Chapter Twenty
“I THOUGHT, IF you were free, I’d paint you this weekend.”
Skylar glanced at Xander from the manga he was reading over his bowl of cereal. “Sure, but I thought you were doing landscapes for your last BFA pieces.”
Xander continued tapping on his phone. He had, begrudgingly, let Unc give him an old smartphone so he could keep up with his social media without using a computer, and had gone with Pamela to a few shows to earn enough money for a minor data plan. “I am doing landscapes. I’m not talking about using you as a model. I’m talking about using you as a canvas.” He looked up then, a sly smile on his face. “I did promise to do a body painting on you, and I think I’m finally ready.”
Skylar stared at him for several seconds, letting the implications of what his lover had just said to him ring through his psyche. Then he closed his book and set it aside. “So you would do what to me, exactly?”
“Paint on your skin. All of it. I ordered special paint that’s not makeup but is kind of makeup-based, in a way. There are a lot of ways to do body painting, it turns out, but I had to search a bit to find one that would still let me use a brush on your skin. Because I knew for you that would be the part you wanted most. To feel me moving brushes all over your body. Marking you with paint.”
Skylar was having a hard time breathing simply thinking about it. “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “How—how long will it take?”
“The entire day. With a team of experienced painters it can take eight to twelve hours. With just me, as my first time, we’re going to wake up, eat breakfast, get started at dawn, and go until the wee hours of the next day. Saturday, Skylar. All of Saturday, you’ll be under my brush.”
Skylar sat back in his chair, covering his mouth. “I don’t…know if I can take that. I mean, I want to, but…”
Xander put down his phone and reached for Skylar’s hand. At first it was a simple touch, but then he deliberately changed it, making the touch the kind that meant, between the two of them, a kiss, then a tender lovemaking. “Trust me to know what you can and can’t handle. I’ve literally been working on this, researching and planning and thinking about it since you asked me for it. The kind of paint. The design I wanted to put on you. How much stimulation you could take. Have you noticed how much brush play we’ve been doing lately? How I keep pushing it, dragging it out, seeing if you can handle the pleasure of lying there, being painted on?”
How could Skylar not have noticed? It was getting to the point that even if Xander was painting for his project, Skylar would glance over, see the paintbrush, and sway on his feet. But… “You mean that was all research?”
Xander’s smile was wicked. “Well, it wasn’t all research. You do get terribly aggressive once we’re done with brush play, and I benefit plenty from that. I can’t wait to see what you do after a full day of it. I think you might turn into the Graysexual Hulk.”
Skylar blushed, but he laughed too. And thought some more about what Xander was proposing. “All day. Wouldn’t we both be exhausted? Cramped?”
“We’d have to take breaks, shift positions. I have a menu planned—things to eat that won’t be too heavy but will keep us going and are easy to grab. I’d ask the rest of the Palace to please be busy elsewhere to give us privacy. Because I want you to be able to be loud if you need to.”
Skylar startled. “You think…you think I’m going to orgasm from it?”
“Maybe. Or maybe you’ll feel emotional. Or maybe we’ll want to blast the stereo. I don’t know what’s going to happen—I feel like this is a powder keg, and I want us to be able to set it off in private. It’s our keg. This is art, but it’s ours. A show for two. And two alone.”
Skylar already felt highly emotional. “That’s a good point. Do you want me to talk to them? You’ve done so much of the rest.”
“Absolutely not. This is my gift to you. You’re the canvas only in this. Your whole role is to appear on Saturday and be painted on. To get good rest the night before. To shower and use no lotions or hair gels, no deodorants or perfumes. To walk out into this living room naked and ready to let me show you, on your skin, all day long, how I love you.”
Skylar swayed in his seat. “I seriously don’t know how I’m going to survive this. I’m weak-kneed and you’re just talking about it. And you want to do this all day?”
“Yeah.” Xander’s grin was almost feral. “I’m so excited. There’s literally nothing you could suggest to me that would be better to do with my Saturday.”
Skylar knew better, but the little doubting part of him decided to test him anyway. “Not even if I said I wanted to spend it fucking you?”
Xander only raised an eyebrow. “One, I’d call you a lying liar who lies, because you would never want to do that. Second, sorry, but that’s boring. Headfucking is so, so much more fun.”
It was what Skylar had expected him to say, wanted him to say, and yet…so much more casual and confident than he’d ever dreamed. “You really don’t mind, do you?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you that for some time now. I’ve been showing you that, in fact.” Xander ran a finger down his nose, then booped the tip. “But it’s all right. You don’t know how to see through to what people are saying with their hearts. You’re too conditioned to only hear the words and the promises they make with their mouths. You were overly social when I met you, but you’re properly antisocial now. I fixed you up just like I wanted you, Galatea.”
Skylar caught his hand, kissed it. “Oh? Was that painting a cunning trap for me, then?”
“Yes. I put it out every night to catch myself a man to take home and make into an image I prefer.”
“How lucky for me, then, that I happened to come by.”
“No. The lucky one was me.” Xander laced their fingers, teasing his thumb as he rose. “Saturday morning?”
Skylar’s heartbeat skipped a beat and quickened its pace. “Saturday morning.”
The rest of the week, Skylar could barely focus, thinking of what was to come. He tried a few times to help Xander prepare, but he was apparently quite serious that Skylar would do nothing but arrive with his naked skin and his anticipation.
The only thing that dimmed Skylar’s prospects for the weekend was the phone call he received from his father on Friday morning, the one he’d been dreading. He didn’t answer it, even though he’d had his script all ready. That had been Xander’s advice, once they’d set the date for the body painting: don’t let his parents or any other nonsense from what Xander kept calling his past life get in the way of his upcoming pleasure. This included ignoring pressure from Delta Sig to explain why he had, for all practical purposes, moved out, and why he never attended Greek functions. He even left unopened an email from Ellen with an update on Marie, one he was fairly sure had something about an engagement in the subject line. Xander said he’d noticed Skylar was often sad after he read emails from Ellen, so no emails of any kind, not even Ellen’s, were allowed.
“Nothing exists this week but your schoolwork and your upcoming session,” Xander told him. “Keep my canvas clean, please.”
Skylar did his best.
They had set up candles for Benzaiten in a makeshift home altar—it wasn’t a proper kamidana, the Japanese Shinto home shrine, as it wasn’t in the right place and it was too low, but Xander pointed out they really weren’t Shinto anyway. “Form new straight lines,” he said, and so they designed the altar the way that suited them best and created their own sacred path to their goddess.
Skylar’s path was to brew her a cup of tea every morning when he made his own. He did it one day as an act of fancy, but it felt right, so he kept doing it. He was shy about it at first, thinking Xander would laugh, but Xander said it was a good idea and got him some incense as well, and said he’d be sure to keep the tea she liked in stock if he wanted to keep doing it.
Skylar said he did, and he thought Benzaiten liked jasmine, the same as he did.
So he made his tea, ignored the distractions, and kept Xander’s canvas clean. He wished, as he went to bed on Friday night, feeling eager but light and unburdened, that he could stay this way. That he didn’t have to pick up his troubles again on Sunday morning. That he could always be Xander’s canvas and nothing more.
Xander woke him at six.
“Time to eat. I’ve made your breakfast.”
He hadn’t simply made Skylar breakfast. He’d brought it to him in bed, on a bamboo tray Skylar hadn’t known he had.
It turned out he didn’t have it—it was Pamela’s, and he’d borrowed it for the day. But it was lovely, and so was the breakfast. Scrambled eggs, toast, sausages, and his jasmine tea.
“I put some out for Benzaiten already.” Xander fed Skylar a bite of toast and wiped the crumbs from his mouth with a napkin. “I gave her some eggs and toast too, and I asked her to be with us today.”
Skylar laced their fingers briefly as he chewed. “Thank you.”
“Finish your breakfast, then go get showered. You can come out in your robe, but of course you’ll take it off right away. No sock this time. I’m painting everything.” He kissed Skylar’s forehead. “I’m going to go get ready.”
Skylar was practically vibrating with excitement, but Xander had already gone into Serious Painter Mode, so focused he was only partially present. It always turned Skylar on, but it was going to be different, he reminded himself in the shower, to have that fully aimed at him.
When he entered the living room, he found it transformed. The furniture had been pushed back, except for the stool Xander always used for sittings, the stool he sat on while he painted, and the ottoman, which he’d covered with a canvas drop cloth. Xander himself wore his usual T-shirt and sweatpants, and his painting apron. He had his brushes—all Skylar’s favorites—set up on his little rolling table, but the paints lined up beside his plastic palette were not ones Skylar had ever seen before.
“Come on over.” Xander waved Skylar to the stool. “We’re going to start with your feet and legs, though I might not finish them first. I’m going to jump around a lot. And anywhere you have body hair it’s going to be abstract, because the hair will be part of the painting. I could have had you shave, and I know you would have, but I didn’t want to, stylistically. Your hair is part of you, so it’s part of your canvas. Anywhere you’re smooth, though, or the hair is short enough I can work with it, I’m going to do specific scenes.” He rested a hand on Skylar’s hip, making him startle then blush as Xander focused on his groin, as if he could see through the fabric of the robe. “I’m painting you everywhere. Your abdomen. Your groin. Your penis. Your inner thighs. Your ass. Everything.” He looked up at Skylar, his penetrative stare making Skylar blush harder. “We’ll wait for that. But remember, no one is around. Pamela took them to a hotel for the night, her treat. So you can have whatever reaction you want when we get to that part.”
Skylar ran a hand through his hair, wondering how he was going to survive this. “What about you? What kind of reaction will you have?”
Xander smiled, some of his intensity fading. “Well, for me, I think this is a lot like how you get off on enjoying doing things to my body. You and I, we take our turns. Today I’m the one giving the pleasure. But this is still great for me. It’s just a different kind of great. An artist’s great.” He stroked Skylar’s beard, the gesture tender. “Are you ready, canvas?”
Skylar squared his shoulders. “Yes.”
“Then take off your robe, sit on the stool, and when I come up to you, give me your right foot.”
Skylar had disrobed for Xander dozens of times, but nothing had ever felt more intimate, more intense. It was more than simply that he’d never had his whole body exposed, more than missing a sock. It was knowing what was coming. That anticipation combined with everything else—when he sat on the stool, when Xander rolled up to him on a shorter one and motioned for his foot and applied the tiny brush to his skin—Skylar was ready to fly to the ceiling.
The brush came, the paint slid across his foot, cool and slick, a tiny line of bright white from his big toe and winding like a vein to his shin.
Skylar let out a breath.
Xander glanced up at him, smiling, then went back to his work, snaking another line from the pinky toe. “Feels great, doesn’t it? I practiced on myself to get a feel for how it would go. Wait until you get a lot of it on you and it dries. It’s like having extra skin. It moves with you. But when you get it wet, such as with too much sweat, it washes away. Magical stuff, this.”
He kept painting thin white lines all over Skylar’s foot, until it was nearly all white, except for thin patches of bare skin that peeked out between the vines. “What is it going to be?”
“You’ll have to wait and see for that. And you will indeed have to wait, because this needs to dry.” He put Skylar’s foot on the floor and tapped his left leg. “Pop the other one up here.”
He gave the same treatment to this foot, except its winding lines were blue-black. The working theme seemed to be that Xander was laying a foundation in certain sections, because after the feet he moved on to the shoulder caps, and the back of Skylar’s neck, and his hips, and his knees, and the underside of his chin. He used all different colors, sometimes a multitude of them at once. Once those sections were done, they stopped for a break. To Skylar’s shock, it was already almost ten.
“You’ve hardly painted anything, and that much time has passed?”
“That’s why we had to start so early.” Xander passed him a plate of cheese and crackers and a glass of water. They were seated with Skylar on the ottoman and Xander on a folding chair now, Skylar with a small towel of modesty over his lap, though he had a feeling before long he’d be giving it up.
“Do you think we’ll be done in time?” Skylar asked him.
“There’s nothing we have to be in time for. We can take until four in the morning. Six in the morning. And we might. I have coffee, tea, energy shots—you can doze if you need to. But I think it might start going faster here soon. There are sections where I’m going to layer on paint.” He offered Skylar more water. “Oh, and I should tell you. You’re a painting in two stages. There’s going to be one painting, and then I’m going to wash that off and do a second painting. I had to get creative to make that work, but it was pretty integral to my vision, so I pushed until I could figure it out. That’s what took me so long. Otherwise I could have been ready last weekend.”
Skylar’s heart was beating fast again. “Okay.”
Xander dusted his hands off. “All right. Are you ready to go back in?”
The next section did go faster, and by noon a majority of Skylar’s body had been painted in large blotches of color, though not all. Skylar was highly aware Xander had left his ass, groin, stomach, chest, forearms, and inner thighs untouched.
After a late lunch and a trip to the bathroom, that changed.
Xander had put on what appeared to be random albums on his stereo prior to this point, his indie bands and retro funk he loved so much, but now he played a playlist on Spotify that was all instrumental, and it seemed designed to put Skylar into a specific mood. It was, honestly, a little melancholic, yet still strangely sensual. Which made him tremble when Xander had him rest his hands on the edge of the kitchen counter, bend at the waist, and spread his legs so he could paint his backside and between his thighs.
“I’m going to talk to you while I do this,” Xander said, “because this is pretty intimate.” The brush trailed the line of his buttock, inside to his thigh, down to his knee. “It’s going to get more intimate as we go on here, but the most difficult part won’t be this, though you’ll think that at first.” A paintbrush touched the area just below Skylar’s anus, making him gasp. “This is conditioning. This is the world telling you this is invasive. And funny enough, of the two of us, I’m the one who should be excited to see you naked and vulnerable. Part of me is, I suppose. But right now, you truly are canvas to me. I’m thinking about putting paint on you, not my mouth or my hands. And as we have discussed at length, I wouldn’t do that to you. Not without a lot of conversation and consultation.” He kept painting, running brushes across all of Skylar’s most intimate areas, places even he hadn’t seen. “Do you know, I like this better, sometimes? That this is how I get intimate with you, with my brushes and my art? I wouldn’t have known to wish for that. But I love it so much. The same way I love you.”
Skylar trembled, feeling dizzy. “I love you too.”
It aroused him, being painted like this. More than he’d dreamed he could be. Some of it was the touch. Some of it was that it was Xander doing the touching. Some of it was nothing more than stimulation. Some of it was the surrender. Some of it was beyond his ability to understand how and why—maybe it was that this way, today, in this circumstance, he found everything sensual and sexual, that this was sexy to him. He didn’t know, and he didn’t have to know. He simply got to feel.
When Xander turned him around, for a moment he was embarrassed of his erection, but of course Xander wasn’t—he smiled at it, winked at Skylar, laced their fingers briefly, then continued to work. And as he had warned Skylar, it was different.
It was different, Skylar realized, because he could see, and because unlike the other parts he’d been able to watch Xander paint, this part he could tell some of what Xander meant to convey.
First Xander used a fan brush and drew intense, distinct lines of bright-red paint from the crease of Skylar’s groin out to the sides of his thighs. This paint covered other paint in places, abstract whorls and streaks of colors on his legs—the red by contrast was sharp and defined, and thick whereas the other had been thinned out. To drive the point home further, Xander used red deepened with black to cast shadows on the other lines of red. While this dried, he took a flat brush dipped in black and approached, resting his hand on Skylar’s abdomen as he began to paint his balls.
Xander bit his lip and glanced up at Skylar. “I’ll confess. This part gets me going just a little.”
Skylar had to shut his eyes, and he gasped against the sensation. “It’s…hard for me to do anything but get going.”
“Do you mind?”
He shook his head. “It’s fine.”
“It can be more than fine. If you want to enjoy it, you can. Make noise if you want.”
He did have a bit of an urge to pant, to tug on Xander’s hair—that was new. “I won’t come, though. That I know.”
“I know that too—you seem to think I’ve been somewhere other than on the other end of this paintbrush when we play together. Shout, though, if you like. Do what pleases you. This is your moment.”
“I want…I want to pull your hair.”
What actually pleased Skylar was the way Xander appeared surprised when he said that. A little abashed too. See, you don’t know everything. “Ahh…sure. This next bit is all rough work, and I’m basically going to be worthless until I’m done painting your junk, so…yeah. Let’s ride.”
Skylar got pretty hard while Xander painted his cock and balls—every inch of them was covered in dull black, which seemed a little creepy and strange, but he wasn’t the artist, and anyway, brushes on your dick felt good. They’d stayed away from genital play, but Skylar was putting that front and center on the menu from now on. Along with hair pulling.
Skylar didn’t yell, but he did gasp, and whine through his nose, and breathe very, very heavily.
They took a break after that, though the break also consisted of the two of them nuzzling, Skylar rubbing his beard along Xander’s neck and cheek, Xander panting against his chin. Their fingers laced, unlaced, trailed along wrists, danced together until they were in danger of abandoning their project and simply making out.
“I’ve got to get it together before I paint there the second time,” Xander murmured as they went back to their positions.
“You’re doing that again?” Skylar was going to die. Seriously going to expire before this was finished.
“Yes, but it will be different. You’ll see.”
Next Xander had him sit on the stool—his ass painting was dry now, and it wouldn’t smudge, Xander said, unless he started sweating, and Xander had a million fans blowing on him and a cool pack under his tush. Now Xander painted his chest, and his abdomen, and his arms.
It took all afternoon and well into the evening, and it was something else.
The painting reminded Skylar of one of those Renaissance or medieval ones where there were a million people and just as many things going on—the ones with angels and devils and priests and cows and birds and shopkeepers and all kinds of odd details. Skylar didn’t have any of those things…except he did. He had drunk fraternity brothers and sorority sisters hanging on each other and stripping their clothes off one another. He had a herd of lawyers severing each other’s heads and ripping off ears and arms as they fought to get to a cold, gleaming tower made of fire that had a gaping demon at the top where all the lawyers leapt blindly into its mouth. He had what looked eerily just like one of his mother’s beach party fundraisers, except the lobsters and the clams were climbing out of the ocean and carrying their roasted brethren away to burn them on funeral pyres, leaving burning coals in their places, and the party guests had no idea. They were zombies anyway; they couldn’t notice a thing.
It was at this point Skylar started to cry.
Xander saw the tears, and with a gentle expression that said he’d known this was coming, passed him a tissue. “It’s all right. I promise, this is just one phase. Remember, there are two parts to this painting.”
“It’s okay.” Skylar wiped the tears away, glad Xander hadn’t gotten to his face yet. “I see where you’re going with this. And it’s hard but…it’s healing.”
“I’m not really saying anything. That’s not the kind of art I do. I paint and draw what I see.”
The tears kept coming. “I wanted you to be a part of this. I kept trying to sell you this. No wonder you ran screaming. I’m just glad you didn’t run screaming from me.”
“This isn’t how I saw you, ever. This is the canvas behind you. You’re still coming.” He pressed a kiss, careful to keep it dry, to Skylar’s painted hip. “Let me know if you need to take a break. Otherwise I want to keep going.”
“I want to keep going too.”
Xander filled Skylar’s torso with scene after scene of what had been his life. His absent parents. The people who demanded he perform for them. It shook him, gutted him—and then, as if reading his mind, Xander painted just that. Skylar, in the center of all of it, down his sternum and over his own heart and solar plexus, wearing a suit and smiling his Silver Stone smile, his guts emptied out across his body. Streaming into the hands of everyone surrounding him. Joining that red stain on his thighs. Constricting his blackened genitals—which weren’t aroused at all. Not anymore.
“Is this how you see me?” Skylar could barely whisper. His heart felt like lead. He couldn’t stop staring at himself. In horror.
“This is how you were, I think, when I met you. I couldn’t see it all at the time. I could see this, though, the night we went to the fundraiser. This is what you showed me in the car. Except you didn’t smile anymore, no more fake, plastic Skylar. I saw the real you, the one that had been flickering underneath.” He started to paint on Skylar’s forearm, a laughing Skylar like the one beneath the cherry blossoms. Then he painted another Skylar on the other forearm, but this one was pained, broken, sobbing. “That night I saw everything. I knew who you could be. Who you were trying to be. And I saw how it was killing you.”
“Xander.”
Xander kept painting—the blotches across Skylar’s body from before became, with slashes and dots, the lines of a suit, except with so many colors and with that nightmare on his chest, it was a rotten suit, as if he were a zombie too, decaying flesh. It was incredible how much it looked like a three-piece suit, complete with tie, had been put on him, front to back and all around, including shoes, but it made Skylar feel sick even before Xander declared the first part of the painting finished and put him in front of a set of mirrors so he could see it.
Skylar didn’t want to see it. “Take it off,” he whispered. “I hate this. I hate who I am.”
“This isn’t who you are,” Xander said, “and you know it.”
Skylar did, actually. The sick feelings twisted, turning to rage. New tears came, but didn’t fall. “I hate what they made me,” he whispered.
Xander undid one of Skylar’s fists, held his hand. “Say it louder. Loud as you need to.”
“I hate what they made me.”
Skylar stared at the mirror, at the horrible images, at the rotten suit. He clenched Xander’s hand tight.
He screamed.
He sobbed.
He slammed his fist against the mirror so hard that it cracked.
“Go on,” Xander said quietly. “Just don’t hurt yourself. I bought spare mirrors.”
Skylar looked at himself and Xander in the cracked mirror, and the wind went out of him. He simply cried.
“I hate what I let them make me. What I let them convince me to make myself.” He buried his face in Xander’s shoulder. “I don’t want to be this anymore.”
Xander kissed his temple, stroked his hair. “You aren’t this. You were never this. I want to paint you now as I see you—I’ve done that a million times, but I realized I needed to do this first. To show you what I see other people trying to paint on you first. Because I think you keep trying to cling to this vision instead. Even though I think you’ve hated this for a long, long time. I wanted you to see it the way I saw it before you saw what I see you as. This isn’t who you are, what you are. This is the suit they put on you. And yes, let’s wash this nonsense away.”
He kept Skylar in front of the mirrors as he worked, and he gave him another plate of food—a sandwich this time, and a cup of jasmine tea, along with more water and some fruit. While Skylar ate, Xander took a sponge and wiped his hard work—hours and hours and hours of it—away. Some of it remained, little echoes and smudges, but the lion’s share of it was gone. Skylar was glad, but blown away as well.
“All that work, just vanished.”
Xander smiled and shrugged. “It was never going to stay. This next one won’t either.”
“But you didn’t even take a photo.”
“Did you want to remember any of that? Or rather, do you think you can forget it?”
Skylar shuddered. “No.”
“This one, I might take a photo of. But probably not. I like the idea of impermanence. That the painting is only for us and this moment. Besides.” He smiled at Skylar. “I think we’re going to be doing this again.”
Skylar smiled back at him. “I think you’re right.”
This time when Xander began to paint, he used a thick, flat paintbrush, the one he used to prime his canvases. He was doing that now, it turned out—dipping into a vat of what Skylar had thought was white paint, but when it went onto his body, especially as it picked up the colors left over from before, it turned out to be…
“Gray?”
Xander nodded. “Yes. It worked out to be exactly the background color I needed, but…well, I appreciate the other echoes it gives my canvas too.”
Skylar had the feeling he was going to be crying again.
He didn’t right away. Mostly he marveled at how odd he looked with his body—whole body, neck and face and ass and balls and dick and thighs and toes and fingers and every single part of him—painted gray. As if he were a shadow or a ghost. They took another break then because Xander said it had to dry before he could go further. Xander smiled at him a lot now, Skylar noticed. As if it was getting harder for Xander to see him simply as a canvas.
Even though he literally looked like one right now. Even though he wore nothing but a sheet of boring gray. Somehow boring wasn’t at all what Xander saw.
He didn’t stay that way, though. First, black lines shot up from his feet, all around him—initially Skylar thought they were vines, but soon it became clear they were the trunk and branches of a tree. Then things began to grow on that tree. People, to start. The Shichifukujin, in various incarnations and occupations, and then their own seven gods, and the Palace of the Sun. And Fudō Myōō and Xander. Skylar and Xander together, everywhere—working on the anime, lying together in bed, Xander painting him, cooking together, walking together. A section represented their courtship, Skylar luring a cranky Xander out into the light. Then Xander luring Skylar out of his suit.
A number of places showed Skylar standing innocently, talking to Pamela or someone and Xander watched him, from the shadows.
Skylar laughed a lot in these scenes. He was happy. He was always helping people too—a whole section depicted him playing hero to the art majors as they gazed at him adoringly, and Xander glowered jealously on the sidelines. That made Skylar laugh in real life. There were so many scenes of him helping people. He was Mr. Friendly, according to Xander.
This was such a better painting.
This was how Xander saw him?
This was beautiful.
This is who I want to be instead.
“I love this,” Skylar said as Xander cleaned his brush.
“Oh, I’m not done.”
Xander got out a small round brush and reached for the pink.
He began to paint delicate, beautiful cherry blossoms all over Skylar’s body.
There was writing too—Xander explained each kanji to him, that they meant he was magnificent, sensitive, sensual, artistic, charming, loyal, steadfast—he lost track of the words, because while they were wonderful and the script breathtaking, it was the blossoms that did him in. He sees me as a cherry tree. A blooming, beautiful cherry tree.
Skylar sobbed.
“I love you,” Skylar cried, trying not to spill tears because Xander was painting cherry blossoms across his face.
“I love you too, my sakura.”
Skylar had watched enough anime to know that one. “Cherry blossom.”
Xander kept painting. “I’m nearly done. Then you can get a look at yourself. I’ll bring out the new mirror so you can see everything, all the sides. Do you want a photo too?”
Skylar shut his eyes, shook his head. “No. Because it can’t ever match the memory. Nothing will ever be like this moment except for this moment.”
Xander put down his brush, removed his apron, and took Skylar’s hands in his. “I don’t want to overcharge an already emotional day, but I need to tell you…I want all the moments with you, Skylar. Wherever you end up next year, whatever you decide to do, I want to be there with you.”
Skylar could barely breathe. He squeezed Xander’s hands as tight as he could. “But…you have graduate school.”
“The world is full of graduate schools. If I’m good enough, I can get into any of them.” His thumbs rubbed the inside of Skylar’s wrists. “But there’s only one Skylar Stone.”
“What if…what if I told you I wanted to be a teacher?” He drew a breath, let it out. “In Japan.”
Xander’s eyes widened. Then he smiled. “Really? Are you serious? Sugoi.”
“That’s…wow, right?”
“Yes. We’re going to have to up your language practice—and mine.”
Skylar ducked his head. “Well, it’s just an idea. And I wouldn’t want to put mine over your grad school.”
“It’s not just an idea. I can tell by the light in your eye. You’ve been thinking about it and working your way up to admitting you wanted to do that.”
“Will it work? I mean, I know Pamela said she knew of ways it could be done, but…does Japan even want someone like me? All kinds of people speak English. Probably a lot of people who already know some Japanese. What if I can’t learn Japanese? You’ve taught me some, but not much, and I can’t make the alphabet mean anything no matter how I stare at it. What if I can’t, ever? What if—”
Xander pressed fingers to his lips. “Hush. First of all, I don’t know anything about how many people try to teach English in Japan, but I will say I bet it’s competitive. However, I also know you are unparalleled at meeting the challenge of that sort of thing. You can be pretty damn charming when you want to be, and I bet you kill at interviews too. But what matters at the end of the day is that you’re willing to do the work, especially when it’s something you believe in. And I’m here to help you. So is everyone.”
Skylar’s heart skipped a beat as he asked his next question. “Would you go with me, though? All the way to Japan?”
“All the way to the sun, if that’s where you said you were going.” He kissed Skylar’s fingertips. “Let me go get you your mirror.”
He got the mirror, replacing the cracked one. Then they stood together, the artist and his canvas, and admired the view.
“I’m beautiful,” Skylar whispered, clutching Xander’s hand.
Xander laced their fingers together. “Yes. You really are.”