I’m still in the clothes I wore to the Residency House. The coat’s hem is damp. My shirt smells faintly of smoke from the low fire he kept alive like a prop. I hang the coat on the rack by the door and watch a line of water fall from the cuff to the floor. The drip lands next to my old work shoes, paint-stiff, soles flattened into the memory of me. My bag goes onto the chair by the table with a thud heavier than it should be. The Ward contract slides half out of the top, the cream paper bright in the work light. I shove it back in without looking and turn the chair, so I don’t have to see any part of it.
The city is mostly asleep. Traffic hums two blocks over. The rain taps at the glass, thin and steady. I flick on the single work light over the easel; the rest of the studio stays in shadow. The lamp’s cone finds the scuffs on the floor, the rings on the table, the small pile of brushes I washed but didn’t put away. This room has never asked me to be anyone but who I am. Tonight it asks me to pick a fight or go to bed. I don’t want sleep. Sleep means replaying a thumb at my jaw and a voice that found a way to be even while saying the kind of things that knot your stomach.
I stretch a small canvas because my hands need a task. The staple gun’s rhythm steadies my breathing. I clamp the stretcher bars in the vice, check corners, and press the face with my palm to listen for the right drum. When it answers, I pull the easel forward a foot, reach for the cheap hardware brush Jonahdumped on my shelf, and lay down a ground I didn’t plan. The first stroke is too hard. I let the brush talk, not my jaw.
I mix more teal. The knife scrapes. The sound is small but sharp in the room. I want to paint anything except the thing I’m thinking about, and the more I try to find an object, the more I paint an absence shaped like a man who doesn’t pretend he isn’t a wall.
Anger is a kind of fuel. It burned all the way home, every block between his cedar room and my stairs. Anger at him for staging a meeting like a surgical theatre and then crossing it with his hand. Anger at myself for leaning forward half an inch the moment before I told him to let go. Anger at the Sanctuaries for being real enough to catch me in their net even when I didn’t name them. I pull the brush down the canvas in fast strokes that would look violent if they weren’t so straight. I keep the edge clean because mess would read as an excuse.
When the first layer is laid, I slow down. My breath changes without permission. I’m mixing without thinking. I realize what I’m painting when the negative space begins to look like a hand.
Not a perfect hand or a photograph. The suggestion of one—the heel of the palm, the notch between thumb and first finger, and the ghost of knuckles where I let the bristles drag.
My mouth goes dry and my stomach turns at the same time. The feeling is familiar from other lives: adrenaline and heat trying to occupy the same space. I hate that my body can’t tell the difference between a fight and a pull. I hate that he knows the difference and used it anyway. I hate that I let him.
I set the brush down into the cradle on the edge of the table and wipe the paint off my fingers with a rag I should have thrown out weeks ago. It leaves a dark smear across my knuckles that looks like a bruise
I tell myself to keep painting, to pull the shape away from the face and back into the room, but the line at my mouth remembers the pressure of his thumb and now my throat goes tight because it was so gentle it makes me angrier than if he’d tried to win.
I press my paint-streaked fingers to my lips, and the smell of oil and solvent takes me somewhere my body doesn’t ask permission to go. Heat runs down the center of me like someone lit a fuse in the corridor between my ribs. The memory of his voice in that room, close and level, slides under my skin. My cheeks get hot. I’m furious that remembering it makes my legs feel weak.
I back into the stool and miss it. My shoulders catch the easel leg. The canvas wobbles and then settles. I slide down the post until I’m on the floor with my back against the easel’s spine, knees bent, and heels braced on the rung. The paint on my hands has dried enough that it doesn’t stain when I grip the hem of my shirt. My breath is loud in a room built to be quiet. I watch the doorway shape on the canvas turn into the shape of a body in shadow because I let it, because the point of art is to tell the truth you’re trying not to admit and tonight the truth is messy.
I don’t do this. I don’t sit on the floor like a teenager and let my head fill with a man I should stay one step ahead of. I don’t get pulled under by a thumb at my mouth. I don’t.
Except I did.
My hand goes to my thigh like my body knows a map before my head will draw it, the heel of my palm pressing through denim until the pressure forces my breath to stutter and then even out again. The other hand holds the hem in a fist because holding something keeps me from shaking. My eyes shut without my permission, and I see the room again, the fire low, rain lines on glass, his sleeves rolled, the scar at his knuckle catching light when he set his hand near the contract.
I hear his voice like it is a sound in the air now, not memory.I won’t pretend this isn’t my house.I’m not asking you to lie.I will keep the rooms intact.Words like equipment, not like seduction, and still they work on me because he meant them and because my body recognizes competence and wants to be near it even while the rest of me wants to claw at it.
I push my palm harder through the cloth and bite the inside of my cheek to keep the noise inside me. I’m angry while I do it. I’m angry at him for getting in under my skin with all his evenness, and I’m angry at myself for letting the anger ride alongside the heat. The combination is an old thing in me, born in rooms where you had to decide whether to run or make a different kind of choice. I hate that I know how to choose and still make it to morning.
My breath picks up. The sound it makes feels too loud under the work light, like I’m paying for it with attention I can’t afford. I slide my hand higher and press down through the layers until the pressure lands where I need it. The relief is sharp enough to make my eyes water. I half-laugh, half-swear under my breath because I resent needing anything from him, even in my head, even for this.
I don’t make it sweet or careful. I make it efficient because what I want is the release that will shut my brain up for thirty seconds and let me choose something else afterward. I rock my hand like I’m fighting something inside myself and I am, and when the heat snaps, it does it fast. I brace my heel and press my paint-streaked palm against my mouth to catch the sound that wants out. It’s not romantic or gentle. It hits like leaning into a wall, the wall holding, and then my spine letting go.
The aftershock brings the thing I hate more than anything—tears. That raw, stinging heat in your eyes when your body gets a thing and your head wanted to be the one to decide. I drop myhand from my mouth and rub the heel into my eye to chase the water away. It leaves a smear at my cheekbone I’ll have to scrub.
The room comes back slowly. The rain keeps the same tempo. The work light draws hard lines on the floor and my knees look too sharp under the denim. My heart slows and then finds something like a normal rhythm. My shoulders ache because I held them too tight. Shame tries to speak; I cut it off mid-sentence, not because it isn’t there, but because I’ve already decided it doesn’t get the microphone.
I stand. My legs remind me they belong to me. I step to the sink and turn the tap. The water goes rusty for two seconds and then clears. I scrub paint off my fingers until the water runs cloudy and then clean. The stain at my knuckle needs a brush. I use the old nailbrush and watch the smear disappear while the skin around it goes red. I splash my face twice. The cracked mirror finds me with cheeks flushed, mouth still set like I held my breath too long, hair escaping the tie like it hates being told what to do. I look like a person who let a room get to her and then took a thing back in the only way that was available.
“No more,” I tell the mirror, low. The words don’t land as law; they land as a wish. I say them anyway. Saying things out loud builds a record.
I dry my face on the ragged towel that lives on the sink’s edge and go back to the easel. The painting looks worse than it did five minutes ago because now I can see what it is without pretending. The doorway pulls the eye. The hand is cleaner than I meant it to be. I lift the brush and cut a line across the palm to force the shape to break. It doesn’t soften. It turns into something else—still a hand, just more honest about being a memory, not a photograph. That I can live with.
The contract peeks out of my bag like a tooth again, somehow farther out even though I pushed it back in. I pull it free and set it on the table. I lay my palm flat on the top pagewithout opening it. The paper is smooth and heavy and means a hundred things: money, space, leverage, a schedule I don’t control, a man who thinks he has to keep doors shut to count his dead as lessons instead of failures. My breathing settles while I look at nothing.
The problem is I believe him. I believe him, and I still don’t think I can live with letting him hold this much of my orbit without interrogating the rest.
“How far will you go?” I ask the empty room.
I set the contract aside and reach for my phone. The battery’s low because I didn’t plug it in when I stumbled in here. I plug it now and sit on the stool while it catches a little charge. I open a browser. I type four words and then delete them because I don’t like how hungry they look on the screen. I type them again because this isn’t a poem, it’s a search:Ward Foundation sanctuaries location.
The results don’t hand me anything plain. Of course they don’t. A map of offices. A brochure. An annual report with photographs cropped so the backgrounds might as well be planets. Blog threads trying to piece donations together into a network. Conspiracy idiots guessing at underground tunnels because they watch too many shows. Articles I’ve read and interviews I didn’t give. I scroll until my finger aches. The information is polished and smooth. The gaps are deliberate.
I refine.Ward Foundation residency house address.I get the Victorian on the edge of the harbor. There are articles about famous writers who stayed there, nothing about the wing where cameras don’t go.Whisper clinics.I get think pieces about safety and shame and nothing that names a door.Sanctuary floor plan.I get churches, co-working spaces, and a Pinterest board that makes me want to delete the internet.
