Adrian #2
Adrian stood in front of him. Close enough for the turpentine and the heat underneath to be present, the scent of the studio on his hands and the warmth of Milo’s body radiating through the space between them.
He put his hands on either side of Milo’s face.
His palms against the jaw, his thumb at the hinge where the muscle had been clenching all night and for months before that, and the muscle jumped once under his thumb and went still.
The paint on his fingers against Milo’s skin, the blue-black and sienna leaving faint marks on his cheekbone where Adrian’s thumb pressed.
Adrian held the jaw in his hands. The jaw he’d painted.
The jaw he’d held in this bar and in his bed and at two in the morning when the only light was the streetlamp through the studio windows.
He held it and looked at the face above it and the face was looking back at him with everything visible, every wall down, the man behind the armor standing in the open with nowhere to go.
Adrian kissed him.
Not the hard terrified thing from the first night across the bar when Milo had grabbed his wrist and closed the distance like a man jumping off something.
Not the tender thing from the studio mornings when the light was good and neither of them had anywhere to be.
This kiss was both of those and neither.
Adrian’s mouth found Milo’s and the kiss was slow and full and carried the weight of what they’d built and the ache of the form ending.
He kissed Milo the way you kiss someone when you know it’s the last time for a while and you want them to feel it in their body for days after, thorough and unhurried and devastating.
Milo’s hands came to his forearms. Both of them, fingers closing with the hold-on grip Adrian knew, the pressure that said stay in the only language Milo’s hands had ever learned.
The grip tightened when Adrian pressed in.
Tightened again when Adrian’s thumb moved against the hinge of his jaw, and Adrian felt the sound Milo made against his mouth, low and involuntary, the sound of a man holding on to something he could feel leaving.
Adrian pulled back. His hands stayed on Milo’s jaw for one more second, his thumbs tracing the line of the bone as he released it, and the releasing was the hardest thing his hands had done since the last time he’d let go of something he loved, and his hands remembered that too.
“You know where I am,” he said. His voice was steady. His hands were not. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not giving you a deadline.” He stepped back. One step. The cold air filling the space where his body had been. “But I can’t sit on this side of the bar and pretend this is enough.”
Adrian picked up his jacket from behind the bar.
Not looking at the stool. Not looking at the glass.
Not looking at Milo’s face because if he looked at Milo’s face he was going to stay and staying was the thing that would kill him slowly the way it had killed him last time, not all at once but in increments, one accommodation at a time, until the person doing the accommodating forgot what shape he’d been before he started bending.
Adrian walked to the door and pushed it open and the cold came through and he walked out into it and the door closed behind him and he stood on the sidewalk for five seconds with his keys in his hand and his chest doing the thing it did when the breath wouldn’t come all the way in and he walked to his car and got in and sat with his hands on the wheel and his forehead on his hands and breathed until the breathing worked.
* * *
Milo sat on the stool in the empty bar.
The turntable was off. The silence was total, the kind of silence a room holds when the thing that filled it is gone and the room hasn’t figured out how to be a room without it.
The bottles on the back rail caught the light and held it.
The bourbon glass in front of him, untouched, two fingers at the same level as when Adrian had poured it.
His hand on the bar, the one that had been reaching for Adrian, palm down, fingers spread against the lacquer in the exact spot where Adrian’s hands had been pressed a minute ago.
His jaw ached. Not the ache of clenching but the ache of release, the muscle remembering Adrian’s thumbs at the hinge, the pressure of being held by someone who knew every line of his face and had decided to let go of it anyway.
The cold from the door was already fading.
The bar was holding its heat the way it always held its heat, the warmth that came from the wood and the years and the man who had just walked out of it.
Adrian’s cloth was on the bar where he’d set it down, folded once, the damp mark underneath it already drying.
His glass was in the rack. His jacket was gone from the hook.
The vinyl was off and the room had no sound except the cooler’s hum and the tap dripping once into the drain, and the silence was not the old silence that had felt like peace.
This was the silence of a room that had been emptied on purpose.
Milo sat on the stool. His jaw was unclenched.
His hands were flat on the bar. The bourbon glass sat in its ring, full, untouched, and he understood with a clarity that felt like something breaking that the ring in the lacquer was permanent and he had made it by showing up and sitting in the same spot for months and never once saying out loud what the showing up meant.
He sat in the bar where Adrian had kissed him and Adrian had held his face and Adrian had let him go and Adrian had walked out into the cold, and for the first time he understood that the thing he was most afraid of wasn’t being seen.
It was this.