13 Dorian
13
Dorian
When my call with Baz ends, I realize I’m smiling. Grinning broadly from the sheer pleasure of hearing her enthusiasm, her joy.
I immediately send off a text to Lloyd-Henry. It’s working. I think Baz is going to paint me after all .
A moment later, he calls. “Dorian Gray. How’s my favorite immortal? Happy?”
“‘Hopeful’ might be a better word.”
“So the little artist is coming around?”
I put him on speaker and uncork a glass bottle, pouring two fingers of whiskey for myself. Sibyl and Vane are out with Noel and Cherith, which means I have the penthouse to myself. Might as well speak freely. “I made some introductions on her behalf, and in a matter of hours, she has gone from a minor influencer in a niche market to a popular creator with money flowing in and dozens of orders to fill. She’s ecstatic, and I’m her savior.”
“She thinks she has it made.” Lloyd chuckles softly. “Does she realize you can take this away from her as swiftly as you made it happen? All it takes is one video, one post, and she’s done. You may want to remind her of that.”
As I sip my drink, I imagine how that conversation would go. I picture the eager light dimming in Baz’s eyes, gratitude replaced with disillusionment. The image hurts me. Actually hurts.
“Dorian.” Lloyd’s voice is firm, insistent. “She knows the deal. She understands that you’re offering a bargain, not a gift. Remember what’s at stake.”
“I know.” I rub my forehead and lie down on the couch, careful to keep my whiskey glass level. “I’m touched you care so deeply about my survival.”
“You’re one of my oldest friends.”
“You haven’t stayed in touch, though.”
“Did I have to? When lives are as long as ours, there are bound to be periods of silence between us. That doesn’t mean I care about you any less. I consider myself your older brother, and as such, Dorian, I have to warn you—you’re going too far with this one. You were supposed to charm her, not collapse at her feet with yearning.”
His sardonic tone annoys me. “I’m not collapsing or yearning.”
“Then you have a plan for taking her down if she doesn’t cooperate? Surely Sibyl has something you could use, fodder for the social media mill. Even something harmless, when twisted and portrayed in just the right way—”
“I know how it works. I’ve done it before.”
“Good boy. Stay focused on the goal. What have I taught you about personal entanglements, romantic commitments?”
“Enough lectures, Lloyd.” Remaining still suddenly seems unbearable, so I lunge off the sofa and stalk the room, taking another swallow of the whiskey.
“Relationships are chains that will keep you from being your truest self. Society has fenced in every type of relationship with a myriad of laws designed to prevent people from indulging their passions. Have a few friends, by all means, but keep them at arm’s length, and be ready to drop them once they’ve outlived their usefulness.”
“Is that what you’ll do with me?”
“You and I are different. We’re in a class by ourselves. Our affinity isn’t a bond so much as a pleasant mutual existence, intersecting paths, occasional support, and an exchange of ideas. We move beyond the sphere of the average human relationship.”
He’s soothing me. I know it, and yet I can’t help yielding, being mollified by his assertion that I’m different. Special.
All my years of life, and I still have this stupid fucking need to be special to someone.
Lloyd is still talking. “This artist…she’ll drag you down to her level if you’re not careful. Commitment ropes you into a life of self-denial, of repression, of rules, Dorian. That’s the path toward guilt, toward the tedium of existing at someone else’s pleasure. It comes with the gnawing sense of failure if you don’t always behave exactly as your significant other wishes you to.”
My fingers tighten around the whiskey glass. “I know your perspective on relationships, Lloyd.”
“And you’ve always agreed with me. What’s different now? And don’t tell me she isn’t like all the others, because you and I both know that humans are all the same.”
“She isn’t strictly human,” I point out.
“She’s descended from a muse, yes, and she has a useful gift, one she has refused to explore. That makes her either naive or cowardly.”
“You don’t know everything about her. What she’s done, what she’s been through…”
Lloyd cuts me off again. “What she has been through? So she told you a sad tale and turned the attention on herself, did she? Gaslighting at its finest. She’s playing you, Dorian. Manipulating you so that when she denies your request, you’ll be too smitten to follow through with the necessary repercussions.”
My pulse quickens, emotions swirling in my heart like pieces of a shipwreck lifted with the tide. They’re unfamiliar feelings, jagged and sharp. Defensive anger, confusion, loneliness, the ache of unsatisfied desire. “This isn’t manipulation. I believe she’s sincere. She’s been honest with me since the night of the skriken attack.”
“Honesty is the death knell of any relationship,” Lloyd responds. “Like an Instagram photo, honesty needs a filter. No one wants all the raw, fetid, lumpy truth lying naked between them. Listen, it comes down to this: you need her to save your life. Most people who think themselves good would save a life without blinking, and yet she refuses. She leads you through this dance instead. So before you let yourself slide helplessly into lovesickness, take a moment to think about that. You want to fuck her? Fine. Fuck her backward and forward and upside down. Get it out of your system. And then come back to your senses, because this isn’t you.”
“Not me?” I scoff. “You think I’m shallow. That I can’t love anyone.”
The words taste bitter on my tongue, because I know them to be true.
“You’re anything but shallow, Dorian. People who love once or twice are the truly shallow ones. They dabble their feet in the pool, find someone passably appealing, and are too lazy or unimaginative to go any further or try anything else. You are deeper than this girl. You are more than one person could ever comprehend…unless that person is wildly clever and supremely imaginative, like myself.”
There’s a smile in his voice. He’s trying to tease a chuckle or a retort out of me, but I don’t indulge him.
“Do yourself a favor,” Lloyd says more gently. “The feelings you think you have for her? Push them into that portrait of yours so you can stay levelheaded for this task. It’s the only way you’ll make it through this alive.”
He ends the call before I can say anything else. Just as well, because I’m not sure how to reply.
He makes sense. He always does, every time he has to talk me down from some crisis of self-loathing or burgeoning emotion. Usually, by the time he’s done speaking, I can’t remember what my point was or how I felt before the conversation began.
But this time, the anger stays with me. So does the confusion and the sense of disappointment in him for making me doubt Baz’s intentions.
I was feeling good about myself, rejoicing in her happiness, and he ruined it.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe I should push all those negative feelings along the tether, into my portrait. Maybe I should shove my attraction to Baz in there, too—the delight at making her happy, the simple joy of seeing her face, the undeniable lure of her body. Maybe I should forget the compelling power of her personality: intense, shadowed by the past, yet sweet and solid and confident. Like dark chocolate.
Maybe I should let my portrait swallow it all, because if I don’t and she denies me in the end, I’m not sure I can follow through with the other part of the plan Lloyd and I have concocted.
Fuck my existence.
I slam the whiskey glass onto the island so hard it cracks, and amber liquid begins seeping out like blood from a cut.
It was a simple cut and a little blood that first alerted me to the uncanny powers of my magnificent portrait. The simplest of accidents, really. I was going through my mail and discovered an envelope my valet had failed to slit, so I took a letter opener from the desk and did it myself. The blade slipped, making a shallow cut across the back of my hand. It barely bled, so I went on with my day and forgot the incident.
Later, as I was sipping my tea and admiring my new painting, I saw the cut, a bloodred scratch across the back of the portrait’s hand. When I glanced down at my own hand, it was flawless. Not a mark on it where that scratch should have been.
I checked the backs of both hands just to be sure. And then I fetched the letter opener and jabbed its pointed end into my fingertip. Seconds later, my finger had healed, and the fingertip of the portrait showed a dot of blood.
I didn’t tell Basil—not for months. I knew what his reaction would be, staunch Irish Catholic that he was, superstitious and pious to a fault. He could be a fierce lover, but he suffered from false guilt over his relationship with me. I sensed it in him after every tryst—the onset of that ponderous guilt, his inner monologue of regret. He’d say fervently, “That was the last time. We cannot do this again, Dorian.”
A bit of my heart crumbled away each time he said it.
And I knew, I knew he would want me to give up the painting, and that was out of the question. What if in trying to purify or destroy the portrait, I perished? I couldn’t take that chance, not when I finally had the one thing worth possessing—immortality.
But as I fell more deeply in love, I convinced myself that he loved me just as much, that he would never put me at risk or ask me to reject this miracle. I told myself I had to be open and honest with him, so I decided to confess the truth.
Maybe Lloyd is right about complete honesty killing relationships. In the end, I gave Basil exactly what he wanted—an excuse to leave me, one stronger than his discomfort with his sexuality.
It’s a dreadful irony that I always seem to fall hardest for people with a steadfast moral compass. Basil’s compass was flawed, warped by the teachings of a repressive religion—but in many ways, he was the best man I ever knew. I could set my course by him, be my best self around him.
I tried after he left. Tried to be “good,” as society defined it. I held myself to Basil’s standard, carried him in my heart as a guide, made my choices based on what I thought he’d prefer. Yet when I found him again in France, he had married. He had erased me from his life and created a new one. He was still painting, but he was notorious for refusing all portrait commissions.
Perhaps I could have seduced him away from his wife, away from that life, but I managed to make one unselfish choice—to leave him. The pain of that decision was so great I found myself wishing I could impress heart wounds on the portrait as well as physical wounds. As soon as I formed that thought, that intent, with all the fervency of my being, my pain evanesced, and the cocky expression of the portrait changed to one of wretchedness.
I knew then that I was utterly free of consequence. So I dove headlong into debauchery.
Since then, I’ve had phases where I tried to stop the mayhem, tried to steady myself and learn useful things. But I always circled back to the same point…the incessant mental query: why? Why was I learning a trade, composing music, studying a new language, climbing another mountain? What was the fucking point?
Eventually I learned to manage the cycle. Now I indulge myself during my productive phases, and when they end, I keep myself so high, so glutted with pleasure, that I don’t have the mental capacity to think about nihilistic truths.
But between the frenzied phases of devouring knowledge or soaking myself in carnal pleasure falls the shadow. The unutterable weariness of living.
That’s one of the things I appreciate so much about Baz. She makes me feel…not so fucking tired. I want her like I haven’t wanted anyone for a very long time.
I took a picture of her today while we were eating ice cream. I settle onto the couch again and pull the photo up on my phone. Her eyes, half-hooded against the sunlight, sparkling under dark lashes. Her lips milky with vanilla ice cream and her tongue poised in the act of licking her mouth clean. It’s the cutest, sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.
Her long, slender fingers fold around the ice cream cone with unconscious elegance. The lighting of the photo makes her skin look richly golden, and the angle shows me her delicate collarbones and the tops of her breasts, the gentle swell of them right before they’re hidden by her tank top.
Lloyd’s words echo in my head. Fuck her backward and forward and upside down. Get it out of your system.
With one hand, I release the button of my shorts and draw down the zipper, my gaze fixed on Baz’s photo. But a static image can’t encompass everything that she is, so once my dick is out, I set the phone down and close my eyes.
Slowly stroking my cock, I picture Baz looking at me with that intense, curious expression she gets sometimes, as if she’s trying to figure me out. There’s another look I love, too—an admiring wonder and warmth in her gaze that tells me she thinks I’m beautiful. I love being beautiful, especially for her. I want to give her all the beauty I have, overwhelm her with it, make her come like I know I could.
Heat builds in my body, in my face as I stroke faster. Usually it takes me a while to come, but I’m especially sensitive at the moment. I was hard for her so many times today, and I did my best to conceal it, but I’m balls out now, literally, letting myself indulge in the idea of fucking her.
She’ll let me do it eventually. She has to. I need to see her face when she comes for me, from all the clever, wicked things I’ll do to her. I have to witness that dazzled bliss in her eyes, hear the soft whimpers she makes or the hoarse screams—I can image both, and I’m desperate to know which sounds I can tease out of her.
Fuck, I’m close. I don’t usually jerk off without lube or toys, so this feels raw, unfamiliar, and yet primal in the best sense. Like I’m returning to a state I can barely remember, long ago, when I was young and I nearly wore out my fingers masturbating multiple times a day.
She does this to me. She makes me feel young, alive, brand-new, and wild with lust. I picture her naked—pretty shoulders, soft breasts, long legs decorated with tattoos, lovely eyes, and that tempting triangle between her legs, two plump lips pressed together, the crease between them begging for my finger to slip inside, to find her clit… In my mind’s eye, she parts her legs, opening that pussy for me… She’s whispering, Dorian, I want you …
My stomach clenches, taut desperation hardening my body as I burst, groaning aloud, come sprinkling my clothes, my hand, the couch, even the carpet.
Gasping, I stroke myself through the end of the orgasm.
I’m not sure when my gasps turn into sobs or when the agony of longing overwhelms that hasty bit of pleasure, like a tidal wave obliterating a sandcastle.
I haven’t cried since France. Since I left Basil for good.
The sobs scare me. They’re hoarse, barking, broken, wrenched from my lungs like knives.
Why am I feeling this way? Is it just her familial connection to Basil, some remnant of the everything I felt for him resurfacing to mock me? Or am I mourning because I have finally healed from that heartbreak and Baz is the surgeon who closed the hole in my heart? I’m trembling on the verge of obsession, and I can’t decide if it’s because she’s the only one who can save me or because by some uncanny chance, she seems to have truly seen me from the moment we met. When was the last time anyone had such power over me? When was the last time I met someone with an unerring moral compass—someone I could trust?
Lloyd was right. This is too much. Too far. If I keep this up, I won’t make it through the rest of the two weeks I promised her.
I collect the emotions—the raw, ugly need, the hollow craving, the charmed softness I feel for her, the wretchedness, the want. I bundle it up, and I shove it deep into myself, so deep that it flows along that inner cord of mine, out of my body and into the portrait.
My sobs halt instantly, relief bathing my soul. There’s a little of that longing left, and I’ll have to keep purging it as it grows in Baz’s presence, but for now, I am calm again. Coolheaded. Prepared to do what is necessary to preserve my flawless existence.
I rise and head for my room to shower, casting a backward glance at the couch. It’s not the first time someone has baptized this place with come, and it won’t be the last. Lloyd has people who clean, and the stuff they use is like magic. There won’t be any stains left behind.
There’ll barely be any sign that I was ever here at all.