Page 34 of Mad for Madison

His lips curved into a small, tentative smile, and he nodded. “Together.”

In that moment, it didn’t matter how complicated things would get. It didn’t matter that the world outside this room would try to pull us apart. All that mattered was that Madison wanted to try, and so did I.

CHAPTER 8

Madison’s Canvas

Bradley

I came awake with a start.The place where I was felt foreign, as if I’d stepped from one dream to another. Blinking, I grounded myself in reality. The futon on the floor, the sheet covering only one of my legs, the nearly unbearable warmth of the radiators filling the room, the paintings, and the scent of oil paint and pine. The lights were low in Madison’s studio, and the spot where he had slept was empty. That was what had woken me. His absence.

I could have sworn that his strong arm had been wrapped around my body until a heartbeat ago, but the spot where he had been was cold.

“Don’t move,” his voice came, barely louder than the scraping of the graphite pencil against the large canvas that mostly concealed him.

“What?” I asked, my heart speeding up when I realized I needed to get to work. I blinked again and looked out the window. “What time is it?”

“Almost three,” Madison said, his voice still low and calm but carrying enough passion to resemble a gust of wind that filled the sails of a ship lost on the ocean. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Why not?” I asked, blinking myself awake. “And why can’t I move?”

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

“Because you’re beautiful,” Madison said after pondering for a moment. “And that answers both questions.”

I propped myself up on my elbow.

“No, no,” Madison said. “Please.”

I lay back down. My right arm was extended high above my head, my face resting on my upper bicep, and my left arm rested in the empty space where Madison had slept. Lying on my side, I faced Madison and his stand and his canvas.

“I need to finish this,” Madison said, although I hadn’t asked him for an explanation again.

“I thought you guys used photos for reference,” I said.

Madison chuckled. “We do. I do. But you…”Scrape, scrape. “There’s something about you tonight, Bradley. I don’t know if a photo would do you justice.”

I laughed a little. “I’m in your bed, Madison. You can stop flattering me.” Besides, I was naked. Aside from my right leg being lightly concealed, I was completely on display for him: me and my entire unimpressive self.

“I also have reservations about photographing naked people while they’re asleep,” Madison said conversationally.

“Oh.” I thought about it. It was a reasonable reservation, but… “I wouldn’t have minded. For you.”

Madison cocked his head and focused on me, although not my face. He was looking at my left hand, partly buried in the sheets.

“Will I have a face?” I asked.

“You have one,” Madison said.

A snort-chuckle escaped me. “Your boys almost never do,” I pointed out. As far as I could see, his subjects faced away from the viewer. At most, a quarter of their face was visible from behind. And in the cases where the subject looked like Madison, the face was never even a little visible. Some paintings had subjects who faced the viewer circumstantially. There were naked guys climbing a bale of hay, but one wore a straw hat that covered most of his head from my prying eyes, and the other was too far in the distance to have any distinguishing features. In another painting, where a group of young men stood on the cliff of a waterfall, the spray of the splashing water rose so high that their faces were hazy, and the one in the middle of the jump was blurred by his movement.

“You have a face,” Madison assured me, scraping away. “Almost done.”

“How long have you been up?” I asked after a long silence. I discovered that the rasping of the pencil against the linen canvas was a rather soothing sound.

“Probably close to two hours,” Madison said. “I lose track of time.”

I hummed that I understood. Three in the morning. We had half the night ahead of us. I needed to be at Neon Nights at half past six.

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