Page 206 of Saint Céline
“No.”
“Did he train himself?”
“Unclear.”
Sophia studied me across the small kitchen table. “You look different.”
I touched my shorter hair automatically. “Bad?”
“No.” She smiled, and for once there was no sadness hidden beneath it. “Like yourself.”
I did not know what to say to that. So I reached for the white wine and poured too much into all our glasses.
* * *
That night, after Sophia and Anya had gone back to their hotel, I stood in the studio alone. The windows were open to the warm French night, letting in the low laughter and clinking of glasses from the street below. Miss Astoria slept curled on a chair in the corner, her white fur catching the lamplight like spilled cream.
A half-finished painting leaned against the wall—the sea, but not Blackwater’s sea: warmer, brighter, its edges deliberately unfinished, as though this water had no interest in swallowing anyone whole. My hands still smelled of turpentine and soap.
Nothing I wore belonged to Katherine anymore—not the loose linen shirt slipping off one shoulder, not the paint-stained trousers rolled at the ankles, not the silver ring I had boughtmyself at the flea market because it was pretty and I simply wanted it. Nothing I wanted belonged to her either.
Vincent entered quietly behind me. He had learned to knock now. Usually.
I glanced over my shoulder. “You’re getting better.”
“At knocking?”
“At pretending you understand boundaries.”
“I understand them,” he said, voice low. “I simply dislike many of them.”
“Progress.”
He came to stand beside me, close enough that I felt the heat of him but not touching, his eyes on the unfinished canvas. For a long while, neither of us spoke. The city breathed outside—warm gold streetlights, distant voices, the faint scent of rosemary and grilled bread drifting up from the café below.
Then he asked, soft as a confession, “Are you happy?”
I looked at the painting. At Miss Astoria’s slow rise and fall of breath. At the yellow light glowing from my mother’s apartment across the street. At the locked drawer beneath my worktable where the box with the handkerchief sat beside Katherine’s phone—my proof, his proof, our deed arranged between us like quiet witnesses we no longer feared.
Happy was too clean a word. Too innocent. Too bright. I did not think happiness knew what to do with women like me. But freedom—freedom could be darker. Harder. Less pure. Freedom could have teeth.
“Yes,” I said softly.
Vincent looked at me. The lamplight caught the sharp line of his jaw, the faint shadow of stubble he had let grow since we arrived, the way his dark eyes always seemed to catalogue every fracture before deciding whether to widen it or seal it closed. Something in his expression shifted—something almost like awe.
I touched the drying paint at the edge of the canvas, blue staining my fingertip.
Then I smiled. “And this is all mine.”
He stepped closer then, one hand rising to brush a stray lock of hair from my cheek. His thumb lingered, tracing the line of my jaw with the same deliberate care he once used to catalogue every secret I tried to hide. “Yes,” he murmured. “It is.”
The air between us thickened, warm and electric, the way it always did when the rest of the world fell away. I turned fully to him, my paint-stained hands sliding up the front of his shirt, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath the crisp cotton. He did not move to stop me. He never did—not when I reached for him like this, claiming the space I had finally made my own.
“Selena,” he said, the name low and reverent on his tongue, and it no longer felt like a theft. It felt like recognition.
I kissed him first—slow at first, then hungry, my fingers twisting into the fabric of his shirt to pull him closer. He tasted like the white wine we had shared earlier with Sophia and Anya, like salt and heat and the faint edge of smoke from the cigarette he had stepped outside to finish while they said their goodbyes. His hands settled on my waist, sliding beneath the loose linen to find bare skin, thumbs stroking the dip of my spine with a patience that always made me want to shatter it.
We moved together without breaking the kiss, my back meeting the edge of the wide wooden worktable. Paint tubes and brushes clattered softly aside as he lifted me onto it, my legs parting so he could step between them. The trousers came off easily—his fingers deft, almost reverent, peeling the fabric down my thighs like he was unwrapping something sacred and dangerous at once. I kicked them away, bare now from the waist down, the cool night air brushing against the slick heat already gathering between my legs. Vincent’s gaze dropped, dark andintent, as though he were memorizing the way I looked, spread open for him in this studio that was mine, this life that was mine.
