I smile. “On brand.”
Her brows knit as she shrugs down the bed, bringing her face level with my side. Running her hand over the words again, she whispers the poem aloud:
“Maree dentro profondiocchi verdi
Tutto mio dietro occhiali dalla montatura scura
Mano ferma, sa chi sono
Togliendomi la maschera che indosso per le masse
Dipingendo immagini nel mio midollo osseo
Lo terrò l'arco, tu trafiggerai la freccia
Questa cosa, l'amore?
Sempre in bianco e nero
Ma con te, la velocità della luce
Ultravioletto”
“I could at least makeout that last word,” I murmur, lips tilting upward.
“This thing, love?” She translates the last verse. “Always black and white, but with you, the speed of light…” She sits up, facing me. “Ultraviolet.”
I reach my hand out, cupping her face. She lets her eyes fall closed, nuzzling against my palm. “I told you I was having déjà vu,” Elena whispers. “I wish I could re-read them all.”
I pull myself up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed as I all but leap out of it. I’m wearing underwear, whereas Elena is still completely naked, but I don’t give her time to dress as I walk out of the room, beckoning her to follow me.
I move through the darkened, quiet house, past the kitchen and into the sunroom behind it. It’s cooler here than inside the house, but the spring weather is warm enough that there is no chill. I flip on the lamp in the corner, illuminating the room in a warm glow. There is a closet beside the couch that I use for storage. Mostly art supplies and some tattoo equipment for when I work at home.
There is one box on the top shelf of the closet simply labeledElena.
I pull it off the top shelf as Elena watches me from the doorway, wrapping a throw blanket from the top of the couch around her shoulders.
I set it down on the workbench and pull open the lid of the box, revealing everything stacked inside. There are more items I recovered from her mother after she moved to New York, thingsneither of us had the heart to throw away, but I had the space for and Monica didn’t. Original copies of her first publications, the raw manuscripts she’d printed out on her home computer.
There are notebooks filled with her writing—from poems to brainstorm notes to book ideas. A small box at the bottom of the larger one holds every poem she ever wrote for me, along with my own sketchbooks—ones I never showed her.
I step back, giving her space to rummage inside. “You’re free to keep anything you want in there. It’s all made by you or for you.”
Her head snaps up. “For me?”
I bite my lip, unsure of how she’s going to take the fact that I spent years of our youth drawing pictures of her, and that I never let her see the majority of them. Just one. The first time she told me she loved me, but little did she know she’d been my inspiration long before that.
Back then she wasn’t mine, and it felt like something I needed to keep to myself. A daydream I was forbidden from having. Now, she feels like mine, but she also doesn’t. I still feel like I’m walking a tightrope with her, constantly afraid that one wrong move or a strong gust of wind will knock us both off, and we’ll never recover.
So long as we stay secret, we stay forbidden, and that’s an incredibly unstable and delicate balance to maintain. I want her to know the true depths of my adoration, but somehow, I can’t help but fear that sharing them would twist the knife deeper were I to lose her again.
I swallow, throwing caution to the wind like I always do with Elena. “I…” I choke a laugh, shaking my head. “I have some old sketchbooks in there, and…I suppose you’ve always been my muse.”
Her brows rise, followed by a lift in her lips and the most adorable scrunch of her nose. Nerves rattle my stomach, and mycheeks flood with heat. Gripping the back of my neck, I watch her sort through the items until she comes across the small box at the bottom, pulling it out and setting it down in front of her.
“Those are my drawings, and all of the poems you ever wrote for me. There are a ton of others in there, though. Some of your old manuscripts too.”
She nods absently, flipping through one of my books as her eyes go wide. I watch the reflection of the pages flashing in her eyes as she takes in the many, many sketches I’ve done.
