This is the second installment of the Cat and Mouse trilogy. If you like this story, look for the first installment, Mouse Trap, and the third installment, Maneki Neko.

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Davey hadn’t bothered to shut the bedroom door behind him, but the cat was content to leave it open. He had made the mistake of letting himself look too long at the sunset, at the colors that glowed over the dark silhouette of the city’s skyline. It was lovely, but it was a sight the cat had not allowed himself to indulge in for a long time. Sunsets brought back too many memories.

His fingers tightened around the handful of sheer fabric he had unconsciously pulled aside the better to see the view. Pain, sharp but not unexpected, burned at the edges of his awareness. He should step away now. He should turn around and go back into his cocoon of carpet and plaster and wood, where there were no memories and no echoes, only warm, pliant bodies and the sensual beauty of the here and the now.

But he didn’t.

The sunset’s colors glowed deeper and the cat’s chest grew tighter. It was going to be bad, this one. He’d blame it on Davey, Davey and his perfect responses. It was his fault, for being perfect, for dragging all this to the front of the cat’s mind, for re-awakening echoes the cat didn’t want to hear any more.

Davey’s fault. Davey, and the sunset.

###

Billy Craig was sitting in the clinic’s waiting room, staring out the window at a tangerine sunset, when Tyler came through the swinging door. Strange, how small Tyler looked in this place, his body wiry and thin in a bloodstained t-shirt, his dark hair hanging limp over his ears, his shoulders slumped in defeat. The bruise on his cheek, the size and color of a plum, was almost a footnote to the greater story his body told.

“She gonna be okay?” Billy Craig asked.

Tyler drew in a breath that made his shoulders shake. “Yeah,” he replied. “She’s gonna be here for a couple of days.”

Billy Craig turned with Tyler as he drew abreast and walked quickly to keep up with him. “What about your dad? What are they going to do about him?”

Tyler stretched out his legs, lengthening his stride until he was all but running toward the exit. He pushed through the glass doors without slowing down. Once outside, he drew in a lungful of humid evening air and let his head fall back as if he were focused entirely on the colors of the sky above him.

“Tyler?”

Billy Craig stood behind him, waiting for an answer. He wished Tyler would say something; he didn’t give two figs what, as long he said something...

“They ain’t gonna do nothing about him,” Tyler finally growled. “She’s the one gotta make a move, and she ain’t gonna.”

“Why’s it gotta be her? That old man’s been whalin’ on you, too, from the looks of that bruise.”

“Shut up. I’m done talking about it. My old man ain’t none of your business, so just shut up.”

Billy Craig scowled. “It is too my business. You’re my...” He swallowed, and his eyes shifted away. “... my best friend.” Another word had danced on his lips for an instant, but not a word he could ever say. Not in Custer County, Alabama.

Tyler never replied to that.

Billy Craig ran his hands through his blonde hair, then jammed them in his pockets and shuffled forward until he stood beside Tyler. “Where you going now?”

In the silence before Tyler answered, notions of running away with him flitted through Billy Craig’s mind, as they always did when the helpless anger got to be too much to swallow down. Right now it felt like he was trying to force a grapefruit down his throat whole, and it had lodged somewhere behind his sternum, aching and fierce.

But running away wasn’t real. They were sixteen years old; they had no where to go, and no way to get there if they did. Besides, running away would mean Tyler leaving his mother alone with the man who had just put her in the hospital for the second time in three years, and Billy Craig knew d*mn well that wasn’t in Tyler to do.

“Home, I guess,” Tyler finally said.

Home was seven miles down the county road, then another mile down a dirt track, but Billy Craig didn’t mind. Night was coming and it would be pleasantly cool after the sun went down. The walk would clear his mind, settle his insides, and walking was far better than waiting in the clinic. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

For an hour, the only traffic that passed them on the road was a truck full of watermelons and a station wagon that had to be as old as Billy Craig’s father. Otherwise, the only sounds that broke the silence were the crickets and the faint slap of their sneakers on the road.

When Tyler finally looked toward him and softly spoke his name, Billy Craig took him by the shoulders and pulled him off the roadside, down into the tall grass where they wouldn’t be seen.

Tyler’s body covered his and their lips met. The first time they’d kissed, Tyler’s mouth had tasted of grape Kool-Aid, cloyingly sweet but not unpleasant. Tonight it tasted of blood and salt.

Tyler’s lips opened obediently beneath Billy Craig’s sweeping tongue and he moaned softly as Billy Craig deepened the kiss. Billy Craig loved that about Tyler, those sounds he made. For all Tyler’s shame and fears of getting caught, once they got started, he gave himself over completely. Billy Craig listened to him spilling soft whimpers into the night air, and wondered if he could learn to play Tyler like an instrument -- to touch him here to get one sound; touch him there and this way to get another, deeper note.

Billy Craig was half-hard and aching to go farther than kissing and a few touches, but Tyler couldn’t be pushed too far, too fast. Still, Billy Craig couldn’t help but arch up a little, trying to bring his hips and pelvis into contact with Tyler. He didn’t need much, just a little bit of friction would do ...

Tyler made a sound in Billy Craig’s mouth, a soft little moan, but it was enough to tell Billy Craig that Tyler had felt him move and, more importantly, that he had liked it. Billy Craig did it again, and was rewarded with Tyler pressing down to meet him, shifting a little to get the angle right.

“Yeah,” Billy Craig whispered. “Like that.”

Tyler moved on him, squirming and sliding against him, too lost in physical sensation to worry about the shame of it now. He didn’t protest when Billy Craig gripped his ass and pushed him downward, lifting his head to press his mouth harder against Tyler’s, to plunge his tongue inside Tyler’s mouth in time with the motion of his hips.

Billy Craig’s hands sought out Tyler’s face, his fingers sliding into his soft hair, thumbs brushing along his cheekbones –

Tyler jerked and gasped. Too late, Billy Craig realized he had hurt him, but Tyler’s gasp had sounded like pleasure and he had ground harder against him.

“Billy Craig,” Tyler whispered, his eyes wide as they stared down at him. “Do it again. Hurt me again.”

Biting his lip, Billy Craig put his hands back on Tyler’s face and pressed his thumb into the bruise as he pushed up hard against him.

Tyler cried out and started to come. Billy Craig watched his face, marveling at the pure abandon of his expression, the flush on his cheeks, his open, moaning mouth. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He gripped Tyler’s hips and shuddered as his own orgasm flooded his senses.

Tyler’s weight settled on him, warm and solid. Billy Craig could hear his heartbeat, felt his chest rising and falling in gradually slowing breaths that gusted softly across his neck.

“Tyler?” Billy Craig murmured, lifting his head. “Hey, you okay?”

Tyler nodded. He sat up on his knees, straddling Billy Craig, and drew the back of his hand over his swollen lips. Then, with an odd expression on his face, he touched the bruise on his cheek. “Did I... did I scare you?” he asked.

Billy Craig shrugged. “No. Did I do it right? Was it what you wanted?”

Tyler looked down, and Billy Craig knew that if it hadn’t been so dark, he would have seen Tyler’s cheeks turning the color of ripe peaches. “Yeah,” Tyler finally said. He smiled, a world of self-deprecation in the small expression as he gingerly touched the spot again. “It doesn’t feel so great now, though.”

“Sorry.”

Tyler didn’t talk much as they finished their long hike home. Billy Craig thought he might have been ashamed of what he had he had asked Billy Craig to do. Or maybe he was afraid of the same thing Billy Craig was starting to fear – that Tyler’s old man had taught him something twisted about love and pain.

But Billy Craig wasn’t going to worry about that. If Tyler found beauty in mixing pleasure and pain, then Billy Craig would mix it for him and do his best to make him happy. He loved Tyler, loved making him come, and whatever Tyler wanted was good and right.

#

It was almost ten o’clock when Billy Craig saw the glow of the porchlight at Tyler’s house. He wondered that anyone had had the presence of mind to turn it on; their exodus from the house with his sobbing, bleeding mother must have been anything but orderly. Billy Craig didn’t usually find relief in the sight of that house, but tonight, knowing they would be alone there, he was glad to see it. He was tired now, ready to get off his feet and get a bite to eat.

“You want to come in?” Tyler asked.

Billy Craig nodded. He followed Tyler up the creaky wooden steps to the front door.

“Ew,” Tyler barked out. “What is that?”

Billy Craig saw it at the same moment Tyler spoke, and he jerked to a stop. “D*mn cat,” he muttered.

On the doormat lay a lump of blood and fur that had once been a field mouse.

He glanced to the end of the porch and saw the cat, a tabby with apricot stripes, in its favorite spot under the porch swing. It looked so soft and harmless, curled on the wooden planking, blinking drowsily at the noisy boys who had awakened it.

“Why does it do that? That’s gross,” Tyler complained.

Billy Craig shrugged. “Who knows. Stupid cat. Stand back, I’ll toss it under the porch.”

While Tyler moved aside, Billy Craig picked up the doormat and carried it in his hands like a laden tray down the steps. At first he resolved not to look at the twisted mass on the mat, but after a moment, his curiosity overcame him.

If he hadn’t already known what a mouse looked like, the tiny corpse would not have taught him much. Except for the small, pointed nose and one ear, the rest was so mangled it no longer bore any resemblance to its original form. Thing was, according to Billy Craig’s, the cat would have done most of that damage while the mouse was still alive. Cats liked to play with their prey; and the mouse’s presence on the doormat was testament to the fact that cat hadn’t even been hungry.

He wondered how long it had taken the mouse to die; or if it had even been dead when the cat had walked away from it.

Shuddering at the turn his thoughts had taken, Billy Craig gave the mat a popping toss toward the crawl space under the porch. There was a plop in the shadowed darkness, and when Billy Craig turned the mat back over, only a brownish stain marked where the mouse had lain, bleeding out its miniature life on a ten-year-old Wal-mart doormat.

He came back up the steps to find Tyler glaring at the cat. “You’re mean as hell, you know that?” The cat deigned to lick its paw in response. “Poor mouse,” he muttered to Billy Craig.