HOLD ME CLOSER

Chapter 13: Behind a Locked Door

The painting had taken him three weeks longer than it should have, mostly because Narin found himself returning to the small third floor room less often than he used to, his allotted twenty minutes swallowed more frequently now by accounting spreadsheets and vendor meetings and the slow accumulating weight of a company his father seemed determined to hand him one crisis at a time.

He worked on it that evening anyway, a canvas of the city skyline seen from his office window, rendered not in the hard glass and steel it actually possessed but in something softer, warmer, the buildings blurred at their edges the way memory blurs things rather than the way eyes actually see them. He had been at it perhaps twenty minutes, brush moving in the particular unhurried rhythm that only ever arrived in this room, when he caught himself, without quite meaning to, adding a warmer gold wash along one edge of the canvas that had no real basis in the actual view from his window, a color he recognized, once he noticed what his own hand had done, as belonging less to any Bangkok skyline and more to a particular hallway on the fourteenth floor at exactly the hour the morning sun came slanting through the still film covered glass.

He set the brush down for a moment, faintly embarrassed at himself, at the way his own private art, the one thing in his life that answered to no one, had apparently begun answering, without his permission, to someone else entirely. He thought, not for the first time that week, of the particular warmth of Krit's laugh, the way it seemed to arrive from somewhere low and unguarded rather than performed for an audience, and found the thought settling into his chest with a weight that was not entirely unwelcome, even as it unsettled him.

He picked the brush back up, and let the gold wash stay.

The door handle turned without the customary knock that had governed this space for nearly a decade, and Narin's whole body went still, the brush freezing mid-stroke.

He knew, before he had even turned fully around, exactly who it would be, some old instinct in his shoulders bracing itself a half second ahead of his mind catching up.

Sompong stood in the doorway, and for a long moment neither of them spoke, the particular silence of a scene that had played out once before, years earlier, in almost exactly this configuration. However, Narin was no longer sixteen and the canvas in front of him was no longer something he needed to explain away as a school assignment gone astray.

"I did not know this room was still in use," his father said finally, his eyes moving once over the canvas, the piano visible behind it, the two other paintings stacked against the far wall, an inventory taken and filed away in the space of a few seconds.

"I still paint, occasionally." Narin kept his voice level, though his hand had gone still around the brush, unwilling to continue the stroke he had been midway through with his father watching, some private instinct urging him to shield the particular gold wash along the canvas's edge from further inspection, as though his father might somehow read, in that single unexplained color, everything Narin himself had only just admitted to noticing.

Sompong said nothing for a moment longer, and Narin found himself, absurdly, sixteen years old again, waiting for the same four sentences he had never fully stopped hearing since the last time this exact scene had unfolded. But his father only studied the canvas a moment longer, something unreadable moving behind his eyes, and then, instead of the speech Narin had braced for, asked only, "How is the accounting department handling the aftermath of the Decha situation?"

The question landed with a strange, disorienting mildness, as though the painting in front of him were simply not worth the effort of a reaction, beneath comment in a way that felt, to Narin, almost more dismissive than outright anger would have been.

"Recovering. I have tightened the approval process for vendor payments going forward."

"Good." Sompong nodded once, already half turned back toward the door. "The office is going well, then. Keep it that way."

He left without another word about the canvas, without acknowledging the piano at all, and Narin stood alone in the small room for a long while afterward, brush still hanging forgotten from his fingers, trying to decide which version of his father's reaction he would have preferred, the sharp cutting judgment of years ago or this new, hollow indifference that seemed to suggest the painting had simply ceased to register as something worth arguing about at all.

He looked back down at the canvas once his father's footsteps had faded down the hall, at the gold wash he had almost hidden a moment ago, and felt something loosen slightly in his chest at having, in the end, not needed to hide it after all, even if the reason his father had not noticed was itself a small quiet grief of its own.

He thought, unbidden, of showing it to Krit someday, of watching his face when he recognized, if he recognized it at all, the particular hallway light Narin had smuggled into an otherwise ordinary skyline, and felt his own pulse pick up slightly at the thought, an entirely disproportionate reaction to something as simple as showing a friend a painting, though Narin was becoming steadily less convinced, each week that passed, that friend was the correct word for whatever Krit had become to him.

He turned the canvas to the wall anyway, out of habit more than necessity, and locked the door behind him on his way out, though the lock felt, for the first time in years, less like a protection from his father's judgment and more like a small private vault, guarding something he was no longer entirely certain he wanted to keep hidden forever, even if he had not yet worked out how, or whether, to let it into the light.

He did not know, standing in the hallway afterward, which possibility troubled him more, his father's indifference or his own growing reluctance to keep the two halves of his life, the locked room and the fourteenth floor hallway, separated much longer.

Later that night, lying awake with the house gone quiet around him, he found his thoughts circling back, as they so often did now, to small unremarkable details he had no business remembering as clearly as he did, the particular calluses along Krit's palms when they had shaken hands that first proper introduction, the way his forearms had flexed lifting a crate without any apparent effort, the low, easy sound of his laugh carrying down a hallway that had, until four months ago, never once carried a sound Narin actually wanted to hear twice. He allowed himself, in the privacy of his own dark room, a few unguarded minutes of simply imagining what it might be like to reach for one of those calloused hands without an excuse required, without a piano or a bookshelf or a fabricated community outreach meeting standing between the wanting and the doing, and found the thought both entirely inappropriate for a man in his position and entirely impossible to set aside once it had taken hold.

He fell asleep eventually with the gold wash still drying, three floors below him, on a canvas that had stopped, somewhere in the last three weeks, being entirely his own.

He woke before his alarm, the house still dark and quiet around him, and lay a long while simply staring at the ceiling, turning over the strange doubled feeling of the previous evening, his father's indifference toward the canvas sitting alongside his own private, unguarded thoughts about Krit in a way that felt, upon reflection, almost like two separate rebellions occurring in the same small locked room, one his father had noticed and dismissed as unworthy of concern, the other his father did not yet know existed at all.

He wondered, staring at the ceiling in the grey early light, which rebellion frightened him more to imagine his father eventually discovering, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that it was not the wanting itself that frightened him most, not anymore, but the particular vulnerability of a want that had grown large enough it could no longer be entirely hidden behind a locked door and twenty careful minutes a day.

He rose earlier than usual that morning, dressed with more care than the day strictly required, and found himself, walking down to breakfast, rehearsing an ordinary excuse in his head in case anyone asked why he seemed distracted, the same practiced deflection he had been perfecting for weeks now, though he noted, with a small private discomfort, that the excuses were beginning to come less easily than they once had, as though some part of him had simply grown tired of constructing them.

At breakfast, his mother studied him a moment longer than usual over her tea, though she said nothing directly, only refilled his cup without being asked and let the quiet of the morning stand, and Narin found himself grateful, not for the first time, for a mother who understood precisely which silences to fill and which to simply allow to exist undisturbed.

His sister joined them a few minutes later, sliding into her seat with rather more energy than the early hour usually produced in her, and caught the tail end of whatever unreadable expression Narin had not quite managed to smooth from his face before she arrived.

"You look like a man with a secret," Nira observed, reaching for the fruit plate, her tone light but her eyes sharp in the particular way that reminded Narin, uncomfortably, of exactly how observant his sister could be when she chose to apply herself to a puzzle rather than to a book.

"I am simply tired."

"Mmh, tired people do not usually smile at nothing over their tea, Phi Narin." She popped a piece of mango into her mouth, entirely unbothered by his obvious discomfort. "I am not going to push. I know that face too well, it means pushing only makes you retreat further. I will just say, whoever they are, I hope they are worth whatever it is costing you to keep smiling about them in secret."

Narin said nothing to that, though something in his chest tightened at how precisely she had guessed at the shape of things without ever being told a single detail, and he found himself, for the rest of that quiet family breakfast, turning her words over with more care than he let show on his face, wondering how much longer he could reasonably expect to keep the small, growing thing behind that locked door contained to twenty minutes and a canvas turned carefully to the wall.