Rough Canvas (Nature of Desire 6)

"Yeah," he said, going back to her implied question. "I think he's pretty damn fragile right now. "

* * * * *

Owen had told Thomas that Marcus was fearless. Never saw a kid so not afraid of anything. If he had fear, he hid it places no one could see. The night that gang of monsters dumped him off and ran, he looked so bad that Mike brought him to the back door of the hospital.

He talked an intern into coming out and treating Marcus in an alley, because he refused to bring him in where he might get caught as a runaway. I came out to help the intern.

Dodger was bleeding everywhere, beat all to hell. He regained consciousness while the doctor was looking him over. The first thing he asked was if Mike had found the money. The second was could somebody bring him a fucking towel so he could wipe the blood off his face?

Marcus had explained it. My father tried to use fear to make me what he wanted me to be.

That's when I decided not to be afraid of anything. Then you came and I remembered that true fear is knowing you have something you can't bear losing.

In the desolate comfort of the three a. m. hour, Marcus had given Thomas the rest of the story in terse sentences, a few syllables to explain what had built his own foundation.

When Mike went after the men who had effectively gang-raped Marcus, they'd stabbed him. Mike made it back to his place and refused to let Marcus call for help, so he'd died while Marcus held the edges of his gut together.

Tobias had been in a gang before he got together with Marcus and Emile, and he could never completely shake the old loyalties. Six months into his first semester of art school, Toby let one of his old gang buddies pressure him into covering his back for a robbery, and his head was bashed in with a tire iron.

On the wall of Marcus' living room, a canvas with the bold, angry colors of Tobias' work shone like jewels. The other three walls had been painted a relaxing blue-green, but Marcus painted his walls specifically for the art hung upon them, so Toby's wall was bare white, giving the art the full focus. When Thomas looked at it now, the significance of it being there was obvious.

Now he can't paint inside the lines of a coloring book. . . Marcus' words haunted the dark corners of Thomas' mind like a ghost.

Behind Marcus' back, determined to pull his weight, Emile took a blowjob gig meant for Marcus. While they didn't know for sure, Marcus suspected the john found out Emile was not anatomically male. Pissed off by what he would perceive as deceit, the john had taken his revenge. Emile was strangled, his body dumped like garbage in one of the landfills. It had taken Marcus and Toby a week to find him.

At the age Thomas had been playing in a baseball league and dreaming about the possibility of going to art school, Marcus had been in the sewers of New York, scoring a warm corner for him and his street rats against bigger, meaner vagrants.

Toby taught me that talent needed to be represented, nurtured, protected. So I ferreted it out, conned and hustled buyers and investors, got where I am today. I don't even have a high-school diploma, let alone a college degree, but do you think anybody ever assumes otherwise? You learn the right language, the right way to present yourself, no one even questions it.

Despite that offhand comment, since Thomas knew how difficult and highbrow the art world truly was, he also knew Marcus' acceptance in that world was right up there with biblical miracles. But what was hustling and charming his way into the intimidating art society of the Upper East Side when he knew what it was to fight packs of wild dogs for food found in the garbage? To hold your surrogate father while he died, holding his guts in, blood up to your elbows? The man who just happened to smack you around and tap your ass when he had the desire for it, but you loved anyway for reasons too complicated to explain?

You have a purity I've lost, pet. But in some ways, the important ones, you're not naive.

You understand the darkness without ever having been in it. You see the world as it is, all its misery and pain, all the beauty that somehow rises above it, and you accept all of it. You accept me.

When Marcus touched him Thomas saw it in his face now, how he drank in Thomas' balance, his quiet stable nature. Yeah, they fit. Yin had to have a yang. The art was the dot of darkness in Thomas' life and the dot of light in Marcus' that made them a part of each other, connected them. He'd always been thankful and awed by his gift, but now Thomas saw it had a higher purpose. Even if he became world renowned or crashed as an art nobody, the greatest treasure it had brought him was that connection with Marcus.

* * * * *

Lauren was watching Thomas shrewdly. "Marcus treats everything as a work of art," she said abruptly. "Something endlessly fascinating in both its perfection and imperfection. So it makes sense that he would wait for that feeling with the man he'd love forever. Josh told me that on the way here. Have faith, Thomas. " Thomas' mind gingerly touched her words, as if they were an animal that might bite. But they also made him remember something else Owen had told him.

"You ever notice how he doesn't look at himself in a mirror?" Why would he need to? Thomas had asked it, half humorously.

"No. " Owen shook his head. "I don't mean look at his hair when he's brushing it, or his jaw for a shave. He never looks at himself. It's his face that got him out. But it's his face that lost him his soul. The way he looks at you, son. . . he thinks you're holding it for him. " Nodding to her, he skirted the living area with a gesture to Josh, and stepped with only a brief hesitation out on the balcony.

Marcus was standing with his back to him, wineglass in hand, considering the city below. The shirt lightly blowing against his body, stretching across the broad shoulders.

The pressed slacks defining his thighs and perfect ass. Studying the tilt of that sculpted face, the light fall of hair feathering his shoulders with the breeze, Thomas couldn't imagine anything further from the roots of a farmer's son.

And he wasn't seeing the surface. Beneath the New York City art dealer, even beneath the farmer's son. Down to the raw, open soul. Would Marcus have faith in Thomas at this most vulnerable juncture? Because Thomas didn't want there to be any more questions between them. Time to stop putting it off. Tomorrow he'd leave. Later tonight he'd talk to Marcus and make him understand.

Taking another step forward, he slid his arm under Marcus', flattened his palm on his chest and pressed his body up against his, feeling the flex of the firm ass as Marcus tilted his head.

"Let me pleasure you, Master," he murmured. "Lean back on me. " Knowing they were turned so his act was disguised, Thomas slid his palm down the flat abdomen and found Marcus' cock, cupped him. That organ capable of giving so much pleasure hardened under his hand. Putting his lips to Marcus' ear, he nuzzled, despite the fact Josh and Lauren were in the penthouse.

"What are you doing?"

"Arousing you the way you always arouse me, when I can't do anything about it. I want to know how much you want me. " Thomas found the side of Marcus' throat, nipped. "Knowing you'll have to wait and suffer the way you make me suffer sometimes. "