Adrian
She’d done it the first week of their MFA program, standing in the doorway of his studio and saying, without preamble, you’re in love with the color blue and you’re terrified of it.
Accurate, resented for four days, then admitted.
That was Nina. She saw things and said them and you could either deal with it or get out of the way.
She came to his end of the bar. Her jacket smelled like the ceramics studio two blocks over, kiln heat and something mineral. She had clay under her nails. She pulled out the stool two down from the third-from-the-right and sat and looked at him.
“Hey.” Her eyes moved to the stool on her right. The third one. “Is that his?”
He set the gin bottle down. “You want tonic?”
“Adrian.”
“Lime or cucumber?”
“Lime.” She watched him cut the lime, glasses low on her nose, hands flat on the bar. “You texted me back in under a minute tonight, which means you were bored, which means he’s not here yet.”
He set the glass in front of her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh.” She picked up the glass and looked at him over it. “The third stool. Nobody’s been sitting in it all night, have they.”
Adrian picked up the cloth and wiped the rail.
“People sit where they sit,” he said.
“There’s a ring on it. Glass ring. Same spot. You wiped everything else.”
He looked at the stool. The ghost ring, the faint mark of a glass set and lifted and set again in the same spot, had been there the whole time he’d been cleaning tonight. He’d wiped around it without noticing he was doing it.
“I missed it,” he said.
“No you didn’t.” She drank her gin. “Talk to me.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You’re painting him.”
The cloth stopped.
Nina set her glass down and waited. She’d been reading his hands for seven years. She knew what the cloth stopping meant.
“I’m working on a large canvas,” he said.
“With a figure.”
“Figures are a legitimate subject.”
“The figure has his posture. I’ve seen him from across this room twice now. The way the shoulders pull forward like he’s bracing for something.”
He went back to wiping. It accomplished nothing and they both knew it.
“Is he out?” she said.
The cloth stopped again.
He made himself move it. “I don’t know.”
Nina’s thumb traced the rim of her glass. She picked up the drink and turned it in her clay-stained hands.
“Omo mi,” she said. Low, the Yoruba she used when she meant it. “You know what you’re doing, right?”
He did. That was the problem with Nina, and the thing that made her necessary: she never asked questions he didn’t already know the answers to. She just made him say them out loud.
“I know,” he said.
“Is it the same thing?”
“No.” A beat. “I don’t know.”
She looked at him. “What’s different?”
He opened his mouth. Couldn’t find the sentence.
The door opened.
Adrian turned before he finished the thought. He knew who it was before the man cleared the threshold. The weight of the door, the speed of it. The direct line to the third stool.
Milo came through and crossed the room. Head down, no scan, hair damp at the temples from a shower. He sat. Clocked Nina, two stools over, and nodded once at Adrian.
Adrian reached for the bourbon. Poured without measuring. Set it on the ghost ring.
He did not look at Nina.
He went to the other end of the bar and found something to do there.
* * *
She stayed for an hour. Two gins. She talked about her ceramics show and the gallery owner who kept mispronouncing her surname.
She didn’t talk to Milo. Didn’t look at him.
She sat with her back to the third stool and talked about kiln temperatures and clay shrinkage rates and Adrian could feel her paying attention to the man behind her the entire time.
When she left, she came around to his side of the rail and kissed him on the cheek, cool from the gin, and said against his ear: “He watches you when you’re not watching him.”
Gone before he could respond.
Adrian stood at the end of the bar with her glass in his hand. He put it in the dishwasher rack and breathed.
Then he looked at Milo.
Who was looking at his bourbon. Glass in both hands, forearms visible below the pushed-up sleeves of his henley.
Jaw doing its thing, left side harder than the right.
His shoulders were angled a degree too far left for a man staring into a glass.
He was looking at the bourbon and his body was pointed at Adrian.
Adrian picked up the cloth.
The bar emptied over the next hour. He wiped, restocked, checked glasses for watermarks. Nina’s words moved through him. He watches you when you’re not watching him. His eyes kept going to the bar mirror. The reflection that included the third stool.
By late it was just the vinyl and Milo and Adrian.
He was restocking the well when Milo’s hand came across the bar.
No words first. No question about the paint.
Adrian was reaching past him to take an empty glass and Milo’s hand was resting on the mahogany and Milo reached out and put his thumb on the inside of Adrian’s wrist. On the paint stain, the blue-black mark that had been living in the crease near his pulse for weeks.
Adrian stopped breathing.
Callused thumb. The rough skin of a man who gripped a stick for a living, warm and dry, pressed to the exact spot on Adrian’s wrist where the paint had settled into the crease and his pulse was going fast enough that there was no way Milo couldn’t feel it.
Adrian could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.
His other hand was holding the cloth and then it wasn’t, because the cloth had fallen and he hadn’t noticed.
Milo was staring at his own thumb on Adrian’s wrist. Not at Adrian.
At the point where his skin met Adrian’s skin, like he was trying to figure out how his hand had gotten there without his permission.
His jaw was locked. He looked like a man who had just done something he couldn’t take back and was calculating the damage in real time.
Then he looked up.
And Adrian saw it. The face he’d caught once before, the second after the laugh.
Milo without the jaw, without the armor, without any of the twelve layers of don’t-touch-me he wore every night on that stool.
Just him. Looking at Adrian like Adrian was the only thing in the room, which he was, because the bar was empty and the vinyl had run out and it was just the two of them and Milo’s thumb on Adrian’s wrist and the stupid hammering of Adrian’s pulse under it.
Milo’s thumb shifted. Found the edge of the paint stain. The callus caught on Adrian’s skin.
Then he leaned across the bar.
Adrian’s brain got about half a second of warning and his body did not move back.
The angle was a disaster because the bar was between them, the edge digging into Adrian’s ribs as Milo’s grip on his wrist pulled him forward, and then Milo’s mouth was on his.
Hard. Bottom lip first. The angle wrong and corrected mid-kiss by someone whose body had committed before his brain had signed off.
Not smooth. Not practiced. The kiss of a man who had been keeping his mouth shut for a very long time and had just stopped.
Adrian’s lips parted and for one second everything connected.
Milo’s mouth and his. The bar between their bodies.
Milo’s thumb on his wrist. Bourbon on Milo’s lower lip, faint and warm.
The kiss lasted maybe three seconds. Long enough for Adrian to feel that the lower lip was fuller than it looked when Milo was clenching, the upper thinner, the pressure crooked because the angle was wrong and neither of them had the brain function to fix it.
Fixing it would’ve meant pulling back and going in again and going in again would’ve meant deciding to keep going and neither of them had gotten that far.
Milo’s jaw trembled against Adrian’s mouth. That jaw. The one Adrian had been watching for months. It trembled once.
Milo pulled back.
They stared at each other across the bar. The record was done. The room was silent except for the needle popping in the groove. Adrian’s wrist was extended and Milo’s thumb was on it and Adrian’s ribs hurt where the bar had dug in and his lower lip was warm and his brain was not working.
Milo looked down at his thumb on Adrian’s wrist. His jaw clenched. The full lockdown, everything shutting at once.
“I shouldn’t have done that.” Flat. The voice of a man boarding up windows.
Adrian’s pulse was hammering in the wrist Milo hadn’t let go of. His lip was warm. He could taste bourbon that wasn’t his.
“Yeah,” he said. “You should have.”
He held Milo’s eyes. Didn’t lean in. Didn’t push. Because pushing would require Milo to respond, and Milo was not going to respond tonight in any way that would be good for either of them.
Milo let go of his wrist.
Adrian could feel exactly where the thumb had been, a warm spot on his skin that had no business being that distracting.
Milo stood. Put cash on the bar, too much, bills lined up with the edge because even in the middle of whatever was happening to him the man needed his money to be organized.
Jacket on. Zipped to the chin. He didn’t look at Adrian.
“Night,” he said.
The door swung and settled. Cold air, a passing car, the empty street, and then the sound was just the bar.
Adrian stood at the rail. The vinyl was done, the needle hissing in the groove. He let it run.
He reached for the cloth under the register and saw the tremor in his fingers. Great. His hands were shaking. He was a thirty-year-old bartender standing in his own bar with shaking hands because a man had kissed him for three seconds and said he shouldn’t have and left.
The last time Adrian had felt like this, he’d spent three years hiding in someone else’s closet and come out the other side with a rule about never doing it again.
The rule had been working. The rule had been easy to follow.
And then Milo Vance had put his thumb on Adrian’s wrist and the rule had become a suggestion and now Adrian was standing here with shaking hands and bourbon on his lip that wasn’t his and he needed to close the bar.
So he closed the bar. Wiped the rail, ran the taps, locked the register, racked the glasses. He wiped the ghost ring off the third stool and didn’t let himself think about it. His hands stopped shaking somewhere around the glassware, which was good, because he’d been starting to worry.
He stopped the turntable. Stood in the unlit bar for a second.
Put his fingers to his lower lip like an idiot, because apparently he was an idiot now, and his lip was warm and he could taste the bourbon and he needed to leave this building before he did something stupid like stand here all night touching his own mouth.
He locked up and went out into the cold.
* * *
His studio was dark and cold and he didn’t turn on a light.
He stood in the doorway and looked at the canvas on the east wall, the one he’d been working on for six weeks, the figure with no face.
He’d painted everything else. The posture, the shoulders, the angle of the neck.
He’d been avoiding the face because painting the face meant admitting what the painting was about, and he’d been doing a very good job of not admitting that.
His lip was warm. His wrist was warm. His hands had stopped shaking.
He turned on the work light and picked up a brush.
He started with the jaw, because of course he did.
The jaw was the thing he knew best. He’d been staring at it across a bar for months.
He knew when the clench started on the left.
He knew the tremor that came before it released.
He’d felt that tremor against his mouth less than an hour ago, and his hand was steady and the paint went down right on the first stroke.
Left side, where the muscle sat harder. Right side, easier.
The mouth, compressed, the way it always was in the bar.
He’d watched that mouth hold itself shut for two months and tonight it had stopped holding for exactly one second and Adrian painted the holding, not the opening, because the holding was the truth.
The nose. The cheekbones. The eyes, which took forty minutes because the eyes were where a painting worked or didn’t. He painted until his fingers were stiff from the cold and his breath was visible in the work light.
He stepped back.
The face was there. Milo’s face, on a canvas in Adrian’s studio, looking back at him with the jaw clenched and everything the man carried visible in paint. The painting had been a figure study for six weeks. Now it was a portrait of someone specific and Adrian couldn’t pretend otherwise.
It was the best thing he’d painted in two years. And it was evidence. Of what he felt, of how long he’d been feeling it, of the fact that he’d been painting this man’s body from memory for six weeks before the man had ever touched him.