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I entered through the unlocked side door, my careful footsteps carrying me to the living room. Ambient light drifted in from the open patio wall, providing enough illumination to see what was in front of me.
The cool night breeze ruffled the edges of the dust covers draped over the furniture, and a hint of stale air lingered inside the home. I wondered how long it had gone unused.
Perking my ears, I listened for movement upstairs but nothing came, or at least nothing loud enough to be heard over the warning bells going off in my head. I’d been about to leave—about to run, actually—thinking I’d gotten it all wrong, hoping I had. Hoping my worst dream and favorite fucking nightmare wasn’t somewhere in that ghost town of a house where no one else knew to find me.
My escape came to a screeching stop when my gaze bumped up against the painting leaning in a corner.
Something misfired in my brain, because where it had never taken effort to walk before, I now had to inwardly shout orders at myself to move.
I squatted in front of the forty-by-forty canvas, scanning the kaleidoscope of amber and green filling the sunflower field. It was one of my first paintings ever, and I’d sold it during the lowest point in my life.
My breath quickened, and I swiveled in my stooped position, taking in everything around me covered by white sheets. I began tearing them all away, revealing painting after painting, all done by me and sold over the course of the last four years to the art gallery downtown.
Only one remained hidden now. It loomed at the foot of the mantel, taller and wider than the others. The humming in my head intensified the closer I got to it, and I tore the sheet away before I lost the nerve to.
The unveiled painting depicted Franky as storm clouds. The fingers of smoke wrapped around my ankles and wrists, tugging them wide, reaching and sliding through my partially exposed cleft to smother my cock. My back arched off the bed of dark clouds in ecstasy as the gray tendrils snaked around my neck in the sunless sky.
The painting was provocative, for sure, but I’d kept my face in shadow, which made it more of a discussion piece, something left up to interpretation, rather than something pornographic.
I trailed a finger over the rough canvas. First over the bolt of lightning arcing across the sky and then the more menacing clouds charging my way—signaling an even deeper and darker degree of brutality approaching. It illustrated our relationship better than any photograph ever could.
I’d titled this oneHis Storm,because Franky was the storm, and I was at the center of it. And because I’d naively believed that the storm had belonged to me.
I could still remember the heartbreaking day I’d handed it over to Neil for a measly six-hundred bucks. Bit by bit I’d had to sell off every piece I owned just to make ends meet.
“This is how you see me,” Franky said from somewhere behind me. I’d felt him enter the room, same as I always did, but I was paralyzed to do anything about it.
“This is who you are,” I whispered. “You’re a storm that intoxicates and then destroys everything in your path. Why is this here? Why are any of them here?”
“I issued strict instructions to the gallery after purchasing my very first Leland Meadows piece. They were to contact me immediately if anything else of yours came through their doors.”
I spun around, anger escalating to unfiltered rage. Franky waited for it less than a dozen feet away, dressed in all black, his matching eyes devouring me. “I don’t get you. I used to think I understood you better than you understood yourself, but I was wrong.”
“Yes, you were, because you can’t know a man who doesn’t know himself.”
“Bullshit,” I called. “You knew who you were, and for a split second you were brave enough to be that person. You used to be a man who said what he felt and felt what he meant. You were warmth through your coldness, and light through even your darkest moments. You used to be a man who wanted to be better, even if you didn’t know how to be. And now you fucking relish in the worse parts of you. In thescaredparts of you. You’ve let the little boy in you run rampant. You’ve spoiled him. You’ve let him indulge in his own pity for so long that you no longer know what it means totry,” I ended, shaking my fists at him, pleading forsomething.
Per usual, I didn’t know how to be near this man and not be honest with him. I hadn’t cracked the code on locking my shit up tight and faking indifference. No matter how many years passed, no matter how many beds I hopped, no matter how many times I told myself I was over it, one second of staring into his eyes as he stripped me bare with his gaze, and my lies went tumbling down.
And my honesty didn’t only extend to pointing out his flaws, because reading Franky his rights was akin to holding a mirror up to my own imperfections. My own weaknesses. Many things that I accused him of could be said about myself. We were both little more than monsters in our own way.
“Whatever good there was in me is gone now,” was all he said. It was like beating my head against a brick wall and not expecting to bleed.
“Give it to him,” I said, skipping straight to my reason for being alone in a room with him. Comparing who this man was now with who he used to be would only lead me to trouble. Would only aid in making me remember the good. He already had the advantage by me being there surrounded by the walls he’d once thrown me up against, standing on the floors he’d eaten me out on, breathing in the ocean he’d take me sailing on before drowning me in his sweat and cum.
And the look in his eyes, and the way his posture dipped forward, said he would take any opportunity he saw to personally remind me of it all.
“Now’s not the right time,” he replied coolly.
A harsh and humorless laugh bubbled up in me, and I scrubbed my hands over my face. “You don’t even want it, Franky. I’m sure if it weren’t for Cole wanting it you would’ve sold it off to the highest bidder a long time ago. So why did you dangle everything he’s been working toward in front of him, only to snatch it away tonight?”
“That’s not—”
“Why!?” My voice echoed through the hollow shrine of the past we stood in, putting an end to the lie he’d been about to deliver with ease. “You wanted me to be there for him. You thought I needed someone to be there for me. Well, you got what you wanted, and now I want you to tell me why you fucked over the only person left in my life who means something to me,” I seethed.
He took a step toward me under the guise of shifting on his feet. My heart pressed against my spine in search of a way out, in search of a place to hide. I had to remind myself not to be afraid of him, remind myself that fear shouldn’t feel this good.
“What’s the matter, Franky? Cat got your tongue?”
