#devotionshipping

*

Her nerves had returned, sharper than before. Lying down felt impossible. She sat at the edge of her bed, pulse quick in her neck. The nervousness wasn’t just about tomorrow morning. It was about now: the dreams.

They usually came when she was worn thin—before exams and auditions, after fights with her mother, once the night before a qualifying Domino Dogs match. They had been happening since they all returned from Duelist Kingdom. They always took place in the sky-high cupola of Pegasus’ castle, where she’d happened upon his diary.

Yugi and Tristan and Joey were in the dreams. Sleep had a way of turning their closeness into something… strange. Something she couldn’t explain. 

She’d been mortified at first, waking up warm to a delicious cramp that squeezed everything from her navel to the wet spot between her legs. She had wondered if it was kind of teenage weirdness: the body processing attention, hormones, stress. Or maybe it was a consequence of the company she kept, of being the lone girl in a gaggle of boys. It had definitely led her classmates to whisper indecent things about her, sometimes. Perhaps they all could see the way Yugi and Tristan and Joey had each taken to her. The staring: mostly clumsy, but intense too, often enough. Téa had most certainly noticed—they each had their own way of doing it, but they did it each the same. 

She was willing to wager that Yugi was in love with her. There was nothing in his looking that wasn’t devotion. He did small, almost old-fashioned things that no one else their age bothered with. He brought her coffee on mornings he knew she’d had early practice. He held doors open and acted surprised when she teased him about it. Once, when she’d fallen asleep in the library after rehearsal, he had sat at the end of the table and waited for her to wake up, pretending to study. When she opened her eyes, he just smiled and asked if she felt better.

Tristan, always trying to seem more mature than he was, hid his attention behind a kind of protective older-brother act. He’d offer to walk her home when she stayed late at the studio or carried her dance bag without being asked, pretending it was no trouble. When a group of older boys once made a joke about the way she stretched in the school courtyard, Tristan had stepped between them and stared until they stopped laughing. He’d never mentioned it afterward, but she’d seen the set of his jaw when she thanked him.

Joey’s was different. It was flighty: quick to catch, quick to hide. He had realized one day that being his friend didn’t make her any less beautiful than the girls he liked to flirt with, and after that, his glances had changed. He tried to keep them discreet, especially around Yugi, but she noticed the way his eyes drifted when she adjusted her skirt or how his voice hitched when he saw her in the skin-tight spandex of her leotard.

She tried not to think of them in that way. They were her friends, her family almost. In daylight, reason and routine banished it easily enough. By the time she met them at school, it was only embarrassment that remained, a blush at something her mind had invented and her conscience scolded away. But sometimes, before morning’s logic returned, there lingered a strange, guilty ache she couldn’t name—a half-memory of their hands on her. She had wondered, once or twice, what it would be like to let them do as they pleased, to see the desire these nights insisted upon her. 

Sleep was an oyster for desire’s wounding grain, the small persistence the pearl of her dreams could form around. 

When she finally closed her eyes, the first thing she saw was the coastline, then the shadow of the castle rising out of the water. She was back in Pegasus’s estate with its salt-heavy air. The spiral staircase turned under her feet as she climbed the turret to the keep.

The chamber door was open. Inside, the walls were stone, but a carpet ran over them like a second skin, woven with gold thread. Tapestries of angels and harps and strange beasts covered the roughness underneath. An open bottle of wine sat on a low table beside a palette blotched with colour. Several easels stood against the wall, canvases half-finished, all of them variations of the same face. Cecelia.

Her most resplendent portrait hung above an oak desk in an elaborate gilt frame. Complete and glorious. Rubenesque, luminous. Pegasus had painted her with heavy, assured strokes. Her hair was pale, curling at the ends, and her eyes followed whatever moved in the room. Her mouth was soft and full. The light on her skin was almost wet. Her shoulders bare beneath a veil that looked like it could slip away at any moment. She was beautiful in a way that seemed to know it would be loved forever.

Téa felt the pull of that gaze. The portrait appeared to breathe. Beneath it, on the oak desk, a diary lay open, its pages filled with dense handwriting in dark ink. The fountain pen still rested in its holder beside a small glass of red wine gone to syrup.

She crossed the room. There was a sitting chair near the window. The sea was visible through the window, dark and endless, and the wind carried the sound of distant waves into the chamber. A sketchbook was open on the seat, a rough pencil outline of Cecelia’s face taking shape before morphing into something else entirely—golden eyes clustered together and spilling across the page, seven in all. 

Téa moved closer to the diary. The elegant handwriting slanted unhurried across the page. The ink had browned with time but the words were clear. The candle on the desk flickered, and it threw a shadow that stretched over Cecelia’s painted face and across the stone wall. The room was quiet except for her breathing and the soft scrape of pages as she reached out to read.

My dearest Cecelia,

Tonight I am thinking of you and our honeymoon in the Eastern Cape. Do you remember the day we rode out from the lodge before dawn? The safari was drowned in golden mist. We saw the rhinos standing statue-still in the distance, and the herds of buffalo moving in slow waves across the ground. You wore that white scarf, and the wind tried to take it from you all day. I thought a few times about it flying away and what it would look like to paint it, to capture that moment it carried over the veld like a surrendering flag. But nothing of this world takes from you—not even the wind, and you held it tighter to you. No matter: I am not as weak willed as the breeze and I know what is needed to take your clothes from you and I do not need a painting to envision you without them. 

We stopped by the river where the elephants came to drink. Their skin looked carved from stone until they moved. The guide poured us wine from the tasting that morning, the Merlot you said reminded you of summer peaches. We drank it out of tin cups while the sun went down. I could taste the earth in it. You leaned against me and said we should never go home. I thought, then, that we wouldn’t. I thought the world would always stay that size: you and me, and the animals watching from the water’s edge. Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.

For our next adventure, I want to take you to the Naramata Bench, in British Columbia. The soil there is full of glacial silt and fractured rock, perfect for vines that grow close to the water. The wines have a mineral sharpness I think you’d love. The orchards in Peachland are nearby, and from the beach you can see the lake stretch out for miles. I imagine you there in summer, bare feet in the sand, a basket of fruit beside you. 

I will never stop chasing the world for places that look like you belong to them.

The words trailed off in a small flourish. The candle hissed and a draft lifted the corner of one sheet. Téa stared at the page. 

From somewhere behind her came a sound: staccato piano, same as before Joey’s payphone line went dead. Its loud discord rang out only once. She startled so hard that she turned to find the noise only to see, her heart jumping high in her chest— 

Joey standing near the door, grinning. The light from the candle touched one side of his face, leaving the other in shadow. He looked the way he always did when he thought he’d caught her off guard: shoulders loose, eyes bright. But there was something else behind his smile… a leering. She felt the tension that had been twisting through her stomach all night melt down her navel into something warmer. Somewhere warmer. 

“You scared me,” she said, though her voice didn’t sound scared.

“Didn’t mean to,” he said. He stepped farther into the room, looking around. His eyes lingered on the walls, the paintings, the half-finished canvases. “Weird place. You sure you’re supposed to be in here?”

“Beats me,” she said.

He walked toward one of the easels and rested his hand on the edge of the frame. It was a fighter’s hand, solid and roughened in small places where the skin had never quite healed smooth. A few faint freckles marked the back of it, and one knuckle looked slightly crooked from having broken and set wrong. His nails were short and uneven, bitten down. She watched it for a moment, tracing its movement in her mind, the way it fit so easily against whatever it touched.

Her gaze drifted from his hand to the painting it rested on. It was a nude study of Cecelia, the brushwork in Pegasus's trademark heavy strokes, her body curved in warm light. But her face was missing, the top half of the canvas still bare. The absence made the image worse somehow, like she had been erased from her own beauty.  

Joey caught her looking. He smiled, a flash of teeth in the candlelight. “She’s got a nice rack on her, huh? Something to really get a guy going.”

“You’re a loser fucking horndog, Joey.”

He chuckled. “Like you’re one to talk.” His voice changed a little for the quieter. “We all know what you like getting up to up here.”

She felt her face warm. “That’s not—” She stopped. The protest sounded small, even to her.

“You don’t gotta pretend with me. I think it’s fucking hot.” 

The silence between them stretched, held by the crackle of the candle and the sound of the sea against the cliffs outside.

Joey stepped closer to the desk. 

“It’s a dream,” Téa said.

He smiled again. “Guess that means you can wake up anytime you want, then.”