by Alice Archer
Oliver appeared by my side to swipe the paper. “I’ll make you a copy. Your assignments for this week are to start journaling, do the self-portrait, and do three hours of labor, but you’ll also do another self-portrait now, as part of the signing process.”
“The fuck I will. I already signed.”
“Start the self-portrait within the next five minutes, and I’ll give you a signing bonus of a bag of muffins.”
“Deal.” I grabbed the pen and flipped to a new page on the legal pad.
Chapter 27
Oliver
Grant smelled like a compost heap. I caught a deeper whiff of his stink when I picked up the signed contract. The way he scrubbed his hands over his arms tempted me to offer a shower as the signing bonus, but I figured he’d need motivation to get through the first week. If he did everything he’d agreed to, I’d give him shower access for a reward. I hoped he’d figure out how to take a bucket bath at his campsite before then.
“Not on the notepad.” I set the contract on my desk and slid an easel toward the living room, to give Grant a view out the French doors. I’d already clamped a backing board and a pad of paper onto the easel.
“What medium do you prefer?” I scanned the art supplies in the shelving Dad and I had designed and built over a long winter.
“How about ballpoint pen on a legal pad?”
I decided to treat Grant as a kid. I grabbed a few paintbrushes, a tempera paint set with six colors, and a paint smock.
“Here. Put this on.” I handed the smock to Grant.
He frowned. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s an artist’s smock.”
“No way am I wearing an apron. This is already humiliating enough.”
“At some point, if you stop resisting, you might have a breakthrough.”
“Cease with the condescension, Snooty Boots. Just tell me what I have to do.”
“I’m guessing what you really want is more than access to a shower and a washing machine. If anything’s going to change, you’ll have to shift your—”
“You piss me off so much.” Grant snatched the smock from my hand and tied it around his gaunt waist with a sharp tug. His angry look reminded me of the look he’d given me in my gallery fantasy. No. The look an imaginary guy who’d looked like Grant had given me during a few minutes of confusion that resulted in jizz on the kitchen cabinet.
I took a deep breath and refocused.
“Go ahead and be pissed off,” I said. At the utility sink in the art corner, I filled a cup with water, then set it in the cup holder on the easel. “Let me ask you something. If I gave you all the amenities now, would you do the assignments?”
“Hell to the fuck no.”
“Well, then. There you go,” I said.
The challenge in Grant’s expression didn’t bode well.
I stood my ground and lifted my chin.
“You act like you rule a kingdom,” Grant said, “but you’re way out here in the boonies.” He took a step toward me. “People stop by to swoon over your pronouncements and that makes you think you have all the answers, but look around. It’s a tiny kingdom. Out in the real world, shit happens that you couldn’t imagine, not if this is how you’ve spent your life.” He waved his hand to include me and everything around us.
My first impulse was to throw the cup of water in Grant’s face. Not to cool him off, but to hurt him. His words had hurt me, though I didn’t think he’d meant them to hurt as much as they did. I took a breath to say something, but Grant beat me to it.
“No amount of King Oliver’s creative techniques are going to remove the type of shit I’m up to my third eye in. I’m not like you and your friends. Creativity is a luxury I can’t afford, and I don’t want you using it to poke around in my psyche. But, hey, if I have to jump through your hoops to survive, to get basic resources so I can think, I’ll do what you’re asking. I won’t be creative about it, but I’ll do it.”
I took a step back and a deeper breath, forced my voice to sound calm. “You’re right. It’s a tiny kingdom, but it’s all mine. Judge me if you want, but you’re the one fighting reality if you think doing more of what you’ve been doing is going to change anything about your situation. I think you’re ready to take a chance and learn something different.”
“Maybe so, but not from a smug jerk of a backwoods dictator of a teacher.”
“A teacher trying to help a reluctant student,” I said.
Grant’s angry glare held frustration and distress. His desperation showed in his painful thinness, yet he’d signed the contract and tied on the smock. He stood straight and looked me in the eye. Pride. I suddenly saw Grant’s anger as a struggle to manage the hits to his pride.
I softened my stance, took my hands out of my pockets, and sat in a slouch on the edge of the dining table, to give Grant a chance to loom over me. “Look at it this way—what do you have to lose?” I asked. “Maybe this contest isn’t between you and me, but between you and you.”
After a final glare, Grant’s gaze shifted toward the French doors and the view of the side yard.
I pushed off from the table and left him to it.
With my back to Grant and the easel, I busied myself in the kitchen. I heard no activity, even when I paused to listen. No tap of brush on water cup. No shuffle of feet. No sound of any kind.
I turned to see Grant facing the blank page, paintbrush in hand. With his back to me, I couldn’t see his expression.
“Everything okay over there?” I asked.
In a rough voice, he said, “What if I’m already done?”
Chapter 28
Grant
I heard a distinctive tick-tick-tick behind me. Oliver had set a kitchen timer.
“You have ten minutes to finish your self-portrait,” he said. “Or no muffins.”
With a brush full of black paint I slapped a stick figure of a man onto the paper. That took three seconds. The paint dripped. Over the next few minutes I used a smaller brush to add black details to my head, legs, and arms.
I looked like a nasty bug.
When I’d finished, I chucked the brush into the cup. A plop of gray water sloshed onto the wood floor. I considered smearing it with my boot, thought better of it, and walked to the art sink for a paper towel. I can clean up my own mess.
Even if Oliver could help me, the way he went about it made me feel angry and mortified, and what was the point of that? But, okay. If the next step up out of the mud and fart fumes of rock bottom required me to grovel for a few weeks, I could do it. I would consider Oliver’s ridiculous assignments a menial job. Labor was something I understood.
“‘A small tweak of perspective can make a big difference.’” I turned to look at Oliver. “You said that, didn’t you?”
“That’s something I say to my students. Where did you hear it?”
“Penelope said it to me.”
“Oh. Are you camping out toward her house?”
“I have no idea. And I’m done answering your questions. It’s my turn to ask you stuff.”
Oliver dried his hands on a dishtowel, returned to his end of the dining table, and sat with his arms folded. I salivated over his shapely arms for a few seconds, stalled on the urge to ask how long his hair would be if he let it down. Would it drape over his biceps? I closed my eyes and shivered, irritated by my lust. Discomfort sharpened my next words.
“You told Kai you and your dad built that.” I gestured toward the stage to my right but didn’t take my eyes off Oliver. “Where are your parents now?”
Oliver frowned and hugged himself around the waist. “My dad and granddad built this house. I… inherited it.”
It gave me a thrill to get a reaction from the guy other than amused omnipotence.
“Er. I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “Losses. Are both your parents
dead?”
Oliver looked away. “My mother is… not in the picture.”
“And yet you inherited the house.”
“It wasn’t… She never owned it.”
“Your parents divorced?”
After a pause long enough to be rude, Oliver said, “Yes.”
Weary of Oliver’s hesitations and reluctance, I decided I wasn’t curious enough about him to stick around, not if I could be noshing a muffin under the trees at my campsite instead.
“Final question,” I said. “Do you have a couple of buckets with lids I could borrow to carry water?”
Chapter 29
Grant
Oliver led me out the French doors, presented me two buckets from a storage closet at the end of the side porch, then taunted me with a tour of his outdoor shower.
We traipsed through the grass and skirted an offshoot of the one-story house until we arrived at a courtyard I’d never noticed. Birch and maple trees, wild roses, and smaller shrubs blocked the entryway.
Oliver held a tree branch aside and waved me through. “There.” He pointed to a walk-around wooden shower stall in the near right corner. “I control the water valve from inside. Do this week’s assignments and I’ll turn it on.”
And that was all it took to double my resolve.
I had to channel my inner brute to haul both five-gallon buckets of water at the same time. By the time I arrived at the campsite, I’d devolved into a panting mess of underfed muscles.
I flopped onto my back in the dirt and devoured one of Oliver’s muffins. Bran with cherries and bits of dried ginger. The decadent treat reminded me I’d missed my own birthday, lost it somewhere between Mitch’s shed and Oliver’s contract. I took another bite. Happy birthday to me.
To resist immediate consumption of the remaining six muffins, I stashed them in the cooler, gathered my toiletries bag and clean change of clothes, and left camp. It hurt my arm to carry one of the full buckets as I bushwhacked into the thick underbrush, but I wanted to be far out of sight. It wasn’t Penelope’s fault I’d plonked my campsite on her trail.
The thorough shave and scrubbing I gave myself with the abundance of water felt so good I dawdled afterward. Also, I had to wait to air dry. I’d draped my only towel over a log to sit on while I bathed, which meant the towel was soaked by the time I was clean. To fling water off my hair, I shook my head until my brain rattled. Didn’t help much. Water dripped over me while I lounged. Bits of sunlight moved across my closed eyelids.
I thought of Oliver at the dining table with his arms crossed, the rounded muscles of his shoulders and arms pushing against his T-shirt. I wondered again what his sparkling copper hair would look like freed from its sloppy topknot and spread over his shoulders. My fingers scrunched the towel as I gripped Oliver’s hair in my imagination.
If he kept his hair up all the time to get it out of the way, why didn’t he just cut it off? I was glad he hadn’t, but it bugged me that I never got to see it down. I was half convinced Oliver only got under my skin because I couldn’t think clearly around his glorious hair.
I’d never had a type—a collection of qualities I could count on to crank my motor. But I’d never seen anyone who looked like Oliver. So maybe I did have a type. Ruddy, clear skin. Perfect, regal nose. Full beard. Biceps galore. Miles of glinty hair.
If Oliver sat next to me on the towel and let his hair down, freed it to flow over his freckled shoulders in the dappled sunlight…
Jesus.
I opened my eyes and looked around. Yep. I was out in the open with a boner. I also was very alone. Hmm. Could be fun. But I didn’t want to think about Oliver. That door would be too difficult to close once I’d opened it. I didn’t need a memory of a sex daydream to add awkward embarrassment to all the other uncomfortable feelings Oliver seemed adept at pulling from me.
Maybe long hair was my type.
Laura and I had met in Seattle at the university’s copy center, where I’d worked for five years, since graduating from high school in Eastern Washington. Her hair fell in golden waves over her straight shoulders. She’d been in her third year of undergraduate school, going for a double major in business and psychology. Her blue eyes, healthy skin, slim body, and the way she’d known exactly what she wanted had seemed so California to me. She told me she couldn’t wait to graduate and return home to get an M.B.A. “Back to the sunshine,” she’d said.
To get in the mood without reverting to Oliver, I conducted a mental survey of Laura’s hairstyles over the years. When we met, she wore her hair loose, with long bangs swept to the side. After we married and moved to Los Angeles, Laura’s hairstyles became more professional. I’d liked the sleek chignon best, for wicked reasons of my own.
In the early years, when Laura still assumed I’d manifest the potential she claimed she saw in me, she allowed me to unravel her careful chignon and unravel her. After her long days of work in the spare bedroom she’d turned into an office, I would take my time undoing her, mesmerized by the flow of her hair around us as we made love.
A glop of spit slicked my cock, made it easy to remember Laura’s capable fingers, insistently pulling me toward her.
I had always, in the privacy of my mind, thought of myself as Laura’s consort—a monarch’s indulgence on the side. She had wanted me to step up beside her as co-ruler. I couldn’t. Her strong opinions about what I should do with my life filled me with static. I worked the whole time Laura and I were together, but never at jobs she considered good enough. It took me a long time to figure out she meant good enough for her, not good enough for me.
Maybe consort was too generous. Male escort felt more accurate, with all it implied about the transactional nature of the arrangement. My income from copy center jobs paid for our groceries and my clothing. Laura’s corporate coaching business paid for everything else, including upgrades of homes and cars and wardrobes when we moved to Santa Barbara.
It struck me that Oliver lording it over me with his stipulations and assignments felt familiar. My chest tightened with the memory of Laura’s escalating disapproval. When I signed Oliver’s contract, I entered into another arrangement I’d probably botch.
And… I was back to thinking about Oliver.
With determination, I backtracked along my train of thought to Laura’s chignon, to the times I’d run the backs of my hands across her tense face, watched her eyes close with relief, reached up to pull out the clips and pins, dropped them to the floor. I lifted her into my arms, held her close, carried her to the bed. The memory pulled me under, gave me something familiar for my body to work with, until my hand flew on my cock and I lost myself to remembered sensations. I kept at it, dragged it out, held off as long as I could, until I shook and moaned and let go.
Afterward, I felt exhausted.
I hadn’t counted on the effort required to keep the body I held in my arms from being Oliver.
Chapter 30
Grant
That first week, Oliver’s labor assignment consisted of running errands for him in town and doing hedge maintenance. Easy stuff. Easier than the journaling and self-portraits.
I felt like I was in school again, rolling my eyes at classwork I didn’t see the point of, but doing it anyway so I’d get to go outside for recess. I went outside, but I didn’t play. I spent most recesses doing homework, to finish before school ended and I had to start my afternoon shift at the print shop—that was my real work.
If I could do that, I could do Oliver’s assignments.
The morning after my happy-ending bathe in the woods, I walked to Oliver’s and found the keys in the van’s glove compartment where he’d said they would be, along with a shopping list and five folded twenties—bounty I reminded myself wasn’t mine.
Oliver himself was nowhere to be seen.
At the bottom of a shopping list, written in a cursive fluid enough to leave no
doubt Oliver was an artist, he’d left me a note. If you have errands of your own to run, feel free, but have the van back by 11:30. I have a meeting in Tacoma this afternoon.
I took the smaller roads to town, north along Wax Orchard Road and Westside Highway, past apple orchards and sheep scattered over fields. Large mailboxes poked up beside long driveways that spun away to houses lost in the woods.
Clouds scuttled in from the west above the Kitsap Peninsula. A few times, I caught glimpses of the sea down to my left.
A right turn onto Cemetery Road took me to the east side of the island, to Vashon Highway and town, where my first stop was the public library. I scored a comfy chair in a back corner by an electrical outlet and plugged in my phone to charge it.
I had one phone message, from Mitch’s phone.
Kai’s voice sounded small, like he wasn’t sure he was willing to commit to expressing himself. He didn’t say much. “Hi, Uncle Grant. I liked seeing you.” There was a pause, long enough I almost checked to see if the recording had ended. I put a finger in my other ear to block out the subtle sounds of the library and heard Kai breathing. “Thank you,” he whispered.
And that was it.
He’d made the call around the time he and his dad would have been on the ferry to Seattle the day I’d seen them. Maybe Mitch’s presence had kept Kai from saying more.
The weight of Kai’s message settled on my shoulders. I slouched in the upholstered chair, remembered Kai’s pinched face, and didn’t know what to do about it.
Mitch and Sonya and the boys had probably settled into the trailer on Vashon. Maybe if I did Oliver’s errands quickly, I could drive by to say hello. I bent my head and took a discrete sniff of my armpit. Ugh. I couldn’t do it. I needed to see Kai, but it would have to wait until I’d showered. And devised a game plan for my future that wouldn’t collapse under the inevitable cross-examination by Mitch Martensen, Esquire.
