Chapter Thirteen
NOW
‘You want me to stay in Paris. With you. For a week. Visiting the places that Earl painted,’ I state as the piano hammers out a crescendo in the background.
It’s not how it’s meant to be, Emmett and I in a place like this. A place that’s quaint, refined, distinctly unwindswept. It’s not how we’ve ever been.
We’re messy and ill-defined. We don’t just come out and say what we want from the other. We tiptoe around it for years instead.
‘Give me until Friday. Look…’ He pauses and pushes his hair back, and I think that this, this is more familiar ground, with neither of us exactly able to say what it is that we want. ‘I’ve been working on this.’
‘What is this? Working with who?’
‘Communicating. I’ve been having therapy.’
‘That’s good, Emmett. I’m pleased for you.’ I say the words and will them to be true. I am pleased for him. I just wish that things were different.
‘I miss you, Luna,’ he tells me, and I’m taken aback.
He catches my eye and I shake my head, trapped somewhere between awe and fear and confusion.
Sometimes I think I hate him, but not for the fact that he left me.
I deserved that, since I lied to him. What I hate is the fact that I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life until he left.
I hate that I’ve never been as happy since, that the world has never again felt so colourful.
But then at other times, I think that loving Emmett was so intense and lonely that I half prefer the duller tones that I live with now. Hate is exhausting.
‘Emmett. I—’
He cuts me off. ‘I should have reached out before now but I needed, I don’t know, time. So much has changed but you’ve always been my best friend, Luna. Always.’
He doesn’t look away.
I’m rendered mute by the directness of his words. Honesty always came at a cost with Emmett in the past. But not now, it seems.
‘Let’s visit these places, the ones Earl painted. It just feels, I don’t know… right.’
I should say no. There’s no point in getting close to Emmett again; there’s no point in getting close to anyone. It only makes it worse when it has to end.
But I’ve never had any control when it came to Emmett.
I’ve disliked myself more than him for it.
How I just waited for him back then, how I’d have done absolutely anything for him.
It makes me feel so weak. So I should gain some of the upper ground here, tell him that I have my own plans for tomorrow and then I’m going home.
That I’m worried that getting close to him and then losing him again would destroy me.
But then maybe humans have never been very good at doing the things that are good for them.
Because despite how on edge I feel, how much I’ll suffer for this later, how much of the truth I’m hiding from him right at this second, I do want to spend more time together.
I’m a glutton and time with Emmett is my punishment.
‘How would it work, logistically?’ I ask.
Emmett smiles. ‘Well, I do know the city pretty well.’
‘Course you do.’
‘We’d visit the places from his final collection in Paris.
There must be a reason that the last painting he ever painted, the one of you, is the only painting he ever wrote a message in.
I think it was for you. All these places meant something to him and Sebastian.
Maybe it’ll answer some questions and I don’t know, settle some things. For us.’
I drum my fingernails on the table. The truth is, the thought of trekking around Paris, visiting the places that Earl painted, well, it terrifies me.
Knowing that he loved Sebastian so much that he painted him decades later is a frightening thought.
I don’t want to believe in a love like that.
It’s devastating, knowing that a love so potent it endured and endured exists in the world.
Imagine knowing that and yet never having it.
‘I just don’t know if I can, Emmett. I’m meant to be focusing on my blog. I’m mid mini-series I can’t let my followers down. We’re a very close community.’
‘What’s the mini-series on?’
‘Earl’s paintings,’ I answer guiltily, knowing exactly how Emmett will respond to the news.
‘Well, that’s perfect then,’ he promises. ‘We can go back to MAM and film there and then see the places in real life.’
I pretend to take some more thinking time. It’s a small win, infinitesimal really, but when you lose as often as I do, you have to take what you can get.
‘If you give me until Friday, I’ll make sure that you have the best mini-break in Paris that ever there was. In Earl’s honour. We can do it together,’ he finishes.
It’s a slightly painful reminder of what we’d promised each other every summer, when we were a ‘we’ and not a ‘he and I’.
I’ve always been good at hiding my heartache from Emmett.
I’m torn. On the one hand, I want to tell Emmett to please leave.
That no one gets to steamroll straight back into my life and send me on some art-inspired quest. But I also want to honour Earl’s memory, I want to see these places.
I, too, have so many unanswered questions.
‘Okay fine,’ I say, already feeling like something is unravelling – I just don’t know what. ‘One mini-break slash quest in Paris. For Earl.’
‘One perfect mini-break, quest in Paris, for Earl,’ he agrees, holding out his hand. I reach over to shake it and I’m struck by how warm and firm his grip is. It’s like everything about modern Emmett. Assured. ‘Now,’ he says, after quite a substantial shake, ‘are you having dessert?’
Scrolling through the comments underneath my Art of Dying post from earlier, I’m not surprised to see that a ton of my regulars have figured out that I’m in the new Earl Spencer painting.
I should have told them right away, since not much gets past the Deathers (well, in the very niche world of death art), but I’d planned to blog live from the MAM until I got accosted there.
I do have twenty-five new followers though.
DarthPainter: Deathers! Does it look like our leader might have been keeping something from us…
Darth is my favourite follower. He joined a couple of months ago and he’s always just so supportive.
He has a link to the MAM exhibit under his comment and there are seventeen more comments discussing it underneath his.
An argument has broken out between followers who think I shouldn’t have kept them in the dark and those who think I have a right to privacy. Darth is defending me, as usual.
VincentVanGetOutOfHere: I knew Luna was famous!
ColourMeIntrigued: Do we think it’s really her though?
DarthPainter: Why are you always so quick with the conspiracy theories? It’s obviously Luna. The face, the hair. Course it’s her.
TheRealPicasso: I’ve been researching and Earl Spencer lived in Bamburgh, Northumberland. I cross-referenced some stills from Luna’s earlier video blogs, and I think she might live there too.
Under this comment, there are some screenshots from the background of earlier vlogs, taken out of my front-room window. Behind me, they’ve cross-referenced the picture with a shot of the centre of Bamburgh. You can see the corner of the castle in the background.
There’s nothing an internet sleuth can’t find out. Once, they figured out that I’m left-handed because I had an ink stain on my left thumb. It’s like the Wild West out there.
I settle on my balcony. It’s dark, but the light from the hotel room lights me up enough. Normally, I do a mixture of written and video blogs, but my hands feel weirdly stiff, so I’ll be videoing all the way in Paris. I hit record.
‘Good evening, Deathers! And welcome, new followers to the Art of Dying, the channel that connects you, the slightly morbid public, with works of art concerned with death and dying. I can see already that some of you have figured me out. You’re right, yours truly does feature in the newly discovered painting by Earl Josef Spencer.
Course it’s a much younger version of me. ’
I hit pause while I have a coughing fit, trying to ignore how decidedly not well I feel.
‘It’s a bit freaky to think that someone’s had a painting of you hanging in their living room for two decades. Mona Lisa has my sympathies. But now you know why I want to do a deep dive into Spencer’s work.’
Another pause, another coughing fit.
‘So I’m planning to visit the sites that feature in Earl’s final works and seeing if I can uncover some death art along the way. But for now, Deathers, I’ll say goodnight. Tomorrow, my quest begins.’
I listen to the clips and edit them together. My voice is raspy from so much talking today, but it’s good enough, so I add a link and hit post.
There are a million messages from Mae, and I’m still feeling tight-chested and tanked up on adrenaline, so once I’m done, I call her.
‘I’ve agreed to spend the rest of the week with Emmett.’
‘And a very good evening to you too, dear sister. It’s nice to hear from you, but a message at some point in the last four hours would have been appreciated, you know.’
I hear someone calling out to her in the background.
‘Have you literally broken off mid-fling to come to answer the phone and lecture me?’
‘No, and anyway, it’s not a fling. It’s less fling, more regular hook-up now.’ I hear mumbling in the background. ‘You’re welcome, babe.’
‘I presume that wasn’t for me?’ I ask.
‘No, that was for… the person staying here.’
It’s not like Mae to be cagey about her love life. There’s too much going on to worry about that, though.
‘You know, we don’t need to talk right now.’
‘I think we should since this is big news indeed. You’re off gallivanting around Paris! Proud of you, sis.’
‘I couldn’t gallivant even if I wanted to.’ I’m trying to be funny, but I just sound sad.
We’re both quiet for a minute then. Just listening to each other breathe down the phone. It’s probably a bit weird.
‘You haven’t told him, then?’ Mae asks.
‘He doesn’t need to know.’
‘It’s just like last time.’
‘It isn’t,’ I say, trying to convince myself as much as Mae because, really, so many things feel exactly the same.