by Clare London
Two weeks after he finished the painting there’d been the fire, when his brother’s apartment had somehow gone up in flames. There’d been no bastard there to help him, or to call 911. It had been gutted and charred and burned bare of anything resembling humanity, before the fire department finally arrived. His brother had burned to death.
Just months ago….
How long did grief last, for God’s sake? How many stages had he been through, like that therapist had tried to tell him? Of course, after the initial fuss of the accident had died down, he’d been a little mad for a while. Fuck it, he’d been very mad. He’d drunk himself into a near coma for a week or so, until he was scared by the shaking of his hands and therefore his inability to paint. The friends had all fallen away, except for Carter Davison. Zeke didn’t chase after them. He didn’t really care; they were just fair-weather friends, after all. He shut his door and closed all channels of communication, and finally no one came knocking for him. People were tolerant, but only for so long: the public’s attention was always fickle.
He still tried to work, however. Dammit, painting was the only thing he knew how to do. The bills still had to be paid; commissions still had to be met; the press still clamored for news of his work. He was even more newsworthy now, of course: the orphaned brother, losing his very last relative in a tragic accident.
But the work he turned out then had been ugly. There was no other word for it. Aggressive and harsh, there were no more of the dynamic, vibrant colors that everyone associated with his paintings. Just ugly… and therefore unmarketable. The money ebbed even further away like a summer tide, like it had never been. Zeke had been ashamed of himself, but he was still greedy for the attention, especially when it began to wane. And that was when his previously endearing eccentricity slid into plain bad behavior. When he started to become loud and brash and aggressive; when he started to seek out sexual pleasure just for the hell of it; when he thought he could continue to live as he always had.
People had still wanted to help him, he remembered. But he held them at bay. Dammit, he hadn’t needed the paperwork to tell him he’d lost everything. His heart told him so. It was difficult to care about a building—about making a living, unpaid bills and angry agents—when there was a fucking hole in the center of him. Why didn’t people see that?
For many more weeks following the fire, he’d tried to keep it all together. He was his own receptionist, cleaner, and facilities manager. He’d lived and breathed the gallery. He lied to the banks and attempted to seduce angry suppliers. Gradually, he painted less and less. The demand dwindled alarmingly quickly, and he sold nothing after Jacky died. And in all honesty, he didn’t seem to have the heart for any of it.
Less than three months ago, the repo men arrived and took the bulk of everything he owned, except his personal goods and some canvases he’d hidden at Carter’s apartment.
He’d not painted at all after that. Carter had insisted he see a therapist, but he never followed through on treatment. But if Carter hadn’t helped him out… well, he’d probably be even more of a basket case than he was now. It wasn’t as if Carter didn’t suffer on his own account, but what fucking use had Zeke been to him in return?
Then, two months ago, he’d sat for a day beside Carter’s telephone and started the process of selling the gallery. His gallery.
ZEKE’S eyes traveled slowly—cautiously—around the upstairs studio again. When he’d come back from Carter’s that day, armed with a list of real estate agents’ appointments and a jagged pain in his gut, he’d stood in this room for over an hour, barely moving. He’d cried too. Dammit, who wouldn’t? Then he’d left the room, closing the door on both his painting and his hopes. He’d known he was beat.
He drank himself into a week of oblivion. Again. Marty had been the only guy to let him indulge it, and perhaps to keep an eye on him, but even he’d grown tired and angry with the loud, awkward young man who threw up in his restroom on a regular basis, and tried to hit on most of his younger clients.
At the end of a particularly draining forty-eight hours, Zeke remembered, he’d somehow staggered home and sat slumped against the far wall of the darkened gallery. His stomach had cramped and protested with the abuse and the vomiting; he couldn’t remember eating very regularly at that time. He’d cried. Yet again.
Just waiting for the final reckoning.
It closed in on him, swiftly and inexorably. Lawyers; finance companies; real estate agents. And, of course, the parasitical gossip press. Ever since the fire, life had turned on him; eaten away at everything he’d ever had; brought him to where he remained today. Broke; ignored; forgotten. He’d thought reckoning came from God, but it was all far more mundane than that.
Am I disappointed, or what?
He sighed loudly, as if trying to expel the memories. He realized he was shaking. The studio cried abandonment to him, the dust on the windowsills disturbed by his entrance and the faintly tart smell of old paint and sour company in his nostrils. Just as he remembered from his nightmares. There were no paints left, no blank canvases. He’d either sold it all, or thrown it out.
He was shocked to find that his hands ached to hold a brush; to stretch a rough-surfaced canvas across a frame. The smell of the cleaning fluid; the soft stickiness of the paint. He missed it like a lover, and he realized he probably always would. He hadn’t turned away from painting; rather, it had escaped from his abuse. He’d let the whole fucking thing down.
Jacky….
He turned around, and went back across the landing to the small bedroom.
He’d known when he sold his gallery that he had no rights to his home, either. The apartment above the gallery went with the building and his debts had swallowed the whole damned lot. Winter didn’t have to offer him a tenancy. His corporation could have used the floor for more gallery space, or to rent to another artist.
My studio….
Winter could have ripped out the fittings and made an office. Or made it a cozy little pied-à-terre and used it to keep whomever he was fucking at the moment in a measure of comfort. Used it for clients; for staff. To raise pigeons, if he chose, for Christ’s sake.
Zeke shook off the ramblings. Damn Winter. Smug, rich prick. Sitting there, with his cool, handsome face, and those amazing eyes, staring at him like Zeke was an alien life form. Long legs and steady shoulders, all wrapped up in Italian fabric and leather, the likes of which hadn’t touched Zeke’s own body for over a year.
“I know your work,” he’d said.
Yeah, right. Like he’d have found the later works interesting, the ones Zeke painted after the fire. It was all wild, dark, monochrome crap. Carter called it some kind of catharsis, but Zeke called it some kind of shit. He’d obviously lost his nerve. We won’t be seeing them in Mr. Miles Stick-up-the-ass Winter’s private collection, will we?
Zeke sighed, knowing he wasn’t being fair. All this wasn’t Winter’s fault. God knows why he was so angry with him. He glanced around the bedroom. There were a couple of bags on the bed; his clothes and belongings had been packed away for a week now. He had expected to be thrown out. He’d been waiting for it, in fact. There were clothes still hanging in the closet, but they were Jacky’s things. Things that his brother had carelessly left whenever he’d visited, things that Zeke had taken from the mess that had been Jacky’s home. Zeke had left them in the apartment, not intending to take them with him, though obviously the new owner wouldn’t want them.
Coward….
He hadn’t been able to face throwing them out. And now he was left with them again, wasn’t he? So tomorrow he’d sweep it all away. Tomorrow, he’d dispose of it all. It’d be just his place again—just him. He’d invite Carter over to share a bottle of beer, and let the poor guy try to tell him how to pull his life together.
Carter. No one had been as good to him as Carter Davison.
But everything came with a price. Everything he received from Carter was from a genuine, selfless desire to help, bu
t it all came with that look that Carter always had now; that lost look. The look that Zeke couldn’t cope with. The look that he thought even a good, friendly fuck wouldn’t ease. Otherwise he’d have offered it to Carter more often. With a sigh, he started to unpack again.
He figured it’d take all of three minutes.
MILES sat on the deep, soft leather couch in his city apartment and watched the panoramic night view from the window. Guests always found it so delightful.
And yet he found it such a cliché. Poor little rich kid. Penthouse apartment; portfolio of Fortune 100 stocks; glamorous clothes; travel. And money—plenty of it. Equally wealthy friends and acquaintances like Red De Vere. And, of course, the even more glamorous girlfriend. Trophies, all of it.
He sighed. Red was right. His friend had an instinctive judgment that Miles had never indulged in himself. He, Miles Winter, was bored.
Of course, he was proud of his position in the Winter Corporation. He’d enjoyed establishing himself in the financial world over the past few years. The business negotiations were amusing; the legalities were challenging. Occasionally, he met someone who threatened to give him a fight, and he welcomed it. Because he almost always won. It wasn’t just a question of his money, which was surely plentiful enough to obtain him whatever he wished. It was also his will—a strong, single-minded, resolute will to win.
He liked to be the victor.
Red would have asked what the fuck else he had in his barren little universe. He, of course, lived every aspect of life to the fullest, and business was merely one element. Miles had met Red when their respective companies had been in the midst of a property deal. Red was the heir apparent to an international racing stable, and, at that time, was enjoying his role as crown prince-in-waiting. His father still ran the business, so Red was left with time on his hands and pockets full of dollars. He was a gift to the paparazzi, a true playboy. He spent money gleefully, he rode his own family’s horses to success on the racecourse, and he found everything an immense entertainment. Miles had been more than a little fascinated by him. He’d also been surprised to find that Red De Vere dated beautiful people of both genders, and no one chastised him for it. He’d been a culture shock to Miles, overall—to a young man who was fairly quiet on the social front, and rather more interested in stock fluctuations than roulette.
And who’d never considered dating men.
But Miles realized early on that Red also played the role for his own amusement, while his personal feelings were kept more carefully hidden. And it seemed that Red had seen a similar duplicity in Miles. Their curiosity had been piqued. They’d both decided to find out a little more about each other.
When the property deal had been concluded, and the lawyers and accountants moved on, Red and Miles remained good friends. By then, they had a shared social life and a fast-growing friendship and trust. Neither gave that attention to anyone else. Two quite different men, yet with the same privileged life and, at heart, the same opinions of how shallow it could all be. Red joked that the analysts would have their money’s worth if they ever attempted to reason out the bond between them. He was just content that it worked; so was Miles. They left it at that. Red made no secret of the fact that he found Miles’ daytime life and ambitions astoundingly boring, though thankfully not Miles, the man. They just had different ideas on how to seek personal satisfaction.
And when they argued—if Red could be accused of such an unattractive trait—then Red would laugh any offense out of his comments, and take Miles out into his nighttime world to make up. It had been a revelation to Miles, to see how the blond lived this more outrageous side of his life. The clubs he visited; the private entertainments he was invited to. The people who welcomed him hungrily, and the people he used in return—and always with his irresistible mixture of charm and cynical amusement. Miles had accompanied him a little nervously at first, but he’d never been pressed to do anything he didn’t want to. And then the curiosity and the fascination began to ensnare him.
What did he want from it all?
Miles had never thought of himself as introspective, but as his adult life continued, so had this dispossessed, hollow feeling. By day, he filled it with business and the mechanics of life. For personal amusement, his collection of paintings began to have a more significant priority. By night, he dated beautiful women, albeit fitfully, and followed Red to various dens of iniquity. Maybe just as a spectator, but he was increasingly fascinated by other sides of life.
That had been the bond that had slowly deepened the friendship with Red into maturity. Red De Vere now knew him better than anyone. He knew when Miles wanted to escape from the restrictions of daily life; where he would feel the thrill of anonymity; how he could indulge tastes and desires that no one else even suspected of him; that he may not even have suspected of himself.
Tastes and desires.
Miles gazed around his professionally decorated room. Sensual, silken drapes; thick fabric wallpaper. The cool, perfectly proportioned chrome and glass furniture. What had Zeke Roswell said? About Miles’ oh-so-tasteful apartment? He was right in his assessment too. That was why the 4:DRMS painting hung elsewhere. Not for the first time, Miles wondered about the bizarre titles Roswell used for his work.
He’d been thinking a lot about the artist since the lawyers’ meeting.
The door from the apartment kitchen slid softly open, and a tall woman stepped through. She carried an opened bottle and two large crystal glasses. She was probably a little taller than Miles himself though her height was accentuated by her extraordinary slimness. She looked across at him, her eyes widened, and she smiled. Perfect teeth, smooth facial skin that barely crinkled at the edges of her mouth. She was totally stunning. Her body moved elegantly across the room, a fall of long golden hair brushing at her shoulders. “Honey, was this the right bottle? I don’t know the vintages like you do.”
“Remy, it’s just wine,” he replied. Did his voice really sound that weary? “Haven’t you had enough? The party went on too long, in my opinion. We’re both pretty tired.”
The woman placed the bottle carefully on the low table and slid onto the couch beside him. Her legs bent gracefully together, and she smoothed the fragile silk of her shift dress underneath her as she settled. Then she kicked off high-heeled, strappy sandals and curled her feet up onto the soft cushions. She saw Miles watching, and she smiled.
“You’re tired because of our aperitif, honey.” She laughed aloud, her eyes flickering around the room as if to an audience. “That delicious session before the party, hmm? If I hadn’t rolled you out of bed and off to the shower, we never would have made it there at all.”
Miles wondered why he couldn’t smile back quite as eagerly. “You regret that, Remy?” He couldn’t help but admire her beauty. Even her behavior in bed was sensual and attractive. And so eager that he was sometimes amazed she wanted him so much. He wasn’t falsely modest; he knew he was attractive to women. And he knew how to please them. But he’d always considered himself rather cool in bed—not as enthusiastic as lovers had wanted, in the past. He hadn’t known why, nor what to do to stimulate things in that context. It had been a source of surprise to him that Remy had attached herself to him, and continued to do so.
Red had once suggested that bedding Remy Dion would be like fucking a painted doll. Miles had replied with spirit that his friend was out of order, obviously jealous, and it was nothing like that. Red had apologized for the first, denied the second with asperity, and laughed at Miles’ defense.
But Miles knew he should be ashamed how often that conversation returned to him, even in the middle of the night, when his naked body was covering Remy’s pale, angular form, when he was sheathed deep inside her. Gasping alongside her cute, quiet little whimpers; climaxing almost against his will. Then lying back against expensive silk sheets with the undeniable feeling of disappointment. With himself, of course.
He wondered why he found real relationships beyond his undoubted abilit
ies.
“Of course not.” Remy sighed, her breath against his cheek, bringing his attention back to her. “I regret nothing that involves being naked with you, honey.” Her lips were flavored with a cherry lipstick and the remains of a sweet wine from the party they’d just been to. There was often drink on her breath; she enjoyed drinking. She smoked heavily as well, and he knew she took recreational drugs in a manner far too casual for his liking. He tolerated it, for the present. Miles hated the parties; he had no interest in being on display. But Remy adored them. And he admitted it was important that he meet these people, that he cultivate their patronage. These were the people he wanted to invest in his new development, the people who would attend the functions he intended to hold in the new gallery.
“Was it tough today, darling? The business with the gallery? I guess that Zeke Roswell is a real oddball. They say he’s trouble, all the way.”
Miles grunted a reply. He didn’t know why he was reluctant to discuss it with her. He often bounced business ideas off her, though he didn’t necessarily expect any return advice. He loosened his tie, and let her slip her thin fingers in between the buttons of his shirt, opening it wide to caress his chest.
“What’s he like, Miles?”
“Roswell?” Miles wondered where to begin. “He’s young, about my age. Longish hair, athletic figure. Dresses like a stylish tramp. Talks loudly and rudely. Waves his hands about. I don’t know what he does with his time, because he’s certainly not showing pictures anymore.”
“But he’s going to stay in the apartment, you say? The one over the gallery. Is that wise, Miles?”
“What do you mean?” He turned to face her and the tight buds of her breasts pressed against his bare skin, even through her dress. He knew she wore no underwear as a matter of course, as it made unsightly lines in her profile. “He’s got to have somewhere to live. I’m buying the gallery, not someone’s home.”
