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“I’M HERE! WHERE ARE you?”
At Marcus’s house, Ryan stood in the open front door and called down the hallway. The small 1920s Craftsman bungalow meant Marcus heard Ryan, wherever he was.
“In the bedroom!”
Ryan kicked off his Converse and headed for Marcus’s voice. In the master bedroom, Marcus stood shirtless in front of a full-length mirror, palming a brush over his short, curly hair. At forty, Marcus didn’t appear much older than Ryan’s thirty. Marcus joked that melanin kept his appearance young. Ryan mythologized Marcus’s fashion sense as belonging to his origins in Atlanta. In Ryan’s mind, the South was always movie-set perfect, filled with dapper black men in the bright colors Marcus favored. Marcus’s friendship superpower was wise advice tinged with sarcasm and occasionally painful honesty, while being the most considerate person Ryan knew.
Smoothing Murray’s Pomade into his hair, Marcus caught Ryan’s eye in the mirror. “You just come here to watch me get ready? Or you gonna tell me why you need to sleep in my guest room?”
Ryan flopped down on Marcus’s bed. His full weight didn’t even shake the heavy four-poster. “I came to watch you get ready.” The saffron-yellow comforter muffled his words.
“Well, I’m not putting on a special show for you. You’ll have to watch the usual boring routine. You gonna tell me what’s up?”
Ryan didn’t have to see Marcus to know he shook his head. He sat up so he wouldn’t smother in the bedding. On the radio, Whitney Houston sang “You Give Good Love.” Likely true about Marcus, though Ryan had only known him as a single man and friend.
“You going out?”
“You changing the subject?”
“Yes.”
Back to the mirror, Marcus’s gaze focused on Ryan. “I am going out.”
“Are you going on a date?” Ryan smiled for the first time since he left his studio that morning.
A wonky old-fashioned alarm clock sat on the bedside table, two little domed bells on top, its fourth leg missing. Ryan related to it, wobbly and unbalanced after his fight with Ben.
Marcus hummed. “What makes you think that?”
“Six years I’ve known you, and you only dress up like this when we go to the bars or dancing. And you never go dancing on a Sunday night.” Ryan picked up the unstable alarm clock. The fourth leg dropped down. He set it back on the table. The leg slipped back into the casing.
“I am going to meet a man.” Marcus returned to the mirror, angling his head to see the top as he continued brushing the waves into neat formation. “I try to never move that old clock, but that makes it hard to turn off in the morning.”
“Are you changing the subject now? Should I stop asking questions?” Ryan picked up the clock again and shook it. The fourth leg rattled loosely. He dug his keys out of his jeans pocket and used a keychain disk, with four tabs like various-sized flathead screwdrivers, to pry off the back of the clock. Marcus, still smoothing waves into his hair, was looking thoughtfully into the mirror.
“Do you ever think you need to change everything?”
Ryan shook the rattling clock gently and the fourth leg, a tiny nut, and a metal flange fell into his hand. He examined the other three legs.
“Lately? All the time,” Ryan said.
When Ryan said no more, Marcus continued. “It’s time I find something that’s mine. I don’t know what I’m waiting for any more.”
“What do you mean?”
Ryan slipped the fourth leg back in from the outside and held it in place with his thumb. He managed to set the nut on the interior end of the leg and partially spin it in the small space.
“Owning a clothing store was Mitchell’s dream. I went along, because making him happy was my dream. When he died, it felt disloyal to sell it. But here I am, ten years later, trying to keep him alive by keeping his dream going.”
Ryan caught Marcus’s eye in the mirror. “Are you closing the store?” The idea shook Ryan. Wishing for change was one thing, but the store was the center of Marcus’s life. The shared history among all their friends might disappear.
Turning the tiny nut in the clock case was slow going. Ryan wedged the tip of his house key as a mini wrench.
“Might sell it. Might keep it. I only know I’m not doing it for me.”
“And you need to find something that’s yours.” Though he’d joked about it, the idea that Marcus might be dating again surprised Ryan even more than the notion the store might go away. The things they never spoke of left Ryan certain Marcus remained single, possibly celibate, since Mitchell’s death.
“Exactly.” Marcus set the brush on the dresser, sprayed cologne in front of him and stepped through the little cloud that hung in the air. It smelled like cedar forests and old library books. “You didn’t come all the way over here, asking to sleep in my guest room, just to check up on me.”
The metal flange seemed to have no relation to the clock leg. Ryan dropped it back in the case and snapped on the back. He set the clock down and angled it to be visible from the bed.
Marcus sat down next him, showing an uncharacteristic disregard for his freshly pressed trousers. “Do you want to talk about it?”
The fears crushing Ryan since he left his apartment fell out of his mouth. “I don’t want Ben to leave me.” Tears prickled hotly. Ryan pulled his wrist across the corner of his eye, shoving the evidence away.
Marcus’s arms folded warmly, guiding Ryan, until his face rested on Marcus’s chest.
“What did you fight about?”
“Everything. I said so many things I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t trying to hurt him but I lost control of myself.” The hot knot that sat in Ryan’s stomach all afternoon seared.
“What things? Love, money, or sex?”
“All of it. No—money. He wants me to make art just to sell. Commercialize my skills. It wouldn’t even be art if I did that.”
“Sounds like we’re both learning the same lesson right now. You can’t bury dreams for him, like I did for Mitchell.” Marcus rubbed up and down on Ryan’s back, like Gramma used to when he was little and sick. Soothed, Ryan closed his eyes again.
“I don’t think he meant for me to give up my dreams. But he wasn’t understanding me either. I don’t know if he understands me at all. He said I’d never love him like Hector, and I said—” Ryan paused, wincing internally, the wound torn open again, “I said a lot of things that he misinterpreted. It got bad, Marcus.”
“Are you just fretting about it? Or planning what you can do to fix it?”
Ryan sat up, rubbed his hand over his face. He wasn’t one hundred percent at fault for the fight; but Marcus was right, he might as well be if he wasn’t actively attempting to fix it.
The bed didn’t shift when Marcus got up and lifted a pressed lemon-yellow button-down oxford off a chair.
Ryan said, “I want to show him that I’m all in, but I can’t be who I’m not. I can’t just fake art to sell like he asked.”
“No. What else does he need?” Marcus buttoned his shirt, a striking contrast to his dark skin, beyond handsome: well-dressed, successful, and classy.
“He needs to work less. He needs me to contribute more, to show I’m on board for the long haul, ready to buy a house, for his dreams. Our dreams.”
Marcus came back and perched on the edge of the bed. “Anything you do for him has to be on your terms. It might be for both of you together. But don’t lose yourself. Whatever he said in that fight, he loves you for who you are, so don’t lose sight of that. Mitchell never would have wanted me to sideline myself for his memory. Like I did.”
“I don’t want Ben to change for me either. But things need to be different.”
Marcus offered his hand. Ryan threaded his fingers through Marcus’s.
Ryan fell back on the bed. The ceiling didn’t have any answers, but he stared at it anyway. “Everything is so convoluted. It’s all mixed up together. I was vicious in asserting my rightness, but Ben wasn’t wrong about everything. I am doing nothing to further my art, but he needs to understand I can’t. Not until I’m ready. Until I have the skills of a true master. But I love him so much, it’s huge. I want it to be what you and Mitchell had, but it’s so unstable. Not only my carelessness, but he’s not home enough for us to make it anything. I need to figure out how to snatch those hours back from his job.”
“Then that’s where you start.” Marcus squeezed Ryan’s hand again, the same sweet comfort Gramma gave.
“I need to think about it.” But his thoughts were already racing. Ryan didn’t want to give up his easy sales job at Nordstrom. It gave him the time he needed for art. But in the short term, he needed more money. Which meant working a lot more hours, or a second job. Which didn’t solve Ben’s long hours. They both needed more money and less time spent at work. Was Ryan up to the task of finding a new job for Ben? The kind of corporate work Ben did was so far removed from Ryan’s world.
“I’m willing to be late,” Marcus said, “if you have more to say about it.”
Ryan struggled to sit up, his fingers still knotted with Marcus’s. “No, go do whatever you’re going to do. We can talk tomorrow. I don’t want to be the bummer that ruins your night. Go on your date.”
Marcus got up and checked his appearance in the mirror again. “It’s not a date.” Marcus addressed his reflection, not Ryan.
Ryan didn’t believe him but he let it drop, with the courtesy Marcus showed him. “I fixed your clock.”
“I see that. Not sure it was worth what you went through to get here today, but I’m grateful.”
◊
“Ryan!”
The bed shook. Ryan jerked to consciousness. Where the fuck was he? Marcus loomed over him, shirtless and matching Ryan’s morning bleariness.
“What?”
Marcus’s guest room blinked into focus and dread settled in as Ryan recalled yesterday. The phone landed harmlessly on the pillow by his head.
“Ben’s on the phone.” Marcus tipped his head at the phone, a tiny go on gesture. He shuffled out of the room, closing the door behind him.
Ryan did his best to rouse to the importance of the call. He needed to make sure Ben believed Ryan would do whatever it took to fix this between them.
“Hi, B.”
“Good morning, Sunshine. Sorry for the early call, but we need to talk.”
“Okay.” Ryan’s heart hammered. There didn’t appear to be a clock anywhere in this room. “Do you want me to come over there?”
“No, I’m already at work.” The rumble of Ben’s voice calmed Ryan. Ben would never call from work to have an earth-shattering conversation.
“Jesus, what time is it?”
“Eight-twenty. I came in to work early. I couldn’t sleep. Late night for you?”
“I couldn’t sleep either, thinking about you. I’m sorry about yesterday. About Saturday.”
Ben’s slow response rocketed Ryan’s heart rate back up. But in the pause, he heard a shuffle and click: Ben closing the door to his office. “I’m sorry for the things I said. Things got out of control, and I wasn’t listening to what you were telling me.”
Relief flooded Ryan. A place to start, even if he didn’t know what to do. “B, the things I said, some of them came out wrong. You aren’t like Hector. That’s part of why I’m with you.”
“I’m sorry I brought him into it at all. It wasn’t fair to you. I was hurt by the things you said at the gallery and I...” Ben’s voice faltered, not quite cracking, dissolving to an emptiness. Ryan heard the ache. One conversation wouldn’t repair this. Ryan had to act, to do something for Ben. “Well, you didn’t deserve that.”
“Thank you. That means a lot to me. We have some ways to go, but we’re okay, right? We’ll get through this?”
“I’ll do whatever it takes. I don’t want to complicate things before we have a chance to talk about all of this, but the landlord called this morning. Our building is going condo.”
Ryan’s eyes burned with sleep deprivation. “What does that mean?”
“Pretty much buy or get out.”
“By when?” Given his morning pulse already, Ryan might have a heart attack before they finished the conversation.
“We have until the thirtieth to decide. If we don’t buy, we have to move by the end of October.”
“What do we do?” A month to decide. Not long enough. Questions sat unformed in his head, loose pieces with no connections to make into sense.
Only Ben’s deep inhalation revealed his discomfort. “We need to talk seriously about it, but this was always our plan. We’re just moving up the timeline. We need to decide if the apartment is what we want. Or do we move somewhere else and hold out for a house in the future, like we’ve talked about?”
“This is a lot on top of everything else. I planned to spend my day taking photos to find something to paint for Eli’s show. Don’t know if I can focus on that now.”
“Maybe go check on your grandmother? Didn’t your parents leave yesterday? Ask her advice about the apartment. I know you won’t take it, but talking with her always makes you feel better. I’d go ask her opinion myself if I wasn’t working.”
Ryan relaxed in relief, more comfortable than he’d been in half a day. “What time will you get home tonight? I’ll be there.”
“I won’t be home until late. Travis’s flight isn’t arriving until nine-thirty, and I have a late dinner meeting before I pick him up.”
“Travis’s flight? What?”
“He’s coming in for the week to sign new artists. I told you, remember? He’s also willing to talk to you about getting your stuff out there. Maybe Eli’s show won’t be your first entrée into the scene if Travis can help.”
Ryan’s heartbeat lurched to fight-or-flight agitation, flaring yesterday’s anger. He forced it to be still, to stay on track for fixing the fight, not making it worse. “If it’s work, why are you picking him up? He can’t take a cab?”
“It’d pretty rude to let him stay with us and not pick him up. Besides, I haven’t seen him in forever.”
Jolted upright, Ryan didn’t bother to hide his irritation. “He’s staying with us?” Impossible to say the necessary things to Ben with Travis in the next room.
“You forgot?”
“There’s been a lot going on.” How could he forget what Ben never told him in the first place?
“Now? Give me two minutes.” Ben’s voice, muffled and far away, came back in a solid rumble. “I have to go. We’re okay, Sunshine. I know the timing on this isn’t great, with the apartment and, well, everything, but we’ll get through. Can’t wait to see you tonight.”
“You too.” Ryan broke the connection. He dropped the phone on his pillow. How could he ask his grandmother for advice about all this, when the only thing he now wanted to ask was how the fuck to get Travis out of his house so he could solve the rest of his life.
Ryan flopped back on the bed. The phone bounced up and hit him in the jaw. Ryan took the hint and dialed his grandmother.
“Good morning, Gramma. What are you doing today?”
“Ouji, you didn’t answer when I called the house. Are you at work? I need to go to the hospital.” Her voice fluttered, creaking and stressed.
Adrenaline shot Ryan back up. He hopped out of bed. “What? Is it bad? I’m on my way. But call 9–1–1 if you need to go before I get there.”
Ryan rushed into the hall, phone clutched tightly in his hand. “Marcus, can you give me a ride?”