Archive of Our Own ^beta

“It is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures.”
—Salvador Dalí

———

When Rafayel asked you what your favorite painting was, you told him about the melting clocks. You could never remember the name. Only the clocks. One curled around a tree branch. Another on the edge of a table, you think. Or maybe a corner. Some animal, too, some kind of seal, some strange-looking dog. A wasteland. The remains of everything that ever was. Or, maybe, a reminder of what it all will come to be.

He rested his head on your thigh while you sat on his couch and recounted it, somewhere between him declining more guest lectures and reading up on museum restorations, somewhere between the table corner and the dog. He let his eyes fall shut while you put the words together, as if they were worth hanging onto in the first place, and we wrapped his arms around your legs, kept you from melting, while you tried to find a picture. So comfortable with you. He always has been, from the moment he fell off that ladder.

He smiled when you finally showed it to him. Pixels could never measure up to brushstrokes, but the work was recognizable all the same. He named the piece instantly, let the artist roll so smoothly off his tongue. Like he’d been quizzed about it to oblivion, once upon a time, and it had been so burned into the recesses of his brain that to know it was merely second nature. His fingers brushed over your skin so absently, as though that too had become ingrained in him—or perhaps it had been there from the start.

Then he asked, “Why?”

“Why?” you echoed, your fingers in his hair. More second-nature touching.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why is it your favorite?”

“Don’t you usually hate it when people wax poetic about art?” You squinted at him. “You always talk about how people look at your paintings and try too hard to pretend they know what your true feelings are, but it’s for you to know and them to never find out.”

His smile took a turn for the proud. “That’s why I want to hear your thoughts,” he said. “You’re not people. You’ve never been people.”

So you told him. The painting was something you carried from your childhood, where all meaningful things live. You’d seen it in an electronic encyclopedia once, and then again in a store front window. A photo, a likeness. It wasn’t until you found it as a jigsaw puzzle in a doctor’s office that you decided it was one of those things that was meant to be in your life. like a song you hear once too often, or a stranger you meet twice on the subway.

“What about a stranger you meet at a fishing pond and in an art studio?” he teased.

You rolled your eyes. You already knew, both of you, that he was meant to find you.

It found you everywhere in life, that painting with the melting clocks. Haunted you with all its questions. Demanded you know its absurdity and make meaning of it, because art imitates life imitates art. It lived in the periphery of your mind the way only death does. It wanted to be known the way you did. Maybe that was why you liked it. Because it wasn’t the sort of thing you could know everything about in thirty seconds. It wanted time. You wanted time. wanted someone to spend it on you, wile away your hours, stop and stare at you in awe and try to figure you out for themselves.

When you stopped talking, when you finally breathed, Rafayel met your eyes with ease, more pink than blue. His fell to half-lidded, molten and adoring, and he held you a little closer, as if pleading to become a part of you. Golden hours always did suit him so well. He took your hand and wound your fingers together, pressed a longing kiss to the back of it. Like it would kill him if he didn’t do it right then. If he didn’t thank you for letting him know you just a little more.

“Let’s go see it,” he said. He already had his phone out, searching for tickets. Such a globetrotter he was. “In person. I’ll take you.”

You raised an eyebrow at him. “I mention a panting once, and that’s all it takes to get you to skip the country? If only you made Thomas’s job that easy.”

“I am,” he said. Tickets reserved. Flight already booked. Melting eyes on you again. “This counts as working.”

But that was weeks ago. Time flies, after all. That’s all it ever does.

———

The painting with the melting clocks lives in some big-city museum. It’s been there for over a hundred years, despite how the place is all glass and eco-friendly doors now. You might mistake it for a hospital if you don’t pay attention. But here it stands, a museum of modern art, and here you stand inside it, idle on the sides of your feet like you’re waiting for a celebrity. You suppose you are, technically, considering how Rafayel is all tied up at the ticket kiosk. But so far, no one on the streets or the subway has recognized him, and he considers it a blessing. You consider it one that the moment becomes back to you, his hand finds your waist easily. Like something else persisting.

Normally, the painting simply hangs among all the others. So unassuming. As though it doesn’t mean the world to somebody. Today, though, and for the coming months, there is a whole exhibition dedicated to the painter—his life, his legacy, the movement he was part of. At least, that’s what Rafayel tells you, and that’s what the pamphlet in his hand told him.

You don’t go straight for the exhibition. Not right away. Besides, it’s all the way on the sixth floor. You probably should have conceived of the idea that a museum could have six floors’ worth of art. That the world probably holds much more than that, and that perhaps it has lost just as much of it.

So you take your time getting there. It’s a nice change; you never really get the chance to look at art in galleries, to really be with it. Not when half the time you’re up to your ears in Wanderers and the other half has you playing bodyguard in these same places, looking but never watching, never studying. You get to watch Rafayel working during lazy afternoons or in the wee hours of the night sometimes—that much is certain—but there’s a difference between watching someone put all the pieces together and taking in a whole piece for what it is at once. With one, you see everything unfold in real time, right down to the wrinkles in his brow and the rung of the ladder leaving imprints on the soles of his bare feet. You’re not afforded that luxury when you see a framed piece in a gallery, and that seems like a luxury in and of itself. You won’t make haphazard guesses at meaning or processes, but you do wonder, a little. How late the artist stayed up. If they have imprints of their own. What they must have been thinking when they added this stroke here or that shade there.

You quietly meander through the halls and weave through the crowds, and Rafayel lets you lead the way, his hand in yours all the while. He doesn’t like people, after all, but he likes you. He probably knows these paintings and sculptures back to front, maybe even studied them when he attended school here on land, but he humors you all the same. He doesn’t wax on about techniques or composition or historical movements; he’s never been the type to do that, even when it came to preparing talking points for the lectures he deigned to agree to. Instead he huddles close to you, sometimes with his chin on your head, sometimes with his chest pressed to your back, and he asks, “What’re you thinking about?” Not because he thinks you’re zoning out, but because he wants to know how the art honestly makes you feel.

You never know how to put it into words, though. Not like the critics, who’ve spent whole lifetimes crafting theories about colors and intentions they can only really grasp at. All you can do instead is answer him as candidly as he asks. You point to the rounded shape of a storm cloud, or the angry gleam in some imagined god’s eye, and you whisper back, “I wonder why they did that.”

Rafayel’s answer is always the same. A gentle squeeze of the waist, his lips at your ear. “What do you think?”

What you think, really, is that this is where he crosses the line from “lecturer” to “teacher.” Where he stops threading together what everyone else must want to hear, hinging correctness and conduct on it, and lets you form it all on your own. Where he withholds all ideas of right or wrong because such concepts don’t exist to him in a building like this. Because to express oneself with canvas or clay or a sheet of music is never wrong, and neither is its interpretation, if only it is sincere. That’s all it needs to be, is as sincere as the smile on his face when you’ve rambled a bit too long, when you’ve nervously laughed and mumbled something about just reading the plaque instead.

Rafayel and his little worships. Rafayel and his dying devotion. No wonder art means so much to him.

Somewhere on the way up, you find the unassuming mauve wall where the painting once lived. Anyone could come upon it here—in the middle of the week while chaperoning a school field trip, or on some tourist-congested Saturday afternoon while idly trying to make sense of the world, or to get away from it. Someone might stand here sometime, crowded in by other gawkers, other lovers, or all alone. might remain here, in silence, making peace by passing the with time. Instead, you make peace with a beige sign with bold black letters: Temporarily moved upstairs.

It’s funny, though. You haven’t even seen the piece in person yet, and you’re already feeling the weighted melancholy of its absence. Something should be here, you know it, in that rectangle of space that’s two shades lighter than everything else.

(But is it really so small? Or is that only to hold up the center?)

Behind you, Rafayel slides his palm along your forearm, covers your hand with his own and fills the space between your fingers. “Come on,” he says. “I can take a hint.”

You still hit a few other pieces on the way. Some are from those old encyclopedias, you remember; others are little treasures he remembers studying secondhand. Miniatures, calligraphy, textiles. You ask him if any of them made him the artist he is today, and he merely shrugs. Presses his hand to his heart. Whatever he is today, he says, is because of what he keeps in there.

Somehow, you don’t feel the need to ask if you’re in it, too. With the way he holds onto you, looks at you, guides you to cleaner spaces, you’re almost certain that you are it.

When you first set foot in the exhibition hall, you almost forget to breathe. Part of you doesn’t even dare to. It’s the typical blinding white walls and polished wooden floors, just like the rest of the museum, but the array of paintings, splashes of color and shape and meaning in absurdity, make it seem temple-like. Every step inside is a greeting of peace, every work a sermon, its audience a congregation, amen under their tongues with each moment of enlightenment. You feel underdressed all of a sudden, unsure of the rites and the rituals and the worthiness of your presence.

But then Rafayel gives your hand a squeeze, and he tugs you along with the flow of the crowd, and he reminds you without words that art requires no penance in its appreciation. To study it is to make communion, and all the hails and prayers live in the widening of the eyes, twitches of fingers, turns of the stomach. That to question creation is as divine as the act of creating itself.

You learn so much in this little temple hall. Where the artist was born, how he lived and studied his craft. The meaning of his wide eyes and the steep curl of his mustache. That he was more than just the melting clocks and barren wastelands and landscapes that made you squint. He was all about perspective, at once past and future, nature and manmade, spirit and religion, order and chaos, philosophy and nonsense. No one knew where any one part of him ended and the other began, and according to one of the quotations on the wall, he very much preferred it that way. Perhaps he thought everyone should live that way—unpredictably—while they still could.

But there isn’t just whimsy and surprise living in his pieces. There’s religion, too. A dedication to a god and his most devout of followers. You can’t tell, at first glance, if he was truly a believer who felt the need to incorporate his faith into every aspect of his work, or if it was just something he had grown up with, a way of life that had become a force of habit, and so it had wormed its way in whether he wanted it there or not. Perhaps it was a mix of both. Another thing whose bookends were delightfully difficult to trace. Whatever it might be, there is one pattern you can pick up on, at least. one predictable thing.

Almost every single portrait you come across features the same woman. Saintly and devout and hard to mistake for anyone else.

Was she a follower? A historical figure he admired? You don’t want to spoil the answer for yourself, so for a while you avoid the plaques on purpose. To try to make a scavenger hunt of it instead, try to see how many paintings she occupies. How many names she’s had, or how many lives she’s lived. You get so lost in it, in her habit and her eyes and the softness of her hair, that you almost miss exactly what you care for. In fact, it’s Rafayel who has to catch you by the wrist and tug you in the right direction.

“Come on,” he says. “Don’t leave me, now.”

(You couldn’t even if you wanted to.)

What was supposed to be the main attraction now becomes a detour, but the mere presence painting, just feet away, steals your breath all the same—somehow manages to do so before you even get the chance to see it. Naturally, there’s already a swathe of people surrounding it, and so you have to stand idle for some stretches of time, waiting for each drop of the crowd to take their photo and trickle away toward some other part of the exhibit. You wonder who else noticed the woman. You wonder who else is counting her.

It takes longer than it should for you to get to the front. Rafayel’s hand stays in yours all the while, and you find yourself squeezing it tight at the sight of the first melting clock. This is religion, too, you think. A long-awaited pilgrimage in the making. All sense of rite and ritual fly out the window, and you don’t know what to do except stare at it in awe. You can’t even bring yourself to pull out your phone and take a photo like nearly everyone else has. All you can do is regard the faithfulness of the colors, how they persisted through time. Follow the pattern of the clocks and try to figure out what time it really is, if time even matters at all. Wonder how much of it went into a canvas so rich and yet so small (it really is that small), and how many nights the painter must have stayed up thinking about it, working on it, adding finishing touch after finishing touch. Wonder if he ever really considered it done, or if he simply resigned himself to the best he could do. If he, too, might have gone blind if he stared at his own work for too long.

“So what do you think?” Rafayel murmurs in your ear. “Everything you thought it’d be?”

A smile worms its way across your face, warm and affectionate and all sorts of grateful. “Yeah,” you tell him. “Thank you.” It is for more than just bringing you here, and he knows it.

He laughs, and he presses a kiss to your temple, a second, a third. Perhaps such public displays aren’t so bad when no one here will ever see you again. “You almost missed it, cutie. What were you so distracted by?”

You perk to attention, standing on the balls of your feet as you try to peek over the crowd, and you point to another painting across the way. “Her.”

You weave through the crowd together with a sprinkle of politeness—hand in hand and another mannered language on Rafayel’s tongue—and you take him on your scavenger hunt again. You find the woman among the abstract, a model of all sorts, and if you look closely enough, you can find her name embedded in the corners of some of the canvases.

“She’s gorgeous,” you breathe, stopping in front of an enormous portrait. “And she’s… everywhere.” You spare him a glance. “Who is she?”

Rafayel’s gaze drifts over the canvas—a god in all his forms, a gathering of followers, the woman robed and carrying a cross, a blank easel and the painter himself before it, staring directly at you, daring you to blink first. The smile that flits over Rafayel‘s face skews bittersweet and knowing, and he nods toward the plaque. “See for yourself.”

So you lean forward, squinting, and your stomach turns upon reading the first sentence alone. It’s all you need to read for every other painting in the hall to make sense.

Rafayel catches the moment you understand it all, and his eyes fall to half-lidded, wistful, admiring. “‘She was destined to be my Gradiva,’” he says, his voice joining the murmurs of the other guests as they echo off the walls, soft, devoted. “’The one who moves forward, my victory, my wife.’”

———

You think about the painter’s wife every hour of that short trip. In the evenings, when you’re huddled up together in the hotel bed after a shared bath or shower, you scroll through the photos you took at the exhibition—not a single clock in sight—and keep one tab open with an encyclopedia article about this Gradiva. It’s a novel, apparently, about a man who develops an obsession with some bas-relief he saw in an art museum, to the point that he dreams of chasing her, catching up with her across time and space.

You linger on the woman’s features as they’re committed to canvas, wondering which details are hers alone and which are woven from the image of the saint, from the mother of a god. How long did the painter chase her? Did he love her for her walk? Would he call it obsession or delusion, too, or is it merely worship of the highest degree? Is it better to chase or be chased, the divine or the devotee? And is it worth it when you catch them or when you’re caught, and what happens when you’re enlightened? And how do you capture so much of your love in an instant before you die?

Once or twice you nod off with your phone in your hand, and sometimes you stir at the feeling of Rafayel coaxing it onto the charger and kissing you good night. And in the mornings, you find him awake before you but never leaving the bed, instead tracing the curves of your body with his knuckles until you’re conscious enough to grant him permission to commit them to his memory again.

“You want to go back to the museum, don’t you,” he says the last morning there, his touch idly gathering the leftover dampness on the inside of your thigh. As though he could make some shade of it for some future painting. His own kind of chasing. “We could squeeze in one more visit before our flight.”

You shake your head, threading your fingers through his hair. “Once is enough for now. Besides, the less often I go, the more I can enjoy the experience I had.”

“Tell me about it.” There’s still a tiredness in his smile as he rolls onto his side, tangles your body with his own. “Tell me what you liked.”

“It just made me think, I guess.” You tuck his head under your chin, trail your fingers up and down his back, soak in the same quiet of the museum. A temple of your own making this time. “It must be lovely, to be loved like that. You know what I mean?”

“Like what?”

“Like…” Little by little, you let your body sink into the mattress, his skin warm and flush against yours. “It must be so special, to be loved by someone so much that they make art of you so religiously. You become… sacred, and immortal, and so loved by someone that they think everyone should dedicate themselves to you, too. Maybe it’s a lot, but… in a way, it’s kind of romantic, don’t you think? Pure, and unwavering, and…”

Rafayel’s eyes aren’t cold when you meet them, but their usual light is missing. Not in the way it usually fades just before he makes it a point to destroy you, but in the way where even he doesn’t know where it’s gone, and he hopes you’ll help him look for it. “Does it really mean that much to you?” he asks; how worrying it is, that you can hardly hear him.

“It’s not about the paintings,” you tell him. “Honest. It’s just something nice to think about. That someone got to be loved that much by someone else. It’s nice to wonder what it’s like.”

Rafayel watches you the same way he looked at that godly portrait. He takes in every element of you, every stroke that made you, and within moments he’s shifting on top of you, lower, hooking your knees over his shoulders. So delicate. So intentional.

“What are you doing?” you ask, half-amused, twitching in anticipation underneath him.

“Showing you,” he says. The most serious you’ve ever seen him. “Showing you what it’s like.”

He dives in just as your phones light up with the flight reminder.

———

You’ve known Rafayel long enough to gather three things.

The first is that you’ve never seen him paint a portrait. More often than not he submits himself to the abstract, to smears of color that, according to him, never fully capture what he feels but at least get close enough. Sometimes, he allows himself a landscape here and there. An ocean in the throes of a storm, or a seashore basking in the calm thereafter. Perhaps even a grove of wisteria, reminiscent of some spring twilight whose secrets are coveted by all but known by only two. But never a portrait. Never a person. No matter how much someone offers to pay him. Not that it was ever about the money. They’re just not meant for him to capture, or so he says. You’re certain Thomas stopped pushing the issue a long time ago.

The second is that he refuses to wake up at dawn if he can help it. He’s never told you why. Just that there’s something about the sound of the morning bells that he hates.

The third is that there is a door in Mo Art Studio—just one—that Rafayel has never opened. It’s nothing more than a dead-end closet, he says. Whatever is behind it, he claims to have no use for. Whatever is behind it, more like, he refuses to see.

You know old tales like this. The first woman and the forbidden fruit. The girl who married a god and could only accept him into her bed chambers with a blindfold on. The man with six missing wives who gave his keys to the seventh and told her to never unlock the cellar. They made moves toward the curious, the forbidden, and paid dearly for it in differing degrees. (Maybe the painter’s wife would join their ranks, but what could possibly have been forbidden to someone so adored?)

You’re pretty sure Rafayel doesn’t keep dead bodies in his closet, but there must be something equally unsettling in there. You know better than to ask about it directly—ironically, you never get the answers you want that way, and the women who came before you, real or not, are lesson enough. So in the time after the trip to the museum, you forgo most words in favor of studying him. The paintings he works on, the interview and gallery invitations he accepts only because he has a quota to meet for Thomas’s sake, the myriad others he declines. Mostly, you keep a vague count in your head of all the times he glances toward the locked door.

He’s been doing it a lot more ever since you got back. Looking as often as he’s been painting.

“What about Linkon University?” you ask him one afternoon, lazily sifting through another pile of lecture invitations. “This one looks pretty personalized. They said they’d love to have you back.” Your brow furrows. “Back? I didn’t know you taught there. You should’ve told me! who knows? Maybe we crossed paths on campus and didn’t even know it. What kind of fate would that be, huh?”

Rafayel smiles faintly, more at his canvas than at you, from his place atop the ladder. He started a new piece recently, not fully nature but not quite human, either. True to his craft, he plays with the most exquisite hues: worn-out grays and shimmering blues and hints of wrathful red. He’s been putting together the beginnings of an illustrious city, rich with color and architecture. A wonder of the world in its own right. And in spite of the colonies of sea creatures in the background—whales and jellies and schools of fish—it’s actually hard to tell if the city is underwater or not. Maybe he really did draw some inspiration from the exhibition. Or maybe it’s meant to be a warning of some kind. But you don’t have the mind or the eye to decide that.

“What are you thinking of calling it?” you ask. “The city, I mean.”

Rafayel lowers his lashes, pensive, almost nostalgic. Can you really feel such things for places only imagined? “I dunno. I’m stuck between two. I guess.”

“What are they?”

He taps the end of his paintbrush against his chin. “Romirro,” he says. “Or Whalefall.”

Maybe he’s answered your unspoken question for you, with the way your heart twists into inexplicable knots. Maybe he’s teaching you exactly how to miss somewhere you’ve never been. You rise, the lecture invitation still in your grasp, and shuffle toward the painting. It’s well-composed, you think, and you’re sure the pigments are mixed to his version of perfection. You think you can make out shadows of civilians lining the streets; they’re just detailed enough for you to know they’re people, but not so much that he’s breached whatever principles he’s set for himself.

“A forum?” you ask, waving the Linkon University envelope. “Or a lecture?”

He tilts his head. “A ceremony,” he murmurs. “Maybe a wedding.”

“A wedding?” You squint. “But where’s the bride?”

When you glance back, Rafayel is staring at you, unmoving. You know that temple reverence in his eyes; you remember every time you felt it in the museum. His gaze makes a sort of triangle, between you and the closet and the envelope in your hand. It makes a turn for the melancholy, somewhere along the way, and he reaches down to pluck the envelope from your grasp.

“I’m working on it,” he murmurs.

Something about the way he says it, looks at you, sends you suspended in midair and plunging into too-dark depths all at once. It doesn’t scare you as much as the thought that he might not pull you back to land.

You clear your throat, clap air and sea from your lungs alike. No. no, it’s just the smell of the paint that’s getting to you. You ought to open a window. You ought to change the subject.

“You should give the lecture,” you tell him. “I’ll even go with you. It won’t be so bad. It’d be nice to go back anyway, see how everything’s changed. Plus, I’ve never been to one of your lectures before. First time for everything, right?”

Rafayel weighs the envelope in his hand, hums in thought, tucks it underneath him. Without another word, he goes back to his city, his ceremony and its missing bride.

You don’t know what name he decides on in all that quiet. You only know that when you step away from the wide, sea-facing windows, he catches you looking at the locked door.

———

How do you immortalize someone when you don’t have an artistic bone in your body? And does the artist secretly resent you for your lack of skill? Or does he sing your praises for trying at all?

When will it be your turn to become the devoted?

You’ve tried before. Painted hesitantly in studios while he rested his chin on your shoulder and stole the occasional glance at you. Taken a couple of drawing lessons that ended up more heated than you anticipated. You’ve fashioned brushes out of coral, woven vows out of wisteria, dived deep into his world just so his home could bear witness to everything you were to him. Hell, you gave yourself over to every one of his senses in a bathtub, and again in the middle of a snow-topped desert. And still it isn’t enough.

Well. To you it isn’t enough. As far as Rafayel is concerned, all you have to do is stay with him. But that’s such an easy thing to do. There has to be more to it than that.

There has to be more to being the painter’s wife.

You try to mull it over while he works on the painting, or while he prepares some talking points for the lecture. (It’s not for a while, at least a month or so, but it’s easier to procrastinate on one thing when he has others to fall back on.) You study the painted city—Romirro, or Whalefall, or whatever it is he’s decided to call it—and you wonder what it might be like to live there. To be so connected to the sea that to feel the pressure of its depths is little more difficult than breathing. To partake in the ceremony. To be the bride.

He tells you a little bit about it, in between brushstrokes, or while he drapes himself over the edge of the bathtub like one of those painted clocks. says it’s some old Lemurian myth that his kind cling to for a little hope. A classic move of the faithless. It is the same story every time. The Sea God picked his most devout follower, one with the purest, most doubtless heart, to be his bride. The city celebrated them as they entered the temple together. And then, dark. Crumbling. Destruction.

“It’s just a story, you know?” he says. As though that’s supposed to do away with every question it leaves in its wake.

“What happened in the temple?” you ask, leaning forward.

He never looks you in the eye when he answers. But at least he still has more than half a mind to tease. “What, you think I was there or something? How would I know?”

“Well, you know the story better than I do.” If that’s all it really is.

“No one knows that part.” He scrunches his nose at you, water dripping from his hair onto the floor as he sets his sketchbook aside. “Don’t give me that face. It’s true. That’s where it ends. Haven’t you ever read stories like that? Where it’s up to you to decide how it really ended?

You fold your arms. “I don’t like stories like that.”

“I figured you would’ve.” He prods your forehead, smoothing it out with his thumb. “With all that thinking going on up there. At this rate, you’re gonna get wrinkles before I do.”

You don’t think you could imagine Rafayel with wrinkles if you tried. “How do people think it ends?”

Rafayel folds his arms on the edge of the tub, resting his chin on top of them. “Some say the Sea God betrayed his people for his bride. Well, no, not his people. They said he betrayed the sea itself. That the sea was so furious with this choice that all of Lemuria was destroyed, its people scattered, and the Sea God himself banished to the depths of the ocean.” He smiles grimly. “But I guess that’s how people cope with stuff they don’t understand. They find something to blame and channel all their anger into that instead.”

You chew your lip, thinking back to the unfinished painting downstairs. The ceremony, well-prepared but ill-executed. All those painted people never knowing what would become of them. The bride, not even there to witness her own demise. “What do you think happened?”

Rafayel studies the floor, his lashes so low you can almost count the droplets clinging to them. “It’s just a story,” he says. Only half-convincing. “What does it matter what I think happened?”

“I think it matters,” you murmur. You tried to cover the sting, you really did. “I like hearing what you think.”

He shrugs after a while, sinks a little deeper into the cooling bathwater. The mark on his chest flickers before he gets the chance to speak. It almost matches the sudden flash of blue in his eyes, gone as soon as it appeared.

“Do you still think it’d be worth it?” he asks instead. “To be loved that much?”

Your brow furrows, in spite of all his efforts. “What are you talking about?”

“Do you think it’s worth it?” he asks again. “If someone loved you so much they’d turn on everything they knew, just for you? That they’d risk destruction, and betrayal, and anger, all for your sake? That if they ever lost you, they’d stop at nothing just to find you again? Even if it took forever? Even if it took more than one forever?”

You’re no stranger to when he gets like this. It happened that first Ebb Day, when he played you for a fool and showed his own anxious hand in the process, pleading with you to promise you’d never hurt him, leave him. It happened that time in the bathtub, when he gave himself up so easily in the middle of a storm and asked if you’d still like him no matter who he became. It isn’t so hard to reassure him like this, but it haunts you all the Same. There’s just… something in his eyes, in his voice, that draws you in too deep. Makes you think one day you won’t know how to get out.

You don’t know if you ever want to get out.

“Rafayel…” You manage a nervous laugh, a playfully feeble flick of the forehead. “C’mon. You’re talking silly. It’s starting to scare me a little.”

“Would it scare you if I loved you like that?” he asks you. “Isn’t that what you want?”

Oh, you know that look in his eyes. The one where all the light leaves them. The one that at once scares you and pulls you to him, makes you want more of it. of him. A sirens’s stare. You might be teetering-drowning, sitting near the tub like that.

You stumble over your words. Just a little. Like a skip of the wrong brushstroke on canvas. “I just want you to love me however you want to love me.”

In an instant, Rafayel snaps back to himself; all the light returns to him. He studies your face all too closely, shifts until he’s slung himself over the edge of the tub, forehead touching yours, bathwater dripping from his hair. It looks like tear tracks on his cheeks.

“Everything I feel about you,” he says, “is more than humans can do or say or understand.”

A century in the future, you think, someone will paint those words on an exhibit wall, too.

His gaze drops to your lips. “Come in. You’re too far away.”

“You’ve been in there for at least an hour,” you remind him. “The water’s freezing cold.”

“Then I’ll get out.”

He puts little effort into pulling the drain plug, drying off, getting dressed. In fact, all he throws on is his underwear, and despite all you’ve seen you find yourself clearing your throat and looking away. “Let’s go to bed,” you tell him.

Whatever care he forewent for himself, he gives to you. He takes his time undressing you, admiring you from all angles, positions you in front of the mirror so you can watch him do it all. Fingers glide and nails graze over skin as he strips you down to the same bareness, and he winds his arms around you from behind, his face buried deep in the curve of your neck. His touch sinks into your skin, and he soaks in yours in turn, and bit by bit his hands wander up, groping, searching for the beat of your heart.

“Can we just stay up and watch the sunrise together?” It doesn’t even sound like a question. It doesn’t need to be one.

You tumble into bed like that, limbs tangled, bodies drenched in moon and starlight, hardly bothering with the blankets. He touches you so delicately that you’re not sure if the goosebumps are from him or the cold, and every so often he drops a kiss onto your jaw, your collarbone, the hollow of your throat. His weight is comfortable on top of you, but there’s something almost pleading, terrified, about it. Like if he moves an inch you’ll disappear.

This is how he has always wanted to love you.

A confession spills out into the half-dark. You’re too tired to control it, too worried that you haven’t figured out the answer yet. “I wish whatever I felt went beyond humans, too.” You smile, even if weakly, even if he can’t see it. “Sorry. All I’ve got is this dumb human heart.”

Rafayel’s breath hitches, and he nudges your touch away, chases the ghost of it with his lips. He presses them to your ribcage, just under your breast, and his arms snake around you, holding you as close to him as he can manage.

“It’s mine,” he whispers. “It’s my heart.”

He holds you like that, sinking into you, his ear to your chest. Resuscitates it with breath and kiss alike. And when the first light of dawn peeks over the horizon and the city bells toll in the distance, he squeezes you a little tighter. Challenges the bounds of humanity in the other direction.

“Rafayel,” you murmur, your fingers tail-fin-delicate down his spine. “The ceremony. Do you… remember it?”

Rafayel doesn’t answer. He only digs his nails in your skin.

———

He hasn’t touched the painting in a while. The bride is still missing.

At first you think it might just be artist’s block. Nothing he hasn’t experienced before. He’ll push and push and right at the last minute, all the inspiration will strike and he’ll stay up for the lion’s share of the night to finish the thing. But no, it isn’t that. You know what his particular brand of blockage looks like. It’s papers scattered across the studio floor, a book open across the planes of his face while he pretends to nap. It’s making snap-judgment plans for a weekend getaway that turns into a week-long getaway. Sometimes it’s even cooking dinner or tidying the space to avoid the damn thing altogether.

This is not that. All he does nowadays is glance at the canvas, sigh, and walk away.

It isn’t that he bit off more than he can chew this time. Rafayel never does that. Even if it seems like it from the outside, he always manages to make something out of the struggle in the end. No, there’s a weight to him now, each time he comes face-to-face with his work. He has a whole staring contest with the thing. Just sits there, watching it listlessly. Sometimes he manages to pick up a brush. Sometimes he manages to mix a shade. Never both at once. Never more than that.

You’ve offered, in your free time, to sit with him while he works. You’ve even joined him for those staring contests, him at the top of the ladder and you on the bottom rung, just out of reach. You never ask about it; bring it up unprompted, and all the effort crumbles at the foundation. You only invites yourself to the studio, keep him company without words. And the silence drags on. And the painting is never finished.

“Maybe she’s already inside,” you mention, only once. The only time you’ve spoken about it since he left it alone. “Or you could leave it up to interpretation, right? Call it a wedding, paint the groom but not the bride. Or not paint either of them.”

Rafayel says nothing. He only rests his head in his hands, and his knuckles whiten with his grip on his hair.

He’s been staring at you all this time, too. Just like the canvas. Over meals, in the car, when he picks you up from the headquarters. Even when you’re video calling just before bed, you find yourself neck-deep in stretches of silence, rooted to your bed by the marbled gaze on your screen. Whenever you ask him what he’s looking at, he only shakes his head, the closest thing to a smile fighting for presence at the corner of his mouth.

“Just you,” he says. “Just watching you.”

If he can’t bring himself to work on the painting, then at the very least he can start preparing for the lecture he agreed to. He already sent the written approval, so he definitely can’t back out no matter how much he’ll beg you for a last-minute cancellation. And you’ve already promised to hold him accountable for it, to Thomas’s delight and to Rafayel’s chagrin. (Sometimes, if you listen closely enough, you can hear him cursing himself for caving.) He’s not really a note-taker or a planner; even if you’ve never attended any of his lectures, you know that the most he does beforehand is scribble out a few talking points that he’ll somehow spin into an hour of history, culture, legacy.

(You don’t know how he does it. Even when you won that Rookie of the Year award, you had to write out and rehearse every word of your one-minute speech, multiple times over, to the audience of stuffed animals on your bed.)

He says he’ll start working on it. Honest. He just needs a bath to clear his mind and get himself ready. He’ll even take his sketchbook in with him, because somehow his greatest ideas come to him when he’s most relaxed, when he’s not looking for them. When he doesn’t even want them. And if he doesn’t manage to get them down while they’re still in his head, they’ll be lost to time forever. He’s learned that lesson more than once.

So he shuffles off to the bathroom, certain to grace your forehead with a kiss before he disappears, and a stale silence falls over the studio. The kind that might drive anyone mad if it went on for too long.

It would do to open some windows.

(You shouldn’t have opened the windows.)

You just wanted to listen to the ocean. Just wanted a bit of air among the smell of the papers and the paints. That was all you needed. Was that really so wrong? Anyone else would have done it, too. And it was fine at first, really. The scent of the salt, the roll of the tides, it would soothe just about anyone. And did soothe you, until the wind came rushing in. Made the curtains flutter and the sand gather on the sills and oh, worst of all, the papers. Sketches scattering, looping everywhere.

Slipping right under the closet door.

He’ll notice if they’re missing. His life may be full of clutter, but it’s an organized clutter—the kind where he knows exactly where everything is, even if it’s buried in a pile in the corner. So you have no choice, really. Even in spite of twisting stomachs and trembling fingers. But is there really something to be so afraid of in Mo Art Studio? Do you really have reason to be nervous? For God’s sake, you’ve watched him drive a man to insanity with little more than a glass of exclusive wine and all but swore eternal companionship in the rain just moments after; whatever lurks behind the door can’t scare you more than crime and commitment laced together.

For a moment—just one, just before you open the door—you fancy bloody bodies hanging from hooks. A nasty, intrusive little thing. It almost stops you from turning the knob. Almost.

The papers are more important.

The door is oddly silent when it swings open; you’d think after all this time untouched, the hinges would scream in protest. The afternoon light bleeds into the cramped space, age-old dust dancing in the sun’s rays, only to reveal the sketches on the floor and a stack of canvases as tall as you. There are a few more wedged inside, leaning against the stack—probably a surplus in case someday he didn’t have the energy to stretch fresh fabric over the frames himself.

It would all be so unassuming if you didn’t catch the fingerprint stains on the edge of one of them.

You almost don’t notice it at first; it doesn’t really make itself known until you bend down to gather the sketches. But you just so happen to see it, and you just so happen to follow the stains further in. You can’t quite make out the colors of the brushstrokes, but they’re there, in various weights and colors. Another abandoned project. Perhaps, if you take a look, it’ll inspire him to go back to painting. Better yet, it might inspire you to start.

(Every wife makes the same mistake. Destroys herself with her own curiosity. You are no different from them.)

The painting is only half-finished, but the rest of it needs no filling in. The colors come together under the light—feathers of baby blue, threads of gold, white pearls strewn about—all to reveal a portrait, the first you’ve ever seen from him. A woman, staring right at you, a dimmed light in eyes whose shape feels familiar, a shade of skin you’ve seen before, an almost forlorn quirk of the lips that—

That…

It almost… it almost looks like…

No. That can’t be right. No one’s opened this closet in years.

It was just a fluke, you tell yourself, holding your breath and thumbing to the canvas behind it. Even if they’ve all been painted on, there’s no way they all look like that.

But the second one does. And so does the third. And that’s when your stomach starts to drop.

You feel almost manic, shaky hands pulling out piece after piece, all unfinished, all of your face. There you are, some white-clad devotee, laying wisteria at an altar by the sea, a veil spilled over your face. There you are again, a ruler, maybe a bride, staring out some ornate window—maybe passing judgment, maybe forlorn. Again the devotee, studying the sunset, again the bride, clutching a seashell necklace in her hand. You thought the stack was enough and then you look up, and there are the bodies on the hooks, more unfinished, unframed paintings, abandoned brides and followers and witches. Some of them barely started. All of them staring. Waiting. Haunting. All of them tied together with an invisible, investigative thread. All of them a you you’ve never known.

When did Rafayel paint these?

You don’t have it in you to scream. In the face of all these faces, you think you’ve forgotten how to. One of the portraits trembles in your grip—of you, at some seaside, light in your eyes and what must be his name on your lips—and your breath grows heavy in your chest. Like you have to fight to do it.

There he is, in your mind’s eye, draped over the edge of the bathtub again. Blue flashing in his eyes. Isn’t that what you want?

There’s the call of your name, and the canvas and the papers tumble from your hands. You try to catch either of them, both, but it’s too late. The sketches are scattered all over the floor again, and the canvas hits the floor with a thud and a splintering of wood, and you try, you really try to get it together before—

Before Rafayel walks in. Stands there. Stares, horrified, at the open closet door.

You speak first. You have to. “Rafayel,” you say, voice cracking. “What are these?”

His eyes dart. All over the place. “Why?” he asks. “Why did you open that door?”

“What are these, Rafayel?”

He staggers. Takes a step back. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, sounding almost hollow, like a cover-up. “I don’t need them anymore.”

The papers nearly wrinkle in your grip as you gather them again. “Where did they come from? When did they come from?”

“Please,” he says. “Please just close the door.”

“You…” You swallow hard around the lump in your throat. “You’ve been painting me. All this time.”

Neither of you moves. The curtains ruffle in the wind. The closet door is still open.

“Rafayel.” You try again. Someone has to. “Why did you paint these?”

Across the studio, he sways on the spot, the leftover bath towel slipping from his neck and rippling to the floor. He opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out. Not at first. He’s still staring. Not at you. At your likenesses. All of them. Melting together like the clocks.

“I—” He holds his breath for far too long in his chest, and he clenches his hands into fists, opens them again. “All I ever wanted was to have you by my side.” He manages a step forward. “No matter who you were. No matter what you looked like. I just wanted you.”

“Did…” Oh, God. You shouldn’t ask. You shouldn’t want to know. Don’t you know enough? Haven’t you cursed yourself plenty? “Did you paint those brides to look like me because… because you love me, or because… am I…” You grope for the doorknob. Just for something to hold onto. It slips, too clammy. “Am I?”

Rafayel doesn’t say anything as the color drains from his face.

———

H     e     r     e      c     o     m     e     s      t     h     e      b     r     i     d     e     .

———

No amount of absurdity—no clocks or shapes or saintly wives—can scrub the closet from your mind. It’s everywhere you go, the lurking between the pages of post-combat reports or in the corners of the exhibitions you still have to attend because duties come first and horrors come second. The portraits are your monsters under the bed, staring at you every time you close your eyes for more than a few moments, every time the silence falls a little too heavy. Forcing you to imagine without memory.

(Maybe it was out of mercy that the man with six missing wives tried to kill the seventh.)

You can’t remember the last time you got a good night’s sleep. You don’t even know how long it’s been, but it feels like an eternity. How many of those hours have you been awake? How many minutes have you tried to let sleep take you and dreamt, over and over, of daggers and altars and lungs full of seawater? How many times have you felt the throb of your heart a little too viscerally and wondered if it was ever yours to begin with?

What did Rafayel do to you, in another life? In all those other lives? The thought makes your knees buckle, and your stomach turn, and on more than one night you find yourself hugging your toilet bowl, heaving up nothing and waiting for some silent relief to come. It gets so bad that Captain Jenna relieves you of your duties, tells you to get some rest and come back in a few days. Rest is all you need, she says, and you’ll be good as new.

If only.

Sometimes you wonder if this is how Rafayel gets when he focuses too hard on his work. If his eyes go bloodshot before he goes blind, if he can barely hold himself up as the night goes on, if in trying to put himself back together he rips himself to shreds. (Isn’t that how you make art, anyway? By hurting?)

Maybe he needed what you think you need now. A little company. A lot of company.

You’re shaking under the covers—it’s all you’ve been able to do under them—when you video call him unannounced after another sleepless night. You’re banking on him being awake, and maybe there’s a sicker part of you that wants to invoke the bond so that he answers without question. But he does answer, on the fourth ring, and when the screen gives way to his face he looks just as exhausted as you feel.

He doesn’t speak at first, though his eyes go wide. Of course they do; it’s the first time you’re reaching out to him for something outside of being his bodyguard. Or maybe you must look like a mess. It’s probably the latter. Eventually he says, “You called.”

“I…” Your fingers curl tightly into your blankets. “I can’t sleep.”

Rafayel chews his lip, subtle though it is. “Me neither.”

Your breath hitches. “Can I come over?” you whisper. And then, so small, so truthful, “I’m scared.”

In seconds, he’s sitting up. “I’ll come get you,” he says. “I’m coming.”

It was like this way back when, just after the Bloomshore District Explosion. You couldn’t sleep then, either. And sure, you weren’t dating at the time, but Rafayel made it a point to keep you company while you went through horror after horror, exhausted all those boxes of tissues, shuffled so aimlessly throughout the studio because it was the only place you were allowed to wonder what the point of anything was. It was the only place you could teeter on the edge of dying and know that he would pull you away from the cliff.

(Was he atoning for something, all this time? Was he?)

Rafayel is outside your apartment all too quickly. Neither of you knows what to do when you open the door—you’ve been separated for stretches of time before, but always for work and never for… this. Whatever this is. His gaze softens the moment it lands on you, such a tattletale, and when he cradles your face in his hands you almost forget about all those portraits.

“Can I take you home?” he asks.

You’ve barely nodded before he gathers you up, locks your door, carries you all the way to the elevator and all the way to his car. He keeps his hand in yours the whole silent drive back to the studio, and he leads you up the stairs. You squeeze his hand tight when you glance at the closet. He squeezes yours back when he looks at the painting on the wall.

It’s funny; once the bedroom door closes behind you, it feels like the portraits can’t catch you anymore. Even still, you find yourself shaking in place, and Rafayel has to guide you to his bed before he sits on it himself. You look around the room, at the skylight, the windows, the sculptures, and a chill runs under your skin.

You point to the sculptures. “Can… we cover those? Please?”

You don’t have to tell him twice. He’s already on the search for sheets, frocks, anything, and you turn your back to them for good measure. Train your gaze on the sea. (Was it really such a vessel for betrayal?)

He’s joined you again soon enough, and he’s almost hesitant to touch you again. Eventually, he rests his hand on your knee, stroking it with his thumb. “I missed you,” he says. The tone tells you more: I thought you’d never come back.

You wring your hands. “I missed you, too.”

“You scared me.”

“I…” Your fingers twist in each other’s grip. “I was scared. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” Rafayel says. “Me, too.”

You could say a million things in the moment, but it passes too quickly to catch it. Instead you watch the roll of the tide, the sand skipping in the wind outside, and you scold yourself for how foreign his touch feels. How long you’ve been away from it, that it must feel that way.

“It was always you,” he says after a while. “You were always my—mine.”

Your chest tightens. “Because you love me?” you ask. “Or because the god loved his bride?”

You don’t mean it maliciously. Really, you don’t. But the twitch in his fingers tells you it stung anyway. His touch relaxes, after a spell, and he gently turns you to face him.

“You were always mine,” he murmurs again. Presses his palm to his heart as though one touch might set it aflame. “This was always yours. Isn’t that enough? Don’t you know that?” Bit by bit, so vulnerably, the mark on his chest flickers to life—the bond mark, your mark. “Isn’t it enough?”

“It was me,” you say, more to yourself than to him. “I was the bride, I was the follower, I was—”

“You were mine,” he says. Like that’s supposed to open and shut the case. Like there aren’t whole lifetimes he knows that you don’t.

“What happened?” you say. Oh, God, you’re starting to shake again. “What happened to me?”

Rafayel’s eyes drift over your face. “You gave me your heart, and I gave you mine.” His hand is still on his chest. The mark is still pulsing, just under his thumb. “That’s what always happens.”

Cautiously, you nudge his hand out of the way. Place yours there instead. Feel how the mark pulses at the ready, waiting for your word.

“Tell me,” you say. “Everything.”

(The last thing Rafayel could ever do is disobey you.)

What comes out of him, what comes to his mind, only lives in bits and pieces, scattered memories, intuition. Jigsaw pieces of the Sea God and his bride, following and devoted and purifying one another, lifetime after lifetime. A dagger in his hands—no, your hands, no, your hands in his. Blood and pearls and flames and cursed sunrises. The tolling of the bell. The waiting. Oh, God, all that waiting, all the waiting at the bottom of the sea, all the time he might as well have stayed there because you were still out of reach. Because all he had to go on was your face. No, not your face. Your soul. You.

“All this time,” Rafayel murmurs. “I just wanted to have you however I could. I knew. I knew it was you. I saw you in my head, all the time. Like you never left.” He sets his jaw. “I had no choice but to paint you. If I didn’t, I might forget you. What you looked like. Everything. I went crazy. I couldn’t paint anyone else. It was a waste of time to.” It’s hard to make out the color in his eyes when he looks at you. “That’s why I don’t paint portraits. Because none of those people are you.”

“But you…” Your brow furrows. “You never finished them. Any of them.”

“They’re not you, either.” He shakes his head. “All this time, I’ve been trying to get you just right, and I’ve never been able to. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to. And I don’t even know if I need to anymore, because you’re here, and you’re real, and—” He stops himself. Like none of this was every really certain. “And… you’re… mine. Right? Aren’t you?”

There’s a shaky hand approaching you, fingers curling under your chin, lifting your eyes to meet his in the night. His eyes flash with that blue again, and the bond mark throbs under your palm, and it’s not Rafayel staring back at you in the comfort of his room anymore. It’s a youthful marked god against a rippling false sunset, curling his fingers around yours and bidding you be quiet. It’s the sharp angles of some deep-sea creatures, cursed and chained and toying with the idea of keeping you in the depths for all time. The bustle of an underwater city in the throes of a festival, the late-night melancholy notes of a conch shell, the sea foam, the salt, the dagger, it hits you like a train, you’re going to be sick—

“It’s true.” You’ve never sounded so small. Never felt so outside yourself. “It’s true.”

Rafayel swallows thickly, throat dipping, eyes never once flicking away. His hand covers yours, presses it more firmly against his chest. “This is all I’ve ever had to give,” he says. Hollow. Desperate. Like he’s not even thinking about the paintings anymore. It was never about the paintings. “Take it. Please.”

What a horror it is, to love someone beyond function.

———

The only way either of you is able to sleep that night is chest-to-chest. No one else can get at your hearts when you’re protecting them so fastidiously. It doesn’t completely keep the nightmares at bay, but it helps. Better to wake with his face buried in your neck than his knife buried in your heart.

You’ve only gotten a few hours of sleep by the time the morning light bleeds in, but your body’s stubbornly decided it’s had enough. Rafayel needs the sleep; you can tell from the dark circles under his eyes, so obvious when you’re this close. So you unravel yourself from him, tuck him in tight, wrap a throw blanket around yourself, and quietly shuffle downstairs.

You can’t bring yourself to open the closet door again. You’ve bitten the fruit, spilled the candle wax, dropped the key in the pool of blood. There’s no reversing it, no point in confronting it. All you can do is turn about the studio, passing over the sketches, the lecture notes, sculpted busts and dried paint smears on palettes. Take in the early-morning exhibition of the man who felt everything beyond human understanding.

(The windows remain closed this time.)

Eventually your eyes land on the painting of the city—Whalefall? Romirro? What did he end up naming it? What was it called once upon a time? Dread weighs on your spine, but you’re drawn to the piece anyway, and you find yourself shifting toward it, minding your step as you climb the ladder to take it all in.

If you could remember it, would it look like this in your head? Would the arches be so soft and stern at once, and would there be so many people flooding the streets? Would the creatures floating by be friendly, and would the sun feel warm on your skin? How do you paint warmth, anyway? How do you paint a memory, really? And did Rafayel paint this place over and over, too, and put them somewhere else you couldn’t find them? Or would he not mind it so much if he left it behind, or the other way round?

There’s a rustle behind you, a few smart knocks, and when you turn in their direction you find Rafayel standing by the side table, still in his pajamas, hair disheveled, all his weight on his good leg. His eyes are set on you—he looks almost relieved that you didn’t leave—but they wander back to the canvas. The one he hasn’t touched in ages. He sighs, and wordlessly he takes a seat on the bottom rung of the ladder. Just out of reach.

The only thing that breaks the blanket of silence is the tolling of the morning bells. And Rafayel flinches, just as always.

“I just wanted to see what you see,” you tell him after a while, hugging yourself tight. “I wanted to see what you remember. Just in case… I could remember it too, I guess.” You study the glitter of the sea at the top of the canvas, the swirls of blue and purple and pink, the temple doors. “I think you should finish it.”

“That’s the funny thing about memories,” he murmurs. “They’re never really finished.”

“Is that why…” Your fingers curl around the edge of the ladder. “Is that why you never finished any of the portraits? Of…”

Rafayel rests his chin in his hand. “The more of them I tried to paint, the less I remembered.”

“So you just… quit while you were ahead?”

Slowly, he rises to his feet, trails his touch over the main thoroughfare of the city. None of the paint comes off on his fingertips; that’s how long it’s been neglected. He turns on his heel, looks up at you. Stands at your altar, ready for sacrifice.

“No,” he says. “I quit when I found you again.”

In that moment, Rafayel is no longer the traces of a former god. He is what he has always been to you: nothing more than a man who committed the cardinal sin of loving.

Haltingly, you make your way down the ladder, and it isn’t until the last step that he fits his grip on your waist and steadies you on solid ground. His hands flex there, as if in apology, and in the silence and the sunlight all you can do is watch each other. Look for the bits and pieces of your lifetimes and wonder if they’ll fit together like they did once.

“You…” You draw in your breath, clench your jaw. “You said… you were afraid you wouldn’t ever get me right… right?

He nods. “Yeah. I did say that.”

Your teeth sink into your lip, and you rest your hands on his arms, keeping his touch present. “Do you want to try to?”

Rafayel’s eyes darken in understanding; they drop to your lips for confirmation. All it takes is a nod for him to slant his mouth against your own, open and warm and wanting. He tastes like the morning and feels like the rush of the tide. All of him rolls over all of you as he nudges you to sit back on the rungs of the ladder, as he takes hold of your thighs and spreads them open to wedge himself between them.

“It won’t be perfect,” he whispers against your jaw, his lips finding the spot just behind your ear, his tongue dragging a taunting path up the column of your neck. “It might take a while to get right. A long… long while. Maybe forever.”

Your fingers, somewhere between careful and coy, trail over the lapel of his sleep shirt. “I have forever. Do you?”

There’s the curve of his smile against your skin. “Yeah. Lots of them.”

He lifts you off the ladder with ease, lets you gather up the throw blanket before carrying you over to the couch. He settles down with you firmly in his lap, and it isn’t long before his hands start to rove over your body, the warmth of your skin under your shirt, his shirt.

“This is new,” you hum in between kisses, your arms getting used to slinging around his neck. How sad that the feel of him has become so foreign; how wonderful that you get to explore it all over again. “I don’t usually get to be…” You gesture vaguely between you. “Like this.”

Rafayel’s eyes glitter, his hands curving around your hips and pushing down firmly. “You take control,” he says, busying himself with your top. “I have something else to focus on.”

Once he’s undone all the buttons and pushed the shirt off your shoulders, he sits back and studies your body. His knuckles drag over scars, blemishes, freckles spattered across your skin; he sinks his hands into the softness of your curves, presses them into the sharp angles of your bones and the gaps in between them. He leaves his mark on you, invisible but indelible, and commits you to memory in turn. He even smiles at the weight of your breath, how quickly you have to brace yourself for balance against the back of the couch.

“Goddesses were built like this, you know.” He says it with such authority that you almost believe him.

“So I’ve heard.” Your breath hitches. “But I’ve never seen a goddess before, so I can’t be sure.”

He wets his lips in anticipation. “I can.”

“Now you’re just teasing.”

“No,” he says. “This is teasing.”

His thumbs find your chest in an instant, drawing circles fit to drive you mad, and in the moments just before you close your eyes you catch him watching you intently, one half-mischievous eyebrow lifting at the corner.

“I didn’t know you liked it that much.” His voice is little more than a buzz, his breath warm and fanning out over your skin. “I would have done it more.”

This is how he learns your body anew. With his mouth on your chest and a hum in his throat and his nails gently clawing down your back. With your hand tugging at his scalp to keep him close, and your knees reddening from where they stick to the leather of the couch, and your hips wondering if they’re allowed to seek the little friction they find. (They’re more than allowed, he tells you with a muffled groan, a single roll of his torso.) He learns all the places that make your breath stutter in your throat—the line of your collarbone, the peaks of your breasts, the curve of your ear (oh, God, that’s a new one for you). It isn’t long before he’s clutching at you, keeping you above him, inching his hand into your underwear and pressing up.

“This,” he breathes, already working those mind-numbing wet circles, already holding you to keep you from wriggling away. “I have to get this right, too.”

It’s not so difficult to crumble under his touch. It’s a practiced, knowing thing. It strikes the right balance of delicate and unrelenting. It already knows you, but he makes the excuse that he doesn’t, so that when the hunger spills onto his face as he tugs your underwear aside, it almost feels newfound. And when he feigns curiosity as he coaxes in two fingers to the knuckle, it almost feels morbid. No apple or candle or key in sight.

He rests his free hand on your heart, god’s gift that it is. It throbs under his palm, like it was never meant to belong inside you. “This is mine,” he says. “Right?”

What else can you do but nod, so bent to his will as you are? What else can you do but dig your nails into the couch, and sink down onto his touch again and again, and catch up to the words that escape you before you can even think them? “Yes—yes, it’s yours—”

He keeps you in place, twin touches on twin pulses, massaging you into a dizzying desperation, and it takes little more to make you tremble above him, begging for relief. There’s a sweet ache starting to stake its claim in your bones, a coil winding in the pit of your stomach, and all you can do like this is rock against his fingers, tensing your muscles to speed the buildup, the pleasure.

“This is what we should have had.” He huffs the words against your lips, the heel of his hand working those circles, tighter, faster. He’s already shifting underneath you with his own need; it doesn’t go unnoticed. “This is how it should have been.”

You silence him with your mouth on his, a climax weakly washing over you, its evidence slick on his skin and flaming under yours. You’re still shaking and whimpering even after it subsides, even with the warmth of his kisses in the crook of your neck. He pulls you close and runs his fingers down your spine, and when you close him between your thighs and settle more firmly in his lap he swallows down a noise of his own. You don’t exactly need more evidence that he needs you, but you’d be a fool to ignore the outline of his cock, straining against too-thin pants and ruined underwear.

“I’ll take care of it,” you whisper, nudging him backward, pushing down his pants just enough to relieve him of the strain. “All you have to do is watch.”

He gives you that up-and-down look again, the craving one. With one flick of the wrist, he summons his dagger. With two more, he’s cut your underwear clean off at the edges, and it falls to the floor in a heap of scrap fabric.

He smiles, dismissing the dagger, his hands scaling your body. “That’s a better use for it anyway.”

You catch his hands just as they reach your shoulders, pretend the gesture didn’t warm your cunt and wet your thighs, and you pin them to back of the couch, your gaze trained on his. “Don’t touch,” you tell him, reaching between you, easing down, joining your bodies in the middle of the devotee’s exhibition, in front of the painted city and all its witnesses. “Just watch.”

Rafayel lets out a choked sound, the wisps of a curse on his tongue, and his whole body goes rigid beneath you. It isn’t until he stills, nods, lets his eyes flutter open, that you grace him with the motion of your hips.

Perhaps he thinks this is how the ceremony should have gone. No blood or daggers, only the double sin of the exchange of pleasure and the beholding of the deed. A metaphorical handing over of the heart. But anyone can do that. Anyone can give up their heart with as little as a greeting. It takes an unwavering devotion for the physical, the visceral, to become manifest. But this, too, is physical, visceral, with the way you grip his wrists for leverage and push your weight onto his, and the way you shudder his name in his ear like a hymn long forgotten, and the way you allow him into your body, pulsing and alive, over and over, so slowly it makes your mind go hazy. It’s a different surrender of the body, a smaller death, a drowning, a baptism. Mutual, as he rises to meet your hips, as he curls his hands around your wrists instead.

“Do you know it now?” you ask him, words scrambled and breath shaky. Your stomach is caving, your body nearly buckling in on itself. Even like this, you’re trapped above him. “Do you?”

“Almost.” A moan slips out of him, and he draws in a breath through his teeth. “Let me”—he shudders, tipping his head back—“let me hold you. Just hold you. Please, please…”

As soon as you relent, he anchors his hands to your waist and holds you still. He watches you, chest heaving—just like you asked him to—and in one fluid motion he digs his heels into the floor and bucks into you so deeply that you almost scream.

“This…” Oh, his voice dips sinfully low, godlike. The end-all-be-all of tones. He makes you clench and flutter around the length of him, makes you catch your breath, and the bite of his nails in your skin sets your body alight. “This is how I want to know you.”

He takes you like this, on a modern-day altar. Holds you there and thrusts up into you, again and again. Keeps you still and rolls his pelvis into yours, ensures you’ve felt every inch of him from the inside out. He offers his neck and his shoulders for the marking, and he growls with delight at the first sting of your teeth. He spins carnal, sinful sounds into words and deeds of worship, a scene inspiring awe instead of disgust in those denizens frozen in time. He fashions the perfect image of you out of the heat spilling on your cheeks, the delirium of pleasure, the release just out of reach no matter how far you chase it. When he dares to slows his pace you squirm on top of him, grind against him, silently plead for more, and just before you manage to open your eyes he captures your mouth in a soothing, shuddering kiss.

“Gorgeous,” he sighs against your lips, tucking your hair behind your ear. His hands skim over your body, and he leans back to admire you through hooded eyes. “So pretty when you take what’s yours.” His thumb grazes over your lips, and he coaxes you to part them. “Say it,” he says, “won’t you?”

Your stomach twists, and you stifle a whine as he sinks you fully onto him. “You’re—you’re mine…”

“That’s it,” he says, his gaze ravenous as it drags over you, as it memorizes every twitch and curve and bend toward desire. So eager he is to be possessed, devoured. “Again.”

“You’re mine—”

And he’s off. Proving it. Every touch of his eats you alive, chases all the way up to the roots of your hair. Every pointed look commits a different part of you to his mind: your mouth as it falls open with a thread of moans and sighs, your torso as it fights to keep you upright with every thrust, your cunt as it takes him in and has nothing to show for itself except burning, pulsing need. Your whole body, learning him, giving in to itself, nothing more than its basest wants. And every movement returns the favor—tells you, in solitude and with all the skeletons in his closet bearing witness, that he is yours in return.

You stutter on top of him, your palm finding purchase on his chest. His heart is pounding underneath your touch, and with it the sear of the bond mark, making itself known. You nearly choke on your words as you press your hand against it, quietly invoke it. “Make me come,” you gasp out. “Please, God, please.”

(This is the death you actually deserve.)

It takes mere seconds. He knows your body better than he thinks he does. His hand shoots down between your legs, and with an artist’s hand, the all-knowing hand of a god, he tips you over the cliff instead of talking you away from it. He holds you close to his body, rocks you through wave after wave of release, and when you bite down on his shoulder his head lolls back in satisfaction. He plunges in right after you, loses what little control he had over himself, slams his hips against and again until that familiar warmth fills you.

Everyone will know who you are now. Even the bride.

All of him goes soft then, inside you, around you. He runs his fingers along your spine, rubs soothing circles into your hips, mouths lazily along your shoulder and neck when you finally collapse against him. Gently, he brushes your hair to the side, and he does what he has always done best: he takes you in with every sense you have. The touch has always been there, and the greed in his eyes subsides, makes way for something loving. He helps you off of him, eases you onto your back and bids you feel the weight of him, and he rests his ear on your pulse, listens for the steady beat of what has always been his. He breathes in the scent of you, musk and morning, and he savors every inch of you he can get his lips on.

“I got it,” he murmurs against your skin, every sense colliding. “I got you.”

———

In Rafayel’s hands, art is aftercare, and the other way around.

There’s a certain devotion in how he kneels at your side and cleans you up. It’s just enough that you’re no longer uncomfortable, but not so much that you lose that primitive, passionate air. He poses you so carefully on the couch, draping the throw blanket over you, and you become as you have always been: for no one else’s eyes but his own. To say there is love in his eyes would be an offense to him—as though “love” would be enough to capture the feeling—and once your hair is properly out of your face he cups your cheek and kisses you with all the forevers he promised. Even when he pulls back it’s reluctant, the aftermath demanding to be felt just as deeply, and he can’t help drawing his thumb over your cheek.

“Can I draw you?” he asks, no more hushed than Saturday evening penance. He begs you to hear him.

Your brow knits together, and you lean into his touch. “You don’t like drawing portraits.”

“I like you.” His nose brushes yours. “And you liked those portraits.”

Your stomach turns. “The ones in the closet?”

“The ones at the museum.”

Meticulousness be damned; you shift to face him more fully. “He painted her to look like saints and holy women,” you say. “Are you… going to draw me to look like the bride?”

He must sense your unease; he’s always been so good about picking up on the unsaid. Your unsaid. “No,” he says, affection pulling at his lips just before he presses them to your forehead. “I’m gonna draw you to look like you.”

It is all he needs to say before he takes up paper and pencil.

He probably wouldn’t have minded if you fell asleep, laid back on the couch like that. Perhaps he might have even preferred it. You could be still, peaceful, vulnerable with him, and he’d watch and sketch and watch and sketch until his eyes or his wrist gave out.

But you’ve always loved to watch him work. On more than one occasion you’ve leaned over the bed first thing in the morning to find him sketching just beside you on the floor, waiting to greet you with a kiss to the top of your head. You’re hardly a stranger to huddling up on his couch in the afternoons and watching him study whatever painting he’s working on so that Thomas isn’t in his ear about upcoming deadlines again. And you’d be a fool to forget the times you’ve shuffled downstairs in the middle of the night to find him pacing with his well-loved brush in his worn-out hands, fit to pull his hair out because the colors aren’t mixing quite right or the inspiration just isn’t coming to him perfectly.

You prefer the mornings most of all. The ones just like this. There are never any expectations for you to be anything else but who you are. Just a painter and his lover, both tired from the night, reveling in each other as their most essential selves.

Rafayel is surprisingly diligent with his sketching; his hand moves with both speed and grace, like he’s running out of time, always has been, but can’t afford not to record you just as he sees you. But perhaps you’re the reason it’s coming easy to him. He doesn’t have to worry about the right colors or the right composition; he has everything he needs right in front of him. If he forgets the exact slope of your nose, or the broad curve of your shoulder, or how blankets fold over the softness of your flesh, all he needs to do is look up. And if he loses himself in the pursuit of perfection, you only need to remind him that you’re not perfect, never were. It’s a perfect paradox.

Perhaps that is all this little moment is, too.

“I wish it had been the other way around,” you mumble as he turns your head just so, as he lifts his index finger so that your gaze follows it to some faraway place.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… I wish you’d been inspired to do those paintings after everything. After we met, and after we went to the museum, and all that.” You tense under the blanket, not daring to ruin all he has set up. “I’m sorry I’m still thinking about it. I’m sorry that it still… scares me.”

“How did you feel?” he asks, casual but caring. “When you saw them.”

There’s that gnawing hole in your stomach again. Staring at the ceiling helps; your eyes can slip out of focus without consequence, and there’s no face you need to put on or perform. You don’t know if it’s the best idea to go back to that place. To open that door in your mind again and peek at the horrors inside.

“Do you remember the first time you showed up in a tabloid?” you ask him. “Or the first time you caught paparazzi taking photos of you?”

He shudders, audibly. “Yep.”

“It’s that… that awful feeling of…” Your hands fashion themselves into claws; perhaps they can explain you better than you can. “That feeling that someone’s been seeing you in a way you never knew, and you didn’t even know they were watching. Or, someone’s got this locked-up room—like with the whole bulletin board and the red yarn—where they’re putting together, I don’t know, conspiracies, or perceptions of you, based on what’s in their head. Based on what they want to make of you. You know? And you wonder, do they actually care about me, or do they care about the version of me that’s stuck in their head? Am I myself, to them, or… or how did they twist me up? And why are they so fixated on me?”

For the first time, the scratch of Rafayel’s pencil comes to a pause. At first you think you might have said too much, or all the wrong things, until he takes your hand and rests his cheek against it. “Is that how you think I think of you?” he asks. It’s quiet, and it’s honest, and it scares you almost as much as opening the closet door did.

You’re not quite sure how to answer at first. You don’t want him to think of you that way. But have you been together long enough that all those projections fell to the wayside, or does he still see them in you? Or is he just waiting for you to remember them the way he does?

You sigh, your eyes still fixed on the ceiling. “What do you think of me?” you ask him. “What do you see when you see me?”

It’s a bold question, one you might regret, but it’s better than making assumptions.

Rafayel hums in thought, manages a few more strokes of his pencil. “You really wanna know?”

“Well, yeah. That’s why I asked, you know?”

He laughs to himself, a point well taken, and taps your arm to get your attention. He’s smiling when your eyes land on his, and he gives his sketchbook one more glance before handing it to you.

“See for yourself,” he says.

To say you’re nervous to look would be an understatement, but to ignore him sharing himself with you would be an insult. Slowly, you push yourself to sit up, and you study the page. Where you figured you might see one haphazard sketch of your body, you find a smattering of pencil strokes, a study, a sheet of your character. Here, in the corner, he’s devoted time to getting the shape of your eyes and the curl of your lashes just right. There, close to the perforated margin and the spiral binding—it’s the curve of your shoulder, the texture of your hair, the softer line of your jaw. In the middle, a splash across the paper, your body, guarded by the blankets, a work of art in its own right.

Rafayel tilts his head, eyes dark but glittering with affection. “Well?” he asks. “Do you look like a bride, or a follower?”

“No…” You turn the sketchbook this way and that, observing the shadows and casts of light from all angles. “I look like… me.”

A smile stretches across his face, and he rests his head on your knee. “What does that look like?”

“Like…” You’re careful not to smudge the pencil marks, no matter how much he might try to convince you that any trace you leave behind could hardly be a flaw. “Like someone you love.”

He looks up at you with such love then, his cheek pressed so intimately to your body, and he slings an arm over you to keep you close. “You are,” he says. “You are someone I love.”

He stays that way for a while, refusing to let you up until you’ve made peace with the sketches, the real images of you. Even at the end of it all, when the sun is hanging lower in the sky, he catches your hand in his and kisses it. Leaves part of himself with you, too. He leads you into the bathroom to shower with him, to freshen up even though the day is almost over, and he leaves you just long enough to get dressed and steal some perfume from his vanity. It’s as you’re capping the fragrance that you catch him in the bedroom doorway, holding out his hand to you.

“C’mon,” he says. “Come with me.”

He keeps his fingers laced with yours as you make your way back to the studio, but he doesn’t linger there. Instead he tugs you along out the back door, toward the beach. It’s starting to get chilly from the proximity to the sea, so he drapes his cardigan over your shoulders along the way. Still, the weather doesn’t raise as many goosebumps on your skin as the approaching stack halfway buried in the sand, all of them facedown.

You’d recognize the smear of blue paint on the side anywhere.

“Are those…” Your chest goes tight. “The ones from the closet?”

This time, the smile on Rafayel’s face is harder to read. Is it grim? Sad? Are those his regrets piled up in front of him, or lost hopes? “I meant it,” he says. “When I said I didn’t need them anymore. I meant it.”

“What are you—”

One snap of his fingers is all it takes to silence you. To focus, moth-drawn, on the flame licking at his fingers, fighting to stay alive.

He takes a deep breath, holds onto it for a while, lets it go. His steps toward the pile of canvases are slow, full of purpose, maybe even ceremonial, and he lifts the top one with all the care of an ancient relic.

There’s a parting softness in his face, a hint of a farewell, as he regards the bride’s expression, just before he presses his flaming thumb to her half-painted lips. A spark is all it takes with things like this.

It’s a sick kind of comical, the way the paintings burn the same as love grows—a slow lick of heat that blooms into an inferno before you have the chance to recognize it. The flames pass from one canvas to another, reeking of canvas and oil and a past that was never yours, and they reflect, flickering in Rafayel’s eyes as he steps back and watches his work curl into itself. There’s a lingering melancholy in them, just before they harden with closure, and he sinks to the sand, and he watches each painting die.

You’re not such a stranger to watching things die. Maybe Rafayel isn’t, either.

———

It will be a long time before you can forget about the burning bride. But that is the way things go.

Rafayel sits with you for a long while on the beach, well into the evening, long after the paintings have dissolved into ash. He pours just enough seawater on what’s left of them to kill the smoke—maybe just for prevention, maybe in some ritual unknown to you. He mentioned it once, after all, how everything must return to the sea in the end.

“I didn’t think you’d do that,” you tell him, the chill of the wind just barely picking up your voice. “You worked hard on them. They could have gone in some gallery somewhere or something. Like a posthumous thing. Something about regrets, I don’t know.”

“And let people keep speculating things that aren’t even true?” He smiles, perhaps at how wrong those people might be, perhaps at the thought that you’re already considering his death. “Besides. Aren’t you the one who pointed out I’d rather burn a painting that isn’t perfect?” He hugs his knees to his chest, buries his bare feet in the sand. “None of them were perfect,” he says. “None of them were you.”

He took you inside when it started to get too cold, and on the way up to the bedroom he rummages through a drawer in the studio and picks out an unused sketchbook. Briefly, he returns to the one he was using before, and he opens up to your study sheet. He looks at it with such love—looks at you with such love—and he carefully tears out the page along the perforated edge and tucks it into the new sketchbook.

“What are you doing?” you ask him, lingering on the stairs.

He busies himself with taping the sheet to the inside cover, dragging an affectionate touch at the corners to cement it in place. “Making a sketchbook for you,” he says, writing a few Lemurian words on the cover with the flourish of a gold marker. “Duh.”

Your brow knits together. “Rafayel, you know I can’t draw to save my life.”

“Good thing you’re not saving my life, then.” He joins to at the stairs, gently taps your forehead with the corner of the sketchbook. “It’s for me to draw you, and only you. Just the way I see you.” He taps each word on the cover of the sketchbook with care. “My love. My life. Home.”

“‘Home?’” You squint. “Mo? Like, the name of the studio?”

“The studio,” he says, "and you, too.”

Your heart softens almost instantly, and a smile to reflect it almost splits your face in two. “Do you want to… go upstairs and draw me right now?”

At least Rafayel gives you a chance to hold the railing for balance just before he bends down and kisses you.

Thankfully, the sketchbook doesn’t entirely distract him from his work. Time passes—that is all it ever does—and the underwater city comes together in pieces. He swirls more pink into the sea, adds a little more foam at the surface for flavor. He even throws in another jellyfish in the background, just because he knows they’re your favorite.

The bride is nowhere to be found. If anything, he takes up his brush and darkens the temple hall. Barely a flame in sight.

The lecture preparations, too, come together a little at a time. You don’t steal a single peek at his notes—not even when the wind blows them away. Even if they’re nothing more than a scribbling of talking points, some scratched out, some emphatically underlined, you’d rather be surprised from start to finish. Just like the other gallery pieces.

The most you allow yourself is to sit nearby as he pores over the things he wants to say, as he paces around the studio with his papers in his hand. You can almost imagine him at the front of the lecture hall: navy suit and no tie, a gold and sapphire ring glinting on his finger, a handkerchief tucked into his pocket that he won’t even use, maybe a pair of tortoiseshell glasses perched just so on the bridge of his nose. All that appearance paling in the face of the wisdom on his tongue, praising correctness and giving just enough pause to let the mistakes breathe.

Every once in a while, he catches you staring, and he grins, and he adds a little extra swagger in his step. Maybe it’s to make you laugh. Maybe it’s so you’ll keep looking at him. You’ll do both either way.

By night he takes up that sketchbook again, sprawls himself across an armchair or the couch while he captures the most mundane parts of you. Your hair, tied up while you prepare ingredients for supper—even the baby ones that tickle the back of your neck. The curve of your stomach when you lean forward and study yourself in the bathroom mirror after a shower—right down to the way your towel digs into your skin because it insists, to his sheer delight, on falling to the floor if you don’t wrap it tightly enough. The shadows of longing cast across your face when your attention drifts away from your book and up toward the bedroom skylight. They aren’t so uncanny when he shows them to you. They aren’t shoved in the recesses of a closet he’ll never open again.

“Do you think you would ever paint me as a saint?” you ask him just before sleep claims you, somewhere in between slithering under the covers and reveling in the drape of his arm over your waist. “Or something holy, or something like that?”

Rafayel merely satisfies himself by tucking his head under your chin, wedging his leg between yours so that it hooks over his hip, and burying his face in the warmth of your chest. “You don’t get it,” he mumbles, his fingers scaling the length of your spine. “I keep telling you. You are something holy.”

In the morning, just before sunrise, he proves it to you.

On the day of the lecture, Rafayel makes it a point to pick you up directly from headquarters. It’s a little out of the way, and you insist that you wouldn’t have minded getting there on your own, but he reminds you that someone so renowned might as well be helpless without someone there to protect him.

(And then he bargains, jokingly, that he’ll add a bonus to your next paycheck. And, well. He just has to twist your arm, you suppose.)

He appraises you up and down when you slide into the passenger’s seat, a curious grin on his face. “What’s with the getup?”

You shrug and pull down the visor mirror to touch up your face, catching your outfit in the process. Pink blouse, pressed slacks, a pearl pin tucked in your hair. “Big day for you,” you tell him. “What was I going to do? Just show up in my Hunter uniform like it doesn’t mean anything?”

“It’s just a lecture.”

“It’s your lecture. And it’s my first time seeing one of them. Come on, Professor.” You nudge him at the next red light. “Let me make a big deal out of it. Please?”

“Well…” He sits back in the driver’s seat, content with just one hand on the wheel, and he rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses. “Since you asked so nicely, I guess I’ll allow it.”

The rest of the drive to the university is pleasantly quiet. He taps his fingers along to a rhythm only he can hear, and he takes each turn and flicks the signals with a refined ease, and he holds your hand over the center console, pressing a subtle kiss to the back of it just before he pulls into the university parking lot.

You only ever had one class in the art building—one of those general education requirements you had to take in your first or second year—but you remember the room number and where you sit as if the last class had been only yesterday. It has to be by coincidence alone that Rafayel leads the way into that very room; it’s still so familiar to you that you even remember how the door screams in protest if you try to open it too cautiously. (It’s the only mistake he’ll make today. You know it.)

One glance at the dimmer lights and the projected title screen, and you’re nineteen or twenty again, nodding off during a slideshow or trying to remember the film director’s name you’re allowed to put on any pop quiz for extra credit. One touch of Rafayel’s hand at the small of your back, and you already know where you’re meant to sit.

He tosses you a wink, and you think it ought to be the other way around. Not that he needs your encouragement; you already know he’s going to do well in spite of how much he probably doesn’t want to be here. (And if he really doesn’t want to be here, he’s doing a fantastic job of covering it up.) You part ways there, on the side stairs of the lecture hall, and while you squeeze into one of the middle seats in one of the middle rows, he hops up onto the dais, greeting a coordinator with a firm handshake and a charming smile that borders on boyish. It never fails to impress you, how he can spin his attitude on a dime like that. How he manages to stay cordial and collected in the face of the very things he hates.

Somewhere between fitting a thumb drive into the local computer and making his way toward the podium, he catches your eye. You, of all people, the middle of middles. His eyes spark, and his smile veers toward the genuine instead of the uncanny, and you’d swear there was a dusting of a blush on his cheeks when he winked and looked away.

(Oh. That’s how he does it.)

Little by little, the lecture hall starts to fill up. It’s a hodgepodge of an audience; some are there for the love of the art, others for the wit and wisdom of the renowned Master Rafayel, and still others giggling in the corners because they heard the guest lecturer was a real looker. To be fair, every reason to be there is a good one. He does embody all those things, in fewer or more degrees. Somehow, he manages to tune out the chatter surrounding him, and it isn’t until the lecture coordinator approaches the podium and introduces him that the hall falls into nothing but silence and polite applause.

There he is again, charm and poise and an inexplicable rigidity about him. He grazes his fingers along the podium like an old friend, one of the few things meant to keep him grounded for the next hour, and he douses himself in humility instead of peacocking about the dais.

Then he allows himself a moment of silence, invites the whole hall to join him in it, and he moves to the first slide. The only thing on it is a photo of the painting of the melting clocks.

“This,” he begins, “is The Persistence of Memory.”

And so you move forward.