“Darling, I’m a retired art history professor. I drink tea and attend book clubs. I hardly have the reach to orchestrate?—”
“Mother.”
Another silence. Longer. Then, softly: “She’s remarkable, isn’t she?”
The honesty caught him off guard. Not the question—the answer that rose before he could stop it.
“Yes.”
One word. The most he’d said to anyone about Lumi. His mother let it sit without pushing.
They hung up. He stood at the windows for an hour after.
Zeir pressed his forehead against the glass. The city spread below him—millions of lights, millions of stories, and somewhere in Bushwick a woman was standing over her kitchen counter probably eating cold Thai food because he’d texted her two words and she’d listened.
He hadn’t washed the paint off his shirt. It hung in his closet. Cerulean and raw sienna. The ghost of her grip.
His phone glowed on the counter. No reply to the eating text. No reply to the message from last night.
But she’d eaten.
He’d take it.
TWENTY
ZEIR
He reached for the blue-green ink before she asked for it.
Not the first time. Not even the fifth. Over the past week, their working rhythm had evolved into an unspoken language that made the back of his neck prickle. He anticipated the ink she needed by the direction of his blocking. He penned compositions that bent toward her instinct before she voiced it. She finished his sentences about villain motivation with the ease of a musician picking up a melody mid-bar.
He handed her a reference page. She was already reaching for it.
“Stop doing that.” Her voice was light, but her eyes were sharp.
“Doing what?”
“Knowing what I’m thinking.”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“You handed me cerulean blue before I asked for it.” She held up the bottle. Exhibit A. “I hadn’t even uncapped the bottle yet.”
“You always reach for cerulean when you’re drawing interior conflict.”
She stared at him. He stared back. The implication of what he’d said—I’ve been watching you closely enough to catalog your color instincts—thickened the air between them.
“Lucky guess.” He turned back to the layout.
“That wasn’t a guess and we both know it.”
He didn’t respond. She didn’t push. But a flush climbed the side of her neck and she bent over her panel with a focus that bordered on aggressive.
The work consumed them. Hours dissolved into the scratch of pen and brush on paper, the clink of ink bottles, the rhythm of two artists operating in tandem. The late-autumn light through the studio windows had turned thin and gray and rain streaked the glass in crooked lines.
She stretched during a break. Tilted her neck. Pulled her hair off her shoulders and tilted her head back, exposing the long line of her throat.
His gaze locked. The hollow at the base—bare skin, the faint pulse visible. His mouth went dry. A hunger that had nothing to do with food burned through him—the five inches of skin between her ear and her collarbone took up his entire peripheral awareness.
