Kate Sherwood - Dark Horse 02 - Out of the Darkness (8 page)

“Sure, yeah. Or come earlier and hang out. Jeff’s worried that no one’s gonna show, and I think he’s full of crap, but just in case he’s right, it wouldn’t hurt to have some warm bodies around. And, hey, if it’s really quiet we can put you in some shorts out on the street and you can offer free daiquiris to anyone who’ll come inside.”

“Don’t make me regret telling you about that.”

“No, man, you haven’t
told
me about it yet, you’ve just
teased
me with it. You won’t have
told
me until I know every damn detail, until I can smell the coconut oil and feel the heat of your sunburned skin….”

“Fine, don’t make me
refuse
to tell you about it.”

There’s a pause. “Dude, my lips are sealed. Now shimmy your pretty little ass into some tight pants and come down and flirt with me in front of Blaine. It’ll be fun for everyone but him.”

“Yeah, all right. I’m gonna get something to eat, and then I’ll come down. It’s probably about an hour drive?”

 

“Little less, maybe. So we’ll see you in… well, given the crap you eat, probably an hour and five minutes?”

“You’ll see me when you see me, big boy. Talk to you later.” Dan hangs up the phone and looks at himself in the mirror. His pants fit right, maybe even a little loose, so Evan can just perv on someone else’s ass. He heads to the kitchen and grabs a slice of cold pizza, then another for the road.

He’s not really sure what he’s getting into at the gallery, but he’s as ready as he’ll ever be.
Chapter 5

D
AN
takes a minute to collect himself before he crosses the street to get to the gallery. He doesn’t know San Francisco very well at all, had to follow MapQuest directions just to find the place, but he can tell he’s in pretty trendy part of town. Lots of galleries and boutiques, and little design-oriented specialty shops. There are cafes, too, although they’re closed now, and bars that are just starting to come to life, filling up with bored-looking yuppies sipping drinks that Dan can just about guarantee are overpriced. It’s a nice place to visit, but he wouldn’t want to live there.

The gallery is in a two-story building, a sort of split level, with a wide central staircase going up half a flight to the top floor, flanked by two narrower stairways going down to the lower floor. The show is obviously upstairs, with two large doors propped open to welcome people, and Dan sees a couple walking up the stairs. They’re dressed a lot better than he is, the man in a suit, the woman in some sort of flowing pants with a sleeveless top. Dan hangs back, suddenly reluctant. He feels under-dressed, under-prepared. He takes a minute to brace himself, and then hears a voice from behind him.

“Dan? It’s Dan, right?”

He turns, and sees two of the people he’d met at Evan’s barbeque the week before. He hunts wildly for the names. “Jason? And, uh… Liam, right?”

Dan remembers that he’d liked Jason, while Liam had been a bit distant, but on this night Dan’s ready to hug the guy because he’s wearing ripped jeans and a stretched-out T-shirt. Granted, Dan’s pretty sure that these are
artfully
distressed items of clothing, with a sort of rent-boy-chic look, but he doesn’t care too much. The guy’s still wearing jeans, so Dan wins.

Jason gives him the same warm smile that Dan remembers from the barbeque. “That’s right! Are you heading in?” He nods at the stairs. “Oh, yeah, I was just… yeah.” He smiles and starts up with them.

The gallery is an almost industrial space, with dark wood plank floors and stark white walls, and peaked skylights that must let in a lot of light in the daytime. Right now, the lighting is fairly subdued, with spotlights from the ceiling highlighting the paintings on the walls. Dan is barely inside the door before a girl in a dark skirt and white blouse holds out a tray to offer him a glass of wine, and he takes one, more from wanting something to do with his hands than from actually wanting a drink. He looks around, wondering what comes next, and then Jeff is there, draping a warm arm around his shoulders.

“Hey, Dan, glad you made it,” he says softly, and then he keeps his arm where it rests as he reaches his other hand out to Jason and Liam. “Guys, thanks for coming.” He chats with them a bit, giving Dan a chance to look around. He’s not sure what’s going on with the public display of affection; he assumes it must be for Blaine’s benefit, but he can’t see the guy anywhere. Maybe this is just… Jeff. Dan relaxes a little, lets his shoulder fall against Jeff’s, and he feels Jeff give his arm a little squeeze in appreciation.

The gallery isn’t packed, but there are quite a few people there. Some are looking at the paintings, others just standing in little groups, visiting. It’s pretty laid back, really. Jason and Liam are moving away now, smiling at Dan, although he notices that Liam looks a little puzzled, presumably by Jeff’s arm placement. Then another couple appears in the doorway, and Jeff turns to greet them, his arm still around Dan. This is getting a bit odd, now. Surely these people are wondering where Evan is; Dan is starting to wonder that himself. He gently disengages himself from Jeff’s arm and smiles when Jeff turns to him. “I’m gonna look at the paintings?”

“Oh, yeah. Okay.” Jeff seems a bit bashful, and Dan is reminded that this is the man’s first show. It must be a little nerve wracking. “Is there a good place to start, or just…?”

“They’re clustered a bit, but I don’t think it really matters which cluster you start with.” Jeff glances over at the new arrivals, then back at Dan. “I could come with you, but my agent wants me at the door.”

“No, that’s fine. I’m fine.” Dan decides to start by the door and work his way around the room.

The first painting is of a vegetable garden. Dan isn’t sure of the style—the brush strokes are really obvious, giving it a textured feeling. Dan figures that must be on purpose, and then remembers what Jeff had said about just letting his mind go, trying to feel the painting rather than understand it. He gives it a try, but he doesn’t really get much. It’s vegetables. In a garden. The colors are nice, maybe…. A woman Dan doesn’t know moves beside him and gives him a polite smile before turning her attention to the painting, and Dan moves on.

The next one is a bit harder to figure out. He wants to call it abstract, but he’s not really sure what that means. He can see parts of what it’s meant to be. There are trees, he’s pretty sure, and a lake… or maybe that’s the sky. And there’s some dark stuff. He tries to just let his brain go, but it doesn’t really know which direction to go in. PuppetChris suggests that they should have actually taken some acid before coming, and maybe that would have helped. Dan has to admit that it probably wouldn’t have hurt. He’s beginning to get a bit desperate; he’s going to have to say
something
to Jeff about all this, and he really has no idea what. He looks around the room, but there’s still no sign of Evan. Great. He’s really going to….

And the next painting erases all those thoughts from his mind. It’s got the same obvious brush strokes as the vegetable bed, and some of the same weirdly unclear stuff around the edges that the landscape had, but at its center, there’s a horse. And Dan isn’t a preteen girl, he doesn’t moon around over pictures of ponies, but…
this
horse. It’s jumping, although Jeff hasn’t painted the jump, and it looks like it’s coming out of the picture at an angle, as if Dan is standing just off to the side of the jump and the horse will brush by him in one more stride. The horse is reaching, really pushing itself, and Dan can feel the power and strain in the muscles, the surging joy of the jump, the savage beauty of a creature doing what it was created to do. He has no idea about the technical merits of the piece, but he can absolutely understand what Jeff was talking about when he said that the art was about feelings. There’s an intensity and passion about it that he finds almost mesmerizing.

“Guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you like this one,” Evan’s voice says from over his shoulder. Evan’s standing close behind him, and Dan leans back a bit, not enough to be obvious, just enough for a little brush of contact. He doesn’t even realize he’s done it until he feels the solid warmth of Evan’s body.

“Okay, but, damn… wouldn’t everyone like this one?” Dan still doesn’t want to look away.

 

“It’s pretty powerful, all right.”

 

“Does he just paint from his imagination, or does he use models, or photographs, or…?”

 

“Usually he tries to look at whatever he’s painting. Like, that vegetable garden was at this painter’s retreat that he dragged me to.”

“You loved it,” Jeff rumbles from behind them both, and Dan can feel Evan’s body shift a little, making room for Jeff. Technically speaking, they’re all standing a little too close for traditional small talk, but Dan hopes that some allowances are made for artists. Or billionaires. Probably not for slutty stable boys….

“I loved the
food
,” Evan clarifies. “And it was fun getting to watch you paint, for about the first hour. After that I was just bored and getting in everyone’s way.”

“What about the horse? Did you have a model for it?” Dan asks. He finally tears his eyes away from it, turning to look at Jeff and putting a little more distance between them as he does.

Jeff smiles his shy smile. “Hokey as it sounds… I saw it in a dream. I woke up and painted the general idea, and then I looked at some real horses to get the details right.” He looks at Dan as if deciding whether to continue. “It’s my most recent one—I did it just after we came back from Kentucky. After the funeral.”

Dan just nods. “Yeah. That makes sense.” It does. The painting reminded him of Justin since he first saw it. The intensity and passion, the
rightness
of the horse doing what it’s doing….

Jeff smiles a little sadly at him, and Evan looks almost startled and turns back to look at the horse. Jeff’s agent comes over then, shepherding him back toward the door to greet more people. Judging by how busy Jeff’s being kept, Dan supposes the opening must be a success. Or maybe it’s only a success if the paintings get sold. He’s still not totally clear on the mechanics of all this.

He senses a shift in the room’s energy, and turns to look at the doorway. Blaine, Monica, and Amanda are standing there, posing regally as they accept the attention they pretend to ignore, full of the unconscious arrogance that comes from being young and rich and beautiful. Evan moves over to join them, as well he should, and Dan forces himself to look away. He doesn’t want to look at the horse any more, not until he’s got his bubbling resentment under control, so he moves on to the next piece.

It takes him almost an hour to finish his circuit of the room. He makes polite, noncommittal small talk with a few people, finishes his glass of wine and declines another, and doesn’t find any other paintings that affect him nearly as much as the horse did. There are some that he really likes, though. Jeff seems to be good at capturing the emotions of both people and animals, and there’s a great series of Tat playing with Lou, the girl’s whip-like delicacy contrasting with the dog’s sturdiness. Dan looks at it closely and decides that if someone didn’t know Tat, they wouldn’t recognize her from the paintings. It’s more the characteristic postures and gestures that he’s seeing, not her face. And he supposes that Lou probably isn’t too worried about violations of
her
privacy.

He looks around, sees Jeff deep in conversation with an older man who’s gesturing animatedly at one of the paintings, and decides against joining them. He thinks about going back to the horse, but then he sees Evan. He’s talking to Monica, and she’s standing really close to him. That would be fine, except that Evan is leaning into it, and then he reaches out and twirls a lock of her hair around his finger, and there’s a level of intimacy in the gesture that makes Dan’s stomach flip a little.

Dan looks back over at Jeff, but he’s oblivious to the little drama and seems to be really enjoying his conversation with the other man. Dan looks around a little wildly to find something with which to distract himself. He wishes he still smoked so he’d have an excuse to go outside. As usual, as soon as he thinks about smoking he gets a craving, and he wonders if any of the businesses in the area would be so gauche as to sell Marlboros; he kind of doubts it. He decides to go outside anyway. Maybe he just needs a little fresh air. Or maybe he can find someone to bum a cigarette from.

He regrets his decision as soon as he gets through the doors. Blaine and Amanda are already out there, standing on the stairs and looking down at the street. And the bastards are smoking. They both give him strange looks, so obviously Blaine has shared his suspicions with his girlfriend. Great. It’s not so much fun to make fun of the guy when Dan’s outnumbered and when he’s got his own worries about who’s flirting with whom.

But he can’t go back inside without looking like he’s running away from them, and he can’t keep going down the stairs without abandoning Jeff, so he stakes his claim to the opposite side of the wide staircase and takes a few deep breaths. He can smell the burning tobacco, and he can’t decide whether to find some fresher air or try to breathe more deeply in order to get as much nicotine as possible. His subconscious chooses for him, and he fills his lungs with the secondhand smoke.

He hears a throaty female laugh from the other side of the stairs. “Do you want one all for yourself?” Amanda offers, holding out a pack of cigarettes.

Dan would have been sorely tempted if it had been someone else offering, but he’s able to resist this offer. He really doesn’t want to owe any of them any favors. “No, thanks. I quit a few years ago.”

She just laughs again. “Me too,” she says, and she takes a deep drag. He can almost taste it. He asks himself what he’s got against her, exactly. She’s dating an asshole, but he should be sympathetic about that, not angry.

Blaine drops his half-smoked butt and grinds it out, and then nods between Amanda and the doorway. “Let’s go back in; Evan will be wondering where his friends are.”

Amanda just looks at him, and then takes another drag. “You go ahead. I’ll be in when I’m done.” She gestures with her cigarette. He looks like he might be about to argue, but then he just shrugs and heads in. He’s ignored Dan completely. What a loss.