Page 61 of Beautiful Savage
Above the couch, myself at nineteen. Nicolas painted me in the back garden: late afternoon light, the heritage roses behind me, the mahogany tree in the corner, the studio's pale stucco wall at frame's edge. I sit on the wooden bench Papa built in 1996, wearing a faded blue dress, hair down over one shoulder, looking past the painter at something beyond. A bird, the sky, nothing. My eyes visible, my mouth at rest. The woman I was before the conservatory dismissed me, before Pristine became my cage.
I've walked past this painting ten thousand times. But now I see it with fresh eyes.
This is the painting Gunner saw that day. The day he came for me, he was already in the cottage when I arrived home from Miss Macie's. I found him standing beneath this very portrait, and we stood facing each other across the living room while my painted eyes watched from the wall. Now I understand what I didn't then: this painting is what stopped him. Made him look. Made him decide. The bougainvillea in the garden gave him the excuse to take me, but this portrait of me at nineteen, this is what made him want to keep me.
Two paintings by Nicolas. Both waiting for Gunner without knowing it. This portrait plus the garden painting that justified the kidnapping.
I pace through rooms that suddenly feel too small to contain this fury, this understanding that the man I love looked at my painted face and decided to take me after standing beneath it. The portrait stays in my peripheral vision always, those painted eyes following me, before I finally sit on the couch beneath it.
At 2:18 PM, I pull out my phone and type:I am at my father's. Tell me why you really sent me away.
I hit send and wait, checking if he's read it, fighting not to type more. The phone sits face-up beside my thigh on the couch. Through the window, the lemon tree sways slightly in the afternoon breeze. The ceiling fan turns lazy circles. Forty-three minutes is an eternity when you're waiting for a response from the man who pushed you away.
At 3:01 PM:You're safer there.
I read it twice. The operational voice, using safety as a cover for something else. My anger flares fresh.
Bullshit.
Twenty-eight minutes this time. I get up, walk to the kitchen, pour water, drink it standing at the sink. I return to the couch.
I want you away from all this.
What.
Not over text.
Then over the phone.
No.
The refusal is final, and I feel it close. He isn't pushing me away from the Hallstein danger.
I set the phone down and don't text for two hours.
I walk the cottage, trying not to think. But his voice, the paintings, Hallstein, it all keeps coming back to me. Gunner wants to end it, but in doing so, he's entering the kind of danger that could end with him dead in some Miami canal.
The anger doesn't disappear; it reorganizes around the love beneath it. I'm still furious that he sent me away, but I understand the motivation, at least.
At 5:34 PM, I pick up the phone again.
One day you'll push me away so far I won't come back.
The line hangs in the empty cottage, not about this afternoon but about everything we've been. For forty days, Gunner has been the one refusing: refusing to look, to touch, to name what blazed between us. I've been the one showing up: painting my body with his garden's flowers, dancing for him, kissing him first, letting him take me against the wall. He's been pulling back while I've been stepping forward. Today is just his biggest pullback yet.
I set the phone down. He doesn't respond for an hour.
At 6:38 PM:I know.
I sit with those two words, not responding, until Nicolas comes in from the studio at 6:50 talking about dinner.
I cook the chicken with citrus and bay leaves that Maman taught me at eleven, rice with sofrito, a simple green salad. The kitchen fills with garlic and lemon and butter, different from Sera's cooking, and I hadn't realized I'd missed it until now. Nicolas opens the special occasion wine from the cabinet without comment, the bottle that's been waiting for a Sunday that didn't come.
At the small kitchen table with Maman's faded placemats, I tell him the edited version. There's a man in Miami. His name is Gunner. Runs security for a Cuban-American family's club. I make his dangerous world sound almost ordinary. We met through a job I don't specify. Been seeing him five weeks. I'm in love with him. He sent me home because something dangerous is happening in his work this week.
What I don't tell: the kidnapping that started everything, the bougainvillea painting on Gunner's wall, this portrait's role inmaking him want me, the man who raped and killed six women, that I could be the next target, that I'm here because Gunner couldn't bear to risk losing me to his enemies.
Nicolas listens without pressing. Halfway through the meal, he says quietly, "Love changes the shape of a face. Yours has changed."
