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BEN SAT ON THE edge of the sofa, elbows propped on his knees as he read the Sunday paper. His rumpled running shorts displayed the long length of his powerful thighs, his hair still in damp curls from his run. Ryan contemplated luring Ben back to bed or maybe a shower together.
Ben folded the paper and dropped it on the coffee table. “You were up early.”
“Got up to close the window and ended up painting.” Ryan grinned, repeating the joke that Ben often made when Ryan left the room to get anything, like clean socks, and disappeared for an hour, stopping to paint on the way back.
“Something new for Eli’s show?”
“No. Just painting.”
“Just painting.” Ben walked to the kitchen. “Can’t even tell me what you’re painting, Ryan?” He tossed the challenge over his shoulder.
Ben only ever used Ryan’s name in concern. Or anger. Ryan’s stomach clenched at the tone in Ben’s voice, threatening to send his coffee back up. He followed Ben, aware he should have noticed Ben’s tense posture, the lack of warmth in his words. Ben’s uncharacteristic silence on the cab ride home last night was an unknown reprieve from the fight gearing up now. Outright anger from Ben, an infrequent occurrence, always caught Ryan off guard, wholly unprepared and unable to guess what caused it. Surely not failing to fill in details about his morning’s painting?
“I didn’t plan to spend the morning in the studio painting. Did we have other plans?”
Ben poured coffee but set the cup aside. He leaned on the counter, arms folded. “You complained to strangers last night that I’m not around enough for you. But I don’t think you get how much of this I’m doing for you.” His words were measured, despite the anger in his tone. Plenty of time to think about what to say while Ryan, unknowing, cheerfully lost the morning to painting.
“What are you doing for me?” Ryan poured coffee, but his shaking hands kept it from being the casual distraction he intended. He put the coffee pot down and pushed the cup aside. The knot in his stomach tightened; he’d skipped breakfast.
Ben swiped a hand across his face, finger and thumb pressing across his temples as if Ryan’s lack of understanding gave him a headache. “I’ve been working a lot of hours for this promotion. I don’t want to be at work all the time but I want to make enough money that you can quit your day job and do art the way you want to. Travis said he’ll consult with you about doing art that will make money—more money than Nordstrom—so you won’t be dependent on me forever.”
The knot of worry in Ryan’s stomach ignited into searing rage. Travis Leverett was Ben’s ex. His only serious ex. “You talked to Travis about this?”
No, that wasn’t the most important thing. Ryan gripped the counter, steadying the emotions scattered by Ben’s words. “You think I need to be doing different art than I’m doing, that you know better than me about my art? Are you fucking kidding me?”
He pushed off the counter toward Ben, then stepped back raking his hand through his hair. “It fucks both my art and our relationship for you to try and make me your stay-at-home wife doing corporate art sales through your ex. Is that really what you want?”
Ben leaned against the sink, arms folded. “I want you to be successful and happy. Everything I’m doing is for that, for us. What are you doing? You say you aren’t ready for shows, but Travis thinks you are. All your friends think you are. And Travis says Asian-themed art is hot now.”
“I’m glad Travis, who has met me one time, knows more about what I’m doing than I do. There’s a level of mastery in what I do. It takes time. I thought you understood that. If you don’t get it, I don’t know how to put it into words for you.” Ryan paced the small kitchen, hemmed in by his inability to take more than four steps each way.
“You can’t put anything into words for me, can you?”
The burr of disgust in Ben’s voice turned Ryan right around to face him. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Ben shrugged, face blank. “How is this any different than you withholding from me during sex?”
Fury and confusion twisted into a crushing weight on Ryan’s chest. This fight had quickly grown into a wild ride, a car rushing at a hundred miles an hour without a steering wheel. It would be exhilarating if it didn’t threaten to run them both off a cliff.
“I’m not.” Taking a defensive position irritated him, since Ryan was in the right. Worse, it was lie; what Ryan withheld he did in secret to keep them both happy.
“Then why won’t you say ‘I love you’?”
Confusion bloomed, overshadowing Ryan’s anger. “You know I do.”
“You say ‘love you’ when you’re running out the door to work, but never when we’re fucking, never when it matters.”
Ryan reeled, stepping backwards and bumping into the fridge. Ben knew his true feelings. Ryan showed him all the time; anything else risked everything. Those words held too much power. Those words sent Hector running away the first time Ryan uttered them. Wanting to love Ben forever, to keep him, was precisely why Ryan didn’t say those words, why he withheld his desires in bed. Ryan did these things for Ben. It might be superstitious as fuck, but Ryan wouldn’t risk saying or doing the things that made everyone else leave him.
“You want me to express feelings, but you’re never fucking here. Hospice, chorus, work, all come first.”
Ben’s face soured. Ryan had struck a nerve. He hated this competitive urge to win and the instant rush of self-loathing in trying to hurt Ben. Never what he wanted.
The brightly lit kitchen smelled like home, like Ben, like comfort, all at odds with anger and disappointment.
“All come first? That’s all I have. I’m not from this town. I don’t have the community you do.” Ben unfolded his arms, pointing accusingly at Ryan’s chest. “You can run up to Marcus’s store and ask his wise advice while buying a shirt. You and Veronica run around talking about art like the rest of us are too stupid to get it. Steven is your best friend, the kind of friend that everyone wishes for.”
Now Ben paced those too few steps, while Ryan stayed at the fridge, giving Ben space, afraid the waves of fury rolling off Ben would catch them both and make this worse.
Ben continued. “Yeah, I have Shane, but he spends more time building new shelves for you than he does going to brunch with me. You think my stuff comes first, while I barely fit into your stuff. So yeah, I’m off doing my things, but all those extra chorus rehearsals are benefitting your ex-boyfriend’s new charity. I volunteer time to hospice and the Men’s Chorus, because that’s all I have that’s mine.”
Ryan’s stomach clenched again, curling around words that struck like a blow. “I didn’t mean—”
Bitterness tainted Ben’s voice, scratching and weakening his usual authoritative rumble. “You can run to your Gramma to hold your hand and say you’re great. In spite of your petty complaints about your parents, I don’t have anything like ‘close Japanese family’ in my identity, or friends that I’ve known since forever, like you do.”
Ryan tensed at the attack, the words ringing too close to long-past fights he’d had with other exes, Jamie and Eli particularly. “‘Japanese’ is my identity to you? Am I an exotic toy that you pay for, like Kevin pays for Eli? You’ll pay for me to make the art you want to see sold, while I’ll look good on your arm?” Nausea surged, the unintended words burned like bile as they came out.
“You think my offer makes me like Kevin, vamping on an artist? Or like Eli, only with you for some Asian exotic thing?” Ben’s flat, toneless voice meant rage. He’d only seen Ben like this two or three times before. Never directed towards Ryan.
Like any true battle, they regrouped, their mingled breathing audible in the pause, coming hard as if they’d run a race. Ryan marshalled his thoughts about why only he controlled his art and Ben had no place to say otherwise. Wasn’t that what they were fighting about before they’d veered so wildly off track into these jagged, painful accusations?
“You say art is the driving force of your life. So you choose an inferior job, and yet you’ll never show your art. If it’s what you care most about, why aren’t you trying to make money with your art?” Clearly Ben had taken stock too and rallied, steering them back. Ryan wasn’t ready for this.
“You want to use your money against me? I work as hard as you do. You treat me like a child, because I don’t make as much money as you, then use it as an excuse to be gone at work, so there isn’t time for me. You want to save to buy a house? Great. What’s in it for me? Sitting around waiting for you in a new location that you think suits your status better than my crappy apartment?”
Ryan had never felt so completely out of control with Ben before. He deserved a fucking medal for holding his own when he wanted only to grab Ben and apologize, to make this stop so that it wouldn’t go on until it irreparably burned them.
Ben sagged against the counter. The angry lines on his face broke into suffering and confusion. A set of angled planes unrelated to the calm curves Ryan painted this morning. A palette of bruised clouds, not tender morning light.
“I work so we can have our dream. If you still think of this as your apartment, is it so wrong for me to want something that’s ours? There’s no other way except to put in the hours to get us where we need to be.” His face darkened, temper rising again. “Why won’t you commit to saving for a house? Why don’t you do saleable art the way I work extra hours?”
“You know I can’t paint just to sell. Or you should know I don’t work like that.”
“How can I know, when you won’t talk to me about your process—or about anything that’s going on with you? I don’t think you’re in it with me, even though you don’t seem to be leaving either. You say things to a strange girl you won’t say to me.”
“Is that what this is about. Girls? Because you know nothing happened last night. I follow the rules.”
“All the rules say is that you can fuck whoever you want. I don’t know what you’re doing, what you’re feeling. Do you tell women what you can’t tell me? Are you intending to do to me what Hector did to you?”
“You’re mad because it was a girl? You never act like this about guys. Just because I’m bisexual doesn’t mean I’m going to do what Hector did—” Ryan caught himself before he said the rest: Everything you’re mad about is me trying to prevent what he did to me from happening again.
The hurt on Ben’s face broke Ryan’s heart. He never wanted them to be here, had held back so long to prevent this.
“It always comes down to him, doesn’t it?” Ben’s voice cracked “You’re never going to love me like you loved Hector, are you? You will always be more in love with him. I bet you said those words to him easily.”
“You’re nothing like him.” Ryan’s words twisted to new meaning at Ben’s stunned expression. Ben was nothing like Hector. Ben was superior. “I didn’t mean it like that. I never want to make the mistakes with you that I made with him.”
“You won’t leave me for a woman? Well, I won’t abandon you like he did either.”
The eagerness to make Ben understand didn’t dampen Ryan’s fury. “Unless I’m not making art the way you want me to. Because I would leave you if you forced me to be something I’m not.”
The words filled the air between them, chokingly thick. None of this went the way he wanted. Not since Eli showed up yesterday in the fucking art supply store.
“I didn’t mean that at all. It came out twisted. Fuck, fuck. I’m not sure what I can say to fix it, B.”
Silence hung heavy between them. Ben’s anger and hurt shimmered in the small space.
“Fuck. I have a hospice volunteer shift in forty-five minutes,” Ben said. “I have to shower. I can’t go down there with all this shit in my head. I can’t do this anymore right now.”
The strain between them solidified. An unbreakable barrier when they were both this mad and hurt. They needed time to cool off. Time for Ben to recover from the additional hurt he carried home from his hospice shifts. “What time will you be back?”
“Probably seven. But maybe we’ll fucking schedule a conversation for—” Ben waved a hand “—another time. I can’t spend the whole night fighting with you. I have too much going on tomorrow.” The anger Ben loaded into the statement implied he wanted otherwise.
“I think I shouldn’t be here when you get back.”
The anger on Ben’s face collapsed into heartbreaking sorrowful pain. “Okay.”
Ben closed his eyes and took a deep breath before he headed for the bedroom. Ryan wanted to run after him, to try and fix it now.
But he didn’t.
When the sound of the shower came on, Ryan braced his hands on either side of the kitchen sink, leaning over it, stomach clenching, threatening dry heaves, as if he’d run a race too far and too fast, stopping suddenly at the edge of a cliff with no way back.