Salvation (12 page)

For most of the video, I was on the
right edge of the frame. But when Nana made her comment about sweating like a
whore in church, the camera panned to me and zoomed in for a close-up. I was
bright red, sweat absolutely pouring off me, my eyes as big as stop signs. “Oh
God,” I muttered. Dmitri put an arm around me, laughing so hard that I thought
he was going to rupture something.

It ended shortly after the part with the
fat-free cheese, and I blushed furiously as everyone around me broke into a
round of applause. “Remind me later to murder you, Skye,” I said.

“Hey, don’t kill the messenger,” he said.
“I just thought you should know that you, your foulmouthed senior friend, and
to a lesser extent, my brother are the latest internet sensation.” Skye handed
the phone back to Hunter and winked at him flirtatiously, then slid out of the
booth. “Alright, my work here is done. I need to get back to school and
concentrate on my final project. Don’t tell me you finished yours already,
Christopher.”

“You two know each other?” Hunter asked.

“We’re both juniors at Sutherlin,”
Christopher said. He told Skye, “I did finish my final project, but I also
volunteered to help set up the year-end student exhibition, so I’ll be on
campus all week. I’ve heard rumors that you’re working on something epic for
the show, by the way. I can’t wait to see it.”

“I may not get it done in time though,
in which case I’m so screwed.” Skye turned to me. “Trevor, if you manage to
forgive me for spilling the beans on your video, would you please come help me
with my sculpture this evening? River will be there, too. All my other friends
go to Sutherlin and I’m trying to keep my project a secret before Friday’s art
show. I really want that big ta da moment.”

“Sure. When and where?” I said.

He spun around and plucked a pen from
the apron of a passing waiter, then grabbed my hand and wrote an address on my
palm. “Thanks,” he told the waiter with a sexy smile, returning the pen where
he’d found it. He turned back to me and said, “We’ll be there all night, so
just come when you can. Alright, I’m off.
Ciao
babes!” With that he spun
around and breezed back out the door of the restaurant.

“Wow, that boy is a force of nature,”
Hunter remarked.

“He really is,” Christopher said with a
smile. “He and his BFF Christian seem to be competing to see which of them can
get in the most trouble at school without actually getting kicked out. I think
Skye’s winning, which is no small feat since his pal is pretty much a
straight-up criminal.”

That expression shouldn’t have made me
miss Vincent, but it did. I excused myself and went back to work, scooping some
empty plates off a nearby table and carrying them through to the kitchen.
Stop
thinking about him,
I admonished myself, and began the unpleasant task of
rinsing a stack of dirty plates in the big industrial sink, since the dish
washer was getting a bit behind.

Stop thinking about his dark eyes. And
the way he smells, like rain and clean cotton and Vincent. Stop thinking about
fitting perfectly in those big arms. Stop missing the sound of his voice....

“Okay Trevor, I think you got it
sorted.”

I glanced up and realized Fergus, the
dish washer, was smirking at me. “What?”

“That plate. You’ve been rinsing it for
a solid five minutes, mate. I’m pretty sure it’s clean.”

“Oh. Right.” I shut the water off and
stepped back from the sink.

“Million miles away there, laddie.”

“Yeah, I guess I was.”

“I’m a bit jealous, to be honest. Been a
long time since I found anything, or
anyone
, that distracting.” He gave
me a friendly smile, and I went back to work.

Chapter
Seven

“Hey, you found it!”

“Yeah, barely. Half the address
disappeared after I washed my hands,” I said, stepping inside the warehouse.
“What is this place?”

“Sutherlin College leases properties all
around the city for students that need bigger studios than the ones on campus.
I got to use this one for the semester as part of my scholarship program.”

As he closed and locked the door behind
me, I came around a wooden partition and stopped in my tracks. “Oh wow,” I
murmured, “that’s absolutely amazing.”

Skye had sculpted two giant men, each
maybe twelve to fifteen feet high even in their crouched positions. It looked
like invisible forces were dragging them apart, their expressions pure anguish,
each caught in a desperate struggle with arms outstretched, splayed fingers
reaching for the other, though they were yards apart. The sculptures were open
frameworks composed of found objects, all rusted bits of metal, yet somehow the
lines of their bodies were fluid, their faces surprisingly expressive.

“I got a little carried away,” Skye
said, coming up beside me and scratching his cheek. “When I first envisioned
it, I thought they’d be maybe eight or ten feet high. Then that happened,” he
said, gesturing toward his creation.

“It’s spectacular. Does it have a name?”

“Not yet. I’m hoping something hits me
by Friday, that’s when it’s due.”

“Are you going to finish in time?” Half
of one of the figures was still just a heavy steel armature.

“No,” River shouted from across the
warehouse as he tugged on a bent piece of metal jutting from the sculpture,
“because he’s the world’s biggest procrastinator! Like today, he just
had
to visit you at work to show you that video! And before you got here he spent
twenty minutes going through his MP3s, because he insisted he had to have the
perfect music or he couldn’t get any work done!”

“Not to make matters worse, but if you
guys want to take a break, I brought pie,” I said. Both brothers dropped what
they were doing and came right over. We ended up sitting cross-legged on the
cement floor while I unpacked the bag I was carrying and explained, “There was
some kind of screw-up at the restaurant. They got sent ten coconut cream pies
from the bakery that does their desserts, and when my bosses called to tell
them about it they were told to keep them. Everyone on the lunch shift got
one.” I lifted the pie tin out of its cardboard container, then set it on the
box top and handed out plastic spoons.

Skye shoveled a big scoop of pie in his
mouth and mumbled around the dessert, “Oh man, I love your job. I want to work
there too, do you think they’d hire me?”

“Sure,” River chimed in. “There aren’t
nearly enough blue-haired lunatics on their payroll.”

Skye smiled at his brother. “You’re so
supportive.”

I licked my spoon and said, “It actually
is a great place to work. My bosses announced today that they’re shutting down
for a week in honor of the Fourth of July, and we all get the days off with
pay.”

“Sweet,” River said. “Now you won’t have
to ask for time off when we cater the wedding.”

“Yup.”

“Damn, I wish I knew Christopher well
enough to wrangle an invitation to his wedding. But since I don’t, you guys
have to take me with you! I’ll bet that big beach house is amazing,” Skye
exclaimed. “I’ll work! I’ll chop onions, or scrub pots, or do whatever you need
to earn my keep.”

“No you won’t,” River said. “You’ll run
down to the beach and we’ll never see you again.”

“I will not! I know I’ll have to pull my
own weight so you can justify bringing me along. C’mon, pretty please?”

“No.”

He turned his big blue eyes on me next.
“Come on Trevor, I know you’re not as much of a hardass as my brother. Take me
with you! Don’t you need someone to chop things and help with clean-up?”

“We kind of do, actually,” I said.

River rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you know
what? If we bring Skye along, we’ll
still
need someone to chop things
and help with clean-up, because he’ll be too busy crashing the wedding to
actually do any work.”

Skye frowned at him. “Will not.”

“Yes you will, and that’s going to reflect
badly on my catering business. I can just picture it!” River raised his voice a
couple octaves and said, “Hey, who’s that spazzy, blue-haired kid up on stage
with the band, convincing them to do a mash-up of Stairway to Heaven and Lady
Gaga?
Oh, that’s the caterer’s deeply annoying kid brother.
Wow, that
caterer is totally professional! Let’s hire him to do our next big event!”

Skye chuckled and said, “That was an
awesome imitation of some crazy sixty-year-old woman talking to herself.”

“Thank you.”

After we’d eaten our fill of the pie and
I packed the rest up for later, River went back to trying to remove a bent
piece of metal from the leg of the sculpture, with the aid of a crowbar this
time. Skye wandered to a little table and began messing with an old, beat-up
laptop, which was hooked to a speaker. After a few moments, Stairway to Heaven
started blasting from the speaker, coming in on the middle of the song. He then
abruptly switched over to Bad Romance and jumped back and forth between the two
repeatedly, sort of DJing on the fly. It actually kind of worked. Finally he
left it on Lady Gaga and began dancing around the room, arms over his head,
lean body gyrating to the music, totally unselfconscious. I’d always admired
people that could be so free, since I was nothing like that.

All of a sudden there was a loud
pounding on the door. Skye gasped and rushed to the speaker, turning it down as
a really deep voice yelled, “Hey, open up in there!”

“Who is it?” Skye called.

The guy outside the door answered in a
normal tone of voice. “It’s 2009! We want our music back!”

“Christian!” Skye yelled, his face
lighting up as he ran to the door. “Hi honey!” he called. “I miss you!”

“In that case, open the door and let me
in!”

“No! You know I want to surprise you
with this sculpture, and it’s not done!”

“I’ve come up with a solution! Open the
door and see.”

Skye grinned and tugged the door open,
then laughed delightedly. A moment later, he led someone around the partition,
the two of them hand-in-hand.

Christian was tall, thin, and barefoot,
dressed only in a pair of low-slung black jeans, a black silk blindfold tied
around his head. His body was adorned with silver, a big cross pendant centered
between his pierced nipples, bracelets and rings clustered on his long,
graceful hands. His hair was a tangle of dyed black spikes, and he was holding
a half-empty bottle of booze. He looked like a total rock star.

I was surprised when he pulled Skye to
him and kissed him deeply, then said, “Mmmm, why do you taste like coconut?”

Skye pushed him back with a laugh and
said, “Because I ate pie, you letch. And way to slip me some tongue.”

“You’re welcome,” Christian said,
flashing a perfect smile. “Where did the pie come from?”

“Trevor brought it from work.” Skye
picked up his hand and led him over to me. “Christian, this is Trevor. Trevor,
Christian.”

“Hi,” I said.

Christian reached out and touched my
chest, then ran his hand up and caressed my face. “Hi Trevor, You feel cute. I
hope you’re not. I’m already jealous of you, because Skye won’t shut up about
you.” He grinned, then pulled me to him and planted a kiss on my mouth, the tip
of his tongue darting over my lower lip. “Mmm, you taste like coconut, too.
That’s kind of hot,” he said as I stepped back in surprise.

Skye rolled his eyes and said, “Awesome
first impression, Z.”

“You know, I can actually hear you
rolling your eyes,” Christian told him.

“What? How?”

“I know the tone of voice that
accompanies the eye roll.”

“Yeah, well you should. You inspire it
often enough. Are you done molesting and quite possibly alienating my new
friend now?” Skye asked him.

“I guess,” Christian said.

“I’m here too, Z. But if you try to slip
me some tongue, I’m totally kickin’ you in the nuts,” River called. Just then,
the piece of metal he’d been working on came off in his hand, and he let out a
triumphant whoop.

“You know it gives me a stiffie when you
get rough with me, big bro,” Christian called back flirtatiously.

“You’re a total perv, Z. You know that,
right?” River said, then tossed the piece of metal onto a pile in the corner,
where it landed with a clatter.

“Thanks for noticing,” Christian said
with a bright smile.

I asked, “So, how do you get Z out of
Christian?”

“Z is the tag he uses for his graffiti
art,” Skye explained.

“Does it stand for something?”

“Yes! It stands for truth, justice, and
the American way,” Christian quipped. “But also, it stands for Zane, my alter
ego. Or, he
used to be
my alter ego, but now Zane and I are merging. I
don’t know where he ends and I begin anymore,” he said ominously. “Creepy, huh?
Someday there will be no more Christian, only Zane. And I can’t fucking wait!”
He smiled cheerfully from beneath his blindfold.

“That’s it,” Skye said, plucking the
bottle from his friend’s hand. “I’m cutting you off. I always know you’ve had
too much to drink when you start talking like a low-budget stage magician.”

“Ooo, harsh!” Christian exclaimed, but
he was still smiling. Then he changed the subject by saying, “So, I’m actually
here to help, believe it or not. Put me to work Skye, I want you to finish your
masterpiece on time.”

“Have you even started your own term
project?” Skye asked him.

“Well, no. But so what? I’ll just, I
dunno, piss on a pregnancy test and glue it to a canvas. I’ll claim it’s a
statement about the oft-ignored plight of male infertility, and I’ll call it
Womb for Improvement.”

Skye laughed and said, “I can totally
see you doing that. And it’s actually not the worst idea you’ve ever had. Did
you just make that up?”

“I did.”

“Your mind is a strange and questionable
place.”

“Thank you. What I’d really like to do,
of course, is take the faculty on a field trip and show them the rather
monumental installation I recently completed down on Market Street. It’s some
of my best work.”

“But then they’d kick you out of school
and throw your ass in jail for vandalism.”

“Well, there is that,” Christian said.
“But enough about my term project, or lack thereof. Tell me how I can help
you.”

“You can’t, not blindfolded.”

“We can fix that.” Christian yanked off
the blindfold and tossed it aside. He had pale green eyes, their soft color
offset by smudged black eyeliner, and they went wide as he took in his friend’s
sculpture. “Oh Skye, it’s amazing.
You’re
amazing.”

“And you’re totally evil! I told you I
wanted to keep it a surprise!”

“I
am
surprised. God it’s
beautiful,” he murmured, wandering farther into the warehouse and circling the
sculptures in a figure eight, his expression dazed and rapturous. Finally, he
came to a stop and knelt down beside one of the figures, tilting his head back
to take it all in. “It’s the best thing you’ve ever done, Skye.”

“You say that every time.”

“That’s because you top yourself with
each new piece you create. Just when I think you’ve reached the absolute zenith
of artistic achievement, you find a way to surpass it.”

Skye grinned, crossing the room to his
friend and resting his hands on his shoulders. “You don’t have to lay it on
that thick, Z. I’ve already forgiven you for ruining the surprise.”

“It’s your own fault for letting me in
here,” Christian said, smiling up at his friend. “You know I have no willpower
whatsoever. When you think about it, you should actually be praising me for
leaving the blindfold on as long as I did. But the rest is no bullshit. The
sculpture’s fucking brilliant, Skye. You’re going to blow everyone away at the
student exhibition.”

“
If
I finish, and
if
I
figure out a way to actually get them to the exhibit hall. They weren’t
supposed to be this big.”

“Bigger is always better, Skye. Don’t
let anyone tell you different,” Christian said with a grin, jumping to his
feet. He caught sight of me then and crossed the room to me. “Oh hey, you
are
cute.
Really
cute. Wanna get out of here for about twenty minutes?” He
gave me the most flirtatious smile I’d ever seen.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Z,” River yelled
from across the room. “Leave the boy alone! I don’t want him to realize my
brother and I hang out with total hussies. He’s not gonna wanna work with me
anymore!”

“Hussies!” Christian snorted with
laughter. “That’s awesome.”