Page 88 of Brushed and Buried
“All these years.” His arms come around me, loose and easy, like this is something we’ve done a thousand times before instead of something we’re still learning.
“Why?”
His chin comes to rest on top of my head, and I feel him thinking, choosing his words carefully. “Because it was the first time anyone had ever really seen me. Not the football kid. NotVictor Holloway’s son. Not the guy everyone expected me to be. Just me.”
His voice drops to barely above a whisper. “You saw something worth drawing, worth keeping. And even when everything else fell apart, I couldn’t let go of that.”
The moment stretches between us, heavy with years of missed chances.
“I wasn’t sure you’d want it,” I admit, my voice barely above a whisper. “I kept wondering if giving it to you would even mean anything.”
“I thought you were playing some long game I didn’t understand.” His arms tighten around me. “I thought you were too smart for some dumb jock to figure out what you really wanted.”
We are silent for a moment, the morning light shifting across the walls of his bedroom, illuminating all the spaces where we’d been wrong about each other. All the years we’d lost to fear and the poisonous whispers of people who had their own agendas. Wonder and regret and hope all tangled together in a way that makes my throat tight.
“We’re here now,” he says, and it sounds like a promise.
“We’re here now,” I agree.
He kisses me then, soft and through, like he’s trying to make up for mornings we missed, conversations we should have had, moments we lost to pride and fear and other people’sexpectations. I kiss him back with everything I have, all the words I never said and the dreams I forced myself to forget.
When we break apart, we’re both breathing hard, foreheads pressed together in the morning light.
“I love you,” he says, and the words are so simple and so long overdue that they hit like lightning.
“I love you too,” I whisper back. “I must always have.”
Surrounded by the evidence of his success and the life he built while we were apart, looking at the proof that I never really left his heart, I finally understand what coming home feels like.
It’s not a place, a building, a city, or a state line crossed.
It’s a person. This person, the one who kept my art beside his bed for many years, holding onto it quietly, even without knowing if we would ever have a chance in this lifetime.
It’s the one who’s looking at me now like I’m everything he ever wanted and finally brave enough to keep.
“Stay,” he says, and it’s not a question anymore.
“Always,” I answer, and everything I’ve ever felt for him lives in that single word.
Epilogue
Adrian
Ten weeks have passed since Trevor and Becca’s wedding, and separation has settled into its own familiar rhythm.
I flew back to Los Angeles while Vince stayed in San Francisco, dealing with the fallout of his public confession after the rehearsal. The resort had been full of ears, and word traveled fast. First came the curious looks, then whispers, and eventually blind items online. It did not stay vague for long. Sooner or later, someone put his name in bold letters.
Before I left, he told me not to worry, that he was not running from any of it, and that everything would be fine. Sponsors wanted meetings. His agent fielded calls. The carefully constructed image he had maintained for years was shifting, and he needed time to navigate what that meant for his career.
Meanwhile, I have my own reckoning waiting, something I never thought would happen again.
The gallery calls came within days of our return, Matheo vibrating with excitement over the sketches I’d shown himfrom Azure Tides. “This is it,” he kept saying, pacing his office like a man possessed. “Adrian Callahan’s comeback. The child prodigy who disappeared for a decade, finally returning with work that surpasses everything he did before.”
I wasn’t starting from scratch. Twenty-two of the pieces that would make upThe Longing Unseenhad been created over the past few years, fragments of memory and longing that I’d painted during sleepless nights, sketches that had grown into full canvases during those rare moments when inspiration struck through the creative drought. They’d been stored in my apartment like artifacts of a life I couldn’t quite abandon, too personal to sell, and too painful to display.
I’d thought they were failures, half-formed attempts to recapture something I’d lost. But Matheo saw them differently. “These aren’t incomplete works,” he’d said, studying canvas after canvas. “These are love letters written over a long period of time. And now you finally have the ending.”
The ending would be the piece I’d started the night Vince posed for me at Azure Tides. It’s the centerpiece, the final brushstroke on a decade of longing made visible.
