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He’s not even really sure why he suggests it.
They’ve been driving through acres of ugly January for close to four hours when Marty loses his patience. Rust won’t stop staring at his goddam sketch of the DB, his body one long tense wire. “You are wound tighter than a dead dog’s asshole,” Marty says. “Try a breath or two.”
Rust doesn’t even bother looking up. “I’m thinking, Marty.”
“Nobody thinks like that for twenty minutes and gets anything useful out of it,” Marty says, and sees Rust shift uncomfortably out of the corner of his eye. “Bet you can’t even see.”
Rust ignores him and lights a cigarette. He always takes that first drag like it’s the only thing between him and oblivion – the only indication, before he started fucking talking, that Rust lives a little closer to the edge of the pit than most people do. He’s pretending not to listen, but Marty knows that’s bullshit.
Despite Rust’s best efforts, he is actually human. And Marty knows that human beings need something other than homicide every so often. Recharge the batteries, like.
“You need me to fuck that mood outa you?”
Rust’s fingers tighten a little around his pen, but he doesn’t look up. “Sex is a chemical prank the body plays on the mind,” he says, and ashes his cigarette.
“Yeah, fine,” Marty says, “but do you want some.”
It’s not that different, besides that it’s Rust.
Rust braced against the side of their car, Rust shaking and swearing and reaching back to grab at Marty’s shirt, his hair, his tie. Marty finally mans up enough to let go of one of Rust’s bony hips and get a hand on his cock, and Rust makes this sound like he’s been shot a couple of times at point-blank range.
They set themselves right afterward – there’s a bite-mark on Marty’s arm he doesn’t remember getting – and Rust’s eyes are mostly closed, his fingers loose when he does his pants back up. “Shit,” he says, mostly to himself. “Chemicals.”
“Thought as much,” Marty says, and gets in the car.
Once it happens, of course, it’s going to happen again. They don’t need to talk about it, label it, whatever. Marty knows how these things work.
Rust doesn’t seem to, and over the next week he winds back up tight. He spends three consecutive nights in the archives, fingers covered in new paper cuts every morning. His face looks even more hollowed-out than usual. He stops being okay for KAs to look at while they’re talking. Why would they, they got this fucking reaper leaning against the living room wall, ledger pinned under one skinny arm like it’s going to make a run for it.
On Thursday, Mrs. Didn’t-Hear-Nothin slams the door almost before they’re out. They get a couple of dry sandwiches and eat them on the side of the road.
“Rust,” Marty says eventually, “you gotta figure out that whole sleep thing.”
Rust gets that fucking cowboy philosopher look on his face again, and it’s been a hard boring bullshit couple of days, so Marty just reaches over and undoes the buckle on Rust’s seatbelt. Gives him an exploratory grope, seeing as how he’s in the neighborhood.
“What’re you doing,” Rust says, low and careful. Marty can feel him getting hard.
It’s satisfying, getting an unmistakable reaction from a guy who wishes he were a casefile or a table of contents instead of a person. “I might not be too good at this,” he says, undoing buttons, and watches Rust bite his lip. “I never had one a those experimental phases.”
Rust’s cock is hot in Marty’s hand. “I think,” he croaks, “even you can figure it out.”
It becomes part of the case, a little bit, in Marty’s head.
They spend long hours tracing the car through Louisiana, Marty doing most of the talking and Rust filling pages with square, dense notes. They bet on birds passing to see who pays for lunch. They stop for cigarettes. They pull over when it gets dark, and Rust kneels in the grass in front of Marty’s open door and undoes his belt and sucks his cock, spitting into the grass afterwards and leaning back on one hand.
“He’s trying to redeem them,” he says, and it takes Marty a second to get it.
“Five fuckin’ minutes, Rust, just five—” and he clambers out of the seat, gets on the cold ground, shoves his hand down Rust’s pants.
When he’s not getting fucked, Rust doesn’t make a lot of noise. Mostly he just stops looking like somebody carved him out of wood and left him in the rain for a decade or so. He gets this hitch in his breath that Marty sometimes remembers, while he’s waiting in line or brushing his teeth.
Marty doesn’t kiss him. Men don’t like that kind of thing.
He does start noticing that Rust has a pretty good ass, but he’s been an ass man from way back. And he has a glance at some of his old porn, just to make sure he still loves pussy – yep. He doesn’t want Rust to fuck him, he’s good being the guy doing that part, that arrangement makes sense.
He doesn’t feel that different, but it creeps up on him slow.
“You ever think,” he says one day in the car, “a man could love—”
“Nope,” Rust says, and Marty leaves it be.