Down For the Count [Wonty]

1-2. The Wreck of '99 [Revised]

Saturday surfaces and afternoon's already up and gunning for Monty's head. There's a certain sort of miasma about it, one that reeks hard of hard-core hell and harder-core hangover. Particularly Monty's. He smells of a distillery, of maimed dreams and a series of sudden, violent seizures within reality's very walls. Monty is retired over a well-to-do, soft sofa that exudes the solemn scent of a seven-figure salary. The little lilt in his breath rises with the acceleration of the spinning world after a spell of stagnation cut short. Monty is slow to stir from his short-lived slumber on someone else's couch, rifling the brains he has to recall only the vague features of yesterday. Alas, he can only put a finger on an ungodly amount of alcohol and a foul blotch of red fatally bled into his permanent record. For a fleeting heartbeat, Monty thinks he's still tripping on some cheap liquor when he sees Winston craning over a desktop before him.

"The fuck are you doing here?" Monty grouses, red-rimmed eyes sticking on the set of slender, lily fingers tapping away at a shiny keyboard. They are sure rallying up a racket, thinks Monty as he sulks under the influence of his augmented senses in a hangover's ruth. Each slash of snow white flesh against plastic amplifies Monty's crapulence twice over. Winston sure made for a volant typist. Who would've thought?

His head raises with a casual humor but his eyes don't touch Monty's. Instead, they hound whatever's so interesting on his blinding-bright computer screen. Monty would blame it on the alcohol but it irks him to no end thinking that Winston's stupid computer beat him in priority.

"You're up. Almost thought you dropped dead on me, there," Winston chuckles, soft-spoken with that stirring, arcane humor of his, the one that lingers in Monty's head like a ghost he just can't seem to exorcise. His words are a cure, soft and smooth like silk on the skin; so casual that it soothes the hangover like a sibyl's spell. He forgets what he was so surly about the instant Winston's placid, sleek voice starts humming in his ears and rippling in his memory like pebbles skipped in the still part of the rapids. Monty swallows dry and waits for the ceiling to slow its cycle of unabated spinning and curling like a carnival ride gone topsy-turvy. He couldn't put a finger on whether the coiling came from the butterflies or the hangover. Either way, it didn't look like it'd let up anytime soon.

"I wish," Monty grumbles, words stumbling beneath his breath. "You got any medicine, man?"

"Yeah," Winston says, then nods, rising from the foldable chair stationed before Monty and the sofa he's stilled on. He steps over to the stand at the foot of the room, then turns around with a plastic bag in hand. "I actually stopped by the pharmacy before you got up. The guy there said not to take too much or you'll just throw it all up." He settles back down on the foldable fixture and probes through the bag until he presents with a a jar of hangover cure and one of pills. Monty mixes the two and takes a sip to test it out.

"I'm going to puke it up either way," he grouches and downs the mixture apprehensively, leisurely, eyes trailing the outline of composure on Winston's face. He wonders what it'd take to freak him out- it seemed that in every circumstance he maintained an unshaken ease, even when he's getting duffed up.

Winston shrugs. "Well," he says, "try not to get it all over my clothes, yeah?" He knows that Monty takes him for a guy of bountiful vanity and cold-blooded materialism. He doesn't see a problem with embodying the expectations since they were already there. His paper-white teeth and the ritzy watch on his wrist really didn't help to submerge the daddy's money stereotype anyways.

"You got any beer?" Monty asks, he's propped up by his elbows on the sofa.

Winston scoffs. "If only. You drank it all."

"Oh. Sorry," Monty says, not really meaning it.

Winston raises his head and his eyes link with Monty's unsure ones, abandoning his desktop. He's apprehensive when he says, "Don't be. I mean, you can be anything now that you've lost everything, so," He pauses and inhales, "don't choose to be sorry. That's just a lame pick, isn't it?"

"Yeah?" Monty scoffs. "What should I be then?"

"Well, anything you wanna be." Winston's split lips, stirring, insatiate, stare Monty straight in the face like an unspoken provocation. A small section of him celebrates the freedom, the rosy vapor, the relieving liberty to have his way with Winston. A small section of him appreciates the hurricane spun straight from the hands of hell itself. A small section of him is satisfied with the way the cookie crumbled.

Monty can navigate conversation with Winston by the seat of his pants- no need for petty lies or façades or foreign fronts. He's still cautious, knowing that Winston will find a way to dig straight into his heart if given a chance. But with the way their lips fit together Monty can't help but let all walls crumble down his neck.

He doesn't have time to double take before his hands are knotted in Winston's dark, downy curls and their lips are slotting together like puzzle pieces predestined for one another. Monty never took much faith in thoughts of destiny and all that nonsensical theurgy, but he now he's helpless not to feel that this how it's meant to be; Winston's legs compressed against the fabric frame of the sofa, fingers curling as they hover above his thighs, the hidden hint of mimosa from the grove behind his estate sealing the moment with its hallmark aroma. Monty's hands engage Winston into the aggressive exchange, the mesmerizing effect of his French 75 flavor overriding the hangover and the illness and all the malaise that still stuck around. Monty's tongue is hot when it slips into Winston's mouth, fingers sliding and twisting through a thick brush of dark brown curls.

The sun palely drives past thin, arabesque-patterned drapes and casts its radiant soul in forms of heated vulnerability and a shining orange shadow. The amassment of accelerating sensations does him in- Monty twitching as Winston dips kisses at his jaw, the lobe of his ear, the corner of his forked lips, Monty's burning erection veiled by the thin fabric of his trousers, the sun enveloping their bodies and emulating a sense of familiarity for Monty as he navigates such a foreign region of his humanity.

Winston pulls back first, head drooping on the slope of Monty's neck like the tease he is. Monty's senses are magnified to an extent in which he can feel the weight of Winston's whisper on his flesh.

"As much as I'd like to keep doing this all day, you need to go shower, Monty. You smell like you're rotting," Winston chuckles, pulling away as Monty scoffs at him. It still sends shudders up his neck, the way Winston drops the t in his name. Or maybe it's the absence of contact on his impatient, needy skin.

"Are you serious?" Monty grouses and Winston slides back on his seat, kicking his feet up on the armrest of the sofa before him before returning to his desktop.

"Yeah," he nods, "When's the last time you showered?"

Monty snickers in disbelief, scoffing with a hint of uncertainty in regard to the domestic feel of it all. "Fuck you," he says even though he abides, although apprehensively.

***
You may notice this is not the original second chapter. I reread it beside the first chapter and thought it was out of place because further introduction was necessary before the conflict approaches. I also remade it because I thought it directly took away from what I wrote in the first chapter. For example, Winston took a backseat in the second chapter and it instead focused on Ani, Clay, and Monty when interest for him was built up in the first chapter. I think it needed to wait a bit and so will be replaced with a later chapter.