7. Nova
— ? —
Nova
Week Four
I’ve started painting again.
Not anything good, not yet. My wrist is still healing, still wrapped in a lighter bandage now that the fracture is knitting together, and my hand shakes if I hold the brush too long. But I’ve started.
The first day, I just opened the tubes of paint. Squeezed colors onto the palette. Watched them sit there, vibrant and waiting, while I remembered what it felt like to create something.
The second day, I made a single brushstroke. One line of cerulean blue across a blank canvas. It wasn’t anything - wasn’t for anything - but my hand remembered the motion, and something in my chest unlocked.
The third day, I painted for an hour. Shapes without meaning. Colors without purpose. My hand cramped and my wrist ached and I had to stop, but when I set down the brush, I was crying.
Not from pain. From relief.
She didn’t take this from me, I thought, staring at the mess of color on the canvas. She took everything else, but she didn’t take this.
Now it’s been a week, and I paint every afternoon while Luca is working. The sitting room has become my studio: easel by the window, paints spread across a table I’ve claimed, turpentine smell lingering in the air. The staff have learned not to clean in here. Luca has learned not to interrupt.
But sometimes I catch him watching.
He thinks I don’t notice. He pauses in the doorway on his way to somewhere else, and he stands there for a moment, silent, his eyes on me. I can feel his gaze like a physical weight - on my hands, my face, the curve of my back as I lean toward the canvas. I can feel the heat of it, the intensity.
I always wait until he leaves before I let myself react.
Before I let myself press my thighs together and breathe through the want.
***
It’s late afternoon when I finally stop for the day.
My wrist is throbbing - I’ve pushed too hard, I know, but I couldn’t help it. The painting is actually becoming something now, shapes coalescing into meaning, and I didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to lose the thread.
I clean my brushes. Cover the canvas. Wipe my hands on a rag that’s already stiff with dried paint.
I should go back to my room. Should wash up, change for dinner, compose myself before I have to sit across from Luca and pretend I’m not thinking about his hands.
Instead, I find myself wandering.
The mansion is quiet at this hour. The staff are in the kitchens preparing dinner. Luca is in his study, doing whatever it is he does behind that closed door - business, he says, but I’ve started to suspect it’s something more. Something to do with Vivienne. Something to do with me.
I haven’t asked. I’m not sure I want to know.
My feet carry me down corridors I’ve walked before, past rooms I’ve already explored. I’m not looking for anything specific - just moving, just existing in this beautiful dark house that’s started to feel like home.
And then I hear the water.
I stop.
The sound is coming from behind a door I’ve passed a dozen times without opening. A door like any other door in this wing - dark wood, iron handle, unremarkable. But behind it, unmistakably, is the sound of running water.
A shower.
His shower.
I should walk away. Should turn around and go back to my room and pretend I never heard anything. Should definitely not stand here with my heart pounding and my skin flushing and my imagination running wild with images I have no right to be imagining.
The door is cracked open.
Just a sliver. Just enough to see steam curling into the hallway, to smell the familiar scent of his soap mixed with something headier, darker.
Walk away, Nova.
Walk away right now.
I don’t walk away.
I step closer. Close enough to see through the crack. Close enough to see-
Oh God.
The bathroom is large, all dark marble and brass fixtures, dominated by a glass-walled shower that takes up an entire corner. And inside the shower, his back to me, is Luca.
He’s naked.
Of course he’s naked, he’s in the shower, what did you expect-
But knowing and seeing are different things.
The water streams down his back, tracing the lines of muscle, the valleys of his spine.
He’s broader than I realized. Broader than he looks in clothes, his shoulders wide enough to block out the light, his back tapering to a narrow waist. The tattoos I’ve traced in the dark are vivid in the light, covering his shoulders, his arms, trailing down his spine in patterns I’ve never fully seen.
He has scars.
More than I knew. More than I’ve felt with my fingertips in the dark.
They cross his back in pale lines - some thin, some thick, some that look like they must have hurt unbearably.
The marks of violence, I realize. The marks of a childhood that was probably as brutal as mine, just in different ways.
His mother did that to him, I think, and rage blooms hot in my chest. His mother marked him the same way she marked me.
He shifts under the spray, and I catch a glimpse of his profile.
His eyes are closed. His head is tipped back, letting the water stream over his face.
His jaw is slack with something that looks like exhaustion, like relief, like a man who carries the weight of the world and only sets it down in here.
His hand moves.
It takes me a moment to realize what I’m seeing. His arm is braced against the tile wall, his head bowed, and his other hand-
His other hand is wrapped around himself.
Oh.
Oh God.
I should look away. I should definitely look away. This is private, this is intimate, this is something I have absolutely no right to be watching-
I don’t look away.
I watch his hand move, slow and deliberate. Watch the muscles in his back tense and flex. Watch his head drop forward, water streaming down his face, his breath coming harder now.
My own breath is coming harder too. My skin is too tight, too hot, every nerve ending alive and screaming. Between my legs, a pulse has started - insistent, demanding, impossible to ignore.
This is wrong, I think. This is so wrong.
But I can’t stop watching.
His rhythm changes. Faster now, more urgent. His free hand balls into a fist against the tile, and I see his shoulders hunch, see the tension coiling in his spine, see-
“Nova.”
The word is guttural. Wrecked.
My name.
He’s saying my name.
The realization hits me like a physical blow. He’s in the shower, touching himself, thinking about me. My name on his lips while his hand moves, while his body tenses, while he chases something I could give him if I just-
His head lifts.
For one frozen moment, our eyes meet in the mirror over the sink. He can see me. Of course he can see me, I’m standing in the doorway like an idiot, watching him with my mouth open and my face flushed and my want written across every inch of me.
He doesn’t stop.
His hand keeps moving. His eyes stay locked on mine. And something in his expression shifts from shock to something else - something dark, something hungry, something that makes my knees go weak.
He wants me to watch.
I should leave. I should apologize and flee and never speak of this again. I should-
I stay.
I stay, and I watch, and I let him see me watching. Let him see the flush spreading down my neck, the way my lips are parted, the way my hand has come up to press against my chest like I can slow my pounding heart.
His rhythm falters. His jaw clenches. His eyes, dark and burning and absolutely ruined, never leave mine.
“Stay,” he says, and it’s a command and a plea and something in between.
I stay.
I watch him come apart.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen - the way his body bows, the way his throat works, the way his eyes finally close and my name tears out of him again, raw and desperate and mine.
I watch the tension drain out of him, watch his hand slow, watch his forehead press against the cool tile as he shudders through the aftermath.
The water keeps running. Steam keeps billowing. And I stand in the doorway, trembling, soaked through with a want so intense it feels like drowning.
He turns.
The full front of him - I see it now. The chest I’ve slept against, the stomach I’ve traced with my fingers, the dark trail of hair leading down to - I force my eyes up. His face. Look at his face.
He’s looking at me like I’m everything he’s ever wanted and everything he knows he shouldn’t have.
“Nova.”
“I should - I should go-”
“Don’t.”
I freeze with my hand on the doorframe.
He steps out of the shower. Doesn’t reach for a towel. Just stands there, water streaming down his body, completely bare, making no move to cover himself.
“You watched,” he says.
“I didn’t mean to - I just - I heard-”
“You watched.” He takes a step toward me. Then another. “And you didn’t leave.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Because I wanted to see. Because I’ve been dying to see. Because every night I lie in your arms and feel you hard against me and I think about what would happen if I just reached down and-
“I don’t know.”
“Liar.”
He’s close now. Close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off his wet skin. Close enough that if I reached out, I could touch him.
I don’t reach out.
I don’t move at all.
“I could see you in the mirror,” he says quietly. “The whole time. I knew you were there.”
“You-”
“And I didn’t stop.”
My breath catches. “Why not?”
Something flickers in his dark eyes. “Because I’ve spent a month sleeping next to you without touching you the way I want to.
Because I’m going out of my mind. Because every time you trace my tattoos in the dark, every time you press your body against mine and fall asleep, I lie there for hours thinking about all the things I’d do to you if you’d let me. ”
“Luca-”
“So when I looked up and saw you watching-” He exhales, shaky. “I decided to let you see. To let you see what you do to me. What you’ve been doing to me since the first moment I saw you laugh at my brother’s table with paint on your fingers.”