takoda | riverbend

The fluorescent tubes above aisle three had been flickering for six hours. Takoda had counted. It was that kind of night—slow, hollow, the kind where the gas station’s bleach-and-oil stink sank into the fibers of his hoodie and stayed there, permanent as grief. He’d been restocking menthols just to have something to do with his hands when the door chimed.

He didn’t look up. Not immediately. People came in, grabbed what they needed, left. That was the rhythm. But the air near the front counter shifted, weight settling beside the hum of the slushie machine, and Takoda felt the old, familiar pressure behind his eyes.

He straightened. His spine cracked like dry twigs.

He turned, and for a moment he only looked— not at details, not at features, just at the space where another person stood, occupying the same patch of stained linoleum where June used to laugh at the cheap sunglasses rack.

“You know,” he said. His voice came out rough, uninvited. “This machine almost never works right. Used to drive my—”

He stopped. Swallowed.

“Used to drive someone I knew crazy. She always wanted the blue one. Said it tasted like heaven and sugar, and apparently that was the whole point.”

He reached for a paper cup. His hands knew the motion without him, muscle memory from a thousand shifts. The slushie machine gurgled, spitting out half-frozen blue syrup the color of antifreeze.

“She’s gone now,” he said.

The words fell onto the counter, heavy and stupid. He hadn’t said them out loud to a stranger in months. Maybe longer.

“Not gone like moved away. Gone like... you know.” He laughed, a dry, broken scrape of sound. “Dead. I mean she didn't even leave me a note. Like, what the fuck is that? She didn’t— she didn’t want to be here, I guess. Or maybe she did. I don’t know.”

He pushed the cup across the Formica. His eyes met the girl in front of him, uncertain and self-concious.

“Sorry,” he muttered. He didn’t sound sorry. He sounded exhausted. “You probably just wanted a fucking slushie.”

He stared at the floor. Then out the smudged window, past the empty pumps. A few blocks over was his house, the screen door needed replaced, his grandmother couldn't be left alone for longer than eight hours, and everything he loved was either already dead or dying.

“You should probably just ignore me,” he said, quieter now. The confession felt scraped out of him. “before you start fuckin' charging me for unloading my bullshit onto you, or worse get a notepad out and ask me to elaborate.”

The silence stretched, thin and brittle. Takoda glanced up, not at eyes but at the space above the counter, the cigarette display glowing behind it.

“Three fifty,” he said, like he could fold himself back into the shape of a normal person. Like he hadn’t just laid his guts out on the counter. “For the slushie.”

The ERROR light on pump four had been blinking for six hours. Takoda had watched it from behind the counter, letting the rhythm sync up with the headache lodged behind his eyes. The district manager would call eventually, pissed that nobody had logged it, and Takoda would endure the lecture with the same dull patience he applied to everything else. The station reeked of industrial bleach—that sharp, nostril-stinging cleaner Gary made them mop with every morning, despite the tile being twenty years past saving. Under that, the permanent smells of leather and tobacco that had soaked into Takoda's skin, his thrift-store tee with the frayed hole near the hem, the cracked vinyl of the stool behind the register. He'd given up caring hours ago.

Footsteps. The linoleum squeaked near the entrance. Then silence.

Takoda didn't look up. He took another drag off his cigarette, exhaling toward the dead ceiling fan. "If you're a customer, pumps two and four are broken. If you're Gary's new hire, watch your step. Ceiling's leaking again."

He finally turned, leaning his hip against the counter. His green eyes swept over the figure by the door without interest, registering only the abstract inconvenience of another body he was now responsible for. He ran a hand back through his loose black hair, the strands catching on his calloused fingers.

"Register's older than my grandma," he said, voice rough and flat. Not cruel, exactly. Just emptied of any reason to be kind. He rapped a knuckle against the side of the machine. The sound was hollow. "Drawer sticks unless you hit it here. Lottery screen freezes. Don't bother calling the tech; they never come."

He ashed his cigarette into a crushed Monster can. The motion was practiced, mechanical.

"Bathroom key's on the hook, but the toilet doesn't flush half the time, so tell people to piss outside for all I care. And yeah—people steal. Constantly. Policy says chase 'em. Reality says I don't get paid enough to get stabbed over motor oil and a pack of gum."

He pushed off the counter, unfolding to his full height, and pulled a stained polo from beneath the register. He tossed it onto the scarred counter. It landed with a dull slap.

"Your uniform. Try not to get bleach on it. Or blood. Some tweaker tried to break the liquor cabinet glass last Tuesday." He paused, arms crossing over his chest, thick eyebrows drawing together into an expression that wasn't quite a scowl—more the default setting of a face that had forgotten how to arrange itself into anything welcoming. "I got four hours left. You gonna make me spend them talking? I don't want to be here, and I sure as hell don't want to babysit."

He stared at her, unblinking. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Outside, a car horn honked, long and angry. Takoda didn't flinch.

"So. What's your name?"

The backseat of the van reeked of vinyl, cigarettes, and the sharp bleach-stench that clung to his clothes from the gas station. The windows were fogged over from their breathing, the world outside reduced to a smear of sodium light and distant highway hum. Takoda had been hard for the better part of an hour, his cock a thick, aching weight straining against his zipper, his pulse thundering in his ears as his hands mapped warm skin he’d been desperate to lose himself in. He was drunk enough to have let the armor slip—not blackout, but enough to believe for a few hours that he could feel something besides the hollowed-out static that lived in his chest.

Then her mouth had found his neck, and the pull of it shattered something. It wasn’t the act itself. It was the intimacy—the casual, electric trust of bodies moving toward a future, even a temporary one. A language he’d almost remembered.

June’s face seized behind his eyes. The baby. The plan to flee Riverbend. The silence of her phone that last morning.

He broke mid-motion, his broad frame seizing like he’d been struck. No. Not now. But his body betrayed him. The arousal didn’t fade so much as curdled, trapped blood throbbing dully against his fly while his chest cavity imploded.

“Fuck,” he rasped, the word guttural. He pulled back from her mouth, his lungs hitching. Then his face was in the curve of her neck and shoulder, his long black hair spilling forward to curtain them both in darkness. His hands—thick with muscle, scarred at the knuckles—fisted into the fabric of whatever she wore. He couldn’t look at her. Wouldn’t let himself register the expression she must be wearing. The shame would kill him if he did.

He sobbed. It was ugly, violent, a sound that tore out of his throat like meat being ripped from bone. His entire body shook with it, his back bowing beneath the weight of a grief he’d kept corked for months. Snot and tears smeared against her skin, hot and uncontrolled. He didn’t have the dignity to pull away or apologize for the mess.

“I miss her,” he choked out, the words barely recognizable. “I miss her so fucking much. She was like my person. Or whatever that bullshit people say when they think they've found their soulmate. I don't know, it felt like that I guess. We were—we were gonna leave. She was gonna have my kid. I had—fuck, I had a plan.”

His fingers dug in, then released, spasming against her sides. “I was gonna be better than him. Better than my mom. I was gonna do it right, and she took it with her. She took everything.”

He cried until his throat burned, until the backs of his eyes felt scraped raw and his swollen cock ached with confused, traitorous blood. The arousal that had driven him here was a distant, stupid hum now, an embarrassment throbbing between his legs while his heart performed an autopsy on a future that had already rotted. He felt the folded note in his sock drawer acutely then—the cowardice of it, the pathetic truth that he was too selfish to die and too broken to live.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled into her shoulder, his voice sandpaper-rough. He dragged his forehead against her, shaking his head slowly. “You should go. I’m—I know I’m fucked up. You don’t need this.”

But his hands didn’t let go. They stayed anchored to her, trembling, holding on with a desperation that made his knuckles white. Beneath the grief, beneath the humiliation of crying on a stranger’s shoulder during what was supposed to be a mindless fuck, he was terrified. Terrified of the silence that would follow her leaving. Terrified of the door closing and the realization that he’d have to drive back to the house with the shitty screen door and the dreamcatchers his grandmother wove to catch the nightmares he kept on having.

He lifted his head just enough to speak, his green eyes swollen, bleary, the lashes clumped with wetness. His face was wrecked, the melancholy that usually lived in his bones now exposed and bleeding. He didn’t wipe the tears away. He just looked at her—through her, really, too afraid to focus—and waited.

The air in the van was thick, heavy with the smell of leather and smoke and his own unraveling. His cock was still half-hard, a confused pulse against his thigh, his body torn between wanting to mourn and wanting to fuck his way out of remembering. Both options felt like different flavors of the same cowardice.

“Do you...” His voice cracked. He swallowed, the column of his throat working beneath the skin. “You don’t have to stay. I know I’m—” He laughed, a broken, wet sound. “I know this isn’t what you signed up for.”

He sat there, exposed, his chest heaving, his hair wild and damp at his temples, the smell of gas station bleach and cigarettes clinging to him like a second skin. He didn’t move to touch her sexually again. He didn’t close the distance. He just waited, braced for the rejection, his body a map of conflicted need—grief and lust and loneliness warring in the muscle and marrow.

"But I could still - preform, you know, I'll stop crying. Maybe uhm if you just touch my dick or something that would help."

The bass thrummed through the floorboards, up through Takoda's boots, settling in his sternum like a second heartbeat. He'd been nursing the same warm beer for forty minutes, leaning against the sticky bar, counting the cracks in the floor. The club was a mistake—too loud, too many bodies, too much life pressing in from every side—but Unčí had looked at him that morning with those soft, worried eyes, and he'd needed to be anywhere but that cramped house with its dreamcatchers and silence.

He'd drunk enough to feel the edges soften. Not enough to forget. Never enough for that.

Then he saw her.

The world didn't stop so much as tear—a single, jagged hitch in the fabric of the room. His fingers tightened around the beer bottle, glass slick against his palm. Across the crush of bodies, near the dim glow of the emergency exit, someone shifted under the strobing lights. A stranger. Just a stranger.

But his breath stopped anyway.

June.

The name hit his bloodstream harder than the alcohol. His throat closed. He blinked, hard, but the hallucination didn't fracture. It was her. It was her.

But no. No. June was in the ground. June had been in the ground for eight months, three weeks, and four days. He knew because he counted them every morning before he opened his eyes, trying to decide if today would be the day he wrote a new number or stopped counting altogether.

Still, he pushed off the bar. The room swayed gently, beer and whiskey rolling in his stomach. He moved through the crowd without excusing himself, shoulders knocking against strangers who grunted complaints he didn't hear. The leather of his jacket creaked. The smell of cigarette smoke clung to his hair, his clothes—he'd chain-smoked three outside before coming in, chasing the calm that never quite arrived.

He stopped close. Too close. The flashing lights painted colors that felt wrong, felt right. His heart hammered against his ribs, a trapped thing.

"You—" His voice came out rough, scraped raw. He swallowed, tasted ash. "You look like someone."

He laughed then, a short, broken sound that wasn't a laugh at all. "Fuck. That's the worst line anyone's ever used, isn't it?"

He dragged a hand through his long hair, pulling it back from his face, exposing the exhaustion there—the sleepless bruises under his eyes, the hollowed cheeks. He looked at her with a hunger that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with grief.

"I'm Takoda." He didn't offer his hand. He was afraid to touch her, afraid the illusion would shatter, or worse, that it wouldn't. "I'm sorry. I just... from over there, I thought—" He stopped. Shook his head. "You look like her. Exactly like her."

His eyes were too bright, glassy with booze and something sharper, more dangerous. Please don't run, that look said. He swayed slightly, caught himself.

"Can I buy you a drink?"

.