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I shook my head. “No. Well, not back then.”
“You have? Now?” His fists balled up, and I took a stumbling step back, almost falling over my desk chair. He must have seen the fear in my eyes because he unclenched his fists, shook them out, and took a long, deep breath. “All right. It’s okay. I thought you had. And it doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is we can be together now… I love you. None of that other stuff matters, no other person matters.”
“It does matter, because I love him,” I repeated again. “And Idon’tlove you.”
“Peter, just—” He broke off. “You can’t mean it. We’re beautiful together. You and me? There’sno onelike you for me, and no one like me for you. We’re a masterpiece. You know it’s true. Maybe I messed it up at first, maybe I hurt us, but we can still fix it. We can be all that we were supposed to be. You just have to let us.”
My heart twisted for him. Empathy I didn’t want to feel body-slammed me. He looked so devastated. So miserable. And he really had lost it all. But that didn’t mean he could have me.
I sat down by him on the carpet. I took up one of his hands, running my fingers over the knuckles, feeling the skin on the back, so subtly different from Daniel’s in texture.
“Look at me,” I began. “This is important.”
He dragged his eyes up from where he’d been watching my fingers dance over his hand. “All right.”
“Do you remember telling me about the trip you took with your family from Rome to Florence back when you were younger? You went to see theDavidthere?”
“Yeah.” He blinked, confused.
“And you know this past fall, someone took a hammer to theDavid’s foot, damaging it, right?”
“Yeah…”
“It can’t ever be repaired. But he’s otherwise still beautiful and perfect.”
Adam tugged his hand out of mine, suspicion clouding his eyes. “Where are you going with this?”
“Just listen to me. I’ve told you a lot of things over the last few months—mainly to stay away from me—but I’ve never told you this.”
He nodded. “Okay, go on.”
I took his hand again. “I also remember you telling me about these other sculptures you saw in Florence. Unfinished works of Michelangelo’s that were kept near the big room where theDavidstands.”
“Yeah.The Prisoners.” Adam wiped at his eyes, pushing the tears off his cheeks. “What about them?”
“I remember you described them to me so well, I could see them in my mind’s eye.” Adam always had such a way with words. A writer through and through. “Then a few months ago, I came across a book of photos, a collection from the museum where theDavid’s kept. I looked through it to study how the photos were taken, what angles were used, and the lighting. All of that. I thought it might be helpful one day. Photography jobs come in all kinds of shapes and sizes.”
I realized I was stalling at getting to the point. Once I’d said what I needed to say, I’d have to let go of his hand and I’d never touch him again. Yesterday, I’d been more than all right with that. But now…
I cleared my throat and pushed on. “I got sucked in beyond just studying the photography work. The close-ups of theDavidwere incredible, but that was no surprise.” I licked my lips. “But those weren’t what held my focus. You see, I couldn’t stop looking at the photos ofThe Prisoners. I just kept coming back to them.”
He looked up from where I held his hand, and our eyes caught.
“I loved how they were unfinished, forever frozen and incomplete,” I said.
“It’s sad.”
“Is it? In the book, the write-up talked about how no one knew just why the sculptures weren’t finished. They posed questions like, had Michelangelo been distracted from his work? Had he been pulled away to another project and just never made it back? Or maybe, as he’d worked, he’d seen a fatal flaw in the marble. Something he couldn’t fix, and that was why they remained incomplete.”
Tears filled Adam’s eyes. “Why are you talking about this?”
“Because I remember you told me once thatThe Prisonerstroubled you because you could see how beautiful they were supposed to be. It seemed a pity to you, a waste of time and marble. You said they could have been beautiful. You wished he’d finished them. But whenIwas looking at the photos, I thought of it differently. To me, they werealreadybeautiful. Unformed, half-made, with a fatal flaw that even a great artist couldn’t overcome. Left forever like that, complete in their unfinished way.”
“Peter, something can’t be complete if it’s unfinished, and—”
“Shh. Adam, I think you imagine us as being like theDavid, nearly perfect with just a little damage to the toe—easy to overlook because the rest is so flawless. But I see us as being likeThe Prisoners—therewaspotential for something whole and complete, but there was a flaw that kept us from ever reaching that potential. Whether that was your family, or your ability to love more than one person at the same time, combined with my inability to be all right with that, or if it was our homophobic culture, or so many other things that went into the formation of the marble that made our relationship, but—”
“Peter, please, stop.”
