31. Like an Ancient Oak
LIKE AN ANCIENT OAK
ASHER
L ev’s confession was either a sincere declaration or the world’s worst pick-up line since language was invented.
“You see through my lies.” Lev lifted his head. “Look at me. I’m telling the truth. Please forgive me. Again. Hopefully, for the last time.”
Asher would have given Lev another chance regardless, and that was the problem.
“Get back up here.” Asher tapped the bench.
“I quite like it down here though.”
Asher rolled his eyes. “You can find something to grovel about later. Your bad jokes are a good place to start.”
Lev sat beside him and kissed Asher’s hand. “Thank you.”
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand. If all you wanted to do was watch me, why not come to me?” Would Lev finally confirm Asher’s suspicions?
“I watched your progress videos on social media many times over,” Lev said.
“I think it broke something in me, all of those silent videos of yours with only your hands in view, gripping the brush, the way your fingers moved. Watching you work was a spiritual experience for me, and when you painted your more erotic pieces, I couldn’t help but touch myself and pretend it was you. ”
“You jerked off to me?”
“Not just you. Your paintings too. I…” He dropped his gaze. “At first I was content to study your work in photographs, to watch your hand grip pencil and paintbrush without seeing the rest of you, but after a while, it wasn’t enough.
“I purchased one of your pieces out of curiosity. Did your work resonate with me so intensely in person? Yes. It did. To touch what you had touched, to trace my fingers over the textures you’d layered with your brush, I’d never felt so understood and so alone all at once.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you won’t be angry, because in the spirit of sharing secrets, I must confess that I own all of your paintings. Erm, at least the ones you’ve listed. The portrait of the guilty man is my white whale.”
Asher’s mouth ran dry. “No.”
Lev nodded gravely. “Yes.”
“Are you serious?”
Lev nodded. “I’ll show you my collection after the others leave.”
Leviathan Marks had a collection of Asher’s work? It was too surreal to comprehend, but it was nothing compared to the realization that Lev had always been there.
“After Ben, I was so fucking broken. I wasn’t going to make art again. I couldn’t look at my old paintings, but I couldn’t throw them out so I put one up on social media, and then someone bought it.”
“The man in the fog.”
“That was you?”
Lev nodded. “The guilty man was the gateway drug to my Asher addiction, but the first piece I held in my hands was that one. It reminded me of Lichenmoor before it was a cage, almost as if you returned a happy memory to me. ”
“You’ve protected me and taken care of me since before you ever met me,” Asher whispered. “I needed you after Ben, and you were already there, rekindling my love for art, helping me move out, and move on.”
“Please don’t give me all the credit. If I hadn’t bought your paintings, someone else would have… and then I would pay them handsomely to add it to my collection, as I’ve done several times before.”
They’d strayed far away from the question he needed Lev to answer.
“Why didn’t you come for me? I know you would have if you could.”
Asher wasn’t asking because he needed to know. He needed to know that Lev could tell the truth about something that he thought would make Asher dislike him.
“Clever lad. Sussed it out, have you? I’m not surprised.”
Asher crossed his arms. “I need to hear it from you.”
Lev sighed. “I don’t want to tell you I have agoraphobia because then I’ll have to tell you what started it and why I can’t fix it.”
“If you don’t want to talk about it, you’ve said enough.”
The scuff of Lev’s palm over his beard sounded like the strike of a match in the silent church. Lev looked at him with ocean eyes so beautiful and vulnerable that Asher wanted to drown in them.
“Can I lay down while I tell you? Perhaps rest my head in your lap?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you.”
Lev turned onto his side, facing the dais, and used Asher’s thigh for a pillow. He inhaled a quivering breath, a melancholy Peter Pan of a man, needing Asher to take care of him.
“My father didn’t die of a stroke.”
How did a family keep secrets locked so tight? How much power did it take to change someone’s death and hide Silas’s existence? If something went wrong at Lichenmoor, would Lev erase him?
Ben had often taunted Asher about how his family wouldn’t know he was missing because they never checked on him. I could lock you in my basement, and no one would come looking for you. He’d done it once or twice for a few hours or the night.
Julian’s crude comment at dinner had been so similar to Ben’s threats, Asher had barely held it together until he ran out of the room, then fled in terror, taking the sword for protection.
Asher inhaled slowly and forced himself to remain rooted in the present, focusing on the sound of the ocean rolling away, the scent of sea salt and dust, Lev’s head in his lap, and the soft ginger hair that he stroked.
“What you saw of my father over the years was exactly how he was in private,” Lev said. “A little stern, a heaping dose of British stoicism, but always quick to laugh, passionate. He was incredibly generous with his money and time.”
“Like you.”
“Perhaps…” Lev cleared his throat. “He had high expectations for his students, and I was no exception.” Lev tugged Asher’s hand from his hair and rolled onto his back, then guided Asher’s hand back to his head. “Keep playing with my hair. I love it.”
After Asher complied, Lev thanked him and continued. “The only reason I’m good at painting and sculpting, and everything else I tried, art related and otherwise, was because Father demanded it. No matter how high his expectations were, I endeavored to meet them.”
“Did you?”
“Meet his expectations?” Lev laughed. “I don’t think anyone did…
” His gaze turned pensive. “Disappointing him was my greatest fear, and when I disappointed him most of all with the most colossal fuck up there ever was, he didn’t blow up like I expected.
It’s the apathy that killed me. That cold disregard. Like I’d died with Silas.”
Asher’s heart stalled in his chest and he forced himself to take another breath, to act like Lev hadn’t revealed something so massive.
“He looked at me like he’d wished the other son, the one who was never his son at all, had been the one who survived. There was always this simmering regret bubbling beneath the silence, the look of disgust I’d see in the corners of my eyesight.”
“I’m so sorry.” Asher squeezed his hand.
“Silas had died, but I was a ghost, and my father was haunted by what I’d done.” Lev continued as if he hadn’t heard him, as if he was in a trance.
“What did you do?” Asher whispered.
Lev blinked, spell broken. “I can’t tell you that. Not yet.”
“Did you kill him?”
“What would you say if I had?”
“I’d ask you why.”
Lev lifted his arm and cupped Asher’s cheek. “Don’t you have any self-preservation at all?”
“You won’t hurt me.” Asher knew that with all the faith a zealot reserved for their god. “You won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Asher removed Lev’s hand from his cheek and flattened it over his heart.
“You made me an artist. You love me. You’d never hurt me.”
“What if I destroy everything I make? What if I hurt the people I love?”
“I think we hurt the people we love the most because we love them.”
Asher’s tears landed on Lev’s cheeks. Lev brushed them away as if they belonged to him.
“Father and I seldom spoke after Silas. I made an appearance when requested, so I didn’t notice at first. Father masked his symptoms so well, but there were things he couldn’t hide.
“He’d tried to sack the house staff and then forgot that he had, then was outraged when they missed their shifts. He talked about people who’d died as if they were still alive and spoke to them as if they were real—my mum, Wendell, Silas.”
“Shit,” Asher said.
“It really was quite shit. To see Father like that…” Lev shook his head. “He wasn’t Lucian Marks. He was a fractured version of himself, a lonely man haunted by broken memories thanks to Alzheimer’s.”
“Oh, Lev.”
“He couldn’t paint anymore. To him, his art looked as it should, but the shapes were all garbled, the eyes all wrong, but it was art.” Lev’s voice broke. “Art in its most honest form.”
Asher covered his mouth, eyes crystalline with tears.
“Every evening he’d fly into a fury, directing all his anger toward me. Sundowning. I was afraid that my presence was hurting him, but I was more afraid of what he’d say next, of what final wounds he’d punish me with. So I left.
“His condition advanced until he got lost inside the castle he’d spent most of his life in. He saw my mother and Wendell all the time. Silas sometimes.
“He wandered at night, and while the staff were careful to lock the doors, he hid skeleton keys all over Lichenmoor. Maybe he was confused and tried to follow my mum, or Wendell, or… I don’t know.
“He vanished during a terrible storm. The staff searched until the tide forced them inside, but no one could find him. When the storm faded, and the tide retreated the next day, the ocean was kind enough to return my father after drowning him.”
“I’m so sorry.” No wonder Lev had been so distraught when Asher had nearly drowned.
“Father would have wanted to keep his dignity, even in death, so in one final attempt at meeting his expectations, I ensured there was no mention of Alzheimer’s in his obituary. Just a quiet, sensible death without suffering. Felled like an ancient oak while he slept.
“He’d requested to be buried at sea. I never understood it, but his directions were clear. We had to go miles out so his ashes wouldn’t return to the place he’d been trapped.”
Asher pulled Lev up from the bench into a hug that smelled of salt and moss and petrichor, of Lichenmoor.
Lev buried his face in Asher’s neck. “That’s when my agoraphobia began. The tide traps me here, and while that may seem irrational, the threat feels real to me.”
“It’s not irrational.”
“You are far too kind.”
Asher snorted. “I am not kind. You tell me all the time.” He gripped Lev’s arms and pulled back. “When was the last time you left?”
“I think you already know. You spent a great deal of time drawing that day in your notebook.”
“Your father’s funeral?” He hadn’t been sure, but if he’d had to guess…
“Yes. Why were you so fascinated with those photos? Did you sense the tempest behind my vacant stare?”
Asher nodded. “You didn’t look like yourself. I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d stared at the photos too long.”
“Like a word spelled correctly that suddenly looks wrong?”
“Exactly.” Asher sighed. “Did you know the photographs were being taken?”
Lev sucked air through his teeth and shook his head. “That photographer had been playing tourist at other people’s funerals for years. We should have had a private ceremony, but that wasn’t what Father wanted.
“I’ll never forget the way I felt watching the wind and waves scatter my father so far from himself, from his home, that he’d never find his way back.
“I couldn’t leave Lichenmoor after that. I’ve tried to get help, but it hasn’t worked yet. The only time I’ve made it past the gate, I needed enough meds to sedate a whale and still nearly clawed my skin to ribbons when I woke up. Do you think less of me?”
Asher shook his head. “We’re all victims of our brain chemistry. You said that.”
“Thank you.” Lev smiled sadly and pulled Asher up from the bench. “Let’s get you to your room.”
“I want to sleep with you.”
They could sleep separately tomorrow… Maybe. Asher never wanted Lev to be alone again.
“I’d love to, but I think we should sleep apart as you suggested. Our relationship is far too important. Not to mention, now that the secret door is open, we’re technically sleeping together, anyway.”