"Imagine what we could be doing if we moved up to Washington. Think of the commissions up there, Hal."
Hal turned from the window and looked over to his younger, half brother, Jimmy, as he sat at his workbench in the studio, glazing a frame to go perfectly with the landscape acrylic Hal had completed not more than two hours earlier.
A lump rose in Hal's throat. He'd been gazing out of the window, down toward the tenant cottage along the river bank because he couldn't bear to look at Jimmy in the late afternoon light beaming down on his unruly, curly blond head from the skylight—giving him a halo by bounding off the dust particles floating in the air and bringing out flecks of gold in the young man's hair. Jimmy was an angel. And he made Hal feel like something else altogether.
He was Hal's half brother, dammit. Hal couldn't be having these thoughts. One of them perhaps should be moving to the larger art scene up in Washington, D.C. But only one of them, or Hal didn't know what might happen. He didn't know how much longer he could go on with just the two of them in the house, working symbiotically in the same studio, Hal painting the landscapes and Jimmy preparing the perfect frame to go with them. Hal had sold very little before Jimmy decided that college wasn't for him and moved in and began framing Hal's work. The custom frames had made all of the difference in sales—and in the attention Hal was receiving from art critics and gallery owners. Hal had to admit that Jimmy was right that they might be ready for a big city now—but Hal could not trust himself with Jimmy very much longer. Certainly not in the proximity required for them to work together.
"Perhaps. It's something to think about," Hal answered, trying not reveal that he was speaking with great difficulty, through heavy breathing, and not turning full face toward the younger man, not wanting to reveal the effect Jimmy in that light had on his body.
Hal switched his gaze back toward the tenant shack and then, because he heard the cough and roar of a power mower, across the road toward Hampton Grove, the B&B. Hal's own house, the central core of which was built in the eighteenth century by the owner of the mill now in ruins down at the edge of the river, was one of a pocket of antebellum houses on the two streets remaining of a town that had almost been wiped off the map by hand-to-hand fighting in a Civil War battle and that now was preserved for posterity and the tourist trade. The young college guy who did the Grove's yard work during the summer had started up with the mower.
The youth was a long and lanky red head, with freckles covering a well-worked chest, bare now. To fight the heat, the yardboy had stripped down to skimpy gray cotton athletic shorts. Hal, already thinking arousing thoughts because of the nearness of Jimmy, found his eyes riveted on the youth, to his chest and washboard abs and down to his crotch, and a hand furtively moving to his own basket.
"Can you come over here and see if you like this frame coloring with your landscape?" Jimmy called over to Hal.
"Just a minute. I'm thirsty. I'll go get something from the fridge and be with you in a minute."
Hal wasn't that thirsty, but he had to cool off somehow before going anywhere near his brother. He moved quickly to the door to the breezeway connecting the older section of the house to the studio, which had been converted from a double garage, and then on into the kitchen, where he threw cubes of ice in a glass and filled it with water. He then applied it to the back of his neck, working to bring his breathing and hardness under control.
He raised his head and looked through the window over the kitchen sink.
It took him a few minutes to notice that he couldn't hear the mower from across the street anymore, and he looked closer at Hampton Grove. The mower was still there, but the yardboy wasn't pushing it. It stood there near the street, in mid swath across the road.
Hal moved through the dining room and into the study at the back of the house, to a window overlooking the river, where he turned his eyes toward the tenant shack. The tenant's muscular jet-black truck was there now, parked outside the house.
Hal's imagination went into high gear, putting the signs together. Hal knew what his tenant was. He was a construction worker over in Harrisonburg. A large, burly man, hard muscle on muscle—large in the sense of a powerful physique, not in any sense of fat. Dark and hairy and rough looking, with a menacing demeanor and full-coverage tattoos and battle scars.
And Hal knew what the man liked and went after. There were cars and trucks over there at all hours of the day and night, whenever the man wasn't working in town. And Hal had seen the men get out of their vehicles and slowly walk up to the door of the shack. And later, he'd seen them stumble out, bowlegged and barely able to walk, but looking oh so satisfied.
The tenant had approached Hal directly, not saying it, but making the offer, letting Hal know he was transparent, that there wasn't an iota of difference between the two of them in what they liked and what they wanted. But Hal had backed away. Afraid. Something about the man scared him. The devil incarnate. Hal lusted after his younger brother, true. But it wasn't the same at all. Hal wanted to take Jimmy, and Hal knew that wasn't how it would proceed if he went with the tenant. Hal knew that going with the tenant would be opening up another door altogether. That man was a dominator and would bottom for no other man. In that way there wasn't any difference between the two of them. And Hal was afraid of the man, afraid that if he gave into him, there would be no turning back.
Thoughts of the long, lanky red-headed yardboy and the dark, menacing tenant flamed in Hal's mind, and he found himself leaving the house and floating across the expanse of grass toward the copse of trees nestling the tenant shack by the ruins of the mill trace at the edge of the river.
He could hear them long before he reached the scrubby flower bed beneath the window that was his goal. Loud cries, approaching screaming, the intent of which Hal could not determine. Pain, yes certainly pain, and fear, at least a touch of that too. But also something else, something more, something dominating. Insistence, and pleasure, and wanting. A want scratched; a dream fulfilled. A total taking and a total giving.
Hal reached the window, which was dusty and streaked with grime. But the light was on in the room, and the view was clear enough. The yardboy reclined in a sling suspended from the ceiling, his arms and legs rising up the four chains at the corners and secured by black strappings. The red head's skull was flopping down from the sling at the near side, his eyes wild, staring at Hal, and his mouth stretched open in a perpetual scream. The hairy beast of a man standing crouched over the freckled torso of the yardboy at the other end of the sling, moving fast and hard in a staccato rhythm that sent the sling swaying toward Hal with each thrust, each attack met with a pain-pleasure cry from the mouth of the yardboy and each backward retreat answered with a gurgling groan.
