by AJ Rose
Just then, my phone chimed with a text. Almost home. Stopped for Thai food. I hope that’s okay.
I barked out a laugh. More than okay, since I also stopped for Thai, thinking you’d still be in Acrylic Paradise. Wavelength: we has it.
Yes we do, came his immediate reply, followed by a smiley emoticon. Leaving the food on the counter, I took the stairs two at a time to jump in the shower and wash the antiseptic hospital smell off before he got back. When he came in the door, he had his extra-large portfolio case, the one that could fit enormous canvases, slung over his right shoulder, as well as a bulging paper bag under his left arm. Wearing only a pair of athletic shorts and my towel draped around my neck, I moved in to help unburden him, setting the paper bag on the counter beside my Thai offering and pulling food out to survey the damage. We’d both ordered the exact same thing.
“This is uncanny,” I said, dishing up smaller portions to take to the living room.
“This is cohabitation. We know each other’s preferences.”
I took a bite and sucked in air to combat the high temperature of the food, and he laughed. “Burn your tongue again?”
“Yesh,” I answered, trying to swallow without doing further damage. Rummaging in the fridge for a Coke, I gulped a couple swigs to cool my fried tongue, then tucked the can between my elbow and ribs to grab both our plates and carry them to the living room. The cold of the can made me hiss.
“You’re such a mess,” he said with a fond smile, leaning his portfolio against the wall beneath the stairs, where he usually stored it. We settled on the couch to eat.
“So, you had Sabrina sit for you today,” I began. “How’d it go?”
He picked through his food, alternately stabbing pieces of vegetables and meat in his Pad Ginger. His carefully chosen words told me all I needed to know.
“It was interesting. She was an excellent model, hardly moving once I positioned her, patient even though it took several hours, and I changed it from charcoal to chalk. She rolled with the punches and was a really good model.”
“Except?” I prodded.
“Hard to explain. She kept staring at me in this weird, intense way.”
“Did you position her looking at you?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“Then what do you expect?”
“Let me show you,” he said, setting his plate on the floor and retrieving his portfolio. Carefully extracting the pastel paper on which he’d drawn, affixed to a Gatorfoam board for ability to transport, he looked it over for signs of tearing. Had he painted, there would have been no transporting the piece, as the paper medium would have needed time to dry. This way, he had the drawing, and if he chose to, he could paint with just that as a reference. He set it up on the easel in front of the TV and inspected it for damage in transport. Satisfied, he moved to the side and turned to me to watch my expression.
I held neutral.
There was something off about it. I stood, approached it, backed off, looked from multiple angles, and looked again. He was right. Something about her eyes didn’t seem right.
“Did you take photos?”
Wordlessly, he handed me his phone, and when I saw them I knew. He’d drawn her exactly as she’d been, just shy of leering. Whether she’d said anything inappropriate or not, her intensity had marred the whole thing.
“I can paint it so it looks better, but it’s weird, right? Gives me the creeps.” I did think he was being a little dramatic when he shuddered, but that was Craig. If his art was the subject, it was dramatic in some way, whether it was the images themselves or his reaction to them.
“Sure you weren’t just nervous or looking for more than was there?”
He crossed his arms and cocked his head, genuinely considering. “I told myself the minute I stepped outside to meet her in the park where we’d agreed to do this not to think of Bianca or any of that mess. I tried, Dane. I think, if those photos are to be believed—” he gestured to the phone I still held “—that she was worse than I drew and I toned her down.”
“Okay, so we chalk this up to a faulty connection and move on. I bet she’d like to keep this if you don’t want it.”
“I can’t ask you to schlep it to work. It’s too big. I’ll try to paint it, so I can salvage something, then I can paint something else over this.”
“That’ll just piss her off. I’m serious. Give it to her. I bet she’d love it. On her next day off, I’ll see if I’m around and I’ll get it to her. Okay?”
He shrugged, pulling it off the easel, turning it so her face was hidden as he leaned it on the wall. “Whatever you say.”
I watched him resume his seat and knew this wasn’t the last of it.
True to my suspicions, I woke in the middle of the night to find Craig in front of the drawing again, hands dirty to the wrists with many pastel shades of color, his hair standing on end and face covered in chalk lines where he’d touched his head in concentration. His white t-shirt was toast.
“What are you doing?” I squinted over the railing, trying to see despite my sleep-blurred eyes.
“I got this idea,” he said absently. “Remember the shot I snapped of you when she grabbed your ass?”
“Yeah,” I said, descending the steps to curl up in the chair on the opposite end of the living room. He’d spotlighted the canvas and left the rest of the lights off, so I didn’t have long before my eyes adjusted.
“I thought I’d try to add you to this. If it doesn’t work, I can still paint her from the photo, but I wanted to make her expression make sense.”
And not be aimed at you, I thought silently.
“So if I turn her a little, put you in there, it makes it look like you’re both laughing at something, and the intensity belongs.”
It looked strange, disembodied. Not at all his best work. In truth, she looked almost demonic, as though I were the soul she attempted to connive to the depths of Hell. It was creepier than it had been the first time.
“Babe, something’s way off.”
“I know,” he growled. “It’s her expression. Like she wanted to eat me while I worked. Seriously, Dane. I’m not off-base here, and I don’t know her well enough to fix it from memory.”
“She’s going to see that and flip out.”
“Well I don’t have to show her,” he offered testily.
“She’ll bug me until I show her.”
“Then you shouldn’t have offered to have me paint her,” he snapped. “I’m only doing this because of you. I didn’t want to spend an afternoon with her, wondering what sort of filthy things she was thinking while sitting there pretending to be all pure and virginal.”
I snorted. “Sabrina, virginal? Hardly.” Rumor had it she’d managed to find out if Dr. Kidd gay or not, and the consensus was decidedly not. Or maybe he swung both ways.
“I also don’t like to fail. So this is a vendetta now.”
“Okay, you don’t have to do this,” I gave in. I’d just have to tell Sabrina… something. Maybe I’d say there’d been a fire and her drawing had been destroyed, or maybe that someone had broken in and stolen only the one of her because it was so awesome. It wasn’t worth Craig’s frustration. “It’s obvious your head isn’t in the right place to pull it off.”
He stiffened, and I immediately regretted the words.
“If my head is off, it’s because she thinks you and I are on this planet for her enjoyment, and she spent four hours sitting for this drawing, thinking I’d be a good lunch.” He tossed the chalk into the open soft case of colors sitting on the stool beside him.
Trying to appease him, I ignored how filthy he was and encircled his compact frame from behind with a grip on his wrists, pulling them to his chest and nuzzling behind his ear. He turned his face toward me and lowered his lips to my forearm.
“You did the best you could with what you were given. If you’re not feeling it, you’re not feeling it. I backed you into a corner. Don’t worry about it.”
“
I am trying here, Dane,” he said, muffled against my arm.
“I know. Let it go now. I’ll just keep work separate from home and not mix the two. You don’t have to deal with her again, okay?”
“Okay. I know it’s stupid. I barely know her, but I cannot get out of my head that she’s trouble. I don’t like you being around her, but obviously that’s not something you can change. You still have to work together.”
I suppressed a scowl. Craig telling me he didn’t like me around Sabrina smacked of my dad bitching about me hanging out with Holly before he believed the bearding lie. It was a good thing Craig couldn’t see my face. I dropped my arms and moved to the stairs.
“Why don’t you come to bed? You have work in four hours.”
He stared at the disturbing creation and blew out a breath. “Yeah, just let me clean up.”
The sound of running water in the downstairs bathroom was the last I heard before Craig’s alarm chirped a few hours later, drawing me out of a dream where the power wouldn’t come on in the OR and I couldn’t see my patient on the table, except a circle of light over his face, which was frozen in an expression of lewd need.
Craig was already up and gone, so I smacked his alarm into silence and shuffled into the bathroom for a quick splash in the shower to wake up. I wasn’t on duty, so I planned to go for a run and spend the morning reading about the latest transplantation research. When I went downstairs to find my running shoes, I stopped cold.
The drawing was now a painting, not of the unusable one of her on her own, but of her and me together. Her expression was much more natural, and mine was only slightly bug-eyed in surprise. It was decent, considering the train wreck he’d painted over, but her fingers on my arm were a little clawlike, her incisors a bit fangy. I shook my head and sat to tie my shoes.
He was trying.
Present Day
“Mr. Lame, how are we doing today?” I asked, stepping into my patient’s room and pulling his chart from the foot of the bed. Andrew Lame—pronounced la-may—looked at me with the hopeful eyes of someone sick of being bedbound. Just as he was about to answer, Dr. Zeller entered the room with her band of interns. They stood obediently off to the side as the doctor greeted our patient and took the chart from me to peruse.
“Who can tell me about Mr. Lame’s injury?” she addressed the group.
One of the interns whispered, “Appropriate, his name is Lame,” pronouncing it as it looked in writing. The one beside him snickered, only to be elbowed by a serious-looking girl who glared at them and stepped forward.
“Andrew Lame,” she said correctly, “is a firefighter.” She turned to the two behind her who were attempting straight faces and failing. “And if he hadn’t just had his ACL replaced, he could probably get out of that bed and beat the two of you for being twelve, but he’s too nice to do so.”
At that point, I couldn’t suppress a smile, looking at the patient to see him as amused by the spectacle as I was. I was pretty sure he’d heard it all before. For a firefighter, he wasn’t a hulking guy, so where the intern got that he was an ass-kicker, I had no idea. He was in good shape and had a kind face beneath his mop of strawberry-blond hair and two-day beard growth that came in more red than blond. Despite having been in pain and through surgery, he was in decent spirits and looked eager to get back on his feet.
“Mr. Lame came in yesterday after blowing out his anterior cruciate ligament while climbing down a ladder while saving someone from a fire, twisting in a way that also damaged some of the cartilage in his right knee. The cartilage was not torn through, so in surgery it was decided to let that heal as much as possible. His ACL was replaced with a cadaver graft, and the surgery went smoothly. Mr. Lame is in good health, so barring any unexpected complications with infection, he should be up by the end of the day and walking with a brace. Post-op temperature spike of one-oh-one, which we are monitoring overnight. Discharge tomorrow with instructions for physical therapy for the next several months.”
Dr. Zeller thanked the intern and stepped forward, asking about Mr. Lame’s pain and introducing me. “This is your physical therapist, Dane Perry, who will be helping you out of bed shortly and getting some weight on that leg. He’ll show you some exercises you can do at home and go over the plan for what you can expect for the remainder of your therapy. Any questions you have, he can answer. If you need anything, just have a nurse page me. Okay?” She returned his chart to me.
Mr. Lame nodded and the group trouped out the door to round on the next patient.
“Lively bunch,” he said as I read the post-op notes. His post-op fever had fallen to a low-grade 99.3, so I was reasonably comfortable going over his exercises, but I did reconsider my plans for a sojourn down the hall.
“Yeah, don’t hold it against them if they’re ever in a fire and in need of rescue.”
He chuckled. “Pretty sure if I save them, they can’t pick on my name anymore.” His good spirits carried him through the next hour as I showed him several exercises he could do while still in bed or at home. Then we shuffled two laps around his room before the exhaustion took over and he collapsed back to the bed, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. I made sure to fill his water pitcher and got him a fresh cup of ice chips, helped him get comfortable, then checked how long his next dose of pain medication would be. It was twenty minutes overdue, so I requested the nurse bring it and waited around until she’d done so.
“You don’t have to keep me company,” Mr. Lame assured me, halfheartedly fussing with his covers. It was clear the second spin around the room had been too much. “I’m sure you have fun plans for the night or something.”
“I’m just fine camping out here and making sure they get your meds quickly. My plans don’t start for another couple hours.”
Craig and I were supposed to meet up with Holly and Braden for dinner. After going home from the gallery opening, Craig had asked for a bit of space, and as disappointed as I was that it wasn’t going to be an instant fairytale ending for us, I understood. What we’d been through, both together and apart, was big and would need more than one date to rectify. But when he’d called and asked if we could meet up with Holly and Braden, people he’d also lost when we’d split, I considered it a win of the battle, if not the war. It was a start.
I made small talk with Mr. Lame for the remaining hour of my shift, well after the nurses delivered his pain meds, and his fiancée, Jennifer, showed up. He dozed some while I went over the at-home information with her, glad he’d have help when he left.
My phone chirped with a text from Holly as I was leaving to go to the locker room and change.
Holly: Reservation confirmed. Ready for this?
I couldn’t help but chuckle.
Me: You seem more nervous than me. Are you ready for this?
Her comeback was immediate.
Holly: Har har. I’m nervous, yes. Haven’t seen him for two years & the last time was awkward.
Me: You’ll be fine. Gotta go so I won’t be late.
I shoved the phone in my locker and took a quick shower. The reservation was at an Italian place on 49th Street, a five-minute cab ride from the hospital. It was sort of fancy, the kind of place that required a tie. Craig was supposed to meet me by the information desk and we’d cab it together.
Spying him standing nervously, I slowed, knowing he hadn’t spotted me yet. Seeing he’d dressed nicer for this than he had for his gallery show—he was wearing actual suit pants—made my heart do a slow flip. Still no tie, but his black button-down was pressed within an inch of its life and was tucked in. He’d even donned a belt.
Which I want to slowly slide from the loops and use to do unspeakable things to him. The intensity of my desire in such a public place surprised me, but I didn’t chide myself for having the thoughts to begin with. Giving myself permission to be real everywhere, not just in the four walls of home or the anonymous safety of a club, had been one of my more difficult hurdles in therapy, and one I was still conquering. I
made a note to mention this moment to Dr. Rodriguez, so she could see her plan was working, however slowly.
A few steps before I reached him, Craig turned and saw me, a dazzling smile splitting his face.
“You look fantastic,” I said, gripping his arm and leaning in to kiss his cheek. The move startled us both, him since I’d never done such a thing before, especially where others could see, and me because my anxiety usually made me vigilant about my personal space.
“So do you. You ready?”
Slipping my palm down his arm to hold his hand, I smiled. “I am.” He stared at me a second, then ducked his chin and shook his head. “What?” I asked.
“Just not used to this.” He raised our joined hands.
“If it bothers you, I can back off.”
“No, no. Part of me thinks I need to be making you work harder for it, but most of me is so happy to see you relaxing that I don’t want to ruin it.”
This time, my entire set of internal organs flipped, leaving me somewhat breathless. “Good, because I like holding your hand, and screw anyone who has a problem with it.”
We walked into the night, flagging a taxi and climbing in without letting go. I’d rehearsed a few questions, but the ride was too quick, and he seemed too fidgety for me to start grilling him.
We paid the driver and exited the car in front of La Piastra, a traditional Italian restaurant with real crystal candleholders in the centers of the tables, fine china, and impeccably trained staff. It was Holly’s favorite restaurant, and given the atmosphere, there was less chance of any awkwardness between her and Craig. A few times, Holly had voiced her displeasure at Craig tossing me out when I had been so clearly sick. Each time she did so, I reminded her he’d done exactly what I’d wanted. I only hoped she’d let it go tonight and remember the days when the four of us had hung out laughing, dancing, and having a good time.
Walking into the restaurant with Craig was like walking into our past. We’d come here when Craig had gotten his first movie-length animation project, when Holly and Braden had gotten engaged, and when I’d finished my intern year and passed the exam to move into my residency. The décor automatically made me content and happy, and I hoped the others were absorbing the same vibe. Sections of the walls were exposed brick, and the wall sconces were wrought iron with gaslight-inspired shades. The high-backed chairs were all modern and leather, and the white tables were perfectly set with black cloth napkins and white china plates bordered with black piping.