9. Elizabeth
— ? —
Elizabeth
Sleep won’t come.
I lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling, replaying every moment of the night. The dance with Ignatius. The hallway, the wall, his body pressing against mine. His voice in my ear, saying things that should have made me slap him but instead made me melt.
I can smell how wet you are.
What belongs to me.
I turn over, burying my face in the pillow, and I want to scream.
He has a woman who adores him. A woman who fits into his world like she was made for it, with her old money and older connections and her hand constantly on his arm. A woman who isn’t a debt to be paid, a promise to be kept, a problem to be solved.
And still he says things like that. Still he touches me like that. Still he looks at me like I’m something he wants to devour but won’t let himself taste.
What kind of man does that?
What kind of man pushes you away with one hand and pulls you back with the other?
I give up on sleep somewhere around two in the morning. The house is silent, Jarec presumably locked away in his study or his room, avoiding me the way he always does after these encounters. The staff won’t stir for hours.
I slip out of bed and pad down the hallway to the room I’ve claimed as my studio.
***
The space was a sitting room once, according to Sarah. Some Fairweather ancestor used it for afternoon tea and private correspondence. Now it holds my easels, my paints, the canvases I’ve been accumulating since I arrived.
I haven’t been painting much. Hard to create when you’re suffocating.
But tonight something is clawing at my chest, demanding release. I need to do something with my hands, need to pour this chaos somewhere outside my body before it consumes me entirely.
The canvas is large, imposing, leaning against the wall where I left it weeks ago. I’ve been meaning to start something new, something to fill the empty hours, but I could never settle on a subject.
Now I know.
I pick up a brush.
And I begin.
***
Hours blur together.
The light changes outside the window, from black to gray to the pale gold of dawn, and I don’t notice. I’m lost in color and form, in the strange desperate need to capture something I can’t name.
My hand moves without conscious thought, mixing shadows, layering darkness over darkness. The brush strokes are bold, almost violent, nothing like my usual careful technique. This isn’t a painting I’m creating. It’s an exorcism.
I work until my shoulders ache, until my fingers cramp around the brush, until the first morning birdsong filters through the window.
Then I step back.
And the portrait stares at me.
Jarec.
He’s in shadow, half-turned away, unreachable.
His profile is sharp, beautiful, rendered in grays and blacks and the faintest hints of blue.
The darkness pools around him like water, like secrets, like all the things he won’t say.
His eyes are fixed on something beyond the frame, something the viewer can never see.
It’s the most honest thing I’ve ever created.
The man I want and can’t have. The husband who claims me in darkened hallways and then walks away like nothing happened. The stranger I married who remains a stranger still, no matter how many times his mouth finds mine.
I’ve painted him the way I see him. Shrouded in mystery. Impossible to reach.
And I’ve painted myself too, though I didn’t mean to. I’m in the empty space he’s turning toward, in the light he’s facing away from. Present but invisible. Always invisible.
My chest aches looking at it.
This is what I feel. This is what I’ve been carrying for weeks, this impossible longing for someone who won’t let himself be known. Someone who kisses me like I’m everything and then tells me to forget it happened.
I can’t let anyone see this.
The realization hits me with the force of a blow. This portrait is a confession, painted in colors and light instead of words. If Jarec saw it, he would know. He would know exactly how deep this has cut, exactly how far past resistance I’ve fallen.
And I won’t give him that power.
I won’t give him anything else he can use to hurt me.
I find a drop cloth in the corner - paint-stained, wrinkled - and drape it over the canvas. Push the whole thing to the back of the studio, behind the other canvases, hidden from view.
It means nothing, I tell myself. It’s just a painting. Just something to get the feelings out.
I almost believe it.
***
The days that follow are a study in careful avoidance.
Jarec takes his meals in the study again. I take mine alone, or in my room, or not at all. We pass each other in hallways and nod politely, like strangers at a funeral, like the storm and the gala never happened.
But I feel his eyes on me.
Not when I’m looking - he’s too careful for that. But when I turn away, when I round a corner, when I think I’m alone. I feel the weight of his attention like a physical thing, a pressure on the back of my neck, and when I turn to catch him, he’s always looking somewhere else.
Is this what our marriage is going to be? This endless dance of almost-touching, almost-speaking, almost-admitting what we both know to be true?
I spend my afternoons in the studio, painting. Safe subjects now - the coastline, the cliffs, the view from my window. Nothing that reveals too much. Nothing that could be used against me.
But sometimes, when the light is right and my guard is down, I find myself pulling back the drop cloth. Looking at his face in shadow. Touching the canvas where I’ve painted the hard line of his jaw.
It’s pathetic. I know it’s pathetic.
But it’s the closest I can get to him, and some desperate part of me will take whatever scraps are offered.
***
Late one evening, I hear his footsteps in the hallway.
I’m in the studio, cleaning my brushes, and I freeze at the sound. His tread is distinctive - heavy, deliberate, the walk of a man who knows exactly where he’s going.
He pauses outside my door.
I hold my breath.
The silence stretches. One heartbeat, two, three. I imagine him standing there, hand raised to knock, debating whether to enter. Whether to speak. Whether to acknowledge that something has shifted between us, something that can’t be unshifted no matter how hard we both pretend.
Then the footsteps resume, continuing down the hall.
His bedroom door opens and closes.
I let out the breath I’ve been holding and sink down onto my paint-stained stool, my heart pounding like I’ve run a marathon.
This can’t continue.
Something has to give.