This chapter takes place the morning after the Whitney opening.

It could not go in the main book.

It’s for you. Every word.

— Milo Hart

Wet Paint

A Paint Me Filthy Bonus Chapter

LUC

I wake up at 8:14 AM Saturday morning with a gold band on my finger and a ring on my husband’s finger and a smear of ochre paint across my left pec from where Ryder rolled onto me in his sleep, and I lie there for a full minute in the gray loft light before I remember I am allowed to have this.

I am allowed to have this.

Ryder is asleep on my chest. He is heavy. He is warm. His hair is against my jaw. His left hand — his ring hand — is curled on top of my sternum, and the gold band I put on his finger in the taxi on the Williamsburg Bridge six hours ago has left a faint impression in his skin because he has been sleeping with his fingers fisted, loosely, against my chest.

He sleeps like he does not quite believe I am going to still be there.

I am still here. I am going to be still here.

The pose couch is not big enough for us, and we are on it anyway, because we did not make it to the bed last night. We made it as far as the pose couch and we laughed at each other and I rode him and we came and we pulled a throw blanket over our legs and we fell asleep sweaty and sticky in what we now call, with great affection, the failure posture.

Ryder snores a little on the exhale. I watch him. I watch his eyelashes, which are the single prettiest thing on his face and which nobody — nobody, in thirty-four years of me painting — has ever been patient enough to paint correctly. I watch the fine line of old ochre on his jaw from where I grabbed his face last night with paint on my thumb. I watch the small freckle below his right clavicle that I have catalogued in my brushes list for sixty-one days.

I have painted him outside for two months. I have not painted on him. Not really. I have not primed him. I have not laid gesso on his skin. I have not painted a gold line down his sternum. I have not made a body print. I have not made a painting of him with him.

I have wanted to. I have wanted to for weeks.

The show is open. The show opened last night. The show is — the Times has already said so — the show of the year.

I do not need to be productive today. I am not going to be productive today. I am going to do the thing I have wanted to do for weeks, and I am going to do it slowly, and I am going to do it on my fiancé who has a ring on his finger and is currently asleep on my chest.

I kiss the top of his head. He does not wake up.

I slide out from under him. Carefully. I replace my arm with a pillow. I put on boxers. I go to the kitchen. I make two espressos.

I stand at the counter looking at the east wall. Three small nails. Empty white space. I know what is going to go on that wall next.

The painting is going to be Ryder. Literally. The painting is going to be made on Ryder. The paint is going to go on his skin first. The paint is going to dry on him. The paint is going to transfer to a canvas when I roll him onto one. The paint is going to become the canvas.

The painting is going to be a body print.

I have been wanting to do a body print since I saw Yves Klein’s Anthropometries when I was nineteen at MoMA. I have been carrying that thought for fifteen years. I did not know, until this morning, that I have been carrying it specifically for Ryder.

I go to the canvas rack. I pick up a 30×40 blank canvas. I put it flat on the drop cloth. I pull out six tubes of paint. Ochre. Bone. The wrong warm red. Black. Violet. Gold.

I have been saving the gold. I bought the tube in October. I have not opened it. I know now what the gold is for.

The gold is for his sternum. The gold is for the line I am going to paint from the hollow of his throat to the root of his cock. The gold is for the line I am then going to lick off him.

I carry everything to the drop cloth. I walk back to the pose couch.

Ryder is still asleep with his ring hand curled on the pillow, and the gold band is there — there, in the morning light, on my fiancé’s finger — and I kneel next to the couch in my boxers with his espresso in my hand, and I lift his ring finger, and I kiss the band.

“Ryder. Baby. Wake up. I have coffee. And a question.”

He stretches. He opens both eyes. He rolls onto his back on the pose couch. The blanket falls down around his hips. He is naked underneath. The ring on his finger catches the light.

“Luc.”

“Mm.”

“I’m — I’m married.”

“Almost. Baby. The question.”

“I want to paint on you today.”

A pause. He blinks.

“Paint — on me.”

“On you. All day. I want you as the canvas. I want to prime you. I want to lay pigment across your whole body. I want to paint a gold line down your sternum. I want to roll you onto a real canvas and take the paint off of you onto it. I want to fuck you while you are looking at the painting of yourself. I want to — I want to make a mess of you, Ryder, that I cannot exhibit. That has to stay here. I want to keep you.”

Silence. He stares at me. His cock, I can see with a quick glance down under the blanket, is fully interested.

“Luc. You have been thinking about this for a while, haven’t you.”

“Two months.”

“Two months. You painter son of a bitch. Yes. Get me on that drop cloth.”

“Drink the coffee first. This is going to take a while.”

He drinks the coffee. I take his hand. I lead my fiancé across the loft to the drop cloth on the floor. I sit him down on it. I kneel in front of him.

“Ryder. Lie down for me.”

He lies down.

RYDER

The drop cloth is cold.

He kneels over me in his black boxers. He is hard in them. I am already hard. I have been hard since I want to paint on you today. My cock is lying against my stomach. A bead of precome has come up at the tip and I don’t know why, because he hasn’t touched me.

He sees it. He does not comment. He dips a brush and brings it over my body and touches it to the inside of my elbow.

Not my chest. Not my nipples. Not my cock. The inside of my elbow.

The paint is actually cold. Gesso straight out of the tube. It goes on my arm in a thin white stripe that makes me gasp.

“Breathe. I’m priming you, baby. The way you prime a canvas before you paint on it. The paint has to have something to sit on. I’m putting a layer down first. Thin. Gesso. It’ll tack up in about four minutes. Then I can paint on it.”

“Hold still, Ryder.”

I hold still. He primes me for ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. He starts at the inside of my elbow and works outward. He crosses to my throat. He primes my collarbone. He does the hollow at my sternum. He does the top of my right pec. He does the freckle below the right clavicle.

He does not paint my nipples. He paints around them.

My nipples get hard from the cold of the gesso on the skin around them, and they stand up, untouched, the only two spots of bare skin in a spreading white landscape, and Luc looks at them and his mouth does the millimeter thing and he says, very quiet:

“Those are for later, baby.”

“Luc.“

“I know. Shh. Hold.”

He moves down my body. He primes my ribcage. He primes my stomach — which contracts under the cold brush, my abs going tight, my breath catching. He does not touch my cock. He paints all the way around it. He primes the tops of my thighs. He primes the inside of my thighs, and I make a sound that is not embarrassed and he says good, good, good boy, low, and my hips push up off the drop cloth once, involuntarily, and he puts his free hand on my hipbone and pushes me back down and says against my ear:

“You’re going to stay down for me. For an hour. Maybe longer. I’m going to paint you and you are going to hold. You are not going to come until I tell you to come. Do you understand.”

“Yes, Luc. Yes.”

“Good boy.”

He finishes the priming on my legs. He does my calves. He does the tops of my feet. He even primes between my toes, which is absurd and also somehow the single most intimate thing a human being has ever done to my body.

He stands up. He steps back. He looks down at me — at 6’1″, 220 pounds of Iowa ex-wrestler covered head to toe in thin white gesso, two pink nipples, one hard cock, the rest of me white, a living blank canvas laid out on his floor — and his eyes go soft.

“Ryder. You’re mine.”

A beat. I cannot speak. I nod.

He crouches by the tray. He picks up a wider brush. Loads it with the warm wrong red — the red he mixed two months ago specifically for me, the red that does not exist on any surface that is not my body.

“Now I paint you.”

LUC

I paint him for forty minutes.

I start at his throat. I lay the warm wrong red in a thin wet stripe across the bone at the base of his neck, left to right, clavicle to clavicle. The red goes on cold over the warming gesso and the gesso underneath it grabs it. The paint does not run. The paint sits. The paint dries where I put it.

Ryder makes a sound. His shoulders come up off the drop cloth two inches and he forces them back down, and he holds.

“Good,” I say, low.

I work down his sternum. I lay the red in a widening stripe between his pecs. I go slow. I watch his nipples — still two small pink unpainted islands — tighten in the cold of the red stripe going past them, and I think, very carefully, later.

I get the ochre. I lay it on his left pec. I paint on his inhales. I hold the brush during his exhales. I am matching him. I am painting to his breath.

I get the black. I do his ribs. The black is the outline.

I am making him more beautiful. I am making him beautiful to himself. When he rolls onto the canvas and the paint comes off, when he stands up and looks at the print, he is going to see what I have been trying to tell him with every painting for two months: you are the most beautiful thing I have ever looked at.

Ryder is breathing harder. I am at his stomach laying violet in a slow sweep along the softness at the bottom of it — the softness he hated two months ago and that I have trained him to love.

“Hold, Ryder.”

“Luc — fuck — “

“Hold.”

I paint across his hips. I paint the tendon that stands up there when his hips flex. I do not touch his cock. His cock is the last piece.

I go down his thighs. I paint the fronts. I paint the tops of his knees. I paint the insides — there, he whimpers. I paint his calves. His ankles. The tops of his feet. Between his toes. He groans.

I am so hard in my boxers that the cotton is wet at the tip.

I move back up his body. I paint his arms. I paint his hands. I paint the ring on his left ring finger — I paint around the ring, very carefully, with the tip of the sable.

I come back to his face. I do his forehead in a thin wash of warm red. I do his cheekbones in ochre. The bridge of his nose in a single fine line of violet. His lips last. I paint his lips in bone white, and his lips part under the brush, and I stop.

I put the brush down. I kiss him. I kiss him with my mouth full of nothing — no paint, just my mouth — and he kisses me back and his painted lips smear bone white against mine.

“Luc, I’m not going to last another forty minutes if you don’t — “

“One more thing, baby.”

I pick up the gold. I open the tube. The seal breaks under my thumbnail. I warm a small amount between my palms. I load the finest brush.

“Luc. What’s the gold for.”

I lean over him. I put the tip of the brush to the hollow at the base of his throat.

“The gold,” I say, “is for this.”

I paint a single thin gold line. I start at the hollow of his throat. I draw it downward. Slow. Precise. No waver. I paint down the center of his sternum, through the red, through the black outline of his ribs, through the violet at his stomach. I paint across his navel. I paint down the line of his lower abs. I paint to the base of his cock.

I stop there. I lift the brush. I look at him.

His pupils are all the way blown out. His mouth is parted. His cock is flushed dark. His chest is heaving. Paint is drying on him in patches.

He looks like nothing I have ever painted. Because I have not painted this. This is not a painting. This is the painting.

I set the brush down. I sit back on my heels between his knees.

“Ryder. You are the best thing I have ever made.”

He makes a wrecked sound.

“I’m going to lick the gold off you now.”

“Luc — “

“Hold.”

RYDER

He licks the gold off me.

He starts at the bottom. He puts his mouth at the base of my cock — on the gold — and he drags his tongue upward. Slow. Painter-slow. He works back up the gold line in reverse, tasting the metallic pigment off my skin, his tongue hot against the cold paint, the gold coming up on his lips and getting smeared across his mouth.

I am making noises I do not have permission to make. Luc hears them. Luc does not stop.

Luc licks the gold up my stomach, across my navel — he pauses there, tongue flat in the soft dip of it, and I feel him breathe there, warm, before he keeps going — and he licks up through the violet and the black and the ochre, and he licks up my sternum, and he gets to the hollow at the base of my throat, and he puts his whole mouth there, open, and he sucks.

I almost come from a mouth on my throat.

“Luc — Luc I’m — “

“Hold. You can. Look at me.”

I look at him. His mouth is gold. His whole mouth is gold. His lips are gold, his chin has gold on it, the corner of his jaw has gold on it. He is smeared. He is wrecked. He is beautiful. His violet eyes are half closed and his pupils are huge and he is on his hands and knees over me with a gold mouth and paint on his forearms and his boxers tented with his cock and he is, unquestionably, the single most obscene thing that has ever happened in my life.

“Hold, Ryder.”

“Yes, Luc. Yes. Yes.”

“Good boy.”

He moves down again. He skips the gold — he got it all — and he goes back to my cock. He takes me in his mouth. Not a deep take. A teasing one. The head, a slow suck, a drag of his tongue along the underside, a long pull — and then he pulls off, Christ, he pulls off as I am about to go, and he sits back on his heels and he says, low:

“Not yet.”

“Luc.“

“Hold.”

“Luc I am going to — I’m going to fucking die, Luc — “

“Ryder. One more thing. One more thing and then I am going to let you come. One more thing and then you are going to get everything. Okay?”

I nod.

“Good. Roll. Onto the canvas.”

The blank 30×40 canvas is on the drop cloth next to me. I did not see him put it there.

“I want every piece of paint on you to come off onto this canvas. I want to make a painting of you with you. I want you to roll onto it and put your weight into it. I want a record of every place I painted. Okay?”

“Yes, Luc.”

“Roll.”

I roll. Off the drop cloth and onto the blank canvas. The canvas is primed and the primer grabs the paint off me immediately. I feel the tackiness pull the red off my right pec. I feel the violet on my stomach transfer. I feel the ochre lift off my arm. I feel, with every point of contact, my body decant into the canvas.

Luc is above me. Luc is directing.

“Arms up, baby. Good. Over your head. Hold them there. Turn your face to the left. Yes. Good. Now slowly — don’t slide, press — yes — good boy — now turn, turn onto your right side, stop, hold — good — now back, roll back, keep your knees bent — now up onto your hands and knees — now lower, lower, pec to the canvas, cheek to the canvas — yes — oh baby, good —”

He is choreographing me the way he choreographs paint. He is making the canvas with me, like I am a brush he is holding by the hips.

“Enough.”

I stop. He pulls me off the canvas onto the drop cloth beside it. I look down at myself. I am patchy. Streaked. Where the canvas took the paint off me, I am pale and slick. Where the paint stayed, I am still red and violet and black and ochre. I am half human and half canvas.

Luc stands up. Picks up the canvas. Lifts it with both hands. Turns it upright, carefully. Leans it against the east wall, under the three small nails.

He stands back. He looks at it. I look at it.

The canvas is me. The canvas is the imprint of my body in six colors. My chest. My arms. My cheek. My hip. My ribs. The curve of my shoulder. The print of my thighs. The gold at the center. Everywhere Luc painted on me — everywhere — has come off onto the canvas in the shape of me.

It is the painting we are going to hang over our bed for the rest of our lives.

Luc turns to me. His boxers are off. He is naked, smeared with my paint from where I kissed him, gold still at the corner of his mouth, fully hard, precome at the tip of his cock, and he is looking at me.

He points at the canvas. “Look at it. On your hands and knees. Facing it. I am going to fuck you while you look at it. I want you to see what I see when I look at you. Okay?”

“Yes, Luc.”

I get on my hands and knees facing the east wall. I face the canvas. I look at my body in six colors on the linen, six feet in front of me, wet and shining and real. I hear the cap of the slick come off. I hear him pour it into his hand. I hear him stroke himself once, twice, and then he is behind me, his knees on the drop cloth, his hand on my hip, his cock pressed against me.

“Look at yourself. That’s what I see when I look at you.”

He pushes in. Slow. I am open from two months of him and from the morning and from the want. He pushes in an inch, holds, pushes in another inch, holds, all the way, and he stops with his hips against my ass and his cock all the way inside me.

“Breathe. Don’t look away. Don’t close your eyes. Look at the canvas. Look at the body I made. Look at what you are to me.”

“Luc.“

He moves. He moves hard. He moves the way he has been wanting to move and holding back from, because the show was happening and because everything was happening, and now nothing is happening, and he moves.

He fucks me hard from behind on a drop cloth in front of a wet painting of my own body, and I keep my eyes on the canvas, and he grips my hip with one hand and the back of my neck with the other and he leans over me so his mouth is at my ear, and he says, filthy, filthy —

“Look at you. Look at my canvas. Look at what I made. You are my painting. You are my fucking painting. Look at how you take me. Look at how my brush makes you, and how my hand makes you, and how my cock is making you right now. You are mine, Ryder. All of you. This body, this ring, this hole, this — “

“Luc — “

“Say it.”

“Yours.”

“Say the name. Look at the canvas and say it. Marcus never had this. Marcus never had you. Say it.”

I look at the canvas. The painting is not done until I do this.

“Marcus never had this,” I say, loud, to the canvas, to the east wall, to the morning, to nobody. “Marcus never had you. Marcus never had this. This is mine. You are mine. Luc, you are mine, you are mine, you are fucking mine, and he is never — he is never —”

Luc comes apart behind me. Luc comes apart on mine. He grabs my hips with both hands and he fucks me hard, three quick brutal strokes, and he bottoms out in me and he freezes and he comes, deep, hot, and he is saying my name — just my name, over and over — Ryder Ryder Ryder Ryder — and I come too.

I come untouched. I come with my eyes on the canvas, on my own painted body, with my husband-to-be buried in me, with his hands on my hips, with the word mine still in my mouth, and I come harder than I have ever come in my life, and I collapse forward onto the drop cloth in a streak of violet and red and black and gold, and I take Luc down with me, and we crumple into a heap on the floor of the loft, painted, fucked, wrecked, engaged, and laughing.

“Ryder.”

“Mm.”

“Not done.”

I lift my head. Turn it to look at him. His mouth is gold.

“Not done, Ryder.”

LUC — INTERLUDE

I peel myself off Ryder’s back. I roll off him onto the drop cloth next to him and I look up at the twenty-foot ceiling. The ceiling is still there. The world is still going.

“Luc. You said — you said you were not done.”

“Water. And toast. And a break. Then we are going to talk about what not done means. Okay?”

I get up bare-assed. I fill two glasses with cold water from the tap. I put two slices of sourdough in the toaster. I put four strawberries on a plate.

I come back across the loft with a tray held in both hands, paint-smeared, fully naked, gold mouth, my fiancé’s cum drying on my thighs. I look, I am sure, insane.

I set the tray down on the drop cloth next to Ryder. He has not moved. He is on his back now, looking up at the east wall, at the canvas we made.

“Are you crying.”

“A little. Not — not sad. It’s me, Luc. That’s — that’s what I look like to you.”

“Baby. Yes.”

He sits up. He eats the toast. We drink the water. We eat the strawberries. For fifteen minutes we do not say anything, because the canvas on the east wall is saying it for us.

At some point I lie down with my head on Ryder’s thigh. His hand comes to my hair. He picks a fleck of violet out of it.

“That painting is ours. Nobody else gets to see it. Not Dehlia. Not Sage. Not Mag. Not the Whitney. Not the Times. This one is ours. This one lives here. Above our bed.”

“Above our bed.”

After a while he says, quiet:

“Luc. Get up. Your turn.”

He smiles. “You’re the painter. Let me paint you.”

RYDER

I make him lie down on the drop cloth. I walk him over. I put my hands on his shoulders. I press gently down. He goes. I lay him on his back and I kneel above him.

His eyes are violet in the gray light.

“Luc. Shut up. I am going to make a mess of you. I am an ex-wrestler from Iowa and I am going to put color on your body until I am satisfied with how you look, and you are going to lie there, and you are going to hold. Okay?”

“Yes, Ryder.”

“Good boy.”

His whole body responds. His pupils widen by a measurable fraction. His jaw softens. His breath goes shallower. His hips tilt up by a degree.

I pick up the wide brush. I dip it in the red. I warm it in my hand — which is a thing he did not do for me; he used the red cold. But Luc needs to be coaxed.

I touch the brush to the hollow at the base of his throat. He gasps. Warm red.

I lay it down the line he painted gold on me, except backwards. In red. From the hollow of his throat down his sternum, between the pale planes of his pecs, down the centerline of his stomach, over his navel, down his lower abs, to the root of his cock.

I stop there because he stopped there on me.

“Ryder. You’re doing it back to me.”

“All of it, baby. You are going to lie there, and I am going to do to you what you did to me. You are going to take every minute of it. You are going to hold. You are going to come when I say you come.”

His eyes close. His whole body goes slack. The supervisor leaves. His face, under me, goes soft in a way I have only seen maybe twice in two months.

I paint his wrists in ochre. A ring at the pulse. A bracelet, not a restraint, but close. I paint his inner elbows. His inner hipbones — the soft pale places where his pelvis meets his stomach, the places I kissed him on a Saturday night in June. I paint the three moles on his back in a small triangle.

I do not paint his nipples. I paint around them. The way he painted around mine. He laughs, quiet, the small broken laugh of a man who is having his own move used against him.

I paint violet across his stomach. I paint the insides of his thighs — ochre on the left, red on the right. I paint the tops of his feet. Between his toes.

I paint his hands. His painter’s knuckles. His calluses. The ring on his finger — I paint around the ring, with the smallest brush I have, the way he painted around mine — and Luc, watching me, goes very still. He has noticed I remembered.

I paint his face last. Red on his forehead. Ochre on his cheekbones. Violet on the bridge of his nose. Bone white on his lips.

I reach for the gold. I warm a small amount between my palms. I load the finest brush. I lean over him. I put the tip of the brush to the hollow of his throat.

I paint a single thin gold line. From the hollow of his throat. Down. Slow. The same line he painted on me. In the same direction. In the same gold.

Through the red on his sternum. Through the violet on his stomach. Across his navel. Through the red on his lower abs. I stop at the base of his cock.

I lift the brush. His eyes are wet.

Luc Voss, thirty-four years old, painter of the show of the year, engaged to me for fourteen hours and thirty-three minutes, is lying on the drop cloth on the floor of his own loft with a gold line down his sternum and tears in his eyes, and he is looking at me.

“Ryder. You — you remembered everything. The ring. The moles. The — “

“I know, baby.”

“Luc. I am going to lick the gold off you now.”

LUC

He licks the gold off me. Starts at the base of my cock, the way I started on him. He drags his tongue up, slow. Slower than I was. He has been watching me for two months and he has been taking notes, and his notes say Luc wants to be taken apart on the exhale, and he is taking me apart on the exhale.

His mouth is warm and wet and slow. I feel the gold come up on his tongue. I feel the metallic taste of it on his breath when he exhales up my sternum.

He pauses at my navel — because I paused there on him — and he breathes, warm, into the dip of my belly, and I make a sound that is not a sound I have made out loud before.

Ryder Kane knows me. He is proving it.

He licks up through the violet. Through the red. He gets to the hollow of my throat and he puts his whole mouth there, open, and he sucks — and I make a noise I do not give my permission to make, a broken high noise, and my hips come up off the drop cloth once, and he puts his hand flat on my stomach and pushes me back down and says:

“Hold.”

“Ryder — “

“You told me to hold, Luc. So you hold.”

“Ryder — “

“Luc. You’re a good boy.”

A beat. My whole body —

He is not shaky and uncertain anymore. He says it now like he owns it. He says it like he has been practicing in his head. He says it looking down at me with gold on his mouth and his hand flat on my stomach, and I break.

I break out loud. I have no pride left. I have no shape left. I say, “Ryder, Ryder, Ryder, please, please, please,” and he does not laugh at me and he does not correct me.

He moves down. He puts his mouth on my cock. He takes me in. Slowly. He is not as practiced as I am — but what he lacks in practice he has in attention, and he is applying all of it.

He works me slowly until I am close — until I am almost there — and then, exactly as I did to him, he pulls off.

“Not yet.”

“Ryder.“

“Hold, baby.”

I hold. I hold because he asked me to. A very small voice in my chest, which I have not heard in a long time, says yes. Yes. Hold for him.

He sits back on his heels. He looks at me. His hand is shaking slightly. I watch him plan.

“Luc. Get up. I need you to help me move the canvas. Our canvas. Off the wall. Down here. On the drop cloth.”

“Ryder — it’s wet, it’ll smear — “

“I know. Trust me.”

I trust him. We carry it together across the loft — wet face up, careful — and we lay it face-up on the drop cloth. The painting of his body. On the floor.

Ryder turns to me.

“Luc. I want you to ride me. On the canvas. On our canvas. I want you on top of me, on top of it. I want your weight to press you into the print. I want the canvas to be the last thing between us and the floor. I want you on top of the painting of me, Luc, and I want you to take me inside you.”

“Yes, Ryder.”

He lies down on his back on the wet canvas. On the painting of his own body. He spreads his arms out across it, palms down.

“Come here.”

RYDER

Luc crawls over me. Slow. He is thirty-four and he has been topping his entire life, except for that one scene two months ago in a shower. I can see him processing it.

He looks down at me. I am painted head to toe. I am lying on the canvas that took that paint. The canvas under my back is transferring back to me — a second layer on my shoulder blades, a second layer on my ass. I am becoming the canvas that became me that is now becoming me again.

Luc laughs. “This is the weirdest sex I have ever had and I have had some weird sex.”

“I know, Luc. I love it.”

“I know you love it. Get on me.”

He swings one leg over my hips. Settles on my thighs. Leans forward. Puts his hands flat on my chest. The paint on his palms and the paint on my chest meets and smears. His gold line is still partly there, smeared now from where I licked it. He leans down and he kisses me and our mouths smear gold on each other.

He reaches for the slick. Pours it into his palm. Reaches behind himself, spreads himself, and I watch him work himself open on his own fingers for a minute. I have never watched him do this for himself. He is letting me watch.

He works himself open. Two fingers. Three. He pulls his fingers out. He slicks my cock with the oil on his palm, unhurried, stroking me twice more than he needs to.

“Luc — are you teasing me right now.”

“Maybe.”

“Luc — “

“Good boy.”

He lifts his hips. He positions himself. He puts a hand behind himself and guides me. He lowers. Slowly. Inch by inch.

Luc is tight and hot and slick. He bottoms out. He sits. He exhales, shakily, and opens his eyes.

“Ryder. Look at us.”

I look up. Luc Voss is above me. Naked. Painted. His body streaked in ochre and violet and the remains of a gold line. His hands are flat on my chest. The wedding band on his left ring finger is catching the gray loft light. His hair is in his eyes. His cock is hard against his own stomach. He is sitting on mine.

He is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

“Luc. Move, baby.”

He moves. Slow at first. He rises, he lowers. He finds a rhythm — painter-rhythm, the long stroke, nothing wasted, full attention. I put my hands on his hips and I hold him loosely. I am letting him set the pace, because this is his scene, this is his reverse, this is his version.

He gets faster. His head tips back. His mouth opens.

“Ryder — Ryder, Ryder, Ryder — “

“I’m here.”

“Ryder, I’m going to come —”

“Come on me. On my chest. I want it on me. I want to feel it. I want you to come on the paint you put on me.”

“Ryder.“

“Do it, baby. Good boy. Come on me.”

He breaks on good boy. Both hands on my chest, his whole body shaking. He comes on my sternum in hot thick stripes across the ochre and the red. He is saying my name.

I fuck up into him three strokes. I come. Inside him. With his cum on my chest, with his hands splayed in the mess of it, with his forehead coming down to my forehead, with the painting of my body under both of us, with the ring on his finger in my sightline, and I come so hard I see light. White.

Luc collapses onto my chest. In his own cum. Smearing it. Laughing. Breathing.

“Ryder. We ruined the canvas. Look.”

I lift my head. The painting of my body on the linen is now underneath two live bodies, and the pressure of us has been smearing it, and our paint has been mixing with the canvas’s paint.

The painting is different. The painting is a new painting. The painting is a record of what we just did on top of it.

“Luc. It’s better. The first version was a body print. This one has our whole morning on it. This one is the record of everything we just did.”

“Yeah, baby. This is the one.”

“This is the one that goes over the bed.”

LUC

The water in the shower runs colored for two minutes. First orange from the ochre, then red, then violet, then a long sluice of gold. Luc is pressed against my back, laughing into my neck, watching the water go colored down the drain.

We wash each other slowly. He soaps my shoulders. I soap his. He kneels, at one point, and washes me between the legs — thorough, careful, specific — because there is, technically, paint in places where paint is not supposed to be. We are domestic. We are not in a hurry.

We put on our matching gray sweats. We come out of the bathroom and look at the loft. The drop cloth is a disaster. The canvas is on the floor face-up. Paint is everywhere.

“Tomorrow,” Luc says. “Tomorrow we clean. Right now we sleep.”

We fall onto the bed on top of the duvet. Luc pulls me into his chest. Hand in my hair. Other hand flat on my back.

“Best morning ever.”

“Best morning ever, Ryder.”

Ryder sleeps for three hours. At 2:14 PM I get up, carefully, and I cross the loft, and I look at the canvas up close. It is the best thing I have ever made. It is also the least sellable, least exhibitable thing I have ever made. It cannot live in any room but the one it was made in.

It is ours.

I pick up my phone. Twenty-three notifications. Dehlia has sold nine pieces since the show opened. Sage is at a diner in Crown Heights with Isobel Cardone eating pancakes. Theo has sent the New Yorker review; it is somehow better than the Times. Mag has sent the proposal photograph.

Ryder’s mother has texted. Hi honey. I read the Times. I read the New Yorker. I do not understand either of them. Your father and I are proud of you both. Tell Luc we love him. Come home for Christmas.

I wake Ryder up gently. I tell him his mother texted.

“Oh, God.“

“Ryder. We are going to Christmas.”

“I told you we were going to Christmas. My dad is going to hug you for approximately fifty-five seconds. My mother is going to feed you until you die. My sister is going to be the worst person you have ever met and you are going to love her. My brother-in-law is a tax attorney. He is a four-hour project. You’ll get through it.”

I laugh out loud. I laugh because I am going to Cedar Rapids in six weeks. I laugh because I am going to be, at Christmas, inside a family I did not have twelve hours ago.

“Ryder. I have a family.”

He opens both eyes. He looks at me.

“Yeah, baby. You have a family.”

RYDER

We hang the canvas at 6:47 PM. Together. Luc measures. I hold the level. We drill into the plaster above the headboard. We use the small hardware Luc has, little brass hangers. We lift the canvas together and we hang it. Straight. Level. Above our bed.

The painting that was, at 10:41 AM, the imprint of my body in six colors is now the record of a morning. It has the imprint. It has the smear of two bodies on top of the imprint. It has a specific small patch where we are pretty sure Luc came and I’ll be polite and not point it out. It has the gold line, twice — once in the original print, once smeared in the aftermath.

It is, objectively, indecent. It is, objectively, the most beautiful painting either of us has ever been in. It is above our bed. It is going to be above our bed for the rest of our lives.

“Luc. What if we move.”

“The painting comes with us. It goes over whatever bed we have next. And the next. It stays.”

“It stays.”

He pulls me against him. I put my face in his hair. He puts his face in my neck. We stand in the bedroom of the Bushwick loft in our matching gray sweats and we look at the painting of ourselves above our bed.

“Ryder. Thank you. For coming up the stairs. For saying yes. For letting me paint on you. For painting on me. Thank you for letting me have this. This specific thing. This morning. This painting.”

“Luc. Thank you for letting me.”

We get in bed. We pull the duvet up. We lie side by side on our backs. We look up at the painting.

Above us. Over us. My body on linen and his paint on me and his cum on me and the smear of our combined Saturday morning, and the gold line down the center of it, and us — us — underneath it, safe, tired, fed, engaged, holding hands.

“Ryder. This is the best painting I have ever made. I am going to paint you for the rest of my life. Every day. Is that okay.”

“Yes, Luc. Yes. Every day. For the rest of my life. Paint me every day.”

We sleep. We sleep under our painting. We wake up at nine-forty and order pizza and eat it on the mattress and watch something stupid and fall asleep again at eleven and sleep until Saturday becomes Sunday and neither of us notices.

We wake up on Sunday morning. The painting is above us. It is the first thing we see. It is going to be the first thing we see every morning for the rest of our lives.

Luc opens his eyes. Looks up. Sees it. Smiles. I open my eyes. Look up. See it. Smile.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” he says.

“Good morning, husband.”

A beat. “Husband,” he says.

“Husband.”

“Ryder — we aren’t — we aren’t legally —”

“I know, Luc. We got engaged thirty-six hours ago. I am aware of the timeline. I’m saying it anyway. Good morning, husband.”

He laughs, quiet, in the bed, under our painting, and he rolls over onto his side and he puts his hand flat on my chest and he says:

“Good morning, husband.”

He closes his eyes. He falls back asleep.

I watch him sleep for a long time in the gray Sunday morning light, under a painting we made together on a drop cloth in a loft in Bushwick on a Saturday that is now, already, the day before today, already memory, already the beginning of a life we are going to have.

I close my eyes. I sleep.

THE END

A Note from Milo

If you made it all the way through, thank you. Seriously.

Luc and Ryder’s story in Paint Me Filthy took every restraint I had. This one took every restraint I didn’t. If you loved the book and you loved this, the single best thing you can do for me is leave a review of Paint Me Filthy on Amazon. Honest reviews are how readers find my work, and they mean more than you can imagine to an independent writer.

— Milo Hart

💖 Loved It? Leave a Review

Honest reviews are how readers find my books. If Paint Me Filthy and this bonus landed for you, the single best thing you can do for me is leave a quick review on Amazon.

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.