Refraction Page 7

  Here, in this place? The demons surrounded them.

  Calvin touched him, though, and he didn’t care.

  There might have been things he could have told Calvin about that. Calvin asked; the man wanted to know. But words were pointless in here, and anyway, Calvin couldn’t see what he was seeing.

  Calvin saw other things, though, about him and his paintings. Things experience had taught him that ordinary people didn’t see.

  That touch came again, firm, heady, and his attention snapped to Calvin, the club fading. The music thrummed, and Calvin’s hips thrust, rolling against him. Oh. Oh, dancing. Right.

  Dancing and wondering what Calvin wore under his kilt.

  Calvin’s eyes were green, but in this light they just looked dark. Dark enough it was hard to tell the pupil from the iris. Framed in that thick eyeliner, they stood out, though, even when the shifting and fading club lighting left his face in shadow.

  Still, Calvin’s face didn’t change, no demons appeared, and the only things in the world were thrumming bass, sweat, and pure need.

  A tall man danced into them, making Calvin take a step backward. The man grinned at Tucker, gave Calvin a little apologetic wave, and when Calvin smiled back, the guy gave him a twirl. Calvin spun around, looking surprised, but laughed and seemed to enjoy the attention.

  Tucker smiled, but he didn’t mean it. Not really. Another couple stepped between him and Calvin, one of these men a deep, bright crimson.

  Stop it. Breathe. Don’t look at them. This wasn’t like home. This wasn’t a stray wanting to be painted. He was under the ground, where the demons lived. Tucker looked for Calvin, but he couldn’t quite find him in all the lights and confusion.

  An eternity, or maybe just a few seconds later, a blond head popped up in front of him. He didn’t dare focus; the man was standing too close. But he could only look away for so long before the guy’s eyes found his. Green eyes ringed in black eyeliner. Soft fingers stroking his beard.

  “Hey, honey.” He knew Calvin couldn’t hear him; it didn’t matter. He leaned into the touch, one hand finding the increasingly familiar spot on Calvin’s hip.

  He got a smile brighter than sunshine, and he could clearly read the word sorry on Calvin’s lips.

  Calvin stuck out his tongue, crossed his eyes, and drew little crazy circles up next to his ear.

  Oh, that made him laugh, and he dared to steal a kiss, hard and fast, hidden under the brim of his hat.

  He felt the sound Calvin made against his lips and the hand that snaked around behind his neck, fingers hot as coals. Calvin started moving again, hips swaying to the beat of the music without breaking the kiss or putting even a hint of colored light between them.

  He followed, the music and Calvin’s hips creating a draw that kept them pressed tight together, gyrating, undulating.

  There was no way to tell with club music being what it was—no real beginning and no real end—how much time was passing, but Calvin kept him dancing between his kisses and his smiles for a good long while.

  When Calvin did step away, he had a lock of damp hair stuck to his forehead and bedroom eyes. He pointed toward the ceiling and grinned.

  Tucker looked up, the lights beautiful, primaries blending into secondary and tertiary colors, and where they touched all three? White. “Light versus ink. Painting versus life.”

  “What?” Calvin shouted just loud enough Tucker actually heard it. He raised an eyebrow and pointed toward the staircase.

  Tucker nodded and smiled, then started moving them, slow and steady toward the steps.

  As soon as they reached the top of the staircase, Calvin turned around and looked at him. “What were you trying to tell me? I couldn’t hear you.”

  It was much quieter by comparison up here, and cooler too.

  “The lights. They’re the opposite of paint.” They pretended to flood whatever they touched, and paint faked the presence of light.

  Calvin sighed. “Are you hungry?”

  “I totally could be.” Right. Stop jabbering like an idiot and hide your crazy a little, please, Williams? “And I need a big drink of water. That’s thirsty work.”

  Calvin pulled their coat tags out of his pocket and traded them in for coats. Tucker was pleased to see they were the same ones they’d turned over earlier. “Let’s go somewhere quieter.”

  He followed Calvin out into the cold. Cold was actually putting it mildly. It was fucking bitter out.

  “Jesus, the wind.” Calvin turned his collar up.

  “Yessir. This is wicked.” A little wonderful, though. Sharp enough to steal his breath and freeze his nose hairs.

  There were a couple of cabs waiting outside, and Calvin went right to the first one and opened the door. “What are you hungry for? There’s a steakhouse right by your hotel.”

  “Are you going to be able to eat?” Because if not, he could wait and order up an early breakfast later. He didn’t want Calvin to have to sit and watch him eat.

  Calvin shook his head no. “I’ve got a shoot on Monday, so….” He shrugged one shoulder and gave Tucker an apologetic look.

  “Do you want to come up to my room instead, then?”

  Calvin looked at the driver. “The Refinery, please.” He smiled at Tucker. “You could order room service.”

  “I could.” He was easy, and he could listen to Calvin talk for hours.

  Calvin shifted on the seat so they were looking at each other. “If you’re looking forward to sharing a nice meal with me, Tucker, you need to know it’s never gonna happen. I’ll go out. I like to go out, and I do it all the time. You’re going to have to eat around me sometime. But I get it if that doesn’t work for you. You wouldn’t be the first guy that I… that couldn’t handle it. Just do us both a favor and don’t torture yourself thinking you’re going to be that special guy who finally gets me to eat. You won’t be.”

  “I don’t give a shit if you eat or not, honey. It’s your body.” It was a matter of manners. You didn’t drink in front of someone in AA; you didn’t eat in front of someone on a diet. He might eat the whole house. He might not eat anything but rice for a month because that was what he had in the kitchen and he couldn’t bear the idea of leaving home. Food was fuel for painting. God, he hoped Marge had supplies for him soon.

  It had been days.

  “Good. Okay. Thank you.” Calvin nodded like that settled things, then nestled in against him. “I have so much to say about tonight I’m having a hard time saying any of it. My head is just….” Calvin made a little explosive gesture with his fingers. “You know? So much.”

  Did he know? He didn’t know how to not live like that. “No worries, honey.”

  Maybe it was contagious, the pressure of the thoughts in his head. God, that was an awful thought, for him to be catching, infectious, spreading like a thought disease.

  Calvin sat up again, suddenly full of energy like something had bitten him. “I mean, your paintings, and that wine, and the hot guy you snapped at, and your jacket on my shoulders, and the nightclub—your eyes and I felt so—oh my God, the dancing. The dancing, Tucker! And I know you lost me for a second there, but I had my eye on your hat, I promise, and… oh, your hat. I love you in that hat. I love you kissing me in that hat.” Calvin sighed, smiling.

  He smiled right back, reaching out to caress Calvin’s belly, just a touch in the darkness. “I hear you.”

  He did, and he understood, down to the bone.

  Gentle fingers covered his, adding pressure. “I knew you would.” Calvin tilted his face up, nipped at Tucker’s chin.

  “Refinery.” The cabbie broke in.

  “Is that us, honey?” He’d been so many places in the last twenty-four hours that he had no idea where he was anymore.

  “Of course. You don’t know the name of your own hotel.” Calvin pulled a card from his pocket and gave it to him with a wink. “Marge slipped it to me. Room 406. I’m starting to understand a little better, tiger. Come on.” A valet opened t
he door, and Calvin slid out of the cab.

  He paid the taxi driver with a smile, then grinned at the guy holding the door. “Samuel! How’s your little girl? She feeling better?”

  Samuel grinned at him, teeth so bright in his dark face. “She is, thank you.”

  “Good deal. Thanks for the tip about the bagel. I’ve had two already.”

  “My pleasure, sir. Can’t beat a New York bagel. How did your show go?”

  “It was lovely, and he is brilliant.” Calvin took his arm.

  “That’s a beautiful thing. You get on inside now, cowboy, before you freeze your longhorns off.”

  “Yessir.” Tucker drew Calvin into the long hallway, the whole place whispering class and money. He rolled his eyes and grinned. Back home he would go to the Driskill or the Menger, something old and wonderful and deliciously haunted, but this worked like a charm.

  Calvin whistled low. “Look at this. Jesus, talk about looking out of place. I feel like people are watching me to see if I’m going to steal the silverware.”

  “I know, right? I don’t think they’d be surprised if I rode a buffalo through the lobby.” He’d been teasing the maids by folding the towels into obscene origami. Best class he’d ever taken.

  “They’re going to go home tonight to their lovers and tell them all about the crazy Texan who brought a little goth boy in a kilt to his room.” Calvin laughed. It rang against the marble and echoed in the cavernous lobby, and he looked around like he could see the sound bounce off the walls. He did it again, this time on purpose. “Oops.”

  Tucker grabbed Calvin, two-stepping them easily on the slick floor, trusting that Calvin could follow, hear the music in the base of his skull.

  Calvin laughed again, following easily and feeling light in his hands. The “little goth boy in a kilt” had his eyes on Tucker’s and didn’t seem to be giving the lobby a second thought. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve never met anyone like you, so we’re even.” He thought that was perfectly fair, in fact.

  “Excellent. What is this dance called, cowboy?”

  “Depends who you ask. My daddy would call it two-stepping; my momma would say we were polishing belt buckles.”

  “Oh, I like your mother’s version much better.” He felt Calvin’s hand slip lower, diving into the pocket of his jeans and giving his ass a squeeze.

  “Mm-hmm.” He did like that, and he danced with Calvin until he saw a fairly grumpy-looking dude in a suit coming their way; then he rolled his eyes. “They’re fixin’ to yell at us. You ready to go upstairs?”

  “I’m ready to go anywhere you want.”

  “Come on, then.” He pushed the Up button, keeping one arm draped around Calvin’s shoulders.

  “Tell me… two lies and one truth. Ever play that one?” Calvin looped an arm around his waist, and they stepped onto the elevator together.

  “Mmm… I have three horses, my babysitter when I was a little boy was a voodoo queen, and I’m scared of motorcycles.” He could do this.

  “Hmm… well. If you have horses, then I hope someone else takes care of them because otherwise they’d starve.” Calvin laughed. “And you’re not ‘scairt’ of anything, you told me as much after coffee. So I’d say the voodoo queen is the truth. I’d totally believe that.”

  “Mmm. Very nice. I don’t have any livestock. My barns are studio space, and I have three Harleys.” Tucker smiled, the guesses pleasing him to death. “Your turn.”

  Calvin stopped him as they got off the elevator. “Wait. You own three Harleys? Gawd. I am nowhere near cool enough to play this with you.” Calvin snorted. “Okay, so me. I love to ski, I once fell out of a helicopter, and I have been to Paris seventeen times.”

  “Mmm.” Paris sounded totally reasonable, but so did the other two. “I’m gonna go with Paris as the truth, but hope for the helicopter, just in case there’s a story there.”

  “Well, can you imagine me on skis? And I wouldn’t be caught dead in a helicopter. No way. I prefer the kind of risks that involve my feet on the ground. Paris is the truth. I go there on shoots a few times a year. Have you been?”

  “I haven’t. I’ve been to London, and I spent almost a year living in Rome when I was a kid, but not Paris.” Rome had been fascinating, wandering around at seventeen with Marge, amazed by the light.

  “You would like Paris. It’s beautiful when you want it to be, and it’s wicked when you don’t.” Calvin licked his lips and leaned against the wall while Tucker hunted his room key in his pockets.

  “Both of those facts make me happy.” He got the room open and cracked up when he found a towel elephant in the doorway.

  “What the hell is that? This is obviously a story.” Calvin scooted past him and crouched down next to the elephant.

  “We have been having towel-folding wars. I’m currently up by one, although that elephant’s pretty fucking cool.”

  “You are….” Calvin stood up again and tugged Tucker into the room. “I’m running out of adjectives. I need to know more. Two more lies and a truth. Go.”

  “I know how to knit, my favorite hard liquor is Jäger, and my first blowjob was in a bathroom in a McDonald’s.” It was challenging to invent lies. Fun, though.

  “Oh my God, those are impossible.” Calvin dumped his coat on a chair and sat on the long couch in front of the windows. “Um. I really can’t believe you have the stomach for Jäger. Even as closeted as you must have been, I can’t see you desperate enough for a McDonald’s bathroom, but I can totally see you sitting with your grandma learning how to knit.” Calvin raised an eyebrow. “Close?”

  “Dead-on. I’m impressed. Can I sit with you? Are you thirsty?”

  “Please sit with me, and I’d love some water.”

  “That I have.” He pulled two bottles from the minifridge-bar deal and handed one over, and then he carefully put his hat upside down on the dresser and shrugged off his jacket and hung it up before he plopped down.

  “Next time we go dancing, I want to go to a Western bar. That whole partnering thing is neat, even if our hands are all backwards.” Calvin drank deep and set the bottle down on a little side table.

  “Is there one here where two men can dance, honey?” Because that could be fun. “I mean together.”

  “Well, there are lots of bars, and this is New York, tiger. We could scope out a few places. But there is a gay bar, yes. It’s a little gimmicky, but the men are hot and the music is all country. They dance on the bar.” Calvin giggled. “It’s called Flaming Saddles.”

  He snorted, then started to laugh, deep, good belly laughs that eased his soul.

  Calvin’s giggling turned to laughter too, and the two of them rolled and howled themselves breathless. “We….” Calvin gulped air. “We have to go there now.”

  “I’m renting a studio for a few weeks. I want to paint here. I will take you dancing again.”

  “You… a few weeks? Really?” Calvin took a deep breath. “Oh, thank God.”

  “A few weeks. Really. Marge is dealing with it. This place is wild.” Tucker brought their foreheads together, stared into Calvin’s pretty eyes. “You’re fascinating.”

  “You’re unreal.” Calvin slid shaking fingers around the back of Tucker’s neck and held him there, just breathing with him.

  He could live with that. He really could.

  CALVIN WAS almost sure he was going to pass out, and it had nothing to do with his calorie intake. He really hoped Tucker was cool with just sitting still a minute while he recovered from this head rush.

  A few weeks. Not a few days, not just a week—a few weeks might be long enough for him to figure this shit out and get ahold of himself. For now, though, he was unspeakably relieved not to have to say goodbye to Tucker tomorrow.

  Tucker sat, watching him, so quiet, so still, but not stiff at all, their foreheads just resting together.

  “Sorry.” What else could he say? He’d just laid a whole mountain of responsibili
ty at Tucker’s feet without saying a word, and Tucker had just absorbed it, like it was okay, like it wasn’t complete insanity. “Really.”

  “For what? I’m not.”

  “Okay.” It was, for now. He smiled. “I’m really glad you’re going to be around for a while. Will you let me come watch you work?”

  “If you want to, sure. It can get messy. Wear old clothes.” Tucker just let him in like it was nothing. Here. Come see.

  “I love messy.” He had this image in his head of Tucker painting and just losing more and more clothing as the afternoon wore on. It made him grin. And despite his energy level when he wasn’t working, he understood patience, and he had a lot of it—he had to in his line of work. He could sit there all day if Tucker wanted him to. “Sounds like fun.”

  He kissed Tucker lightly, finally feeling like he could sit up on his own, picked up his bottle of water, and took a big gulp.

  Tucker leaned back on the sofa with a lazy smile. His phone buzzed, and he looked at it, then chuckled. “Daddy says that the show must’ve gone well. Marge is still on the phone with my momma.”

  Calvin smiled, feeling almost as proud as if the show had been his own. “Way to go, tiger. People were having a good time, I’m telling you, and the wine was fantastic. How long has Marge been your agent?”

  “Since I was thirteen, but like I told you, I’ve known her forever. She’s Momma’s agent too.”

  So talent ran in the family. He wondered what Tucker’s mom painted. He wondered if a mom would worry about a son who painted the things Tucker did. And he wasn’t sure if he should ask, but he already knew he would. “You’ve been doing shows and hating them since you were thirteen?”

  “I was sixteen when I went to my first. My art was different then—think more comic book and less Dante’s Inferno—but yeah, I’ve always been wigged-out at the thought that people were judging me, my work, like it’s just a commodity.”

  “I can relate.” In his career, he was judged all the time. Some people judged him for a living. “What does your mom do? She’s a painter too?”

  “Yessir. She does photorealism, sort of like Audrey Flack. This incredible, huge stuff that defies reality. She’s amazing. Daddy is a commercial contractor—he builds restaurants, hotels, malls, that sort of thing.”