"Don't," he says, thin and strangled — no, not strangled, really. Smothered. The word hardly left his throat at all, and if John hadn't been so close, just about on top of him in an enclosed space, he might never have heard.

John has pushed down Jim's zipper with two blunt fingertips — no need to be in a hurry about it. The kid shivers, a real full-body shiver at the sensation and sound of metal parting from metal, but he's going to hear something a lot worse, probably, if he can't keep his head. John has walked away from wrecks before.

(Lacerations to the face and chest, probably from where he went through the windshield, but it's the damndest thing, you'll never believe it, something must've burst...)

"Keep driving."

Jim's fresh-faced, cute in a college-town kind of way, but his face stiff with fear is a few notches above cute. Get a man like this and if he hasn't already called you a faggot he may never — he's too frightened of what comes next. He'll forget. It's sublime.

"Are you crazy? I'll crash the car—" His voice is breaking.

"Easy, easy," John says, close to his ear, close to his neck radiating blood-heat even here in the dark. "Just keep your eyes on the road. You can do that, can't you?"

The tip of his tongue tracks a line down the side of Jim's throat — tasting the air, testing the waters to see if he'll suck a sharp breath and jerk the wheel left or fumble for the brake pedal. The kid's eyelashes cast spider-shadows down his cheeks, long and crooked.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm helping you out."

This will be the last time someone touches him like this before he dies. The odds aren't small that it's the first time anyone has touched him like this at all — maybe not, kids these days, but no one can touch him the way John can. Anatomically, without pretenses. Meat is meat, and skin is skin.

If he tries anything smart John will cut his fingers off one by one.

John palms for the shape of him through his jeans, idly curious if he's wearing underwear. Jim's spine stiffens against the driver's seat, his legs go rigid even as he stubbornly keeps his heel to the floor and his foot easing against the accelerator. If this is how he looks when he's concentrating — well.

He can try and concentrate all he likes, there's some part of him between his legs that's ready to play traitor and it begs more eloquently than the rest of him can.

The kid's barely suppressing whimpers and yet he's still hard — ah, to be young again. Through gritted teeth: "Are you going to bite it off or something?"

John presses the hair back from his forehead, scattering drops of wet. He's ready to sink down, to brace on Jim's denim lap. "Now why would I do that?"

He takes Jim into his mouth.

All roads are the same — the same roadside rests and standardized signage, informational billboards stating that Hell is real or a sex shop is just off the next exit or a local girl's gone missing in several pieces and her folks want her back very much. West Texas is the same, bound up with the smell of gasoline.

It's a defense against the thin memory of some other backcountry road, before seatbelts and before missing persons billboards — of being bent low over the divider with a cramp in his jaw and a steadily growing awareness in his mind that he was going to do something really satisfying when let up. It wasn't his knife back then, it'd been parked half-buried in the ashtray like it was waiting for him, easy to hand and a dream to handle. A payment. A present.

Jim is breathing ragged now, trying to keep quiet, trying to keep his eyes on the road just like John asked. He's not so sure what happens at the end of this, so it figures he'll try to make it last. John's breaths maintain an evenness, dragged through his nose as he works his way up and down again. He maintains pressure with the knife. The shoulders of his damp coat strain across his back, and wouldn't it give the kid a scare if he happened to sneeze while he was down here, and bit —

The kid tastes like cigarette ash and long night driving. The tip of the switchblade is pressing into his leg just hard enough to cut a dent into his jeans.

No sharp teeth, only sloppy tongue — he sucks him off with frank greediness, tasting him squirm and letting there be nothing between them but the dull roar of the road. Somebody could see them like this, sure. Somebody'd get an eyeful. It's the taste of altruism that coats the inside of John's mouth — this sad-sack kid, thinking he'd do the decent thing, and now a stranger's mouth is rasping over his cock, keeping him punishingly stiff whether he likes it or not.

Can you believe people do this for fun, is what he would say if his mouth weren't otherwise occupied. Two tons of beautiful flammable metal run through with wires and glass, and you're trusting life and limb to your ability to keep your eyes on the double yellow lines with some skinny blonde country-club thing bobbing and gagging in your lap. He, at least, does not gag. The tip of his tongue finds Jim's most sensitive places and works them raw.

Jim makes a small sick noise in the back of his throat, and his dick twitches against John's mouth, maybe not in that exact order. The steering wheel's started to drift, now they're somewhere in the other lane, across the painted line — call it a knack that John can tell, Jim's driving one-handed now with the other making a gingerly fist in the wet hair at John's nape. Like he's deliberating on whether to throw him off.

With a switchblade not six inches from some of his more vital organs, and a few big blood vessels besides, he ought to know better. If he kicks up a fuss then they'll both get it. It's so easy to lose control of the wheel this early in the morning, cutting a shallow turn too sharply on wet blacktop or washed-out gravel, to run straight off the road without even meaning to. To wrap your vehicle around a signpost or the only tree in sight. Unexplained brake failure. Operator error.

(You wouldn't believe this, but when the county coroner wheeled him in, all ten fingers—)

John works at him with his mouth, wringing a climax out of him like a bloody shirt. The blood is loud in his own ears, singing loud and clear like the blotches of impossible color behind his closed eyelids. There's a barely perceptible sound like the pads of a young man's sweating fingers unclenching from the steering wheel — then just the dim jangle of the turned-down radio and the steady grind of tires on blacktop, the small broken sound of the driver's breath. But they're still on course, not scraping through the dirt or at the bottom of a ditch. Not bad.

The thin taste of chlorine tracks down his tongue like a line of salt, biological and chemical all at once. He spits, not on the upholstery but down in the wheel well. The kid whimpers.