it into place with his bare fisted hands. The uncomfortable moment passed, but another followed it. My “always” consists of the three hundred and sixty five days I can remember. All else is as if it never was. I had to have known Jonathan La Croix. He held the evidence of that hidden in tight rolls of canvas in the trunk in his hands. What had he been to me and why was his name the one name I’d allowed myself to know in a year?
“Come with me,” La Croix said. He carried the trunk filled with imperfect portraits up the stairs and I followed. The white of his knuckles stood out on his fingers as he held the trunk’s handles tighter than necessary. But I also noticed the way his black shirt stretched across his shoulders and the way his broad back narrowed to a nipped athletic waist. Not because I’m an artist. Something else in me had wakened. A sleeping woman who now yawned and sat up to note the way La Croix’s powerful legs took the stairs. He was very tall, topping me by at least a foot. I had to rush to keep up with him though his stride was steady and slow.
I tried not to stare, but I failed.
The song in my blood had changed to, “Here he is. Here he is.” But when he turned to make sure I followed him down the long dark upstairs hall, there were shadows in his eyes I was no longer sure I should have been driven to find.
He didn’t take me to a guest bedroom. While my blood still sang and the magnet pulled and I avoided the dark light in his blue eyes, he led me onward until we came to a corner of the house I knew to be a rounded turret I’d seen from the street.
When he turned the key and opened the door, I breathed out a rush of air I hadn’t realized I’d been holding tight in my lungs like a diver plunged deep into a cold, tumultuous sea.
I stepped forward onto paint-spattered tarps. Here they covered the Cyprus floors and led me in a wrinkled path straight to an easel and stool. Beside the easel, a long low bench held the paints I’d need. Only the deep, rich midnight colors I’d been working with for the past year and the necessary others for blending.
I dropped my bag and went for the paints and blank canvas.
But, unlike at St. Mary’s, the world didn’t narrow and fade around me. La Croix walked to a wall and placed the trunk against it and I watched him even as I began to mix and blend the deep purple I’d need for the background of the painting already taking amorphous shape in my mind.
This time I would paint something different.
“Chloe,” La Croix said and my fingers actually stilled. I didn’t make a move as he approached. I didn’t blink or breathe. There was still a hint of impatience in his voice or maybe it was frustration. He worked his hands open and closed as if he needed to do something with them now that the trunk had been placed on the floor. He didn’t stop until he stood directly beside my perch on the stool. The proximity of his warm body was more of a distraction to my senses than I’d ever allowed before when the paint called to me.
“Y…yes?” I replied.
I slowly rose to my feet because he was so tall and I didn’t want to feel small beside him. I immediately knew it for a mistake. He was still taller than me. I had to tilt my chin to meet his gaze and our bodies were also much closer than they had been before. I had met day after empty day for a year as if life was a vacuum threatening to leave me forever in limbo surrounded by nothingness. Surely I could look into this familiar stranger’s eyes.
I rubbed my fingers together.
The cool slide of bruised lavender reminded me I couldn’t reach up to trace the planes of his angular face no matter how they intrigued me.
He searched my direct gaze and I let him because paint was already on my fingers and I couldn’t run away from him without running away from the canvas I was compelled to fill.
“They told me that you sometimes forget to eat or sleep,” he began.
“No. I don’t forget. Not about those things,” I said. I never forgot my need for food and rest. I’d only learned exactly how little I needed to survive.
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