“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 everythingthe 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.
Milo
He kissed Adrian three days ago and hadn’t slept right since.
Well, that’s not totally true. He’d slept. His body did what it was told, seven hours with the alarm set for five-thirty and the room dark and the refrigerator humming its one note. His body slept. His brain ran the kiss on a loop like game film he couldn’t stop reviewing. The angle of it, wrong because the bar was in the way. The pressure of Adrian’s mouth. The bourbon Milo tasted on Adrian’s lip that was Milo’s own bourbon, transferred. His jaw trembling against Adrian’s mouth, which was the part that kept him awake, because his jaw didn’t do that. His jaw held. His jaw was the one thing that always held, and it had trembled, and Adrian had felt it.
I shouldn’t have done that.
Yeah. You should have.
Three days. He went to practice. He ran drills. He ate what the nutrition plan told him to eat and drove the routes the schedule told him to drive and the system held the way it always held, except it had a hole in it now and the hole was shaped like Adrian’s mouth and four words that wouldn’t stop playing. He needed to be thinking about the power play and the road trip and his minus-two from the last three games. He needed to be better, Kovac’s word, the only word that mattered. He didn’t need to be thinking about a bartender’s hands on his face and the warmthof paint-stained palms cupping his jaw like it was something worth holding.
He needed wins. He did not need a boyfriend. He did not need whatever Adrian was. He did not need any of this.
He didn’t go to the Grotto.
He went somewhere else instead. A bar near the arena with a sports name he’d already forgotten, six televisions, and a menu laminated in plastic. The bartender said “what can I get you” before Milo had fully sat, which was efficient and completely wrong.
He ordered bourbon and it came in a pint glass.
A pint glass. Designed for beer, the weight wrong in his hand, too light at the top, the bourbon sitting at the bottom with room for six more inches of liquid it wasn’t going to get. A woman two stools down was telling her friend something with her whole body, elbows up, the universal geometry of a story that kept growing. The fryer had been going since he walked in, coating the roof of his mouth.
The bourbon sat at the bottom of the pint glass like something abandoned in a well.
