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Conor
I was happy to make tea. Happy to shuffle around my dingy kitchen. To drown out the voices in my head with the sound of water running into the tea kettle. To riffle through the assortment of teabags thrown in a dusty drawer along with old takeout menus, unused packets of sweet and sour sauce, rubber bands and a spare bolt or two. Happy to find a cup that wasn’t dirty or chipped. Happy to search the dark ends of my cabinets for a saucer, which I was sure I didn’t have. To stab into a shrivelled lemon. To feel the citrus acid on the cuts along my knuckles not yet fully healed. I was happy to keep myself busy.
Because otherwise I saw her again. On her knees. On the street. Crying. And it broke my heart all over again.
When I finally turned around with two piping cups of chamomile with thin slices of lemon, I found Aurnia setting up one of my old sketchbooks on an easel I’d forgotten I’d even had. A remnant from art school. Stashed away in my closet. Had she gone through my things to find it? What else had she found? My heart rate quickened and I realised how terrified I was of that: of her seeing. Of her seeing me.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said as I set the cups down on the flimsy kitchen table.
I gestured toward the chair where the cup of tea was waiting. Aurnia shook her head. She, in turn, pointed at a chair herself, one situated across from where she stood. Its proximity to her frightened me. It reminded me of a chair for an execution. If I sat in it, I knew I would be crossing a line just like all those doomed men before me. Death for them. Wrongness for me. I’d been toying with that line for so long and there it was. Just in front of me.
“Come have tea,” I told Aurnia.
I should have known that the stubborn little thing wouldn’t be so easy to persuade. My little thief didn’t give up at the sight of a lock. She just put a pick between her lips and grinned.
“You paid for a portrait,” she said. “You’re going to get a portrait.”
I pulled out the chair at the table for her as if that would make any difference in hell.
She still did not move from behind the easel.
“I don’t want a portrait,” I told her.
This was true. I didn’t. I didn’t want Aurnia’s eyes on me. Focused. Intent. Unwavering. I didn’t want to have to sit there and watch her tongue move at the corner of her sweet lips as she worked. I feared I didn’t have the restraint to keep myself in place. I could grip the sides of the chair. But the plastic would bend easily beneath my white-knuckle grip. There were no straps to hold me in place. At least the men on their execution chair were given that luxury. To be held down. To be kept from that thing they so desired: life. Aurnia. Life.
But it was more than that. More than the physical pain of keeping myself from her when we were so close. I didn’t want a portrait, because I didn’t want to see how she saw me. I could barely stand the sight of my own reflection in the mirror through my eyes. My reflection through her eyes would be unbearable.
“I won’t take your money otherwise,” Aurnia said.
There was no wavering in her voice. Her feet were set like she meant business. They were too close, I could have told her. Too close to really stand a chance if I were to really put up a fight.
“It’s already given,” I told her, nodding once more at the chair at the table.
“Conor.”
It was a cheap shot. Saying my name like that.
“Aurnia,” I said, one last gasping attempt at freedom. “You don’t have to do this. You should sleep. Rest. You look exhausted.”
“Sit,” was all she said.
I left the teas on the table. I went to her as if there were two guards at my side. I sat without protest even though I knew what was coming. Even though I knew there was no turning back from this point.
Aurnia pressed the tip of her pencil against her bottom lip as she studied me. My fingers were already at the sides of the chair. The plastic already threatening to bend. Promising to break.
The day had gotten dark early. Clouds hung low outside my window. Soon the street lamps would blink on one by one down the street. For now there was dusk inside my small living room. Aurnia appeared to me like a figure through a fog. I could trace the sharpness of her shoulders in her thin black turtleneck. Her legs were like shadows against the wall, slim and willowy. Her hair was the darkest of them all. It fell across the side of her face like midnight, shielded her one eye like a velvet mask, shifted as she tilted her head slightly to the side like the rolling of waves beneath a starless sky.
Aurnia was oh so close and yet there was so much still hidden to me. This was for the best. This darkness. This mystery. We shouldn’t get closer. We shouldn’t unearth one another. We shouldn’t turn on the lights.
And yet there was Aurnia with a pencil in her slender fingers. Was there anything more dangerous than a pencil? Than what it could see? Than what it could create?
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said, shifting uncomfortably beneath her gaze.
She was so young. So goddamn young. Not yet eighteen. You wouldn’t know it from her eyes. From the way she looked at me. There was nothing childlike in her studying of me. She was a woman. And I quivered beneath her gaze.
“Something isn’t right,” Aurnia answered.
I snorted. Something? Was she fucking kidding me? Nothing was goddamn “right” about this. About any of this. She was seventeen. I was thirty-one. It wasn’t right that she was alone with me in my apartment. It wasn’t right that she was about to draw me. It wasn’t right all the doors I feared this would open between us. I wasn’t sure I had a single fucking “right” thought about my little thief since the very moment I found her in Dublin Ink.
