The painting had been finished for twenty minutes before I actually looked at it.
That was how it usually went, the slow return from wherever the work had taken me, like surfacing from deep water. The room reassembled itself piece by piece. The smell of paint and turpentine. The cold through the small window above the shelf. The low amber light of a Sunday afternoon falling across the studio floor in long strips, the light that made everything look like it was already a memory.
I set the brush down and looked at what I'd made.
At first it read like exhaustion colors spread without ceremony, unstructured, the thing you'd mistake for carelessness if you only glanced. But the longer I stood with it, the more something else surfaced. A weight underneath all that color. Something I hadn't placed there deliberately but that was there all the same, unmistakable now that I was on the outside of it.
All those colors. And still a sadness running through every single one.
Just like yourself, I thought, and turned away from it, because that was enough of that.
Stormy had left Friday evening, and the apartment had exhaled in her absence. Not unpleasantly we weren't unfriendly, just not close, coexistence that worked precisely because neither of us pushed it further than necessary.
In the kitchen, I stood over the stove and tried to remember the last time I'd eaten since morning.
The pasta water was taking its time. Outside, a car passed with music bleeding from the windows something bass-heavy, there and then gone. I stirred the pot and stared at nothing.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
Charlie.
"Hey, hey — Eve." Her voice carried the warmth of a house full of people, background noise threading through voices overlapping, something clattering, a child laughing somewhere at the back of it all. "You want to come over to Grandma's? Whole family thing today and she keeps asking about you. Like specifically. By name."
"Tell her I'll come next time," I said. "I've got an assignment I've been putting off."
A pause. "Eve."
"I'm serious about the assignment."
"I know you are." A small sigh, not dramatic, just the exhale of someone who had seen through the excuse and chosen not to make it a thing. "Okay. Come next time. For real."
"For real."
"She's going to ask where you are."
"Tell her I said hi and I'm sorry."
"She'll forgive you. She always does." A voice called her name in the background. "I have to go — call me later?"
"I will."
She hung up.
The silence the call left behind settled around me differently than the silence before it. Family gatherings. A house full of people glad to see each other. Charlie had no idea what she was offering, or how much easier it was to say no from a distance than to sit in the middle of it and feel the outline of everything that had always been missing.
She didn't know. I'd never found words for it that didn't make it heavier than I wanted it to be.
The water boiled. I dropped the pasta in.
The text came while I was eating.
Unknown number. I almost left it unknown numbers rarely brought anything worth the energy but something made me open it anyway.
Got your number from Professor Bert. I want to take you out.
I read it twice. Set my fork down. Read it a third time.
No name. No preamble. No attempt at easing into it — just the statement, flat and direct, written with the confidence of someone for whom asking was the formality and the answer was already assumed.
I had a response half formed when the same number called.
Against my better judgment, I answered.
"Hey." A pause, barely a beat. "Are you listening?"
Low. Unhurried. I'd heard that voice once before, in a classroom, and I'd been annoyed at myself for cataloguing it then too.
My fork went down entirely. "How did you get my number?"
"Professor Bert."
"You asked Professor Bert for my number."
"I did."
"And she just gave it to you."
A brief pause. "She did."
I sat with that for a second. Professor Bert who ran her classroom like a controlled experiment in psychological endurance, who had made a visiting lecturer visibly sweat last term, handing over a student's contact information because Liam Lincoln had asked for it. The fact that it had worked said something I put away without deciding what to do with yet.
"So you do know who I am," he said. Something in his voice shifted not quite amusement.
"I know your name."
"You've been thinking about me."
"I haven't."
"You answered on the second ring."
"I was sitting next to my phone."
"Sure."
There was something almost bored about the way he said it, not dismissive, but removed from reality, like he was watching the exchange from a slight distance and finding it more interesting than he'd expected. That was what kept me from hanging up immediately, which I was already annoyed about.
"What do you actually want?" I asked.
"I told you. I want to take you out."
"You texted a stranger out of nowhere asking them on a date. People don't do that."
"I do."
"Why?"
A pause. Longer than the others.
"You moved my bag," he said.
I blinked. "What?"
"In Bert's class. You came in late and you moved my bag off the chair without asking. Without even looking at me first." Another pause. "Then you sat down and pretended I wasn't there for two and a half hours."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
"Most people don't do that," he said, and underneath the low evenness of his voice something was there that hadn't been before. Not vulnerability exactly more like someone pressing on something they hadn't fully decided to name yet. "I'm asking you out because you didn't care that it was my bag."
The kitchen was very quiet.
It landed differently than I expected not like a line, not like something rehearsed. Just a statement, almost matter-of-fact, from someone who existed in a world where people registered him, adjusted for him, performed around him. And Everly Carver had moved his bag like it was just a bag. That apparently registered as something worth noticing.
I wasn't sure what to do with that, so I set it aside.
"And I don't want to go," I said.
"You haven't heard what I'm suggesting."
"It doesn't matter what you're suggesting."
"It might."
"It doesn't."
Silence. Not the silence of someone caught off guard more like someone deciding how much further to push and landing on not yet.
"Most people don't say no," he said, quieter.
"That's not my problem."
I ended the call.
The kitchen held its silence around me.
Outside, the afternoon light had gone cooler, the brief gold of it already passed. I sat with the phone face-down on the table.
Whatever had passed between us at that party and I wasn't naive enough to pretend it had been nothing — it wasn't a reason. I was no one in his world, no one near his circle, and twenty seconds of eye contact across a dance floor didn't make me interesting to someone like him. Curiosity wasn't interest. Novelty wasn't care. Whatever brief, reflexive thing a person like Liam Lincoln felt toward someone who didn't react the way he expected it passed. It always did. The next girl was always available.
The phone lit up.
So rude.
Two words, somehow carrying the tone of someone more entertained than offended. Which was almost worse.
I didn't reply. He didn't text again.