A Beautiful Silence
by
Lee Brazil
Please note- this title contains adult material and is intended for mature readers 18 and over.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either imaginary or used fictitiously. Resemblances to actual events or persons, living or deceased, is unintentional.
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A Beautiful Silence Copyright © 2010 Published by Lee Brazil at Smashwords
Dr. Mackenzie Taylor has been happy with his life thus far. He’s got a successful career, a great group of friends, a terrific home on the California coast and a sexy younger lover. Mack’s just turned forty-five though, and thinks its time to settle down and start the family he’s always wanted. He doesn’t want to spend his weekends rushing out to his lover’s country hide away or waiting around for Lex to arrive in Newport Beach. He doesn’t want to wake up alone, eat take out meals or drink with his friends in local bars.
Mack’s boyfriend of two years though, is a reclusive writer of growing fame nearly twenty years his junior. While Mack has had his chance to sow his wild oats and be the life of the party, Lex has stayed close to home and lived a pretty sedate lifestyle despite his glamorous career and eccentric wardrobe.
A long distance relationship has suited both men for the past two years, but things are changing, and they aren’t managing to spend much time together. Mack’s discovering a new insecurity that has come with age, and Lex is discovering that success in his chosen career comes at a price.
Chapter 1
“Hey, Brody”, Mack slowed his stroll to finish the call before he got to his door enjoying the cool ocean breeze that ruffled the elegant greenery that his association dues paid for. He needed to get off the phone before he got through the doorway. Lex wouldn’t want to listen to him talk to someone else. His painfully shy lover avoided other people and Mack happily arranged his time so they could be alone when Lex visited.
He paused near a red hibiscus by the gate leading to his walk. Tipping his head, he surveyed the building that had been his home for the past two years. Contrary to most California architecture, there was no pink stucco or cactus garden in sight. This designer community resembled the east coast antebellum architecture of the south, and his unit gleamed a clean crisp white. Flowering shrubs flourished along the front and lined the interior of the short white picket fence that marked off his lot from his neighbor’s. He fiddled with the gate for a moment while he talked, then opened it and stepped through. The cement walkway needed to be power-washed and the flower beds could do with replanting. Shit. Those were things that Lex would have noticed right away.
“Mack, what are you up to this evening?” Brody and his partner, James Sherman, a model, owned the condo that adjoined his and Lex’s. The other two men had lived in the adjoining condo long before Mack had made the purchase, and they’d become friends over the last two years.
“I’m just walking up my sidewalk. You?” He bent to brush dull brown wood chips off the cement back into the flower bed. The gardeners came every week, but the stuff seemed to creep onto the walkway the minute they left.
“Well, James is off in NYC for some photo shoot or other, and I’m single for the night again. Want to come by and have a drink?” Brody’s handsome partner with his golden California boy image was much in demand lately, and frequently out of town, or even out of the country, on photo shoots and related events. Mack and Davis, as the self professed domestically challenged halves of a couple, gravitated together to drink whiskey, watch sports, throw steaks on the grill, and commiserate with each other for being the left behind part of a glamorous couple.
“Sorry, man, I am, thankfully, not single this weekend. Lex is out for the weekend but, hey, maybe you can come by and meet him. Just not tonight, ok? Tonight, I have plans.” Mack leaned against his door and looked out over the yard. Yeah, it needed work beyond what a few immigrant laborers could provide. Maybe he could get Lex to run out to the garden shop with him and pick up some plants for the gardeners to put in. On Sunday, when the itch had died down some. He snickered, if it did.
“He is? That’s great! So, where’s he staying?”
Mack pulled his phone from his ear and regarded it as though the object itself had spoken. He turned his head and looked at the dark windows of his place. No light shone from behind the louvered blinds. He went from horny as hell to angry in seconds. “What do you mean?”
“Man, I’ve been here all day working on my yard, and no one’s been in your place.” Davis’s voice was tentative, as though he didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news.
“Fuck. He did it again. That asshole is blowing me off again!” Mack slammed his fist against his white door. The errant thought crossed his mind as he tilted his head to hold his phone in place so he could cradle his now aching right hand with his left, that he really fucking hated the color white. And mature men did not resort to violence just because they were fucking disappointed.
“Hey, calm down ok? Maybe I missed his arrival and he’s inside asleep in the dark.” Pitched soothingly low, Davis’s voice exuded his patented ‘humor the patient until the nurse gets here to take over’ tone.
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.” Mack’s hand shook with the intensity of his anger as he tried to open the door with his uninjured hand. After a brief fumble he succeeded and pushed the door open.
“Go check it out then come over and we’ll commiserate and drown our sorrows in whiskey shots and baseball.”
Mack hung up the phone and stepped through his door. Gloomy darkness met his entrance. He peered across the short entry way to the living area. Neat and tidy, the black leather sofa empty, as were the two matching recliners. He could tell by the lack of light that Lex wasn’t in the kitchen either. Dark, silent, and, damn it, unfriendly, the house mocked his high hopes for a romantic weekend. No sexy curry scent drifted from the kitchen. No sultry jazz singer crooned in the background. No warm wet kiss greeted him, and fuck, there no relief loomed for the hard on he’d had for the last ten miles of his trip home.
An evil little red light blinked at him from across the darkened living room. A message. Fuck. He knew what it would say. Sorry, but Lex wouldn’t be driving down. He had a deadline. He had a commitment; some bullshit excuse. Well, Mack didn’t want to hear it. He refused to listen to it. Mack stomped across the slate gray carpet into the living area and glanced toward the open door of the room they’d designated as Lex’s office when they’d bought the place. Fuck. That room right there said it all. They decorated the rest of the house, spent hours on the phone and the internet choosing paint and he’d furnished it with the stuff from his old apartment. Randomly packages arrived containing stuff that Lex ordered on the internet for the place. He’d call when a box arrived, they’d laugh and talk while Mack assembled the bookcase, or bakers rack, or whatever crap Lex had chosen, and then he’d put it carefully in the place where Lex said it should go.
But that room, the one supposedly exclusively Lex’s, had stayed the same way it had been when they moved in. Lex had professed to hate the white walls and dull grey carpet. Mack had hung dark blackout curtains over all the windows in the room before Lex’s first visit, and they remained the only sign of his use of the room. Lex’s paranoia wouldn’t allow him to function in a room that faced the front of the house where any passing stranger could see inside. The fact that he had never done anything else to give the room his own distinct stamp, in fact, as far as Mack knew, he’d never even worked in the room, pretty much said it all, didn’t it? This condo wasn’t Lex’s home away from home, hell, it probably didn’t rate any higher than a motel from the way he avoided it lately!
Mack wandered dispiritedly down the gray carpeted hallway past his own office – no fucking white walls there- to the master suite. Here, now this room, they had created together. The painful reminder of how well their personalities could mesh showed in the creation of this room. They paneled the walls from a chair rail down in golden oak and papered the upper portions in a forest green and antique ivory brocade pattern. The giant four poster bed, clothed in piles of fluffy and silky, slinky and cool, cotton, silk, cashmere blankets and throws, angled out from one corner into the center of the room. Mounds of pillows graced the head of the bed and an ivory wicker chest held more at the foot. No electronics resided in this room. It held no computers, no TV, just the built in speakers of the sound system that wired throughout the condo. They had planned this room as an oasis to relax and enjoy each other, no outside world was permitted.
Toweling his brown hair dry while standing there after a shower, Mack’s gaze strayed bitterly to the other half of the large walk in closet that lined one wall of the master bedroom. The golden oak accordion doors on both sides were completely opened. His side displayed meticulously arranged rows of dark suits for the office, white oxford dress shirts, a small selection of casual shirts and a few coats on the bar. The shelves contained a stack of 501’s in every shade of faded and a pile of colored t-shirts. Dress shoes and tennis shoes, running shoes and flip flops neatly marched across the bottom. A red baseball cap and a grey felt fedora sat in lonely splendor on an upper shelf. Lex’s side of the closet contained a few pairs of Levi’s, a couple of white shirts, and a pair of running shoes. Even the clothes he’d left here didn’t express the other man’s personality. To see the office and the closet you’d think he was just an average anybody, instead of the unpredictably eccentric and incredibly appealing hermit that he was.