The Painter & The Pianist

i.

CHAPTER ONE

Monserrat Castellani didn't spend all of his time in gay-bars, he didn't own a tutu, and he certainly did not have fantasies of himself singing "Bad Romance" in a sequined disco suit when he got out of the shower. As a matter of fact, he was so stereotypically unstereotypical as a gay boy that his love for fashion was, as he claimed it to be, "totally inspired by nothing more than good spatial reasoning skills and a strategical method of color alignment." He declared to be above categorization. He knew what happened to those who were caught in it.

Thus, his room was not an abyss of pink swirls and fluffy clouds like he had secretly wanted it to be, it was sophisticated and gray. His desk was organized with stacks of his school papers and a nice array of painter's books being held by the book weight his sister gave him for his birthday. Adjunct to them was a silver vase holding his brushes, pencils, and charcoals.

Often, he sat for hours at a time, quite unproductively, admiring the vase, and remembering when his ex-boyfriend gave it to him. They had been sitting abut to each other on his couch as Amadeus set it on his lap, all wrapped in heart wrapping paper; grinning like a two-year-old on Christmas.

...Monserrat really needed to get a life.

As his eyes glazed over, dancing across the tired lines of the glass vase that had somehow come to mean so much to him, he felt his phone buzz across the desk in an apostrophe of vibrations. Monserrat glanced over at the screen as the phone continued to ring. It was Amadeus. He ignored it. Again, he looked back at the vase, feeling morose this time.

As he ignored the persistent prat of a caller, he wondered how much it would cost to just get a new phone. A knock at the door interrupted his thoughts. He glanced over at the hard wooden door. He wondered how much it would cost to get a new apartment.

Despite his incredible skill at ignoring annoying sounds, the knocking continued. Even a tub of vegan mint-chocolate ice cream couldn't assuage his consternation at the sound of the knuckles of Amadeus' fists. He knew it was Amadeus.

Monserrat closed his eyes tightly, as every knock that he heard seemed to get louder and louder. Why couldn't he just mope in peace? His fingers shook, his closed eyes were twitching, and his breath increased in pace every time another knock struck the door. "Gah!" he shrieked, opening his eyes to find the world spinning.

He glared at the swirling object of his irritation, but nothing happened. Sighing, he trudged towards the door.

He set his hand on the knob, turning it slowly. When it swung open, Amadeus barged in with the smell of thousands of dying bugs on his breath. Monserrat bewilderedly shut the door behind him. "What in the name of Da Vinci are you-"

"Not right now," he muttered, slumping across the floor like a sack of limp, air-deprived potatoes; reaching a hand forward to rest on Monserrat's shoulder like it had done so many times before. Oh, how Monserrat despised his (ex-)boyfriend's tendency to be an ambiguously spontaneous boy-scout ("Stop visiting my house at three in the morning, you creep!" he recalled shouting only a few days ago, appalled by how Amadeus' visits had become habitual).

"Come on, Amadeus... Over here," he said, sighing. Monserrat lead him onto his couch. His eyes scanned Amadeus' body and his face. There were a few scratches on his jaw and his knuckles were bleeding slightly. These were signs of a physical fight and by the looks of it, not a winning one. Monserrat's annoyance turned to a slight worry.

"What happened, Amadeus?" 

Amadeus opened his mouth, then let out a quick breath. "Can't I just sit here with you instead of being nagged over like I'm your grandkid? I'm an adult too."