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“No lowballing, please. This is serious. Your last work sold at twenty thousand a piece, and you now have private interest before the catalogue has even closed.”
“That early work was bought by you.”
“And?”
“You don’t count.”
“What the hell are you talking about? The Gilded Table does count.”
I roll my eyes at him. “She’s not an idiot, Jack. She’ll know you’re the main instigator.”
He opens the lid on the next toastie. Examines its excellence.
“I have a lot of money and poor impulse control. That’s the ideal art buyer for their auction room.”
I give him a look. “Don’t diss the art community.”
Jack shrugs. “Fine. Whatever. I have excellent instincts and impeccable taste.”
His humour is infectious. So jovial as we argue over valuation, catalogue wording, photography, and whether Jack’s fabricated Gilded Table is ethically dubious.
Jack insists theatrics are a vital part of commerce. Bryce agrees that inventing an exclusive collective whose only member is himself might be considered somewhat misleading, but Jack says exclusivity has to start somewhere, end of.
I laugh until my sides ache.
Bryce laughs too, but still, yet again, it doesn’t reach all the way into his eyes.
He grows a whole lot quieter as Jack talks about the next few weeks leading up to the auction. His current toastie remains unfinished on his plate, and his fingers tighten around his champagne glass.
The next few weeks.
My excitement catches on the phrase, because that’s the repeating statement that seems to trigger him.
The next few weeks.
Jack keeps talking, outlining photographs, descriptions and a reserve price that makes me choke, but Bryce has gone somewhere else. Not physically. He’s still sitting beside me, still beautiful and rumpled in the aftermath of an ass fisting, but the lightness has drained out of him. It only gets more dramatic by the second.
Jack notices too, and the energy takes a one-eighty. His smile fades, his expression changes.
“Time to cut the crap now. What’s up, BT? Don’t say the last toastie was under par, because it wasn’t. The mushrooms were to die for.”
Bryce plays dumb. Fake smile.
“Nothing,” he says.
Jack’s eyebrows rise.
Bryce has never been convincing when he’s lying. Not to me. Not to Jack. Probably not to anyone with eyes.
Silence. All three of us.
Heavy, horrible silence.
Bryce finally sighs, still looking at the remains of the toastie on his plate. It takes a few more seconds before he turns to me, eyes locking.
My God, at seeing the hurt in them, every happy part of me shrivels away.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he says.
