Gregory L. Norris
The first orgasm, burning white-hot, instantly overwhelmed Corin, forcing his body to straighten out, transforming him from a bent shadow hiding among the boulders and trees to an actual body, visible, out in the open. Fresh sweat broke across his flesh. The temperature on that merciless muggy day, now waning to night, skyrocketed. Corin forgot to breathe. His tongue shriveled. His throat ached for water. All of the liquid inside him had leached through his pores or squirted out of his cock to ooze down the inside of his leg. He was on fire.
Corin’s misery had started the moment he set forth down Dean Avenue. By Palomino, his blue jeans had rubbed his tick-tocking cock to within a few strokes of cumming. His balls had felt itchy and loose before leaving the apartment. His nerves had been on edge in anticipation since he received the knowledge, and when he long last shot his load into the front of his too-tight jeans—because he had bravely traveled to this place, he was here—every cell in his body climaxed in appreciation.
Then the wave finished its crash over him, and he was just one more horny male soaked in sweat with his dick hanging out among the rangy pines near the exit 2 rest area sandwiched between the highway and the woods off Palomino Drive. More to the point, he was now fair game, an easy target.
Corin struggled to catch his breath and choked down the ball of heat gathered at the back of his mouth. He didn’t see any other men but had heard things—snapping branches, a grunt, car doors opening and closing quietly, secretively down in the patch of pitted asphalt visible through breaks in the branches. The woods had a mossy end-of-summer odor, stale in a way that reminded him of the locker room at his high school—a smell Corin still equated with sex a year and two months after graduation.
What if Larry had lied about the woods off Palomino Drive? The fucker, Corin knew too well, delighted in making his life miserable. Corin had been at the bottom of the pecking order in high school, and not much had changed since. He was still being picked on and teased by the local bully, only now that bully paid him three bucks, thirty-five cents an hour for the privilege and wore a nametag with the word Manager on it.
Just go home before you get into trouble, the sane voice in his thoughts urged.
Corin shuffled a few steps forward. Another, less sane representative from his imagination piped up, reminding him that he hadn’t come this far just to ejaculate a mess into his underwear. You could have done that in your bed, under your sheet, man. Or in a sock, or down the shower drain, or out behind the sagging gray metal shed behind the apartment complex where they stored the lawn equipment.
What Corin had traveled to accomplish involved activities requiring two participants.
“Hey,” a gruff man’s voice said from Corin’s right in that part of the woods suddenly gone gray.
Corin spun around. The jarring motion briefly sent the world into a cyclone of charcoal tones, launched electricity down his legs, up his torso, the current supplied by his cock, which had stiffened again fully. The world stabilized enough for Corin to see that the man was, indeed, a man. Tall, dressed in a T-shirt and cut-off shorts, sneakers, and white tube socks. The man wore his hair in a buzz cut, looked tough, masculine, and had a mustache.
It’s him, one of the voices, sane or insane, clarioned in his thoughts. It didn’t matter whether they were right or if the man was really firefighter Tom Mankins; in the twilight, the man became Tom.
“Hi,” Corin said around a mouthful of hot coals.
The man shifted in place, snaked a big hand, hairy on the back, down to grope his crotch. “You up for it?”
A curious mix of apprehension and excitement slithered over Corin’s skin. “Sure,” he stammered.
Several tense seconds later, the fireman huffed, “What are you waiting for? Get over here and suck my dick.”
“Yeah, right,” Corin heard himself say, adding a nervous chuckle. But the voice didn’t sound like his own any more than his body felt under his control. Corin shuffled forward, taking awkward, leaden steps. Sweat poured down his forehead and stung at his eyes. After crossing the few yards—what felt more like a gulf of miles—Corin dropped to his knees. He gazed up, high on a heady cocktail of cologne and crotch.
“That’s a good boy,” the man growled.
“I’m nineteen. I’m not a boy.”
“Less yapping and more sucking. I don’t got a lot of time.”
Sane absently wondered if the man was a trucker, driver of one of the big rigs parked at the rest stop. Insane, the voice in Corin’s head that worried he was broken, defective, an abomination, told him no, this man was Tom Terrific, Tom Mankins, the friendly neighborhood fireman, mustache and all.
Hands shaking, Corin unhooked the man’s belt, unbuttoned him, unzipped. He wasn’t wearing underwear. Free-balling it, as Corin had once heard a coworker say at the Burger Shack. It was hot out, real dog day weather, Sane reasoned. It didn’t strike him at first that the man wasn’t wearing his tight-whites because he was, in truth, old hat at this, a frequent visitor to the regional suck-and-squirt, not until the long walk back to the apartment.
Right then, however, eyes wide and unblinking, Corin focused on the god’s cock. Gorged on blood, it log-rolled out of his shorts to hang at an angle, its shaft bent in the middle, its head a classic helmet whose piss-hole had already begun to leak. Two enormous balls spilled out beneath it, ripe with that funky locker room odor Corin loved. Lush curls wreathed everything.
Corin gripped the man’s cock by its root and leaned closer. His next orgasm snuck up on him as secretively as the first, right as he stole his initial taste of the fireman’s boner. The ripe male taste, the spongy texture … how often he’d rubbed his erection in the dark, or outside behind the shed, hidden from prying eyes, dreaming of this moment. Dreaming of that uniform. And here it was, long last—with the man of his dreams.
“I love you, Tom,” Corin moaned around the man’s dick while also tugging at his balls. The new night filled with exploding stars that only he could see and Corin came without touching himself.
“Watch your teeth, boy,” the man admonished. He no longer sounded like Tom Mankins, any more than he sounded pleased at the job Corin was doing. And he wasn’t in his fireman’s uniform.
A rush of guilt and disgust flooded Corin’s insides. The truth glared at him. He was on his knees in the woods, sucking on a stranger’s cock. Said stranger’s smell made him gag. And the taste…would he ever be able to wash it off his tongue? The most damning evidence was the knowledge of who the man was not.
For a brief and startling instant, Corin was at work, standing outside the Burger Shack, with seven of his coworkers and that arrogant toad, Larry Hinsdale. Corin’s heart raced. Not because of the fire alarm, wailing from inside the restaurant—the term restaurant being generous, as the appropriately named Burger Shack, the B. S. was, indeed, a shack. Not owing to the deep bleats pulsing from the fire truck, the town’s behemoth red pumper. Or the flurry of uniformed bodies tracking back and forth between the smoke-filled building, the ambulance, or police cruiser that had responded. Not even Larry’s cries of vengeance against the entire crew, which he threatened to can, regardless of who started the grease fire. After he lit them on fire, of course, and pissed out the ashes.
No, what caused Corin’s heart to gallop was the image of the tall, handsome hero who jumped out of the pumper wearing big rubber boots and a black and yellow coat over a tight-fitting black T-shirt. A man with a sculpted athlete’s haircut and a trim black mustache.
Corin tracked the man’s course, around the pumper and into the restaurant. He imagined what it would be like to still be inside, crying out for help, and to be rescued by this man, this god, this—
This cock painting his tongue in pre-cum was not Tom Mankin’s.
Corin spit it out, licked his lips, shuddered. “I have to go,” he said and started to rise, only to get slammed back down.
“You’re not done yet, cocksucker,” the brute growled. “Lick my nuts.”
“No,” Corin protested.
The man seized a handful of sweaty hair. “You ain’t allowed to stop until you finish getting me off, fuck face.”
Ripe, sweaty balls smashed against his nostrils and lips.
“Suck them!”
Corin did, afraid that a clout—or worse—would follow if he disobeyed. The man’s nuts were too big to gobble at the same time so he hard-sucked the left first, then the right. They were oily with stale sweat, stunk of raw masculinity. Corin attempted to convince himself they were Tom’s balls. Big, handsome Tom, his man in uniform. His hero. It worked, at least for a time, and he was back in the parking lot outside the Burger Shack. Larry continued his tirade.
“Fire you all, sue your asses, too—only I doubt I’d get much from a bunch of titty-babies who still live at home with their mommies.” Larry delivered that last bit directly at Corin. “Some of you losers who don’t even live in real houses!”
Corin hated Larry, had hated him dating back to the previous autumn of ’82, when he was hired on the spot at minimum wage plus one meal per full shift.
“Hey, leave that kid alone,” a man’s deep voice interjected.
Larry’s outburst ended, and Corin turned toward the source of the voice. It was the fireman with the mustache, standing with his ax in hand, his jacket opened just enough to reveal a hint of sweat blossoming out of armpits.
“This isn’t his fault,” the fireman said, his voice powerful enough to shut lousy Larry Hinsdale’s mouth.
The fireman’s blue-gray gaze shifted toward Corin. The man continued on his way to the pumper, but not before offering the barest smile. Mouth hanging open, Corin could only stare, drinking in the perfect square of the fireman’s butt in his uniform pants, the size of his feet, the sweat glistening on his neatly-shorn neck.
My hero, thought Corin.
“You little cock-smooch,” Larry grumbled.
But Corin didn’t care. He was in love. For the first time, really, truly in love.
“Suck it.”
The vision shorted out, this time completely, as the length invading his mouth slid deeper, tapping the back of his throat. Corin gagged. Tears invaded his eyes. He coughed. The man with the mustache seemed to enjoy this development more than anything else. The cock between his lips swelled up even thicker, taking on a consistency like stone. A succession of ruthless fuck-thrusts forward left Corin choking, unable to breathe. Bile shuddered up his throat, but it was driven back down in a flood of salty, sour liquid. The man with the mustache whispered a moan as he came. Corin swallowed the mouthful of sperm and fantasized that it belonged to Tom.
The man pulled out, sighed in disgust. Hauling up his shorts, he hawked a wad of spit and launched it at Corin. The spit struck his cheek. Fear surged back in a paralyzing dose. Corin remained where he was and didn’t so much as raise a hand to ward off the mosquitoes buzzing around his head or wipe at the brand of spittle, not until he heard the man’s footsteps crunching across the forest floor, headed in the direction of the parking lot. Only then did he move.
Corin raced down the trail and back onto Palomino Drive, and didn’t stop running until he’d reached the neighborhood containing the drab red brick apartment buildings. Soaked in sweat and convinced he was going to catch fire and spontaneously combust, Corin hot-footed into the front entrance of Building R, up the stairs, and down the long, dark hallway. Steeling himself, he unlocked the door to 2-09.
The apartment was unbearably hot and smelled of her sweat. She was asleep on the sofa, in front of the TV. Corin crept past her and to his bedroom. Though little else that night had gone smoothly, this one thing did, and he was grateful. He made it into his room and closed the door, thought about turning on the air conditioner but decided not to—the noise would wake her and then he’d catch hell for running up the electricity bill.
Instead, he opened the windows, sweated, and stunk, the musky odor on his body both his own and that of the stranger in the woods. Before shutting off the light and stripping down, Corin opened the little calendar book he kept in the bedside table’s drawer and flipped back two months to June the 27th, 1983, a date circled with a heart in bold red ink.
The day Tom Mankins saved them all at the Burger Shack and stole Corin’s heart.
Corin needed rescuing.
From the Burger Shack, where he had become the manager’s favorite punching bag; where, two nights earlier while swabbing out the men’s restroom during the final hour of the closing shift Larry had said, “What’s taking you so long? You in there giving blow jobs? Don’t you know most of the fags in this town go down to the woods near the rest stop for that?”
From her, now out in the kitchen slamming cabinets and plates, her usual morning tirade. And cooking bacon again, if the sickening aroma in the air was any indication. The sun streaming into his room had already baked the place into an oven. Sweat and bacon. Worse, Corin still had that funky taste in his mouth. His stomach burbled. Corin exhaled, buried his face in his pillow, breathed through his nose. Nothing helped.
Most of all, Corin needed rescuing from himself.
He knew he liked men, not girls, even before puberty. But right after his body suffered the change signaling adulthood, at the back of his mind nagged a belief that there was something fundamentally wrong with him. A little crazy? Perhaps. Obsessive? Sure. Completely cuckoo-bird in the gray matter? There were mornings like the one after he’d sucked a complete stranger’s cock and balls in the woods near the highway when he believed it.
Bacon. Corin gagged, willed his rising gorge to settle, and held his breath. Owing to the greasy meals his mother cooked, his job at the Burger Shack, and the fact he’d caught Larry Hinsdale spitting onto an unruly customer’s double-stack with extra tomatoes, Corin had renounced eating meat. He was now a vegetarian, four months and less than a week along.
Of course, he’d devoured meat last night, one of the voices in his head teased. He’d swallowed animal product—the dude’s load—so what did that make him now?
“A cocksucker,” Corin whispered into the pillow, aware of the wicked little smile creeping onto his lips.
True, the man with the mustache wasn’t Tom Mankins. But, for an instant, Corin had believed he was.
“Tom,” he sighed. Then he was hard again and itchy all over, stroking his cock and fantasizing.
The gods had seen fit to put him in the drive-thru window a few weeks earlier, on a Saturday night. Corin almost never manned the window; by a fluke, that particular night, the lines of fate crossed and, at five o’clock, a black truck drove up to the speaker.
“Welcome to the Burger Shack. What can I get you?”
Never before had a double-stack, fries, and cola, no ice, sounded so poetic after Corin connected the deep, manly baritone over the speaker with the rugged firefighter who pulled up to the window. A cold knife flayed him down the middle, gullet to gonads, while fresh sweat broke across his forehead.
“Hi,” Corin stammered.
Sitting behind the wheel of the pickup dressed in his fireman’s uniform and looking more like a force of nature than anyone mortal was the handsome hero who’d come to Corin’s rescue back on that miserable June night.
“Hey, buddy, how’s it hanging?”
Suddenly, there were multiple Corins in the drive-thru window: the insane version, whose eyes wandered down the sculpt of the man’s chest, lower, to the fullness of his crotch, the bulge of a real man’s cock and meaty balls clearly displayed in his uniform pants; the sane one, who rang in the man’s order, tendered change, and offered a reserved smile; and the Corin who was a bit of both, sane and insane, and completely, totally in love with this magnificent defender of the downtrodden.
“You saved us, back in June. June the 27th. I remember it well.”
The fireman shrugged. “I just helped put out your grease fire, that’s all.”
“Naw, it was more than that. You were great. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Corin,” he heard himself answer. “Corin Smith.”
The man in the fireman’s uniform—the god—extended his hand. “Tom Mankins, at your service, buddy.”
Corin hesitated. For a moment, all he could do was focus on that hand. The hand of a true god, so strong, with its rough skin, the pattern of dark hair sprouted across its back; those fingers, which scratched the god’s hairy balls and wiped his ass and jerked his cock and picked the sock fuzz from between his sweaty toes …
Corin reached for it and the effect, he imagined, was like that famous painting by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, God Creates Adam. Their flesh connected. Tom squeezed down and Corin felt born again.
He also shot his wad into his pants, right then and there in the drive-thru window.
“Where were you last night?”
“Work.”
“I called work. You weren’t in.”
Corin drank his glass of water; his stomach couldn’t handle orange juice—or her interrogation. “Whoever you talked to lied.”
She snorted a piggy laugh, shifted on the sofa. “Then we’ll see when you get paid. Don’t think I won’t know.”
The stench of bacon grease infused the apartment. Corin swept a look around the dirty builder-beige walls, across the cheap glass-top kitchen table, the stack of unopened bills, and made it into the living room. His eyes drifted over the dirty brown sectional, where she sat stuffing her face and watching the TV, only to deflect away, to the wall, where a lone photo was hung, that of a handsome man dressed in a suit and tie; a man with a neat, full mustache.
Corin broke focus with the photograph and hurried away before the despair of it all completely smothered him to death.
Another merciless scorcher baked the morning. By afternoon, Corin couldn’t breathe and was convinced he’d catch fire and burn up. He’d already showered twice and jerked off to visions of Tom Mankins an equal number of times. He had to get away from the apartment.
Corin headed toward the front door.
“Where are you going?”
“For a walk.”
“Don’t you have to work?”
“Not today. Schedule’s on the fridge, remember?”
“Call up Mister Hinsdale and tell him you want overtime. We’ve got bills to pay. Phone, cable, groceries—the rent. And tell him you want a raise!”
Corin yes’ed her and kept walking. He exited one miserable realm and entered another outside the building. The blanket of humidity engulfed him, making his steps heavier despite their quickness. Corin hurried down Dean Avenue, headed who-knew-where under the power of his own footfalls when most guys his age drove cars.
What he wouldn’t give to drive around town in the passenger seat of that big black pickup truck beside the man in the fireman’s uniform. Then nobody would nark on him—they wouldn’t dare, because they’d know he was Tom Terrific’s special buddy.
The plan came to him several days later, while Corin lay sprawled across his bed in his underwear, listening to Duran Duran on the radio. He’d been daydreaming the time away through numerous romantic scenarios, oblivious to the hour: Tom Mankins rescuing him, carrying him out of a burning building straight to the safety of his bed, where the fireman gazed deeply into his eyes and, unable to resist, fucked him in a variety of holes and positions. The smell of smoke carried around his hero in Corin’s fantasies, the raw, primal stink of creation and destruction.
Corin sucked on Tom’s bare toes, licked his hairy balls, feasted upon Tom’s asshole, now knowing how those places on a man’s body would taste. They were universal, pretty much the same on all of the men he’d serviced who weren’t Tom. But on Tom, their ripeness, their musk, was gloriously pure to him because he was Tom, Terrific Tom, Corin’s champion. For Tom, who pulled him to safety when his car ran off a road, slammed into a tree; who caught Corin when he jumped off the balcony and into his powerful arms; who punched Larry Hinsdale in the face, swept Corin into his protective embrace, and carried him out of the Burger Shack, pledging to take care of him forever on his fireman’s paycheck, there was little he wouldn’t give the man. Corin would lick and sniff every inch of Tom’s body, no matter how sweaty or dirty, because that’s what real men liked.
That’s what his man liked.
The smoky smell of Tom filled his mind and his breaths, so vivid in the warm bedroom. All it would take to make the scenarios real was another small grease fire at the Burger Shack. Nothing too elaborate. The last one had only kept him out of work for a week for repairs. An alarm would clear the place out, preventing injuries. The fire department would respond. Tom would again rescue him—from his rotten boss, that shitty job, this miserable life. They would leave together, and he’d never be forced to face the foul lump of flesh in the apartment’s other rooms again.
He’d be with the man he loved forever.
“You idiot,” the boss man shrieked.
Hinsdale shoved him away hard enough that Corin hit the fryolator. He reached on instinct to steady himself from falling, only to recoil at the rush of exquisitely painful heat up his hands as his fingers connected with the volcanic surface. Then he was on the floor among the grease and the french fries that had slipped between the counter and fryolator. The stench nearly overwhelmed him, but the agony of two seared fingertips kept him keenly aware of what happened next as Hinsdale banged out the small flames using a dishcloth.
“I saw you, you filthy little cock-biter,” Hinsdale shouted, oblivious to customers and coworkers alike. “You set it deliberately with these!”
Hinsdale held up a book of matches, the ones Corin had taken from her clutter back at that hellish apartment.
“You tried to burn down the place—get the fuck out of here!”
“But—” Corin protested.
“Now! You’re fired. And if you ever come in here again, I swear I’ll fucking kill you!”
Fired. And failed.
His stomach in knots, two fingers on the hand he used to masturbate singing in pain, both with divots of flesh weeping sticky fluid where the blisters had popped, he walked up and down Dean Avenue, wondering where he should go. Corin attempted to apply at two different grocery stores, only at each place, the managers sized him up and down and said they weren’t hiring, despite the signs on glass doors advertising to the contrary.
By the time he showed up at the fire station, Insane Corin was in control.
“Tom, yes, Tom.”
“Tom who? Bishop or Mankins?”
“Tom Terrific,” Corin said, his voice verging on sobs. “It’s an emergency!”
“What kind of emergency?” asked the fireman standing near the big red pump truck, a chubby man with a bushy beard covered in flecks of dandruff. Even in his crazed state—maybe because of it—Corin sensed the note of condescension in the man’s attitude, something Corin recognized all too clearly from school, from work, from life. From nineteen shitty years of life that felt more like ninety when you got right down to it.
“Now,” Corin shrieked. “Please …”
The fireman snorted a swear beneath his breath and turned away from the colossal open garage door. The caustic sting of dry tears invaded the corners of Corin’s eyes. He circled in place, waited for what felt more like hours than minutes.
But then Corin glanced up, and there he stood. Tom Terrific.
His Tom Terrific.
The room smelled like men, like sweaty ass and hairy balls and dirty gym socks. It was a lounge with a TV hooked up to a cable box, not rabbit ears, a bunch of newspapers turned to the sports pages, and a copy of a pawed-through beaver magazine.
“Burned my hand at work,” Corin managed when Tom Terrific asked him what was wrong.
“You’re that kid from the Burger Shack, right?”
Corin’s mouth broke in a wide smile. “Yeah, you remember me?”
“Sure do,” Tom Terrific said. “Let’s have a look at that hand.”
The sting as he cleaned Corin’s fingers, applied salve, and wrapped them in special pads for burn wounds barely registered. The contours of the room no longer seemed solid. Corin caught himself staring at Tom, staring without blinking, completely bewitched by the fireman’s magnificence. Corin breathed in the scent of sweat Tom exuded, clean and masculine. He studied Tom Terrific’s mustache and lips, lips that curled downward when he smiled. Despite the pain of his touch, Tom’s fingers sent icy-hot flickers rippling through Corin’s blood.
“You gotta be more careful, buddy,” Tom Terrific said. He gave Corin’s knee a playful pat.
And then, with the line between fantasy not simply blurred beyond recognition but completely gone, Corin leaned up and crushed their lips together. The kiss lasted for a second, perhaps two, and filled Corin’s head with a Fourth of July spectacle that only he could see. Flesh met flesh, the taste more delicious than Corin had thought possible, even in his most vivid fantasies. Their lips met, held—
Then Tom shoved him away, off the chair and onto the floor, right as Corin whispered the words, “I love you, Tom.”
Crying. Spinning. Burning on the inside as well as the outside, he staggered back to the apartment, cursing himself for being so stupid. He’d kissed Tom—heaven! But hell had quickly followed, delivered by a shove from his mustached god’s mighty hand. Tom. Tom had cast him out.
The tears left Corin feeling even drier on the inside, like kindling ready to ignite from the barest spark. Not even a week of rain or a gallon of icy water could put out that kind of conflagration once it started. It built steadier toward being; he felt the fire powering up, growing hotter with his steps. Tom could have saved him from those other men. He still could.
If only Hinsdale, the fucker, hadn’t seen him tap the lit match to that pile of clotted fryolator fat splattered on the counter.
Still, it had been a very good plan.
It was still a very good plan.
She laid into him the moment he walked through the door.
“Hinsdale called, wants his uniform and nametag back before he’ll give you your final paycheck. Fired, he said. You worthless piece of shit!”
She struck him across the face. Fresh pain crackled through his flesh, white-hot like summer thunder, the spark that lit the tinder. Now, there would only be flames.
Corin barely remembered shoving her, the doughy, loose feel of her filthy skin beneath his hands, or the sound of cracking furniture and bones as she tumbled over, hitting her skull on the TV stand. Even the peal of his scream emerged in a disconnected, distant way, someone else’s voice, belonging to a worthless lump of flesh living in this squalor and being punished for the crimes others had committed.
But Corin had risen above that version of himself. He was the Phoenix, and he would ascend from the ashes. Tom would rescue him, see his beauty, heal him. Love him.
“Tom,” Corin whispered.
Methodically, he glanced toward the phone, sitting atop the side table on a phone book. It had survived the destructive cyclone of spinning limbs and crashing furniture. Light the match. Touch it to the greasy stovetop. The curtains above the kitchen sink, too, which had absorbed plenty of oily residue over the years.
He lit another match and touched it to the roll of paper towels, the junk mail and bills piling up on the tacky department store table with the glass top, one of the four inserts missing, broken after she’d slammed her nasty coffee cup on it in a fit of anger over his meager weekly earnings.
Corin was so above her, above this. This shitty, miserable life. He deserved better. He deserved—
“Tom.”
The smoky smell of his champion teased Corin’s next sip of breath. Closing his eyes, he imagined Tom charging through the apartment door, desperate to rescue him, to be his big hero, to save the young man he loved. Corin would wrap an arm around Tom’s neck, clinging to him for life. They would run through the flames together, forever in love, and they would make love nonstop. Hot, sweaty male love, tender as often as rough. Love and sex and endless, constant heat.
Tom’s handsome face hovered before Corin’s half-closed, dreamy gaze. He had come for him, as Corin knew his hero would. Tom loved him. That face, so handsome, so sexy … his god’s mustache, how it would feel tickling over his asshole as it feasted in readiness to fuck.
Then Corin realized he hadn’t called 911 to ask for the fire department. He opened his eyes to see that the flames had jumped off the table, cut a line over the greasy floor, and were climbing the walls, devouring a cheap calendar, one she’d gotten free at the bank last Christmas. Christmas of 1982. A great Christmas, yeah—his gift had been locking himself in the bathroom while she drank and smoked and bemoaned her life. The calendar burned. So did the carpet.
Tom’s face hovered out of focus beyond a filter of oily smoke. Corin focused. It wasn’t Tom, savior of his universe, but the picture on the wall.
“Daddy?” Corin gasped.
He blinked, and the fantasy of Tom ended, leaving him surrounded by the stark reality of the flames.
Corin hurried toward the phone. Help—he needed to call for help! The grease on his shoes from his slip at the Burger Shack caught fire. Flames raced up his pant leg. For a moment, he was the Phoenix, rising up from the ashes. But then the exquisite agony hit, and the hungry fire engulfed him.