Chapter Thirty-Three Understanding Aesthetics

I talked to Jasmine for what seemed like hours. Terms and stories flew out of my mouth that I had never thought of before, and there were so many – too many – connections inside of my head to keep them flowing. Jasmine didn’t talk too much, compared to myself anyway, but she was an attentive listener, nodding her head as her blonde bangs swayed. She would occasionally pop up with a question, or a small story of her own, but it was no match to the index of terms that I was building up, and finally spewing out.

As I spoke to the young girl, a flippant and iridescent memory started to make its way to the front of my brain. It wasn’t a memory so much, as another definition I had stumbled upon much like maladroit. I discovered this term completely by mistake while glancing through one of Gerard’s art textbooks. We had been looking for a specific painting, one by Frida Kalho, which was very rare and he couldn’t remember what textbook he had found it in. It had been in the middle of the night, and we had been talking on his bed. Once Gerard got the idea of this painting inside his head, however, the sleep that had been clinging to our eyes was a distant dream and he just had to show it to me. And there was no arguing with Gerard once he got an idea in his head.

I followed him into the living area where he nearly ripped down the entire book shelf with a wild gleam in his eye, handing me half of the pile of textbooks before he told me to get to work.

Gerard kept all of his art books, even the ones he hated, because they brought back memories of the school he loved, and they represented another form of art. Even if Gerard hated the artist, he kept their stuff and it boggled my mind. I would have gotten rid of half the shit he kept on his shelf. A vast majority of the artists he presented me with, I found myself developing a strong dislike for. It wasn’t always because of their work – sometimes there would be a biography of the painter next to their work, or Gerard would tell me any information the book lacked, and a lot of them were just shitty people. Most were alcoholics, drugs addicts, and completely full of themselves. I found myself hating them as if I knew them personally, and flung that distaste onto the medium they used to express themselves.

But Gerard never did that. He refused to do that. A painting was a part of someone’s soul and personality, and yes, they were pompous jackasses most of the time, but that was how they presented themselves. There was a whole world of images out there that a person could manipulate and control and that was what shone through the surface. That was what the words beside them represented about their life. It was the things that they couldn’t control, the parts of themselves that they wanted no one to see that would somehow get out there and onto that piece of art.

“But how?” I had asked, wide awake with not a chance of sleep in my mind for that night.

“There is no how in the things we cannot control, Frank,” he had answered, clucking his tongue in the side of his cheek, still perched over book after book. “They may have not wanted their real image to get out on a painting, but it did. And there is still the issue of being able to see it in the first place.”

Before I had the chance to ask more questions, he began to explain himself, dictating the hidden meaning, even to the artist. It was like Gerard’s words were paint thinner, and he was breaking the piece down bit by bit, until the underlying forces, the artist’s soul was brought through. And no matter how ugly the person they really were, the leftover remaining pieces after Gerard’s own thinly veiled destruction technique was astounding.

There were a lot of artists I liked as people, but just couldn’t fathom their work for anything. Kalho was one of those people. She seemed like a decent enough person, especially given the hard life she had lived, but her paintings were warped. Half of them were self portraits, and none of them were flattering. There was a lot of blood in some of her pieces (one of which she was depicted holding her own heart) and she didn’t flatter herself in her work. Not in the least. She had thick bushy eyebrows – even worse than Gerard’s, which looked like caterpillars crawling across his face on bad days – and instead of downplay her bad attributes, she highlighted them. She made her eyebrows bigger, bushier, and sometimes into one long thing that extended across her brow. I didn’t get it. I chalked off all the self-portraits as an exercise in narcissism, but Gerard had been quick to correct me.

It had been an exercise in bravery. He never could paint himself, he never wanted to paint himself, because he was always afraid of how people would depict him. Kalho was afraid of the same thing, but embraced it. She thought people might make fun of her eyebrows, so she did it first. Gerard really admired her for that, and I began to find myself understanding her paintings (and others) a little bit more with each word he said. Gerard was long winded, talking a lot, but if you heard him out long enough, there would be times where his genius would pop through, and he’d actually teach me something that made my brain stop its thought patterns, back up, and start working in another way. He would point out little details I had refused to see in the piece, and showed me that beauty could exist in everything, even if it was hated.

You destroy the things you love, he had dictated so many nights ago. But you learn from the things you hate. We both had to learn from these artists he kept on his shelves years and years after he had finished studying them, because he could continue to learn. Besides, it was impossible to hate according to Gerard; true artists just didn’t do that. Although Gerard did admit it, he found more flaws in some things than others.

After Gerard had grabbed a stack of books that had listed Frida Kalho in the contents, he handed off half to me, and we curled up on the sheet we had dragged out from his room. We stayed there the rest of the night, his voice high and excited as he talked about this obscure and obscene portrait of a woman with thick brows, poised beside her monkey, looking dignified. He riffled through the pages too quickly, unable to give me a title to accompany that vague description. Even that wasn’t much help, considering Frida painted that monkey a lot, and I ended up being distracted by the book.

I let my fingers run over the glossy pages, surprised that this text wasn’t as worn away as the others. Most of the ones Gerard kept by his side were falling apart, the pages torn and frayed and even falling out of their cracked spine. This one looked brand new and it struck me as different. I couldn’t exactly tell why it was different, other than the thick adhesive glue smell that kept the pages bound, but it almost felt hot in my hands. I had to keep reading it. Its content actually held pictures I enjoyed, a lot of the softer stuff by Monet and Da Vinci, but it contained hard rigid symmetrical designs that I could get lost in by Escher too. I had been transfixed with an Escher piece for about twenty minutes, trying to decipher the copious amounts of stairs and ceilings, when I noticed a bolded word in the vocabulary. It was aesthetics, and it intrigued me right away. I must have read the definition over and over again at least twenty times, completely blown away by its meaning.

Aesthetics was the study of beauty; the branch of philosophy dealing with aesthetic values, such as the beautiful and the sublime. My mouth hung open as I read it, my finger tracing the glossy pages in a repetitious manner. It was so poignant at that very moment, laid out on a frayed sheet with the man I was sleeping with, the dark night air coming through the glass pane of the window we were not allowed to go near. I had the sudden urge to look at Gerard in the moments after I read the definition, and when I locked my gaze on him, I saw the term before my eyes.

Gerard was always philosophical, no matter what he was saying, and it had a complex transition into the real world. But he wasn’t philosophical about movies, books, or politics; he yielded away from those aspects. He didn’t own a working TV, he hated the government, and he barely read anything, other than these art textbooks and random poems in front of us. And yet, he was still philosophical. He was always philosophical about art, I noted, but as I broke it down further, I realized it was something else entirely he was theorizing about. Beauty. Art itself was the epitome of beauty – it had to be. You wouldn’t stare at a painting much longer than a second if it wasn’t visually appealing. Gerard just didn’t stare at art, though – he stared at nature, people, his apartment – anything and everything that could be art, and therefore, could be beautiful. It was always beauty he was bantering about, going on and on in all of its different forms. Beauty had so many forms to it, and you didn’t need to have a TV or read a book to understand them all.

He had caught me staring at him in a quick flash before he changed books, still looking for this ambiguous picture, and paused for a second, glancing over to the book I had placed in my lap.

“Ah,” he had said to himself, comprehending something. “I rarely read that one.”

And then he went back to his search, leaving me with my mouth still hung open.

The term had always stuck with me after that; anytime he opened his mouth to theorize, the definition coming in random strong bursts. Unlike all of the other things that Gerard threw at me, this hit home more than usual. Probably because Gerard was studying something without actually being aware of it. He didn’t read that textbook; he didn’t know that definition. I had searched for it in the other ones, clawing my way through the pages, but it had never turned up. This was the only book that had it, and it was one of the only ones he never read. He did his theorizing all by himself, not influenced at all. It was as if the term never existed before this book, and never even been there before Gerard had been around. Maybe he had created it on his own, and he had already lived part of his dream about being remembered as an inspiration. It was almost as if he was fucking born to do this, to spout beauty and knowledge like it was nothing. And it had always amazed me, especially as I related this to Jasmine.

We continued our talk on the rocks, shifting positions when our legs got tired and sore from staying bent in the same place for too long. I couldn’t help but smile through the whole discussion, the word coming to my mind over and over again. I was being just like Gerard, aesthesis taking over and guiding me. I may not have been born with the talent, but I had certainly spent enough time around him to start to pick it up. And judging from the way Jasmine’s eyes lit up and seemed to cloud over with thought, I figured I was doing a good job. It felt so good to be teaching someone else, to be on the other end of the spectrum and not feeling like a naïve stupid teen most of the time, not exposed to high culture. Jasmine was no expert, but she had a little more knowledge than I did about some artists. I figured it came with being a girl; they were allowed to go to museums and pay extra attention to this kind of stuff, while boys were always shied away from it and were told to be a man. I knew I was probably giving away my sexuality, just from the way I carried on about art and culture, without even mentioning Gerard and our relationship, but she never said a word. She seemed impressed most of the time, her eyes wide and lips always ready to ask another question. And though I knew, as we packed up and started to go back to the cabin, the talk of aesthesis still on the tips of our tongues, that Sam and Travis would bring on the gay jokes fully again, it didn’t matter. Boys weren’t supposed to talk about art, they were supposed to be men and fuck anything with legs. I found it ironic, though, that talking to Jasmine about the specific hue of the green leaves on the tree, and its significance in a work of art, was when I felt the most like a man in my entire life.

When we got back to the cabin, though still entranced with each other and our words, we separated briefly to clean ourselves up. We were still sticky from our ice cream fight, despite the licking and sleeve scrubbing we had done to clean ourselves off. I washed my face in the small cramped bathroom, the water from the tap smelling a bit off. (It was okay to wash with, Jasmine assured me before I had stepped inside, but she took no embarrassment to remind me to never drink it, because of her little experience).

I looked at my cheek in the small musty mirror when I was done, rubbing my finger along my jaw where Jasmine’s tongue had been. Anytime the memory of the deepened kiss we had shared came to my mind, my stomach did a little flip and my blood rushed to other areas. I didn’t like the feeling at first - it scared me, mostly because it reminded me of the first time I had had sex with Gerard. For days – weeks, even - after that first event, and each time I thought of it, my stomach had done the same flip.

I didn’t like sharing the special feelings I had for Gerard with someone else. Those were ours and ours alone. The talk of art seemed to be the only thing that calmed my nerves and thoughts, rationalizing everything as okay. I wrote off the feeling as the excitement for Gerard’s passion, and the excitement for someone finally understanding me. And gradually, just like the paranoid banter, my thoughts about Gerard began to take on a new form.

He was still present in my mind; it was almost impossible for him not to be. Now that I was spouting the same knowledge as him, he too, became knowledge inside my head. He was no longer at the forefront, poking and jabbing me, reminding me that I had fucked him and cared about him. I still felt that way, but those feelings had calmed within me. I was in a relationship with him, and he wasn’t going anywhere. I could trust him. Even though the kiss (now kiss es) with Jasmine had been awkward and, in a way, wrong, I was sure that he would be proud of me for teaching someone else about the art we both loved so much. When that thought came to me, it cooled my blood and I only began to draw on Gerard as an entity, not as my lover. He really did become just the person that taught me art, and I in turn became the prodigy that was blooming in Jasmine’s company. It was for safety purposes, only, I assured myself, and walked out of the bathroom.

I wandered around the house for a while, trying to find Jasmine again. I walked past the living room, and saw just the mere carcasses of teen bodies, wasted and passed out from only one night of partying and drinking. Some of them were awake and talking halfheartedly, while others were splayed on the floor and on people’s laps, breathing heavily. The pile of vomit that I had spotted in the morning was gone, but its smell still lingered. I almost wanted them to start smoking up again, just to rid my nostrils of the putrid odor. I spotted Sam and Travis intertwined on the same couch, the body of the girl in dark clothing, Nicole, situated to Sam’s side. They were all passed out on the single couch, pushing those who had regained consciousness to the floor. Travis was at the end, leaning into the arm, his face almost as squished as Sam’s appeared to be on a normal basis. Following like a line of knocked over dominos, Sam was leaning on Travis, his face buried in his shoulder. I chuckled as I spotted Sam’s hand innocently resting on Travis’s thigh as they slept. I had to fight off the urge to wake them all up, and draw complete attention to the oblivious gay act going on. Though it would have been fun to label someone else’s sexuality, I knew that they would somehow find the way to turn it back on me, and besides, I knew how shitty it felt to be labeled without regard. I was bigger than that; more mature, with still the air of childlike ways Jasmine had given me back.

With the brief thought of her entering my mind (again), she appeared at my side, panting and breathing hard from jumping on the trampoline. She had changed her clothing, to a different set of jeans and tank top – a light red, but not quite pink, and had discarded her hoodie. Her small bare shoulders were coifed off by her hair, falling down them in loose tendrils.

“Hey,” she breathed close to me, making sure I could hear her from the roar of the room. People began to regain their consciousness (but not their willpower) and were starting up the party again. Sam and Travis were still passed out, Nicole just beginning to stir, blinking her eyes open and then doing a double take for the hand positioning. Instead of moving Sam, however, she merely pointed over to the other people who were conscious, motioning and giggling over its meaning. I felt myself beam inside; Sam still got what he deserved, without me degrading myself. I looked back over at Jasmine and felt myself smile inside again. Maybe things weren’t so bad here after all.

“Hey,” I greeted, genuinely happy to see her again. It hadn’t been long, maybe one or two hours at the most, but it was nice to not be left alone for too long. The smile she displayed also told me she was happy to see me, too.

“I want more art lessons,” she teased, taking my hand and pulling me down to the spot where we had sat the night before, against the wall and watched the display of idiots in front of us. I let myself be led, my smile never skipping a beat like my breaths did. When she had placed us both to the ground again, but still didn’t dislocate her hand, she concluded her statement. “We never got to finish.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever finish,” I scoffed, rolling my eyes. “I could probably tell you about art all night.”

Though I talked in a half-serious manner, it was really true. I had spent months with Gerard by that point, just learning and absorbing things. I probably had enough knowledge to teach a full course on the subject. Now that I was expanding and adding to his theories, I could probably talk for years.

“Is that a bad thing?” she asked, cocking her head a little to challenge me.

“Probably not,” I stated sincerely, feeling my heart swell with what I told myself was pride.

I would have never, in a million years, thought I could find someone actually interested in my art babble, especially out in the middle of nowhere in this shitty and desolate cottage. And fuck, I was going to take this opportunity and run with it.

I began to spill out knowledge again, picking up from a random point in my head, when I noticed her squeeze my hand that I had forgotten she was still holding. We had been getting closer and closer as we talked when we were by the river, bridging the inches between us and throwing legs over the other person’s, but we have never actually linked like this before, other than the kiss. It sent shivers up my spine, but when I looked down at Jasmine’s smiling face, I knew it was okay. We were sharing; bonding, like I had done with Gerard at the beginning when we were first starting our lessons. He would always touch me when he talked, lingering close to my body and the canvas I was doing. I had liked it then, and I still liked it, even if it was Jasmine. Sure, I wanted Gerard to be there, but he wasn’t. I was dealing and accepting it, moving on and remaking the scenario I missed. Only unlike before, I found the courage to reciprocate and squeezed her back. When I had something solid to hang onto, I noticed how easily the words fell from my mouth and into the air, making a picture that only we could see.

We kept painting that picture, like we had hours before, only this time Jasmine had a brush, too. She would pipe up more often now, with something other than a small story to relate, or a question for clarification. She’d add on to my theories, which were really only my rendition of Gerard’s. I was surprised at how easily everything came to her; how it just rolled off her tongue so soon when it had taken me weeks to absorb everything and work up the courage to say it all over again. I had always thought that if I spoke my opinions that were parallel to Gerard, I would fuck up and end up representing something wrong. Jasmine, though, she was fearless – unashamed and unabashed. She kept going, not knowing when to stop.

When I brought up Picasso and his views on women, she had gone off on a complete and utter tangent, relating the work that she had never seen, let alone studied, before to her own life and her experiences with her father.

“I’m almost positive I would love Picasso,” she stated once I had told her about the jagged picture of the women with a triangular face.

“But why?” I asked. “He hated women.”

“Exactly, but it has to be more than that,” she started to explain, taking over the conversation. She motioned with her free hand, the one that wasn’t still clinging onto me. “I mean, my dad hated women, too. But, he only beat my mother. Why did he leave me alone? It was more than just leaving me to watch, hurting me in a different way. He wanted to hit my mother, but he inflicted something else on me. I was still a woman and so was my mother, but how were we so different in his eyes? Maybe Picasso was expressing his viewpoint of certain kinds of women, I don’t know. I’d have to see more of his work to draw that conclusion, and maybe if I can find it in there, I can figure out what type of women my dad hated. And then, maybe, why the fuck he did all those things.”

She took a deep breath after, recuperating from her story. I felt my heart ache for her again with the mere mentioning of her father, and found my arm snaking behind her back to pull her into a hug. Though she said she was fine, and the somber nature was no longer in her voice, she still gave into the hug, grateful to have something else to cling onto.

“I don’t know how you can do that,” I said suddenly, my thoughts spilling from my mouth too soon.

“What?”

“Relate paintings to your life,” I said, but it still didn’t sound exactly how I wanted it to.

It was hard to explain, but I just never related paintings to my life. I could see and value interpretations, but I had always been more drawn to what the painter was thinking. Especially when I looked at Gerard’s work. When he painted something, he painted what he saw, or what he wanted himself and others to see. I always stretched my mind to find that meaning, and then saw where it applied in his life. I saw a picture he drew once of his brother, but it was completely out of context. His eyes were too small for his head, and his thick-rimmed glasses too huge over his small nose. It was almost like a caricature that someone could buy at the fair for five bucks, but there was something distinguishing it from that. It wasn’t drawn in the same manner, for the same purpose. It wasn’t for entertainment. The lines were too detailed and serious for it to be a comical description. The piece was for interpretation, like how all his work was, but I couldn’t get it right away. It took me hours before I finally unraveled the mystery.

The picture represented his brother’s struggle to fit into his own life, his own skin, and to see the world for what he wanted to. His eyes were too small to represent how he was blind to his own needs, sheltered too much by the big glasses (that could have represented a big brother) from society. When I had figured out that much, I had stopped, leaving it as is. I didn’t apply it to my own life. I couldn’t see how to apply it to my own life. It was Gerard’s brother, not mine. It was Gerard’s work, not mine. When and if I did paint, I let my life seep into things, but never before or after the fact. It just didn’t make sense to me, and I informed Jasmine of my situation, not understanding how it came to her without thinking.

“How can you not relate painting to your life?” she merely questioned me back, her mouth falling open in a surprised gape. “You’re a painter, Frank. Everything has to relate.”

I shrugged my shoulders; she already had my answer. She scrunched up her face for a moment, studying me.

“Maybe you should look deeper then,” she suggested, an unrecognizable tone coming into her voice. “Or maybe you should go out and live. You know, get a life.”

She nudged me in the stomach, teasing me. I tried not to take offence to it, but when I replied, I could sense (and almost taste) the bitter resentment in my voice.

“Hey, I have a life.”

“Of what?” she countered, coming closer to me, almost face to face.

“A lot of things…”

She had turned the tables on me, making me think about the other side of Gerard. He was my teacher, my mentor, but fuck, he was also my life. I spent all my time there, painting and fucking. But she couldn’t know the other side of the equation. There was no other side to it, at least right then. I may have ended up looking like a loser at that moment for my answer, but it was better than losing him.

She pursed her lips a bit, accepting my response, almost seeming to know that I was hiding something important, something I didn’t want to share just yet. Or at all.

“Maybe I’m not seeing things the way I’m supposed to,” she replied, her voice cool and alluring. She raised her eyebrows a little, mocking some of my statements on interpretation beforehand. “But you can’t expect people to know you, if you don’t let them inside.”

“People do know me,” I countered, feeling her words sting a wound I didn’t know was there. She had started to become almost as philosophical as Gerard, and I didn’t like her overshadowing me so suddenly. I liked us being equal, sharing back and forth and bonding. It was something that I never got with Gerard. I always felt like he was better than me in some ways, because of his age and experience. Jasmine and I were the same age, and hopefully had the same amount of experience (though not necessarily the same type). I liked being equal for once, and I didn’t want it ruined.

“I don’t,” she interjected, her voice no longer taking on a joke-insult format, but a clear and concise need to know.

“You do know me,” I replied, trying to convey my serious tone. Though she didn’t know the full story of everything, she knew a lot more than I had ever let Sam and Travis find out.

“Fine,” she gave in, rolling her eyes at my stubbornness. “But I want to know more. You’re interesting. I don’t know why I haven’t talked to you before.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling a wave of self-consciousness and relief rush through me. “You’re interesting, too. But I don’t know what more I could tell you.”

Or should tell you, I found myself thinking after.

“Doesn’t matter,” she stated, moving closer to me. She paused for a second, feeling both of our hearts beating faster than they should have been before she continued. “Sometimes actions are just as good.”

I swallowed hard, wanting to push her away and grab her close to me at the same time. Just like from before, our legs and hands had been becoming entwined, but with the mention of her very sentence, I had a bad feeling that something good was going to happen.

We turned our heads slowly to look at each other, our eyes darting around the other person’s countenance slowly, debating our next move. I knew what was going to happen, I could fucking feel it in the way her arm was looped with my own, and the way our heads started to move together. I knew what was going to happen, but I didn’t stop it. It wasn’t like before where she had caught me off guard on the trampoline, or when I had changed my objective in the ice cream fight. We were both aware of this, and we both wanted it. I needed it to happen again, even if I knew it was a little more than just bonding, just thanking, and kissing for the sheer sake of it. Everything always had double meanings and I couldn’t fucking escape them.

Before our lips ever had the chance to touch again, a voice with an octave so sharp landed in our ears and tore us apart in shockwaves.

“Fucking finally,” Sam shouted, pitch increasing with each syllable. I felt my heart drop out of my stomach, but I wasn’t sure if it was because Sam was talking again or the distance that Jasmine was now from me. “You’re no longer a fag.”

“I never was one, Sam,” I said through gritted teeth. I refused to look at him, keeping my eyes focused on a distinct patch of hardwood flooring.

“Sure,” he nodded and teased, his voice oozing with pride. “We’ll be the judge of that.”

“Fuck off.”

I didn’t want to be apart of another stupid fight, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I could feel Jasmine’s body stiffen in my arms, anger or fear (maybe a little of both) running through her veins.

“I think you should fuck off,” Sam stated, insulting tone dripping away at the end. “Fuck off and fuck her, then you’ll be fine.”

That was it. Something inside of me snapped and I could feel my male-dominated urge coming out in me. I had sat there and taken all the shit Sam had ever given, not saying a word to defend myself. I didn’t even try to fight. I was sick of being a fag in his mind – even if I was one in real life. I had to prove myself to him, show him that he was wrong, and do something he would never expect from me. And what’s the least likely thing for Frank the fag to do?

Fight back.

I released my arms from Jasmine and began to get up, surprising Sam at my ascendancy. I had never been that forceful with him before, even if I was just standing up and not actually doing anything. I was going to defend my ground, and Jasmine’s as well. It was one thing to make fun of me; I could handle it and I had been for a while. The moment he brought Jasmine into things, it wasn’t cool anymore. She had dealt with so much shit from the male gender, she didn’t need anymore. Especially considering what Sam had said. God, we may have been about to kiss, but that didn’t mean we were going to fuck. His insults were completely contradictory. If I was gay, fucking a girl wouldn’t turn me back. I was gay, so there was fucking females on my mind at all in logical terms. I had Gerard for that, little kisses and holding aside. That was just small and something good friends did. I was better friends with Jasmine than Sam and I ever had been, and at that moment, I knew ever would be.

“Sam, seriously,” I started, my voice clear and concise, not wavering a bit despite the surplus of emotions that filtered through me. “Leave her the fuck out of this.”

“All right, fine,” Sam agreed begrudgingly, but I still didn’t let my guard down. It was too good to be true; Sam wasn’t giving up this easily. A sly smile spread across his face, proving me right.

“I’ll leave her out of this, but you better not stay out of her.”

He dislocated his gaze from my own fiery eyes, to look at Jasmine still sitting on the ground. An animalistic smile spread across his face, and I felt like I was going to throw up.

“Fuck her senseless, Frank,” Sam concluded, letting his eyes wander back to mine again. My heart pumped and I could feel the blood in my temples. I couldn’t believe his complete and utter disregard for Jasmine, and women in general. Sam treated them like shit, like meat to be consumed, fucked, and then discarded like they were nothing. I had seen what Jasmine was like that day, what an awesome person she was. And how strong she was. I knew she could hold her ground here; I knew these insults were nothing to what she had experienced in her own life, but I knew I had to help. It was my way of proving to her that the entire male gender wasn’t a bunch of assholes. Even if Sam wasn’t harping on me being gay anymore, I couldn’t just let this go. I thought beforehand I had been angry, but not I was steaming.

I stepped forward towards Sam, not really sure what I was going to do. I had never been in a real physical fight before, and I knew I was treading on some dangerous territory. Sam was notorious for his fights, because of his goddamn temper that he could never control. He may have been just as big as me, maybe even smaller in girth, but fuck, he could fight. He fought dirty, too. He’d bring out real weapons (he had been suspended from school for over a week for having a switchblade in his locker), find weapons on the ground (like a rock, or even a fucking tree branch) or he’d just use himself – biting hard enough to leave bruises and marks. I’d seen him break noses before, and cause stitches. I didn’t want to get into a fight with him, but I needed to intimidate him somehow. My brain wasn’t thinking properly; I was too mad to do that. I found myself stepping forward again, Sam’s smile only increasing as I did.

“Bring it on,” he whispered, his lips twisting into a sneer at the end.

My logical mind told me that I shouldn’t have been doing this. My conscious told me the same, too – I would only be stooping down to his level. But I found myself walking forward again, my heart nearly beating into my throat. I was about to take another step forward, followed by Sam’s nonchalant movements, when I felt someone grab me by the shoulders and turn me around. I went with a sharp movement, and stared at Jasmine’s blue eyes. They were clouded over, tears threatening to come soon. She didn’t want this, even if she had been the brunt of the joke; this was not what she needed. She had grown up in a house of violence. I was emulating her father right now, or maybe even the brother she had lost, trying to defend something that would only hurt everyone more in the end.

This was a huge mistake.

“Don’t,” she pleaded the words her eyes spoke. I looked at her and sighed, my anger dying down as I smothered it out unnaturally. This was not what she wanted, so I wasn’t going to do it. She didn’t need to witness another person getting beaten, even if it was a small chance that Sam could be the victim.

I walked away.

“Thank you,” she breathed.

I looked at her and only her, hearing the voices of Sam and Travis and some other people in the background, laughing and mocking. I chose to not listen and make sense of their words. It would only anger me more.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jasmine leaned forward and whispered in my ear. I thought she had been leaning in for a hug, which I was readily wanting to give her, if she needed it or not. My hands were at the small of her back, while the one hand of hers that rested on my shoulder was draped down on my arms, interlocking with my fingers. The hug ended, and I nodded to her requested, and she began to lead me in a hurry out of the putrid smelling room.

***

I had no idea where exactly we were going, considering the limit of three living spaces to the cabin, but I figured we were going to the trampoline. It would be good to jump out the anger I felt instead of fighting Sam, and I wanted to see Jasmine smile again. When we bypassed the large object, however, my brows furrowed with confusion. Jasmine glanced back at me, leading the way with my hand still clutched in her own. She noticed my pace had slowed and began to explain.

“The back cellar. Jay closed it off so only he could use it and told everyone that bogus story to get people to stay away. It’s more than just a cellar, though; it’s actually kind of nice. I used to sleep down there, so I could be closer to the trampoline.”

She finished with a smile, tugging and urging me to move. I shrugged and let myself go the few paces before she stopped in front of a small doorway that was slanted into the side of the cabin, leading down. She crouched and undid the combination lock within a matter of seconds, sliding the heavy barricade away. She smiled at me again, a pure innocent smile that I had missed from before. I felt like my mission was already accomplished, and as she took my hand and led me down the dark stairs, I felt the same smile graze my own mouth.

I had never been that much of a fan of dark places, but I felt better having her right next to me; at least she knew where she was going. I felt even gayer than I already was, letting some small fragile girl lead the way into a very creepy space, but I wasn’t going to fight it. It was her house anyway; I didn’t feel comfortable leading.

The lights were flicked on in a matter of moments, and an amber glow washed over the cellar. But it wasn’t a cellar - Jasmine had not been kidding. It was more like an unfinished basement with one large room, and some primary ones around it. It was fucking awesome. There were concrete walls going all around it, boxing it off and showing that it was about half the size of the house that rested on the upper level. There was another floral couch in the corner like the ones upstairs, only this one was far more worn, the flowers peaking up at us looking as if they were dying on the smoke stained fabric. There were a few other things in the room, like a desk and some drawers, along with a lot of bedding, pillows and blankets, but not much else. It was very spacious, making it look larger than it really was. A light hung lowly from the ceiling, and though small, it did a good job of lighting the room. The occasional shadow would dance across either one of our faces, adding to the mysterious quality. Jasmine closed the door behind us, sending a large creaking noise to echo into in the air. It wasn’t too far underground, only about ten steps down, but the chill from the deep earth hit our skin right away, causing Jasmine to shiver. She was still only wearing a tank top, while I had my hoodie zipped up to the top.

“You okay?” I asked, walking closer to her. “You want my jacket?”

She gave me a skeptical look and shook her head, her blonde bangs criss-crossing over her forehead.

“I’m fine,” she insisted, but a shiver still erupted through her body. She brushed it off, rubbing her hands together in front of her face and took a jagged breath in. I laughed at her cocky demeanor, not wanting to receive help for something when she really needed it. She shot me another look, to which I merely laughed at again, moving over to her and putting my arm around her, hopefully to keep her warm.

“Fine,” she gave in, in a mock annoyed tone, clutching my arm back. Without asking, she unzipped my hoodie right down to the bottom, wrapping her arms around my thick torso. “We can share.”

She nuzzled into my chest, and though I was sure she could hear my heart pounding a mile a minute, I wrapped my arms around her, too, pulling the rest of the fabric over her back. We stood and breathed like that for a while, my hands resting tentatively on her shoulders and upper back. I didn’t know how hard I should touch her; she was so strong on the inside, but so delicate in person. I felt like I was wrapping a breakable object with the excess of my jacket.

“This is slightly uncomfortable,” she said after only few moments of us standing in the middle of the well lit basement area. She scrunched up her face into my chest, and I couldn’t help but agree.

Though it was quite warm for both us in there, it was really awkward standing so close together, and yet doing everything I possibly could to keep our hips from touching at all. I pretended to ignore the sensations going on below my navel, writing it all off as the coldness in the room, in contrast to her warm body. Or to the fact that this act in itself reminded me of how Gerard and I used to spend our time. I kept my mind running with excuses - anything other than the truth. Jasmine had been turning me on, and it didn’t help matters when she dislocated her arms from me, only to pull me over to the couch that was in the corner.

“Sit here,” she dictated, dragging me and placing me on the couch cushion next to her, my body to the side so we could look and converse with each other again. The couch was soft and squishy, seeming to swallow my body whole, while Jasmine merely floated on top of the cushions like she was floating. Or flying.

There was a silence for a while, filled up by the odd buzzing noise of the music, the voices, and the electrical equipment above our heads. I could also hear crickets from the outside night filtering through the wooden doors, and finally Jasmine’s shiver was added to the list of noises. It seemed to snap me out of my dazed state, in awe of the cellar and the total seclusion it had, moving closer to Jasmine.

“You want a blanket?” I asked, pointing to the pile where fifty must have been rolled up against the wall, in all colors and textures. She shook her head again like a little child, pouting her lips a bit. Like her actions before, she moved closer to me, sliding her arms around my waist, but this time, balancing herself more gracefully. Our legs interconnected and tangled for a bit until we both found a position we were comfortable with. I held onto her, pulling myself up from the depths of the cushions.

“So, where were we before?” she asked, the other connotations of the statement lost on me.

“Umm, I was telling you that people do know me, I think,” I started, racking my memory past the confrontation with Sam. I looked around the room as I thought, not seeing her face fall. She didn’t say anything, so I went on, trying to prove her point wrong. “Gerard knows me.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said, her voice sounding a little deflated. “You talk about him a lot.”

I swallowed, feeling my body stiffen around her. And I felt her grip on my body go a little weaker. “I do?”

“Yeah,” she verified, her smile waning and her voice lower than usual. “You must really like him.”

Again, I swallowed hard, but I didn’t say anything. I nodded my head feebly, but that was all I trusted myself to do, and somehow, I thought that was too much.

“Oh,” she suddenly uttered, realizing where she had gone wrong. “I wasn’t trying to be a dick like Sam. I was just saying…” She released her hands from my waist, and started to motion with them, trying to find her words, while I laid in quiet anxiety. “He’s your teacher, of course you like him. That kind of thing. You get what I mean?”

She tilted her head and looked up at me, biting her lip to the side. I nodded again, not willing to say much else.

“Yeah… He’s a good teacher.”

“I’m sure he is,” she said, a little too quickly for my liking.

We were silent again, the aura in the room seeming to be getting thicker by the second. Finally she broke the air into pieces with a question. “What’s his favorite painting?”

“Of his own? Or others?” I asked too quickly, grateful for the distraction.

She shrugged her shoulders, telling me either was fine. I opened my mouth to answer, expecting it to come right away, but for once that day, no thoughts came into my head. I was completely blank. Gerard had never told me his favorite anything before. We looked at art piece after art piece, but he never ranked them. He gave critiques and praise for almost all of them, and though they weren’t always perfectly balanced, he never acquitted anything to a specific order. He hated numbers, so why would he?

As I thought more, I begun to realize that it wasn’t just with his paintings that Gerard didn’t uphold positions – it was with everything else. Gerard didn’t have a favorite anything. Not movies, book, or food. Though we had discussed those genres before, Gerard had never used the word ‘favorite’. It was preferences. He preferred the movie Star Wars over something else, but he never specifically favored anything. It was too secluding and ranking, and that was not like Gerard in the least. We may have eaten French bread and cheese all the time, but he would change it up, having feta one day and brie the next. Gerard was never the same. He tried everything at least once…

And that’s when the answer hit me.

“Everything,” I told Jasmine, smiling.

“Everything?” she questioned back, raising her eyebrows. “Everything can’t be his favorite. There is some real shit out there.”

“I know,” I nodded, not fazed by her challenge this time, and almost happy about it. “Gerard’s an artist. He wants everything.” I could feel something strong inside my chest rise and fall, making me feel grounded and whole. There was so much more behind my statement.

“I guess,” she shrugged, turning her attention away again. Her face was close to my own, but for the most part, she kept her head on my chest, looking up at me every once in a while. “So, since you’re an artist, you don’t have favorites either?”

I paused for a bit, furrowing my brow. In technical terms, it did apply, but I wasn’t a painter. I didn’t know what my art, my passion even was just yet. Gerard had told me I was an artist, and I believed him, but there was more to it. It was like intimacy; you never stopped unfolding yourself, you never stopped learning about yourself. I was still looking for the passion I could be intimate with.

“I guess…”

“I know what my favorite picture is,” she stated, moving on quickly with a smile on her face. I nudged her, urging her to continue. “The Mona Lisa.”

“Really?” I nearly gasped.

I knew that Jasmine hadn’t seen as many pictures as I had, but she was still as knowledgeable, especially after we had spent the whole day talking about art. She knew her artists well, but I couldn’t believe she had picked that one out of everything on this planet. Da Vinci was all well and good, but the Mona Lisa, in my mind, was too dull. It was just a woman standing there, not even smiling. Half-smiling. It was too famous for its own good, too. Da Vinci had so many other great pieces of work, I never had a clue why this one was such a big deal. Jasmine was so original herself, I would have thought she would have picked something more withstanding to her needs, especially since she did relate everything back to her own life.

“Yes!” she stated right back, almost as shocked as I was. “How can you not like it?” She leaned back from me, displaying her wide countenance.

“How can you like it?” I shot right back, earning another childish tongue protrude.

“Her smile,” she answered, after pouting for a bit. I raised my eyebrows at her, and urged her to continue. “You never know what she’s thinking when she’s smiling. It’s not even a whole smile, but I’ve always wondered why she was like that. What was she looking at when he painted her? What was she thinking? Was she happy?”

Jasmine stopped suddenly, only to intake more air. She was really getting into it and I had to admit, she was making valid points. I felt my face drop from shock into a placid stance as she bantered on a little bit more, validating her point thoroughly. The Mona Lisa was intriguing, just like she had said. She was mysterious and honestly, when Jasmine was done her talk, I had the very same questions that she did. I had just never been bothered to think about them before. I hadn’t interpreted the piece that way. Gerard came into my thoughts like the chill in the air, and I smiled, his lessons on painting still affecting me.

“I like her smile so much more than my own,” I heard Jasmine add quietly, at the end of her explanation. It perked up my attention, causing me to look at her with a baffled expression.

“What?”

She blushed, for what I thought was the first time since I had met her. It had only been last night, but it seemed like years by that point.

“I don’t like my smile,” she stated again, stifling the hated object as it spread across her face.

“But why?”

I adored her smile; it was what made her Jasmine, the child-like woman who always wanted to have fun. Her teeth were so white and they seemed to be brand new, just like her.

“People always know what I’m thinking when I smile,” she explained, trying not to make eye contact with me. “I don’t like being able to be read so easily. I’d much rather be mysterious…” She let her voice trail off at the end, and I felt her hand move to the small of my back, trailing like her voice lightly.

I was still stuck on the first part of the sentence.

“People know what you’re thinking when you smile?” I repeated her words, thinking they would maybe make more sense if they came out of my mouth. They didn’t.

Though I adored Jasmine’s grin, it was almost as bad as Gerard’s. While I knew that she didn’t have an ulterior motive like he always did when he smirked, I could never tell just why she was smiling per se. It seemed like she did an abundance of it, especially around me, for no particular reason. It was an infectious smile, too, and would spread like wildfire, leaving me to wonder why exactly I was laughing and giggling in the first place.

“Yeah,” she nodded, her tone serious. She looked over at me, taking an eyeful of my perplexed countenance and let out a deep breath. “You don’t?”

I shook my head, causing her to let out another breath and take her free hand to her forehead in an emotion that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. It was aggravation, threaded with the roots of embarrassment. I still didn’t get it.

“I thought I’ve been making it obvious,” she breathed, laughing and smiling yet again in the palm of her hand, as if to hide how exposed she felt. She had been exposed before, but I had been oblivious to that fact. Now that she was telling me just where to look, she felt shamed and wanted to cover up. I knew that feeling of being exposed and bare, and though it was only metaphorical for Jasmine, I knew how to help her fight it. I grabbed her wrist lightly in my hand, pulling the shield she had placed in front of her mouth down. She went willingly, making eye contact with me the entire time as her hand slinked to her side. I blinked a few times, checking over her white teeth and then her blue eyes, but nothing sank in. What was she trying to say with her smile?

“I don’t get it,” I answered after what seemed like forever. She looked at me for a bit longer, chewing on her bottom lip as she thought. She reached forward slowly in the next moment, during which I had blinked, and placed a hand on my cheek, bringing our faces inches apart.

And that’s when I got it.

I hadn’t been a complete idiot beforehand, I just hadn’t wanted to understand what was going on. I couldn’t ignore the sensation of her almost in my lap, the phantom feeling of her arms around me, and now this hand on my cheek. I knew and as she saw the understanding in my eyes, we finished the act we were going to do upstairs ages ago.

My lips stayed stationary for a while as she pressed into me, but my arms grabbed her closer and I began to kiss back. Images of us together, on the rocks, eating ice cream, and sitting in the living area came back to me, just as our hands found each other’s bodies like we had never been exposed to them before. It was starting to make sense why she was always so close to me, why she was gripping my hand, and climbing into my hoodie.

She liked me, she wanted to get closer to me, and wanted us to be alone. She had said this was only about kissing someone for the sheer sake of it in the morning. And it had been then. The trampoline had brought out the best in us, making her happy and making me realize that I could fly if I really wanted to, without being completely ready yet. Even this afternoon, I could have written off the ice cream fight and kiss and something done in the moment and nothing but. I had wanted that kiss; the time had felt right for it.

With this one, though, our limbs intertwined and our tongues soon diving in much deeper than they had before, I didn’t know what this was; I only knew bits and pieces.

This kiss had more to it than just perfect timing. Before, the environments had presented themselves to us and we had merely taken advantage. This time, it was reversed. She had to seek out this basement for us to kiss in, so we could be alone and take advantage of it ourselves. This was more than just an occurrence; it was progressing faster and faster, and was soon going to be too big to erase. It was clear she wanted it, she initiated it, and gave it all away with her smile. Jasmine was confident and strong – she knew what she wanted. But there was still the matter of myself. If I was going along with this, did that mean I felt the same way?

She was in my lap at that point, her legs wrapped around my waist as our lips met over and over again, going from quick pecks to prolonged embraces. Our breath was changing rapidly and I could feel her press herself into my crotch, sending shockwaves up my spine.

This was going too fast, I realized. Too fast without a name.

I pulled my lips away from hers temporarily, but wrapped my hands around her back so she knew I still wanted her to stay. Despite my confusion, it felt so nice having her there, having someone touch me like Gerard did again.

“This is more than just a kiss for the hell of it, isn’t it?” I asked lowly, spilling my thoughts out into the chilled air. I felt her sigh, her breath tickling my face.

“I don’t know what this is,” she confessed, her fingers toying with the hemline of my hoodie. “I just feel like doing it.”

I nodded, absorbing information before I confessed as well. “Me too.”

I watched as her face lit up, her blue eyes sparkling as she leaned down to kiss me again. I found myself letting her, pressing my lips against hers again quickly, then pulling away just as fast.

“But…” I added, sensing her disappointment. I looked at her, then looked down at my hands on her small arms, thinking hard.

Gerard was still present in my mind. I could write off a kiss, I could even write off the amount of careless touching Jasmine and I had been doing the past few hours. But her in my lap? My growing erection? I wasn’t so sure I could bypass those things and explain them as nothing to myself, let alone Gerard. I felt like I was stuck, and the only person who I would have gone to for guidance in this type of situation would have been Gerard. He was too far away – and the person I would be hurting – and I didn’t even know how he would have dealt in this situation, if it had ever been presented to him. He was gay, when would he have to deal with a random occurrence and inkling for a female that he couldn’t help?

And then it hit me again. Vivian.

“But what?” Jasmine asked, perking up a bit.

I looked up at her, my eyes darting around and trying to find the right words to express this, without totally confessing that I didn’t want to cheat on my fag boyfriend.

“This happened to Gerard once,” I started.

“Really?” she asked again, but I couldn’t tell with what emotion.

“Yeah,” I nodded, feeling more confident with myself. “This woman, Vivian. He used to draw her at art school. They were really close friends, and they still are now. They kiss and hug all the time, but they’re just friends. It’s a way of showing affection, that’s all.”

I smiled at her crookedly, chewing on my lip as I nodded my head in conclusion. She matched my countenance, bringing her lips to mine again for a few quick pecks. We started to kiss again, at a slightly slower rate, and I was beginning to think that my explanation had sufficed for both of us. We were just like Gerard and Vivian. It didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything – just that we were really good friends.

When she stopped kissing suddenly, placing her hand on the nape of my neck and drawing our foreheads together intimately, I knew something else was up. We breathed like that for a while, not saying anything to ruin the moment, but I knew something big was coming. Something was going to happen, I could feel it in the chill in the basement air, and in the way Jasmine’s lip quivered when she finally started to speak again.

“Did Gerard and Vivian…” She paused, blinked, and took a shaky breath. “Did they ever have sex?”

I swallowed hard, all of my body stiffening. I knew the answer to the question, and I knew its real life context that it would have. I could feel our hips touching, and I knew I was getting hard. And getting hard for her. She had started to feel me, too, and was rocking into me slightly. I ran my hands up and down her back while she played with my hairline, tangling her fingers in the locks softly. We just breathed for the longest time, our foreheads pressed together, before I couldn’t take it anymore. I placed a kiss over her raw lips, diving my tongue in quickly before I uttered my answer lowly on the tips of our tongues.

“Yes.”

She breathed in deeply through her nose, pulling herself more into my body and nodding into my neck. I had been scared to answer, scared of what she would think, and what we would do with the new knowledge. My fear was still present, but we were both understanding each other in that fear. She kissed me again and again quickly, while her hands started to fall down to my sides. When she caught the hemline of my shirt and began to pull it off, it was the ultimate act of comprehension.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14