Julian had never been the kind of man who compared himself to his friends, but sometimes it wasn’t easy walking next to Ilan. He’d hit his growth spurt early, was the first one of their friends to stop getting carded for booze, long before he was twenty-one.
He stood a full head taller than Julian now, and broad shouldered from his gym addiction. Every suit he owned looked like it had been tailored to fit him, and he wore them with a casual ease that Julian had never possessed. They strolled through the mall, Ilan’s eyes heavy-lidded from his long shift, and he clutched a coffee to his chest like it was a lifeline. He was wrecked from work, and yet Julian paled in his shadow as all eyes followed them through the racks of clothing.
Ilan pulled a dark cable-knit sweater out by the edge of a hanger and held it up to Julian, then shook his head. “You need soft creams.”
“That sounds dirty,” Julian said as he flipped through sweaters in various shades of blacks and greys.
“I meant it both ways.” Ilan grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him to the wall where several mannequins were posed, impeccably dressed and pulling off a style that Julian’s body could never. “Something like that.”
“Lifeless? Plastic?”
“You don’t have to embrace that whole tartan teacher aesthetic every second of every day.” He dragged his finger over the wrinkled collar of Julian’s under shirt which was, in fact, a sort of faded yellow and white that he’d blended with a brown sweater-vest. “You’re still young enough, and very hot. Let me play dress-up.”
Julian rolled his eyes, but he stopped fighting Ilan as he gathered several different pieces and hustled him toward the fitting rooms. Half his closet was filled with outfits his friend had picked out but he hadn’t bothered to wear, and this week he wanted to embrace something closer to Ilan’s aesthetic. He’d allow Ilan to find what flattered him, what complimented him, and he’d shed his stuffy, stoic teacher look in the back of his closet until it was all over.
Standing in front of the mirror, Julian peeled away his sweater vest, then unbuttoned his shirt and trousers. He stared at himself for a while—the pale expanse of his skin, the roundness of him, the soft muscles. He’d never been overly motivated to turn his body into a sculpture. Ilan had more than once admitted that half the time he spent in the gym was running away from his own thoughts, and Julian had better ways of doing that. His mother had spent a lot of years subtly trying to get him to hate himself—to want something that conformed to society better, but he had rejected that one tendril of control.
Stepping closer to the mirror, he brushed his finger under his nose, along the lines of his scars where he had been patched and sewn. The money, the time, the pain—he’d suffered them all, even before he could remember. And though he knew it was for him to live a comfortable life, it was also for the sake of his mother’s vanity.
He wondered far too often how a man like his father could love her. How he could devote his time and energy and soul to a woman who had only stayed with him after his stroke because it would make her look shallow and cruel to have left. But he spent his life watching her go out of her way to make him appear sighted, to hide his weaker hand and stiff arm. How she filled the room with her bright laughter and overwhelming charm so they didn’t look too closely at the misery between them.
And yet, his father still loved her.
Julian had never asked why, mostly because he was afraid of the answer.
“Well?” Ilan demanded from behind the door.
“Just a second.” He shed the rest of his clothes and pulled from the first pile Ilan had put together for him, doing up zippers and buttons until he was pasted into the look of someone else. And it wasn’t bad, but he didn’t love the reflection that stared out at him now any more than he did in his plaids and browns.
Julian sighed, then opened the door, holding his hands out for Ilan to give his seal of approval. He ignored the soft shutter on Ilan’s phone, and the grin on his face as he shoved another stack of clothes into his arms. “I love