Chapter Text
I want life’s ragged way of getting along, the wasted afternoon and empty morning, the sloppy kiss.
jack ridl
*
He’s not looking at the Matisse at all.
Slouching on an uncomfortable museum bench, his stare is transfixed by the nonsensical plan of galleries and passageways laid out across a trifold visitor’s map, inscrutably numbered and arrowed to form nothing less than a gateway to the eternal abyss. This is a possibility, to be fair. Filled with the preening, undue vanity of lustful empires, surely an opening to Sheol is somewhere within the famed Italian revivalist walls of the SMK.
Jou watches the man’s head tilt to one side and then the other, the universal sign for what fresh hell. He brings the map closer to his face, then further to arm’s length. Broad shoulders sink, despairing. His mouth makes a silent curse.
Closing his sketch pad, Jou gets up from his bench. He has his own overused copy of the visitor’s map folded neatly in the hand he extends by the time he crosses the room.
The man looks at him before he looks at the pamphlet. It’s here that Jou stalls.
His eyes are a color that is difficult to name, because the color seems to come from some other world. Certainly not a true brown. Jou thinks he sees spun golds, burnt green, mud grey. Warm and clear and curved, like morning light refracted through a looking glass.
Truthfully, he is not one for such overdescription, but neither can Jou account for the sudden shiver that sweeps through him when the man’s eyes turn from his own, too much like the cold abandonment you feel when you step out of the sun.
The man speaks first—the sort of first that suggests he is used to doing so in most rooms he enters, neither by choice nor obligation, but simply because of the fact of who he is. “D’you have to sell your soul for that?” Even his voice sits nicely on the ear, this deep and smooth timbre.
Somewhat bewildered, Jou looks down at his visitor’s map, the handmade translations of the printed Danish and English type inked with a neat and sensible penmanship. He hears himself answer before fully intending to do so. “It was my mother’s.”
The man pauses, then lifts his gaze to Jou with a wider smile. “So, you sold your mother’s soul?”
His own smile at this catches Jou by surprise, grounding him as though waking from a dream. Up until that moment, Jou had been on autopilot from the sheer exhaustion of the past forty-three hours. Even the daze that had brought him to his most favorite room in all of Copenhagen had been entirely devoid of conscious intent. He thinks he might have been sleepwalking.
His last bout of chronic insomnia had been under similar circumstances. Then, as now, Jou had finished another unceremonious year around the sun on his own. Then, as now, he had commemorated the occasion by coming to see Matisse—specifically, the Matisse that had changed the whole direction of modern art, cutting a line so perfectly across the annals of time there could be no other way to read the division, because the artist had put it on the canvas himself.
Jou opens his mother’s annotated map and points to the present room. “You’re here, if that’s helpful.”
“Very.” He hums it. Also has yet to take the pamphlet for his own, holding his lowered to his lap. Still, he observes Jou’s copy with interest.
“Okay,” says the man after a pause, his confession arriving like an afterthought. “My boyfriend told me there’s this painting here I should see, if I want to remember how to appreciate a different perspective.”
The way he says them suggests some of these words are borrowed verbatim, delivered in a teasing lilt that could be mean but is more likely just careless, fumbling someone else’s feelings along with a lesser portion of his own.
Still, he’d brought himself all the way here, map in hand, to follow through on the promise. Jou finds this commendable.
“I think your boyfriend’s describing all art,” says Jou, and only smiles again because the man does, too.
“Rome.” His grin is loose, confident. A charm that comes much too easy, used to making trouble. “You know the colosseum?”
Jou moves the pad of his index finger to the left wing in veg the museum’s floorplan, and taps one of the numbered gallery rooms there. “Danish Golden Age.”
The man’s brow furrows slightly. “I think you mean Italian.” His skepticism is at least kind, like he believes there’s a private reason for this lapse in Jou’s good sense, and also believes it isn’t his place to judge him for it.
Still smiling, Jou shakes his head, then halfway through the gesture nods his understanding over the confusion. “The north went south, too.”
“Well, what won’t we do for honor and glory?”
“And nicer weather.”
The man laughs again. He stands from the bench, but makes no move to accept the borrowed map, keeping his own instead. “Okay, Golden Age. You’re funny.”
Jou can’t think of anything to say to this, possibly because it’s awful in Copenhagen at the moment, a sudden thundering swell driving the whole of the city to shelter.
He hadn’t been thinking about this immediate context when he spoke, but now he can see it, and feels not flattered or pleased with himself, but false, and undeserving. Jou doesn’t believe himself to be so clever, and he doesn’t like to give the wrong impression.
All their lives, Mimi has been calling this his most tedious schoolboy trait. You don’t have to be so good all the time!
She’d yelled this most recently while caravaning him to Kankū during rush hour with twin toddlers and an aging lab, having laughed right in Jou’s face when he’d tried to say he’d take a private car to the airport, not wanting to be a bother. Jou spent the nail biting ride sat between her children’s car seats where he could also keep one peripheral eye on her dog in the far back, and let his both loudest and oldest friend rail on over all the things she thought he ought to try to challenge about himself in order to grow as a fulfilled person. After twenty something years, it’s quite a list, but one point in particular has always been the stickiest. Don’t mistake nice for good!
Except Jou doesn’t think he plays everything nice; and, more to the point, he doesn’t think he’s particularly good.
He also knows that if he told Mimi either of these things, she’d immediately start crying at best, or rail even harder about her point being proven at worst. He actively tries to avoid either extreme, because Jou understands that all Mimi really wants is to be included in his life again, make up for time lost, grown up neighborhood kids recently reconnecting. It’s also why Jou overcompensates for it all now, taking every day of his meager leave to visit with her and Daisuke in Osaka, both of his parents long since gone, and his brothers preoccupied with their separate lives.
It had been on one of these visits, just a month ago, that Daisuke had stayed back while Mimi ushered their children off to bath time, and asked Jou outright what his wife couldn’t bring herself to say. So, how come you always act like you don’t deserve a good life?
Usually, Daisuke is considerably less tactful than this, so Jou had grasped the underlying tenderness at once, however bluntly delivered. Still, he had not responded right away, holding his small cup of brewed tea tightly between both hands.
They were sitting across from each other at a dining table laden with glitter Play Doh, cut up construction paper, finger paints, wax crayons, kiddie peel-off nail polish, squish toys, a ripped board book, practice chopsticks, sippy cups, and the vestiges of a chaotic if wholesome meal that involved not a single bland, fried, plainly buttered, or mashed item one might find on a restaurant’s kids’ menu, because this was a household parented by a professional chef and a cookbook author, neither of whom believed in keeping good food from curious children.
Ignoring Jou’s hesitation, but more likely simply unaware of it, Daisuke polished off the last of the oysters Mimi had grilled for their toddlers, selected out of the fresh catch Jou’d purchased at Kuromon market that morning, before he’d asked again. I know it’s none of my business. But, Mimi and I talk about it all the time, you know. Everything you give everybody else. I mean, what you still give Osamu! When does it end? What are you giving yourself?
Jou had found himself nodding, making some evasive muttering sound, pushing his glasses back up the high bridge of his nose. Yeah, he must have admitted in the end. You’re right. I don’t give to myself.
The lie had stuck to his throat, a greasy coat thickening his tongue, making his mouth taste of bile, or guilt. This, important to name, because Jou is still trying to teach himself to distinguish his guilt from his faults, despite how often he fails the lesson.
*
Jou’s route through the museum has been the same since he first began these sojourns, in that every one starts and ends with Matisse.
The circuit between either end variously brings him to linger in certain galleries than others, and, of course, there’s the special exhibitions that catch his attention, but otherwise it’s an orderly routine, and that suits Jou just fine. He prefers the dependable, something to rely on. Has always tried to live by the same, too.
If a gallery room is not terribly crowded, he’ll stay a while to sketch something he sees. The spiral bound book he is using for this visit is slim enough to fit into the inside breast pocket of his overcoat, and the graphite pencil he’s favoring was from a gift set from Sora. A watercolorist, she’d also recommended the sketch pad brand, liking the feel of the paper, its weight and capacity to hold even the most swiftly laid marks without smudging or smearing. It’s now the only paper he purchases for himself, too. He used to not be so particular about these instruments, but sketching has become something of a hobby, and Jou has never been very good at being idle.
It’s how he began all this, in fact.
He’d been in his first year of medical school, holed up in the reading room of the university library directly under a vent, so he had both his coat and scarf still buttoned and wrapped, fingerless gloves. On the table in front of him was his father’s hand-me-down copy of Netter’s Atlas, and keeping him company on the other side of the table was Sora, her face just barely visible under the pulled down drawstring hood of her sweatshirt, elbow to the desk and chin propped up in her palm, and her eyes closed.
Jou turned to a clean page in his study notebook. Looking carefully between a sleeping Sora, an illustration of a side profile in his anatomy textbook, and his makeshift drawing pad, he manages to put a very uninspired translation of her face to paper.
That’s the word he’d used for it, too, when Sora’d talked him into letting her see the attempt he’d made. He couldn’t even look at the awkward lines and unconfident marks, had intended to throw the paper away, get back to the studying tools that actually worked. Instead, he watched with shallow breath as Sora quietly observed herself through his hands, and then looked back at him with a smile. He’d kept the hobby.
It had a surprisingly useful aspect as well, tracing and then replicating each anatomical drawing in Atlas and then Gray’s. Every case undertaken after that day began with at least two copied drawings into his study notebooks, until Sora purchased a proper sketchbook for him for his birthday.
Jou knew that the quality of his brand new sketch pad wasn’t inexpensive, and that she wasn’t supposed to be spending her little money on anything but basic needs for herself. He also knew he wasn’t the one bravely breaking out from under his family’s thumb to pursue his own dreams, even if that meant he would have to do so entirely on his own.
And though he understands he hasn’t the right, what bothers Jou more is that he no longer knows who Sora is now.
If she still keeps her hair short or ever made her oft-talked about pilgrimage to the Prado after she’d saved up enough, telling him that seeing a painting in a photograph or online is never the same as being before it.
If she still works in watercolors, or if she’s added another medium to her portfolio.
If she’s still with the new boyfriend she’d eloped with after graduation, when she’d told Jou she couldn’t wait for him to make room in his life for her.
If she, too, still thinks about the room he’d made after that anyway, for almost a year, until the day she cut him off without a word, ending the affair as quietly as it had begun, uncharacteristic of either of them, but not so much that they hadn’t kept choosing to carry it on for as long as they did.
Every time Mimi pushes him about breaking out of predictability, of allowing himself the freedom of not having to be so good all the time, Jou wants to tell her she’s holding him to a bar he’s never measured up against to begin with. That being childhood friends doesn’t mean you actually know each other better than the rest of the world, and that this somehow makes being honest with one another all that harder.
But that would mean telling Mimi all the things he doesn’t like about himself, and all the things he’s done while trying to like himself better, to make up for the good he has never been, and then watching her opinion of him change.
*
There’s this way that El Greco models hands that is utterly confounding. In his earliest paintings especially, they are more often than not sculpted in a manner that is both warm and alive, and impossible to replicate in life.
In the painting Jou’s studying, the hand gestures with an open palm softly curved into itself, a blush of lifeblood coursing beneath pale skin. But besides this, the rest of the figure’s hand makes little sense. The thumb joint is pinched, the nail far too sleight, the wrist swollen oddly, and the angle of the ring and littlest fingers appear to defy proportional logic.
All this means that Jou spends most of his time not sketching the hand into his notepad but making small diagnostic annotations to himself, noting the skin and muscle conditions, leaving himself questions in the margins of the paper.
He must be making harsher judgments than he might if this were a real patient of his, because behind him is that deep timbre, words underlined in a laugh.
“Not a good prognosis, I’m guessing.”
His instinct is to close the sketchbook, but then the man touches the top of the paper to stay him, and Jou immediately understands El Greco’s painted hands. Imperfection his penance for the arrogance of man, for how could art think to recreate this?
Climbing over the gallery bench to sit beside Jou, the man slides his hand lightly down the surface of the page. “Can I?” Like he isn’t already lifting the book out of Jou’s open palm.
His breath isn’t shallow then, because Jou doesn’t have strong opinions anymore about people seeing his sketches. He isn’t trying to be an artist, and neither is the hobby for art’s sake. And, anyway, he doesn’t sketch from life anymore, and never anything intimate, the face of a person he might have loved.
Jou slides over on the bench, politely making more room. Hesitating slightly, he volunteers the explanation without first waiting for the ask. “It was a study tool,” he tells him, “at the start. I retain things better if I’m not just reading about it.”
Worked so well that a few of his colleagues have even begun picking up the habit, too, having seen him doodling in hospital cafeterias or working out the diagnosis for a challenging case by attempting to map out the problem. Even Daisuke’s tried following his lead, drawing up recipe ideas right onto the construction paper he and Mimi substitute for tablecloth and placemats, because why bother with children under the age of five.
Beside him, the man arcs a defined brow, nodding to his answer. “You’re good.”
“That’s not true,” Jou says at once.
He glances at him, brown eyes shifting to a cooler hue. For a moment, Jou’s distracted, wondering again about the nature of this particular color. Then, remembering himself, he feels his face warm, and he looks away, back to the portrait on the wall across from their bench.
The man follows his nod, and his head goes a little onto its side. “Huh,” he says, like he’s only putting it together himself. “Yeah, I see it. Wonky hands.”
“He gets better.”
“I mean,” and he drops his voice low, like he’s letting Jou in on the secret, “it’d be okay if he didn’t, too.” His smile gets wider as he sits upright, thumbs back a few pages in the sketchbook. “It’d be okay if you didn’t ei—,”
“All right,” says Jou, louder than appropriate for the space they occupy, snatching the notebook back. But he finds that he’s smiling, too, his body oddly at ease. “I take it the colosseum did its job.”
“Hey, the effort was there.” The man shrugs, broad shoulders stretching the fitted cut of his shirt, rolled up sleeves pushed past his elbows. “I just don’t think I saw it.”
Jou remembers the painting well, picturing it in his mind. “Every window arch has its own perspective. It’s not possible to see that view in real life.”
“Sort of like a film reel.”
“Sure,” agrees Jou, a little surprised. It’s not a bad analogy at all. He looks at the man, who seems to be amused by the reaction.
“I didn’t say I didn’t understand it,” says the man, cheeky toned. “I just don’t know if I buy it.”
“Well, pre-cinema, it would have been a clever visual device.”
The man nods, less like he submits to the explanation than simply bored with the concept. “Thing is,” he says, in this way that suggests it is not the first time he’s made this particular point, “if everything’s a matter of perspective, can anyone have an original one?”
“As in, if everyone’s special, no one is?”
He tilts his head when he laughs that time. “I mean, yeah. Sure. What’s unique anymore?”
Jou considers the question honestly. He turns over the sketchbook in his hands, an unconscious habit when he’s working out a problem, unable to be idle. He startles in mid turn, looking down at the notebook.
“Technically, this. Right? Yes, it’s a copy,” admits Jou, consenting to semantics, “but that’s how artists learned in his time, too.” He nods at the El Greco painting still watching the pair of them from across their bench. “To study art, you apprenticed to a workshop, and you copied everything you saw. But,” continues Jou, slower now even to himself, “the point is, it was what you saw. That alone is the difference.”
When he looks up, it’s to those brown eyes again, so intensely fixed that Jou blushes, frees one hand from the sketchbook he’s still holding to adjust the perch of his glasses, run his hair back off his forehead.
“Of course, I could be misunderstanding the issue,” says Jou, quick to walk the unearned confidence back.
It’s an awkward deferral, when the truth is Jou is more knowledgeable than most. Still, he is not an expert in this field, and could never claim the years of training required before asserting this kind of opinion. He doesn’t want to give the impression that he—
“Yeah, but you’re not.” He stands, rolling his shoulders back in a mild stretch, entirely unaware of how even this small movement commands the whole of the room. Jou doesn’t know where else to look, when he looks back at him.
His smile feels like it’s just for Jou, too. “Come on, Golden Age. Show me another one.”
*
Jou learns his name as they’re exploring the nineteenth century galleries, which Taichi doubted counted as modern even after Jou's explanation on the matter. He still feels that the nearly horizontally prone bronze figure he’s standing before had something like a contemporary abruptness to it, jarring to the point of stopping him in his tracks.
“That’s the stuff of nightmares,” he says, then bends a bit at the waist to inspect the face more closely.
“The artist’s metaphor for death,” says Jou, but only after he’s read the accompanying artwork label, armed now with the curator’s interpretation to which he can safely begin to affix his own.
Taichi, meanwhile, won’t read anything the museum puts near any of its displayed work. When Jou subtly brings attention to these helpful guideposts, Taichi sometimes humors him, but it’s clear from the bland expression he wears as he skims the text far too quickly that it’s not a learning tool he prioritizes.
“I’ve got my own ideas,” with this shrug that is neither presumptive nor ignorant, but nonetheless unbothered. Open to other opinions, to be persuaded, which isn’t to say a changed outcome is always guaranteed.
Jou is beginning to find it mildly exasperating, but he also finds himself wanting to listen to his reasoning anyway. What continues to take him aback is that Taichi sincerely seems to want to listen to the ideas Jou has, too.
Like now, for example. He glances at Jou, clearly thinking over the metaphor he’d offered as the artwork’s explanation.
“Where do you see that?” asks Taichi, again pointedly ignoring the label text.
So Jou looks back at the sculpture. There’s a leanness to the figure that is disarming. Skeletal, with bizarrely angular lines, the patina eroding to a sickly yellowed green, like decayed flesh melting off the bone. The figure lunges forward, too, limbs outstretched, clawing towards nothing. But how could they know there is nothing ahead for them?
“The hands,” answers Jou.
Taichi looks like he wants to smile wider than he does. “I’m picking up a pattern.”
“Surgeon.”
“Hand?”
Jou shakes his head, and Taichi guesses again. “Oral?”
The cheek is back, or maybe Jou imagines this. He blinks quickly, heat crawling up the back of his neck. Embarrassed mostly, where the mind can go. Taichi’s smile doesn’t help.
“Orthopedics,” he says, and manages to sound fully normal, like there had been nothing to mishear.
Taichi lifts his chin, and Jou realizes then that he can impress him, too. “You need a lot of stamina for that?”
Jou says he does, because it’s true, and one reason why even on holidays like these Jou rarely took a day off from the gym, endurance training as much for marathon sessions as for the fact that some spinal surgeries require being able to break the bone first. Most of his early career began with these realignment operations, but in the last few years, Jou had narrowed specialties.
“Well,” says Taichi, sighing, “then we met at the wrong time.” He looks down at his left knee, leaning harder onto it as to demonstrate the point. “Bad tackle took me out right at my prime.”
Looking at him, Jou doesn’t think he believes the exaggeration, or the possibility that Taichi has ever not been in a perfect state, too attractive at every turn, possessed of himself. This admiring thought comes to him so immediately that he’s caught off guard, pivoting in a panic. “I’m mostly in neuro-orthapedics now.”
For some reason, this seems to still make him interesting. “So,” and here Taichi pauses for a long moment, “things like strokes.” He does not phrase this as a question, and looks at Jou with the expectation of being right.
He is, of course, so Jou nods.
Jou also doesn’t say anything else, feeling himself grow quiet inside and out, the uninvited stillness of grief still able to find him all these years later, and in no time at all. He pushes it back down.
Taichi isn’t looking to him anymore, nor to the sculpture, from which he has taken a gingerly step back, almost respectful of its right to its own space. “I like a challenge, too,” he says, easily moving the conversation along. He’s even found another artwork to examine, too, a small oil of two young men, shepherds at leisure. Resting on the ruins of a stone temple, they face each other with an attentive disinterest in anything else. Devoted.
Taichi goes closer to the painting, but Jou has lost his footing. At his side, his hand makes a closed fist, clutching at air instead of the small round stress plushie that Mimi had given him, one of many she’d piled into every spare corner of his world she can find, not so secretly terrified he will overwork himself into an early grave. Thinking of her, he loosens his hand, breathes easy once more.
“One of which brought you to this museum, apparently.”
Taichi grins at this, eyes still fixed on the painting of the shepherds. “Sure, but I don’t think he’d like it put like that.” Glancing through the rest of the offerings on display in the room, he continues thinking aloud. “Maybe I’d have come here anyway.”
When he wanders off into an adjoining gallery, Jou follows. He doesn’t even realize he does until he has, and they’ve walked tougher through the rest of the modern galleries, and then the contemporary installations, where Taichi is marveling at another oil portrait, nodding his chin at it in this way that means he wants Jou to look, too. “If you could diagnose his issue, what would it be?”
Jou balks, embarrassed for no reason at all. “That’s not what I was doing.”
“Study tool,” repeats Taichi, parroting in a manner that reminds Jou of childhood arguments with his brothers, making him smile.
“Anatomy study.” It’s the way Taichi doesn’t ask him to say more that has Jou volunteering anyway, managing somehow to ignore the ease with which he is admitting this stranger into his life.
“School never came easy to me,” he says after a moment, and then does not stop talking about it, or thinking about all that came between the moments, either.
Not being particularly natural at schoolwork wasn’t something people believed of him, because studying was all he ever did, in and out of class, cram schools, private tutoring. It was difficult to convince others that he spent all his time this way because this dog headed persistence was all he had, and not a natural inclination for the subject.
“But in medical school, we had elective clinics at the university art museum.” Sora had been one of the instructors, fulfilling a credit towards her masters in fine arts degree at the university art school. “Art and empathy, art and the mind, art and public health,” Jou shrugs, as though to suggest an endless array of possible mini-clinic offerings. “And I suppose it became a way to see differently.” And here, finally, he almost says even more, says what it really became to him, but something manages to remind him just in time to keep the really important things private, to hold back what it is too precious to share.
If Taichi can read the hesitancy, he keeps this hidden, too. At least he smiles then, conceding the point. “Art and its many uses.”
Value is the word Jou might have used, but he can’t disagree either. “It’s how I met my ex-husband, too,” he says.
Taichi’s brows lift. “Oh, yeah?”
Jou nods. “He was a collector.”
Taichi’s brows keep talking for him, so Jou answers in kind, juts his chin wordlessly towards the opposite wall. Taichi turns with him, and they both observe the oil stick and acrylic canvas mounted to a modern frame with a mirrored chrome finish, the make of which had been Jou’s own suggestion, years ago.
Like a pin to an inflated balloon, Taichi’s shoulders go cartoonishly slack. “You’re fucking with me.”
Jou shakes his head, and blushes hard.
Taichi has already bounded forward in a sudden surge of energy, stopping just before the painting. It towers another metre and a half. His mouth hangs half open. When he swivels his head back with another question that is more of a demand, he only moves just that part of his body, as though unwilling or unable to part entirely from the painting if he can help it. It’s a compulsion Jou is familiar with.
Taichi asks the obvious. “This is a good painting, isn’t it?”
Jou joins him, but with a little distance. He looks not at the canvas but at the label placed on the wall beside it, where Anonymous Gift is credited for the painting’s acquisition to the museum’s collection.
“We bought this instead of rings.” Jou pauses before he corrects himself, “He bought it instead of rings.”
Osamu hadn’t asked him before he’d done so, either, not for Jou’s input or the actual question. He had simply told him they would get married on an otherwise forgettable Thursday afternoon, and so Jou had stood in their foyer watching the art handlers carry the painting in through the entrance of their home and heard himself say “yes” to a proposal that technically hadn’t been posed.
But then, that was how most things went between them, their entire relationship. Osamu decided their dates, their lifestyle, their friends. His decisions were sensible in the moment, too, always rooted in some kind of logic that, if not immediately apparent, then at least appropriate to the present condition.
For this reason, and for a very long time, Jou hadn’t the language to understand what was happening to him.
He still had a difficult time hearing the way Osamu cared for him characterized as controlling, because Jou doesn’t want to believe himself as someone who could be so controlled. To Jou, it was simply nice being taken care of, when, most days, he barely had the time to begin to think about caring for himself.
That hapless, helpless, overextended image is the self he’d presented to Osamu when they first met. At the time, Jou had been through just a fraction of the interminable second year of his surgical residency—otherwise known as Hell Year—when he’d accepted a blind date with a man whose situation a former medical school classmate had described simply as “comfortable,” a word, Jou realized much later, which wealthy people only used with people who weren’t.
He’d spent the whole dinner thinking the otherwise mysteriously empty restaurant was just unpopular, which he’d told Osamu was a shame, because their six course dinner had been delicious and the wine pairings faultless. For their one month anniversary, Osamu recreated the meal down to the pre-arranged vacant dining room and the same corner booth, with just a bottle of the 1945 Mouton he’d purchased for the occasion as the one new addition. Overwhelmed, Jou’d stammered his gratitude for such a thoughtful gift, while Osamu’d just laughed at him, bemused, because the wine hadn’t been the present at all—the restaurant was.
For the next four years, Jou and Osamu had every anniversary dinner at that table. When the manager brought in a designer for some needed renovations, theirs was the one corner that remained as is before and after the makeover. After the head chef was poached by a competitor, Osamu continued to have her flown in every year for that one set meal at full salary. Both of Jou’s brothers had their wedding receptions in the dining room, which gave Osamu the idea that they should get married, too.
He’d told Jou as much the Thursday the painting arrived as an engagement gift. He then took them to their restaurant—Jou’s restaurant—to toast the momentous decision with another 1945 vintage, this one a Romanée-Conti that had Jou sealing away the tiny voice of doubt and discomfort he’d been quietly feeding for months, planning how he’d leave, how to end it for real, because how much strength of heart did he really have to start over?
Instead, he let Osamu fuck him raw and collared in his bed, as, in all their years together, they never shared rooms, not even on holiday. In fact, the first and only time Jou entered Osamu’s bedroom was when he found him there not four weeks married, in the aftermath of a near fatal hemorrhage stroke, his body folded over onto itself on the carpeted floor, slumped into thirds.
*