Trin by JM Snyder

Chapter 1-6

“What’d he say?” Aissa wants to know. She hounds Trin long after Gerrick has followed the other gunners into the waystation, leaving the dazed mech to stare into the shadowy depths of his run-gun engine. One word rings in Trin’s ears like the clatter of a wrench dropped to the concrete garage floor. Tonight. If Aissa would shut up long enough to let him gather his thoughts together, he could tell her what it is she wants to know. He said tonight.

But when he mentions that he can’t get a word in for all her questions, she turns the hose on him.

By the time he calls it a day, his hands are black with oil from changing the shocks. At the pump he has to scrub with stones to see his skin again. Aissa primes the handle as he rinses off, more than once splashing him out of spite, but he barely feels the water—his pants and shirt are damp and clammy from where she sprayed him earlier.

“So,” she wants to know, letting the pump run dry, “you excited?”

“No,” he lies. His heart flutters like a bird caught in his chest, and he gets dizzy if he turns his head too fast. There’s a barely perceptible quiver to his fingers that has nothing to do with the icy water running over them. He can picture himself walking down the darkened hall above the common room. He can imagine stopping in front of Gerrick’s door. He can even see himself inside, the pallet spread out like an invitation on the floor, the gunner standing beside it and smiling at him. What would you do, he asks in Trin’s mind, for me? Then he begins to take off his shirt, and somewhere between the first button and the last, Trin explodes.

Flicking him with the last of the water as it rushes from the pump, Aissa declares, “You’re full of shit.”

“What?” he wants to know.

She shakes her head, her curls tumbling over her shoulders. “You’re already so worked up over him, Trini, that you ain’t gonna be any good in his pallet tonight.”

“Maybe that’s not what he has in mind,” Trin pouts, though it’s surely what he has in mind and if he doesn’t get a piece of that man tonight, he’s going to be more than a little disappointed in the morning. He’ll be crushed. Still, it’s not really any of her business what he does with his clothes off, is it? “Maybe all he wants to do is talk.”

“Bullshit.”

Trin holds his hands up in her face and shakes them dry, splattering her with oil and water.

“Eww!” One leg shoots out automatically to kick him in the shin. “If he wanted to talk, he could do it here. Stop it. Trin—”

He drops his hands to his stomach, where they fist in a clean spot on his shirt. She lowers her voice to an intimate level and watches his fingers twist in the material. “All someone has to do is say his name,” she murmurs, “and you’re all too willing to bend over for them.”

“That’s not true,” Trin protests, but he can’t meet her gaze. He’s never actually let any of the gunners f**k him just so he could hear Gerrick’s latest exploit. He’ll touch them, lick them, suck them, rim them, finger them, sure. Hands thrust into pants, lips on hard d***s, the taste of salty c*m lingering in his mouth, that he’s done before, just to hear Gerrick’s name. But now he’s here. It’ll be the man himself tonight, no one else. Finally.

The only other guy Trin’s ever put out for was a kid his own age, Monet, back before he even knew Gerrick existed. He was the darkest boy Trin ever met—his skin glistened in the sun like flints of obsidian, and his black eyes were red-rimmed slits in the high plains of his face. A beautiful boy who rode through Arens from one of the inposts, with thin copper wires tied to his wrists like bracelets and hoops piercing his ears, his eyebrow, his n*****s. In the heat of summer six years ago he stood in the shade of one of the bay doors and watched Trin work on the run-gun trucks. When Trin came close enough, Monet told him, “You skittish but I like ya. Ever been with a boy before?”

The answer was no, but Trin was fifteen and already lusted after the gunners. Any port in a storm, he thought at the time. He took Monet up to his room, a tiny closet space above the kitchens where he sleeps. He didn’t even wash up first. In his mind s*x is his pallet hard on his knees and elbows, hot hands on his thighs, his hands and face grimy with oil and dirt. Sometimes, thinking on it, he almost comes remembering the heat alone.

It’s been years since he last saw Monet. He frowns at his hands clenched in his shirt and recalls that the boy was killed by devlars two or three months after he left Arens. The creatures swarmed over him like bees, biting and scratching and digging into his flesh, hard skin, sinewy muscles. A gunner passing through told him it was over quick. “Devlars git ‘cha like that,” the man said, his hand on Trin’s knee beneath the table and steadily rising up his thigh, “you ain’t got one scream in ya before yer dead. A shame, really. Sexy boy. Dark.”

Sensing a shift in his mood, Aissa laughs brightly to distract him from his morbid thoughts. “If he asks, just tell him you were practicing,” she says. Then she gives him a saucy wink. “That’s what I told your brother.”

Trin scrunches up his face. “I’m not hearing this,” he cries. Aissa and s*x are incongruous in his mind. Add Blain in the picture and devlars eating him alive sounds almost pleasant. When Aissa starts to say something, he covers his ears with his hands. “I’m not!” he shouts, laughing himself. “I don’t want to know!”

Aissa tugs at his arm so he’ll listen to her. “You’ll find out soon enough. After riding in hard off the wasteland, you don’t honestly think all he wants to do tonight is talk, do you? God, Trini, you’re not that naive.”