Chapter 10: Painted Desires
His words hung in the air between them, suspended in the dust motes dancing in the slanted afternoon light. Tell me you want this.
Lilah’s breath hitched. The clinical part of her brain, the part that catalogued injuries and calculated dosages, observed the situation with detached clarity: Horizontal. Weight on left elbow. Elevated heart rate. Pupils dilated. But the other part, the part that had been coiled tight since the bridge, since the zipper sound of the body bag, simply shattered.
“Yes,” she said, the word a rough exhale.
It was all the permission he needed. Jace’s mouth crashed back onto hers, not with patient exploration now, but with a focused, consuming heat. His painted hands—smears of umber and ultramarine—slid under the hem of her stained scrubs top, pushing it up. The fabric caught for a moment under her arms, then he broke the kiss just long enough to yank it over her head and toss it aside onto a stack of canvases.
The cool studio air pebbled her skin. His eyes, dark and intent, swept over her, the freckles across her chest, the strong line of her collarbone. There was no artful seduction in his gaze, only raw appreciation. “Christ, Lilah,” he breathed, before his mouth found the pulse hammering at the base of her throat.
His lips were warm, his tongue tasting the salt of her skin. One hand cupped her breast, his thumb brushing over her nipple, sending a shockwave of sensation straight to her core. She arched into his touch, a moan escaping her. Her own hands were desperate, pulling at the waistband of his jeans, fumbling with the button.
He laughed, a low, dark sound against her neck. “Easy, tiger.” He shifted, kneeling back for a moment to shed his own jeans, and she took the opportunity to shove her pants and underwear down her legs, kicking them off the futon. The vulnerability was momentary, eclipsed by the sheer need to feel him against her, skin to skin.
When he settled back over her, the full, hot length of him pressed against her thigh, the world narrowed to this: the creak of the old futon, the smell of their mingled sweat overlaid with turpentine, the vivid landscape of his painted hands on her bare hips.
He slid a hand between her legs, his fingers finding her wet and ready. She gasped, her head falling back. He watched her face, his own a mask of intense concentration as he touched her, his movements sure and relentless. The coil of tension from her shift, from the sorrow she’d compartmentalized, began to unravel under his fingers.
“Jace,” she pleaded, unsure what she was asking for.
“I know,” he murmured, withdrawing his hand. He guided himself to her entrance, pausing there, his forehead damp against hers. The golden light from the skylight gilded the sweat on his temple, caught in his blond lashes. For a suspended second, they were frozen, a breath held.
Then he pushed inside.
The sound she made was half-sob, half-sigh. He filled her completely, a stark, grounding pressure that chased the last ghosts of the night from her bones. He held still, letting her adjust, his body trembling with the effort. His eyes were open, locked on hers. In them, she saw the reflection of the skylight, and her own face, wrecked and open.
He began to move.
It wasn’t gentle. It was necessary. Each thrust was a punctuation mark against the chaos, a deep, claiming rhythm that echoed the violent strokes on the canvas nearby. She met him thrust for thrust, her nails digging into the hard muscle of his back, surely leaving half-moon marks in the drying paint. The futon protested beneath them, scraping across the concrete floor with their momentum.
There was no art to it, only a furious, beautiful synchronicity. She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him deeper. A broken, pleasured cry was torn from her throat, mingling with his guttural groan. The world dissolved into sensation: the slap of skin, the shudder of the frame beneath them, the sharp, clean scent of him overwhelming the chemical smell of the studio.
He shifted an angle, his hand slipping between them again, and the coil inside her snapped. Pleasure, bright and obliterating, ripped through her in waves. She cried out, her body bowing tight against his.
Feeling her climax, his own control shattered. His rhythm fractured into short, deep drives, his face buried in the crook of her neck with a final, choked sound as he followed her over.
Silence, then. The only sounds were their ragged breaths and the distant, persistent hum of the city. The long beam of sunlight had moved, now illuminating a swirling abstract painting on the far wall, making the colors swim.
Slowly, Jace’s weight settled onto her, warm and heavy and solid. He nuzzled her neck, his lips soft against her racing pulse. She traced the unfamiliar patterns his paint had left on his shoulder blade—a streak of yellow, a smudge of black.
After a few minutes, he rolled to the side, taking her with him, tucking her against his body. The air was cooling on their damp skin. He pulled a rumpled, paint-stained throw blanket from the back of the futon and draped it over them both.
“So,” he said, his voice lazy and thick with satisfaction. “How’s your first date with an artist going?”
A laugh bubbled up from her chest, surprising her. It felt foreign and good. “A little derivative. I’ve seen the ‘naked woman on a futon’ trope before.”
He pinched her hip gently. “Ouch. That’s neo-expressionist realism, thank you very much.” He gestured with his chin toward the unfinished painting on the floor. “And you’re a terrible model. You keep moving.”
She followed his gaze to the canvas. The figure in it was all fierce, abstract emotion. It didn’t look like her, and yet, in some essential way, it absolutely did. It was how he saw her. Not the calm, capable EMT, but this raw, vibrant force.
“It’s not finished,” she observed quietly.
“Nope.” He popped the ‘p’. His fingers played idly with a curl of her hair. “Good things rarely are.”
The comfortable silence stretched between them again, but the earlier urgency was gone, replaced by a spent, peaceful closeness. Lilah’s mind, finally quiet, began to tick back online. The reality of Nathan, miles away but psychologically present in this very room, nudged at the edges of her contentment.
As if reading her thoughts—which he was terrifyingly good at—Jace spoke into her hair. “He’ll be back tomorrow evening.”
She didn’t respond. She didn’t know what to say.
“Hey.” He turned onto his side, propping his head on his hand. His expression was serious now, the playful glint replaced by something more considered. “This isn’t me being sneaky. He knows you’re here. He called here. The lines are… weird, but they’re drawn.”
“Are they?” she asked, her voice small.
“Yeah. They are.” He brushed a thumb over her cheekbone. “Tonight is tonight. Tomorrow is tomorrow. Let tonight be what it is.”
She wanted to. God, she wanted to. She nodded, letting her body relax back into the curve of his. The blanket smelled of oil paint and him. Outside, the golden light began to deepen into amber, then a soft, dusty rose. The studio, in the dying glow, felt less like a battlefield of creation and more like a sanctuary.
“I’m starving,” Jace announced suddenly, breaking the spell. “I have half a leftover pizza that may or may not have charcoal briquettes for toppings. And, I think, two semi-cold beers.”
She smiled, a real one this time. “Sounds like a five-star meal.”
He scrambled up, gloriously naked and unconcerned, padding across the cold concrete to a small, battered fridge humming in the corner. She watched him move, the elegant lines of his back, the casual grace. He returned with the pizza box and two brown bottles, handing her one.
They ate sitting cross-legged on the futon, the blanket around their shoulders, passing the cardboard box between them. The pizza was terrible—chewy and cold. The beer was perfect.
He told her a ridiculous story about trying to buy a specific shade of magenta from an insanely pretentious paint supplier downtown, doing a spot-on impression of the clerk that had her laughing until her sides ached. She told him about her partner, Raj, and his obsession with growing temperamental orchids in their ambulance bay, which he swore improved the “energy.”
For an hour, it was easy. It was light. The shadows in the room grew long and deep, and Jace lit a few candles, their flickering light dancing over the sculptures and paintings, making the studio feel like a cave of wonders.
Later, when the candles had burned low, he pulled her into the small, attached bathroom to wash the paint from their skin. The water from the tap ran in rust-colored streams at first. He stood behind her, his arms around her waist, his chin on her shoulder as they looked at their smudged reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror—a war-painted version of the two of them, blurred at the edges.
“See?” he said softly, meeting her eyes in the glass. “We clean up okay.”
Back on the futon, wrapped in a less-paint-stained blanket, she drifted on the edge of sleep, her back pressed to his chest, his breath warm on her neck. The events of the last twenty-four hours—the trauma of the call, the intensity with Jace—swirled together into a strange, exhausting dream.
Just before sleep took her completely, she felt his lips brush her shoulder, a whisper so faint she might have imagined it.
“Whatever happens tomorrow… this was real.”
And in the dark, with the city’s heartbeat thrumming through the floorboards, she believed him. The peace of it, the simple, uncomplicated warmth of his body around hers, allowed her to finally let go. She fell asleep not thinking of endings or beginnings, but existing purely in the fragile, fleeting now.
Outside, a key turned in the building’s front door, three floors down. A suitcase wheeled over the threshold. But in the loft, under the watchful eyes of a hundred painted figures, they heard none of it.