4. My, What Sharp Claws
MY, WHAT SHARP CLAWS
LEV
S ilas prowled on spindly legs, dressed in black like a splotch of spilled ink, playing every bit the part of a stain Lev could never erase. Pale, near-skeletal fingers trailed toward Asher’s flushed cheek.
“No wonder your little protégé enchants you so.”
Lev fought the urge to tackle him, but he couldn’t touch Silas, because he wasn’t real.
“He almost reminds me of me. Beautiful. Haunted. A half-empty glass waiting to be filled.” Silas moved behind Asher and toyed with a curl at the base of his neck.
“Entirely unaware that you have nothing to give him, that you’ll leave him more empty than before, then dance on the shards of the trust you broke. ”
Silas buried his nose in Blakely’s hair, sharp shoulders rising as he inhaled. “What does he smell like, Levvy? Does he smell like ours?”
Lev steered Asher by the shoulders to the stool.
“He is young, though…” Silas crossed his arms and leaned against the wall beside a painting of his father. “I never knew you were that kind of predator.”
Then, he disappeared .
Blakely was staring. Fucking Silas.
“Please begin,” Lev said. “I need to see to breakfast and shall return shortly.”
Lev sped from the studio and into the washroom. His hand shook as he twisted the dial of the faucet, and while he waited for the pipes to clear, he searched his reflection in the tarnished mirror. Aside from the black spots of mirror rot and guilt that ate at him, he found no predator there.
The crimes Lev had committed against Silas were many, but he’d never preyed on him. He splashed water on his face, and forced Silas from his thoughts.
When Lev returned to the studio, he found Asher engrossed in his work, sketch finished, a few colors mixed on a saucer he’d stolen from beneath one of Lev’s forgotten teacups. A battered notebook lay open on the ancient utility cart he stored his paint in.
On his canvas, Asher had sketched a narrow river surrounded by trees, the Bolton Strid, according to the page in his sketchbook.
Curious choice. A man clung to a granite boulder on the bank, his lower half already engulfed by the Strid, but the man’s face was as serene as if he were a water sprite returning home after nearly drowning on dry land.
“You’re making yourself at home.”
Asher turned. “I’m sorry. I was only…”
Lev lifted his hand. “I was teasing, Blakely. I want you to be comfortable at Lichenmoor.”
Asher moved to take the sketchbook from the stool, but Lev plucked it up first.
“I’m not finished with that.” Asher extended his hand, attention still fixed on his painting, a perfect picture of ambivalence belied by the subtle twitch of his jaw clenching. “Give. It. Back.”
Yummy.
“Come now, Blakely.” Lev hoisted the sketchbook just out of reach. “Surely you can paint without your reference while I have a quick peek.”
Looking at another artist’s sketchbook was like peeling back their skin and flaying their soul. Lev wanted to make things even, to see Asher as much as Asher saw him.
In a flash of motion, Asher leaped from the stool in an ineffectual, if not adorable, attempt to wrest it from his grip.
Lev lowered the book, intending to return it, but in the melee, the book fell from his hands.
Pages fluttered as the sketchbook drifted to the ground, flashing snapshots of blurry sketches and notes to himself. One drawing gave him pause.
Four crescent lines that could have been turbulent waves, blades of snipped grass, vertebrae trailing down the center of a back. But it was familiar. Uncanny.
His long arms were no match for Asher as he plucked the book from the floor and opened it—a freight train barreled into his chest.
Using Lev’s foot as a step stool, Asher vaulted up Lev’s body, and snatched the sketchbook from his hands, then stuffed it into the front pocket of his hoodie. His cheeks were, if possible, an even darker shade of red.
“My, what sharp claws you have, little dormouse.”
Blakely scowled. “Don’t call me that. I won’t let you bully me.”
Lev saluted him. “Noted. But you misunderstand. I wasn’t bullying you. It was sheer curiosity that carried me away.”
“ Right .”
Baring his palms, Lev turned on the puppy-dog eyes that had gotten him out of many a quandary. “Please forgive me. ”
The wrinkle between Blakely’s brows smoothed, but not entirely. “Would you have let me look at yours?”
“No. I suppose not.” Lev stroked his beard and snapped his fingers. “But it’s only fair. I’ll trade you…”
What were those four marks?
He retrieved his notebook from the top drawer of the utility cart. “Here.”
Blakely stilled, eyes glazed with want, looking very much like a lover who’d been told he could come. His lips parted on a soft inhale caught in his chest. Blood fluttered in the pulse point of his neck.
Lev wanted to taste him there, count his heartbeats with his tongue. If he were as villainous as Silas claimed, he would have.
But he wasn’t, so he stepped back and gave his sketchbook a little shake like a lure on a line. What would Asher think of the sketches Lev had already drawn of him?
“No. I couldn’t.” Asher pushed the sketchbook away.
“You disappoint me.” Now he’d have to steal Blakely’s sketchbook later.
Curiosity would drive him insane if he didn’t find out what those four lines made up. He could ask, but something about the lines filled him with foreboding. He’d take it only long enough to look.
“Please continue.” Lev gestured for him to sit.
Asher’s eyes narrowed on the stool as if it were rigged with a shocking device.
“It’s not a trap. Go ahead. I promise to behave.”
Asher scoffed, but finally sat. He stretched his neck, tilting his head backward, and rolling it to one shoulder, and then the other like he wanted to taunt Lev with an Adam’s apple so anatomically perfect only some sculptural deity could have constructed it.
Before Silas had died he’d once said, “You know it’s just glands strewn over cartilage.
I cannot fathom why you’re so obsessed.” With a pop of suction broken, Lev had lifted his mouth.
“It’s living art, an architectural landmark.
” Lev had ended the sentence with a bite to the spot.
Silas had laughed and pushed his head away.
“Easy there, Van Gogh. You need some fresh air.” Lev had clucked his tongue.
“Perhaps you’re right. Forgive me whilst I steal the breath from your lungs.
” Sealing his lips over Silas’s, Lev had done exactly that, kissing him until they both were breathless.
Things between them hadn’t always been bad.
The swirl of Asher’s paintbrush on his palette brought Lev back to the present.
Lev memorized the way Asher gripped the brush between his fingertips with nary a tremor despite his audience, how his tongue darted out between his teeth again, resting on his lower lip as he surveyed his progress, the sharp glint in his eye as he layered confident strokes on the canvas.
He’d slipped into that liminal space where art bled into reality, where the outside world faded away, and all that was left was emotion, memory, sensation—the scent of wet paint and linseed oil, the nearly inaudible scratch of bristles against canvas.
Watching someone make art was like watching them get off, the closest Lev could get to reading someone’s mind, to knowing what they looked like on the inside. If he sank his teeth into Asher, what would he taste like? What would he bleed?