Rough Canvas (45 page)

Marcus had explained it.
My father tried to use fear to make me what he wanted me to be.

That’s when I decided not to be afraid of anything. Then you came and I remembered that true
fear is knowing you have something you can’t bear losing.

In the desolate comfort of the three a.m. hour, Marcus had given Thomas the rest of the story in terse sentences, a few syllables to explain what had built his own foundation.

When Mike went after the men who had effectively gang-raped Marcus, they’d

stabbed him. Mike made it back to his place and refused to let Marcus call for help, so he’d died while Marcus held the edges of his gut together.

Tobias had been in a gang before he got together with Marcus and Emile, and he

could never completely shake the old loyalties. Six months into his first semester of art school, Toby let one of his old gang buddies pressure him into covering his back for a robbery, and his head was bashed in with a tire iron.

On the wall of Marcus’ living room, a canvas with the bold, angry colors of Tobias’

work shone like jewels. The other three walls had been painted a relaxing blue-green, but Marcus painted his walls specifically for the art hung upon them, so Toby’s wall was bare white, giving the art the full focus. When Thomas looked at it now, the significance of it being there was obvious.

Now he can’t paint inside the lines of a coloring book…
Marcus’ words haunted the dark corners of Thomas’ mind like a ghost.

Behind Marcus’ back, determined to pull his weight, Emile took a blowjob gig

meant for Marcus. While they didn’t know for sure, Marcus suspected the john found out Emile was not anatomically male. Pissed off by what he would perceive as deceit, the john had taken his revenge. Emile was strangled, his body dumped like garbage in one of the landfills. It had taken Marcus and Toby a week to find him.

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At the age Thomas had been playing in a baseball league and dreaming about the

possibility of going to art school, Marcus had been in the sewers of New York, scoring a warm corner for him and his street rats against bigger, meaner vagrants.

Toby taught me that talent needed to be represented, nurtured, protected. So I ferreted it out,
conned and hustled buyers and investors, got where I am today. I don’t even have a high-school
diploma, let alone a college degree, but do you think anybody ever assumes otherwise? You learn
the right language, the right way to present yourself, no one even questions it.

Despite that offhand comment, since Thomas knew how difficult and highbrow the

art world truly was, he also knew Marcus’ acceptance in that world was right up there with biblical miracles. But what was hustling and charming his way into the

intimidating art society of the Upper East Side when he knew what it was to fight packs of wild dogs for food found in the garbage? To hold your surrogate father while he died, holding his guts in, blood up to your elbows? The man who just happened to smack you around and tap your ass when he had the desire for it, but you loved

anyway for reasons too complicated to explain?

You have a purity I’ve lost, pet. But in some ways, the important ones, you’re not naïve.

You understand the darkness without ever having been in it. You see the world as it is, all its
misery and pain, all the beauty that somehow rises above it, and you accept all of it. You accept
me.

When Marcus touched him Thomas saw it in his face now, how he drank in

Thomas’ balance, his quiet stable nature. Yeah, they fit. Yin had to have a yang. The art was the dot of darkness in Thomas’ life and the dot of light in Marcus’ that made them a part of each other, connected them. He’d always been thankful and awed by his gift, but now Thomas saw it had a higher purpose. Even if he became world renowned or

crashed as an art nobody, the greatest treasure it had brought him was that connection with Marcus.

* * * * *

Lauren was watching Thomas shrewdly. “Marcus treats everything as a work of

art,” she said abruptly. “Something endlessly fascinating in both its perfection and imperfection. So it makes sense that he would wait for that feeling with the man he’d love forever. Josh told me that on the way here. Have faith, Thomas.”

Thomas’ mind gingerly touched her words, as if they were an animal that might

bite. But they also made him remember something else Owen had told him.

“You ever notice how he doesn’t look at himself in a mirror?”

Why would he need to?
Thomas had asked it, half humorously.

“No.” Owen shook his head. “I don’t mean look at his hair when he’s brushing it, or his jaw
for a shave. He never looks at himself. It’s his face that got him out. But it’s his face that lost him
his soul. The way he looks at you, son…he thinks you’re holding it for him.”

Nodding to her, he skirted the living area with a gesture to Josh, and stepped with only a brief hesitation out on the balcony.

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Marcus was standing with his back to him, wineglass in hand, considering the city below. The shirt lightly blowing against his body, stretching across the broad shoulders.

The pressed slacks defining his thighs and perfect ass. Studying the tilt of that sculpted face, the light fall of hair feathering his shoulders with the breeze, Thomas couldn’t imagine anything further from the roots of a farmer’s son.

And he wasn’t seeing the surface. Beneath the New York City art dealer, even

beneath the farmer’s son. Down to the raw, open soul. Would Marcus have faith in
Thomas
at this most vulnerable juncture? Because Thomas didn’t want there to be any more questions between them. Time to stop putting it off. Tomorrow he’d leave. Later tonight he’d talk to Marcus and make him understand.

Taking another step forward, he slid his arm under Marcus’, flattened his palm on his chest and pressed his body up against his, feeling the flex of the firm ass as Marcus tilted his head.

“Let me pleasure you, Master,” he murmured. “Lean back on me.” Knowing they

were turned so his act was disguised, Thomas slid his palm down the flat abdomen and found Marcus’ cock, cupped him. That organ capable of giving so much pleasure

hardened under his hand. Putting his lips to Marcus’ ear, he nuzzled, despite the fact Josh and Lauren were in the penthouse.

”What are you doing?”

“Arousing you the way you always arouse me, when I can’t do anything about it. I want to know how much you want me.” Thomas found the side of Marcus’ throat,

nipped. “Knowing you’ll have to wait and suffer the way you make me suffer

sometimes.”

“You might get punished for that later.”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to hold out that long.”

Marcus curved his hand over Thomas’. “Look in the living room.”

Lauren had gotten her wine and was standing next to Josh, her hand on his nape as he sat on his heels, looking at the music choices. When he turned his head and kissed her just above the knee in her short skirt, her hand tightened on his neck. She murmured, “Behave”, earning an unrepentant heated smile from Josh as he curved his fingers around the back of her knee, his thumb coursing along the upper part of her thigh.

The pose, him on his knees, the way it changed the look in her eyes, the intent look in Josh’s that said he knew exactly what it did to her, was so familiar that Thomas couldn’t help but get more aroused himself at the sight.

As Josh’s hand climbed higher, he and Lauren still not cognizant of Marcus and

Thomas’ regard, she watched him, a soft look in her eyes. But her mouth firmed and she reached down, grasped his wrist to stop him. He kissed the back of her knuckles, caressed her with his cheek, brushing his hair against her bare skin and the soft gleam of the wedding band on her finger.

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Devotion. Utter. Permanent. It was like much of the subject matter of Thomas’

paintings. The shape of it could change, yes, but not the fundamental things that were the foundation. It was in the way they looked at each other.

“Perfect timing,” Marcus said quietly. He caressed Thomas’ back, that lingering touch just over his buttocks, easing him back into the room.

Lauren’s head lifted. Josh merely rested his temple against her knee, his hand still firmly wrapped around her leg while her hand teased the strands of unruly brown and blond hair beneath her touch.

“I’d like the two of you to hear something.” Marcus gestured Thomas to a chair but remained standing. Josh rose and took the sofa, reclaiming his drink as Lauren settled in under his arm with her wine.

“It means a lot to me, the three of you being here tonight.” Marcus took a position at the fireplace, before the mantle. He cleared his throat, lifted a shoulder. “I haven’t had many people in my life I’ve truly loved, that stuck. I’d forgotten what it means to have people who care enough about you to give up things for you. Be there when you need them.”

He’d captured their attention fully, for certain. Thomas glanced over to see Lauren and Josh both intently watching him. Thomas turned his attention back to find Marcus’

gaze specifically on him, and when his voice lowered, became somewhat more

unsteady on the next words, Thomas leaned forward, his brows drawing down.

“Once, a long time ago, I gave you a chain, and I told you if you broke it, we’d go our separate ways and I’d wish you well. You remember? You mailed it back to me after you left, for Rory.”

Thomas nodded. “I remember.”

“That wasn’t about being magnanimous. I was being a cowardly asshole who

wanted to make sure I didn’t let you get too close, even as I was doing everything I could to pull you inside me. So it’s no wonder when you left, I felt ripped apart. You asked why I didn’t come after you for so long. I was angry that I’d allowed myself to get that vulnerable again. That I’d set all the rules in place and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

“Every day you were gone, I just missed you more, and I went ten rounds every

one of those days, making sure I didn’t call, didn’t do all those desperate bullshit moves people stupid enough to open their hearts do.”

Thomas swallowed. He heard Lauren say softly, “Oh Marcus,” but Marcus pressed

on, his eyes locked on Thomas’.

“I’m saying this in front of them, because it was Josh and Lauren who made me go after you. It’s hard, especially for a Dom, to realize that to get what you really want you have to give up control completely, just hoping to hell that Fate doesn’t kick your balls into the back of your throat. I’ve been there, one too many times, and I wasn’t ever going to do it again.”

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A grim smile touched his mouth. “But I figured out that it’s worse to do without you than to take that risk. So I hatched my strategy to sell your paintings and come back to get you, to deal with what we had.

“I don’t want to be magnanimous anymore.” His expression changed, that stern

Master look, so unexpected that Thomas almost rose out of the chair, but something in Marcus’ look kept him pinned to it just as effectively. “You’re mine, Thomas. With your family, without your family, wherever we need to be, whatever we need to do, we need to be together.

“I will take a lifetime of you, good, bad, terrible, to anything without you. I love you. And as much as you’re mine, I’m just as much yours. Maybe more, though until the other night I was afraid to admit that to you, or to myself.”

He was not going to get teary-eyed like Les over some Hallmark commercial, but

damn, if Marcus wasn’t making it tough. He wasn’t done yet, though.
Jesus.

Marcus turned, slid a box out from behind the framed print propped on the mantle and extended it to Thomas.

Thomas rose now, feeling at a loss for words. He had no idea where this was going, or what it meant, but he knew from the stunned look on the faces of the couple on the couch, he wasn’t the only one who was nonplused.

Thomas opened the box and blinked despite himself. “You changed it.”

Marcus nodded. “I took the originally broken gold chain, had silver welded in as a decorative inlay. This chain, as small as the links are, is an unbreakable alloy. Once you put it around your waist and lock it with the fastener,” his green eyes gleamed with that light that could spin Thomas’ brain to his groin in a blink, “only I can get it off you.” He reached into the box, touched the loop that was pinned to the velvet base. “And instead of a tail of chain, this goes around your cock. You’ll wear my collar at all times, pet.”

Thomas touched the slim chain, the same metal disk lock.
Mine.
Looking far more like something that would be put on a prisoner. A willing one.

He pressed his lips together. “When did you do this?”

“Before I came down to buy the farm. I’d brought these with me as well.”

Thomas raised his gaze to find Marcus holding a second box. When he slid the top back, Thomas could only stare at the matching pair of men’s rings. One gold, one silver, a single etching on each, a bold line like a lightning strike.

Thomas blinked. Blinked again. He thought either his senses had all been

incapacitated or Josh and Lauren had become statues. Because everything was

suddenly so still Thomas was as unaware of their presence as any other inanimate objects in the room. He wasn’t including those rings as inanimate objects, though, not with their ability to inject this hot flood of feeling through him.

“I want you to marry me, Thomas.” Marcus’ attention had weight and heat on

every exposed, raw part of him. “We can get a license in a state where it’s legal, have a ceremony wherever you want, however you want. And I don’t care if there’s no law for 238

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it on the books, it will be the law between you and me and whatever God there is. I want it to be impossible for us to leave each other without a hell of a lot of paperwork, ugly custody battles over furniture, whatever.