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The Resurrection Shuffle

by
Barbara Welton

BROW BEATEN, HEAVY LEATHER

Tomas collects leather jackets. He has a whole wardrobe full. Biker jackets. Some padded, some thigh-length, some full of zippers, black ones mainly, a couple of red ones, some modelled on the original WW1 German pilot jackets, most modelled after Marlon Brando in The Wild One, some with badges and stick pins stuck all over them, some with intricate artworks painted on the back. Each jacket is unique; there aren't two the same. But they all have one thing in common -

Tomas only buys jackets that have been in accidents. He buys them directly from their previous owners. He trawls the daily newspapers for reports of motorbike accidents and tracks down those involved. He subscribes to various biker magazines and has a standard ad that he runs in the 'Wanted To Buy' columns in the back pages. He visits bikers and their passengers in hospitals where their bodies lie in trusses and casts, their limbs tied to ceilings, their bowels in colostomy bags. He talks with them softly and calmly. He lays his hands over their broken forms and tells them they'll be fine. They know their bodies will heal because they feel the warmth and tingle beneath Tomas' splayed-wide hands when he touches them. They sell him their leather jackets.

'Broken in,' Tomas describes his jacket collection, and broken they certainly are. He never mends a single slash or rip. He never washes off a speck of dirt or spray of blood. He takes them home, removes his clothes and puts the leathers on. I've seen him do this...

'Oh, man...' He threw his head back and gasped. 'Christ... feel that!' His neck was long and pale, stretched back so that his dark, near-black hair brushed over the shoulders of the jacket, touching the epaulettes. He hugged the jacket around himself, he pulled the lapels and collar up high and buried his face into the animal hide, filling his lungs with horrible breaths of dead animal and maimed human. I watched his cock swell and rise, the bevelled tip standing up to graze the bottom hem of the jacket and tremble.

'It's the moment of impact,' he tried to explain to me. 'All that fear and adrenalin, it all ends up here...' he stroked the leather sleeves sensuously, 'Here in the hide. I can feel it. This jacket is broken in, a body was broken in this jacket. Oh, Christ...' And his cock spasmed, strings of semen dribbling down to the floor.

Tomas is the only man I know who can come without ever even touching his dick. It's quite the party trick. But I wasn't fortunate enough to be born an empath like Tom, so I don't get the same effect from the lines of leather jackets hanging silent in his cupboard. At his insistence, I've tried many of them on, but my lack of connection and empathy has, every time, left me a guy standing in the middle of the floor, naked except for a leather jacket that doesn't actually fit, sporting a limp dick and goosebumps.

We were in a pub once, Tomas and I, when a huge, bearded guy with a walking stick approached our table and shook Tom's hand with all the fervour of the saved.

'It's you, man! You visited me in hospital! You fuckin' saved me, man!'

Tomas smiled his gentle, knowing smile and sent some god-knows-what good feeling through his hand into the big guy's. 'Yes,' he said, 'It's good to see you walking again.'

The big guy obviously felt whatever Tom sent into his palm, for his eyes went soft and gooey, like a teenaged girl after her first kiss. 'I couldn't have done it without you. I felt like my bones actually crawled around inside me looking for each other after you put your hands over me. The doctors said they'd never seen shattered bone knit as quickly as mine did. You're a fuckin' saint, man. You're a miracle worker. Have you still got my jacket?'

'I cherish your jacket, my friend.' Tomas shook the guy's hand again and the dude hobbled away with an idiot grin on his face.

'I cherish his jacket alright,' Tom shivered over his beer, obviously recalling the intimacies he and the leather had shared. 'My knees just about buckled when I came. That jacket got dragged behind a station wagon for half a block.'

I first met Tomas at the funeral of a mutual friend. I was walking away from the graveside after the service, wiping the remains of a handful of disturbingly fertile earth from my hand. I'd never thrown dirt onto a coffin before, never heard the dull thud that the clods of soil make as they hit the wood. It was such a sad sound, such a sad gesture, I had to walk away as soon as convention allowed me an opportunity.

Tomas was kneeling in the mound of soil beside the grave, running his fingers joyously through the rich brown earth, a watery smile flitting over his Eastern European features. It didn't occur to me to wonder why this guy was being at one with the ground the way he was. I knew the dearly departed in the grave had lots of weird friends - probably even counted me as one of them. As I walked by where he knelt, Tomas put one hand out and touched my leg.

'It's only a sad sound because you know they can't hear it,' he said to me.

He had the most beautiful brown eyes I had ever looked down into. I almost dropped to my knees then and there to join him in whatever the hell he was doing in the dirt.

'I think I should take you home and fill you with contraband.' He stood up and held his hand out to me in greeting. 'I am Tomas,' he introduced himself.

'Dan,' I nodded at him, the flesh of my hand tingling wherever his skin touched mine.

He took me back to his place, got me drunk and stoned and never laid a dirty thought on me. I'd thought he was at least going to try. It transpired though that Tom was not only heterosexual but curiously uninterested in sex in general, with anybody, of any gender. He said the full body contact of intercourse messed with his mind too much, he being an empath and all. I thought this was a pretty goddamn cool excuse and endeavoured to remember to use it next time I wanted to weasel my way out of any entanglements I tired of.

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