As a scholar of tales of knighthood and the chivalric code, Rory knew better than anyone that a true knight could only love his princess from afar. For the knight who dared to touch his princess, there could only be tragedy and despair.
Rory got into his truck and got on the road, first picking up a grateful Daiki from the home of his even-more-grateful puppysitter, Mrs. Stephens.
“You’re lucky she’s so patient,” he told Daiki when they were driving. “Wait till I tell your mom.” He wondered what Yamane would think of motherhood but decided he never wanted to find out. He drove his truck for a while, with Daiki sticking his nose out the window, using the MapQuest page as his guide until he came to a large house with a U- shaped driveway.
Rory’s first impression was that it was simply a mistake; he must have ended up at the wrong place accidentally. He took out the map and got his phone out of the pocket of his blazer when Yamane opened the front door and came out to greet him.
“Hi.” Yamane’s hair blew around in the breeze. “You found it.”
“I didn’t think you were here at first; I didn’t see your rental car.”
“The realtor dropped me off,” said Yamane.
“What?”
“I said the realtor dropped me off. She brought me here so I could see it before I signed a lease.” He waited for Rory to understand.
“You’re going to live here?” asked Rory stupidly. “In Baton Rouge?”
“Yes. It turns out my talent goes with me wherever I go. I don’t have to give up my work when I move.”
“Yamane?”
“Princess Celendrianna is complete in Japanese. It hasn’t been translated yet, but it’s finished… My art book is selling well, and I have this gallery opening. If I wanted to, I could retire now. I could have retired after the Snoggs if I’d wanted. I love my work, but I love you too, and I can do my work anywhere.”
“I don’t understand.” At that moment Daiki made his presence known by whining and scratching in the window of the truck. Rory unlocked the cab. Daiki jumped straight into Yamane’s arms.
“What’s not to understand? You are my home. I can only be home wherever you are. You’re in Baton Rouge, so I rented this house. When you decide where you want to work, we’ll buy a house together. If you want.” Yamane swallowed. “Was I wrong to think this way?” asked Yamane in almost a whisper. “Was I mistaken?”
“Oh, hell no, cher.” Rory was immediately contrite. He pulled Yamane to him in a dog- crushing embrace and kissed him like he meant it. “There goes the neighborhood.” He grinned ruefully, looking around. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” said Yamane. “I want to pick curtains and go to the washer/dryer place with you.”
“As if you’d ever put your clothes in a coin-operated machine.”
Yamane started to say something, but Daiki jumped from his arms to the flower bed.
“Oh, no! Daiki!”
Rory looked around him, then at Yamane and Daiki. “I was so embarrassed for you to see my apartment. I was worried all the way here.”
“Why? I’m sure it’s fine. Well… for tonight.” Rory laughed. “Show me around, cher.”
Rory declared the whole house a no-smoking zone. Yamane tossed his cigarettes into the outside trash and left his lighter by the fireplace.
“We can stop on the way to my place and get you a nicotine patch so you don’t get us killed while you’re quitting. I’ve seen how you get.” Rory nuzzled Yamane’s neck and watched Daiki roll on the grass. Rory sighed. “I can’t believe it.”
“What?”
“I would’ve taken whatever you had to offer me, be it a week or a day or an hour. I would have taken scraps, and you’ve given me everything. I just don’t… It’s not what I expected.” Rory’s voice broke a little. He held Yamane as though he couldn’t get enough, and truly, he couldn’t.
Yamane embraced him just as tightly. “You’re not just my knight; you’re my prince. You’re my hero. When I look at you I see all the beauty the world has to offer wrapped up in you like a gift. I know it’s stupid.” Yamane turned away, but Rory caught him and turned him back. “You’ve taken all the sharp edges off of me.” He saw Daiki nudge his paws under an ornamental cabbage and shrieked, “Daiki!” He tore off after the dog.
“Whoa. Yeah, no sharp edges there anymore.” Rory shook his head to get his hearing back.
“Well, you know what I mean.” Yamane carried the dog back. “I never knew I could want something as badly as I want to stay with you. When I flew to New York, it was lonely.”
“I guess that I understand better than most that home isn’t a place. My home has been your heart since the day I met you. If I lost that connection, I don’t know what I’d do.”
Yamane’s rich brown eyes searched Rory’s. “You’re safe with me.”
“Am I?” Rory asked for the reassurance he’d needed since the beginning, when he had no connection to Yamane and felt he had no right. “Am I really safe with you, Yamane?”
“I belong to you, Rory, and you belong to me.”
Rory put his lips to Yamane’s and kissed him deeply, savoring Yamane’s words as though he could still taste them there. “I love you.”
Epilogue
“Hey,” said Yamane, “I thought you’d need me to help you tie that.” He watched as Rory expertly tied the bow tie and smoothed the lapels of his tuxedo.
“I didn’t hear you, lover. Did you just say, ‘Dress, Forrest, dress’?”
“Okay, I’m sorry, it’s just that --” Rory turned around and Yamane swallowed hard. “Oh, Rory, you really are James Bond, aren’t you?”
“Nope, just another one of Ran Yamane’s rabid fans.”
“Oh, hey. You aren’t still going on about that, are you?”
“Nah. Just teasing.” Rory took Yamane’s hands and held him away so he could look him over. “You take my breath away, Yamane.”
“Rory.” Yamane went to him for a long kiss. They held each other for only a few seconds and reluctantly parted. “I’m afraid we have to go. I can’t miss it. They’re sending a damn limousine and everything.”
“Ooh, goody. We can make out in the car.”
“Uh, well. Speaking of that. There’s something I’d like to tell you about the exhibit. I hope you won’t get mad.”
“Oh, do you want me to keep my hands off? Trying to make the ladies think they have a chance, huh? What some people won’t do to sell pictures. I’m shocked, Yamane. I thought I knew you better than that.”
“No, Rory, I’m afraid you don’t understand,” said Yamane. The elevator arrived, and they stepped in. “You see --”
Rory took the empty elevator car as a sign from heaven that he needed to kiss Yamane breathless. Yamane still looked dazed when Rory casually told him, “After you,” and motioned him out. A black limousine with tinted windows waited for them in front of the hotel. The chauffeur opened the door and Yamane entered, followed by Rory, who didn’t wait until the door closed before he took Yamane in his arms again.
“In an effort to aid you in your subterfuge,” said Rory, “I think I’ll continue to kiss you, because I hear that rich, art-acquiring women love men with swollen, kissable lips.” Rory did his best to create that impression.
“Rory, I --” said Yamane, but that was as far as he got before Rory’s hands started sliding down the inside of the silk coat he was wearing, and the next thing he knew, he was holding Rory’s head in his lap and whispering, “Go, baby, go” to the ceiling of the limousine.
Rory surfaced from under Yamane’s coat with a satisfied expression on his face and reached into the bar for a beer, but not before he kissed Yamane thoroughly again.
Yamane sighed. “You are the grand master of the sneak-attack blowjob.”
“I think everyone should have a hobby, don’t you?” Rory sipped his beer. Just looking at his lips on the neck of the bottle made Yamane shudder again. “You were saying?”
“Oh” -- Yamane tried
to remember -- “yeah, I just wanted you to know that --”
The car came to a jerky stop, and the driver opened the door on Rory’s side, waiting for him to step out.
* * *
Yamane stepped out a moment later, after a quick adjustment and a check in the mirror. “It’s written all over my face, isn’t it?”
“Kind of.” Rory grinned. “But it looks good on you.” He smiled and squeezed Yamane’s hand, then dropped it, looking casually around. “I’m going for straight guy friend, how am I doing?”
“You’re a natural. I’ve been trying to tell you all evening, but I haven’t had the chance, Rory. It’s important that you know…”
“Yamane!” called a well-dressed man from the doorway. He smoothed his dark hair back and caught Yamane’s hands in his. “I was starting to get worried.”
Rory noticed he walked just like a New Yorker. He made no small talk but took Yamane and swept him into the gallery without a backward glance. Rory stood outside for a moment, looking at Yamane’s work through the windows.
As always, he was drawn in completely by what he saw. The paintings on display there were mostly landscapes, but unmistakably showed Yamane’s eye for pattern and detail. He made a landscape look like a textile somehow, and the way he used color and repeated patterns subtly was all Ran Yamane. These weren’t pictures you put in your living room because they matched the sofa. He took a deep breath.
Rory ambled into the gallery deliberately, upholding some inner contract to be a die- hard southern gentleman no matter how fast the world moved around him. He languidly sipped the beer he brought with him, and allowed himself to be absorbed by Yamane’s genius. He walked from painting to painting, amazed. He didn’t know that Yamane had such a body of work in this medium, for starters, and he hadn’t had any appreciation for just how good at it he really was. Personal prejudice aside, Yamane was so amazing Rory didn’t know where to begin.
There were large canvases that filled his gaze with a chaos of color, and small canvases like tiny jewels, so beautiful they seemed to beg him to come closer, as if he could be absorbed into them. He was making the rounds when a subtle change in the tone of the conversations around him caught his attention, a kind of hush that made him think Yamane must have entered the room. He looked around and found instead that people seemed to be staring at him. He looked behind him and heard a man near his elbow laugh.
“Don’t look now, but you’ve been spotted.” He indicated a smaller alcove with the words GALLERIE PRIVÉE on an archway over the entrance.
Rory meandered in that direction, certain now that people were staring at him. One or two women had their eyebrows raised, and one man put his program to his mouth to hide his grin. No one would meet his eyes.
“Yamane, what have you done?” Rory muttered under his breath. He entered the dimly lit private gallery and caught his breath. Each and every work on the wall was a pen-and-ink sketch of him. His face, his body, and him with Yamane straddling him in the heat of a passionate moment. He swallowed. He had been captured as early as when they first met, walking to Gladstone’s in Long Beach, and as recently as the week before, playing with Daiki on the lawn at his grandparents’ house. It was…unspeakable.
“Rory,” Yamane began. “Before you say anything, let me explain.”
“You little shit,” Rory hissed, but he was laughing. “Everyone out there was looking at me! I couldn’t figure out why.”
“Well, um… I tried to tell you.”
“Yeah, now I know, huh? Holy cow!” He looked around and sipped his beer some more.
“I wanted to show you before, but I didn’t want you to tell me no.” Yamane wrung his hands. “I won’t take it down; it’s my best work.”
“Of course you don’t have to take it down, are you crazy? Were you that worried I’d be angry?”
“Well --” Yamane bit his lip.
“I’m not. I’m an artist’s lover. I just guess it goes with the territory, right?” Rory kissed his brow, brushing the hair back away from his face. “But, damn.” He looked at an outrageously erotic picture of him in the shower. “I guess I won’t be teaching elementary school.”
Yamane raised his brows. “I guess I’m hot for teacher.” Yamane pushed him to the back of the private room. “This is my most recent, and I wouldn’t let them light up this alcove until I could show it to you. Close your eyes.” Rory did as he was told. From behind his closed eyes, he sensed the lighting change in the room and heard Yamane fumbling around with something against the far wall.
“Okay, Rory, open.”
Rory opened his eyes. At the far wall hung a painting about two feet by four feet. In the lower left corner, Yamane had painted a magnificent portrait of himself, in traditional Japanese clothing, the fabric texture and colors so magnificent they just popped off the canvas.
He had painted himself as a doll, thought Rory, almost cold and lifeless with an eerie, haunting, and ethereal beauty. Yamane’s image was painted on a hill with the night sky as a backdrop, his arms outstretched as though he could touch the stars. He had used a multitude of blues to achieve an inky, dark sky that was at once crisp and clear but vaguely chaotic, as though the heavens were moving, and the pinpricks of light that formed the stars vibrantly alive. Rory had never seen anything like it and it took his breath away.
“It’s exquisite,” he murmured. “So magnificent. I hope to hell you’re not thinking of selling that; I’ll kill you where you stand.”
“No, it’s not for sale,” said Yamane quietly. “Watch.” Yamane changed the light slowly. Rory couldn’t tell if he was turning it up or down, but the light had a subtle effect on the painting itself, and all of a sudden, Rory saw what Yamane was trying to show him.
“Oh, Yamane… I’m speechless.”
Yamane came to stand next to him. “It’s not a trick or glow-in-the-dark paint or something. It’s something I discovered one night while I was painting it. I… was thinking about you, and it just happened.”
In this light, Rory could clearly see that Yamane had used a pointillism technique to render his image in the cluster of stars. The thousands of pinpricks of paint Yamane used to paint them shone brightly in the dim light and made a perfect picture of Rory’s face in profile.
“I’m speechless,” Rory said again.
“And yet, you’ve said that twice.”
“Yamane, I couldn’t begin to be worthy of something like this --”
Yamane cut him off with a kiss. “Pish posh. A guy doesn’t find his prince every day, you know. At any rate, I quit smoking, so you have to stay with me forever. No one else will have me.”
“Yamane, it’s only considered quitting when you stop wearing the nicotine patch.” He picked up Yamane’s hand in both of his and kissed it. They stood looking at Yamane’s painting for a while, holding each other, completely oblivious to the others milling about the gallery.
“I have only one question for you,” said Rory, looking into Yamane’s shining eyes.
“What?” Yamane asked breathlessly.
“How are we ever going to find a couch that matches that?”
* * *
The End
* * *
Want to read more books by Z.A. Maxfield right now?
Oh noes, it’s over!
What do I read next!
How about Crossing Borders!
Chapter 1
It seemed unimaginably sudden when Tristan decided this was the last day he’d look at some guy out of the corner of his eye and think, maybe, yeah, that would be so…damn. He’d been feeling it all along, the nagging and awkward insistence of his brain over the ease of his body getting lucky. There wasn’t a girl in his circle of friends who didn’t come on to him, but lately his body had been vibing more insistently in a different key, and with every month that passed and every insipid date with his girlfriend Tiffany-call-me-Viper, he’d realized it wasn’t something he could run from anymore. Because when Viper stood him up, Tristan l
ooked at her brother, whatever his name was, when he answered the door all embarrassed and thoughtful and guilty somehow, and he thought, Damn, I should have asked you out instead.
“She’s gone out with another dude… Sorry,” Viper’s brother said. Like that was a bad thing. “I think she’s kind of over you, you know?” He hung on the door a little, and Tristan noticed right away that he was aroused and trying to hide it. “Sorry, man,” he said again.
Tristan held his hand out and smacked the door, stopping it as it was closing. Mesmerized, fascinated, and trying not to look at the spot of moisture growing against the faded blue of the man’s jeans, he said, “Hey, wait—”
But then what’s-his-name looked behind him at a girl with blonde hair and seriously kissed lips. She slid her arms around his waist under his shirt. Tristan turned to leave. “Never mind,” he added as he carefully stepped down the brick stairs to the sidewalk. “Tell Viper I said bye.”
“Sure thing,” said Viper’s brother as he closed the door.
Jeez… Viper. Tristan felt bad about feeling nothing at all.
So even though the decision seemed sudden, as he boarded up and down the large rolling hills on State College Boulevard, Tristan was aware that the choice he was making today came from a long and sometimes Byzantine series of personal dialogues. If Viper didn’t do it for him, it wasn’t going to get done. He felt relieved somehow, unencumbered. He felt the wind blow through his hair and through his life as it wafted out all the garbage he’d been doing for years that meant nothing to him.
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