BLAKE
Tuesday, December 15
The walk didn’t make his head better or worse. The cold was kind of nice, but the movement was kind of awful, and so it all equalized. When Blake got home, he was still hypersensitive and nauseated, wondering if the coffee had been a mistake on top of all of his other mistakes. He took the label limit of Tylenol—not that he’d ever been convinced it helped, but why not?—shed his clothes, and climbed straight into his bed.
Of course, before he could fall asleep, despite the achy, churning misery in his head, memories of the night before and morning-after revisited him. God forbid he forget for even a second that, after having a perfect spanking, great sex, and delicious aftercare, he’d proceeded to throw up at the stroke of midnight like some kind of broken Cinderella.
And then, instead of retaining any of his dignity, he’d basically crawled into Oliver’s lap and kept him pinned for the rest of the night. When he’d woken up and realized hours had passed, he’d been horrified, even though Oliver had just given him an absent smile and tried to conceal his wince as he unfolded himself from the hard floor. The hard floor where he’d spent the night, thanks to Blake, in a bathroom that smelled faintly of bile.
And when Blake had begun to think that maybe he could make up for it in the future, Oliver had basically said he didn’t want to fuck a sick person, which Blake definitely was. Besides, he was finally getting to move back to Denver like he’d always talked about.
So, that was that.
It all sucked. He’d known Oliver wouldn’t want anything complicated from a young deadbeat who’d been a defendant in his own courtroom, for fuck’s sake. But he’d thought he might be able to enjoy Oliver for a while, and he’d known that just a few weeks with him would be worth the inevitable, painful ending. Instead, all he’d gotten was a single night.
He’d meant what he’d said to Oliver that the play and sex didn’t have anything to do with it. He had done enough of both since his diagnosis to be confident about that. It had probably been something at dinner. He could almost forgive himself for eating the food. He didn’t have that many dietary triggers. But the wine on top of it?
Unless his triggers were changing. Did that even happen? He didn’t think so, but what the fuck did he know, really? He’d quit seeing Dr. Collier as soon as he’d realized that the office would charge his insurance for no-shows. The only way his mom knew whether or not he was attending was by checking the statements.
He set an alarm using his wristband and then pulled a pillow over his head for the next two hours. That’s how long it took for the thoughts and pounding ache to surrender to the rising water of restless sleep.
When the wristband woke him, silently vibrating against his skin, he forced himself out from the dark oasis of his apartment and into the cold midwinter’s day to walk the dogs.
He’d used to think the dog-walking gig was just a temporary thing to allow him to get his head sorted out, literally. When the headaches had gotten bad in his senior year of college, it had felt like a temporary setback. He’d been raised with the assumption that there was a pill or a therapy for everything, and his mother had the resources to send him to all of the best specialists.
Then, it hadn’t been that easy.
He shoved his hands in his pockets, remembering the canvas in the living room almost with surprise. Instead of staring at it obsessively, he’d forgotten it was there for a few days. His subconscious was preoccupied with Tish’s photographs, and instead of dismissing Bria’s texts with forwarded articles, he’d been opening them.
Over the past week, he’d felt weirdly hopeful. It was such a foreign sensation that it had led him to doing strange things, like smiling to himself unconsciously while imagining smearing paint on strangers in the grocery checkout line. And walking to Oliver’s house, unannounced, for a hook-up—or a conversation, or just to see him. Mostly that last thing.
Blake hadn’t been in love before, but falling for Oliver didn’t come as a surprise. The feelings he’d developed for Oliver over the last several months hadn’t needed much encouragement to trip over the edge from infatuation to something deeper and more inescapable.
Still, he hadn’t expected forever. Just… longer than what he’d gotten.
His head was so sore and his thoughts so mopey that he didn’t see Abel Moriarty until it was much too late to avoid him.
Abel looked even more bristled than usual. Blake saw hairs on his neck, visible above the collar of his thin sweater. The day had gotten fairly warm for December, but it was still under fifty degrees. They stared at one another for a moment, in which Blake realized that Abel had no more interest in seeing Blake than Blake had in seeing him. But someone hadn’t gotten the memo: Pumpkin, who was leaping with joyful abandon against the end of her white leather leash, barking happily at the sight of Blake.
Abel and Mary Moriarty had no children. They took everything very seriously, from their work to their landscaping, and they adored Pumpkin. Abel clearly couldn’t bring himself to reel Pumpkin in and disappoint her, which left him standing still and helpless a dozen feet away from Blake on the sidewalk.
So, Blake smiled thinly. “Mind if I say hi?” he asked, having to raise his voice a little to be heard over Pumpkin’s enthusiastic yips.
Abel averted his eyes, shook his head, and slowly walked forward so that Pumpkin, bounding along in front of him, could put her soft paws up on Blake’s knees.
He knelt down and rubbed her behind her silky ears, lowering his face so that she could get a couple of licks in at his neck and jaw, but not going so far as to give her access to his actual face. She was as perfectly groomed and perfumed as always. He’d tried not to think about how much he’d miss her since he’d gotten canned—it wasn’t like it would’ve done any good to dwell on it. But he had missed her. He got attached to all the dogs he worked with, and Pumpkin was as loveable and sweet as a stuffed animal brought to life.
After Pumpkin settled down from high-pitched whining to calmer, happy wriggling, Blake peered up at Mr. Moriarty. Abel was still glowering, but looked more uncomfortable than aggrieved.
“You’re walking her yourself, then?”
Abel hesitated, then nodded shortly. “We didn’t want to disrupt her routine.”
Trying to extract himself from this awkward-as-fuck moment as quickly as possible, Blake gave Pumpkin’s head a quick kiss and stood up.
Abel looked mournful. “You really care about her,” he said quietly. “I thought you did.”
Oh, fuck. Blake loved dogs, he really did. But he didn’t always know what to do with people like the Moriartys, who referred to their dogs as “furkids” or whatever and loved them to the point of vulnerable desperation.
“Look,” Blake said, going so far as to remove his sunglasses, which he immediately regretted even though the day was overcast. He winced, but determinedly met Abel’s eye. He couldn’t believe he was saying this, but he found that he really, really wanted to remove some of the disappointment from Abel’s expression. “I’m not just a stoner for fun, okay? It helps with my headaches.”
“Headaches?” Abel echoed, sounding supremely doubtful.
“Yeah,” Blake said. He should have known trying to explain would be a waste of time. He quickly slipped his sunglasses back on. “Like, migraines.”
“You’re a medicinal user,” Abel said, sounding slightly less doubtful. But only slightly.
Blake just shrugged in acknowledgement, wondering if it would be weird for him to walk on the grass to get around Abel, who was planted in his path like a statue, and Pumpkin, who had propped her feet against his legs again as soon as he’d stood up, and begun pawing at him, which felt kind of like being tapped by two cotton balls.
“Then, why were you charged at all? Medicinal use is an exception to the laws.”
“I didn’t tell the lawyers. It’s not, like, a prescription,” Blake muttered.
“My sister-in-law, Brenda, is a lawyer,” Abel went on, and with more energy. “She told us that they wouldn’t have come down hard on you unless it was an extreme case.”
Blake shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Then again, law enforcement is full of bigots.”
Blake was surprised into a bemused smile. “I don’t think my being half-Korean has anything to do with it.”
Abel rubbed his beard, falling silent. Blake’s discomfort was compounding with every second.
“Well, sir, like you said, routine is important, so I don’t want to let myself run late,” he said awkwardly, but it seemed to do the trick.
“Oh, right,” Abel said, pulling Pumpkin back. “Good—good afternoon, then, Mr. VanPelt.”
Blake held back his sigh. “Yeah, thanks, Mr. Moriarty.”
By the end of the day, Blake was tentatively optimistic that he was going to shake off the spell without another crest. He even had the energy to dig out the migraine journal he’d been neglecting for months, and he filled out the column about activities, food, and drink in the forty-eight-hour period prior, laughing to himself when he put down “awesome spanking/sex.” Then, he remembered how Oliver had acted like he, Oliver, had somehow injured Blake with what had been, objectively speaking, a pretty mild scene. He thought about crossing it out for the sake of principle. He left it instead, but only because he had no plans to actually show the journal to Dr. Collier.
That thought gave him pause. Why had he begun boycotting the appointments, exactly? He couldn’t remember. A few words hung in his mind, which he was fairly sure belonged to his mother and which he’d been stubbornly ignoring at the time. You’re grieving, and grief has stages.
What had he been grieving, he’d wondered angrily at the time. And why had she already given up?
Now, he thought he understood. His mother hadn’t wanted him to be waiting for some perfect future that might not happen. She’d wanted him to accept his limitations and be happy within them, just in case. That had made him furious then. It still made him feel—something. But it wasn’t anger at this point. It was sadder than that, more wistful.
Suddenly curious, he googled “stages of grief” on his phone, and they popped up in a bulleted list: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
He rubbed his forehead and looked up from the kitchen table into the living room, taken by surprise by the sight of the forgotten, unfinished portrait on its easel.
He got up from the table and walked over to it. In the dim glow of the lamp, some of the lines were almost invisible, but he knew where they were anyway. He could trace them with his eyes—the ones that were there, and the ones he’d add in another time, in another life, where he could sit here and finish the piece in the way he’d finished so many before. But that had been then, and his now was different. He was different.
There was something inexplicably triggering about portraiture that he didn’t understand, but the tradition he’d longed to take part in since he saw his first Rembrandt, and in which he’d once been considered something of a savant, was lost to him. And he had to accept that he’d probably never get it back.
He was holding the pen he’d used to make his journal entry. He looked down at it, then at the canvas. With a quick swing of his arm, he punctured the canvas in the top left corner and dragged the pen in a diagonal slash to the bottom right. The canvas parted with the sound of tearing fabric, but a little more resistance. The movement, ultimately, upset the easel, and the torn canvas was knocked to the ground. It landed face-down on the rug.
Blake felt nothing. Or, he felt nothing that he could identify.
Was that, possibly, acceptance?
It would figure if his goddamn mother had been right all along.
He was sad, but not about this, not right now. It was astounding, to think that this thing—this condition—which had so dominated his life, and totally monopolized his misery, could be overshadowed. But it was. He missed Oliver, the way you can miss someone you’ve just seen when you know that, in the way you wanted them with you, they’re long gone.
The Oliver-incurred pain was so bright and vivid, he could feel it in his whole body. It felt clean and survivable, without the faintest echo of the mire he’d fought through in the past couple of years. He was on the other side of that long sleepwalk, he realized. And stronger for it.
He’d survive losing Oliver before he’d even had him.
It was his only solace, and it wasn’t much.
But, at the same time… fuck. It was everything.
Thursday
Blake, Bria, and Tish all met at Tish’s to celebrate the HERE article. When Blake showed up to find them in conical party hats and holding champagne, he rolled his eyes in outward exasperation. But on the inside, he was pretty charmed.
The HERE story was the best they could have hoped for. It included all of Tish’s best images. It focused almost equally on each of the three of them with only good things to say, and it was getting shared. Like, dozens of times an hour. They kept refreshing the Facebook article and toasting the uptick each time.
Blake was toasting with sparkling grape juice, which Tish had provided without comment after he’d declined the champagne. The bottle had already been open in their fridge, so it was completely flat, but he drank it without complaint.
Everyone was casual for the night in—Blake in his standard t-shirt and jeans, Bria in yoga pants, ballet flats, and an oversized black t-shirt screen-printed with camera lenses. Tish was wearing sweatpants, a hoodie, and a backward baseball cap with no makeup, and the only glitter in sight was the residual variety that always populated their furniture.
“Stop checking me out, Blakey, ew,” Tish said, apparently catching sight of one of Blake’s more direct glances when they were getting off the couch to refill Bria’s glass. “I feel so objectified.”
“He’s always thought you were hot on a masc day,” Bria said.
“Which I try not to be offended by, considering you’re never masc and he wanted you to fuck him.”
“Okay, I’m right here,” Blake pointed out, leaning back against the futon cushions and glowering at them. “Now, who’s objectifying whom?”
“Oh my God, Blakey, did you just say ‘whom’?” Tish called incredulously from the kitchen.
“We can all objectify each other,” Bria suggested, waggling her eyebrows. Her eyes met Blake’s and her smile faded. She rolled onto her hip so that she faced him, her expression suddenly serious. “I’m sorry I went off about the weed thing. Is that going to be all right?”
“I hope so,” Blake said. “It’s going to be over with soon, one way or the other. And you don’t have to be sorry. It was stupid, bringing that shit with me when we were working.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t care about you having weed because we were working, I cared that you got in trouble.” She glowered and her voice lowered like the next words pained her. “I care about you.”
Blake’s mouth itched with the urge to smile, but he didn’t let himself, too afraid that Bria would see it as being laughed at. He put his hand on hers and squeezed. “I know. And—same.”
Bria’s phone buzzed and she picked it up, her face going totally blank after a second. “Oh my God, you guys.” She leaned in and fumbled with the trackpad on Tish’s laptop, uncharacteristically graceless. “You guys, you guys…” she chanted as a page loaded.
“Isn’t ‘guys’ one of those words we’re not saying anymore?” Blake murmured even as he leaned forward to peer at the screen, their shoulders bumping together. Bria ignored him, her face pale, but excited, and when the page came up, Blake understood why.
The HERE article had just been reblogged by BuzzFeed. “Ten Genius Photos That Prove the Human Body is the Ideal Canvas.”
“Look!” Bria said, pointing to the hits in the corner, which were already past one hundred thousand.
They stared at each other for a second, and then Tish gave a little whoop, hopped over the back of the futon, and wrapped an arm around them both, tackling them. And Blake was too adrenaline-filled to even feel their knee landing in his ribs as he laughed and grappled back, and then Bria pulled his hair and kissed his cheek, and then she and Tish kind of made out, and then they all laughed together again.
Blake had gone home some time around ten, leaving Bria and Tish entangled in what appeared to be a mostly platonic cuddle on the futon. They’d booed him for being an old man, but he’d shrugged it off, totally unwilling to risk throwing himself off with another late night.
He’d gotten calls and texts from three modern art studios, as well as one professional makeup artist who’d said his name in a way that suggested he’d expected Blake to recognize it, which Blake had gone along with. The hinted-at opportunities all sounded fun, but not like anything he was going to let himself get carried away by.
Tish had only taken one call from a number they recognized, and then bounced on the balls of their feet after a long conversation. Apparently, it had been a gallery director in Kansas City who Tish had already had preliminary talks with about a show.
“We don’t have enough pieces, do we?” Blake had asked, dubious.
“They were hoping we could incorporate two new models. Or at least one.”
Blake had balked. Painting Bria had felt natural. Painting a random model? He wasn’t so sure.
That’s when Oliver’s face had flashed in his mind’s eye—and he had decided he’d better head home before he hit the tail end of his adrenaline high and got weepy.
Tish’s tawny hazel eyes had seemed to follow his expression very closely, but instead of interrogating him, they’d just patted his arm. “Well, think about it.”
And he’d said he would.
Blake glanced at his phone when it rang again, thinking this might be the one time he didn’t answer… but then he gritted his teeth and picked up, noting that the number was local and vaguely familiar.
“Hello?”
“Oh, Blake, great,” said a tired voice about as familiar as the number—he knew he’d heard it before, but couldn’t place it. “This is Colin Peters.”
“Colin?” Blake paused to stare down at his phone screen, confirming the time. “It’s ten after ten.”
“Is it?” Colin sounded wearily amused. “I don’t know what to tell you. Late nights are kind of the name of the game in public service.”
“That fucking sucks,” Blake said reflexively. “Um, sorry.”
But Colin was laughing. “No, you’re completely right. It’s not a highlight of the job by any means. Anyway, if you have a minute, I’ve got some good news.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I heard from the prosecutor, and she’s going to offer you that diversion after all.”
Blake had started walking again, but now he stumbled to a stop for the second time in a quarter of a block, and decided not to risk any more steps until the conversation was over.
“What? Why?”
“Well, she said that she’d reexamined the officers’ statements, but she was pretty vague about it. And, frankly, I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, you know? I just said that I was sure you’d take it, but of course I’d have to talk to you first. We’re tentatively planning to have you accept the diversion first thing in the morning. Before she can change her mind again.”
“I should do it, shouldn’t I?” Oliver had acted like this would be a good thing.
“Yes,” Colin said, emphatic. “It’ll basically make it like the arrest never happened. You’ll complete some community service. Pay a fine. And you can make payments on the fine if you have to.”
Well, yeah, that did sound fucking ideal. “Like it never happened?” Blake repeated. “Nothing on my record?”
“No record,” Colin confirmed. “It will show up like a dismissal.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“Um,” Colin said, sounding sheepish, “I don’t think you should really thank me. The prosecutor got there on her own, for whatever reason. But I do want to help you take her up on it ASAP, so can you meet me at the courthouse tomorrow morning? I have court at eight-thirty, so I was hoping we could drop everything off before that, around eight-fifteen.”
“Definitely,” Blake said. “See you then.”
Friday
Blake didn’t see Oliver around the courthouse, and he wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.
The building looked different to him without a migraine and the additional shock of being walked around in handcuffs. Everything was a little shabby, and the people working behind the various counters and windows looked less fierce and more weary.
Colin showed him the paperwork, Blake signed, and then Colin left him shuffling his copies of the paperwork into a folder outside of an office that had a plaque over it reading “Clerk of the Court.” Which was where Blake overheard a familiar name in the conversation between two of the middle-aged women in the office, and couldn’t help eavesdropping.
“…Abel Moriarty, I remember him. He made Susan’s life a living hell over that historic district nonsense. He’s like a dog with a bone once he gets his mind set on something.”
“Oh, him. He called yesterday?”
“He called six times yesterday, demanding to speak to Mallory. When she finally took the call, I guess it went on for almost an hour! And he wore her down, it looks like, because this morning, Sandy said she was writing up a diversion agreement for that VanPelt kid to sign, first thing.”
Blake stopped listening, worried that if he heard any more, his brain might explode.
Wonders never fucking ceased.