Chapter 25: Everything At Once

We got back to the apartment at seven.

Noah was with Caleb’s replacement, a quiet steady woman named Grace who had been vetted by three separate agencies and background checked by Damien’s security team with a thoroughness that suggested Damien had decided that the Caleb situation was not something he intended to repeat in any form. Grace had fed Noah dinner and read him two chapters of a book about a dragon who was afraid of fire which Noah had found both philosophically interesting and personally relatable on behalf of the dragon and had then put him to bed with the competent ease of someone who was good at the specific work of caring for small people.

He was asleep when we arrived.

I went to check on him anyway because I had started doing that. Walking to his doorway in the evenings and standing there for a moment in the particular quiet of a sleeping child and letting it do whatever it did to me which was something I had stopped trying to name and simply allowed.

He was on his side with Felix in the crook of his arm and the nightlight casting its soft orange glow across his face and his dark hair going in three directions simultaneously and his small chest rising and falling with the deep complete breathing of someone who had made total peace with unconsciousness.

I stood in the doorway for a long moment.

Then I went to the studio.

I did not plan to. I had not said to myself on the drive back from Brooklyn that I was going to paint tonight. But the elevator stopped at the fourth floor before it stopped at Damien’s apartment and I stepped out with the automatic quality of going somewhere your body has decided on before your mind has caught up and I unlocked the studio and went inside.

The north facing windows were dark now.

No morning light. No afternoon honesty. Just the city outside doing what the city did at night, burning with ten thousand lit windows and the distant particular hum of a place that did not stop, and that light coming through the glass was different from the daytime light but it was not nothing. It had its own quality. Its own color. Something amber and alive and slightly restless.

I turned on the work lamp.

Stood in the center of the room.

The painting from the first day was against the east wall where I had put it after it dried. The one of Damien that was not his face but was entirely him. Dark and warm and the amber thing at the center that had no name.

I did not look at it.

I looked at the blank canvas on the easel that I had not touched since that first painting because I had been waiting without knowing I was waiting for something to accumulate enough to need to come out.

It had accumulated.

I picked up a brush.

I did not think about what I was going to paint. Thinking about it was how you ended up with something planned rather than something true and I had learned the difference in this studio in a way I had not been able to learn it anywhere else. The north facing light had something to do with it. The honesty of it. The way it showed you things as they were rather than as any particular hour wanted them to appear.

I began.

What came out was not what I expected.

It was not Damien and it was not Noah and it was not Eleanor in her brownstone kitchen with her cold tea and her bright eyes and her window boxes with the stubborn October flowers. It was not the rainy street or the restaurant or the red dress or any of the images I had been carrying.

It was me.

Not my face. The way the Damien painting was not his face. Something more interior than that. The feeling of myself at this particular moment in this particular life, which was a thing I had never tried to paint before because I had never been certain enough of what that feeling was to put it into color and form.

I was certain now.

I painted for three hours.

I did not hear Damien come in.

I became aware of him the way I had become aware of him that first day, not from sound but from that particular shift in the quality of a room when he entered it. That specific gravity of his settling into the space around me.

I kept painting.

He did not speak. He found the place he had stood that first afternoon, the wall beside the door, and leaned against it with his arms folded and watched me work with the focused complete attention he gave to everything he considered worth understanding.

I worked for another forty minutes.

Then I stepped back.

Looked at the canvas.

Breathed.

It was a woman standing in a doorway. Not clearly defined. More impression than image, the way I worked when I was working from something true rather than something observed. But recognizable to anyone who knew how to look, which meant recognizable to me and almost certainly recognizable to the man currently standing against the wall behind me.

She was standing in a doorway between two kinds of light.

Behind her the particular grey of a life that had been small and survivable and hers. In front of her something warmer and more complicated and considerably less safe that was also, unmistakably, where she was going.

Her posture was the posture of someone who had made a decision and was living inside the first moment of it. Not the moment of deciding. The moment after. When the decision is made and irreversible and you are standing in the space between the old life and the new one and understanding with the complete clarity of that particular threshold that you are not going back.

I stood looking at it for a long time.

“Mia,” Damien said quietly from behind me.

“I know,” I said.

He crossed the room and stood beside me and we looked at it together the way we had looked at the first painting. In the silence that was full rather than empty.

“This is you,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” I said.

“In the doorway,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Choosing,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Already chosen.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I need to tell you something,” he said.

I turned to look at him.

He was looking at the painting with an expression that was moving through several things at once. The complexity of a man who had spent his life building architecture around his interior and was in the process of dismantling it deliberately and was discovering that dismantling was both more painful and more necessary than he had anticipated.

He looked at me.

“I have been in love with you,” he said quietly, “since the moment you said I’m not most people in a restaurant where you had every reason to be intimidated and were not even slightly.”

I looked at him.

“I have been in love with you through the arrangement and the events and the headlines and Marcus and Caleb and the Foundation and page forty seven and my mother’s kitchen.” He held my gaze with those dark steady eyes. “I have been in love with you while being significantly less than fully honest with you and I understand that those two things are in contradiction and I am not asking you to resolve that contradiction tonight or to forgive it on any particular timeline.”

“Damien,” I said softly.

“I am asking you,” he said, “to understand that everything I have not told you has come from fear rather than intent. And that I am done being afraid of the things that matter enough to be afraid of.” He paused. “I am done building walls around the things I love.”

The studio was very still.

The city burned outside the dark windows.

I looked at this man. This complicated, carefully opening, devastatingly specific man who had come to a rainy street because his mother sent him and stayed because I had looked at him like a person and had been building, slowly and at significant personal cost, toward this moment in a studio with north facing windows where he stood in front of a painting of a woman in a doorway and said everything he had been holding.

I stepped toward him.

He went very still in the way he went still when I moved toward him, that complete arrested attention of someone encountering something they had been hoping for and had not entirely allowed themselves to expect.

I put both hands against his chest.

His heartbeat was loud beneath my palms.

“I have been in love with you,” I said quietly, “since the cushion tower.”

Something broke open in his expression.

“I know,” he said softly. “I told you that.”

“You were right,” I said. “You are occasionally insufferable about being right.”

“Only on days ending in Y,” he said.

I laughed. He pulled me toward him and I went completely and his arms came around me and I pressed my face into his neck and he held me with the particular tightness of someone holding something they had been afraid of losing and had not lost.

We stood like that for a long time.

His lips at my hair. My hands against his back. The painting behind us. The city outside the dark windows doing its restless amber burning.

Then he lifted his head and looked down at me and his eyes in the work lamp light were very dark and very warm and doing the thing they did where they moved across my face like they were reading something written specifically for them.

“Come to bed,” he said softly.

“In a minute,” I said. “I need to clean my brushes.”

He looked at me.

“You are cleaning your brushes right now,” he said.

“I am always cleaning my brushes,” I said. “You cannot leave brushes dirty. It ruins them.”

He looked at the ceiling briefly with the expression of a man adjusting his expectations.

“Clean your brushes,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

He sat on the floor beneath the north facing windows while I cleaned my brushes and he watched me work the way he always watched me work and the silence between us was the fullest kind and I moved through it and let it be what it was.

When I was done I sat beside him on the floor.

The city outside. The painting on the easel. The work lamp warm and steady above us.

“What do you want,” he said quietly. Not about tonight. About everything.

I leaned my head against his shoulder.

“This,” I said. “Exactly this.”

He turned his head and pressed his lips to my hair.

“Then this is what you have,” he said.

We sat beneath the north facing windows for a long time.

And then we went to bed.

And what happened between us that night in the dark of his bedroom was different from before. Deeper and slower and more honest in a way that had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with two people who had arrived finally at the same place at the same time with nothing between them that had not been said.

He moved with that deliberate unhurried quality that made me feel like the only destination worth arriving at. His hands warm and certain and entirely present. His mouth at my skin saying things that his voice could not have made more true.

I held nothing back.

Neither did he.

Afterward I lay against his chest in the dark and listened to his heartbeat slow and felt his hand moving in those long unhurried strokes up and down my back and the city was quiet outside and down the hall Noah slept with Felix in the crook of his arm.

“Sunday,” I said softly into the quiet.

“Mm,” he said.

“I want to invite Eleanor,” I said. “For pancakes.”

His hand stilled on my back.

Then resumed.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Okay.”

“And I want to call Serena,” I said. “About a schedule. Something slow and on Noah’s timeline the way you said.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And I want to finish the painting tomorrow,” I said. “The woman in the doorway. There is something missing in the bottom right corner.”

“What’s missing,” he said.

I thought about it.

“A hand,” I said. “Reaching in from outside the frame. From the warm side.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Whose hand,” he said softly.

I lifted my head and looked at him in the dark.

“Yours,” I said.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he pulled me back down and held me close and pressed his lips to my hair and I felt him exhale the deep slow exhale of a man who had arrived somewhere he had not known he was trying to reach.

“Sleep,” he said softly.

“You sleep,” I said.

“Mia.”

“I’m sleeping,” I said.

I was not sleeping. I was lying in the warm dark listening to his heartbeat and thinking about Sunday mornings and pancake edges and a hand reaching in from the warm side of a painting and the particular feeling of standing in a doorway between two kinds of light and knowing without question which direction you were going.

I fell asleep eventually.

And if I dreamed I did not remember what about.

But I woke in the morning with his arm around me and the early light coming pale through the curtains and the sound of small feet in the hallway outside and a voice saying Mia in a loud whisper that was not remotely a whisper and I smiled before I opened my eyes.

And opened them.

And everything was exactly where I had left it.