Chapter Forty-Five Recapturing Freedom

I woke up with Gerard’s lips on mine. The stale and bitter existence of morning was still working its way through my system, preventing me from reacting at first. He continued to press against me until my eyelids begin to flutter open in the amber light. When I saw the face of the man I had come to love, and love a fucking whole lot, I kissed back readily. My hands, though tangled and stiff under the thin sheets from his bed, worked their way through and slinked over his bare shoulders, and up through his hairline. I kept him in place as our tongues entered each other’s mouths. There was no bitter aftertaste left from sleeping in his mouth, only a cool refreshing tinge, so I had assumed he had gotten up long before me. I felt myself swell inside, knowing that even if he had gotten up first (something that always happened with his erratic sleeping patterns) he had come right back, slid under the blankets, and placed his warm naked skin against my own.

I loved it when Gerard kissed me awake. It made me feel so special and important, but it was different than usual. All the time when I was around him, he would touch me or nuzzle me, letting me know that he was still there and paying attention to me. Even when Vivian, his best friend and one of the only people who knew him completely, came around he still kept his hands on me, he still paid attention to me. When she had come over for breakfast, his hand had been on my thigh the entire time, even as he talked to her. Gerard was very good at dividing his attention between the things he loved. When I was over, part of the reason he would get up extra early or randomly in the middle of the night was so he could work on his second love, his art, while I still slept. He didn’t want to miss a single moment between the two of us, and he was getting good at fighting the clock.

As I pulled him closer to me, sleep being cast away from my body, I couldn’t smell paint on him, but I just knew from the way his calloused hands felt running up and down my chest, that he had been doing something creative. He splayed his fingers out over my chest, running them down my sides and arms slowly, applying pressure to some areas. He was the one to break the slow and passionate kiss first, to place his lips and tongue over the areas where his hands had been only moments prior. I closed my eyes and pressed my head farther into the soft pillow. I watched through lidded eyes as his head dropped down lower on my body, kissing and sucking on my collar bone and the flesh in between as I ran my hand through his hair. Our breathing became slightly erratic; his was ruptured from the constant attention to my chest, myself recovering from the surprise that had now almost officially woken me up. I could hear the soft bursts of air coming out of his nose sporadically, and I felt the warm breeze anytime he dislodged his lips, swallowing up oxygen or my skin whole. I rubbed my hands up and down his chest in a pure state of bliss, and I began to wonder if all of this was a dream, and I hadn’t woken up just yet. Everything just seemed too good, too calm, and too reasonable to be true.

“I love you,” Gerard breathed in one of the moments he had dislocated himself from me. His hands trailed up my arms as he pressed his cheek over my chest, the side where my heart was. I was sure he could hear the beats increasing two-fold with the mention of the words it had taken him so long to say.

Finally, after many discussions, deliberations and arguments, Gerard had told me he loved me and I still couldn’t fathom it. It was clear why I did love him, even if it had taken Gerard awhile to see that. He was the artist that was in the process of giving me my life back, showing me what it was to be myself, and letting me do things that no one else ever had. He was the best person in my life; it was a given that I should love him.

But he didn’t have to love me. By all logical standpoints, without including the legal and moral issues, Gerard should not have loved me. I was only a naïve seventeen year old who had harassed him outside the liquor store, I had stolen his cigarettes, and I was needy, coming to his house every day after school. I was a child; something he did not want of his own. All a child did was take and take and take – and that was what I was doing. But for some strange reason that even I could not understand just yet, Gerard kept me around. And he loved me for it. The night before had been the only night where I had paid him back – if only a little bit – for all of the things he had done for me. With my camera and the words I had taught myself, formulated on my own accord, I had shown the artist that it was okay to love me. And when he finally said those words, against the blackest of night sky and the absence of light in his cold and small room, I had not known what to do.

I had nearly been asleep then, my lids halfway down my eyes. I couldn’t even remember what I had said back to him, if anything. As he told me again the next morning, it asserted the truth and making me realize this was not a dream. This was reality. He loved me, and though I didn’t know why, it meant the world to both of us. Someone like Gerard loved someone like me, and this time, I wasn’t too tired to respond.

“I love you, too,” I echoed, a smile forming on my face with the mere thought of it all. I felt my hands cling to him tighter, and his teeth against my skin as he smiled. He nuzzled his nose and forehead into my chest, taking my nipple carefully into his mouth while his other hand roamed further down my body. I felt his delicate fingers trace over my pubic bone, my body growing taut in anticipation for his next action.

Gerard was never one to just go and grab my cock right away. He always had to prolong the motion, touching everywhere else but the exact spot. Most people would call this teasing, but Gerard called it foreplay, and I didn’t care what anyone called it as long as he got to his desired destination eventually. I was willing to wait it out, because it only made me appreciate the moment more when his fist slowly wrapped itself around the base of my forming erection. I had not woken up with a hard on, but Gerard’s kissing and touching soon changed the location of my blood.

I felt his fingers wrap around me gently, stroking the skin around first, and I was glad that he could just do it again without asking. He could touch me again when he wanted to, knowing that I consented and that if I didn’t want him there, I would move him. The way his face had been last night scared me. The wrinkles grew deep with concern for my safety, wondering if this was just a whole repeated mess of his brother’s sad fate. I felt myself cling onto him more and more, showing him that I loved him. I wasn’t being tricked or fooled into any of this. I wanted him and I loved him.

The morning seemed to change things, a good nights sleep resting his worries for the time being. He was full of more ease than before, clearly displayed as he carelessly licked and kissed his way into the center of my chest. He pressed his chin into the small bit of a belly I had acquired and made eye contact with me. His brows were raised casually and his eyes spoke of lust, but with a much deeper commitment.

“Good morning,” he expressed merrily, giving my erection a little squeeze as he did so.

I smiled and laughed a bit, warm feelings ushering through my system. I placed one of my hands on the side of his face, directing him up to my lips again, our tongues mingling with the bitter taste of morning, connecting our hips. He took his hand off my cock, bracing himself above me as we continued to kiss. I could feel the start of his erection pressed into my thigh, making my insides shake with expectation. I continued to kiss him, picking up the pace a little and rocking our hips in motion, before I turned him effortlessly over, his bare chest face up. I broke the connection with our lips momentarily, taking my body away from his as I went over to his bedside table and grabbed the bottle of lube. I winced, feeling the chill from where his body used to be at my side. To warm us both up, I crawled my way over to him, uncapping the tube with my teeth. He drew my hands closer to him and began to kiss my fingers in preparation as the rest of our bodies just figured out where to go. Even before we were inside one another, we fit together and worked in a rhythm that I knew just felt right.

I loved morning sex. I didn’t know what it was about it, but I loved it when Gerard and I would wake up, just look at each other and within moments we would be in a pile of hot and sweaty flesh under the sheets. It felt so good and so right, and honestly, was the best way to wake up. Gerard always insisted that he was never fully alert or himself until he had his morning coffee, and though the drink had started to grow on me (if I put in about a dozen spoonful so of sugar and half the milk carton), morning sex held no comparison. Coffee may have stimulated his brain, but sex stimulated his body, mind, soul – everything.

This phenomenon had only happened a few times in our dating relationship, but each time it did, I recalled Gerard’s philosophy about going slow to preserve the moment. I loved every moment of morning sex: the initial stiffness in the body being worked out slowly by the urge to move and thrust, the bitter taste from not being able to eat or clean your mouth, the salty taste of skin over a tongue that had barely any saliva left inside of it, and the complete normalcy of it all. Morning sex was something that couples did. It was something that people living together for a long time did. It was a sense of commitment and carefree attitude towards an act that had been the bane of most teenagers’ existence. Though there were times where Gerard and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other, it was not in an animalistic fucking urge. We just wanted each other right then, and there were no questions, no worrying, and no awkwardness we had to fret over anymore. We had transformed this act of sex into something normal. I never knew how to describe it, and if someone were to ask me about it, I wouldn’t know what to tell them. It was just sex; a way of expressing our attitude towards each other. And that time, it was all about expressing love.

I had known it all before that when we had sex we were really making love. Gerard preferred to categorize it as making art – and definitely not love, but really, there was no distinction. Art was love; art was everything and we were everything. Gerard had just not wanted to admit love so soon, if at all. We weren’t allowed to be together, but we had to defy that rule. We had to break rules in order to live. We weren’t allowed to love each other, that was for sure, if we ever got together or not. But last night, we had broken the final rule. There was nothing left to break. And instead of feeling doomed or damned, and like the world was going to cave in on us because of our wrong doing, I felt fucking liberated.

The words that we had both spoken to each other were on the tip of my tongue constantly. When I entered Gerard, and we began the movements together, his strong hands and legs wrapped around me, pushing me inside of him deeper, they fell out from my mouth. They were in a hushed and labored whisper, but they were still vocalized. They still existed beyond the abyss of my own fragile mind. I breathed life into them the more I breathed them out. Gerard didn’t say anything back, other than pulling me closer to him for another kiss as I thrust in deeper, but that was okay. I figured he didn’t hear me, or was too busy with other things. His lack of response didn’t stop me from saying it again and again as I got closer and closer. They were all jagged whispers and cries, most of the time muttered into his bare chest as his hands were pressed against the small of my back. Gerard’s cock was in between our moving bodies and I wrapped my hand around it, pushing my thumb over the top, making his eyes shut tighter and his mouth drop open in ecstasy. I began to pump it harder, knowing I was about to come any moment. Once I did, I said those three little words, full volume and as clear as day, into the heated air around us. He gave no response, especially since he was too concentrated on his own orgasm, which I could feel approaching at any moment. He moaned as he finally released, my fist and his chest covered. The words had still not passed his lips, but by that point, we were both too exhausted that I just let it go, and collapsed on top of him.

We caught our breaths together, his hand running slowly up and down my back, now bare. The sheet we had draped around ourselves during the action had fallen away in the last moments of climax, leaving us both exposed. We stayed like this, content, comfortable, and complacent, the aftermath of morning sex around us and not leaving anytime soon.

I began to catch my breath slowly, my face hot and clammy against his bare skin. My hands were up by his shoulders, and I let my fingers fall down to his arms, tracing them over his delicate, yet tough skin. I could feel his chest rising and falling, taking in oxygen like it was water and he was stranded in a desert. I turned my face to look at him, watching his pouty lips open and his hair fall over his eyes. I was catching my breath a lot faster than he was, and I began to pull myself closer to his face, kissing my way up.

“I love you,” I informed him when we had made eye contact. I was about to place a kiss on his lips, but wanted to wait until I heard the reciprocal gesture. He had caught his breath at that point, giving me a half-expressed dopey smile from his state of bliss. Even with a chest full of oxygen, did he not say the words back.

Feeling slightly perturbed, I went in to kiss him anyway in a meek and mild gesture. I pulled away after our lips touched a few times, tongues barely hitting the surface and looked down on him incredulously. I felt my brows furrow, but still, he remained the way he always had been, in his languid state, and most of all, silent.

“Why aren’t you saying it back?” I asked him, letting some of my concern slip out. I knew he loved me, and though there were still some minor doubts rolling around in my head, especially as he didn’t say those words back, I still knew he did. I could see it in his eyes. The way the deep green color mixed with the slight gleam gave it all away. I knew he loved me in the way his hands were placed carelessly, yet carefully on my back, supporting me as I looked down at him. But not hearing the words sent a chill up my spine that I didn’t like. I had always thought you said those words back to whoever said them to you, and the fact that he simply wasn’t right then, made me think we were back to square one.

“Because I don’t need to,” he finally answered, his smile gaining full force. The words sounded negative, but again, his facial construction contradicted everything I had thought before. He looked almost happy he didn’t say them back, as apposed to absolutely frightened the night prior.

“Why not?”

My voice was slightly hitched from worry, and he saw the concern right away. He sighed, running one of his strong hands through my slightly damped hair. His smile fell to a purse on his lips as we readjusted our bodies. We dislocated from our sexual stance, turning to our sides and interlocking once more, in comfort. He continued to brush the hair our of my eyes and gave me that look. He gazed so intently with his pursed lips and wary eyes that I began to resent them, if only in that instant.

“Why aren’t you saying it back?” My words were a bit stronger in their force this time around, but it was merely masking my weakness. I bit my lip and looked down at my hands, now collected between our two bodies, not wanting to say the next part, but my lip trembling bits and pieces of it out.
“Do you not…?”

Thankfully, that was as far as I got before Gerard stepped in, pulling me closer.

“I do love you, Frank.”

I felt like such a baby, especially as he pulled me into a hug and cooed in my ear, but I couldn’t help the anxiety that had washed over me. I had never said I love you to anyone before that was not my family, or friend. Even Jasmine, though I had admitted I loved her, I also admitted that I had loved Gerard more. And I did, fuck, I really did. Hearing him express the same feelings for myself the night before had been amazing, but when I thought he was going to take it all back… I wasn’t sure if I could have handled that. It was one thing to never say and never give me the chance to believe it. It was downright cruel to give it to me to taste it, then never let me finish it all.

“I do love you,” he stated again, once we had pulled away from the hug. He gave me a small smile, exposing only half of his baby-like teeth. “But I don’t see the need to declare a constant state of being.”

“What?”

He sighed again, collecting his words, before beginning. “I love you, but I’ve always known that, I guess. It’s a constant thing inside of me, just like breathing.”

He paused, bringing one of his free hands to his mouth and gnawing on a finger as he thought. I was left to stare at him, letting his words embed themselves inside my mind. I knew he had loved me before he had said it, but I began to wonder when he himself had made this realization. Was it that first night? Was it when I was gone? Or was it right from the very beginning, when I was still that punk kid outside the liquor store? I didn’t know, and I almost didn’t want to.

“Though I love you, I don’t feel the need to state it all of the time. It would be like walking around and constantly shouting ‘I’m breathing!’ at the top of my lungs. I don’t see the need to do that.”

I felt myself blushing, because I knew that I was like his example. I was walking around and shooting ‘I love you’ at the top of my lungs. I felt the need to. I thought it was necessary because, as long as I had lived, it had never felt like I was breathing.

“There are some times, however, where I feel the need to just take a deep breath.” Gerard began to speak again, bringing the hand from his mouth and draping it across my shoulder. I smiled, and we both took a deep breath together. He leaned forward and pecked me on the mouth, then drew back to the discussion seriously.

“There are times when I won’t say ‘I love you’ back, Frank. But I still love you. I will probably always love you, if I’m being completely honest. But I only feel the need to express that emotion under some circumstances. Like when I woke you up this morning.” He stretched out his last words, bringing his body closer to my own, bridging the small gap of unclaimed mattress in between us, and allowing his hand to drape casually down my bare back. “I wanted to say ‘I love you’ then, but you didn’t have to say it back. When I say it, it’s because I feel it so much in that moment that I need to get it out. You don’t always have to say it back because, trust me, I know you love me too.”

He gave me a sly smile, and I blushed again, knowing the extra connotation in things. Though he told me I would never have to say it back to him, I had a feeling, that no matter the context or circumstances, I would always say it back anyway. It was just programmed into me since birth. It had been formulated into family conversations and departures for as long as I could remember. When my mom said ‘bye, I love you,’ or anything similar, I would say it back. Even in my teenage years when she said it, there was this switch inside me that got turned on, and I would say it back. Thankfully, my mother had stopped expressing those sentiments in a full regard ages ago. But that still left me with this switch that was constantly turned on when I was with Gerard. Even if I could manage to turn off the automatic response in me, I would probably still say it all the time because I felt like saying it all the time. I loved Gerard. It was a fact that I was willing to repeat as long as possible.

“I know you want to say it all the time,” Gerard started again, reading my thoughts. I had let my eyes wander around the room, to the walls that enclosed us, but now I snapped them back on the man before me, listening and blushing intensely as he spoke. “But I never want you to have to feel like you need to say it. It should never become a formula within our conversations.”

“But Gerard, I don’t feel like I need to say it.”

He gave me a weak smile that almost seemed to hurt him. This whole love notion was still a heavy weight on his chest, crushing the bones that hid his heart from the outside world. He wanted to love, he was happy when he finally let himself, but there was a fragility to him because of this emotion he had let inside. It boggled my mind how the artist – a person who was so focused on not hating anything, thinking it was absolutely impossible, finding the beauty in anything and everything – could find it so hard to love.

Love, he had told me before, was one of the strongest emotions. It really was, but I had never thought of myself as this strong being capable of possessing it. Furthermore, I had never, ever thought of myself as being stronger than Gerard – or at least on the same range. I was handling this concept perfectly fine; I was embracing it and embracing him in all one go. When I looked at him, his eyes merely dropped and his smile seemed to pain his entire face.

“I know,” he started again, sighs falling from his mouth like breaths. “But there will come a time when we won’t want to say it all the time.”

“Stop talking about us being over,” I begged him, cutting him off before he could say anything else. I hated it when he brought up the topic that I had been trying so hard to avoid. I just wanted to fucking enjoy the moment we were having just then.

“No,” Gerard cut in, correcting me. “That’s not what I was talking about.”

Though I felt my chest tighten in embarrassment for being wrong, I still managed to jest. “For once.”

“For once,” he agreed, rolling his eyes in a painful honesty before continuing. “Of course you want to say this all the time now, Frank. It’s something new, fresh, wonderful. But there will come a time when it’s just there. It’s not throbbing as much as it is now, but has settled down into something normal, but still something just as good.”

He paused for a moment, thinking once again about something far in the back of his mind. I was left to think for myself, finally able to understand what he was getting at. I could relate every word of what he was saying to our sex. In the beginning, we had done it a lot. It was something new and exciting, and we embellished every opportunity we had to take part in it. Though our relationship was still in its infancy as far as duration, we had grown up so much. We still had sex all the time, but it was something normal. We lost the initial nervousness and excitement of anticipation, and it was replaced by something else – but it was something just as good. It was a secure sense, knowing that it would still be here all the time and we could take it when we wanted it.

I thought of the sex we had taken part in that morning and trying to relate it back to Gerard’s theory on love declarations and I saw where he was coming from. There was no obligation to say ‘I love you’ when we felt it all the time. It was easier for this concept to sink in with sex because there weren’t as many ingrained rules. Love was such a tricky subject to handle. There was no way of measuring it with duration or amount of times like there was with sex. The society we lived in just made rules to make the emotion easier to deal with. But Gerard and I were all about breaking rule; I didn’t know why this one, out of all of them, had been extra hard to shake off.

“I don’t want this to become a formula,” Gerard spoke again, taking his thumbnail out of range of his mother. He became pensive, and started to tell me a real life example. “Once, when I was eating alone one day, I overhead a conversation between a man and his wife. Actually, you couldn’t call it a conversation, just the carcass of one. The wife asked her husband ‘so how was your day?’ and I was nearly sick.”

“Why?” I asked, my brows drawing together at the base of my forehead. The carcass of which Gerard was describing sounded exactly like the family dinners at my place, before all of this shit had happened. “Isn’t it just a conversation starter?”

“Yes, but you should never need a conversation starter. It is either there or it isn’t. You shouldn’t have to ask someone how their day was. You should just tell them.”

He was motioning with his hands vehemently, and I could see how passionate he was about all of this. The idea of a false conversation scared Gerard. I could see the fear wavering around in his eyes. Conversation – real conversation – without starters or formulaic terms was what Gerard thrived on. It was what allowed him to voice his philosophies and tell his stories, like the one he was doing right then. I thought back to when I first met Gerard, how he had wanted me to stay around because he liked talking to me. We never had awkward starters. We never had fabricated lines. And if somehow, if we used one of those cliché terms, we took it and made it our own. Gerard would rather there be silence than to have anything fake go in between. He was all or nothing; just like us.

Out of the blue, his point began to make more sense. He would rather not state the term of love, than to overstate it. Overstating something with that much emotion and power was just like succumbing to having to ask how someone’s day was. Love wasn’t something you forced in a generic way. And since we were far, far from generic, it shouldn’t happen between us.

My eyes grew wide, and Gerard’s smile perked on his lips once more. He knew I understood.

“Exactly,” he oozed, clutching me with his hand. He nodded his head as he spoke again, the pride radiating off of his glowing skin. “I never want this to be a formula with us. I never want anything to be a formula. I hate math!”

“Me too.”

His lips curls into a smile as our eyes made contact and our heads navigated closer and closer to one another until we met for a kiss. My hands slid up his shoulder, resting on the nape of his neck as his tongue peaked slowly outside of my mouth. I opened, allowing him entry as he scooped my body up and closer to him. Our legs were intertwined with the other, one slung over his hip, our genitals touching but not getting too excited. This was one of those secure embraces; ones that we took just to appreciate the other person, to realize they were still there and what an impact we had on the other person. Everything seemed to be done in slow motion, the movement of tongues and fingers together, gentle rocking of hips. There was no way we were going to have sex again, but we could appreciate the afterglow. The sun’s light rays from outside of the dark door had been flooding in ever since my eyes had been kissed open. I could feel a warmness I never thought possible in my own arms, moving slowly around me, mixed with the sun that didn’t seem to end. Gerard took his lips away from my own, descending to my neck, before uttering a quick reassurance.

“I missed you.”

“I know,” I answered with that same tone. I reciprocated the gesture, not really caring if the same love philosophy applied. I felt it in that moment, so I was going to say it. “I missed you, too.”

“I missed this,” Gerard breathed for clarification, squeezing my body tighter and closer to him, showing me that it wasn’t just sex he missed, it was the actual element of me, as if I had doubts before. “I missed waking up with you in my bed.”

“Same here,” I reciprocated again. He didn’t seem to care I was slightly disobeying our new philosophy, as he nuzzled his head into my neck, just feeling the warmth of our two bodies together.

“I missed having another heartbeat inside here,” he said, barely above a whisper. I let my mouth hang open, but I realized how I could never say anything back to that one; it was something that could not be reciprocated.

It was right then, as I felt Gerard cling to me for dear life, that I realized just how alone he had been over those weeks we were figuring everything out. He was alone in this apartment for what had probably been the longest time ever. He could not leave because of his bail conditions, I couldn’t risk seeing him, and most likely, his best friend hadn’t come over because of her daughter. Gerard couldn’t be around minors, and if things with Vivian’s mom were still iffy, then she wouldn’t be able to find a baby sitter for her. To top all the desolation off, his bird had flown away days before he was ripped from humanity. He couldn’t call anyone without raising suspicion, and even so, Gerard wasn’t the same on the phone. It was talking into an inanimate object – it never transferred the vitality he received when he fed off other’s energies. He couldn’t do anything but be alone. Even the dove’s coos weren’t around to break some of the silence of solitude. I felt my heart ache, and I clung onto his body much like he was doing to my own.

I thought I could relate to his feelings of seclusion when I had been cooped up in my house, but I couldn’t. I was only separated from him, and not humanity. I had my parents, despite their cold shoulders, they were still around for me to feel that cold. I had some solace with Jasmine. Though she was gone at night and I was devoid of another person in my bed, I could still hear the faint murmurings of my parents or other life outside myself. I was alone in mere ideology inside my house, but I was never alone physically.

Gerard possessed both forms of despairing solitude and I felt those words coming to the surface yet again. I wanted to say them, but I kept them inside, figuring I had already said them enough that morning.

“I’ve never been in love,” Gerard stated randomly, but it felt like he was reading my mind. I didn’t comprehend that he just knew what to say, even if it didn’t always make perfect sense the first time around.

“What do you mean?” I asked, pulling away to look at his face. He was calm and serious, with a hint of melancholy.

“I’ve never said ‘I love you’ to anyone before,” he clarified further, “and meant it.”

“But…” I interjected, trailing off. Gerard was a lot older than me. He had been around a lot longer – surely he had loved before. I thought back to that night where he had told me of all of his past lovers. Some, at the beginning, had just been about sex. But another name ran through my existence. “What about Raymond? Didn’t you love him?”

Gerard smiled, scoffing a bit, the pain of his dead ex-lover still present. “We may have said it to each other, but that didn’t mean we were in love.”

“What do you mean?”

Those two had been together for seven years. They had to be in love by that time. Even if it hadn’t been right away, didn’t spending that much time with the same person just automatically inflict that emotion on you? Gerard and I had been together as a couple for barely two months. It didn’t make sense that I could jump so far ahead of Ray in a single bound.

“Raymond and I were never in love,” Gerard stated again, shaking his head out of the memories that still haunted him. “We couldn’t have love with that we had.”

“What did you have?”

“Dependency.”

His facial expressions dropped saying the word that I had placed out of my memory. I never quite understood what he had meant when he had said it the first time, and even then, after sharing and expressing so many different things, I still couldn’t grasp what the term actually meant.

“He depended on me for financial and creative support, and I depended on him for…” Gerard trailed off for a second, shaking his head again as if to will away his dependable aspect. I could see it in his eyes, though he wasn’t looking at me, just how much this hurt him. “For…something to come home to. For someone to be there for me. I depended on him too much for that, and it hurt ten times more when he left.”

I saw his eyes crinkled as he shut them extra hard, the horrible memory too much. He was motioning weakly with his hand, and I reached out and grabbed it, interlocking our fingers, hopefully calming him down. He breathed, seeming the first time he had done the action in ages. He looked at me through his thick bangs that had fallen over his forehead again. He nodded his head, swallowing back something harsh, the bitter aftertaste still present in his mouth as he began again.

“I could never love Raymond, and he could never love me. We could only love the things we did for each other, and we only loved them when we got something in return. We fell apart when we moved apart. Love – real love – doesn’t do that.”

I found my heart sinking along with his own, but rising slowly at the same time. He turned to me, looking me in the eye as we thought the same thing. I felt myself smile weakly knowing that if this was real love we had, then at least when we were over, it would still be there.

“So, you don’t love Ray anymore? Or whatever you had?”

“No,” he stated dry and matter-of-factly. “I can’t love him now because I never did. And, probably never will.” The sense of mortality at the end of his statement made my mind work hard and fast to change the focus on the outpouring of Gerard’s love, or lack thereof until this day.

“What about Vivian?” I remembered the best friend that had once been intimate with Gerard. He had to love her; I could see it in the way they acted with each other. It was like watching an old married couple reminisce about the days when they were wild and free. It may not have been a sexual yearning, but that lust had once been there. Wouldn’t the same context of love follow?

“Ah, yes,” he oozed, his face lighting up with the mere mention of the elegant red head’s name. The dark clouds from Raymond and his death moved onto the sunlight of Vivian in the sky that encompassed Gerard’s love life. I wondered where that left me in the grand scheme of things above, but knowing that I was the one in Gerard’s arms in that moment in time, knowing that I was everything and so was he, led me to believe that we were both the sky itself as a whole. And if Jasmine was here, she’d be a mere bird flying by.

“I do love Vivian,” he started again, shaking me from my thoughts. “But it’s not the same kind of love I have for you.”

“What do you have with Vivian?”

“I don’t really know,” he scoffed, laughing, his eyebrows raising up. “I love her because she keeps me sane, keeps me grounded. If it weren’t for her, I would never leave the house. She annoys me some days, but I know she’s doing it for my best interest.” He paused for a second, laughing at another internal memory. “We have a lot of fun together. She says I make her laugh and I get her thinking. She gets me outside. We’re in love with each other, but it’s not a do-or-die type of situation. There is no urgency, there is no forbiddance. It’s just us. We’re friends, despite our minor sexual encounters.” He looked down at me, his smile still present but changing form.

“With me and you, however…” He trailed off, thinking hard. “There is that do-or-die situation. We couldn’t just let each other go. We couldn’t just be friends, or teacher and student, or anything else. We had to be everything. And there is something about that that is so scary.”

“Scary?” I repeated, my voice raising at the end to form a question. When Gerard gave me a look, half-contemptuous and half-fearful, I realized I had to figure this one out for myself. He didn’t want to explain his fears because they would over take him again. I soon began to realize that there was never a time where I hadn’t felt some kind of fear coursing through my veins, whether it was directly related to him or not. Any relationship in itself was a scary thing. Giving yourself away like we had was a scary thing. And with the society hounding us like they had, even the threat of something was enough to break up most people.

“Gerard,” I started, when it had been silent for awhile, the initial purpose of this conversation coming back to me. “What exactly do we have though?”

“We have a lot of things…” he started, his eyes darting back and forth, reviewing everything in his mind. “Something special. Something illegal.” He scoffed at bit at his remark, before continuing, gripping my arm with the strong emotion he placed with the next adjective. “Something wonderful. Something I have never had before.”

His voice fell out from under him then, his hand loosening and tracing along side over my skin. His eyes met mine but only stayed there for a second, something distinct catching his attention behind me. He reached over, pressing against me and blocking my vision with a clear shot of his flesh. When he and my eyesight had returned, I saw he held my camera in front of me.

“Something photogenic,” he added the last description, smiling as he passed over the camera to me. I raised it above our two bodies, snapping a picture of us together, the bright light filling the room, reminding us that it was still too dark. After the click and flash happened, I knew the last picture had been taken, and there was still one thing left for both of us to do. Develop the love we had worked so hard on creating.

“Something photogenic,” he enunciated again, finally settling upon a desired adjective that could hold our future. I smiled, relishing in the fact that it would be my passion to expose us.

Gerard had been all of my firsts. Even when kissing, he had been the first man I had ever kissed. He was my first fuck, first kiss, first love… everything. But I had always thought he was so much more experienced. I had accepted the fact that I would never be any of his firsts. But as I held the camera in my hands, his words echoed through me.

I’ve never been in love before.

He may have been talking about his past experiences, but I could see the present in that statement. He may not have been in love before, but he was in love now. And it was with me. I was the first person he had truly been in love with, and it was the best feeling in the world. I couldn’t wait to develop the pictures, and develop everything else at the same time.

“Something photogenic,” I repeated with Gerard. I held up the camera, asking another question. “For all the world to see?”

He smiled, bringing my head closer to his, connecting our foreheads.

“Let’s just develop ourselves for now. We still have a lot of work to do.”

Gerard practically commanded that we get out of bed next. I had to comply even if the way the sheets were so folded and clung together created a warm cocoon. I wanted to spend the entire morning there, Gerard in my arms, but he insisted upon awakening. We needed to get up and out of the cocoon if I ever wanted to be a butterfly. We needed to develop my pictures to see just what I had got myself into. Whatever it was going to be, I knew Gerard would be with me every step of the way.

He pulled me from the sheets, the remnants sex and the smell of lust still on our naked bodies. It didn’t seem to matter and plucked me from his room, still completely bare and exposed like a newborn bird. He dragged me over to empty cage where the dove used to reside and, after a moment of reflection, located a doorknob to a door I had never seen before. It was almost directly in the corner of the room, the dove cage blocking it most of the time. Its knob was the same color as the door, giving it camouflage. When he opened the new place, all I could see were old paint supplies; canvases, brushes, shells of paint cans, and other useless junk. He began to empty it in a hurry, clearing away some space and looking for something at the same time. He was taking such an initiative while I hung around behind him, rubbing my hands up and down my bare arms in an attempt to keep warm. Though the sun shone through the panes of glass vibrantly, there was a chill coming from this closet I couldn’t fathom. It was the first time it had been opened in years, I could tell, and Gerard was breathing life into it again.

He turned around unexpectedly, a voracious look in his eyes. He grabbed one of my hands on my shoulders, clutched it within his own, and pulled me into the depths of the dark closet. It was even larger once the junk had been cleared out of the way. He flicked a switch in the far corner of the area, and red light washed over us. I squinted at first, looking around and trying to comprehend what was going on.

“It’s a darkroom,” he informed, through it was hard to hear him from the loud buzz emitting from the bulb scathing my eardrums. I placed the back of my hand above my eyes in a vain attempt to will away the penetrating light. I gave up, realizing it was all around me and that I couldn’t escape. I could see Gerard’s smile brim from ear to ear, looking sinister in the twisted ambiance of the room.

When I finally peeled my eyes away from him and started to look around, I realized the full extent of what he had said. I saw materials, tables, and even a small line for old photos all along the back wall of the room. Fuck there were shelves built into the wall, just slim slabs of wood, that held materials. There was a small sink, some of the plumbing from the bathroom being re-routed to have at least one small hose in the basin. It was not very pretty to look at, but practical at least. It wasn’t a closet anymore – but an entire room, a fortress where it looked like someone had spent many years in hiding. There was a thin layer of dust around everything, not been touched since those years of captivity. Things were laid out as if they were meant to be resumed the next day, but instead entered a time warp. There was even a coffee mug set aside a thick book and frivolous aged papers. I strained to look around more and more, almost expecting to find the skeleton of ambition inside the room, still captive, while I was captivated.

Though I had never been in a darkroom my entire life, I recognized everything around me instantly. It was more than just simple recognition from all the photography books that Jasmine had brought me from the library, or any videos I may have watched, or anything like that. It was deeper, far, far deeper than that. I felt like I had already been in this room before; I felt like it was a part of me. It was strange, feeling so at home and attuned to something you’ve never witness before.

My mouth dropped in amazement and I stared at Gerard.

“I know what it is,” I told him, the bottom still gone from my voice. “But how do you know, Gerard?”

Ever since I had known the elusive artist, he had never mentioned photography. He had mentioned every single kind of painter, sculptor, and even guitarist, when I had been brave enough to mention my other interest, but never had I heard him even mention a disposable camera. On his walls, there was picture after picture, but none of them photographs. I was even beginning to doubt that he had pictures of his family. Even in the books that lined his shelves gave no mention to photography, let alone a camera or picture itself. These elements were a foreign thing to Gerard, or so I thought. His lack of interest and knowledge in photography before had been one of the major reasons I was so excited to do this myself. I was branching out – being different from him for once, rather than mimicking and emulating any way I could. I thought I could perhaps teach him a thing or two, but Gerard was already two steps ahead of me. I was surrounded with all sorts of tools and objects at my disposal now. This didn’t make any sense, even if it was Gerard I was trying to understand.

He smiled smugly at me for awhile, before his previous knowledge and memories began to attack him. “Raymond tried photography once…” his voice trailed off, and he fooled his arms over his chest, clearing his throat.

Gerard had been so persistent to find Ray’s passion when the two had first met. He had told me he tried to teach Ray how to paint more, since the man had been forced to forgo his dreams of art school, but that it had never come out right. He had encouraged him to do other things, and apparently photography had been on of them.

“He got really into it, too. Went out and bought roll after roll of film, camera after camera, book after book. He was so happy, so energetic. But like with many things with Raymond, he was scared away from it after only a week or two.”

I felt my chest tighten with the despondency in his voice. Was I treading on Gerard’s dead lover’s territory?

“I’m sorry…” I mumbled, unsure how to go about the situation now. “I don’t have to use his equipment. I can go out and get my own.”

The last thing I wanted to do was to overwrite any kind of memory Gerard had of this man who he could not create new ones for. But instead of a weak agreement, Gerard’s head lifted up, his eyes wide.

“No,” he insisted breathlessly, bringing me closer to him. Our hands were connected, the grip becoming loose with lack of focus. “I got up early and tried to remember where everything he had disappeared off to. When Ray and I finished, I didn’t want to look at anything that reminded me of him. I got rid of all the books, giving half to Vivian and burning the other batch. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I had done with his cameras and other junk, but I knew I kept them. I have no idea why I did, but I’m glad. I knew they would come in handy in the future and fuck, they certainly cost enough. I wasn’t just going to get rid of them. I completely forgot about this closet until today, until a few moments on the bed with you. Raymond never used this like he should have, and I never had an interest in taking pictures. But you,” he paused for emphasis, his eyes growing wide with a pride that for once, wasn’t self-inflicted. “ You have potential. I want you to have this space. Make it your own.”

“Thank you,” I expressed deeply and I felt him wrap me in for another hug. This was absolutely amazing, and I knew my words could not express all that I wanted them to. I loved Gerard so much more right then, if that was possible. All of the time I had spent with him, I had been trying to find my talent, and he had been with me every step of the way. I thought, at first, he had been so supportive because I had been trying to do it through his own creative expression. It was easy to help someone who was doing the same thing as you. But it was clear to both of us that I was never a painter. It was too hard for me to get things to cooperate and look how I needed them to. Painting was not in my blood, but photography was. Gerard didn’t know what to do or how work a camera, and really had no interest in it – until I did. He had forgotten about the cameras entirely until I came along and had dug them up from his subconscious. He was so focused on supporting me it didn’t matter if he didn’t like my art as much as he did his own. If I loved it, so did he. He wanted to make me happy and that, right then, was better than anything anyone had ever given to me. I hugged him so hard, trying to give him something with my empty arms.

“No need to thank me,” he insisted, brushing his hand through my hair and kissing the top of my head affectionately. We pulled apart slightly, and he gave me a lopsided grin. “Just start developing pictures.”

Heeding to Gerard’s words of wisdom, I did exactly that.

He left me in the room alone after a quick kiss and some encouraging sentiments and I began my task. I had been nervous at first that I wouldn’t know what to do, but Gerard told me that if it was really in my hands, in my blood, body, and soul, that something out there would guide me. Something would point me in the right direction, given the right tools and I would take off. Some of the best lessons were self-taught.

He was … a little off.

Gerard had good intentions, and his words did have merit. This was in my hands and that made me feel like I knew what I was doing. It gave me that initial boost of confidence to take a step forward into the room. But I got too arrogant too fast, and I nearly lost what I had worked so hard for. I wanted to rip the film out of the camera and just develop it quick and flawlessly like they did in the movies. I wanted everything to be so Hollywood and have it worked out already for me. I had done so much work already, why should I have to feel lost again?

Art was about making sacrifices. Art was about making mistakes to find it again and again. Art was about living, and I sure as hell knew, even in my seventeen years of existence that life never came easily. It was bumpy, but if I had a good spirit, bumps could be fun.

I brushed dust away from everything I saw at first, which had been the first correct step. It led me to see the old book with a cracked spine next to the coffee mug. There were bookmarks and folded pages everywhere. I took it easily in my hands, blowing on it and becoming so caught up in its essence. When I flipped over the cover delicately in my fingers (I seemed to think it was as fragile as the negatives still hiding in the camera), I saw a name scrawled onto the cover: Raymond Toro-Ortiz. The scripture was almost childlike in nature. It was printed, but the letters blended together. I could see restraint in the way he tried to write his name, and passion trying to leap forward.

Ray struggled to even write his name onto something that could be his passion, I slowly realized. I felt my heart swell, and I was determined to never let it happen to me.

I drew my attention to the notes by my side, and saw the craziest amounts of measurements and foreign words that I was slowly beginning to recognize. Fixer, Stop Bath, Developer. Enlarger, Jobo Drum. I saw chemical burns on the sides of some pages, a broken pencil and its lead smudge everywhere. It felt so weird, walking through Ray’s instructions to himself so he wouldn’t forget.

Don’t screw it up this time. Remember to turn off the light. Complete darkness.
Wait twenty-five seconds. Filter two or three.
Fuck, it’s like a cave in here. I feel like I’m dead.
Second batch: ruined.
Fuck this, I should just be a writer.

I saw how angry he was at himself as he wrote. I could see his aggression, but no longer masked in passion. He was just angry; there was no external target. He was taking this out on himself, when the camera was begging to be his creative punching bag. I wondered how his photos turned out, but I knew that would have to remain an unanswered question. I could never ask Gerard something so personal.

As I flipped through some pages more and more, I spotted something else. It was a different set of writing, not as hard into the paper. The pencil seemed to be light as air on the page. It was two sentences, the first part crossed out, in the darker hue with more pressure. Two different writers. Ray and Gerard, I deduced. I squinted in the light I was still getting used to, and realized what it said.

Raymond, you’re doing good. I love you.

It was on one of the last sheets of paper. Nothing else on it, nothing else around it. Was this when Ray gave up, or when they both did? I looked around the room, and I felt so lost. It was still home to me. I felt solid in my feet, like I was anchored to the ground. But I knew something was still off. I was back in time, walking into the middle of their relationship.

The first part of the statement had been crossed out. Ray couldn’t accept his passion, but he could accept Gerard loving him. I wasn’t sure what I needed to do, but I know that this small closet needed to become my own in some way.

Slowly, I flipped the cover of the book and added my name. Not under Ray’s, or over Ray’s, but next to it. Then I tried to get to work, following in his footsteps, but taking a different path.

I tried to adhere to Ray’s instructions word for word, but even with his past guidance, it was still really awkward. His first lesson was how to make it completely dark in the room. To get the negatives out, I needed to not only close and door, draw the makeshift curtain across it, and turn the red light off, but cram towels under the small crack so nothing got in. If your eyes adjust to the dark, then there is some light. Wait ten minutes then hold your hand up in front of your face. Pitch black. Like a cave.

Sometimes Ray’s voice was so loud in my head, I swore he was in the room with me. And when I was surrounded in darkness and struggling, cursing, and almost failing to take the negatives out of the camera without fucking it up, I could feel someone there with me. Helping me, in an odd way. I knew this sounded crazy in my mind. But when pitch black surrounds you on all sides and you feel as if you’re the only person on earth, your mind starts to wander. I felt like I was crazy, a weird sense of anger from my slippery fingers not cooperating with the scissors, and another sense of euphoria when I finally got it to work right.

In the dark, my memory got foggy. I filtered through all of the things I needed to do, losing and finding myself in the process. It took forever to do all my negatives. I slowly began to realize that not all the rolls of film I bought had been color. In fact, just one was. And it was one of the pointless ones that I had used up with meaningless pictures at the beginning. The ones with Gerard and I from his bed last night were not in color. I felt myself get angry at first. I felt cheated not seeing the vivid green hue of Gerard’s eyes like in the pictures of grass I had taken. I felt my anger wash over me, again and again, and I started to dig through Ray’s papers. I had no idea how this was supposed to help me. Maybe I wanted to add my own self-hating dialogue to his papers – I wasn’t sure. But the moment I did, I learned something key.

For color photos, you don’t use a red light. It will ruin them.

Breathing deeply, I backed away slowly. I double checked the fact in the book beside me, and then I trusted Ray – and I realized the good in the situation. Color would have to wait, but black and white, the ones with Gerard and I – that I could do now. Albeit a tad begrudgingly, I moved on.

The chemicals left my hands feeling dry and needy, and was an added sting onto my skin which was already cut up from the negatives. There had been gloves positioned on one of the shelves, but I didn’t feel right wearing them. Not only did it leave me feeling disconnected from what I was doing, but I felt like I was overstepping my boundaries far too much. I would be putting my hands where Ray’s had been. I didn’t need to do that. It didn’t feel right. I did manage to find a smock in the room which I flung over my still-naked body. It didn’t feel exactly right wearing clothing with my passion all around me, but I still felt confident. And besides, the chemicals were strong and I did want to keep at least some of my skin around certain areas protected.

The hours and my frustration blurred together. I needed so many trays, so many solutions, so much water, and so many things to remember. I was still confined to the small space, but at least I could see a bit better now. I was no longer in a lulling cave, but in a blinding red light. It could have been worse, and honestly I wouldn’t have changed it either way.

It took forever to get the amount of contrast right on the photo paper. I was about to give up a few times, and I was so fucking grateful I left the photos of us until the end. I fucked up a few times, making a few photos so off it wasn’t even funny. I had to adjust the enlarger, try again, adjust, try again. It was a tedious and repetitive vortex. The lulling and soothing quality of the room wore away, and I was just fucking frustrated. I found myself cursing with no merit, and I started to understand why Ray had quit this so quickly. It was hard. But I knew that deep down inside of me, anytime I caught a look at my hands, that I needed to push through.

I kept thinking that painting, or writing or even guitar never had anything this fucking hard. They never had precise instructions to follow to the exact mark or else risk having everything being fucked up. It was all up to the artist. But when I really thought about that aspect – the complete and utter disregard for any type of form or instruction, having to make it up as you went along… it was sort of scary. There was one thing to have intuition, another to follow instructions. Photography had a nice bit of both that worked together; it was something I could handle. I could be drawn to whatever image I wanted to capture, but to fully demonstrate it, I had a backbone of authority to fall back on. I hated authority, but I could start to respect why some of it was there. I wasn’t sure how Gerard could make his painting up on the spot. You could take lessons, but you didn’t always need to. Same with writing, and even guitar. Some people could just pick the instrument up and play. You couldn’t do that with photography. It had to be right. And as fucking aggravating as that was (and expensive, as I came to realize), I knew there was a small sense of security wrapped around me.

When I got the contrast worked out, I tried to develop and set up the photos in order, starting with the first roll taken that day I got back from the hospital. I did this, hoping they would somehow tell a story. I tried to ignore the fact that I would be missing a part of it; hopefully it wouldn’t be too important. (It was always better to leave someone guessing, anyway.) I wanted to see the truth behind what had happened those few weeks separated from Gerard, not only for his sake, but for my own as well. When participating fully in the action, it was hard to decipher any other meaning but personal from it. I wondered what my story would look like to Gerard, to Jasmine, and hell, even Vivian. I wondered what they would say, and if I really would have an impact. Everything in the interactions between all of us so far had been just telling stories – but it had always been them telling me theirs. I never had anything substantial to contribute. Now, I had something they could see, and hold in their hands.

My prediction had been correct; my photographs began to develop in an array of images set to the same course. After the long and grueling process of developing, I was able to hang all that I could on the line. I was still surrounded in red light, so I couldn’t see everything for all that it was worth (photos look different in red light than in regular light. Keep checking them), but what I could see was amazing. I felt like I was living it again. I saw a picture, a frame of life captured in a single instance.

It took me a while to fully comprehend the intent of my story and even much of the plot at first. Once I reached the last roll of film – the one that held the truth of Gerard and I – the story began to take shape. It took on characters at that point in time, real people with real faces. Other than the single Jasmine picture, there had been no human existence in the film. But now, I saw hands linking together. I saw faces pressed up against one another, limps intertwined, and glimpses of tainted flesh that had once been so private. There was a darkness to those pictures caused by the lack of light in the room. Instead of making them look damaged, it made them look special. The privacy element was still shown on these rolls of film, and that was the beautiful part of it all.

Delicately, I looked upon each picture one by one, taking as much care with each small frame as Gerard had with me that first night we were together. The shots I had taken were so intimate and so alluring at the same time. I saw love in there, clean, pure, and consensual love. It radiated through the red light, and even if they were in black and white, I saw them in full color. Love was shown in each one of the photos. It invited people inside. It made you want to be a part, of the exact same photo, the exact same time, and most of all, with those people, a young boy and an older man being so intimate with each other. It made you want to be one of them, or know one of them in a desperate attempt to achieve something that extraordinary.

As I hung the final picture on the line, I beamed with pride inside. I was one of those people in the picture and I did know the other one. I loved him and I could see clearly that he loved me. The gleam in his green eyes, though the color had been lost with the black and white film, was still there. The camera had captured it, and I now held it. I felt hope flourish inside of me. When the time was right, and Gerard and I would walk outside, after I was eighteen, and not be afraid that we loved each other, I would show people our pictures. I would show them the one with us in bed, our lips pressed together, and hands on each other’s bodies, drawing us closer together. Our lips were over each others solidly, but there are no tongues interchanged. It was just two bodies being pressed against one another, being together as one.

And then, after hours and lifetimes, I was done. Well, almost done. I looked at the one roll of film, cast off to the side. It was in color, something much farther than my reach.

Whole other can of worms that you can’t fucking handle.

I knew that Ray’s negativity would not be inflicted upon me, but I couldn’t help feeling angry. I couldn’t develop this roll. I didn’t know what to do with it. I tried to find notes in the larger book, but it was far too confusing. And this time, Ray wasn’t going to guide me. Gerard knew nothing about photography. For once in my life, he couldn’t help me, even if he wanted to. I stared at the roll, glared at it, and stared it down. I couldn’t risk ruining it. I didn’t know what treasures could be present. I needed help, I just didn’t know where to get it. It made me feel empty inside, at least a little, but I tried to fill the void with what I had managed to accomplish. After a plight like that, it was a fucking lot.

Looking at the black and whites on the line, I realized that most of the nature shots I had done were on that roll. I breathed out a little, thankful that none of the Gerard ones were going to be forever trapped. And in a way, the color seemed appropriate. Nature should be in full color, full bloom. It was the beauty that almost everyone could appreciate. Even if you didn’t like art, didn’t know a damn thing about it, most people could find green grass, blue sky, and a flower aesthetically pleasing. It was a good first step; to appreciate the dark aspects of the world, you need to realize that there is color everywhere. In order to fully appreciate life, you need to see the good and bad. The good, the color, I realized was the first part of my story. There was no way I could introduce people to the world of blacks, whites, and grays without getting them to appreciate this first.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14