Where Angels Fear to Tread, a Chasing Amy story by Sue Castle. Rated NC17 for language and adult themes (just like the movie! What a surprise! Speaking of which, I strongly recommend watching the movie before reading the story). No copyright infringement intended to Kevin Smith, View Askew et al. Banky simply wouldn't shut up.

Fools rush in. Fools fucking rush in where their dicks lead 'em.

I knew it was the fucking end when he started going out with that fucking dyke. I tried to tell him. Did he listen? Fuck that! Does he ever?

Holden McNeil's been my friend for over twenty fucking years. We lived together, worked together, went to school together, he even picked a fight so he could get kicked out when I did. You'd think he'd know me. You'd think I'd fucking well know him. Wouldn't ya? Just shows how damned stupid friends can be.

I went further than just talking to him. I fucking well drew him a picture. Man-hating leather wearing dyke at one end of a street, Santa Claus at the other, Easter Bunny at the end of the crossing street, and man-friendly open-minded politically-aware fucking Lesbian with a fucking capital L at the final end. Who's gonna come out on top? The fucking man-hating dyke, that's who, I told him, 'cause the others are fucking fairy tales!

Fairy tales. Fuck that. More like a goddamned nightmare.

'S not like I don't understand. Really. I mean, fags I get. They need dick. I can buy that, and I told Holden so. They need it. I get that. But dykes? Bullshit political posturing. Chick waiting to get dick, and ripping a guy's head and heart apart while she does it. Told him so.

Even tried to head it off at the pass. One too many days she sat behind the couch while we were hanging together, and I told him, time's gonna come when I throw down the gauntlet and it's gonna be me or her. Then he hits me with the fucking brick.

How the hell can he be in love with her? She's gonna fucking destroy him.

There's no 'we' here. I walk in the apartment to watch my own fucking TV from my own fucking couch and find them laying naked on it.

Fuck.

Don't remember dropping the milk. Just remember looking down at her thinking, 'Fuck. Bullshit posturing. She was after his dick all along.' Then I stop thinking.

The sun's hot on my face and the step's cold under my ass when he sits down next to me. I can't look at him. He won't listen to me.

"This is all going to end badly," I tell him.

"You don't know that!"

Don't I? Fuck I don't. "I know you." And I do. Down to his soul, I know Holden, and he can be a fucking self-righteous, self-centered, stupid son of a bitch. He can also be the only one in the entire fucking world who understands what the hell I'm thinking. Even when I don't. What he can't seem to get is that it goes both ways. Then the stupid fuck doesn't believe me when I told him the bitch had an agenda. No, he tries to turn it around on me. What's my agenda?

"My agenda is to watch your back." You stupid asshole.

"To what end?"

He looks so earnest. So fucking clueless. I try to explain, fighting a losing battle, but not prepared to quit just yet. "To ensure that all this time we've spent together building something wasn't wasted."

"She's not going to ruin the comic."

Oh, fuck. No shit. Like that's the only thing at risk here. He can be so fucking clueless for a reasonably intelligent guy! I don't know how to say it any more clearly. I look at him. He looks satisfied. With his reasoning. His life. His dick's happy, so he's happy. I can feel the look turning into a glare. Like a laser beam trying to bore a hole into his fucking thick skull. "I wasn't talking about the comic."

He still doesn't fucking get it. I don't think he ever will. It all gets me thinking, and that's when it all goes to shit.

Hooper -- "That boy loves you in a way that he ain't ready to deal with."

Next few weeks suck big-time. My life is totally fucked up. Holden's drawing like a fucking fiend all day and gone all night, hanging out with the fags and dykes and tip-toeing around me like I'm a fucking nuke about to blow. We had tickets to the hockey game.

He took the cunt.

Fucking figures.

Must not have gone as well as he thought. I don't hear him come in, but it can't have been too late, because when I get up in the morning he's still sitting on the couch, looks like he hasn't moved in hours. I'm still more than half asleep, but I can fucking feel the misery pouring off him in waves. If I was to draw him now, he'd be, like, surrounded with line after line of pain just fucking sweating out of him. Then the light hits the side of his face. I scrub my eyes with the heels of my hands and look away.

Been a long fucking time since I saw him cry.

God damn that fucking bitch to hell. I knew this was gonna happen.

I stretch, not sure what to say, lending support the only fucking way I know how. Sitting there. Wallowing in the pain with him. The silence gets so fucking thick I can't breathe.

"The girl?" I finally ask, knowing the answer, careful not to call her what she really is, for doing this to him. Don't want to hurt him even more; don't want to make him defend the bitch.

He can't even fucking talk. He just nods.

I swear to God if I had her here right now I'd cut out her fucking guts with a dull knife.

Next month is pure fucking hell. Holden's thinking. I can tell, 'cause he's not talking. Just going around with that intense, vacant look, like a dog right before the car hits it. Only I got a bad feeling this time I'm the dog and Holden's the car. My skin itches. I wish he'd fucking well get on with it.

Then he does, and God, I wish he hadn't.

Starts out badly. What do I expect? I walk in the room and the table's set, nicely, for three.

Oh, fuck.

Then I see the bitch, sitting there with a pissy look on her face, glaring at me, staring all weepy-eyed at Holden. I want to yell at her, give it up! Haven't you done enough? Haven't you ripped his heart out and shit on it already? Then it hits me. Maybe, just maybe, he's gonna tell her to go to hell, and I'm here so he doesn't have to tell me after. Then reality slaps me again, and I glance over at the table. No fucking way. Three plates. Holden's got something planned.

God help us all. Well, not the bitch, but me, anyway. And Holden. He needs all the fucking help he can get.

He sets the TV up so it's got fish swimming around on it, and he sets a chair up so he can talk to both of us at the same time. It's a fucking flashback to high school, with Holden playing the principal. I don't like it any better now than I did then. I've got a bad feeling about this. Obi-Wan's not the only one who knows better than to fuck with fate. Unfortunately, I don't have any better luck getting out of it than he does.

Holden goes into a riff about wanting us all to be one big fucking happy family, and I want to puke. But I can't move. Now I really feel like the fucking dog caught in the headlights, and it's not a good feeling. Then Holden sits down and stares right into my fucking eyes, and it's like there's no one else in the whole world but him and me.

I used to love it when he did that. Then it dawns on me what he's saying. I sit there and watch his mouth move, unable to believe he's saying what he is fucking well saying.

"Banky, I know why you're having such a hard time with me and Alyssa."

Yeah, 'cause she's a man-hating dyke who's getting between us and fucking up our friendship and your life. Your point?

"It's something that's been obvious forever and I guess I just didn't acknowledge it."

You have fucking bad taste in women?

"You're in love with me."

No fucking shit -- my brain freezes. He can't have said what I just heard him say. No fucking way. My mouth opens. Nothing intelligent comes out.

"What?" Was that a scream? Sure sounded like it from the inside.

"You're attracted to me."

He sounds so fucking reasonable! And more than a little pleased with himself. Stupid fucker!

"Just as, in a way, I guess I'm attracted to you. I mean, it makes sense."

To somebody, maybe! You've lost your fucking mind! She's done this to you! You've been hanging out with fags too much! Now you think everybody's fucking queer! Fucking Hooper! Fucking Alyssa!!

"We've been together so long, we have so much in common ..."

My mouth starts going and my body stands up to head for the door before my brain can unfreeze. "Well," I manage, light and fucking breezy, "I gotta get home. Gotta watch the last few minutes of Little House--"

The fucking bastard grabs me by the head and kisses me. Fast. Hard. My mouth's still open so there's even a little tongue. I tell myself I may puke. I can't believe I've got a hard-on. He lets go of me and I drop back on the couch, automatically curling up to hide the fact that I'm hard enough to fucking hammer wood with my dick. I can't say anything, but I know my face is screaming, Oh, Shit.

"It's something you're gonna have to deal with, Bank."

His voice is so fucking gentle. I can't look at his face. I've known him too long, know what he's gonna look like. He's gonna have that reasonable, calm look on his face like he always does right before he drops both of us up to our asses in shit. I feel like I'm made out of stone, and it's not just my dick.

"And that would explain your jealousy of Alyssa, your homophobia, your sense of humor --"

Wait a fucking minute! "Jesus," I protest, "Just 'cause a guy's got a predilection toward dick jokes -"

"Bank." His voice strangles mine. "Deal with it. You'll feel much better."

Now I'm looking at him and I can't fucking look away. Don't do this to me, man. Don't make me look there. Don't make me go there. You fucking bastard. Don't do this to me.

Thank God, he's talking to the bitch now, and I can breathe again. It hurts, but at least the fucking lungs are working. Then it hits me, another fucking brick to the head.

He's sitting beside me, between me and the dyke, and he's trying to convince us both to have sex with him. He still sounds so reasonable, but I look down, and I can see he's starting to get off on this. Just as fucking well. If my dick's gonna act so stupid, at least it's not alone. He says my name again and I tune right back in, like one of Pavlov's fucking dogs hearing a bell, or a buzzer, or whatever the fuck it is. He's staring right into my eyes, right into my brain. What's left of it, anyway. What hasn't already frozen or fried.

"Banky, you can take that leap that everyone else but you sees you should take."

He takes a breath, and my brain picks out 'Everybody else?' Jesus, have I been broadcasting fag-vibes all over the fucking place? His voice catches my thoughts before they ping-pong totally out of my head.

"And it'll be with me, your best friend for years. We've been everything to each other but intimates, and now we'll have been through that together too."

Will you go to hell with me, Holden? Because here, now, hearing you say this in front of that fucking cunt, that's exactly where you're putting me.

"And it won't be a total leap for you, because a woman'll be involved. And when it's over all that hostility and aggression you feel toward Alyssa will be gone."

Never in a million fucking years. Don't you get it, Holden?

"Because you'll have shared in something beautiful with the woman I love. It'll be cathartic."

Lance that fucking wound, Holden. Rip my dick off and beat me to death with it. Cauterize the bastard. Fucking kill me. Now.

"This will keep us together. What do you say?"

I hate you. I love you. I want to beat you over the fucking thick skull with a fucking brick. I wouldn't touch that fucking dyke with a ten foot pole, and my dick will fall off before it comes anywhere near the two of you together. "Sure," my mouth says.

Sometimes I think I was dropped on my fucking head when I was a baby and never got my brain unscrambled. He can do this to me. He's the only one on the whole fucking planet who can do this to me. I let him do this to me.

God damn us both.

Then I hear something fucking wonderful. The bitch told him no. "Thank Christ!" comes out before I can clamp my fucking mouth shut. I widen my eyes at them. Cunt looks like she swallowed a lemon. "Sorry," I lie.

Then she stands, and fuck it, but he's crying again. Stunned stupid, like this whole fucking thing wasn't stupid to start out -- like he didn't expect it to blow up in his fucking face. She hugs him, then she slaps him, and my head rings along with his, just from the noise. Christ, that had to hurt. More than his face, too. She pauses on the way out and looks down at me, resignation and pain in those fucking wet eyes.

"He's yours again."

Not so you'd notice, cunt.

He watches her leave. I watch him watching her. Then he looks at me. Second. Like it's been since the first time he saw the bitch. I can't find anything to say to him. My fucking mouth, that's been doing so well all on its own all fucking night, can't form a word. All it can remember is the way that it felt when he kissed me.

I get up and walk into my room. I can feel him watching me even through the door.

He was gone the next day when I dragged my sorry ass out of bed. I wasn't sorry to get up; can't believe the fucking dreams I was having about him. It wasn't the first time, not that I'd admit that to anybody, but they were different now.

Now I knew what he tasted like.

My brain twisted on that, and I went looking for him. Finally found him the one place I should've looked first. The fucker moved in with Hooper. Soon as I heard his voice on the other end of the line I hung up.

The next year went by slowly, and it's all blurry now. He sent me the pages, and I inked them, and we killed the comic we'd worked so fucking hard to create. Didn't surprise me. Since the bitch came into the picture everything else had died, why not the comic? Took me a little while to find my fucking balance again, but I did. Sort of.

Hard to walk by yourself when you've been one of two your whole fucking life.

Three months after the book went to press, Holden disappeared. Publisher couldn't tell me where he went, Hooper didn't know and neither did anyone else. I even called the bitch.

"Alyssa?"

She didn't say anything for a minute. "Banky?" she finally said like she was saying, Satan?

"D'you know where Holden went?"

"Not my problem any more when you lose your boyfriend." Then the cunt had the nerve to hang up on me. When I could think about it rationally, meaning a hell of a long time after hanging up, I thought I heard her crying by the end of the sentence.

Too fucking bad. This was all her fault.

Then I shook my head. Not all of it. Part of it was mine, too. And a fucking hell of a lot of it was Holden's.

Got me to thinking, though. I wandered out into the world, squinting at the fucking sunlight after too many days hiding in my room, and ran into Hooper. He was totally fagged out in black leather and eyeliner. He also looked at me sympathetically. I didn't know whether to hit him or walk away. So I stood there and looked at him.

"He's okay, Banky."

I must've looked like some fucking pathetic dog trying to find its lost master or something. I glared at him. He looked even more sorry for me. Bastard.

"Really?" That was so fucking far from the 'I don't give a shit' I'd meant to say. My mouth, I swear to God, does whatever the fuck it wants to and leaves my brain behind.

"He will be. So will you." He started to reach out to me, and the 'hit him' instinct was so strong the only fucking thing I could do was turn and walk away.

I stayed away from the city. In the 'burbs, where I belong. Stayed in our -- my -- fucking apartment and created a new universe, and to my total fucking astonishment it sold. Maybe God was cutting me some slack. Or maybe it was because the only fucking thing I was doing was working. That was okay.

Not easy to change the habit of a lifetime. My habit was Holden, and without the fucker there wasn't anything else to do but work.

Eight months went by, every day pretty much the same as the others, every fucking night a goddamned wet dream about fucking Holden. Literally. I thought a lot about what he'd done, to himself, to her, to me, to all of us. What he hadn't done. What I fucking wished he'd done.

Maybe he had something with that crap about me being in love with him. All I knew was that I wanted him back. I had a huge fucking hole in my life and he wasn't there to fill it, and I was as flat and two dimensional as my drawing before the inking got done.

There's a hell of a lot to be said for tracing. Adds some fucking life to the picture. I missed it.

I worked my ass off hoping to be too fucking busy to go to the Comicon. No such luck. Deja fucking vu.

A kid throws the final Chronic issue down on the table, and I take a deep breath. That brings back some fucking painful memories. He starts to rattle on about Holden, and I look up.

Right into Holden's face.

Okay, so he's halfway across the fucking room, but he's there. He looks kinda thin, and a little tired, but fucking beautiful. I shake my head. Too many fucking dreams.

He holds up a copy of Baby Dave and gives me a thumbs up. I grin a little, more inside than out. He likes it. Too fucking cool. Then I do the single most fucking honorable thing I've ever done in my life.

I point with my chin over to where the bitch has her table. Answering the fan without paying any attention to what I'm saying, I draw my hands together, first fingers pointed up, our old sign for 'having a moment' or 'getting some ass', whichever.

He holds up two crossed fingers. So, he still has hopes. I give him a thumbs up. He smiles at me, and waves good-bye.

More than he gave me the last time he left.

"Bye," I say very quietly, and the fan wanders away. My eyes follow Holden as he walks across the room, heading toward the bitch. Then I realize what I'm doing, and realize I'm holding my fucking breath waiting for him to turn around and come back, and shake my head, knocking loose all the stupid fucking fantasies. "Next!" I call out. I have work to do. Thank Christ.

I don't see him leave, but I see her leave. With a chick. I want to kill her.

Then I want to kiss her, and the thought leaves me fucking nauseous, if a little light-headed. Because unless he's waiting for them for a three-way, and knowing Holden I'm the only one he'd have a fucking three-way with, then she told him no.

Always knew she was a stupid cunt.

I go to the bar we went to the previous year.

No Holden. Hooper, yeah, and Alyssa, and the girl she's currently fucking. No Holden. I go to the train station. Still no Holden.

After four fucking hours of walking around New York like a fucking walking advertisement to get mugged and murdered, I go home.

Walk in.

Find Holden asleep on the couch.

I kiss him before I even know I've moved. He does that to me. Makes me do stupid fucking things before I have the chance to think about them.

Then he's kissing me, and I land flat on my back on the floor, and he's on top of me, and it doesn't fucking matter that I can't breathe. Because his tongue's in my mouth and his hand's in my hair and his other hand's down my fucking pants and my dick's the happiest it's ever been.

Okay, so it might have been worth having the bitch come in and ruin everything and lead to a year in hell if he's going to do this.

He's squeezing and pulling me, and my hands are just as fucking busy as his are, and I can't believe I've got my hands on Holden's ass. My thighs are wrapped around his hips and I'm humping like there's no fucking tomorrow, and that's all right, because there's fucking tonight.

As much fucking as he can give me.

I don't know what he's been doing the last year, but he's learned some things, or maybe he always knew them and I was shit-stupid and never guessed. And I don't give a damn because now he's biting my neck, and both his hands are working at my dick and balls, and I'm babbling some shit about love and finally and something too fucking Hallmark to even think about.

If he laughs I'll rip his goddamn nuts off. Right after I come.

I do it almost the same time I think about it, the coming, not the ripping, and he's making this weird fucking noise, halfway between a laugh and a scream. And he's coming, too, all over my hand, even on my wrist, and maybe it's been awhile for him, too, because there's a hell of a lot of it.

It tastes good.

There's that choked noise again, and I look up to see him staring at me. There are tears on his cheeks, but he looks happy. Horny. Like he wants to fuck me forever. I lick the rest of the stuff off my hand, and he moans.

I kinda like that sound.

Every single minute of the rest of the night is clear as fucking crystal. I keep expecting it to blur, but it doesn't. Him helping me off the floor, too fucking funny since we're both shaking like fucking leaves. Staggering into my bedroom. Falling on the bed.

His eyes as he touches me. His body moving against mine. It's nasty and amazing and fucking incredible. The second time I come it's in his mouth, and I nearly fucking pass out. The next time he comes it's between my thighs, sawing up against my balls, and it feels so fucking good it almost hurts.

I wake up first the next morning. He's sleeping like the fucking dead, and from the look of the bags under his eyes, he needs it. It's okay. He's not going anywhere. Even if I have to tie him to the fucking bed. He's not leaving me again.

Maybe I'll let him fuck me today. I wasn't lying last year when I told him I could understand how a guy could need dick. I sure as hell need his. Probably more than he needs it, at this point. I know one thing for fucking sure.

Now I've fucking had it, I'm not giving it back. Ever.

end