NEVERMORE : A twist to the tale
– Chapter 18

Spectre’s art studio didn’t feel like a battlefield.

Classical music rocked my heart in a symphony worthy of a final act. A light breeze escaped from the half-open window behind me, swinging my dress toward Spectre. A ray of sunshine hit part of his face, and his gaze raked over my body like sensual adoration. His pupils widened, dedicated to the task. The way he observed me didn’t feel intrusive but way too erotic.

His dress shirt was unbuttoned at the top to show off his fair, muscular chest. It was the first time Spectre wasn’t so neat and strictly dressed, despite wearing his fancy trousers.

Posing for him wasn’t a burden, even if I bit on my lip so hard to contain my heart racing like a clock out of order. His pen went back and forth over the canvas with hard strokes, commanding his brain. Sometimes, out of nowhere, he’d tear up what he’d drafted and start over again. Other times, he’d remove one of the sketches to save it, and redo another, moving his easel to another angle.

But his eyes—his eyes were solely mine.

“I have a question,” I cut through the silence, changing my pose by lifting my dress as if walking in a valley of flowers—even if I was picturing myself crushing them one by one.

He just hummed, informing me I could go on but too dedicated to his work to speak.

“The Sad Girl.” My trust issues were spreading again, the need to unravel Spectre’s intentions stronger than anything before I could let myself fall into the rabbit hole. “Why don’t you sell The Sad Girl?”

“Because I want the world to see it. No one else gets to own it.”

I made that a second question. “How did you remember every detail of me? Did you take a picture?”

“No.” He took out a charcoal, his eyes setting firmly on mine, giving me his full attention. “I can remember every detail of you. I don’t need a picture.”

“So, why did you ask me to become your muse? Why not use a picture?”

“Because I work with emotions. I want to witness the moment and memorize it. With your hatred of me, you showed me only a side of you. If I were to take a picture of you back then, it’d be you giving me the middle finger, and that’s not what I wanted.”

“But I could just have pretended with a smile or something. We wouldn’t have to spend all this time together.” For some unknown reason, my heart hammered at the sight of Spectre stalking toward me and cleaning his hands with a towel. I was replaceing excuses to escape the tension. Another excuse to run away.

“Precisely. We wouldn’t have.” He paused for an instant, lingering so close to me. “Contemplating a picture isn’t enough. I need to unravel your truths and know everything about you as my muse. Obsessively explore your many facets.”

Another step from him made my heart pulsate in my throat, and a horde of goose bumps made my hair stand on end. “It sounds like you’re asking for my soul, something far more intimate than being a simple muse.”

“Simple?” he breathed, the corner of his lips lifting up. “I heard the relationship between an artist and his muse is intuitive, peculiar, visceral, complex.”

Until he got bored and set his sights on another muse. My father had loved my mother a long time ago; he had courted her with many dates and shared her life for twenty years. He did all of that only to betray us, hiding his true colors all this time. Augustus chased me to fall in love with someone else. The moment I gave in to Spectre, he’d flee, just like a memory.

“We have an expiration date.” I lifted my chin. “I’ll do my best to help you with your fairy-tale project because it’s what you pay me for, and after that, you’re leaving, right?”

I’d noticed that the boxes in his house were already packed.

“Yes,” he dropped. “I’ll be heading to the US.”

And meanwhile, I’d be headed to my small town, going back to where it all started.

“Why are you leaving?”

“I have nothing left for me here.” His finger skimmed across my jaw and stopped on its course. “Can I?”

I nodded, and he pushed my hair slightly away from my collarbone, stroking the naked, shivering part of my skin delicately.

“What are you running away from?” I recognized the look in his eyes. I’d had the same when I wanted to give everything up. The emptiness. The void. The past.

“I’ve been given many opportunities, lots of money, and expansion—that’s if our collaboration is successful. If I were to stay here, this would be the downfall of my career. I’ve seen everything I had to see. I’m done, and my latest pieces are…” He cleared his throat. “Either terrible or absent. All the money I’m making is from my investments, not so much from art.”

“The eternal quest for inspiration. And do you feel you’ll be able to have a new beginning if you hide who you are?”

His eyes dropped to my lips, and my belly melted like lava. “It’s part of the myth.”

“That’s why you don’t want to stay in the same place? You believe people will unmask you?” Why would it be too bad? He’s a walking dream. “But you’ll always be alone because if you were to create a link with anyone, everyone would end up knowing someday. It’s inevitable,” I mused out loud as a warning that nothing good could come from giving in to temptation.

His fingers had stopped on their course. “I’m used to being alone. I’m better left alone. It’s the best for everyone.”

“How can you live like that?” My lips inched closer to his, having a mind of their own. “How can you cut everyone from your life and live like a ghost?”

“It’s what I feel inside.”

“Emptiness,” I said, and he frowned. “I’ve looked at your studio and artwork. I’m the only painting whose face is visible—you usually never paint people in a way we can recognize who they are. They are always hidden. Why?”

Our bodies were attracted like magnetic electricity, a few centimeters from colliding. This was dangerous—not in the exhilarating, playing-with-fire kind of way but the destructive kind. The kind that gets you submerged underneath water, that feels so calm and needy, but it’d choke you to death if you stayed longer.

“Because you were the only person I met who didn’t hide who she was or her emotions. It was pure. Raw. Beautiful. You did what others couldn’t. That’s why The Sad Girl spoke to the world. They could identify with you. They could feel. You made others feel. Do you know how gifted you are? No one thought you were weak, Aurore. Broken, maybe, but never weak.”

“Broken isn’t any better,” I snorted.

“Broken means you survived. It means whatever life threw at you, you were stronger and beat it. It means you won.”

I’d hated him for so long, but I was healing. I was growing, despite the fact it left a scar on me. The scar that my close ones would see as proof I wasn’t strong enough. The scar that exposed my imperfections and this feeling of not being good enough, not worthy enough. I’d been reborn that day, because feeling meant being alive.

“I had no muse until you. Only you.”

I felt his hot breath brushing over my lips, and my stomach coiled.

“I-I can’t do this,” I shrieked in a low moan.

“Aurore.” At the sound of his voice, my eyes drifted to his. “I can’t control the urge to kiss you.”

Before I could snap an answer, our lips had crushed together and sent me to another world with him.

His hands roamed my skin as our kiss grew hot and passionate by the second. It wasn’t the one described in fairy tales but the kind that ravaged your soul and ignited your whole being. One that sent you to the top of the stars. Each flick of his tongue was possessive as my hands latched on to his jaw, the need for more growing like a heated volcano. His strong arm hooked around me and held me steady in his protective embrace. His body would have felt like stone if it weren’t for the beating of his heart—which was beating as strongly as mine.

It was like ice meeting fire, a combustion of elements forming an electrical shock.

When we pulled back, neither he nor I seemed to realize what had happened. Ajax, usually so controlled and frigid, had eyes like a storm, ready to ravage me, passion consuming him whole. As for me, my hatred had transformed itself into an inferno of lust.

“I have to write.” I pulled my spirits back, breaking the kiss. I felt inspired. And now, I needed to go.

“We’re done for today,” he said at almost the same moment, as if we hadn’t just kissed like a very scorching moment in a book.

At least we agreed, right before I almost tripped. Again. “I know I’m a walking disaster. This happens when I’m either flushed, awkward, or angry, and I can’t seem to help my case by talking.”

“You’re flushed?”

“You just kissed me.” As if that should be my best defense. I’d kissed him back too. Hell, I almost bit him. And worst of all—he inspired me.

“But you told me you didn’t want to do it again.”

I wished I could read him.

“I don’t because there is no us.” I defended a lost cause. “You shouldn’t have kissed me again.”

“You’re making it hard for me.” He didn’t seem to have listened to me, lost in whatever rigid universe he was coming from.

“You’re leaving, and I’ll be leaving too, for what it’s worth, and I have a story to write, and you’re drawing me for a project I dreamed of making mine. That doesn’t scream healthy, earth-shattering romance.” I pulled away. “And worst of all, I’m under contract with you, Spectre. You can’t have anyone in your life because you live like a ghost, and I’m The Sad Girl.”

“I need to protect myself.”

“From me, because you don’t trust me, and I get it. I don’t trust you either.” I managed a smile. That was why this whole thing was doomed from the start.

“Do you still hate me?”

I thought this through, the taste of his lips still inked on mine. “This answer belongs to me only. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with my bed and unicorn pajamas to get some writing done at my home.”

He nodded, and I pinched my skin, promising myself to stop making impulsive mistakes with Spectre, or else he might give me the biggest heartbreak of all.

I only had one thing on my mind the moment I crossed my front door—and it wasn’t to finish off the leftover chocolate fudge in the fridge that I had saved for the occasion but to open my notebook.

I didn’t even bother to sit up on my bed; my nose was already diving through the pages of my past in search of a specific moment.

The one where I’d probably first met Ajax unknowingly in an abandoned storage room.

“Where is it, damn it.” I turned the pages with speed every time I came face-to-face with the name Augustus—this asshole filled my notebook.

I slammed my finger on the paragraph. “That’s it!”

I was beginning to believe that the tortured man I had met was a ghost. One who haunted these remnants of the past with his presence. This was the sixth time I had returned to the storage room looking for the stranger. But he had never come back, while I was leaning against the same broken window through which gave a view to the gardens. I began to write in the middle of this dusty place with the smell of old books, and dear journal, I found proof that the stranger was real. I found sketches made on some kind of parchment hidden in the windowsill. The pencil marks were dry, stiff, hard, and unerasable.

It was the same drawing over and over. A barely sketched man’s face, proportioned with circles and squares, which displayed several expressions on his face. The same emotions had been drawn several times in different ways, as if we could guess someone’s personality just by the way he smiled, before being scratched out. He had added the words empty, fake, not it, all around. He approached them almost in a scientific way, like an actor trying to reproduce them. But most of the expressions were overdone—they didn’t seem real. Except one. It was the only girl present in the sketches—or more or less only the woman’s gaze, because only her eyes were drawn. She had a lost look, half-sad, even if her eyes seemed to squint as if she was smiling falsely.

I even thought for a moment that she looked like me, but she had beautiful eyes full of sweetness that could be read like an open book, and I was the kind to hold everything in. I put the sketches in the corner. I had no more time. I had an appointment with Augustus, who was returning from his architecture class with Violette at this moment. Maybe she was the girl the stranger had drawn?

I hurriedly pulled out the letter I had in my pocket addressed to “the dark stranger” and tucked it in with the rest of the sketches. I had written the sentences:

‘Dear ghost, I hope we’ll meet again. I’ll be waiting. Not just for your name, but who you truly are. My sister gave this to me for luck. I don’t need it anymore. It’s your time to make a wish, stranger. The girl from the storage room.’

Inside the letter, I had given him my most prized possession, hoping that Luna wouldn’t hold it against me.

My four-leaf clover.

I don’t even know why I did it—no one knew about that man, except rumors that he was some ‘freak,’ but something inside me pushed me to replace out the truth.

The door cracked open, and I ran towards it. I had ten minutes left before I posed as a muse. Augustus had come in and asked me why I was standing in this dismal storage room. Again. Violette gave me a wave and a smile, which I didn’t return.

“We still have five minutes before I start working.” I pulled Augustus by his collar and kissed him in front of her, looking her straight in the eyes before slamming the door, displaying a sharky smile that I had won. I hate her, dear journal. I hate the way she makes me feel like—

“Argh!” I shut the notebook. I didn’t know if I was more repulsed by how ridiculous I was or by the regret of not having sent them both to the bushes nearby before shipping them to a land with no happy ever afters.

A couple of days after that, the storage room had definitely been closed. Rumor had it students were making out inside at the risk of damaging the material. My jealousy had cost me to lose the safe haven of that stranger and the possibility of ever seeing him again.

“Which meant he probably never got the four-leaf clover.” I thought this through. “But Ajax said he got one.”

Had the four-leaf clover sent me to him all along, or was my imagination playing tricks on me?