BLAKE
about two hours earlier
Blake met Bria at the factory at five, which gave them three hours before they planned to photograph her. He’d walked the space two nights ago with Bria and Tish, and then they’d helped Tish set up all of the lighting apparatuses. The metal frames, bulbs, and draped cords were still there like strange, slender-legged birds standing at various heights on the industrial building’s concrete floor. Sunlight poured in on the west side, throwing deep shadows and imbuing the window panes with an amber glow.
Bria was practically bouncing on the soles of her feet with eagerness, but she grimaced when Blake set his supply case on the edge of the thick sheet of plastic they’d spread out so that he could paint her.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She flashed him one of the dark grins that would have made Blake’s cock stir in anticipation back when they were sleeping together. Now he just smiled back, wryly. He arched a brow, too, and she relented and rolled her eyes. “I was just thinking this is very Dexter. If you have knives instead of brushes in that case, I’m going to kick your ass first and ask questions later.”
“That a promise?” Blake asked before he could worry she’d take it the wrong way—as an invitation rather than banter. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want to revisit the extracurricular activities he’d enjoyed with her in the past. Something between them had shifted in the months since they’d last played, and he liked how things were now.
The moment of tension dissipated when her answer was an easy laugh.
But the passing thought made him curious. Bria had broken things off between them, but Blake hadn’t suffered over it, aside from the minor inconvenience of finding another source of bruises and orgasms from time to time. He’d never had an issue finding partners. What bothered him—and “bothered” wasn’t the right word, but he wasn’t sure how else to describe it—was wondering why she’d done it. He assumed it was because she’d met someone else, but after months of waiting patiently for her to show up with a besotted partner at her side, he’d seen no one. She’d mentioned no one.
Blake was almost curious enough to ask. But not quite. He and Bria got along in part because neither of them expected the other to share every detail of their life. He valued their companionable silences too much to betray Bria with interrogations about mystery men.
He’d always considered himself private, but Bria took it to another level. And, considering that he could count his actual friends on one hand, Blake wasn’t going to risk pissing her off by prying.
“Get ready, then stand here,” he said, nodding toward the middle of the plastic.
“Get naked, you mean?” She winked at him and then pulled her dress over her head, shivering only once in the chill of the musty room. She shucked off her shoes and stepped onto the plastic. She’d once told Blake that modeling made people impervious to cold and hunger—that, or they didn’t last through their first few jobs. Bria had lasted through a lot more than a few jobs over the years Blake had known her, but her break still hadn’t come.
His eyes skimmed the contours of her body with an appreciation that had nothing to do with sex. Blake’s attraction to women usually began and ended with how they could make him feel, by hitting him or stepping on him or snarling in his ear. Their bodies in repose didn’t do much for him. For that reason, he wasn’t sure he fully qualified as bi. But no one could deny that Bria was beautiful, and the artist in Blake had a particular appreciation for the elegance of her long bones and the burnished copper glow of her skin.
When she was down to nothing but a pair of black panties, her toes flexed against the plastic, making it crackle. She held her arms out and grinned. “Let’s do this.”
Despite his anxiety about holding it together tonight, Blake automatically grinned back at her. He felt the thrill he always did in the moment before he picked up a brush. It was the anticipation of knowing he would soon put something into the world that hadn’t been there before. The thrill was particularly intense tonight. He didn’t want to admit it even to himself, but he was probably just as excited as Bria was to see what could happen.
The first time Blake had painted Bria, it had been only her face. She’d been complaining about her inability to master a certain kind of contouring technique, so he’d watched the video she’d been trying to copy from, explained why the so-called professional was doing it wrong, and then demonstrated a better method for her.
It had kind of snowballed from there.
Bria would send him a video. He’d critique it, prove his argument with a demonstration, and so on. It had begun with semi-standard makeup applications, like cat eyes, and evolved—into transforming half of Bria’s face into scales, and, once, giving her cheek an open wound which had been so realistic that Bria herself had almost gagged when she’d checked the mirror.
It hadn’t surprised him that, eventually, their past-time escalated into him painting her from head to toe. But he hadn’t expected that when they did, it would feel like real work, the sort of creating that got under his skin and filled his head with a pleasant, humming energy. The work that made moments stretch into hours, where he became so attuned to the color and the building texture and the illusion of his own making that his other senses receded.
When he pulled back to take a break two hours in, he realized Tish had shown up at some point, but he’d been so distracted that he hadn’t even heard them adjusting the stands for the freestanding lights and humming tunelessly.
Blake blinked in their direction, which was a mistake, because outside of the pool of light that illuminated Bria and their island of sheet plastic, the space was completely dark. When his eyes tried to shift too quickly between dark spaces and light spaces, it could fuck with him.
Quickly averting his stare, he frowned at the arches of Bria’s feet, which he hadn’t decided how to tie in yet. She had great feet, and even though the general concept was that her lower body wouldn’t be in the shot for the first few poses, when the time came for the pose with her feet in view, he really wanted them just right. For her hands, he’d highlighted the space between her fingers, making each one look wide and flat. He decided to try something similar here, and bent down. Bria jumped when he first slid his brush between her toes, but then she was still.
“The only thing colder than standing naked in an abandoned factory in December,” she said through chattering teeth, “is standing naked in an abandoned factory in December, covered in wet paint.”
Blake frowned and pressed his clean left thumb against the firm, lean muscle of her thigh. The silver color there didn’t so much as smear. “It’s not wet.”
“That shit that you just poured between my toes sure as fuck is,” Bria growled. “Don’t you dare laugh.” Blake obediently smothered his chuckle by biting his lip.
“About ready?” Tish called. “Because I am, and it looks amazing. The moonlight is really fantastic over here, too, but I can see some clouds rolling in. Tick, tock.”
Blake felt a tiny, unrelenting pain bloom where, all day, he’d felt only intermittent throbs. He gritted his teeth, his smile vanishing, and sat back on his heels away from Bria’s feet.
‘Tick, tock’ is right, Blake thought grimly.
“Yeah, let’s go,” he murmured.
Bria gingerly stepped off the paint-splattered plastic, and as she walked toward Tish, Tish clapped their hands delightedly.
“Oh, holy hell, she looks awesome,” they exclaimed. Blake wanted to turn his head toward Bria and see what she looked like in motion, and hated that he had to play it safe instead, closing his eyes and counting back from five, then ten, then fifteen until his nausea boiled away.
“I’m just gonna take a leak real quick,” he called without turning, and he fingered the joints in his pocket as he strode toward the door, peeking out through a crack in one eyelid every few steps so that he didn’t crash into anything and wincing every time at the painful light.
He could imagine the incredulous stares Bria and Tish would have fixed on his back as he escaped onto a rickety fire escape and lit his smoke with trembling hands.
Sometimes, he’d thought about telling Bria. He had a feeling he knew more about her than most people did, and he knew she cared about him. That was a pretty rare thing, to have a friend who really cared. Especially when you weren’t fucking them anymore.
But he never had told her, and the longer he said nothing, the harder it became to imagine saying anything. The headaches weren’t a secret, exactly, but it was just—well, he didn’t know how to talk about them. They weren’t a problem or a passing ailment. They were more than likely permanent. His secret, excruciating flaw.
He also hated thinking about them himself, and telling someone else about them also meant having to answer whatever questions they came up with, most of which had the unhelpful answer of “I don’t know,” and all of which revealed that nobody really got it. Most people thought they understood. They got headaches sometimes, too, after all. Everybody did.
What Blake didn’t want to explain was that migraines weren’t just headaches, and chronic migraines weren’t just migraines. When the doctor Blake hated seeing talked about them in his serious voice with his serious stare, he called the sum total of Blake’s symptoms “migraine,” singular. For some reason, that simple difference in the word made it sound monumentally ominous. Sometimes, irrationally, Blake thought that was the primary reason he’d skipped his last six appointments. Just because he couldn’t bear to hear the doctor call his headaches that.
Blake took a last, heavy drag of the joint, the paper burned back so far that he felt the sting of heat on his thumb and forefinger where he held it. He waited past the early pain that was mostly his nervous system warning him—hey, fucker, this is hot!—until he felt the stomach-turning flare of a real burn. Only then did he drop the joint and grind it against the grate. Little bits of burning paper fell toward the alley like crimson snowflakes. They disappeared, burning out long before they hit the pavement two stories below.
The pain in his head was still there, but it was numbed enough that, when he came back onto the old factory floor, he let himself look at Bria in a pool of moonlight, her palms pressed against the glass, while Tish exclaimed “Yes, yes!” and dropped to one knee, aiming the camera lens up toward Bria’s chin. They weren’t using the flash, so he came closer, heart hammering at the sight of Bria, his living canvas, her painted eyelids giving the illusion of a solid black iris glittering with vacant intelligence.
Tish heard his footsteps and looked over their shoulder with a brilliant grin. “Blakey,” they breathed, and Blake was so caught up in the excitement of the project that he couldn’t even bring himself to be annoyed by the nickname.
“Yeah,” he said, answering the unspoken question. “I know.”
Blake turned away under the pretense of readying his paint when they changed spaces and employed the flash. It was good to have a few minutes, anyway, to think about how to use the layer he’d already put on Bria to most quickly and efficiently create the next concept. She had to be exhausted by now, though no one would ever know it from watching her in front of the camera. In any case, they’d planned the shoot, including Blake’s work, to last three and a half hours for a reason. He might be the only one with a rebelling nervous system, but none of them could stay at their best for much longer than that. When Bria was back under his hands, he still hadn’t settled on his approach. And then he lifted his brush, turned it and studied the color on its tip, and smiled to himself as he seized on the answer.
He felt, sometimes, like all of his creativity was in his hands instead of his mind. In moments where everything was right, he wasn’t even sure he had control of his wrists and fingers; they took on a will of their own, moving without conscious decision, tracing shapes more graceful and finding shadows more surprising than anything he could have invented with conscious thought.
He fell back into the lull of the paint, the delicate and rapid dance of it, trying to outrun the inferno that was building in his skull.
Just as his vision was beginning to get patchy, he finished.
The first concept had been shadows within a few sharp lines—Ghost in the Machine, he and Tish had dubbed her when they’d been reviewing his sketches. The second was full of metallic detail, but delicate, too—Femmedroid, whom Blake had worried all night that he wouldn’t be able to last long enough to paint.
But as he pushed himself back onto his ass and rested his wrists on his paint-streaked knees to look up at Bria, he grinned despite the tide of the migraine. And from behind him, Tish murmured, “Wow.”
This time, when they started photographing, Blake went all the way out of the building, into the parking lot where they’d left their cars, bent over the sparse grass at the edge of the crumbling asphalt, and vomited into the tall grass and weeds.
All in all, he was proud of himself. He’d done his part, and even if Tish’s photos didn’t turn out, he’d enjoy the memory of Bria with his temporary art all over her. He was beginning to understand why those monks drew intricate designs on the beach, even knowing the tide would smooth them away. There was something very zen about imagining Bria wiping away his work, letting it wash down her shower drain.
He felt good, all things considered. He’d pulled off the night.
Blake stayed poised with his hands on his knees for a few moments after his stomach stopped heaving, just to be safe. He didn’t have much to bring up. Some water, and hopefully not all of the Tylenol. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grimacing at the sour taste, and straightened just as headlights swung into the parking lot.
Surprised and wary, Blake hesitated to study the approaching car. They weren’t exactly in a nice part of town; there were no abandoned warehouses in gated communities, after all. So, initially, he relaxed when he saw that the car was a police cruiser. They had permission to be out here. Bria, who was full of mysterious and convenient connections, had set it up, then given Blake and Tish the guy’s number just in case.
But then, as the cruiser flipped on its lights with a quick bark of its siren, and the driver left it running as he and his partner got out, one from each side, Blake remembered the joint he’d smoked on the fire escape, and the others in his pocket.
So much for pulling off the night.