by Kris Ripper
Because of the space heater. Not…any other considerations.
I was still shivering and wrapped tight in my hoodie when I made it to the coffee pot, where I huddled, letting my hands hover over the glass carafe so I could feel the heat of it on my skin.
“Cold, pookie?”
“Growl,” I said without turning around.
“Did you just…Alex, he just—well, he didn’t actually growl. He said the word ‘growl.’ Am I on drugs?”
Alex stepped up beside me and held out a mug. “Internal application works even better.”
I kept my face very straight as I took it. “Grunt.”
And oh god, my stomach tumbled over when he smiled. “Chuckle. Drink your coffee. Also, Jame’s got something for you.”
“Oh yeah?” I forced my gaze toward the coffee pot, since pouring scalding hot liquid into a receptacle one’s holding in one’s hand requires a base level of concentration.
“I was going to save it for later, but whatever.”
Then she was right behind me, tugging down my hood, reaching around my neck to—
“Are you collaring me right now? Because usually a guy likes a conversation before that sort of thing.”
She giggled. Actually, genuinely giggled. “It’s a necklace, not a collar. But now that you mention it”—her fingers grazed my skin, making me shiver—“it is a bit of a choker. You might put the coffee down before you spill it. You seem to be having some trouble holding still.”
“Grumble,” I muttered. And put the coffee down.
“I made this for you last night. It took ages.” She smoothed something over my neck, pulling whatever it was all the way to the back.
Every hair on my body stood upright, thrilling to Jamie’s fingers.
“I have to tie it on, but it’s not permanent. You can untie it whenever you like.”
“In a mirror,” Alex added. “Or get someone else to do it. That’s even better.”
“Or leave it on forever.”
I could feel her breath as she tied the necklace/choker/not-collar. It took everything in my power not to tremble. I wanted to keep talking irreverently, but I couldn’t.
“I probably should have let you see it before I put it on, huh? This way it’ll be a surprise, though it might be somewhat awkward if you hate it.”
I couldn’t possibly hate it. Even if it was bright pink and sparkly. She’d made it for me. She’d spent ages, apparently, making me something. Thinking about me the whole time.
“There. Done. Someone get this man a mirror.”
Alex, suddenly in front of us, held up his phone. I assumed so I could see myself in the front-facing camera, but instead he took a picture, then turned it our way.
Me looking pre-coffee, with Jamie over my shoulder looking impish. A lopsided smile, one hand still on my neck. And the choker, angled rows of knotted string or yarn or whatever it was, like the friendship bracelets girls always wore in elementary school, which I’d secretly envied.
Wait.
I pointed at Alex. “You told her.”
“That you always wanted a friendship bracelet? Yeah. And look, now you’ve got one.”
It’s weird, the things that make me feel exposed. There was nothing shameful about it. I didn’t have a thing with bracelets being for girls, or crafts being silly, or anything. It was more…you had to have friends to have a friendship bracelet. And I’d had Alex. He’d had me. But we hadn’t had anyone else. Not until we met Jamie.
“Not exactly friendship. More love-plus. Or maybe supercharged love.” She turned me and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Do you like the colors? Indigo, turquoise, saffron. A little bright, a little enigmatic. Like you.”
“I like the colors.” The turquoise was a splash of water, the saffron reminiscent of sunset over the sea, and indigo the deepening sky overhead as night absorbed day. I quickly turned to my coffee, struggling to fight my emotions.
Nothing had happened. Nothing was changing. So why did I suddenly feel like we were saying goodbye? It made no damn sense.
“When’re you gonna make me a collar, Jame?” Alex teased.
I heard them kiss behind me.
“When you’ve earned one, obviously.”
By the time I sat down at the table—they’d already partially made breakfast, though the coagulating oatmeal told a tale of people who’d eaten too many days of oatmeal after the bacon and eggs ran out—I managed to assemble my face into a neutral expression. And all the time I was aware of the subtle presence around my throat, perfectly tied, never pulling tight.
She’d made it for me, because I wanted a friendship bracelet when I was little. And because Alex was the kind of person who remembered small things, especially ones that hooked into my psyche and couldn’t be extracted without bleeding.
Except it had.
I wanted to touch it, to trace it. I wanted to go upstairs and stare at it properly, in a mirror. But I didn’t. There would be time enough for that later. When I was alone again.
Chapter Fourteen
I STUMBLED UP to the workshop on Monday morning clutching a cup of coffee with two add shots. This was the kind of morning that should be earned through debauchery and sex at the very least. Possibly multiple partners over a period of hours.
Not sitting alone in my apartment reading a book. Dammit.
I’d almost finished reading all the Hazeltine. I couldn’t face ending it yet. I’d saved the essays he’d written about being sick for last. All that razor-edged insight turned on what it meant to die, what it meant to survive. How cheap life was on the frontier of medicine and politics.
And a happy Morbid Monday to you, too.
It took me half a block to notice someone standing outside the shop. I took a fortifying gulp of coffee and squinted until I realized it was Paulson. Chad’s son-slash-agent.
“Good morning,” I said, sounding way the hell more hungover than I actually was. “Why didn’t you go inside?”
“I don’t have a key.”
I stopped walking to blink at him. “Seriously? But you’re Chad’s”—don’t say “son,” Chad wouldn’t give a shit about that—“agent.”
He gave me a shrewd sort of look, like he knew what I was thinking. “No one has a key to the workshop.”
“Well. That makes this awkward.” I fished out my keys and let us in. “You should have phoned ahead, I’d’ve gotten you coffee. Or actually, you knew I was going to be here. You should have gotten me coffee.” I flashed a flirty smile. “I take it with a little bit of cream, no sugar. You know, for next time.”
Given that Chad was a conservative prick, I assumed his kid wouldn’t fall far from the tree. I’m not above trying to squick straight men, you know, as a hobby. But he didn’t bat an eyelash.
“Look, I realize Chad isn’t the easiest boss, and I don’t have any problem with you messing with him personally, but there has to be a line, Justin. It can’t cross over to the professional side, and to be honest, I thought better of you than that.”
I’d been walking to the back, where my desk was. His words, to say nothing of the edgy, angry tone, stopped me dead. I turned slowly, far more puzzled than anything else. “Wait, what? Did he finally find the porn? Because that was a joke, Paulson.”
“The porn?”
Wrong tree. I shook my head. “You want to tell me what the hell you’re talking about? Did something go wrong with the sea birds? I swear, they were all in the storage shed and ready to go when I left before Christmas.”
“No, the sea birds were fine. Better than fine, actually. I think if the City of La Vista needs statues of fowl in the future, he’ll be the first artist they think of.”
“Good.” I gave up trying to be hardcore and sank back against one of Chad’s work tables, setting my briefcase at my feet. “So what are we talking about, then? I swear, Paulson, when I fuck with your dad, I do it responsibly.”
“Okay, first of all, no one calls me that except him. It’s Colin.”
“You…your name is Paulson Colin?”
“Colin Paulson, actually, and don’t get me started.” He glanced around like he was looking for something radical, like a chair. He ended up dragging over a crate and sitting down. Which sorta made it so he had to crane his neck to look at me, poor little Colin Paulson. Who was in his forties and could only sit on a crate in his dad’s workshop. “Second, I’m talking about that damn binder. All through Christmas my grandmother fought with him over it. He tried to bring it to the dinner table. On Christmas.”
It took me a minute to figure out what he was talking about. “Oh. Black binder? Half inch?”
“Is this some kind of practical joke to you? Of course it’s that binder. My father—Chad doesn’t do a lot of research projects. So what happened? He asked you to pick something at random and you chose a gay man who died of AIDS? Did you think that would be funny? I know he can be abrasive with his talk radio, but I think you crossed a line by setting him up to be a laughing stock, Justin.”
“A laughing stock?” All right, now I was getting a little annoyed. “What about Enrico Hazeltine is hilarious to you exactly?”
“The fact that my dad is walking around talking like the guy is the second coming of Da Vinci. And not so much hilarious as insulting.”
I straightened up. “Excuse me? You think admiring a gay man who died of AIDS is somehow beneath your father?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course not.” And I’ve called enough people out on casual homophobia to have a feel for when they’re being hypocritical, and I didn’t get that at all from Colin Paulson. He was pissed in a seemingly non-homophobic capacity, all frowning and jaw-clenched. “I think setting up your jerk boss to look like a fool in public is pretty far beneath you, though.”
“I’m not setting Chad up. He asked me to look into Hazeltine. I made the binder because he was floundering on the sea birds, but I knew if he had a project ready and waiting for him, he’d get it done. But the idea came from him. Not me.”
Colin Paulson looked distinctly unimpressed. “My father came to you and asked you to research Enrico Hazeltine.”
I sagged back again. “There are two or three pieces that Hazeltine’s relatively well known for. Chad was watching-not-watching that cable network he likes to have on incessantly, and they were running a segment about killing the NEA. They used Hazeltine’s best known painting to illustrate the kind of thing that the world could well do without, which is bullshit, since Hazeltine never received backing of any kind from the National Endowment for the Arts. I checked.”
“So he asked you to look into the artist.”
“He took a picture on his phone. All he had was a name. He didn’t even bother googling.”
That got a small, slightly cynical smile out of Colin. “Of course not. That’s what he has you for.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, I know Chad basically thinks of me as a pansy who’s only good for answering the phone and making the printer work, but I take this seriously. I take him seriously. Well, okay, not him, but his work. I didn’t give him a bio on Hazeltine mostly because he doesn’t care about that stuff.” I paused. “And only a little because it amused me that he fell in love with a gay guy.”
He just stared at me for a long moment, like the next words out of his mouth would be, Pack your shit and get out. Except what he said was: “You’re wrong. About how he sees you.”
I rolled my eyes. “I think he’s literally said, ‘Your job’s so easy a monkey could do it.’”
“Well, he hired a lot of monkeys before you, and only one of them lasted longer than a month. If he tried to fire you the family would stage an intervention. You’re the only person he’s ever worked with he doesn’t constantly whine about. He’d never say it, but he really likes you.” Colin Paulson gestured to the room. “I have no idea how you stay cooped up in here with him all day every day without hitting him over the head with something.”
“I have a gift for resisting temptation.”
“You must. Anyway, you’re going to have to tell him who Hazeltine is at some point. If you can’t pry him loose from the project.”
“I don’t want to pry him loose from the project.” He started to open his mouth, but I held up a hand. “No, wait. Look at this.” I set down my coffee and hauled the file box from where I’d stashed it under a table and behind an old plastic storage tub. “This is some of the most interesting stuff I’ve ever seen him do. I took it all down when I needed him focused on sea birds, though I thought for sure he’d’ve found it before I came back to work.”
“I told him he couldn’t start on the new project until we discussed it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? How’d that work out for you?”
“He threw a fit. But it worked, apparently.” He started picking through the sketches. “Gosh. This is…something.”
“It’s the most inspired I think I’ve ever seen him. I mean, you know how he gets when he’s into something he’s working on. But this burned brighter.” Since this was the man’s agent, I felt okay adding, “I was a little worried making him wait would screw it up.”
“No.” Colin slowly shook his head, holding different sketches up to the light before putting them down. “I think it just made it more enticing to him. Wow, this is what he’s going to work on?”
I glanced up. Charcoal drawing, heavy lines showing the structure of the piece, lighter ones filling in the sides. “There’s another one with color. I think he’s considering incorporating stained glass.”
“He hasn’t worked with glass in…years.”
“Since before my time, but I noticed he’d been poking around in his stained glass crates.”
Colin nodded, distracted as hell. Resembling Chad more than usual.
“I don’t know if there’s any commercial value to this as a project. But I really do respect Chad’s work.” My fingers stole without my permission to the choker Cork had made for me. “I am…personally intrigued by the idea of him bringing Hazeltine’s paintings into three dimensions.”
“Yeah, I can see it. Just one painting, though, right?”
So I explained about the companion piece, the one Hazeltine never finished. We were still talking about it when Chad came in, looking way worse than I felt. He grumped around for about five minutes acting like a pissy teenager before giving in and taking over the conversation completely.
And honestly? Now that Colin had said the guy didn’t despise me, I felt a little more invested in my job. Which probably made me kind of a flake, but whatever. We spent a good part of the morning talking about different ideas, and logistics, and everything except audience, because Chad liked to say he didn’t care who was experiencing his art, as long as someone was.
Which in this case was probably for the best. I had no idea who Colin Paulson thought would pay for contemporary sculpture based on the work of Enrico Hazeltine, but I suspected those considerations would only result in huffing and puffing and muttered obscenities.
Whereas ignoring the future marketability of the work resulted in one weirdly excited old white man.
Despite a rote effort at the usual sniping, Chad was in good spirits the rest of the week.
Chapter Fifteen
I SHOULDN’T HAVE told any of my people about any of my other people. Which, in retrospect, was obvious, and I don’t know how on earth I’d let those lines blur. That stupid workshop. It was still eating my life and it had been over for months.
Jamie wanted to know when she and Alex could meet my friends. (She used the word in cold blood: friends.) Miguel wanted to know when he and the rest of my “friends” could meet Alex and Jamie. It was ridiculous. First, that I had all these…people. And second, that they all wanted to meet each other. Like some big circle jerk o’Justin.
Actually, scratch that. If it was a sex thing, I might be tempted. A bunch of kinky queers (and one kinky straight chick). Good times.
But it wasn’t.
It was some kind of th
ing where a bunch of people didn’t know each other and I was the thing they had in common. Even thinking about it made my skin crawl. Add to that: it was just so inconvenient. I was planning to dodge all of them on Saturday night, trying to decide how far I wanted to travel to find a bar I knew where I wouldn’t run into anyone, when my phone rang.
And it was my mother.
I stared at the screen, Ma calling, momentarily too surprised to react. Then I answered my damn phone. “Everything okay?”
“Of course everything’s okay. Shouldn’t everything be okay?”
I relaxed a little. “You don’t usually call me, I thought something might be wrong.”
“No, no. Not at all.”
Which was…a relief. Except she was still calling me for something.
“Peppe stopped in for a few nights,” she continued. “It was nice to see him.”
“That’s good. How’s he doing?” Trying to rush my mother to the point was an endeavor doomed to failure, so I listened to her talk for a while about everything else in the world.
She updated me on Peppe’s band, and his newest girlfriend (“She sounds nice, but you know his taste has never been good, so…”), and various people she worked with. After twenty minutes of updates, many of which I’d already heard from Alex and Jamie, she finally paused in that way that indicated she was about to say something of substance.
I switched phone hands and waited.
“When Peppe was here, we were talking, and we’ve both been expecting an…announcement. For some time now.”
“An announcement?” I echoed, when it seemed clear she wasn’t going to say anything else.
“Yes, Justin.” Her Yes, stupid tone. “An announcement. But when I try to bring it up, Jamie changes the subject.”
“An announcement from Jamie? About what?” She loved her job, so it couldn’t be that. We were all sort of hoping her dad kicked off (in that way you do, when you recognize it would probably suck, but it seemed like it’d have an eventual positive effect on the lives of those involved), but Ma would never talk about that lightly. She remained Switzerland on the topic of both Jamie’s and Alex’s parents.
