They say art is beautiful, don’t they, and Mickey is a facts, physical-shit-he-can-hold-or-observe kind of guy, so naturally he tries to draw the most beautiful thing he can see with his own two eyes, which is how he finally ends up drawing another person for the first time. How he starts sketching Mandy with a pencil on the back of a receipt propped up against his thigh on a peaceful Saturday morning, Terry locked up for a short stint and their brothers doing something shady across state lines. Mandy with her long, unkempt black hair and her grungy slept-in eyeliner, the fleck of light winking off her silver nose ring, the way her mouth scrunches up in that grin and her eyes flare vivid blue (which he tries to but can’t quite capture in black and white) when she finds something really amusing. Her blunt cut bangs, sticking up weirdly from sleep while she eats cereal dry (milk ran out) in front of the TV, which is playing some old cartoon. Her pale, slightly hunched-in shoulders, a habit learned from just shy of a decade and a half of taking up as little space as possible. He tries to capture the way the sunlight shining through the grubby living room window makes her face glow, the halation of it, just a little.

The result is a tiny two by two inch bust. The receipt doesn’t take the graphite too well, and his pencil pokes maddeningly through the paper once while he’s shading her hair, but when he’s done, thrusts it gruffly at Mandy despite having half a mind to rip it up into a million pieces, and grunts, “Now you can stop asking me to fuckin’ draw you,” she takes it with both hands cupped — like she’s holding a baby bird, like she’s holding water that’ll trickle away if she isn’t careful, delicate — and stares down at it. She’s silent for ages, Mickey’s heart beating a mile a minute the entire time, his face and the back of his neck burning scarlet. His blood is rushing wet and loud in his ears, so loud he almost doesn’t hear her when she looks up, bright blue eyes wide and shiny, too shiny, and whispers a tiny, reverent, “Thank you.”

She doesn’t say anything more, and her eyes drop back to the scrap of paper. That urge to rip up the sketch, to destroy everything he’s ever drawn, and everything he’s ever liked about himself (and the intersection of that Venn diagram is nearly a circle itself), is still there, solid as a block of marble. But he can feel it being chiseled away, bit by bit; more, the longer she looks.

After what seems like an interminable amount of time she gets up, hands still cupped and head ducked to keep staring, and walks into her room with it. Then, after a beat, comes back without it, acting like nothing’s happened, eyes no longer shiny, bangs still flipped up ridiculously, and apparently ravenous, shoveling handfuls of off-brand Lucky Charms into her mouth.

They spend the rest of the morning like that, watching some cartoon on their shitty second-hand TV, Mickey’s heartbeat slowing, the etching away of that marble keeping perfect time.

True to form, she never asks him to draw her again, but it’s mostly because he does it again and again without prompting.

—

Later that night, when Ian’s gone home and the house is dark and silent, Mickey picks up a pencil. Sketches feverishly by the moonlight coming through his bedroom window: Ian chest up, left shoulder and part of his cheek obscured by the folds of Mickey’s bedsheets. He speeds through most of the drawing, a man possessed, but spends extra time on Ian’s eyes, tracing over each line twice. After shading in the irises, blacking out the pupils, Mickey picks up a boxcutter and uses it to spear the eraser out of the metal bit of his pencil, then carefully shaves it to a sharp point. Pinching it between his index finger and thumb, he erases precise, tiny white squares of reflected light into each eye.

Then he lets himself do what he wanted to, hours earlier, and looks at Ian’s face, his eyes, as long as he likes.

—-

Mickey wakes with his eyes closed, the backs of his eyelids glowing red. To the sound of soft snores, the smell of Ian’s sheets and musk and clean sweat, and something else, too. He keeps his eyes shut just a moment longer, breathing it all in, before blinking them open, his brow furrowed against the sunlight.

Slowly, Ian comes into focus. His face is slack, forehead smooth, eyebrows straight. Lips slightly parted and chapped, cheeks flushed. It’s the first time in a long, long time — years — that Mickey’s woken up before him, to his sleeping face.

There’s just a beat of hesitation before he does it, pulse strong and burning in his eyes. Then, reaching out with one hand, Mickey cards gentle fingers through Ian’s hair, enjoys the heat permeating from his head and into Mickey’s fingertips, admires the way the white and black look against the vivid orange and rust: right.

After a moment of just looking quietly, Mickey gets up, slips on his boxers and Ian’s shirt, and creeps out of the room to make them coffee.

Last night he hadn’t really had a chance to take in Ian’s apartment, preoccupied with more urgent matters, but now, he has a good, long look.

It’s a modest but comfortable one-bedroom on the third floor of the building, a counter littered with knickknacks and framed photos separating the living room and kitchen. The large windows and balcony door let in a good amount of sunlight, enough to illuminate the whole apartment; fired-up dust particles swirl in the rays filtering through the open blinds. Just outside he can see the balcony: a narrow strip of cement crowded by a single rickety iron chair and, curiously, three large, soil-filled pots, not yet sprouted.

Stepping into the kitchen, Mickey opens a few likely cabinets, but is momentarily distracted by a lightly crinkled piece of paper tacked, pride of place, onto the fridge by a magnet shaped like the state of Florida. He smiles at it, unrushed: crudely drawn in colourful crayon are three figures, labelled ‘eeN,’ ‘Me,’ and ‘FRebee,’ and an odd-looking green blob like a Christmas tree covered in red baubles.

He puts on the coffee and turns back to the counter. Next to a photo of Ian and Fiona somewhere sunny, and another of what looks like most of the Gallaghers (he’s shocked but not surprised by how much has changed: among others, Liam, grown up, and Lip with a buzzed head, holding a baby and standing next to a tall blonde), sits a thin, yellowish book. Mickey flips idly through it while he waits, the rich, earthy smell of the coffee saturating the early morning air, and the steady sound of the drips punctuated by the rasping of the turning pages. The book, The Old Farmer’s 20XX Almanac, is filled with detailed tables and odd symbols Mickey doesn’t understand, but which Ian apparently does: labelled tabs are stuck to certain pages, cascading; blue ink annotations litter the margins and spaces between paragraphs; and particular dates and numbers are highlighted in neon yellow. Mickey grins at every addition, couldn’t explain if he tried why each press of pen, why the photos and the plant pots and mismatched tableware, the rumpled throw and pillows on the couch, make him suddenly so unbearably fond his cheeks, his stomach, his teeth, ache. He stands still, simply exists in the feeling for a minute.

The coffee stops dripping. Mickey is just pouring it into two mugs when there’s the sounds of shuffling from the bedroom, a muffled swear, and the thumps of two feet on hardwood. Seconds later, Ian races into the room in nothing but evidently hastily pulled-on boxer briefs, eyes on the door before he notices Mickey standing there, mugs in hand. He skids to a stop.

There’s a silence as Ian stares, mouth hanging open slightly. Mickey smirks knowingly at him, eyes squinting, as he lifts a mug to sip from it. He holds the other out to Ian.

Ian accepts it mutely but doesn’t drink, still staring intensely — like he’s trying to catch something, a specific look, maybe, on Mickey’s face, in his eyes.

Silence but for the birds chirping outside.

“I love you,” Ian says suddenly, offers it up with no prompting (Ian shouldering the risk this time), and Mickey can’t help the hitch in his breath. Ian says it plainly, like there’s no question, like it hasn’t been on Mickey’s mind — torturing him — for day. For years.

After a moment, “Do you …” he starts, and this — this is hesitant. Careful. Slow. All the things Ian usually isn’t.

Mickey puts down his mug, Ian scrambling to follow suit.

And Mickey looks at him. Ian’s fiery red hair is all messy from sleeping, unruly and falling into his eye on one side, completely flattened away and back on the other. The sunlight streaming through the windows turns his irises grass green, makes his hair, the side of his face and neck, his sleep-creased arm, glow bright, warm gold. Mickey takes it all in, eyes moving up and down, left, right, and thinks about capturing it permanently with a painting (leisurely picking and mixing the colours; the smell of turpentine; the cool, slippery feeling of paint on his skin, rubbed between the pads of his index finger and thumb, sinking into the grooves and whorls), but knows even if he doesn’t that he and Ian will remember this moment for years, decades, forever, regardless; it’s etched, permanent and inky, bituminous, under their skin; rushing hotly through their veins; pulsing, scattering vibrantly in the marrow of their bones.

“Do you love me? Will you stay?”

A couple years later, when Ian asks another question, four words, Mickey will answer the same way he does now:

He smiles big at him, skin at the corners of his eyes crinkling. Takes a few steps forward and lifts his face, cups Ian’s with both hands (enjoys the feeling of the stubble against his palms) and strokes his right cheek, the golden one, with his index finger. New, precious details are thrown into sharp relief by proximity and light, and Mickey breathes in and holds each one. Takes note of how, up close, gaze darting between each one, Ian’s eyes aren’t uniformly green, but really cool grey with warm olive ringing the pupils, just like he remembers. Memorizes Ian’s eyelashes, all tangled up, blazing white in the morning sun, and the hundreds of beautiful freckles — each one a different size, a different shade of brown, red, orange, ochre, rich havana — scattered across his face (even over his trembling bottom lip, under his stubbly chin, in sprays on both eyelids), spilling randomly, incalculably onto his neck, shoulders, elbows, his entire body.

(He wonders if the freckles will be different tomorrow — darker, busier on his right side, maybe? Warms at the thought of getting to find out, to catalogue those minute changes every day.)

The sound of Mickey’s voice is sweet and clear when he finally speaks, can’t possibly be put down on paper. It doesn’t matter: Ian will hear that sound, those words yelled over loud music, whispered across a pillow, breathed into warm skin, again and again for the rest of their lives, and he will always respond the same way he does now:

He surges forward and kisses him.

—