Chapter II
II
Charlotte leads Giada up the stairs.
There are still echoes of the last owner—in the furniture, the pots and pans—but she’s done what she can to make the place her own.
Books line almost every shelf, volumes in Latin, French, and English, collected piecemeal on her evening walks, from market crates and outside shops.
Fresh flowers crowd a vase on the narrow kitchen table, and in the little sitting room she’s painted the walls her favorite shade of green.
A summer shade, a garden hue, like the lawn of Clement Hall—sometimes Charlotte stays up, sits in a corner chair and leaves the curtains open, watches the sunlight dance across the green, pretends the grass is moving in the breeze.
It’s a nice enough apartment, more lived-in than lavish, but then, Sabine was the one who sought out luxury. Charlotte would rather feel at home.
Sabine—creeping in like a shadow even now.
She shakes her head, does her best to banish the ghost as the bathroom door creaks open, and Giada emerges in nothing but a borrowed silk robe, cinched around her waist.
“Where do you want me?” Her lips twitch as she says it, as if daring Charlotte to say Here, with me. Instead, she gestures to the velvet chair she’s dragged into the middle of the room, the fabric midnight blue.
Giada nods and takes her place beside the chair, then slips the robe’s knot and shrugs off the silk, letting it pool on the floor, exposing her curves, her bare skin, as smooth and gold as honey.
Charlotte clenches her jaw.
She hasn’t fed, not since she crossed paths with Giada at the fountain. Before that, in fact. Two nights, then. Three?
She knows, from the drawn-out games they used to play, that she is capable of going weeks without a meal.
She knows, but knowing doesn’t make it easier.
Her mind believes, but her body doesn’t understand.
Her teeth ache and her stomach twists, her throat dry and her still heart desperate to beat.
Every moment is an act of will when the hunger goes so deep.
A ringing bell inside her head. A tuning fork against her skeleton.
Charlotte pushes the thoughts away as Giada lowers herself into the chair, limbs bright against the dark blue velvet.
“You tell me when to stop,” she says, offering Charlotte a variety of poses as she shifts her weight, treating the chair as if it is a picture frame, the new bounds of her world, the light rolling over her, the dimples in her thighs, the hills and valleys of her hips.
If Sabine was the stone at the center of the fruit, Giada is the peach itself. Soft and supple and—
“Stop.”
Just like that, she does.
That uncanny stillness sweeps over her again. But there is something else, something Charlotte missed before. That pent-up energy is still there, humming just beneath the surface, like water perched at the rim of a full cup, giving the impression that any moment it could spill.
It isn’t the stillness that makes Giada such a perfect model. It is this.
“Can you stay like that?” she asks.
Only Giada’s lips move as she answers quietly, “Of course.”
Charlotte’s pencil begins to race across the pad of paper, convinced that any moment the spell will break, and Giada will come to life again before she has a chance to finish.
But Giada doesn’t move an inch.
Charlotte draws with a sure hand, ghosting out the guiding lines, gaze flicking from the paper to the chair and back again, every time expecting to catch some minute adjustment, and finding none. The only movement, the slow blinking of her lashes. The faint rise and fall of her chest.
She has always enjoyed drawing. When she was young, she’d practice rendering her mother’s sculptures.
And later, she would sketch a little of every place they went together, she and Sabine.
Before cameras became commonplace, it was a way for her to capture pieces of her life.
Moments pressed into paper. Filling sketchbook after sketchbook.
She didn’t keep them all, only the latest.
And even that she’d left behind in London.
She drew Sabine as well, of course. At least, she tried. Sabine had the kind of face, those angles, that light, that seemed designed to haunt an artist. But Charlotte could never seem to get it right.
But Giada comes to life beneath her pencil.
She is stretched like a bolt of fabric across the chair, her bare legs thrown over one arm, her neck cradled by the other so that her head tips back, throat exposed, the sharp end of her bob skimming the air like a paintbrush. Her face caught mid-turn toward Charlotte as she draws.
Ten minutes go by in this way. Thirty. An hour.
“You can’t be comfortable.”
A shrug, or at least, the air of a shrug, since Giada’s shoulders never bob. The ghost of a smile, not even a ripple at the corner of her mouth. “You could distract me.”
Charlotte’s pencil whispers. “How?”
Giada hums in thought and says, “Tell me a story.”
A brief and fleeting memory, light as moth wings: Jocelyn’s head in her lap, one eye closed as she holds an oak leaf to the sun to see the veins shot through with light. Tell me a story, Lottie.
“A story,” she echoes thoughtfully.
Charlotte knows a thousand stories. Fairy tales and novels, epic poems and children’s verses. She could recite any one of them from memory, or she could make a new one up from scratch. For some reason, she does neither.
Tell me a story.
Why does she decide to tell the truth?
Perhaps it is the safe angle of Giada’s face, the fact she would have to turn her head to meet her gaze.
Or perhaps it is the fact these last ten years have somehow been the longest of her life.
Perhaps it is the loneliness, the longing to be known by someone else, to be real for someone else, besides Sabine.
“Once there was a girl afraid of growing up,” she says, her pencil still scratching at the page.
“When she was a child, she was a giant, free and large and boundless. But growing up, she knew, meant becoming small, small enough to fit in a man’s open hand.
No longer a person at all, but a trophy, a trinket. ”
As Charlotte speaks, she draws, and as she draws, the shapes come together on the parchment, the lines joining, the limbs and torso rising to the surface.
“She wanted to stay young forever. But her body didn’t listen, and then, neither did her heart, and soon—too soon—she was sent to London, to watch and learn and be made worthy of those men. So that one might choose her for himself.”
Giada makes a derisive sound. “I knew the English were prudish, but I didn’t know you were still so backwards, too.”
“It was a long time ago,” says Charlotte, smudging a line with the ball of her thumb as she presses on. “Now, some of the men she met there were handsome enough. Some were even kind. But looking at them all, she knew they were heavy. She knew she would be crushed beneath their weight.”
Charlotte’s pencil changes from a whisper to a rasping hiss as the lines grow sharper, more deliberate. She traces the body on paper, shades the fold at the waist, the crook of the elbow, the slope of the cheek until the woman on the page is no longer a stranger.
“Then, one day, she met a woman.”
Giada hums in static pleasure. “A welcome twist. What was she like?”
The pencil stalls. The room flickers, and for a moment Charlotte is eighteen and standing on the stairs at that first ball, a voice like a secret in her ear.
“She was—”
Eyes like lanterns, hair like heated steel.
“—undeniable.”
A hand drawing her away from the crowd.
“Perilous.”
Fingers knotted in hair. Teeth trailing skin.
“Alluring.”
“Sounds like a good time,” teases Giada.
Charlotte swallows. She can almost feel Sabine peering like a ghost over her shoulder, fingers grazing the nape of her neck as she draws.
“It was a good time, at first,” she says, setting in on Giada’s hair, her lines as smooth as a brush sliding through.
“The woman took so little and gave so much. She offered the girl friendship, offered her pleasure, offered her everything she ever wanted. And in the end, all she asked for was her soul.”
At that, Giada almost moves.
A small spasm of surprise, a ripple on the surface, quickly stilled. Charlotte glances up, expects to see the other woman staring back at her, but her face hasn’t turned, her gaze still trained on the corner of the room.
“A devil, then.”
Charlotte nods. “But what good is a soul, really?” she muses, as if it’s the first time she’s stopped to wonder.
As if it’s not the question that plagued her that first night, that still plagues her after all these years.
“It lives in the mind. A piece you cannot see or touch. A prize you are told to shield for a time you cannot know. Easy enough to part with something so abstract when the alternative is freedom. When the promise is love.”
Charlotte’s pencil skates back and forth, for a moment the only sound in the room, as if both of them are holding their breath. “She didn’t know it then, but it turns out a soul is what makes the sun feel warm against your skin, what gives food taste, what makes you feel full.
“Still, the girl told herself it was worth it. After all, she had the woman’s love, and that was enough. That would always be enough.”
The drawing is almost done now, as much as a drawing can be. It is by nature an unfinished thing, the edges bleeding into empty space. But Charlotte knows there is a moment when a piece can be overworked, when the artist goes a stroke too far.
Charlotte knows that she should stop, before she ruins it.
But she cannot bring herself to put the pencil down.
“And then,” she says, “the woman got sick, and her love sickened with her. It withered. And died. And then the girl had nothing.”
The air around Giada churns with interest. Her mind, so open, so unguarded, teeters on belief. And Charlotte knows there is still time to change direction, to convince her it is nothing but a fairy tale.