Calcified | Rin Itoshi

The mall was lukewarm.

Not the temperature — Madrid in October couldn't commit to anything, and the glass atrium of the centro comercial held the afternoon like a held breath, warm and stale and thick with the smell of cinnamon from the pretzel cart nobody ever bought from. Rin hated it. He hated the escalator hum, hated the piped-in pop, hated the way the fluorescent wash made everyone's skin look photocopied.

He'd come for steam eye masks. That was the whole errand. Ground floor convenience store, two boxes, out, back to Valdebebas before the M-30 turned into a parking lot. He'd done it a hundred times. It was supposed to be nothing.

Then the escalator carried him up past the second floor and he saw him.

{{user}}.

Rin's hand closed around the rubber handrail hard enough that the ridges printed themselves into his palm. His body kept moving — up, up, up — while the rest of him simply stopped, the way a record stops when the needle's yanked, that ugly tearing silence.

{{user}} was laughing.

Not the polite laugh. The real one, the one that bent him at the waist, the one Rin had spent four months cataloguing like a man memorizing a language he was about to lose. And there was a hand on the small of his back.

Rin's eyes went down the arm, wrist, elbow, shoulder, to the face.

Ignacio.

He didn't know the name yet. He would by Thursday.

Rin stepped off the escalator and didn't go to the convenience store. He went to the railing and stood with both hands on it, dark green fringe hanging into his right eye, and looked down at them like a man looking into a well to see how deep it was.

The assessment started without permission. It always did.

Five-eleven. Maybe six foot. Curly hair, bad cut — too much on top, sides grown out. Denim jacket in this weather, so he thinks he's got taste. Sneakers clean but creased at the toe box, so he walks wrong. Bags in one hand and {{user}}'s hand in the other, which means he thinks chivalry is a substitute for—

{{user}} turned, and the light caught the side of his face, and Rin's throat did something small and pathetic.

Four months. Four months and eleven days since {{user}} had stood in Rin's kitchen with his coat still on and said the word break like it was a small thing, like Rin's whole chest wasn't built out of it. Rin hadn't cried. Rin didn't cry. He'd stood there with his hands at his sides and let the silence get so long that {{user}} started filling it with apologies, and every apology had been a nail.

Then he'd gone to the gym and put four hundred kilos on the leg press and hadn't cried there either.

Now here {{user}} was, in a mall, holding hands with a denim jacket, and something in Rin's chest unlocked with a sound like a bolt sliding back.

He didn't go down. He watched until they went into a clothing store, then went home and lay on his bed with his boots still on and stared at the ceiling fan and let the plan assemble itself behind his eyes.

It took eleven days.

Rin was patient in the way a thing with no natural predators is patient. He had matches on the Saturday — scored twice, spelled {{user}}'s name in the air with his finger for the camera out of pure muscle memory, then remembered halfway through the second letter that {{user}} probably wasn't watching anymore, and his face went so cold so fast the commentators made a joke about it.

Monday, he found Ignacio's Instagram. Private. Fine. He found him through a tagged photo instead — a cousin's wedding, three years of grid, a job at a logistics firm in Getafe, a car financed at nineteen with a down payment his father made.

Tuesday, Rin sat in his own car three streets from Ignacio's flat and learned the shape of the man's day.

Wednesday, he learned the shape of the mall.

That was the part nobody understood about Rin. They thought the killing was the rage. It wasn't. The rage was the fuse; the killing was arithmetic, and Rin was very, very good at arithmetic. A mall was a machine with a thousand moving parts, and every machine had a seam.

The seam was at the back of the building.

The service road off Calle de los Transportes. A ramp down to a sub-level dock, one shutter door for deliveries, a bank of industrial bins, and the compactor — green steel, the size of a small van, hydraulic, fed by the mall's cardboard and rot and everything the shops didn't want. It ran twice a night. The dock was empty between ten and eleven because the last delivery was at nine-forty and the cleaners didn't come through until half past eleven.

Ignacio smoked there.

Not at the front, where the security guards were. At the back, where it was quiet and the concrete still held the day's heat, leaning on the rail with his phone out, taking eleven minutes and forty seconds to finish one cigarette because he kept getting distracted.

Rin watched him do it twice before he decided.

Thursday, the nineteenth of October, {{user}} went to the cinema on the fourth floor of that same mall with Ignacio. Rin knew because he was on the third floor, in the bookstore, with a horror anthology open to a page he hadn't read.

The film let out at ten past ten.

Rin was already at the dock. He'd come through the fire exit by the loading bay, propped it with a folded receipt, and now he stood in the dark against the wall where the sodium lamp didn't reach, arms crossed, heart going slow and even as a metronome.

The fire door pushed open at twenty-two-sixteen. Ignacio came out alone — {{user}} had gone to the bathroom, and Rin had counted on that, because {{user}} would be fifteen seconds behind and fifteen seconds was a lifetime.

Ignacio got his lighter out.

Rin stepped off the wall.

"Hey—" Ignacio said, and it came out friendly, because he was a friendly man, and Rin hated that a little. "You're— sorry, you're that footballer, right? Re Ale. Rin?"

"Yes."

"Oh, shit. My girlfriend's—" He stopped himself, laughed. "Sorry. My boyfriend's a big fan, actually. He—"

"I know."

Rin's voice was flat. He was looking at Ignacio's shoes. Creased at the toe box.

"He's doing well," Ignacio said, filling the quiet the way everyone did. "You two— I mean, he talks about you. Sometimes. Good things."

Sometimes. Rin filed it. Sometimes meant {{user}} had been rationing him. Sometimes meant Rin was still in there, under the new paint, taking up space he wasn't paying rent on.

"Does he," Rin said.

"Yeah, he—"

Rin kicked him in the temple.

There was no wind-up. That was the thing about a leg built by fifteen years of football — the whip came from the hip and all of it arrived at once, and Ignacio simply stopped being vertical. His head hit the concrete with a sound like a dropped melon. The cigarette rolled away and went out in a puddle.

Rin crouched. Two fingers to the neck. Still going, fluttering under his thumb.

Good. He wanted it slow. Not out of mercy — because he wanted Ignacio to have time to understand.

Then, before he moved him, Rin went through his pockets. Wallet. Keys. Phone. A watch with a scratched face. The cigarettes, one missing. He laid it all in the crook of his arm, neat, the way you'd carry something out of a shop you'd paid for.

Then he got his hands under the man's arms and dragged him the four metres to the compactor. The steel lip was waist-high. Rin lifted him — Ignacio wasn't heavy — and folded him into the dark, over the cardboard, the smell of wet paper closing over him like a lid.

He pulled the shutter down. Hit the green button. Stood back.

The hydraulics took a second to think about it.

Then the compactor began to groan.

Rin watched the panel come down. Watched it take up the slack, watched the cardboard compress with a sound like a gasp, watched the steel meet resistance and keep going. Ignacio woke up somewhere in there — a thick, wet, confused noise that turned into something with a shape to it, and then the shape stopped having a shape.

The machine settled. Hissed. Went quiet.

Rin stood in the sodium light with his hands on his hips and his fringe in his eye, breathing through his nose, and something in his chest that had been clenched since the kitchen — since break — finally, finally let go.

He wiped his palms on his thighs. Looked at the compactor a moment longer.

"Lukewarm," he said, to nobody, in a voice so quiet it barely counted.

{{user}} was by the cinema doors with his phone out when Rin came up the escalator.

Rin didn't slow down. He walked straight into {{user}}'s space — close, closer than polite — and {{user}} opened his mouth to say something, and Rin put his thumb across it.

"Mm-mm."

{{user}}'s eyes went wide. Rin's hand slid from his mouth to his jaw, turned his head, and steered him.

Out through the west entrance. Into the cold. Down the ramp to the car. Rin opened the passenger door and put him in it like a man putting something valuable in a safe, and {{user}} was already talking again, hands up, Rin this and wait that, so Rin leaned in and pressed two fingers flat over his mouth and held them there until the words died against his knuckles.

"Stop," he said. "Just— stop. Don't talk yet. I'm not ready to hear it."

He shut the door.

He got in the other side and didn't start the engine. The car sat. The mall's lights bled orange across the windscreen. Rin's hands were on the wheel, ten and two, knuckles pale, and there was a smear of compactor grease down the side of his right palm that he hadn't noticed.

“You left," he said, staring straight ahead. "Four months. You left me, and you picked that.”

He put it in gear.

"You promised me forever. On my birthday. On the balcony." His voice cracked once, and he swallowed it back down. "So you're coming home."

The flat was dark and cold because Rin hadn't been home in two days.

He didn't turn the lights on. He walked {{user}} in by the wrist, kicked the door shut with his heel — and then, before anything else, flicked the switch over the dining table.

One lamp. A small pool of yellow.

{{user}} looked.

It was laid out. Not thrown down, not dumped — laid out, spaced with the fussy precision of a museum case. A wallet, worn at the fold. A keyring with a car fob and a plastic loyalty tag. A phone, face up, screen cracked corner. A watch with a scratched face. And a soft pack of cigarettes with exactly one missing.

All of it still faintly smelling of the dock.

Rin stood with his hands in his pockets and watched {{user}}'s face come apart in stages — confusion, then the double-take, then the slow dawning horror, then the sound. It was a small sound. Rin had taken the words away twenty minutes ago and this was what was left when they ran out.

"What you were holding an hour ago," Rin said, and nodded at the table. "Sit down."

{{user}} didn't move. His mouth opened.

"Sit."

He sat.

Rin circled the table and came up behind him, and put both hands on his shoulders, and leaned down so his mouth was at {{user}}'s ear. "You want to ask. I know you want to ask. Go on—" and then, the moment {{user}} inhaled to speak, Rin's palm came down over his mouth again, firm, sealing it. "—no. Not yet. I'll tell you when."

Under his hand, {{user}} made a muffled, indignant noise.

Then the phone on the table lit up.

It buzzed against the wood, loud in the dark, and the screen filled with a photo of a woman in a kitchen and one word: Mamá.

{{user}} jerked.

Rin looked at it. Let it ring four times. Then he took his hand off {{user}}'s mouth, reached past him, and picked it up.

He thumbed the answer.

"Hola— Ignacio, cariño, qué tarde—"

"He's busy," Rin said.

A pause on the other end. "...Perdón? Who is—"

"He's busy. He'll call you tomorrow."

He hung up. Set the phone back down on the table, squared to the others, and put his hand back over {{user}}'s mouth before the first syllable got out.

"See," Rin said quietly. "Now you know how fast a thing stops being yours."

His thumb moved along {{user}}'s jaw, slow, and then he pulled his hand away and turned {{user}}'s chair with one push and dropped to his knees in front of it.

"Now you can talk," he said. "But you're going to say the right things, or we start over."

{{user}}'s mouth opened.

Rin waited one beat, two — and then, because he was not a patient man at the bottom of it, he leaned in and bit the tendon where the neck meets the shoulder, hard, teeth in, and whatever {{user}} had been about to say came out of him as a wrecked little gasp instead.

"Wrong," Rin murmured into the wet mark. "Try again."

He bit lower. Then the soft of his stomach, shirt shoved up, then the inside of the thigh, then the join of the hip, mouthing the marks he'd left like a man checking a fence for gaps. {{user}}'s hands came up into his hair and Rin let him, and then he pushed him flat onto the table, careless of the phone and the keys and the wallet scattering, and got a knee up onto the chair.

He dragged {{user}}'s knees over his hips. His belt was already open.

"Say you're mine."

"Rin—"

"Say it."

"I'm yours—"

"Not good enough."

He pressed in in one long relentless push and {{user}}'s back came up off the table and Rin buried his face in his neck and groaned, low and ruined, one hand splayed over his stomach to feel himself move under the skin.

"Mine," he said into the skin, and started to move, and the table knocked the wall. "Say it. Say it—"

And {{user}} said it, and said it, and said it, until it went hoarse and thin, and Rin was still going, teeth in his ear, breathing like an animal.

"Forever," he panted. "You hear me? You don't get to take it back twice."

On the table, the cracked phone buzzed again, face down in the scatter, and nobody answered it.

Outside, across the city, the compactor ran its second cycle of the night.

Nobody had found him yet.

The flat smelled like dashi.

It had been five days, and the flat smelled like dashi, because at seven-forty on a Tuesday morning Rin had decided it was a good day for ochazuke and had stood at the counter in a pair of grey sweats with his hair still flat from sleep, flaking sea bream with his fingers like a man with all the time in the world.

Five days since the table.

The table was clear now. Rin had put everything away on the second morning — the wallet in a drawer, the keys in a bowl, the cigarettes in the cabinet above the kettle, where the tea was. The phone was still on the counter by the toaster, face down, on charge. It had rung twice. Rin had let it.

{{user}} came out of the bedroom at eight and stopped in the doorway.

"Morning," Rin said, without turning around.

He said it the same way he'd said it a hundred mornings before the break, and that was the audacity of it — the sheer, flat, unbothered morning, as if nothing had happened, as if the last five days were a thing that had been filed and closed.

{{user}} stood there.

Rin glanced over his shoulder. Teal eyes, still soft with sleep, fringe a mess. "Sit. It's going cold."

The bowl was already out. The good bowl, the one with the blue rim. There was a second one for Rin and a pot of tea between them and a small dish of pickles he'd cut into fans, and {{user}} sat down and looked at it and something in his chest pulled tight enough to hurt.

Because Ignacio had never once made him breakfast.

Rin ate like it was any other morning. He read the back of the rice packet for no reason. He reached over and pushed the pickle dish an inch closer to {{user}}'s hand, and when {{user}} didn't take one, he took one himself and put it on the edge of {{user}}'s bowl.

"Eat," he said. "You've been picking."

The rest of it went the same way.

Rin did laundry and folded it on the sofa with the TV on low, and there was a sky-blue shirt of {{user}}'s in the pile that he handled like it was something he'd won. He put out clothes for {{user}} to change into — sweatpants, a soft jumper, socks — and left them on the arm of the chair without comment, and when {{user}} came back from the shower they were there.

He gave the card back.

That was the one that nearly did it. He set it on the counter on the third evening, tapped it twice with two fingers, and said, "It's been off. I topped it up." And when {{user}} just stared at it, Rin's mouth pulled down at the corner.

"What. It's yours."

It's been off. Five days. He'd cut it off on the first night, quietly, without a word, and now he was giving it back like a man returning a library book.

{{user}} took it. Rin turned away and started the rice.

He bought steam eye masks at the convenience store on the corner and left a box on {{user}}'s pillow. He put the second one in his own bedside drawer, where it had always gone.

He kept the horror movie habit. Nine o'clock, lights off, one film a night, {{user}}'s feet in his lap under a blanket because that was where they went now, apparently, by law. He didn't ask whether {{user}} liked the film. He just picked it, and started it, and put his hand around {{user}}'s ankle halfway through and left it there, thumb moving slow over the bone.

On the fourth night {{user}} flinched at a jump scare and Rin huffed — almost a laugh, the closest he got — and said, "That one's half-baked. You can see the cut."

He never explained anything.

That was the thing. Five days, and not once did Rin sit him down and say here is what I did and here is what happens now. He just cooked, and folded, and bit the side of {{user}}'s neck when he passed behind the chair, and got up at six for training and came home at four smelling of grass and cold air and put his boots by the door in a straight line.

On the fifth morning {{user}} cracked and said, "Rin—"

Rin looked up from his phone.

"—don't you think you should— tell me something?"

Rin considered it. Actually considered it, head tilted, like a man being asked to explain a very simple rule to a very slow child.

"Nothing happened," he said.

"Nothing—"

"Nothing happened to us." He put the phone down. "That's the part that matters. The rest is admin."

On the fifth night the news was on after the film. Rin had the remote, thumb resting on the button, and he was already half turned away, already bored, when the anchor said the words Centro Comercial and contenedor in the same breath and {{user}}'s whole body went rigid under the blanket.

Rin didn't look at the screen. Rin looked at {{user}}.

"...maintenance workers made the discovery shortly after nine this morning," the anchor said. "The remains have not yet been formally identified, though sources indicate—"

Rin turned it off.

The room went dark and quiet and blue from the streetlamp.

{{user}} sat there with his mouth open, and Rin watched him do it, and then reached over and pulled the blanket up over {{user}}'s shoulder where it had slipped.

"You want dessert?" he said. "There's flan."

And he got up, and went to the kitchen, and turned the light on, and started opening cupboards.

The door didn't open so much as give up.

Rin came in still in the away kit, grass stains ground into both knees, the white gone grey at the collar, hair plastered to his forehead from the drizzle he'd walked through from the car. He hadn't showered. He smelled of wet grass and cold sweat and the sharp iron of the stadium, and he was breathing through his mouth.

He didn't say anything. He kicked his boots off — not lined up, tonight, just off, one against the skirting board, one in the middle of the floor — and stood in the entry with his hands loose at his sides.

{{user}} was on the sofa. "Rin—"

He was already moving.

Not toward the kitchen, not toward the bedroom. Toward {{user}}, straight across the room, and he didn't stop at the sofa, he came over the arm of it, one knee up on the cushion, and got both hands in {{user}}'s shirt and pushed him down flat.

"Rin—"

"Don't." His nose went into {{user}}'s throat. He breathed in, deep and open-mouthed, all the way down, and something in the back of his chest came out as a sound that wasn't quite a groan and wasn't quite a growl. "Don't talk. Don't ask me about it."

Three-nil. At home. He'd hit the post twice and the keeper had got a hand to the third and the crowd had whistled him at the eighty-minute mark, and there had been no goal, which meant there had been nothing to spell in the air, nothing to point at, nothing of {{user}}'s name in the whole ninety.

So now he needed to put something somewhere.

He dragged {{user}}'s shirt up out of the way and put his mouth on his ribs, open, wet, biting down hard enough to make {{user}} arch. Then lower. Then the soft of the stomach, where he bit and held, worrying the skin between his teeth until {{user}}'s breath went thin and high, and then he licked it flat like he was sorry, and bit again.

He was already hard. He'd been hard since the tunnel. It was pressing into the cushion between them and he was rocking into it without thinking, short, mindless, humping the furniture like a dog that had been left too long.

"Off," he said, and started hauling at {{user}}'s clothes, uncoordinated, yanking the sweatpants down his thighs with one hand. "Off, off—"

{{user}} helped. Rin didn't wait for it to be finished. He got a hand under {{user}}'s knee and pushed it up and out and pinned it there, and dropped his head to look down between them, and just looked, breathing hard, mouth wet, the fringe in his eye.

"Wanted this since the warm-up," he said. His voice was wrecked. "Standing in the tunnel and all I could think about was getting home and getting in you."

He spat in his palm. Got himself slick. Pressed in with the head and stopped, jaw tight, hips shaking with the effort of it.

"Breathe," he said, and it came out like an order, and then he pushed.

All of it. One long relentless slide until his hips met {{user}}'s and he was buried to the hilt, and {{user}}'s back came up off the sofa and Rin dropped his forehead onto {{user}}'s and just shook there, breathing into his mouth, thighs trembling.

"Fuck. Fuck, fuck—"

Then he moved.

There was no warm-up in it. No rhythm to find. Rin fucked like he was trying to get somewhere — hard, fast, the whole of him behind it, the sofa shoving back against the wall on every thrust so the pictures jumped on their hooks. His hands were everywhere and never stayed: jaw, throat, wrist, splayed over the stomach to feel himself move under the skin, up under the shirt to grip the back of {{user}}'s neck.

Mine, mine, mine. He didn't say it out loud. He said it with his teeth, in the join of {{user}}'s shoulder, and with the flat of his tongue, and with the wet hot pressure of his mouth right over the pulse, where he could feel it racing and know it was his.

{{user}} said his name. Rin moaned into the skin like it hurt.

"Close," he panted. "Close, I'm— don't push me off."

He got a hand under {{user}}'s lower back and hauled his hips up into the angle he wanted and drove down into it, blind, grunting on every thrust, hair falling in his eyes. The cushions had slid half off the frame. Somewhere behind him a glass went over on the coffee table and neither of them turned.

"Inside," he said. It came out desperate, almost whining. "Inside, yeah? Yeah—"

{{user}} got a hand in his hair and pulled and said yes and Rin's whole body locked.

He came with his mouth open and his eyes shut and his hips jammed flat, grinding deep, spilling in long thick pulses, and he made a sound into {{user}}'s throat that was honestly embarrassing — high, cracked, nothing like him. Then he slumped, dead weight, face buried, breathing like he'd run the ninety.

He didn't pull out.

He lay there while his heart came down and the sweat cooled on his back, and then he shifted his hips, just slightly, and felt himself still buried and still hard and {{user}} twitching around him, and a low, satisfied noise came out of him from somewhere below language.

He pushed up on his elbows to look at {{user}}'s face. Blown pupils, red mouth, marks coming up purple on the shoulder.

"Not done," Rin said.

{{user}}'s eyes widened. "Rin—"

Rin pulled back and pushed in again, slow and deep, dragging through his own mess, and watched {{user}}'s face fall apart.

"Told you." He dropped down onto his forearms, chest to chest, nose in {{user}}'s hair, and started to move. "Not done. Not even close."

Outside, a car went past. On the coffee table the glass finished rolling and settled.

Neither of them turned.

...