She holds out the jacket. Arm extended, the fabric folded neatly. The gesture is formal. Transactional. A thing borrowed, a thing returned.
I take it. Our hands don't touch. The jacket is warm—she carried it against her body on the subway, pressed between her arm and her ribs—and I can feel the warmth of her in the fabric and I set it on the back of a chair and try not to think about it.
"Thank you," I say.
"You sent me an address and a time," she says. "No name. No question. Like a summons."
"I didn't have your number until Saturday."
"How did you get it?"
"The gallery contact list. Nish shares it with prospective buyers."
Her eyes narrow. "Are you a prospective buyer?"
"I went to your show. I expressed interest."
The half-truth tastes like copper in my mouth. I expressed interest through Lena, months before the show. I've already bought two of her pieces. They're in my bedroom closet, wrapped in cloth, hidden like contraband.
"You disappeared for four days," she says.
"I was traveling. For work."
"You didn't tell me."
"We don't have that kind of arrangement, Jess."
The words come out colder than I intend. I hear them land—watch the micro-flinch in her expression, the brief flash of hurt before her jaw resets and the armor comes back up. I want to take the words back. I want to cross the room and put my hands on her face and tell her that every minute in Montreal was a minute I spent thinking about her, that I sat in a hotel room overlooking the Saint Lawrence and drafted eleven texts to her and deleted all of them because none of them were adequate to the task of expressing what I felt.
I don't say any of that. I stand by the chair with my hand on the jacket and I watch her watch me and the space between us hums.
"What kind of arrangement do we have?" she asks. Her voice is quiet now. Dangerous-quiet. The quiet of a woman who is giving you one chance to say the right thing.
"I don't know."
"You kissed me. In my studio. In the middle of the night. And then you left."
"Yes."
"Why did you leave?"
"Because if I'd stayed, I wouldn't have stopped."
The honesty of it fills the room. I didn't plan to say it—the words came from the same place as the thumb in the hardware store, the jacket on the sidewalk, the walk across the studio floor. The place that bypasses strategy and speaks directly from the thing I've been trying to contain.
Her breathing changes. Subtle—a slight quickening, a shallowness. She's standing ten feet from me in the green dress and she heard what I said and her body is responding before her mind can intervene.
"You don't know me," she says. "You don't know anything about me."
"I know enough."
"What do you know? That I'm a sculptor. That I shop at the same bodega. That I look good in a green dress. That's not knowing someone, Damien. That's—noticing someone."
"There's a difference?"
"Yes. Noticing is what you do from a distance. Knowing requires you to actually let someone in."
She's looking at me with those eyes—the ones that read metal, that find flaws, that see the stress points in a structure before it fails. She's looking for the seam. Looking for the place where the performance breaks and the real thing shows through.
