Chapter Thirteen
IT WAS TWO thirty in the morning when they pulled into the city limits for Takaketo.
They’d taken turns driving, but Skylar had been the pilot for the last leg, and he’d convinced Xander, finally, that it was okay for him to doze off, that Skylar was wide awake and in no danger of inadvertently joining him in a nap from his position behind the wheel. The twenty-ounce container of convenience store cappuccino had gone a long way to helping him on that front. But the truth was, Skylar’s swirling thoughts were ammunition enough to keep him awake.
Since traffic was nonexistent as he wove his way to the northwest side of campus, Skylar stole liberal glances at Xander as he drove. At his face, quiet and serene in sleep.
At his hands, curled up against his chest.
Skylar’s heart beat faster when he thought about how Xander had caressed him in the hotel parking lot. He hadn’t seen that coming, that Xander would want to touch his hand in such a manner, or that he, Skylar, would react the way he had. Plenty of other people had touched his hands, and he’d never thought anything of it. Girls attempting to flirt with him had stroked his hands, he was almost sure of it. Maybe guys had too. A lot of people flirted with Skylar.
Why was Xander an exception? Why, when Xander touched him, smiled at him, did Skylar feel giddy and nervous and excited? Why did he spend so much time thinking about how he could get it to happen again?
It was a good thing, yes? He’d felt with Xander like he’d been able to be himself, but more importantly, he didn’t feel like some kind of sexual freak. He understood, intellectually, he wasn’t the only person who experienced attraction differently. Gray sexuality. Asexuality. It was a spectrum, he knew, but that was about it. He hadn’t looked deeply or thought about it much past the initial glimpse into his research. He’d been young, tense, and…perhaps a bit proud. He remembered thinking, I’m not like that. I’m not one of those.
He winced. Very well. He’d been more than proud. He’d been an ass. But he’d been afraid. He still was, if he was honest. But he was also eager. Eager to explore this…this whatever this was, this part of himself, this new element. So long as Xander was there, he was willing to open the door.
He was aware it would be difficult to shut later. That he would, in fact, need to shut it, and be the Skylar his family wanted him to be. But right now he couldn’t think about that. He told himself it would be fine, and he overrode all the voices warning him he was ushering in something he couldn’t stop.
He was fine, at the moment—but he wasn’t ready to see if he was fine when he was left to his own devices, alone in the darkness. He wished now he’d have booked them in a hotel room. Had he done that, Skylar would have been able to go to sleep with Xander in the room beside him. Not in bed beside him—the thought did give him a thrill, but it also made him panic and break out in sweat—but perhaps in a nearby bed. And then they could have breakfast together. And talk some more. They had planned to spend the weekend together, yes?
Could he still do that?
What would be the best way to ask?
To start, he’d have to wake him up, so he began there. “Xander.” He put a hand on his shoulder, shook him gently. “Xander, we’re back in Takaketo.”
Xander roused blearily, for a few seconds clearly unaware of where he was or what had happened. It was adorable, and Skylar would have enjoyed it lingering, but soon Xander blinked, rubbed his eyes, and yawned himself into the moment. “Right. Sorry. I totally zonked.”
“It’s fine.” Skylar swallowed an urge to clear his throat and mentally scrambled for an overture. “I was wondering…since our return is a little unplanned…” He lost his courage and drew a breath, trying to regroup.
Xander filled in the breach, not understanding what he meant, but saving him nonetheless. “Yeah, I’m going to totally freak out my landlady. She sets an alarm for her part of the house, and she’s used to it if I come home late during the school year, or even if she knows I’m working on a project, but with her thinking I’m gone? I should wake her up. Which will suck, but I don’t know what else to do.”
Skylar wanted to purr. I do. “Come stay with me. We have plenty of room.”
The last of Xander’s sleepiness fell off as he held up both hands and backed against the passenger door. “No. Way. The hell I’m going to your damn frat.”
While Skylar had expected this reaction, it didn’t annoy him any less. “There are only three people in the entire house. Myself, the house mother, Ms. Mary, who is a complete marshmallow, and Unc.”
Xander lowered his hands and raised dubious eyebrows at Skylar. “Unc. Seriously?”
Skylar smiled, nostalgia washing over him as he called up the origin story. “Back when we pledged—he and I are both seniors this fall—he was friendly with everyone, and helpful, but in a way that wasn’t always caretaking. He wasn’t a mother hen. He was your favorite uncle who teased you and made you forget you were nervous. I can’t remember who started calling him Uncle Jeff. He might have named himself that. At some point he became Unc. And then that’s all he was, and all he’s been since.” Skylar sat up straighter, hit by a sudden epiphany. “He is your Hotay. Jolly jokester, always up for an adventure.”
Xander did not look amused. “A frat boy is not my Hotay.”
“You tried to call me Hotay, and I’m a frat boy.”
Xander grunted and turned to face the window, arms folded in front of his body.
Skylar buzzed now, alive with the thought of not only taking Xander to Delta Sig but introducing him to Unc. But Xander wasn’t sold on the idea yet. Think, Stone. How are you going to seal this deal?
He wracked his brain, rifling through Lucky 7 issues, seeing if he could use some kind of Hotay & Moo hook. He sifted through the original source material too, through the seven gods of fortune, and of Fudō Myōō.
When he found the bait, he almost slammed on the brakes, he was so excited and overcome by how obvious the answer had been all along. He gripped the steering wheel, drew a breath, and said as calmly as he could, “If you stay overnight with me, I’ll take you to the basement and show you the shrine of Benzaiten.”
Xander shot him a glare, but Skylar knew he had him. “There’s no shrine. Especially not to Benzaiten.”
“Come over and catch me in my lie.”
Xander stared straight ahead and bit hard on the inside of his left cheek. Then he sighed. “Fine. I will.”
Smiling wide enough he thought his face might break, Skylar aimed the car down the street that would take them to Greek Row.
XANDER REGRETTED AGREEING to go to Skylar’s fraternity as soon as the house appeared around the corner. It sat on a hill, imposing in red brick and white pillars, overlooking Gama Auditorium like it was a sanctuary of the gods. Which Xander was sure the occupants of the house felt it was. He hadn’t even passed through the gates—the fucking driveway had gates, with a passcode Skylar entered on his smartphone—and he already wanted to run.
“Relax,” Skylar murmured as he put the phone into the drink holder and sailed through the blockade as it parted for him. “I’m telling you. You’re overreacting.”
Xander wrapped his arms around himself and glanced back and forth, waiting for drunken assholes to burst from the shadows and from behind clumps of greenery. “You’re sure there’s no one here but this Unc guy? And the marshmallow mother?”
“No one else is here. Unless Unc has an overnight guest, in which case we won’t see him, because he’ll be otherwise occupied. I doubt that’s the case, though, because he struggles in that department. He lacks a certain…subtlety in securing a date.”
“The more you talk about this guy, the more I’m sure I’m going to hate him.”
“You might take a minute to warm up to him, but Unc will win you over eventually. He always does.”
Xander vowed to under no circumstances raise his temperature to this guy above that of an icicle.
Skylar parked his car in the back of the house in a long garage where he had his own individual door. He pulled it closed and hit a keypad tucked into the frame of the garage as soon as they had their bags from the trunk, and as they headed for a side entrance, he punched at an app on his phone.
“Turning off the alarm. Give me a second.” He hovered over the app a little longer, then nodded, put it away, and reached for a set of keys. “Okay. We might luck out and everyone will be asleep, but the odds are—”
“Stone, what the hell—well, hey. You brought a friend home!”
Skylar glanced over his shoulder, a rueful smile on his face. “As I was saying, the odds are good Unc is still awake.”
Xander stood behind Skylar on the landing of a set of stairs, where their choices were go down into a basement or up into what appeared to be a kitchen or mudroom area off a kitchen. The man addressing them was above them, halfway down the stairs, and damn Skylar if he didn’t step to the side so the bleach-topped buffoon grinning as he towered over Xander could get at him more easily.
The man stuck out a not-insubstantial hand. “Jeff Turner. Pleased to meet you.”
Xander tried to keep his expression flat, but he was fairly sure he scowled. “Xander Fairchild.” He made no remarks about his enjoyment level over their encounter.
Unc raised his eyebrows at Skylar. “Wait—is this—this is the guy? The one from the project? Who draws Hotay & Moo?”
Skylar nodded at Unc but turned to speak to Xander. “Unc is another fan.”
Xander tucked his hands under his armpits and cast a suspicious glare at Skylar. I don’t believe this shit for a second.
Skylar held up his hands and let an intense Unc fill his space.
“I fucking love that manga.” Unc guided Xander down the stairs, and somehow there was no way for Xander to do anything but follow his lead—it was that or trip. “You took over our sophomore year, right? The drawing style was different when we were freshmen. It was fine, but I like the way you draw them better. And you’ve really improved in the last year especially. I can’t wait to see what you do with it next.”
They were in some kind of lounge area now, a huge open space with a bar and sectional couches, plus a pool table and several smaller study tables. And a row of what sure as hell looked like restaurant booths in the back. Unc led them to the nearest sectional, where a spread of study guides and notebooks were littered everywhere—but also a stack of manga.
Including Fullmetal Alchemist.
Xander scanned the stack—volumes five through fifteen—and couldn’t help slide his gaze to Unc. Surely these weren’t his. But then he remembered Skylar saying something about his fraternity brother who read manga.
Oh, shit.
Unc stuck a pen in the side of his mouth and grinned around it, looking like a cat with the canary. “I know, total old school, right? But I can’t help it. I go for the classics when I’m stressed. I’m reading Attack on Titan, obviously, but it’s unfinished, and that makes me anxious when I’m trying to study. I need to be able to close the narrative. Sky told me you had him reading Fullmetal, and I needed to revisit it again.”
Xander could see Skylar smiling knowingly off to the side, behind Unc. He tried to renew his vow to stay icy to this guy, told himself a lot of people read Fullmetal Alchemist.
But not that many read it for stress relief. And talked about narrative closure.
“I named one of my cats after Hiromu Arakawa.”
Unc grinned. “That’s awesome. What else do you read?”
Xander kept his arms pinned to his belly, his gaze on the stack of manga volumes. “I haven’t had time to read lately, but I wore down every copy of manga and comics the Mason City library had in high school, and I bought the Fullmetal box set with Christmas money. I love the way Arakawa-sensei drew the series. She was my gateway into manga drawing style.” He glowered. “But I don’t read Attack on Titan. I don’t go in for the gore and death and fighting manga.”
“Sure, sure. But…you read Evangelion, right? Or you’ve at least watched the anime?” When Xander winced, Unc all but turned into an offended Southern miss. “But…Evangelion.”
“Sorry. Not my thing.”
“Okay, so what is your thing? You can’t have stopped reading entirely. I gotta know what Hotay & Moo’s artist is into.”
Xander wasn’t sure why he was reluctant to confess. Probably because he knew he was three more conversational exchanges away from caving and at least tolerating this guy. “Noragami.”
“Yesss.” Unc did a fist pump. “I knew it. I totally see shades of Adachitoka in your work. But I wasn’t sure if that was me reading into it because both Hotay & Moo and Noragami have Shinto echoes.” He flopped onto the sofa, sprawling with one leg over the armrest, patting the space beside him with one hand and gesturing to Xander and Skylar with the other. “Sit, both of you. I don’t know how far you drove tonight, but it was hella far, I know that much, because I saw Sky Instagram from way the fuck over in Liberty at lunch. You don’t have to talk about that yet, though, because I want to hear more about this manga stuff.”
“He came to see the shrine,” Skylar said as he sat. He did so elegantly, Xander noticed. Xander couldn’t stop tracking Skylar’s hands now. Watching his fingers open and close around things.
Remembering the way they felt, the way touching them made Skylar gasp.
“The shrine.” Unc’s booming voice startled Xander out of his erotic thoughts. “We totally have to see the shrine. I gotta hunt down the key, though. Do you think it’s in Vernon’s room?”
“I don’t need to see the shrine.” Xander sank deeper into the couch, noting it was incredibly comfortable. He could sleep here, until six or seven, when Pamela would wake up. Then he could go home.
“He doesn’t think it exists,” Skylar said.
“What? Oh, now we really have to see it.”
Xander glared at Skylar. Thanks.
Skylar winked at him, and Xander’s body broke out in goose bumps.
Unc was on his phone, thumb-texting like mad. “I’m seeing if Reynolds knows where the key is.”
Skylar tucked his feet beneath him on the couch and leaned onto the cushions, propping himself up with his elbow. “So who is your other cat named after?”
God, but Skylar looked good, lying there so relaxed. “Hokusai? He’s an incredibly prolific Japanese artist who spawned the Western Impressionist painting movement. You know of him, though you may not know you do.”
Unc glanced up at Skylar briefly from his phone. “That wave poster in Bedler’s room you like so much? That’s Hokusai.”
Xander side-eyed Unc, having a hard time believing the guy who really did look like a total fuck-off was this much of an expert on Japanese culture. “Well done.”
Unc shrugged. “I’m sure you know tons more than me about him. I’m what you call a generalist.”
“I do like that painting,” Skylar said. “Though it scares me at the same time.”
Xander tried to shut up, he really did. But it was like holding back…well, a wave. “It’s not a painting. It’s a woodcut, so that’s a print. And you shouldn’t see the wave as scary. That’s not what he was saying.”
Skylar lowered his arm and twisted his body to frown at Xander. “But it’s a tsunami. It’s swamping boats. It’s overtaking a mountain.”
Xander shook his head. “No. It’s doing none of those things.”
Skylar stared at him openmouthed. “It is so. I’ve seen the painting. The print, whatever. I’ve looked at it dozens of times.”
“I’ve seen one of the original prints live and in person, and I’ve written a twenty-five-page paper on it and Hokusai’s other Fuji prints. And I got an A.”
Unc put down his phone and chuckled as he rose. “I’ll be right back. Bedler left the poster in his room, I’m almost sure of it.”
He hurried up the stairs, humming to himself as he went. Once he was out of earshot, Skylar tipped his head to the side and widened his eyes at Xander in silent question.
He sighed and reached for the top volume of Alchemist. “I don’t love him. But I don’t hate him.”
“I told you. He grows on you.” Skylar moved closer, not quite touching, but near enough that Xander’s heart beat faster. Xander flipped through the pages, part of his brain registering nostalgia for the familiar panels, but mostly he was aware of how close Skylar sat. He drew a deep breath and without meaning to leaned closer.
Skylar’s hand brushed his thigh before resting on his own leg. “You can’t tell me I smell like a magazine. I never got a chance to put on cologne.”
Xander blushed, heat spreading from his chest into the trunks of his legs, down his arms. “You don’t.”
Skylar tensed. “If you tell me I smell like vomit…”
“No.” Xander shut his eyes, inhaled again, slowly, trying to put words to the scent. But words weren’t his forte. “I can’t name it. But it’s…you.”
Skylar leaned closer, intensifying the scent, making Xander’s heartbeat quicken and drift into the base of his throat. “Could you…draw it?”
Xander ducked his head, smiling. His jaw trembled, though, when Skylar’s fingers brushed his, sending electricity down his arm, through his veins. “Skylar.” He gasped, shivering and shutting his eyes when Skylar coaxed his hand open, teasing his fingers back. Xander tried to resist, tried to object. “He’s coming back any second.”
He waited for Skylar to point out the obvious, that nobody but they knew touching hands was making out, but Skylar said no such thing. He also didn’t continue his light touches, instead lacing his fingers between Xander’s, as if asking for an anchor.
“He knows.” Skylar squeezed, tentatively, and swallowed hard before continuing. “I can tell by the way he’s watching. He thinks there’s something between us. I don’t know if he’ll say anything while you’re still here—I wish he would, because you’d shoot him down.”
Xander drew back to look at him, affronted. “Why do you think I’d do that?”
“Because of the way he’d do it. He’d tease you, and you’d get grumpy at him—I can’t explain it, you’d smooth it somehow. Or maybe that’s me being hopeful. All I know is at some point he’s going to waggle his eyebrows at me and say, ‘So, changed your mind after all, huh?’ and then I have to either lie or tell him the truth. And I don’t want to do either one.”
Xander stroked the back of Skylar’s hand. “What do you mean, changed your mind?”
“He asked me the other day if I was gay. In a manner of speaking. And I told him I wasn’t.” Skylar glanced at Xander, looking worried, as if this statement would upset him.
Xander wasn’t upset. He did, however, tread with care. “Do you identify with a specific orientation?” When Skylar tensed, he stroked the back of his hand some more. “It’s all right not to, you know. I only wanted to know, so I didn’t misidentify you.”
“You’re not upset because you’re gay, I said I’m attracted to you, but I…”
“There are definitely people who feel they must run around and police the way everyone else speaks about themselves, who think there’s a right and wrong way to be queer and gay and gray and everything that isn’t straight cisgender. Me, I’d rather ignore the arguments and paint, but I do prefer to know how individual people identify, and I try to get it right when I talk to and about them, because it’s polite. Beyond that, I figure, none of my business.” He felt that said it all, honestly, but in case Skylar was still worried… “As far as you and me go, does it matter what label you have or don’t? Does it change something?”
Shutting his eyes, trembling slightly, Skylar leaned into Xander’s side. He tilted his head so it rested against Xander’s temple. “Where have you been all my life?”
Xander’s heart swelled, soaring inside his body. “Pennsylvania. And Art Building West.”
“Found it!”
They pulled away from one another at Unc’s call, though Skylar’s hand lingered on Xander’s until the last possible second, he couldn’t help noticing.
Unc came into the room. “The poster was simple to get to, but I got the key too—in Vernon’s underwear drawer, if you can believe it. The guy has no imagination.” He had the framed poster tucked under his arm as he hustled down the stairs and over to the sitting area, spinning a key on a string on his other hand. “Honestly, if you think about it, he should have given it to one of us for the summer, or Ms. Mary. I never even thought of it until just now. Because aren’t you supposed to keep it clean? I remember them carrying on about it when they showed it to us as pledges. Anyway.” He plunked the poster frame on the edge of the coffee table in front of Xander and Skylar. “I want to hear about this painting. Woodcut thing. Start there. What do you mean, it’s a woodcut?”
Xander missed Skylar’s hand, but he still felt the pressure of it humming against his skin. “I mean that you’re looking at a print. That every version of them, they’re all prints. He drew the designs for the print, then he and his assistants carved the design out of a woodblock so they could print that image en masse. So there are original prints, and then there are prints made from when the woodblock had aged—you can tell the difference by the wear on the edges of the boats, and the color. The color is also key. He couldn’t have done the print without Prussian Blue, which had just been invented.”
Unc sat on the edge of the coffee table. His eyes sparkled, and he grinned. “Yeah. This is great. Keep going. I know you’ve got more.”
Xander could go on for an hour about Hokusai. “He made the print because he was broke. It was part of a series about Mt. Fuji—everyone focuses on the wave, but the focal point is the mountain. And it isn’t a tsunami. It’s just a large wave.”
Skylar scooted forward on the sofa, shaking his head as he gestured to the white tips of the water, to the boats underneath. “The wave is a monster. It’s engulfing the mountain, the men in the boats. Look at them. They’re terrified for their lives.”
“No, look at them.” Xander pointed to the men, pressing his finger to the plastic coating of the frame. “And think about the culture he produced his art in. The time. This is the Edo period. Japan had been cut off from the rest of the world for centuries, but they’re about to lose that isolation forever. Hokusai can feel it. Everyone can. That’s what the wave is. That’s the monster. That’s the terror. But they’re not letting it break them. That’s not the way Japan works. Those fishermen aren’t quaking. They’re hunkering down. They’re going to ride out that wave. And that mountain? This print is in point perspective—which, incidentally, is why westerners love it so much. It’s what we’re used to. Usually ukiyo-e prints didn’t use it, not the way he did. That mountain isn’t in the path of the wave. Look at it again. The mountain is the anchor. I told you, it’s the focal point. It’s the thing that will keep the fishermen, and Japan, stable. This wave is going to come, it’s going to change everything, but the mountain will remain. They will be okay. That’s his message.”
Unc had slid to the floor to get a better look at the poster, still propping it up with one hand. “Holy shit.”
Skylar sat quietly beside Xander, staring into Hokusai’s sea. Xander couldn’t tell what Skylar was thinking. So he kept talking.
“Hokusai is the reason we have the Impressionist painters. His work—especially this print—was exported by the Dutch and seen by the masters we know in the west. He made a print of a wave crashing onto Kanagawa, but what ended up happening was his wave washed from Japan onto the rest of the world, and it’s still cresting. So maybe it was a tsunami after all. But it came from Japan. Not onto it. Fuji still stands.”
Skylar pressed his hands together as if in prayer, holding them before his lips, still staring at the print. “You’re incredible, Xander. You truly are.”
Xander ducked his head, feeling the blush stain his ears. “It’s only art history.”
“You two.” Unc ruffled each of their heads in turn, and Xander held his breath, ready to be called out on their relationship—did they have one, then?—but Unc only stood, stretching, and sighed. “Okay. You guys ready to go see a shrine?”
Skylar rose, offering a hand to Xander. His eyes shone with excitement. “I can’t wait for you to see it. I can’t wait to see it again. I haven’t been down there in years, and we really don’t open it up for anything else.”
“There’s a committee who cleans it, but neither of us has ever been on it.” Unc rubbed his hands together. “Let’s do this.”
Xander followed them, unsure if he should let himself get caught up in their eagerness or not. “I still can’t believe there truly is a shrine. In a fraternity, of all things.”
Unc glanced over his shoulder. “You really are down on frats, aren’t you?”
“He really is,” Skylar answered for him.
Xander glared at them both.
Unc grinned. “That’s all right. We’ll show you otherwise. Starting with our amazing shrine.” He led them through a narrow door down a winding set of stairs into a basement hallway. “Wait until you see it. It’s got the red-gate thing and the whole bit, and the little roof. The pledges hang up prayers too. It’s the best.”
Then it should be on the main campus, Xander thought, but said nothing, only continued to follow. It would be cool to finally see a shrine on campus after all this time, even if it was in a damn fraternity.
Unc fiddled with the key. “Get ready to have your socks knocked off,” he said, and pushed open the door.
Skylar reached around the corner to turn on the lights, and the three of them stepped into the small chamber.
Unc was right. The shrine definitely left an impression.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the one he’d intended.