Chapter Five
Blake sighed as he sat down on the edge of his bed, the mattress creaking under his and Rusty’s weight.
His old room wasn’t nearly as impressive as the last room he’d shared a bed with Rusty in, but it’d have to do.
Rusty was looking around it with interest, taking in every minute detail of the space.
This suddenly felt uncomfortably intimate, like he was showing Rusty a part of himself that he wasn’t ready for.
Or, well…
Maybe it was okay to showRustyall of this. They were married, after all.
Still. There were a lot of things in here he’d never shared with anyone. Rusty was the first boy he’d ever had in his room. In this room, anyway.
“Look at that comic book collection,” Rusty said, nodding to the bookshelf. “It was pretty much impossible to get comics when I was a kid. No one sold ‘em.”
“We had a great bookstore here. It shut down for a while, but it looked like it was open again when we drove past. The owner always ordered my comics in for me.”
“I would’ve killed for a collection like that when I was a kid,” Rusty said.
“I wanted to be a comic book artist at one point,” Blake explained. He hadn’t told many people that in his life, but since they were talking about it, he assumed Rusty would be interested in knowing.
“Really?” Rusty asked, turning away from a painting he’d been staring at to look at Blake again.
“Really,” Blake said. “I’m not great at illustration, though. I’ve always been a better painter. Not that it made any difference in the end.”
“These are good, though,” Rusty said, nodding at one of the old paintings he’d been looking at a moment earlier. “Really good. Why didn’t you pursue it?”
“Because I had to pay the bills somehow,” Blake said, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. He didn’t hate his job, exactly, but he hated that he had to do it. He hated that he hadn’t had the drive, or the connections, or whatever it was he needed to pursue his dream.
All he’d ever wanted to do was share things with people that would make them smile.
He hated that he’d had to leave his home, his friends and his family behind so he could go and make the kind of living thatmightmean he could retire early and do something meaningful with his life.
He wasn’t sure that was the kind of thing he needed to tell Rusty, though.
“Would it have made you happy?” Rusty asked. “Painting for a living, I mean.”
“Yes,” Blake said. “Wouldn’t music have made you happy?”
To Blake’s surprise, Rusty shook his head. “Nah. Not if I had to do it for money. Then it’s about what other people want, not whatIwant. I dunno if I could do what other people want. Not with something that means so much to me.”
“Huh.” Blake shifted his weight on the mattress. He’d never really thought of it like that. “I want to do what other people want,” he said. “I mean… for me, it’s always been about sharing the one talent I have.”
Rusty hummed, reaching out to touch a teddy bear that was still sitting on one of Blake’s pillows.
He’d missed that bear when he moved out, but he would have felt ridiculous taking it with him.
“Whatdoyou do?” Blake asked. “Because that’s gonna come up eventually and it’d be nice if we were both saying the same thing.”
“You can tell your parents whatever you want,” Rusty said. “But I’m a property developer. Which I guess is boring.”
Blake’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Really,” Rusty said. “You can tell them I do something more exciting if you want. I don’t mind.”
“I think… I think that’s fine,” Blake said. “This explains what you meant about an expense account.”
