Chapter 4: Private Devotion
The cold of the leather seat had seeped into Jess’s bones. When Elise finally said, “We’re done,” the words were like a key turning in a lock, releasing her from a paralysis she hadn’t fully acknowledged. She unfolded herself, her joints protesting.
Elise was already at the sink in the kitchenette, scrubbing the charcoal from her hands with a brutal, mechanical efficiency. The water ran gray. She didn’t look up. “You should go. The light’s gone.”
It was a dismissal, cold and sudden. The intimacy of the afternoon—the probing questions, the intense scrutiny—slammed shut. Jess stood, feeling clumsy and discarded. Her canvas bag by the door seemed like an artifact from another life.“Okay. Thanks, I guess.”
“Mmm.” Elise tore a sheet of paper towel from a roll, her back still turned.
Jess walked to the door, her steps echoing. She glanced back. The two large drawings were pinned to the easel now, facing away from her. All she could see was the aggressive, dark scoring on the backs of the sheets, lines of force that looked like they might tear through the paper. She pulled the heavy steel door open and slipped into the hallway, the comparative silence of the stairwell a relief.
Back in her own loft, the emptiness felt different. It wasn’t just empty of people; it felt empty of her. Like Elise had somehow siphoned something out and kept it in that studio. Jess made tea, the ritual doing little to warm her. She tried to sketch from memory—the water tower, the pigeon—but her lines were weak, timid. Everything felt bland.
She gave up and scrolled on her phone, a numbing distraction. A notification popped up—a new follower on Instagram. @E_Moreau_Studio. The account was private, but the profile picture was a slice of a marble hand, its fingers partially shattered. Jess’s thumb hovered over the ‘Follow Request’ button. Her heart beat a dull, persistent rhythm in her chest. After a long minute, she tapped it.
The acceptance was instantaneous.
She sat up straight, phone glowing in the darkening room. The account had three posts. The first was a photo of a tangled, rusted metal form, captioned “Studies in tension.” The second was a close-up of textured clay that looked unsettlingly like skin. The third, posted just twenty minutes ago, was a drawing.
It was her.
Not a realistic portrait, but a violent, beautiful distortion. It was the second sketch from today. Elise had captured the slump of her shoulders, the slight raise of her right collarbone, but the lines were frantic, possessive. The charcoal had been worked and reworked around her eyes, smudging them into dark, hollow pools. The caption was a single line from Rilke: “This is the creature that has never been.”
Jess stared until the screen timed out, throwing the room into darkness. A cocktail of emotions stirred in her gut—flattery, fear, a terrifying sense of recognition. She was that creature in the drawing. Unmade, and waiting.
She didn’t sleep well. Dreams were full of scraping sounds and the smell of wet paper. She woke early, the dawn light a pale, judgmental gray. Needing air, needing to reclaim something, she pulled on a sweatshirt and quietly made her way up to the roof.
The morning was crisp, the city sounds still muted. Her painting, covered with a plastic tarp, was where she’d left it. She walked towards it, the gravel crunching under her shoes. Something was off. The tarp’s corners were weighted down with bricks, which was normal, but the shape beneath wasn’t.It was too angular.
She knelt, a cold knot forming in her stomach. She pulled back a corner of the tarp.
Her painting was gone.
In its place, leaning against the wall, was a large, flat rectangular object wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. A note was pinned to the front, written in Elise’s sharp, vertical script.
“A trade. Yours for mine. A conversation continued. -E”
Jess’s fingers were numb. She fumbled with the tight knot, finally breaking the twine. The brown paper fell away.
It was the stolen mirror painting. The one she’d seen in Elise’s studio weeks ago, the one that had pulsed with a weird, jealous energy. Seeing it here, in the open air, was different. The figure in the midnight room wasn’t just looking into a mirror anymore. The reflection’s hand was now pressed against the glass from the other side, its fingers splayed, yearning to break through. The paint in that spot was thick, chaotic, as if it had been applied in a fury. The overall brushwork was masterful, a storm of emotion she could never hope to match.
It was a magnified, perfected version of her own lonely impulse. It was also a violation. Elise had been up here. She had taken Jess’s work—the one thing that was purely, privately hers—and left this… this testament of obsession in its place.
This wasn’t flattery. This was colonization.
Jess stumbled back from the painting, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. The roof, her sanctuary, felt contaminated. She looked at the wrapped canvas, then at the open sky.A trade. A conversation. The words were a sleek trap.
She couldn’t leave it here. She also couldn’t bring it inside. That felt like surrendering.
In the end, anger made the decision. A hot, clarifying spark that cut through the fear. She wouldn’t be erased. She grabbed the painting, the mirror-image woman glaring up at her, and carried it, not back to her apartment, but to the heavy, industrial door that led to the roof’s utility ledge. She propped it there, out of the weather but hidden from view. A prisoner in limbo.
Then she went back downstairs, straight past her own door, and stood before Elise’s. She didn’t knock. She pressed her ear to the cold steel.
From within, she heard it. Not the sound of charcoal. It was a different sound. A low, rhythmic, wet scraping. A sculptor working clay. And under it, a hum. Elise was humming a tuneless, absent-minded melody, the sound of someone utterly lost in the act of creation.
Jess stood there, her cheek against the door, listening to the sound of her own form being shaped from the void. She didn’t knock. She just listened. Then she turned, walked back to her loft, and closed the door softly behind her. She leaned against it, sliding down to sit on the floor.
She pulled out her phone. She opened the Instagram DM thread with @E_Moreau_Studio. The cursor blinked in the empty message box.
Her thumbs moved. She typed three words, deleted them, then typed two more. She stared at them, the reality of sending it making her vision swim.She hit send.
The message read: We need to talk.
The blue ‘Delivered’ notification beneath her text felt like a point of no return. Jess let the phone clatter onto the floorboards, the sound too loud in the silence. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, seeing phantom flares of light, waiting for the inevitable typing bubbles to appear.
They didn’t.
Five minutes passed, measured by the frantic drum of her pulse in her ears. The silence from the phone was worse than a reply. It was a void. She imagined Elise reading the message in her studio, those gray eyes scanning the words, a slow smile perhaps touching her lips as she deliberately didn’t respond. The power play was exquisite.
A new sound sliced through her panic. Not a phone vibration.
It was the distinct, heavy clunk of a deadbolt being turned next door. Metal grinding against metal. Jess froze, her breath catching. Floorboards creaked on the other side of the wall, a slow, deliberate pressure moving toward the door to the hallway.DOOR OPENS.
The sound was a dry gasp of hinges. Jess scrambled to her feet, instinctively backing away from her own door as if it had grown hot. She stood in the center of her room, paralyzed, listening.
She heard Elise’s footsteps, light and assured, cross the hallway. They didn’t pause at Jess’s door. They continued, past it, toward the stairwell leading down and out of the building. The faint, astringent scent of turpentine and something earthier, like wet stone, seeped under Jess’s door. It lingered in the air for a moment after the footsteps faded.
She’d left. Without acknowledging the message.Without knocking.
The dismissal was absolute. It left Jess standing alone, vibrating with a cocktail of relief and shaming anger. She paced, the unfinished city skyline through her windows seeming to watch her. ‘We need to talk.’ It sounded so juvenile now, so weak. A child’s demand for fairness.
An hour bled past. The light in the room changed. She finally picked up her phone. Still no reply. The profile picture of the shattered marble hand seemed to mock her.
A new, quieter fury settled in. It was practical, metallic. She couldn’t stay here, cowering. She needed her painting back. That was a concrete fact. The trade was not accepted. She yanked her door open and strode the three steps to Elise’s studio. She raised her fist, knuckles poised to strike the steel.
She hesitated. The door was slightly ajar.
A quarter-inch gap. Just darkness within.
“Elise?” Jess called, her voice steadier than she felt.No answer. Just the hum of the building. The open door was an obvious invitation, or a test.A trap, maybe. Jess pushed it, and it swung inward silently.
The studio was dark, save for one hanging bulb over the main worktable. It was clean. Startlingly so. The floor was swept, the tools arranged in militaristic rows. The shrouded forms were gone. The drawings from yesterday—the frantic, hungry sketches of her—were nowhere to be seen.
It felt like a stage after the performance, everything struck and packed away. On the vast, empty worktable, centered under the bulb, sat a single object.
It was a towel, folded neatly. A clean, white hand towel. It was spotless except for a single, rust-colored smear right in its center. The stain was a dull burgundy, faded from washing, but unmistakable. It looked like old blood.
Beside the towel was a small, folded square of tracing paper. Jess’s name was written on it in that sharp script. Her fingers trembled as she picked it up, the paper whisper-thin. She unfolded it.
Inside was not a note. It was a pencil drawing, minute and incredibly detailed. It was of a hairline fracture in a marble slab. The fracture, upon closer inspection, subtly traced the exact curve of her own jawline from the portrait Elise had stolen. At the bottom of the sketch, small and precise, were the coordinates for a location downtown, and a time: 10 PM.
The door creaked behind her.
Jess spun, clutching the paper. Elise stood in the doorway, a canvas tote bag slung over her shoulder. She smelled of cold air and fresh coffee. She looked at Jess in her studio, at the drawing in her hand, and showed no surprise.
“You left your door open,” Jess said, accusation masking her trespass.
“I know.” Elise stepped inside, letting the door swing shut behind her. Her eyes went to the towel with the stain, then back to Jess. “You wanted to talk.”
“You took my painting from the roof.”
“I left a better one.” Elise said it simply, as if discussing a swapped umbrella. She set her bag down. “Yours was a question. Mine was the answer.”
“It wasn’t yours to take!” Jess’s voice echoed in the cavernous room. “That was mine. You can’t just… trade people’s souls without asking.”
Elise tilted her head, a genuine flicker of curiosity in her eyes. “Is that what it was? Your soul?” She took a step closer, her gaze dropping to the drawing in Jess’s hand. “You saw the coordinates. Will you come?”
“To some random warehouse at ten o’clock? Are you insane?”
“Probably.” A faint, almost imperceptible smile. “It’s a gallery. My dealer is hosting a private preview. A few collectors. I want you to see the work finished, in the light it deserves.” She paused, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “I want you to see what you inspired.”
The flattery was a blade this time, sharp and dangerous. Jess looked at the drawing of the fracture, at the stain on the towel. This was the real trade, not paintings. An invitation into Elise’s world for a piece of her own.
“Why the blood?” Jess asked, pointing at the towel, her voice hollow.
Elise glanced at it. “Iron oxide.Pigment. It’s just paint, Jess.” She walked to the table, picked up the towel, and dabbed it casually at a smudge on her own wrist. “See?”
The stain on her skin was indeed a rusty red-brown.Paint. Jess felt foolish, off-balance.
“Ten o’clock,” Elise repeated, her tone final. She wasn’t asking. She was stating a fact, a time they would both now orbit. “Wear something stark.Black. It’s a funeral for mediocrity.”
She turned and walked toward the sink, dismissing Jess as completely as if she’d already left. The conversation was over. Jess stood there, the coordinates burning a hole in her palm. She had come for a confrontation and had been given a summons instead.
She left without another word, the door closing with a soft, definitive click behind her. In her own loft, she leaned against the door, the thin paper crisp in her fist. She looked at the digital clock on her stove. 7:32 PM.
She had two hours and twenty-eight minutes to decide. The city outside began to sparkle with evening lights, each one a possible yes or a no. Downstairs, in the silent studio, Elise unfolded the stained towel. She studied the rust-colored smear, not on her wrist, but on the opposite side, a patch Jess hadn't seen.
She brought the fabric to her face and inhaled deeply, her eyes closing. It didn’t smell of paint. It smelled of copper and salt and the particular, sweet scent of fear she had carved from the air around Jess just moments before. A scent only true pigment could hold.