by Ace Gray
I could listen to her talk about their travels, her childhood, loving them, hating them unending. After all, it was what her words brought out in her that made it special. Nothing about my father had made me special. I’d accepted that long ago, but the feeling was fresh all over again. I found myself wanting a family like Filly’s.
I found myself wanting it with her.
If only she could forgive me for all the fucked up shit. And her parents could look passed me being the Montague to their Capulet. And I could somehow shake my family obligation, my family name. I sighed. Having a future with Filly would be harder than begging forgiveness from Saint Peter himself, but I had to try.
Right. Fucking. Now.
A scream yanked me from my thoughts as Emmett’s arms wheeled once and his foot kicked the side of his chair, sending the kid careening to the floor with a thump recognizable for each his chair, shoulder and head as he bounced. He cried out as his blood spattered on the floor.
My blood pressure rose in anticipation of what would come next. The blood was going to trigger visions of Roz that would pummel me. Blood on snow, crimson staining white. They always reached in and squeezed my chest, the panic flared my temper and things always got out of hand. I waited, trying to steel myself from the onslaught.
The vision didn’t come.
Emmett kept up with brutal kicks. The kid wheezed. And I sat mystified as his blood made Jackson Polluck shapes on the floor. Emmett even looked up expectantly, but my rage just didn’t filter in.
Filly had done this. Or exercising my demons with her had. I smiled. She was the one. My one. And I knew it in the simplicity of the moment as surely as I knew she would spit in my eye if I said that to her.
I laughed at the thought.
“Find something amusing, Brye?” Emmett asked with a growl.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” I pulled my gun from my holster and leveled it at the kid whose face was swollen shut and pulled the trigger. His body went limp against the floor.
“What the fuck was that?” Emmett spun at me, his fists and face clenched. “I was just getting warmed up.”
“Oh good Christ, Emmett he was barely conscious.” I rolled my eyes.
“We were supposed to send him back.” He stepped up to me and looked down his nose at me.
“Come on. I’ve got better things to do.” I jerked my chin and waved my gun toward the door.
“Like what?”
He was challenging me. Again. I thought about spinning and shoving the heel of my hand up his nose. If I hadn’t broken it before, that sure as hell would. But then there’d be more blood. And more blood meant more clean up. More questions. I’d have to remind him with something of startling severity, but not now. Right now I had a different priority.
“I’ve got some paint to buy.”
This house was too quiet. Each creak of a floorboard echoed and all too many times I convinced myself it was footsteps of one satanic ass or another coming for me. Brye’s absence hit me hard today.
He’d found my jean shorts and left me with an old Ramones t-shirt. Clean clothes—hell clothes period with these people—made me feel more myself. Standing up on his furniture to see the art hanging on the ostentatiously high walls was just as grounding. I laughed with an almost full heart when I found Dogs Playing Poker tucked in the corner between Michelangelo and Magritte.
Eventually, I’d settled in with a leather-bound copy of Romeo & Juliet that I’d found. The gold leaf was smooth beneath my fingers and the buttery leather warmed in my palms. I couldn’t help but think about how appropriate the book was. For a second I imagined Brye saying my favorite lines.
“Amen, amen. But come what sorrow can.
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.
Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare;
It is enough I may but call her mine.”
“You smile like your mother.” Connor leaned against the doorframe, his soulless eyes on me, a smirk pulling at his waxy lips. “I used to love watching her smile at your father and knowing I could wipe it all away.”
I snapped the book shut and clutched it to my chest as I shoved back into the chair as far as I could. He laughed.
“I love watching you smile.” His broadened as he watched me. “I love knowing that at any time I can wipe it from your face.”
He turned back into the hallway on a positively wicked chuckle and all the warmth I’d fought for with small amounts of normalcy throughout the day, went right with him.
Somehow the leather wouldn’t warm in my hands again as I read Romeo & Juliet in the bathtub. It was the only place I felt safe in the whole of Chicago. Under the watchful eye of my mother and as far away as I could be from Connor.
Every page or two my mind would wander to one of them. Connor was at the forefront, where he was, what he was doing and if he would come back. Brye was every other breath with the same list but a completely different type of worry. And then would come my parents who had to be beside themselves. Were they looking for me? Did they have a hint as to where I’d really gone? When would they stop looking? Would I know the day? Sense it in some weird way?
Would I live to find out?
The thought had always been in the back of my mind but now that Brye had told me about Rosalyn…
A tear dripped down my cheek and stained the bible thin page, making text from behind muddle with what I’d been reading. My life was that spot, words and words, layered without making sense. A story distorted and wrong with no way to find The End.
More of my tears fell, turning the pages in front of me into an incoherent mess.
“Filly?” Brye’s dark and rich amber honey voice called from the next room. “Filly,” he called again, fear edging in when I didn’t answer.
My heart sank and fluttered all at once, making my stomach somersault on top of it all.
“Filly!”
“Here,” I called as I shut the book and wiped away my tears as I stood.
He jogged around the corner, catching me step out of the tub.
“What happened?” he asked softly, his eyes melting as they looked me over head to toe, twice.
“Your dad…” I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and shrugged.
“Did he touch you? Did he hurt you?” He rushed over and reached for me. I found myself wanting nothing more than to sag into his arms.
So I made myself stay anchored as his reached fizzled out.
“He didn’t even come all the way into the room.” My arms found their new favorite perch—wrapped around my body and holding tight.
“He doesn’t have to,” Brye grumbled then blew out a deep breath. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, knowing that with him here, I was.
“How’s your chest?”
“Taken good care of, thanks.” He gave me a small smile. “I really do mean thanks, you could have left me on my own on that one.”
“You took it for me.” Heat bloomed in my heart at the simple sentence. “I’m hurt, not heartless.”
“And here I’m both.” He shrugged.
The protest was on the tip of my tongue. He wasn’t a monster, not completely anyway, and the sadness that leaked out of him when he said it affected me.
“I got you something today,” he continued as he nodded back toward his bedroom. “Hope it helps pass the time.”
I swallowed back the urge to ask him just how long that would be as I followed him. No answer would steady my stomach or ease my fears. But then we turned into the room and I laid eyes on it.
“Brye,” I gasped.
There was an easel, a few stretched canvases, a notebook, and paint. So much paint. Brushes were balled in the bottom of the plastic bag scrunched beneath the easel. I swore I saw a palette leaned up against one of the wooden legs.
“This is all for me?” I stepped toward it in awe.
�
��I don’t know a lot about the supplies, but the girl at the store helped me.”
I reached out for the canvas but couldn’t bring myself to touch it after rubbing a warm black book all day. My fingers hovered over top, exploring the edges of my gifts with a safe bubble between.
“It’s beautiful, Brye. This is all beautiful.”
“I know this can never be home, but maybe this can make it feel a little less fucked up.”
“Thank you,” I breathed. “Really.” I crouched down and dug into the bag, finding more goodies than I would have guessed.
He said something about getting food and wine, but I wasn’t listening. I was transfixed. When he walked out of the room, I simply inspected each item in my hand. The urge to paint was clawing at the low reaches of my stomach. I could fight it, but I really didn’t want to.
I started moving things, opening tubes and adjusting. They were his lovely scotch glasses, but I filled one up with water and stole one of his plush hand towels. I shoved the sleeves of my shirt up and tucked it in on itself and used a spare brush to knot my long hair up in a bun then I started painting.
All that mattered in that moment was the feeling that I would be able to create again. The way the paint looked on the palette was the way my heart felt. Smooth, not cracked, and brilliantly bright. That easel, those paints, they brought me one of the truest homes I’d ever known and it made me smile.
Only one thing begged to be released from the canvas in front of me. Brye. Solid and silent, brooding as I pictured him so inclined to do, and carrying the weight of this fucked up world on his shoulders. His body was easy to find the lines of—I knew them all and the fine details of his beautiful tattoo. Each line, each curve came together in thick, rough brush strokes until a manly, muscled abstract body sat hunched on the canvas in front me.
An errant hair fell into my eyes and I shoved it up, feeling the cold cream of oil paint smear across my brow. I smiled remembering how I could see Brye with the same mark in my first fantasies. My fantasies that felt within reach with a brush in my hand.
“Anything that makes you that happy was worth it.”
My eyes darted over top of the easel and met his, glimmering with a bit of a smile. My knees wobbled.
“Do you want to see?” I asked as I stepped back and smiled.
He nodded before setting down two plates and coming to stand behind me. “Filly,” he gasped as he pressed up against me.
Every inch of me was aware of the man behind me. With the living, breathing body behind me and the deep, dark and chaotic lines in front of me, I was a goner. I didn’t want to be, but when I’d opened those tubes of paint, I’d accidentally opened up my heart too.
“Is that…” His voice trailed off, his warm breath rustling the free wisps of my hair.
He reached out beside me, his fingers wanting to touch the way mine always yearned to. I wrapped my hand around his wrist and pushed his fingers into the wet paint. He sucked in a deep breath and stumbled into me, his other hand wrapping around my waist automatically.
“It’s you,” I murmured.
“How can you paint me?” His fingers dug into my hip while the others trailed through my fresh paint.
“With broad brush strokes.”
“No, I mean…”
“I know what you mean.” I laughed a little, noticing how much I liked the effect of his finger tracks in the paint. “I like to paint pain and suffering as much as love and life. I like the ugly.”
“Are you going to do more?”
I nodded and let him go, stepping out of his grip and swirling my brush in the highball. “I hope you’re not mad about the glass.” I motioned toward it and cast a sideways glance at him where he still stood dumbfounded.
“You mad about the cold Thai food?” He stepped closer to the canvas.
I grabbed an egg roll in response and studied him a little more. In this light he was darker, shadows cast across his sharp features and chilled form, but he was in awe too. And wonder lit him up and once again the boy I’d lost my damn mind over was gawking at artwork with me.
Until he turned and gawked at me.
Brye became something new right then. He wasn’t an asshole, he wasn’t broken. He was whole and all the pieces made some odd sort of sense. They spoke to me.
He was mine.
“I could show you?” I offered quietly.
“How to do this?”
“I’ll eat, you change, then we’ll paint.”
His eyes lit up when I said we even though he tried to extinguish it the moment later. He pulled back and I saw that little bit of marvel fading into shadow. The part of him that had been so open to me was fading away.
“You said you never had, I’d like to teach you.” I drew him back the slightest bit with my whispered wants. “Please.”
I laid my hand over his heart, opposite of the brand he’d gotten for me and the wall he’d been constructing came crashing back down.
Can she feel my heart going apeshit under there? How can she stand to touch me? How can I stand to refuse her?
The answer was that I couldn’t.
And honestly, I didn’t want to anymore either. I’d decided she soothed my demons, I could fight a few for her. Starting with my own.
“I think I’d like that.”
Though not as much as I liked the way her fingers flexed into my chest. And when they skated down, I couldn’t help the way I growled. She didn’t stop either. Her tiny fingers slid on my suit jacket and slowly undid the three buttons. My lungs stretched with a deep breath and stayed as tight as a rubber band. She slid her hands back up and shoved at the shoulders. The whisper of silken fabric sliding followed by a soft thump was the only way I knew my blazer was gone. I was numb.
“You can’t paint in that.” She nodded toward the perfectly pressed button down.
I waited for a moment, praying to any heathen god that may listen that she may undo those buttons too. But she turned from me and folded onto the floor with a snatched plate of larb in her lap. I blew out a deep breath and prayed the tension would melt from my chest. With her a stone’s throw away, I figured it was futile.
“Thank you for the paints.” Her voice was bright, almost a lark, reminding me of the girl that I’d met that first day. “I can’t tell you what they mean to me. Dinner too.”
I looked over to find her shoving a stuffed piece of cabbage into her mouth as I pulled the tails of my shirt from my belt. Her smile made it that much harder to function.
“You’re welcome,” I said as I winced getting out of my shirt.
“Want me to…” She pointed at my chest with her chopsticks.
“Kiss it and make it all better?” I hadn’t meant to joke with her, not while we were still trying to figure out this volatile truce, this love, hate.
“Let me have some of that chili oil first.”
The way her smile brightened sliced me. I thought the chili oil in my wound might actually feel better. Being vulnerable was uncomfortable, tight hands on my heart. And that it might bring hellfire down on her…
But I craved it all the same.
“I’m kidding, Brye,” she teased. “Now change so we can paint.”
Playful in a Ramones t-shirt with blue lightning across her brow was going to kill me. Or her. What I felt flared up wild.
I ripped at the buttons of my shirt feeling the fury take over. After all the shit, after how long I’d suffered, after losing, I’d found her and there was no fucking way to keep her. Not really. I shoved at my pants, conscious of how my belt clanged on the wood floors. I wanted to tear the boards away, the scars on back too, and maybe my father’s throat out despite the pain it would cause my weathered body. Then maybe…
A small laugh came from behind me, bubbly like a little stream. I spun.
“Sorry.” Filly blushed as she bit her lip. “I should be comfortable with the human form.” She gestured up and down my body.
Bright red bloomed across her cheeks and
lit her collarbone on fire as I stood bare-assed naked in front of her. Something closer to lightning heated my veins as her doe eyes widened.
“You like what you see?” I asked and she audibly gulped.
Her mouth hung in a shocked, slack smile as her whole body turned that deep blush and goosebumps traveled in its wake. She couldn’t answer. Or didn’t want to. I couldn’t tell. I walked around naked regularly and fucked in front of people, but it was Filly and her silence that stripped me bare.
I wanted to hide.
“You could be carved from marble,” she finally managed.
“Is that a good thing?”
“Though the masters never carved…that…umm…men like you.” She gestured at my crotch, closed her eyes and turned away from me, her neck turning the color of scalded skin.
I tried to hide the smile that might splinter my cheeks if I let it go as I pulled on some gym shorts and nothing else.
“All right, let’s do this,” Filly squeaked, and as tempting as it was to keep it up, tonight wasn’t that night. I slid down to the floor beside her and reached for the other plate of Thai.
“Talk me through it.”
She blew out a deep breath and leaned her head back against the bed. “I can’t talk you through it. You have to feel your way through it.”
I could think of some other things I wanted to feel my way through, but I bit my tongue.
“But what about dealing with the paint? I mean won’t I smear it?”
“Sometimes.” She shrugged. “Sometimes you want to, sometimes those are the mistakes that make the work that much better. Sometimes you have to be patient so you don’t.” She laughed a single small laugh. “Something tells me that’s both of our weak spot.”
“How do I make the shapes?”
“Close your eyes and picture something,” she instructed.
Her voice was so hypnotic, and this moment was so easy between us, I did exactly as I was told. Filly was the only thing I could summon up.
