A True Gentleman
Title: A True Gentleman (11/?)
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG-NC17
Warnings: AU, angst, art geekery
Summary: Uni fic.
Harvard was white with new snow, falling in those big, light flakes that drifted slowly down in the bitter cold air. Few people stayed outside for long, crowding coffee shops and libraries, or simply opting to go home after class. It made the campus almost hauntingly quiet.
Dom and Elijah stuck it out after Photography, trudging through the weather with their cameras around their necks, looking for shots to complete their portfolios before the student show. The small park they frequented in better weather was undisturbed, a white carpet surrounded by silvery trees.
“I can’t get over how close we are, man,” Elijah said, a cigarette dangling from between his knuckles as he adjusted his aperture, shooting the gradients in the clouds. “It’s like the end of high school all over again. But with beer.”
Dom breathed a laugh in response, keeping his eye on a pair of waxwings all puffed up together on a branch above. Elijah had been on this vein for the last week or so, as if it was just setting in for him that their time here was nearly over.
“We should go out, celebrate. Let’s pick up Orli from the gym and hit Bukowksi’s or something after this.”
“I can’t,” Dom murmured, “I’ve got to take Billy to work later.”
He’d been driving Billy to work for nearly a week, and true to his word, he arrived on time, early some days. One evening he followed him into Morton’s and had some dinner, although he had the good sense to let Billy be and sit in someone else’s section. Billy said little on their drives in, sometimes talking about coursework or commenting on the music, though he always thanked him for the ride while putting on that silly Velcro bowtie under his collar.
“I can’t believe you’re still doing this study thing with him, man,” Elijah fiddled with his lenses. “I mean, the semester… shit, this whole thing, it’s almost over. Why fucking bother at this point?”
Dom adjusted his focus on the birds, waiting Elijah out.
“Is Mort really forcing you to?”
Snapping three shots, Dom looked down, turning around and flexing his fingers in the cold. He shrugged, “Mort doesn’t force people to do anything. He just uses Jedi mind tricks to make you think it’s for the best.”
“That’s not a fucking excuse,” Elijah’s laughed.
Dom looked at the path their footprints had made across the snow field, the only ones so far marring the pristine white, and raised his camera to snap a couple of shots of it.
“I mean, getting Orli to try and fix his piece-of-shit car, I thought we were going to at least egg his windows or something. Didn’t have to, though, he got his undies in a wad just over the idea that you had us try.” Elijah giggled, sticking the butt of his smoke into the snow and then pocketing it. “He’s so hyper-sensitive about fucking nothing, it’s hilarious.”
“Having your car break down isn’t nothing to everyone, Lij,” Dom retorted in Billy’s defense before catching himself, but it was already too late, Elijah’s eyes had locked onto him. He shrugged, “He has a lot of shit on his mind.”
“Sorry, you’re good buddies now, huh?” Elijah snorted, though his eyes were fiercely intent. “Study buddies. In the name of Art History and good grades, right? Shit you don’t get from Orli and me.”
Dom snapped another several photos, still caught in Elijah’s gaze, the one Dom often thought of as some telekinetic alien brain scan when he was parsing something out.
“You like him.”
Dom’s pulse tripped a little as he fiddled with his camera under the magnitude of Elijah’s deduction. The moment stretched taut between them.
“Oh my God, you do! I knew it!” Elijah laughed, and then the grin melted off like so many icicles, to something else entirely. “Oh God.”
Dom raised his eyes and his chin, glaring back at his friend with enough fire to deliver a warning not to rip into it one way or the other. Elijah’s eyes widened, his mouth pursing around words and questions that didn’t escape. Dom brazenly lifted his camera and snapped a shot of that look, so rare to see in this last year.
It pulled Elijah out of his fish-mouthing. “You really… Why?”
Dom shrugged as he adjusted his shutter speed, keeping his focus on the camera settings. He hadn’t figured out an answer for that in all this time himself.
“Does… Is he even gay? I mean, like…” Elijah eyes finally dropped away, and Dom nearly felt like he could breathe again as Elijah kept going. “Shit, Billy’s practically asexual. I can’t imagine… oh fuck, I don’t even want to imagine. Fuck you, Dom.”
Dom grinned, raised his camera again to grab a shot of Elijah’s abject horror at his own thoughts betraying him.
“You fucker!” Elijah lunged and Dom backed away at a jog, bobbing and darting until something under the snow took his feet out from under him and he fell hard on his arse with an oof, cradling his camera to his chest as he went flat in the few inches of powder. Elijah jumped on him, grabbing a handful of snow and scrubbing his face with it. Dom howled, not really fighting too hard as they both kept their cameras out of harm’s way.
He looked up when Elijah stilled, swiping snow from his face with his free hand and registering the weight of Elijah straddled on top of him in a way that had only happened a chance few times including this one, the majority of those in the privacy of his bedroom and usually involving alcohol. He could tell Elijah’s head was in the same place, going back to the time when he was once the object of Dom’s infatuation, maybe with a slip of regret that he’d had a chance then.
Dom was still struck by Elijah, though, looking remarkable with the new snow and the naked trees around him, the blue undertone of his skin kissed by winter. While he had become used to letting go of those who had rejected him, he rarely forgot why he’d given them a go in the first place, and Elijah was no exception. He snapped a shot of him without really trying to aim or focus, one he didn’t even dispute.
“Are you serious?” Elijah asked. “Or is it gonna go like they all do?”
“Didn’t,” Dom admitted, remembering again that fleeting kiss on Billy’s sofa. “It didn’t go that way at all. I just…” he glanced off to the side, suddenly a bit shy at the longing he could hear in his own voice. “I don’t know if it’ll go any farther, though.”
“What did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything,” Dom answered, even though his mind supplied plenty of things Billy had and hadn’t done. Billy’d pursed his lips against his own, he’d closed his eyes, he’d inhaled through his nose and out in a warm puff against Dom’s mouth. He hadn’t shoved him off, hadn’t shouted in disgust.
Elijah lifted off him, sitting in the snow beside where Dom lay, still peering at him with those vast penetrating eyes, searching for answers to whatever questions he had behind his lips. Dom stayed where he was, his camera propped on his stomach, held there by one cold hand, his face wet with melting snow clinging in his lashes as he looked up through the tree branches above. A part of him knew Elijah would keep this close to the chest. Dom kept a number of Elijah’s deepest secrets, after all. And he thought Orlando already suspected, from the look he’d got when he’d figured out it was Billy’s old car he was meant to fix a week ago. He hadn’t said a thing about it since, but Orli was quicker on the uptake than he let on.
He pulled the camera up, focusing a shot of the trees and the silent snow falling directly on him. His fingers were beginning to go numb, more now they were damp from wrestling in the snow, but he snapped the shots anyway, sitting up to tug a warm, dry bit of his soft cotton undershirt from beneath his jumper and coat to wipe the lens and cap it.
“What are we gonna do after this, man?” Elijah asked next, pulling out his pack of smokes and lighting one. “It’s so weird. Only a month and a half to go.”
Dom shrugged, still fiddling with his camera. “I don’t know. My parents won’t pay my part of the rent once the lease is up in June. They probably expect me to come home by then.”
He sighed. Going home meant indulging his father’s directives, either he’d become his lackey at the firm or spend another however many years at another school studying to get another degree and just postpone the former option. Billy was right about one thing. His parents weren’t going to pay his way forever, and certainly not if he didn’t do what they wanted. Dom spent most of his time avoiding even thinking about it. He spent most of his time thinking about Billy instead.
“I’m not going back to Iowa,” Elijah said with a fierce determination, reaching for his camera bag and dusting it off. “Maybe to visit, but I’m not going back to stay. Not with my dad the way he is.”
Dom watched him pull hard on his cigarette, his short hair growing out from close crop making him look a least a little older than he’d been when Dom had first met him. He’d come a long way from a few years ago, a long way from the hateful sort of thinking his own father had pounded into him through fear. Elijah may never let his family know what sort of personal inclinations he had, may never even decide to act on them at all, but he still had the balls to decide his own fate and strike out on his own. That was another part of this they were all avoiding, the fact that after graduation, their little trio would likely be split up. Dom lifted a hand and scrubbed the back of Lij’s head affectionately.
“Billy fucking Boyd, Dom, really?” Elijah shook Dom’s hand off, the gap in his teeth setting off his smile. “Are you even allowed to date a TA? Isn’t that like statutory rape or something?”
Dom chuckled, his face heating up in the cold air, pulling himself up and dusting off as much of the snow as he could. He held a hand out, hauling his mate up from the cold. As Elijah brushed off his arse and knees, Dom studied the shape of himself in the snow, the space where he’d fallen, and the imprint of Elijah’s knees to either side and where he’d sat afterward. A memory of a conversation, secrets shared and things let go, nestled in a white relief. He plucked the cap off his lens and snapped a couple of shots of it.
“Billy could be okay, I guess,” Elijah decided as they turned and followed their tracks back the way they’d come. Dom glanced at him with surprise. “I mean, if he’d calm the hell down and learn to take a joke. And if he’d wear something besides fucking khakis and sweater vests. He’d be a real person for a change.”
Dom recapped his lens and pushed his frozen fingers deeply into his pockets as they headed back in the direction of the photography wing. With so many people heading home early, they might grab the dark room without having to wait. “He’s always been a real person, Lij.”
The following Saturday morning Dom shuffled the stack of developed shots from yesterday along with the rest from the semester into his portfolio as he headed out in the frosty weather. He sighed as he drove along the icy roads, contemplating driving by Billy’s although he had no good reason for it. He’d become so used to seeing him every day, even if it was just during the drive to and from Morton’s, that not seeing him for this one day felt like a loss. He laughed at himself, thinking what Elijah would say to that now.
He was cutting it close, the deadline to get his work in the student show was the coming Monday. He’d never liked leaving his artwork somewhere. Nearly every time he had corners of his photos dinged, or his charcoal smudged by careless hands. And though he could buy ready-made mats for this, he always thought hand-cut mats were better, and chances were the nearby art and hobby stores had been raided by the other students already.
The little bell rang above the door as he came through a small framing shop he hadn’t been to before. There were voices from the back room, and in a few seconds someone came out and their eyes met, both frozen.
“Billy,” the name dropped from Dom’s mouth as he stood in the middle of the lobby, corners of frames and prints all around him. He laughed, honestly surprised and feeling a little duped, “I had no idea you worked here.”
Billy let out an amused breath, his mouth curling a little, “I guess it never really came up.” He toyed with the strings on the light canvas apron he wore round his waist over jeans. Dom had never seen him wear jeans before. Instantly his mind scampered over a dozen questions: why Billy hadn’t told him he had another job, why he might take this one framing junk art, why that apron over jeans did things for him that the barman’s apron over slacks with a bowtie didn’t come close to, why his hair somehow looked more fiery red with the wintry light from the windows. Suddenly Billy was a thousand times more mysterious and gorgeous than he already was.
“I, erm,” Dom started, coming forward to the counter with his portfolio, “I’ve got a few things here, for school. They just need mats, no frames.”
Billy arched a brow, “They don’t have you mat your own things?”
“Well, you can,” Dom shrugged guiltily, “I’m just shite at it. Can never get the maths right.”
“Right,” Billy said, reaching behind himself for a damp rag to clean off the remnants of someone else’s pastels from the counter so Dom could bring out his work. “Let’s have it, then.”
Dom opened up his portfolio, bringing out the photographs first, watching as Billy’s careful hands spread them apart and studied them all. “Will these all be for the student’s show?”
“Yeah. Well no. I’m only supposed to pick five, but I sort of like all of these so I haven’t really narrowed it down,” Dom admitted, knowing that framers generally hated when artists did this sort of thing. “I wanted to get in here early to be sure I can get them matted before Monday though. If that’s possible.”
Billy gave him a look, one Dom knew well and that made him turn his guilty grin to his shoes. Billy didn’t even have to tell him what a sod he was.
Instead, Billy merely looked at the twelve photographs he’d spread out with a critical eye, his thumbnail going in his mouth in thought, something he often did while grading papers. He shifted his feet and his hips in those jeans and apron cocked with the unconscious move. Dom licked his lips and held his breath.
Billy pulled five of the photos aside, and Dom fixated on his hands; the way he handled his photographs only by the very corners with just the narrow pads of his fingers. For a moment he thought Billy had picked out those five, but then he turned his attention to the remaining seven. “You like these colors. You shoot them quite a bit,” he commented. “There’s a whole… sort of ‘cold morning’ feel to them.”
Dom looked, now noticing the common theme he hadn’t really thought of; these photos were all shades of sunrise-cool blues, creamy tans, hints of pink and orange. Billy’s hand lingered on a shot of Orlando in their flat, throwing a pot on a kick-wheel by the big windows facing an early Boston sunrise. He tugged it aside, and another of the cityscape, also early morning.
“The rest of these are all natural settings. Outside, I think. They all go together.” Billy looked up, “I mean, it doesn’t matter in the student show, but for real galleries, they really like a sort of common theme, you know? There’s a chance they’ll sell your work as a collection that way.”
Dom stared, mainly struck at Billy offering him real advice on his personal passion.
Billy shrugged, looking back down, pulling one of the shots of Elijah from yesterday toward him. It was mostly blurry, and half of Elijah’s face was out of frame, but the camera had managed to focus in on Elijah’s eye, jaw and the side of his lips, with the blurs of falling snow all around and the tree branches behind giving the whole thing a fey quality.
Billy left that one in the group, going on to the next. “What is this?”
Dom pulled his gaze from Billy and looked at the shot, feeling a bit of heat come to his cheeks at what it was and represented, and exactly how Billy fit into it. “It’s…erm, me. The shape of me. I fell in the snow, and that’s where I was, and it’s… somewhere I’ve been.”
His explanation was beyond lame, he wouldn’t blame Billy if he looked at him like he was an idiot. But Billy looked up, nearly smiled and said, “No tea on hand, then?”
He remembered! Not only did Billy remember, but he grasped what the idea meant to him, maybe even that the idea was less about the visual than the memory of it, and it was the memory that was important. Christ, he wanted to kiss him again for that.
“Not this time,” he mumbled vaguely, taking in Billy in this whole new element. He leaned his palms on the counter, smiling as he tried for flirty, “I didn’t know you owned any jeans.”
Billy did a slight double take, his feet shifting again which only brought Dom’s attention back down to the neat fit at his waist where his shirt was tucked in, the way the strings of the apron wrapped around twice and tied in slipknot off one hip.
“Um,” Billy scratched his chin, “You know, this isn’t my choice or anything, but I think…” he lingered over the shots, leaving the one of Dom’s imprint in the group and pulled away a sort of generic landscape of a pond away towards the other seven, “I think these five are probably the best. Even if I have to look at Elijah’s mug while I mat this.”
Dom giggled stupidly, thoroughly stuck on trying to apply a name to the exact shade of Billy’s hair in this light on top of being elated that Billy half made a joke. “How did you get here?” he asked.
“What?” Billy looked perplexed.
“Here,” Dom stumbled, “How did you get here today?”
“I walked,” Billy cocked a brow at him. “’S not far. So are these the ones you want done?”
Dom blinked, and then came back to why he was here, looking at the five of his photos Billy had selected. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, these are good. They have a theme, you’re right.”
Billy stepped to the back counter for a moment, coming back to with a couple of mat corners. “I know they don’t really like you to use any colored mats for the student shows, but…” he used the shot of Dom’s imprint in the snow to illustrate, “If you use a warm white versus a cool white, you can see how it draws the eye to the shades in your piece. The blues pop with a cool white, and the tans and pinks come out with the warm. See?”
Dom did, fascinated with watching him in this space. Billy suggested going with the warm white mat, and Dom blindly agreed, watching his hands carefully shuffle the photos together a fresh fold of parchment off a long roll to protect them, writing Dom’s name on the edge.
“I can get these matted by the end of tomorrow,” Billy told him, “You said you need them by Monday, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Dom answered, thinking quickly, “You work here tomorrow too? Maybe I can come by after your shift, since I’m driving you to Morton’s after?”
Billy shuffled uncomfortably, bringing a calculator onto the counter top to make quick figures. “Five of these, plus square feet of mat board, custom-cut fee, and a rush by tomorrow… So it’s going to come to… seventy-six eighty. You’ll pay when you pick up. Tomorrow, round five-thirty?”
“Okay,” Dom breathed through a smile, unfazed by the cost, but aware of Billy’s sudden discomfort and wondering what he’d done now. “Tomorrow, then.”
He shuffled the rest of his shots back into his portfolio, eyeing the folder of his work in Billy’s hands, suddenly considering all the things that could happen to them in a frame shop again.
Billy raised his eyebrows, “They’ll be fine, Dom.” He murmured, using Dom’s name for the first time today, acknowledging that they actually knew each other outside of a business transaction.
He nodded, clutching his own portfolio, and Billy turned back to the door to the rear of the shop. “Bills,” Dom called, halting him. “I like the jeans.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG-NC17
Warnings: AU, angst, art geekery
Summary: Uni fic.
Harvard was white with new snow, falling in those big, light flakes that drifted slowly down in the bitter cold air. Few people stayed outside for long, crowding coffee shops and libraries, or simply opting to go home after class. It made the campus almost hauntingly quiet.
Dom and Elijah stuck it out after Photography, trudging through the weather with their cameras around their necks, looking for shots to complete their portfolios before the student show. The small park they frequented in better weather was undisturbed, a white carpet surrounded by silvery trees.
“I can’t get over how close we are, man,” Elijah said, a cigarette dangling from between his knuckles as he adjusted his aperture, shooting the gradients in the clouds. “It’s like the end of high school all over again. But with beer.”
Dom breathed a laugh in response, keeping his eye on a pair of waxwings all puffed up together on a branch above. Elijah had been on this vein for the last week or so, as if it was just setting in for him that their time here was nearly over.
“We should go out, celebrate. Let’s pick up Orli from the gym and hit Bukowksi’s or something after this.”
“I can’t,” Dom murmured, “I’ve got to take Billy to work later.”
He’d been driving Billy to work for nearly a week, and true to his word, he arrived on time, early some days. One evening he followed him into Morton’s and had some dinner, although he had the good sense to let Billy be and sit in someone else’s section. Billy said little on their drives in, sometimes talking about coursework or commenting on the music, though he always thanked him for the ride while putting on that silly Velcro bowtie under his collar.
“I can’t believe you’re still doing this study thing with him, man,” Elijah fiddled with his lenses. “I mean, the semester… shit, this whole thing, it’s almost over. Why fucking bother at this point?”
Dom adjusted his focus on the birds, waiting Elijah out.
“Is Mort really forcing you to?”
Snapping three shots, Dom looked down, turning around and flexing his fingers in the cold. He shrugged, “Mort doesn’t force people to do anything. He just uses Jedi mind tricks to make you think it’s for the best.”
“That’s not a fucking excuse,” Elijah’s laughed.
Dom looked at the path their footprints had made across the snow field, the only ones so far marring the pristine white, and raised his camera to snap a couple of shots of it.
“I mean, getting Orli to try and fix his piece-of-shit car, I thought we were going to at least egg his windows or something. Didn’t have to, though, he got his undies in a wad just over the idea that you had us try.” Elijah giggled, sticking the butt of his smoke into the snow and then pocketing it. “He’s so hyper-sensitive about fucking nothing, it’s hilarious.”
“Having your car break down isn’t nothing to everyone, Lij,” Dom retorted in Billy’s defense before catching himself, but it was already too late, Elijah’s eyes had locked onto him. He shrugged, “He has a lot of shit on his mind.”
“Sorry, you’re good buddies now, huh?” Elijah snorted, though his eyes were fiercely intent. “Study buddies. In the name of Art History and good grades, right? Shit you don’t get from Orli and me.”
Dom snapped another several photos, still caught in Elijah’s gaze, the one Dom often thought of as some telekinetic alien brain scan when he was parsing something out.
“You like him.”
Dom’s pulse tripped a little as he fiddled with his camera under the magnitude of Elijah’s deduction. The moment stretched taut between them.
“Oh my God, you do! I knew it!” Elijah laughed, and then the grin melted off like so many icicles, to something else entirely. “Oh God.”
Dom raised his eyes and his chin, glaring back at his friend with enough fire to deliver a warning not to rip into it one way or the other. Elijah’s eyes widened, his mouth pursing around words and questions that didn’t escape. Dom brazenly lifted his camera and snapped a shot of that look, so rare to see in this last year.
It pulled Elijah out of his fish-mouthing. “You really… Why?”
Dom shrugged as he adjusted his shutter speed, keeping his focus on the camera settings. He hadn’t figured out an answer for that in all this time himself.
“Does… Is he even gay? I mean, like…” Elijah eyes finally dropped away, and Dom nearly felt like he could breathe again as Elijah kept going. “Shit, Billy’s practically asexual. I can’t imagine… oh fuck, I don’t even want to imagine. Fuck you, Dom.”
Dom grinned, raised his camera again to grab a shot of Elijah’s abject horror at his own thoughts betraying him.
“You fucker!” Elijah lunged and Dom backed away at a jog, bobbing and darting until something under the snow took his feet out from under him and he fell hard on his arse with an oof, cradling his camera to his chest as he went flat in the few inches of powder. Elijah jumped on him, grabbing a handful of snow and scrubbing his face with it. Dom howled, not really fighting too hard as they both kept their cameras out of harm’s way.
He looked up when Elijah stilled, swiping snow from his face with his free hand and registering the weight of Elijah straddled on top of him in a way that had only happened a chance few times including this one, the majority of those in the privacy of his bedroom and usually involving alcohol. He could tell Elijah’s head was in the same place, going back to the time when he was once the object of Dom’s infatuation, maybe with a slip of regret that he’d had a chance then.
Dom was still struck by Elijah, though, looking remarkable with the new snow and the naked trees around him, the blue undertone of his skin kissed by winter. While he had become used to letting go of those who had rejected him, he rarely forgot why he’d given them a go in the first place, and Elijah was no exception. He snapped a shot of him without really trying to aim or focus, one he didn’t even dispute.
“Are you serious?” Elijah asked. “Or is it gonna go like they all do?”
“Didn’t,” Dom admitted, remembering again that fleeting kiss on Billy’s sofa. “It didn’t go that way at all. I just…” he glanced off to the side, suddenly a bit shy at the longing he could hear in his own voice. “I don’t know if it’ll go any farther, though.”
“What did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything,” Dom answered, even though his mind supplied plenty of things Billy had and hadn’t done. Billy’d pursed his lips against his own, he’d closed his eyes, he’d inhaled through his nose and out in a warm puff against Dom’s mouth. He hadn’t shoved him off, hadn’t shouted in disgust.
Elijah lifted off him, sitting in the snow beside where Dom lay, still peering at him with those vast penetrating eyes, searching for answers to whatever questions he had behind his lips. Dom stayed where he was, his camera propped on his stomach, held there by one cold hand, his face wet with melting snow clinging in his lashes as he looked up through the tree branches above. A part of him knew Elijah would keep this close to the chest. Dom kept a number of Elijah’s deepest secrets, after all. And he thought Orlando already suspected, from the look he’d got when he’d figured out it was Billy’s old car he was meant to fix a week ago. He hadn’t said a thing about it since, but Orli was quicker on the uptake than he let on.
He pulled the camera up, focusing a shot of the trees and the silent snow falling directly on him. His fingers were beginning to go numb, more now they were damp from wrestling in the snow, but he snapped the shots anyway, sitting up to tug a warm, dry bit of his soft cotton undershirt from beneath his jumper and coat to wipe the lens and cap it.
“What are we gonna do after this, man?” Elijah asked next, pulling out his pack of smokes and lighting one. “It’s so weird. Only a month and a half to go.”
Dom shrugged, still fiddling with his camera. “I don’t know. My parents won’t pay my part of the rent once the lease is up in June. They probably expect me to come home by then.”
He sighed. Going home meant indulging his father’s directives, either he’d become his lackey at the firm or spend another however many years at another school studying to get another degree and just postpone the former option. Billy was right about one thing. His parents weren’t going to pay his way forever, and certainly not if he didn’t do what they wanted. Dom spent most of his time avoiding even thinking about it. He spent most of his time thinking about Billy instead.
“I’m not going back to Iowa,” Elijah said with a fierce determination, reaching for his camera bag and dusting it off. “Maybe to visit, but I’m not going back to stay. Not with my dad the way he is.”
Dom watched him pull hard on his cigarette, his short hair growing out from close crop making him look a least a little older than he’d been when Dom had first met him. He’d come a long way from a few years ago, a long way from the hateful sort of thinking his own father had pounded into him through fear. Elijah may never let his family know what sort of personal inclinations he had, may never even decide to act on them at all, but he still had the balls to decide his own fate and strike out on his own. That was another part of this they were all avoiding, the fact that after graduation, their little trio would likely be split up. Dom lifted a hand and scrubbed the back of Lij’s head affectionately.
“Billy fucking Boyd, Dom, really?” Elijah shook Dom’s hand off, the gap in his teeth setting off his smile. “Are you even allowed to date a TA? Isn’t that like statutory rape or something?”
Dom chuckled, his face heating up in the cold air, pulling himself up and dusting off as much of the snow as he could. He held a hand out, hauling his mate up from the cold. As Elijah brushed off his arse and knees, Dom studied the shape of himself in the snow, the space where he’d fallen, and the imprint of Elijah’s knees to either side and where he’d sat afterward. A memory of a conversation, secrets shared and things let go, nestled in a white relief. He plucked the cap off his lens and snapped a couple of shots of it.
“Billy could be okay, I guess,” Elijah decided as they turned and followed their tracks back the way they’d come. Dom glanced at him with surprise. “I mean, if he’d calm the hell down and learn to take a joke. And if he’d wear something besides fucking khakis and sweater vests. He’d be a real person for a change.”
Dom recapped his lens and pushed his frozen fingers deeply into his pockets as they headed back in the direction of the photography wing. With so many people heading home early, they might grab the dark room without having to wait. “He’s always been a real person, Lij.”
The following Saturday morning Dom shuffled the stack of developed shots from yesterday along with the rest from the semester into his portfolio as he headed out in the frosty weather. He sighed as he drove along the icy roads, contemplating driving by Billy’s although he had no good reason for it. He’d become so used to seeing him every day, even if it was just during the drive to and from Morton’s, that not seeing him for this one day felt like a loss. He laughed at himself, thinking what Elijah would say to that now.
He was cutting it close, the deadline to get his work in the student show was the coming Monday. He’d never liked leaving his artwork somewhere. Nearly every time he had corners of his photos dinged, or his charcoal smudged by careless hands. And though he could buy ready-made mats for this, he always thought hand-cut mats were better, and chances were the nearby art and hobby stores had been raided by the other students already.
The little bell rang above the door as he came through a small framing shop he hadn’t been to before. There were voices from the back room, and in a few seconds someone came out and their eyes met, both frozen.
“Billy,” the name dropped from Dom’s mouth as he stood in the middle of the lobby, corners of frames and prints all around him. He laughed, honestly surprised and feeling a little duped, “I had no idea you worked here.”
Billy let out an amused breath, his mouth curling a little, “I guess it never really came up.” He toyed with the strings on the light canvas apron he wore round his waist over jeans. Dom had never seen him wear jeans before. Instantly his mind scampered over a dozen questions: why Billy hadn’t told him he had another job, why he might take this one framing junk art, why that apron over jeans did things for him that the barman’s apron over slacks with a bowtie didn’t come close to, why his hair somehow looked more fiery red with the wintry light from the windows. Suddenly Billy was a thousand times more mysterious and gorgeous than he already was.
“I, erm,” Dom started, coming forward to the counter with his portfolio, “I’ve got a few things here, for school. They just need mats, no frames.”
Billy arched a brow, “They don’t have you mat your own things?”
“Well, you can,” Dom shrugged guiltily, “I’m just shite at it. Can never get the maths right.”
“Right,” Billy said, reaching behind himself for a damp rag to clean off the remnants of someone else’s pastels from the counter so Dom could bring out his work. “Let’s have it, then.”
Dom opened up his portfolio, bringing out the photographs first, watching as Billy’s careful hands spread them apart and studied them all. “Will these all be for the student’s show?”
“Yeah. Well no. I’m only supposed to pick five, but I sort of like all of these so I haven’t really narrowed it down,” Dom admitted, knowing that framers generally hated when artists did this sort of thing. “I wanted to get in here early to be sure I can get them matted before Monday though. If that’s possible.”
Billy gave him a look, one Dom knew well and that made him turn his guilty grin to his shoes. Billy didn’t even have to tell him what a sod he was.
Instead, Billy merely looked at the twelve photographs he’d spread out with a critical eye, his thumbnail going in his mouth in thought, something he often did while grading papers. He shifted his feet and his hips in those jeans and apron cocked with the unconscious move. Dom licked his lips and held his breath.
Billy pulled five of the photos aside, and Dom fixated on his hands; the way he handled his photographs only by the very corners with just the narrow pads of his fingers. For a moment he thought Billy had picked out those five, but then he turned his attention to the remaining seven. “You like these colors. You shoot them quite a bit,” he commented. “There’s a whole… sort of ‘cold morning’ feel to them.”
Dom looked, now noticing the common theme he hadn’t really thought of; these photos were all shades of sunrise-cool blues, creamy tans, hints of pink and orange. Billy’s hand lingered on a shot of Orlando in their flat, throwing a pot on a kick-wheel by the big windows facing an early Boston sunrise. He tugged it aside, and another of the cityscape, also early morning.
“The rest of these are all natural settings. Outside, I think. They all go together.” Billy looked up, “I mean, it doesn’t matter in the student show, but for real galleries, they really like a sort of common theme, you know? There’s a chance they’ll sell your work as a collection that way.”
Dom stared, mainly struck at Billy offering him real advice on his personal passion.
Billy shrugged, looking back down, pulling one of the shots of Elijah from yesterday toward him. It was mostly blurry, and half of Elijah’s face was out of frame, but the camera had managed to focus in on Elijah’s eye, jaw and the side of his lips, with the blurs of falling snow all around and the tree branches behind giving the whole thing a fey quality.
Billy left that one in the group, going on to the next. “What is this?”
Dom pulled his gaze from Billy and looked at the shot, feeling a bit of heat come to his cheeks at what it was and represented, and exactly how Billy fit into it. “It’s…erm, me. The shape of me. I fell in the snow, and that’s where I was, and it’s… somewhere I’ve been.”
His explanation was beyond lame, he wouldn’t blame Billy if he looked at him like he was an idiot. But Billy looked up, nearly smiled and said, “No tea on hand, then?”
He remembered! Not only did Billy remember, but he grasped what the idea meant to him, maybe even that the idea was less about the visual than the memory of it, and it was the memory that was important. Christ, he wanted to kiss him again for that.
“Not this time,” he mumbled vaguely, taking in Billy in this whole new element. He leaned his palms on the counter, smiling as he tried for flirty, “I didn’t know you owned any jeans.”
Billy did a slight double take, his feet shifting again which only brought Dom’s attention back down to the neat fit at his waist where his shirt was tucked in, the way the strings of the apron wrapped around twice and tied in slipknot off one hip.
“Um,” Billy scratched his chin, “You know, this isn’t my choice or anything, but I think…” he lingered over the shots, leaving the one of Dom’s imprint in the group and pulled away a sort of generic landscape of a pond away towards the other seven, “I think these five are probably the best. Even if I have to look at Elijah’s mug while I mat this.”
Dom giggled stupidly, thoroughly stuck on trying to apply a name to the exact shade of Billy’s hair in this light on top of being elated that Billy half made a joke. “How did you get here?” he asked.
“What?” Billy looked perplexed.
“Here,” Dom stumbled, “How did you get here today?”
“I walked,” Billy cocked a brow at him. “’S not far. So are these the ones you want done?”
Dom blinked, and then came back to why he was here, looking at the five of his photos Billy had selected. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, these are good. They have a theme, you’re right.”
Billy stepped to the back counter for a moment, coming back to with a couple of mat corners. “I know they don’t really like you to use any colored mats for the student shows, but…” he used the shot of Dom’s imprint in the snow to illustrate, “If you use a warm white versus a cool white, you can see how it draws the eye to the shades in your piece. The blues pop with a cool white, and the tans and pinks come out with the warm. See?”
Dom did, fascinated with watching him in this space. Billy suggested going with the warm white mat, and Dom blindly agreed, watching his hands carefully shuffle the photos together a fresh fold of parchment off a long roll to protect them, writing Dom’s name on the edge.
“I can get these matted by the end of tomorrow,” Billy told him, “You said you need them by Monday, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Dom answered, thinking quickly, “You work here tomorrow too? Maybe I can come by after your shift, since I’m driving you to Morton’s after?”
Billy shuffled uncomfortably, bringing a calculator onto the counter top to make quick figures. “Five of these, plus square feet of mat board, custom-cut fee, and a rush by tomorrow… So it’s going to come to… seventy-six eighty. You’ll pay when you pick up. Tomorrow, round five-thirty?”
“Okay,” Dom breathed through a smile, unfazed by the cost, but aware of Billy’s sudden discomfort and wondering what he’d done now. “Tomorrow, then.”
He shuffled the rest of his shots back into his portfolio, eyeing the folder of his work in Billy’s hands, suddenly considering all the things that could happen to them in a frame shop again.
Billy raised his eyebrows, “They’ll be fine, Dom.” He murmured, using Dom’s name for the first time today, acknowledging that they actually knew each other outside of a business transaction.
He nodded, clutching his own portfolio, and Billy turned back to the door to the rear of the shop. “Bills,” Dom called, halting him. “I like the jeans.”
CHAPTER TWELVE