(Non)Fiction
written for hope
[ Casey/Zeke ] PG-13
Casey knows what Zeke's body looks like.
He's assembled it piecemeal after years of careful observation, culled together from stolen glances and chance encounters, from the thin sliver of pale skin that shows whenever Zeke's pants ride too low and his shirt rides too high, to the little bit exposed at his collar, the small V of flesh that stretches flat and perfect between his collarbones. There's the line of his spine as he changes after gym class - the flawless seam of hollows and notches along the curve of his back - muscle and bone and sinew working as he trades one shirt for another, his hands moving over damp cotton. Strong, agile fingers with blunt nails and awkward knuckles, shoulder blades like taut sails.
When Zeke smiles, his mouth is mostly just teeth and one small gap, right there in the front and Casey knows what it feels like to run his tongue along the inside of a gap like that because he's got one too. Sometimes he finds himself wondering absently whether or not Zeke's would feel the same. He's seen his mouth do plenty of things besides smile - he's seen it lie and condescend and take long, sweet drags off of half-spent cigarettes, the smoke curling from the upturned corner of his lips in tendrils of gray and blue.
Some bits of Zeke, Casey stockpiles in photographs - all velvet black and blown-out white - soft, with too many blurred edges. And even though the Zeke in his photos is always slightly out of focus, the Zeke in his dreams is always sharp and brilliant and painfully clear - brownblack eyes and tan, slender limbs and flushed, parted lips that murmur nonsense with a nicotine voice. Lips that sting and curse and beg in ways Casey always thought were beyond the reaches of his imagination. A tongue that tastes like tar and brown sugar.
The parts he's not sure about, Casey makes up in his head, so Zeke's got Casey's narrow ass and winged hip bones, the kind that never fit properly when pressed close to another human body - the kind that jut and hurt when you fuck. He's given him a set of scars and a tiny mole on the inside of this wrist - a small birthmark on his inner left thigh, right next to a red, angry mark inherited from Casey's hungry, inquisitive mouth.
This is the Zeke that crawls into bed with Casey every night - a strange collage of fantasy and reality, all of the stitching and joints buried beneath the skin, hidden by the delicacy of Casey's craftsmanship. Sometimes when he wakes, Casey finds new bruises in the bathroom mirror, ones that were not there the night before - strange constellations of purple and yellow smudged upon his ribcage, nebulous and radiant against his palewhite skin. He thinks it must be Zeke - his Zeke - leaving love letters behind from some distant place.
The proof of his patchwork lover lingers long after dreams fade, and Casey is left haunted in his waking.
