Page 23 of Hot Set

The man shook my hand and smiled. “Mark,” he replied. “I’m a friend of Brandon’s.”

I wondered iffriend of Brandon’smeant something more than “friend”.

“He called me begging for help, so I thought I’d indulge him,” Mark continued. “This movie sounds like it’s cursed, doesn’t it?”

I shook my head, as if I could literally shake away all my needless conflicting thoughts about Brandon. Why did it matter if Markwasor had been something more than a friend of Brandon’s?

Mark pulled out pots of paint. He clearly had a system going, one that involved setting out everything he might possibly need before he began. I was more of a grab-as-I-go kind of man.

“I wouldn’t say it’s cursed,” I replied. “Just…”

It was just that poor Brandon really didn’t have any experience in this kind of thing. He had passion, so much passion, but he’d…

Heat rose to my face, and I knew I must’ve been as red as a sunset. Hopefully, Mark either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t say anything. Sex with Brandon had been a mistake. My life had been so blissfully uncomplicated before. Now, even when Brandon wasn’t around, he still haunted my thoughts.

“Disheveled?” Mark offered. “That’s Brandon for you. During undergrad, he was always coming up with these crazy schemes and ideas. I think it was probably a legitimate pastime of his.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked.

Mark grabbed the reference photo we were using, a graveyard that we were supposed to paint with red tones and black shadows. “He did,” Mark said. “And he consistently bit off more than he could chew. For his freshman composition class, the final project was to redo something you’d previously written and make it into another genre. Most of Brandon’s classmates just took a paper they’d written and turned it into a PowerPoint or something, but not him. No, he decided he was going to write a novel about—what was it? Global warming, maybe.”

“How did that work out?” I asked.

Mark shrugged. “I think he wrote the first twenty pages and called it good enough. He passed, at least.”

“So, he’s not going to win the Nobel Prize in literature anytime soon, huh?”

Mark smirked. “Did you think he would?”

I nodded to the open half-gallon of red paint on the floor. “That’s what we’re doing the background with,” I said.

Mark glanced at the paint and nodded. “You know,” he said, “I think this would look better if we did the linework in Indian ink rather than pencil. It’d create a good contrast.”

I laughed. “Well, you’re more the expert than I am, but won’t it smear once it’s dry?”

Mark dug through the pockets of his canvas portfolio and pulled out the small pot of black ink. “No,” he said, “Indian ink is waterproof once it dries.”

After placing the ink between us, Mark dipped in a brush. He moved forward to the canvas on his knees and sat back on his heels, carefully tracing over the delicate pencil lines at the bottom of the massive piece of fabric that we were trying to make into a background.

“Now, my question is,” Mark queried, “why Brandon doesn’t just do this all with a greenscreen. He could.”

“I don’t know enough about movies to say,” I replied.

“Neither do I,” Mark said, “Not making them, anyway. But I can name every horror film ever made.”

“Brandon probably can, too,” I said.

“Probably. He’s always been a cinephile,” Mark said, “Even in undergrad. He used to invite the whole class to go to the movies with him.”

“Did everyone go?”

Mark shrugged. “A few people. Never the whole class. Brandon had this sort of infectious energy about him, and I think it creeped some people out. He’s become a bit more reserved over the years.”

I dipped my brush in the ink and swiped it over the canvas. Minutes passed while Mark and I silently traced over the pencil lines. The Indian inkdidshow up better on the canvas, and it would really bring out the brightness of the red a lot better. It really fitted Brandon’s aesthetic as well.

“So, you’ve known Brandon for a long time,” I said.

“On and off,” Mark said. “I knew him from my undergrad. I met him again when I was finishing my master’s, and we kind of hit it off.”

---