Then I hear Leo’s voice, closer than before. ‘You might want to look now.’
He’s sitting beside me, watching me – not nervous, exactly, more like he’s waiting for something. His knees are angled awkwardly as he keeps the oar wedged between the gondola and the canal wall, holding us still.
He gives me his best face-transforming smile. ‘I mean look up, silly.’
So I do. And I think I’ve found the reason Leo wasn’t in his room last night. And why he skipped school today.
Ahuge piece of art stretches across the underside of the bridge, illuminated by the cone of light from Leo’s phone torch. Two figures. Her pose –La Bella. His –Portrait of a Youth. They’re in the same frames they were in at the Gallerie, only they’re less like gilded borders and more like iPad screens. Leo and I are inside them. But we’re also breaking free, our hands stretching out of the devices towards each other.
The gondola rocks gently as I take it in – the almost-touch, our fingers a hair’s breadth apart.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I whisper. ‘It’s … us.’
‘I keep saying the wrong thing,’ Leo says quietly. ‘So I wanted to show you instead.’
I notice new details – our other hands are lifting away our painted faces, revealing what’s underneath: the kelpie girl from the loch and the rebel boy from the lagoon.
‘When you caught sight of my mask at that class. Did you know then – that I was Sketchy?’
‘No!’ He shakes his head. ‘Like I said … it was later than that. Although there was that time we were sitting across from each other texting. I’d almost convinced myself it was you, then you got a message when I hadn’t sent one. I only found out for sure the night you kissed me … well, that morning, when Jacopo showed me your artwork.’
I wind one of the ribbons from my hair around my finger. The last thing I want to talk about is my most humiliating moment with him – especially here in the dark when all I can think about is kissing him again.
‘I came to tell you, but you thought I wanted to confront you about the Florence stuff.’ He squeezes my hand, eyes on mine. ‘I didn’t kiss you back because I wanted you to know exactly who you were kissing. No doubts. No masks.’
‘God, it’s such a mess,’ I mutter. ‘All the stuff I said to you … I was horrible.’
Leo rubs the back of his neck. ‘I was hardly the welcoming committee. When you showed up with the extra funding, it made the Institute feel permanent, when all I wanted was to go back to my old school … to paint my own way.’
I let out a breath. ‘OK. That … makes more sense. Though you did go all friendly after you snooped onmy portrait. Admit it.’
He nods, laughing when I shove his shoulder.
‘It wasn’t pity, though. I saw something in it. Not enough to know it was Sketchy. Just … enough to hope you’d shake things up … that my parents don’t just want more artists who are carbon-copies of my dad.’
We break eye contact at the same time, our attention slipping back to the mural above us – two figures, mid-reach, mid-reveal.
‘So … here we are,’ he says quietly. ‘No masks. No screens. And you know exactly who I am.’
I know what he’s saying – that he wouldn’t pull away this time … if we wanted to kiss. That the choice is mine.
The old me would retreat into my head, into lines and layers and distractions … where it’s safer to hide than risk being seen.
But this is Leo. This is Rebel. He already knows the soft, vulnerable parts of me. And he’s looking at me like we have all the time in the world, and he won’t take a single step I don’t choose.
So I choose.
I lean in, closing the gap between us, like the figures above. The gondola wobbles and he lets out a quiet laugh against my lips. And then it happens – nomasks, no screens, just us. Rebel and Sketchy. The kelpie girl and the rebel boy.
It should be awkward and new. Instead, it feels inevitable. After a year of sketches and scraps and stolen words online, we’ve been drawing towards this moment all along.
The following day, we have breakfast at the bar, just like my very first morning in Venice. Only this time, Leo isn’t the cold, distant boy he was then. He’s the boy I kissed in a gondola, the boy who rowed through the mist with me at sunrise.
Another difference is that we’re sitting at a table instead of standing at the counter, because Martino Ballarin is here too. It’s the first time I’ve had a proper look at him – not a painting, not a mural, not dressed in costume, but himself. Mustard chinos, shirt buttons straining, a red scarf tied in that neat Italian way. It’s the same colour as the blood-soaked hats of redcap goblins from Scottish folklore. A collage forms in my mind: pebbled leather for his skin and a hard shiny metal for his calculating eyes.
‘I’m looking forward to seeing your self-portrait, Leonardo. Is it going to be last in the schedule as I requested?’
Leo opens his mouth to answer, but a yawn escapes instead, and that sets me off too. He bumps my kneeunder the table and I freeze him a micro-glare to cut it out.
