Talker's Graduation (4 page)

He cried out, and Brian heaved and grunted, spilling himself

inside. Tate felt it, would feel it for the next hour, running down his

thighs, making a sloppy mess of his backside—he loved it. Feeling

it there was like his own little closet-porn movie of the two of them

making love.

He opened his eyes after a moment, feeling Brian softening

inside him but not wanting to move yet. Brian was idly running his

fingers through the come spatters on his stomach, and Tate

grabbed his T-shirt from where it had fallen next to them in order to

wipe him off.

“Killjoy,” Brian said softly, and Tate grinned.

“Come-junkie.”

“Well yeah!”

Tate laughed and rolled to the side, using his T-shirt to clean

Brian up some more before pitching the shirt into the hamper.

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21

He rested his head on the shoulder with the scars on it,

because now it was strong enough to take the weight, and dropped

a reverent kiss on bare, scarred skin.

“Do we still have time?” he asked anxiously, and Brian didn’t

even need to look at the bedside clock.

“The show isn’t until this evening, Talker. We could spend all

morning and still have time to open the gallery.”

“Yeah, but you have responsibilities.” Tate sobered. “I know

you do—I don’t want to get in your way.”

Brian stroked the bare side of his scalp. Tate’s hair hung long

on his other side, but he’d had to keep his tattoos shaved—three

years hadn’t changed the fact that the hair didn’t really grow there.

“You don’t get in the way, baby,” Brian said earnestly. “You’ve

been really patient this last month. But I got the last detail done last

night, and I promised, today is all about us, okay?”

Talker nodded, and kissed his shoulder again. “I just, you

know… I don’t want to be clingy boyfriend on your big day.”

Brian lowered his head and took Talker’s mouth fully,

possessively, kissing away morning breath first and doubts and

fears and insecurities second, kissing until it was just the two of

them, like it always had been, even when Talker had his doubts.

BRIAN was working late again tonight.

Tate had been thrilled at first. When Brian had been given the

okay to go back to work, he hadn"t started out applying for

restaurant jobs. Instead, he"d gone to the pottery galleries and

workshops and applied for jobs until he found the same place Tate

had gotten that first block of clay. It was a gallery with a workshop

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22

on the side, complete with wheel and an entire palette of stains and

glazes.

Brian had gone in one day to answer the help wanted sign on

the front and then asked if the wheel was available to work on if he

had time. The owner of the gallery had asked to see his work, and

the next day, he"d not only had a job, he"d had an offer to sell some

of his abstract pieces and to learn how to work on the wheel.

Brian had been ecstatic.

When school started again, the owner had been good about

working around Brian"s schedule, even opening the gallery on

Sunday so Brian could work the register and have some quiet time

with the wheel. The pay wasn"t quite as good as waiting tables, but

the art supplies were free, and the commission Brian was making

from selling pieces was enough to make up for the tips he wasn"t

getting. It would have been a perfect set-up—and Talker would

have been ecstatic for something that wasn"t Brian putting a fifty-

pound tray on a barely healed shoulder—if it weren"t for one lousy

thing.

The gallery owner was a skeezy perv who wanted Brian"s ass

so bad he almost panted whenever Brian walked in the room, and

who looked at Tate like he had body lice, hepatitis, and halitosis all

rolled up into one.

Even Brian saw it, but because he was Brian and he had a

good heart, he was all stoic and accepting about it and didn"t see

the icky parts.

“He"s
such
a perv!” Tate snarled one night after coming to pick

Brian up. The guy—a decent-looking man in his forties—had

walked them to the door with his hand in the small of Brian"s back

and his thigh pressing up against Brian"s backside. Brian had kept

moving away from him (into Tate, who had nearly been tripped a

couple of times) and Mark had kept invading his space. Brian had

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23

practically tripped on his way out the door and Talker had turned

around and steadied him on his feet.

“Jeez, man, give us some space!” Talker snapped, and Mark"s

reply haunted him.

“I"m not the one who"s bringing him down.”

Talker had sulked—he freely admitted it—all the way home

that night.

“He"s lonely,” Brian apologized, and then winced at the look

Tate had given him. “Okay—I"m sorry. Do you want me to quit?” He

was sincere, too, and Tate had needed a fierce, tight grip on his

worry-stone before answering.

“No,” he said quietly. “You"re happy there. You have a chance

to do your homework—you might graduate next year, and that"s

huge.”

It
was
huge. Brian had missed a semester, but he was in

position to graduate mid-year the next year. That meant that he

could actually
just work
while Talker was going through school, and

it meant that one of them might actually get a degree.

At this point, Talker was reasonably sure it wasn"t going to be

him.

Talker was better at school than Brian—quicker, better with

words, better at getting concepts, just generally better at the school

game. But he had the attention span of a butterfly on crack-cocaine

and the staying power of a hummingbird on meth. He"d taken

classes—a full load every semester—and he"d passed them. But it

hadn"t been until this last year, when Brian had dragged him to the

evaluator"s office, that he realized his dilemma. If he wanted to

graduate
with
anything, he was going to have to go to school for

another three years, and his scholarship would run out at the end of

this one.

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24

But it was more than that; it was more than how close Brian

was to graduating and how much he enjoyed having the extra time

to do his homework. It was that Brian
loved
sculpting, loved it with a

passion and enthusiasm that Talker had only seen Brian put into

him.
Hell, a year ago, Talker would have been hard put to

remember what Brian"s major was—and Talker had loved the guy,

even when they hadn"t been a couple. But Brian never
talked
about

his classes, ever. He was going to get a degree in computers, but

Talker couldn"t remember if it was hardware or software or

engineering or design or what. Brian couldn"t remember either. All

Talker could get from him was a vague notion of having enough

stability to be able to afford shoes and car insurance, and Talker

knew that when Brian had been a kid living with his Aunt Lyndie,

those things had been iffy.

But sculpting… God. Talker knew more about clay and artists

and technique and drawbacks and kilns and glazes and…

everything
than he would"ve ever thought possible, because Brian

brought it home and got excited about it and… Jesus. It made the

guy actually
talk.

Talker had the feeling that Brian could have waited tables for

his entire life, and had the same enthusiasm for that job that he had

for what he was studying in college. It had occurred to him, not for

the first time, that Brian might have fallen into college in the same

way he"d fallen into women"s beds for most of his life: That was

what people expected, so that"s just what he did.

It wasn"t the same with sculpting. With sculpting, Brian

became the master of his passion, and did that translate into his

time with Tate?

Hell yeah.

So Mark Orenbacher was a perv and a skeeze and he wanted

Brian so bad his dick practically made sonar noises whenever

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25

Brian"s tight little ass walked by. So the fuck what. If Talker couldn"t

trust Brian enough to stick to his art and not grope some random

skeezy fucking perv, then what good was the living together, the

surviving together, the living on Top Ramen and laughter and faith?

Not very fucking much, was it?

“No,” Tate said, mumbling but sincere. “Don"t quit. Just make

sure he knows your ass is mine.”

Brian had smiled, a little embarrassed. “Really, Talker, who

else would it belong to?”

Tate had been appeased—but not all the demons were set to

rest. There was the knowledge that someone else wanted what

Tate had always thought of as his and his alone. Tate had been

Brian"s doorway out of the closet; he"d been Brian"s first and only

crush. Brian had told him about trying to kiss other men, and how

the kisses had been hot—better than with women—but that they

hadn"t gone anywhere because they hadn"t been
Talker.
Tate had

been proud of that. He was special—Brian thought he was special.

If Brian strayed, got talked into skeezy perv Orenbacher"s bed

when he was weak or tired, Tate could understand and even

forgive that—but he didn"t think he could take it if Brian didn"t think

he was special anymore.

So he put up with the late nights (no later than restaurant

work, he told himself) and he put up with clay all over Brian"s

clothes (but that didn"t stop him from getting Brian an apron for his

birthday) and he put up with his horrible, horrible fantasies of

skeezy perv Mark Orenbacher going down on his sweet innocent

Brian some late night when Brian was half-asleep on the pottery

wheel, dreaming of going home to Tate.

But that didn"t mean he wasn"t wary one night when he

opened the door, his silence and stealth muffling the usual bright

sound of the bell. It was in the spring, right before school got out,

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26

and Brian had been studying hard for finals as well as preparing for

a show. It was a big deal—a
really
big deal. Brian had been making

extra money by supplying pieces for the gallery, which the gallery

sold for what Tate felt was a
really big
percentage, but having a

show? That was big mojo. If people liked your shit, they bought it

for really big prices, and then maybe Tate and Brian could afford to

keep sending Tate to school.

The thought filled Tate with both a lot of joy and a lot of guilt.

Send him to school—awesome! To be what? Still didn"t know.

But after nearly two years of living together as lovers and

students, Talker knew that he was more than ready to simply be

living with his lover and ditch the whole „student" part of that lifestyle

choice.

And now, school was almost out and Tate was slipping into

the darkened gallery. He liked it when it was dark and empty—

some nights he and Brian would kiss, soft and hot, in the back far

corner where no one could see them, surrounded by shelves upon

shelves of delicate, grotesque, or stunning artwork. He"d told Brian

one night that it made their touches seem like poetry, and he"d

been so enraptured by the glowing lights in their little alcoves and

the graceful, flying lines of the sculptures that he didn"t even feel

silly saying it.

Brian must have liked those words because he sank down to

his knees, right there in the gallery, and took Talker"s body into his

mouth. It was the most daring, public thing they"d ever done, and it

didn"t feel profane or risky or even voyeuristic. It felt… beautiful.

With Brian, those sculptures were like extensions of his

beautiful, simple soul, and when Talker drove their beat-to-shit

Toyota to the gallery from Gatsby"s Nick, the nightclub where
he

worked, he always entered the gallery like it was a shrine.

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27

This night, he heard two voices and winced. The gallery was

closed, which meant that the side with the sculptures and the cash

register stand was dark and the other side, the side with the pottery