#marquezcest

anyway maybe i've talked about this before? but like. alex having to hide marc's bikes from him during his arm years, marc bouncing off the walls literally not allowed to do physical exercise after an entire life as a top athlete whose only hobbies are constant motion/motocross/hard napping afterwards. marc in a horrible mood making everyone's life miserable. marc in horrible PAIN and unable to distract himself using his body etc. alex helping marc with his PT, alex also miserable during the worst of the arm era, alex hiding the bikes, alex managing marc's life and saving marc from himself...

Marc’s a deep sleeper. A serious sleeper. If you’re watching him, you can watch his chest hitch, up and down, up and down, like a machine. If you can’t see him, then you can listen to his breath, fast and neat through his nose. There’s nothing self-conscious about Marc when he’s asleep. When he’s too quiet, actually, is when you can tell that he’s pretending.

If Marc’s quiet, so quiet that he must be holding his mouth open in a dark room, tongue curled back behind his teeth, then you know that he’s awake, and maybe that something is wrong. That he’s in pain, could be. Or that he’s making himself feel too good. 

It’s not — not that Marc is being rude. He’s not trying to rub it in; he’s never trying. It’s just that Alex knows it by heart, how the flowers printed on the underside of Marc’s mattress look while Marc breathes too quietly.

Marc comes to Alex’s team. Alex gives Marc a tow into Q2. He’d said it, and everyone knew it, that he wouldn’t make much out of beating Marc to the second round. Marc, meanwhile, was fighting his bike, and if he couldn’t make it do what he wanted today, he’d make it do something stupid tomorrow. It’s simple math, for the team, for Alex, and convenient if you think, for example, about the small muscles in Marc’s eye, and his right arm jarring against asphalt, which is always implied.

Marc tells the press about it. 

“He came to me, it came from him,” Marc tells them.

It’s true — Alex offered. He thinks better off the track than on it, sometimes, so he went to Marc before. 

There’s something stark about the words though, once Marc has Alex saying them from Marc’s mouth. For the journalists and all to write down.

“If you want to take me, take me,” he has Alex saying. “In the end, it doesn’t make any difference.”

Afterwards in his own words, Marc tells them not to get it wrong, though. That Alex could, would, beat Marc, for sure, on this circuit — on a different bike, in a different race.

The thing about Marc is there’s nothing self-conscious about how he loves. Alex especially. He wouldn’t even think to be.

Maybe Marc knows exactly what Alex sounds like when he’s jerking off too. Probably he does. Twenty-something years in the same bed, it can’t have been totally avoided, even if Marc sleeps quicker. When Alex needs it, he just does it, hard and fast. When he does, his head is filled up with other people’s bodies, other people’s chests in his face, their mouths around his dick. At that point, Marc could be hanging over the edge of the bed to watch him, and Alex wouldn’t know. He’s not looking at the flowers on the underside of the mattress, then. 

When they shared the room, Alex had the bottom bunk, and a box of tissues underneath his bed that he started keeping there at thirteen. He’d clean himself off, aim for the trashcan without getting up, so he could pass out before the feeling wore off. It helped him sleep. If he missed the bin, he’d pick up his trash in the morning. It wasn’t a big deal. He’d never tried that hard to control his breathing.

Alex’s first communion was held in the church in Cervera, in the square. It was May and he wore a navy suit like all the others. At the ceremony, it was only the families and the old people who could be found in the front pews of any service. Some of the mothers cried; the only brother that Alex saw crying was Marc. Afterwards, they went out into the square again, and the people buzzed around each other like bees, giving out congratulations and picking them up. Marc stayed standing next to Alex the whole time, helping him collect his; beaming. 

In the restaurant directly across from the church, where they ended up with three or four other families and filled the whole place up, someone’s uncle spoke to Marc. Alex didn’t know him. He guesses Marc didn’t either, but it was like that. They looked up at him, in a pinstripe suit, standing while they sat in their place of honor. 

“Who knew?” the old man said to Marc, “All they had to do to get you to smile was have a party for your brother.”

A lot of people don’t know that, that Marc was a quiet kid. A serious kid. Sometimes when they were little — four and seven, eight and eleven — Alex would get mistaken for the older brother. Marc was taller for a while with his years, but delicate. Like a baby, while Alex looked like a boy. When they figured it out, friends of their mom would nod, appraising and then sage. The second one is always bigger, they’d say. More cooked, because the mother’s body learns what to do.

It wasn’t just that, though. A lot of people don’t remember that when they were little, Marc got shy sometimes, in front of grown ups, or meeting other kids sometimes too. They had an arrangement then, so that Alex would go in front, and Marc behind his shoulder, poised, nervous, all grin. At the ice cream man, Alex, brave, ordered for them both. One of the crema, please, and one of the chocolate. Marc coached him what they wanted in his ear. 

Sometimes, Marc needed help. 

Alex is kneeling on cement. Somewhere under him, he has a bead of concrete digging into his shin. Under his fingers, he has the healing seam of Marc’s arm. The scar tissue – you have to roll it. It feels like plastic, hard and identifiable under the skin. Marc is on his back on the sunbed pulled halfway into the shade. Alex is digging his fingers into the rubber scar of Marc’s arm, and Marc is breathing too quietly, mouth open, tongue curled back. 

During the worst of it, when there’s a timer going and Alex isn’t allowed to stop digging, he says, to help Marc — “What do you think? Not bad — I should be a professional, no?”

In the space where a laugh could go, Marc lets himself pant instead, a breath out of time. It comes out with something high pitched. Marc darts his tongue out to wet his mouth. There’s sweat forming on his upper lip. 

Alex lets himself look away, across the deck to where the fronds of a potted palm tree are waving, and light from the pool water bounces on their undersides. He doesn’t make either of them suffer by being too gentle, while he tries to crumble Marc’s scar.

Afterwards, when the timer goes off, he gets to go easy, doctor’s orders. He takes Marc’s hot hand in his and helps him stretch his bicep out. Bend and flex. A breeze comes across the patio. It lifts Marc’s hair, and Alex’s. Alex looks down at his brother’s face, easy now. Only a little crease between his eyebrows.

When they’re done, Marc’s eyes are closed, and he’s breathing quietly through his mouth, and he’s hard. 

Alex sees it. It’s just physical, sure. It’s for the endorphins, whatever, after pain, like after a race. And for the weeks of nothing since the surgery, and who knows how long before that since it hurt too bad. Their mom had joked about it even, when Marc came home with his right arm taped to a piece of styrofoam and folded over his chest. It’s not that funny from this angle though, Marc’s hard cock tenting up his pants in the full bright sun. You can see it in his shadow on the bench. 

Alex reaches up and cups the back of Marc’s neck. Marc lets out a shaky breath. Alex rubs his thumb over the hinge of Marc’s jaw, tiny motions. Soothing. Marc breathes in deep again, and the barrel of his chest swells into the line of Alex’s forearm again, the way it must have done a hundred times just now, while Alex worked on him, he realizes. Body against body, the way it feels when you have someone next to you in bed.

“Marc,” says Alex. A little bit chiding. One of the ways he says Marc’s name. It’s nothing so heavy; next to it, the birds, the rustle of leaves, the water in the pool lapping. Somewhere on the street, a car is pulling out of a garage, with the sound of gravel grinding lazily. The wrinkle of Marc’s forehead deepens. Through his tank top, his nipples are hard. The material of his workout pants bends shiny highlights over his trapped dick, and it gleams. 

It’s hard to look at Marc there, flexed like a muscle, like a trembling bead of sweat, just for lying on the table. For some people, seeing Marc like that makes them mean. Alex gets it. But they don’t understand that Marc isn’t trying for it; he just is. The thing about Marc is it’s easy, easy, to tell what he needs. 

“Okay,” says Alex. He squeezes the back of Marc’s neck again; then lets go. He has to give Marc’s workout shorts a tug to get them over his ass. And then he takes Marc in hand.

Marc makes some kind of noise, ehi, or something like that, in a whistley voice, and Alex waits to see if Marc will complain more, but he waits without stopping moving his hand. And it’s like he thought. Marc’s hips push up and his dick presses through the loop in Alex’s fingers, like any body part, hot and hard and real. Alex’s palm is a little damp because it’s hot out, in the sun, and from rubbing Marc’s arm his hand has some cream on it, some ointment for his fresh skin, that always looks wet anyway with how new it is, like dew on grass in the morning.

He doesn’t half-ass it. He palms Marc and gives a few strokes to get his sweat and sunscreen all over, and when he gets there, he twists his fist over the head too. Marc throws his head back and makes his lips into a wide horizontal line, like it feels good. Should be a professional, Alex thinks, and makes himself laugh. Marc would hate that. He has proper ideas about things like that. About the things that Alex should be.

It turns out that it’s easy. It might be one of the easiest handjobs Alex has ever given. It embarasses him, for a second, for Marc, and he’s glad then that it’s only him. It doesn’t take long before Marc’s breathing gets tight for real, and his thighs flex uncontrolled, dick so hard and red that it looks painful, can’t last. He goes for the head again and Marc hisses and starts to come over his fingers. 

When he breathes out, Alex finds that his other hand is plastered over Marc's chest near his armpit, and is petting over him instinctively. He stops and gives Marc’s shoulder a squeeze. Marc still has his eyes closed, breathing deep and even now. He uncurls his fingers from Marc’s dick and it sags over itself. Alex casts around. He rocks back on his heels and gets up. 

At the edge of the pool, he swishes his hand around, listens to the water, smells the chlorine. The breeze is still going now and again. He stands up and shakes out his ankles, his calves. He runs a wet hand over his knee. He has a deep red indentation where a piece of gravel was digging into him the whole time, starting to itch now with blood flow coming back.

Back on the patio, Marc’s using one hand to get his pants back on.

“All set?” says Alex, meeting briefly the eye that Marc is squinting up at him with, but he doesn’t wait much for an answer. He’s already drifting towards the house. Marc will be fine to get his pants back on himself. He isn’t actually completely helpless.