by Cole McCade
He couldn’t be wondering that.
Couldn’t be wondering at the soft parting of Rian’s lips; at the way the silence between them seemed to tremble, honeyed and slow.
Damon sucked in a breath, and forced it out on uncertain words. “So...where are your showings?”
“New York, mostly,” Rian said after a moment. “My family is from Rochester, and well...anyone who’s anyone in the art world...” He shrugged with an uncomfortable little laugh, ducking his head. “And it’s past tense. Were. I pulled them all when I came here.”
“Why...?”
“Because I didn’t know if it was what I wanted,” Rian murmured. “And I didn’t know if it was what I deserved.”
Damon wasn’t sure what to say. What it was okay to ask, what wasn’t, why he even wanted to know. But finally he said, “Is this more about having things handed to you?”
“And the prize goes to Mr. Louis,” Rian said with a touch of cynicism that seemed to be turned inward, his own words a weapon to stab himself. His gaze flitted to the side, then up, lingering on the stained glass covers on the light fixtures. “My parents aren’t famous. If I mention Ariana and Ronan Falwell, the most recognition they’ll get is thinking my father’s name sounds like Ronan Farrow. But they’re moneyed, and if you know the right people in the world of useless New England old money that keeps perpetuating itself through corporate investments, their names open doors.” He smiled up at the panes of gold, lips tight. “Including doors to prestigious art galleries for their useless son whose only purpose was to be pretty, and make pretty things.”
“Ah.” Damon glanced over his shoulder, out the door...then shifted to nudge it closed, blocking off the hallway outside. This just...didn’t feel like a conversation that should be overheard by anyone passing by. “So you want to try to show something under your own merits?”
“At this point, I don’t know,” Rian said with a touch of frustration. “I thought so. I thought I’d just come here to find it in me to produce something really worthy, but the longer I stay here, the less I care about that...and the more I care about staying here for these boys.”
Damon flushed, heat pooling under his skin.
He somehow hadn’t expected that from Rian.
Especially with such sincerity, sweet and gritty as that raw sugar in his voice.
“You care about them that much?” he asked tentatively.
“Entirely out of character, isn’t it? I should try to be more self-absorbed.” Rian glanced over his upraised shoulder; the net top fell down further, the stark line of his collarbone a deliciously articulated ridge against pale skin, his bare shoulders dotted in a startling speckling of tiny tan freckles like a robin’s egg. Damon tore his gaze from Rian’s shoulders, and followed his line of sight to that wisteria sculpture as Rian continued, “But I just keep thinking if my parents had been a little more absent, a little less interested in spoiling me... I could have been one of these boys. My parents still don’t understand why I’m here.”
Yet between those words was something a little more honest, clear as if Rian had whispered into Damon’s ear.
My parents still don’t understand me.
“Hey,” he offered. “I get it. My parents don’t really understand me, either...but it’s kind of hard to ask them to when I don’t really understand myself.” He tried a smile. “I love ’em anyway. And I’m guessing you love yours, too.”
“Yeah.” Why did Rian’s most genuine, honest smiles always seem so sad? “I do. But sometimes I wonder what it’s like to love someone without feeling so...so completely separate from them.”
Yeah.
I wonder that too.
And that wondering was a knot in Damon’s throat, a tightness in his chest, a strangeness that kept him lingering on the single slim tendril of night-dark hair lying against the stark line of Rian’s jaw, against the smoothness of his neck; the way his smile faded but his lips remained parted as if he was drinking in something deep and slow on the air, the pink tip of his tongue just barely visible. A subtle movement of that tongue, as if on an unspoken word, reflected in the working of Rian’s throat...and Damon caught himself, forcing himself to look away.
“I think a lot of people wonder that,” he said neutrally. “Maybe we’re all just looking for somewhere to belong, and thinking everyone else has it figured out when they’re asking that same damned question, too.”
“Could be. All of us alone and wishing to be as together as we think everyone else is.” Rian thrummed quietly, low and every word like a drop of syrup. Sugar candy, Damon thought again, and tried not to wonder if Rian would taste that way, and crumble on his tongue. “But Damon?”
Damon dragged his gaze back to Rian—and found hazel eyes watching him from beneath heavily shaded lashes. Those same smoky-smudged wisps of eyeliner, but this time accented with tiny traceries of glittering gold, and Damon realized he’d spangled gold dust into his eyelashes, too—until those deep, liquid eyes were all black and amber, darkness and stars.
And Damon’s heart turned over, strange and slow and warm, as Rian offered him a slow, small smile. “I bet those boys would say there’s somewhere you belong,” he murmured. “That’s why you like football, isn’t it? Because it’s not about competition. It’s about making a place for yourself, and for them. A place where you can all feel like you belong.”
Fuck.
How much had Damon been laying himself open these last few days, that Rian could just...just...pluck that out of him like Damon was some strange fruit, all these little morsels of quiet hurting; these longing things Rian could roll over his tongue the way he rolled those quiet words?
Damon parted his lips, but nothing...nothing would come out.
Because once again, as happened much too often in the last few days...he didn’t know what to say.
He was afraid to know what he’d say, when the first damned instinct was to thrust back, reject that gently offered understanding, because fuck if he knew what to do with Rian like this.
Fuck if he knew what to do with this feeling.
Other than to run from it.
Is that what you want, Damon?
To run from the very damned thing you claimed to want?
He didn’t—he just—
“I’m late,” he muttered, stepping back, feeling for the doorknob. “Practice. Sorry. Gotta go. I...” He swallowed. “I’ll update you if anything crops up with Chris.”
Rian didn’t say anything.
So Damon just...left.
Jerked the door open, backed out into the hall, walked away.
And told himself he wasn’t running from...from...
From wanting something from those soft, pale lips that never quite seemed to smile just for him.
Chapter Seven
Anything new to report?
Rian sprawled against his desk, his chin resting on one forearm, his other arm draped out in front of him with his phone clasped loosely in his hand, the unsent text waiting below a line of unanswered ones. He hovered his thumb over the little icon of a paper airplane, scowling at the previous text history.
[Monday, 5:42PM]
Chris seemed the same in class today.
[Tuesday, 8:01PM]
I washed your plate and left it outside your door.
[Thursday, 7:14AM]
Are you going to the faculty meeting next Monday?
He didn’t even know why he’d sent that last one. Of course Damon was going to the faculty meeting; they all had to go to the faculty meetings, he just—he—
He just wanted that stubborn, rude, irritating rock to actually answer him.
They were supposed to be working together on this, weren’t they? Keeping an eye on Chris and reporting in, but if he didn’t know better...
He’d think Damon was avoiding him.
&n
bsp; Rian deleted the unsent text with a grumble and let his wrist go lax, flopping his phone face-down on the desk.
Jerk.
What was all that mess about being sorry he was such a jackass, only to keep acting like the exact same jackass? And why the hell was it annoying Rian so much?
Well...what if something happened with Chris?
What if...what if...
There was no what if.
If Rian had sent something about a problem with Chris, Damon probably would have answered in a heartbeat.
Which meant Damon was just refusing to answer because it was him.
Well, so what?
Hate him anyway.
Dick.
He can go right there on that shelf with the ceramic ones.
And stick his head right in that freaking kiln.
With a groan, Rian thunked his head against the desk, closing his eyes and burying his nose against the crease of his sketchbook, the untouched pages, when he couldn’t bring himself to draw anything when the last time he’d tried, he caught himself sketching the low bridge of Damon’s nose, the way the corners of his mouth dimpled with that wry, mocking, arrogant smile that made his already full lips seem so much richer and softer and—
“Uh... Mr. Falwell? You okay?”
Rian opened one eye, peering past his arm and his hair; one of the last period sophomores—Jay? His brain didn’t want to stick on names right now—eyed Rian nervously past the papercraft project he was working on; a few of the other students gave him odd looks, too, and Rian lifted his head with a small smile, propping his chin in his hand.
“I’m fine,” he said. “You’re not the only ones who fall asleep in class sometimes. Storms always put me right to sleep.”
That got him a few oh-look-the-adult’s-trying-to-be-funny laughs, dutiful, but they settled back to work, talking amongst themselves. As if trying to underscore his rather sad comedic timing, the gray sky outside let out a rumble; it had been coming down like cats all day, raining in a steady sheet of silver occasionally punctuated by crackles of lightning.
Rian sighed, letting his gaze drift over the classroom, past the rows of tables and to the little work area Chris had claimed for himself. Just as he had every day, Chris bent over his wisteria sculpture, completely absorbed in those fine details to the point where Rian was starting to wonder if, for some reason, Chris was putting off firing it, committing those details to their final form.
But was Rian imagining things, or did Chris look...?
He tried not to be obvious about watching Chris directly, instead turning his head to watch the storm drip-drip-dripping outside and only studying Chris from the corner of his eye. He looked...exhausted, honestly; the shadows beneath his eyes bordered on purple, deep and bagged, and there was a certain gauntness to his cheeks, a certain haggardness that haunted his face. His hair was dirty, oily, unkempt. And once again he wasn’t really doing much with the sculpture; his hand poised with a wire texturing brush, but it wasn’t moving and hadn’t for at least the past ten minutes while Chris stared at it dully, as if he was asleep while wide awake.
Rian flipped his phone up, thumbing through the texts with Damon, then tapped the camera icon next to the message composition field, made sure the sound and the flash were turned off...and surreptitiously snapped a photo of Chris. In the harsh storm-light coming through the window he looked even worse, washed-out and pale in the image; his skin sallow and pockmarked, red splotches of what looked like stress acne leaping into bright relief.
Without a word, Rian attached the image to the text window.
And hit Send.
Just as he did, the last bell went off; Rian watched as the boys filed out. Chris walked slower than usual, his feet dragging, his head down.
How much longer was Rian supposed to let this go on just to play along with Walden’s asinine rules, while whatever was hurting Chris grew worse and worse?
Were Chris’s parents really so damned indifferent that they wouldn’t want to know something was wrong with their son?
Rian waited until the last of the boys filed out of the room, then checked his phone.
Nothing.
Damn it.
Was he the only one who actually gave a damn?
Maybe you’re just trying to control everything again. Sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong, trying to fix things that don’t need to be fixed just to feel better about yourself.
He closed his eyes, hissing out his breath through his teeth.
It wasn’t that.
...was it?
He couldn’t deal with this train of thought right now.
And, with a frustrated sound, he thrust away from his desk, scooping up his sketchbook and flipping back through the pages until he found the rough sketches he’d made of that lightning-struck tree. Stalking into his workroom, he flicked the overhead light on, tossed the sketchbook onto a worktable, and yanked an unfinished painting off one of the easels scattered around the room, replacing it with a fresh one.
He needed to do something with all this brimming energy running through him until he felt lightning-struck himself, burning up from inside.
Rian ran his fingertips over the sketches, the different ways he’d captured his memory of the tree’s silhouette and how it had glowed against the dark, stripped naked until it was all heart, no armor.
All heart, no armor.
Yeah.
That.
That feeling.
He’d always been all heart, no armor, but right now it felt like he’d lost even his skin, his flesh, his bones, nothing to wrap up and protect his bright-beating heart that just kept pounding and pounding and pounding more furiously with rage, with frustration, with...with...
Stop it.
He traced his fingers along the various sketches until he found one that felt like silk under his fingertips, the lines flowing as if charting the moving lines of a creature of muscle and sinew and bone, rather than a tree of fibers and branches and roots. As if a man had planted himself in the earth, and slept for ages until his yearning heart began to reach up and up and up to the sky, seeking to burn himself in the heavens while the heavens came down to meet him in jagged shots of light.
That one.
He plucked a wooden pencil with a softer lead core from the rack of pencils, pens, and brushes alongside his worktable, and gave the sketch another long look before setting out to duplicate it in more details, marking out lines on the canvas that he would later paint over in first solid tones, then shadows, then highlights, then more and more layers of detail until it became not just the memory of that lightning-cored tree...
...but the feeling of it, burning hot.
All heart.
No armor.
Just fire.
So he sketched—he sketched in swift slashing lines, in soft gray wisps of graphite, in feathery strokes that gave impressions he could follow later, until he was moving so fast he felt like he couldn’t wait: breathless, needy, aching for the creamy-sharp smell of fresh paint and the feeling of the brush and the wet slide of its bristles over the canvas, until he only needed faint scribbles of shadows and contours to be ready. To pluck tubes of oil paints from the rack, pouring color after color over the palette, mixing it into swirls with his fingertips until it made irregular streaks that would perfectly mimic the streaking texture of a tree’s soft inner fibers.
He painted by lightning-light, as the storm poured outside; painted to the sound of rain and the beat of thunder that he wasn’t quite sure wasn’t the beat of his heart.
Until he heard nothing but the roar of his blood.
The crash of this terrible feeling inside his chest.
Almost indistinguishable from the crash of the studio door opening, so jarring that he jerked with a wild jolt between his ribs like a bolt-slash of fear, and
narrowly missed ruining the canvas when his arm snapped to one side, swirling out of control. Only practice and instinct let him fold the brush back against his palm, its wet tip smearing against his inner elbow instead of across the painting. He stared at it for several numb, uncomprehending moments, waiting for reality to catch up and tell him what had pulled him out of his trance.
There was someone standing in his doorway.
Broad and firm and brooding, raw power radiating from gleaming masculine contours; Damon stood filling the door frame from side to side, breathing heavily in deep, rough expansions of his tightly muscled chest. Rainwater drenched him from head to toe, slicking his hair and dripping from the tips; pouring like tears over his cheekbones and jaw and lips; soaking his tight gray T-shirt into a second skin that clung lovingly to his wide shoulders and tapered waist and the defined crests of his hips; waterlogging his track pants to leave them weighted and dragging downward, baring a thin strip of glistening brown skin and the striations of hardened muscle beneath. He stared at Rian with his lips parted and his eyes hot and searching, demanding something that sparked an answering insistence in Rian.
He’d never felt his temper ignite so fast, going up like a bloom of smoke from an explosion. Yes—temper, that had to be what he was feeling, anger making him burn hot, making him fierce as he snapped, “What the hell, Damon? You couldn’t knock?”
“I did knock,” Damon threw at him, stalking into the studio, taking up too much space in the cramped quarters, his scent mixing with the cool tinniness of rainwater to overwhelm even the smell of fresh paint; trails of dripping water spattered behind him, gleaming on the floor. “You didn’t fucking answer. And after you sent me that text—”
“Which one?” Rian spat back, flinging the paintbrush down on his worktable and angling to put his body between Damon and the canvas, guarding it when like hell he’d let Damon see the feelings he’d been pouring out in paint. Stopping just in front of Damon, Rian glared up at him, his heart slamming wildly in his chest. “The ones I’ve been sending you all week? Oh, I’m sorry, did it take seeing just how sick Chris looks to actually get an answer out of you? Or did you just come here to make a dripping mess all over my studio?”
