Wallflower (Rear Entrance Video, #2)

by Heidi Belleau

  Shit, Rob had no idea what was going on or what the guy meant. How could a man who spoke every single thing that crossed his mind somehow be so damn impossible to read? Of course, Rob could just ask him straight up; after all, Dylan would almost certainly answer honestly if faced with a direct question. Not that Rob could get up the guts to ask it.

  So instead, he tried, “So why Pop Art? There are so many galleries downtown, even the VAG. Why bus all the way out to Surrey?”

  They walked right past the shuttered coffee shop—and everything it represented—and into the main atrium of the gallery, where a permanent collection of ceramic and sculptural pieces were on display inside little glass boxes. Sterile. Untouchable.

  Dylan walked by them all like he didn’t even see them. “Because when we do our presentation next week they’re going to be expecting me to walk up there and talk about Coast Salish art or something. Blah, blah, blah traditions, blah, blah, blah authenticity and all that shit—never mind the fact that whether you count me as Inuit or white or something in between, they’re still not my traditions—but instead I’m gonna go up there and tell them about neon, mass-produced American art depicting decades-old pop culture, and present it as being just as authentic as The Raven and the First Men ever was.”

  Rob stopped just before the entryway into the Visiting Collections wing where the Pop Art exhibit was housed. “You know Bill Reid?”

  Dylan rolled his eyes. “Dude. I’m all bitter and possibly-almost-certainly having an existential crisis. I’m not ignorant.”

  “Sorry,” Rob said.

  “Apology accepted,” Dylan replied, and led the way into the gallery.

  If the conversation hadn’t ended then, it would have when Rob finally passed the threshold and found himself face-to-face with a massive wall of brightly colored Marilyns, the image and the impact so much more than any college dorm poster representation could hope to be. It knocked the breath out of him. “Wow,” he said, staring at all that color and contrast, his eyes unable to keep still on one single horizon. “It’s big.”

  Dylan laughed, the sound reverberating against the gallery’s white walls and high ceilings. “Yeah. And in your fucking face, right? Love it or hate it, you sure as fuck can’t ignore it.” He crossed his arms, his face in profile absolutely glowing with admiration, and then said, softer, “That’s what I want for my art.”

  Rob wet his lips with his tongue, looking back to the images again, even though they’d lost some of their lustre in the face of the passion glinting in Dylan’s black eyes. “You . . . you’re not afraid of being hated?” he asked, mirroring Dylan’s awed softness.

  “Who are you kidding, I’m already hated. Better to be hated for something I create than for my genetics. My heritage. Whatever.” The fierceness flared up hot but faded just as fast in a boom like a backdraft. “Anyway, don’t you want to make an impression? Be memorable?”

  “No,” Rob said, rubbing his hands. At least this soon after being outside there was a possibility of the gesture being because of the cold instead of anxiety. “Useful. Well-loved. Old and cherished even if nobody quite knows why.” Now it was Rob’s turn to catch Dylan staring at him, something unreadable but undeniably attracted in his eyes. “Anyway, um, we should . . . we should probably start taking some notes for this tour.”

  “Y-yeah,” Dylan said. And what was that unsteady waver in his voice?

  After the coffee fiasco, Rob refused to analyze it. Instead, he followed Dylan’s meandering path through the gallery, letting Dylan take the lead on describing and analyzing the pieces while he hung back and wrote notes. He’d put it all together in a PowerPoint presentation tonight, and then he’d shunt it off to Dylan, who could copy and paste the correct images into the frames.

  At the last, they came to a small screen-printed image, another Marilyn Monroe piece that couldn’t be more different from the first one.

  “Saved the best for last,” Dylan said.

  All pinks and oranges, it was a haphazardly collaged series of Marilyn Monroe photographs crowded together into one image, all of them depicting the same day at the beach: Marilyn frolicking in the sand in her bikini, waving a wrap—or was it seaweed?—behind her in the wind. Smiling beautifully as she came closer and closer to the camera. Except, all but one of the photographs were defaced. Some with checkmarks, one with a handwritten GOOD, but most with huge, angry Xs, often crossing out the whole of Marilyn’s face on that first furious stroke.

  Rob didn’t get it at all.

  “My Marilyn, by Richard Hamilton,” Dylan announced, and waited for Rob to take it down in his notebook. “Marilyn Monroe liked to personally vet photographs of her. That’s what the markings on the photos are, telling the photographer or her publicist or whoever which images she likes enough to publish and which ones she doesn’t.”

  Well, that was a much more practical explanation than the graffiti or defacement Rob had first assumed, but somehow it didn’t make up for the sense of anger—of the intent to destroy—that Rob still felt radiating in waves off those markings.

  “The artist made this shortly after her death. I read about how he probably called it My Marilyn to separate it from the similar work Andy Warhol was doing of her at the same time.” He tilted his head toward the huge wall of Marilyns at the gallery’s entrance in illustration.

  “Oh,” Rob said, writing quickly.

  “But I think there’s more to it. I mean, look at Marilyn Monroe. Changed her face, her hair, her body, her name, all for us. So we’d accept her. A cultural icon then, a cult one now. She died in probably one of the worst and most pathetic ways a person can die, and yet there’s what, three, four? generations of teenage girls who all idolize and identify with her.” Rob had stopped writing, was instead watching rapt as Dylan stared into the gaudy image, his hand twitching with the held-back desire to touch it, maybe even reach through it. “So I guess what I’m saying is, you know, if the artist just wanted to make a statement in opposition to Warhol, he’d have used his name. Hamilton’s Marilyn or something, although I guess that doesn’t sound as good. But he called it My Marilyn, like he owned her, or a piece of her anyway, like how we all feel about celebrities and Marilyn Monroe in particular. My Marilyn. Our Marilyn. But then you see the markings, how many photos she kept private versus the one picture she approved of—” He pointed at the bottom left Marilyn, caught mid-laugh, seeming to dance, chin raised and collarbones in sharp definition. “And it makes you feel like you never knew her—never really had her at all.”

  Yes. Yes. Even the most public person, the most carefully composed, the most aware of their image and how they affected people, especially that person, had secrets nobody but a few could know, secrets that were angry and hurtful and killing them on the inside, and all the while the world comforted themselves with the sanitized version and—

  Dylan was still staring at My Marilyn, lost in the power of the image, the power only he could see. But Rob was lost in Dylan.

  No resisting this new center of gravity. He reached out, caught Dylan’s soft fingers in his own clay-callused ones. Stepped close as he wove their fingers together, until their hands were clasped tight and so warm. And then he stood on his tiptoes and pressed their lips together, knowing that Dylan could easily fight him off and reject him, but he wasn’t.

  My Dylan, and simultaneously not mine at all.

  Sure, Rob had been kissed before. He wasn’t that much of a loser.

  But oh, he’d sure as hell never been kissed like this.

  Dylan hadn’t been expecting the kiss, but he wasn’t startled by it for long. He sprang into action, grabbing Rob by the shoulders and spinning them both until Rob’s back slammed against the bare white wall. Kissing him all the while, little gasps for breath sounding out of the corners of their lips as they collided and broke apart.

  “Hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” Dylan growled, boxing Rob in with his body, looming over him, overpowering him, taking over his senses in
an assault a thousand times more powerful than Warhol’s Marilyns.

  “I’m a big boy,” Rob gasped back, staring hard into Dylan’s narrowed eyes, daring him to call Rob puny now. “I think I know what I’m getting into.”

  No more talking. Dylan lunged forward and covered Rob’s mouth with his own. Tightened his grip on Rob’s shoulders the deeper his tongue got into Rob’s mouth. Behind his eyelids, Rob’s world erupted into neon colors, pink and teal and orange and yellow, a riot of sensation too powerful to process. Teeth on his lower lip. Dry lips sticking to his own. Tongue sweeping across his tongue. Breath puffing against his skin. A hand cupping his cheek.

  A hand cupping his cheek, tilting his face upward, gently posing him like a doll. Two sides of the same masculine power—forceful strength and sweet tenderness—and Rob was captured, helpless, at the chaotic center point where they crashed together. If this kiss and this meeting were a whirlpool, then he wanted to drown in it. If they were a tornado, then he wanted to be carried away forever.

  “Hey! You two!”

  The vacuum they were in exploded open, the outside world rushing back toward them and carrying a security guard with it. He was waving a nightstick that he clearly didn’t intend to hit anybody with, not remotely threatening or imposing, but Rob still wilted with embarrassment, half back to his senses. Dylan’s kissed-red mouth just broke out in a big grin.

  “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you,” the guard shouted once they were both looking, and for some Godforsaken reason, Rob gaped in the opposite direction, as if there were another pair of horny dudes just behind them rutting against the collection’s Lichtenstein. When he turned back to the guard again, he was stopped a few feet away, still shaking that nightstick like an ornery old man with a cane. “Yeah, you two! Not in here, you hear me? Now get!”

  “Fascist!” Dylan yelled back, but he was laughing, and he grabbed Rob’s hand. Tugged on it insistently as Rob stooped to pick up his fallen notebook and stuff it into his bag. He’d sacrifice the pen, wherever it was. And then he was up and they were running, dodging through the maze of white walls past a neon blur, back toward the red fire escape sign. Rob had a second or so to think how it could easily be a piece of art in this exhibit, with its hard industrial lines and bright geometry altered by its new context, and then the security guard yelled, “Not through there!” and Dylan pushed the bar anyway, and they fell together into the frigid, rainy alley to the high, aggressive chirp of the fire alarm.

  The rain drenched them both in seconds, Rob’s hair plastered to his face, and he thought that would be it for them, but Dylan grabbed him again and shoved him under a steel overhang where he was half sheltered from the rain and kissed him again. He wished he could say the kiss warmed him up, but it didn’t; he shivered against Dylan’s body, trying to find the slivers of warmth that could still penetrate the heavy ice-cold fabric of Dylan’s soaking wet sweatshirt. No luck there. He let Dylan’s hot breath warm his mouth instead.

  He couldn’t believe this was happening. He’d never been kicked out of anywhere, unless you counted temporary bans from 4chan. He’d definitely never kissed a guy in public, and in a filthy back alley at that. It took that romantic cliché of kissing in the rain and twisted it sideways into a bizarre mirror-world version, and Rob couldn’t get enough of it.

  He bucked against Dylan’s big body, let out little moaning yips into Dylan’s mouth. But as much as he squirmed, as hard as he pressed himself forward, Dylan’s hands stayed above the waist, massaging Rob’s shoulders or stroking his neck or combing through his wet hair.

  Enough of this shit. Rob reached up, caught Dylan’s right hand in his left one, and guided it down where it needed to go.

  Dylan let himself be posed, but once his palm was cupping Rob’s cock, it didn’t squeeze or rub, it just held still, frozen in more than one way. Dylan pulled out of their kiss and stared down into Rob’s eyes as both their panting breaths erupted in white gusts between them. “You sure about this?” Dylan asked, voice steady, but Rob could hear the harsh need there too, suppressed but present.

  “Yeah. As long as you are.”

  A gentle squeeze, then, as Dylan massaged Rob’s aching shaft through the tight denim of his jeans. “This is okay? Me touching you here? Like this?”

  “For fuck’s sake, of course it is. It better be, since I put your hand there in the first place. Now, c’mon, you dragged me out into this sketchy back alley, so you better give me the whole experience.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Dylan warned, eyes twinkling, and lowered himself to his knees.

  “Oh!” Rob cried, falling against the cement wall of the gallery. “Oh, oh shit, I didn’t mean that! You don’t have to—”

  “Do you want it? Because if you want it, I want it.” He palmed Rob’s dick, teasing him with not nearly enough pressure. And then the bastard licked his lips. Looking down and seeing Dylan looking up, it was like the whole world had tilted on its side. Poseidon Adventure: Blowjob Edition.

  “Yeah, God yeah, I want it, but in this rain your knees you’ll get wet and holy shit holy holy holy—”

  Dylan had opened his fly. Had pulled his bare, hot cock out through the Y of his briefs and into the cool air. “Love that poem,” Dylan said as Rob gibbered past comprehension and gave himself over to the feeling of those soft but powerful hands wrapped around his shaft, shielding it from the cold and twisting sinfully in opposite directions. Wringing him out.

  Anyone could see. Anyone could walk by. There might be surveillance cameras. Rob must have been going crazy. What poem was Dylan even talking about? He shouted and hissed as Dylan’s hot, wet mouth took in the head of his cock. He clawed at the wall for purchase as Dylan’s flexible tongue lapped at his pre-cum-drenched slit. And the whole while, those two hands locked around his shaft like a vice, twisting and twisting and twisting, driving him fucking wild while Dylan expertly worked the head.

  Who needed deep-throating when you could have this?

  He kept his hands on the wall, didn’t dare touch Dylan’s head, didn’t want to disturb his flow or his groove or whatever. And anyway, he was happy being passive, happy letting Dylan do things to him. And God were they amazing things. Mind-blowing things. Ball- and toe-tingling things. Oh. Oh.

  “Shit, I’m gonna—” He tried to rear back, but one of Dylan’s powerful hands snaked around behind him, grabbing a handful of his ass and keeping him close, no, not just keeping him close, pulling him in, drawing him forward until he was fucking into Dylan’s throat. And even though Dylan was gagging, he wasn’t letting Rob pull away; he just held him tight until he arched and shot, until the mind-bending My Marilyn pink that washed over him faded back into the glittering blackness of the wet alley again.

  “Nice,” Dylan croaked like a man who’d just taken a hit off a bong, and sat back on his heels to put Rob’s dick away again and zip him up. He wiped a rope of drool from his chin with the cuff of his sweatshirt.

  “That was—” Rob sputtered. “Do you want me to—” His knees buckled.

  Dylan was on his feet in an instant, catching Rob before he slumped right onto his ass in a puddle. He held him in a bear hug, and Rob shivered down to his bones, teeth suddenly chattering, his clothes sopping wet and ice cold. “Don’t worry about it, Puny. What do you weigh, eighty pounds? We better get you out of this rain before you freeze to death.”

  “A h-h-hundred and t-twenty,” Rob stuttered, dazed as Dylan threw an arm around his back and half carried him out of the alley and into the gallery parking lot.

  “Shit!” Dylan shouted, and Rob looked up from his drunken two left feet just in time to see the bus fly by. “Won’t be another one for at least a half an hour, this time of the night. Shit, shit.” He reached into his front kangaroo pocket and pulled out a battered cell phone.

  “What are y-you—”

  “Calling you a cab, Puny, before you get hypothermia or pneumonia or something.” He keyed in the numbers and raised his phone to his ear,
and Rob watched him, a little bit stunned, as he ordered the cab.

  They waited for it together in the bus shelter, sitting huddled on the bench and watching in somewhat awkward silence as the cars flew by. When Rob’s cab pulled up to the curb, Dylan helped him to his feet and pressed a fifty-dollar bill into his hands. “This should get you home,” he said, a little stiffly.

  “N-no. No. I can’t take this, Dylan. Thanks, but I’ll just use my dad’s Visa.”

  “No way. My treat. Least I can do, after subjecting you to the elements.” There was no wry smile, no twinkle in his eyes.

  Rob’s heart pounded, and he forced himself to look at Dylan straight on, fighting back that old survival instinct to hide behind his bangs. “Come with me, then. My roommates won’t mind,” he pleaded, and when Dylan’s impassive face didn’t shift, added, “Please? We can . . . warm each other up.” Too bad he missed the flirtatious mark by at least fifty miles.

  Dylan shook his head and practically dumped Rob into the backseat of the cab. “I really better not. Now get going. Don’t forget to have those PowerPoints to me by Friday night so I can finish everything up over the weekend.”

  “Oh. Um. Yeah, of course. Okay. See ya, Dylan.”

  “Bye, Puny.”

  The cab door slammed shut.

  “You did what last night?” Bernice shrieked.

  Rob stared down at the white lid of his Starbucks and pursed his lips, trying to ignore the heat of his cheeks.

  And then, because either his embarrassment wasn’t apparent to her or she just was too excited to care, she added “In an alley?”

  “C’mon, Bernie, keep it down. I don’t think the barista needs to know about my sex life.” He snuck a look at the girl behind the counter, but she wasn’t watching him too closely. He hoped it was because the whoosh of the steamer had drowned out his words, but more likely she was just used to pretending she didn’t hear awkward conversations from her customers.