Tristan Sable (haigha) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-08-13 13:38:00 |
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Entry tags: | march hare, white rabbit |
Who: Tristan and Ella (as May)
What: Meeting for sex (and talking)
Where: Tristan's new place - a warehouse with a living area that he's renting
When: Before Ella's daughter is kidnapped
Warnings/Rating: Angst. General setup for sex-for-cash, but nothing really "on screen".
The suite had finally gotten to be too much. Too much everything - lights, money, opulence. He could handle it, but only for limited periods of time. And since he wasn’t planning on leaving the city, it was time to find a place that was more his own.
The warehouse was billed as having a certain loft living space to it, but it was rough, a half-walled off corner that only had enough insulation to keep the sounds from the rest of the place from filtering in. He’d paid enough to have a large, soft bed brought in. With insomnia that still plagued him, he wanted the time he did get to sleep to be comfortable. The place had hot water to spare, even if the shower was a tiled room that was almost big enough to be a communal facility. It was a strange space, but the main space was walled and ceilinged in the sort of translucent materials that drew in every last scrap of light during the day, and wired with warm-tinged lights that filled the space at night. It was a place for him to work not just live. He could splatter paint wherever he wanted, could hang canvases from the crossbeams near the ceiling (and thank god for a lack of fear over heights as he inched along the I-beams).
It was Wednesday night before he even thought to call the woman that handled May’s appointments. He hadn’t seen her since his cancellation the week of the hotel party, but he suddenly wanted to again. Needed to. So he called the woman he hated to talk to and gave her the new address. And hung up the phone. And began to paint.
She hadn’t expected Anna to call again. There’d been a week, a week after a party she ought to feel grateful she’d escaped the worst of and then a phone call to abruptly call a halt to the existing appointment marked out in the calendar in soft, inoffensive pencil. Ella picked up the phone distracted, with Beth making a mess out of cereal and her spoon all over the high chair and an hour before she was due at the bar and she heard that voice, low and smooth and cultured on the other end. Anna sounded, Ella thought, like someone who had a piece of chocolate on the flat of their tongue, like every word came around it, all smoothly velvet and rich. Anna sounded approving, like getting another appointment was something she hadn’t expected and Ella shouldn’t have, herself but there was a touch of doubt as she reeled off the address as if it weren’t nearly as good as the Aria hotel had been.
Ella could hear her own voice, a little breathless and high in her ears through the swish and pound of her own blood beating, and she heard ‘new address’ and she heard ‘old customer’, and she wrote down the address and the time beneath the place on the torn off envelope she’d written ‘diapers’ and ‘tomatoes’, and the demand wrote itself over her skin instead, chased itself in writhing shivers up her back.
The time on the envelope, it was when she’d had the sitter booked for a shift at the club, but a shift at the club was less than half what an hour with the Artist would pay. She rang up the club and she coughed convincingly down the phone, and when the sitter came to watch Beth, Ella was soft curls high on her head and the clean-washed smell of cheap soap and a great deal of water. The club wasn’t a place for soft cotton and dresses, the first couple of paychecks had required picking out what she could. Most of the nights, she spent behind the bar because it was easy, right then, than getting up on stage might be but it was less money and the men didn’t tip when they were there for the stage and the women there. It was clingy black jersey that rode high on the thigh and low in the back, the kind of dress that on the hanger looked like there wasn’t enough to make a dress and it was cheap enough that the electric prickle of static climbed her thighs. She took a cab and the heat of the Vegas evening pressed up against her as she swung herself free from the stale processed air of the backseat and gazed up at the warehouse with something like skepticism in blue eyes. If the detail had followed, they were going to be disappointed; Ella knocked once and she tried the handle and then she slid inside the door, into the dim cool of the place itself.
The space was half-lit, the majority of it focused in one area of the warehouse halfway down, with an additional soft glow from the living space. There was the glint of scaffolding, a man’s height above the concrete floor, poised in front of a hanging swath of canvas, just a bit wider than Tristan could spread his arms. The space was filled with music, and maybe he had grown used to the money in some ways - the ways that allowed him to have speakers in the space that piped through music of his choosing. It, like the light, was focused in the area where he worked, the sort of piano music that drew forth more emotion than he usually wanted to admit to. The piece that played meandered through melodies and themes, never quite stopping, but shifting from motif to motif. It drew Tchaikovsky to mind, but there were subtle, but important, distinct differences from anything the composer had ever written. The flow of notes stank of rain and dignity.
From that scaffolding above the floor, Tristan held a brush as wide as his hand and filled in blank space on the canvas with swift but careful sweeps of midnight, navy blue. Toward one edge of the canvas, the strokes were haphazard, uncaring if they meandered away with the sway of the substrate, but on the other edge, they were careful, exact, and after a moment began to outline the shoulder and face-in-profile of a woman. Elegant and of an age where it was clear that the faint outline of her hair would remain snowy white, even when he was done painting. Her face spanned from his knees to well above his head, and he stepped up onto an overturned bucket to sketch out the top curve of her head. Her features were faint yet, but visible the closer one drew to the piece, and pulled from the surface with the sort of attention that betrayed the artist’s care for his subject.
So absorbed was he in both music and paint that he didn’t hear the door open, nor the soft thunk as it closed again behind Ella, even though it echoed through the wide space, an undercurrent to the music. He backed up as much as the narrow scaffold would allow him, leaning against the rail as he took stock of the portrait. He laid the brush to the side and ran a hand through his hair. There was an angle of pained tension to his shoulders as he stared at the elegant profile, and he visibly sighed, a raising and lowering of shoulders whose sound was lost in the music.
The ceiling was way, way up high, light that should have lost itself coming on down from the ceiling but managed to spread itself and sweeten itself as it fell. Ella stepped into shadow as she looked along the length of a room that wasn’t a room at all but a wide open space with nothing like walls or stairs to make it look less like bare bones and the skeleton of a place rather than a place at all. She thought first that the wrong address had been written on the piece of paper or that the driver had gotten himself lost along the way; a little of May’s solidly-laquered confidence cracked - Ella’s hand crept to the hem determined to crawl higher up her thighs, tugged it downward in a movement that had nothing of the hip-sway imagined professionalism based on nothing but a bottle of wine and a host of movies the first time she’d made up her mind to put herself out there instead of worry more over bills.
Music filtered across the long length of the building and Ella might have said something about Tchaikovsky, about the melodic fifths that crawled in and out of the music, the slide from one key to the next and back again and where it borrowed and from who in history but May didn’t know anything about classical music and she didn’t have four years of cramming it in along with New York architecture and a general loosening of Southern-learned speech. May was thick-sugared syllables and her own South gathered up against her like a blanket, and Ella’s heels clicked on cement floor as she stood beneath that broad-spread canvas and said, “She’s beautiful,” like admiration doubled back on itself to pretty itself up a little more in the mirror.
“Who is she?” She’d liked the Aria, the comfort of obvious, quiet wealth - the safety of a man at the door and elevators that opened and shut quietly and a whole host of other people behind doors who’d hear if you yelled. She’d liked that it was rich, right there in the pile of the carpet underneath the arches of her feet and she’d liked the way the Artist jostled right up against it, all angular disapproval and dirt. But the warehouse, as she craned her head to look up, art right there instead of someplace he could yank away before she could look, had its possibilities. Ella smiled up at him, cheap black dress and plastic-leather heels and her hands folded in front of her like a chorister going to a strip joint for a day out.
“You called. I didn’t think you were planning on calling me again. Y’all moved.”
The clicking of her heels finally reached out to him in the silent rests of the music, staccato percussion before the left-hand low notes of the piano filled the space again. He turned, the scaffolding giving its own creaky accompaniment, but it was solid enough to barely even sway with his movement. He looked down at her, his face lost in the shadow his hair made in the light that fell straight down from the ceiling. The darkness ate his features for a moment, haloing the mess of his hair in lamp gold on black, and it took until he shifted again for that lamplight to find the sharp highlights of nose and cheekbone. He studied her for a long, silent moment from his perch on high, expression still not quite visible, but then he finally moved and the light caught the shining glint of his eyes as he turned.
He climbed down the side of the scaffolding, no real ladder, but using the crisscrossing pipes as steps and handholds, bare toes curling to provide extra grip as he worked himself down toward the floor. He was just as thin as always, just as tall, though the shadows that were visible under his eyes as he finally moved into enough light to see, were just as dark as always, something haunted there. He’d been silent until that point, but he looked at her for another moment before finally answering her question. “She was my Nadezhda.” That was all he said before turning again, padding across the concrete on dirty soled feet, heading for the glow of the living area.
“I moved,” he said, just loud enough to carry over the music, even though he was moving away from her as if he expected her to follow. Once he rounded one of the dividing walls, it only took a moment for the music to stop, silence filling the echoing space. “Why wouldn’t I call?” He was hidden for that moment, but the frown was easily audible.
She didn’t know what a Nadezhda was but the word sounded pretty. It sounded like music and it sounded like maybe it was Spanish or Russian, some language she’d not sung often enough to learn the syllables and sounds to fish out the meaning behind them. Ella didn’t know why, if you had money enough for hotel rooms and people to come give you fresh towels, thick carpet that softened your footsteps and dulled down any noise you might make, you wanted to move somewhere that was dirty floors and scaffolding and she eyed the long shiny lines of it with the mistrust of someone stood in badly-fitting shoes who might be asked to go on up there.
The music stopped before she could ask and the click of the heels was very loud now; there was no carpet to soak up disturbances and no curtains to shut out the world. She missed it right then, the kind of music that no one listened to where she could hear it and the kind of music no one played at the club, she missed it like snowfall at Christmas and a broad, white-painted kitchen come vacations, with an ache that beat beneath her breastbone briefly. But music, love of it was Ella and not May at all and May trailed him toward dividing walls and the lack of music and the frown that was familiar enough to tug a readied smile.
“Y’all didn’t before,” she said reasonably, like it was a logical conclusion; she had a call from Anna that was cancellation, dripping-wet still from the shower and a babysitter already booked, Anna who sounded less like she was sucking melted chocolate and more like she’d swallowed something sour. Anna didn’t pay cancellation charges and she didn’t book the same girl twice if they lost a job. There were rumors, the office in the business district looked like something perfectly normal if a little rundown but there were always other girls in the waiting room who were ready to gossip. “You like it better here?”
He saw the expression of confusion flicker over her face before he moved away, and he frowned. “Nadezhda von Meck. She was--” He broke off his explanation, shaking his head. “It’s not important. It’s just a painting. Not even a very good one.” He scowled and turned, defensiveness layered over the lean muscles of his back like armor. Around the corner, though simple, the space showed a few more signs of money and comfort. The bed - rival to the one he’d had in the hotel. A rug - maybe not the plush carpet she was used to in his space, but enough to keep bare feet off the concrete. A coffee maker that could be programmed - something that kept hot coffee fresh for him all day. Bins in the corner, the same he’d had in the closet at the hotel, filled with the few things he carried with him when he moved. It wasn’t opulent, not in the slightest, but it had its own level of rich comfort.
The silence hung in the space, movements loud now that the music had stopped. “I had... something came up.” The response was sharp and defensive, not wanting to explain just why he’d had to cancel on her. “I had to take care of stuff. I paid the...” He waved a hand back at her, loosely, while he fiddled with the coffee maker. “The cancellation fee. I paid it. Didn’t know how to get the other weeks’ fees to you, but,” he looked at her, an up and down that took her in from hair to shoes, sliding over the staticky cling of her dress to body. There was just a shade of disappointment in the shadows around his eyes, but he turned back to the machine before it could solidify into anything more substantial. “You seem to have done alright without me calling for a little.”
The space between them was finally eaten by the long stride of his legs as he crossed over to her again, holding out a mug to her. The coffee was black, strong, but it was good. It was one thing he’d always splurged on, even back when he was struggling to even pay the rent. Going without heat in a damp Seattle winter just to feed his caffeine addiction. He held his own mug in his other hand - his favorite mug. One that hadn’t made an appearance while he lived in the hotel. It had a picture of a bunny on it, a tiny thing small enough to still be fluffy fuzz. The rim of the mug was chipped, enough to cause a cut-lip casualty if he wasn’t careful, but he tuned the mug just enough as he took a drink, old habit keeping him from injury. “It’s more mine,” was his only reply to where he liked it better.
It stung, the way his eyes slid over her like that and she could taste the contempt on the back of her tongue, acrid-sharp and bitter, feel it creep up the back of her neck like shame. It stung and that was Ella not May, May shrugged beneath the elastic cling of the black jersey, lack of care or just shiny-sleek with the promise of money at the end, but Ella-May were both confused at the prospect of the fee. Anna wrote it hard into her contracts, she wrote it in ink on paper and she was suitably fast and professional in skimming over what it meant on the phone. “No money in means no money out,” she’d said across the desk, in expensive silk the color of peacocks and a gold pen swung between her fingers, and then she’d smiled, sweet as melted chocolate, “You understand. It’s business.” Ella had signed her name with that gold pen and she knew; no money in, no money out.
“There’s no cancellation fee,” she stood there in her cheap shoes and her dress riding high, and she looked back at him as blank and as sweet as a summer sky in high June, bare of anything that could be pretension at truth. The space didn’t look rich to her right off, it took looking at to see the wealth in the place, the quiet opulence in that bed and the rug lying across the floor. Coffee hung in the air like a perfume but confusion wore her well enough that neither Ella nor May had appreciation for what it meant, nor an appreciative grin for the mug in his hands. “No appointment, no fee, that’s how it works, sugar. Didn’t Anna explain it to you?”
And at the last little jab, she lifted her chin and she looked at him, frank blue eyes and soft corolla of blond hair around her face and she was May, all May when she lifted one shoulder and the dress skimmed down freckled-pale skin and she said, “A girl’s got to pay the bills,” with the kind of nonchalance that had nothing to do with a life outside.
Her pain was ignored for the moment in favor of her confusion, and after a moment to realize what it might mean, that she didn’t know what he was talking about, he stepped closer and scowled. It was very possibly threatening, but his anger wasn’t directed at her. Not at all. He’d met enough girls and boys over the past years, most of them with intermediary caretakers, and he knew how the world worked, even if he did shut himself away from it most of the time. It was for reasons like this. The moment of confusion laid her clean for that flicker of time, in a way that let him see past the confidence of personality she put on for him. Likely for everyone she was with. But no, there, in the honest confusion, there was her. And he wanted to grab onto it - keep it at the surface. Even though he knew it wasn’t his right. So he watched it slip under cover again, but it didn’t stop his own words. “Then she’s keeping it from you. Because my account sure as fuck took the same dip it always does. And I have no problem with that, if it’s going at least some to you. But I have a problem when it doesn’t.”
Not that he could do a thing about it. “But that’s the way it works, isn’t it? Or didn’t she explain it to you?” The tone was too snide, too biting, and it wasn’t for her, even if it was directed that way. He shook his head and stepped back, out of the looming lean he’d worked himself into. Out of the space that was hers and hers alone. He turned away, crossing back across his living space as he shook his head. “If you’d let me pay you directly...” he started, a murmur that got lost against the lip of his mug. He didn’t finish the thought, and when his voice raised again, the topic was changed. “You look nice, but it’s not you so much, is it?” He’d seen the too short, too low look on so many other girls, and some of the boys. Like a uniform that everyone slipped into when they knew they were going to have to slip out of it again in front of someone else. “I hope you didn’t have to walk far. The cheap shoes are going to cut up your feet in no time.” And maybe he was paying just a little too much attention to everything around him, if he could identify the quality of a woman’s shoes just at a glance.
She believed it of Anna. Once (before New York, before bills that tumbled in and before she began to hate the smell of antiseptic) Ella would not. She would have sought out the explanation kerneled within, would have held fast with tight fingers to a belief but she felt at once tired and sick and a little defeated, and she believed it of Anna with the smooth, rich voice. She shrugged one shoulder as May once again, and she let the dress roll high, like she didn’t mind the way he looked at her this time, less like she was something unexpected and more like tarnished pennies in the hand and entirely usual, like it was water rolling off glass. “It’s a business, honey, she makes her money how she wants to.” But it rubbed sharp against her skin and the fingers of her left hand rubbed at her elbow, arms crossed over her belly like she was holding a little of it in.
He was close enough for the hairs on her arms to stand high, warmth and height and snide anger stood close enough to see the fleckerels of paint that had spattered his shirt and when he stepped back, walked away, May stepped out of the cheap shoes with exaggerated grace, one then the other and they sat with their heels together on the concrete like a crocodile’s smile.
“Does it matter?” she said, and her voice was molasses and laughter, all good mood designed to persuade and she followed him, the long line of his back less of a warning, this time, now she knew the Artist was bark, not bite, now she knew he could be teased out of it, a little. “I’m the same, if I’m wearing this or nothing at all.” And she took care with that and it was all experienced girl rather than young thing, the reminder slow and thoughtful. She thought just a minute about that pay directly, about what it would mean, slow trickle of cash without anything that went to Anna taken out, about being able to say ‘no’ without another girl sent in her place. But she looked at him now, and she heard the acid in the air like smelling rain before it fell, and Ella thought no in the same beat she thought of what it would mean. It would be real, then, in a way it wasn’t with Anna, and she stood there, bare feet on concrete and in that cheap dress and May watched him walk away, nothing shy left.
A drink from the chipped mug was accompanied by a flicker of glance downward when she shrugged and started the chain reaction of her dress hiking higher up her thigh. He may have preferred the dresses that seemed more her, but he wouldn't completely ignore the leg-baring benefits of this one. "I know it's business. Doesn't mean I have to like when you get cheated out of money I owe you."
He turned with enough time to watch her step out of her shoes, and couldn't help the sneaking hint of a smile at the inches she lost once her feet were flat on the floor. She may have been on the concrete, not yet made it to the rug, but the floor there had at least been scrubbed clean. His own bare feet were dirty from wandering in the warehouse proper and climbing up and down on the scaffolding, but hers would stay clean unless she ventured out there.
"Of course it matters," he replied with a frown, setting his mug on the counter that housed the coffee maker and leaning his hips back against the edge of it, folding his arms over his chest. "Clothes always influence who you are and how other people see you." He gestured at himself. "This is how you know me, and how I act, and how I'm me. And that's the way I like it, and why I'll dress like this even when I'm staying in a suite. You stick me in a suit and slick my hair down, I'm a different person. And not a person I like. I've had to do it in the past, and there's a reason I don't now if I can help it. Everyone plays that game, even if you say you don't." He switched the direction of his gesture from himself to her. "You are very much May right now. In your short little dress that you've never worn to see me before. So whoever it is you are when you're not here, that's farther away. Which you're maybe glad for, but it doesn't change that you're not the same as you are in the dresses that cover more." He could add how much he enjoyed being the one to uncover her from those more modest dresses, but that wasn't the point at the moment.
She didn’t think of it as her money right then. She thought of it as Anna’s, same way as she thought of the work, with the comfortable distance that allowed her to be her mother’s daughter and the girl who had sung in church like her breath was liquid and the woman Coop had loved enough to leave behind. May watched his eyes flicker up the pale length of her thighs and she didn’t smile but she looked him right back, and the blond eyebrows didn’t go up but the soft blue gaze beneath said she saw and that she noticed and that she let him know all of that. The cheap dress wasn’t for the Artist, the man who liked imperfect places and light and music, the man who sketched out a woman twice if not three times his age almost lifesize like he loved her more than any one thing in that Aria suite had cost.
The shoes were cheap but they were broken in, and her feet on that cool, dirty concrete were unhurt. She liked the carpet fine but the chilly solidity of the floor was welcome and pleasant after the sticky heat outside and Ella cared not a bit about lost inches, even if he loomed against his countertop like he had menace to spare. She’d seen him often enough to know that the art was true, the menace wasn’t. “Clothes don’t make you any different,” she argued now and certain and it was May who looked him over, paid attention to the hair and grinned at the notion of a suit. “Bare skin, you’re still the same and the clothes don’t make you someone else, but maybe they change how you think. I know I’m the same,” and if she flinched like someone had stepped close behind her when he said May like an answer to a question, she stood there in her bare feet with her skin creeping because it was never the way, with the Artist. Talking wasn’t his strong suit, he was paint and abruptness and maybe the kind of sleep she tiptoed away from that seemed like he went into it fighting.
Her fingers slid down to the hem of the dress, “You dislike it so much, I don’t have to wear it.” It was teasing, but she eyed him down with all the confidence of a month working at the club where girls took off clothes every day with nothing in their eyes but the certainty they’d do it again tomorrow.
He shook his head at her continuing insistence that clothes didn’t change a person - didn’t change her - because he didn’t believe it. For as antisocial as he made himself, he’d met enough people to know how the world worked. Maybe it wouldn’t work in certain cases (he would always be a boy without a family and not enough money), but even superficially, things changed. He unfolded his arms and pushed away from the counter. It wasn’t a slink, he didn’t quite have that sort of movement in him, but it was just slow enough in crossing the space that there was a moment of silence before he reached out to feel the untouched canvas of her thigh where she’d bared herself. His hand pushed flat against the soft give of flesh, and fingertips ventured under the hiked-high hem of her dress.
“Something else has changed then.” His voice had dipped quiet, cigarette-rough, but warm. This close, he smelled of the paint he’d so recently set aside, the coffee he’d just abandoned, and the shampoo he’d stolen from the suite. He’d caught the flinch at her own (given) name, and between that and his conviction that there was something different, he wanted to step away instead of closer. They were thoughts that were too personal, too close to beginning to know someone instead of keep a safe distance bridged only by the physical. He should stop calling. He should find someone new. He should.
He should, but not just then. Just then, he slipped his hand higher, up to her hip, holding her there for a moment as he looked down at her, and then he stepped to the side. His hand journeyed low across her belly as he circled around to stand behind her, ending on the hip opposite of where it had started. The touch had been light enough to qualify as gentle, but heavy enough to not tickle. He stopped close and leaned down to rest his forehead against her hair. There was a soft powder scent to her that made him push away the curiosity of who she was when she wasn’t with him, and he sighed. “Something’s different.”
Ella didn’t expect much of clients. They were mostly (mercifully) quick and they were anonymous and they didn’t call again. The Artist, she expected him to want what wasn’t there and she expected a little boy lost in a grown man’s hotel suite and mess like he didn’t know how to take care of himself. She didn’t expect him to walk toward her like he was already doing what he meant to do, in his own head, and a little hiss of breath came through teeth when his hand inched past the silly dress and to the forgiveness of pale thighs. It was cheap cotton underwear, the kind that came in packs at Walmart and that was Ella, too Ella for May but May squeezed her eyes closed and she let him treat her body like it was his for a minute, because it was, right then. She didn’t think of the detail and where they’d be and she didn’t think a minute of Ian and fear thick enough to taste, she didn’t think of it so hard that she was thinking of it even as the heel of his hand settled against the crest of her hip bone, right where the skin stretched back taut after the soft pouch of her belly. Some of the weight after, it had come right off, but it had left her with the ribbons of soft silver marks, fleshy memories.
“Not a thing.” She’d worked with women every day now for weeks, women who put breathy sighs into their voices, who widened up their eyes and painted on the kinds of smiles that were welcome and excitement and promises, who showed a little and promised a lot, who faked it so well you could barely know it if you weren’t in a place all tinsel and faded sweat. May borrowed from it, she took soft certainty and laughter and she said ‘not a thing’ with her head tipped back, like willingness bought in a box.
His brow creased where it still pressed against her hair, and the frown was delivered to the base of her skull. He didn’t know her well enough to be completely certain of anything about her. But yet there was a feeling about her words that he didn’t like. Something that sounded changed from what they’d once been just a few short weeks ago. He couldn’t chase after it with fingertips the way he chased the goosebump pucker of her skin when it was exposed to cooler air. He should close his eyes and pretend her as someone else, the way she was doing with her own identity, but the easy give and welcome were too much. He didn’t know about any of the things going through her mind, and wouldn’t chase down or admit to the ones going through his own. But they clashed - he knew that much. Not only the thoughts, but them, the two of them, in a way they hadn’t before.
She was packaged in a way she’d never been before, both her clothing and her attitude, and he wasn’t able to figure out why. Only that it felt, for the first time, like something he didn’t want. Any other girl that walked through his door could have brought that very same dress and attitude with her and he wouldn’t have complained a word, only slept with her and never called for her again. But May (or whoever she was when she wasn’t May) had started out in soft cotton dresses and brown boots, a mistake in appointments because he’d been new to the city. But it had been enough for him to call again. And again. Until it had settled into something that was broken by a missed appointment and then the static-sticky dress and a pair of cheap heels. The sweet syrup of the South had accompanied her through his door in a way that didn’t apologize and didn’t match anyone else he’d met. And while she still had the sweet drawl, something else had joined it, something harder and more familiar to his own life. He didn’t let her go, not yet, but he sighed a warm breath into her hair. “Not true.”
She remembered just then, with her nose full of linseed oil and the acridity of turpentine, the bitterness of oil paints and the smoky warmth that clung to the Artist like the last breath of a cigarette, what he was like. He palmed her skin like she was something he could pin down and paint, he asked things the others didn’t and it was determinedly May when his breath tickled the back of her neck, May enough for the glass-thin delicacy of barriers made, May who twisted, the dress riding against her as she cantilevered against his hips until she was soft determination and her chin tipped up, blue eyes sweet on his.
“You plannin’ on arguing all day, honey?” It didn’t feel like prying but like it might, like fingertips stroking down the crevasse that separated what would be shared and what she kept for herself, insistent. Her own palms slid down her hips, smoothing all that static-fabric down until the hem was almost the way it should be, and then her fingers curled underneath and she pulled up and over her head, bare skin in the cool of the warehouse and she let the dress drop like she didn’t mind one bit. Underneath, it was the same; underneath was cheap underwear and bare feet but it was May who looked at him like expectation, like goods bought and paid for, May who ran her own palm over the line from collarbone to belly like known topography.
“Or you plannin’ on else?” The thin quiver of spine was all cool air touching places it hadn’t.
The roll and twist of her body against him as she turned was just as distracting as it always was, and his hand continued to drag against her hip until she stepped away just enough to put a step of space between them. He wanted to reach out, draw her back, ferret-hunt the things that he knew she had to be hiding, but then the dress was pulled away and she was hiding very little. At least physically. The skin, the silvery souvenirs of life along it, the underthings that he could recognize as her - for a moment it returned the two of them to where they always were. He could hear the crackle spark of static as the fabric was drawn over her head, but once the dress was gone, dropped to the side, he forgot about it and simply looked at her.
He wanted to touch. With hands and mouth in ways they’d done and in ways that were more intimate than they’d ever been. But then she was looking at him with that edge in her eyes, and though his own gaze followed her hand downward for a moment, this was different too. He had no right to be angry at being treated like a simple customer (he was a customer, after all), but he didn’t have to like that she treated herself as just a purchase. He reached forward and caught her wrist, the one with the teasing fingers moving over her own skin, and with two long strides, had the backs of her shoulders pressed to the wall (block brick and sturdy enough to hold up anything) that divided them from the rest of the echoing space. His fingers were careful, his steps were careful - irritated and stubborn and strong, but nothing that was going to hurt her. He’d even kicked aside her shoes with a bare foot, ensuring neither of them would trip. Once he had her there, he stopped and closed his eyes, sighing quietly. “Stop that. I always argue,” he ended up whispering, “Why’s today any different?”
For a moment, things were as she remembered them being. For a moment, her bare feet solid on concrete instead of carpet and the cool of high ceilings and wide spaces instead of the processed chill of expensive air-conditioning, she could close her eyes and see the suite, the paintings stuck up against the plate glass until neon played beneath oil and the sliver-pale artist in the darkness. Ella drew the dress over her head and she needed to be May just then, needed to be May who didn’t give a darn thing for standing there bare as could be with her own fingers warm on cool skin. And then his thumb was strong on her wrist, his pulse steady and quickening until his hand pushed and the rasp of brick abutted her back and Ella’s breath caught and May gasped - soft, deliberate, the blue eyes little-girl wide and the look in them all adult, through pale lashes. He hadn’t seemed the type to push her around but Ella thought maybe this, this was the artist beneath the careful-careful, the willing-wanting to give, and her spine arched away from brickwork and May’s eyes lit like the Vegas strip, comfortable in knowing.
“Today’s no different from any other day,” she sounded certain as girls who’d been working it years, like it was written down in ink that couldn’t be smudged. She lowered her eyes to where his hand imprinted around her wrist, red ringing pale, but the look slid up at him was acquiescence, the acknowledgment of things bought and paid for that drew a line underneath a figure in a ledger. She looked at where her shoes had been kicked as though she were memorizing where exactly they had fallen and quick as possible, eyes slid back up to him. “Y’all plan on arguing with me now?” It sounded like laughter.
It irritated him to not know if that gasp that escaped her lips was real or playacting for his benefit, and though he trailed his free hand over the curve of her torso when she arched away from the wall, he also frowned. It was more complicated than he wanted, searching for the balance between wanting to touch and take, and wondering about the woman he was touching. Somewhere in the past weeks, whether due to their cancelled appointments or the influence of the hotel (showing him his cracks and the emptiness behind them, showing him the way he so easily spilled himself and tore himself apart for the regard of someone else), whether it was him or her or the both of them in opposite directions, it was different.
The laughter under her words was the key to the handcuff of his fingers, and he pulled his hand away from her wrist, shaking his head and running all 10 fingers back through the mess-nest of his hair. It resisted the attempt to corral it back, and fell forward again over his forehead to half-hide his gaze. “Fuck,” he murmured, more for himself than for her, as he shook his head again and stepped away. It was resignation rather than anger, and whatever anger was there was for himself and that cracked-flesh image of his own chest that continued to haunt him. He wanted to chase it away, was trying to do it with the girl pressed against the wall, but that was very obviously revealing itself to be a losing battle. Her body wasn’t enough to fill the absences in his heart, and she wasn’t giving any more.
Nor should she.
“Fuck,” he repeated, and turned in a tense-spine arc away from her. His steps looked like pain as he walked away, over to the far side of the unmade bed, where he perched on the edge, his back an expanse of vulnerability as he buried his hands again in his hair. “Whatever,” he finally said toward the floor between his bare feet.
His fingers unfastened like a catch springing loose and there was the glaze of his palm across her rib-cage, his fingers skipping across the bones like a player trying to draw out a note. He was there one minute, tall and quick and he was angry, she knew in the drawn-breath volte-face, in the terse curvature of his spine as he poured himself over against his knees and presented her with nothing, no demands, no clear line along which to walk. She sagged against the wall, solid brick snagging on cotton underwear and loose blond hair come unknotted and she blinked, quiet uncertainty and faint desperation coppery as pennies. She waited, long minute but he didn’t come back, he sat as though he had been undone and Ella felt the certainty crack like misshapen glass emptied of water; he was different, the Artist, but not like this.
She thought for a second - briefly - gaze skipping toward the door and the entry and past the scaffolding looming darkly in its corner, of the man who waited beyond, the man she wouldn’t see but who would be there, waiting. It was too quick just now for it to have been anything at all, too quick for Ella to have been anything at all. But Anna, all that melted chocolate spilled into calm, bitter acid and Ella’s palms were sweaty-nervous on the brickwork.
“Y’all feeling all right?” Her voice sifted across the distance, bounced on naked floor, across empty space. Her feet were soft, the shuffle of them over concrete was quiet; the bed bowed beneath her weight, the hand on his shoulder blade tentative-quiet. “If you can’t,” the soft hesitancy of problems down there implied, suggested, “I can help?” There wasn’t a one she’d been to that needed help, but there were stories, there always were.
He hadn't thought about whether or not she would follow him across the room, and he was torn between the surprise and the accepting certainty when he felt the shift of the bed. The bed itself was too expensive, the sort of mattress that would accept the tossing and turning of one person without disturbing the other, but the sheets moved and the comforter bunched, and he knew she was there even before the tentative touch to his shoulder. He tried to stop himself, but he shifted just enough to push back into that touch, until her hand laid palm-flat, and then he pulled away again. He wasn't feeling alright. Not at all. But she wasn't a therapist, and he wouldn't lay that at her feet.
Instead, he laughed at her hesitant question, pride taking a bruising blow, and shook his head. One dark eye peered at her through his hair when he turned to look at her over his shoulder. It was a long look, taking in her gaze and the silhouette of her kneeling there, and he laughed again. They sounds came out as low, dark gravel in the larger space, and he turned his eyes away from her again. "Really not the issue," he murmured, the image of her still foremost in his mind as he looked down at the rug. The shape of her, the thought of sinking into her warmth, the memory of the way her skin tasted when he pressed his mouth to her shoulder instead of kissing her - he was half-hard already even with the uncertain depression and neediness creeping in the back of his mind.
She’d expected anger, she realized when she breathed out and the gust of it was half-audible, the noise of breath that had been held prisoner in a cage of ribs. She’d expected anger and he wasn’t, and her fingers curled over the prow of his shoulder-blade as it curved toward the heel of her hand and away again, strong and warm and certain just in this. He hadn’t thought whether she’d follow him but she wasn’t leaving when Anna could hold back the money, when he hadn’t said go like he meant a minute of it, and she knelt, bare knees on soft, achingly soft mattress and rumpled sheets and she wondered just then if he’d ever made the bed a day in his life or if he liked life creased and rucked and uncomfortable just because that was how he was made.
He looked at her like she’d broken something and Ella let her palm drag down his shoulder and away, fingers curving back into her hand and contact broken like disconnections, like chains undone. “What, then?” It wasn’t uncertainty, it was more confusion, South-sweet, the bewilderment of what could possibly go wrong, deviate from a script she knew he knew, well as she did. He’d commanded it and she was relieved again when he laughed like nothing but a boy with stung pride, instead of a man who might have a mind to fling her around for wondering if he could get good and hard over a girl. But he looked away, like he didn’t want that, and she wondered what it was the Artist thought, when he called up Anna or someone else, asked about a girl for a night, an evening, an hour. She didn’t think much on clients, she didn’t want to, but she looked at the shadow of his profile just then and wondered briefly, fleetingly, as her knee nudged his back.
“You want me to go?”
The answer to her wonders - the things he would never tell her (even if he'd known she was curious) because that sort of sharing wasn't who they were - was that he had made his bed. For years. He'd made it every day when he lived with his grandmother, just because it made her happy, and making her happy had made him happy. And he'd made it every day in the foster homes because it was required - one of the rules that no one wanted to break. And when 18 hit and he walked out the door, he never made his bed again. There were the times that someone else did it for him, but he never dragged up the sheets on his own.
He heard her sigh, and a shiver followed the dragging path of her hand along his back. He wished for it to reappear at his waist, to burrow under the washed-soft fabric of his shirt until her fingers pressed against skin, but he didn't know how to ask for it. Didn't know if he should. He guessed not, even though it was touch and contact and he had her there for the asking and taking. Her confusion ate at him instead, and though he continued to look in the opposite direction, he shook his head.
"This city is more fucked up than any other place I've ever been," he said. And though he knew she didn't know his history, he knew how strong of a statement that was. There was too much pain in honesty for him to lay everything bare for her, and too much that was unbelievable anyway. With the hotel and the door, with some strange power that hijacked who he was and twisted it around for its own amusement. It wasn't something that anyone uninvolved would understand. Instead of explaining things that he didn't even have an answer to, he reached one lanky arm back behind himself, fingers finding her knee that pressed against him. The skin was smooth there under his paint-stained fingertips, and though the angle was awkward, he traced the jut of bone at the crest of her kneecap. His face shifted just enough to hint at a smile, though the tangle of his hair hid it from her. No, getting it up wasn't a problem. Not when simply the feel of her skin pricked at his interest.
His head was bowed low, a tangle of black curls at the nape of his neck and his voice was low too, quiet like leaning in to catch a breath. She wasn’t touching him, not quite, but she could feel the way he twisted against the line, like something caught that didn’t want to be, or something that was almost caught but not quite, like decisions that didn’t make sense. He shook his head and the mop of curls shook and she thought of the door just then and the line of light that limned it with a mixture of disappointment and relief; Anna didn’t pay for missed appointments and she didn’t pay when an appointment wasn’t done. She leaned just far enough forward to catch the murmur of his words on breath, all turpentine and coffee and smoke clinging to soft, worn fabric and the curls her nose brushed up against, and she smiled recognition, May and Ella both.
Vegas was unfriendly as New York behind its Vegas carnival mask, Vegas was the world tipped sideways and viewed upside down, holding on tight as tight to a carnival ride that swooped you all the ways you didn’t want to go. Ella thought of the twitchy man behind the door, trussed tight in lace at the throat and cotton at the wrists, she thought of New York winters and Vegas heat and a sister who looked at her like mistrust written in big letters, along with go home. His palm slid over her knee, a prickle of warmth in the large facet of his hand and Ella leaned in like contact wanted rather than paid for, the illusion desired for like Vegas tinsel, like showgirls kicking high.
“Why do you stay?” she said, the notch of her chin against his shoulder and her hand skimmed the length of his arm, down to the loose hinge of his elbow, all encouragement in soft finger-patter. You could like the city, hate it as much as you liked, but you didn’t take it to bed with you, most of the time, she thought. Either it was bigger than wanting wide spaces and rolling green or the dirty-cold gray of brick, or it was something more than strip-lights and neon. Her hand slid over his hip. “Or you planning on leaving, someday?”
If he closed his eyes, focused on the soft murmur of her voice and the gentle surety of her touch, if he did that, he could almost pretend that she meant it. His eyes didn't have to show him the blunt edges of her gaze, the one that screamed out how she was only there because he called with enough money to lure her. He'd never had a problem with that before, not until this city started dredging the murky lake of his life and its memories. She wasn't his lifeboat, but he could pretend for just long enough to lose himself in her.
Why did he stay? He didn't quite know himself, but his mind flooded with thoughts of people he once knew, those who had renewed connections in this city. He thought of the bright, broken laughter in the back of his mind - the woman who wasn't quite, not completely, a woman. He thought of the weight that kept him there, even when his mind insisted it was time to move on. He leaned back until his shoulders found the softness of her, lifting one hand to cross over his body and touch her fingers where they traveled over his arm. "Someday," he murmured, "I always leave someday." He turned his head just enough to catch a glow of blonde in his peripheral vision, and he lifted her wrist to his mouth, pressing lips against the tender skin of its underside. Let me pretend, the gesture said. She could do her job, however distasteful she seemed to find it, and he could delude himself for just a little longer. At least until she walked out the door.
And maybe he would find the strength to not call on her again.