Page 15 of Private Viewing

"Can't. It's my main thing. You knew this going in."

Laurent kissed the talking out of him, which worked for whole seconds at a time, and walked him backward — away from the front glass, away from the street, into the dim of the back rooms where the light didn't reach and no one passing on Twenty-Fourth would ever see. Charlie went, laughing, catching himself on Laurent's shoulders, and somewhere in the dark he stopped laughing, because Laurent got the denim jacket off him and put his mouth to the warm line of his throat and Charlie's breath changed, went ragged and amazed, his hands going still in Laurent's hair like he'd forgotten what they were for.

"Oh," Charlie said. Small. Wondering. The same oh he'd apparently said to the cold loft three days ago, Laurent would learn later, the oh of a color going down right. "Oh, that's — okay. Yeah. That."

And Laurent, who had done this a hundred times with a hundred men and always, always kept some final room of himself locked, some last wall between the act and the self — Laurent felt the room unlock. Because Charlie looked at him the whole time. That was the thing. That was the undoing. Charlie couldn't stop looking, greedy and open and unhidden, looking at Laurent like he might disappear, cataloguing every sound Laurent made and every place Laurent's careful control slipped, delighted by all of it, seeing him — and there was nowhere to hide from a man who looked like that, and for the first time in his adult life Laurent didn't want to hide, didn't reach for the wall, let himself be looked at all the way down.

"You keep — " Charlie's voice, wrecked, against his skin, hands mapping him like a surface he intended to paint from memory. "You keep making that sound. The low one. I want that sound in a jar. I want to keep it."

"You're narrating."

"I narrate when I'm happy, it's a whole—" Charlie's breath broke as Laurent's hands found bare skin. "Okay, I'm gonna stop narrating."

He didn't, entirely. Charlie was never going to entirely stop, and that was the miracle of it — that even here, especially here, he stayed himself, loud and reckless and delighted and present, no performance in him anywhere, nothing held back for later. And Laurent, who had built a whole life out of what he held back for later, who bought the pastry every day just to prove he could leave it, took Charlie apart slowly in the dark of his own gallery and let himself, for once, keep nothing in reserve.

The physical of it Laurent would carry in fragments after — Charlie's rough painter's hands and the cadmium he'd smell on his own skin the next day, the specific weight of him, the way he said Laurent's name at the end like it had two syllables and both of them mattered, the way he laughed even then, breathless and amazed, I told you, I told you I was right, muffled against Laurent's shoulder. But the thing underneath it, the thing that was the whole scene and the whole book of Laurent's careful life cracking open — that was simpler and harder to hold. It was being seen. All the way down, in the dark, with nothing arranged, no folder, no name on the glass, no acceptable half of a larger thing. Just Laurent, the man under all of it, the boy from nowhere who'd learned wealth as a language and taste as armor and had never once let anyone past the last wall — seen, and wanted anyway, and not left on the desk.

He came undone from that. Not from the sex. From that.

***

After, they ended up on the floor of the back room, on Charlie's ruined denim jacket and Laurent's very good coat, which Laurent registered with distant amusement he was going to have to explain to his dry cleaner and did not care. The gallery hummed its night-hum around them. Somewhere out front the gold painting hung in the dark, being true.

Charlie was a warm sprawl half across him, tracing something on Laurent's chest with one finger — a shape, Laurent realized, the boy was drawing on him, couldn't stop making marks even now.

"What are you painting," Laurent said. His voice had gone somewhere it didn't usually go.

"The sound. The low one. I'm trying to figure out what color it is." Charlie's finger moved. "It's not blue. Everything's usually blue with me. This one's — I don't have it yet. It's new." He propped up on an elbow and looked down at Laurent in the dark, and his face was doing the open thing, all the way open, and there was something under the delight now that made Laurent's chest do something the ai — that made his chest do something he had no rule for. "You went somewhere. At the end. You got real quiet, real — you weren't hiding. I've never seen you not hiding. Not even a little. It was—" Charlie stopped, and for once, once, went quiet looking for a word. "That's the one I want in the jar. Not the sound. That."

"Charlie."

"Yeah."

Laurent reached up and put his hand in the disaster of Charlie's hair, and he meant to say something dry, something that put a wall back, something acceptable — and he found he couldn't, and he didn't, and the not-doing-it felt like the first honest thing he'd done in twenty years.

"The opening is in four days," Laurent said instead, quietly, because it was the true thing and the frightening thing and he was apparently only capable of true things now. "The whole city is going to be in this room. Sabine. The critics. Everyone I've spent my life making believe I'm untouchable." He looked at the boy sprawled across his chest in the dark, at the wall out front with the confession on it. "And your wall is the best wall in the show, and I hung the proof of this on it myself, in the open, where anyone with your eye could read it. I can't undo that. I don't want to undo that. But I need you to understand what we just walked into."

Charlie was quiet a moment. Then he lowered his head back down onto Laurent's chest, over the low sound, over the thing he was trying to find the color of.

"So we walked into it," he said. "Together. On purpose." A beat. "I'm not scared of the room, Laurent. I told you. The room got real. That's the only kind I like."

Laurent lay on the floor of his own gallery at one in the morning with a boy from Queens on his chest and the confession hanging in the dark and four days until the entire city came to look, and he was more frightened than he'd been in twenty years, and more awake, and he did not reach for a single wall.

He should have been terrified only of the room.

He didn't yet know to be terrified of himself — of the reasons, still sitting in him, patient and excellent, waiting for the moment the fear got big enough to make them sound like love.

Chapter 7

The Discovery

Sabine Kessler's apartment took up the top two floors of a building on Fifth that had a name instead of a number, and Charlie stood in the private elevator watching himself in the brass and thought, she collects people the way Laurent hangs paintings, and I got sent up in the freight.

The invitation had come through Naomi. Ms. Kessler would like to show you her collection before the opening. Tuesday, two o'clock. She's sending a car. Charlie had texted Laurent — your scary cashmere collector wants to give me a private tour, should I be worried — and Laurent had taken four hours to answer, which he never did, and then answered Go. She could change your life. Be yourself but not all of yourself, which Charlie had read eleven times on the M and still couldn't get the color of.

The elevator opened directly into the apartment, no hallway, no door, just — the collection. And Charlie, who had spent his whole life being annoying at museums until the guards knew him, stopped dead, because it was better than most museums. A Twombly the size of a garage door. A little Agnes Martin that made his throat hurt. A Bourgeois in the corner like a spider deciding about him. He forgot, for a second, to be nervous. He just looked, greedy, the way he looked at everything, moving toward the Martin without asking.

"There he is," Sabine said, from somewhere in all that space. "The looker. Marguerite said you look at paintings like a raccoon looks at a latch. She meant it unkindly. I don't."