˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

LANDO, my music buddy.

ALEX, the best friend's brother.

CHARLES, my childhood.

GEORGE, knight in shining armor.

OSCAR, the unattainable.

CARLOS, the best of my summers.

💌 the winning driver will have a special chapter release. happy voting!

not because he's particularly loud about it (though he is loud, you'll learn this later); no, you almost drop the squeegee because he pushes through the door at 4:47 pm on a thursday, thirteen minutes before close, wearing a jacket that's approximately four sizes too big for him and carrying a folder so stuffed with papers that it's held shut with not one but three rubber bands, and he looks around the shop with the expression of a man who has just found water in a desert.

“hi,” he says, to no one in particular, to the whole room, even if it’s just the two of you in there, “this is a print shop, yes?”

you set the squeegee down on the workbench, carefully, and turn to face him. the overhead fluorescents catch the ink stains on your forearms and he doesn't even glance at them, because he's looking at your face like you're the most important person he's spoken to all week. maybe all month. it's a little unnerving, but it’s also a little flattering. you don't know what to do with it yet so you file it away somewhere in the back of your brain, under things to think about later when you're not covered in printing ink.

“screen printing, mostly,” you say, “we do some digital transfer but the bulk of it is screen. you got a project?”

he exhales, relieved, “yes. okay. yes,” he comes to the counter, drops the folder on it with a thud, and starts wrestling with the rubber bands. “i have a band. not— i mean, i'm not in the band, i do their merch. i design stuff, i've been printing it myself but it looks —” he pauses, tilting his head, searching for the word, “bad. it looks bad. like, someone-made-this-in-his-dorm-room-at-2AM-bad.”

“was that someone you?”

“yes,” he says, very solemnly, “that someone was me.”

you almost smile. you manage not to. (barely.)

he gets the folder open and fans out a collection of printed designs on scrap pieces of fabric across your counter. some of them are clearly heat-transfer, where the ink sits on top of the fabric like a decal instead of sinking into it, and a few of them have the telltale ghost of a peel-edge. they're not terrible, actually. the designs themselves have something going on, this sort of loose, hand-done quality that feels intentional even when it isn't, and it’s the kind of aesthetic that college garage bands with slightly too much personality tend to gravitate toward.

you pick one up. it's a t-shirt graphic, band name in a font that looks like it was sketched out by hand, a rough little drawing of what appears to be five stick figures in various poses with their respective musical instruments.

“rookie '25?” you read.

“that’s us,” he leans on the counter, and it takes you a moment to realize he's watching you look at the designs the same way you'd watch someone read something you wrote, as if bracing for impact, “it's kind of a joke, right, we're all third years, and we’re not even in the class of ‘25 but– listen, i just do the— the visual stuff. which i'm clearly very good at," he adds, gesturing at the heat-transfer catastrophes spread across your counter.

“these aren't that bad,” you say, because you mean it and because you've seen genuinely bad— you once had a client bring in a file that was literally just a jpeg someone had screenshotted off google images, and you could tell the search was helmet png because it had the grey and white checkerboard background behind it, and asked you to screen print it without the background. this is not that. “the designs are actually good. it's just the execution.”

something shifts in his expression. “yeah?”

“screen printing will make them look completely different. it deposits the ink into the fabric instead of on top of it, so you get that—” you gesture vaguely at yourself, at the shop, at the concept of good printing in general, “— quality feel. more like actual band merch.”

“more like we didn't make it in a dorm room at 2 AM.”

“exactly.”

he grins. it's a good grin, takes up his whole face, eyes crinkling unabashedly, “okay,” he says, “tell me what i need to do.”

what he needs to do, as it turns out, is come back. a lot.

this is not unusual in itself;  screen printing isn't a one-visit process, especially for someone learning it for himself from the ground up. there's the initial consultation, then the file prep, then the film positives, then the screen burning, then the press check, and somewhere in the middle of all of that there's usually a lot of back-and-forth about colorways and fabrics and how many shirts they actually need. regular clients come in regularly. this is normal.

what is slightly less normal is that franco colapinto, merch guy for rookie '25, appears to have gotten the impression that he needs to test a new design approximately every two weeks.

you notice it somewhere around the fourth visit. you're at the light table, cleaning up for the day, when he comes in with that same overstuffed folder and the expression of a man with a mission, and he spreads three new sketches across your counter and says, “so i was thinking… what if we did a long sleeve this time, but with a different colorway? like, the same base design but we switch the ink colors?”

you look at the sketches. they're good, and it’s because they're always good, “a different colorway is basically a separate run,” you tell him, flipping through the pages, “you'd be paying per color per screen, so if you're doing two colorways of the same design you're essentially doubling your screen costs.”

he nods very seriously, “right, okay, so if we… what if we just did a sample first? just one or two shirts to see how it looks?”

“you already have samples from last time.”

“those were for a different design.”

“you have a lot of designs for a band with—” you glance up, “— what did you say, two hundred instagram followers?”

the corner of his mouth curve up, “two hundred and twelve, actually. we're growing.”

“right,” you look back at the sketches, because looking at the sketches is safer than looking at whatever is happening at the corner of his mouth. “i can do a sample run. it'll be a smaller setup fee since we've already got your base screens. send me the files and i'll work up a quote.”

“great,” he says, and you can hear the smile in it even when you're not looking, “i'll have them to you by friday.”

he does. he also leaves, on the back of the spec sheet, a small drawing of what appears to be a cartoon version of both of you at the light table, with a little speech bubble from cartoon franco that says this girl is very smart and knows everything about printing. underneath it, in different ink, as if he had scribbled it on a while later: also she should tell me if she wants coffee sometime.

you put it in the second drawer of the workbench, under a stack of order forms.

you don't throw it away.

the notes become a thing.

you don't know exactly when they become a thing, only that at some point you start leaving space in your own scribbled order notes— margin space, white space at the bottom of a spec sheet— because he always fills it in. it starts with his cartoon of the both of you at the light table and escalates, in the same way that things escalate when you're not paying careful enough attention, into something that occupies more and more of your brain at inconvenient hours.

he leaves a little sketch of a squeegee with a face on it. you draw a tiny ink well next to it with an arrow and write stop drawing on my work papers. he writes back never!!! with three exclamation points and a small star. he asks, via scrap paper, whether you prefer screen printing to digital and you write back a surprisingly long answer about the tactile quality of it, about how there's something you like about a process that's physical and a little unpredictable and leaves room for happy accidents.

the next time he comes in he looks at you over the counter with an expression you can't fully parse and says, “you wrote a lot.”

“you asked,” you say with a shrug of your shoulder.

“i did,” he agrees. and then, as though he is saying a universal truth: “i liked reading it.”

you think about that for three days.

the thing is— and you are aware this is a thing, you're not oblivious, you have eyes and a functioning nervous system— franco colapinto is very attractive and very aware that he's very attractive which should be annoying but he is so endearing in a way that is circles back to being less annoying, if that makes any sense.

he flirts with you the way some people breathe: constantly, easily, and apparently wwithout any effort. and the thing about that, the thing you keep bumping into when you turn it over in your mind at night, is that it doesn't feel like a performance. he flirts with the girl at the coffee cart across the street, sure (you've seen it, he got a free muffin out of it once) but when he leans on your counter and asks you questions about riso printing (which, you tell him, you’re learning to do despite working mostly with textiles), with his chin in his hand and his eyes on your face like there's nothing more interesting happening anywhere on earth, something about it feels different. it feels more… deliberate? if that’s the word. it’s like he's choosing it.

you're probably projecting. you are, statistically speaking, a person who has been wrong about things before.

still.

still.

INTERLUDE. elsewhere, a gig set up.

the venue is, as it has always been every first and third tuesday of the month for the past two years, at yuki's, a bar that holds one hundred people on a good night and smells like sticky floors and old cigarettes, the latter evident in the yellow-stained walls underneath the peeling wallpaper. isack is doing a soundcheck that has gone on fourteen minutes longer than necessary. ollie is tuning his guitar for what is, by her count, the fifth time, kimi tapping impatiently on his keyboard waiting for him to finish. gabriel and jack are arguing pleasantly about something involving a tambourine that no one asked for.

she is holding a clipboard and a cold brew and looking at the box of samples plopped on top of what is supposedly the merch table, and she is, quietly, losing her mind.

“franco,” she says, in the tone she has developed specifically for the moments when someone is about to hear something they won't enjoy. franco is arranging the samples by colorway, which she would find endearing if she were not doing math in her head. “how many samples do we have?”

“like, seven different runs,” he says, not looking up, “i'm still deciding on the hoodie colorway.”

“we have two hundred instagram followers.”

“two hundred and twenty-two,” he corrects, “gabi got us some new ones after his guess the song video.”

“franco. who do you think is buying all of this merch?”

he finally looks up,  “we're building inventory,” he tries, “for when we blow up.”

she stares at him. she has known franco for two and a half years and she has, in that time, developed a specific kind of patience for him that she would describe as hard won, “franco. the samples alone… how much have you spent?”

he gives her a number that makes her close her eyes, count to ten.

“that is our entire merch budget for the semester,” she says, very calmly, once she’s reached ten.

“it's an investment,” he reasons. then, because he is franco and franco cannot help himself: “and maybe you should buy a shirt or something. i noticed you've been wearing isack's hoodie for three gigs in a row, so maybe focus your energy—”

“finish that sentence,” she says, pointing a finger at him, “and i will put you in charge of social media again.”

franco closes his mouth. they both know what happened last time he was in charge of the social media.

she turns back to her clipboard, goes through the pre-show checklist they always do. she will deal with the samples later. she will also deal with whatever is happening with franco and his obsession with samples, because she has managed this band for almost three years and she is not stupid, and investment is not a word that explains seven runs of samples for a band with two hundred and twenty-two instagram followers.

the thing cracks on a thursday, which feels appropriate, somehow, since the whole thing started on a thursday and it's going to unravel on one, too. narrative symmetry, in a way.

franco comes in at the usual time, unusual in that he's carrying not just the folder but also two coffees, and he sets one on the counter in front of you with the ease of someone who has been doing this for months, which he has not, except that he's been leaving coffee? on scrap paper for months so perhaps it feels like the same thing to him. “i got you oat milk,” he says. “because you mentioned —”

“i mentioned it in a note,” you say, “two months ago.”

“i have a good memory.” he opens the folder. “okay, so i was thinking… new idea, what if we did a hoodie with a print on the sleeve instead of the chest? kind of more architectural, you know, less expected —”

“franco.” you say.

he looks up.

“how many of these are you actually going to sell?”

something in his expression does a quick, almost imperceptible thing. a flicker, there and gone, “what do you mean?”

“i mean—” you gesture at the folder, at the counter, at the general accumulated evidence of seven sample runs and three colorway tests and one inexplicable tote bag order, “you have two hundred followers. you've got samples in every fabric we carry, you've got color tests for designs,— i even printed tote bags!— and now you’re telling me you want to test out a new design. so i guess i'm asking — what are these for? like, genuinely man, what's the plan here?”

there is a pause. it's the longest pause franco colapinto has ever produced in your presence, which is saying something because he is, as a baseline, a person who reflexively fills silences. he looks at the folder. he looks at the coffee.

then, he looks at you.

“okay,” he says, slowly.

“okay?” you echo.

“don't— okay, don't make it weird.”

“i'm not making it weird, i asked a normal —”

“the tote bags were because you mentioned offhand that you'd never actually gotten to do a run of totes and you wanted to see how the registration came out on a smaller surface area.” he says it fast, like pulling off a bandage, and he continues, “the sleeve print is because you said once that you thought chest prints were overdone. the second colorway was because you said you liked— well, you said colors that shouldn't work together sometimes work together, and i wanted to see which ones you'd pick.” he stops. he looks, for the first time since you've known him, almost uncertain, “i wasn't really thinking about the followers, or the budget, i was thinking about… i just wanted to come in. and have a reason to come in. and you always know what to do with the designs so i just kept—” he picks up his coffee, puts it back down. “i know that's stupid.”

you look at him for a long moment.

“franco.”

“yeah?”

“do you know how much ink costs per liter?”

he blinks. “i — what?”

“ink.” you fold your arms, “do you know what the setup cost is for a new screen? the exposure time, the emulsion, the cleanup? every sample run we do, that's time and materials an —” you stop, because he's starting to look genuinely stricken, like a kicked puppy, which was not actually the goal here, “i'm not — i'm not mad. i'm not. i just need you to understand that this isn't a zero-cost thing, the samples. it's not like i'm doing your samples for fun.”

“i know.” he says, quietly. “i know, i should have— i wasn't thinking about that, i was only thinking about—” he makes a vague gesture that encompasses, apparently, you, “i'm sorry. genuinely. that was really inconsiderate.”

the thing is, he means it. and you can tell he means it, because it’s evident in the way his whole posture changes, losing the easy lean that's become so familiar to you, going a little more careful.

franco colapinto doing sincere is, you're learning in real time, a different frequency than franco colapinto doing charming. both of them hit you somewhere in the sternum.

“okay,” you say.

“okay?” it’s his turn now to repeat it.

“i said i wasn’t mad.”

“right.” he nods. then, after a beat: “but you're something.”

“i'm… something,” you agree, “i'm—” you stop. you pick up the coffee he brought you, the oat milk one, the one he remembered from a note you wrote two months ago. “i'm going to tell you how much each run actually costs. because if you're going to keep doing this you should know what it costs.”

he goes very still, eyes wide, “keep doing this?”

“i'm not saying go order ten more sample runs.” you warn him as you open the order book, flip to a fresh page. “i'm just saying, if you have an actual project, come in. and if you want to see how sleeve prints register, we can talk about that too. but we're going to write it down and you're going to look at the numbers.”

“you're still going to let me come in,” he says, slowly, like he's checking.

“franco.”

“sorry, sorry— yes. yes, numbers. i will look at all the numbers.” he's smiling now, and it's different from the grin he walked in with that first thursday, it’s softer, maybe. more like something he's not quite trying to perform, “can i also— just to be clear— can i still leave notes?”

you look down at the order book. you think about the second drawer of the workbench, which now contains approximately eleven pieces of scrap paper with varying degrees of cartoons and questions and one very earnest you seem like someone who is really good at most things and i would like to know what the other things are.

"yeah," you say. "you can still leave notes."

he exhales. reaches into the folder, pulls out the sleeve print sketch — the one that is, objectively, a better design than anything on the first visit, because he's been getting better, you've been watching him get better, which is its own kind of problem you haven't looked at directly yet. "okay," he says. "so. tell me about the numbers."

you tell him about the numbers. he writes some of them down on the back of the spec sheet and draws an exclamation point next to the ones that surprise him. at 5:03, thirteen minutes after the shop was supposed to close, he's still at the counter and you're still talking, and the overhead fluorescents are doing that late-evening thing where they get a little warmer, or maybe that's just the way you're choosing to see it.

“hey,” he says, eventually, when the conversation has wound down to a natural pause, “the coffee thing. the notes.”

“yeah?”

“i know i went about it in a way that was—” he makes a face — “a lot. and not very practical. and slightly expensive.”

“slightly,” you repeat, slowly, not quite believing him.

“okay… maybe very expensive. like, i put my own personal money towards it. but i meant it, the curiosity. i wasn't just coming in to waste your time—” he stops, tries again, “i wanted an excuse because i wanted to talk to you. but also i actually wanted to talk to you. does that make sense?”

it makes, unfortunately, a tremendous amount of sense.

“it makes sense.” you say.

“okay.” he gathers the folder, snaps the rubber bands back around it. “so if i asked you to get actual coffee— not a sample run, not a design excuse, just coffee— would that also make sense?”

you think about thursdays and talking to him for so long you close up forty-five minutes after you’re supposed to. you think about eleven scrap papers in a drawer. you think about a cartoon version of franco at the light table with a speech bubble saying this girl is very smart and knows everything about printing, which you still haven't thrown away and at this point probably won't.

“yeah,” you say. “that would also make sense.”

he smiles, fully. “thursday?” he asks.

“next thursday.” you say.

he leaves a sketch on the counter when he goes, and on the back of it, in the margin, is a small drawing of two coffee cups and a star.

you put it in the drawer with the rest of them.

THE SETLIST, a.k.a. the main show.

that's the way it goes  ⸻  isack  hadjar  x  reader  ⸻  or,  the band reminisce on how you got the manager role in the first place.

ENCORE, a.k.a. stories for the other band members, with different mcs.

you’ve spent the past two days alternating between staring at a blank page and berating yourself for staring at a blank page, which is, ironically, just another form of procrastination.

it’s not even that you don’t want to start, you just don’t know where. it feels like every thought you’ve had has already been said, painted, sculpted, dissected to death, and who are you to think you’ll come up with something new?

it’s exhausting, loving something this much. it’s exhausting, feeling everything so deeply that even the act of trying to put it into words feels like a betrayal of how big it is inside you.

you only remember the gallery because of a poster. you’re halfway across campus, nursing a smoothie from the caf’s walmart version of jamba juice, when you spot it tacked to the bulletin board— nouvelle exposition française: art from the 18th to 21st centuries.

“okay,” you mutter to yourself, squinting at the glossy image of a woman in a powdered wig, “what kind of french art?”

there’s no answer, obviously, but you still roll your eyes, half at yourself, half at the vagueness of the world. fine. you’ll take whatever inspiration you can get, even if it means enduring an entire exhibit of pastel cherubs and men in powdered wigs pretending to be thoughtful.

so you go that afternoon.

the campus museum— the gallery — is almost empty when you get there. just a couple of tourists trailing behind a guide, some art majors sketching quietly in the corner. the student at the front desk doesn’t even look up when you flash your id.

you take the stairs up to the second floor two at a time, where the exhibit starts.

it’s… fine. you can tell it’s supposed to be inspired, but something about the arrangement feels lazy, like they ran out of space halfway through and started improvising. you make mental notes anyway, walking past the first few displays in a polite sort of disinterest. oils, pastels, sculptures, impressionists next to surrealists next to something that looks like it belongs in a completely different museum. 

you start to think maybe your adviser was wrong, maybe there’s such a thing as starting too early. still, you stop in front of each piece because that’s what good students do, hoping that maybe something will stick.

and then it does.

you almost miss it, tucked away in a quiet section, almost hidden between two larger, louder pieces, a modest brass filigree frame, no bigger than a door, maybe four feet by six. not grand, not loud. just quiet. pretty unassuming. but it catches you anyway, in that strange, magnetic kind of pull that stops you mid-step.

the subject is a young man. he’s seated, turned slightly toward the painter, his gaze soft. his hair is dark, the kind of brown that turns golden when the light hits it, his skin luminous in the half-shadow, his mouth curved like he’s trying not to smile. the clothes are simple, a white shirt, collar open, a dark coat draped over his shoulders. it looks late 1800s, judging by the clothes and the furniture, but that’s not what hooks you.

it’s the way he’s painted. the light falls on him like he’s being seen for the first time, like the artist loved him so much he had to make him immortal. you can feel the affection in every inch of it— the slight tilt of his head, the soft crease between his brows, tthe way his hand rests on his knee as though the painter couldn’t bear to let that detail go unseen.

you lean in to read the plaque beside it. one word. alexandre. no artist’s name, no date, no title. just that.

you should move on. there’s an entire hallway left to see. but your feet don’t move. you just stand there, your reflection faint against the glass, the hum of the gallery’s air conditioning soft in your ears.

not to say you fall in love, but—

you sit down right there, ignoring the slight creak of the bench, the soft hum of the air conditioner, the faint echo of your own heartbeat. you take out your sketchbook. you don’t even think— your pencil moves before your brain can stop it. you start tracing his face, line after line, until you can almost feel the shape of him under your fingertips. the curve of his jaw. the tilt of his head. the mole near his ear that the artist must have adored enough to keep.

hours pass before you realize the light outside has changed, spilling through the high windows in muted gold. your music has looped twice, your pencil’s smudged your fingertips gray, and still you can’t stop. you’re not sure what exactly you’re searching for in his face— maybe the story, maybe the feeling— but whatever it is, it’s enough to make you stay there until the gallery lights flicker, warning you that it’s closing time.

you pack up reluctantly, look back once more before leaving. the man in the  painting stares back, unchanged.

you tell yourself it’s nothing, just curiosity, just character study. but when you get home and see your sketches laid out across the floor, every one of them looks just like him.

isack hadjar does not believe in luck. he never has. his father told him once over dinner that luck was just the word people used when they didn’t want to admit someone worked harder. luck wasn’t what got him into the best physics program at his university, nor was it luck that got him the full ride. luck didn’t make the universe expand or make the equations click into place in his head like they were always meant to.

merit did all that. long nights spent hunched over equations did. his scholarship, his discipline, his absolute refusal to believe in coincidence— that’s what did it.

so, obviously, he doesn’t believe in luck. or he shouldn’t.

except lately, he’s starting to think luck might believe in him.

because somehow, despite all that, he’s stuck giving tours at the campus museum for his required work hours, and if that isn’t a cosmic joke he doesn’t know what is. it looks good on paper: air-conditioning, a small allowance, no heavy lifting (though he wouldn’t mind that, even!), and it’s a campus job, which means proximity to the lab.

the thing about paper is that it’s flat, and the thing about real life is that it’s not.

he thought the job would be easy. maybe he’d hang out behind the desk with pepe, the guy who’s manning the reception counter for the summer. he thought he’d get to stand around, read a book, maybe answer the occasional question about where the bathrooms were.

what he hadn’t accounted for was that apparently, everyone decided the gallery was the perfect summer activity. tourists, parents, retired professors, and most especially art camp kids in matching t-shirts, toting around sketchbooks bigger than their torsos.

so now, every day, he’s giving tours in the echoing halls of the museum, repeating the same script over and over in that half-bored, half-fake-enthusiastic tone he’s perfected. 

“this piece— uhhh— portrays the struggle of…” he trails off, realizing he’s read the wrong paragraph from his notes again. “...light and shadow. in a very symbolic way.” he gestures vaguely toward the nearest painting. the group murmurs politely.

isack knows gets away with it because his accent distracts people, makes everything sound more authentic. the upper deities of the financial aid department assigned him this post because he’s french. that’s it. not because he knows art, or cares too much particularly about it, but because the exhibit is called new french art, and apparently that makes him the closest thing to a cultural ambassador this side of the atlantic.

he doesn’t hate it, it’s just… tedious. the same questions, the same footsteps echoing against the same parquet floors. 

by the third week of summer, he’s perfected the art of cutting corners. he shuffles people past the middle section quickly, the one with all the portraits. no one ever notices. he times his speeches by heart: ten minutes from impressionism to postmodern, eight if he walks fast enough.

he thinks of luck again sometimes, but only when he catches the bus just as the doors are closing, or when pepe sneaks him free coffee from the café. those are just… a series of events falling into each other, not luck.

he doesn’t notice you.

not the first time, or the second, or the sixth, or even the tenth. to him, you’re just another blur in the periphery, someone sitting cross-legged on the bench, sketchbook open, headphones on, the faint clatter of pencil against paper swallowed by the museum’s stillness. he’s too busy counting heads, too busy watching the clock, too busy thinking about lunch.

but if he did notice, if he ever slowed down long enough to look, he might see how your shoulders tilt slightly when you draw, how you bite the inside of your cheek when a line doesn’t come out the way you want. he might see the mess of graphite on your fingertips, the ghost of the painting you’re recreating etched across a dozen half-finished pages. 

he might have even liked the way your brow furrows in concentration, how the strands of your hair keep falling into your eyes until you push them back impatiently, smudging a streak of pencil on your cheek without realizing. he might like the smallness of that moment, the sheerintimacy of it, the quiet act of someone so consumed by something that time forgets to move forward.

but he doesn’t notice any of that.

instead, isack hadjar finishes another tour, pockets the crumpled script the manager, claire, gave him at the start of the summer, and leans against the reception counter. pepe offers him a mint. he declines. there’s a smear of charcoal on the back of his hand— from brushing past one of the art camp kids brandishing their art supplies like a sword, maybe. he wipes it away without thinking.

luck doesn’t exist, he tells himself again.

if it did, maybe he would have noticed you earlier.

the janitor’s name is marcel, though most people at the gallery just call him mar. he doesn’t mind, really— he’s been working here long enough to know that art people aren’t good with names, just shapes and color and the idea of people.

he used to work construction before his knee went out, so now he cleans floors and empties bins and sometimes fixes the lights when they flicker too long. the gallery’s been his routine for nearly eight years, and by now, he knows every inch of it— the smell of oil and varnish that never quite leaves, the way the air shifts colder when it rains, the paintings that seem to breathe when the light hits them right.

he starts noticing you mid-june. 

he’s cleaned the floors around you more times than he can count. every evening, when the sun starts dripping through the high gallery windows and the shadows stretch long across the marble, he does his usual route of sweeping, wiping down benches, emptying the bins, until he reaches your corner. that’s when he gives you the same nudge he’s been giving for weeks now, broom handle tapping gently against the baseboard near your feet.

“closing soon, miss,” he says, voice low so it doesn’t echo too much.

you always blink up at him like you’ve been pulled out of a dream, pencil still hovering in mid-air. “already?”

he chuckles, every single time. “already,” he repeats.

and every single time, you fumble to pack up your things, pencils rattling into a tin, papers rustling, the faint panic of someone who doesn’t want to leave just yet. you always glance back once, before the turn of the stairwell takes the painting out of sight. he doesn’t miss it.

sometimes, when he locks up after you’re gone, he wanders over to that same corner. not for long— just enough to look at the painting you keep sketching. alexandre. he’s not an art man, never claimed to be. he cleans up the places people make art in, that’s all. 

he tells thea, the security guard who works the second floor, once, during their late closing rounds. “that girl— the one with the sketches— she loves that painting too much.”

thea just shrugs. “artists. they all get obsessed with something.”

but mar doesn’t think it’s obsession. it’s gentler than that. it’s the same look, he thinks, that he gets when he comes home, sees his wife on the couch watching her usual reruns of jeopardy, murmuring that dinner’s in the fridge, asking if she wants him to reheat it, and he’ll always shake his head, says he’ll do it himself. it’s the same look, he realizes, when you’re in love.

by july’s end, he knows your rhythm by heart. the faint squeak of your shoes on the stairs. the sound of your bag clinking with keychains. and he starts timing his rounds around that, letting you stay a few minutes longer before he has to turn off the lights.

sometimes he thinks about asking what it is you see in that boy— what keeps you coming back. but he never does. instead, he lets you have your quiet, and he keeps your secret safe.

and every night, right before lights-out, he finds you there, still sketching under the too-bright fluorescents, shoulders curled inward, pencil racing against time. he gives you that same small nudge, careful not to startle you.

“closing soon,” he murmurs again, softer this time.

and you, as always, look up, eyes a little dazed, heart still somewhere inside the painting. “already?”

he smiles. “already.”

you smile back, a little sad, a little grateful. and then you leave, the sound of your keychains echoing down the empty hall.

your roommate has long since given up on the idea of personal space when it comes to you.

not that she minds— you’re her best friend, her artistic tornado of a human being, and you’ve bared your lives to each other that you’d never do to anyone else, but it’s close to midnight on a sunday, and you’re sprawled at the foot of her bed like you’re at your therapist’s couch. she’d been half-asleep when you barged in, laptop in hand, hair a mess.

she’s half under the covers, scrolling through her phone, when you start wailing— not dramatically, but close enough. that low, frustrated groan that means you’ve hit another creative wall.

“i can’t find anything,” you say, as if the world itself has conspired against you. “nothing. no record, no origin, no provenance, nothing.”

your roommate glances up from her screen. “you’re still talking about the painting, huh?”

you nod, hitting your head on the mattress over and over again, cursing how soft it is, “you’d think someone, anyone, would’ve written about it, but all the catalogues just skip over it. some don’t even list the artist’s name, and the ones that do can’t agree if alexandre is supposed to be the artist or the subject or maybe someone’s dead lover. like— how does that happen? how does a painting like that just— slip through the cracks?”

she hums in sympathy, which, in her language, means she’s listening but also trying not to roll her eyes. you’ve been like this for weeks now, sketching, googling, scouring the archives, even emailing the museum’s administrative office (“for research purposes,” you said, like that made it sound any less crazy).

“maybe it’s cursed,” she suggests, deadpan. “maybe if you say alexandre three times in front of a mirror, the painting appears behind you.”

your ears perk up at that, “you think so?”

her eyes widen, incredulous, “oh my god!”

jack’s head pops out from beneath the blanket, hair mussed, squinting at the light. “do you have to be here?” he mumbles, voice thick with sleep. “it’s, like, midnight.”

you jolt. “oh my god, jack, i didn’t know you were—”

“he’s always here,” she says, running her hand through jack’s hair. “i told you, we have no personal space in this household. none. you, me, and apparently my boyfriend, who’s now invested in your art crisis.”

jack rubs his eyes, still half-asleep. “what crisis?”

“she’s in love with a painting,” she says simply.

“i am not—” you sit up straight, indignant. “i am not in love with him! i just— i find him fascinating. artistically.”

jack raises an eyebrow. “uh-huh. sure.”

“she has a crush,” she supplies, grinning.

“i do not have a crush!” you exclaim, voice climbing a full octave higher than usual, which, of course, only makes them laugh harder. “it’s not a crush, it’s— it’s academic interest!”

your roommate bites back a grin. “academic interest,” she echoes. “sure. because everyone spends every free afternoon staring lovingly at their academic interests.”

“you don’t understand, it’s— it’s the composition!” you say, gesturing wildly. “the brushwork! the way the light falls on his face, it’s just— god, it’s like he’s breathing. you look at him and you just know the artist couldn’t have painted him without—”

“without wanting to kiss him?” jack mumbles into the pillow.

god, you want to throw your laptop at him. “shut. up.”

he laughs, muffled, half-awake. “i’m just saying, sounds like a crush to me.”

“it’s not—” you insist again, even though both of them are grinning now. “it’s research.”

they both look at you pointedly, like they don’t quite believe it.

eventually, you deflate— shoulders slumping, laptop pressed against your knees. “i just… want to know who he is,” you say quietly. “it feels wrong that someone could’ve loved him that much and left no trace.”

for once, she doesn’t tease. she reaches out and nudges your stomach with her foot. “then find him,” she says softly. “but maybe do it tomorrow, yeah? because right now, you’re keeping my boyfriend from sleeping.”

jack mumbles something in agreement, already sinking back under the blanket.

“you’re no help at all—” you mutter, gathering your laptop, retreating toward the door with as much dignity as you can manage.

“tell alexandre we said hi!” your rommate calls after you, and you don’t dignify that with a response.

thea works the “evening” shift at the gallery, the quiet one between four and midnight. most people would balk at it, say it sounds too creepy, or make a joke about how the paintings come alive at night like that one movie, but she likes it. she likes the stillness, the way the gallery breathes differently after dark. she likes that she can take her time on her rounds, pausing to look at the paintings without the noise of tourists or students.

she’s been here for three years now, a former criminology major who couldn’t finish school when her mom got sick, and the museum job pays steady enough. she knows the sound of every hinge, every flickering light, every whisper of the air conditioning vents. she knows which paintings crackle faintly when the humidity rises and which display lights take an extra second to turn on.

she knows the janitor, mar, who hums while he mops, and pepe, the scholar working his hours at the desk, who leaves exactly at five, no matter what.

she notices you first through the camera monitors, the grainy black-and-white footage of a girl in loose jeans and paint-stained sneakers, always carrying the same bag with a mess of keychains clinking together, breaking the monotony of the quiet halls.

when you start coming so often she knows your schedule better than her own, so much so that she realizes that her rounds where she passes by the second-floor exhibit coincides just as you’re packing up. you always nod politely when she walks by, the type of nod that means i see you, i know you’re just doing your job, thank you.

she likes that. most people don’t look at security guards. most people treat them like furniture.

she doesn’t talk to you until one evening in late july. the gallery is nearly empty, the light turning gold through the big glass windows, the kind of light that makes everything look softer, more temporary. she finds you sitting cross-legged again, pencil moving fast, and she almost doesn’t want to disturb you. but it’s close to seven-thirty, and mar is already waiting by the breaker room to turn the lights off.

“hey, kid,” she says, gently, stepping closer. “closing soon.”

you look up, startled, like she’s pulled you out of a dream. “oh— sorry! i lost track of time again.”

she smiles, shaking her head. “no worries, just letting you know before the lights shut off.”

you grin sheepishly, gathering your things. “i know. i just— i keep thinking i’ll see something new if i stare long enough.”

“and do you?” she asks.

you glance at the painting, at alexandre, “yeah,” you say quietly. “every time.”

something in the way you say it makes her chest ache a little. she’s not an artist, doesn’t pretend to understand that kind of devotion, but she recognizes sincerity when she sees it.

she wishes she’d ever felt that strongly about something that didn’t disappoint her.

as you sling your bag over your shoulder, one of your keychains— a small enamel heart— snaps loose and falls to the floor with a clink. you don’t notice, but she does. she picks it up after you’re gone, tucks it into her pocket, meaning to return it later.

the next day, she waits for you by the front desk. when you arrive, she holds out the keychain between two fingers. “you dropped this yesterday.”

your eyes widen. “oh my god, i thought i lost it. thank you!”

you take it from her gingerly, clipping it on to your bag with the rest of its siblings.  “no problem,” she says. “so, another day of sketching?”

you laugh, and it’s such a bright, unguarded sound that even mar looks up from buffing the floors to smile. “don’t encourage her,” he teases. “she’ll stay here till midnight if you let her.”

“you wouldn’t kick me out now, would you, mar?” you ask, all mock-innocent.

“depends,” he says. “you bring coffee?”

you grin, and to thea’s surprise, the next day, you do. one cup for him, one for her, both still warm, labeled in messy handwriting— for mar and for thea.

“what’s this for?” thea asks, blinking.

“for letting me haunt the place,” you say. “you guys don’t get enough appreciation.”

she stares at you for a second, then shakes her head, a small smile tugging at her lips. “you’re something else, kid.”

“can you tell my adviser that?” you jokingly reply, and then you’re gone again, disappearing up the stairs toward your corner of the world.

after that, the gallery feels different. when she and mar lock up at night, they always check that painting last. mar says it’s habit. thea thinks it’s something else. she swears the air in that corner holds a trace of your presence— a faint hum of graphite dust and headphone music and warm coffee.

“she’s a good kid,” mar says one evening, flipping off the final switch.

“yeah,” thea agrees softly, watching the lights fade across alexandre’s painted face. “she is.”

jack doohan should probably get out of here. 

jack doohan shouldn’t even be ‘here’ at all– ‘here’ being his girlfriend’s dorm suite, with his girlfriend’s roommate (hey, that’s you!) pacing in the living room outside. he knows better by now, knows that the dorm’s got a strict ‘no-boys’ policy, knows that the RA lives two doors down, knows that if he gets caught, he’ll probably be immortalized as a cautionary tale on the building’s group chat. but he can’t help it.

what’s a guy supposed to do when his girlfriend bats her lashes and says just stay over, no one will notice?

it’s fine, usually. was fine, anyway— right up until you started haunting the common area.

… not that jack had any problem with that! obviously not, he’s just a guest here, but up until a few weeks ago, you usually stayed in your own room, playing something from that one girl you liked who wore skeleton pajamas, which meant jack was free to just… come and go as he pleased. no need for the awkward, pre-walk-of-shame small talk.

halfway through debating whether to crawl out the window (which, for the record, is six stories up), he hears your voice.

“if you’re planning on sneaking out, now’s the best time. the RA’s got classes until the afternoon.”

he cracks the door open. “you know your RA’s schedule?”

you grin from your perch by the window, legs crossed, sunlight painting your face in warm shapes. “yeah. we used we to sneak a lot of guys in here back in the day.” you say it so casually that he chokes on air, blinking, until you smirk. “kidding. relax, doohan. you know how it goes— sheshe only has eyes for you, wants to marry you, raise little surfboard babies in some beach house, and—”

“okay! got it!” he cuts you off before the teasing can get worse.

his eyes then focus on the elephant in the room (big, loud address me practically floating in front of it): a rolling whiteboard covered with finished and unfinished sketches of your mystery man, pinned and taped onto every available surface, like a madman trying to connect together a murder, sans the red string.

“what’s this?”

“uh… character study?” you provide, though it’s barely believable.

“this your mystery guy, right?” jack walks closer, studies the subject closer, the slope of his nose, the mole on his neck, right below his left ear. “feels like i know him, like i’ve seen him before.”

“yeah, probably,” you say, sliding off the stool to join him. “he’s based on a painting in the french exhibit at the gallery. that’s probably where.”

“right,” he says, nodding. “yeah, that must be it.” a beat, then: “so, the RA’s gone, yeah?”

“yep,” you say. “you’re safe. go out the boring way, lover boy.”

he salutes halfheartedly, grinning as he slips out. nearly runs into the RA, who apparently had a cancelled lecture, and laughs under his breath all the way down the hall.

he doesn’t think much of it— your sketches, the painting, the strange déjà vu curling in his chest. just one of those things, he tells himself.

later that night, at a friend’s apartment, he meets his former roommate kimi’s new roommate’s (ollie's) friend’s (gabi's) friend. an intricate, unnecessary chain of introductions that lands on one name: isack.

jack stares for a second too long, trying to place him. there’s something naggingly familiar about the guy— something in the slope of his nose, the way the light catches just under his jaw.

after a few beers, he finally mentions it. “you look familiar, mate. have we met before?”

isack just shrugs, “probably. orientation week, maybe? think we were in the same cohort or something.”

“yeah,” jack says, though it doesn’t sit right. it’s close enough, though, and he lets it go.

he doesn’t think about your mystery man again— why would he, when there’s a perfectly logical explanation sitting right in front of him?

the museum manager’s name is claire delacroix, which, ironically, makes her sound like she should’ve been a curator at the louvre instead of managing a midsized university gallery whose biggest claim to fame is that one visiting monet sketch that wasn’t even real. she doesn’t mind the job, though. it’s calm and it’s not like it’s the kind of work that follows her home… most days.

she knows every exhibit rotation, every insurance contract, every shipment that comes in wrapped in bubble foam. she runs on routine and tea and the occasional thrill of catching a student trying to sneak a selfie too close to a sculpture.

what she doesn’t love, though, is being chased down in her office by another eager art major with too much passion and not enough boundaries.

you knock— not even properly, just two hurried taps before you’re already halfway inside— and she knows, immediately, that it’s you. she’s seen your emails, both of them, sent two weeks apart. polite, but insistent, curious to the point of interrogation. she’d almost admired the persistence if it hadn’t been clogging up her inbox at the height of inventory season.

“hi, ms. delacroix,” you start, breathless, clutching your sketchbook to your chest like it’d fly away if you didn’t. “sorry, i know you’re busy, but—”

“you’ve emailed me,” she says, voice sharp.

“right,” you say quickly, nodding. “twice. but i just— i thought maybe it’d be easier to talk in person. it’s about the french exhibit. specifically, the portrait. alexandre.”

claire sighs softly through her nose, gesturing toward the chair across from her desk. “sit.”

you do, all jittery energy and enthusiasm, and claire folds her hands on the table, watching as you flip open your sketchbook, showing her— god, dozens— of studies of the same man’s face. different angles, expressions, lighting. she’s seen art students obsess over paintings before, but rarely like this.

“i can’t find anything about it,” you say, almost pleading now. “nothing online, nothing in the archives, not even in the gallery’s public catalog. i know it’s a loan from some french university, but there’s got to be a record, right? provenance papers, exhibition history, something?”

“it’s part of the musée de montparnasse collection,” claire says, reaching for a folder from the drawer behind her. “they’re notoriously disorganized, i’m afraid. we only got a partial file— no name, approximate date, listed artist unknown. the only thing we have is the inscription.”

“alexandre,” you murmur.

she nods. “yes. but that could refer to anyone— the subject, the painter, even the patron. nineteenth-century records are often vague. sometimes intentionally.”

you frown, the frustration written all over your face. “there must be something,” you insist quietly. “this piece… it feels like it mattered to someone. i just— i want to know why.”

unfortunately for her, claire feels a small pang of sympathy. she used to be like you, earnest, relentless, unwilling to accept that not every story could be recovered. “if it helps, i can ask around,” she offers. “though most of our french works are handled by the curatorial assistants. have you spoken to any of the staff?”

“i’ve talked to the janitor,” you admit, sheepish. “and the security guard.”

claire smiles despite herself. “resourceful. but maybe try one of the docents? our student guide— oh, what’s his name again— ah, isack. yes. he’s been assigned to the exhibit all summer. maybe he’s overheard something useful.”

you perk up immediately. “is he here now?”

she glances at her watch. “he should be. let me check.” she picks up the desk phone, pressing a button for reception. “pepe? can you check if isack hadjar’s free? i have a student who’d like to ask him about the exhibit.”

a pause. muffled static.

“ah,” says pepe finally, “he’s with a group right now. just started a tour. sorry, mate— ma’am. i meant ma’am. sorry.”

claire hums. “all right, thank you.” she hangs up, turns to you with an apologetic smile. “looks like you just missed him. he’ll be done in an hour or so if you want to wait.”

you hesitate, glancing at your watch, at the mess of notes in your lap. “i— i have a consultation with my adviser soon.”

she nods, watching as you leave, the sound of your keychains fading down the hall, the faint click of the gallery door behind you.

a few minutes later, she hears laughter through the window overlooking the second floor, the echo of a dozen children and, faintly, isack’s voice, patient and slightly exasperated as he tries to wrangle them into a line.

claire glances down at the folder still open on her desk. the photocopy of the painting’s record stares back at her: alexandre, c. 1887.

by the time isack finishes his tour and the museum quiets again, you’re long gone.

francis has always thought of himself as a patient man. he has to be— it comes with the job. teaching art history to undergrads and half-dreaming grad students means you get used to questions that lead nowhere, theories that collapse under their own sentimentality, and passion that burns way too bright, way too fast. 

still, when you show up at his office door one afternoon, breathless and clutching a sketchbook that looks like it’s been through a war, he knows this isn’t going to be one of those simple ten-minute consultations.

“professor roberts?” you start, knocking lightly even though the door’s open. “do you have a moment?”

he looks up from the stack of essays on his desk— yet another batch of overconfident takes on impressionism— and smiles. “well, you did ask me to pencil you in for this afternoon.”

you step in, uncertain but determined, like someone who’s already rehearsed this conversation twice in your head. “it’s about my dissertation. or, like— the idea for it. i think i’ve found my subject, but…”

francis gestures to the chair across from him. “but you’re not sure if you’re insane for choosing it?”

you blink, surprised, then laugh. “yeah. that.”

he leans back, folding his arms. “try me.”

so you tell him, about the summer exhibit, about alexandre, about how you’ve been going back almost every day, sketching him, researching him, emailing the manager and getting nowhere. you tell him about the ambiguity of the inscription, the missing records, the lack of documentation. and then, in the smallest, softest voice, you say, “but there’s something about him, professor. it’s like… whoever painted him didn’t just want to capture what he looked like. they wanted to remember what he felt like.”

francis listens quietly. he doesn’t interrupt. he lets you talk until your voice runs out of steam, until all the frantic energy that’s been building inside you for days dissolves into the still air of his office. “you think you’re connecting with the subject,” he says slowly, “but maybe you’re really connecting with the artist.”

you look at him, brow furrowed, thoughtful. “what do you mean?”

“it’s not uncommon,” he continues, “to see yourself in the creator. especially when the work is intimate. you start asking the same questions they must’ve asked. what did they see? why did they stay? why did they leave?” he pauses, just briefly, “sometimes it’s not the art we fall in love with, it’s the feeling that someone once felt the same thing we do. that they couldn’t bear to forget.”

“so you think i’m projecting,” you say after a while, voice slightly defensive.

he smiles, not unkindly. “i think you’re an artist. it’s what we do.”

you exhale, leaning back in your chair, staring at the sketchbook again. “sometimes i feel like i’m in the same position as whoever painted him. like i know what they felt. like i’m supposed to finish what they started.”

that makes him look at you a little closer. “finish?”

“not literally,” you say quickly, cheeks warm. “just— i don’t know. like the painting isn’t done. or maybe i’m not done with it.” you close the sketchbook carefully, almost reverently. “it’s stupid.”

“it’s not stupid,” francis says softly. “it’s the beginning of something. maybe not what you expected, but it’s something.”

“something… like my dissertation?”

the clock on his wall ticks softly. somewhere in the distance, the faint hum of students filters in through the open window, the city alive beyond the safety of academia. francis remembers being your age, staying up in his studio until dawn, chasing a feeling he couldn’t name, painting and repainting the same face until he could admit that he was driving himself mad.

“art isn’t supposed to make sense,” he says finally. “not when you’re in the middle of it. you don’t need to explain the connection. just follow it.”

you nod, slowly, like you’re storing his words away for later. when you stand, he notices how your fingers linger on the edge of your sketchbook. “thank you,” you say quietly. “for not thinking i’m insane.”

he laughs, a low, warm sound. “if i thought every student who fell in love with a painting was insane, i’d have quit years ago.”

“it feels like i know him,” you admit. “like he’s waiting for me to figure something out.”

francis smiles faintly, the kind that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “then maybe that’s where you start.”

“my dissertation?”

“your story,” he corrects. “whatever it is you’re trying to say. don’t force it yet. just… follow it.” he pauses, glancing at his watch. “though if you want a jumpstart, give me a working title by next week. you’ll be ahead of anyone in your year. no pressure.”

you groan softly, leaning back in your chair. “no pressure, he says.”

“one week.” he says, tapping your sketchbook. “figure alexandre out.”

the name on the bartender’s tag reads milo, though most people forget that halfway through their third drink. he’s been tending bar long enough to know that most faces blur together by the end of the night— the lovers, the loners, the students half-broke and overconfident on cheap beer. the place itself isn’t fancy, just the regular-degular off-campus bar that smells too strongly of the lemon cleaner management tells him to use.

tonight’s quiet, even for the summer semester, the air humming with heat and the ceiling fan clicking every few seconds like a metronome for the empty room. the booths are mostly empty except for two graduate students arguing about methodology, and milo’s polishing glasses he’s already polished twice before, just to give himself something to do.

you look like someone who didn’t mean to end up here, like you took a wrong turn and decided to stay anyway. there’s paint under your nails and a sketchbook peeking out of your bag, and you order a gin and tonic like it’s something you do all the time even though you hesitate before saying it.

“slow night,” he says, filling your glass, trying to be friendly.

you smile faintly. “yeah. i needed a change of scenery.”

he nods, slides the drink across the counter. “you from the uni?”

“yeah,” you say, distracted, flipping through your sketchbook.

you don’t notice when the door swings open behind you, when another student walks in— curls flattened from the drizzle outside, ID tag still tucked haphazardly into his pocket, a quick stride that makes him look like he’s always late to something.

he’s been here before, the boy, though not often, milo’s remembered him once or twice, thinks his name starts with an i— isaac, was it? either way, he takes a seat at the far end of the bar, a few stools down from you.

he doesn’t notice you either— not because you’re forgettable, but because the universe seems committed to keeping the both of you orbiting without collision.

“beer?” milo asks him.

“hit me with the cheapest you’ve got.”

milo pours, sets the bottle down, and turns back to the sink. the bar hums quietly, the low murmur of music filling the space between strangers. for a moment, you both exist in the same frame— you sketching, him nursing a beer, both of you looking down instead of sideways.

at one point, milo swears your reflections almost overlap in the mirror behind the bar, just for a second, like two ghosts moving through the same place at slightly different times. he half-expects one of you to turn, to catch the other’s eye, to say something. but you don’t. you never do.

when you turn to glance toward the door, he’s bent over his drink. when he finally looks around the room, you’re sketching again, pen moving fast.

it’s almost cinematic, if milo were the type to notice that kind of thing. but he’s not. he just keeps wiping glasses and refilling drinks, letting the moments pass the way they always do.

the door opens again, the faint jingle echoing through the empty-ish room. the boy looks up, leaves the bar to join his friends in a booth at the back.

a minute later, you finish your drink, leave a few bills and a polite smile, and turn to leave.

milo watches as you pass in front of the boy’s booth, a split second before the boy looks up from his phone, his gaze brushing the space where you’d been sitting moments ago. his friends are laughing, one of them gesturing toward the bar, and he glances that way idly— only to find your empty stool, the ring of condensation still on the counter.

milo notices a piece of paper left behind on the counter, half tucked under your empty glass. he picks it up, meaning to throw it away, but pauses. it’s a sketch— graphite and smudged fingerprints, a face he faintly recognizes. a man with dark curls, a soft mouth, eyes caught in that impossible space between thought and silence.

milo whistles under his breath. “hell of a doodle.”

he sets it aside, intending to pin it to the corkboard behind the bar, the one cluttered with fake IDs and love notes and 1x1 photos of students who have made the bar their home. but then something stops him.

because an hour later, when the boy returns to the counter to pay his tab, milo looks up— and for a second, his brain stutters.

the resemblance is uncanny.

the jawline, the curve of the mouth, the exact slope of the nose. it’s him. the guy in the drawing.

“everything all right?” the boy  asks, noticing the stare.

milo blinks, laughs it off, handing him the receipt. “yeah. just… thought you looked familiar, is all.”

isack nods, uninterested, pockets the change, and leaves.

milo watches the door swing shut, the rain swallowing him whole.

when he looks back down at the sketch, he swears the drawn eyes are watching him.

he pins it to the corkboard anyway. just another lost thing.

and the next day, when you return to the bar, you glance at the wall and smile softly, relief flooding your face when you see it hanging there.

“thought i lost that,” you tell him, and he shrugs, moving to unpin it from the board before you wave it off, “nah, i’ve got, like, a million more like it— ‘sides, it’s nice. seeing my work on display.”

and milo, for reasons he can’t explain, feels like he’s just witnessed something that doesn’t belong to this world— like luck, if he believed in that sort of thing, had brushed through the bar for a moment, then vanished.

isack doesn’t usually come back to the bar twice in the same week— let alone two weeks in a row— but it’s thursday again, and pepe had texted him something like “beer? i need to stop thinking about my cat’s vet bill before i cry”, and well, there are worse reasons to go out.

so he comes. it’s raining again, that soft summer rain that sticks to the air, and the bar smells like wet denim and the strong lemon cleaner. milo’s behind the counter, wiping down glasses, looking about as half-asleep as isack feels.

isack takes a stool while pepe orders two beers, already chatting up someone three seats down. he’s halfway tuned out when his eyes drift to the corkboard, to the messy collage of old receipts, photos, doodles, and the hundreds of paper scraps that make the place feel alive. but then he pauses.

there, near the center, pinned with a pushpin and curling slightly at the corners, is a sketch. graphite on cream paper, smudged and deliberate. it’s a face. it’s his face.

he stares at it for a long moment, blinking, certain he’s imagining it. but the resemblance is undeniable. the jawline, the hair— slightly tousled, falling over his forehead just so. the small mole under his left ear. even the faint tension in the eyes.

“what the hell,” he mutters under his breath.

pepe leans over, already laughing. “what?”

he points. “why is there a picture of me on that wall?”

pepe squints, following his gaze. “shit, that really does look like you.”

the bartender — joel, his name tag reads, though isack swears last week it was milo— overhears them and glances over, raising an eyebrow. “what looks like him?”

“that.” pepe gestures toward the corkboard. “you hanging up portraits of customers now?”

milo laughs, walking over to take a closer look. “oh— that? yeah. someone left it here last week.”

isack frowns, incredulous. “someone left it?”

“yeah,” milo says, pulling the paper free and smoothing it out on the counter. “she was sitting where you are now, spent the whole night sketching in this little book. left this behind when she left. i kept it ‘cause it looked… well, i don’t know. familiar, i guess.”

“you’re telling me someone came in and drew me without me even being here?”

“looks that way.”

pepe leans over, squinting. “mon dieu,” he says, in mock awe, imitating isack’s accent. “it does look like you. what, are you posing for mysterious artists now?”

“i’m not,” isack says flatly, still staring at the page.

milo shrugs, half-smile still on his face. “then you’ve got a doppelgänger somewhere who’s very popular with art students.”

isack laughs under his breath, shaking his head, but the sound doesn’t quite reach his eyes. because the longer he looks, the more unsettling it feels. it’s not a caricature, not some random doodle. it’s intimate, almost, like the artist wasn’t drawing a face but him.

“you said she left it?” he asks.

“yeah,” milo— no, joel— no, joel-milo?— says. “came back the next day to get it, though. seemed pretty relieved to see it up there.”

“what did she look like?”

the bartender pauses, trying to remember. “uh, kinda quiet. art kid, you know the type. she had this bag covered in keychains— could hear her coming before i saw her.”

pepe snorts. “so, half the arts department.”

isack doesn’t reply. he just keeps staring at the sketch. there’s something about it that won’t let him go— not just the resemblance, but the way it feels. whoever drew it, they’d spent time on it. cared. maybe too much.

“you want it?” joel-milo asks, seeing his hesitation. “i can make a copy if you want the original. it’s yours, technically.”

isack shakes his head. “no, keep it. she came back for it, right?”

“yeah, but she left again pretty quick. didn’t even finish her drink. said it was nice to see her work up somewhere that wasn’t the studio.”

“then it’s hers,” isack says simply, finishing what’s left of his beer.

he tries to brush it off. he really does. but later, when he’s walking home through the rain, the image won’t leave his head. the eyes, the lines, the way it looked unfinished and yet complete all at once.

and the strangest thing—

when he gets home, he catches his reflection in the hallway mirror, the dim light flickering above him, and for a moment,  just a second, he sees the same expression on his own face.

that quiet, half-familiar softness. like he’s been painted before and just forgot to notice.

how can someone paint someone with such love?

you think about it constantly now, in the bus, in line for coffee, in the empty corners of the library when you should be drafting a proposal outline. it sits behind your eyes, the thought of it, like it’s been tattooed into your eyelids. that painting, him, the way he looked, not just at you, but through you—

no, not through you. through time. through whoever was standing there the moment the brush touched canvas.

you’ve spent weeks trying to understand it. the intimacy of it, the unbearable softness, how someone could take oil and pigment and turn it into devotion.

because it wasn’t just skill. skill could capture resemblance. this… what ever this is— it’s something else. whoever painted alexandre must have loved him so deeply it spilled from their fingers. it’s in the tilt of his mouth, that half-smile that doesn’t know whether to stay or go. in the way the light catches his skin, in the curve of his shoulder, the space left unfinished near his wrist, as if the artist couldn’t bear to paint the rest.

you close your eyes and try to imagine it.

the studio, maybe. a small one, late 1800s, the air thick with turpentine and cigarette smoke. afternoon light slanting in through lace curtains. the sound of someone humming quietly under their breath. the artist, you, maybe, in some strange daydream of reincarnation, standing before an easel, brush trembling, trying to steady your hand.

and him— alexandre, or maybe you’re alexandre, or maybe it’s your benefactor— sitting a few feet away, draped in soft linen, curls falling into his eyes. he’s patient, but not still. his mouth moves as he speaks to you, though you can’t quite hear what he’s saying. he’s laughing, sometimes, when you mess up, when the paint runs, when you curse softly in the old language of the heart. and the entire room smells of him— of sunlight and tobacco and the faintest trace of cologne that will someday stop existing.

you paint him the way you’d memorize someone’s voice. line by line, stroke by stroke, desperate to keep him real just a little longer. the light keeps changing and so does he. at some point, he stops talking, and you both fall into silence. there’s nothing left but the rhythm of your breaths falling into place, of paint against canvas. and you think, if i stop now, he’ll disappear. if i finish, he’ll leave.

so you keep painting. keep loving him through color and shadow and the shape of his hands.

and when you open your eyes again, you’re back in your room, sitting on the floor, sketchbook open across your knees. your pencil hovers midair. you’ve drawn him again, without meaning to. the same face, the same jawline, the same eyes that refuse to look anywhere but at you.

you press your thumb against the paper, smudge the graphite where his cheek should be, and feel an ache rise in your chest.

how can someone paint someone with such love?

the answer, you think, is that maybe they couldn’t help it.

and maybe you can’t either.

ten.

you wake late. sunlight slipping through the blinds, half-burning, half-gentle. the morning feels like it’s already running ahead of you, like time forgot to wait.

today’s the day you promised your adviser your title, a working thread for the dissertation that’s been bleeding through your thoughts for weeks, a jumpstart ahead of those in your year. your sketchbook is a mess— half drawings, half frantic notes. alexandre, intimacy, permanence, memory, devotion. it all loops, over and over, until the words stop sounding like words.

you throw on clothes without thinking and sling your bag over your shoulder. the keychains jangle like your nerves. you don’t have time for breakfast. you only have time to get to the museum. you don’t even know why— you just do. maybe to see him again. the painting, you mean. not him. not anyone else.

nine.

isack’s morning starts slow. slower than usual, maybe because it’s his last day at the gallery. the scholarship hours are up, and he’s counting the minutes until he can hand back his name tag and stop pretending to know the answer to the difference between monet and manet. pepe teases him about being sentimental. he’s not. or he tells himself he’s not.

the air feels strange, though. like something’s about to shift.

“one last tour, eh?” pepe says, tapping his clipboard.

“one last,” isack repeats, not quite smiling.

eight.

you take the long way through campus. the pavement still slick from last night’s rain.

you could’ve gone straight to francis’ office, handed him your paper, said something like, “my working title is about love and loss in portraiture.” but that feels dishonest now, incomplete. because what you’ve been doing isn’t just research anymore, it’s searching. for something you can’t name.

the museum steps are practically like muscle memory to you, you could walk them blindfolded.

you take the stairs two at a time.

seven.

isack finishes his last tour before lunch. a group of teenagers, bored and loud, phones out, barely listening. he doesn’t blame them. he mumbles through the last description and lets them scatter. the echo of their sneakers fades into silence. he breathes.

he thinks about the sketch from the bar again. the one milo said a girl left behind. he hadn’t meant to think about it, but it keeps flashing back— those smudged lines, the eyes that looked like his but weren’t his. sometimes he catches himself thinking about the girl too, even though he doesn’t know her. maybe because she looked at his face without ever seeing him.

six.

you enter the gallery, breathless. the lobby is almost empty— the kind of emptiness that hums. the receptionist, pepe, greets you absently. you smile, distracted, muttering a thanks, already climbing the stairs. your bag bumps against your hip, your keychains clinking, a small echo of your hurry.

you think about francis’ words. no pressure. you think about alexandre, about the artist who painted him, about the love that filled every inch of color until it couldn’t hold anymore. you think maybe that’s your title. maybe that’s what this whole thing has been about.

you just need to see him one more time.

five.

isack’s helping mar stack chairs in the reception area, trying to be useful before he signs off. mar tells him something about how he’ll miss having someone to complain to about the mop handles. he smiles, says, “you’ll find another pessimist,” and mar laughs, low and warm.

then the radio crackles. “hadjar,” pepe’s voice, “one last favor— someone’s asking about the french exhibit, can you check the lights on the second floor?”

he sighs, rolls his eyes, but goes anyway.

four.

you round the corner toward the exhibit, the familiar chill of the air conditioning wrapping around you. it’s quiet, but not silent. somewhere, a floorboard creaks. you adjust the strap of your bag, heart picking up for no good reason.

the light in the U-shaped room glows soft, golden, dust floating like slow snow. you head for the far corner. you could walk this path in your sleep.

three.

isack takes the stairs two at a time.

the light hums overhead. he runs a hand through his hair, the cheap fabric of his polo sticking to his back. he’s not really thinking, just moving, wanting to get this last task over with so he can finally clock out.

two.

you turn the corner.

he turns the corner.

it’s that simple.

your bag swings wide, your foot slips, and you collide chest-first into him. it’s clumsy, the impact that knocking the breath out of both of you. your sketchbook spills from your hand, pages fanning open on the floor like wings.

you blink, startled, stepping back. he bends down automatically, picking it up before you can.

and then—

one.

“shit— sorry—” you start, dropping to your knees to gather your things.

“no, i should’ve— i didn’t see—”

the voices overlap. you look up at the same time he crouches to help, and the world seems to tilt just slightly out of focus.

for a second, neither of you move.

his hand pauses over your sketchbook. your fingers brush his when you both reach for the same page— that page, of course, the one with alexandre’s face.

and then you see him, really see him.

the shape of his mouth, the dark curls that never quite fall right, the mole beneath his left ear.

the air goes thin.

his eyes flicker down to the sketches in his hand before he’s looking at you, too, brow furrowed, confusion and something like recognition flickering across his face.

“that—” you start, your voice catching.

he blinks, “is this supposed to be—”

“it’s you.” you whisper.

he laughs, a breathless, incredulous sound. “it’s me.”

[some time in the future, or maybe later that evening. time has gone soft around the edges, either way.]

the room is quiet except for the hum of the city outside, the faraway rhythm of cars on wet pavement. the moonlight cuts through the curtains in strips, painting the bed in cool silver.

isack is lying on his stomach, one arm slung over the pillow, hair messy and skin still warm from sleep. his breath rises and falls in slow, even waves. you’re sitting up beside him, knees drawn to your chest, sketchbook balanced against your thighs. the pencil moves softly, its sound barely audible over the quiet.

he shifts, mumbling something against the pillow. his voice comes out rough and drowsy. “what’re you doing?”

“nothing,” you whisper, though your pencil betrays you, still scratching quietly across the page.

he groans softly, stretching, turning his head to look at you with one half-lidded eye. “you should sleep.”

“in a bit,” you murmur. “just trying to get this right.”

he smiles lazily, then goes, “you’ve been sketching me for hours.”

you glance down at him, pencil hovering above the page. “not hours.”

“feels like hours,” he says, voice half-drifting into a yawn. “go to bed, mon ange. you can draw me tomorrow.”

“i just want to finish the light,” you protest softly.

he hums, eyes fluttering closed again. “you’ve got the rest of forever for the light.”

you freeze at that. the rest of forever.

you look at him again, the curve of his spine, the dip between his shoulders, the quiet weight of his presence beside you. you press your pencil to the paper and keep going, slower now, tenderly, tracing him like he’s the last thing you’ll ever want to remember.

eventually, your hand stills. you set the sketchbook aside and lie down next to him, tucking yourself into the warmth of his skin, his heartbeat steady against your ear. he shifts slightly, instinctively, arm sliding around your waist.

“forever’s a long time,” you whisper, barely audible.

he smiles without opening his eyes. “good thing we’ve got it, then.”

somewhere in the dark, your pencil lies still, and the moment⸻ this ordinary, infinite moment, paints itself.

p.s.:  almost  a  year  ago  i  lowkey  also  found  myself  fascinated  by  my  own  version  of  alexandre,  which  i  immediately  reported  to  kae,  in  the  screenshot  below.  obviously  mine  was  more  jokey-jokey,  but  i  joke  a  lot  about  ‘visiting  my  husband’  every  time  i  go  to  the  museum  (which  is  now  a  lot  more  frequently  since  i  have  book  club  there!)