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Looking back, it was inevitable, really, that perhaps because you had spent so much of your lives locked in each other’s orbit, the space between your bodies would get confused. Somehow, whatever force that controlled the atoms of the universe, whether that be chemical reactions or God or beings from a different dimension that programmed you all into a simulator or something, finally lost track of who was supposed to be attached to which body, or even that there were supposed to be two separate bodies at all. Or maybe it was all a metaphor for penetration.
It started, as with everything that had ever existed between you, with a joke. You forgot what you were laughing about, but all that mattered is that you were laughing, not whoever made the other laugh first, only that the sound of your laughter was funnier than anything else in the world.
He leaned in, as was his habit. From the first time you met, it was as if his cells already knew that they were destined to be alongside your cells. As you laughed, he leaned closer and reached out a hand to brace around your wrist, only he missed and collapsed against the back of the sofa. You laughed even harder at his fumble, but your wrist where he meant to connect buzzed with pressure and phantom heat.
“Whoa, Bird, what the hell?” he asked, and you laughed like he was making another joke, but then you followed his black eyes down to the space between you two, and saw that there actually was no space between you two. Literally. His hand disappeared into your forearm, like you were a wall in GTA IV and he had crashed into you so hard that he glitched through you and into blue hell.
The buzz in your wrist persisted. It felt like your blood cells were hitting a dam in your veins and spilling around it in rivers of runoff.
“Can you feel that?” You heard an edge in his voice, the same edge as when he was on the cusp of an idea. Whether the idea was moronic or brilliant was always a toss-up, depending on how harsh the collision was between the two of you and the outside world, but in the bubble carved out just for you, you always would go along with it whatever it was anyway.
“Yeah, of course I do,” you said, like it was the answer to a dumb question. Truthfully, you weren’t entirely sure what you were seeing was real. You’d bought weed from a different dealer last week, maybe something in it was messing with you.
But then he said, “Me too. Dude, it’s like I can feel your, like, blood or something,” and that was a strange thing to say, even for a hallucination. Or a dream. You thought maybe this was a weird marijuana dream. You’d had them before of you and him, but they usually involved a lot more schemes. And costumes. Costumes were a recurring theme in your dreams, each of you slipping in and out of different characters even in one conversation. But your dreams were always better scored—the soundscape of this one featured only the click of the radiator and the faint whoosh of traffic outside.
He wiggled his fingers, and no, they were inside your wrist, alright. You felt the wave of them move through the layers of your flesh. It felt weird, but a good weird. He moved his hand up your arm towards your elbow. Pins and needles pricked under your skin in his wake. Giggling, he wiggled his fingers again, this time right near the soft crease of your elbow, and you laughed at how it tickled, like getting licked by a puppy. You said, “Oh,” and it came out soft and breathy.
When he pulled his hand away, something in your skin snapped, as if your arm was a rubber band and he had stretched you as far as you could go and then let loose. That pleasant buzzing sensation vanished. You both stared at your arm and then at his hand. Nothing on either of your skin showed any proof of what had happened. Tentatively, you prodded your arm. Your finger left a shallow divot in your pale skin, and you felt the touch of your own cool finger, then you released and felt nothing. Not even a bruise.
“Did that really happen?” you asked.
“Well, duh. We both saw it, didn’t we?” But he sounded unsure. You didn’t like whenever he sounded unsure, because it happened so rarely. This tone of voice from him always preceded a bitter acid leak in your stomach, and that was usually how you knew something had gone wrong three or four steps back, but the thing with him was that he never looked back to try and debrief what had gone wrong. His way of solving problems was to forge on ahead, and more often than not, the path he was going down that at one point was so obviously wrong somehow looped back around into being right.
So he thrust his hand into the center of your chest, and it did pass into your chest. His palm broke through your thin shirt, brushed the hairs on your sternum, and sunk deep past your skin. A gasp burst from you, and you felt the air move around his hand inside your lungs.
A giddy grin split his wide mouth. “Wicked.” He moved his hand down, and you felt him tugging around in your guts. You imagined this was what a pumpkin would feel while being carved on Halloween, its soft, stringy flesh and seeds getting scooped out and dumped into a bucket. The crook of his fingers sent shock waves down your limbs. He pulled and pulled at your intestines, and you could feel it in your fingernails.
“Oh God, Matt,” you said, or at least you tried to say. It might have come out as more of a groan. It was challenging to speak with someone’s hand inside you and swimming through your digestive tract.
“Holy shit.” You not only heard the awe in his voice, you felt it throbbing in your stomach. Liquid heat spilled directly out of him and into you, coiling down past your dermal barrier and infecting you cell by cell, one drop of food dye polluting an entire glass of water. The flint in his eyes sparked, and you knew what he was going to do right before he plunged his other hand into you. The sensation doubled; the feeling of being touched in places humans weren’t meant to be touched burned white hot, somewhere on the border between pain and pleasure.
You were breathing ragged, or maybe he was. You saw his chest rapidly rising and falling but felt the air rushing in your own mouth, past your own teeth. He laughed with glee, and it shook your arteries. He pushed further into you until his fist wrapped around your spine. Your body jerked as if run through with an electrical current.
“This is insane,” he said. His voice vibrated up every one of your vertebrae. “This is so crazy, I can’t believe this is happening. Do you feel this? Do you know what you feel like? Bird, it’s like I’ve got a hold of your life force here.”
You thought of the metaphor at the same time as him. “Like Yoda, on Dagobah.”
“Exactly like Yoda, on Dagobah.” He spoke in his best Yoda impression, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” He pinched your ribs. You shivered at how it tickled. “You must feel the Force around you. Here, between you.” His hand slid up through your chest and sliced into your heart. Your blood pulsed between his fingers. “Me.”
You nodded. You’d ended up on your back somehow. You were looking up at him haloed by the dim yellow ceiling light in your living room. He crawled over you, his knees sinking into your thighs, and the buzzing intensified.
“I feel like I could—wait a minute.” Brow furrowed, he twisted into your shoulder, wrapped his fingers around the cord of your nerves, and yanked. Your arm twitched, then flopped like a dead fish. “Ah-ha!” he crowed. He tried again, and your arm jolted up and held in the air. “Awesome!” With a flex of his hand, buried past the wrist into the meat of your pectoral, your arm waved back and forth. “Hello everyone,” he said in a dopey imitation of your voice, “I’m Jay.” Suddenly, he gasped, and your arm plummeted back to the couch. “Bird, this is genius. This is how we get the show at the Rivoli! We tell them we’re a ventriloquist act and then we go on stage and I make you play the piano by controlling your body!”
“But you don’t know how to play the piano,” you said. “I do. It’s not that impressive if it’s just me playing like I usually do.”
You felt his disappointment flowing out of him, blue and watery. “Oh yeah, I guess so.” He thought for a moment, idly floating his hands through you and experimenting with what nerves he could twinge. “How does this feel for you? Does it feel good?”
Every place inside of you that he touched blossomed with that blinding hot pleasure-pain. Your toes curled. “Yeah, it feels good.” This was the best drug you’d ever had in your life. You wished this dream would never end. For the first time, but not the last, you realized that you wanted to devote control of your body to him forever. From this point on, he would never even have to tell you to jump, he could simply gesture and send you as high as he wanted. It was unfiltered bliss.
He knew it too, because he said, “I know it does.” His hand climbed higher, into your throat. The pressure radiating from each of his fingers increased, tight tendrils curled around your airway. “I can feel every word before you even say it. I wonder if I can know even before you know. Oh Birdie, can I?”
You nodded. You were always going to nod, to grant him permission he didn’t need. He could take whatever he wanted from you, and you would give it—will give it—over and over again.
The hand inside your throat slid into your jaw. He slipped around your tongue, ran reverent fingertips over your teeth. Your eyes were fixed on his face above you, but you could also see yourself reflected. In looking at him, you saw your own eyes, blown wide and dark and dumb. You saw his hand enmeshed between the stubble on your chin and your gums. You felt the flex of his arm push deeper, impossibly deeper until he brushed up against your brain stem.
Everything you were already feeling expanded and exploded like a supernova. Every place you connected burned, but whether it was from your skin or your nerves or your hands inside you, you couldn’t tell. You saw two faces, one blonde, one dark, through one set of eyes. Constellations popped behind your eyelids and speckled down your neck and your chest and into your wrists and over your back. You knew everything in the universe—how to play every song on every N64 game, how to spell every word in the dictionary, how many steps it took to walk between your childhood houses—you knew everything that could ever be of any importance to you.
“Holy fuck, Bird,” you said. “I can hear you. I can literally hear you.”
You tried to say yeah, but it turns out, you couldn’t speak very well with your arm in your mouth.
“Is there more? Oh God, please say yes.” You reached deeper, tasting metal and oil on your tongue, and the barrel of a gun ripped through the back of your throat and burrowed further into your neural pathways. Electricity buzzed around your skull and shot through your arm in your mouth and up to your skull, a circuit clamping closed that you hadn’t known had been gaping open.
Your cheeks were wet, from what you could tell of what was your face. While experiencing fused consciousness for the first time, it was hard to keep track of where your skin was. Everything was building building building—a crescendo in the violins, an ascending legato melody in the low brass, a flourish in the woodwinds, and on the cymbal crash, you shook and shook apart. Your bones clacked together; your veins and nerves twisted in knots. Your voice tore from your ruined throat in a moan that seemed to last the entirety of time itself.
When you drifted back into your body, slowly, down from whatever place you had skyrocketed, the first thing you saw when you opened your eyes was him kneeling above you with his hands braced on either side of your head. The soft light from the ceiling haloed his sweaty hair, illuminating an angel with a flushed face. You wanted to reach up and brush the strands from his forehead, but you forgot how to move your arms on your own.
He exhaled, you inhaled.
He wet his lips. You knew exactly how his spit tasted. “Dude. Was that—? Did you really just—?”
It took you too long to understand what he meant, now that you weren’t thinking the same thoughts. Your body still felt fuzzy and blissed out, like an exceptionally strong trip, and feeling hadn’t yet returned to your fingers and toes. Your underwear felt damper than it did before, and the realization floated lazily to you that what had felt so like an orgasm, very much was. “Uh. I, uh.”
“Wow.” You waited for him to call you a freak, or a faggot, or laugh and reveal this was all one big prank he’d pulled on you, but he didn’t. You didn’t ask if it was the same for him; he would’ve only lied to you. Instead, you just stared at each other, breathing in tandem.
One inhale, one exhale.