Chapter 6 #2
Freddie's words came back. I'd draw a face. So you'd know whether they needed help. The painting had no face. But it didn't need one. The shoulder said everything the face would have hidden.
‘You've been painting me.’
‘Yeah.’
No hesitation.
Rory in the doorway. Arms crossed. No apology. ‘Since before you came here. Since the staff meeting. Now it’s finished.’
Neil stared at the shoulder that was his. The warm tones under the dark.
‘You painted what I look like when I'm turning away.’
‘I painted what you look like most of the time.’ No cruelty. Observation.
‘Freddie said your paintings don't have faces. He said he'd draw a face so you could see if the person was okay.’
Quiet for a moment. Then: ‘Smart kid.’
‘He said it's a better kind of painting.’
‘He might be right.’
‘When will you paint my face?’
He hadn't meant to ask.
That didn't matter.
Rory's expression changed. The guarded look dissolved. What replaced it was open and raw and careful.
‘When you stop turning,’ he said.
The answer should have ended it.
Neil didn’t leave.
‘You made it look like I’m choosing to go.’
He hadn’t meant to say that either.
‘Aren’t you?’ Rory said. Not unkindly.
‘I don’t know.’
Three words. They sat in the studio between them.
Neil kissed him.
Slowly this time. His hand on Rory's jaw, thumb against the cheekbone. The stubble rough under his palm.
This kiss was different from last week's, not the desperate, clumsy first. This one knew things.
Had memory. His mouth remembered the ring, found it, pressed against it, the click of metal on his lower lip now familiar.
The taste of Rory's mouth already becoming what he recognised: coffee, turps, and underneath, just him.
Rory's hands found Neil's hips and they sank. Down onto the drop cloths. The floor was hard. The studio small and warm.
Neil wanted to learn the body. Map it. The impulse that had made him draw Adam Kershaw's shoulders at fifteen, the need to understand a form through attention, except now he could use his mouth.
He pulled Rory's T-shirt off. Pushed him back against the cloth and looked at him in the studio light. Without urgency. Without blur.
A scar on the lower ribs, thin, old, white against the dark hair. A story he didn't know yet.
He started at the serpent tattoo that went from Rory's right hand to his upper arm.
Put his mouth on the wrist where the ink curved across the dorsal surface and traced the line with his lips.
Turpentine and soap here. Up the wrist, following the serpent between the tendons.
The skin thinner here, the pulse fast beneath, and the skin changed, warmer, saltier, the beginning of the animal underneath the chemicals.
The tendons shifted under his palm as Rory's fingers flexed.
Up the inside of the forearm where the tail coiled. The hair finer here, pale against the darker ink. He let his tongue trace the serpent's final curve and Rory shivered. A tremor ran through him, the length of the arm, into the shoulder.
He kept going. Shoulder, the deltoid bunching as Rory braced.
Collarbone, the ridge sharp under his tongue, the hollow above it where sweat had pooled.
He tasted the salt and swallowed. Down the chest, over the sternum, the hair coarser here, catching on his lower lip.
He pressed his face into it. Different from the wrist. Just skin and the faint musk of arousal, a musk he'd encountered but never this close, never with this much light, never with the intention to remember it.
The ring. Cool metal against his lip, he took it in his mouth.
The contrast startled his tongue, silver and skin, two textures that shouldn't coexist and did.
He tugged gently. The nipple stiffened against his lip.
Rory's breath caught, a tight hiss, head dropping back against the canvas.
The sound hit below his stomach. A pull beneath the ribs.
He tugged again. Rory's fingers found his nape, not pushing, just holding.
Neil circled the ring with his tongue. Tasted the metal warming in his mouth. Let his teeth close around the base of the nipple, gentle, experimental, and Rory's hips bucked up involuntarily, a sharp jerk that pressed his hard cock against Neil's stomach through the denim.
Down. Stomach, the muscle tensing under his mouth, the abdominals visible, the narrowing trail of dark hair that thickened below the navel.
Salt and skin, the heat deeper, the body warmer the closer he got to the centre.
The hip bone where the tattoo roots reached, he kissed along the ink, the root system that crawled down past the waistband.
He undid Rory's jeans. Fingers steadier than last week. Rory lifted his hips and helped.
All of him. Hard and flushed in the studio light. Neil studied him with the same attention he'd given the painting, the proportions, the details.
This was Rory. Whose paintings he'd studied on a Friday night alone. Whose brother slept with the landing light on. Whose coffee he drank. Whose name he'd bitten off while coming.
He lowered his mouth on his cock. Learned the mechanics the way he learned anything: attention first, then practice. The weight. The breath through the nose. The slow drag, tongue flat, pressure steady, that shattered Rory's exhale.
‘Like that.’ Rough. ‘Fuck, Neil. Like that.’
His name in that voice in this room with his mouth full of this man and the painting of his own shoulder watching from the easel. It hit below the ribs and stayed.
Rory's fingers in his hair. ‘Wait. Come here.’
He pulled Neil up. Kissed him open-mouthed, hungry, his cock still hard between them and rolling slick against Neil's stomach in a slow, involuntary rhythm he didn't bother hiding. The lack of shame in it was its own revelation.
Then reversed them. Neil on his back, the canvas rough through his shirt, the studio ceiling cracked plaster and exposed wire. The sudden wet furnace of Rory's mouth. Deep. Held. Mouth and hand moving together, an artist's attention applied to a different surface.
‘Yeah. Slower. There.’
‘Alright?’
‘Don't stop. Don't... don't stop.’
Imperfect at the edges. A scrape of tooth that was almost too much. Two men willing to be bad at something together until they were good at it. When Neil got close Rory slowed. Let the muscle in his thigh unclench. Built it again.
Neil couldn't hold it. ‘Rory... I'm...’
Rory's hand pressed his hip down. Didn't stop. Didn't pull away.
Neil came with a sound that started as Rory's name and lost its shape halfway through. When his breathing returned, he found Rory, still hard. The imperfect grip, the awkward wrist. Rory groaned into his hip and came in Neil's hand.
After. Legs tangled. The floor hard. Rory's weight half on him, arm across his chest, hand resting on his ribs.
He should get up. Reassemble.
His hand found Rory's forearm. Thumb against the serpent's tail at the wrist. A small contact. An admission, not incidental.
Rory shifted onto one elbow. Looked at Neil with everything stripped, the charm, the banter, the public face. What was underneath was quieter.
Rory sat up. Ran his hand through his hair, pushing it off his forehead.
‘Maybe we should take a week off this.’
Five words. The room got smaller.
Neil’s hand stopped on the ridge of dried paint. ‘Right.’
‘I just think...’
‘No, you’re right. It’s sensible.’
‘That’s not...’ Rory looked away. Picked at a dried smear of paint on the drop cloth. His jaw worked once. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘What did you mean?’
Nothing. Rory’s mouth opened and closed and opened again and what came out was: ‘I can’t keep doing Fridays.’
Worse. That was worse. Neil was already sitting up, already reaching for his shirt, the retreat so practised it had its own choreography: shirt, socks, shoes, car keys, the flat in forty minutes, the silence for the rest of the weekend.
‘Neil...’
‘It’s fine.’
‘It’s not fine, I’m saying it wrong.’ Rory’s voice cracked on the last word.
Not performance. Frustration. The voice of someone who could read a body on canvas and couldn’t manage a sentence on a studio floor.
‘I don’t want to stop. I want more than Friday.
I want...’ He stopped. Swallowed. ‘I’m not built for casual.
That’s what I’m trying to say. I’ve been trying to say it for three weeks and every time I open my mouth it comes out as something else. ’
The silence changed shape. From ended to open.
When Neil looked away, his heart was hammering. The paint under his fingers was ridged where the knife had scraped. He kept his thumb on one ridge and did not move it.
He didn't answer. Couldn't. The word for what this was, somewhere between want and need and terrifying, he didn't have it yet. Or he had it and couldn't say it. Same difference.
Rory got up. Moved to the worktable. Came back with a rag, paint-spotted, chemical-sharp, the studio's version of a flannel. He wiped Neil's hand without ceremony. Then his own stomach. Practical. Unashamed.
‘Tea?’ he said.
‘You're offering me tea.’
‘I'm offering you tea. Or coffee. I've got wine too. And a packet of digestives that Kieran hasn't found yet.’
‘Tea's fine.’
Rory disappeared. Neil lay on the studio floor and listened to the kettle boil in the kitchen. The domestic sound, the hiss, the click, arriving through the wall into a room where he'd just had a man's cock in his mouth and the contrast was so vast he laughed. Once. Short, without humour.
Rory came back with two mugs. Sat on the floor beside him, back against the wall, legs stretched out. Handed one over.
‘Milk, no sugar,’ Rory said. ‘You take your tea like this. I've been watching.’
He had.
‘That's either attentive or stalking.’
‘Thin line.’ He sipped. ‘You know, for someone who insists this is 'just sex,' you've spent quite a long time looking at my painting.’
‘The painting is good.’
‘The painting is you.’
‘The painting is your interpretation of me.’
‘Yeah. That's how painting works.’
‘Would you paint me differently now?’
Rory considered this. His mug rested on his knee. The studio light was still on, hard and white, His bare chest in the light, the tattoo, the ring, the charcoal streak across his cheekbone. A man sitting on his own studio floor in his jeans with tea and a question.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You're starting to turn around.’
When Neil looked at his tea, the surface trembled. His hand hadn't steadied, not from the cold.
‘I'm not turning around. I'm standing in your studio drinking tea after...’
‘After having sex with me. You can say it.’
‘After having sex with you.’
‘And before that you drove here. You came back.’ Rory's voice was even. Laying out the sequence, not pushing. ‘That's turning, Neil. Whether you call it that or not.’
Neil drank his tea. It was builder's. Strong, milky. He'd paid attention to how Neil took it. Never asked. Just noticed.
‘I should go,’ he said.
‘You should.’
‘This was...’
‘If you say “just sex” I’ll believe you said it wrong as well.’ A beat. Then, quieter: ‘Please.’
The please hit harder than anything else he'd said. Rory didn't say please. Rory said grand and brilliant and fancy a coffee and see you round. Neil put the mug down. Looked at Rory. Green eyes in the white light. Patient. Waiting. Without pushing and without pretending.
‘It wasn't just sex,’ Neil said. Quietly. Eyes on his hands.
‘I know.’
‘I don't know what it is.’
‘That's enough. For now.’
Neil dressed. As Rory walked him to the door, the goodbye was different from last week. A kiss, not desperate, not a prelude. A recognition. His mouth on Rory's mouth, brief and warm, the ring clicking against his lip, and the taste of tea and the irreplaceable taste of the man himself.
‘See you, Neil.’
‘See you.’
He drove home. The flat was dark. The fridge was dark. The tree with brAVE in purple, invisible in the unlit kitchen, but he knew it was there.