Chapter 52 – Aurora
The studio is the only room that still believes me when I lie.
I tell the walls I’m fine. I tell the single bulb above my easel that the jitter in my hands is just too much coffee.
I tell the canvases stacked like patients along the baseboards that I am not waiting to hear his step in the hall.
The walls keep quiet. The bulb hums. The canvases stare back, their blankness more honest than I’m being.
Turpentine breathes from the jar beside the sink.
Someone left a curve of ultramarine on the rim like a mouth.
The floor carries the steady grit of dried paint under bare soles, comforting as a prayer bead.
Outside, the Sanctuary sleeps in its mesh of cameras and codes.
In here, a tank top, leggings, and the smell of oil and metal hold me together.
My phone buzzes on the floor boards by my foot, the screen washing blue across the underside of the table. Unknown number, again.
We can get you out. He’s not who you think.
I delete it, again. The messages feel like a hand tugging the hem of my dress in a crowd—insistent, impersonal, and too pleased with its own urgency.
I could take it to Cassian or Reid. Instead I put the face down on the boards and tell myself that I’m going to paint until the sting in my body is something I can name and not just something that makes me pace.
A stroke becomes a palm against my throat. The canvas is cooperating and betraying me at the same time, as usual. My hand knows him. It paints him without permission.
I drag the flat of the brush down through the teal and into the black. The paint resists and then yields. His thumb was here earlier, low and back toward the hinge of my jaw. He insists I’m safe, and my body is a traitor who keeps believing him.
The brush skids. I put it in the jar and reach for the palette knife instead.
Metal against paint, paint against canvas, the scratch of it as loud as the sound inside my head.
I chase a strip of light along the imagined stairwell, meaning to widen it, and my hand slips off the edge and into my palm.
It’s a nick. The knife kisses the meat under my thumb and leaves a line, quick and efficient. I don’t gasp so much as sigh. I’ve been expecting something to split all night. It’s almost a relief that it’s this and not a thought.
The blood is bright and immediate, a red that doesn’t apologize for itself.
It beads, then swells, then threatens the floor.
I set the knife on the ledge by the canvas and press my other hand into the cut without thinking.
Warmth slides between my fingers. The throb in my palm matches the throb in my throat.
I lift my hand and drag the pad of my thumb down the painted rail.
Red over teal. The line it leaves isn’t pretty.
Footsteps in the hall reach my ears too quiet for anyone but him.
I don’t turn until he’s in the doorway and the single bulb finds the white of his shirt cuffs and the edges of his forearms where the sleeves are rolled.
The rest of him is shadow and attention.
His eyes come to the knife, to the wet color on my hands, to my mouth.
They flick once toward the phone on the floor and settle back on me.
“Rory,” he whispers.
“I’m fine,” I snap, and we both hear the lie.
He steps inside and leaves the door ajar. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s paint,” I argue, even as more red gathers along the edge of my palm and spills over to my wrist. “It’s not—” I shake my hand once, as if that could fix it. The motion sends dots of red onto my tank top. They look like a constellation someone cruel would draw.
He crosses the room slowly, as though the floor is full of wires. He’s already reading the scene. When he’s close enough to lay his hand over mine, I shift back, my spine meeting canvas. The wet paint on the panel cold-kisses the back of my shoulder blades and climbs my skin.
“You make me crazy,” I tell him because it’s the first thing my mouth finds. It comes out wet and harsh. “I can’t sleep. I can’t stop seeing you. My head is noise and my body—” I bite down on the rest because embarrassment is pointless and also bottomless.
He glances at the knife where I left it perched on the canvas ledge. The blade has paint along one side. “Put that down,” he says softly.
“Maybe I don’t want to.” Which is ridiculous because it’s already down and because I don’t know whether the sentence means I want the knife or I want him to tell me what to do and have it work.
He’s close enough now that I can smell his soap and the long day still living in the thread of his shirt.
Close enough that my breath changes to match his without permission.
He doesn’t crowd. He knows better than to herd me into a corner unless I ask him to.
But the canvas is already at my back, wet and patient, and the only way forward is through him.
“Let me see,” he says, and lifts my cut hand without taking the knife. His fingers wrap my wrist. He studies the line in my palm like it’s a map.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” he agrees, “but it’s not a problem.”
He picks up the palette knife from the ledge very carefully. He turns the blade in his fingers, so the light hits the dull side. He lets me see him choose. He lifts it toward me and brings the flat to my throat.
The shock of it is clean. The cool metal against skin that has been burning for an hour draws a breath out of me I didn’t know I was holding. He doesn’t press. He lays the steel there like a hand that knows it holds a heartbeat.
“Look at me,” he says.
I do. The single bulb makes salt and shadow of his face.
His eyes are not soft. They’re focused. He is both the man in the car earlier—the one who took his time and let me take mine—and the man who tracked me through a crowd with a hand at the small of my back like he could separate me from the world by will alone.
The two men are one. The sight of him there, deliberate, unhurried, sure, is a better anchor than any word he’s taught me.
“I’m not cutting you,” he says, as if he can hear the part of my body that still expects harm ask how to brace. “I will never put you in danger to satisfy anything in me. Do you understand me?”
I nod once. The steel moves with my throat. He slides the flat along the line under my jaw. The paint on my back presses colder as the movement pulls me a fraction deeper into the wet canvas. He watches my face while he does it. He’s not watching the knife. The knife is a prop. I am the room.
He reaches behind me with his free hand and drags two fingers through the palette.
He doesn’t look to see which color. When those fingers come back to my skin, it’s a smear of deep blue-green.
He marks along my collarbone, the paint cool first and then warm as my body takes it.
The gesture shouldn’t land as deep as it does; it feels like being named.
His mouth tightens at the corners. He shifts the knife to his other hand, still flat, keeps it at my throat as a line of certainty.
The metal tells me where I am. His paint-slick thumb traces a second stripe from the notch at my collarbone down to the center of my sternum.
He doesn’t hurry. He talks me through the distance with his eyes.
“You make me crazy,” I say again, softer, almost a laugh as it catches at the back. “It’s your fault I’m like this.”
“It’s our fault,” he corrects, and the truly awful thing is how tender that sounds.
He lowers the knife, still flat, and runs the cool handle down the center of my spine over my shirt, not hard. The shiver that adds to the heat in my body feels like a straight line from then to now. The noise I make is a surprise to both of us.
He breathes something like a curse and steps closer. “Hands,” he says quietly.
I offer the cut one first. He takes it face-up, holds for a second long enough to make the sting feel purposeful, then brings my other wrist to meet it.
He doesn’t bind. He just holds both in one of his, gently, above my head against the dry edge of the canvas’ stretcher bar, careful of the wet paint.
It’s an old posture and a new one at once, surrender and reach combined.
He watches my face for even the hint of flinch.
There isn’t one. He sets his mouth against the inside of my wrist where the veins talk and inhales, one slow breath like he’s committing something to memory he doesn’t trust the world to keep safe for him.
When he lets go to peel my tank up, I keep my arms where they are.
He draws the tank over my head, careful not to smear more than he has to, and lowers it to the floor, and for the first time tonight I want the single bulb to be brighter so I can see his face see me.
He looks like a man who found water after walking through a small desert he built out of necessity and didn’t realize he didn’t have to live in anymore.
“You’re mine to make a masterpiece of,” he says, but the sentence doesn’t land as command. It lands as vow. A part of me that stays wary even in sleep lifts its head, sniffs, and settles.
He guides me sideways, his hand firm on my lower back, steering me like I'm a canvas he's repositioning for better light, until the wet canvas and the stretchers give way to the cool, unforgiving floor of the studio.
He lowers me onto a drop cloth smeared with half-dried pigments and the abandoned panel from earlier, my back pressing into the slick mess—wet paint kissing my shoulder blades in cold, viscous streaks, clinging to the backs of my thighs in warmer, tackier blobs that squelch under my weight.