True Colors

by Clare London

  Miles’ breath caught in his throat. He made as if to move toward Zeke, and then a pair of students pushed between them, crowding around the screen and jostling Zeke. Zeke grinned ruefully as he was swept back to the other side in a crowd of people. Miles followed his eyes for as long as he could, smiling with him. Then he moved in to the screen to make his own mark.

  ZEKE had slipped back to his quiet corner, watching the reaction of the guests. The gallery was a laughing, chattering mess of glamorous people, dipping fingers in paint and daubing evidence of their personalities all over a Perspex wall. The clear screen was covered with multicolored prints, smudges and drips. Some of the fingerprints touched at others; some overlapped as if the fingers had entwined. People were pushing and shoving to find a space, then coming back to look at their contribution and to play the game of guessing whose the other prints were.

  Never had this city’s art world had such fun.

  “Brilliant idea, hon,” smiled Red. He appeared protectively at Zeke’s shoulder. “Audience participation, eh? No one else would dare.” His eyes lost their cynical glaze for a moment and he watched the participants with unadulterated amusement. A corporate executive roared with laughter and dabbed the remains of his painted fingertips onto the nose of his expensively dressed wife. A journalist shrugged in embarrassment but pushed another person aside to get to the color of paint that he preferred. A couple of young students, with complimentary tickets from their local art college and very obviously in love, refused the wipes to clean themselves and instead moved away from the screen with painted fingertips pressed together, frowning with their concentration on maintaining the touch.

  Zeke smiled along with the blond man. The gimmick had been taken up far more enthusiastically than even he had hoped. “They’ve got to join in, Red. No point offering connection unless there are people there to accept it. Both sides have got to be involved.”

  Red looked at him more carefully. “You talkin’ about art, hon?”

  “Of course,” replied Zeke, evenly. “That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?”

  He felt Red tense beside him, and wondered if he was going to say something else. Or perhaps he was worried that Zeke would start prying into his meeting with Carter. But he saw the real reason why, a moment later. Remy Dion had stepped up to the screen and was making her mark in a particularly sickly yellow-colored paint. She had the female publishing editor of the fashion magazine hanging onto her left arm, and the younger son of one of the sponsors for Miles’ gallery on her other side, his arm curled possessively around her miniscule waist.

  Probably her next career conquest.

  Her cronies from the magazine cooed and fluttered around her, offering the wipes that she used quickly and thoroughly, as if the paint might poison her skin. And then, as she dropped a soiled wipe into the sycophantic hands of the younger son, she glanced across at Zeke. Her mouth smiled at her fans; a wide, even-toothed, professional smile. But it was the look in her eyes that reached Zeke, and he was shocked to see a deep, naked fury in them. Christ, he’d never even met the girl, had he? Seen her at the first exhibition, though she’d arrived late, just to accompany Miles to the after-show party. And he’d read plenty about her in the papers, with Miles when they were dating, and afterward. Most of it crap, of course, created for the sake of sensation. She and Miles had parted amicably, so he’d thought.

  Was that what that look was about? Jealousy? Could Miles have misjudged the situation that badly?

  He looked around and saw Miles standing by the front door of the gallery. The dark-haired man had left his prints and then moved himself away from the screen quite unobtrusively, leaving Zeke to his admirers and the fascinated finger-painters. He wasn’t looking for Remy, for his eyes passed swiftly over her. Zeke wondered if he were looking for Red. The blond man had also left his side, possibly to avoid being too close to Remy himself. It was blatantly obvious how much he disliked her.

  It’s time. Zeke took a deep breath. Now or never!

  He looked quickly over toward the door to his apartment. It was, of course, locked today, and a low table had been drawn half across it, to separate the private areas from the public. The table had been used for more catalogs and a few of the freestanding exhibits. Zeke’s eyes flickered to the wall beside the door. It was blank, as if the picture hanging had stopped short of that area. Six feet up that wall was a single picture hook, unused. Zeke caught at Tony’s arm as the boy rushed past him, probably fetching more drinks. “Showtime, Tony,” he murmured. “I need to put that last picture up, okay?”

  Tony nodded and smiled. They both went over to the table and Tony reached under it, pulling out the wrapped picture that he and Malia had looked at earlier. It had been safely and secretly stored there while the guests wandered past and marveled at the wealth of other exhibits. Tony helped Zeke rip off the packaging, standing behind him and keeping him partially hidden from the other people moving past.

  Zeke held the picture in front of him, looking down on its uncovered face. Tony was peering over his shoulder, trying to see what it was. It was smaller than many of the paintings displayed that day: a black-and-white print. When Zeke looked back up, the expression on his face obviously startled Tony.

  “Zeke, are you okay? We can put it back if you like….”

  Zeke shook his head. “It’s time to come out of whatever artistic closet I’ve been hiding in, you know? I’ve done it for myself. But now I must show that I have.”

  Tony grunted as if he didn’t know what the hell was going on, but as that summed up most of his working life so far, he was reconciled to it. He smiled at Zeke again, his face a bit flushed from the champagne he’d been stealing glasses of all evening. “Whatever you do, Zeke, it’s okay by me. I trust you. Here; let me help.” He held the picture steady as Zeke fixed it swiftly onto the hook. Then they both pulled away to look at it on the wall.

  Zeke sucked in his breath.

  TONY stared in surprise. He’d never seen anything like it.

  It was a pencil sketch of a pair of hands, slightly larger than life size. Solely the hands; palms facing each other, fingertips just touching. But it was so much more than just a sketch. There was something about the fluidity of the pencil lines, something that breathed in the veins and the tendons of the hands as clearly as if they were living. The shading was careful, yet it flowed easily; the color scheme was frighteningly simple, yet it implied far more depth and tone than ever a single graphite pencil had promised before. The skin on the hands seemed to wrinkle and glow; the whorls on the tips of the fingers were individually crafted.

  When Tony looked more closely, he realized that the hands didn’t really match, as if there were two different people involved. One hand had long, slender fingers, with the slightest nub of a lump on the side of the middle finger. The skin looked healthy, but there were creases of regular use on the fingertips. The other hand had a slightly darker tone, with skin that looked better cared for, and nails that looked carefully shaped. There was a tiny fleck at the base of the ring finger, in a crescent shape—like the memory of a scar.

  The hands touched at only a few points, and yet Tony felt a slow, sensual shiver as he gazed at the picture. Unlike some of the other portraits on show today, it wasn’t of hands praying, or of hands touching in passing. Instead, there was deep emotion there, and raw longing. The hands were coming together; they were embracing. He felt an unmistakably sexual charge from it, and he flushed, confused. He’d never felt that way from a mere drawing….

  It fit the theme of the exhibition perfectly, of course. But Tony felt that it stood alone for some reason. It represented something more than—and different from—every other painting here today. Not like me to be so fanciful. His heart was beating far more quickly than before, and there were goose bumps up his arms.

  Some of this art appreciation stuff must be rubbing off on me.

  He was aware of the crowd behind him slowing down as they caught sight of the new addition.
He turned to look at Zeke—to ask, naively, who’d drawn it—but the man had already gone from his side. He glanced quickly around the rest of the gallery and saw heads turning toward him. There was a sudden buzz of interested chatter around the room. When his eyes darted toward the doorway to the outside world, he saw his boss, Miles Winter, still standing there, though now his eyes were riveted on the picture.

  Tony wondered why Miles looked so pale tonight.

  Many of the original guests had left, but there was still a sizeable crowd remaining. Within a couple of minutes, almost all of them were clustered around Zeke’s new picture, or trying to get a better view of it. Tony listened with fascination to the comments around him. They were many and varied, but mostly impressed.

  “Whose is it?”

  “Christ, sweetie, you should stay on Celebrities Behaving Badly and leave art reviews to us. It’s his, isn’t it? Zeke Roswell’s. Must be….”

  “You’d know it was a Roswell, wouldn’t you? Even without the colors. Look at the pen strokes.”

  “Too delicate. More like a sketch….”

  “More like his brother’s work, you mean?”

  “There’s boldness here that you never got in Jacky Roswell’s stuff, dammit. You could admire Jacky’s skill, but this stuff of Zeke’s grabs you by the balls, and you gotta feel it….”

  “I always said that about his work, didn’t I?”

  “Makes my stomach turn, you know… in a sexy kind of way.”

  A couple of journalists were huddled together in front of Tony, muttering. There was a young man—obviously a trainee—and an older, more confident woman who was probably his features editor.

  “If it’s a new Roswell, this is a hell of a story, kid,” she muttered. “Gotta have a headline. But what’s the damn title? See anything?”

  The young man peered at the corner of the picture. “Says 4:Y. Nothing else. Zeke Roswell always titled his paintings cryptically like that, didn’t he?”

  “4:Y? ‘For why’? What the fuck does that mean?” The trainee beside her winced, nervously gripping his notepad, so tightly the bindings twisted. She peered at the picture herself, as if she were trying to see behind the canvas. “Some kind of philosophical crap-trap, I expect, like all these artists favor. Just painters, aren’t they, at the end of the day? For why… it’s probably California-speak, probably a confused cry about the state of his personal angst. Like we’re bothered. He needs to get a proper job, that’d tell him for why….”

  She ignored the growl from the back of their group. It came from behind Tony, and he smiled with some satisfaction at hearing it. The young man also heard it, and he flushed. His eyes darted to Tony’s for confirmation, and Tony nodded back to him. So the kid seemed to be new to the city pages, but he looked like the kind who was keen to do well, and he would have read up on the Roswells, both of them, as soon as he knew he’d got the exhibition job. And dollar to a cent, he knew the guy standing directly behind them was the man himself—Zeke Roswell.

  ZEKE and Miles both stood behind Tony; Miles had moved very swiftly to stand at Zeke’s side. Both listened carefully to the conversations around them. Both had growled at the journalist’s comments. But as Zeke reached out his hand to attract her attention, Miles’ grip held him back.

  Zeke turned to look at the strong, lean hand on his shoulder. He particularly stared at the tiny, crescent-shaped scar at the base of Miles’ ring finger. Miles had told him it was from a rather unexciting household accident when he was young, but it had never faded completely. Zeke remembered licking at it, many times; softly lapping up drops of spilled beer or salt from takeout supper; sucking the sweat on Miles’ fingers after an energetic session in bed; cleaning off the sticky threads of warm come, after climaxing deep inside Miles’ fist.

  He had a fascination for it, similar to the way that Miles caressed his tattoo. It was one of the marks of Miles—one of the things that were just his. He shivered. Reluctantly, he pulled back his hand, and sighed. “Ah, Miles, I just want to tell her—”

  “Leave it,” urged Miles, in a low voice. “Leave her. Why would you want to waste your time on her, anyway? This is your day, Zeke, your show. Don’t you see it now? It’s my gallery, okay, but this is all you, all yours. You’re the one they love; the one who’s a success.”

  He drew Zeke away from the chattering crowd, both of them knowing they had little time or chance for a private conversation here. Especially since Zeke had unveiled that picture. Miles’ voice was urgent. “I arrived late tonight, deliberately, because I knew you’d have everything in hand. I wanted to tell you I trusted you, to show you….”

  Zeke frowned slightly. “No, man. You’ve always been clear. It’s me that’s been giving the mixed messages, remember?”

  “Zeke….” Miles shook his head impatiently, ignoring him. “That doesn’t matter now.” His eyes were drawn back to the picture as if it were a magic charm—like a Circe calling sailors to its doom, like a Shangri-La calling to abandoned survivors. “Look at it. How could you bear to keep it hidden until now? Of course it’s your work. It cries out everything about you. And it’s… it’s fantastic. I can’t believe how beautiful it is, how rich, how vivid. But when did you…? How…?”

  Why didn’t you tell me? Zeke knew that was what Miles really meant. He wondered wryly when they’d lost their taste for argument. They’d always done it so well. He reckoned it was just about the same time that he started to feel as tongue-tied as a six-year-old kid in front of Miles. And that was about ten minutes ago.

  “Miles, I couldn’t let you see it until it was finished; if it were finished. That’s why I’ve not been drawing other stuff recently. I’ve been… working on this.”

  Miles grimaced. “Your evasion… your irritation when I questioned you about your painting and drawing. I thought you were pulling away from me.”

  “I know you did.” Zeke spoke very softly, very carefully. “And perhaps for a while I thought I should.”

  “You wanted to?”

  Zeke smiled. “No, dammit, that’s not what I said, is it? I just needed to think things through. Did that all through last night, to tell you the truth. And I started to make sense of a lot of other stuff I’ve been thinking and feeling over the last few weeks.” He didn’t dare look directly at Miles, in case he lost his nerve. He swallowed hard. “When you talked about breaking up last night—I was shocked. Shit, I’d never stopped to think whether we were together to start with, so the thought of parting was a horror I hadn’t considered. But then the horror was right there.”

  “Zeke—”

  “Hush,” said Zeke. “It’s my turn for the words, okay? I tried to pretend it meant jack shit to me, that it was all just for the pleasure of the moment. But you made me think about you, as well as myself; about all that I wanted to do for you. Made me think about why I was up nights and early mornings, doing this picture; why I’ve been sweating bricks over whether it’s good enough; why it’s so fucking important. And then I had to look at myself. At what a shit-faced little coward I was, all over you like a rash on the one hand, yet keeping you away from me on the other. I was scared, you see. Scared of what was happening to me; scared of what I wanted to say and do.” He rolled his eyes up and took a deeper breath. He didn’t know how long he’d have before Miles was swept away from him again, or whether he’d come back afterward. “I don’t want to be scared anymore. Not of Jacky’s memory; not of myself. Not of caring. Not of us….”

  Miles touched his arm; nothing more.

  “I want to be with you, Miles. I don’t want to leave. Not the gallery, not you. Things feel good with you; I feel good. You’ve connected me with the world again, even when I fought like hell against it. I can’t get enough of you; I can’t feel comfortable without you. You’re my connection. And hey, you’re the best fuck I ever had, of course.” He grinned nervously, glancing sideways up at Miles. “Dammit, you’re the best everything.”

  Miles’ eyes were very bright and sharp
and fixed on Zeke’s mouth like he was waiting for something to spill out and upset him. They sparkled at every word of Zeke’s that didn’t. “You said ‘caring’,” he said very softly. “I thought that was just one of those ‘words’ you have no time for.”

  “Sure, that’s what it was,” replied Zeke, a little testily. He wondered if he’d gone too far. It wouldn’t be the first time, of course. Then he saw the hopeful look in Miles’ eyes and dammit, he didn’t care whether he had or not, he had to go through with this. “But now it’s a word for you. From me. You deserve a better response from me than you’ve been getting—something for all that you’ve given me.” He pointed to the painting in front of them. “And this gift is to speak for me as well. A gift for you.”

  MILES could hear Malia calling over. One of the sponsors wanted to discuss the gallery and was striding across the room toward him and Zeke.

  Miles ignored everyone else. He drew Zeke into the shadow of the apartment door, where they could still see the picture but keep their attention on each other. Zeke looked relaxed, now that he’d spoken what was on his mind. His face was soft, and his lips moist. Miles wanted desperately to kiss them. He wondered how long it’d be before he was allowed to do that again.

  He reached out and stroked at the silver ankh around Zeke’s neck. It was slim and cool, a vivid contrast against the warm pulse of Zeke’s throat. Zeke’s eyes flickered half-closed at the touch, and then he opened them wide and grinned back at Miles. His expression was hungry; he was seeking even more. “So you like the picture?”

  “I like it,” said Miles, softly.

  “You know what it means.” Zeke looked relieved, his eyes a little damp. “You understand.”

  “And I see where you hung it,” said Miles, slowly. His mouth twisted into a mischievous smile, and the pair of them looked instinctively to the floor beneath the painting. They both knew that underneath the table, there was a small, dark stain on the expensive polished floor.