Dreams Such as These

Author: Chrislee

*

When Lindsey McDonald was fourteen, he had a dream. A startling dream, which ended the way most of his early teenage dreams ended: his sweaty palm gripping his rigid cock beneath the threadbare covers of his bed in the closet his mother called a bedroom.

In the dream, Lindsey was walking home from the pool hall, Corner Pocket, where he spent most of his free time shooting the shit with his friends and sneaking sips of Eddie Belder’s warm Coors.

Eddie was 18, but he looked 21 and he had fake ID. Lindsey thought Eddie was as cool as shit. He particularly admired the casual way Eddie leaned against the peeling wall of Corner Pocket, one lock of his dirty blonde hair hanging in a shaggy curtain across his forehead. Eddie rolled his own cigarettes and it was rumored he fucked girls in the men’s bathroom.

In Lindsey’s dream, Eddie’s face was the last thing he remembered seeing before he left Corner Pocket and started down the shitty main street towards home.

Dream Lindsey walks with his head down, his hands shoved in the loose front pockets of his Levis 501’s. There’s a John Cougar Mellencamp song in his head: Lonely Ol’ Night he thinks and he hums a little bit, not too loud because he wouldn’t want anyone to hear him; he wouldn’t want anyone to know he thinks John is kinda cool.

At the town’s only traffic light, Lindsey turns right. He passes the bakery and the Laundromat and a few blocks down, the little elementary school he went to. Fuck, he hates Oklahoma.

Dream Lindsey wishes he had a smoke. He crosses the empty street and cuts through the cemetery that separates his house, or shack to be more precise, from the rest of this one-horse town. His mother won’t be home; she works at a truck stop on the highway. His father is gone. At least this month.

The sky is lifeless. There isn’t a single star to guide him, but Lindsey has passed this way before. As a kid he could get from school to home in seven minutes flat with his eyes closed. And his hands tied behind his back. He pauses to topple a crumbling angel with one sneakered foot. Fuck it. It was goin’ in that direction anyway.

He’s pretty much in the middle of the cemetery when he hears the noise. He stops and for a minute all he can hear is his own breath in his ear. He twists his head trying to find the noise again and catches something out of the corner of his eye, a flash of black.

“Dickwad,” Lindsey mutters under his breath. “I know you’re there,” he says a little more loudly. It’s a lie. IHe doesn’t have a clue who’s doggin’ him. He takes a step forward, rounding the edge of the Bishop Family Tomb. It’s the biggest monument in the cemetery because the Bishop family practically owned everything in this county and the next. Big feeling in life, dead like everyone else in the end.

“Hello, Lindsey.”

Shelley Firth. She is standing just past the Bishop’s tomb, where he wouldn’t be able to see her until just now.

Shelley Firth is the most beautiful girl in town and Lindsey has whacked off to the thought of her luminous skin and candy-pink mouth on more than one occasion. Her tits are like two little Dixie cups, small and pointed- all nipple and no flesh. She has boy hips and a sweet ass and Dream Lindsey is hard the instant he sees her.

“Hi, Shelley,” he says. He looks left and then right. Usually when there is a Shelley there is an Eddie. But that wouldn’t make sense because he’d left Eddie at the pool hall.

Shelley shrugs.

“Yeah, well, I gotta get home,” Lindsey says and takes a step forward.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you going to be able to walk?” Shelley smiles a little and looks down at Lindsey’s crotch.

She can see his hard on? In the dark?

For a second Lindsey considers his options. Shelley is obviously way older than her years. If you believe the rumors- and Lindsey is inclined to- she’d sucked off the entire football team by the time she was thirteen. Sadly, Lindsey wasn’t big enough for football.

“I won’t hurt you,” she says, stepping closer.

“Like you could,” Lindsey says. He isn’t tall, true, but he can scrap. Not that he has any interest in ‘scrapping’ with Shelley, but if Eddie finds out about this he’ll be wearing his asshole as a hat.

Shelley falls to her knees on the grass in front of Lindsey and starts popping the buttons on his fly. Dream Lindsey’s dick emerges- a long hard powerful instrument of destruction.

Shelley coos with pleasure. Lindsey sighs and closes his eyes. Anticipating his buckling knees, he reaches one arm out to rest against the Bishop’s tomb.

And this is the point in the dream that freaks Lindsey out. Because his hand doesn’t touch cool stone, it touches something distinctly human. He feels the crisp cotton of a shirt, the hard muscle that flexes under his palm. Lindsey turns to look and watches, dazed, as a shadowy figure brings Lindsey’s wrist to his mouth.

Dream Lindsey couldn’t have told you what the man looked like. Years later the face that his mind would conjure up was Eddie Belder’s. So when he remembered the dream (and he often did)- it was Eddie’s pale grey eyes slanted down at him, Eddie’s thick fingers cradling his fragile wrist, Eddie’s teeth sinking into his skin and sucking. Sucking.

And in the dream, Lindsey comes before Shelley has even put her lips against the head of his cock.

*

There’s a knock at his door and Lindsey looks up. Lilah Morgan is standing there.

“Burning the midnight oil?” She asks leaning into his office.

Smug bitch.

“Yeah. You, too.”

She steps into the office, smoothing the jacket of her Versace suit. “It’s quieter now.”

“And you haven’t got anyone to go home to.” It’s not a question.

She parks her ass on the edge of Lindsey’s desk.

“Pot meet kettle,” she says.

“Yeah. Look, I was just about to go get a drink.”

“Why, is that an invitation, Mr. McDonald?” Lilah says in her best Oklahoman drawl.

“It’s the best offer you’re likely to get tonight,” he says, pulling his jacket off the back of his chair and tugging his tie back into place.

“Well, alright then.”

*

They complain about the Senior Partners through the first third of the bottle of Glenlivet. By the time they start the second third, Lindsey’s tie is off and so is Lilah’s suit jacket. Her silk blouse gapes open and Lindsey can see the firm curve of one breast above the demure lace edge of her bra. By the time they’re finished half the bottle, Lilah has stopped re-applying her lipstick and started to pepper her sentences with expletives. She smells good, like honey and the slick centre of peach-flesh.

“And that bastard Angel,” Lilah is saying, spilling a little of the remaining scotch on the table and dragging her fingers through it before bringing them to her mouth and licking them clean. “If it wasn’t for him we’d be senior management right now.”

“I guess,” Lindsey says. His head is back against the leather banquette. His eyes are closed.

“Don’t be so goddamn blasé, Lindsey. We have to do something about him.”

Lindsey opens his eyes. “He’ll sabotage himself, Lilah.”

“How do you know?”

“The good ones always do.”

When they finish the bottle, Lindsey feels drunk and Lilah seems sober.

“I can hold my liquor,” she says. “It’s a skill.”

He puts her into one cab and gets into another. At the last minute he changes his mind and gets out.

He tells himself he just wants to watch.

*

It’s easy enough to find Angel. For a guy who doesn’t like the spotlight, he’s ridiculously easy to track down. Or maybe Lindsey just knows all the right people to ask or into whose hand he needs to slip the cash.

From this vantage point he can see Angel helping the helpless.

Christ.

If there was a kitten that needed rescuing, Lindsey had no doubt Angel would be up for the job. But right now, he’s crouched down in front of a young girl. Lindsey can’t hear the words, but he knows how they’ll sound to the frightened victim: soothing, reassuring.

But this isn’t what Lindsey came to see. So he’ll just wait.

It’s the middle of the night when the fight breaks out. Three rather impressive vamps drop from the sky- although Lindsey realizes that’s impossible- and Angel sets about the business of killing them. Show time.

Lindsey waits for it, his mouth dry. He’ll never know what pushes the demon forward, but when Angel’s face morphs, Lindsey is so hard he can barely move. By the time Angel has dusted the third vampire, Lindsey’s hand is pressed hard against the wedge of cock trapped in his trousers.

When he opens his eyes, Angel is standing across the alley watching him.

“You’re pathetic,” Angel says. “You know that, right.”

Lindsey slides his back up the wall; it’s the only way he can make it to his feet.

“Isn’t this a bit downtown for you, Lindsey?”

Lindsey smiles coldly. “Just doing some research.”

Angel’s smile is colder. “Oh, is that what you kids are calling it these days?”

God, Lindsey hates this fucker.

And he wonders what it would be like to be pressed against him, just for an instant..

“I’m goin’ home,” Lindsey says.

“Good idea. There’s all sorts of crazy people on the streets,” Angel says. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

“I appreciate your concern,” Lindsey says.

Angel narrows his lips and then disappears deeper into the alley.

*

In bed he remembers that night in the cemetery.

He sees the slow fall of the angel monument. He sees Shelley drop to her knees. He holds out his arm and turns his head to look for the figure in the dark.

Only it’s not Eddie’s face he sees.

It hasn’t been for quite some time.

THE END

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