“So I give you a schedule and you move ropes,” she says. “If ropes were all you moved, we wouldn’t be here.”
“We’re here because you called,” I say. “And because you painted a door that looks like a door I built.”
She doesn’t blink or look away. She’s tired but present, a combination I know because my mother used to make that face when she had a migraine and still opened the shelter’s door for a woman who couldn’t stand up without leaning on a wall.“Then talk to me like I’m a person who understands what she’s painting,” she says, voice flat. “Don’t talk to me like a donor.”
“Donors get numbers,” I say. “You get the truth without the parts that help anyone break a lock.”
“Try me,” she says.
“Your new series uses ratios and marks that match our spaces,” I say. “I could call it coincidence, but it isn’t. You looked too well. That’s not a sin. It’s a risk.”
“Risk to whom? Me? Or your rooms.”
“Both,” I say. “In different ways.”
She leans forward an inch, hands on the table without touching paper. “You didn’t answer the question,” she says. “Why does a grant come with a gag?”
“It doesn’t,” I repeat, lower, and slower so she hears the distinction. “The NDA covers the Foundation’s clients and programs. It doesn’t cover your art. The safety review covers logistics. It doesn’t tell you what you can paint. If you think I’m lying, bring your lawyer. I’ll pay his bill to argue with mine.”
Her mouth twitches before it hardens. “Logistics also buy time,” she says. “Time buys control.”
“It buys planning,” I counter. “Planning is the difference between a woman leaving a clinic at dusk and a woman leaving at noon. You know which one I prefer.”
“Don’t,” she says sharply. “Don’t talk to me like you invented care. I grew up counting locks. I don’t need you to define safety.”
“You need me not to let a fool turn your work into a map.”.
“And you’ll decide who the fool is,” she retorts.
“I’ll decide if the room is safe,” I counter smoothly. “Because I built it. And because when a man decides to make a point with a headline, he doesn’t ask permission.”
She laughs once without humor. “You’re asking for obedience.”
“I’m asking for time,” I say. “And cooperation.”
“Same thing in your mouth,” she says with a shrug.
It shouldn’t get under my skin, but it does. “You don’t owe me obedience,” I say, sharper than I intend. “But you owe your work a chance not to be used to hurt the people in it.”
“Don’t tell me what I owe,” she says, standing. The chair leg skids back with a bark. Her breath quickens and then she irons it flat. We’re eye to eye now and she’s not short. The room pulls tight around the inches between us. The fire pops once and settles.
“You think I want to expose women because I like seeing my name in a paper,” she says. “You think I don’t know what men do when they see a door? I know exactly what they do. I’ve been opening and closing doors for myself since I was ten. You don’t get to stand in a nice room with wine and tell me that what I do to survive needs your signature.”
Half of me wants to tell her that I know the shape of the other half of that sentence because my mother taught it to me on her bathroom floor while she held a towel to a stranger’s face. The other half wants to stop the part of me that wants to confess. I lay out the same facts in a different frame.
“You’re not a ward,” I say gently. “I’m not your savior. I’m the man who gets to make decisions about where my money and my rooms intersect with your work so the people in the rooms stay breathing.”
She moves, a step to the right, toward the space past me. I put a palm on the table to block the corner she’d cut. “No one owns you,” I say. “Not me. Not donors. Not the press. Not men with cameras. Not politicians who would love to hold up a print and say,look what exists.I am not asking you to lie. I am asking you to let me make sure the truth doesn’t put a price on anyone’s back.”
She takes another step, that fast shift a body makes when it’s done negotiating. I don’t think. I reach. My fingers close around her wrist.
I’m careful, even when angry. Thumb on the inside, not the bone. Pressure to stop movement, not to hold. Her pulse hits my hand twice like a drum I could lock my breathing to if I let myself. The skin under my thumb is warm. The smell that sits closest to her is soap, not perfume. The rest is paint and solvent and rain. The muscles in her forearm tense and then tighten again when she decides not to pull. It’s a choice, not an inability.
“Let go,” she says with a terrifying calm. I release her because I said I would listen when she told me to. But the moment opened a door I didn’t plan to open tonight. I move my hand up, slow enough she can stop me, and put my fingers along her jaw.
She doesn’t lean away. Her eyes look like they did at the mezzanine when she found me in the crowd—steady, furious, and curious in a way she wouldn’t admit if I gave her a hundred chances to deny it. I bend because I want to know if restraint will hold. It does. Our mouths meet once. A test with weight behind it. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t tilt her head to give me leverage. The kiss sits in the exact length of control I have left and then ends because she decides to end it.
She steps back. I let my hand drop. My palm remembers the shape of her jaw as if it’s something I need for a later procedure.
