My voice, quiet in the golden evening light. “I lost myself. I lost . . . who I was. Who I could be. I lost . . . everything. And I saw this painting. I don’t know why, but it struck me. I had nothing, no name, no past, no future. And I saw this painting, and it . . . it meant something to me. I saw myself in it, somehow. I don’t know. I’ll never know. But I chose this painting. Madame X. Other portraits of the time, they’re given names. But this one? Just . . . Madame X. She has a name, you know: Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. But in this portrait, she is Madame X. The subject of a painting, no more, no less. Something in that meant something to me.”
I expect a comment, something deep and meaningful. Instead he turns and moves across the room to the wall opposite, to Van Gogh’s Starry Night. “And this one?”
I shrug. “I just like it.”
“Bullshit.”
I frown at the sudden and harsh vulgarity. “Logan—”
“Tell me the truth, or tell me to shut up, but don’t lie to me.”
“I wasn’t lying. I saw it, and I liked it. I felt empty, and . . . blank. Numb. The kind of numb where you have so many feelings you just stop feeling any of them. I couldn’t express them, couldn’t express anything. And this painting? It expresses so much. Loneliness, but also peace. Distortion, confusion, passion. Insanity, even. There is something to latch on to, though, in the church steeple. You look at it, and you can see so many things. Whatever your past has brought you, there is something of this painting in you. Of course, then . . . I knew none of this. Not even my name. I just . . . knew I could look at the Starry Night and it would help me make sense of some of the many things in my mind.”
“I have so many questions.” His voice is quiet as he says this, as if admitting a secret he fears will gut him.
“Me, too.” There is far more truth in those two words than I can even withstand.
I am compelled to turn away, to let myself collapse on the couch. I find my fingers wrapped around the glass tumbler, eyeing the finger’s worth of scotch whisky. Touch it to my lips. And yes, my lips touch the faint smear on the rim where his mouth pressed against glass: an intimacy. My lips burn, my throat burns, my eyes water, I cough and swallow, cough. Liquid fire races down my throat, spreads through my stomach and into my veins.
Oh.
This is why they drink such vile stuff.
The afterburn, the heat in my blood, the dizzy warmth in my skull . . . another taste, another cough-swallow-cough-cough, and the buzz expands.
I could float away.
Elbows on knees, knees together, feet wide apart, leaning forward, staring at the map with its strange spelling and bizarre curvature and not-quite accurate geographical relationships, I am dizzy and floating in the clouds, finding a looseness in my skull, something vital disconnecting. A tether, snaking and curling into itself, no longer attached.
His hand, wrapping around mine. Not taking the glass away, but rather his hand on mine, over mine, engulfing, enveloping, covering. He’s on the couch beside me. How? When? He isn’t massive. He is perhaps six feet, an inch or two more, at most. Compact. His muscles seem . . . harder, somehow. Thicker, though not as hugely bulging and perfectly designed as . . . I shake my head, forgetting where that train of thought was going. He is a predator. Every muscle honed from use. Nothing spare, nothing excess. I’m staring. Helpless.
My stare is drawn up, away from the sculpture of arms and chest and thighs, up, to tumultuous indigo pools, so bright and vivid as to be nearly luminescent.
Oh . . .
I’m drawn in. Falling forward. I see eternity in that shade of blue.
My hand, beneath his, tightens on the glass. His, on mine, lifts. The tumbler with its scotch contents touches his mouth. I tip the glass upward, my hand forming the motion, spilling the liquid onto his tongue. I can see his teeth, a pink splotch of tongue. I watch his Adam’s apple bob. He doesn’t cough as he swallows. Now the vessel, nearly empty, is moving to me. My hand under Logan’s. Our hands moving in sync. He brings the tumbler to my lips, we tilt it, and I swallow.
Fire burns.
In my throat, in my veins,
between my thighs.
Heat and moisture, fiery and potent as the scotch whisky in my belly, pools between my legs.
Logan’s nostrils flare, and I wonder if he can smell my essence. How long has passed now? How many minutes have been taken in the exchange of sips, mine and his? They’ve passed in silence, however many it is. But this silence—it is alive. Not mere absence of word or sound, but communication of something deeper, some language of eyes meeting and hands brushing and breaths counted, a syntax of sensuous gazes, and something deeper yet, something felt in the gut, something shared that cannot be enumerated or encapsulated or communicated in mere thought or language.
As there is something in the beauty of art that stirs the soul, so is there something in a profoundly vital silence that moves the heart.
His eyes move to my lips as I swallow the scotch, and this time I do not cough. I lick my lips, and his eyes follow the path of my tongue from mouth corner to corner, capturing each last drop of the whisky. His tongue moves, too. Between his lips, and I watch it as he watched me. I can almost taste his tongue and lips rather than my own.
His lips part, and he sighs, the air passing slightly through his nose as well. His brows are drawn down, the wrinkle at the bridge of his nose furrowed and deep. The sigh . . . it was the sound he made after kissing me.
Huh. That’s how it sounds. Huh, but a breath, rather than vibrating vocal cords.
I have that sound captured in my soul.
The tip of my nose touches his. The earth has tilted and I am falling into him. My elbows still on my knees, but my arms are crossed in an X, left hand drooping to my right knee and vice versa.
Three mouthfuls of scotch. I am not drunk; I am intoxicated by Logan.
There is a dab of liquid at the corner of Logan’s mouth. I am utterly seized by the need to lick it away. To kiss it away. To taste scotch on his skin. I lean forward, breathing slowly, tongue sliding along my lips.
But at the last moment, I catch myself, stop. I could weep from the need to taste his kiss, to taste whisky-honeyed flesh. Instead, I touch my thumb to his mouth. Wipe. Smear. And then . . .
I suck the hint of moisture off my thumb. Logan’s chest makes a sound as of mountains colliding. A groan? A murmur?
Sense returns, albeit in dizzy snatches. I lurch to my feet, stumble away, bedroom bound.
He is too much. Too close. Too intense, too embedded in the meaning of my need and embroiled in the substance of my desire. I cannot fathom moments without him now. Yet I cannot breathe because he is all of the fractal seconds I possess, he is every stuttered fragment of time, and each breath is a drink of him. Intoxicated, I breathe yet more of him. Drowning, I am become nothing but the taste of his presence, the flavor of his eyes on mine and the glance of knuckle past knuckle, the feast of a memory of a kiss.
I close my bedroom door and collapse backward against it. I hear nothing. Only the thunderous pound of my heart, the knowledge of my guilt. The promise of what cameras have seen, and what I will suffer for it.
I hear my front door open. It’s a subtle sound, a click of the knob twisting, the latch sliding in. The whisper of weather seal on hardwood.
Suddenly, panic seizes me.
If he leaves now, I will collapse inward like a star under its own weight.
Unthinking, I tear open my bedroom door, flee out, across the living room, the tumbler, now empty, alone on the coffee table. My front door is closing. I catch it.
“Logan?”
I don’t know what comes next; I haven’t thought this far ahead. I just knew I couldn’t let him leave like that.
I see him now. Back turned to me, broad shoulders bowed and hunched, hard fists clenched, beautiful head ducked. An imposing, virile, masculine figure, arousing and erotic.
“Cinderella.” He hears my door, twists his head to look at me over his shoulder. He is not smiling, and his chest is heaving as if his breath has been leeched by intense physical combat.