Attempting to give a decent blowjob was, Evan found, difficult enough to pull off at times, and trying to give one while kneeling in waist-high weeds didn’t do much to help matters. He had to angle his head just so and do very weird things with his mouth to ensure not scratching the delicate skin with his teeth. It was uncomfortable, and he was beginning to get a headache, but Evan kept at it, determined to give his boyfriend the most mind-blowing pleasure possible.

Keeping his eyes closed, Evan reached up and wrapped his hand around Pietro’s penis. Buoyed by the speed demon’s strangled moan, Evan lunged forward, sliding as much of Pietro’s cock into his mouth as he could in that position. He held it in his mouth a moment, flicking his tongue on the underside of the throbbing flesh and swooping upward, dragging his tongue in lazy circles around the surging head. Scooting closer, and egged on by Pietro’s soft gasps, Evan angled his head and began to slide his mouth down the length of the shaft, licking and nibbling with his lips until he felt the tip hit the back of his throat and felt the crinkly hair of Pietro’s pubes tickle his nose. Pietro began pumping his hips at that moment, picking up speed as Evan’s tongue played along his shaft. The older teen cradled the blond head in his hands – not forcing him or guiding him, Evan knew – but steadying him and relieving some of the tension on his neck as he pleasured him. Evan reached behind and grabbed handfuls of Pietro’s ass, amazed as always at its smoothness and subtle muscularity.

With an effort, Evan moved back a little – just enough to give himself some purchase room – and hurriedly yanked his zipper down to pull out his own stiff cock. It leapt in his trembling hand, and Evan began whacking off as if there were the devil to pay, amazed at how completely his hunger had seized him. It seemed like it was so long since he’d been in this position with Pietro, but he still knew exactly what to do and how to do it well, if the speedster’s moans were any indication. The white-haired teen was alternating between uneven huffs and low, mewling sounds. Evan looked up and saw Pietro staring down at him, mouth open, eyes hazy and perspiration trickling down the sides of his face.

His eyes never leaving Pietro’s, Evan slid his mouth down to the base of his balls, letting the cock slide even further down his throat. Giving Pietro’s balls a gentle squeeze, Evan fought hard not to smile when Pietro began groaning in earnest, his legs trembling. Sliding Pietro’s cock out of his mouth, Evan began to stroke it quickly, watching Pietro’s eyes darken to the color of blue satin, his moans rising in volume and echoing off the trees, until with an almost violent jerk, he flung his head back, giving a shout loud enough to bring the sky down on their heads. Pietro’s body trembled for several moments as he moaned his release, and Evan laid his cheek against one of Pietro’s thighs, employing a few quick strokes of his own to bring himself off. He cried out against Pietro’s skin as tumbled into the abyss. The white-haired mutant quickly bent down, pressing his lips to Evan’s right temple and cradling him close, holding the blond until the last of the shivers passed through him. Evan relaxed in Pietro’s embrace, too far-gone to notice that the tell-tale, pre-spike itching of his skin had started up again, but unlike in past days, not one unwanted sliver of bone appeared.

~*~

The sun was just dipping below the horizon when Evan entered the mansion and dragged himself up the stairs leading to his room. He was covered in dust, there was grass in his shorts, and his knees were slightly bruised . . . and he felt freaking terrific. He and Pietro had . . . communed for hours in their little hiding place, and the result was the most fun Evan had had for a good while. There weren’t any spikes, no sores, nothing strange – well, aside from Pietro’s neon purple underwear. Just a pleasant afternoon spent largely on his knees with his boyfriend. It just didn’t get much better.

Reaching for his doorknob, Evan jerked back when it turned without his touching it, and his door flew open to reveal his Auntie O carrying an armful of his dirty clothes.

“Oh my goodness, Evan!” She recoiled, then relaxed. “You startled me.” She shifted to glance at her watch, and then looked at him again with her eyebrows high. “You’ve been out quite awhile.”

“Yeah, um, there was basketball –” He stopped, and backtracked quickly, remembering that he couldn’t use practice as an excuse anymore. Crap. I need to start writing this stuff down. “Um, Bayville was going to play Central High. I thought about going, but changed my mind. Decided to board awhile.”

“I see.” Evan stiffened as his aunt peered at him, scanning him from head to toe. “It looks like you had a rough time of it.” Shrewd, pale-blue eyes locked to his. “It’s not like you to be so . . . untidy from a session of skateboarding.”

“I was doing some new tricks.” Evan found he couldn’t quite hold his aunt’s gaze. “I haven’t really ironed out all the kinks.” He looked down and his mouth fell open. There were grass stains on his knees. He discreetly attempted to tug his shorts down to cover them. “I guess I was a little tired, and I always get sloppy when I’m feeling low-energy.”

Ororo’s eyes softened. “I know school has been rough on all of you lately.” She cupped his cheek. “And the Professor and I are so very proud of the way you all are handling yourselves. We have no choice to believe that once it is established that most mutants are not a threat to mankind, things will become easier for all of us.”

“Well, it can’t get any worse,” Evan muttered, ducking his head and shifting nervously from one foot to the other. Knees aside, he had purplish marks on his neck that would be hard to blame on falling off his board. “Um, I’m gonna get cleaned up, auntie, you know, I kinda . . . reek.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but a shower and a change of clothes would probably be a good idea.” Ororo smiled gently and moved aside. “Dinner’s in ten. It’s your favorite – lasagna. And for dessert, cheesecake. Lots of dairy – maybe it’ll give you back some of that energy. I notice you’ve not been drinking as much milk lately.”

“Yeah, I haven’t really felt like –” Evan was edging into his room, but he stopped abruptly, his eyes going wide. “–it . . .”

Doing a quick calculation in his mind, his eyes went even wider when he realized just how sharply his milk intake had dropped. No pizza with extra-cheese, no milkshakes from Burger Bomb, hardly any milk in his cereal. And no chugging carton after carton of 2-percent. He hadn’t lost his taste for moo juice, but he wasn’t consuming as much of it as he had in the past. Maybe that’s the problem. Deep in thought, he wandered into his room, rubbing the marks on his arm. Maybe milk doesn’t just do a body good . . . it keeps mine from turning against me. Stripping to shower, Evan’s first thought was to run to the kitchen and start chugging, but he held himself back. He decided he’d eat dinner and then see how he felt. But first, it was time to clean up, and find a shirt with a neck high enough to hide the hickeys on his neck, or his spike situation would be the least of his worries.

~*~

Chomping his way through two helpings of lasagna, a slice and a half of cherry cheesecake and three tall glasses of milk, Evan sprinted up the stairs to his room and eagerly shut and locked his door, ready to test his spikes. It never took his body long to digest the milk and pull the much-needed calcium into his bones. Another function of his mutation, the skater figured. Inhaling deeply, Evan did a count to three before reaching in his mind to turn on his spikes. Within seconds, a row of neat bone ridges protruded from his forearm. And there was no pinching sensation as they punched through – just the slight itching of his skin that indicated that they were coming out.

All right, Spykeman . . . don’t get too excited. Evan gently prodded one of the shards of bone. Let’s see if they go back in without a fight. With another deep inhalation, Evan let his breath out slowly and counted down in his mind . . . two seconds . . . three . . . four . . . five –

With a start, he looked down at his arm. They were gone. The spikes had gone in, no straining, no second-tries, no problem.

And no ugly-ass marks. Evan rubbed the smooth stretch of skin where the spikes had appeared. Nothing! Just like the old days! Still, he quashed the hope that was surging in him. Once could be called a fluke. If he could do it twice . . .

Repeating his actions to the letter, Evan made the spikes appear on the palms of his hands, and with a mental go command, watched in shocked awe as they shot from his hands and buried themselves neatly into the corner of his room that he’d been aiming at.

Yes! Yes! That’s it! Evan barely held back from jumping up and down like a weirdo. Kurt was next door, though, and Evan feared alarming his furry teammate. Throwing himself on his bed instead, he amused himself by creating little spikes, no larger than the width of a pencil, and shooting at the ceiling, hitting the mark every time. He knew that Auntie ‘Ro would probably go off on him if she saw him Swiss-cheesing his room, but Evan, for the moment, didn’t care, just so relieved that there wasn’t some huge, deep-rooted cause for his ailment – just a lack of moo juice. He wondered how he could have gone so long without noticing. Sure, things had been a little hectic with the return to school after the whole mutant-outing thing, but still . . .

He rose from his bed slowly as if in a trance, and stared at a bottle on his dresser. It was a soda bottle that had seen better days, empty now of the cold, bubbly drink it had once contained. The cheery neon red lightning bolt against black lettering made the thing look almost Goth, but Evan realized that in that bottle lay part of the reason he’d bailed on his milk habit.

The other part of the reason – inadvertently, sorta – was across town, possibly trying to explain away grass stains on his own clothes. That in mind, Evan lunged for his phone and dialed quickly, hoping that for a change, he’d be the one to pick up. Whenever someone else at the Brotherhood compound picked up, they gave the blond hell for being a “mutant sell-out” just because the X-Men refused to join any of the pro-mutant groups that were springing up around the country. Evan had tried disguising his voice once, but that hadn’t worked. Apparently, Pietro didn’t get a lot of calls.

“’Allo?”

Evan blinked. That didn’t sound like Todd or Lance or Fred. Or Mystique for that matter. He wondered if he’d mis-dialed. “Uh, sorry. I think I have the wrong number –”

“Who you lookin’ for, mon ami?”

The blond frowned into the phone. The voice was not familiar, but whoever it was sounded like Pepe LaPew with a lisp. “Um, Pietro Maximoff, but I don’t think –”

“Oui. Dis his phone number. Who can I say wants ‘im?”

“Uh . . .” Evan wasn’t sure what was going on, but he did know that Pietro or somebody had better have a damn good explanation for this guy’s presence. “He’ll know who it is. Just tell him he has a phone call.”

Normally, the blond wasn’t so rude or short over the phone, especially with someone he didn’t even know, but the guy was irritating him, especially his voice . . . like he’d swallowed glass or something. Still, Evan felt kind of like he was being a jerk, and was going to amend his words and add a ‘please’ or two, but that’s when the mystery man chuckled, and said something beneath his breath that Evan could not quite catch.

“Mysterieux, eh? I like dat. You a homme after my own heart.” The man laughed again. “Hold th’ line, mon ami. I’ll get ‘im directly.”

Evan jumped when the receiver was all but slammed down, and a sharp tone called out for Pietro. The blond’s curiosity quickly became concern: Nobody, not even Lance, really, spoke with such . . . well . . . authority. Pietro had always acted as de-facto head of the Brotherhood, and that was even before it had come out that Magneto was his father. Whoever this mon ami guy was acted as if he owned the place, and that didn’t sound good. Evan frowned deeply. It didn’t sound good at all.

“Hello?”

“’Tro?” Evan spoke softly. “It’s me. Can you talk?”

“Sure.” There was a rustling noise, then Pietro’s voice again, clearer than before. “What’s up . . . or is that a dumb question?”

Evan blushed at Pietro’s knowing snicker. “Uh-uh. Still tapped out from earlier.” He still spoke cautiously. “Yo, who answered your phone?”

Pietro’s laughter stopped much too quickly for Evan’s taste. “Oh. Him. That’s . . . a new boarder.”

“A new what?”

“Boarder. Someone who’s renting a room here . . . and paying for it,” Pietro said. “It was Lance’s bright idea – said this place is supposed to be the Bayville Boarding House . . . so he figured if we fix the place up, we could rent out the extra rooms and make money like that. We put up a couple of flyers. So far, this guy’s the only one we hooked. He moved in a couple of days ago.”

Evan didn’t respond for a while. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t wholly believe his boyfriend. Pietro’s voice sounded smooth enough, and the story was plausible enough, but there was something else . . . something about the way the guy had sounded. He had the cool confidence of someone who thought they owned a place, not just renting out one measly room.

“That’s kinda dangerous, isn’t it?” Evan said after awhile, wondering why he was speaking so softly. No one could hear him through the walls, and there was only one phone at Pietro’s, but the blond couldn’t get over the feeling that someone was eavesdropping. “He could be one of those anti-mutant assholes. Everyone knows who the mutants are in Bayville. What if he was sent there to infiltrate ya’ll? You could be sleeping in your beds, and here he comes with an AK-47.”

“Daniels, you really need to try reading a book or something.” Pietro sounded amused. “All those spy movies are turning your brain to shredded wheat. I don’t know why he’s in Bayville, and I don’t really care. He’s got money – he paid three months up front. And believe me – he’s not anti-mutant.”

“How do you know, man?” Evan knew Pietro wanted him to drop the subject, but the blond still felt uneasy. “What the hell do you know about him? What’s his name? Where’s he from?”

“He goes by Remy, and weirdly, I think that’s his real name, poor asshole.” Pietro answered. “Where he’s from? I don’t know. He said he lived in the City for awhile, doing card tricks on the street for money.”

Card tricks? That seemed to stir some vague memory within Evan, but it was too shadowy to draw out. “The City? He doesn’t sound like he’s from there. He sounds French or something.”

“He’s Cajun or some shit. I wasn’t really listening. Todd might know. He’s been talking to him all day about eating snails or something stupid.” Now Pietro sounded a little annoyed. “Look, all you need to know is that he’s not gonna be in our way when you come over. I don’t know his deal, but I do know he’s not gonna be here long. This place is barely big enough for the four of us . . . but we need the money.”

“Okay, okay, chill.” Evan knew that money was a sore point with Pietro and the rest of the Brotherhood. Mystique had abandoned them again – for good, it looked like – and Pietro swore his father was out of the picture, so the Brotherhood had to fend for itself. And with so much anti-mutant feeling around, it was hard for any known mutant to get honest work. “I just wondered. Remember, I haven’t been around in the past couple of days.”

“Yeah, I noticed. My right hand hates you, Daniels. Whacking off alone is so unfulfilling – tiring, too.”

Evan’s cheeks, and other parts of him that were a bit lower down, warmed up a little. “Uh, yeah. For me, too. Thought we made up for it pretty good today, though.”

“Yeeee-aah.” Evan could hear the smile in Pietro’s voice. “Today was pretty good. Still, would’ve been nice if you’d, uh, let me return the favor. But I figured with the spike thing . . . you didn’t want to take any chances.”

“Yeah, I thought of that. But seriously, I don’t think I coulda held on long enough for you to get in position.” Evan shifted, feeling the room in the crotch of his pants diminishing rapidly. “Uh, anyway, that’s why I called. Dude, I think I figured it out!”

“What?”

“The spike thing? My problem . . . I mean . . . it was simple . . . easy . . .” Evan rolled onto his stomach, propelled by a resurgence of excitement. “I can’t believe I didn’t think . . . I mean . . . whoa . . . it was . . . obvious . . .” Evan paused for breath.

“Daniels, you know, a conversation usually goes a lot better when full sentences are involved.”

Evan breathed out, forcing himself to calm down. “All right, all right . . . sorry man . . . I’m just jazzed. I . . . okay . . . you know how I need to drink a lot of milk to put back the calcium that my spikes take out of me?”

“Yeah, I remember seeing you drink fifteen cartons of that crap. I still don’t know how you can take the taste. Tastes like spit to me. White spit.”

The blond ignored that. “Anyway, well, the more I drink the more spikes I can make. And the less I drink, well, the less I make. I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Well I don’t know. I’ve always liked milk. I’ve always drank it. I guess my body craved it because of my mutation. There’s never been a time that I stopped drinking it . . . until a few months ago. You got me into drinking JambaJolt.” Evan glared at the empty bottle on his dresser. “Got me so hooked on it, that I stopped drinking much milk at all. Pure milk – not just cheese or yogurt or whatever, but actual moo juice.”

“And . . . ?”

“And so, since my body didn’t have a surplus of calcium to use, it got hard for me to make spikes. And the spikes I made were all hard and weird looking and they hurt comin’ out.” Evan paused a little. “I guess it’s almost like starving or something. You can survive for awhile off your fat cells, but it won’t be comfortable. For me to not have what happened to me happen, I gotta keep my calcium levels high. Either by popping vitamins or drinking moo juice. I ate all this dairy stuff at dinner, and came up here and was able to grow spikes, retract ‘em, and shoot with no problem. All I needed to do was add milk, man.”

“So . . . milk is like a laxative for your spikes. You need it to keep things flowing regular, eh?”

Evan made a pained face. Leave it to the speed demon to come up with a perfectly disgusting analogy for what was for Evan, a very happy discovery. “Whatever, man. Anyway, I had to call you soon as I figured out what the problem was. It’s a relief, I’m telling you. I was starting to think I was . . . I dunno . . . turning into some weird thing.”

“You know you’re leaving yourself wide open for with that one, Daniels. But since you were such a good boy earlier, I’ll let it go.”

Evan shook his head, smiling. Pietro was happy for him, Evan could tell, and was expressing it in typical Pietro style – with sneer and snark attached. “So, you know what this means, right? We can go on and get me pierced! I’m ready for it. After all the crap I’ve been through with my spikes, it can’t be any more painful.”

There was silence. Lots of it. Evan’s happy expression faded as he wondered if the phone had gone dead.

Finally, “Evan. We – you don’t have to do that.”

The blond was quiet. Evan. Not Spykesnot or Spykeboy or Daniels or Bleach. Evan. Pietro had called him Evan. And the way he said it . . . it was in the same soft and gentle voice Evan imagined Pietro would use when and if he said, “I love you.” Evan didn’t hold out much hope of ever hearing those words from Pietro – they just weren’t the type to get all gooey with each other. Besides, Evan knew. He knew. Still, Pietro using his actual name and saying it in that voice . . . Evan shivered, wondering what was going through his boyfriend’s mind.

“I want to do it, ‘Tro. I said I would . . . I’m not gonna back out now.”

“Yeah, but . . . what if you’re wrong?” There was a moment of silence. “What if it’s not the milk thing? What if the same thing starts happening again?”

“It won’t, dude. It is the milk thing. Seriously, it’s the best I’ve felt in weeks – so far as my spikes go.” Evan frowned. “Why are you twitchy about it?”

“I’m not. I just –” Pietro’s voice was faltering and uncertain. “This thing made you crazy. I don’t want you to get your hopes up if this is just a temporary fix.”

“It’s not.” Evan fought down his anger as best he could. He appreciated Pietro’s concern, but wasn’t the speed demon listening? Everything was going to be all right now.

“Everything’s cool.” The blond caressed the back of his arms in reassurance and shot off a spike that went right through the plastic JambaJolt bottle. “You’ll see. Now c’mon . . . tell me what time you wanna go to the mall. Kitty says they pierce guys half-price on Thursdays and Fridays . . .”