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Enzo furrowed his brow. “Why not?”
“Because it’s not my place. And because you’d only grant it out of pity or desperation to make me happy.”
Enzo remained silent so long Fiore feared he’d insulted him. When he spoke at last, however, his words emerged soft and gentle as ever before. “I cannot deny it delights me to make you happy. But pity has never once entered into it.”
Fiore wanted so badly to believe him. And perhaps that drove him to reply with more honesty than he might have otherwise done. “I wish to draw you.”
Enzo didn’t look offended—as he had every right to be, when a mere courtesan asked him to play artist’s model. Instead his furrowed brow bespoke only confusion. “Me? Why?”
“Because you have a strikingly handsome aspect. And because I’d like to have your image to look at whenever you’re not before me.”
Enzo appeared no less bewildered by this. “Then why hesitate?”
“I know you don’t like to be perceived.”
“I like to be perceived by you.”
This assertion, so gentle and unassuming yet undeniably honest, left Fiore in stunned silence for some moments. For he realized even amidst all his own artifice that the same held true for him as well.
Still, it wouldn’t do to let Enzo continue on against his best interests, no matter how appealing that course felt to Fiore. And so he forced his tongue to say, reminding himself as much as Enzo, “If I preserve your likeness in my zibaldone, then anyone who gazes upon it may perceive you.”
No small thing to ask of a man who never left his house without a mask.
Yet Enzo didn’t balk at the prospect. Instead, the shy smile Fiore loved so well plucked at his scarred and handsome mouth. “You preserve things as you perceive them. And the way you perceive me is how I’d like others to perceive me. So really I wouldn’t mind at all.”
In the face of this sincerity, Fiore could deny his desires no longer. He indulged them first with a kiss, lingering on Enzo’s lips until breath demanded he break off.
Then he curled into the corner of the sofa with his zibaldone propped against his knees and, at long last, laid down the decisive pencil strokes to capture the features burned indelibly on his heart.
~
The gondola journey from Ca’ Scaevola to theKingfisherwent smoothly. Fiore encountered difficulty only with embarking and disembarking, and Enzo’s assistance made both far easier.
The fresh air was well worth the trouble in Fiore’s opinion. After a fortnight indoors, even the vast halls of Ca’ Scaevola had begun to feel closed in. Now, as he alighted from the gondola onto the street flanking the ship, he breathed in deep and delighted in the myriad incidental sounds of the serene city. He tucked his arm into Enzo’s and strode up the gangplank—Carlotta had arranged for its rolling out in daylight hours beforehand.
Corelli and her sons greeted them with a wave as they passed. Serafina was not out; it was only midmorning, and like Fiore, she didn’t oft arise before midday. Fiore tried not to think about when last he’d trod this very deck. He plastered on his best effort at a smile—close-lipped, thin, hardly tugging at the scar on his cheek—and went below.
His quarters looked almost precisely as he’d left them. Minus all the sundries Carlotta had retrieved for his use at Ca’ Scaevola. Only furniture and decoration remained, alongside his sea-chest.
Enzo removed his mask, cloak, hood, and hat, just as he’d done hundreds of times before when crossing Fiore’s threshold. “Where shall we begin?”
Fiore knew not where. An unaccountable melancholy had crept over him. The sunlight drew his gaze, sparkling down through the deck-prisms overhead and streaming into the porthole window. Despite Enzo’s nautical ancestry there were no porthole windows in Ca’ Scaevola. At least not so far as Fiore had seen. Nor had he beheld a single deck prism. It was a stupid thing to fixate on, and yet he found himself seized with a desire to carve the prisms out of the ceiling and shove them into his sea-chest like stolen treasure for transport back to the palazzo.
Forcing his gaze away from the light did nothing to improve his mood. He’d covered a whole wall in his sketches—and for what? What pride he’d foolishly placed in mere scribblings on scrap paper from an amateur hand. Any one of the paintings hanging in Ca’ Scaevola’s galleries outshone the lot.
The furnishings looked even more ridiculous. His stupid half-a-whaleboat bed could barely hold one man, let alone two, let alone the hundreds if not thousands who’d graced its timbers in the half-decade Fiore had spent here. The sea-chest he could at least tuck away out of sight, but—
“Fiore?”
A jolt ran through Fiore despite Enzo’s soft tone.
“Here.” Enzo gently led him to his old chair—one of a set, bought third-hand from a sale of effects, its shield-back carved with fish scales, yet even if he had the whole set it would not equal one-tenth of a single stick of furniture from Ca’ Scaevola. “Sit down.”
Fiore sat. His eyes burned. He’d spent years curating and decorating his quarters, and now it all looked so stupid. He should never have come back.
“Why not?” asked Enzo.
Fiore realized, far too late, that his last thought had left his lips. He swallowed hard to master his voice. “It’s ridiculous.”
