21. Gabe
TWENTY-ONE
GABE
“Of course you’re welcome to choose any medium or subject matter, but I hope your proposal includes the human form,” Professor Bradley told him from across the desk in her basement office.
The art department wasn’t high on the priority list, and it was made clear in a thousand different ways.
The darkroom, for example, had cracks in the walls that needed to be repaired each year to keep it dark.
“You have such a way with your figure drawings, and it seems a shame not to highlight that for your final show.”
Gabe had received the date for his senior show.
It would be up for a week in the student union art gallery, and since his enrollment status was more precarious than other students, he’d received a date near the end of the semester.
If he’d known he could afford school that spring, he might have been scheduled much sooner in the semester and have had to prepare for it during the fall.
“Yes, I’m sure that will make it into the proposal.”
“I’ll be looking for it this week. The sooner you get started, the longer you’ll have to work on it,” she said, as though Gabe was unaware of how the progression of time worked.
“Thanks, Professor.”
He headed up the stairs of Old Main to the street level, the tiny urban campus spilling out around him.
Sometimes he regretted choosing a small private college (because good god it was more expensive than he’d ever considered when he was eighteen), but he tried to tamp down the guilt by remembering that this was the right place for him.
He was so grateful to be given the opportunity to finish his degree that semester.
He had the rare weekday coffee shop shift to head to shortly, so he flipped his hood on his new jacket up against the icy wind and headed toward Parker’s Prius.
It was always easy to pick out because while there were a million little blue Priuses, this one had a trans flag sticker on the bumper.
When he got settled in, he checked his phone for the notifications he’d felt roll in during his meeting with his advisor.
Half a dozen messages from Brandon were waiting for him, wishing him a good first day of school and asking what supplies he’d need for the semester. The final text apologized for all the messages and asked Gabe to give him a call back.
“Hi, sorry for the texts,” Brandon apologized. Again.
“No worries. What’s up? How’s your first day of class? Spanish, right?”
“Yeah, and I’m fucking terrible at Spanish, so I’m expecting to get my ass handed to me.”
“You only need a 2.0 to pass,” Gabe reminded him. It was a mantra he kept in his own head daily.
“Do you have books or supplies you need this semester?” They were several months into this situation now, and while Gabe didn’t think it would ever feel normal, it felt familiar.
“Let me see which books I can get for free. Mac showed me a notebook app for the iPad, so I don’t have to buy any school supplies this semester.”
“And your show? You’ll need supplies for that, right?”
Presently, Gabe was thinking of buying giant canvases for life-sized paintings. And that would be expensive.
“Gabe,” Brandon said, “it’s okay if your supplies are expensive. Please let me take care of it.”
Brandon wasn’t a firm, dominant guy. He was sweet, soft. He made Gabe feel held. But his voice was full of authority, and it made Gabe’s pants tight.
“Okay,” Gabe agreed.
“I wish I could go supply shopping with you. See your process. Let you loose in an art store.”
“That sounds fun,” Gabe agreed.
“Instead, I’ll just send you a boring Venmo.”
“Hard to be bored by any kind of Venmo.” Gabe laughed. Money was boring to Brandon. Gabe had to keep reminding himself of that. He was what made money interesting to Brandon.
“If you don’t give me a number, I’ll send you two grand to start out with.”
Two grand, lump sum, showing up in his bank account on a random Wednesday, just because. It still felt like a dream.
“You are way too generous,” Gabe said, already allotting those funds to canvases and paint. He felt his phone buzz again. Doubtless the Venmo transfer. “Thank you.” He always tried to make sure his appreciation was heartfelt and frequent .
“Thank you for letting me,” Brandon said. “You know it makes me happy.”
“Still don’t know why,” Gabe joked. In an ideal world, he’d be able to tackle Brandon with a hug, but they had to settle for phone calls, long strings of text messages…a variety of photos.
“You know why,” Brandon whispered.
Alone in Parker’s car, it felt like the two of them were together, in a way. In the space inside their phone call. Suddenly, it was too intimate.
“How’s Skylar?”
“Oh my god, when he was in Minnesota, I was actually missing him on the road. The devil you know, and all that. Now, in Carolina, I am so fucking grateful to be hundreds of miles away from him. And I’m grateful Beck is the one whose phone he’s blowing up.”
“Why doesn’t he just live with Beck in Iowa?”
“Beck had a girlfriend at the beginning of the season. That didn’t work out, she moved out, and Skylar had already signed the lease for our place. I’m pretty sure if Beck had a two-bedroom, Sky would have moved in. But Beck also has better boundaries with Skylar than I do.”
“I miss you,” Gabe said, the feeling bursting out of him. The brief time Brandon had been up in the Twin Cities had been the best part of the year, and Gabe’s trip to Iowa had been memorable.
“That’s mutual.”
“Can I have your coach’s number? I have a couple of things to talk to him about,” Gabe joked.
“I’ll send you his contact info. You can see if you can do some magic for me.”
“How’s your bruise?” Brandon had sent him photos of his thigh where he’d blocked a shot right at the end of the year, and slowly, Gabe had been trying out the watercolor brushes in Procreate to memorialize it as it kept changing color.
“I’ll send you a new photo in a bit. I’m about to head to practice. Thanks for calling. It was nice to hear your voice.”
They hung up, and Gabe looked up when the Iowa Stars would be back in Iowa. Sunday. Gabe had an idea, and he figured Brandon would need some privacy for it.
“I’m not sure why this is better than just a photo,” Brandon said on the other end of the FaceTime call they were on. He was in his bedroom in Iowa, door locked, computer propped up so that Gabe had a good viewing angle of Brandon’s body as he stretched out on the bed.
“Honestly, I’m not sure either. But it’s more fun.”
Gabe wasn’t surprised how easy it had been to convince Brandon to model for him again, but he was pleased.
“Skylar has already made fun of me three separate times.”
“Sky is jealous,” Gabe said. Brandon always complained about Skylar, but Gabe didn’t believe he actually bothered Brandon. Skylar was just a competitive hockey player. Weren’t they all?
“He had the good sense to leave.” This was technically during pregame nap time, which was the part of Brandon’s pro athlete life that appealed to Gabe the most, so Skylar was making himself scarce for the sake of Brandon’s privacy and sleeping on Beck’s couch.
Gabe had a real drawing board in front of him with a giant sheet of paper on it.
He loved the iPad, but his senior show wouldn’t be digital—or wouldn’t be only digital.
He might do an animation if he could get it to look right and project it on a wall between two of the enormous canvases.
Professor Bradley had liked that idea when she’d read his proposal, so he’d probably have to.
“How’s Ashley doing?” Gabe asked as he started to draw.
He’d been posting more of his sketches of Brandon’s “reference photos” and had, in turn, been fielding a lot of thirsty comments, both on his explicit Patreon posts, as well as on his censored Instagram posts.
His engagement was higher than ever as he watched his follower count grow.
Social media wasn’t his end goal, but it was nice to finally feel like he was gaining a bit of an audience.
He’d even sold a few prints and gained several new patrons.
“It’s weird to talk about my sister when I’m naked and you’re looking at me with your artist eyes.”
“Point taken,” Gabe said. “Can I tell you a funny story about Duncan, then?”
“Please,” Brandon said. He was trying to force himself to relax, which was creating more tension in his neck and throat. He’d done the same thing the last time Gabe drew him.
“So Duncan is a baker, right? And his favorite thing to make is sourdough, which needs a starter. You combine water and flour, and as it sits in the corner of your kitchen, it gathers natural yeast. And you feed it more water and flour, and it grows.”
“It’s alive?”
“I guess so. Duncan is pretty good at this by now. He bakes sourdough for the coffee shop I work at sometimes and has it all down to a science. And most of that happens in the basement kitchen. However, the basement is cold, and he was trying out leaving his starter in the main kitchen between bakes. But what he didn’t consider was that he lives with a bunch of agents of chaos.
Parker plugged in the Crock-Pot too close to the starter, and it got too warm and grew too much and exploded out of the jar, covering most of the counter, and everything on it, in bread goo. ”
Laughter shook through Brandon’s body, and the tension in his neck disappeared.
“What happened next?”
“Wyatt found it, and made pretty much every bad decision he could have in that moment. He just…cleaned it all up. Which sounds like the right thing to do. Sourdough starter smells sour, so he thought it went bad. It was everywhere, so he wiped it up. And if you’re wondering why that’s a disaster, it can take weeks to get a new starter back up and running to make bread. ”
“What did Duncan do?”
“Thankfully he had some that he’d dehydrated, so he was able to get it going again. But everyone learned some valuable lessons.”
Brandon’s eyes drifted shut as he listened to Gabe recap a handful of house-related escapades, including how Parker sold the dresser they had refurbished for six times what he’d put into it and had subsequently filled their garage with new projects because he couldn’t stand to see a piece of furniture get thrown away.
Gabe didn’t draw Brandon’s face often, due to the nature of his work, but he couldn’t help himself. Relaxed and sleepy, Brandon’s face was too beautiful, too sweet to pass up. Once again, he wondered if Brandon was happy and comfortable with him because he was the only gay person Brandon knew.
Obviously, he knew Skylar and Jackson and Ryan.
Gabe didn’t know why those guys didn’t count in this arithmetic.
It always felt inevitable that when Brandon started meeting more people, he’d find someone he clicked with better.
Someone like him. Not someone like Gabe, who lived in a house with a million roommates and had taken way longer to graduate than anyone he knew.
Not Gabe, who had to have so many jobs just to survive.
Not Gabe, who hadn’t owned a suit before Brandon and didn’t know the first thing about hockey.
It was selfish to keep one fist wrapped tightly in Brandon’s sleeve, unwilling to let him find someone else.
Not that it ever felt like Brandon was pulling away.
Maybe after all the time they’d spent together, Brandon kept smiling at him with those soft eyes the way he was through the screen because he genuinely liked Gabe. He was starting to let himself entertain that idea.