Skye Blue, page 14
part #6 of Firsts and Forever Series
Given all of that, the message I found waiting in my in-box when I logged on to the dating site was excruciating. Mac had emailed me late last night. He had, in effect, broken up with me.
I can’t keep doing this, he’d written. I feel so close to you, closer than I probably should, given the fact that we really don’t know each other. I’m developing real feelings for you and that scares the hell out of me. You know why I just can’t open myself up to a relationship, given some of the things I told you. You understand better than anyone how hurt and damaged I am, even though I didn’t even tell you the whole story of those years with my ex. It was even worse than you think. Things happened that I can’t talk about, not even with you.
I need to end this for another reason though, too. I briefly mentioned someone I work with that I’m attracted to. That’s become more intense, though I really can’t be with him either, any more than I can be with you.
It’s all more than I can handle. My feelings for him and my feelings for you are overwhelming. I can’t deal with any of it, because the scars from my last relationship are way too deep.
You won’t hear from me again. I’m deleting this account after I know you’ve received this message. I should have known I was too messed up even to try to make friends or to find someone to chat with. There are two things I want you to know before I go, though.
This meant the world to me. You’re an amazing person, and you were a great friend to me over this past week. You helped me in ways you don’t even realize. I’m so grateful to you.
The other thing I want to tell you is this: keep my phone number for an emergency, in case the darkness closes in again. If you find yourself contemplating suicide and you have no one to turn to, please call me. I care about you and I want to make sure you’re okay, even if I’m too screwed up to be a real part of your life.
Goodbye, friend.
I sat there for a long time, rereading that message over and over again. Eventually, I copied and pasted it into a file and saved it on my computer. Maybe that was kind of like holding on to a little part of him.
After that, I sent him this email: I’ll miss you Mac, and I wish you nothing but the best. Thank you for listening and caring. The same goes for my phone number, please save it and use it if you ever find yourself in such a dark place that you need help finding your way back out. There was so much more to say, but maybe that would be enough.
I felt hollow as I closed the computer and put it under the bed, then curled up and pulled the blanket over me. After a while, the cat climbed in the window and joined me on his pillow. I stroked his fur as I told him, “Bad news, Draco. Your other dad isn’t going to be a part of our lives anymore. I’m going to be a single parent now.”
Though really, I had been all along.
Chapter Seven
There was excitement in the air, almost palpable on the first day of school. I leaned against the back of the bench and adjusted my sunglasses, then closed my eyes and tilted my face toward the midmorning sun as I waited for Christian. He was late, but not critically so. Not yet, anyway.
I shook out my arms, then bent them over my head and took hold of my left elbow, stretching the muscles in my upper arm with my right hand. I’d spent most of yesterday doing far too much heavy lifting and I was feeling it now. After Saturday night, when both Dare and Mac delivered a ‘thanks but no thanks,’ I’d felt the need to keep myself occupied and to create some order in my life. That ended up taking the form of rearranging all the crap in my apartment. I’d designated a third of the living room to house the raw materials for my sculptures, then proceeded to shift, stack, and generally heave most of my scrap metal into one great big Jenga puzzle. It ended up looking kind of cool, actually, and if I’d had my welding equipment, I might have been tempted to fix it in place. The project had taken hours because a lot of it had to be disassembled before I could even move it, like that huge propeller.
Hard as it was for me, I did some editing too, and made several trips downstairs with bits and pieces that I finally admitted I’d probably never use. A broken dorm fridge, for example, would in all likelihood never find its way into one of my sculptures. I lined up my rejects on the sidewalk with a sign that said ‘free’ (no way was anyone going to pay for this stuff) and every time I came back downstairs, the crap I’d hauled down previously was gone.
In a way, that made me feel slightly vindicated. My brother had thought the vast majority of the stuff I brought home was useless garbage that no one would possibly want. It turned out other people were just as enthralled by weird free stuff as I was.
After what remained of my collection was neatly stacked, I cleaned the apartment and rearranged the furniture. Then I hung up my neon sign on the wall across from my bed, where I could enjoy it. Lastly, I built a stand for the Royal Rodent’s fairly large cage and gave him a place of honor in the corner of my bedroom.
Some of the odds and ends might have gone, but the mouse was staying. Fine, I’d admit it. I had become attached to vermin.
Someone dropped onto the bench beside me and my eyes flew open. Christian was in full-on rock star mode. He was wearing guyliner, low slung black jeans, a pair of black boots, and nothing else. “That’s a whole lot of look for ten a.m. on a Monday morning,” I told him.
“What? I totally toned it down.”
“This is toned down? What does toned up look like?”
“I’ll have you know I showed a lot of restraint. I almost drew a big henna tattoo in the center of my chest. It was going to be a huge fist giving the finger, a special present for Professor Maitland. But I decided to be mature instead. I’m totally over the whole mature thing now though and am considering drawing it in with a Sharpie.”
I got to my feet and slung my backpack over my shoulder as I said, “Maybe you can wait until the second day of school to alienate the entire faculty. Come on, let’s go to class. I think yours is on the way to my mixed media lab.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Christian glanced at me as we started walking, then looked again, longer this time. “Something’s different,” he said. He kept staring at me and finally said, “You took out your lip piercing. How come?”
“I was kind of over it.”
“How can you be over it? You were so fucking happy when you got that thing! You never took it off, not once over the last year.”
“Probably explains why I’m over it.”
He stopped walking abruptly, so that a couple students that had been behind us had to dodge around him. “Okay, this is really depressing.”
I turned to look at him. “What is?”
“You. Me. This sudden onslaught of maturity. You with the lip ring, me deciding against the huge, offensive body art. It’s tragic, really.”
“Why?”
“Because this is our last year of art school! When it’s over, we’re going to have to go out in the real world and get real jobs and wear real clothes and act like real grown-ups, all the fucking time! So we shouldn’t be growing up now, we should still be acting like Peter Pan! Because when this school year is over, reality is going to suck the life right out of us, so hard and so fast that we won’t even be Skye and Christian anymore.” He was trying to laugh it off, but there was something in his pale green eyes that told me this was no joke to him.
I picked up his hand and said, “You can still be Peter Pan when this is over, and I can still be your Lost Boy. Now come on, Peter. We’re late.”
He sighed and started walking again, holding my hand a bit tighter. “I really can’t,” he muttered. “I was only allotted so many Peter Pan years. They expire on graduation day.”
“The way you’re talking makes it sound like you’re handing yourself over to the authorities as soon as you graduate for an extended prison sentence.”
“Might as well be.”
“I don’t suppose you’re actually willing to talk about whatever’s going on with you right now,” I ventured.
He pulled up a half-smile and glanced over at me. “I told you what’s going on. I don’t want this to end. I love art school, and my life right now, and you and me. I love roaming the streets at three a.m. with a backpack full of spray paint. I love making art. I love this freedom.”
“But the only part that’ll actually be ending is school. You can keep doing all that other stuff, even after we both graduate and get day jobs.”
“This is me,” he said abruptly, coming to a stop beside a doorway framed in purple bougainvillea. “Want to meet for lunch after class in the student union?”
“Sure. I’ll text Zandra and see if she wants to join us.”
“Where is she anyway?”
“Since she’s far smarter than us, she didn’t schedule any classes that begin before noon.”
“That is smart. How will you text her, though? Is your phone working again?”
“Yup. I bought more air time.”
“Good, not being able to reach you was a pain. See you later.” He entered the building and I continued my trek across the hilly campus. I was greeted by several people along the way. It wasn’t a very big school, so most of the returning students knew each other. After three years it kind of felt like home, and I could definitely understand Christian’s melancholy. The fact that this was our last year was definitely bittersweet.
I wasn’t going to have much time to dwell on it, though. I’d been gradually making up classes from the months I missed after I tried to OD, so I was going to have a heavier than average course load on top of needing to complete a comprehensive senior project. Stretching it out an extra semester wasn’t an option, since my scholarship covered only four years of instruction and I’d never be able to pay for more on my own.
“Hey there, Skye.” I glanced over at my friend Christopher Robin, who fell in step beside me. Christopher was a beautiful guy with blond curly hair and soulful blue eyes.
“Hi, C.R. Wow, married life is really agreeing with you. You look terrific.” He’d always been really thin, but since his July Fourth wedding he’d filled out slightly and there was a healthy glow in his normally pale cheeks.
He smiled shyly at that. “Thanks. You headed to the Big House?” That was everyone’s nickname for the one modern building on the nearly-century-old campus. It housed many of the studios, and thanks to an awkward facade, looked an awful lot like the whole thing was behind bars.
“Yup. You too?” When he nodded, I said, “I’m a little surprised that you came back for your senior year.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve already made it big in the art world. In fact, you’re well on your way to being the most famous student to ever attend Sutherlin.” He’d had a smash hit debut art show several months back, and had even landed the cover of a national arts magazine. Since then, he’d opened his own gallery. From what I’d heard, it was doing well.
“That’s not true. There have been plenty of successful graduates.” He was being modest. Christopher was a total rock star.
“Still though. It doesn’t really seem like you’d need this place anymore.”
“I made a promise to myself a long time ago to complete both my B.F.A. and M.F.A., no matter what,” he said. “Besides, I don’t think I’ll ever feel like I’m done learning and growing as an artist. Even after I complete my M.F.A. I’m sure I’ll still be looking for ways to keep improving.”
We parted ways once we reached the Big House. As he went upstairs and as I continued down the long corridor to the mixed media lab, I couldn’t help but compare myself to Christopher. He was always so focused and it really seemed like he had it all figured out. All I’d ever figured out was that I loved to sculpt. I’d been damn lucky to win the national competition that got me this scholarship, and for a while I’d tried to tell myself that win must mean I was good and that I’d be able to have a career doing what I loved.
But of course, it didn’t mean that at all. It just meant that some arbitrary panel of judges decided to assign meaning to a project I made when I was a kid, meaning that wasn’t even really there. I’d thought back then that winning the contest was only the beginning, but since then I’d realized I’d actually just peaked early. I was a ‘B’ student at Sutherlin, not exceptional at all, it turned out.
“Mr. Fleischmann, nice of you to join us.” That exceedingly tired attempt at humor came from Norbert Musgrave, my professor, as I stepped into the studio. Everyone else was already busy sketching out project ideas. A few people looked up and smiled at me, and I returned their smiles as I found a seat near the back of the room. I pulled out my sketchbook and a couple drawing pencils, and then I stopped and stared at the cover, running a fingertip over Mac’s phone number.
There’d been so much potential there. I usually didn’t click with people like that. While I made friends easily, I tended to keep things light. Nothing was ever that intense, that intimate. The connection Mac and I had shared had been something special.
I stifled a sigh and turned to a blank page in my sketchbook, then just sat there for a long time, tapping the blunt end of the pencil against the paper. Finally, when I started to draw, Dare’s face took shape on the page. That had been intense too, but in a very different way. I didn’t know how I was supposed to go in to work every day and see him and not touch him, not crave him with every part of me. I’d never felt an attraction that strong.
Again, it seemed so odd that I could be drawn to both of these men simultaneously. It seemed like being so totally into one of them should have made my attraction to the other impossible. I tried to reach the conclusion that maybe they were both wrong for me if I could be attracted to someone else at the same time, but that wouldn’t hold water. Neither of them felt wrong in the slightest.
I continued to work on the sketch, roughing in the general shape and going back to concentrate on the eyes. I wished I had some colored pencils with me to do them justice. The nose took shape with a few simple strokes. It was straight and on the strong side. Not like mine, which was a bit too prominent, but in a way that balanced him out and saved him from being too pretty. Next I drew his mouth. God, that mouth. Full, soft lips with a well-defined cleft in the center of his top lip....
The memory of him kissing me came flooding back. There had been so much hunger, so much urgency in his kiss, like he didn’t just want to kiss me, he needed to. He’d been every bit as attracted to me as I’d been to him.
The attraction I felt with Mac was mutual too, I was sure of it. In fact, it was the intensity of that attraction that had made him step back from me. It was odd. Both men had reacted the same way to me. They’d both pulled back the moment things started to get too intense.
Ultimately, neither one had been willing to take a chance on me. I understood why in Mac’s case. He’d been burned horribly by his last relationship. I had no idea what Dare’s reasons were for needing to keep me at bay. He talked about being damaged but God, who wasn’t?
It occurred to me as I continued to fill in details on the sketch that if I could combine Dare and Mac, I’d end up with the perfect man for me. I had a raw, primal, physical attraction with one and a deep, soulful, almost spiritual connection with the other. If I ever found that in any one person, I’d keep him forever.
Funnily enough, it was because of Mac that I’d met Dare. He’d told me about the auditions at Thrust. I wondered how he knew about them.
I put my pencil down and stared at the drawing as a crazy thought entered my mind.
What if Mac and Dare were one and the same?
Could that even be possible?
I replayed everything Mac had told me about himself, looking for anything that would eliminate this as a possibility. I couldn’t think of a single thing that would disprove this. In fact, I remembered something Mac had said once. What was it? I didn’t recall the exact words, but it was something like, ‘You wouldn’t like me if you met me in real life. I’ve put up so many walls.’
Okay, that didn’t prove anything. So what if I hadn’t liked Dare when I first met him? A lot of people were unlikeable.
I looked for more pieces to the puzzle. Something had happened to end Mac’s successful career. He’d never said what the career was or what ended it, but an injury like Dare’s could certainly have been a career ender. Given how extraordinarily talented Dare was, he must have been a professional dancer before getting hurt and winding up as a go-go boy.
I was completely grasping at straws. There was no way they were the same person...right?
But my God, what if they were?
I had to find out. Now. This was going to drive me absolutely crazy until I got an answer.
I closed my sketch pad and returned it and the pencils to my backpack, which I zipped shut and slung over my shoulder as I got out of my seat. “Going somewhere, Mr. Fleischmann?” my professor asked, and everyone in the room glanced up at me.
I wracked my brain for an excuse as to why I absolutely had to leave right now. Unfortunately, I was a terrible liar. I always got way too elaborate. The dog ate my homework would never suffice for me. Instead, it would spin into an epic tale of valiantly trying to wrestle my homework away from teams of wild hyenas. So, as I tried to form a lie around something simple like leaving the stove on in my apartment, I could already feel it snowballing out of control into an outlandish tale involving firemen, high-rise apartments, and scores of defenseless children and senior tenants that I simply had to rescue.
I went with the truth instead. It sounded equally insane. “I need to go. I have to figure out if these two guys are really the same guy. I’ve been sitting here trying to piece it together, and I think there’s an outside chance that maybe they are. It’s like a total, oh-my-God, no-freaking-way, completely crazy long shot. But if they are, or if he is, then he’s my perfect match. Maybe even my soul mate. I mean, who knows, right? Weirder things have been known to happen. But there’s just no way I can concentrate on anything until I figure this out. So, like I said, I have to go. I’ll be back for our next session, though. Sorry.” Wow. And I’d just said that in front of my entire class.
