered despite the heat. Then he straightened his arms and pushed down, forcing Lij to put both knees back on the seat and lifting himself up and putting half his weight on Elijah's long bones. Lij groaned beneath Dom with the extra weight but seemed to immediately approve when it changed the angle enough to ram into that sweet little spot up in front. Lij was gasping and yelling alternately through clenched teeth and a wide open mouth before he started shaking and bucking as he shot come down his own leg. Dom was right behind him, riding the wake of the spasming little hole, sucking in so much air his head spun even as the stars lit and exploded behind his blacked-out eyes. They all fell from the sky and trickled down Dom's spine until dark and limitless eternity stretched out before him and then was blown away in a hot dusty breeze.

Blissful pause.

Unpatterned breathing.

Cicada Hum.

Fucking Cicadas.

“Fuck,” Lij grumbled for about the forty-seventh time. Dom pulled out of him, catching his breath again, shouldering the sweat on his eyes, and admiring his dirty work. Lij's ass had two black hand prints, the thumbs pointing right at his abused little hole, his hips had an enigmatic smear of grime all over them with many little satellite smudges, and then there were the ten streaks, outlined in sweat. His back looked like an unsubtley erotic Rorschach print. Dom smiled sleepy-eyed. Racing stripes, he thought to himself and stifled a giggle. It really wasn't all that funny, but sex sometimes made him giddy.

When Lij had sufficiently regained his composure he turned around and dispatched Dom's mouth and tongue again in appreciation, nipping with flat teeth and slicking his hands across sweat-soaked skin. Dom didn't hesitate to do the same, spreading just a little more dirt on Lij's bare skinny chest and ribs, too.

Lij withdrew languidly and sank into the sun-hot seat. The rays were pouring through the windows right on them and alighting dust in the air in the darker, shadowy corners of the shop. Lij winced at a hot spot on his back.

“You wanna go for a swim?” Lij asked.

“You should take a bath.”

He looked down at himself and wrigglegiggled. “We could do both.”

One final gusty breath to recapture some oxygen. “K.”


~*~


Lij jumped out of the car with the kind of energy no man of Earth has immediately after sex, and suddenly Dom thought maybe he had hit upon the truth of the mystery finally. Lij was simply not of this world.

Dom dragged his sluggish legs out of the car, fixed himself up with equally leaden arms, and then hoisted himself to a more or less standing stature. And he was going to go swimming? If it wasn't so blasted hot he'd go to sleep. Standing. Right there. His eyes threatened for a moment but then he leaned forward and his feet shuffleslid underneath him and began the process of walking. His brain reluctantly maintained conciousness. His sense of balance lodged a formal complaint.

In the house, the indoor darkness was a relief from the stark sunshine, though the heat still prevailed and the air was stagnant and heavy with the smell of teakwood and corn husks. He didn't linger long. He scrubbed his hands clean, grabbed two towels from the bathroom and a fresh bar of soap. Luckily they had some Ivory in the pantry. Digging sand out of a bar of soap is a pain in the ass. He knew that, bizarrely, from experience. A bizarre experience, that for once had nothing to do with Lij. It was before he met him, so maybe he should look at it as life preparing him for the inevitability of him meeting Lij. The two events felt similarly surreal.

Lij was waiting outside, dressed and despondant looking. He couldn't blame him. If he were banned from setting foot in someone's home, someone he knew, he'd probably dislike being reminded of it, too. He handed a towel to Lij and they set off down the driveway with a companionable distance between their shoulders and the sun on their backs.

“How much time we got?”

Dom chewed his cheek. “I should get back for supper. So, a while.” He didn't bother to ask Lij what sort of commitments he might have, Lij never had any such things. And Lij never asked him if he should be working on someone's car instead of spending the whole day screwing around in the water. Dom was equally appreciative of the infrequency of probative questions from Lij.

They reached the spot on the road about two miles from Dom's uncle's house where the brush lays down quite a bit between the thick wood, and bike treds and footprints in between tufts of tough dry grass and rocks mark the trailhead. Dom could hear in his head the crunch of gravel under a sliding rubber tire from dozens of memories of riding down there as a kid from his uncle's house with some of the neighborhood kids his age. He wondered where Lij was when Dom was ten and Evil Knieveling his way down the rather steep and definitely tretcherous path from the road to the river. He didn't even know how old Lij was really, so he could only guess that he would have still been a child at that point. He wondered if he ever met him or saw him on his visits.

He wondered about Bill too. Knowing Bill he was no where near this little dust bowl twelve years ago. That guy had been all over – which, now that he was thinking about it, begged the question, what the hell was Bill doing here now? He'd have to remember to ask him, though he doubted he'd get a straight answer.

The green canopy and the evaporative aura of the forest were a small reprieve from the heat. Dom and Lij took familiar plodding steps down the hill, not even looking at the ground and the endless assortment of natural boobytraps that particular trail held; ditches, unbalanced rock piles, exposed roots, and patches where the slope of the ground was only level enough to just keep the sand and gravel from sliding down the hill on its own. These spots they usually rode like tiny dusty ski slopes, eroding them with their sliding shoes every trip down and making it that much more difficult to ride the next time. They rounded a bend and the water came into view.

The rope swing, as the locale was generally called, consisted of a sandy beach-like spot on the bank of a small, slow moving, brown river. The “beach” itself was only maybe ten feet wide, brush and trees cutting it off on both ends. From the water's edge, it was a solid ten more feet nearly straight up to get to the trail. In the space between there was a tangle of thick tree roots anchored in sandy soil, exposed by decades or possibly centuries of climbing children (and a fair share of adults). At the top of the bank was the tree. A monolithic specimen of an oak that leaned out over the water stretching its limbs as if to hold hands with the trees on the other bank. On one of these limbs hung the rope, hence the name of the place. One could only guess how many generations of rope swingers it had seen, how many kids had run screaming off the highest point they could find on that ledge, tethered to the sky for a brief instant before letting go with an exultant splash. Dom wondered who was the first. Who would be the last. And would the humans end the relationship, or would the tree?

It was just them today. Usually there would be a couple of local kids already at the spot swinging and swimming during summer vacation, but today it was blessedly quiet and private. Dom liked kids, sort of even liked meeting the new crop of them there and showing them things like rope swing etiquette and the proper way to do a rope swing cannon ball, but he had been wondering how he was going to explain Lij's bathing in the river to them. He knew they would ask, and he knew they would ask him instead of Lij. Though that wasn't necessarily a bad thing either. If they did ask Lij, he was bound to tell them something that would get them both arrested or possibly just excommunicated from the church they didn't go to.

The locals generally all told their kids about Lij, and if they didn't, they heard it from other kids. Don't talk to Elijah. Just ignore him. In the case of the kids, the young ones, Dom was somewhat inclined to appreciate those warnings.

Lij didn't take his usual running vault off the bank today. He got naked and took the soap into the water. Dom was about to remind him that just because there was no one there now, it didn't mean that there couldn't be a gaggle of kids showing up at any minute. But then he figured that he could throw Lij his shorts if it was necessary, and just started methodically getting his own sweat soaked outer layers off and hung them on a treebranch.

He stepped out onto a loop of woody root, the pebbles and splinters not even an annoyance on his toughened feet, and reeeached for the nylon-cum-sisal amalgamation of knotted rope which some unknown person had unkindly not returned to its holding spot around a little board nailed to the tree. The first jump always made him a little nervous. From week to week or even day to day it seemed he could forget how brave he got by the end of the day's swimming and swinging so that the next time it felt a bit like the first time. If only all things kept their freshness thus, he thought. The rope swing always made him wax all poetic and nostalgic, though it happened less and less as the place became a familiar, even daily haunt.

Dom ran his hand once over the bark of the tree and the now incomprehensible collection of initials and obscenities scratched into it before taking a breath and falling off the edge with his fists white around a stringy knot. He was always surprised at how short the ride was. By the time your mind had gotten to the point that you could apreciate the flying bottomless feeling and the feathery wind, you reached the zenith, and had to let go or risk smashing back into the bank. Which he had done once or twice. He hit the water, and gorgeous, beautiful, absolutely splendidly cool relief surrounded him and made him contemplate just never coming up for air ever again it was so nice. A one hundred eighty degree turn in temperature it seemed. Amazing what an about-face can do to a body. Very well turn him around.

He did come up afterall, but only because he hadn't let out the balloon of air in his lungs. Lij was idly scrubbing at his chest with the soap, the foam making a bluish, cloudy fan on the surface of the water in front of him.

“Ivory,” he smiled at Dom and gave him an appreicative gesture with the soap. Now why didn't it surprise him that he would also be familiar with the trials and tribulations of outdoor bathing?

Lij turned away from him again in a reflexive manner, as if turning into the spray of an imaginary shower head, and Dom could see his back. He had the sudden urge to just go up to him and help him get the black streaks off his back. Not that he didn't like them. He felt himself flinch, as if to actually do it, take the soap from him and run slick hands down his sides, tenderly care for that alabaster skin, and he pushed that right down. That seemed out of bounds somehow. Lij managed just fine on his own, though he asked Dom once if he had gotten it all, craning his neck, and Dom, barely looking at him, said yes, even though there was still a tiny smudge here and there.

Dom lounged in the water, letting it tap the heat from him for several minutes before falling into a lazy stroke out to the sandbar.

The sandbar was just that. A pile of sand in the middle of the river, positioned conveniently just off the doorstep of the ropeswing, though it moved around a little from year to year. Dom imagined it may have been artificially seeded by ancient rope-swingers through the infectious habit of children to throw rocks into bodies of water as far as they could manage. The sandbar was about halfway out, about as far as you'd expect a ten year old to be able to throw a rock. But maybe it had always been there. Who knew. Now it was simply a marker. It was a place to be in the middle of the river without having to tread water. It also served as the finish line for rope swing dicathelons and triathelons. The former involved running from the beach into the water and swimming to the sandbar, while in the latter you start with a bike ride from home, then run down the trail (try not to die) to the beach and swim to the sandbar. Loser gets a noogie.

Dom watched a small fish scoot away from him in the water, near the surface since you can't see more than two feet in the murk, and then crouched and watched as Lij reboxed the soap and threw it up on the beach where it bounced off a springy root and plopped back into the water. He smiled at Lij's muttered curse and then admired the view as he trudged up the beach, wet slippery naked, and fished the box out of the water, this time tossing it further inland. Lij turned and his skin glowed in the spotty sunlight coming through the trees. He must have figured that since he was out of the water he might as well take a swing because as soon as he turned to head back to the water, he pivoted and started climbing up the root ladder.

Dom could never figure out how Lij could muster the courage to go flying off that thing completely naked. Every time he did it, Dom would cringe and reflexively squeeze his legs together, ready himself to rescue the kid should he become suddenly immobilized by the slapping pain of a nut-flop. Never happened though.

While Lij climbed, Dom swam back toward shore and grabbed the algae-green tail end of the rope that dangled in the water. With Lij up on the ledge, Dom whipped the rope with practiced skill and it arched sharply in the air, the big knot landing squarely in Lij's hand. With all the pomp and circumstance of doing the dishes, Lij took a lopsided vault off the edge so that he and the rope spun through the air in a dip that seemed much slower to watch than it did to live. He let go at the pinnacle and even continued to spin a little on the trip down to the water.

Dom climbed while Lij swam in. Lij threw him the rope when he got to the top and he jumped from further in the bank, grabbing the rope up high and pulling his feet up to clear the land. That kind of jump lasted a little longer, but you couldn't get as much distance usually. They had talked about digging a trench in the bank there so that you could make use of the full arc of the rope but it would have likely compromised the tree. By the time he reached the highest point he had turned in the air and was facing the shore again, and Lij was already out of the water and scrambling up the beach.

Lij wanted to volley. Dom dropped and the second he hit the water he was swimming in to shore. This was really hard to do with two people. Almost impossible to keep up for more than a couple of jumps, but the two of them still held the record they were sure, and they kept private tabs on it, hoping to beat their previous best. Lij swung over his head and Dom made a dash for the roots, catching the rope from Lij's backswing before he had even reached the top. That saved them a moment. He got to the top, took a breath and swung. He let his heels drop and skimmed across the water until he plunged in and under, giving the rope an extra push away from him as he let go. He wasn't sure if that effort actually accomplished anything, but he liked to try to improve their speed if he could.

They managed only about seven jumps before Dom slipped under the water and couldn't be motivated to push anymore. He sluggishly swam to where he could sit on the bottom and have his head and shoulders out of the water and did just that. Lij took his last jump, and panting, swam up to him.

“You broke it,” he huffed.

“Too tired.”

“Sugar.”

Dom smiled and looked into his shadow on the water. His own blue eyes glittered back at him in a spot of sunlight. Thought about leaning over and licking Lij. Telling him if he was a vampire he could suck hummingbird food from his viens. Badly wanted to say that and bite his neck, make him squirm a little. But he didn't. Maybe someday he could do that. Some day that wasn't today. He leaned back and put his face to the sun and groaned. “I should get back to that firebird.”

“That what?”

“The firebird. You know the car we fucked in like two hours ago?”

“Oh. I didn't know that was called a firebird.”

Dom huffed a little laugh and slipped under the water to cool his head off again. Under the water everything was a dull vaccuum of light and sound. He liked to stay under as long as he could. He liked the effortless emptiness of it. He came back up with a puff and a little spray when his chest started to try to make him open his airway. He wiped his face and stood. “You staying here?” He knew the answer.

Lij just nodded and crawled forward on his hands to let his pink toes float behind him. He barely kept his nose out of the water at that depth. Dom looked at the way his toes seemed to move and live on their own, heedless of Lij. At least he didnt' think Lij deliberately made his toes flinch and wiggle like that. He could feel his own toes doing much the same thing in the sand. He wanted to tickle the bottom of that calloused foot on the soft part in the arch. Lick right there, and squeeze his delicate middle toes between his lips and have Lij look back at him, eyes wide and bright with laughter. That too, was not on the list.