FAN FICTION POST: "Precious", part 1 (Queer As Folk)
Title: Precious
Author: me
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Brian/Justin
Summary: Too many times it has taken some kind of tragedy to bring Justin and Brian closer together.
Previous parts: PROLOGUE
Notes: Instead of replying to everyone's generous compliments on the prologue, I just have to say THANK YOU to everyone who has read and commented on this so far. Since this is my first fic for this fandom, it's really encouraging to get such a positive reaction. I hope you guys enjoy the first chapter.
p a r t | o n e
In New York, there is no such thing as night. There’s just a time that you sleep, or try to sleep, over the sound of cars honking and groups of pedestrians talking loudly as they walk by outside.
Except when you don’t sleep. Then there is just some surreal hours during which you feel very still because you don’t have anywhere to go, yet your mind is going all over the place.
Justin is sitting on the side of the mattress on his apartment floor, and as it usually is at this hour, his mind is not in New York with the loud sirens and clicking of pairs of high-heels on sidewalks, but off in Pittsburgh. He can practically see everyone there and what they’re probably doing right now. Ben and Michael sitting up in bed reading. His mother having her glass of wine before bed and watching some late night talk show on TV that’s supposed to be funny but doesn’t make her laugh. Emmett curled up on Debbie’s sofa with fuzzy slippers on, having milk and cookies and snickering to himself as he hears Debbie’s loud voice cussing about something to Carl on the floor above him, the muffled sound accompanied by the slamming of dresser drawers as she changes for bed.
Despite those kind of images he sees, In Justin’s head, Pittsburgh is something quiet and peaceful. He never thought of his home town that way until he came to live in New York, where there are plenty of things beautiful but not what you might call cozy, warm, or quiet. He can imagine Hunter yells obscenities at the TV screen while he’s playing video games on the PlayStation his foster fathers got him for his second birthday he celebrated with them, loud enough to make them give each other annoyed looks and almost regret buying it. And Ted and Emmett probably still get into the occasional childish argument over something petty and stupid. And of course, now that Babylon has been rebuilt there is at least one place in Pittsburgh where the day is just beginning rather than ending for someone at this time of night. But even with all of the hectic and overwhelming things he remembers from his life that began with the night he was hanging around outside Babylon by himself, it is a place he associates more with little things. Waking up to the sun gently coming in through the windows in his old bedroom at home. Those gardenia flowers Mel and Linz used to grow in their garden when they lived there that made their back yard smell really good. Drag queens he didn’t even know smiling at him on the street because he had acquired some local fame as either the teenage kid who almost got killed by his homophobe classmate, the last King of Babylon, or the little blond twink who somehow had Brian Kinney whipped.
He tries not to let his thoughts linger on Brian too much, but as usual, they stay there a while where they have a familiar home. But he doesn’t quite know where thoughts about him should go, because the most disturbing thing about thinking about Brian is that it is not as easy to picture what he is probably doing right at this time.
Knowing Brian, he is standing up on the catwalk at Babylon, staring down at dozens of men who all look like perfect dancing Ken dolls through the lens of whatever drugs he is on and probably wouldn’t look bad without them either, picking which one of them he’s going to prey on tonight. Knowing Brian, he is at home watching some black and white classic like On the Waterfront and worshiping the eternally young and sad ghosts in the TV. Knowing Brian, he is doing the same thing Justin is doing right now, sitting at home and just thinking as the minutes go by. Knowing Brian, he can’t really know what he is doing. For he isn’t sure if he really knows him anymore.
In the seven months he has lived here, he went back to Pittsburgh to visit once. By that time, Brian stopped corresponding with him nearly as often as he did in the first four months or so. Both of them had busy lives, and it just gradually happened that way. For they never made any promises to each other before he left. The only understanding was that they were just going to see what would happen.
Justin didn’t know what went wrong. But when they met at the airport and Brian came up and hugged him, it didn’t feel quite right. He got the distinct idea that Brian was being cautious about it. The hug felt loose, all arms and nothing else; not like when Brian usually held him and their chests pressed together so tightly they could just barely breathe in and out and smell each other’s scents. And when he kissed him, it was just a greeting, the same way he kissed Michael or Lindsay instead of their way. They went for a cup of coffee and talked about their lives that Justin now realized were completely separate from each other even if everything in this town used to be his life, and then Justin went to his mom’s and stayed there both nights of his visit. He went out with Brian and the other guys but never set foot in the loft.
The second night, they were all at Woody’s playing pool and a little after midnight Michael, Ben, Emmett, and Ted all left more or less at the same time, as if they were assuming Justin and Brian were surely going to go home together and had things they wanted to do alone. After they were out the door, Brian and Justin looked at each other and then started another game. After eight minutes Justin was beating him, badly, even though Brian was usually a lot better at pool than him. Justin finally sighed exasperatedly, deciding this was pointless, and laid his cue carelessly on the table.
“I have to say, I thought we’d at least last longer than this,” he said, sitting up on the edge of the table.
Brian, aiming to shoot a yellow ball into a middle pocket, looked up at him. “Sunshine, you’re blocking my shot.”
“Fuck the shot.”
“Yeah, good idea. You’re kicking my ass anyway.”
“No, I’m not kicking your ass. This is more like intensively grinding you into a fine powder under one foot with little exerted effort. What the hell.”
“Uh-oh,” Brian said patronizingly, taking a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. “Little Justin is using long sentences and big words. You know what that means.”
“Oh yeah? What does that mean?”
“You’re feeling distressed or frustrated.”
“I wonder why.”
Brian lit his cigarette - or two cigarettes, as Justin only now noticed - in his mouth. He took one of them out and gave it to him. “What, cause you’ve been back for two days and we haven’t even fucked again?”
The surprise of him voicing the obvious right out loud as if it was something completely inconsequential made Justin silent for a moment. Brian put his own pool cue up on the table and started to walk away. Justin followed him out of the bar and they started walking down the sidewalk beside each other. They got to the end of the block before Brian said any more.
“Look, we’re not married like we were going to be. We’re not engaged anymore. We’re not even in that little arrangement anymore. It’s not like we said we were going to wait for each other, we have absolutely no obligations-“
“Brian.” Justin said it mostly because he wanted to make him stop, and now wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. “...I already know everything you’re telling me.”
“Good...Because if we don’t let ourselves do whatever we want, we’ll never know exactly what it is we want.”
“I thought we already knew that.”
“You’re 22. You haven’t had enough yet to know what you want.”
Justin flung what was left of his cigarette on the ground and stomped it out. “If you don’t still love me, just tell me.”
Brian gave a bitter laugh, like he was seeing right through him and how ridiculous it was to pretend it would be that easy to hear. Or maybe he was laughing at how insane the idea of him falling right out of love with Justin over six months, like someone had just turned some light switch off, was. “You’re not listening to me.”
“Well, do you?” Justin said, now stopping on the sidewalk and staring at him, waiting. "Don't make this about me if that's not what it's about."
“It goddamn well should be about you. Didn’t I teach you not to worry about anything else?”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit, Brian. Most of what I learned about how to me a man and all that - the best homosexual I could be or whatever the hell you want to call it - I learned on my own, and it wasn’t fucking easy either.”
Brian looked at him calmly, took his cigarette and also threw it on the ground. “I know.”
Justin looked around as if getting his bearings of where they had ended up, when really he just didn’t want to look at Brian’s blank face anymore. “I think I’ll walk,” he said. “I feel like it.”
“You sure?” Brian asked.
He nodded.
But for another long moment, neither of them moved.
“Well,” Brian said, breaking the silence. “Get back safely. And...keep letting me know what’s going on with you.“
Justin started to slowly shake his head, and he reached up and grabbed the collar of Brian’s jacket. “Look, why are you...I don’t know what you think, but - I love you. I still love you, and I don’t see any reason to fuck something like this up - “
“Justin,” he said, just like Justin had said his name just to make him stop talking before. He reached one hand up to the back of his neck to pull him forward and kissed his forehead softly. Then Justin grabbed hold of his jacket with both hands and just stayed with his face buried there against his chest for a long moment, breathing him in, unable to look at his face anymore because it was telling him everything he didn't want to hear. And then without warning, Brian pulled away and turned without another word, walking off to his car without looking behind him.
One benefit of being a real couple which Justin never actually considered when trying to get Brian to see it was what he wanted is that ending things is much more efficient and clear that way. If you were never in a real relationship in the first place, you cannot ask him when he stops making an effort if he is breaking up with you or not.
It was after that he started seeing Luke.
In the dark, a thin hand crawls up Justin’s arm toward his cigarette, like a spider attracted to the light on the burning end. A lazy voice behind him says, “Give me some of that.”
Justin hands the cigarette back to Luke, who has been lying in bed behind him so quiet and motionless that Justin, in his thoughts, has all but forgotten he’s there. He has the lights off as he usually does at night to save energy costs. From the next room comes the faint sound of an old blues record playing, and the singer has so much pain in his voice it sounds like he’s dying. Everything about the atmosphere makes it feel almost like Justin is alone, but someone is there with him.
“I didn’t think old geezers like Mr. Riven were up this late,” Luke laughs, who visits this apartment enough to know who must be playing the music.
“You kidding?” Justin says. “Nobody in this building goes to sleep until 2:00. Actually, I think he might be an insomniac or something. I’ve heard his TV on at 5:00 in the morning before.”
Luke is 21 and a college student who had some of his photography featured in the same exhibit Justin was able to get some of his paintings into within two months of living there. At the gallery, Luke blatantly flirted with Justin even with his boyfriend standing five feet away gawking at the photographs he’d taken of him feeding some pigeons. The boyfriend came up during their conversation, smiling, and said, “Luke, are you trying to pick up some more beautiful subjects for your work? You always get to the really cute ones before I do,” and Justin knew right away the two of them must not have much of a monogamous relationship.
Since then, he and Luke quickly became friends. He was completely shameless about making moves on him the first couple times they met up again, but Justin just told him, “You know, you’re hot, but you also have awesome taste in music and art, and I just need a friend in New York to teach me how to avoid getting mugged. Let’s not fuck up a good thing by fucking.” So they just kept hanging out, walking to parks where Luke would take pictures, sharing hilarious stories about getting blowjobs in the darkroom at school and seeing hopelessly drunk fags injure themselves doing idiotic things on the 4th of July, and going out to the clubs and dancing together on those occasional nights when Justin had a strong feeling he was going to get depressed if he stayed at home alone in the dark with Mr. Riven’s blues music heard through the walls.
He isn’t in love with Luke, just as Luke isn’t in love with him, but he learned to love him if only out of need. And when he came back from Pittsburgh that one time feeling cold and abandoned, like everything he depended on had been yanked out from under him, he was like a safe place to crawl back into.
Justin learned a long time ago that he surprisingly did not actually want to be like Brian, sleeping with guys he doesn't even love for no other reason than to fulfill primal needs. But sometimes being like him is the only way Justin has to keep him close. In his dark apartment where he keeps all the lights out at night, the other body in his bed can become anybody he needs.
I want you to always remember this, so no matter who you're ever with, I'll always be there.
“Hey...Justin.”
Shaken out of his thoughts, he looks up. “Yeah?”
Luke sits up in bed, and Justin notices he is staring across the room at where a very large canvas is leaning against the wall, facing into it.
“That thing has been there for almost as long as I’ve been coming around here. You just use it for a doorstop or something, or are you going to ever finish it?”
Justin sighs. “Have you seen it?”
Luke shakes his head, so Justin stands up with a little slow reluctance to go turn on the light.
“Agh!” Luke covers his eyes with his arm because they aren’t adjusted to the light, and they both laugh. Then when he hears Justin turning the canvas around, he lowers his arm and his smile immediately drops.
“Whoa...”
One night a while ago Justin couldn't sleep, and he got out of bed and started painting Brian. Tried painting Brian. He wanted this to be something he could be more proud of than anything he’d ever done, for it to show Brian as he saw him; perfectly-shaped like a statue of a Greek god, looking powerful like a super hero, yet with a face that had the large eyes of someone who was just a boy inside if you looked very close. Something eternally beautiful, immortal and unchanging, as Brian would always be on the inside. Rage, Dionysus, and Peter Pan all put together into a physical form that was somehow so beautiful and so damaged and scarred at the same time. Justin wanted to show the world with this painting what he would always see when he looked at Brian, even when he was 60.
But he couldn’t get it to come out right, no matter how much he tried to do parts of it over again. The look in his eyes was either too wise or too innocent. His body was either too lean and frail-looking or so muscular and solid he didn’t look like something you would want to touch. Finally he decided maybe a subject like Brian was too much of a paradox with different qualities battling each other inside to represent with a physical form that showed those qualities. He was both a fearless warrior and a scared little boy, both aged and immature, heartless and sweet and insensitive and paternal. He was all of those things. To omit showing any of them in this painting would not do him justice at all.
So now it is just an unfinished portrait of a man with his naked body partially concealed in shadows, his face more than any other part, for leaving a lot of it to the imagination is the best Justin was able to do.
“Did you have somebody sit for that?” Luke asks, and as he sees the look on his face Justin thinks maybe he didn’t do as bad a job on it as he thinks. Because Luke seems to be in some disbelief that there is a real person in the world like the one in this painting.
“No...not exactly.” Justin sits back down on the mattress next to him and takes his cigarette back to take a drag, and then they both stare forward at Brian.
“But it’s somebody you know?” Luke assumes, because he can tell from Justin’s quiet tone.
“Yeah...this guy from back home,” Justin admits with the same reluctance he showed him the painting with.
“Well, come on, you have to spill now.”
Justin laughs. “Sometimes you remind me a lot of my friend Daphne.”
“Don’t be evasive.”
“Okay, okay.” Justin pauses, wondering where exactly the story should begin. “So. Back when I was seventeen - not exactly out of the closet yet,” he explained, “I had just gotten a really crappy fake ID. I told my mom one night I was going to sleep over at Daphne’s, and instead I went out to check out the bars and stuff. I was wandering around cluelessly, feeling like I had been pitched into a strange alternate reality world where I didn’t even speak the right language. Anyway, I made it to the outside of this one club, and he was coming out of there with his friends, this 29-year-old man who looked like a model in a cologne ad or something. We noticed each other at just about the same time, and he didn’t wait a second before walking right over to me and saying, ‘How’s it going.’”
“No shit.”
Justin just laughs.
“So what happened?” Luke presses. “He took you home and you did it?”
“He tried to take me home and do me. But before we got very far he got a call finding out he was a father.”
“No!”
“I couldn’t just go home, so I went with him and his best friend and met his newborn son. He had a couple lesbian friends who wanted to have a kid so he gave them the necessary donation. I even helped them decide on a name for their baby. Then we went back to his place and did it.”
Luke starts laughing loudly.
“But after that, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me,” Justin says. “I was a little too young for him, after all.”
“Well, isn’t that life. Did you ever even see him again?”
He looks to the side at Luke and smirks. “Four years later we ended up almost getting married.”
Luke stares like he isn’t sure if he’s joking or not at first. “What happened?”
“What happened in between then and us getting engaged or what happened to stop us from getting married?”
“Um. All of the above?”
Justin smiles. “Well, how about this for an explanation? Some things can change..but there are some things you can’t change.”
Luke nods. “So you were the one who ran away from him, after all?”
“No, he was the one who convinced me to come to New York. Brian was right. If we had gone through with getting married, I would have been really happy for a while. But then I would have ended up depending on him financially and feeling useless, regretting that I let the chance to go after my dreams slide right by me, eventually resenting the life I had with him, and maybe even blaming him. It would have ruined our relationship, no matter how much we loved each other.”
Luke looks surprised by this sensible and well-thought-through explanation. "But you still love him?"
He gives a soft laugh. "If you knew Brian - or knew me when I was with Brian - you wouldn't have to ask."
"So then...what's the answer?"
Justin shows his exasperation by tossing his hands in the air. "Fuck if I know."
Luke stares forward at the painting. “How come you never even told me about a Brian before?”
“I mentioned him before. Maybe not by name. You probably assumed he was just an old friend.”
“Hm. Well, I did always know your reason for not wanting to sleep with me at first was bullshit. Now I know.”
Justin laughs and shoves his elbow into Luke’s side. “Oh, it couldn’t have been that I just didn’t like you and was trying to be nice?”
“Of course not,” Luke says, laughing too.
The cigarette is down to a short stub, so Justin leans across Luke to put it out in the ashtray on the floor by his alarm clock. He stays lying across his lap with his head resting on his crossed arms, and Luke starts playing with his hair.
“Well, babe, I just hope you don’t have any different kind of regrets now,” he says.
Justin looks to the side at the figure painted on the canvas. “No.”
But then he doesn’t look away for a long time.
Once again, his thoughts go to someone in Pittsburgh, but even though he once knew Brian enough to paint him without a picture reference and hardly ever needed to call him to tell him about his day because he could already guess what he’d say in response to everything, he can’t clearly picture what Brian would be doing right now. He doesn’t know if he feels incomplete and is out at the baths getting the only kind of therapy he believes in, or if he has actually become more whole since Justin left and spends more of his evenings having dinner at his friends’ warm homes. He doesn’t know if Brian has rebuilt his life to be something different that doesn’t depend on the past and is held up on its own new foundation, just like he has rebuilt Babylon, and moved on, or if he is still almost the exact same person he was when Justin met him outside Babylon years ago.
And part of him thinks that might have something to do with why he couldn’t paint him and make it look quite right. It is as if Brian is not letting him see him anymore; he has backed up out of the light into the shadows to hide.
Continue to part 2...
Author: me
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Brian/Justin
Summary: Too many times it has taken some kind of tragedy to bring Justin and Brian closer together.
Previous parts: PROLOGUE
Notes: Instead of replying to everyone's generous compliments on the prologue, I just have to say THANK YOU to everyone who has read and commented on this so far. Since this is my first fic for this fandom, it's really encouraging to get such a positive reaction. I hope you guys enjoy the first chapter.
p a r t | o n e
In New York, there is no such thing as night. There’s just a time that you sleep, or try to sleep, over the sound of cars honking and groups of pedestrians talking loudly as they walk by outside.
Except when you don’t sleep. Then there is just some surreal hours during which you feel very still because you don’t have anywhere to go, yet your mind is going all over the place.
Justin is sitting on the side of the mattress on his apartment floor, and as it usually is at this hour, his mind is not in New York with the loud sirens and clicking of pairs of high-heels on sidewalks, but off in Pittsburgh. He can practically see everyone there and what they’re probably doing right now. Ben and Michael sitting up in bed reading. His mother having her glass of wine before bed and watching some late night talk show on TV that’s supposed to be funny but doesn’t make her laugh. Emmett curled up on Debbie’s sofa with fuzzy slippers on, having milk and cookies and snickering to himself as he hears Debbie’s loud voice cussing about something to Carl on the floor above him, the muffled sound accompanied by the slamming of dresser drawers as she changes for bed.
Despite those kind of images he sees, In Justin’s head, Pittsburgh is something quiet and peaceful. He never thought of his home town that way until he came to live in New York, where there are plenty of things beautiful but not what you might call cozy, warm, or quiet. He can imagine Hunter yells obscenities at the TV screen while he’s playing video games on the PlayStation his foster fathers got him for his second birthday he celebrated with them, loud enough to make them give each other annoyed looks and almost regret buying it. And Ted and Emmett probably still get into the occasional childish argument over something petty and stupid. And of course, now that Babylon has been rebuilt there is at least one place in Pittsburgh where the day is just beginning rather than ending for someone at this time of night. But even with all of the hectic and overwhelming things he remembers from his life that began with the night he was hanging around outside Babylon by himself, it is a place he associates more with little things. Waking up to the sun gently coming in through the windows in his old bedroom at home. Those gardenia flowers Mel and Linz used to grow in their garden when they lived there that made their back yard smell really good. Drag queens he didn’t even know smiling at him on the street because he had acquired some local fame as either the teenage kid who almost got killed by his homophobe classmate, the last King of Babylon, or the little blond twink who somehow had Brian Kinney whipped.
He tries not to let his thoughts linger on Brian too much, but as usual, they stay there a while where they have a familiar home. But he doesn’t quite know where thoughts about him should go, because the most disturbing thing about thinking about Brian is that it is not as easy to picture what he is probably doing right at this time.
Knowing Brian, he is standing up on the catwalk at Babylon, staring down at dozens of men who all look like perfect dancing Ken dolls through the lens of whatever drugs he is on and probably wouldn’t look bad without them either, picking which one of them he’s going to prey on tonight. Knowing Brian, he is at home watching some black and white classic like On the Waterfront and worshiping the eternally young and sad ghosts in the TV. Knowing Brian, he is doing the same thing Justin is doing right now, sitting at home and just thinking as the minutes go by. Knowing Brian, he can’t really know what he is doing. For he isn’t sure if he really knows him anymore.
In the seven months he has lived here, he went back to Pittsburgh to visit once. By that time, Brian stopped corresponding with him nearly as often as he did in the first four months or so. Both of them had busy lives, and it just gradually happened that way. For they never made any promises to each other before he left. The only understanding was that they were just going to see what would happen.
Justin didn’t know what went wrong. But when they met at the airport and Brian came up and hugged him, it didn’t feel quite right. He got the distinct idea that Brian was being cautious about it. The hug felt loose, all arms and nothing else; not like when Brian usually held him and their chests pressed together so tightly they could just barely breathe in and out and smell each other’s scents. And when he kissed him, it was just a greeting, the same way he kissed Michael or Lindsay instead of their way. They went for a cup of coffee and talked about their lives that Justin now realized were completely separate from each other even if everything in this town used to be his life, and then Justin went to his mom’s and stayed there both nights of his visit. He went out with Brian and the other guys but never set foot in the loft.
The second night, they were all at Woody’s playing pool and a little after midnight Michael, Ben, Emmett, and Ted all left more or less at the same time, as if they were assuming Justin and Brian were surely going to go home together and had things they wanted to do alone. After they were out the door, Brian and Justin looked at each other and then started another game. After eight minutes Justin was beating him, badly, even though Brian was usually a lot better at pool than him. Justin finally sighed exasperatedly, deciding this was pointless, and laid his cue carelessly on the table.
“I have to say, I thought we’d at least last longer than this,” he said, sitting up on the edge of the table.
Brian, aiming to shoot a yellow ball into a middle pocket, looked up at him. “Sunshine, you’re blocking my shot.”
“Fuck the shot.”
“Yeah, good idea. You’re kicking my ass anyway.”
“No, I’m not kicking your ass. This is more like intensively grinding you into a fine powder under one foot with little exerted effort. What the hell.”
“Uh-oh,” Brian said patronizingly, taking a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. “Little Justin is using long sentences and big words. You know what that means.”
“Oh yeah? What does that mean?”
“You’re feeling distressed or frustrated.”
“I wonder why.”
Brian lit his cigarette - or two cigarettes, as Justin only now noticed - in his mouth. He took one of them out and gave it to him. “What, cause you’ve been back for two days and we haven’t even fucked again?”
The surprise of him voicing the obvious right out loud as if it was something completely inconsequential made Justin silent for a moment. Brian put his own pool cue up on the table and started to walk away. Justin followed him out of the bar and they started walking down the sidewalk beside each other. They got to the end of the block before Brian said any more.
“Look, we’re not married like we were going to be. We’re not engaged anymore. We’re not even in that little arrangement anymore. It’s not like we said we were going to wait for each other, we have absolutely no obligations-“
“Brian.” Justin said it mostly because he wanted to make him stop, and now wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. “...I already know everything you’re telling me.”
“Good...Because if we don’t let ourselves do whatever we want, we’ll never know exactly what it is we want.”
“I thought we already knew that.”
“You’re 22. You haven’t had enough yet to know what you want.”
Justin flung what was left of his cigarette on the ground and stomped it out. “If you don’t still love me, just tell me.”
Brian gave a bitter laugh, like he was seeing right through him and how ridiculous it was to pretend it would be that easy to hear. Or maybe he was laughing at how insane the idea of him falling right out of love with Justin over six months, like someone had just turned some light switch off, was. “You’re not listening to me.”
“Well, do you?” Justin said, now stopping on the sidewalk and staring at him, waiting. "Don't make this about me if that's not what it's about."
“It goddamn well should be about you. Didn’t I teach you not to worry about anything else?”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit, Brian. Most of what I learned about how to me a man and all that - the best homosexual I could be or whatever the hell you want to call it - I learned on my own, and it wasn’t fucking easy either.”
Brian looked at him calmly, took his cigarette and also threw it on the ground. “I know.”
Justin looked around as if getting his bearings of where they had ended up, when really he just didn’t want to look at Brian’s blank face anymore. “I think I’ll walk,” he said. “I feel like it.”
“You sure?” Brian asked.
He nodded.
But for another long moment, neither of them moved.
“Well,” Brian said, breaking the silence. “Get back safely. And...keep letting me know what’s going on with you.“
Justin started to slowly shake his head, and he reached up and grabbed the collar of Brian’s jacket. “Look, why are you...I don’t know what you think, but - I love you. I still love you, and I don’t see any reason to fuck something like this up - “
“Justin,” he said, just like Justin had said his name just to make him stop talking before. He reached one hand up to the back of his neck to pull him forward and kissed his forehead softly. Then Justin grabbed hold of his jacket with both hands and just stayed with his face buried there against his chest for a long moment, breathing him in, unable to look at his face anymore because it was telling him everything he didn't want to hear. And then without warning, Brian pulled away and turned without another word, walking off to his car without looking behind him.
One benefit of being a real couple which Justin never actually considered when trying to get Brian to see it was what he wanted is that ending things is much more efficient and clear that way. If you were never in a real relationship in the first place, you cannot ask him when he stops making an effort if he is breaking up with you or not.
It was after that he started seeing Luke.
In the dark, a thin hand crawls up Justin’s arm toward his cigarette, like a spider attracted to the light on the burning end. A lazy voice behind him says, “Give me some of that.”
Justin hands the cigarette back to Luke, who has been lying in bed behind him so quiet and motionless that Justin, in his thoughts, has all but forgotten he’s there. He has the lights off as he usually does at night to save energy costs. From the next room comes the faint sound of an old blues record playing, and the singer has so much pain in his voice it sounds like he’s dying. Everything about the atmosphere makes it feel almost like Justin is alone, but someone is there with him.
“I didn’t think old geezers like Mr. Riven were up this late,” Luke laughs, who visits this apartment enough to know who must be playing the music.
“You kidding?” Justin says. “Nobody in this building goes to sleep until 2:00. Actually, I think he might be an insomniac or something. I’ve heard his TV on at 5:00 in the morning before.”
Luke is 21 and a college student who had some of his photography featured in the same exhibit Justin was able to get some of his paintings into within two months of living there. At the gallery, Luke blatantly flirted with Justin even with his boyfriend standing five feet away gawking at the photographs he’d taken of him feeding some pigeons. The boyfriend came up during their conversation, smiling, and said, “Luke, are you trying to pick up some more beautiful subjects for your work? You always get to the really cute ones before I do,” and Justin knew right away the two of them must not have much of a monogamous relationship.
Since then, he and Luke quickly became friends. He was completely shameless about making moves on him the first couple times they met up again, but Justin just told him, “You know, you’re hot, but you also have awesome taste in music and art, and I just need a friend in New York to teach me how to avoid getting mugged. Let’s not fuck up a good thing by fucking.” So they just kept hanging out, walking to parks where Luke would take pictures, sharing hilarious stories about getting blowjobs in the darkroom at school and seeing hopelessly drunk fags injure themselves doing idiotic things on the 4th of July, and going out to the clubs and dancing together on those occasional nights when Justin had a strong feeling he was going to get depressed if he stayed at home alone in the dark with Mr. Riven’s blues music heard through the walls.
He isn’t in love with Luke, just as Luke isn’t in love with him, but he learned to love him if only out of need. And when he came back from Pittsburgh that one time feeling cold and abandoned, like everything he depended on had been yanked out from under him, he was like a safe place to crawl back into.
Justin learned a long time ago that he surprisingly did not actually want to be like Brian, sleeping with guys he doesn't even love for no other reason than to fulfill primal needs. But sometimes being like him is the only way Justin has to keep him close. In his dark apartment where he keeps all the lights out at night, the other body in his bed can become anybody he needs.
I want you to always remember this, so no matter who you're ever with, I'll always be there.
“Hey...Justin.”
Shaken out of his thoughts, he looks up. “Yeah?”
Luke sits up in bed, and Justin notices he is staring across the room at where a very large canvas is leaning against the wall, facing into it.
“That thing has been there for almost as long as I’ve been coming around here. You just use it for a doorstop or something, or are you going to ever finish it?”
Justin sighs. “Have you seen it?”
Luke shakes his head, so Justin stands up with a little slow reluctance to go turn on the light.
“Agh!” Luke covers his eyes with his arm because they aren’t adjusted to the light, and they both laugh. Then when he hears Justin turning the canvas around, he lowers his arm and his smile immediately drops.
“Whoa...”
One night a while ago Justin couldn't sleep, and he got out of bed and started painting Brian. Tried painting Brian. He wanted this to be something he could be more proud of than anything he’d ever done, for it to show Brian as he saw him; perfectly-shaped like a statue of a Greek god, looking powerful like a super hero, yet with a face that had the large eyes of someone who was just a boy inside if you looked very close. Something eternally beautiful, immortal and unchanging, as Brian would always be on the inside. Rage, Dionysus, and Peter Pan all put together into a physical form that was somehow so beautiful and so damaged and scarred at the same time. Justin wanted to show the world with this painting what he would always see when he looked at Brian, even when he was 60.
But he couldn’t get it to come out right, no matter how much he tried to do parts of it over again. The look in his eyes was either too wise or too innocent. His body was either too lean and frail-looking or so muscular and solid he didn’t look like something you would want to touch. Finally he decided maybe a subject like Brian was too much of a paradox with different qualities battling each other inside to represent with a physical form that showed those qualities. He was both a fearless warrior and a scared little boy, both aged and immature, heartless and sweet and insensitive and paternal. He was all of those things. To omit showing any of them in this painting would not do him justice at all.
So now it is just an unfinished portrait of a man with his naked body partially concealed in shadows, his face more than any other part, for leaving a lot of it to the imagination is the best Justin was able to do.
“Did you have somebody sit for that?” Luke asks, and as he sees the look on his face Justin thinks maybe he didn’t do as bad a job on it as he thinks. Because Luke seems to be in some disbelief that there is a real person in the world like the one in this painting.
“No...not exactly.” Justin sits back down on the mattress next to him and takes his cigarette back to take a drag, and then they both stare forward at Brian.
“But it’s somebody you know?” Luke assumes, because he can tell from Justin’s quiet tone.
“Yeah...this guy from back home,” Justin admits with the same reluctance he showed him the painting with.
“Well, come on, you have to spill now.”
Justin laughs. “Sometimes you remind me a lot of my friend Daphne.”
“Don’t be evasive.”
“Okay, okay.” Justin pauses, wondering where exactly the story should begin. “So. Back when I was seventeen - not exactly out of the closet yet,” he explained, “I had just gotten a really crappy fake ID. I told my mom one night I was going to sleep over at Daphne’s, and instead I went out to check out the bars and stuff. I was wandering around cluelessly, feeling like I had been pitched into a strange alternate reality world where I didn’t even speak the right language. Anyway, I made it to the outside of this one club, and he was coming out of there with his friends, this 29-year-old man who looked like a model in a cologne ad or something. We noticed each other at just about the same time, and he didn’t wait a second before walking right over to me and saying, ‘How’s it going.’”
“No shit.”
Justin just laughs.
“So what happened?” Luke presses. “He took you home and you did it?”
“He tried to take me home and do me. But before we got very far he got a call finding out he was a father.”
“No!”
“I couldn’t just go home, so I went with him and his best friend and met his newborn son. He had a couple lesbian friends who wanted to have a kid so he gave them the necessary donation. I even helped them decide on a name for their baby. Then we went back to his place and did it.”
Luke starts laughing loudly.
“But after that, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me,” Justin says. “I was a little too young for him, after all.”
“Well, isn’t that life. Did you ever even see him again?”
He looks to the side at Luke and smirks. “Four years later we ended up almost getting married.”
Luke stares like he isn’t sure if he’s joking or not at first. “What happened?”
“What happened in between then and us getting engaged or what happened to stop us from getting married?”
“Um. All of the above?”
Justin smiles. “Well, how about this for an explanation? Some things can change..but there are some things you can’t change.”
Luke nods. “So you were the one who ran away from him, after all?”
“No, he was the one who convinced me to come to New York. Brian was right. If we had gone through with getting married, I would have been really happy for a while. But then I would have ended up depending on him financially and feeling useless, regretting that I let the chance to go after my dreams slide right by me, eventually resenting the life I had with him, and maybe even blaming him. It would have ruined our relationship, no matter how much we loved each other.”
Luke looks surprised by this sensible and well-thought-through explanation. "But you still love him?"
He gives a soft laugh. "If you knew Brian - or knew me when I was with Brian - you wouldn't have to ask."
"So then...what's the answer?"
Justin shows his exasperation by tossing his hands in the air. "Fuck if I know."
Luke stares forward at the painting. “How come you never even told me about a Brian before?”
“I mentioned him before. Maybe not by name. You probably assumed he was just an old friend.”
“Hm. Well, I did always know your reason for not wanting to sleep with me at first was bullshit. Now I know.”
Justin laughs and shoves his elbow into Luke’s side. “Oh, it couldn’t have been that I just didn’t like you and was trying to be nice?”
“Of course not,” Luke says, laughing too.
The cigarette is down to a short stub, so Justin leans across Luke to put it out in the ashtray on the floor by his alarm clock. He stays lying across his lap with his head resting on his crossed arms, and Luke starts playing with his hair.
“Well, babe, I just hope you don’t have any different kind of regrets now,” he says.
Justin looks to the side at the figure painted on the canvas. “No.”
But then he doesn’t look away for a long time.
Once again, his thoughts go to someone in Pittsburgh, but even though he once knew Brian enough to paint him without a picture reference and hardly ever needed to call him to tell him about his day because he could already guess what he’d say in response to everything, he can’t clearly picture what Brian would be doing right now. He doesn’t know if he feels incomplete and is out at the baths getting the only kind of therapy he believes in, or if he has actually become more whole since Justin left and spends more of his evenings having dinner at his friends’ warm homes. He doesn’t know if Brian has rebuilt his life to be something different that doesn’t depend on the past and is held up on its own new foundation, just like he has rebuilt Babylon, and moved on, or if he is still almost the exact same person he was when Justin met him outside Babylon years ago.
And part of him thinks that might have something to do with why he couldn’t paint him and make it look quite right. It is as if Brian is not letting him see him anymore; he has backed up out of the light into the shadows to hide.
Continue to part 2...