Chapter 9: The Promise
The cold, rough plaster of the gallery wall bit into Jess’s shoulder blades. Elise’s presence was a physical weight, a wall of heat and intention that pinned her more surely than the hands braced on either side of her head. The stolen key felt like a leaden secret in the pocket of her jeans, a guilty anchor dragging her down into this moment.
“You’re distracted,” Elise murmured, her voice a low vibration that seemed to travel through the stone into Jess’s bones. A thumb swept over Jess’s lower lip. “Even now. Even here. Your mind is somewhere else in this room.”
It was true. With Elise watching her, touching her, the act of thinking became a frayed rope she couldn’t grip. Her gaze kept darting over Elise’s shoulder to the shrouded forms in the gloom—the things she’d come here to see alone. Now, under that piercing gray scrutiny, every question she’d prepared melted into static.
“I’m not, I just… the, uh, the light from the skylight is…” Jess stammered, her train of thought derailing as Elise’s fingers trailed down the column of her throat, resting on the frantic pulse there.
Elise chuckled, a dark, knowing sound. “It’s alright. I like it. The fluster. The unraveling.” Her hands slid down, mapping Jess’s ribs through the thin fabric of her t-shirt, coming to rest on her hips. “It’s honest.”
Then her touch grew more deliberate, more searching. Her palms smoothed over Jess’s waist, fingers curling into the denim of her jeans, dipping just beneath the waistband. Jess’s breath hitched, a sharp, involuntary sound in the cavernous quiet. Her head fell back against the wall with a soft thud.
“You’ll—” she gasped, the words torn between fear and a terrifying want. “You’ll—ah—be there? At the… at the opening?”
Elise’s chuckle vibrated against the sensitive skin of her neck. “Every moment. Every fracture. Every scream.” Her teeth closed, gently but unmistakably, on Jess’s earlobe. The pressure was a promise and a threat. “I’ll be the hands pulling you apart.”
The kiss that followed was not an answer. It was a claim. It was raw, all teeth and desperate pressure, a transaction of fear and fascination. Elise’s taste was of black coffee and the faint, clean scent of the clay that dusted her hands. Jess kissed back, her hands finally moving from their frozen pose at her sides to clutch at Elise’s leather jacket, pulling her closer even as some primal part of her screamed to push away.
She was like a bird pinned under the foot of a lion. The lion studied its catch, not with immediate violence, but with a calm, terrifying possession. The bird’s heart hammered against its ribs, a frantic drumbeat of survival, but its wings were limp. The lion was beautiful in its power. And the bird, in its dizzying paralysis, didn’t know if it wanted to be eaten or if it had simply forgotten how to try to escape.
Elise broke the kiss, her breathing slightly ragged. She rested her forehead against Jess’s, their noses brushing. In the half-light, her eyes were like smoked glass. “You came here alone,” she stated, the amusement gone, replaced by a quiet intensity. “In the dead of night. With my key.”
Jess’s blood ran cold. The secret was out, and it sounded like a betrayal when Elise said it. “I was curious.”
“Curious,” Elise echoed. She took a half-step back, her hands sliding from Jess’s waist. The sudden absence of her touch felt like a vacuum. “Good. Curiosity is the first step. Come.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She simply turned and walked deeper into the gallery, a silhouette moving confidently between the shrouded statues. Jess, her legs unsteady, pushed herself off the wall and followed. The urge to run for the door was a loud, clear bell in her mind. Her feet moved toward Elise instead.
Elise stopped before a tall figure covered by a heavy canvas drop cloth. With a dramatic sweep, she pulled it away.
Moonlight cascaded over the sculpture. It was a woman, or the echo of one, carved from a pale, streaked marble. The form was caught in a twist, one arm flung up as if warding off a blow, the other drawn protectively across a face that was only partially revealed. The features that were visible were a haunting, elegant blur—not lacking detail, but seemingly melting, transforming from one state into another. The line of the jaw softened into the curve of a shoulder, the strands of hair flowed like liquid into the grain of the stone.
“It’s not finished,” Elise said, her voice soft now, almost reverent. “She’s still becoming. Caught between being seen and being unmade.”
Jess stepped closer, her artist’s eye overriding her fear. The craftsmanship was breathtaking. The emotional charge was unbearable. “It’s… it’s terrifying. And beautiful.”
“They’re the same thing,” Elise said. She reached out and ran her fingertips along the statue’s raised arm, a caress. Then she looked directly at Jess. “Do you see it?”
“See what?”
“The likeness.”
Jess stared. She traced the swoop of the brow, the set of the partial mouth. A cold knot tightened in her stomach. It was abstract, impressionistic, but the feeling of it, the posture of vulnerable defiance—it resonated with a familiarity that made her skin prickle. The deep-set eyes, though only roughly suggested, held a quiet intensity.
“No,” Jess whispered, but it was a lie, and they both knew it.
“You asked if I’ll be there at the opening,” Elise said, moving behind Jess, her voice close to her ear again. She didn’t touch her. “I will. But you’ll be there too, Jess. In every piece. You already are.”
Jess turned to face her, the immensity of it—the theft, the sculpture, the kiss, this undeniable, crawling awe—closing in. “I don’t know how to be a muse.”
Elise smiled, a real smile that touched her severe eyes. It was more unsettling than her scowl. “You don’t have to be anything. You just have to exist. And let me translate it.” She glanced toward the door. “Go home. It’s almost dawn.”
The dismissal was abrupt. It left Jess stranded. One minute she was the center of a frightening universe, the next she was being shown the door. The lion was letting the bird go, confident it would not, or could not, truly fly away.
Jess walked back through the gallery, past the spectral forms of other unfinished works. She felt Elise’s gaze on her back, a tangible pressure between her shoulder blades. She fumbled with the heavy lock on the main door, the key cold in her trembling hand.
She fumbled with the heavy lock on the main door, the key cold in her trembling hand. The metallic clunk echoed like a gunshot in the vast quiet. Gray predawn light seeped through the transom window, painting the world outside in shades of exhaust and loneliness.
Jess stopped. Her hand fell from the latch. The city outside felt suddenly hollow, a drained set waiting for actors who would never arrive.
“I don’t…” The words were a faint exhalation, misting slightly in the chilled air. She didn’t turn around. “I don’t want to leave.”
She felt Elise behind her before she heard her. Not a sound, but a shift in the atmosphere, a concentration of the shadows at her back. The scent of clay and damp stone grew stronger.
A hand, cool and solid, settled on her shoulder. Then Elise’s lips were against the juncture of her neck, the words vibrating into her skin. “I wasn’t going to let you.” A pause, filled with the sound of Jess’s own heartbeat. “Not fully.”
Elise’s other hand came around, fingers closing over Jess’s on the cold key. She guided it, turning the lock back the other way with a definitive, heavier thud. The sound sealed them in.
“The light’s all wrong out there anyway,” Elise murmured, her breath warm against Jess’s ear. She pulled Jess gently back from the door, turning her around. “It’s flat. Washes everything out. In here…” She gestured to the bloody light from the stained glass window, now beginning to glow as the sun touched the city’s horizon. “In here, the shadows have texture.”
Jess looked up at her. The severe haircut was softened by the low light, the gray eyes now holding fragments of red. “What does that mean, ‘not fully’?”
“It means a part of you stays,” Elise said, as if it were simple. She tucked a strand of Jess’s honey-toned hair behind her ear, her thumb lingering on her cheekbone. “With the work. With me. It’s already done.” She dropped her hand. “But the rest of you should probably get some sleep. You look shattered.”
It was the most normal thing anyone had said to her in hours. A hysterical laugh bubbled in Jess’s throat. “Yeah. Right. Sleep.”
“Go on.” Elise gave her a slight nudge toward the door, but this time to the artist’s entrance at the side, a smaller, less imposing thing. “I have hours of work left. The dawn is when the stone finally stops whispering and starts telling the truth.”
Jess moved on unsteady legs, the stolen key now a lead weight in her palm. At the small door, she glanced back. Elise was already walking away, a silhouette merging with the other half-formed figures in the gallery.
She was just another one of Elise’s unfinished pieces.
The morning air outside was bracing, a slap of diesel and damp concrete. Jess walked the three blocks to their building without seeing a single person. Her loft felt alien, quiet and empty in a way that the gallery, full of screaming stone, had not.
She didn’t sleep. She sat on her futon, staring at the blank canvas on her easel. Her own attempts felt childish now—safe splashes of color, polite shapes. She thought of the marble woman, forever caught between being seen and being unmade.
A soft, scraping sound came from the shared wall. Then another. The deliberate, rhythmic drag of a tool on stone. It was a sound both patient and possessive.
It was the sound of being translated.
Jess pulled her knees to her chest, listening. She didn’t paint. She just sat there, in the growing light of a day she already knew would belong to Elise, and wondered which parts of her had been left behind in the red-dark gallery, and if she would ever want them back.