“Our porn tour.” Victor turned his head, frowning a little. “Did you tape that?”
“What do you think?”
Victor looked around. Sure enough, the camera was on the desk, and the red recording light was on. “You know, I’ll bet most people make one or two sex tapes and then they’re like, okay, did that, moving on.” Andy laughed.
Victor got to his feet, walked over to the camera, and turned it off. “We are a couple of perverts.” Andy had almost stopped laughing, but that set him off again. “We actually watch these things.” Andy waved at him like ‘stop.’
Victor did not stop. “We rate these things.”
“Hey, some days we feel like Buenos Aires, and some days we feel like Amsterdam.” Andy giggled again, wiped his eyes, and hauled himself to his feet. “Look at it this way, the likelihood that either of us will ever need Viagra is really low.”
Victor laughed, then winced. “Ow.”
“What? Oh.” Andy touched the bruise on Victor’s lip. “Sorry about that.”
“Well, I told you to. Odds were in favor of you going hard.”
“I was hard all right. Thanks for not biting me.” A light kiss. “Do we have to do anything for the rest of the day?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let’s go watch a movie with Molly.” But before that, Andy had to take a minute, or three, for a long silent hug. This man, he thought, my love.
Andy hadn’t exactly forgotten about their friends Red and Mary, and the whole Macbeth situation in London. But they’d been sufficiently busy that he hadn’t followed up with anybody. It was Monday, and they didn’t have a thing they needed to do before getting ready to go out to see Vicky (and everybody else) perform at Chrome. It was warm, so they were out on the loungers. Molly was in her usual spot behind them. Victor was reading; Andy had been reading, but was now looking at email. “Our friend the pornographer says that the revised Macbeth is smashing all records for that company.”
“They probably don’t usually have an American action hero playing Macduff.”
“Playing anything,” Andy agreed. “Not to mention the most-commented-upon swordfight in the history of the internet.”
“Is it really?”
“Apparently so. The Niall and Red version, which must chap that guy’s ass.” Victor laughed. He felt sorry for the actor playing Macbeth. Andy didn’t, much. “Come on, he’s lucky he has the part. Niall could have said, you know what Janis, I’ll catch up with you and Geoffrey after it closes, have to tread the boards now.”
“He didn’t want to be an actor.”
“I know. He doesn’t want that life.”
“He’s got his hands full with Janis.”
“And his mouth full with Geoffrey, no doubt.”
Victor snickered. “So what have you told Reggie lately?”
“Not a lot. I sent him one of those pictures of Dmitri and Patrick and he
swooned so much I thought I’d better not send him any more.”
“Who’s still outstanding?”
“Well, since I got Antony and Cleopatra this week, I think I’m through until Red and Mary come home. Nobody else has come knocking saying can we do this or that, and I’m out of ideas, and you haven’t thrown me anything for a while.”
“We got so many more than I expected. It was fun.”
“Yeah, it was. Anyway, I’ve been pretty much choosing the gallery images along the way. Now it’s time to do the processing. And now that I know how many it is, I can start thinking about when and where to hang the show.”
“That gallery where you had ‘A Tempest’ is too small, huh.” Andy made a sound of assent. Victor looked around for his drink, realized the glass was almost empty, and went to get a refill. “More water for you?” He refilled Andy’s glass too, set down the pitcher, and had a thought. “Were you working on a show when we met?”
“When I did Tanith’s pictures? Yeah, I was.”
“Did you not do a book for it? I only remember seeing one from spring twenty twelve.”
Andy’s usual thing was to print up a single book with all the images from a given shoot, highlighting the ones he’d printed for hanging. Only occasionally did he design and print a book for the public. “The spring show had a book. The fall show, after I hung it, I thought it was too depressing. So I didn’t do my usual thing, much less one for sale.”
“What was the subject?” Victor sat down, elbows on his knees, studying his husband. Andy didn’t usually do depressing things. Even his next exhibit, the wildly popular ‘Cut Open’ – which was explicitly about damage – hadn’t been depressing.
Andy gazed back at him. “Empty theaters. I’d taken it down a week or so before we met again.”
“Oh.” Say no more, Victor thought. No wonder Andy hadn’t kept working on it. At the time, that must have felt like opening a vein. He wanted to apologize. Something in his husband’s expression told him he shouldn’t.
He tried something else instead. “Ever think of revisiting that?”
“Well, I never did before.” Andy thought about it. “In view of
subsequent events, I might feel differently about those images now. There’s a lot of promise in an empty theater.”
He might have hesitated to suggest another project for his husband, but he knew this one wouldn’t take much time. Andy had a template for those archive books. Plus, he wouldn’t be surprised if some of that material would be a good tie-in for their Broadway concert. “I’d like to see them.”
“Then I’ll throw together a book.” Andy smiled, leaned across the gap between the loungers, and kissed Victor. “I love you so much.”
“I love you too. You’re literally the most interesting man in the world.
Even when you don’t have the beard.”
“I don’t always print a book,” said Andy, striking a
