Paint It Black

by Amy Lane

  “And?” Cheever sounded hungry for the details, but Blake wasn’t going to tell him what went where.

  “Was a lot like Cindy, truth be told. Seamus laughed and was tender. Kind. I realized that for me, it was the way someone made me feel, not the parts.”

  “Mm.” Cheever took their laced hands and kissed his knuckles. “I want that,” he said after a moment. “I want someone who will make me feel kindness. Laugh when I’m dumb. Touch me gentle.”

  Blake thought about his last lover, the boy Trav remembered. He’d been superhot—Blake thought he might have been a porn model—and aggressive as hell.

  “Rough can be sweet too,” he said with dignity, and Cheever’s laugh was a reward.

  “I’m not an addict,” Cheever said softly.

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want cocaine or any other drug. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m depressed and in pain. But I’m making that better.”

  A bubble of hysteria squeaked past Blake’s throat. “I’m so glad.”

  “Do you see where this is going, Blake?”

  Blake did. But he was older, and a friend of the family, and this bright and shining young man—

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  “Stop reading my mind!” He hid his face against Cheever’s back in embarrassment.

  “Do you see where this is going?” he repeated.

  “No.” The lie tasted peevish, like juice and Cheerios.

  “Tell the truth, Blake Manning. Do you see where this is going?”

  “Yes.” Blake tried to unlace their fingers, but Cheever captured his hand firmly. “I should—”

  “Do you like holding me?”

  Oh God, yes. He felt so right. “That’s not—”

  “That’s the only point. Stay. Don’t lie to me about it being wrong. Don’t lie to yourself. Not now. We’ve been nothing but honest, Blake. Don’t stop now.”

  Blake stopped struggling. “I don’t have much fight in me today,” he confessed, and pulled Cheever tighter. “I just…. You feel so good.”

  “You too. Just stay. Just… stay.”

  “Your family,” Blake breathed, thinking about the night he’d just spent with Heather, looking at those pictures, having his heart ripped out. “There’s not much I wouldn’t do for any of you.”

  “I want me to mean the most,” Cheever told him. “But we’ll get there.”

  Yeah. Fine. Whatever.

  “Sleep, baby,” Cheever told him. “Tomorrow we can start again. I needed a picture, you see? What pretty looked like. What it should feel like when someone touches you. I needed to know you had a picture.”

  “What if I didn’t?”

  “We would have looked together.” Cheever let out a sigh. “We’ll still look. For one that looks like us. But right now, you know what it looks like when it’s sweet. We’ll work toward that.”

  Blake was falling asleep, hard. “You Sanders boys,” he mumbled. “Looking for art, for poetry, for story, for music. Like meteors, carving light through the sky. How’m I supposed to be in that picture?”

  “We need the sweetness,” Cheever said. “You’re real good at that. Now sleep.”

  Bossy little shit.

  Blake’s heart, tender and sore, curled in on itself and pulled him under.

  HE WOKE up alone, about two hours later. Cheever’s spot was still warm, and panic shot him upright. He heard the sound of water in the bathroom and, surprisingly enough, Cheever’s pleasant baritone, humming.

  One of Blake’s songs.

  Weird.

  “How you feeling?” Marcia asked from her side of the room. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, doing something on a tablet.

  “Like I needed the nap.” He yawned. “How about you?”

  She looked up and smiled slightly. “Like I miss art, but not as much as I should.”

  Blake frowned. “You should miss art?”

  “I OD’d the month before I got my degree as an animator,” she said, matter-of-fact, like you got in rehab. “And even Cheever picked up a pencil when he was feeling good enough. And I don’t even think he likes art that much.”

  Blake thought about it. “Mackey and me went to music,” he said. At first it had been Mackey mostly, but the more he drove Blake about practicing, becoming the best musician he could be, the more Blake remembered how a song, or lyric, or just a bar of melody, had saved him, pulled him out of that hotel room and back to trying one more time. It had become his joy again too.

  “You’re good at it,” Marcia agreed. “But me, you know where I went?”

  “Not art?”

  “Your promise of children in the house.” She looked at him, her face pinched and a little desperate. “That promise still stands, doesn’t it?”

  Blake nodded. “I talked to Shelia and Briony about it.” He remembered the relief in Shelia’s voice. “Shelia was like, ‘Oh my God! You found us a nanny!’ and I was like, ‘I found you help, not an employee, just a friend—’”

  Marcia’s face lit up. “I can take classes,” she said in wonder. “I can take classes and be a nanny.”

  Blake held out a hand. “How about just spend a week with them and make sure it doesn’t drive you batshit!”

  Marcia’s low laugh reassured him. “How about CPR and early childhood education,” she said. “I can start some of those classes from here.” Her face fell. “Cheever said he’d stay as long as I was here, but he shouldn’t have to.”

  Blake thought about it. “Maybe he wants to, darlin’. You know, Cheever needs to rethink how he’s been living too.”

  “Cheever wants you—”

  “I’m on tour six to nine months out of the year,” he said, hating himself for that. “Cheever might not want to spend all that time on the road.”

  “Why don’t you ask Cheever,” Cheever said, coming out of the bathroom toweling his hair. It hung in ringlets around his eyes, and for a moment, Blake was distracted by the pale skin revealed under a fluffy white bathrobe, the few strands of cinnamon hair down his lightly defined chest, the freckles that appeared to be sprinkled on his shoulders.

  “I… uh…. You showered.” He wanted to slide his hand underneath that robe and see if the freckles really did cover his shoulders.

  “I did. The doc let me out of the handcuff.”

  “I’ll, uh, go outside while you change.”

  Cheever and Marcia exchanged glances, and Cheever’s gaze hooded.

  “I’ll go,” Marcia said mildly.

  “No!” Blake said, a little panicked, but he couldn’t seem to stop staring at Cheever’s chest. “I need to… uh…. I can’t….” His mouth was so dry, his tongue stuck to the roof.

  “Go ahead and go outside,” Cheever purred. “I’ll get dressed, and we can go for a walk.”

  “That’s a great idea.” Marcia looked from Cheever’s smug expression back to Blake, who was feeling panicked and probably looking that way, as well. “I like that idea. Go wait outside.”

  Oh Lord. “You two are so not as cute as you think you are,” he muttered, but it allowed him to close his eyes so he didn’t see Cheever’s almost naked body and slide outside the door.

  He was leaning against the frame when Doc Cambridge sauntered down the hall. “Hey, you’re up.”

  “Yeah. I, uh… didn’t mean to sleep—”

  “Cheever said the family’s running you pretty ragged. You looked like you needed it.” The hallway had big plate windows that overlooked the grounds, and Blake glanced outside at the lowering afternoon sun.

  “Yeah, but it’s getting pretty late. I… I think he’s feeling better. He really doesn’t need me to spend the night.”

  Cambridge’s lips twisted, and he rolled his eyes. “He got you on the run?”

  “I used to hope—pray—that Kell would turn his sights on me. Did you know that?”

  Cambridge cocked his head. “You never said that in so many words, but I g
ot that impression.”

  “Now… God. Those boys don’t fuck around when they get an idea in their heads, do they?”

  “No, they do not,” Cambridge said mildly. “Does that scare you?”

  “Yes.” Blake leaned back against the doorframe and closed his eyes against the pretty golden shadows. “You gotta tell me why this won’t work. I’m good at doing what you ask. You give me a reason this is bad for him, a reason he could be hurt, I can hook on to that. Like quitting coke and pills, right?”

  “Cheever’s not an addict, Blake. He’s troubled, yes, but people with depression, in therapy, they have relationships, get married, start families. He’s ready to do the work. You need to be ready to see him as something other than helpless while he’s doing it.”

  Blake glared at him. “That’s shitty advice. No offense, but you may be the worst shrink in Beverly fucking Hills. Can’t you see I’m not good enough for him?”

  Cambridge let out a slow breath. “No, son. That’s what you see. And for the record? It’s not true. Now you can run away from this relationship and tell yourself you’re protecting him, protecting your family, doing all sorts of noble bullshit, but it’ll be just that.”

  “Bullshit?” Blake’s voice cracked.

  “Grade A. Now, do you not see him that way?”

  “As a lover?” His voice went up two octaves.

  “Asked and answered.” Cambridge rolled his eyes. “Then you can run away, tail tucked firmly between your legs, and avoid him at all the family meetings—”

  “That’s an option?”

  “Or you can lie to him and say you don’t see him that way—”

  “That has not worked so far.”

  “Or you can—”

  Cheever popped his head out of the room, his hair hastily slicked back, a button-down shirt and cargo shorts firmly in place. He was wearing tennis shoes, not slippers, and Blake sort of gaped at him. “You ready to go for a walk before dinner? That’s okay, right, Doc? You said so, when Blake was still sleeping.”

  Cambridge looked Blake in the eyes. “Or you can take this young man’s hand and see where he leads you,” he finished mildly, like it was not the most terrifying choice on the list.

  “You’re a terrible person,” Blake said, deeply sincere about that.

  “Let’s just say I have my ways to get petty revenge. Now go.” Cambridge made shooing motions. “Scoot. Watching you two get out of this building will actually be the happiest part of my day.”

  “Come on,” Cheever said, grabbing Blake’s hand and tugging. “We have about a half an hour before they stop serving dinner.”

  Blake followed him, for no good reason other than he smelled good, like fresh bodywash and aftershave, and he was so damned pretty when he smiled. Together they slid out a side door and onto grounds that looked like a movie shot of an English country garden—except it was in California, so there was the general scent of Joshua pine and dust.

  “There’s walkways around the back,” Cheever said, pulling Blake until he fell in step. “And some trees and places to sit. You can see the sunset—or so I’m told.”

  “You can,” Blake said, remembering sitting with Mackey one evening and playing until the sun set and they both missed dinner. It wasn’t that his memories of rehab were fond, exactly, but he did treasure those moments when he and Mackey had become brothers.

  “I forget, sometimes.” Cheever sighed. “I feel like sort of a special snowflake, since I’m not like most of the people here. Addiction is a terrible thing. It’s like they wake up every morning and know that their whole day is uphill. Every fucking day. And I know…. Well, I guess I just have a different promise of better, you know?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I woke up this morning and wanted to paint. It was all I could think about, all day. And I was so excited. And then I drew that picture and ran into the doc’s office, and it all poured out—and it was awful, like having my chest dragged on broken glass. Like, anguish—that’s what it felt like. And you came, and talked to me, and it was painful, but it was… better. Like, I’d been all cleaned out by the anguish, and the talk with you reminded me that sometimes pain was good for you. And now, now I’m happy. And the sadness is there, waiting for me, and I know I’ll have to battle with it, maybe for a long time. Maybe forever. But I also know I’ll have days when I wake up and the world is bright and shiny like it is….”

  They rounded the corner to the back, where the grounds dropped off, and they were at the crest of a gentle green hill. The sun cut through the clouds, blinding them both for a moment and then settling, casting a molten sheen on everything before them.

  “Now,” Cheever said, squinting against the light but smiling too.

  The sunset brought him joy.

  Blake stared at him, his heart thudding in his throat, and thought about those times when he would have given his soul for a bump of coke, for a Percocet, for a body in the dark or a fifth of anything, including radiator fluid.

  This moment here, seeing Cheever’s eyes closed, his face lifted toward the sun, was worth not doing it, every time.

  “Pretty,” he said, his voice thin. Cheever opened his eyes and looked at him slyly.

  “You think I’m pretty,” he said with a winsome smile.

  “I told you that.” Blake tugged at their hands, but Cheever didn’t let go.

  “I think you’re pretty too,” he said, dead seriously, and this time Blake managed to yank his hand free.

  “What antidepressants are you on? Xanax? Zoloft? ’Cause when you break my heart and I hit the pill bottle again, I want to know what you’re taking.”

  “That was mean,” Cheever told him, eyebrows knitted. “What did I say?”

  Blake shook his head. “Just… you can’t look at me like I’m a fantasy and offer me something real.”

  Cheever’s mouth parted, and his fingertips came up to graze Blake’s cheeks. Blake knew what he looked like, knew the scars of youth on his face, and he tried to jerk away.

  Cheever grasped his chin. “I see who you are, Blake Manning. I see the scars. I even knew you before you got your teeth fixed and you were still growing the chia-beard. I could paint a completely accurate picture of you, right down to that spot on your chin you miss shaving, because it’s indented. And people would still look at it and think you’re beautiful, because that’s what art does. You wouldn’t see the scars or the shadows or the calluses on your fingers. You’d see what….” He stopped, his eyes wide. “Goddammit,” he muttered, as if to somebody else, and then he focused completely on Blake. “You’d see what I feel,” he said. And then, like he’d made a realization that sort of pissed him off, he added, “That’s how art works.”

  Blake managed to quirk an eyebrow at him, because admitting Cheever’s words moved him was just too hard today. “You don’t sound too happy about that,” he said.

  “I just realized why Professor Tierce gave me a C,” he said, irritated. “Because anything I felt strongly about, I tried to hide.”

  Blake shuddered. “You didn’t hide those fuckin’ landscapes, Cheever. I’m sayin’—”

  “Yeah, but you’re the first person to look at them and say, ‘Oh, hey, that looks like the boy’s planning to bury his own body there.’”

  Ugh. “They were not pleasing.” He managed to turn away from Cheever and watch the crown of the sun shooting spears over the horizon. Cheever grabbed his hand again, and Blake allowed him to lace their fingers together.

  “You are,” Cheever whispered. “I’m going to paint such a picture of you—”

  “No….” Blake heard the pleading in his voice. He and the boys stayed away from pictures on their album covers, stayed away from having their face in the trades. Mackey was the pretty one, but he didn’t really give a shit unless he was planning his wardrobe for the band. But as a whole, they all knew what they looked like and knew where they were from. A bunch of anonymous redneck white boys. They weren’t much to look at. They were ju
st there for the music, thanks.

  “Just for me,” Cheever soothed. “So you can see what I see. See why it’s so important to me. See why… why I’d crawl out of hell for you.”

  Like he just had. Blake shrugged, trying to shove all his internal organs back to where they belonged. “I can’t tell you what to paint,” he said mildly, and Cheever’s frustrated sigh was about what he’d expected.

  The sun disappeared completely, and Cheever moved between Blake and the sunset, smiling slightly. “Like what you see? Or are you blind now from looking at the sun?”

  What he saw was Cheever, playful, luminous, relieved of the terrible burden that had removed him emotionally from everyone he knew.

  “Still blind,” Blake said breathily.

  Cheever leaned forward and kissed him, taking charge this time, teasing the seam of Blake’s lips with his tongue.

  Blake opened his mouth, undone and unguarded, and let him in.

  Ah… it felt so right. Cheever kissed softly, sweetly, every brush of his tongue an exploration, every reaction from Blake a glorious reward.

  Oh man—it had been so long since anybody had treated Blake special.

  Blake took it, accepted every foray into his mouth, accepted Cheever’s hands on his hips, accepted their bodies, pressing close together along the front. He wrapped his arms around Cheever’s shoulders and stroked his back, cupped the back of his neck under his hair, held him close—and kissed him some more.

  Cheever gave a happy, breathless little moan and ground up against Blake, pulling him forcibly back to the present, where they were in public and Cheever was very young and very new.

  He pulled back, panting, and rested his forehead against Cheever’s. “You’re going to miss—” Deep breath. “—your dinner.”

  Cheever nodded, but he didn’t buy it. “This isn’t over.”

  No.

  “We can’t finish it here,” Blake said simply. “Wait until your time is up, until the doc gives you the all clear. Then you can come to the house.” He winced. “We’ll see each other there.”