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It had been one of Bee’s bright ideas to coax Andrew into artwork, originally.
“Some things are too big for words alone to hold,” she’d said. “Expressing yourself creatively… Well. Think of it as if you are giving your brain a whole new dictionary. A whole new language, even.”
Andrew had raised an eyebrow at her, cutting, critical. He was cosy in his familiar home in her office, tucked in the corner of the comfy couch, a knitted blanket resting over his knees. He twirled one of her hand-sculpted figurines between his palms, back and forth, and thumbed over a blunt chip in the glaze.
She had tried to spin these sugar-glass stories for him, before. Fairytales on the healing power of art and how cathartic it could be to let shape and colour speak for him.
Nonsense.
She tried again, one cold afternoon in November. A day where Andrew’s voice had withered away overnight and sank loppsided into a graveyard in the back of his throat. His words in waterlogged coffins far, far beneath the earth. If he crept his hands back his throat, the words would fall apart as he dragged them free. Crushed, sopping flowers.
“Let’s try something,” Bee suggested. There had been silence between them. So, so much silence so far, and it was beginning to sting in Andrew’s mouth, like the tips of his teeth grazing ice. “Take this paper, here, and draw whatever comes to your mind. Just- anything. Anything you want.”
Andrew humoured her, because he was fond of Bee. And because he knew that the hope in her eyes, behind the skittles-burst frames of her chunky glasses, was authentic.
Nobody had ever looked at Andrew in the way that Bee did. Nobody had ever looked at Andrew as anything other an inconvenient conundrum to resolve.
So, when she bumbled over to her desk and pulled out a cardboard box of art supplies, he took the small sketchbook she offered him. When she dropped a pouch of pencils onto the coffee table, he shifted forward and plucked a grey one from the wobbly stack. He twirled it round and round, one-two-three, before leafing open the book on his lap.
He paused with the pencil tip at the paper. When Bee made no move of her own, simply sitting still to observe him, he crawled a sharp glance across the floorboards to her.
Her lips curled at the corners. She heard what he was saying, loud and clear. Shrugging a lazy shoulder and a why not? with her other arm, she chose a crayon of her own from the box. Andrew watched her closely, for a moment, as she began to doodle in the margins of her journal. He dropped his gaze only when she peeked up at him and her smile, like ribbon unspooling towards him, made the air in the room feel sun-warm with yellow.
He snapped back to the paper and began. Once finished, he ripped the page from the metal spirals in the spine of the sketchbook and set his work on the coffee table. With two fingertips, he slid it slowly across the surface towards Bee.
His creation was dramatic. A bubble-letter, greyscale image of the word NO.
Bee leaned forward, elbows on her knees, fingers steepled beneath her chin. She studied his piece with careful, quiet attention. As always, she accepted what he gave her unconditionally. She always had, even back when he did not trust her, even when all she was to him was a representation of everything that had ever failed him.
Every little tidbit, every little wound, every little splinter of his soul, Bee caught them in her palms and kept them warm and unbreaking.
After a moment, she reached for her mug of cooling tea and sank back into the cushion of her armchair. With a fond, fond sigh, she cradled the drink close to her chest, hands wrapping around the porcelain, and smiled at him.
“Certainly a strong message,” she teased. “But it’s still a picture. It still tells us something.”
Andrew dropped his pencil back into the pouch. He pat-pat-patted the lid of the art box back into place. Now that this ridiculous activity was over, now that Bee had thrown the towel in on therapising him with crayons, he could settle back cosy onto the couch with his hot chocolate and-
“What made you pick the grey?”
Andrew stilled. After a moment, he blinked at her, coolly, heavily. Unhooked by her attempt of drawing him in. He was no weak fish on the end of a line.
“Bee,” he warned. His voice was dry and thin, crackle-edged from lack of use.
Her eyes smiled. Her cheeks warmed. “Andrew.”
He forced down a swallow.
Her gaze dipped to his hands, and he followed suit. Graphite had smudged into the tips of his fingers, shadowing the crescent-curve of his nails. He hadn’t noticed it before, and the sight of it now made him fidget, made him itch with the want of scrubbing at the grit, the dust. He didn’t like the cling of the powder to his skin.
“There’s always a reason behind the things we do, the things we pick,” Bee said. “Looks like your hands are already talking. Might we have discovered an artist in you, Andrew?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. Tucked his fingers into the hidden hollows of his elbows, grinding the pads of his thumb and index together.
Sometimes, it felt as if Bee could read him like his thoughts had taken shape in midair, spilling just outside his head, caught in the lamplight of her office. As if threads of his inner world had been patiently waiting only for her gathering hands, and once found, they slipped right through his skull to guide her step-by-step back to the source.
But Andrew. He knew Bee, too. He knew Bee. In small ways, in big ways. He knew that she took her tea with two small sugar cubes and a dash of ice-cold milk, steeped until it rivalled burned caramel. Only the artificial sweetener kind of sugar, too. Specifically, the shop-brand, the one that came in a yellow tub. Not real sugar. The granules of that stuck in her molars.
He knew Bee. In small ways, in big ways.
Because he also knew no matter how hard he pushed her away, she never left.
“Maybe you do not know me,” Andrew muttered, and he smoothed a ruffle in the blanket over his lap, “at all, Bee.”
Bee lifted her mug in silent toast. Playfully smug, eyes shining, like she already knew she’d won a little ground.
“The fact you haven’t left means there’s a chance you’re thinking about it,” she said. “And that is good enough for me.”
Andrew had no intention of following up on any of Bee’s artsy-craftsy miracle cures, but somehow Neil had seen the google searches on his phone, the links to art supply shops that Bee had texted.
Neil, in his most meddlesome of manners, had purchased everything without ever even knowing what the materials were for.
The delivery arrived over a month ago and, since then, it has lived in a dark corner of the living room in the Columbia house. The box is tacked together with strips of wishy-washy sticky tape and wedged into hiding behind the old, sagging couch.
Today, it takes Andrew less than five minutes in total to unpack it. He grabs an old white blanket from its home on the armchair. The fabric is yellowed in the creases, ratty in the corners, and torn in the back where it got snagged in the hooks of the washer machine. Its only real purpose is to cover a gash in the armchair’s upholstery.
Andrew shakes it out and snaps away the old dust from its fibres, before laying it flat across the floor. Then, he topples a huge canvas out of the cardboard box. He watches it slide free from the sleeve and thunk into place in the centre of the blanket.
Next comes the paint. Each colour is tucked away in a metal tin, their rims about the size of Andrew’s palms. Red, green, blue, yellow, gold, black. He finds a large knife in one of the kitchen drawers and uses it to pry the lids open. They’re stubborn little things, those tins, those lids, with their varnish flaking from their bellies, and a couple of them skitter metal-on-wood across the floor when they finally give way and pop off their base.
The gold one bursts a spluttering spray of glitter across the back of Andrew’s wrist just as Neil nudges open the living room door.
He is hardly a step over the threshold when he rocks to a stop.
“Oh. Wow,” he says, blinking in surprise. He tilts his head, taking in the mismatched picnic of art materials. “You’ve decided to try them? I was beginning to think that Bee’s assignment was to just stare at the box forever.”
Andrew slides him an icy glance, a shard of sharp glass of a glare. As he scruffs the gold paint off his wrist, scrubbing with a tuft of the blanket, Neil just smiles, all teeth, and wanders over to sit down on the floor beside him. Sliding criss-crossed his legs, he tucks his toes in neat beneath himself, and asks, “Do you know what you’re going to make?”
Andrew doesn’t answer. He doesn’t feel much like talking, today. Words require too much effort, so he sets to quietly unpacking the rest of the paint tins from their box, instead. He has no plan, really. Nothing at all. He has no image in his head of what he’s going to create, or if he’s even going to create. He had no idea, just half an hour ago, that he would find himself doing this. It was as if something invisible had tugged him down here to the living room, uncaring of whether he tripped all the way there or landed on his feet.
Maybe Bee was right. Maybe his hands just simply had something to say. Maybe they were ready to talk, after all.
Neil has brought a plastic punnet of strawberries along with him, and he sets it down in his lap to dip a hand inside and sift through the freshly-rinsed bunch. When he chooses one and brings it to his mouth, the split-second crunch of his teeth through the cold skin is crisp. A chubby droplet of juice trickles down his thumb.
Andrew pauses. For a moment, from the corner of his eye, he watches as Neil’s tongue kitten-licks his golden-brown skin clean, curling round his thumb. He snaps back to the canvas when he sees that Neil has caught him.
Neil’s cheeks lift around the spread of a smile. He does not ask if Andrew wants a strawberry, because he knows what the answer will be. Of course Andrew wants a strawberry. Neil simply plucks the fattest one from the punnet’s puppy-pile and scoots his body a hairsbreadth closer on the floor. Shoulder brushing Andrew’s, he leans in and lifts the strawberry towards Andrew’s face.
“They’re nice,” he says. “I made sure to get the freshest looking ones this morning.”
He brushes the strawberry over Andrew’s lips. A tip-tap tip-tap at the seam, playful, and he holds Andrew’s gaze steady in his own until Andrew opens-up for him. The chill of the fruit is nippy on his tongue, but Neil’s fingers are warm beneath it as Andrew draws the berry into his mouth.
Neil’s eyes follow the movement, closely. “Good?”
It bursts so sweetly in Andrew’s mouth. Bright and vivid and tangy. He savours the taste on his palette before swallowing, sucks the juice from the back of his teeth, then opens again when Neil right away offers another.
For a little while, it goes like that. A quiet rhythm as Andrew begins to arrange the paint tins in a tidy row alongside the canvas and Neil feeds them from the one-for-me and one-for-you bunch of strawberries. For Andrew, he always chooses the juiciest, the most vibrant picks. And as he does so, he hums beneath his breath, murmuring questions like:
“Did Bee give you any prompts?”
“Are you supposed to focus on something in particular?”
“Is Nicky going to freak out if that blanket gets destroyed?”
Eventually, Andrew finishes. And when he next sucks a strawberry off of Neil’s gentle fingers, the tip of Neil’s thumb lingers on the bow of his lips. He brushes away a teardrop of juice from the corner, there, and presses down softly until Andrew’s mouth parts for him.
Can I kiss you? it asks.
Andrew draws Neil’s thumb into the wet heat of his mouth as answer.
When they kiss, Neil opens for Andrew so easily, so silkily, so relievedly. With a juice-sweet sigh trickled right into Andrew’s lungs.
Andrew shifts up onto his knees and moves closer to slide one of his legs over Neil’s lap. Settling comfily there, tucking his thighs snugly around Neil’s hips. He cups Neil’s cheek with one palm and licks softly into his mouth, feeling how Neil’s body tightens, just a moment, before his shoulders shudder it out and warm breath trickles over Andrew’s lips.
“Andrew,” he whispers. He’s so warm, beneath him. The silky heat of his body seeping through the cotton of his clothes, coaxing the cold of Andrew’s skin a rosy pink. The paint tins were frosty, but Neil is cosy.
Andrew’s hands slide up Neil’s arms and slip slowly along the line of his shoulders. Tiptoeing round the back of Neil’s neck to thread into locks of his hair, nestling cosily there amongst the glossy curls, twirling the shower-damp ends between his fingers.
Neil melts back into the press of them, the weight of them tugging at his scalp. His eyes flutter and his palms find Andrew’s waist as he says again, “Andrew.”
Andrew tilts Neil’s head back to deepen the kiss, just a little, and his eyes are closing greedily into it when his eyes catch suddenly on a shimmery smudge of gold paint across on Neil’s cheek. Glittering wetly in the lamplight, shining across the apple, like a stray fleck of sunlight through the window. It must be a left-over splatter from when Andrew was first opening the paint, but he thought he had cleaned all of that off. He hadn’t realised a spot had been missed.
But there the paint sits, now. A wobbly streak of glimmering gold, melting into the small dimple on Neil’s cheek. The one that appears only for his secret Andrew smile.
Gold. Gold, gold, gold.
Neil blinks up at him and his eyes are so blue as he waits for his next kiss, his face cupped in Andrew’s hands. Opal, sapphire, teal. Summer-sky bright right in the centres. Like a painter had gathered every shade of blue under the sun and spilled all the most beautiful hues of it along a wooden palette, letting them swirl together.
This close, Andrew can see that the iris is scattered with tiny speckles of gold, too. Freckled there, like the painter had made a last-minute decision to sprinkle some gold dust. Trickles in here-and-there clusters, like fireworks sparking too-soon when the sky is still blue.
Gold. Gold, gold, gold.
What is gold, to Andrew?
What is gold, to Neil?
What is gold?
Gold, when Andrew thinks about it. Gold, when he studies the glimmer of it on Neil's cheek, in Neil’s eyes.
Gold is the colour on an evening where they lay in bed together in the Columbia house, and for the very first time, Andrew does not feel the need to abanddon the sheets moments after the comedown from sex.
Instead of disappearing into the bathroom where he would hook his hands onto the countertop and bore his eyes into his reflection in the mirror. Instead of scrubbing all sensation from the surface of his skin beneath the ice-cold spray of the numbing, numbing shower. Instead of snapping the shutters in his chest closed to keep Neil out, he stays.
Instead of ripping away from Neil, he stays.
That evening, the window beside the bed is wide-open and calling out into the sunset. Inviting the sleepy sun to tiptoe its warmth into the room. Dwindling through the curtains, tripping on Andrew’s discarded shirt and a toppled-over sneaker of Neil’s. Walking its fingertips across the floorboards with the scent of fresh, fresh grass.
Andrew sits on the edge of the bed with one leg tucked up into his chest, his arm wrapped around his front, cupping his elbow. Beside him, Neil’s body is tired and sated and velvety beneath the blanket. Sleepy. Lying on his front, head resting on a crumpled tuft of the pillow, and melting like a pool of sun-warmed syrup. A drizzle of honey over the whipped-cream white of the blankets. Sprinkled with cherry-on-top bite marks from Andrew’s teeth.
Golden in the light and blink-blink-blinking with those long, fair lashes.
“Hi,” he says, so simply. A smile tugging on the corners of his lips, a glint in his eyes. Above the petal-pink blush of his cheeks, the one Andrew coaxed there by wringing gasp after gasp from him, his freckles glow like speckles of toffee, like sprinkles of butterscotch.
Gold. Gold, gold, gold.
Andrew turns away from Neil’s gaze and snatches the top drawer of the bedside table open. The wood rattles on its hinges and he feels around inside it for his packet of cigarettes. Once he finds it and lights one, he brings it to his lips and draws in a long, deep breath. Holding the smoke down warm and tingly in his lungs before sighing it out slow. Mindful and measured.
The things that Neil makes him feel, sometimes. There is no words for the things that Neil makes Andrew feel. Those feelings spider-webbed up the knobs of his spine and reached his neck like a noose, sneaky as a snake, tightening in until he was locked before ever realising. And oh, at first, he fought. He fought. He fought. He didn’t want this this with Neil. He didn’t want this this with anyone.
Andrew’s soul had been trapped his whole life in a thick, glass box. He was not born that way. No. He was born as a half of one whole.
Andrew and Aaron.
Aaron and Andrew.
When Andrew took his first breath of life, his lungs filled only by making space for the little baby-fingers his twin had curled round his heartstrings. Tucked into the chambers, sewn to the arteries. They grew there together, and there was a lullaby, in the breath of one baby giving life to the other. One pulse feeding the other.
Ripping them apart was the first of Andrew’s many, many deaths. The night they were separrated, he bled out for the very first time. And the nurses that took care of him, the staff in the hospital nursery, they did not know. They could not have known. As they swaddled Andrew in a lovely baby blanket, as they petted his chubby cheeks and poof-puff of blonde hair, they did not see that Andrew was suffocating. That Andrew was choking for breath. That all of the air had been sucked clean out of the room.
They’d ripped off his chest when they took Aaron. To pry his twin out, to peel him from his skeleton, they must have broken Andrew’s ribs. They must have severed his muscles. How was he to breathe with his chest torn to shreds?
But the adults in Andrew’s life always their hands over their ears. He learned to stop crying.
Since then, Andrew has kept himself in darkness. In hiding. Stuck there, and he tried to keep himself stuck there, where it was safe, where it was predictable, where it was controlled, until Neil came along. Neil with his blueberry-bright eyes and smirking lips and unnerving ability to sink his gaze right through Andrew’s skin. Neil sees what festers in the marrow of Andrew’s bones and he doesn’t care for the rot or ruin that he finds there. The horror of it does not even make him blink.
Neil with his you gave me a key and his if it means losing you then no and his patient-for-Andrew impatient fingertips reaching into Andrew’s soul.
Did Neil not know the danger of taking a person little by little apart?
Because that is what he did. With kisses and with touches and with whispered words in Andrew’s ear and hands curling into his hair and always yes with you against Andrew’s lips.
But with his fire, too. His ready-to-spark matchstick energy and the fear on his face as he stared death down but did not move for the bullets.
And when the lock around Andrew’s soul gave way, when the glass case fell free, the shatter of it was like startling awake from a sleep that he never remembered closing his eyes to. Had he ever been awake, really? His soul, right there on the earth, gasped in a breath for the very first time, tethered back to him only now by a thin, gold ribbon.
And Neil? Neil looked Andrew right in the eye as he reached for the other end. He looked Andrew wide-open in the eyes as he twirled the ribbon round his littlest finger.
Gold. Gold, gold, gold.
Auburn hair. Caramel skin. Butterscotch freckles.
Andrew does not know what he is supposed to do with a feeling like this. He doesn’t really know what this feeling is, even.
But Neil. Neil. Neil gifts Andrew with trickles of kisses to his lips, his hands light on Andrew’s waist, his hands soft on Andrew’s thighs, and the taste of him is sweet as golden syrup, rich as spoonfuls of treacle.
Beside him, that sunset in bed, Neil presses one hand flat to the mattress to sit himself up. The blankets puddle lazily around his hips as he leans across to where Andrew is sitting, shuffling sleepily closer. Once there, his hand drifts up to Andrew’s face, to cradle the curve of his cheek. And with the tip of his finger, he strokes the feather-swoop ends of Andrew’s lashes.
“Do you want to be alone now?” he whispers. He catches Andrew’s tired blink in his palm. Nestles it cosy in the heart there and watches as Andrew watches him close his fingers around it, keeping it snug in the nest of his life-lines. “I can give you some space, if you want.”
Andrew could want. Up until now, up until today, he’s always wanted. He has needed the space. It’s like a creeping-up of emptiness, after sex. A coldness that unhooks his ribcage from his spine and hollows him out.
Because how can sex be good, now?
How can sex be something that he wants?
How can he want something that was once so dehumanising, so traumatising?
But it is like silk, it is like satin, the way Neil’s hands curl gentle around the curves of Andrew’s body. He holds there softly, settles there calmly, soothes there sweetly.
And it’s like gold, the way Neil tastes. How he trickles over Andrew’s tongue like biting into a fizzy-lemonade lollipop, the crisp crack of the shell before the warm caramel centre spills out. When Neil lays back against the blankets, Andrew wants to hold him down by the wrists and lick the melted sugar of him.
Now, today, here... There is gold on Neil’s cheek, gold on Neil’s face. So bright and shiny beneath his eyes, so stark against the blue. And there is Neil beneath him, beneath Andrew, and he is warm to Andrew’s skin, he is warm to Andrew’s bones. He tastes like strawberries, like lip balm. Like hard-boiled sweets in the sticky-sunny summer, the ones that Andrew tucks to the back of his teeth with his tongue and sucks til the rounds are small and glassy.
“You’re daydreaming,” Neil murmurs, and he is. He is. That’s true. His hands squeeze Andrew’s waist, grounding, but when Andrew makes for the next kiss, Neil pulls back, sensing the drift. “Where did you go?”
There is no way that Andrew could possibly explain. Not in words, at least. Not simply.
Gold, he could say. It wouldn’t be enough. Not hardly.
So he doesn’t. He just tightens his fingers where they’re curled in Neil’s hair and draws him back in, tilts his chin up a little. It’s a good ploy, a kiss distraction. One that Neil nearly always tumbles over for.
But it’s Andrew who record-scratch screeches it to a halt, this time. His breath is on Neil’s lips, ghosting, when suddenly his gaze snags sharply on the tin of black paint, sitting just beside the canvas, behind Neil.
So glossy on the surface, like a pressed-flat mirror.
Black.
Black, black, black.
Andrew knows black.
He knows black too, too well.
Gold, he’d like to stay with gold. Gold is syrup, gold is bright. Gold is honey, is tea, is the sweetness of sugar unravelling slowly in the heat of the liquid. Gold is warmth and gold is rest, gold is Neil and his golden-brown skin, but black is-
Andrew feels stuffed top-to-toe with black, somedays. As if the colour itself has come alive and climbed its slimy way inside his body to pour him full to the brim, to the throat. If he tries to speak, his voice must climb up through murky lake-water.
“Andrew.”
Black engulfs gold. It eclipses it.
“Andrew.”
Black is like a cave that yawns open in the earth, a hollow that tears open in his chest, he-
He is trying to stay present. Fuck, he is trying. He is trying so hard, and he’s keeping his eyes wide-open and he is not looking at the black. He is breathing in Neil’s vanilla body-wash scent and his apple shampoo, so thick in his hair. He’s warm and wanting under Andrew’s touch, and Andrew is trying to focus on the gold glimmer of him, the brightness.
But gold gives wicked, wicked way beneath the thirsty swallow of black, and-
Andrew feels. He feels. He feels.
His eyes shutter closed and everything is dark. Everything is dark and the room has folded in on itself, a crushed-paper swan in a clenching fist. Neil’s lap beneath him has slipped away, his hands have dissolved. There is no paints, no canvas, no blanket. Everything is dark and everything is shadowed and Andrew’s hands are too small, suddenly. His fingers are too cold, suddenly. He’s gripping fistfuls of a pillow so tight that his nails are bleaching snow-white. He is digging, he is gripping, he is clutching.
He’s eight-years-old, here, and his body is so much not his that he wishes he could unzip it like a second skin, that he could rip the stitching that seams his insides together. There is no gold here, no shimmer. None at all. None at al. There is only a blackness that blistersinside of him, that scorches the insides of his veins. Endless, endless blackness. He has charcoal in the very grain of him, did anybody know, in every cell of his body, did anybody know, did anybody know, he’s too, he’s-
“Andrew,” Neil says. Snap-bang, sharp. Real-life. Now, now, now.
Like a bucket of ice water, tossed down his spine. Watercolour of old memories too close to the edge of a drenched page and they are leaking the then into today.
“Are you with me?” Neil asks. The living room is bleeding back in around him, drip by drip. “It’s just me. Just us, here.”
Andrew’s breath feels sticky. Clinging to the back of his throat, like cough syrup.
There are days where he is drenched to the bone in a jaw-wide-open brand of numbness. Creepy-crawly fingers of frost that freeze him solid, that stun him still. Ice cube of a soul.
“Andrew Minyard,” Neil says. “Columbia. Friday. March. Neil.”
It’s Neil. It’s just Neil. It’s just Neil and his soft bottom lip so red, so like the nibbled inside of the strawberries in the punnet. So toastty is his lap beneath Andrew and his hands on Andrew’s waist, his fingernails coaxing strawberry-milkshake trails along Andrew’s hipbones.
Andrew knows that on days where he feels like an icicle, he would melt himself if it meant finding Neil on the ground.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Neil reminds. “Betsy suggested trying the art, yeah, but… It’s your choice, Andrew. You get to pick.
Andrew knows that. He knows that, he knows that, he knows that. His hand finds Neil’s cheek and holds against the curve of it. A thumb traces over the rosy apple there, smearing the edges of the gold paint wider, thicker, and he pushes down hard. When he eases back, the blood rushes in to flush the skin anew. It hums a lifeforce behind the painted outline of Andrew’s fingerprint.
So very different to the prints that have rotted on Andrew’s body, for so long. The old handpints have always slithered oil-on-water over his skin. Dripping from his joints, his limbs, his knuckles and his fingernails. Pooling in the back of his knees where the skin is soft and giving and pink. The curves of his elbows, soaking into the creases there.
Handprints that tiptoe up the length of his spine and clasp around his chest. Squeezing in and out, in and out, creaking at his ribs. A forced heartbeat that keeps Andrew’s puppet of a body endlessly, awfully alive.
Andrew does not care about the cruelty of his past, but only in the way that lungs do not care about breathing. Only in the way that veins do not care about pulling blood, back and forth, back and forth. Only in the way a heart does not care if its muscles are strong enough to pulse. He does not care and so he does. It exists inside him. He does not care and so it never leaves.
But this art, here, now, his own paints. His own paper. His own pencils, his own markers, his own blood-sweat-and-fingernails. This is different. This is very, very different. This is something he can control. This is something that is his, that is all his.
Neil is blinking up at Andrew, so still, so silent, and there is a knowing in his eyes as he watches Andrew’s expression shadow, twist, change.
The black paint is right there, right beside them. Andrew slides off Neil’s lap, out of the warmth of Neil’s arms, and gets onto his hands and knees. When he presses his hands into the tin of black paint, one by one, he does not stop sinking until it swallows him ice-cold all the way to the elbows. The dark of it gulps his knuckles down deep.
Only once saturated, only once drenched, does he pull back.
It’s like a black hole, of sorts. If he could wield it, he would reach back through the past and grab a fist around the shirt collar of his younger self. He would yank his younger self into the present, drag him tripping and stumbling into the now, into the current day.
His little self. If he tumbled out, fell to the floorboards, buckled at his knees, he would be covered in soot. Covered in charcoal, covered in damp dust, so soaked to the brittle bones under his skin in everything that cruel hands pressed onto him, pressed into him, pressed over him.
The gravity of his arrival would not be kind. It would not be gentle. Andrew would not step into his past with a lamplight left on in the porch and a door clicking softly open. There would be no mat to dry his shoes or closet to hang his coat, his hat, his gloves. No. No, no, no. No, no, no.
He would fall heels-over-head into the black hole and find himself spit out into blink and you’ve missed it! snapshots of his past. Onto the threadbare carpets of bedrooms in foster homes that were never really his. He would crawl across dark rooms in the dull dead of nightfall, and he would bypass the beds, of course, because he would already know that they are empty. Nothing on the mattress other than a pillow shoved beneath the blankets. Hidden by shaking little hands so hopeful that any demons that tried to climb between the sheets would be tricked.
He would rip open the wardrobe door and shove the chaos of clutter aside. They were never organised, those foster homes. Foster kids were always an afterthought, after all. And there, there, is where he would find himself. He would find himself. Hunched small and quiet in the corner. Hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed tight-shut and his face buried in the rocking cradle of his knees.
He would say nothing. His younger self would not listen, anyways. He knows that. He would simply fit his hands around the fragile limbs of his small, skinny body and pull. And when he dragged himself out, he would pretend not to see the remnants of his spirit smeared like gunshots across the cartoon wallpaper.
Andrew would claw his way back to the present. Out of the black hole, back to the now, and tugging that small, small boy to his feet.
There would be debris, all over him. From the top of his head to the tips of his toes. Stringy and stubborn tangles of tar, oozing from the ends of his hair like tacky knots, like damp cobwebs.
He could peel that from his skin, then. First rough, his hands hurried, his hands hasty, his hands tearing the soot from the boy’s clothes and rattling it from his dangling sleeves. Get it off, get it off, get it off. And then gentle, he’d be gentle, he’d go gentle, he would be so, so gentle when he gets to the little boy’s face and cradles his gaunt cheeks and, with soft thumbs, brush away the sticky layer that clamps his small mouth shut. He would dust and pull until the filth gives way for blonde hair, until the charcoal crumbles for a tiny pink nose to peek free, until there is enough space carved out of the suffocating darkness for a brand-new breath to be drawn in.
His own hands, then. His present-day hands. They would be sodden, wrinkled, raw, torn, with the debris of it all. His knuckles darkened with the stain. But when he started to drip with it, he could turn to the canvas at his feet. He could shake his wrists out. He could snap his hands in the air until the filth was purged from his skin and splattered like black paint, like wet charcoal, across the canvas.
It’s not his. It’s not his.
It’s never been his.
It’s never, ever been his.
Now, anger crackles down Andrew’s spine when he lands his palms down heavy onto the canvas. Wet, loud, shaking, trembling with paint. Black bleeds from him. From his fingertips, from his knuckles, from his wrists. Something like grief, something like rage, dried and bruised and pressed into powder, pressed into liquid, and it has just been waiting for years to be let from his veins.
And once he bleeds, he pours. The canvas chokes on the black, as he adds more and more and more and more. Sputtering, shuddering, struggling. Coughing darkness back up at him through his fingers in bubbles, like a punctured lung filling with blood.
His pulse is so loud that it trembles in his hands. If he leans close enough, will the paint have his heartbeat, too?
“How do you feel,” Bee once asked him, “when you think about it?”
Like this, he’d say, now. He did not have the words then, but this, this, can speak for him. The words without words would swell up in him, like a tidal wave, ringing like a laugh, like something maniacal. He’d hang his head and he’d shake with it, he’d tremble with it and he might even grin with it. Just like this, Bee. Do you see it? Do you see it now? Should I hold it up higher for you? Where should we hang it? Let’s look at it longer, Bee. Let’s look at it-
There was handprints on him, for so long. Branded into his skeleton, stained into the essence of him. And with the paint he now swallows his hands into, with the blackness he pushes across the paper, with each clot of grief that he heaves from his bones, he wrings the stain of those handprints from his body.
In the carved-out hollows they left behind, maybe he can pour himself back in. Maybe for the first time. Maybe for the very, very first time.
They bled him out to black-and-white for far too long. Greyscale. An outline. White chalk on black paper and Andrew stuffed stitch-to-stitch with charcoal. Now, he wants it out. All of the blackness, every smudge of it.
He wants room for himself in his own body. Because when he reaches up to pull every colour from the sky, he wants enough space inside to hold it all. He wants enough space to drink the all the colours from his palms.
He doesn’t realise he is shaking until Neil starts to cautiously shift beside him, starts to unfold his legs and presses his hands to the floor to move so slowly closer. His eyes are wide-open when he leans into Andrew’s space, but Andrew does not even turn his head to meet him. He catches the creep of Neil’s shadow coming nearer over the canvas and his arm snaps automatically out to stop him.
Stay. A hand laid flat to the heart of Neil’s chest. Black paint soaked into Andrew’s palm, now seeping into the cotton of Neil’s shirt. He’s not shaking, he’s not shaking. He is not shaking. Do not move.
Neil stays. At first, he doesn’t even blink. He barely breathes.
Then- “Andrew,” he says, after a long moment. His voice rumbles beneath Andrew’s hand. “You’re trembling. You need to breathe.”
Andrew looks down. His knees, one biting into the wooden slat of the canvas and the other still on the floor, are shuddering. They’re covered in splotches of paint. His lungs stutter around a mouthful of air, and the sting there, the scrape-down in his throat, reminds him that he has not done so in awhile.
“You went into your head again. Really far,” Neil says. Like when Nathaniel takes me, he does not say. It’s loud, nonetheless. Andrew hears it. “Are you back? Are you here?”
Andrew’s breath pants out of him. The world is spinning at the edges, even with his hand on Neil’s chest. Blurring into watercolour still, melting into a slip-slide of oil, into mess, and his eyes catch on the tin of cherry-red paint just beside his elbow. He must have accidentally knocked it over at some point while working with the black, because it is laying on its side now and dribbling blood onto the canvas, as if a fatal wound is begging through the back.
It’s pooling, it’s pooling, the red is seeping into the black, it is dripping into the darkness, he’s losing the feeling of Neil’s warmth beneath his clenching fist, he’s losing the feel of the ground beneath his knees, he-
Red. Red, red, red.
Red is holy. Red is rich. Red is blood. Red.
Andrew remembers the foster home that taught him about the love of Jesus Christ. He remembers the smoothness of the varnished wood beneath his little hand as he ran his fingers along the chapel pews, thumb catching on scrapes and scratches. He remembers the thickly-sweet, cloying scent of the candles, tucked away in the corners, and the sconces of incense that hummed above the altar.
He remembers that his legs were too short to reach the ground when he sat in the pews. His foster mother had dressed him in warm woollen socks and a pair of shiny church shoes. He sat with his knees locked straight and studied his reflection in their shined-and-polished toes. He could see the crucifix reflected there, somedays.
At the pulpit, the priest drank wine from a golden chalice. When he brought to his mouth, it stained his lips a bright, rich red. The blood of Christ. Andrew was too little to take communion, but he still followed behind his foster mother when it was time to walk up the middle aisle. He clung to the back of her skirts, a clutch of the fabric tight in his palm, and shuffled knobby-kneed along. Silent and obedient, like a little sheep to the slaughter.
The priest at that church always raised a holy hand above the crown of Andrew’s head. But why did it never feel like a blessing? Why did it never feel like salvation?
To Andrew.
To Andrew.
To Andrew, the weight of it thumped down on him like a leaden weight. Like an iron collar snapping shut round his throat. God never answered his prayers, so he must not have been saying them right. God never answered his prayers, so he must not have been doing something right. All the Priest’s blessing did, then, was chain him closer to an altar of his own guilt.
He tried so hard. He did, he did. He tried to be the perfect little Catholic boy. He tried to learn how to bend his arms and legs into the bones of the crucifix. How to saw himself into the grain. How to cling with his fingernails to the rusty nails, to the metal that pinned the planks together. But no matter how hard he tried, no matter how sharp the ach, Andrew could never forge a home between the splinters.
In that foster home, Andrew prayed.
He prayed.
He prayed, he prayed, he prayed.
He slipped out of his bed in the dead of the night, no friend but for the twinkle of milky moonlight, and tiptoed across the room to pull open the chest of drawers. In the dusty depths of them, he found his church suit. It was too big. Too baggy. A hand-me-down. But formal enough to speak quietly to the Lord. Right?
It was good enough for mass, for service. It was good enough for that one easter Sunday he spent with this foster family, the one where his foster mother gifted him a chocolate bunny and kissed his forehead.
If the suit was no longer good enough, then… it would only be because Andrew was the one wearing it.
He sat on the carpet to wiggle his feet into the clunky church shoes. He couldn’t tie the laces. He wasn’t sure yet how to loop the knot, how to form the bunny ears. He tried his best to flop them together, just as he had seen others do, but the laces slipped through his grasp, whenever he tried. There was so many things that Andrew was no good at, but he was trying. He was really, really trying. And God would see that he was trying. Right?
That would be enough. Right?
Right?
Right?
He prayed.
He prayed. He pressed his hands together exactly as the teachers in Sunday school had taught him. With a string of rosary beads clutched between his hands, slipping in the sweat of his palms, his forehead pressed down to his curled-up knuckles. He prayed like each and every blood-red bead on the chain was a notch in a rope that tethered him to the soil of the earth, to the salt of the earth.
But why, why, why, did it always feel like creatures from Hell were just biding their time until they could curl their claws round his ankles? Why did it always feel as if the ground beneath his feet was caving, that the demons were only waiting to gulp him down whole into the darkness, into the fire?
Why did it not work, why was it not working? He was trying so hard, he was doing everything that he was supposed to do. Everything that God had ever asked of him in this house, he had taken and turned into a vow. He had twined the devotions round the ribs in his chest until prayer was the only thing that he ever, ever breathed. If he coughed, his palms would come away from his mouth with a ribbon-wrapped scroll of bloody, bloody scripture.
So, why?
Why did the demons still find him at bedtime? Why did they climb into his bed?
He was trying so hard. He was doing everything they said.
God helps people, they said.
God saves people, they said.
God loves you, they said.
God. God, God, God.
Red were the rosary beads that Andrew clutched in shaking, rattling hands.
Red was the blood that dripped from Jesus Christ’s temples around his crown of thorns. Andrew stood in front of the statue every Sunday morning. It was so tall that he had to rock back on his heels to strain his eyes up high enough.
Red were the mottled bruises that Andrew found on his inner thighs after the man slithered out of his bed.
Red was the feverish flush of his cheeks when he curled himself up small in the corner and smothered down his sobs. The crying never helped. It never did. It never helped. But he was holding so many hurting parts inside of himself and they were spilling out over the floor now, with his tears. He tried to scoop them up, tried to shove them back into his body, but the blood just kept coming. His church shoes were so dirty. Oh, they were so dirty.
Our father, he prayed, who art in Heaven.
In the kitchen, at the end of the staircase, a dinnerplate flew from his foster father’s hand and shattered off the tiles.
Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, he prayed, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
And his eyes squeezed shut as his foster mother’s awful, awful sobbing ripped holes down the hallway.
Give us this day, he prayed, our daily bread.
And her crying was snuffed out with fist. Her soft hands, the ones she used to gently comb Andrew’s hair before school, hit the ground to catch her fall.
Forgive us our trespasses, he prayed.
As his body on its shaking knees stayed pinned to the floorboards. As his hands did not unfold from their brittle bowl of prayers. As his weak legs did not drag him up to his feet. As they did not stumble him down the stairs. As they did not crawl him desperately to his foster mother’s side, as they did curl him up beside her or nurse her bruises.
Forgive us our trespasses, as Andrew failed to protect one of the only people that had ever shown him softness.
Forgive us our trespasses.
God was supposed to see everything, but he must not have been watching those nights. He must not have been watching as Andrew shoved his forehead flat to the ground, nose to the wood, and pleaded through prayer after prayer.
Did God have his hands over his eyes, those nights?
He was removed from that house a week later.
Red is the-
“Andrew,” Neil says. His voice is sharp, again. A snag in the coil of panic barb-wiring its way around Andrew’s throat. “Breathe. Look at me.”
The artery in his neck is thumping, it is thundering. The line of his jaw, it’s alive. He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.
If he looks down, is he bleeding? Is the red spilling out? Is he soaked in it?
Is Neil covered in it?
His chest is heaving. The canvas is steeped in black, but the clish-clash riot of red is still trickling from the overturned tin. He cannot tear his eyes away from it. He cannot stop staring.
Red red red.
Red is blood, red is rosary beads, red is the awful marks that punctured Andrew’s skin, red is the blood he cleaned from his foster mother’s face, red is the flesh and tissue that was his heart and soul before it rotted, red is-
“Look at me,” Neil pleads, and it’s loud in Andrew’s ears. He risks sliding one hand out to lay it on Andrew’s arm, and he tucks the tip of a finger into the vulnerable hollow of his elbow. So thin is the skin there, so fragile are the bones so close to the service. He strokes it, he squeezes. “Look at me and listen to me and come back to me.”
Red, red, red.
Andrew turns his head finally, finally, and he sees Neil. He sees Neil and his eyes are blue and he does not see the rosary beads. He sees Neil and the gold on Neil’s cheek and not the blackness. He sees Neil and not pain, he sees-
Red.
Red, red, red.
Because red is the colour of Neil’s mouth, too. The freshly-bitten cherry inside of it. Plucked ripe and juicy in the height of summer, so lazy in a splay of sunshine. Rinsed in ice-cold water and patted dry. Red is the taste of his kiss, the decadance of it, the wetness. The sweetness that Neil drips with, like the skin of the berry sighing out a breath.
Andrew does not make the decision to get back into Neil’s lap, again. His body does it for him. It’s his body that climbs him up off his knees and slides him to a shaky sit on Neil’s legs. It’s his body that accidentally kicks over more tins of paint as he does so, as he rushes, as he hurries. And it’s his body that does not care at all as pools and pools of yellow-purple-green-orange-red-blue begin to stream and trickle around them.
It is Neil that catches him.
Andrew leans down to press their foreheads together, and it is Neil that says, right there, in their joined breath, “Stay with me. Stay here with me.”
With you.
Andrew kisses Neil and his eyes close into it as he feels around the edge of the canvas for the tin of red paint. With two fingertips, he pulls it upright and drags it across the floor. The cold metal stings against the side of his leg, but the chill is chased skittering away by Neil’s warm fingertips, the way they slip in beneath the hem of Andrew’s shirt, the way they ground him there.
Andrew’s breath hitches as Neil touches the bare skin of his waist. It takes him a moment to gather himself, but he leans over to dip both hands into the red paint. Pressing down so deep that the liquid swells well past his wrists. The coldness of it bites up his spine, nipping the hairs at the back of his neck. When he lifts them back up, the paint is clinging in shiny threads between his fingers.
Neil slides one hand round to the base of Andrew’s spine. He strokes the curve of it, the one so perfectly shaped for his touch.
Andrew sits up straighter in Neil’s lap, his hands dripping. When Neil chases his lips, when Neil leans in closer, he presses a hand to his chest, stilling him quiet. His fingertips curl a slow fistful into the fabric of Neil’s shirt.
“Take this off,” he says. His knuckles whiten, but it’s awash beneath the red. “I want to paint you.”
Neil does. He looks into Andrew’s eyes and spares not a single breath before he strips it off over his head and tosses it to the side.
Andrew paints.
He starts with his fingers around Neil’s wrists. Pad of his thumbs and flat of his hands tickling gentle over the tiny, bird-bone structures there. The vulnerability of the tendons, the muscles, the ligaments. So much strength in such small, small things.
He flips Neil’s palm over and cradles it in the cup of one of his own. Spreading it wide-open like an offering. His fingernails trace the lines of Neil’s palm. The love lines, the life lines, the future. They’re so scarred, here. Severed in places, puckered in others. There is not a single thread of fate that follows a simple, winding pathway.
Maybe the universe had no idea what to do with Neil. For so long, he was destined only for death. His first pair of baby shoes may as well have been made for his funeral, after all.
Fitting that he ended up with Andrew, a soul without want for staying.
Andrew skims the bases of Neil’s fingers, then slips his own silky between them. When he closes his hand, it coats Neil’s knuckles in red. He tiptoes his touch, then, up and up and up Neil’s forearms, his elbows. The front of them and then the back, then the hill of his shoulders.
At Neil’s throat, Andrew rests the bloody tip of his littlest finger. Right over the thrum of Neil’s artery.
He listens for the badum badum badum of life.
Neil’s breath starts to fall out faster from his chest as he stares up at Andrew, waiting, wanting, eyes glassy. Andrew holds his gaze and, slowly, so slowly, he bends down lower and slides his hand until it’s fully curled around the side of Neil’s neck. There, he tightens his grip, just a little, and watches as Neil’s fragile breath flutters beneath the pressure.
With his other hand, he cradles Neil’s cheek and tips him up by the jaw. He brings their lips together again and, when he loosens his fingers, Neil’s next breath comes shuddering through the kiss itself.
When he kisses Neil, Andrew sees red.
“Again,” Neil says. Andrew pulls back to breathe, but Neil follows him, leaning closer, and Andrew lets him catch, lets him find, lets him hold. Neil’s hand fisting the hem of Andrew’s shirt, twisting it, pulling it taut, and the other sliding higher on Andrew’s chest. His thumb finds Andrew’s collarbone and he strokes the dip of it, gently, and he whispers at Andrew’s lips, soft and hitching, “more.”
Red, red, red.
Red is the colour of Neil’s tongue as he trickles a breathy fine-wine whine right into Andrew’s mouth.
Red is the colour that tangles round Andrew’s fingers in clusters of silky curls when he slides a hand into Neil’s hair. Closing his palm there and curling his fingers so that he can tilt Neil just right, guide him just where he belongs.
Red is the paint that is soaked into Neil’s fingers. Into his hands. Into his wrists, into his arms, into his shoulders, into his neck. And even into his throat, where the outline of Andrew’s fingerprints shine, like a signature.
Red is the paint so glossy and thick and bright on Neil’s golden skin. On the curve of his cheek, the handprint that Andrew left so gently there, so different to handprints that he knows from his own past, and when the edge of that starts to melt toward the corner of Neil’s lips, Andrew thumbs it away.
He keeps Neil safe.
He always keeps Neil safe.
Red is something that always happened to Andrew, but here it is something he chose.
Red is the gift of paint that Neil leaves softly on Andrew’s cheek with his own fingertips. He strokes a lock of fallen hair back from Andrew’s forehead.
Red is the flash of heat and mirth that sparks in Neil’s eyes when Andrew says, “More.”
The world tilts at the edges as Neil wraps his arms fully around Andrew and flips them over. He slides Andrew off his lap and eases him down to lay flat against the paint-sodden blanket, one hand cupping the back of Andrew’s head to soften the land.
A pool of paint stings cold against the back of Andrew’s shoulder, but it melts quickly into his own body heat. He feels like warm water, poured into a puddle, and he slips his fingers into Neil’s hair to pull him down close.
“My turn to touch you, now,” Neil says, and the smile reaches his eyes, sparkling in the blue-blue there. He brushes the tip of his nose from Andrew’s temple to the corner of his lips and it drags a trail of cherry-red paint with him before he sinks down into a deep, deep kiss. His hand comes to rest beside Andrew’s head, holding himself up, and it lands in a puddle of bright-butter yellow. “I’ll make you feel good.”
These days, they do not feel the need to explicitly ask yes or no, every time. They speak with their bodies, often. Syllables and sentences hidden in the press of their hands.
When Neil strokes Andrew’s face, finger smudging the line of red, he turns to catch the edge of Neil’s thumb with his lips again, just like before. He draws the finger into his mouth, indifferent to the taste of the paint on the tip of his tongue, and closes him in satiny heat. He both sees with his eyes and feels with his body how Neil crumples above him, around him. His elbow trembles where it supports his weight.
“Andrew,” is all he says, and it’s like a plea shook from his lungs, falling out without permission. Curls tumbling down over his forehead, falling tangled at his temples. God, Andrew wants to bite him, wants to sink his teeth in deep, wants to taste what Neil would be with everything stripped far, far away. Would be find pieces of himself buried there?
But it’s nothing more than a trickle of sound as Neil presses their lips together again. When he breathes, this time, it’s straight from Andrew’s mouth. He pushes Andrew’s shirt up to bunch around his chest.
The porcelain-pink canvas of Andrew’s skin, there. A cool breeze rushes in as he’s exposed, and the buds of his nipples harden with a shudder. A rose-petal pink that Neil quickly covers with his mouth, with his grin, teasing with his tongue, and Andrew gasps so suddenly that it rips from his chest while his hand thumps hard into Neil’s hair to grip.
Neil only huffs out a laugh. His eyes still swept-up to Andrew, he begins to dust a trail of slow, slow kisses across Andrew’s chest. When he takes the other nipple into his mouth, it is so sweet a sensation that Andrew’s hips snap forward of their own accord. His hands struggle between pushing Neil’s head away and drawing him closer, all in one, and Neil slides a thigh between his to give him something firm to press against.
He dips his touch a little lower. A breath deeper, a sliver down. He trails the fingertips of one hand over the curve of Andrew’s ribs and down to his waist again. Trickling lower lower lower, between his hips, until he reaches the waistband of Andrew’s pants.
“Do you want?” he whispers. He tucks one finger just beneath the fabric, a tease of warmth before snapping the elastic against Andrew’s skin. Eyes heavy and low as he watches Andrew hitch around it. “Can I touch you here?”
Andrew’s breath breaks softly between them. His thoughts spin. He fits one hand between their bodies and reaches down to grab around Neil’s wrist tightly, to press the warmth and seeking of Neil down to where he is aching, where he is throbbing.
Yes, as he rocks up into the touch and watches Neil’s eyes deepen. Dark-chocolate sweet.
Yes, with his hand open-closing in Neil’s hair and his nails on Neil’s scalp.
Yes, as Neil’s fingers slip slowly beneath the fabric of his underwear.
And yes, as a shiver sighs out of Andrew’s held-tight body. He drags Neil closer, so much closer, and his thighs fall open wider and his foot slides up the back of Neil’s calf until he can hook his leg around Neil’s waist, his sock catches and slips halfway off and-
Yes. Yes yes yes.
When Neil wraps his fingers around Andrew, when he takes him in his palm, he is gentle. He is so, so gentle. He is always gentle, with this. But it’s like a string snapping in Andrew. Like a firecracker breaking wide-open open in his chest and the sparks catching fire across his skin. He arches up into Neil, curving for him, like a bow and arrow, like a magnet to steel. There is no closer to go, there is nowhere to go, they are already pressed so tight, but Neil just kisses him and smiles and soothes, “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
Andrew’s head thumps back trembling against the blanket beneath them. Pleasures opens up sharp and tingling in the pit of his stomach, curling at the base of his spine. It’s like honey dripping through him, like a shot of sugar to the system. Along his now-bared throat, Neil nibbles with teeth, and he presses a grin to Andrew’s skin when he tastes, on the very tip of his tongue, the shudder that it shakes out.
“You look so good like this,” he whispers. Andrew grinds forward into his hand, chasing the warmth of his fist, the tightness, and Neil lowers himself down to one elbow again. He slides his free hand beneath Andrew’s head and cradles it, his fingers curling softly there, grounding him, holding him present. “Like you’re part of the painting, now.”
Andrew kisses him to swallow the words. They’re too much. They are far, far too much. Shut up, shut up, shut up. But then Neil twists his wrist, just right, just there, and he runs the pad of his thumb over Andrew’s tip, and Andrew gasps as his own hand tears out of Neil’s hair and snatches at the blanket to anchor himself. Paint splatters between his fingers as he clutches. They’ve knocked so many of the tins over, by now.
Is it blue on his hand? Or green? Yellow? Pink? Blue-green-yellow-pink? All of them?
All of them, all of them, all of them.
He doesn’t care, anyways. He doesn’t, he doesn’t care, he does not care. Not when Neil is stroking him like that, not when Neil is kissing him like that, not when Neil is touching him like that. They break from their kisses only to pull each other’s clothes off, and even then they fall back together as much as possible around the layers. In their haste, they knock over so much more paint, their hands and knees slip-sliding in all of the colours that begin to pour and spread and breathe and hum around them.
Once they are free of all the barriers, once everything is peeled away, Neil crawls back over Andrew’s body,
He eases him down again to lay flat on his back. “Like this,” he says, and he gentles Andrew’s legs open, a soft hand on each of his knees, stroking the curves tenderly. Slow, slow, slow. He watches him with careful eyes, with a careful gaze. “Okay?”
Andrew’s heart thumps.
There’s a blanket beneath him and he knows it because there’s a coffee cup-shaped hole scorched straight through the fabric in the corner. He can feel the rough edges of it now if he just stretches a little. Above his head, there’s a sprawling damp stain on the ceiling, from when the sink broke on Christmas eve and spluttered water all over the floor. To the right, an old lamp that flickers its light on-and-off more than it glows.
And there’s Neil. There is Neil, there is Neil, there is Neil.
It’s easier, some days, to be ripped out of the room. Ripped out of his body, ripped out of his skin, ripped right back into the past. But not today. Not today.
Today he will take with both of his hands. He will gather all of today in his palms, like cupping some of the spilled paint, and he will close all of his fingers around it, even if it drips and drips through his knuckles, even if it covers the floor some more around his toes.
Today, he will allow himself to wring out every drop of colour, every drop of pleasure.
When he gets his hands back on Neil’s skin, they are so covered in paint that each and every touch leaves a sunburst splay of popping-open colours behind. Fingerprints like clusters of wildflowers, palms like wide-open brushstrokes. Red and blue and gold and purple and white, all dragging crooked and smudged and melting warm, warm, warm.
Neil slides one hand over Andrew’s hip and down to his thigh. Blue-green-pink melting into Andrew’s skin, seeping into him, filling him. At Andrew’s knee, he curls his hand and he draws Andrew’s leg up high-high-high, guiding it to wrap round his waist.
When he presses their hips together, Neil is so warm. He is so very, very warm.
Giving, during sex, during intimacy, is one thing. Giving is Andrew’s hands controlling where they land. Andrew’s hands deciding where they move. Andrew’s hands penning the script and changing the plot.
If sex is an art form, then giving is Andrew’s hand wrapped cosy round the handle of a paintbrush and the wood softened into grooves by his familiar fingers. It’s Andrew standing before an easel and his clothes are clean and the canvas is square-edged and even. It’s a neat row of materials sitting patient and quiet and waiting in their organised shelf, primed and listening for his command.
But receiving. Receiving is his body as the canvas and there he is, laid out on the floor, and he is so wildly and entirely helpless to whatever colour, whatever stroke, whatever weight comes next. No idea what pathway the painting wishes to take, what stories it wants to tell. He does not know the middle of it, the ending of it. He doesn’t even know the beginning, not until the artist makes the first touch.
The canvas of him, the paper of his skin, it can bend if there is too much, of course. But there is only so much give left in Andrew’s body. There is only so much give in bones that are so deep-to-the-marrow exhausted from yielding.
It is terrifying, to open up to it. To invite somebody so close. There is a throbbing emptiness inside of Andrew, some days. It is a hollow that was scooped out of him, so long ago, and it aches in his bones in the same way that old scars do in cold, cold winter.
To lay himself before Neil, now. To receive. To accept. He is naked in ways that have nothing to do with the reveal of his skin, nothing to do with the peel-back of his clothes.
Neil kisses him and Andrew thinks that there is a small chance he could eventually get somewhat used to this, to the receiving, if only Neil did not act as if it meant so much. If only Neil did not touch him with such carefulness in his hands. If only Neil did not look at him with those blue-blue eyes, so eclipsed by his pupils, and study what makes Andrew’s breath catch, what tugs the softest sounds from his mouth.
Maybe Andrew could become casual about it, then. Maybe he could dismiss it. This, that. All of it. Some of it. Maybe he could shrug it off.
But Neil treats Andrew’s pleasure as if it is the most important thing in the world, in these moments. As if it is yet another language he wishes to learn by heart, and he starts all the way back with the letters, every time, before moving to the words, to the lines. He watches Andrew’s hands twist in the blanket, watches Andrew’s body shudder beneath him, watches Andrew’s cheeks flush, watches Andrew’s toes curl, and Andrew just-
He has to push Neil’s face away. He has to throw his own arm across his face. Because he can only pretend that receiving means nothing when he is not looking into Neil’s wide-open eyes.
“How can this be something that I want, now?” He asked Bee, once. They were drawing together, that day. He with a sketchbook in his lap and a box of soft pastels, and Bee with her pick-n-mix blend of Hello Kitty and Care Bear colouring pencils. “It was so… violent, before. I shouldn’t want it, now.”
The scritch-scratch of Bee’s art slowed to a pause. Tucking her pencil into her palm, she raised her hand to slowly push her glasses up the bridge of her nose. Buying time until she founds the words, and her voice was firm but achingly soft when she found them. She promised, “That was not sex, Andrew.”
She leaned forward in her chair, and she held her hands out over her knees, palms-up. Her wrists were so smooth. There was so much vulnerability, there. She waited until he dragged his eyes from his own work, lifted them to her, and the warmth he found in her gaze brought his breath to stillness.
“Wanting to be intimate now, with someone, with Neil… That does not mean what you went through as a child was not devastating,” she said. “Because that was not sex, Andrew. It was entirely different. And there is an and then, you know? An and then that comes after something so traumatic.”
He gripped his pastel tighter. It threatened to snap, between his two fingers.
“What they did to you.” Bee exhaled, slowly. She looked like she might collapse her own pencil in half. There is no words for this, she told Andrew once. “It was not the end of your sentence, then. You kept going. You’re here. And it is not the end of your sentence now.”
Crumbles of dust from the pastel in his palm.
“That was not sex, Andrew. And now. Now. You are allowed to want. You are allowed to live.”
Melting in the warmth of his skin.
“There is no one right way to be a survivor. You pick what's right for you."
By now, they are covered in paint. They are dripping in it. Somewhere along the way, it must have made the decision to fully abandon the canvas on the floor to crawl its way home in the heat of their skin.
A streak of yellow so buttery-bright along Neil’s ribs and the outline of Andrew’s nails pulled through it. The line of Neil’s jaw, a dragged-across trail of blue-red from when Andrew held his face still for a kiss. A curl of hair tumbling down over Neil’s forehead, where Andrew had tangled his fingers. Closing tight around the strands and drenching them in the just-open pink of a fresh, fresh flower.
Neil’s fingerprints are all over Andrew. Red, blue, yellow, black, green, gold, pink. It is said that pieces of a person are left behind on everything they have ever touched, and they have made living, breathing masterpieces of each other.
“I have you,” Neil murmurs, and his lips are on Andrew’s mouth. His lips are on Andrew’s cheek. His lips are tucked against Andrew’s temple, and his lips are kissing silkily up the column of his throat. He is here, he is there, he is everywhere.
Andrew’s breath is catching in his chest, his fingers are tightening in Neil’s hair, he is so close to shattering, to falling apart, and Neil whispers, into his mouth, “It’s okay, Andrew. You can, you can.”
Neil kisses him, kisses him, kisses him. Like the world is cradled in the hand he uses to cup Andrew’s cheek, to tilt his face up into him. He whispers something there, too. But it’s so soft and so breathy. So quiet that the light of sunset can hardly catch the words, can hardly carry it to Andrew’s ears. There is no space left between their bodies for it to fit, anyways.
Andrew cannot hear them, not above the scatter of his own heartbeat. But the sound of the voice, the familiarity of it, is enough to soothe him down slow, to settle him. And when the pleasure climbs to its peak, when it cracks wide-open inside him, when his hips suddenly still and his eyes slip close, he comes with a shudder of a gasp right into Neil’s mouth.
And when he does, all he can see and hear and feel is colour.