"This is insane," I say, my voice echoing in the empty space.
"This is me taking you on a proper date. Even if nobody knows about it."
He takes my hand and leads me into the first gallery. Modern art fills the walls with bold colors and abstract shapes that make you think rather than just look. We wander through in silence, stopping when something catches our eye. It strikes me how easy this is, how natural it feels to just exist beside him without needing to fill every moment with words.
"What do you think?" Jackson asks, nodding at a painting that's mostly red with jagged black lines cutting through the canvas like wounds.
"I think it looks angry."
"Yeah. It does." He studies it for another moment, his thumb tracing circles on the back of my hand. "Sometimes I feel like that. All this stuff inside that I can't let out."
I squeeze his hand, understanding. We're both carrying so much that we can't say, not yet.
We move to the next gallery, then the next, taking our time with each piece. Classical paintings fill the walls here, landscapes and portraits from centuries ago, and there's something about being surrounded by all this history, all these moments frozen in time, that makes me feel both small and significant at once.
Jackson stops in front of a painting of a woman in a garden, surrounded by flowers in full bloom, her face tilted toward the sun.
"That one reminds me of you," he says.
"Why?"
"The way she's looking at the flowers. Like she's seeing something beautiful that nobody else notices." He squeezes my hand, his voice dropping lower. "That's how you look at the world. Even after everything that's happened to you, you still find the beauty in things."
My throat tightens. "Jackson?—"
"I know. Not saying it yet. But I'm thinking about it." He turns to face me fully, both hands finding my waist now. "All the fucking time."
The yearning in his voice is almost unbearable. I reach up, touching his face, and he leans into my palm like he's been starving for it.
"Me too," I whisper.
We stand here for a long moment, just looking at each other in this empty museum, surrounded by art and silence and everything we're not ready to say out loud yet.
"Come on," he says finally, taking my hand again. "There's more I want to show you."
He leads me through gallery after gallery, and I'm struck by how much thought he's put into this, how carefully he's planned every moment. We stop in the sculpture garden, sit on a bench surrounded by marble and bronze figures, and he tells me about the first time he came here on a school field trip in third grade.
"I thought it was boring as hell," he admits. "Couldn't understand why anyone would want to look at old paintings and statues."
"What changed?"
"I grew up. Started seeing things differently." He glances at me, his eyes soft. "Started understanding that some things are worth slowing down for, worth really paying attention to."
My heart aches with how much I want to kiss him right now, but there are security cameras everywhere, and we agreed to be careful, so instead, I just lean my head on his shoulder, and he wraps his arm around me.
We end up in the contemporary wing, where the art gets weird and experimental. Jackson makes increasingly ridiculous interpretations that have me doubled over, and I realize this is what I've missed—the easy back-and-forth, the way we've always had.
"Okay, but seriously," I say, gesturing at a pile of neon-colored geometric shapes on the floor. "What is this supposed to be?"
"Clearly it's a commentary on the futility of modern capitalism," he says with mock seriousness.
"You don't even know what that means."
"Sure, I do. It means—" He pauses. "Okay, I have no idea what that means, but it sounded smart."
I laugh, shaking my head, and he grins at me with such open affection that my breath catches.
"What?" I ask.
