by M. K. York
He’d just finished cleaning the walls by the time Lukas arrived. He stopped, wiping his hands on a paper towel, and went to get the door.
He wasn’t really prepared for Lukas, as it turned out. Lukas was standing there, jacket draped over one arm, a six-pack dangling from one hand by the loop of the bag, peering into the apartment with bland interest. But he’d clearly also thought about preserving his good clothing, because what he was wearing could only marginally be classified as clothing.
“Hey,” said Lukas genially, lifting the six-pack. “Thought this might be called for.”
“Yeah. Uh. Yeah, you can just—put it in the fridge.” Mark stepped back from the doorway and waved Lukas in, suddenly vividly and horribly aware that he was wearing old sweatpants that did not fit well and a shirt that did nothing for him, because Lukas was wearing. Well.
“Thanks.” Lukas turned his back to Mark and bent down to put the beers in the fridge. His jeans were worn so thin (full! of! holes! Mark’s brain unhelpfully supplied with great emphasis, circling them and underlining like sports commentators drawing plays on the video of the field, arrows, skin visible here) that very little was left to the imagination, and his shirt was long-sleeved, but painfully tight. There were spattered spots of paint over both the shirt and jeans already, dashing any hopes that they’d been a deliberate choice.
“You can just put your coat on a chair.” Mark gestured at the two chairs at the little table. Lukas nodded and tossed the jacket onto the back of one.
“Okay.” Lukas turned to him. “What are we painting?”
“Uh, this room. Here.” Mark stepped in. “Spare room. Finally got it cleared out.”
“Yeah, I can see why you’re not wild about it.” Lukas squinted around the bare room. “Not bad, though. Did you have a roommate?”
Mark couldn’t help the undignified, choking laugh that surfaced. “Not quite. Okay, so, I already wiped down the walls, they’re pretty much ready to go—I was planning on rollers.”
Lukas made a face, picking one up. “These have seen better days.”
“Look, it doesn’t need to be amazing, it just needs to change color.”
“No. No, you asked for my help, and I don’t half-ass this.” Lukas pointed at the window. “For one thing, were you planning on taping off that trim?”
“... No?”
“Oh my God. Thank the good Lord you called for help. Come on, we’ve got to hit up a supply store.”
“We really don’t!”
“Do you have tape?”
“Masking tape?”
Lukas shook his head slowly. “All that schooling and you still don’t own a single roll of the good stuff. Come on.”
“I never need it! This is the first time I’ve had to paint anything.”
Lukas shrugged back into his jacket. “You going to wear those sweatpants to the store?”
“No.” Mark rolled his eyes and went back into his bedroom to change, allowing himself the luxury of a brief moment of hyperventilation. Goddamn it, Lukas had been pleasant, he’d been friendly, he’d been good to talk to, but he hadn’t been—like this. He’d looked good at Katie’s party, sure, who didn’t; it had been full of people dressed up. But there was a big gap between how any given man looked in a suit and how he looked wearing clothes so tight they were like a second skin. And how a man looked when he was neatly slotted into the category colleague, probably heterosexual versus in my living room, getting judgy about colors.
He put on his best jeans for showing off his ass and reemerged.
Lukas was standing in front of the fridge, staring at the photos that were stuck up with magnets.
“This looks nice,” said Lukas, nodding at a picture of Mark and Dylan and a whole bunch of their friends on the ill-advised and expensive trip they’d taken to Cabo in third year. It wasn’t too obvious that Mark and Dylan were together—they were just kneeling side by side in the front row of people, Dylan’s arm looped loosely over Mark’s back.
“Yeah, my peeps from law school.” Mark smiled briefly, grabbing his coat out of the closet. “It was a good time. We were all stupid, but it was good. You ready to go?”
“Sure thing. Got directions on my phone.” Lukas followed Mark out the door, deceptively docile. Mark realized his mistake a moment later when Lukas casually asked, “You keep in touch?”
“With my law-school friends?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, you know, we try, but we’re all crazy busy this year. It’s hard.”
“Who’s left in the area? I think you mentioned that one of your friends moved to the East Coast.” Lukas was leading the way, deftly dodging other pedestrians.
“Yeah, uh, he moved to New York. Gracie and Pete are still around here, she’s working at the AG’s office, he’s in private practice, family law. Who else—oh, Nanette, she’s working for the U.”
“It sounds hard. You must have gotten close, working together in law school.”
“It’s kind of like a dysfunctional family, you know?” Mark sighed. “And kind of like high school. You spend all your time together for three years and then you part ways and it’s like—everything that was so intense and so important at the time just fades away, and you have this new life to deal with.”
“I see.” Lukas turned, and Mark followed him, right into a hardware store that had thankfully managed to miss out on the crowds of Black Friday shoppers. It smelled comfortingly of treated wood, bins of nails at the ready. Lukas looked at home, moving from section to section with a critical eye. It didn’t take Lukas long to find what they needed, and he somehow managed to pay for it when Mark was briefly distracted by a text from his brother.
“What? I should be getting that! It’s my room!”
“It was three dollars,” said Lukas serenely. “Get me a burger later if you feel guilty.”
“Sure, sure,” muttered Mark. A burger. Later. Sure. That was going to be a normal, ordinary, friendly thing to do. Right? You fed people who painted your spare room. That was a rule somewhere. He was pretty sure. It was like helping you move into a new apartment.
On the walk back Mark seized the opportunity to change the conversation. “So!” he said brightly. “How are the guys?”
“Nick’s having a baby.”
“Oh, yeah? That’s awesome!”
“Yeah, he asked me to be the godfather. I’m a heartbeat away from fatherhood, now.”
“Oh, that’s nuts. I can’t even imagine being a dad.” Mark tipped his head back, looking up at the iron-gray sky. “I’m only twenty-six, you know? I’ve got friends who already have kids by now, even some of the people from law school. Travis at the office must have started having kids at my age. I just can’t picture it.”
“You don’t even know enough to get painter’s tape, I can’t imagine you as a dad either,” said Lukas dryly.
“Hey!” Mark was indignant, and a little relieved. “Whatever. I’d be great at it. You don’t have to paint children.”
“It’s generally discouraged, in fact.”
“Except at fairs.”
“And the zoo.”
“Really? The zoo?”
“Haven’t you been out here? They’ve got face-painting booths.”
“Probably not their busiest time of year.”
“Probably not.”
“I haven’t been, though.”
Back at the apartment, Lukas tossed his jacket over the chair while Mark hung his up. “All right. We’re going to start by taping off the trim, and then we’ll use rollers you didn’t get at a garage sale.”
“Hey!”
“Didn’t you?” Lukas raised his eyebrows quellingly as he started to run the tape across the sill. Mark sighed.
“Yeah, okay, I maybe got them out of a free bin on the sidewalk.”
“God, that’s worse.” Lukas grabbed the step stool Mark had left lying around and dragged it over to where he was working, though he hardly needed it. “That’s actually worse. I didn�
��t know it was possible.”
“Fine, Mister Accomplished Painter Man. Show me how it’s done.”
Which Lukas proceeded to do: popping open the paint can with a grunt, tipping out some of the paint into the trays, and stretching up to get up to the ceiling—he’d taped that off too, with careful, precise hands.
Mark managed to keep up a running stream of chatter, but he couldn’t stop looking. The new realization that Lukas was hot was ringing in his brain like a bell. Suddenly everything he did seemed heavy with significance.
And the hell of it was, he was sure there were moments when Lukas was looking back.
By the time they had a coat of paint up, Mark had realized bitterly that he’d never changed back into his painting sweatpants, so his best jeans were now de facto his painting jeans; he’d heard about Lukas’s thoughts on a couple of new TV shows; and he’d gotten most of the way through the story about the time, at Thanksgiving as a young child, he’d stolen a turkey costume from the school play, put it on, and chased his little brother around the house in it.
“—so then my mom says, ‘So help me GOD, you put him DOWN,’ and I said, ‘NEVER!’”
Lukas was cracking up, soundlessly, sides heaving with laughter. “I can’t fucking believe you.”
“Neither could anyone else. I didn’t get any turkey that night.”
“Can you blame them?”
“Not even a little bit. I was a huge pain in the ass. I’ve really only gotten worse with age, but at least these days it’s mostly not in costume.”
“Yeah. I was so glad Katie’s party wasn’t costume.”
“Really? I was a little disappointed. I threatened to come as a Playboy Bunny and she told me in no uncertain terms that I’d be turned away at the door if I came in that getup.”
“Playboy—Bunny,” said Lukas.
“Yeah. It would have been fun!”
“Bunny.”
“Please. Little fluffy tail, headband? I could have put that together in fifteen minutes.”
“It’s probably just as well you didn’t.”
“Well, yeah, there were all those attorneys to meet. God, it’s like she knows everyone.”
“She might, for all we know.”
Mark stepped back, lowering the brush he’d been using to touch up one of the corners. “Hey, are we done? It kind of looks like we’re done.”
Lukas wiped his brow with the back of one arm. “I think so.”
“Jesus, I’m starving. I know you said burger but what about pizza? I think that’s a traditional thank-you for something like this.”
Lukas smiled, one corner of his mouth lifting. “Sure.”
“What do you like?”
“What?”
“On your pizza. What toppings?”
“Canadian bacon and pineapple.”
“Oh Jesus, you’re one of those Hawaiian-eating freaks. Well, fine, your side of the pizza can have the devil’s fruit on it.”
“And yours is what, pepperoni?”
“And other things! I like the classic. Green peppers, et cetera.”
“...you actually say et cetera. Out loud. Do you listen to yourself?”
“Shut up, I’m going to call in the order.”
Lukas looked down at himself. “I kind of want to sit on your couch, but I’m covered in wet paint.”
“Uh,” said Mark, his brain shorting out. “Do you—uh,” and was rescued.
“I think there’s a spare drop cloth. Mind if I throw it over the couch?”
“No, yeah, go for it, sounds great.” Mark grinned—painfully aware that it was a little manic—and thank God the pizza place picked up, so he could shift his attention to that.
He heard shuffling from behind him as he finished ordering, and when he turned, Lukas was in the process of sitting down heavily on the couch, sighing in relief.
“All right. You got a remote for that thing?” Lukas nodded at the TV.
“Yeah, it’s right around here—okay, here we go.” Mark tossed it to him. “You pick.”
“I better. I came over, didn’t I?” Lukas turned the TV on and started flipping through the menu as Mark dug a couple of cans of beer out of the fridge. “Hey, how about a murder mystery?”
“Ha ha.”
“No, I’m serious! Look, Murder, She Wrote is on.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. I deal with this case all day at work and you want to watch more murder stuff?”
“I enjoy a good time. Hey, you said I got to pick.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Mark tossed a beer to Lukas as he sank onto the far end of the couch, leaving the middle cushion unoccupied. “If only I’d known how much I would regret it.”
Lukas laughed and turned up the volume as the theme song started playing briskly.
“Great. We’ve already missed the first murder.” Mark rolled his eyes.
“Wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been bitching.”
“Oh, come on!”
By the time the pizza came, they’d been bickering about which of the obvious murderers had committed it, and Mark got up off the couch to get the pizza, still talking. He came back with paper towels for plates. Lukas grabbed his casually, hand brushing Mark’s with an electrical charge that left Mark dropping into his spot, feeling a little breathless.
The end of the pizza came long before the end of the episode. Their conversation faltered as they watched the credits roll.
“Well,” said Lukas eventually, “I’d better get going.”
Mark glanced back at the room. “Think it’ll need another coat?”
“For sure, but you want to wait at least a day in this weather.”
“Really?”
“If you ever want it to dry.”
“Great. Ugh. Here I thought I was almost done.”
“Tell you what, I’ll come by tomorrow and lend a hand again.”
“Really?” Mark couldn’t seem to hold in his obvious enthusiasm. “I hate painting.”
“Really. But only if there’s more food.” Lukas grinned—and how had Mark not noticed, before, what a great smile he had?
“Oh, there can be food. There can be so much food.”
“Then I’m in. What time?”
“I don’t know, maybe three? Does that work?”
“Yeah, sure.” Lukas rose to his feet. “I’ve got a job in the morning, but I should be free in the afternoon.”
“Great, awesome. Perfect.” Mark knew he was babbling.
At the door, Lukas paused to glance back. Mark had gotten to his feet to follow Lukas, and he was standing too close.
“Thanks for having me over.”
“I think I pretty obviously owe you thanks for helping with my spare room.” Mark smiled at him. “But sure, you’re welcome.”
Lukas laughed again, starting to walk down the hall. “See you tomorrow.”
“Bye!” Mark waved before closing the door, and then leaned his forehead against it. “What the fuck,” he whispered to himself, very quietly.
*
Lukas knew he was walking too fast back to his car—he was going to walk right into somebody. But he couldn’t seem to calm down, couldn’t contain the bright effervescent thing in his chest that simultaneously thrilled and terrified him.
Mark was a puzzle. Put him together, one piece at a time. Twenty-six. Brother. From Cleveland, family in Cleveland. Pictures on the fridge: some obviously family, same facial features. And some obviously friends. Friends he had talked about before. Friends he talked about differently depending on who he’d been reminded of.
And in that picture from a tropical vacation, Mark beaming out at the camera in a group of young, happy people. Lukas couldn’t have proved anything, but between that guy in the picture with his arm around Mark, and the way Mark had laughed at the theater about a friend going off to New York, and now this empty room, something like a roommate—Lukas didn’t want to get ahead of himself, he didn’t, but it was hard.
He’d wanted to be a det
ective, when he’d thought about becoming a police officer. The day-to-day grind had never been that interesting to him, being a beat cop. He’d always thought it would be a step on the way to detective and then his real life could start.
And here the clues were lining up: Mark was, maybe, if Lukas was lucky, if Lukas could be calm, a possibility. There were reasons why that would be a bad idea. He’d think about them later. He couldn’t think about them now, when he was feeling like he’d caught on fire, with the way he was sure he’d seen Mark looking at him. Who knew paint-covered work clothes did it for him?
When Mark had opened the door, he’d felt a surge of something, like laughter at Mark and at himself, at how ridiculous Mark looked in his work clothes. He should have reminded Mark to change when they got back, but the view had been too good.
When he finally got home, he tried to convince himself that he shouldn’t, but in the end he couldn’t help opening his laptop and starting the search: Mark Eliades lawyer seattle.
It was easy enough to find Mark’s Facebook profile. It was locked, of course, and Lukas definitely wasn’t going to treat him like a case, catfish him. Friending him seemed like too much, somehow. But with more digging he came across a handful of pieces of Mark, over the years. Quotes in his college newspaper. A story from a Cleveland paper about his scholarships. Finally, traces of him during law school.
And then there was the jackpot: a story in The Stranger that quoted him as an openly gay law student, talking about the lack of nonreligious reasons to oppose same-sex marriage.
Lukas closed his laptop and leaned back, heart pounding.
Sleep was going to be a problem.
Chapter Ten
Mark was double-fisting his coffee, a mug of very hot fancy latte in one hand and a small cold can of Starbucks Doubleshot in the other, when his phone rang in the morning.
He let go of the Doubleshot to answer it. “Hi, this is Mark.”
“It’s Lena.” She sounded unusually grim.
“It’s a Saturday. What’s up?”
“Our client wants to talk.”
“It couldn’t wait until Monday?”
“Apparently not. I wanted to know if you wanted to come in with me.”
