Chapter Seventeen #2
Gabriel walks me slowly through the pieces that are already in place.
Bold abstract work in one room. Figurative oil portraits in another. A triptych of coastline studies that makes my chest ache because the blues are almost the exact shade of the water outside.
"They open in a few days," he says. "Small show. New artists, one established name to keep collectors feeling superior."
I smile despite myself.
Then he turns and looks at me in full.
"You should think about painting for a showing."
I go very still.
The words ring in me harder than they should.
Because this is the thing I've been circling without daring to touch. The thought under every brushstroke since yesterday. The possibility under the possibility.
He sees it immediately.
"I am not asking for an answer today," he says. "I am asking you to think seriously."
My eyes drop to the canvas tucked against my side.
To the man in the suit.
To the life I once thought I might have. Galleries. Paintings. Openings. A name printed on a card beside my work instead of buried in old portfolios in a storage unit I couldn't bear to revisit.
"I don't know if I can," I say quietly.
"Yes, you do," Gabriel says. "What you don't know is whether you'll allow yourself to."
That one takes the air right out of me.
Because again, annoyingly, he's right.
The want is there.
It's been there.
It's in my fingers. In the ache in my wrist. In the way I keep looking around this gallery with the terrible, hungry feeling of recognition.
But the guilt is there too.
My mother died coming home from my first gallery opening. My father's mind shattered in the same accident. The last time my art mattered publicly, it felt like it cost me everything.
How do you go back to something after that and not feel like you're tempting fate?
"I can feel it," I admit, voice low. "The need to paint.
To keep going. To make more. To..." I laugh once under my breath, shaky around the edges.
"To show them, maybe. But the guilt still sits there every time I think about it.
Like if I let myself want this again, I'm betraying everything that happened. "
Gabriel's expression softens, losing some of its teasing ease.
"You are not responsible for surviving," he says quietly. "And you are not dishonoring grief by making something beautiful with the life you still have."
That lands deep.
Too deep.
I look away before he can see the sudden sting in my eyes.
We stay another half hour. He shows me one room twice. I ask about paper stock, framing, lighting, all the things that live in the artist part of my brain like they never really left. By the time I step back into the late afternoon sun, something in me feels almost electric. Tender. Awake.
And terrified.
When I make it back to the villa, the sun has already gone honey-soft over the water.
It's later than I meant to stay out.
I come through the kitchen doors with the satchel hanging against my hip and my canvas tucked carefully inside, and the first thing I see is a silver cover on a plate at the island.
I stop.
There's a folded note propped beside it.
In case you didn't eat.
That's it.
No signature. No flourish. Just Everett in five words.
My chest squeezes.
I glance automatically toward the study. The glass doors are shut.
Through the panes, I can see him inside with his back half turned, phone to his ear, jacket off, sleeves rolled, one hand braced against the desk as he says something sharp and low that sounds serious enough I can't make out the words, only the tension in them.
He's right there.
Visible.
Unreachable.
The shut doors say more than a speech ever could.
I take the plate and note upstairs to the bedroom.
There's sea air drifting in through the cracked terrace doors, and somewhere in the villa below, his voice rises and falls through the muffled barrier of glass.
I sit on the edge of the bed, lift the silver cover, and find grilled fish, vegetables, warm bread, and lemon tucked neatly at the side.
He remembered I'd be hungry.
He ordered dinner anyway.
He left the note instead of making a thing of it.
And somehow, because he's Everett, that small quiet thoughtfulness hits harder than grand gestures ever could.
I eat slowly, bare feet tucked under me, the painting propped against the wall near the dresser where I can't stop glancing at it.
The lonely billionaire.
Gabriel's words won't leave me alone.
Sometimes our art comes out subconsciously. Sometimes it's an emotion. Sometimes it's a feeling. It's almost always something we don't express anywhere else but on a canvas.
I painted Everett.
Not the sea. Not France. Not the women in linen and sunglasses or the curves of old stone streets or the watercolor blues of the Riviera.
Him.
A faceless man at a window with a phone in his hand and loneliness in the line of his back.
And the worst part is, now that I've seen it, I can't unsee what that means.
That he lives in my head.
That he matters enough to come out in paint before I could stop him.
That somewhere under all my practical thinking and contracts and rules and one-year deadlines, some part of me has already started translating him into feeling.
I finish dinner and set the plate aside, then walk to the painting again.
The wet paint has dried enough now that I can touch the edge of the canvas without smudging it.
My finger traces the air just above the line of his shoulder.
Everett behind glass.
Everett in a penthouse.
Everett in the office downstairs, one room away and still somehow impossible to get close to.
The thought slips in quiet and devastating. Maybe I painted him because I recognized him before I was ready to admit it, or because I painted him because I know loneliness when I see it. Or maybe I painted him because I am starting to love the parts of him he doesn't know what to do with.
I close my eyes and let the thought hit me.
Not love.
Not yet.
But something close enough to cast a shadow.
And the shadow has his shape.
The clock on my phone reads 2:47 a.m.
Sleep isn't coming.
I've been staring at the ceiling for what feels like hours, the sheets tangled around my legs, the painting propped against the dresser where I can see it every time I turn my head.
The Lonely Billionaire.
Even in the dark, I know where it is.
Even with my eyes closed, I know what it looks like. And maybe that's the real problem. Not that I painted Everett but that I can't stop thinking about what it means that I did.
I roll onto the other side of the bed out of instinct and find cold sheets. They’re empty.
For one second, I let the disappointment sink in that he left the bed. Then I sit up.
The villa is quiet, though the stillness feels loud in a different way with waking up alone. I tug on the lightweight robe hanging at the end of the bed and step into the hallway barefoot, already assuming I'll find him in the office.
The kitchen is dark except for the blue glow of the appliance panel and the small green light on the espresso machine that never fully turns off.
His phone is on the counter.
I don’t mean to look. I’m not the kind of person who checks someone else’s phone. But the screen lights up as I pass and a notification banner sits across the lock screen bright enough to read from three feet away.
Genevieve Holiday
Everett, I’d like to schedule a call this week to discuss—
The preview cuts off there.
His aunt wants a scheduled meeting, and the fact that it arrived at midnight feels odd. What could seem so pressing that she would text him when she knows we’re in France on our honeymoon. It has to mean business with the trust.
The kind of business that Everett doesn’t talk about. Not with me anyway.
The screen goes dark again.
I keep walking toward the office.
The glass doors are open.
The room is dark.
That unsettles me more than it should.
I head for the terrace instead, sliding one of the doors open just enough to step through.
The night air wraps around me, soft and warm and carrying the scent of salt and stone and chlorine.
Then I see him.
Everett is in the pool.
Not floating. Not drifting. Not doing anything that looks remotely restful.
He's doing laps like he's trying to beat something. His body cuts through the water in hard, punishing strokes, each turn at the edge too sharp, too forceful, like he's angry at the pool for existing.
Or maybe angry at himself.
I stand there for a moment, robe pulled tighter around me, and watch him.
He reaches the far end, turns, and catches sight of me as he comes up.
For a second, he just stays there with his hands braced on the edge, water running down his face and shoulders, chest rising and falling harder than a casual midnight swim should require.
"Sorry," I say quietly. "I thought you were working."
He pushes wet hair back from his forehead. "Couldn't sleep."
"Same."
That gets me a glance. Brief, unreadable, and somehow more exhausted than anything I've seen from him in daylight.
The underwater lights turn the pool an impossible blue. They make him look almost unreal in it—broad shoulders, slick skin, black trunks hanging low on his hips, every hard line of him sharpened by shadow and water.
He moves to the side and hooks one arm over the edge.
I come a little farther onto the terrace, enough that my feet hit the damp stone near the pool.
"You swim a lot?" I ask.
"When I need to shut my head off."
The answer comes too fast to have been fully considered.
I look at him for a second. "Were you a swimmer?"
His gaze shifts past me toward the dark line of the sea beyond the terrace wall. "Yeah."
"Like, recreationally? Or competitively?"
His mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "Competitively."
"How competitively?"
A beat passes.
Then, "Enough that the Olympics were once a possibility."
I blink.
"You almost tried out for the Olympics?"
"Would have," he says, and there's something flat in the words that stops me from sounding too impressed. "At one point."
I take another step closer. "What happened?"
He doesn't answer right away.
His jaw tightens.
Then he looks away and says, "It doesn't matter."
And there it is.
That door. The one I keep walking into.
I cross my arms over my chest, robe loose around my legs in the night breeze. "Are you ever going to tell me anything real about you?"
His eyes come back to me then, and for a second I think I've gone too far.
Or maybe just far enough.
He pushes off from the wall and stands in the shallow end, water sliding down his chest, his expression shuttering back into something calmer. Colder.
Safer.
"This is exactly why we need to be careful."
The words hit with a small, sharp sting.
"Careful?" I repeat. "What does that even mean at this point?"
"It means," he says, voice low and controlled now, "that this is a marriage on paper, Aria. That was always the arrangement."
The night goes very still around us.
I stare at him. "So what, we're having separate honeymoons in the same villa?"
His jaw tightens. "If that's what we need to do."
I wait.
For him to soften it. For him to say this is harder than he thought it would be. For him to admit that something here has changed for him too.
He doesn't.
"It's better for both of us," he says, "if we don't get too comfortable pretending this is anything else."
For one terrible second, I just stand there in my thin robe and bare feet and try to act like those words didn't land exactly where they were meant to.
Then I nod once because I'm not about to beg him for honesty he clearly doesn't want to give me.
"Right," I say. "Of course."
His face doesn't change.
"Goodnight, Aria."
And there it is.
The clean ending.
The dismissal wrapped in control.
The point where I realize the conversation is over, not because we ran out of things to say, but because he decided it was.
So I turn and walk back toward the villa without another word, the robe dampening at the hem from the terrace stone, my pride gathered around me like armor.
I don't look back.
I make it to the open door before I hear the splash behind me.
Then another.
Then the relentless rhythm of his strokes cutting through the water again.
Harder than before, somehow.
As if there's something in him he's trying to punish out of existence.
I slide the terrace door shut behind me and stand there for a second in the dark, hand still on the glass, listening to the muffled sound of him swimming.
Then I go back upstairs alone.