3. Macabre Doppelgänger #2
“Sorry.” Asher’s gaze dropped again, long lashes casting shadows on the apples of his cheeks.
What would those lashes look like clenched together in pleasure, or wet with tears? He wanted to count each strand, draw and paint them, feel them brush against his skin.
“I’m impressed you noticed such small details,” Lev added. “Let me show you what I’m working on now.”
Lev abandoned Asher’s bowl on the counter along the way. Asher approached Lev’s easel like a deer that might run off.
“I’m afraid it’s still in the ugly stage,” Lev said.
An ugly stage was perfectly normal. Every good painting had one. What wasn’t normal was how much Lev wished he’d been further along. What wasn’t normal was how much he wanted Asher to like his attempt at Silas’s neck.
Lev had spent years in therapy learning to disconnect his self-worth from his art, a task made more difficult when Lucian had raised him to be a successor, not a son.
The Marks family couldn’t help but repeat the same mistakes, passing the same baggage on to generation after generation like luggage on a carousel.
Lev’s grandfather had tried to force Lucian into a corporate box, but he’d rebelled.
Lev, on the other hand, had climbed right into Lucian’s art-shaped box and remained there, desperate for his approval.
Asher surveyed the painting quietly. His gaze shifted to the floor where Lev’s last three pieces leaned against the wall.
Each painting was a snapshot of what remained of his memories of Silas. Never the full picture. Only a hand fisted in bed linen. The tight cage of ribs beneath skin. The sharp edge of a tilted chin.
Every studied artist knew their anatomy as well as they knew their geometry, but Lev had mapped the landscape of Silas’s body with his hands and tongue, been inside of him, scented his blood.
Nearly two decades later, that knowledge was slipping through his fingers, especially when Silas had come back all wrong. He looked the same—obsidian hair, pale blemish-less skin, high cheekbones, and powder blue eyes—but it wasn’t him.
The Silas who haunted him was a macabre doppelg?nger.
That was why Lev continued painting Silas no matter how much it hurt. It was the punishment he deserved, and the only way to preserve the real Silas’s memory.
“You’ve never painted anything like this before,” Asher said.
Lev raised his eyebrows. “Is that so?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just, I’ve followed you so closely, I thought I’d seen everything. ”
“This is a new series. I’ve never dabbled in something so…”
“Vulnerable?” Asher suggested.
“Precisely.”
“This is the man from the other painting. Who is he?”
“Come now, Blakely, you don’t expect me to tell you that, do you?”
Returning his attention to Lev’s work-in-progress, Asher gestured along the sinewy strands of muscle and tendon in Silas’s neck.
“You’ve captured him clearer here. The man in your first portrait,” he swiveled to the one on the wall, “looks like he’s holding his breath, but in this one you caught him mid-gasp.
“The shadows under his eyes are a moodier purple too, and the lavender freckles give it movement. This isn’t a gasp of pleasure, but of despair, maybe even the last breath of death. I can almost hear it.”
Lev’s stomach dropped. How did Asher read his art so acutely?
“I’m afraid to tell you, Blakely, but like any other uninspired art critic, you’re inferring more meaning than the artist intended.”
“But it doesn’t matter what you intended, right? Art is what’s inferred. The painting is no longer yours once you give birth to it. It’s for the viewer, the emotions you evoke in them … You said that.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Hm,” Asher replied with a cheeky smirk and walked back to the wall of Lucian’s paintings.
A handsome man with black hair frequented most of Lucian’s portraits—Wendell Morrigan, noted poet, Lucian’s romantic partner, Lev’s surrogate father, and Silas’s father by blood.
Asher pointed to Wendell’s neck, his clavicle, his Adam’s apple. “Lucian’s work is beautiful, but it isn’t fluid. It’s too heavy- handed. Too static.”
Lev said nothing, watching the genius of a lad with rapt attention.
Lucian had once said that his art was stone, while Lev’s was water. At first, Lev thought water meant weaker, until Lucian clarified that water carved through stone if given enough time, while stone would only gather moss.
Blakely’s tongue peeked out between parted lips. A tic when lost in thought. An intimate thing for Lev to witness. His tongue dipped back into his mouth.
“It’s all subjective anyway, isn’t it? I prefer your style, but it doesn’t make Lucian’s any less.”
“Don’t worry, Blakely. You haven’t offended me. In fact, you’ve enchanted me so thoroughly that I fear I’ll die if I don’t watch you paint immediately.”
Lev exchanged his still-drying painting for a fresh canvas and placed it on the easel.
“Sit.” He patted the stool he’d spent so much time working from.
Asher nibbled that plump lower lip again. Lev bit into his own and turned his gaze heavenward.
“I don’t have any of my equipment.”
“Use mine.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Come now, Blakely, you know you want to.”
“He is rather pretty,” said a saccharine voice.
Silas .