Platonic (29 page)

Mark raises an eyebrow and Daniel just raises one back. “I thought this would make a nice night out. I bought us tickets as soon as you said you were coming.”

“I haven’t listened to piano since—”

“I listen to it all the time,” Daniel says. “It still reminds me of you.”

“I haven’t played since high school.”

“Yeah,” Daniel squeezes his hand and leads him inside. ”But it’s still the reason we met.”

Mark beams at Daniel as he grabs Mark’s hand and pulls him in, flashing his phone at the bouncer manning the inner door and showing their tickets. They are met by a bright, bubbly woman who clasps her hands together and leans in for a kiss on each cheek from Daniel.

“Welcome again, Mr O’Shea.” She looks over to Mark and nods her welcome to him.

“You are in for a fantastic night, I guarantee it,” she tells them. “Follow me.”

She leads them up a spiral staircase and through a red velvet curtain into the VIP balcony. A dozen others are there already, some of whom nod their acknowledgment to Daniel.

They’re given a small table and two tall barstools overlooking the main stage and the twin black and white grand pianos. The woman leaves for a moment and comes back with an ice bucket and champagne, which she pops open and pours into two glasses.

“Is this okay?” Daniel asks, voice quiet and unsure with just an edge of pleading, as if Mark might say no and slip away from him. It’s strange for Mark to witness and sad, because they shouldn’t be like that with each other; but it is also miraculous that they’re with each other at all. Daniel reaches for him, and Mark lets him interlace their fingers together across the table.

Mark stares at him and then down at the growing crowd and the pianos, and everywhere, the spread of low blue lights. “Are you kidding? This is perfect.”

“You’ve said before that you still listen to classical music and I thought this would be fun and not so distracting as going to a show or something—”

“Violins, strings… I listen to strings, mostly. I don’t… this is honestly so perfect; stop being silly. I didn’t even know I wanted to come here and you still managed to bring me.”

Daniel drops his eyes, his long eyelashes caught in the blue light. He sips his champagne and contemplates and then says, “Maybe we’re starting to know each other that well?”

Mark grins. “Oh, I hope so.”

***

They catch a cab home, Daniel whispering against Mark’s mouth that London cabbies have seen so much worse. They’re both hard and laughing by the time Daniel gets his door open, and this time there is no weirdness and no hesitation. They get off fast, spending too much time on kissing and laughing and too little on actually remembering to try to find a rhythm for their pleasure.

Afterward, Daniel fetches two of his large sketch folios from the study and drops them onto the bed beside Mark. He’s blushing, and Mark can already guess what’s in them as he sits up against the headboard. “New designs?” he teases and Daniel shakes his head and settles opposite Mark, the folio upside down for him as he rests it upon his knees and opens it.

Daniel has told Mark that he’s started sketching him again (from memory, because it would be a waste of their time to do it when they’re actually together). This folio is page after page of line sketches of Mark, wearing Daniel’s designs and smiling up from pages colored in with pencils and water paints.

Mark spends twenty minutes poring over the images of himself, drawn from every possible angle as Daniel has worked to get every aspect of his face and body right. It’s Mark the way Daniel sees him: dressed in perfect clothes, with his hair in waves and his glasses on, in beautiful places surrounded by beautiful people and always happy, his eyes always colored precisely the right green to stand out from the rest of the image.

When he closes the second folio, Daniel is just sitting there, playing with the corner of a sheet, his cheeks still bright red and his eyes focused on his hands, eyelashes long and lush as he blinks.

“Thank you,” Mark says, and kisses him again.

***

Sunday, Daniel assures Mark, is for sleeping in and being lazy in London just as much as it is in New York. Mark corrects him, pointing out that Sunday mornings are now his usual weekly date with Max, and Daniel teases him about being overeager and shows him the email Alexis sent a month ago, detailing all of Mark’s finer attributes.

Mark kisses him to shut him up and can’t help but blush. Then he mumbles, “Finer attributes,” and holds Daniel down on the bed and spends as long as he can worshiping his body.

***

“I don’t miss talking to you as much as I think I should,” Mark confides between kisses, lying heavily across Daniel’s naked body, their half-hard, slowly recovering cocks caught deliciously between them.

Daniel pushes him up and stares. “Me either,” he admits. “I think it’s because we talk every single day. Probably more than is healthy.”

It’s true. They email and text and call and Skype. They share details so mundane that Mark can’t be bothered to reread what he writes before sending it, even though, when he gets the same mundane daily accounts back from Daniel, he reads them through twice.

“I miss being with you, though,” Mark says, rocking into him, kissing his cheek.

Daniel knows he doesn’t just mean the sex, or the kissing, or being in the same space at the same time. There is something so much more. “Me too.”

“I guess this is it until Thanksgiving,” Mark sighs.

“Christmas,” Daniel corrects him, having decided to wait until they were together to break this particularly heartbreaking piece of news. “Thanksgiving is an American thing; the rest of the world really couldn’t give a fuck and I couldn’t afford to take the time even if there was a national holiday.” Mark tries to keep from looking miserable but fails. They’ve only been apart for two months and coming back together has been fraught, difficult and desperate. It’s over six months until Christmas. He can’t imagine being able to bear it.

“You’re going back to Illinois for Thanksgiving?” Daniel asks.

“I wanted you in New York, all to myself.” Sighing heavily, Mark kisses Daniel’s shoulder and rallies. “Christmas, then?”

Daniel nods. “It’ll have to be back home. We can split your time between my family and yours, if you like.”

Mark sighs again. “I’d rather spend it mostly with yours, to be honest.” Then he thinks of something he’s been avoiding asking via email for weeks. He kisses Daniel’s neck and asks, “Do you really think your parents are happy about me being… back?”

Daniel laughs. “I Skyped them especially to tell them about a month ago. You should have seen my mom’s face.”

Mark is about to ask what, exactly, this means when his phone vibrates on the bedside table. He buries his face in Daniel’s neck. “Can you?” he asks, because Daniel’s arms seem longer and his hands are too snugly fitted to Daniel’s waist for him to want to move an inch.

Laughing, Daniel stretches to grab the phone for him. “Is this Patrick,
the
Patrick?”

Mark’s head snaps up. “Seriously?” he asks.

Daniel laughs and holds Mark’s phone hostage for a second. “Yes, seriously. The ex you said you never spoke to anymore?”

Mark’s heart skips a beat; ten years ago this would totally be about uncertainty and mistrust. Now is different, though, and Daniel is still smiling and just seems inquisitive. “Yeah, if that’s… Patrick Hunt, then I have
no
idea why it’s Patrick Hunt. What does it say?”

Daniel reads the message for him and arches an eyebrow. “A little birdie told me you were in London? Obviously you’ve outgrown needing me for three a.m. consults about your love life if you can’t even drop me a line when you’re already across the Atlantic.” Mark’s face turns red as he nuzzles in closer to Daniel’s skin and the fact that Daniel can see it only makes it worse.

“I completely forgot he was over here—”

“No you didn’t,” Daniel chastises. They’ve talked plenty about Patrick in the past, his presence dipping in and out of Mark’s tales from Stanford.

“I mean I didn’t even think to meet up with him.”

“Am I that distracting?” Daniel teases.

“Yes,” Mark retorts. “Oh, he will want to meet you,” he admits after a second of further nuzzling against Daniel’s skin. He looks up and rests his chin on his hand over Daniel’s chest. Then he starts to chew his lip.Daniel waits patiently while Mark tries to remember how much of the story Daniel already knows.

“So you know Patrick was the instructor at Stanford. He was a good friend—”

“And taught you everything you know about how to suck cock.” Daniel grins wickedly.

“Yes,” Mark blushes. “Shut up. And you know I emailed him a bit after Ben and before you. We haven’t really spoken for… six months, I guess. We haven’t needed to.”

“He’s a good friend,” Daniel says. “You should have told him you were over here.”

“Oh, he’ll forgive me,” Mark says, pressing his forehead to Daniel’s sternum. “He will want to meet you, though.”

“How does he know who I am if you haven’t spoken to him in six months?”

“He was kind of rooting for you… us.”

“While you were at Stanford?” Daniel asks, incredulously.

“I told you I never got over you.”

***

They meet Patrick in a pub that Daniel’s never heard of. He’s in the back, dressed in a suit far too nice for a Sunday afternoon. He hugs Mark tightly and actually has the audacity to ruffle his hair and say, “Good to see you’re keeping yourself pretty,” while Daniel just looks from one to the other.

Then Patrick turns to him and smiles and offers his hand. “Hi, I’m Patrick.”

“Dan,” Daniel responds, not rudely, but slightly thrown by the height and the breadth of the imposing man in front of him.

Patrick nods and turns back to Mark immediately, asking, “What’s this surprise you mentioned?”

Mark’s grin grows and Daniel fidgets, and it takes several long seconds for everything to slip into place in Patrick’s head.

Patrick turns back to Daniel. “Dan as in… Daniel?” Patrick asks, and now he’s looking at him much more carefully. Taking in the tailored jeans, the styled hair, and the way he stands a little too close and just a little behind Mark. “
The
Daniel? You two finally—”

And then he drags both of them in for a simultaneous hug. “About fucking time,” he exclaims.

***

It turns out that Daniel likes Patrick very much even though Patrick spent over a year playing fuck-buddy with Mark. It’s strange, and Mark wasn’t sure Daniel would be okay with it, but he couldn’t miss the chance to show Patrick everything that had come about.

So what was intended to be one quick drink at the pub turns into a late lunch. Patrick regales Daniel with tales from Stanford, and Daniel tells Patrick about New York and Illinois and high school. Eventually, Mark explains their current transatlantic predicament and Patrick laughs himself silly. But he takes it all in, and when they part ways he hugs both of them again.

He pulls Mark back, though, letting Daniel walk a little further away. “How are you handling all of this?” he asks, low enough that Daniel won’t hear him.

“Okay, so far. Being here this weekend has been reenergizing.”

“Good.” Patrick stares ahead at Daniel, who walks without looking back at them. “I really hope you get through the next six months, because I’m pretty sure this is your shot at everything you wanted.”

Mark looks hard at him, and Patrick just stares right back, his gaze level and serious. Then he cracks a smile and pulls Mark in under his arm so he can whisper in his ear, “I’ll expect an invite to the wedding.”

This makes Mark blush, and Patrick disentangles quickly, pushing him ahead and smacking him on the ass as he had so often done. By the time Mark catches up to Daniel, Patrick is across the street hailing a cab. Mark is still blushing and, when Daniel raises an eyebrow at him, Mark shakes his head and says it was nothing.

Daniel doesn’t seem to mind so much, just slips his hand into Mark’s and heads toward home.

***

That night, Daniel takes Mark to the new store. It’s a warm summer evening, and the theater district pulses with the throng leaving afternoon matinees and finding dinner or another source of entertainment. As they head north toward the pedestrian malls full of boutique fashion stores, the crowds thin and most of the shopfronts are dim, already closed.

Mark presses up close behind Daniel as he unlocks the door to his store. “You’re amazing,” Mark says before Daniel even has the lights switched on. The space floods with light that pours from fixtures set into the periphery of the hardwood floor and the chandelier hanging in the center of the room.

The lights cast the fabrics of the clothes into an array of shadows that make their colors seem even more vibrant than Mark is used to seeing in Daniel’s designs. He stares at the richness of the room and his eyes move to a couple who have paused to peer in through the display windows. They move on, and Mark crosses to a corner in the front of the store dedicated to a selection of deep purple suits that he desperately wants to run his fingers over. He spends half an hour just looking at clothes, holding them in his hands and quizzing Daniel about them. Then he hugs Daniel tight and tells him once more that he can’t believe how incredible he is.

Daniel just blushes in his arms and tells him that the store has been the easy bit. He gushes about the woman he has running the place and the way London’s fashion-forward are buying up anything and everything he puts on the mannequins. He has two junior designers working for him now, one in New York and one in London, both still in school but eager and talented. This means he’s been able to juggle both the collaboration with Martinez and a reasonable turnout of new clothes for his own lines. It also means he’s lost a lot of sleep, but it’s worth it. Mark just marvels at him and kisses his temple again.

***

Mark leaves the next day at the crack of dawn and Daniel goes with him all the way to Heathrow just because he can. They kiss outside security, and Mark bites down on his bottom lip to keep from crying as he moves through the gates.