A True Gentleman
Title: A True Gentleman (13/?)
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG-NC17
Warnings: AU, angst, art geekery
Summary: Uni fic.
Billy stirred sugar into the small coffee he’d scrounged up some change for at the Dunkin’ Donuts and swallowed half in one gulp, pausing to flip over the classified section of a newspaper that had been left beside the swizzle sticks and creamers outside the walk-up service window. None of the used cars in it even approached the few hundred dollars he’d paid for the old Pulsar two years ago, and he doubted he could come up with that much at this point. He’d have to save up for a year to be able to get a reliable vehicle, and by then he planned to be out of Boston entirely, and hopefully back home. He shook his head and dropped the paper, looking up across the square to see Dominic already making his way up Mass Ave towards him.
It had been a week since what had happened. Billy had come up with a feeble excuse not to study this past Thursday, which Dom hadn’t bought for a minute but took like he’d been expecting it. He showed to drive Billy to work with impeccable timing, not so early that Billy might still have to shower, or might be just stepping out of it and still needing to get dressed, but right when he ought to be ready to walk out the door. And here he was, heading towards him outside the Holyoke like he knew Billy’s schedule as well as his own. Observant little shit.
He tried to come up with something else within the next ninety seconds, a reason not to spend the next three hours in Dom’s presence, and came up woefully empty.
“Hi,” Dom greeted uncertainly, eyeballing the tiny paper cup in his hand and nodding back at the counter, “Sure you don’t want a bigger one?”
“No,” Billy shook his head quickly, finishing the last swallow and pitching the cup toward the rubbish bin. He opened his mouth to say he wanted to go to the library, but Dom beat him to the bunch.
“Hey, I think I left one of my notebooks at your house. Last…um, last Monday. I haven’t been able to find it,” he said, one of his hands scrubbing at the back of his hair.
Billy blinked. The fact that Dom had gone a week without a class notebook and had as many chances to pick it up when driving him to work struck him as ludicrous, a reason to get them both alone there again, but taking in Dom’s wide-eyed, earnest expression and the hesitant mention of last time, when they’d left off studying and spent the afternoon naked in his bed, his ability to fire back fizzled. “Okay.”
“Let’s take my car, yeah? It’s too cold,” Dom blew on his fingers in their cut off gloves, and Billy’s head took him back to having them working the buttons of his own shirt free, one by one. He nodded, striking out toward the student carpark.
Billy absolutely hated to admit it, but he’d spent the last week hardly able to concentrate for as often as flashes of that afternoon kept shoving themselves to the forefront. Far from that brief and relatively chaste kiss on his sofa, which he could forcibly evict from his head by concentrating on work, now when he was in the middle of grading papers on Greco-Roman sculptures or trying to fine tune his proposal, he’d get a sense memory of Dom’s tongue twisting with his own, of the surprising gentleness of his touch, the way his abs bunched up as he pumped into his own fist, way he smelled and tasted. It was powerfully, persistently distracting.
So much so that he didn’t even realize they were heading towards the river as if on the way to Morton’s already, and not to his own house. “Dom, you’re heading to my work.”
Dom glanced over at him, angel-faced, “Oh, right.”
But instead of turning right at the next street, he continued down along Broadway and took a left on Prospect. “Where are you going?” Billy argued. “You need to turn around!”
“Relax, Bills,” Dom murmured, his voice that low, sexy purr he’d used before, when he was promising to do things that would drive Billy crazy.
“I thought you said you left a notebook at my place,” Billy spluttered, his hand gripping the handle on the car door as if unconsciously considering jumping out.
Dom sent a glinting gaze at him as he drove. “I lied.”
“So you’re kidnapping me now?” The words came up like vomit as Billy’s heart began to hammer, “After last time you’ve just decided you can do whatever you like, is that it?”
Dom’s eyes flickered back at him as he kept on driving, unreadable, and he stayed maddeningly silent until he’d pulled into the old factory district of Kendall Park, which was now a revamped area of expensive lofts and high-end shopping.
Easing into a numbered space in the parking garage under one of the renovated factories, Dom turned the car off and got out, slinging his bag over his shoulder and waiting for Billy to do the same. Exhaling through his teeth, Billy still felt wired and irritated that Dom would trick him, bringing him here where he and his arsehole friends obviously lived. He pushed the door open and hauled his rucksack and briefcase out of the back seat, glaring over the roof of the Prius. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“I have asked, about a half a dozen times. I knew you’d never voluntarily come,” Dom fired back, and his face was not the smug, wicked, got one over on you expression Billy expected, but a resigned sort of stubbornness instead. “Come on.”
Billy followed him into a lift, Dom punching the button for the top floor. Billy glanced up at him as the doors closed, finding Dom’s eyes on him again, crawling over his body the way they had in his kitchen before everything had gone all to hell.
He stared at his shoes until the lift smoothly came to a stop and spilled them into a long hallway, following Dom to the last door and waiting as he fumbled with his keys.
The door opened to a single massive rectangular room. An open kitchen with a long island and shining stainless steel appliances lay to the left, and on the right a massive ten seat dining room table that held a jumble of backpacks, sleek new laptops and textbooks. The walls on either side of the room were painted a burnished copper color, the wood accents and the hardwood floors stained dark. The entire far wall was floor-to-ceiling windows at least twenty five feet high, overlooking the Boston skyline to the east. There was a pool table and a pinball machine to one side, and on the other, a folding screen and behind it a pottery wheel that Billy recognized from Dom’s photographs. Centered in front of the massive windows was an enormous flat screen television, which was tuned to a basketball game. On the two long leather sofas in front of it was Elijah, with two of his friends that Billy recognized from campus but whose names he didn’t know.
“Sblomie,” Elijah called. “Come watch with us, it’s Notre Dame and Baylor.”
“Nah, mate,” Dom said, pulling open the fridge to grab four bottles of Newcastle, cradling the cold bottles awkwardly against his front, “All work and no play, you know.”
“Billy, don’t you like basketball?” Elijah asked with a wide grin. His friends sniggered.
“No,” Billy muttered quietly, feeling awkward at being addressed by someone outside of a classroom who had only ever spoken to him with upper class condescension.
“Billy likes football, like any Scot should, eh?” Dom injected, cutting Elijah’s avenue off. “My guess is he’s a Rangers or a Celtic man. That’s Celtic, by the way, not Seltic, like your idiot Yank team pronounces it, right Bills?”
“Sure,” Billy mumbled, turning his back to the others and his body toward the retreat of the door. “Dom, maybe we should just go to my place, or-”
“Relax Bills, I haven’t even shown you my etchings yet,” Dom smiled, putting a warm hand on his shoulder to point him toward the spiral staircase leading to an upper floor that overhung the kitchen and dining area. He leaned close to whisper, “They won’t bother us, I promise.”
Billy sighed uncomfortably, heading up the stairs with Dom behind, then letting him go ahead along the loft railing with wolf whistles following them to the third door.
Dom tugged off his gloves and peeled off his coat as Billy took in the room. It was nearly large enough to fit Billy’s entire flat inside it. Most of it was occupied by the king-sized bed that sat on a platform of drawers, its covers scrunched to one side and pillows scattered. On one wall was a shelf full of books and two desks. One wasn’t used as a desk, but held a large, complex stereo system and several piles of CDs, as well as an expensive dock for an MP3 player. The other held a massive computer display and a digital tablet, wires snaking out from the back to be plugged into Dom’s laptop. A closet stood open with hanging shirts and the odd suit, with a pile of dirty laundry at its base beside a hamper.
Against the other wall was a large drafting table, spread with rolls of blueprint paper, drafting pencils, and sets of expensive art markers cluttered along the top. On a filing cabinet to the side was an unfinished foamboard model of a building, an exacto knife and extra blades in a case, empty glue bottles, packets of tiny fake trees and grass colored flocking waiting to be used, and whole pieces of foamboard propped against the wall. Beside that was a large sketchpad on an easel, open to drawings of what looked like beetles and birds of various types.
Dropping his bag and briefcase on the corner of Dom’s bed, Billy tentatively approached the sketchpad and flipped back a page, finding a sketch of a nude man from the back, posed prone, hands pressed to the glass of a huge window with a cityscape outside, one knee cocked just enough to tilt the hips, the dimpling of the buttock and musculature of the back shaded with a loose, crosshatched grace in marker. It was as well-executed as it was provocative. Flipping back another page, and another, gave him similar variations of the same nude in pencil and charcoal.
“You did this?” he asked, surprised at this side of Dominic he’d never seen.
Dom looked up from the stack of CDs he was perusing, “Yeah. That’s for Blanchett’s class.”
Billy lightly touched the foamboard building and found that the roof lifted off, showing the insides.
“That one’s for my Design final. Bit of a bitch, really.”
“It’s really good.”
“Nah, it’s not. Not structurally, anyway,” Dom chuckled, coming around and unrolling the blueprints to show him. “I get these visual ideas, you know, and I can’t… I don’t want deviate from them. It looks fucking amazing in foamboard, right? But all Noble can say is that my angles are off, my equations are all wrong, the thing would collapse if anyone tried to build it for real. Even my dad says so. But you know me, stubborn as hell,” he grinned. “I’ll get points off, but I don’t really care, to be honest. It’s my dad who wanted me to major in this anyway, not me. I’d rather just draw. That’s Orlando’s arse you’re ogling, by the way,” he pointed to the nude as he wandered back to the stereo.
Billy breathed a laugh, shrugging out of his blazer as he glanced over a frame-up on the wall above of a fraternity paddle, shirt and some text in violet and gold on the wall. Music erupted from the MP3 player, too loudly, jolting Billy back to the face the room. “Sorry!” Dom yelled above it, cutting the volume down to low.
Shrugging off the apology, Billy’s eye went to the print above the headboard of the huge bed.
“I’ll bet you know the painter, title, and the year on that one,” Dom challenged, seeing Billy looking at it. “And probably which museum has it as well.”
Billy suddenly found himself smiling, “Toulouse-Lautrec, The Bed. That was, erm… eighteen ninety-two or three, I think. Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Some people debate on whether they’re two women, two men, your standard hetero couple, or whether they’re lovers at all. Although based on the rest of the series and Henri’s history, they’re probably both prostitutes.”
Dominic’s returning smile was pleased and impressed, “Interpret as you will.”
Billy looked back at the piece, “Aye. It’s one of his better works, in my opinion. Everyone knows his poster art, but it’s his paintings that really show his skill, I think. Even from when he was a boy, he could paint that well. Look at the use of color, how warm and soft it is, even in the greens and blues. Look how the top of the headboard is just suggested, but it’s still got so much depth. Half the time he never even gessoed his canvases, did you know that? ‘Only the figure exists,’ is what he once wrote to a friend. ‘The landscape is, and should be, only an accessory’.”
“He said a lot of things,” Dom intoned, setting a cracked beer on the table near Billy and climbing up on the bed himself, crossing his arms above his head against his pillows with the print above him.
“Did he?” Billy looked at him sidelong, tugging the desk chair out and sitting on it backwards, leaning his arms across the back. “What else did he say?”
“All kinds of things. Bohemian hippy green fairy sorts of things. Let me see if I remember right,” Dom lowered his lashes, thinking, “Things like ‘I have tried to do what is true and not ideal’, and ‘Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die from it’.”
Taken aback, Billy stared at Dom, lying there spouting poetry, quotes Billy himself didn’t know but wouldn’t be far off base for old Toulouse. Billy had never in his whole life been desired, but suddenly, he was back in his kitchen with Dom’s eyes raking over him, then his hands and his mouth doing the same, telling him he looked really fucking good, overwhelming him with need for more of that, the desire to be desired.
Dom opened his eyes, looking back at him from where he sprawled languidly like he was inviting Billy to climb right on. Billy shook his head, stumbling off the chair for his briefcase, and pulling out a stack of grading to be done. Toulouse was wrong. The desire to be desired wasn’t love, certainly not from or for someone like Dominic Monaghan.
He heard Dom exhale as he settled back in the desk chair, watching him get up in his peripheral vision and dig out some work from his own bag. The MP3 player cycled through several songs, some Billy had never heard as well as a few old classics he knew well as he graded through one stack of assignments and started on another. Dom remained against the pillows with a textbook open on his belly and another beside him, writing out essay questions in a bluebook. He tapped the eraser of his pencil to the beat, sometimes mouthing the words to songs, often stopping to stretch his arms above him and yawn as the time went by.
About an hour and a half after they started, the door burst open, with Orlando’s face bright and dazzling grin wide, but then it fell to almost disappointed as he leaned in the threshold and crossed his arms as he looked at them. He still wore a coat over sweaty gym clothes.
“No sock on the doorknob?” he queried loudly, and Elijah’s high giggle exploded from below, ringing through the whole flat.
“Does it look like it?” Dom asked, though his grin hitched crookedly to one side. “We’re a bit busy here, mate. Studying.”
“Uh-huh,” Orlando’s eyebrows hopped, gaze flicking from Dom to Billy and back. “Studying. Billy,” he nodded by way of greeting. “Did you sort out your car?”
“Ah,” Billy mumbled, “I had a bloke tow it away.”
“Did you get another, or…?” he glanced at Dom again briefly.
“No, I…” Billy scrubbed at his hair, entirely uncomfortable with this strange turnabout of Dom’s mates actually being nice to him. “Once I finish my Doctorate I won’t be here any longer so… I guess I’ll just make do.”
Orlando nodded at that, still darting looks between the pair of them before Dom arched his eyebrows pointedly. “Right, well,” he lingered dumbly, “I’ll just…” and he left, sending Dom a not very subtle wink and wicked grin before he closed the door.
“Christ, Dom,” Billy huffed, feeling his face burning. He took off his glasses to rub the heat off his face.
“What?” Dom retorted, his own voice nearly a whisper. “I didn’t… they don’t know anything.”
“Sure they don’t. Sock on the doorknob?” Billy stood, feeling restless as he fussed with his things, searching for something imaginary in the pockets of his bag.
A silly grin flashed across Dom’s face unbidden. “It’s nothing. It’s when you live in the dorms with a roommate and you-”
“I know what it bloody means,” Billy cut him off. His eyes crawled the room, wanting to look anywhere but at Dominic, on his bed, and firmly tried to ignore the idea that Dom’s arsehole friends already suspected they were up here fucking, and what a hilarious joke that must be. Especially since it had actually happened, which his damned brain insisted on reminding him constantly.
He found the frat insignia on the wall again and moved closer to squint so he could read the text, which pronounced it the Sigma Alpha Epsilon creed.
"The True Gentleman"
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds
from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and
whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does
not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the
obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his
inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if
necessity compels him to humble another; who does not
flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own
possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness
but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows
his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others
rather than his own; and who appears well in any company,
a man with whome honor is sacred and virtue safe.
-John Walter Wayland (Virginia 1899)
Billy swallowed, the heaviness of those words ringing in his head. Dom had been none of those things. He and his friends had been nearly the polar opposite of what this spoke. And somehow, it wasn’t a surprise. Billy had never been inclined to join a frat, not even back at Glasgow University. None of them ever lived up to what they claimed to be. It was a position of status for kids who came from money, along with the ability to have enormous parties and do really stupid shit under a guise of organized brotherhood, not become this archaic ideal of a virtuous man. The idea that this was framed up with it fancy matting job, probably for quite a lot of money seemed ridiculous considering it was in Dominic Monaghan’s personal bedroom.
“I’m going to go,” he said abruptly, pushing his things back into his briefcase swiftly, hoisting his rucksack onto his back and grabbing his jacket. He wanted to get out of here before anything else happened.
“Okay. I’ll drive you,” Dom struggled out from under his books and off the bed.
“No, I’ll just take the bus.”
“But I’ve got to take you to-”
“No, Dom,” Billy’s voice went fierce and a little wild as his hand grabbed for the bedroom doorknob and Dom’s landed atop it to slow him down. The nearness of him, the warmth of his skin and the scant inch of height Dom had on him seemed to cage him in. He felt breathless as he met Dom’s eyes and muttered, “I need to go.”
Dom looked like he would argue, like he would keep his hand there and ask Billy all the questions behind that deep crystalline blue of his gaze, questions that would bring a lot of shit to the surface and that he didn’t want to have to answer.
But in a moment Dom’s hand left his, his expression closing as he stepped back to let him pull open the door and hurry down the stairs.
“Billy! You’re not leaving, are you?” Elijah’s voice rang out after him, with laughter following behind as he slammed the door of the loft and found the stairs down to the street.
It wasn’t until he was on a bus heading back toward Cambridge that he started arguing with himself with the words of that creed running through his head. No man was all of those ridiculously perfect things. Certainly not Dom. Not Billy himself. Not even Toulouse-Lautrec, who Dom held in high enough regard to have his work be the first thing he’d see every morning. Dom’s quote from him swam back into his head, not the one about desire, but the one about truth.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG-NC17
Warnings: AU, angst, art geekery
Summary: Uni fic.
Billy stirred sugar into the small coffee he’d scrounged up some change for at the Dunkin’ Donuts and swallowed half in one gulp, pausing to flip over the classified section of a newspaper that had been left beside the swizzle sticks and creamers outside the walk-up service window. None of the used cars in it even approached the few hundred dollars he’d paid for the old Pulsar two years ago, and he doubted he could come up with that much at this point. He’d have to save up for a year to be able to get a reliable vehicle, and by then he planned to be out of Boston entirely, and hopefully back home. He shook his head and dropped the paper, looking up across the square to see Dominic already making his way up Mass Ave towards him.
It had been a week since what had happened. Billy had come up with a feeble excuse not to study this past Thursday, which Dom hadn’t bought for a minute but took like he’d been expecting it. He showed to drive Billy to work with impeccable timing, not so early that Billy might still have to shower, or might be just stepping out of it and still needing to get dressed, but right when he ought to be ready to walk out the door. And here he was, heading towards him outside the Holyoke like he knew Billy’s schedule as well as his own. Observant little shit.
He tried to come up with something else within the next ninety seconds, a reason not to spend the next three hours in Dom’s presence, and came up woefully empty.
“Hi,” Dom greeted uncertainly, eyeballing the tiny paper cup in his hand and nodding back at the counter, “Sure you don’t want a bigger one?”
“No,” Billy shook his head quickly, finishing the last swallow and pitching the cup toward the rubbish bin. He opened his mouth to say he wanted to go to the library, but Dom beat him to the bunch.
“Hey, I think I left one of my notebooks at your house. Last…um, last Monday. I haven’t been able to find it,” he said, one of his hands scrubbing at the back of his hair.
Billy blinked. The fact that Dom had gone a week without a class notebook and had as many chances to pick it up when driving him to work struck him as ludicrous, a reason to get them both alone there again, but taking in Dom’s wide-eyed, earnest expression and the hesitant mention of last time, when they’d left off studying and spent the afternoon naked in his bed, his ability to fire back fizzled. “Okay.”
“Let’s take my car, yeah? It’s too cold,” Dom blew on his fingers in their cut off gloves, and Billy’s head took him back to having them working the buttons of his own shirt free, one by one. He nodded, striking out toward the student carpark.
Billy absolutely hated to admit it, but he’d spent the last week hardly able to concentrate for as often as flashes of that afternoon kept shoving themselves to the forefront. Far from that brief and relatively chaste kiss on his sofa, which he could forcibly evict from his head by concentrating on work, now when he was in the middle of grading papers on Greco-Roman sculptures or trying to fine tune his proposal, he’d get a sense memory of Dom’s tongue twisting with his own, of the surprising gentleness of his touch, the way his abs bunched up as he pumped into his own fist, way he smelled and tasted. It was powerfully, persistently distracting.
So much so that he didn’t even realize they were heading towards the river as if on the way to Morton’s already, and not to his own house. “Dom, you’re heading to my work.”
Dom glanced over at him, angel-faced, “Oh, right.”
But instead of turning right at the next street, he continued down along Broadway and took a left on Prospect. “Where are you going?” Billy argued. “You need to turn around!”
“Relax, Bills,” Dom murmured, his voice that low, sexy purr he’d used before, when he was promising to do things that would drive Billy crazy.
“I thought you said you left a notebook at my place,” Billy spluttered, his hand gripping the handle on the car door as if unconsciously considering jumping out.
Dom sent a glinting gaze at him as he drove. “I lied.”
“So you’re kidnapping me now?” The words came up like vomit as Billy’s heart began to hammer, “After last time you’ve just decided you can do whatever you like, is that it?”
Dom’s eyes flickered back at him as he kept on driving, unreadable, and he stayed maddeningly silent until he’d pulled into the old factory district of Kendall Park, which was now a revamped area of expensive lofts and high-end shopping.
Easing into a numbered space in the parking garage under one of the renovated factories, Dom turned the car off and got out, slinging his bag over his shoulder and waiting for Billy to do the same. Exhaling through his teeth, Billy still felt wired and irritated that Dom would trick him, bringing him here where he and his arsehole friends obviously lived. He pushed the door open and hauled his rucksack and briefcase out of the back seat, glaring over the roof of the Prius. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“I have asked, about a half a dozen times. I knew you’d never voluntarily come,” Dom fired back, and his face was not the smug, wicked, got one over on you expression Billy expected, but a resigned sort of stubbornness instead. “Come on.”
Billy followed him into a lift, Dom punching the button for the top floor. Billy glanced up at him as the doors closed, finding Dom’s eyes on him again, crawling over his body the way they had in his kitchen before everything had gone all to hell.
He stared at his shoes until the lift smoothly came to a stop and spilled them into a long hallway, following Dom to the last door and waiting as he fumbled with his keys.
The door opened to a single massive rectangular room. An open kitchen with a long island and shining stainless steel appliances lay to the left, and on the right a massive ten seat dining room table that held a jumble of backpacks, sleek new laptops and textbooks. The walls on either side of the room were painted a burnished copper color, the wood accents and the hardwood floors stained dark. The entire far wall was floor-to-ceiling windows at least twenty five feet high, overlooking the Boston skyline to the east. There was a pool table and a pinball machine to one side, and on the other, a folding screen and behind it a pottery wheel that Billy recognized from Dom’s photographs. Centered in front of the massive windows was an enormous flat screen television, which was tuned to a basketball game. On the two long leather sofas in front of it was Elijah, with two of his friends that Billy recognized from campus but whose names he didn’t know.
“Sblomie,” Elijah called. “Come watch with us, it’s Notre Dame and Baylor.”
“Nah, mate,” Dom said, pulling open the fridge to grab four bottles of Newcastle, cradling the cold bottles awkwardly against his front, “All work and no play, you know.”
“Billy, don’t you like basketball?” Elijah asked with a wide grin. His friends sniggered.
“No,” Billy muttered quietly, feeling awkward at being addressed by someone outside of a classroom who had only ever spoken to him with upper class condescension.
“Billy likes football, like any Scot should, eh?” Dom injected, cutting Elijah’s avenue off. “My guess is he’s a Rangers or a Celtic man. That’s Celtic, by the way, not Seltic, like your idiot Yank team pronounces it, right Bills?”
“Sure,” Billy mumbled, turning his back to the others and his body toward the retreat of the door. “Dom, maybe we should just go to my place, or-”
“Relax Bills, I haven’t even shown you my etchings yet,” Dom smiled, putting a warm hand on his shoulder to point him toward the spiral staircase leading to an upper floor that overhung the kitchen and dining area. He leaned close to whisper, “They won’t bother us, I promise.”
Billy sighed uncomfortably, heading up the stairs with Dom behind, then letting him go ahead along the loft railing with wolf whistles following them to the third door.
Dom tugged off his gloves and peeled off his coat as Billy took in the room. It was nearly large enough to fit Billy’s entire flat inside it. Most of it was occupied by the king-sized bed that sat on a platform of drawers, its covers scrunched to one side and pillows scattered. On one wall was a shelf full of books and two desks. One wasn’t used as a desk, but held a large, complex stereo system and several piles of CDs, as well as an expensive dock for an MP3 player. The other held a massive computer display and a digital tablet, wires snaking out from the back to be plugged into Dom’s laptop. A closet stood open with hanging shirts and the odd suit, with a pile of dirty laundry at its base beside a hamper.
Against the other wall was a large drafting table, spread with rolls of blueprint paper, drafting pencils, and sets of expensive art markers cluttered along the top. On a filing cabinet to the side was an unfinished foamboard model of a building, an exacto knife and extra blades in a case, empty glue bottles, packets of tiny fake trees and grass colored flocking waiting to be used, and whole pieces of foamboard propped against the wall. Beside that was a large sketchpad on an easel, open to drawings of what looked like beetles and birds of various types.
Dropping his bag and briefcase on the corner of Dom’s bed, Billy tentatively approached the sketchpad and flipped back a page, finding a sketch of a nude man from the back, posed prone, hands pressed to the glass of a huge window with a cityscape outside, one knee cocked just enough to tilt the hips, the dimpling of the buttock and musculature of the back shaded with a loose, crosshatched grace in marker. It was as well-executed as it was provocative. Flipping back another page, and another, gave him similar variations of the same nude in pencil and charcoal.
“You did this?” he asked, surprised at this side of Dominic he’d never seen.
Dom looked up from the stack of CDs he was perusing, “Yeah. That’s for Blanchett’s class.”
Billy lightly touched the foamboard building and found that the roof lifted off, showing the insides.
“That one’s for my Design final. Bit of a bitch, really.”
“It’s really good.”
“Nah, it’s not. Not structurally, anyway,” Dom chuckled, coming around and unrolling the blueprints to show him. “I get these visual ideas, you know, and I can’t… I don’t want deviate from them. It looks fucking amazing in foamboard, right? But all Noble can say is that my angles are off, my equations are all wrong, the thing would collapse if anyone tried to build it for real. Even my dad says so. But you know me, stubborn as hell,” he grinned. “I’ll get points off, but I don’t really care, to be honest. It’s my dad who wanted me to major in this anyway, not me. I’d rather just draw. That’s Orlando’s arse you’re ogling, by the way,” he pointed to the nude as he wandered back to the stereo.
Billy breathed a laugh, shrugging out of his blazer as he glanced over a frame-up on the wall above of a fraternity paddle, shirt and some text in violet and gold on the wall. Music erupted from the MP3 player, too loudly, jolting Billy back to the face the room. “Sorry!” Dom yelled above it, cutting the volume down to low.
Shrugging off the apology, Billy’s eye went to the print above the headboard of the huge bed.
“I’ll bet you know the painter, title, and the year on that one,” Dom challenged, seeing Billy looking at it. “And probably which museum has it as well.”
Billy suddenly found himself smiling, “Toulouse-Lautrec, The Bed. That was, erm… eighteen ninety-two or three, I think. Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Some people debate on whether they’re two women, two men, your standard hetero couple, or whether they’re lovers at all. Although based on the rest of the series and Henri’s history, they’re probably both prostitutes.”
Dominic’s returning smile was pleased and impressed, “Interpret as you will.”
Billy looked back at the piece, “Aye. It’s one of his better works, in my opinion. Everyone knows his poster art, but it’s his paintings that really show his skill, I think. Even from when he was a boy, he could paint that well. Look at the use of color, how warm and soft it is, even in the greens and blues. Look how the top of the headboard is just suggested, but it’s still got so much depth. Half the time he never even gessoed his canvases, did you know that? ‘Only the figure exists,’ is what he once wrote to a friend. ‘The landscape is, and should be, only an accessory’.”
“He said a lot of things,” Dom intoned, setting a cracked beer on the table near Billy and climbing up on the bed himself, crossing his arms above his head against his pillows with the print above him.
“Did he?” Billy looked at him sidelong, tugging the desk chair out and sitting on it backwards, leaning his arms across the back. “What else did he say?”
“All kinds of things. Bohemian hippy green fairy sorts of things. Let me see if I remember right,” Dom lowered his lashes, thinking, “Things like ‘I have tried to do what is true and not ideal’, and ‘Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die from it’.”
Taken aback, Billy stared at Dom, lying there spouting poetry, quotes Billy himself didn’t know but wouldn’t be far off base for old Toulouse. Billy had never in his whole life been desired, but suddenly, he was back in his kitchen with Dom’s eyes raking over him, then his hands and his mouth doing the same, telling him he looked really fucking good, overwhelming him with need for more of that, the desire to be desired.
Dom opened his eyes, looking back at him from where he sprawled languidly like he was inviting Billy to climb right on. Billy shook his head, stumbling off the chair for his briefcase, and pulling out a stack of grading to be done. Toulouse was wrong. The desire to be desired wasn’t love, certainly not from or for someone like Dominic Monaghan.
He heard Dom exhale as he settled back in the desk chair, watching him get up in his peripheral vision and dig out some work from his own bag. The MP3 player cycled through several songs, some Billy had never heard as well as a few old classics he knew well as he graded through one stack of assignments and started on another. Dom remained against the pillows with a textbook open on his belly and another beside him, writing out essay questions in a bluebook. He tapped the eraser of his pencil to the beat, sometimes mouthing the words to songs, often stopping to stretch his arms above him and yawn as the time went by.
About an hour and a half after they started, the door burst open, with Orlando’s face bright and dazzling grin wide, but then it fell to almost disappointed as he leaned in the threshold and crossed his arms as he looked at them. He still wore a coat over sweaty gym clothes.
“No sock on the doorknob?” he queried loudly, and Elijah’s high giggle exploded from below, ringing through the whole flat.
“Does it look like it?” Dom asked, though his grin hitched crookedly to one side. “We’re a bit busy here, mate. Studying.”
“Uh-huh,” Orlando’s eyebrows hopped, gaze flicking from Dom to Billy and back. “Studying. Billy,” he nodded by way of greeting. “Did you sort out your car?”
“Ah,” Billy mumbled, “I had a bloke tow it away.”
“Did you get another, or…?” he glanced at Dom again briefly.
“No, I…” Billy scrubbed at his hair, entirely uncomfortable with this strange turnabout of Dom’s mates actually being nice to him. “Once I finish my Doctorate I won’t be here any longer so… I guess I’ll just make do.”
Orlando nodded at that, still darting looks between the pair of them before Dom arched his eyebrows pointedly. “Right, well,” he lingered dumbly, “I’ll just…” and he left, sending Dom a not very subtle wink and wicked grin before he closed the door.
“Christ, Dom,” Billy huffed, feeling his face burning. He took off his glasses to rub the heat off his face.
“What?” Dom retorted, his own voice nearly a whisper. “I didn’t… they don’t know anything.”
“Sure they don’t. Sock on the doorknob?” Billy stood, feeling restless as he fussed with his things, searching for something imaginary in the pockets of his bag.
A silly grin flashed across Dom’s face unbidden. “It’s nothing. It’s when you live in the dorms with a roommate and you-”
“I know what it bloody means,” Billy cut him off. His eyes crawled the room, wanting to look anywhere but at Dominic, on his bed, and firmly tried to ignore the idea that Dom’s arsehole friends already suspected they were up here fucking, and what a hilarious joke that must be. Especially since it had actually happened, which his damned brain insisted on reminding him constantly.
He found the frat insignia on the wall again and moved closer to squint so he could read the text, which pronounced it the Sigma Alpha Epsilon creed.
"The True Gentleman"
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds
from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and
whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does
not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the
obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his
inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if
necessity compels him to humble another; who does not
flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own
possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness
but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows
his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others
rather than his own; and who appears well in any company,
a man with whome honor is sacred and virtue safe.
-John Walter Wayland (Virginia 1899)
Billy swallowed, the heaviness of those words ringing in his head. Dom had been none of those things. He and his friends had been nearly the polar opposite of what this spoke. And somehow, it wasn’t a surprise. Billy had never been inclined to join a frat, not even back at Glasgow University. None of them ever lived up to what they claimed to be. It was a position of status for kids who came from money, along with the ability to have enormous parties and do really stupid shit under a guise of organized brotherhood, not become this archaic ideal of a virtuous man. The idea that this was framed up with it fancy matting job, probably for quite a lot of money seemed ridiculous considering it was in Dominic Monaghan’s personal bedroom.
“I’m going to go,” he said abruptly, pushing his things back into his briefcase swiftly, hoisting his rucksack onto his back and grabbing his jacket. He wanted to get out of here before anything else happened.
“Okay. I’ll drive you,” Dom struggled out from under his books and off the bed.
“No, I’ll just take the bus.”
“But I’ve got to take you to-”
“No, Dom,” Billy’s voice went fierce and a little wild as his hand grabbed for the bedroom doorknob and Dom’s landed atop it to slow him down. The nearness of him, the warmth of his skin and the scant inch of height Dom had on him seemed to cage him in. He felt breathless as he met Dom’s eyes and muttered, “I need to go.”
Dom looked like he would argue, like he would keep his hand there and ask Billy all the questions behind that deep crystalline blue of his gaze, questions that would bring a lot of shit to the surface and that he didn’t want to have to answer.
But in a moment Dom’s hand left his, his expression closing as he stepped back to let him pull open the door and hurry down the stairs.
“Billy! You’re not leaving, are you?” Elijah’s voice rang out after him, with laughter following behind as he slammed the door of the loft and found the stairs down to the street.
It wasn’t until he was on a bus heading back toward Cambridge that he started arguing with himself with the words of that creed running through his head. No man was all of those ridiculously perfect things. Certainly not Dom. Not Billy himself. Not even Toulouse-Lautrec, who Dom held in high enough regard to have his work be the first thing he’d see every morning. Dom’s quote from him swam back into his head, not the one about desire, but the one about truth.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN