A Different Tomorrow, by Pic

A Different Tomorrow

by Pic

Rated: A Slash

Pairing: Dustin Yarma/Other

Summary: Dustin is at yet another Hollywood party and his life takes an unexpected turn.

Disclaimer: Recognizable characters aren't mine.

Author's Notes: This Dustin has nothing to do with the Dustin of When Tomorrow Comes. If you will, this is an alternative next step for Dustin's life to the one outlined in that story.

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Dustin Yarma tried to remember why he'd agreed to this. Oh, yeah. Jared. His intrepid friend had asked him to come with him to this party, so that it didn't seem as though Jared was stalking the gorgeous Swedish girl that he wanted in the worst way. Dustin had thought that anything was better than listening to Minnow fuck someone senseless in the next room. He'd been wrong. And was bored nearly to tears.

As a general rule, Dustin liked parties. String as many five to ten minute meaningless conversations as you can stomach together with drinks and finger food. Social coasting Jared called it. But sole social coasting was tougher; you had no one to watch your back or get you out of conversations that had run their course. Dustin was suffering from the lack tonight, but he'd managed to separate himself from the last airhead who'd brought him a drink just as his ran out.

Sighing as he surveyed the room, Dustin admitted that not all parties were created equal. Twenty-something Hollywood had little to offer to anyone much older. A decade was a lifetime in this town; too many careers took off and crash-landed in far less time.

"It's too damn loud, isn't it?"

"What?" Dustin replied, turning toward the person that appeared in his peripheral vision and shouted that which he hadn't quite heard over the awful music.

Trey Donaldson, an actor on his way up the career ladder, smirked at him and inclined his head toward the stairway. Dustin looked that way and then back at Trey, an eyebrow raised in question. Donaldson grinned, grabbed Dustin's upper arm and leaned closer. "C'mon," he shouted almost directly into Yarma's ear. "I'm going deaf in here, and I've got an interview with In Style tomorrow. I don't want to be shouting and saying "Huh?" to whoever they send."

A quick look around didn't turn up Jared, and Trey was pulling him toward the stairs. Intrigued, grateful for something to do and knowing Mackey would kill to get Donaldson to do a guest shot on anything the studio did, Dustin matched the younger man's stride. They climbed two flights of stairs together and the music mercifully faded a little.

Trey grinned at him, opened a door and gestured Dustin forward. Dustin shrugged and complied with the tacit request. When Trey closed the door behind them, there was silence. It was absolutely glorious.

"Wow," Dustin muttered admiringly. "That's pretty intense sound insulation."

"Self defense. My friends like their music loud." Trey looked a little sheepish when he added, "I don't even like their music."

"You're not alone there," Yarma noted, eyes scanning the dim room into which he'd been ushered. It was the biggest bedroom Dustin had ever seen, spanning nearly the entire third floor of the house. The king-sized bed was on the water side of the beach front home, well separated from the sitting room area in which they were currently standing.

"If you don't mind my asking," Trey began with an engaging grin, "why the hell are you alone? I mean, date-wise."

Dustin hated personal questions, particularly from actors and more particularly those that even remotely threatened the safety of his detachment. So he ignored it, opting instead to offer his hand, "Dustin Yarma."

Accepting what was given, the shorter, fair-haired actor reciprocated, "Trey Donaldson." Smirking again, he added, "You here to pitch something to me?"

So he knows who I am. Interesting.

Aloud, Dustin admitted, "No, although my boss wouldn't mind if I did. I'm amoral support for a friend's relentless pursuit of a woman who has no interest in him, whatsoever. Someone's got to pick him up and dust him off."

"There was a lot of that needed tonight."

"Excuse me?"

Leaning on the back of an expensive looking leather couch, Trey looked pointedly at Dustin. "I watched you shoot down at least fifteen women who wanted to take you home. And don't get twitchy, I wasn't watching for all that long."

Fifteen women? No fucking way! What's this kid's game?

Shrugging, Dustin offered, "I think you were scoping someone else's technique."

"Nope. Tall. Lean. Penetrating green eyes. Matching silk shirt. Definitely you."

Donaldson's eyes were smiling at him and Dustin found himself chuckling incredulously and shaking his head. "I didn't even talk to fifteen women tonight, Trey."

"You were in your own world a big part of the time, Dustin. Kind of on auto-pilot or something. A man with more important things on his mind than getting laid by a peroxide blonde or two." Trey grinned, looked Dustin up and down exaggeratedly and laughed. "I thought a man like that might be interesting to talk to." Sighing and standing up straighter, Trey offered, "You want a Scotch, Dustin."

"Sure," Yarma agreed, intrigued by the ambiguities and the accuracies in Donaldson's analysis of him. He also used the time to check out his surroundings.

From the bar, Trey ventured, "C'mon, take pity on a curious actor. Why the 'I want to be alone' deal?"

"Are you going to invite In Style up here?" Dustin countered. The furniture was modern Italian leather and wood, nothing all that out of the ordinary. But the art the art was highly eclectic. With some very interesting pieces juxtaposed in a look that shouldn't flow but did.

"I was considering it. You think I should?"

Smiling at the acceptance of the subject change, Dustin wondered how Trey was going to ask his question the next time. And how he'd avoid it and all the associated issues. "Why not?" Yarma asked to keep the conversation moving while he casually moved deeper into the room and took a closer look at Trey's art.

"I don't know. I find a lot of their stuff - I don't know - sterile, I guess."

Yarma's wandering halted abruptly when he saw the two pieces on the north wall nearer to the bed. Walking toward them, he murmured, "There's nothing sterile about these." Dustin was transfixed. They were a pair; anyone with an eye at all could see that. Surrealist and abstract on the one hand and incredibly erotic on the other. "These two are incredible. Who's the artist?"

Trey was at his side, smiling a small mysterious smile and holding out the promised drink.

Dustin took it, regarding his host expectantly.

Lifting his glass, Trey said, "Cheers." After they both drank, he asked, "What do they say to you, Dustin?"

Touch.

Trying to accept the refusal to answer as graciously as Trey had, Yarma applied himself to the new question on the table. "What don't they say?" Dustin gestured to the one nearer to the bed, dominated by sharp hues of red and black that were at war with soft green and cold blue. "Look at them, Trey. There's pain and passion. Desire and disgust. Fear, loathing, lust and love. Obsession and self-sacrifice. I don't know. I can't really articulate what I see, but they ... they're amazing." "You were on a roll there, Dustin. I guess I should say thanks and tilt my head modestly."

When he did, Yarma gaped at him. "You painted these? God, Trey, they're great. What are you doing wasting your time acting with a talent like that?"

Trey moved closer and regarded the paintings over Dustin's shoulder. "Are you sure you're a movie producer?" he playfully whispered in Yarma's ear, knowing that Dustin had to be aware of the money Donaldson commanded per project.

Dustin laughed and sheepishly smiled at the actor. "Yeah, I just love art."

"May I paint you?"

"What?"

Trey Donaldson laughed heartily. "Don't look so shocked, Dustin. You heard me right. I'd like to paint you. May I?"

"Why do you want to paint me?"

"Why?" Trey repeated, his eyes moving over Dustin slowly and intimately. Then Donaldson walked around Yarma, eyes avidly perusing what he saw, as he explained, "You're an attractive man, Dustin, but you're so much more than that. You have in you some of the same dualities that you saw in my work. I'm curious how the darkness and light will come out on canvas."

Dustin's heart was pounding; he couldn't look away from the intensity in Trey's eyes, now hovering less than six inches from his own. Not wanting to come across as a silent, overwhelmed idiot, Dustin demurred, "I'm not very interesting."

"You are to me. How can I explain?" Trey frowned for a moment, took a sip of his Scotch and suggested, "Look at this painting with me?"

Nodding, Dustin moved to stand in front of the artwork in the set that caught his eye that was located further from the bed. Trey moved behind him. Dustin couldn't see the other man but he could feel his presence. Near to him, but not touching. Slightly to his right, Dustin thought. Trey's deep, measured voice and the painting became Dustin's reality.

"This is my expression of the pain of desire, Dustin. Of wanting someone so much that you tremble with anticipation whenever you think of them. Wherever you happen to be at the time. In the shower. That's good, because we can take care of things very nicely in there. Get that twinge and just give into it. Close our eyes and lean into the water, trusting our hand not to let us down. It never does. Not in the shower. Not unless the phone rings or someone knocks on the door or something else interrupts the moment."

Dustin thought of Darcy. What one smile from her had been able to do to him. What she could reduce him to with her tongue playing in his mouth. Licking at his chest. Moving over his cock.

Trey's voice centered him back on the picture. "Now, at work. That's not so good. Thinking about the object of our desire there. We can't concentrate. We can't relieve the pressure. Those urges overcoming you in a meeting or in an elevator or some other public place is even worse. Out in the open, there are people to share your pain. But they don't. They luxuriate in it. Someone else is making a spectacle of themselves. Someone else is at another person's mercy. Not them. Not at that moment in time. So they can feel superior. While we suffer, wanting what we can't have."

Dustin was getting hard. His breaths were coming in short pants. Fuck, he still wanted Darcy. After everything that had passed between them.

"What can we do, Dustin? We're caught. Helpless and without hope, between the wanting and the not having. What can we do to escape?"

Trey's hands trailed down Dustin's sides, moved over his hips and along his thighs.

"We can open our eyes wider. Can't we?" Trey asked, gently stroking the back of Dustin's thighs and placing a kiss at the base of his throat. "Take those two small ovals of ecru in the bottom left quadrant and expand them to displace the red and silver spikes of anger and lust.

When neither protest nor response came, Donaldson continued, "Find what we can have, wherever it's hiding. Maybe fill the canvas with ecru and build upon our new background a life without the one we want. Could we do that?"

"Christ, Trey," Dustin groaned, as clever fingers moved across his abdomen underneath his silk shirt. "What are you doing?"

"Asking you if art is living and if life can imitate it?" Trey murmured, his hands never stopping their search for the places where Dustin liked to be touched. His lips moved along Dustin's jawline.

Amazingly, Yarma found himself trying to imagine the painting modified as Trey described. Life without Darcy starting as a four foot by four foot splotch of ecru. He chuckled at the thought and responded to the specifically articulated question. "Art is about life. The expression of complex thoughts and emotions is is art, and life is experiencing them. And when when you get hurt you want to stop feeling. Thoughts are ok, because you can force them down one path or another. Emotions are different. Wild. Uncontrollable."

"But if art is the expression of thought and emotion, what happens if emotion is missing?"

"Without emotion, your art is hollow and incomplete. And so is your life." Dustin swallowed hard at the indictment of his recent past that had just escaped his lips. Something deep inside forced him onward. "But it just hurts too damn much to to open up again."

"It's time to stop hurting, Dustin." Donaldson punctuated his pronouncement with a nip of Yarma's earlobe. "What do you want to paint onto your new background?"

"My new background," Yarma tried out the concept aloud, suddenly aware that Trey's hands were kneading his ass, his tongue tasting the skin beneath Dustin's right ear. Realizing that he'd been lulled by the imagery and words and not at all sure he wanted to be where this seemed to be going, Dustin dodged, "I'm not a painter." The further revelation that he also wasn't certain that he didn't want to go to Trey's destination stunned him. Fortunately, Trey resumed speaking before Dustin had time to ponder.

"Tell me what you want in your life and I'll tell you what it would look like on the canvas we're creating." After lazily licking along the juncture of Dustin's neck and shoulder to pass the time while Dustin considered, Trey prompted, "What do you want to feel when you leave this room?"

"I I want to forget her. How do you paint the absence of something?"

"A stylized female figure in a deep gray fading into the mists of memory depicted as a very slightly lighter gray."

"Ok, gray on gray. I can see that."

"Can you? From up close, maybe, but not at much of a distance. Her quasi-silhouette isn't very well defined." Trey's whisper was accompanied by light touches of Dustin's inner thighs.

Dustin's smile was now in appreciation of both the image and the sensations elicited by Trey's caresses. They were right in a way that he wasn't sure that he could describe. Yarma knew that this scene would shock most of his friends, but he couldn't bring himself to pull away from the man who had painted the pictures on the wall and the vivid one forming in Yarma's mind.

"Hey, Dustin, talk to me. Is this ok with you?"

"Yeah," Yarma managed after a swallow or two, spreading his legs slightly to accommodate the stroking fingers. "It's ok."

"Can I be in your painting?" the actor murmured into the producer's ear.

"You want to paint yourself?" Dustin questioned, laughing.

"A flash of blue with hints of silver and red shouldn't be too narcissistic."

"I guess not," Dustin allowed.

"Do you agree with my color choices?"

Yarma looked over his shoulder at the man who was grinning at him. "Cool and collected that heats up nicely when he's passionate about something?"

"That works."

Yarma nodded and redirected his attention back to the painting, decision made. "You can be in it."

"What do you want from me, Dustin?"

Hands were unbuckling Dustin's belt and teeth were gnawing at his throat. Dustin was painfully hard and aching for something - anything. But Darcy's face kept intruding, every time he closed his eyes. Dustin shook his head to banish the image, just as Trey took his cock in one of those artist's hands.

Trey stilled immediately. "Do you want me to stop?" he whispered, anguish evident in his tone. But he didn't coax Dustin with the hand that now just cradled him.

"I can't get her out of my fucking mind," Dustin admitted disgustedly.

"Look at me, Dustin," Trey suggested softly. "Really look at me."

Dustin turned and regarded the younger man. A few inches shorter than Dustin and a little broader across the shoulders and chest. Tight black t-shirt. Tight jeans that left nothing of the outline of his erection to the imagination. Eyes that were asking permission. Hopefully and unashamedly asking him to allow this intimacy. Dustin was afraid and he didn't fully understand why.

At that juncture, spoken words seemed necessary. "Who who are you trying to forget?" Yarma asked.

Donaldson squeezed Dustin's cock briefly and smiled. "I got past my bad relationships with those paintings. This is for you, Dustin."

"How did you know that I ", Dustin trailed off, embarrassed.

"I didn't. Not until we got up here and you looked at them. And reacted the way you did. Before that, I just wanted you."

Yarma glanced over his shoulder at the paintings and nodded. They spoke to him. Volumes of shared experiences. Save one.

Out with it, Dustin. It'll keep the embarrassment to a minimum. "Uh Trey, I'm ah not really I mean, I haven't, you know, with guys."

"How fortunate for me," Trey countered with a grin and a knowing caress of the still rock hard erection he held in his hand. "Will you allow me to initiate you?"

Dustin watched, fascinated, as Trey Donaldson knelt in front of him. Nervous, Yarma blurted, "What does sex look like on canvas?"

Untying Dustin's shoes, one at a time, Trey looked pensive. "Depends," he murmured softly, lifting Yarma's feet free like an accomplished shoe salesman and placing each shoe behind him, safely out of the way. "Are you talking about a quick fuck or lovemaking?"

"I don't want a quick fuck in my painting."

The quiet conviction in Dustin's voice intrigued Trey. "What do you need from a lover? Really need, not what you'd settle for to get laid on a regular basis."

Question surprising him, Yarma self-deprecatingly replied, "I'm no different from everybody else."

Going beyond the call of shoe sale duty, Trey slid Dustin's socks off as well, clarifying, "I'm not talking physically." Smiling up at Yarma, he added, "But I think you knew that. We're talking viscera, Dustin. Your gut and your heart - what do they need? This," he said, planting a quick kiss on Yarma's erection, "wants what we all want."

Dustin almost laughed. The situation was getting more bizarre by the moment. But his reply was honest. "Loyalty."

Smiling happily and humming a tune Yarma didn't recognize, Trey unzipped Dustin's pants the rest of the way and let them fall around Yarma's now bare feet. Feeling reckless, Dustin kicked them aside and held his breath.

"Not fidelity?" Trey asked finally.

"Well, I'd like that too, but I need loyalty."

Looking him in the eye, Trey asked, "Gray on gray woman wasn't?"

"No, but, hell, I'm not sure I gave her any good reason to be."

"People who love you don't need another reason, Dustin."

Yarma nodded, trying to think of something to say. Gentle hands sliding his boxers down slowly recalled an earlier topic to Dustin's fragmenting thoughts. "Describe the love scene in my painting."

Trey smiled and lifted each of Dustin's feet to free the boxers and tossed the garment over his shoulder. "First things first. Loyalty would be a smear of deep purple, the color of a fine Cabernet. Fidelity is a obelisk of pale, yet vibrant green roughly outlined in gold."

The hands were stroking his thighs again. It felt good, but Dustin wanted to know "And the love scene?"

Never stopping his tactile seduction, Trey whispered, "It would flow from the upper right hand corner on a meandering path to the lower left, tendrils reaching out in seemingly random directions, permeating everything. A raging river of bright blues and greens, white and black filling in and adding texture. No gray, Dustin. None."

Grinning at the rapt attention Yarma had paid to his description, Trey slowly licked his lips.

Dustin's breath caught in his throat. The man that half the women in North America wanted to fuck was on his knees about to oh, God. Yarma's frantic brain sent out a plea for him to stop this before it got out of hand. Dustin had barely registered the intellectual protest, when lips surrounded his cock and a tongue moved teasingly over it. Lust threw intellect aside where it wouldn't get hurt.

Yarma fought to keep his eyes open. If he closed them, he'd see Darcy. The moment he thought that, he realized that maybe he was jumping to a conclusion. It was possible that he'd see a barely discernible gray on lighter gray, so vivid was the imagery Trey evoked. Dustin wasn't sure, but knew he didn't yet have the courage to try.

Trey's tongue danced around the tip of Dustin's erection until Yarma became frantic. Then the actor shifted tactics and took him deeper and deeper with each bob of his head. He couldn't keep still, but Trey steadied Dustin's hips, completely controlling the encounter. Dustin almost screamed with frustrated lust when Trey returned to teasing just the head and working the root patiently with his hand.

Before Dustin could register the absence of the oral stimulation, the actor was standing and kissing him. Coming up for air, Trey murmured, "Can you see it? Your river?"

Without thinking, Dustin shut his eyes, and there it was -- the entire image with its ecru backdrop. Awed, he nodded.

"Let's take this to the bed, Dustin. I don't want your first time to be standing up."

"Where ever you think."

Leading Dustin to their destination with a smoky stare and another lick of his lips, Trey grinned at he dazed expression on Yarma's face. "How are we doing in fording your river?"

"Fine," was the whispered reply.

Not one to question his impulses, Donaldson maneuvered Dustin until he was standing with his back to the bed. "Are there rapids, do you think?"

Rapids? Oh, yeah - the river. "Must be. A raft too."

Making promises of pleasure with his eyes, Trey unbuttoned Dustin's silk shirt. "Hang on, then. We wouldn't want to lose you overboard."

"You too," Dustin implored, as Trey slipped both shirt and suit coat off of Yarma's shoulders together.

"I will. I promise." With a sigh, Donaldson leaned in and captured an erect nipple between his teeth and tormented it with his tongue before gently biting down.

Dustin arched forward and held the actor's head to his chest. Grinning at the producer's need, Trey firmly pulled his head back and pushed Dustin onto the bed. Yarma landed on his back and Trey followed, repeating, "Hang on, Dustin."

Boat/river analogy notwithstanding, Yarma reached for Trey and held him in a less metaphorical way.

After playfully kissing and touching Dustin for several excruciatingly long minutes, Trey asked, "Will you let me paint you?"

"Maybe, if you let me come. Right now." Dustin had tried to growl, but the words came out in a breathless moan.

Trey smiled a long slow smile and then bent to his task. After teasing the head of his cock unmercifully, Trey deep throated Dustin. Overstimulated as he was, Yarma didn't have time to warn Trey that he was very close. However, the actor neither needed nor had any intention of heeding any such warning. Yarma groaned Trey's name when his orgasm ripped through him.

When Dustin returned to the land of the living a few minutes later, he was being cuddled in Trey's arms. Donaldson's hands moved over his body soothingly.

Seeing Dustin's eyes finally focus, Trey whispered, "You back with me?"

Smiling slightly, Yarma nodded and murmured, "It's funny."

Raising an eyebrow in mock dismay, Trey countered, "Be careful what you say next. Delicate actor ego present."

Dustin chuckled softly, but his voice was serious as he continued, "I knew what I was doing. With my life, I mean. Shutting myself down emotionally. But your paintings, on the wall and in my head, showed me the price I was paying." Sighing, he admitted, "I owe you for that, and I have no idea how to repay that debt."

"I do. Stay the night, Dustin."

Smiling, Dustin allowed himself to be drawn closer into a protective embrace wondering briefly when Trey had taken off his own clothes before protesting sleepily, "But what about Jared?"

"Hmmm? Oh, your friend. I think a man needs to pick himself up once in a while, don't you?"

Chuckling, Dustin murmured, "Yeah, I do. At least tonight I do."

"Good. Time to get some sleep, Dustin."

"Sleep?" Yarma questioned, suddenly and not inexplicably shy. "Um but you didn't I mean, you pulled out the stops for me, but "

Donaldson smiled slowly, as Dustin's voice trailed off endearingly and his eyes shifted to the paintings that had started it all. If Trey looked closely, he suspected that he'd see a blush on the older man's cheeks. "I told you. Tonight's for you, Dustin. Tomorrow, we can see about me, if you decide you want to."

"But -."

"No buts. There's way too much history bound up in what happened. I hope you remember that there are future possibilities, too when you're thinking things over. You know, sleeping on it."

Dustin stared at Trey in disbelief, uncertain what to say, but settling for an honest, "You don't belong in this business."

Laughing, Donaldson allowed, "Maybe not, but it pays well. Rest."

With that single final word, Trey placed a brief kiss on Dustin's lips. When it was over, Dustin unconsciously raised a hand to his mouth, seeming to check to see if it was still there. Trey chuckled.

Caught, Dustin smiled sheepishly and asked, "So ah when are you planning to paint me?"

Trey grinned. "Later. After we get know each other a bit better."

Not quite believing how good he felt or trusting how comfortable he was, Dustin sighed. Amazing what great sex will do - even, to Dustin's surprise - sex with another man, but Yarma knew too well what could happen next. Not ready to simply accept this at face value, he countered, "We'll see how the new painting looks in the light of day."

"I like a challenge."

"I get that."

"Goodnight, Dustin."

"'Night, Trey."

End

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