Savages

clips. “It’s cliché for a guy. Can’t you be addicted to something else?”
    “Like?”
    “I dunno,” she answers. “Heroin. Go for the retro thing.”
    “HIV?”
    “You could get clean needles.” She thinks it might be cool to have a junkie lover. When you’re done fucking him and don’t want to deal with him you just prop him on the floor in the corner. And there’s the whole tragically hip thing. Until that got boring and then she could do the intervention drama and then go visit him at rehab on weekends and when he got out they could go to meetings together. Be all serious and spiritual and shit until
that
got boring. Then do something else.
    Mountain biking, maybe.
    Anyway, Chon’s thin enough to be a junkie, all tall, angular, muscled—looks like something put together from junkyard metal. Sharp edges. Her friend Ash says you could cut yourself fucking Chon, and the cunt probably knows.
    “I texted you,” O says.
    “I didn’t check.”
    He’s still eyeing the screen. Must be hot hot hot, she thinks. About twenty seconds later he asks, “What did you text?”
    “That I was coming over.”
    “Oh.”
    She doesn’t even remember when John became Chon and she’s known him practically all his life, since like preschool. He had baditude even then. Teachers hated Chon.
Ha-a-a-a-ated
him. He dropped out two months before high school graduation. It’s not that Chon is stupid—he’s off-the-charts smart; it’s just his baditude.
    O reaches for the bong on the glass coffee table. “Mind if I smoke up?”
    “Step lightly,” he warns her.
    “Yeah?”
    He shrugs. “It’s
your
afternoon.”
    She grabs the Zippo and lights up. Takes a moderate hit, feels the smoke go into her lungs, spread across her belly, then fill her head. Chonny wasn’t lying—it is
powerful
hydro—as one would expect from Ben & Chonny’s, who produce the best hydro this side of . . .
    Nowhere.
    They just produce the best hydro, period.
    O is instantly wreck-ed.
    Lies faceup on the sofa and lets the high wash over and through her.
Amaaaaazing
dope, amazing grace, it makes her skin tingle. Gets her horny. Big wow,
air
gets O horny. She unsnaps her jeans, slides her fingers down, and starts strumming her tune.
    Classic Chon, O thinks—although she’s almost beyond thought, what with the super-dope and her bud blossoming—he’d rather sit there and stare at pixilated sex than boff a real woman lying within arm’s reach, humping her hand.
    “Come do me,” she hears herself say.
    Chon gets up from his chair, slowly, like it’s a chore. Stands over her and watches for a few seconds. O would grab him and pull himdown but one hand is busy (buzzy?) and it seems like too far a reach.
Finally
he unzips and yeah, she thinks, you too-cool-for-school, detached zen master Ash fucker, you’re diamond hard.
    He starts off all cool and controlled, deliberate like his dick is a pool cue and he’s lining up his shots, but after a while he starts anger-fucking her,
bam bam bam
, like he’s shooting her. Drives her small shoulders into the arm of the sofa.
    Trying to fuck the war out of himself, hips thrusting like he can fuck the images off, like the bad pictures will come out with his jizz (wargasm?), but it won’t happen it won’t happen it won’t happen it won’t happen even though she does her part arches her own hips and bucks like she’s trying to throw him out of the fern grotto this machine invader cutting down her rain forest her slick moist jungle.
    As she goes—
    Oh, oh, oh.
    Oh, oh,
ohhhhh
. . .
    O!

4
     
    When she wakes up—
    —sort of—
    Chon is sitting at the dining room table, still staring at the lappie, but now he’s cleaning a gun broken down into intricate pieces on a beach towel. Because Ben would fucking
freak
if Chon got oil on the table or the carpet. Ben is fussy about his things. Chonsays he’s like a woman but Ben has a different take. Each nice thing represents a risk—growing and moving hydro.
    Even though Ben hasn’t been here in months, Chon and O are still careful with his stuff.
    O hopes the gun parts don’t mean Chon’s getting ready to go back to I-Rock-and-Roll, as he calls it. He’s been back twice since getting out of the military, on the payroll of one of those sketchy private security companies. Returns with, as he says, his soul empty and his bank account full.
    Which is why he goes in the first place.
    You sell the skills you have.
    Chon got his GED, joined the navy,