Milo’s hands found the back of Adrian’s neck. His fingers in the close-cropped hair, pulling him closer. Not guiding. Needing. The tremor in both hands, the physiological fact of wanting this much for this long and having it here.
When Adrian’s mouth closed around him, Milo’s hips came off the mattress. The sheets tore loose at the far corner. Adrian’s name came out of his mouth, the first syllable clear, the rest lost. Adrian’s hand flat on Milo’s stomach, holding him down, his mouth warm and slow and thorough and devastating in its patience. Milo’s head pressed back into the pillow and his eyes were closed and his hands were in Adrian’s hair and every empty room in this apartment was full of the sound of his own breathing.
Adrian pulled off before Milo got there. Milo made a sound that was embarrassing and didn’t care. Adrian crawled up his body and kissed him and Milo could taste himself on Adrian’s mouth and his hands went to Adrian’s belt and pulled.
They got the rest of the clothes off with the gracelessness of people whose hands were shaking. Milo wrapped his hand around Adrian’s cock and Adrian groaned into his neck, his hips pushing forward, and Milo watched his face and saw what his own wanting looked like from the outside: the eyes closing, the mouth falling open, the loss of the composure that Adrian wore so easily everywhere else. Adrian undone by this, by him.
They found a rhythm that built without direction, Adrian’s hand around Milo and Milo’s hand around Adrian, theirforeheads pressed together, their breath mixing in the narrow space between their mouths. The bedframe knocked against the wall, a low rhythmic sound this room had never made. Adrian’s breath broke against his neck in fragments and Milo’s came apart against Adrian’s shoulder and the rhythm tightened and climbed.
Milo came first, his face pressed into Adrian’s shoulder, his hand gripping the back of Adrian’s neck hard enough that the seams of his own control went, and the shaking went through his whole body in one wave and he said Adrian’s name into Adrian’s skin. Adrian followed him over seconds later, cum warm between their stomachs, his hand gripping the sheet beside Milo’s head and his whole body going taut and then releasing with a sound Milo felt against his collarbone.
They stayed. Breathing. The bedframe silent. Adrian’s hand on Milo’s stomach, not moving, not asking for anything. The sweat cooling. The room holding them both.
Later. The ceiling of Milo’s apartment.
No crack in the plaster. No character. White, smooth, featureless. He lay on his back and looked at it. The sheets were twisted, half off the mattress, holding the warmth of two bodies and the smell of sweat and underneath it the olive oil on Adrian’s skin.
Adrian’s hand came to his chest. Palm over the heartbeat. His heel against the sternum, covering the place where Milo pressed his own hand when the weight came.
“What’s on your walls at home,” Adrian said.
Milo looked at the ceiling. “Hockey pictures. My sister’s school photos. A calendar my mother put up and never took down. The clock.”
His throat tightened. He pressed the heel of his hand over Adrian’s hand, his palm against Adrian’s knuckles, Adrian’s palm against his chest.
Adrian’s hand stayed. He didn’t push.
“I could bring something,” he said. Palm up, no pull. “A plant. A print. Something.”
The ceiling. The refrigerator hum. The city’s orange through the windows in long rectangles on the floor, reaching the foot of the bed and stopping.
Milo said nothing.
He heard himself not saying it. The offer had been a plant, a print, anything. Evidence of a person allowed to be here. A mark on the wall. A color that wasn’t eggshell. Proof that would be here when Adrian was not, that visitors and teammates and anyone who walked through that door could see and wonder about.
Adrian’s hand stayed on his chest. His breathing slowed and the hand grew heavier with sleep.
Milo lay there looking at the ceiling that held no crack and no nail hole and no shadow.
The garlic smell from the kitchen was already fading.
Adrian
Nina came to the studio one morning and ruined his life, which was her job as his best friend and she was very good at it.
He’d been at the worktable since seven, working on the smaller canvas, the warm-toned piece that had been asking different questions from the painting on the east wall. Yellows and siennas finding their positions before he’d directed them there, his hands ahead of his thinking, the turpentine rising each time he loaded the brush. One of those sessions where nothing fought him, where the paint went where it wanted and where it wanted was right.
Three raps on the door. Quick, evenly spaced. A formality, not a question. Nobody knocked like Nina.
“It’s open,” he said.
She came in with kiln smell on her jacket and clay under her nails and her glasses fogged from the cold meeting the warm studio. She pushed them clear with one finger without breaking stride, the red jacket, the heavy one she wore when she’d been in the ceramics studio’s unheated back room. Her boots left faint wet prints on the floor, each step a darker patch already fading before she’d taken the next one. She looked at Adrian, then at the canvas on the worktable, then at the painting on the east wall, then at his hands.
She sat on the wooden chair near the south wall and crossed her arms.
“Who is he.”
Adrian’s brush made one more circuit on the palette, the sienna bleeding into the edge. He set it down. “Someone I know.”
