THE BLACK BODYGUARD: VOLUME I CALIFORNIA GOTHIC Chapter 6

 

California Gothic Chapter 6

Chapter 6: California Gothic

I woke to the sound of the ocean and the smell of coffee.

For a moment, I didn't know where I was. The ceiling was wrong—too high, too wooden, too much like a forest had decided to become architecture. Then yesterday crashed back: the drive, the diner, the deck, her head on my shoulder. I sat up fast, heart pounding.

The cabin was quiet. The bed beside me was empty, had always been empty. I'd slept alone, as I should have, as I'd insisted to myself a dozen times before finally closing my eyes.

But someone had made coffee.

I found her on the deck, wrapped in a blanket twice her size, a mug steaming between her hands. The morning sun turned the ocean to hammered gold, and she was watching it like it owed her something.

"You're up early," I said, stepping outside.

"Never went to sleep."

I stopped. "What?"

She shrugged, not looking at me. "Couldn't. Too much quiet. Too much thinking." A pause. "Too much you, ten feet away."

I didn't know what to do with that, so I did nothing. I took the mug she gestured toward—a second one, waiting for me—and stood beside her, looking out at the water.

"You should sleep," I said finally.

"I should do a lot of things." She sipped her coffee. "Our mediator arrives today."

"Mediator." I'd almost forgotten. "Justin something."

"Justin Chatwin." She said the name like it explained everything.

"Should I know who that is?"

"He was in War of the Worlds. With Tom Cruise. Played his son." She finally looked at me, a small smile playing at her lips. "He's also an artist, a yogi, a meditation guide, and according to him, a direct descendant of a Tibetan monk who can levitate."

"Can he?"

"Can he what?"

"Levitate."

She laughed—that real laugh, the one I was starting to crave. "I have no idea. But he's very convincing."

I filed this away. "And he's here to... what, exactly?"

Lana's smile faded. "To help me. With the creative process. The block. The darkness." She gestured vaguely at the horizon. "All of it."

"You have a block?"

"I have everything." She pulled the blanket tighter. "That's the problem."

•••

Justin Chatwin arrived at noon in a vintage Land Rover that looked like it had driven out of a safari brochure.

He unfolded himself from the driver's seat like he was performing a yoga sequence—one long, lean movement that ended with him standing in the gravel, barefoot, wearing linen pants and a white linen shirt unbuttoned just far enough to be intentional. His hair was artfully disheveled, his smile warm and slightly distant, as if he was already meditating on something more interesting than whatever I was about to say.

"Lana," he breathed, opening his arms.

"Justin." She stepped into the embrace, and I watched them hold each other a beat too long, the way old friends did when they'd shared something heavy.

Justin pulled back, cupping her face. "You look tired."

"Thanks."

"You know what I mean." He turned to me, and his expression shifted—assessing, curious, maybe a little amused. "And you must be the guardian."

"Kevin."

"Kevin." He shook my hand with both of his, a gesture that felt simultaneously intimate and performative. "She's told me about you."

"Has she?"

"Not in words." He smiled, mysterious, and let go. "The universe speaks in other ways."

I glanced at Lana. She was watching Justin with an expression I couldn't read—something between affection and wariness, the way you watch a fire you're not sure is contained.

"Let me get my things," Justin said, already drifting toward the Land Rover. "I brought supplies. Crystals. Sage. A theremin."

"A what?" I asked.

Lana touched my arm. "Don't ask."

•••

The afternoon unfolded like something from another planet.

Justin produced a theremin from the back of his Land Rover—an actual theremin, with its antenna and its eerie, wavering voice—and set it up on the deck. He played it badly but with complete conviction, producing sounds that made the seabirds scatter and my teeth ache.

"It's about intention," Justin explained, mid-wooble. "The notes themselves are secondary."

Lana sat cross-legged on a blanket, watching with the expression of someone witnessing a car crash in slow motion. I leaned against the cabin wall, arms crossed, telling myself this was normal. This was what creative people did. This was fine.

When the theremin finally fell silent, Justin beamed at us. "The energy here is extraordinary. Truly. I felt it as soon as I crossed the county line."

"The ocean," Lana offered.

"The ocean, yes. But also something else." Justin's eyes found mine, held me. "A grounding presence. A counterweight to all this..." He gestured at the sky, the water, the infinite. "...etherealness."

I said nothing.

Justin smiled, unbothered. "We'll start the session after sunset. The light will be perfect then."

"What session?" I asked.

Lana stood, brushing sand from her dress. "The artist. I told you about the artist."

"You told me someone was painting you."

"Us." She met my eyes. "He's painting us."

•••

The artist's name was Marco, and he arrived as the sun began its slow dive toward the horizon.

He was small and intense, with hands that never stopped moving and eyes that seemed to take in everything at once. He spoke with a heavy Italian accent and carried equipment like he was preparing for war—canvases, easels, boxes of paints in colors I didn't have names for.

"The light," Marco said, looking at the sky. "We must work fast. The light will not wait."

He set up his easel on a bluff overlooking the water, then turned to study his subjects. I stood awkwardly beside Lana, unsure where to put my hands, my feet, my face.

"No," Marco said immediately. "Not like that. You are not posing for a yearbook. You are... you are something else."

Lana glanced at me. "He's very direct."

"I noticed."

Marco circled us, muttering in Italian. Then he stopped, pointed. "There is a barn. Down the road. Abandoned. We go there."

"A barn?" I said.

"The light is wrong here. Too soft. Too forgiving." Marco was already packing his equipment. "The barn has edges. Shadows. Truth."

Justin, who had been meditating on a nearby rock, opened one eye. "He's right. The barn calls to you."

I looked at Lana. She shrugged. "When in Rome."

"This isn't Rome."

"Italian artist, abandoned barn, impending sunset. Just go with it."

•••

The barn was exactly what Marco had promised—abandoned, weathered, leaning slightly to the left like it was tired of standing. It sat in a field of dry grass that rustled in the evening wind, and behind it, the Pacific stretched to the horizon, impossibly blue.

Marco positioned us in front of the barn's massive doors, which hung slightly open, revealing darkness within.

"Stand here," he commanded. "You—the woman—turn slightly. Yes. Look at him, but not at him. Look past him. Look through him."

Lana adjusted, her gaze finding something beyond my shoulder.

"You." Marco pointed at me. "Do not move. Do not smile. You are not a smiling man."

"I'm not?"

"No. You are... you are the mountain. The thing that does not change. The thing the storm breaks against."

I stood still. Lana looked through me. Marco painted.

The silence stretched. The sun dropped. The light turned gold, then amber, then something deeper—the color of old photographs, of memories I couldn't quite trust.

"Talk," Marco said suddenly. "Not to me. To each other. I need to see you."

Lana's lips curved slightly. "What should we talk about?"

"I don't know." I kept my face still, the way Marco wanted. "Ask me something."

She considered. "What's the first thing you noticed about me? The real first thing. Not at the coffee shop. At the party."

I remembered: the tinsel, the balloons, the drunk girl grabbing my zipper. Lana had been different then—just a redhead in the background, trying to disappear.

"You were hiding," I said. "Your friends were awful, and you were sitting there like you wanted to be anywhere else. Like you were watching yourself from outside your own body."

She blinked. "That's... uncomfortably accurate."

"Is it wrong?"

"No." Her voice was softer now. "It's right. I always feel like that. Like I'm watching myself from somewhere else. Like the real me is trapped behind glass, and everyone's looking at the reflection."

I thought about this. "Maybe the reflection is real too. Just... different."

Marco's brush moved faster, his eyes flicking between us and the canvas.

"What about you?" Lana asked. "Do you feel like that? Trapped?"

I considered lying. I considered deflecting, making a joke, changing the subject. But something about the light, the barn, the way she was looking at me—through me—made honesty the only option.

"Sometimes," I said. "When I was a kid, I stuttered. Bad. Couldn't get through a sentence without tripping over my own tongue. Teachers thought I was slow. Kids thought I was stupid. I learned to be quiet because talking was too hard."

"And now?"

"Now I'm quiet because I'm used to it." I paused. "Also because people talk enough for everyone. Present company included."

She laughed, and the sound was different now—not performance, not surprise. Something closer to recognition.

"Justin was right," she said.

"About what?"

"The grounding presence." Her eyes held mine. "You make me feel less like I'm floating away."

Marco made a sound of satisfaction. "Yes. This. Stay exactly like this."

We stayed.

•••

The painting took three hours.

By the end, the sun was gone and the stars were emerging, and my legs ached from standing still. Lana had drifted closer at some point—I couldn't say when—so that her shoulder almost touched my arm, her presence a warmth against the cooling night.

Marco worked without stopping, without speaking, his face illuminated by a single lamp he'd set up on a tripod. When he finally set down his brush, he stared at the canvas for a long moment, then stepped back.

"It is done."

We gathered around. Justin materialized from somewhere, holding a joint that had burned down to nothing.

I looked at the painting.

I didn't know what I'd expected—something abstract, maybe, or flattering, the way famous people were always painted. But this was different. This was us, but not us. This was what Marco saw when he looked through his artist eyes.

We stood before the barn's dark doorway, Lana in white, me in black. Her face was turned toward me, but her eyes were somewhere else—somewhere sad and far away. I faced forward, expressionless, solid as stone. The barn loomed behind us, its darkness somehow alive, somehow hungry. And above us, barely visible in the painting's upper corner, a single crack ran through the sky—subtle, easy to miss, but unmistakably there.

California Gothic, Marco had written at the bottom. Not signed yet. Just the title.

"It's us," Lana breathed.

"It is you," Marco agreed. "What you are. What you carry. What waits behind you."

I stared at the crack in the sky. "What's that supposed to be?"

Marco shrugged, philosophical. "Maybe the crack in everything. How the light gets in. How the dark gets out." He began packing his supplies. "You decide. That's the point of art."

•••

Later, around a driftwood fire on the beach, Justin produced a bottle of mezcal and a bag of mushrooms that he claimed were "medicinal."

Lana declined the mushrooms but accepted the mezcal. I stuck to water, watching the flames and the way they painted her face in oranges and reds.

"The painting," she said, staring into the fire. "It's beautiful. But it's also... terrifying."

"Why terrifying?"

"Because it's true." She took a long swallow from her cup. "The darkness behind us. The crack in everything. That's what my life feels like. Like I'm always standing in front of something that's about to swallow me whole."

Justin, who had consumed an impressive amount of both substances, nodded sagely. "The void is not your enemy. The void is your canvas."

Lana ignored him. She was looking at me. "Do you feel it? The darkness?"

I thought about it. Thought about my brother, dead of cancer. Thought about my grandmother, wanting me to be something I wasn't. Thought about all those nights in Maryland, alone on the couch, watching infomercials for products I'd never buy.

"Sometimes," I said. "But I've learned to live with it. To make space for it without letting it take over."

"How?"

"I don't know. I just... I keep going. One foot in front of the other. Eventually the darkness gets tired of following."

She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "What if it never gets tired?"

I looked at her for a long moment. Then I reached out and took her hand. It was small in mine, cold from the ocean air, and when I wrapped my fingers around it, she gasped slightly—a tiny sound, quickly hidden.

"Then you keep going anyway," I said. "That's all any of us can do."

•••

The fire burned low. Justin wandered off to commune with the tide pools. The stars wheeled overhead, indifferent and infinite.

Lana leaned against my shoulder, the way she had the night before, but this time it felt different. This time it felt like choosing. Like giving in to something we'd both been pretending wasn't there.

"Kevin," she said quietly.

"Yeah?"

"I don't want to go back."

"To L.A.?"

"To any of it. The fame. The performance. The endless being watched." She pressed closer. "I want to stay here, in this moment, with you, forever."

I didn't answer. Couldn't. Because I wanted it too—wanted it with a ferocity that scared me.

"I know it's not possible," she continued. "I know tomorrow we drive back and everything goes back to the way it was. But tonight—" She looked up at me, her eyes dark and shining. "Tonight, can we pretend? Just for a few hours?"

I looked at her. At the firelight in her hair. At the vulnerability she tried so hard to hide. At the woman behind the fame, the performance, the persona.

I should say no. I knew I should say no.

"Yes," I said instead.

She kissed me.

It started soft—tentative, almost questioning. Then something shifted, broke loose, and suddenly we were both drowning in it, her hands fisting in my shirt, my arms wrapping around her, pulling her close. The fire crackled. The waves crashed. The world fell away.

When we finally broke apart, breathless, she was smiling—a real smile, bright and unguarded and maybe the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

"I've wanted to do that since the coffee shop," she admitted.

"Why didn't you?"

"I was scared." She touched my face, traced my jaw. "I'm still scared."

"Of what?"

"Of this. Of you. Of how much I want it." Her thumb brushed my lips. "Of how much I want you."

I didn't have an answer for that. So I kissed her again, and this time when she pulled me down onto the blanket, I went willingly.

The fire burned on, unnoticed. The stars kept their distance. And for a few hours, on a beach in Big Sur, two people who'd spent their whole lives being watched finally stopped performing.

•••

Later—much later—we lay tangled together, her head on my chest, my fingers tracing patterns on her bare shoulder. The fire was embers now, the ocean a steady heartbeat in the dark.

"I meant what I said," she murmured. "About not wanting to go back."

"I know."

"Come with me. Not as a bodyguard. As..." She trailed off.

"As what?"

"As mine."

I stared at the stars. Thought about my life—my apartment, my job, the careful walls I'd built. Thought about what it would mean to tear them down.

"Lana—"

"I know." She cut me off gently. "I know it's complicated. I know who I am, what my life is. But I also know that I've never felt this way before. Never felt this... seen."

I looked down at her. "I see you."

"I know." She smiled, sleepy and satisfied. "That's the problem."

We lay there as the night deepened, as the fire died completely, as the first hints of gray appeared in the eastern sky. Neither spoke. Neither slept. Neither wanted to break the spell.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that we were standing in front of our own barn, our own darkness, our own crack in the sky. And I couldn't shake the fear that when we finally walked through that door, nothing would ever be the same.

•••

Morning came cold and bright.

I woke alone on the beach, wrapped in the blanket, a note pinned to the fabric with a rock:

Went to watch the sunrise from the bluff. Come find me. — L

I smiled despite myself. Despite everything.

I found her exactly where she'd promised, sitting on the edge of the world, the new sun setting her hair on fire. She turned when she heard me approach, and her smile was everything—open, hopeful, young.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey yourself."

She patted the ground beside her. I sat. We watched the sun climb, painting the ocean in shades of gold and rose.

"I talked to Marco," she said. "He's going to exhibit the painting. In L.A. Next month."

"California Gothic?"

She nodded. "He wants us there. At the opening."

I considered this. "You think that's a good idea?"

"I think..." She hesitated. "I think I want you there. With me. Not as security."

I looked at her. The sun was in her eyes, making them squint, making her look younger than she was. Making her look like someone I could love.

"Lana—"

"I'm not asking for forever." She cut me off, gentle but firm. "I'm just asking for now. For whatever this is. For as long as it lasts."

I thought about my brother. About how I'd spent my whole life playing it safe, keeping my distance, never letting anyone close enough to hurt me. About how that strategy had kept me alive but hadn't made me live.

"Yes," I said.

She blinked. "Yes?"

"Yes. To whatever this is. For as long as it lasts."

She kissed me, quick and bright, and when she pulled back she was laughing—that real laugh, the one I loved.

"Good," she said. "Because Justin's making us seaweed wraps in an hour and I need moral support."

I groaned. "Seaweed wraps?"

"The universe calls." She stood, offering me her hand. "Coming?"

I took it. Let her pull me up. Let myself imagine, just for a moment, that this could work. That we could work.

The sun kept rising. The ocean kept crashing. And somewhere behind us, in an abandoned barn, a painting waited to show the world exactly what we were.

We just didn't know it yet.

AtilA