5. Stella
STELLA
I wake up with my head on his chest and absolutely no desire to move. Ever. For the rest of my life. I might just pick this exact spot to live out the rest of my days.
It takes a second for everything to come back. The movie we didn’t finish. The way his hand found the back of my neck. The way one thing became another thing and that thing became us stumbling into my bedroom. My cheeks go warm at the memory of what happened after that.
His arm is heavy across my waist, like even in sleep, he doesn’t want me going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. Just in case that wasn’t already clear. I have no plans to go anywhere ever again.
The light coming through the window is warm and golden thanks to the fact that we took a long nap and missed the rest of the afternoon. For a minute, it’s enough to lie here and breathe, keeping track of the heartbeat under my ear. Slow and steady. His chest rises and falls, rises and falls.
And his face? I wish I could paint it. He looks different when he’s asleep.
Softer around the edges, like all the things that make him sharp during the day have been put down for a while.
His jaw is still ridiculous, obviously. That jaw does not take a break.
But the tension is gone from it now, and his mouth is slightly open.
He looks like a man who isn’t carrying anything for once.
That’s when I start noticing the scars.
They’re everywhere. Some of them are thin and white.
Old, healed over so long ago they barely catch the light.
Others are thicker, raised, the kind that didn’t heal clean.
A lot of them are hidden by tattoos, which I’m now realizing might be the point.
The ink doesn’t just decorate his skin. It covers it.
It tells a story over the top of another story, and the one underneath is the one I’m not supposed to see.
I trace one with my eyes, a pale line that runs along his ribs and disappears under the dark swirl of ink on his side. What did that? A knife? Something worse? How old was he? Was he scared?
I don’t ask. He’s asleep, though even if he wasn’t, I get the feeling those aren’t questions he’d answer. But I lie here, looking at the map of him, all these marks and all this ink, and I think about how much a body can go through and still be warm and breathing and holding someone.
It’s like a light switching on in a room I forgot I had. I see something. Not the scars, exactly, but the idea of them. Lines hidden under other lines. A painting that’s two paintings at once. Something beautiful on the surface with something harder underneath.
I need my paints.
The need hits me so hard I’m moving before I’ve thought it through, sliding out from under his arm as carefully as I can manage.
He shifts but doesn’t wake up, and I hold my breath until he settles.
Then I’m padding across the apartment barefoot, grabbing my palette, squeezing paint straight from the tubes without mixing first because the colors are already in my head, and I need to get them down before they leave.
I set a fresh canvas on the easel and start blocking in shapes. Big ones first, dark underneath, layers of warmth on top. It’s not an ocean this time. It’s something else. I don’t know what yet. I just know it has to be dark at the bottom and lit from inside.
I don’t know how long I’ve been painting when I hear, “You always work like that?”
I jump so hard I nearly flick paint across the room. He’s standing in the doorway to the bedroom, watching me, up against the doorframe with his arms folded over his bare torso. He doesn’t look alarmed or confused. He looks like he’s been watching for a while and is perfectly fine with the view.
I’m okay with the view from where I’m standing, for the record. The man could model boxer briefs for a living.
“Like what?” I ask, pressing a hand to my chest, where my heart is trying to escape.
“Like the building’s on fire and the painting is the only thing worth saving.”
I look down at myself. There’s paint on my hands and my arms and somehow my left knee.
The T-shirt is officially a lost cause. “It’s kind of an emergency situation when an idea shows up,” I explain.
“If I don’t get it down fast, it leaves.
And then I’m just standing here holding a brush like an idiot. ”
He nods slowly, like it makes sense. “What’s this one?”
“I’m not sure yet.” I look at the canvas, frowning, tipping my head to the side.
“Something about layers. Things underneath other things.” I glance at him and then away again, fast, because I’m not about to tell him he’s the inspiration.
Not yet. Maybe not ever. “Eventually, it’ll tell me what it is. They usually do.”
He crosses the room in two long strides before settling on the sofa, his arms spread across the back. He’s like a study in contrast, something beautiful set against the drab upholstery surrounding him, looking relaxed but also slightly dangerous in a muscular, sexy kind of way.
“How long have you been painting?” he asks.
“Since I was little.” I go back to work, talking as I go.
“My grandma had all these art books. Big ones, the kind with glossy pages. I used to sit on the floor and stare at them for hours.” It occurs to me this is the easiest conversation I’ve ever had.
There’s something about having my hands busy that loosens the rest of me.
The words come out without all the usual filtering and second-guessing.
Is this too much? Am I being weird? Does he actually care, or is he just waiting for me to stop talking? None of that is present.
“Where’s your grandma now?” he asks.
“She passed two years ago.” I mix a darker shade and lay it into the bottom left corner. “It was just me and her for a long time. I was five when my parents died. Car accident. We were on a trip at the time.”
The brush keeps moving. It’s easier to say these things when the brush keeps moving.
“I was in the back seat, but I don’t remember anything about it,” I add, because I don’t want him to think I’m going for sympathy.
I’m not. It’s just the truth. “I think I was too young to hold onto much of anything about them, honestly. But I have impressions. Warmth. I know they loved me. I think I can remember my mom’s laugh, but I might be making it up. ”
I glance away from the canvas to find him watching me intently. Am I talking too much? It doesn’t seem like he minds. There’s no judgment on his face. I see that much clearly.
“Grandma raised me after that,” I continue.
“She was careful. About everything. She was the kind of woman who would wake up in the middle of the night to make sure she locked the door, even though she had already locked it two or three times. She didn’t trust the weather forecast and thought leaving the house was basically asking for trouble. ”
I stop myself because I can feel the edges of something I don’t usually go into.
The way Grandma loved me, which was real and enormous, and the way that love came wrapped in a kind of fear that got into everything.
I told your parents to be careful. They didn’t listen.
Look what happened. She said it so often it became part of the walls. Part of me.
“Anyway.” I shrug, aiming for casual. “She did her best. I just think her best came with a lot of fear mixed in.”
When I glance over again, Tristan’s expression has changed. The softness is gone, replaced by something heavier. Quieter. Like he’s absorbing what I said and sorting it out in his head.
“I’m sorry,” he says. That’s it. He doesn’t add anything to those two words. Nothing about how hard it must’ve been or how he can’t imagine. Just I’m sorry, and it means more coming from him than a whole speech would from anyone else.
“It’s fine. It was a long time ago.” I turn back to the canvas because if I keep looking at his face while it’s doing that, I’m going to feel things I have no business feeling. “What about you? Any tragic backstory I should know about?”
“No.”
Okay, then.
I add a streak of warmth to the middle of the canvas and try a different angle. “Are you on Facebook or anything? Instagram?”
“No.”
“Nothing? Nothing at all?”
“I don’t do social media.”
I nod like that’s a totally normal thing for a man under thirty to say.
Maybe it is, though. Maybe he’s just private.
One of those people who think social media rots your brain, which is probably fair.
I’ve lost entire evenings to strangers arguing about nothing in comment sections, so I should know.
But it sits funny, for some reason. The pile of things I don’t know about him is already approaching Mt.
Everest territory, and this is just one more thing to add on top.
He’s in personal security and carries scars he hid under tattoos.
Random people are afraid of him in restaurants.
When his phone buzzes, he leaves, no matter what’s happening. Like whoever was calling owns him.
I want to ask more, I really do. But I’ve spent enough time with my own walls up around me to know what it looks like when someone has theirs up. Tristan’s are made of something thicker than drywall.
“You’re the first person who’s ever asked me this stuff, you know.
” I focus on a tricky bit near the center of the canvas where two colors are fighting each other.
“In real life, I mean. I have friends online. I talk to people in forums and group chats and stuff. But in person?” I shake my head.
“You’re kind of... it. And you actually seem like you care about the answers, which is new. ”
I feel his eyes boring holes into the side of my head. “I do care,” he murmurs. It’s so simple and so sure that I believe him completely.
Then his phone buzzes.
I don’t even have to look. I hear it vibrating on the nightstand in the bedroom, where he left it, and I watch the shift happen in real time from the corner of my eye. The softness in his body drains away like water through a crack. His jaw tightens and his eyes go flat.
I don’t say anything when he gets up. I go back to my painting, much too aware of the sound of him getting dressed.
Whoever his boss is, they have terrible timing.
I guess I should just be grateful we had this time together.
Besides, I get the feeling it’s not the last time. It better not be, anyway.
When he reappears, he’s fully dressed, like he put on a suit of armor. He’s adjusting his cuffs when I hold up my paintbrush like a stop sign. “Before you go, I’m not letting you walk out of here a second time without a way to reach you. Give me your number. Please,” I add as a last-second thought.
He almost smiles. My phone is on the counter, and he picks it up, brings it to me so I can unlock it, then adds a new contact under his name.
I look at it, then at him. Tristan Gray. As if I’d get him mixed up with other Tristans, so he wanted to be sure.
He even kisses me at the door—shorter than last time, but just as panty-melting. My legs are trembling a little by the time his footsteps fade as he trots down the stairs.
Tristan Gray.
I’ve spent enough of my life online to be pretty good at detective work.
I set the palette aside for now and open my laptop instead.
I search his phone number, hoping a reverse lookup will help, but I end up with nothing.
I try image searches of tattoo designs like his, which is a stretch, but I’m nothing if not thorough when I’m anxious. And I’m always anxious.
Nothing. He’s not anywhere. No results, no profiles, no mentions. It’s like he doesn’t exist.
I close the laptop and look at Socks, who’s been watching this whole thing from his cushion with his usual judgmental expression. “He’s hiding something,” I tell him.
He twitches his nose.
“I know,” I agree. “I like him anyway. That’s the problem.”
Then I go back to the painting because it’s the only thing that makes sense right now. The dark layers at the bottom are starting to look like something. The warm ones on top are fighting to cover them.
It’s two paintings at once. I just don’t know which one is real yet.