Chapter 5

JORY DIDN’T want to admit how much the guy from the diner freaked him out, but since Mal hadn’t objected to him driving again, he figured he could head toward home without being too obvious. Jory drove back downtown, turning a block before the Black Cat to cross the bridge. An ice cream stand he loved was right at the edge of McCormick Park, and it seemed like as good a spot for dessert as any.

“Ice cream?” Mal asked, nodding to the narrow row of green that ran along the river. “I love this park.”

“You’ve been here?” Jory asked, surprised.

“I paint here. And believe me, after seeing all of the musicians and artists sitting on the sidewalks downtown last weekend, I know how pretentious that sounds.”

Jory pulled into a parking spot and stared at Mal. “I think that’d be the craft fair at the farmers’ market.”

“That was supposed to be a farmers’ market? Because I didn’t see a single vegetable. Of course, I’m a carnivore, so it’s not like I was looking that hard.”

“Why do you paint? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Mal lowered his gaze, looking flustered. “I know it seems stupid when I can just photograph everything with my phone, but I love having the chance to really look at things.”

“Can I see?” he asked. Over the past few hours, he’d told Mal more about himself than he had ever told any guy, and he wanted to know more about Mal in turn. So much of what he said smacked of obvious bullshit, but since Mal was charming and didn’t seem to be all that interested in convincing Jory that any of it was true, he’d played along. But painting was the first thing Mal had mentioned, other than Louise, that there might be concrete evidence of, and he was eager to know if anything about the man was real.

“That depends,” Mal said, meeting his gaze again. “Can I paint you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. We’ve still an hour or so of daylight left, and all you’d have to do is sit there for a bit. I’ll spring for the ice cream if you say yes.”

Jory considered his question. “I’ll buy the ice cream. You got dinner, so it’s only fair. Do you have paintings you’ve done with you? So I know what I’m getting into?”

“Let’s get ice cream first and I’ll dig stuff out of the trunk.”

Half an hour later, Jory found himself sitting in the park and paging through a stack of ancient sketchbooks while Mal bent over another. The paintings were tiny—not the large framed pictures Jory tended to see displayed at tables at the Sunday craft fairs, but what they lacked in size they compensated for in detail, skill, and variety. The first book was the size of a regular notebook, but Mal had filled the front and back of each thick page with four tiny square paintings, each separated from the other by a crisp unpainted border.

Most of them were tiny paintings of New York: landmarks and crowded streets. Some were loose and haphazard paintings that only left an impression of what Mal must have been looking at, and others were so detailed that they looked like surreal photographs. A whole section was nothing but flowers and birds, with a messy scrawl in the border identifying each item, along with the date it was painted.

“These are amazing,” Jory said, glancing up to find himself the subject of disconcertingly focused scrutiny. “How long have you been doing this?”

“A very long time,” Mal said, setting his pencil aside to grab his dish of ice cream again. “You’re right about this, this is good. I never would have ordered it, but it’s delicious.”

“No one ever thinks to order the cardamom,” Jory said, grabbing a spoonful of his melting green tea ice cream. “When you add a scoop of the pistachio, it’s like eating baklava ice cream.”

“It’s amazing,” Mal conceded. “If I wasn’t completely stuffed, I’d suggest we go find someplace that does good baklava, just to compare.”

Jory reared back, honestly offended. “Find someplace?”

“I have become familiar with every pastry, cookie, and sandwich you guys sell. You don’t do baklava.”

“I don’t make it to sell, but it’s easy compared to most pastry.”

Mal chuckled and bent back over the sketchbook in his lap. The light was fading enough that Jory couldn’t make out anything other than a few faint pencil marks. Jory let him focus, flipping through the rest of the sketchbook. There were almost two years’ worth of tiny square paintings between the thick covers, including four small paintings of the Missoula valley right before he reached a few blank pages at the end.

“That’s not people or anything,” Mal said, not looking up from the sketch he was working on. “There are people doing stuff, but they’re just part of the scenery.”

“I wondered why I got a whole page in that one,” Jory said, nodding toward the book in Mal’s lap.

Mal froze, his face flooding with color.

“What?” Jory asked, suddenly worried by the way Mal hunched protectively over his current sketchbook. “It can’t be that bad. Let me see?”

“Are you going to get offended if there’s more than one sketch of you in here?”

“How could there even be one? I met you a couple of weeks ago.”

“Well….”

Jory glared at him. “You’ve been sneaking pictures of me?”

“Just two at the café,” Mal said, grabbing his charcoal pencil and handing the new sketchbook over.

Jory stared at his own face, smiling back at him in thin lines of gray. He turned back a page and found himself on the two previous pages, this time in soft shades of cream, brown, and black. A few details of the café, like the espresso machine and the door to the kitchen, were painted behind him.

“I swear I’m not a stalker,” Mal said quickly. “I paint whatever strikes me as interesting, and I’m interested in you.”

He grinned, folded the sketchbook back to the newest picture, and then handed it back. “I don’t mind. It’s too flattering, but it’s your drawing.”

Mal became sheepish. “Realism is all it takes to make a picture of you look mesmerizing.”

“Cheesy.”

“But true,” Mal insisted, bending back over the drawing.

“What’s New York like?” Jory asked, trying his best to sit still.

“I love it,” Mal said quietly. “Every borough has its own neighborhoods, its own culture. Louise and I have lived in Park Slope for ages. It’s this little section of Brooklyn near the bridge. There are decent restaurants and stores right around the corner, and the park is a few blocks away. We go running, me and her.”

“I can’t imagine that she runs very much,” Jory said, recalling the chubby pug.

“Sometimes she doesn’t want to go,” Mal admitted. “The neighborhood is great, though. It’s gotten all trendy lately too. Town houses are being remodeled, new restaurants are everywhere, and the people are all decent.”

“Isn’t it kind of scary there? All I’ve ever heard about Brooklyn is that the crime rate is high.”

Mal shook his head and snorted. “I like to think I’m scarier than anything on the streets of New York.” He reached toward Jory, gently using his thumb to nudge his chin to the side. “Stay just like that.”

Jory waited for a moment, too curious to stay quiet for long. “How did you end up there?”

“It was as far from Oregon as I could get.” For a moment there was only the sound of the charcoal scraping across the textured paper. “Everywhere I went there, the way I’d betrayed my brother came back to haunt me. Finally I decided I was going to get as far away from the memories, and the members of my family who came looking for me, as possible. And it was the best decision I ever made—I found some great friends in New York, found a nice place, and met Frank and… and Louise. The original Louise.”

“Is your pug named after her?”

Mal’s smile turned sad, but his focus never drifted from the page. “Yeah, she is. I rented a room from Louise a long time ago. Technically, Frankie was Louise, but he kept going by Frank because back then, he had to. Things were different then, and transitioning completely would have meant leaving New York, starting over. Frankie was quiet, kind of shy, but he was so damn handsome. Louise was phenomenal. She was a beautiful, bright woman who lived for jazz clubs and music. Frankie would have given anything to just be her forever. Louise and I went out a lot because no one bothered us when we looked like every other couple. Not that I couldn’t have protected Frankie, because I could have. We made it work, for a few years, anyway.”

“What happened?” Jory asked, not entirely sure he wanted to know the answer.

“Frank joined the Army, his unit deployed to a combat zone, and eight months later they sent what was left of him back in a closed casket.”

Jory reached for him automatically, heedless of the risk, and wrapped his arm around Mal’s shoulders.

“The worst part was that I got to be his friend at the funeral. Just a random tenant Frank would share cigars with every now and then. Times were different.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jory murmured, squeezing Mal’s shoulder. “I can’t imagine what that must’ve been like.”

Mal shook his head quickly as if trying to wake himself up. “I’m sorry… I was supposed to be talking about the city. I guess it’s been such a long time since I’ve had anyone to talk to other than my Louise that I may have forgotten how to make light conversation.”

“It’s okay,” Jory said, pulling Mal toward him into a cumbersome side-hug. “The point of this is to get to know each other, isn’t it? No one’s life is all sunshine and rainbows.”

“Normally, I don’t whine about it. You’re easy to talk to,” Mal muttered.

“It really is okay. If you need somebody to talk to, I don’t mind.”

“You might not think it’s weird, but I do. Sitting here with you, I’d rather think about the future than the past,” Mal said, his gaze shifting between Jory and the page.

They stayed in the park until the last of the light had faded, Jory taking the opportunity to ramble about growing up in St. Louis, and to talk about some of the things he missed most about his last foster home. It had been a long time since he’d had anyone who cared enough to listen, and even talking about something as simple as Barbara’s gingerbread cake, the first thing he’d begged her to teach him how to make himself, made him feel nostalgic and relaxed. He wasn’t quite sure what Mal’s painting process entailed, but Mal focused on his charcoal sketch until he was squinting at the page in the darkness.

“Come on,” Jory said, tugging at Mal’s elbow. “It’s too dark to work on that out here.”

Mal finally looked up at the world around them, pouting. “Damn, the color was perfect too.”

Jory wanted to say that they could always try again, but he held back. Mal hadn’t gotten more specific about why he was in town, and despite the fact that Jory wanted to believe Mal might still be there tomorrow, or even next week, it didn’t seem likely. Mal might have to finish his painting from memory, because they might never have more than this one chance.

Jory helped Mal gather up his sketchbooks and carry them back up the hill to the car. His damn lungs began to ache a third of the way up, and he had to slow down. By the time he made it to the top, Mal looked panicked.

“You’re wheezing,” Mal said, his eyes wide.

“Yeah. My lungs….” He took in a slow, deep breath. It eased the pressure a little. “Pneumonia. Just give me a minute, I’ll catch my breath pretty quickly.”

Mal snagged his keys from Jory and held the door for him, taking the sketchbooks too. When he got in, he stared at Jory for a moment as if he was trying to figure out a puzzle. Jory warred with himself as he caught his breath. Mal drove him home, annoyingly quiet beside him. When they pulled up to the building, Jory swallowed hard. “I know you don’t get sick. You don’t ever get sick.”

“Of course not. I can’t get sick,” Mal said at last.

“And you don’t get hurt either,” Jory said, failing to keep the suspicion out of his voice.

Mal scoffed. “That’s not true. Lots of things hurt.”

“But you don’t get injured.” It wasn’t a question, because Jory already knew the answer. When they’d touched, there was no lingering pain or echo of old wounds.

Mal looked sheepish. “I can get injured, but I tend to heal quickly.”

“No, you don’t. There isn’t a single healed wound anywhere on your body. No fractures, no torn muscles, no scar tissue. There are no signs that your body has ever been damaged.”

Jory studied Mal’s reaction, waiting for the inevitable suspicion and look of disbelief. Mal seem to take his comments in stride, not pointing out that Jory could be wrong or that he shouldn’t possess any knowledge of Mal’s medical history.

“As long as I don’t get hurt too badly, I can heal completely. The closest I’ve ever come to getting sick was getting stuck with ticks or fleas.”

Jory gaped at him. “How do you do it?”

“It’s a little embarrassing, but taking a nap in the middle of a field, usually.”

He groaned. “You know what I mean. How do you not get sick?”

Confusion bloomed across Mal’s features. “I’m no more human than you are. I thought that was obvious.”

He leaned backward, his mind reeling as he tried to figure out how much Mal knew about him, how he could have known, and what his angle was.

“No, you don’t need to do that,” Mal said, reaching toward him. “You don’t need to panic. You could sense that I’m not human when you touched me at the café, I know you could.”

Jory didn’t say anything.

“For me it’s smell, not touch. I knew what you are the moment I smelled you, and I smelled you from outside the café.”

Despite how fucked-up this date had just become, he surreptitiously tilted his head down to see if he actually smelled.

“It’s just your natural scent. And believe me, there is nothing unpleasant about it. That’s part of why I get so weird around you—you smell….” Mal lowered his head, apparently embarrassed.

“What?” Jory asked, inching away from Mal.

“Arousing. You smell like vanilla, and sugar, and cinnamon, and sex—all rolled into one. When you lie, your scent gets bitter, but you seem to get a kick out of it, so it comes together with everything else and makes you smell… lighter? I don’t know. But your fear is like witch hazel and stomach acid. As much as I want to just rub myself up against you, I know that you feel afraid every time you touch anyone.”

“Not you. Not anymore.”

“Why?”

“Every time I touch someone, it hurts,” he said before he could stop himself. He squeezed his eyes shut, wishing he could take that back. “Everyone has an ache or an old injury that they’ve learned to ignore, or they’re fighting off a cold, or they’re depressed. I can feel all of it. Every time I touch someone, it always hurts.”

“But I don’t hurt?”

He forced himself not to flinch as Mal trailed his hand up over his arm, across his shoulder, and to the bare skin at the back of his neck. He gasped at the electrifying contact, so different from everything he’d ever known.

“That’s got to be unsettling,” Mal whispered. “Bracing yourself for pain every time someone comes near you. And just guessing about why I don’t hurt you probably wasn’t helping you relax.”

“You really don’t get sick?”

“I really don’t.”

The flood of sensation where Mal’s fingers were still stroking the back of his neck was quickly consuming his attention. The realization that Mal, of all the people he’d come across in life, was somehow like him seemed to be an insignificant detail compared to the way Mal made him feel. He swallowed hard, his mind reeling at the possibilities. When Mal took a deep breath and held it, he froze.

He didn’t need to ask if Mal could smell when he was turned-on. The glazed look in Mal’s eyes and slight flush that tinted his features made it pretty clear.

He turned to the side, facing Mal head-on, and looked at him. He took in the sharp angles of his face, his dark eyes and long hair a striking contrast to his pale skin. His lips, curved up in a knowing smile, were close enough to touch. Jory didn’t want to let this opportunity go to waste. He set his fingertips at the base of Mal’s jaw, grazing over the dark stubble all the way to his chin. Mal leaned into his touch, gasping as Jory traced the edge of his mouth.

In a flash, Mal’s lips were pressed against his. He wasn’t sure who had initiated the kiss, but Jory quickly got lost in the feel of Mal’s tongue moving against his own, gentle and electrifying at the same time. The rush of excitement shot straight to his groin, making him moan as his cock surged to attention.

He moved his hands around the back of Mal’s neck, tugging him across the center console to deepen the kiss. Mal trailed his fingers down over his collarbone, tracing the neckline of his sweater. Jory leaned into him, hungry for more.

When he pulled away with a gasp, Mal touched his forehead to Jory’s and took a deep, slow breath.

“Do you want to….” Jory panted. “Come finish that painting upstairs?”

Mal chuckled, the sound so deep it came out as a rumble rather than a laugh. “I’d rather follow you upstairs and peel your clothes off, but I wouldn’t mind spending some time sketching you naked.”

Jory laughed, tugging Mal back across the console and kissing him again. Mal kept the kiss slow this time, leaving trails of intense energy behind as he traced his fingers over Jory’s neck.