Blake reached down, his hand wrapping around Andre’s cock, stroking him in time with his thrusts. The dual sensation pushed Andre over the edge almost immediately.
He came with a sharp, broken cry, his body clenching hard around Blake, his hips stuttering upward.
The feeling of Andre coming around him shattered the last of Blake’s control. He drove in one final, deep time, his own climax tearing through him with a force that left him blind and breathless. He collapsed against Andre, his breath leaving him in shattered waves, his face buried in the crook of Andre’s neck.
They lay there for a long time, tangled together in the cooling sheets, their breathing slowly returning to normal.
Blake shifted his weight, rolling slightly to the side but keeping Andre pulled tight against his chest. He pressed a kiss to Andre’s damp forehead, then rested his chin on top of his head.
“I love you,” Blake said, the words quiet in the morning light.
“I love you too,” Andre murmured, his eyes closed, his hand resting flat against Blake’s heart.
Blake held him, listening to the sounds of the city waking up outside their window, and knew, with a certainty that settled deep into his bones, that he had made the right choice. He was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Chapter eight
Opening Night
The Whitfield Gallery was located in Mayfair, a sleek, minimalist space with polished concrete floors and lighting designed to make everything look expensive.
On a Thursday evening in late July, it was packed.
Andre stood near the back of the main room, holding a glass of sparkling water he hadn’t tasted, watching the crowd. He was wearing a dark, tailored suit that Claire had insisted on buying for him, his curls pushed back from his forehead, his expression a carefully constructed mask of calm.
Inside, he was terrified.
This was his first solo exhibition. Fifteen paintings, the culmination of six months of obsessive, relentless work in the studio on The Cut. They hung on the pristine white walls, exposed and vulnerable, stripped of the privacy of his workspace.
There was the large abstract in blues and grays, shot through with the vivid malachite green that had been inspired by Liam’s eyes. There was a series of smaller canvases capturing the geometry of tennis — the tension of a serve, the blur of a racket head, the stark white lines of a court — renderednot with the anger of his early work, but with a fluid, kinetic grace. And in the center of the room hung the piece he had finished the night Blake was in Connecticut: a study of morning light in their bedroom, the dust motes suspended in a warm, golden haze.
“Stop looking like you are attending a funeral,” Pierre said, appearing at Andre’s elbow with a glass of champagne. “People are buying them. The woman in the terrible red dress just bought the one with the green stripe.”
Andre blinked, looking at his father. Pierre was wearing a suit that looked ten years old, his thick baker’s hands looking strangely delicate wrapped around the stem of the champagne flute.
“She bought it?” Andre asked.
“Yes. For a ridiculous amount of money. I could buy a new oven for what she paid for that canvas.” Pierre took a sip of champagne and grimaced. “English bubbles. Like drinking sparkling water with a bad attitude.”
Claire appeared on Andre’s other side, slipping her arm through his. She looked elegant in a simple black dress, her eyes bright with pride.
“Do not listen to him. He has been telling everyone who will listen that he is the artist’s father.”
“I am the artist’s father,” Pierre grumbled. “It is a fact.”
Andre smiled, the knot in his chest loosening slightly. He looked around the room, spotting Liam and Talia near the front entrance. Liam was talking animatedly to a gallery assistant, gesturing wildly, while Talia stood beside him, looking impossibly chic in a dark green jumpsuit, laughing at whatever Liam was saying.
It was a perfect night. Almost perfect.
Blake was in Germany. The Hamburg Open was a mandatory ATP 500 event, and Blake had a second-round match on Wednesday and a third-round match on Friday. They had spoken on the phone that morning, Blake apologizing again for not being there, Andre assuring him that he understood. And he did understand. Tennis was their job. The schedule was unforgiving. But as Andre watched the crowd move from painting to painting, a small, quiet part of him wished Blake was standing beside him.
“Andre!”
Talia waved from across the room, gesturing for him to come over. Andre excused himself from his parents and navigated through the crowd, accepting congratulations and shaking hands with people he didn’t know.
“You’re a hit,” Talia said as he approached, kissing him on both cheeks. “The gallery director looks like the cat that got the cream. Half the room has red dots next to them.”
“It is overwhelming,” Andre admitted.
