“Let me see,” he says, and lifts my cut hand without taking the knife. His fingers wrap my wrist. He studies the line in my palm like it’s a map.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” he agrees, “but it’s not a problem.”
He picks up the palette knife from the ledge very carefully. He turns the blade in his fingers, so the light hits the dull side. He lets me see him choose. He lifts it toward me and brings the flat to my throat.
The shock of it is clean. The cool metal against skin that has been burning for an hour draws a breath out of me I didn’t know I was holding. He doesn’t press. He lays the steel there like a hand that knows it holds a heartbeat.
“Look at me,” he says.
I do. The single bulb makes salt and shadow of his face. His eyes are not soft. They’re focused. He is both the man in the car earlier—the one who took his time and let me take mine—and the man who tracked me through a crowd with a hand at the small of my back like he could separate me from the world by will alone. The two men are one. The sight of him there, deliberate, unhurried, sure, is a better anchor than any word he’s taught me.
“I’m not cutting you,” he says, as if he can hear the part of my body that still expects harm ask how to brace. “I will never put you in danger to satisfy anything in me. Do you understand me?”
I nod once. The steel moves with my throat. He slides the flat along the line under my jaw. The paint on my back presses colder as the movement pulls me a fraction deeper into the wet canvas. He watches my face while he does it. He’s not watching the knife. The knife is a prop. I am the room.
He reaches behind me with his free hand and drags two fingers through the palette. He doesn’t look to see which color. When those fingers come back to my skin, it’s a smear of deep blue-green. He marks along my collarbone, the paint cool first and then warm as my body takes it. The gesture shouldn’t land as deep as it does; it feels like being named.
His mouth tightens at the corners. He shifts the knife to his other hand, still flat, keeps it at my throat as a line of certainty. The metal tells me where I am. His paint-slick thumb traces a second stripe from the notch at my collarbone down tothe center of my sternum. He doesn’t hurry. He talks me through the distance with his eyes.
“You make me crazy,” I say again, softer, almost a laugh as it catches at the back. “It’s your fault I’m like this.”
“It’s our fault,” he corrects, and the truly awful thing is how tender that sounds.
He lowers the knife, still flat, and runs the cool handle down the center of my spine over my shirt, not hard. The shiver that adds to the heat in my body feels like a straight line from then to now. The noise I make is a surprise to both of us.
He breathes something like a curse and steps closer. “Hands,” he says quietly.
I offer the cut one first. He takes it face-up, holds for a second long enough to make the sting feel purposeful, then brings my other wrist to meet it. He doesn’t bind. He just holds both in one of his, gently, above my head against the dry edge of the canvas’ stretcher bar, careful of the wet paint. It’s an old posture and a new one at once, surrender and reach combined. He watches my face for even the hint of flinch. There isn’t one. He sets his mouth against the inside of my wrist where the veins talk and inhales, one slow breath like he’s committing something to memory he doesn’t trust the world to keep safe for him. When he lets go to peel my tank up, I keep my arms where they are.
He draws the tank over my head, careful not to smear more than he has to, and lowers it to the floor, and for the first time tonight I want the single bulb to be brighter so I can see his face see me. He looks like a man who found water after walking through a small desert he built out of necessity and didn’t realize he didn’t have to live in anymore.
“You’re mine to make a masterpiece of,” he says, but the sentence doesn’t land as command. It lands as vow. A part of me that stays wary even in sleep lifts its head, sniffs, and settles.
He guides me sideways, his hand firm on my lower back, steering me like I'm a canvas he's repositioning for better light, until the wet canvas and the stretchers give way to the cool, unforgiving floor of the studio. He lowers me onto a drop cloth smeared with half-dried pigments and the abandoned panel from earlier, my back pressing into the slick mess—wet paint kissing my shoulder blades in cold, viscous streaks, clinging to the backs of my thighs in warmer, tackier blobs that squelch under my weight.
The scents hit me hard: turpentine sharp in my nostrils, mingled with the earthy tang of oil paints and the faint musk of our sweat. He doesn’t look away as he follows me down, his body a heavy shadow over mine, eyes locked on my face like he's etching every flicker of need into memory. His hands, already streaked with blue and crimson from the palette, find my hips and the knobs of my vertebrae between my shoulders like landmarks he’s studied privately for weeks, fingers digging in just enough to bruise, to claim.
He doesn’t touch where I’m bleeding again until he’s got the cloth nearby and a roll of gauze, and then he wraps my palm neat and tight like he ties his own, his callused fingers precise yet tender, the sight of his hands doing care and not control making my cunt clench with a fresh wave of heat, my breath catching as I watch him secure the bandage. It makes me feel like the floor is the kind of steady that can hold whole buildings, grounding me even as desire coils tighter in my core.
The flat of the knife returns, briefly, its cold metal sliding along the outside of my thigh, sending a shiver racing up my spine, gooseflesh prickling in its wake. The blade's edge is dull against my skin, a tease of danger that makes my nipples harden instantly, aching for touch.
“Rory,” he says in that voice that sounds like a request and a benediction both, low and gravel-rough, vibrating through me like a promise.
“Don’t stop,” I hear myself answer, the words ragged, needy, spilling out as I arch toward him, my body begging before my mouth can catch up.
He doesn’t. The studio makes itself larger to hold us, walls echoing our breaths, the bulb humming overhead like the command center did earlier, but this room’s hum is human-made and human-fed, raw and alive, and no one’s life is on the other end of it except ours—messy, urgent, ours.
His hands, now fully covered in paint—smudges of ultramarine and cadmium red transferring from the drop cloth to his palms—roam over me, undressing me with rough tugs, yanking my shirt over my head, the fabric catching on my arms before he rips it free, exposing my breasts to the cool air.
Paint from his fingers streaks across my ribs as he shoves my pants down my hips, the denim scraping my skin, leaving me bare and sprawled beneath him, my back arching into the wet canvas, more colors blooming across my flesh like abstract bruises.
The knife’s handle finds my spine again, cold, and unyielding, tracing a deliberate line between my shoulder blades and down to my lower back, the pressure making my breath hitch and land and hitch, a gasp tearing from my throat as the chill contrasts the heat building between my thighs. He moves with the kind of patience that makes me furious at first—teasing, drawing it out—then grateful because you realize it’s the only way not to miss anything, every nerve ending igniting under his touch. I find his shoulder with my teeth once, biting down hard enough to mark, a warning and thanks twisted into the same fierce grip, tasting salt and skin. He takes both, growling low in his chest, the sound rumbling through me.
It’s not gentle. It’s not brutal. It’s specific, raw, the difference between being looked at and looked into—his gaze stripping me deeper than his hands. Paint smears under my shoulder, across the side of my ribs, on his cheek when he lowers his head to kiss a line he marked and smudges it without caring, his mouth hot and wet on my breast, tongue swirling around my nipple, sucking hard until it peaks stiff and aching, paint from his lips trailing across the swell in vivid streaks, blue mingling with the flush of my skin. He switches to the other, teeth grazing just enough to sting, pulling a moan from me that echoes off the walls, my hips bucking up instinctively, grinding against his thigh for friction, my cunt slick and throbbing, desperate.
He doesn't stop there—his mouth trails lower, paint-smeared lips dragging down my sternum, over my belly, leaving a messy path of color and heat. He spreads my thighs with paint-streaked hands, fingers digging into the soft flesh, bruising as he hooks my legs over his shoulders, exposing me completely. The knife's handle returns briefly, its cold tip tracing the inner curve of my thigh, making me shudder, before he sets it aside.
