I bit my lip.
“Sorry,” I said.
His eyes raked down my body almost critically for a few seconds before he glanced down at the floor. I braced myself to hear him tell me to put my clothes back on. He looked at his hands, where the backs of his fingers were smudged with red paint. Then he nodded.
“Take it off,” he murmured.
My throat closed.
“What, now?” I choked out.
“Now,” he answered with the hint of a smile, not looking up. He turned and picked up a crocheted afghan that was draped over the back of a chair in the corner. “Cover yourself with this,” he instructed, handing it to me without looking. When I’d done as he asked he set about pulling the fabric across me how he wanted it, revealing parts of me and hiding others. When he was finished he went to the window and opened the shades. The room flooded with light. He set a new canvas on an easel, spent a moment angling it just so, and then picked up a single black charcoal pencil and started to sketch me.
I held as still as I could. It was quiet. All I could hear was the rough scrape of his marks against the canvas. I almost didn’t dare to breathe, for fear of spoiling the moment.
Suddenly he laughed.
“Relax, Angela,” he said. “Talk to me. Tell me more about your life this year. I’ve been thinking of you all these long months.”
I sighed and spilled. That’s when I told him about Clara, how she’d stumbled around Jackson that past winter with what might as well have been a neon sign over her head that read ANGEL-BLOOD in flashing letters. I talked about how Clara was obsessed with Christian Prescott because she thought he was her purpose.
“Ah,” he said. “Purpose. I haven’t heard that word in a long time.”
I told him about the man in the gray suit.
“How mysterious,” he said with a smile. “Well, we’ll see how that goes, won’t we?”
He didn’t say anything else about purpose, and I didn’t press him. I was too busy feeling the strokes his hand made on his canvas like real touches on my skin. I stayed like that for an hour, maybe more, until suddenly he stopped working. He put his pencil down.
“Enough for today,” he said. “We’ll pick up tomorrow. I’m hungry.”
He stepped past me into the living room, leaving me to get dressed alone. My disappointment was a lump in my throat. He didn’t see me as anything but another subject. A way to pass the time. But then, he wanted me to come back tomorrow. I hadn’t completely blown it.
I posed for him every day that week. He never let me see his progress, but when it was all done he announced that I should come to dinner at his place, and we’d celebrate my return to Italy, and he’d show me the painting. I stood next to him, fully clothed this time, and he pulled the cloth he’d been using to cover the canvas aside, and I sucked in my breath.
It was me—not just my body, my nose and my blue-black hair and my legs stretched out against the soft, green velvet of the sofa, but what was inside: the light in me almost seeming to pulse from the canvas, gleaming along my bare shoulder, shining in my eyes.
A woman, not a girl.
A shining woman.
He saw me.
“It may be the best piece I’ve ever done.” He turned to gaze at me with a warmth that spread all through me. “You are a wonder, Angela.”
Oh geez, I thought dizzily. I haven’t even kissed him yet, and I feel like my sky is full of fireworks. Lightning strikes. Magic.
“Kiss me,” I whispered in Italian.
Something in his eyes flashed, like pain and triumph at once. “Angela . . .”
“Kiss me,” I said again, and put my arms around him. I looked up into his face, his dark-with-secrets eyes, and I smiled. “Ti voglio baciare,” I said. I want to kiss you.
He lowered his lips to mine.
I was undone.
I was reborn.
This was actually happening. I was kissing him, my fingers in his hair, and it was like setting a match to gasoline. I couldn’t get close enough.
He pulled away, his breathing ragged. “Wait. I can’t do this, as much as I’d like to. As beautiful as you are. We can’t.”
“Why?” I wanted to know, my knees still quaking from the force of the kiss. “I’m not asking you to go steady or anything. I want you to be the first, is all.”
His eyes flashed up to mine at the word first. “Why?” he asked hoarsely. “Why would you possibly want me?”
“Have you taken a good look at yourself in the mirror lately?” I asked, and then, maybe because I didn’t want to come off as totally shallow, I added, “You’re the only person who really understands me, Phen. That’s why I want it to be you.”
And because I love you. I didn’t say out loud, but I wondered if he could see it on my face.
“Besides, I want to experience it with someone who really knows what they’re doing,” I said playfully, thinking of that lady in 1636.
He gave a small, disbelieving laugh. “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing.” His dark eyes were dark with something like desire.
“I know you want me,” I said. I kissed him again. Slowly. Showing him it was all right.
He groaned, then pulled away again. “This isn’t supposed to happen this way. I was supposed to teach you.”
“So teach me.”
“I’m not good for you,” he said. “I’m not . . . good.”
“You’re not bad,” I protested. “You’re ambivalent, right?” Up to then I’d liked the idea of his ambivalence. If he’d been a White Wing, there’s no way I ever would have tried this. He would have been too good for me. Untouchable. But it was perfect like this. He was perfect.
I leaned in again, but he took me by the shoulders and pushed me away from him. Hard. I stumbled back.
“No,” he said. “Angela, please try to understand. I’m sorry if I led you to think . . .”
Rejection flared through me. Sudden tears sprang to my eyes. “You led me to think what? That you could be interested in someone like me?”
He sighed. “You are magnificent, strong-willed, smart. You’re amazing. Any mortal boy would be lucky to have you.”
“I don’t want a mortal boy,” I said, my voice silly and cracking and vulnerable. “I want you. It can be casual. I don’t care.”
He closed his eyes for a minute, his jaw tightening. Then he dropped his head, sighed again, and said, “I can’t be with you, Angela.”