“What’s going on?” He stroked my hair. A moment’s hesitation as he examined my part told me I had a bruise on my scalp where Robin had pulled. He hadn’t even been that rough.
“Same shit.” I sighed. “How do you stop being humiliated by the fact that you can’t do what everyone else can, at least not without a lot more hassle? More importantly, how do you convince people not to see you as broken or defective because you can’t?”
“Looks like you solved that one at least.”
I flicked a glance over my shoulder to see him grinning.
“The dark of night hides many sins.” I smiled ruefully. “If he were to see me now, he’d run screaming for the hills.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do. Past experience. Should I regale you with tales of some of the ridiculous boo-boos that got me sidelined in gym class as a kid because my mother put the fear of God—or at least a lawsuit—into my school principal?”
“There are always exceptions to every rule.” Jace shrugged. “How will you ever find them unless you keep testing it?”
“I dunno. Sometimes I’m not sure the letdown is worth it.”
“Yeah, but is the potential reward?”
“Maybe?” I rolled onto my back, elevating my legs on the arm of the sofa, stretching out. “If I ever find one of those exceptions, I’ll let you know.”
He tapped once on the bruise on my scalp.
“Ow! Jesus!”
“Why not start here?” he asked. “Clearly there’s already someone out there whose default position is that you won’t break.”
I touched my lips, feeling the swelling there. “And if he is turned off by the reality?”
“Well.” He shrugged again. “What do you have at present that you’ll have lost, in that case?”
“Just my pride.” I sighed and closed my eyes, falling silent until Jace nudged me out of my half sleep and urged me to bed.
My knee appeared to be doing fine the next day. Bruised as hell, but fine. Jace and I decided to stick to our plan to walk around Saugatuck and visit some of the craft shops and art galleries. It was a gorgeous, sunny June afternoon, perfect for strolling around a lakeside town. I assumed Robin was staying at the Dunes somewhere, which meant my chances of running into him were a lot better hanging around the resort than playing tourist. After getting a look at myself in the mirror this morning, I’d decided that I’d keep my promise to call him tonight—but when I did so, I’d schedule any hookup for the next day at the very earliest.
Of course, thinking that bumping into him couldn’t happen ensured it absolutely had to happen. Which it did, as we were heading down the street from the paradise known as Saugatuck Spice Merchants (I walked away with several blends of tea that smelled incredible), full from lunch and debating which of the intriguing nearby restaurants to have dinner at this evening.
Robin practically ran right into us as he stepped out of an empty building, never noticing because his attention was on the professionally dressed woman with whom he was speaking. A glance at the name tag the woman wore identified her as being from a realtor, and a sign in the window of the building revealed that it was for lease.
Robin was looking at properties in the area? I blinked, adjusting my assumption that he was a vacationer.
Before I could wonder about it any further, though, he finally saw us and stopped short, staring at me. It took me a moment to remember what I looked like.
“I’ll be in touch with you, Vita,” he said abruptly, his attention fixed on me. I could see the consternation wrinkling his forehead and braced myself for the inevitable.
The realtor clearly picked up on a vibe of some sort and accepted the dismissal without protest. “Of course, Mr. Brady.”
When she’d gone, I jumped in before he could speak.
“Jace, Robin. Robin, my friend, Joscelin Sieger. I’m crashing at his place in Chicago.”
It was too much to hope that he’d let himself be diverted. He gave Jace a distracted nod, but his eyes never left me.
“Wow. Did I do that?”
How the fuck was I supposed to answer that? He’d been nibbling and sucking on my lips like they were his favorite candy, and I hadn’t infused in days. “It looks worse than it is.”
“I didn’t—” His mouth tightened, and for the first time since we’d met each other, he looked well and truly disconcerted. Even upset. “Did I go too far?”
“Don’t worry about it. You just got a little nippy, and I bruise easily, for obvious reasons. It’s not your fault I look like I got punched in the mouth.” I rolled my eyes and gave him a wry smile, because fuck it, you had to laugh at that shit sometimes.
Or I might have been trying to use humor to defuse the whole thing before Robin freaked out. I felt Jace’s eyes on me as I shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”
I glanced at Jace, pleading for some backup, and he came through for me like the true friend he was. “It’s true. He gets a shiner if you cuss him out.”
Robin stared at me another moment, then nodded slowly. “Okay.”
Jace really needed to quit looking at me quite so intently.
“So, you’re local?” I asked in a desperate bid to turn the conversation. “I’d thought you were a vacationer.”
“No, I just moved here. I’m still looking for a house and a space for the gallery I plan to open.” He snorted and shook his head, though he was smiling as he looked around the street. “Because, of course, another art gallery is just what this town needs.”
Jace’s eyes lit up. “You’re an artist?”
“No.” Robin ducked his head. “I can’t draw a stick figure. My parents were art dealers, and they recently retired, so I’ve inherited their contact list and inventory.”
“Jace is a painter. We went to art school together. You should check out his work.” I tossed Jace a grin.
“What about you? What do you do?” Robin’s pale-blue eyes fixed on me.
“Tattoos. I’m a tattoo artist.”
“Ah. That explains the gorgeous ink.” I smiled and ducked my head under his perusal. His admiration felt good. “Where are you two headed this afternoon?”
I looked up and down the street. “Just sightseeing.”
“Have you made it out to Oval Beach yet?”
Jace grinned broadly. “Not yet, but it’s on the agenda. I’ve heard interesting things.”
“Oh, really?” I flicked a sideways glance at him.
Judging from the way Robin was mirroring that grin, I suspected at least some of those interesting things might even be true. His gaze zeroed in on me. “I’d be happy to play tour guide.”
Fuck. If he got me in the light of day mostly undressed, he’d see the other bruises he’d left. Not to mention the fact that the temporary tattoo paints Jace had applied were beginning to fade. And then there was that conversation he was determined we were going to have . . .
“We don’t have our suits.” I felt Jace’s eyes on me again and silently begged him to keep backing me up.
“Where we’re going, you won’t need them. Unless you plan to hang out by the water and swim. Which would be insane this time of year.”
Oh great. Scratch the “mostly” bit. I’d be fucking nude.
“Uh, we had plans to—” I began to stammer, but Jace cut me off.
“Sounds fun. We’re in.”
Fucking traitor.
We stopped by Robin’s place for blankets and sunblock, which was how we learned Robin’s place wasn’t exactly a place.
“You live on a boat?”
“For now.” Robin shrugged. “There’s not a lot of space, but I didn’t want to leave her behind in Connecticut, so I took her through New York on the Hudson River and then along the Great Lakes, up one side of Michigan and down the other to get here.”
He jogged down the steps to the cabin or whatever you called the area below deck to grab what we needed. As far as personal boats went, it was large, but I didn’t thi
nk it would quite qualify as a yacht. Not that I would have known. I had to imagine whatever living space he had down there was cramped.
While he was out of sight, I took advantage of the opportunity to give Jace a death glare. “Want to tell me what that was about?”
“What?” He pulled off innocent and bewildered well. “I wanted to go to the beach.”
“Is this your way of telling me something?”
He crossed his arms over his chest, leaning against a tall piling on the dock. “What message do you think I might be sending you?”
“You’re deliberately maneuvering me into a position so he can see all my bruises,” I accused. “Are you afraid I haven’t told him the truth? I have.”
“Pfft. Not my business.” He rolled his eyes at me. “Dude, last time I checked, I wasn’t a cricket with a top hat and cane. If your first assumption is that I think you should be more forthcoming, then it probably says more about what you are holding back.”
He had a point there. Robin was interested in another go, and so was I. Especially given the sort of stuff he kept promising to do to me, if he made good on even a fraction of his dirty talk. But he wanted to have a conversation first, and that could lead to nothing but disappointment. He’d hold back, or he’d decide it was too risky and he wanted nothing to do with me. I wanted to go with it and damn the consequences, and Robin wasn’t going to allow it to go down like that.
Robin drove us from the little marina on Kalamazoo Lake to the beach on Lake Michigan, north of the town. At first glance, the beach was like any other. On a warm June day like this, families with children were everywhere, building sand castles and swimming despite the chill of the lake, and everyone in a bathing suit. The only thing unusual was that the proportion of same-sex couples was somewhat higher than you would normally see.
Robin gestured. “Head north, toward those dunes up there.”
It was a long trudge through the sand, but the farther north we got, the more apparent a trail became, heading out of sight of the shore. Some ways in, there was a booth where Robin paid a fee.
“It’s private land,” he explained. “Not part of the state park, so there’s a separate admission fee.”
Past the booth, the trail ended. The sand was dotted with blankets and towels and men lying nude in the afternoon sun. There was plenty of cruising going on and no small amount of public groping; many of those who weren’t sunbathing were engaged in a variety of not-family-friendly activities. No wonder this place was off the beaten path. On public land, these guys would end up in jail.
Jace, a shameless, self-professed voyeur and connoisseur of every sort of man, grinned with delight, peeling his shirt over his head. I wouldn’t put money on Robin and me enjoying his company for long.
“Holy shit,” Robin breathed, pausing in spreading the blanket. I stopped undressing, smiling with pride. I knew exactly what had caught his attention. Robin’s eyes slid to me, then back to Jace. “Did you do those?”
Jace presented his back more fully to let Robin admire. “He did.”
I shrugged. “Jace helped with the design. He really is an incredible artist.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The concept for Jace’s tats had evolved from a trip we took when we were in art school together, when he’d come home to Colorado with me for spring break. I’d taken him to see a number of natural attractions, and he’d been particularly moved by the Garden of the Gods.
Crawling up his back and shoulders were images that called to mind the red sandstone formations that tower over the landscape there, without being a literal depiction of them. An interpretation of the impression they had left, if you would. Careful shading gave the illusion that they were in 3-D, rocky spires rising in relief against the surface of his skin. Greenery filled the space between the formations and curled around his upper arms, like the forests that grew between the mounds. The rocks towered over a river that ran from his lower right ribs to his waist on the left side, and a coyote stood on its banks, drinking. Other animals were worked in, mostly hidden by the trees. It had taken countless hours to do the piece, and we still added to it on occasion. I liked the design because it was earthy, very much like Jace himself. Nature at its most beautiful.
“This is even better than the ones I admired on you,” Robin enthused. I smiled, unable to disagree with him there. The design frankly made the one I’d drawn for Jace to paint on my back look downright amateur. I wondered if I’d ever do another work equal to it.
“That’s because Geoff hasn’t found anyone as talented as he is to ink him, so he’s got to make do with shoddy substitutes,” Jace said cheerfully, drawing away from Robin to finish stripping.
“Shoddy substitutes?” Robin gave me a confused look.
I chucked a thumb over my shoulder at the fading marks on my back. “They’re not real. They’re paints, the expensive, long-lasting ones they use for fake tattoos in movies. I’m still looking for someone qualified to do the kind of work I want done.” In one-hour increments, for months on end, with healing time in between, and with the risk that even if I properly infuse, excessive bleeding could still push the ink out and make it look shabby. Sure. No problem finding someone willing to take that job on. There had been a guy in my hometown who had the talent—and probably the availability—to do it, the one I would have tried to do my apprenticeship with if I’d been willing to live that close to my mother. But unless I moved back, having him do the work wasn’t an option.
My perfectionism and my disorder conspired to keep me from turning my body into the canvas I’d always wanted it to be.
Robin tilted his head at me. Curious, not judgmental. “You’re a tattoo artist and you’re not inked yourself?”
I gestured to the small image of a blood drop on my ankle, the one that had made my mother freak the fuck out when I was eighteen. “Aside from this? Like I said, not yet. The amount of time and effort that will go into the design I made is intensive.” I shrugged self-consciously, dropping onto the blanket to finish undressing. “It made it hard to find an apprenticeship, actually, since most tattoo artists won’t take you seriously if you’re not tattooed yourself. I had to rely on my designs to get me in.”
Nude, Jace stretched and looked around. “While you two bond about body art, I think I’m going to introduce myself to some people. Catch you later.”
My self-bet turned out to be prophetic. Within minutes, he was chatting up a couple of very femme twinks nearby. I smiled at his predictability, basking in the warm sunlight. Jace’s tastes might be eclectic, and I might be just as likely to find him bidding farewell to a grizzled bear as a drag queen in the morning, but beyond all else, he adored the willowy princesses.
“Sunblock?” Robin cast a shadow over me, interrupting my musings, and I smiled and nodded. I had to admit, his active pursuit was nice, and not something I’d gotten to enjoy much in my life.
“Sure.” I rolled over and offered him my back.
He paused in drizzling sunblock down my spine. His large hands practically covered me from rib to rib. “I’m trying to figure you out.”
“Why?” I buried my face in my arms, wondering if he would notice the bruises his fingers had left on my upper arms and ass the night before.
“Because nothing about you adds up.” I felt his finger, greasy with sunblock, trace the point where my hip curved around to my buttock. Yeah, he’d noticed the bruises.
“Those aren’t a problem,” I gritted, lifting my head and getting ready to turn and glare if he started fretting.
“I know,” Robin said equitably. “Or at least, that’s what I assumed from everything you told me.”
“So you’re not freaking out?”
I watched his shadow on the sand shrug. “I won’t say the first glance didn’t startle me, but only because it was unexpected. If you say they’re not a problem, I’ll believe you.”
His tendency to prove me wrong when I assumed he would react badly was fr
ustrating. “They’re only a problem when someone who doesn’t understand sees them. Parents can catch shit when the neighbors see their hemo kid with a bloody nose or a bunch of bruises and jump to conclusions. More than one family has had social services called on them.”
“Ouch.” Robin’s fingers tightened a moment, then relaxed, like he might have clamped his hands down on me hard if he hadn’t remembered not to. “Believe it or not, I know what that’s like.”
“Oh?”
He resumed working the sunblock into my skin. “People can misinterpret bruises on a sub too,” he murmured, so softly it was almost inaudible beneath the breeze off the lake. “How’s your knee?”
“Bruised, but the joint didn’t bleed.” If he could be straightforward about this and not freak out, I guess I could stop trying to downplay everything. “I infused after I got back to the room. Honestly, the bruising you see wouldn’t be as bad as it is, except I hadn’t done my prophylaxis in a few days.”
“I did some research last night and this morning. Infusing, now, that’s dosing yourself with clotting factors, right?”
I shot him a startled glance over my shoulder. “You did research?”
“Of course I did.” He looked surprised by the question, as if I was being ridiculous for not knowing he would. “Tell me more about infusing.”
Which was how I ended up sitting nude on the sand, surrounded by dunes and similarly nude men, filling Robin in on infusing for injuries and bleeds versus prophylaxis. And no matter how many times I tried to change the subject, he kept bringing it back to my hemophilia.
“You don’t want to hear all this,” I protested.
“I need to hear this. This is stuff I have to know if I’m going to play responsibly with you.” He said it simply. Just a matter of fact.
Then uncertainty creased his brow and made him frown. “Unless—am I reading this wrong? Are you actually not interested in playing with me?”
“No, I am, I am. It’s just—” I waved my hands around in a vague, confused way that probably told him nothing except that I was a flighty neurotic who made no sense. “I’m only going to be here for a few days. This is more trouble than a hookup is worth.”
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