Chapter Fifty-Nine #2
I framed it myself, like it was a holy masterpiece destined for the grandest church in all of Europe. Like each long-faded line was a tender fragment of my heart.
And now it’s hanging in the farthest corner of the garden.
Unlike all the other sketches he made of me, I’m smiling in this one.
He goes marble at the sight of it, cold and still. I know what he sees—how unsettling it must be. No one can look at these drawings and not see that the artist loved the subject. I can’t look at this and not realize he once loved me.
I dig my nails into my palms, willing my anxiety down into the smallest, darkest place in me. It’s going to be fine. Bargain or not, he still has an uncanny memory. He’s going to remember. He has to.
He touches his signature with a single finger. “I drew this.”
It’s not a question, but I answer anyway. “Yes.”
His eyes flicker to me. “Of you.”
Tears fill my eyes. “Yes.”
A minute passes, a century. My entire world narrows to that furrowed line on his brow.
He’s looking less like someone on the verge of being assailed by a feral creature, and more like the scholar I know and love, the boy who once asked me in complete seriousness if centaurs and insects were the same.
Do you remember? Please remember…
My chest is airless, entirely made of hope. I draw up beside him and run my finger along the fading black mark on his wrist.
“You saved my life, but there was a cost.” Not only my life, but my very soul.
Would I be here, putting my wild, beating heart in his hands if not for him?
Would I have taken down the walls I built to keep everyone out even as they imprisoned me like a tomb?
Lupa told me to stay alive, but I wasn’t living until I let him in.
Even if he never remembers me, I’ll never forget him.
“A cost.” His breath is steady and even, nothing like the riot in me. Does it quicken at my touch? Does his body know me even if his heart can’t? A flower doesn’t know why it unfurls for the sun. Something within it tells it to grow toward the light.
There’s still a seed inside him that calls us together, I’m certain of it.
He catches my wrist in his elegant hand. I shudder as the cuff of my sleeve rises, baring my skin and the first of the black marks marching up my arms. He makes a bitten-off sound at the sight of them.
“Virgil.” His voice is warm, breathless. It curls around my name like a quilt, like home. “Virgil.” He brushes back my overlong hair, traces his thumb under my jaw, where my pulse leaps.
My tears are already falling, but I must ask; I have to make sure he’s here before I let myself fall again. “Do you remember the last animal I painted with you?”
He presses his brow to mine. His laughter is a warm rain against my face, a stormy summer night spent tangled on a floor overlooking the sky. “That dog was a millipede. You’ll never change my mind.”
I can’t tell if it’s a sob or a laugh that splits me wide open, but I’m not in pieces for long. Our arms tangle, my head goes to the divot of his neck, and he’s holding me together. Each gasping breath feels like the first one I ever took.
“You remember.”
He tucks a black curl behind my ear, thumb lingering on my cheekbone, brushing away the tears I can’t stop shedding. “Not fully, but bits and pieces. I know—I know you were important to me.”
His dark, shining eyes are careful, but in them I also see softness. He hardly remembers who I am, but he trusts me. He knows me.
He deserves the truth even if it feels like too much. “Then know that I love you, Leonardo. I loved you for years and was too lonely to know it. If you’ll allow it—if it’s not too late—I want to earn your love again.”
He blinks, then smiles, a slow, sly smirk I’ve seen a thousand times before.
“Virgil.” Cristo santo, will there ever be a day when my name in his mouth doesn’t set every one of my nerves on fire?
I hope not. I don’t think so. I’ll burn for him until I’m ash.
“How can it be too late already? We’ve only just met. ”
I’ve spent so much of the year dwelling on my death, wondering what its cause would be.
I never expected it could be sheer, heartrending joy.
I push up onto my toes and kiss him.
He tastes like chestnuts. And honey. A cake, if I’m being honest, and all at once, I remember the feast I asked the servants to lay out inside.
“Did you know,” Leonardo says, “there’s people watching us?”
I turn and gasp. The spying scoundrels! My brothers and sister watching us from the third-floor windows even though I asked them not to. Beneath them on the second floor, Mamma, already weeping. She waves tentatively, clutching a handkerchief.
“My family.” I pause, worrying I’m overwhelming him, and decide to leap in anyway. “They’d like to be yours, too, if you’d let them?”
He makes a soft sound, two fingers touching the place where I’ve kissed him. “I’ve always wanted a younger sibling.”
“I know, caro, I know.” My tears well up again.
There’s an ocean of feeling inside me, its shores hidden on distant horizons.
I don’t know how this will go. I don’t know if he’ll want to stay at Casa delle Volpi or leave, but I believe there’ll be time enough for everything.
To remember our history, to make the dreams we talked about real enough to touch.
I have him here, and that’s all I want for now.
Niccolo is keeping everything else I need safe: a battered drawing of two foxes, a red-leather-bound copy of Dante’s Inferno, and a little vial filled with gold.
“Can… we go inside? I’d like to meet them.” Slowly, tentatively, he laces his fingers through mine. As if testing a lost key on a forgotten door. “I want to remember this old life of mine.”
I squeeze his hand tightly, so he knows he belongs. “ ’Tis not old. It’s barely started.”