Just after midnight, the restoration lab belonged to me. Its windows mirrored a stark contrast to the night, where an inky darkness enveloped the outside world. Inside, a soft flickering glow created a sterile type of warmth. My sanctuary of sorts.
Most conservators had long since slouched home for the night, except for Marissa, who’d left an hour ago, still muttering about the “priorities” of our new benefactor. Somewhere upstairs, a janitor dragged a squeaky-wheeled cart across marble tiles. Down here, silence.
I liked it better that way—no chatter, no interruptions, just the sound of my gloves brushing canvas. The portrait waited under a forensic light: a woman with her eyes painted shut, her mouth slack in a counterfeit sleep. Armand Lefèvre’s commission notes called her La Belle du Sommeil, the Sleeping Beauty. I called her Rosaline.
I pressed a cotton swab to the canvas, drawing away another pinprick of cloudy varnish. The solvent pooled briefly, glimmering under the harsh fluorescence before I wicked it up. Underneath, a square of green—teal, almost blue—breathed for the first time in nearly two centuries. I watched it, lungs tight. It seemed both jubilant and out of place, a live vein under a dead field.
Peeling off my right glove, I thumbed at the ache in my wrist. I’d been picking at the same square inch for forty-three minutes. The fixative, possibly original or from a clumsy 1970s restorer, refused to yield evenly. In one patch, the solvent turned sticky and yellow, bleeding into the next layer like the painting’s own blood had started to ooze through.
I leaned in, the tip of my nose almost touching the surface. The smell was sweet and faintly rotten, like old wine left open for weeks. I noticed a thin red line along Rosaline’s jaw, barely visible. In the digital scan, absent. Under ultraviolet, it glowed subtly, like a paper cut. A scar, maybe.
A buzz from my phone broke my trance. A text. Cassie.
Did you die? Or did Lefèvre’s painting eat you whole?
The latter. If I stop responding, avenge me…
Will scatter your ashes in the most pretentious gallery I can find xoxo.
I smirked, setting the phone screenside-down on the rolling table.
Back to work. Two drops of solvent. A fresh cotton. Another gentle pass. The surface shimmered, as pigment hung in the old varnish. I rotated the easel lamp slightly, hoping the raking light would reveal the texture better.
The face was delicate, classicist; the lips painted with surgical sharpness. But the artist had built in contradictory gestures: a swirl of impasto at the cheekbone, the faintest sneer at the right corner. The hair, once gold, was buried under four layers of umber, as if someone tried to dim her.
The uneasy part wasn’t how the painting changed every time I worked on it, though it did. The colors shifted nightly, never matching photos or memory. I documented everything, as trained: shots before and after every round, comparison macros. They never aligned. The creepier part was how, after midnight, I started to see her in my peripheral vision—once in the window, once in my palette knife’s reflection—always when I was about to stop, as if the painting demanded I continue.
I stood, stretching my back until it cracked. An air vent above the sink coughed on, and for a moment, I thought I heard footsteps in the stairwell. Security made their rounds, but rarely came to this floor unless someone tripped an alarm. I waited, staring at the entryway’s yellowed glass. Nothing.
I squinted at my hands. A bead of solvent—flammable, skin-drying, possibly carcinogenic—trembled on my index finger. I calmly wiped it on a pad, then turned to the logbook, recording:
[1:12 am—Solvent B/2, 2 drops, 1min contact. No immediate irritation. Will check in AM.]
My handwriting looked unfamiliar, almost aggressive, as if someone had been writing through me.
A sudden urge struck me, primitive and undeniable, to check the painting for hidden layers. It was irresponsible; protocol required two conservators present for any invasive imaging, but fatigue had burned away caution. I reached for the UV flashlight, killing the main light with my elbow.
In ultraviolet, the painting convulsed into a bruised blue and ghostly green. Rosaline’s mouth glowed a harsh white, teeth exposed, though she’d been painted with lips closed. The line along her jaw cut up to the temple, like a seam in the skull. I traced it with the beam; under the wash of paint, something thick and crystalline lurked.
A wave of dizziness hit me, so hard that I clutched the workbench. I breathed shallowly. I’d skipped dinner, eaten only half a Kind bar since breakfast.
When my eyes adjusted, I saw her—Rosaline—awake. Eyelids thin as moth wings, behind her left eye was a distinct, glimmering marking. Was it the underdrawing? Or some artifact of the pigment? I inched closer.
Behind me, a footstep.
I spun around, nearly knocking the lamp off its clamp. The hallway was empty except for the amber glow of the exit sign. My heart skittered.
I scanned the studio, unchanged. The painting, mute. I snapped a quick photo of Rosaline’s altered face, dimmed the UV, and restored the main lights. Her expression had settled into something patient, seemingly satisfied with how long I’d been forced to look at her.
Fatigue sharpened into hyperawareness. Every faint sound in the building amplified: the distant hum of the HVAC, the click of my shoes on linoleum, the whisper of the painting’s centuries-old canvas settling into the humidity.
I put on new gloves, squared my shoulders, and decided to strip one more patch of varnish before calling it. The cotton swab rasped as it ran over the surface, collecting gunk. I rotated the painting, staring at the newly revealed strip of blue-green. It resembled the ocean at night. I wondered, with sudden certainty, if this was the last thing the original model had ever seen.
On impulse, I set down the cotton and reached for the scalpel—No. 15 blade, new and shining. The compulsion was irrational, but I’d done hundreds of micro-incisions before. I pressed the tip to the edge of the jawline where the bleeding pigment had pooled—a razor-thin cut, just enough to see if the surface could be separated.
The scalpel slid through too easily. I shivered. Under the flaked paint, a sliver of bright red, not paint at all, but something else—organic, almost fresh. My stomach clenched. I wiped the blade, half-expecting to see it stained. It was clean.
I bent close, squinting through the binocular magnifier. The cut had vanished. No trace of the incision, no exposed layer. The jawline was perfectly smooth, as if it had healed itself in the three seconds I had looked away.
I sat back, forcing my breathing to slow. It’s sleep deprivation. Hallucination. These things happen. Thumbing the camera app open, I took a macro shot. The surface was flawless. I closed the camera, and my reflection stared back, unblinking, from the black glass.
The next hour passed in a haze. I documented, cleaned, and swabbed, but the shifts became subtler, more taunting. By 2:34 a.m., I found myself staring at the wall, unsure how long I’d been sitting motionless.
A sound: not footsteps, but a soft tapping at the door.
I froze. It repeated. I stood and edged toward the glass; blood suddenly molten in my ears. The frosted pane distorted the figure outside: tall, broad, a hint of a coat’s silhouette.
I debated ignoring it, but the rap came again—this time louder.
Hesitating, I opened the door just a crack.
A sharp-featured man in a dark suit, unseasonably formal for this hour. I recognized him from the digital photo attached to the commission: Armand Lefèvre, the new collector with old money and rumored predilections.
“Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” he said, his soft accent laced with charm. “May I?”
I stepped aside, pulse racing. “It’s…not really visiting hours.”
He smiled, the edges of his mouth never quite moving. “Forgive me. I was in the neighborhood. Couldn’t resist seeing her.”
I nodded toward the easel, trying to mask the trembling in my hand. “She’s—stable. Though there are some anomalies in the varnish. I was going to prepare a report for tomorrow—”
He glided to the painting, staring with an intensity that made me look away. “You are Evelyn, yes?”
“Yes. I’m the lead on this. I supervise all major interventions.”
He turned, eyes narrowing. “You look tired, Miss Roth. Do you always work so late?”
“It’s quieter at night,” I said. “Fewer distractions.”
“Except from her.” He gestured to the portrait, his hand elegant and still.
I cleared my throat. “She’s…demanding.”
He laughed, a single note. “So was the artist. Did you know he was rumored to have worked only at night?”
“I read the provenance file. There’s some debate over authorship.”
“Everything worth having is debated,” he said. “And yet you treat her as if she were a relic, a crime scene to be reconstructed.”
I bristled. “Conservation is about respect. The original intent matters.”
He stepped closer. Not touching, but near enough that I smelled something expensive—vetiver, leather. “And what if the original intent was…transformation?”
I looked at the painting, then at him. “I preserve what’s there.”
“But you are also creating, no?” He plucked a glove from the table and ran a fingertip just above Rosaline’s face, never making contact. “Every restorer leaves a trace, even if invisible.”
He watched me with a concentration that left no room to hide.
“I suppose,” I said, voice unexpectedly hoarse.
He stepped back, surveying the room. “Do you mind if I stay? Observe?”
I hesitated; every protocol screamed against it, but I nodded, too tired to refuse.
I pulled on my gloves, checked my hands for tremor, and prepared a new swab. Armand sat, perfectly poised, in the visitor’s chair, gaze fixed on my movements.
“Have you worked on many like her?” he asked.
“Portraits? They’re most of what I do.”
“But not like her,” he pressed.
I didn’t answer. The swab blurred in my vision, and for a second, I thought I saw Rosaline’s lips part, just the slightest crack. My hands froze.
Armand rose, almost soundless, standing behind me. “Sometimes, the subject wishes not to be restored,” he said, close to my ear. “Sometimes, the only way to honor her is to let her wounds remain.”
I inhaled, the chemical scent now tangled with his. “You’re suggesting I do nothing?”
“Not nothing.” He leaned in, voice a velvet knife. “Only what is necessary.”
A beat of silence.
“Your hands, Evelyn, so careful. Do they ever shake?”
“They do,” I said, “when someone’s watching me work.”
He laughed. “Then I’ll leave you to it. But promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“Don’t lose yourself in her.” He looked at the painting, then to me. “Some nights, the boundary blurs.”
I watched him go. The door clicked shut with exaggerated gentleness.
My skin tingled where his voice had touched it. The air in the studio felt denser. I stared at the painting, swallowing panic, and started scrubbing the night’s tools. I replayed the conversation in my mind, picking at every inflection, every ambiguous pause. Had he threatened me? Warned me? Or was I imagining menace because the painting had crawled into my fucking head?
As the days passed, Arman’s visits became routine, intrusive, annoying. I began to see him, smell him, even when he wasn’t there. I needed a break from the lab, from him, but not from Rosaline.
Fighting my better judgment, I brought her home. There were protocols against this—insurance, liability, the forms I’d signed—but I rationalized it: Armand wanted a private consult, he paid cash, and the woman in the painting haunted the air vents and mirrors more than I liked to admit.
I stashed the wrapped canvas in my car, heart racing, and by eleven p.m., it was propped in the spare bedroom, watching me through the crisp muslin dropcloth I’d hung to block out both sun and my girlfriend's eyes.
This room was the coldest in the apartment. The old windows rattled, and the ceiling fan shed dust onto anything uncovered too long. Still, it felt safer than the studio, which had taken on a mausoleum hush, as if the painting had drawn in all the leftover noise into her skin of oil and cloth.
I plugged in a desk lamp, set the bulb to its lowest wattage, and arranged my restoration kit in a line: solvents in amber vials, brushes—sable, squirrel, hog-bristle—fanned out like a bouquet. I left the whole array untouched for five minutes, staring at my reflection in the dark window, before peeling back the muslin.
Rosaline’s face was different at home. In the half-light, she had none of the clinical glamour she wore in the lab. The color of her skin was cold butter, eyes still stitched shut with improbable brushwork, but her mouth seemed softer, more permissive. I found myself apologizing for the mess, the laundry basket, the mug ring on the worktable. Then I laughed, the sound so small that I glanced at the painting to see if she’d noticed.
Mixing a paste to spot-fill the pitted ground at her temple, I leaned close and saw the same inexplicable seam at her jawline, now looking less like a wound and more like a repaired break—a kintsugi of flesh, the skin mended with gold shimmer. I was too tired to trust my eyes.
At some point, the solvents seeped through my gloves and into the crack between thumb and forefinger. It burned, then numbed. I closed my eyes and let the sensation spread, travel up my wrist, into the dip between radius and ulna. In that space, I imagined someone else’s hand, tapered fingers pressing tingles into my flesh. It was erotic in a way that had nothing to do with the body and everything to do with the promise of undoing.
A memory unspooled: Cassie pinning me in the kitchen, palms slick with olive oil and bread flour, tracing my jaw with her sticky knuckle until I nearly buckled. The musk of her arousal rising over salt and dough, igniting my own need to bite, to claim back control.
Opening my eyes, I briefly saw Cassie’s reflection superimposed over Rosaline’s face, the two blurring into something neither and both. The effect was so sharp and private I shivered, mouth dry, nipples taut beneath my hoodie. The sensation between my legs was an annoyance, a low-tide tug that refused to ebb.
I tried to focus on the painting, but my breath came shallow, uneven, pulse in my hand mirrored by one at my throat. I reached for the smallest brush—Winsor & Newton, Series 7, a quarter-millimeter at most—and dipped it in the most obscene, carmine pigment I owned. The brush vibrated as I brought it close to the canvas, tip hovering just above the painted flesh.
I touched it, once, at the hollow where Rosaline’s throat met her clavicle. The color beaded, then ran, a thin rivulet that threatened to undo the last hour’s restoration. I drew another line along the curve of the jaw, following the ghost of the wound that rattled my mind. The brush was so fine I felt each bristle against the grit of the painting, a featherlight abrasion leaving my hand trembling.
When the color bled, I pressed my finger to it, smudging it into a stain. My skin prickled.
The urge was as clear and irrational as any I’d known: I wanted the mark on my body, wanted to feel the line of the wound as a physical echo, as if I could paint myself into the same history. I pushed the sleeve of my hoodie up, then used the brush to draw a line from the blue-veined pulse point at my wrist to my elbow. The paint was cold and wet, but the feeling was hot, electric, almost embarrassing. I pressed harder, watching the pigment pool, and when I looked at the painting again, Rosaline’s mouth had changed: the lips parted, as if she was about to speak or feed.
A moan escaped my lips before I could stop it. I felt my knees squeeze together, the fabric of my leggings insistent against the heat that pulsed my pussy. I closed my eyes, let the brush rest, and slid my hand down my body, marveling at the sensation of painted and unpainted skin. The line on my arm smeared. I moved my hand up under my sweatshirt, found my nipple, cupped a breast, and gasped—shocked at the immediacy of it, the way a simple act of mimicry could spark so much want.
I pushed back in the chair, hand still wet with pigment, and let it roam under the waistband of my leggings. The solvent scent was sharp, chemical, but beneath it was the musk of sweat and need. I imagined Rosaline watching me, her painted eyes still closed, her mouth a greedy, growing smile. I let my fingers slip lower, found the seam of my body already slick, and pressed in.
The pressure was instant, overwhelming, a shudder that climbed my spine and threatened to split me in half. I pushed my tights down and kicked them off. Cassie snapped into my mind, but her image just as quickly flickered out.
My thoughts tightened around the painting, the tang of solvent and pigment, the delicate groove of the wound at the jawline, until the world shrank to the space between my thighs and the line I had drawn on my arm.
The hush of the room was immense; it pressed in from all sides, making every accidental sound—a gasp, the faint stick of my bare skin on vinyl—amplify until it became part of the ritual. I moved my hand faster, desperate, each touch leaving a ghostly half-moon arc on my skin. The brushstrokes I’d made smeared, red and alive and deeply satisfying.
When I blinked, the afterimage of the painting lingered, superimposed on my own face, the wound on the canvas mapped perfectly to my jaw. The urge to hurt, or heal, or be seen doing both, was overwhelming; I didn’t know whose desire it was anymore.
My head dropped back, eyes squeezed shut. I let my legs splay open, thinking of Cassie—not the real Cassie, but the ideal, the one who would look at this spectacle and smile, kneel beside me, licking the paint off my arm. But the image collapsed under the weight of my obsession; even in my fantasy, I pushed her aside and returned to the painting.
I rocked my hips, pressing one digit into the throb of my clit and, as if it were a release button, my body slumped in the chair. I let out a muffled moan. I pushed harder, swiping back and forth. I gritted my teeth.
The friction became unbearable, and the whole world narrowed to the point of contact. I didn’t make a sound at first, but as the wave built, I heard myself whimper, a thin noise that made the shame sharper. I closed my eyes to let her face flash behind my lids. That smile. I pictured those lips suckling my clit.
I let my fingers slide, my middle finger slipping into my pussy. I was so slick it was effortless. The thump of my heart began to rage, each beat extending my already hardened nipples. I wanted her tongue inside me, wanted to pull her hair, grinding my essence onto her mouth until I came. I wanted to stare into her eyes as she brought me to climax, then yank her into a fevered kiss.
My fingers were soaked, pussy and pigment, and I swirled a digit, teasing my g-spot, edging myself away from that orgasmic peak to extend the dream. I mewled, lamenting for a woman I didn’t know, yet somehow invaded every bit of my lust. It took only a few more rough circles before everything went white behind my eyelids.
When the tremor faded, I pressed my forehead to the cool edge of the worktable. My pussy was a mess—paint and cum. I glanced at the painting, half expecting it to laugh at me, but instead Rosaline looked sated, her lips stitched in silence.
It was nearly two in the morning. The hallway outside was black, the apartment thick with the hush of post-coital come-down and the sweet, rotten scent of art materials. I cleaned the brushes with a tenderness I did not extend to myself, lined them up, capped the solvents, and replaced the muslin over the painting. As I did, a static charge jumped from my knuckle to the canvas, and I flinched, hair on my arms standing upright.
I locked the spare room, felt a buzz in my hoodie pocket.
A text from Armand: Stopped by the studio…surprised it was empty.
I considered ignoring it, but guilt washed over me, like I was the mistress holding secrets.
She’s with me
There was a long pause, then I saw he was typing.
You understand her now, yes?
What did that mean? Could he have known? How?
I didn’t answer, just waited for the next question, or command, or verdict.
Sleep well, Evelyn…tomorrow, we finish
I stood there, skin painted, heart racing, letting Armand’s words infect the moment; the perfect line separating repair from damage.
By dawn, the mark on my arm was a faint runnel, a dried river of carmine, but the feeling it left was raw and tender as fresh skin. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, cataloguing the points of contact: the ache at my temples, the stickiness on my thighs, the ghost of a finger’s pressure pressed just below the hollow of my jaw. Cassie’s side of the bed was empty except for the faint linger of her lavender pillow spray, which only made me want to claw at my own chest.
I had always been faithful. Even in my most private moments, whatever fantasies I nursed were pruned to fit the shape of Cassie’s hands, Cassie’s tongue. The lustful urge I’d chased last night—bruised and artless, desperate as a junkie’s last fix—felt like a lie against the body I’d pledged myself to. But in the moments when I was not quite awake, I would catch glimpses: the glint of Armand’s smile, the uncanny patience of Rosaline’s painted mouth, looping in my mind like an infectious GIF.
Cassie texted at 6:51 a.m., the timestamp a rebuke.
Good morning, x. Hope you slept.
I hovered above the reply field. How was I supposed to explain the extraordinary?
Missed you, I wrote.
It sounded like a non sequitur, even to myself.
I added: Dreamt about you
Which was true, even though Cassie’s cameo in the night’s tension had been displaced by Rosaline in permutations I would never, ever admit to another living being.
Cassie replied almost instantly: Sweet. Tell me later
Later would be after work. Which meant I had twelve hours to scrape last night off my skin and try, at least in posture if not in honesty, to return to normal. I showered hard, boiling the bathroom in eucalyptus steam, and watched the water run pink down the drain from the residual paint. I tried to imagine the day as a series of containment protocols. Control the flow of evidence. Minimize cross-contamination. Lie when necessary.
At the gallery, the director was waiting for me: hands folded, face set to neutral management concern. The air in his office was museum-grade dry, and I felt my skin pull as I sat across from him. I braced for a lecture.
He started with pleasantries, the way a dentist might before telling you your gums were receding. “Evelyn, your reports are meticulous, as always. But,”—and there it was—“we do need to address some inconsistencies regarding the custody of the Lefèvre commission.”
My voice sounded distant, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “I kept it climate-controlled at all times. No exposure, no risk.” I didn’t say, I slept with it in the next room. I didn’t say, it’s safer with me than anywhere else on earth.
He looked pained in the way only bureaucrats can be when discussing something they privately envy.
“Armand will be coming in tonight for the final session. He wants to be present for the work and for the post-restoration handover.” He paused, letting the silence absorb any resistance I might have mounted. “You’ll supervise, of course. But for insurance—” a delicate tilt of the head—“we do ask you to have a peer present. Marissa will stay late.”
The meeting was over before it began. I signed the forms, agreed to Marissa’s surveillance, pretended to notice nothing unusual in the director’s watchful, unblinking gaze. When I left his office, I felt the faintest touch of relief—at least it would be over soon. The painting would be finished, the man placated, my hands permitted to go back to lesser wounds.
Back in the lab, the air was cold and metallic. I carefully reset Rosaline on an easel and draped her in a new shroud. I ran a gloved finger along the edge of the canvas, steadying myself.
Tonight, I’d strip the last layer, seal the ground, and give Rosaline back the face she’d been painted to wear. The temptation to prolong the process, to keep her just a little longer, was a sweet acid in my mouth, but I tamped it down. There was a pleasure in the precision, and tonight I would savor it.
Marissa rolled in just after nine, hair in a fresh ponytail, fingertips stained ultramarine. She kept a practiced distance, like a nurse assigned to a particularly volatile patient, but her eyes lingered on the shrouded easel. “You good?” she asked.
I nodded. “Just want to get through tonight.”
She grinned, a flash of canine. “Armand’s in the lobby. He brought a dusty bottle of something. Probably costs more than my car.”
Armand’s presence warped the air, even before he entered the lab. His eyes swept the space, landing reverently on the painting, then on me.
“She is ready?” he asked, voice low as the hush before applause.
I nodded.
The painting stood upright now, unshrouded, the forensic lamp raising a grainy luster from her face. Rosaline’s lips—delicate, still parted as if interrupted mid-breath—were no longer the waxen grey of death but a new, ambiguous pink, the exact color of a secret. The hairline scar running from her jaw to her temple glimmered faintly, not quite gold and not quite a wound. If paintings had a pulse, hers would be here, in this trembling seam.
Marissa stood beside me, arms crossed, a vaguely amused squint on her face.
“She’s stable,” I told Armand, resisting the urge to smooth my lab coat or retreat behind professional certainty. “Final retouch went in this morning. All that’s left is the surface resin—if you want it glossy, or matte. I prepped both finishes.”
Armand shook his head, ever so slightly. “No gloss. Nothing between us.” He stepped forward, hands clasped like a priest approaching sacrament. Even Marissa seemed to flinch at the way his gaze collapsed the room to just the canvas and him. “You did well, Miss Roth. Both of you.” He gave Marissa a polite half-bow, then met her eyes with a laser focus that dared her to look away first.
Marissa lifted her phone, thumbed an invisible text, then set it on the counter. “If you want a privacy window, just say it,” she muttered, almost playful. “I’ll be right around the corner.”
Armand smiled, the predator’s version of gratitude. “Your prudence is noted. But for this last part, I require only Miss Roth.” His eyes slid back to me, pupils wide, as if trying to drink in every spectrum of reflected color.
Marissa flicked her gaze to me, a quick, encrypted message: You okay?
I was, or not, but my hands were steady and my obligation clear. “It’s fine,” I told her. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
When the door shut, Armand circled the easel, studying Rosaline with a hunger that felt both sexual and sacramental. “You see it now, don’t you?” he whispered. “What she truly is.”
I followed his gaze, let myself imagine: not just a restored portrait but a presence, a residue. A woman, yes, but also a theory: that a person’s likeness could be so perfectly rendered, so obsessively composed, that it outlived the original, grew more alive the longer it was viewed, until the act of seeing became a touch, and the touch, a trespass.
“She’s remarkable,” I admitted, though the word felt inadequate. The air between us vibrated with the static of too many unsaid things—about the painting, but also about my own body, which had never felt quite so porous, so confessional.
Armand’s voice, when it came, was thinner than I expected, almost fragile. “I have followed her through a hundred galleries, in lesser incarnations. You are the first who has captured her in her true aspect.” He paused, as if waiting for me to either accept or deny a secret he’d just pronounced. “Do you know the story of her provenance?”
I shook my head.
“She was modeled by the artist’s lover,” Armand said, voice so low it barely reached me. “She was also his rival. A painter, in her own right. Some believe this is not a portrait, but a pact: to preserve her, so she could outlast him in the one way he could not forgive.” He glanced up, catching my eyes with a sudden, clinical tenderness. “Imagine loving someone enough to immortalize their wound—and then leaving it visible, so the world might see how deeply you cut each other.”
I felt flush and it rose from my neck to my scalp. I wanted, very much, to touch the painting, to run my finger along the impossibly fine seam at her jawline, to feel the friction of so much history pressed into a single line. But instead I waited, feeling him close the gap between us with a certainty I envied.
Armand reached out, not to the painting but to my hand, white-gloved and trembling at my side. He pressed my fingertips into the edge of the canvas, just at the place where Rosaline’s scar caught the light.
I tried to pull back, but he held my wrist with a gentleness that stopped just short of command.
“You repaired her,” he said, “but you also marked her. It's not possible to do otherwise. Every restorer leaves something behind.” His thumb traced the blue vein at my wrist, a calling to my shame.
The silence in the room was absolute; I found myself holding my breath. “What are you leaving behind?” I asked, voice so thin it nearly vanished.
Armand’s smile was private, and I realized he wasn’t looking at the painting anymore.
“You,” he said. “You are what I leave.” His eyes flicked to mine, steady, softening at the edges. For a moment, I felt the gravity of my own body—every past scar, every indiscretion, pulled forward and held up to the light.
“This is not a transaction,” I said quietly. “You can take her home. The restoration is finished.”
Armand’s lips twitched, an almost-smirk. He released my wrist and instead swept his palm across the small of my back, not quite touching, just mapping the air above my spine. Even through the lab coat, I felt the heat of it, a current that thrummed my chest.
My nipples raised, pressing against the thin cotton of my blouse. I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the steel-backed glass door: hair wild, cheeks hectic, eyes so dark they looked lidless. I felt like a fever chart, all spikes and dips and sudden, catastrophic surges.
He ran the backs of his knuckles along my jaw, following the arc of Rosaline’s own painted wound.
“You see? Not so different,” he murmured, as if I were the forgery and he the expert in undisguising.
Against all reason, the intimacy of it made me ache lower. I wanted—God, I wanted, and it was a want that frayed my vocabulary. There was nothing professional left in the room, only the hunger to be taken apart with the same care I’d lavished on the painting.
His lips touched mine. Tentative at first and before I could reach for anything of my own, Armand was already teasing up the fabric of my shirt, baring my belly and then the pale, shivering slope of my bare breasts. His hands made a slow, deliberate survey of my ribs. I wanted to say something—some quip, some protest—but all that came out was a stammering exhale.
He bent his head and I felt the wet heat of his mouth close around a nipple, soft at first, then sharp with tongue and teeth. The sensation was so acute it bordered on pain, a line of fire straight to my core. I grabbed the back of his neck and arched myself into his mouth.
It was not romance, not even gentleness, but a kind of mutual interrogation: what can be found when you take someone apart, when you have reduced them to their elements and rebuilt them, molecule by molecule, back into the shape of need.
He scraped his teeth up the slope of my breast, leaving a faint welt that vanished as fast as my dignity.
“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this,” he hissed, voice hoarse and close to breaking.
I almost laughed, the urge was so animal, but I could only moan as he clamped both my wrists in one hand and pressed me, back arched, against the edge of the worktable. A cup holding micro-brushes rolled, slow-motion, to the floor. He didn’t notice or care.
Armand’s other hand went straight for the fly of my jeans, deft, almost businesslike, as if undressing me were a negotiation and he’d already closed the deal. My panties were soaked, sheer as a watercolor test strip, and when he forced his fingers past the band and into the heat of me, I nearly buckled.
The way he swept two, then three fingers through the slick made me feel grotesque and greedy. His thumb pressed my clit, not gently, but like he wanted to pin me to the table by that one fucking nerve, to render me helpless and twitching and ridiculous.
I hissed, “Fuck—” and he drowned the word by shoving his tongue in my mouth, teeth clacking against my own.
I hadn’t fucked a man in ages, not since I’d figured out what I liked and what I could not abide. But there was something perfect in the way Armand handled me—not like a woman, but like a puzzle, something to be unlocked, undone, solved.
His hands never stopped moving: squeezing the curve of my thigh, tugging the waistband, tracing the seam up the inside of my labia, and finally shoving two fingers inside me so hard I gasped and bit down on his tongue.
He laughed into my mouth, primal and triumphant, and forced me back so my ass hit the table’s edge. Jeans and underwear yanked down in a single, practiced wrench.
The cold air shocked my skin. He slapped my thigh, hard enough to sting, and then again. I jerked, not because it hurt, but because the pain was sharp and clarifying, a jolt that forced the world into a single axis: me, him, the table, the painting’s impossible gaze.
He knelt and pushed my knees apart, wedging his shoulders between them like a battering ram. I tried to joke—something about how I’d have to sterilize the work surface after, but his tongue was already at work; slow licks and mean, deliberate flicks.
Mouthing my clit with focus, he slid fingers back inside, curled them up, rough, blunt, hitting the spot Cassie always coaxed with featherlight circles. There was no feather here. He wanted to empty me out, make me drip, and I let him, let the noise come raw from my throat.
“Jesus,” I rasped, both hands fisting the edge of the table.
He went harder, tongue flat, nose pressed to me. The sound was obscene: wet suction and the slap of his spit on my skin. I came with a violence that stunned even me, the muscles in my thighs clamping around his jaw and my whole body convulsing in a spasm that bordered on seizure. I tried to muffle the scream and only managed to taste the copper of my own bitten lip.
Now upright, he spun me so fast the room swam. I clung to the edge of the workbench, jeans twisted at my ankles, and felt the unmistakable drag of his belt and zipper as he ground himself hard against my ass.
I wanted to say no—that wasn’t in the brief, that wasn’t who I was or what I’d ever even let myself want—but the only sound that came out was a whimper, some blend of humiliation and hunger.
He hesitated, just a fraction, as if waiting for the protocol cue, and then his hands slid under my pelvis and lifted, pulling me back until I was flush against him. He took a half-step, and I was bent forward, palms flat, feet scrambling for purchase on the slick vinyl flooring. He reached between my thighs and spread me wider, the cold air and his heat alternating until I could no longer tell the difference.
Something inside me thrilled at the helplessness, the way my body could be opened, offered up in a way my mind never allowed. He felt for the crease of me, then pressed the fat, hard line of his cock against my entrance. For a second, a pointed hesitation—then he forced himself in, with an economy of motion that made me gasp and claw at the edge of the table.
He was so fucking deep, so abruptly there, I felt nothing but sensation: flesh, pressure, the impossible hot stretch as he bottomed out. Each thrust was a careful, measured increment, as if he was taking samples—not pounding, not rutting, but cataloguing every flinch and tremor as a new property of the medium.
I braced myself and shuddered, eyes watery, forehead pressed to the cold resin of the bench. He set a palm to the back of my neck, holding me steady, and I thought I’d hate it, that I’d buck and run, but instead I found myself arching, wanting more.
Leaning in over me, he pressed his cheek to my hair and whispered, “You mend the broken so exquisitely, Evelyn. But you ache to be broken yourself, yes?” The words detonated low in my cunt. “You want to be made over. Admitted. Signed by the hand of the master.”
He started to move in earnest, each stroke precise, relentless, like he was trying to drive the signature through my backbone. I tried to say something, anything, but it all came out as a choked gasp.
“Look at her,” he said, his hand reaching up to force my chin toward the painting. I saw Rosaline, the scar on her jaw glimmering, almost wet, her lips parted in the exact O of my own—two women split by centuries, matched in a mutual, wrecked surprise. “You see? She’s alive again. And you, you are the medium.”
I whimpered, every muscle shaking. “Don’t stop,” I heard myself say, voice alien and urgent.
He didn’t. His pace intensified, still measured, but with the inevitability of a clock winding down, each thrust hammering the air from my lungs. The edge of the table bit into my ribs and left a row of bruises, but I craved the evidence, wanted to bear the moniker of this moment on my skin.
Reaching down, he pinched my clit with two fingers and twisted, until the pain blurred into a hot, elemental wave that made my knees give. I came again, and this time I screamed, the sound guttural and torn, more like a death rattle than a climax. He followed, a grunt of satisfaction, and collapsed against my back, still holding my neck in a grip that felt like both possession and benediction.
When Armand withdrew, he did so with a slow, deliberate motion. He let go of my neck last, then wrapped both arms around my middle, holding my drained, shaking body upright. My head lolled forward, hair curtaining my face, and I tried to catch my breath while the world reassembled itself from the shatter.
He dressed with clinical efficiency, tucking in his shirt, smoothing the lapels, as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. For a moment, I hated him, the ease of his return to form, but I hated myself more for envying the composure.
And then, he slowly approached the painting. “Look,” he said—not to me, but to Rosaline.
Something in the studio changed then. The light, the air, maybe the very molecules in the solvent haze.
The painting had always been beautiful, but now it was resplendent, the face on the canvas awash with an uncanny, impossible glow. The scar, once subtle as an afterthought, was gilded with a line of what looked like fresh blood, or mercury, or maybe just the purest, most intoxicating red I’d ever mixed.
But it was the eyes that stopped me cold: they were open. Just a slit, lashless, the merest suggestion of iris, but undeniably awake and watching. My own reflection was there, faint and doubled, standing beside Armand’s—a triptych of witness, perpetrator, victim.
He reached a finger out, not touching, but close enough to stir the dust motes in the painting’s wake. “You did it,” he said. “She’s complete now.” His voice was raw, the edge of pleasure and mourning indistinguishable.
I wanted to laugh, to weep, to slap him, but my hands wouldn’t leave the table. The aftermath of the act had left me boneless, adrift, but also more solid than I’d ever felt, as if my body was only now catching up to the intensity of its own longing. Armand pulled the muslin back over Rosaline’s face, then cupped my jaw.
“Don’t lose yourself,” he whispered.
I put myself back together in rituals; sliding on of jeans, buttoning of blouse, dragging cloth over skin like a dressing. The cotton stuck where sweat and spit and cum had dried. I glanced at the clock: two-seventeen. Marissa had long gone, and no one had texted, but the silence was different now—it felt expectant, like the night was holding its breath for what would happen next.
Armand poured a glass of wine with the solemnity of a closing argument. I sipped, tongue searching the rim for a taste of iron or memory, some trace of what had just occurred. My hand shook, so I steadied the glass with both and tipped it back, letting the ache behind my teeth bloom into something sharp, then sweet.
“Will you remember this?” he asked, voice raspy.
I coughed out a laugh. “You think I could forget?”
He smiled, and for an instant, it was the only honest thing on his face.
“Some people do. Some people are so skilled at restoration, at making the evidence disappear, they convince themselves nothing was ever broken at all.”
“Not me,” I said, leaning back against a stool. “I keep every fracture.”
He nodded; it seemed like the answer he’d wanted. The wine sat in my belly, warm, alive.
After Armand left, I polished away the last traces—wine spots, fibers, the faintest print of my thigh on the vinyl bench.
Alone, I studied Rolsaline for a full minute in the sterile, overhead light. The eyes, now wide, met mine with the slow, hungry patience of something that had all the time in the world. The jaw’s red seam, once a retouched flaw, now shone like a deliberate signature. I reached up, ran a fingertip along it, and felt a pulse that might have been my own.
Shame rose up, white-hot, but I let it pass. I’d preserved the painting. But in the process, I’d become a vessel for the wound—a carrier, a witness, a lover of the thing that would destroy me and remake me in its image.
I wrote the final restoration note by hand, the pen skittering across the page:
[Restoration complete. Structural integrity: irrevocable. Retouch: minimal. Loss: indeterminate. Object and observer indistinguishable. Recommend no further intervention—preserve as is.]
I left the lab at dawn, arms empty, heart wrecked clean. In the foyer, I paused beneath the fluorescence and felt, for the first time in years, the ache of my own outline. Not absence, exactly, but the lucidity that comes when you realize the thing you thought you were mending has been undoing you in return, cell by cell, touch by touch.
When I reached the parking lot, I found a text from Cassie:
Did the painting survive?
I stared until the screen dimmed, then answered:
We both did…
For now.
