He set the coffee cup down harder than he meant to. The sound carried.
He heard the loose board.
* * *
Milo came through the corridor in his shirt, unbuttoned, bare feet, and the cold of the studio floor hit him at the threshold. His hair was pushed sideways from sleep and his jaw was loose and he stopped in the doorway and his eyes went to the painting.
He stood there long enough for the radiator to cycle through its full complaint and start over.
“That’s me,” he said. To the painting, not to Adrian.
Adrian’s grip on the mug tightened. “It’s not finished.”
It was finished. It had been finished for two days. He said it anyway because the alternative was saying what was underneath it, and the morning was not big enough for what was underneath it.
Milo turned and looked at him. Not the quick inventory glance. The morning face, jaw loose, looking at Adrian with unhurried attention. Morning light on both of them, cold and even.
Adrian held it. Milo’s eyes were darker in this light, and the unbuttoned shirt showed the hollow at the base of his throat where Adrian had put his mouth six hours ago. The pulse there, visible. Adrian watched it.
Then Milo’s hands went into his pockets.
“I can’t do this in public,” he said.
Plain. No apology, no hedge. He was looking at Adrian when he said it.
Adrian looked at him. The coffee cup. The chip on the rim he kept meaning to stop using. He traced it once with his thumb.
He nodded.
He knew this shape. He’d lived in it for three years, the specific geography of accommodation, adjusting himself to fit inside someone else’s closet. He’d built his current life on the rubble of it. And here it was again, arriving in his own studio on a cold morning with a different man and the same sentence wearing different clothes.
He nodded and said none of that.
Milo did not move toward the door.
Adrian noticed. Every other time things had broken through between them, Milo had left. The laugh, the kiss, every time. The door was ten feet away and Milo was standing on the cold floor in his unbuttoned shirt and his feet were not moving.
“Coffee?” Adrian said.
“Yeah.”
He poured the second mug, the blue one, heavier, no chip, and brought it over. Their fingers overlapped on the ceramic during the handoff, Adrian’s paint-stained knuckles against Milo’s bare ones, and neither of them adjusted to avoid it.
They stood in the cold studio with their coffee, and the radiator ticked, and the city came up outside the windows. The first bus on Michigan Avenue, the delivery truck backing on the next block. Adrian’s socks on the cold floor, the left one damp where he’d stepped near the sink.
Milo held his coffee with both hands. The way he held everything. All the way, or not at all.
* * *
Adrian was in the studio when the Hounds played the Fury.
He’d been checking the schedule since preseason. He’d set up score notifications weeks ago, standing behind the bar on a slow night, tapping the toggle and setting his phone face-down and going on wiping. Before the wrist, before the kiss, before any of it. Because he’d wanted to know when Milo was playing, and he hadn’t made himself examine why until it was too late to pretend the answer was casual.
He was at the worktable with a smaller canvas, a study in warm tones, yellows and siennas. His hands were blue-black from the earlier session, the pigment settled into his knuckles. He worked the upper quadrant harder than it needed and let himself think about the nod.
Not the same person. The ex had saidof coursethe first time, with a smile that Adrian now understood had been the smile of a man closing a negotiation.Of coursehad meant nothing.I can’t do this in publicwas a different sentence. It was ugly and honest and Milo had said it first thing in the morning with his jaw loose from sleep and his eyes on Adrian’s face and Adrian was not going to pretend those two things were the same just because they rhymed.
His phone buzzed.Hounds 3, Fury 2. Final.
