Page 7 of Beautiful Savage
Outside, distant sounds drift from the studio, the tinkling of brushes against glass jars. The house settles around me. My knuckles throb, and thin, dark lines of blood stain my fingers. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Thirty. I remain motionless, the paintings gazing down, especially the one that hides her face.
What I came here to do and what I am doing now have come apart. I shift my stance, testing my balance. Then gravel crunches underfoot, a truck door thuds, and footsteps echo on the porch.
The door opens.
She walks in looking down, fumbling with a bag zipper. She wears a wrap skirt over a leotard, her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. Ballet shoes are visible through the open zipper. She is thinking about something else — groceries, tomorrow's lesson.
She closes the door and looks up.
She sees me. Sees me standing under her childhood portrait.
Everything stops. Her body goes rigid. The bag slides to her elbow. Dark eyes — exactly like the paintings, but more. The painter caught truth. The jaw line, the shoulders. But he missed something. There is something regal in her stillness.
My pulse hammers in my throat.
We do not move. Do not speak. Five seconds. Ten.
Nine years of control, collapsing. My body recognizes something it has not recognized in almost a decade. Maybe never. My hand at my side closes into a fist without permission. The split knuckles pull. Fresh blood wells.
She is looking at me. Not through me. Not around me. At me. Her gaze isn't sliding off me, like everyone else's does. And I am looking back. Seeing her. Understanding it in my body, before the thought arrives, that everything I came here to do just became impossible.
She is real.
And I am fucked.
3 - Daphne
The piano in Studio A definitely needs tuning. The middle C has been flat for three weeks and Miss Macie keeps promising to call someone. Maybe I should just call the tuner myself, save everyone the weekly reminder dance. I’m thinking about this as I fumble with my dance bag’s stubborn zipper, the one that always catches on the inner lining, when I push through my front door.
I close it behind me with my foot, an automatic gesture born from years of coming home with arms full of groceries or lesson plans. The bag finally cooperates as I turn toward the kitchen, already mentally cataloging what's in the fridge for dinner. Papa's probably lost in his painting. I can hear the faint drift of his radio from the studio, that classical station he loves.
Then I see him. A stranger stands in my living room.
My pulse hammers so hard I can feel it in my fingertips still clutching the keys. The scream that should come gets caught somewhere between my lungs and throat, the years of trained courtesy suppressing it before it can form. My hand goes to my mouth but no sound comes out.
"Can I help you?" The teacher voice emerges without my permission, the same soft upward inflection I use with the mothers at Miss Macie's, trying to make this invasion fit into some social framework I understand.
My brain processes him in fragments. His size first, how he makes my living room look smaller just by existing in it. Black clothes, all black, like he stepped out of shadow. Standingperfectly still in the center of the room, as if he's been there for hours. My body understands before I do. The cold spreads from my sternum outward, fast, the way shock moves before pain does. My mouth goes instantly dry. The truck keys in my right hand are suddenly slick with sweat.
His hands hang loose at his sides. Blood darkens the knuckles of his right hand, some dried brown, some still wet enough to catch the light. On his forearm where the black sleeve is pushed up, a tattoo: an armored figure with wings spread, holding a sword.
Then his face, the scarred, broken beauty of it, like he's been hit so many times the damage stopped being damage and became the face itself. Pale eyes that could be gray or could be smoke, watching me with an intensity that makes my lungs forget how to work. A scar crosses from his left eyebrow over the bridge of his nose. He hasn't moved. Not a shift of weight, not a turn of his head. Nothing.
The stillness is wrong. Not the stillness of someone waiting, or someone paused mid-action. This is the stillness of a man who has already decided everything that's going to happen. My body recognizes it even though I have no language for it. The recognition floods my system with terror so complete it feels like drowning.
I don't scream. The instinct rises and dies in my throat as a small, wet sound I swallow back. My hand goes to my mouth, pressing against my lips. My body has already done the calculation: if I scream, Papa will come from his studio. If Papa comes, this man will handle him the way he's handled whoever bled on his knuckles. The scream stays trapped behind my fingers.
"Is there… can I… do you need something?" The words come out in my teacher voice, soft and accommodating. My first protocol, deployed automatically while my hand drops from mymouth. As if this is normal. As if massive strangers in black regularly appear in my living room.
He doesn't respond. The pale eyes stay on mine. The stillness remains absolute.
The silence stretches until I can hear my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. My hands find my bag strap, adjusting it on my shoulder, something to do while I reach for the next protocol in my sequence, the one that converts intruders into guests.
"Would you like some water? I could get you a glass." I take a half-step toward the kitchen, testing.
Nothing. Not even a blink. The protocol fails completely. The stillness is suffocating. Papa's radio drifts faintly from the garden: a violin concerto, peaceful and entirely wrong for this moment.
I touch my hair, tucking a strand behind my ear that doesn't need tucking. "I think you might be looking for my father." My voice stays carefully light, helpful. "He's in his studio out back. I can show you…"
