#7 - Graphite, Plaster, Cock, Midnight – ssecca01

Midnight. The hour was one that JC saw quite often and loved more and more each time. Midnight was a time when everything was new; when the moonlight gave new life to dead shadows; when the still silence of his studio sent shivers up his spine and impulses to his fingers. It was when he was an artist. A true artist. Where he was his own.

JC licked his lips and adjusted himself on the hard chair beneath him. Comfort was nothing he required at that hour. He worked better when he was uncomfortable, it forced him to fully concentrate on the matter at hand. That night, the matter at hand was Joey.

Joey had fallen asleep more than an hour ago, propped haphazardly against the plaster sculpture JC created months before. He had tried to explain to Joey that it didn't look like a cock, and that is was in fact a melodic movement of life and living, but Joey didn't get it. He wasn't an artist. Not like JC was. He insisted on its phallic representation and JC didn't see reason to argue.

The light of the moon shined in through the open window that faced JC's backyard and made Joey look more angelic that JC ever thought was possible. He knew Joey. He knew that angelic was not a word usually associated with him. Devilish, crude, loud and funny, yes. But not angelic.

But there was something in the way the light fell across the bridge of his nose and the curve of his shoulders. Something that made it easy for JC to see the innocence in the man, to visualize actual wings tucked carefully behind him. To see a vulnerability that he knew was there somewhere, but that Joey tried so hard to hide. So hard, in fact, that he succeeded. No one ever saw that part of him. Not without the moonlight guiding the way.

His lips slid over each other as JC moistened them with his tongue. Joey was beautiful. Though he wasn't an artist, he was art. The line of his jaw, the fall of his hair, the slight curve to his lips and the fullness of his body. He was an artists imagination. He was JC's imagination.

JC's fingers slid over the paper, smudging the gray strokes he'd left behind representing Joey's neck. The graphite pencil seemed to have a life of its own as it read JC's mind and created the perfect image of Joey sleeping on the paper before him. With a quick smile, JC studied the drawing he'd somehow created. It was perfect.

Joey with wings. The Joey no one but JC knew existed.