It was easy in the beginning when kisses between them were fueled by anger and drunkenness and a reckless understanding that it didn�t mean anything, it was just them. Just them being Billy and Joe, and not really getting that it was supposed to mean anything in the first place.
Back then it only hurt physically, and sometimes the only way Billy could remember the feel of Joe�s lips on his was by running his tongue along the cuts that Joe�s teeth had carelessly left there. They didn�t matter, the cuts, because this was music, and in this industry you bled and you didn�t care.
Then it started to mean something, all of a sudden, and it hurt in a completely different way that had nothing to do with bruised skin and scraped lips. That was when he left, because that kind of pain didn�t do anyone any good, not in the long run.
But he came back, and maybe that was when it all started falling apart. Or maybe it started years before that, the first time Joe shoved him up against a wall in the back of a club and claimed his mouth with his own.
It rained the day they buried him, and by the time Billy was alone at the grave he was sinking in two inches of mud.
The name on the stone was the name of someone he had never met, because Joe hadn�t been anyone but Joe Dick since the day he met Billy. He stood there with the rain dripping into his eyes as he looked at the unfamiliar words, and he tossed his cigarette into the mud beneath his shoes, watching it disappear. Then he lifted his hand back up to his lips, kissed his fingers and ran them across the cool slick stone.
�Fuck you, man,� he said, and his words were nearly lost under the sound of the falling rain.
Fuck you.