He’d looked at her when she first arrived, but after they began speaking, she’d gotten the impression that he was trying to avoid it. But now his gaze roamed over her body in an assessing way, and she had to cross her ankles to avoid squirming under the force of his scrutiny,because he was transparently thinking about her shoulders, her waist, her breasts, even. She held her breath and willed her heart rate to slow.
After a minute, Adrian handed the phone back to her, browser showing a short formfitting black dress with long sleeves and a low asymmetric neckline. It was like nothing she’d ever owned.
“Why this one?” she asked.
Adrian had a few freckles across his cheekbones. They were more prominent as a bit of color rose in his cheeks.
“You don’t have to get that one,” he said.
“No, I mean, I’m trying to understand what makes this a cocktail dress.”
His lower lip tightened again. “I just thought it would suit you.” Clearly uncomfortable with the topic, he buttoned his jacket in a smooth motion as he moved to stand. “Tuesday, then?”
“Wait,” she said, even though Adrian looked ready to leave.
He turned back, and Caroline suddenly appreciated that he was as tall as her, which was never a guarantee, and his shoulders were set with a physical confidence missing from most of the guys she encountered at school. She couldn’t think of him as a guy, really; he was a man, and that label seemed ridiculous to apply even to the students a few years older than her.
Caroline swallowed hard over her dry throat, because she was going on a real date with amanshe didn’t know, and she’d never even figured out datingguys.
She handed her phone back to Adrian, playing through the moment of apprehension.
“Could you pick out some shoes too?”
Chapter Four
Adrian used the momentum of putting on real clothes and leaving the apartment to carry him over to a visit to his studio space the next day. He hadn’t gone in since splitting with Nora. As he rode to his stop on the edge of Fort Point, he wondered whether Tom had wanted him out of the apartment as much as he’d needed additional rent funds.
In either event, it was energizing to walk to the former factory the city had converted to studio spaces, wave hello to familiar faces as he transited the long hallway bisecting the building, and unlock the plywood door to the room where he worked. The space was long and narrow, with a large window at the north end of the room and a share of skylights above. The walls were only plaster and drywall, so the sounds of other artists moving in their own studios reverberated around the room. The air was redolent of linseed oil and turpentine, and for the first time in months, the day felt promising. Adrian put on headphones and pulled a playlist up from his phone as he took stock of his works in progress. He queued up a little Brahms,Allegro non troppo, to blur out the background noise.
He had a few pieces in various stages of development. He’d always worked primarily in oil on canvas, but the last thing he’d touched before decamping to Tom’s couch was nothing but pencil marks and some grisaille he’dstarted laying down. He frowned at the reference images he’d taped to the wall behind his easel; his most recent series had drawn from historical battles and depicted conflicts coincidental with the rise of Postimpressionism with those famouseffets de soirtechniques. His research had taken him to the Boston College library, where he still had alumni access. There he’d gotten distracted by some medical texts with useful reference images for the bodies, which had made him question whether he really had the skill to execute this composition without live models, which had led him to—
Not paint for more than a month.
As Adrian squinted at a blurry image of Ottoman soldiers, his phone beeped from his pocket.
Texts from an unknown number with an unfamiliar area code:
Unknown:Good morning!
Unknown:What’s your Venmo?
It took him a moment to realize the text had to be from Caroline and Venmo had to be a payment mechanism. He saved her to his contacts, the action of putting her name into his phone feeling uncomfortably intimate. He guiltily insisted to nobody in particular that his intentions were very pure with respect to the twenty-two-year-old blond girl trying to send him money for a date.
Adrian:I don’t use Venmo.
He returned the phone to his pocket. He tried to muster enthusiasm for the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie project but let his hands fall before he reached for one of his smocks.
His phone immediately beeped again.
Caroline:PayPal then?
Adrian:I don’t use PayPal either.
Wasn’t he very appropriate? So appropriate.
His gaze turned to the pile of lumber he’d acquired for canvas frames. If he didn’t feel like painting, he could still spend the day productively assembling a few new canvases, he decided. He set the phone on a stool and squatted to sort the pine boards.
He kept the phone in the corner of his vision as he selected pieces for a couple of forty-by-sixty canvases.Couch art, a judgmental inner voice told him, because his work always sold best in that size, and it inevitably ended up in someone’s formal living room, tucked away behind their least comfortable settee. He sternly instructed his artistic conscience that he would be making no art at all if he didn’t start selling more paintings soon.
