Once Burned

by Alexa Land

  “It’s okay. We’ll figure out how to get it tomorrow.”

  I left the bathroom to give him some privacy. After piling my wet clothes and shoes in front of my closet, I toweled off and pulled on a gray sweatshirt and a pair of flannel pajama pants. Then I stuck some clothes on the hook just inside the bathroom door before heading to the kitchen.

  He emerged from the bathroom about fifteen minutes later, dressed in the blue, long-sleeved T-shirt and black sweat pants I’d left for him. Instead of joining me on the couch, he sat on the floor right beside me and leaned against my thigh. I set aside my mug of tea and rested my hand on his shoulder.

  After a while, I said, “That was a frighteningly thorough disappearing job, right down to deleting your email address and abandoning your phone. You left me with absolutely no way to contact you.”

  “I wanted to cut off everything that was Ignacio. I always knew I’d eventually get caught in the lie, and my plan for when that happened was to make a clean break. I never thought I’d keep it going so long, or that I’d fall in love along the way. I also never imagined you’d want anything to do with me after you learned the truth.”

  I asked, “How did all of this start?”

  “There was a famous gallery in L.A. that I idolized. I tried again and again to get an appointment so I could show them my work, but since I was a nobody, they wouldn’t give me the time of day. I even went in with my portfolio a couple of times, but they had their security guard throw me out.

  “With every rejection, I became more determined. In retrospect, I was aiming too high, not that any of the lesser-known galleries were interested in me, either. But I built up that gallery in my mind as the ultimate goal. If I could just get them to display my work, I thought it would validate me as an artist. Then the rest of the art community would have to acknowledge me, too.”

  He sat up a bit and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear before continuing. “About five years ago, they put out an open call for emerging international artists, as part of a planned global exposition. That was huge, because they’d never done an open call of any kind before.

  “On a whim, I made up a fake name and bio, and I submitted my portfolio, because it was an opportunity to finally get them to look at my work. I was so stupid. I didn’t think about what it would mean if I was accepted into the show.

  “Much to my surprise, I got called for an interview, so I came up with a Spanish accent and dressed the part, and Ignacio Mondelvano was born. I had no idea the show would launch my career, or that I’d end up playing that role indefinitely.”

  I mulled all of that over before saying, “You said everything you told me, apart from your name and where you were from, was the truth. Should I believe you?”

  He looked me in the eye and said, “I swear I didn’t lie about anything else. That’s why I never had to worry about keeping my story straight, because it was all true. I was raised by a single mom, but that happened in L.A., not Barcelona. She died when I was fifteen, and then my entire life spiraled out of control.”

  I slid off the couch and sat beside him on the floor. When I put my arm around his shoulders, he curled up against my side. After a pause, I said, “I’m curious why you never legally changed your name, after living as Ignacio all those years.”

  “I always expected to be found out, and then I figured I’d have to drop the act and go back to being me. Whoever that is….”

  I said, “The logistics of using a made-up name must have been so complicated.”

  He nodded and put his head on my shoulder. “I have a fake I.D. with Ignacio’s name, but my passport and bank account are under my real one. I didn’t exactly have a plan in place when all of this started. Like I said, I didn’t expect that art show to launch my career. I just wanted the acknowledgement that I was good enough. But then my paintings sold out, and people were asking for more, and I got a write-up in a national magazine. All of a sudden, my dreams were coming true. I finally had the career I always wanted, and people began treating me with respect. It was bittersweet, because it was all based on a lie. Until I became someone else, nobody gave a shit about me.”

  “That’s not right. You’re an incredibly talented artist, and your work should speak for itself.”

  “In a perfect world, yeah, it should. But I tried to make it in the art world as Joe for nearly a decade, and I got nowhere. Maybe I just didn’t know how to play the game or get my foot in the door, and maybe it was a fluke that Ignacio struck gold on his first try. Who knows? My painting style was consistent throughout, so it had nothing to do with the quality of the artwork. That really only began to evolve in the last two or three years, as I gained more confidence. I guess I needed people to believe in me before I could believe in myself.”

  When I felt him shiver, I said, “Let’s go to bed. It’s much warmer under the covers.”

  He sat up and looked at me as he asked, “Are you really letting me spend the night here, even after everything?” I nodded, and he said, “But…why?”

  I grinned a little. “Remember the part where I told you I love you?”

  “But there’s no way you could trust me after all of this.”

  “Actually, that’s always been a work-in-progress for both of us. You didn’t trust me with your secret, and I’ve been holding back parts of myself. I have a hard time being vulnerable with you, and not just when we’re having sex.”

  He said, “But that’s not comparable to my giant lie.”

  “It doesn’t have to be. It’s just meant to show both of us have work to do. That was true even before all of this happened.”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes,” he said. “Also, I promise never to run away again. I know that was stupid and childish, but I was just so ashamed and absolutely sure you’d hate me.”

  “I could never hate you.”

  He studied the floor and murmured, “You must be so angry, though.”

  “I was, especially because you left before we could talk about it. But now that you’re back, I’m more relieved than anything else.” I kissed his forehead, and then I got up and held out my hand. “Come on, let’s go to bed.” He let me pull him to his feet.

  When we were both under the covers with the lights out, he touched my face and whispered, “I never expected this kind of forgiveness. It’s so much more than I deserve.”

  “I think it’d probably help a lot if you forgave yourself, too.”

  “I’ll work on it.” He chewed his lower lip, and after a moment he said, “Will you please come with me tomorrow when I meet with Ollie? He already knows the truth. I sent him a letter from Dublin, so you wouldn’t feel you had to keep my secret. But I need to apologize in person, and I could really use the moral support.”

  “I’ll be happy to go with you.”

  “Thank you, Cam.”

  After a pause, I said, “I don’t know what to call you.”

  He thought about that before saying, “I’m not Joe anymore. I haven’t been him in a very long time. Would it be strange to keep calling me Ignacio? It’s how I think of myself now, even though that’s probably pretty warped.”

  “I’d like that,” I said as I held his hand in both of mine. “No matter what you decided on, you’d always be my Ignacio.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next morning, I awoke to find Ignacio on the couch with his phone, which had been sitting on my kitchen counter since I returned from Ireland. He was dressed in his Henley and jeans from the night before, and there was a neatly folded stack of my clothes on the coffee table. I sat up and murmured, “You did laundry?”

  He nodded. “With only one outfit, I had to. I threw in some of your stuff while I was at it. Then I called the hotel where I was staying in Dublin and paid them to ship me my luggage. It should be here in a couple of days.”

  “We could have just asked my dad to send it to you.” I swung my legs out of bed and stretched my arms over my head.

  He put down his phone and said, “I th
ought about that, but I didn’t want to inconvenience him.” Ignacio stood up and gestured at the kitchen. “I bought some groceries and have breakfast ready to go. I was just waiting for you to wake up.”

  “I’m surprised I slept through all of that.”

  “I tried to be quiet.”

  I got up and crossed the room to him. He seemed subdued, and I took his hand and asked, “Are you alright?”

  “Yeah. There’s just a lot I need to figure out, including how I’ll earn an income now that my career is over.”

  I said, “Christopher is a good friend. If you go see him and tell him everything you told me, I bet he’ll keep selling your paintings in his gallery.”

  “I am planning to go see him today so I can apologize in person, but I can’t ask him to keep selling my work. He’s newer than I am in the art world, and he and his husband just bought that expensive property. Gossip spreads like wildfire in this community, and it’s just a matter of time before everyone finds out what I did. The last thing Christopher needs is to tarnish his reputation by associating himself with a fraud. It could drive his gallery out of business.”

  “You aren’t a fraud, Ignacio. Your paintings are the real deal.”

  “But I wasn’t, and when this leaks out, it’s going to cause a huge backlash.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “It’s a pretty safe assumption.” He headed to the kitchen and changed the subject with, “I’m going to start making breakfast.” I sighed and went to get a shower.

  When I joined him at the counter fifteen minutes later, he slid an omelet onto my plate and sat down beside me. There was also coffee, toast, and fruit salad, and I took a sip from my mug before trying to lighten the mood with, “I can’t believe you passed up an opportunity to make pancakes.”

  He picked at his fruit salad and muttered, “We don’t always have to do what I want.”

  Right about then, I realized his confidence was completely shot. I hoped it was just a temporary situation. It was sad to see him like that.

  Once we finished breakfast, I loaned Ignacio a jacket and we left the apartment. Since the rain had stopped, we decided to walk to Nana and Ollie’s house in Pacific Heights. He was quiet and introspective, and clearly worried about what was going to happen when he saw his long-time friend and mentor face-to-face.

  Dante answered our knock when we reached the rainbow-colored Queen Anne Victorian. He greeted me with a friendly squeeze of my shoulder before turning a dead-serious gaze on Ignacio. He could be intimidating as hell when he chose to. “Ollie’s expecting you,” Dante said. “Come in.”

  Ignacio murmured a thank you, and we followed Dante into the kitchen, where Nana and her husband were baking something. Unlike her grandson, Nana greeted both of us warmly. Ollie wiped his hands on his blue apron and crossed the room to Ignacio.

  The tension in the room was palpable. I was so relieved when Ollie rested his hand on Ignacio’s arm and said, “It’s good to see you, son.”

  Tears spilled down his cheeks, and Ignacio blurted, “I’m so sorry, Ollie. God, I’m sorry.”

  The little old man said, “Now, there’s no need for tears. Come on, let’s go to my office and talk about this.” He guided Ignacio out of the kitchen.

  I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and dropped onto a stool at the kitchen island. Nana smiled at me as she rolled out some dough on a floured marble board. She was wearing a pink track suit and an apron printed to look like a sexy lady in a bikini, and she said, “I always knew he’d come back, because you two are meant to be. That was obvious from the first moment I saw you together at that bachelor auction.”

  I asked, “How mad was Ollie when he got Ignacio’s letter?”

  Nana pushed her big, round glasses further up the bridge of her nose and said, “He was surprised, but he wasn’t angry. When your kids do something wrong, it doesn’t solve anything to get mad at them. You just gotta hear their side of it and try to understand.”

  Dante, who’d been raised by Nana from the time he was seven, sat down beside me and shot her a look. “You used to get mad at me all the time when I was a kid.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I’ve mellowed with age,” she said. “Besides, you were a willful little fucker. Even Mother Theresa would’ve had her patience tested if she’d had to put up with your shenanigans.”

  Dante grinned at her affectionately, then turned to me and said, “She’s not wrong.”

  “I can only imagine you as a kid,” I said. “I bet you already dressed like that and thought you knew everything.” I gestured at his expensive, dark gray suit, which he wore with an open-collared black dress shirt.

  “Actually, I dressed like that as a kid.” He indicated my jeans, sneakers, and dark blue warm-up jacket, which had a white stripe down each sleeve. “I thought you’d turned a corner recently in your wardrobe choices, but you seem to be regressing.”

  “Hey, it’s a day off.”

  He held his arms out to the sides and said, “So’s this.” A teasing grin curled the corner of his full lips.

  I asked, “What’s your family up to today?”

  “Charlie and Jayden are working on a couple of landscape paintings. Jayden seems to have caught the art bug, and Charlie started painting to show his support. Turns out, my husband’s a natural, much to his surprise. I’m going to bring home some lunch for them in a little while, but first, I wanted to drop by and see if Ollie needed my help with anything.”

  “Like tossing Ignacio out of the house when he came by to apologize?”

  He said, “I’m just here to keep the peace.”

  “Ignacio’s racked with guilt as it is. Could you try to be a little nicer to him?”

  “Considering he lied to people I care about, I think I’m being remarkably civil.”

  Nana had sprinkled the dough with cinnamon-sugar and rolled it into a long tube, and as she sliced it into little pinwheels, she said, “Don’t be a tool, Dante. If Cameron and Ollie can forgive him, then you sure as shit can, too.”

  She turned to a pair of baking sheets, which contained a lot of five-inch-long rolled tubes of dough. When she began topping each tube with a pair of round pinwheels, Dante asked, “What are you doing, Nana?”

  “I’m making cinnamon roll topiaries. See? There’s the stem, and these are the flowers.” Nana seemed blissfully unaware of the fact that she was making a tray of dicks. I grinned at my friend, and Dante just sighed.

  About half an hour later, as four dozen cinnamon dicks cooled on the kitchen counter, Ollie and Ignacio emerged from the office. My boyfriend gave him a hug, and Ollie said, “We’ll be expecting you and Cam for dinner next week. Take care of yourself, son, and try not to worry. You were born to be an artist, and we’re going to figure out a way to salvage your career. Mark my words.”

  Ignacio said, “I’m just grateful you were willing to forgive me.”

  “Quit beating yourself up over this, kiddo,” Ollie said. “You’re the same old Iggy I’ve always known. What’s that they say? A rose by any other name?”

  Ignacio smiled at him, and then he said, “We’d better go, but we’ll see you next week. Thank you for everything.”

  “Here’s a little goodie for the road.” Nana handed each of us a pastry wrapped in a napkin, and then she exclaimed, “Oh hell, I forgot the best part. Hang on.” She grabbed a bag from the counter and squirted the tip of each cinnamon dick with a generous dollop of white icing.

  Ignacio and I both held back a laugh, but then we grew serious when Dante said, “I’ll walk you out.”

  When we reached the sidewalk, Ignacio turned to my friend and said, “I don’t blame you for distrusting me. I really don’t know why Ollie and Cam were so quick to forgive me after what I did.”

  “They forgave you because they love you,” Dante said. “Try not to fuck that up.” Then he turned and headed down the sidewalk.

  As we started walking in the opposite direction, Ignacio said, “That c
ould have gone a lot worse. Dante’s definitely not the president of my fan club, but I get it. He doesn’t like it when anyone messes with his family.”

  “What did you and Ollie talk about?”

  “I told him the same thing I told you, about how this all began. He was worried about the legal ramifications of using a false name and misrepresenting myself, so he called a lawyer friend of his and asked a few questions. I’m going to write a formal apology to the gallery and return the money I made from the sale of my paintings in that international exposition. Then we’ll see what happens.” He shook his head and added, “Even after everything, Ollie’s still looking out for me. I never imagined anyone could be as understanding as the two of you.”

  “Dante’s right, we love you.” He smiled at me and laced his fingers with mine, and I said, “Cheers.” I tapped my pastry to his, and we both took a big bite of our cinnamon dongs.

  *****

  Our next stop was Christopher’s gallery. Surprisingly, he seemed amused instead of angry, and he leaned back in his desk chair after Ignacio repeated his origin story and said, “It’s so damn weird to hear you talking without the thick, Spanish accent. That was an Oscar-worthy performance, for real.”

  Ignacio said, “I’m sorry I lied to you.”

  Christopher tucked a blond curl behind his ear and said, “I’ll admit, I was kind of pissed off when I first got your letter. But I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I actually get it. I had some bad experiences in the art world early on, which is why I decided to open my own gallery and play by my rules. I wanted to give outsiders like us the chance to reach an audience, even if we’re not the ‘popular kids’ in the art community, or the flavor of the month. All of this just goes to show your paintings are in exactly the right place. Oh, that reminds me.” He sorted through the paperwork on his desk and produced an envelope, which he held out to Ignacio. “The last of your Cuba Series sold. Here are your royalties.”