“You may not think I am familiar with the games of your parents,” I said, softer, my hands still on her ankle, “but you get a lot of practice when you come from the bottom. I would sayyoumay be more blind to them than me.”
Then she knelt before me, on both knees, eye to eye with me.
“I don’t hate you,” she recanted, her voice sounding like a guilty child’s admission. Her hands balled into fists in her soaked skirt.
“I know,” I said softly. She had a hard time meeting my eyes now.
I touched her face, cupping her cold cheek. The streetlamp cast a dull light over her face when she looked up at me again. The rain mixed with her tears, her eyes tired from whatever war was going on inside her mind. She made herself so small, as if in anticipation. Belittled all her life.
“You’re not my enemy, Petre.” Our lips were so close. “You are my wife.”
An instinctual lunge, her arms thrown around my neck, and our lips crashed together. I enveloped her in my arms. I balled my fists in her wet blouse, squeezing her against me like it would be possible to just absorb her there, two pieces of wet clay kneaded together.
I held her in my arms as we caught our breath, and I pulled her head into my shoulder in our embrace.
“You’ll fall ill if we stay out here,” I breathed, holding her frame like it was merely a doll, light and delicate.
“What’s the point, I’m already sick.” If I didn’t know better, I’d think I caught a breathy laugh.
The night may have been a failure, but it seemed like maybe it wasn’t a waste, after all.
Chapter Seventeen
The Performer
“What’s wrong with it anyway?” I didn’t even bother watching as I kneaded a small ball of tawny clay.
“It needs to be patched. The pressure isn’t holding, and heat is escaping somewhere,” Arkady said, slathering parts of the bricks with wet cement. “It’s yearly maintenance. A kiln this big needs it. I can’t fire any of my new statues until it’s finished.”
“Right.” I nodded as if perfectly acquainted with the standards of the trade. “Is that what keeps you here so late?”
He gave a tired laugh, taking a break to sit on his ladder. He wiped his rough hands with a dirty cloth hung over his shoulder. It could be my ladylike hormonal nature—but why was he more attractive when he was covered in dirt and dewy from a light sweat?
“Petre.”
“Hm?” I blinked.
“Are you just going to play with that ball of silt all day?”
“What, do you expect me to help patch your kiln? You’re the one who repeatsDon’t touch anythingall the time.” I tried to mimic his stern tone.
He shook his head and sighed, turning back to his work as he realized I was probably right.
Arkady was the same in his studio as he was outside: focused, stern, task-oriented. It wasn’t a complaint, just an observation as to why he was the way that he was.
The studio wasn’t disorganized, it just looked that way because you could see lots of clay and dust. It was dirty, not messy. Wooden crates categorized by scrap material, types of tools, even broken pots to be thrown back into the slick pile. Tins of glaze, brushes, smaller sculpting tools organized in the drawers of a secondhand filing cabinet.
“Are you worried?” I began, pressing my thumb deep into the clay after rolling it into a near sphere in my palm. “About the commissioner digging? There isn’t much to find on me, not anything that he wouldn’t already know from his proximity to my father.”
“No more worried than I’ve been before.” He didn’t look at me as he scraped his pointing trowel against the brick. “At some point, the constant and steadfast threats become meaningless.”
“How does he know you?” I blurted the question quicker than I thought.
“I wasn’t the best behaved in my youth.”
“And you somehowarenow?”
He threw a sarcastic smile over his shoulder. “You are full of jokes today. Does something have you in good spirits?”
