Chapter 23 – Aurora #2
I gasp because my lungs remember they exist, not because he surprised me. His hands are warm. The room was set two degrees cooler than comfort, and now my whole body knows it.
“You’re trembling,” he murmurs.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I whisper back, and I mean it. In this room, I am afraid of me.
He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t do the thing men do when they win a battle.
Something flickers in his face, too fast to name.
Not just hunger. Something older. Old pain has a look, a small pull at the corner of the mouth that doesn’t belong to the words it’s saying.
I’ve seen it in kids who learned bad lessons young and in women who forgot what rest feels like.
It disarms me before I can decide whether it should.
For a second I don’t want to hit him with another question; I want to ask one he won't answer on paper: Who taught you to build walls like this? I don’t ask.
The question would become a doorway. Doorways are currency here, and I’m not ready to spend.
“I need air,” I say, because if I stay I’ll let him put his hand on mine again and I don’t know which of us I’ll be afterward.
He doesn’t block the way to the door. He doesn’t say stay. He just nods once, a standing-down motion. “Tomorrow,” he says quietly. “We go deeper.”
“Into what?” I ask, hating the way the word deeper moves in my body.
“Process,” he says, like we’re talking about a mural and not his hands. “Protocol. Paint.”
“That order,” I say.
“That order,” he confirms.
I turn and make myself walk, trying not to hurry.
My legs feel wrong, like I’m walking through water.
The heavy door opens under my hand without a fight.
The corridor is cooler, empty, and clean.
I realize I still have the brush in my hand, the hog bristle, the handle warm where our fingers both touched it. I don’t put it back.
The hall gives me back the sound of my own footsteps. It’s a relief and a warning.
I don’t go straight up. I take the long way, past the library where the ladder’s wheels squeak once because someone left it that way on purpose.
Past a side hall where a door that looks like a closet smells like toner and new paper.
Past a small window that frames a square of night so perfect it looks painted.
I put my forehead against the cool glass for a second and force air into my chest and out again until my hands stop feeling like someone else’s.
By the time I reach the landing, the music behind me has moved into a track I can’t hear. The house’s hum takes over. When I push into the east wing, Lila’s door cracks open like it knows my footfall and not just my name.
Her hair is pulled up, her face clean. She reads my mouth before she reads my eyes. “Okay,” she says softly, no joke attached. “Soup. Then sleep. Then war.”
“Soup,” I say. It comes out hoarse. “Then a list.”
She nods. “I told Simone you’d be hungry at exactly this minute. She said if she feeds you anything but soup after that room she’ll have to answer for it to someone you don’t want to meet.”
I don’t ask who. I don’t want new characters in my head right now.
I step into my room and shut the door with a care that makes the latch click like a promise.
The air smells like linen and cedar again, the studio’s paint already a ghost on my clothes.
The easel is still by the window where the light will be right in the morning.
I don’t want morning. I want a night that tells the truth and leaves me alone.
The brush is still in my hand. I look at it like it belongs to someone else. Paint has dried along the ferrule, a ridgeline of white and umber and black that records the moment I said threshold without using the word.
I go to the sink and turn the water on. It runs cold for a beat and then remembers how to be warm.
I wet a cloth and wipe my forearm where his fingers traced paint like a line only he could see.
The mark comes away in streaks, then in nothing, leaving a faint warmth that was mine before it was his.
I wash again because ritual makes your brain think it’s in charge.
The second pass doesn’t change anything.
He’s not on my skin, but my skin still knows him.
I look at my palm. Paint smears across the pads in a pattern I know without thinking: ultramarine thinned with white, umber dragged, black dabbed with the corner of a rag.
It smells like cedar and rain and him. It’s evidence.
That’s what I tell myself. It’s an object I can hold up later and say, you see, this happened in that room, and no one touched me without my permission, and I still feel like I left with something I didn’t want to carry.
My body knows it’s not evidence. It’s a promise I made to myself when I didn’t pull away.
I press my palm to the paper on the desk, the nice stationery I mocked earlier, and leave a print.
When I lie back, I don’t pull the covers up.
I stare at the ceiling until the room’s shapes decide what they want to be.
My mouth still remembers the way breath changes when a person stands close with intention.
I hate him. I want him. I want the Sanctuaries to be exactly what he says they are and I want to break his rules until I find the part where the truth hurts.
I lift my hand and bring it to my face. The paint smell has faded under soap and the room and the night. What’s left is skin. Mine. I press my palm to my mouth and pretend it’s a test I’m going to pass tomorrow.
“Get the answers,” I whisper to the dark. “Keep your distance.”
My body hums like it didn’t hear me. It will have to learn.
I close my eyes and let sleep circle the room without entering. When it finally does, it brings a studio with it and a light that turns on above a table no one could call safe.