The elevator door closed.She pressed her back against the cold metal wall and exhaled.
Her phone buzzed. Mika.
How was day one?
He got my exact paper.
Oh no.
What?
Oh no as in OH NO. He paid attention. The quiet kind. The kind where they don’t TELL you they noticed, they just fix it. That’s the most dangerous kind, Lu. That’s the kind you can’t argue with because they never give you anything to push back against.
Chelsea evening air hit her face. Taxis and gallery-goers and the last light bleeding off the buildings.
Also he holds his brush upside down when he’s distracted and his voice cracked when we finished a panel and I told him vulnerability is the braver choice while looking directly into his eyes like an absolute lunatic.
Mika:You told the Villain King to show his soft underbelly. On day one.
In my defense, it was about the character.
Was it though?
It was not. It was not about the character at all.
Babe.
I’m going home. I’m going to have a calm, rational conversation with Moriarty about professional boundaries.
The plant doesn’t talk back.
That’s why it’s my safest relationship.
Her loft.Nine o’clock.
Moriarty’s vine had made another move on the light box. Iago drooped from his pot, surviving out of spite and diminishing water. The record player spun low trip-hop into the quiet.
She tried to work. Nightbloom edits. Color corrections. But her hands kept going still and her mind kept sliding back to Chelsea—the crossroads panel, the way his composition framed the space she was going to fill before she knew she was going to fill it.
The dry precision with which he’d said “because it might” when she threatened to throw ink at his head.
She pulled the Shadowfang volumes from the shelf. Volume Four. The villain whose isolation was a choice, whose walls were built from talent, whose arc turned on the moment someone saw through the mask.
Now she’d spent ten hours beside the man who made these characters. Watched his ideas move across a page with the precision she’d spent a decade trying to understand in print. Watched the artist appear and the walls go up and the phone call that erased all of it.
She closed the book.
Stood. Looked at Moriarty.
“For the record,” she told the plant, “I had a plan this morning. Cool. Detached. Strictly businesslike. And then hestocked my workspace with the exact paper I use and told me my colors were wrong and was RIGHT about it and we made the best page of my career and he said ‘because it might’ about a painting catching fire with the delivery of a man who has REHEARSED being devastating?—”
Moriarty’s vine brushed the edge of her ink tray.
“Unhelpful.”
She turned off the lamp. Crawled into bed.
FOURTEEN
