she herself is a haunted house.

“Why did you stop me after class, that first day?” you ask in the darkness of his car one night, on the way back to his place after attending a symphony orchestra—in another city, to avoid the Big Brothers of your university. But what you really mean is, Tell me how I’m special, superior, again, like the needy, greedy thing you are.

He’s quiet for a few seconds, staring ahead. “You were so still in class, so quiet, but you had this intensity about you. You’d tilt your head to the side when you were thinking or listening to something—you still do. It reminded me of a bird. You looked so beautiful, so curious, when you did that.”

professor baelor x reader, age gap, modern au.

word count: 7.6k

Read it on ao3.

Pinterest board.

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter,

“And because it is my heart.”

—Stephen Crane, “In the Desert”

And I know there is something all wrong about me—

believe me. Sometimes I shock myself.

—Sophocles, Electra

He’s the same age as your father. The thought, really, comes out of nowhere because you haven’t thought about your father in a long time. There’s nothing of this man—neither looks nor personality—that would lend itself to any comparison. In fact, the mere thought of the two men standing next to each other is ridiculous. Your father, with his thinning hair and southern accent and ninth grade education.

And Baelor—

Baelor Targaryen. Even the name has an air of superiority, shows you exactly who he is before he opens his mouth and the measured RP accent betrays him further: the last vestiges of aristocracy remaining in the world, old blood, born into privilege: the grandson of a prime minister; the son of an ambassador. The ex-husband of a baroness.

And forty-nine. A few months older than the old man, actually. The thought brings a strange kind of secret glee, like discovering a chess move that would tip the board in your favor. Except you’re playing yourself and you haven’t seen your father in years.

You hadn’t given it much thought the first time you’d looked him up, seen the enlarged numbers on your computer screen on a quiet Friday night in your tiny bedroom, a bottle of wine reduced to its last dregs, his name in your search bar. You’d spent the rest of the night absorbing every pixel of him that existed on the internet – your university’s Facebook posts, debates and lectures uploaded to YouTube, essays, op-eds. Intelligence Squared. Ninety-second Street Y. Politics, art, literature, philosophy, history. He’s a human encyclopedia.

For some reason, it's all you’re thinking about now, months later, in his bedroom with the lights of the city illuminating your glistening bodies as he holds you down by the neck until only your bottom is in the air and fucks you so brutally it slackens your jaw, the pillow your cheek is shoved into damp with saliva.

You try to breathe, want to say, Please, please, please. Beg for something he’s already giving you, but the words die in your throat and are resurrected as moans. The sheets are soaked, the sounds all obscene.

He’s a talker in bed, too. His fingers slide from your neck to smooth away the hair sticking to your cheek. He envelops you, nuzzling into your neck, his beard scratching the soft skin, and you fall apart just as he says, There you go, there’s my good girl. You did so well. Is that what you needed?

He stands at the head of the class like a benevolent dictator. Tall and lordly, his voice remains soft even when he raises it, full of authority. He wears a turtleneck to hide the bite marks you’ve left on his neck.

Joining his class had been a fluke. You were too young for the name Targaryen to mean much of anything, but all the other courses and seminars listed had sounded so dreadfully dull. You’d submitted your sketchbook instead of the required essay—even though it was past the deadline, even though he did not teach art, not exclusively—its pages smelling faintly of turpentine.

You sat there, on that first day of class, one of the chosen few, feeling like the biggest fraud, like you’d entered some exclusive, private club with a fake ID. He pulled you aside afterwards, as the room quickly emptied of students. Your sketchbook lay open on his desk.

“Your use of light and shadow is remarkable. You’re familiar with Caravaggio?” You nodded. “I first saw his paintings in Rome. They have an immediacy that’s difficult to articulate.” He paused, looking down at one painting whose creation you don’t remember because you’d been too blacked-out drunk at the time, shaking his head slightly. “Your style is different, but it carries that same… dream-like quality.”

He reached out, running his thumb slowly over each brushstroke, almost reverently. It made you feel strangely self-conscious. He looked up at you then, and that was when you first noticed that his eyes were two different colors. Blue and brown, light and dark, himself a kind of living chiaroscuro.

“It doesn’t work as well if you reveal everything,” was your quiet reply, still struck by his eyes.

“Exactly right. Often it’s what’s kept in the shadows that is far more compelling.”

“Like pornography.”

He smiled faintly, leaning back in his chair. He twisted his ring round and round his elongated finger. “I suppose.”

“I can’t say I’ve ever had a student submit a painting in place of an essay before,” he continued, somewhat wryly. He closed the sketchbook, offered it back to you. “Don’t lose this.” A pause. “Don’t give it to any other professors, either.”

You went home that day and sacrificed an entire weekend – and the lives of a small forest – trying to get the exact colors of those mismatched eyes right, until blue and brown covered every surface of that miserable, cramped room. Each time you blinked, the world came back tinted in those two shades. You only made it through classes that Monday by drinking half your body weight in coffee. And there was the Xanax, of course.

Here you are now, sprawled across his fancy sofa in your pajamas and his socks, and it’s 1 A.M. and the only sounds are the scratch of pen and pencil on paper, the dull noise of the city hundreds of feet below. He sits behind his desk across from you, head bent low, soft lamplight reflected in his reading glasses. He’s grading papers. You’re supposed to be working on an assignment.

Draw a still life… Focus on composition, balance, and negative space… Use only…

Well. Baelor’s still enough.

You adjust the line of his wrist, layering graphite in slow, deliberate strokes. Your eyes follow the veins on the back of his hand, the curve of his fingers, the dull glint of his ring. Hands are important, difficult. Hands are capable of so much. You want to slice that skin open, cut into the muscles and tendons and nerves and watch the blood flow out—strip the flesh off his bones, paint him from the inside out, be the cartographer of his soul.

On your page, Baelor is dismembered and scattered, the unwitting model for your impromptu study in human anatomy. A nose here, a chin there. Mouth, eyes, chest. A constellation of body parts.

“I thought you had some art project due tomorrow,” he murmurs without looking up.

Your pencil stills for half a second.

“I’m working on it.”

“I certainly hope not, or I’ll have a lot to answer for.”

You hide your smile behind your sketchpad and feign a yawn. When he continues ignoring you, you set it down and take your top off. He doesn’t look up. Mildly insulted, you lean back and mumble, “Fine, if that’s how you choose to exercise your free will.”

“Free will is an illusion,” he mutters drily, capping his pen.

Your smile morphs into a grin when he stands up anyway.

He has the hunger of something feral, the patience of a saint. You’re lying on the edge of his bed as he kneels on the floor and feasts on your cunt like it’s his last supper. His beard is glistening with your slick, and you grab his head with both hands as full-body shudders wrack your frame. You’ve lost count of how many times you’ve come, his head has been buried between your thighs for the better part of an hour.

You gasp. “Baelor—”

It’s too much, too much. You try to push away from him, shift to the center of the bed, but he slides you back toward him with such effortless ease it makes you gasp again.

“Where are you going?” he murmurs huskily, standing up. His hand cups your cunt and he shoves two fingers back inside you while he tries to get his cock out with his other hand, the careless gesture of possessiveness makes your stomach all wobbly. “You feel like a fucking furnace, sweet thing.”

Your thighs sting from his beard; your fingers slip down to trace the shape of his teeth indented into the flesh as you sit up further, opening your legs wide, feeling his fingers flex inside, his family crest buried into your swollen cunt, open for his inspection. His pupils are blown so wide his eyes are the same color for once.

He pulls his fingers out and replaces them unceremoniously with his cock. You throw your head back and let out a strangled cry, your body going cork-screw tight, squirming and clenching around him. You open your legs wider still to accommodate the stretch of him. Your toes dig into the bed.

He bites, you scratch. You push him onto his back and straddle him, roll your hips against him until the hairs on his stomach are as wet as his beard, until you feel that familiar tightness in your core.

He pulls you back under him and fucks you through the orgasm, gripping the back of your knees and presses them into the bed on either side of your shoulders, your name a slurred chant on his lips as he sinks into you over and over. You gasp into his mouth, because you can feel him everywhere, and it’s too much, too much.

You plunder each other. Your lips latch onto his violently, sloppy and wet, tasting yourself on his tongue. Your legs bounce uselessly on either side of his hips as he drives into you, fucked limp. His movements grow jerky and uneven. He tries to pull away, but you buck your hips against his.

“Come in my pussy.”

He groans, fisting the sheet next to your head, moving so hard you can already feel the bruises forming on your thighs.

He trembles when he comes, buried deep inside you. It leaks out, warm and sticky, down onto the bedsheets. His knuckles and ring knock into the soft, wet skin of your inner thigh over and over as he strokes himself, until you’ve taken every last drop and he collapses onto you, breathing raggedly.

You’re not alone in your reverence. The students all worship him. He has an air of unaffectedness, a unique intellect that is attractive to them because it makes them feel smart; intelligence by proximity, by osmosis. He does not teach full-time anymore, and his one senior seminar is highly competitive because of its very limited seats. His illustrious academic career and famous last name only add to the appeal.

He is not an elitist, doesn’t have the superiority complex most of the other faculty do, but he’s famously tough to impress. There is a running joke—an unwritten rule—in the class group chat (affectionately named BREAK, short for Baelor Requires Extensive Academic Knowledge) to never refer to him by his actual name, and most take inspiration from his assignment notes: Mr. Elaborate, Mr. Explain, Mr. Not Entirely Convincing, etc, etc…

He demands more from you than the rest, and not just the warmth of your body. The vain part of you—you are an artist, after all—is flattered. Likes to think he recognizes your talent and wants to nurture it. He tells you Greek myths until you fall asleep, entire histories of kings and battles, recites poetry, his voice soft as butter in the dark, lends you books, so many of them it’s overwhelming at times—Joyce, Milton, Zola, Dostoevsky, Jung, Proust, Chekhov—and quizzes you on them. Takes you to the opera, museums, plays. Gives you the education that was not afforded to you by your white-trash upbringing; listens to you like your opinions are of utmost interest to him. Sometimes he makes you reread the books you’ve already read, because you had read the wrong translation, because Garnett tended to skip the passages she didn’t understand, and Volokhonsky—

And what does it say about you, that you prefer spending your weekends this way—watching him work or helping him make dinner while Beethoven’s 7th plays softly in the background?

And always, this terrible hunger. For his voice, his hands, his words. Yes, keep talking, please, never stop.

“Why did you stop me after class, that first day?” you ask in the darkness of his car one night, on the way back to his place after attending a symphony orchestra—in another city, to avoid the Big Brothers of your university. But what you really mean is, Tell me how I’m special, superior, again, like the needy, greedy thing you are.

He’s quiet for a few seconds, staring ahead. “You were so still in class, so quiet, but you had this intensity about you. You’d tilt your head to the side when you were thinking or listening to something—you still do. It reminded me of a bird. You looked so beautiful, so curious, when you did that.”

“I don’t do that.”

“You’re doing it now.”

You laugh, straightening in your seat.

His hand lifts from the steering wheel, sliding beneath your hair to cradle the back of your neck, gaze drifting from the road to your face.

“I think I wanted you, even then.”

You sit at the dinner table in his sleek penthouse apartment, city light spilling into the kitchen and dining area. A tattered copy of Symposium lies next to your plate of pasta.

“People talk about soulmates like it’s a beautiful thing—the idea that you’re only half of a whole until you meet another person,” you mutter, chewing behind your fingers. “But it’s the other way around. You’re born whole, and the act of love is what splits you into two. You have to let this person into your body—or more often, they force their way in. You're interrupted. It’s an invasion, not a reunion. An annexation. A parasite. A tumor. And you either have to learn to accommodate it at the cost of disfiguring yourself, or excise it from your body.”

He listens to it all, your little half-formed, improvised thesis, leaned back in his chair, fingers resting lightly on the stem of his wine glass, an affectionate, if somewhat amused, smile playing at his lips.

“Interesting. What you’re describing isn’t love, though. It sounds more like dependency. That’s always been your enemy.”

“Same thing.”

“They aren’t, sweetheart. It breaks my heart that you think they are.”

And you hate how soft his voice is, have to blink to keep your eyes clear and dry. By now he knows you better than anyone else, and the unspoken words linger in the quiet between the sounds of cutlery: your father left and your mother has never hugged you and you couldn’t be more of a textbook cliché if you tried.

“Either way,” you say with a self-conscious shrug, face warm, twirling spaghetti around your fork, “whatever it is, it’s a losing struggle,” and inwardly cringe at your closing statement.

“A losing struggle it may be, but is it not a noble one?”

“It’s not. The whole thing is rooted in narcissism.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know, just the concept of finding a perfect other half…”

And he lets you go on and on, night after night, his eyes twinkling across from you, his curiosity almost as great as your need for his approval: Go on. Tell me everything. You never talk like this in class. You love your mother. Tell me about her. Tell me what’s wrong. You’re so wonderful, so beautiful, my brilliant girl.

Later that night, when you’re back in your own apartment, he sends you a text:

I liked hearing your thoughts on Aristophanes' speech this evening. I think it would make a great subject for your next painting.

You do try. Try to be like any other girl in her twenties, to go out on weekends and gather ye rosebuds, while ye may. Your roommate, a pretty blonde girl with too much lip filler, asks if you want to hang, her friends are coming over and there’s this new club that’s like sooo—

And you’re enjoying yourself, you really are. The girls are nice; they’re curious about you. They ooh and aah over your paintings and your slim figure and gossip about hot guys and hookups and make sure you feel included. You go out and dance and accept the drinks bought for you, play along until the scaffolding of your smile threatens to topple. But always, there’s the terrible ache of not belonging. Of looking in from the outside. Your jealousy eats away at your chest—of these girls whose lives almost seem predetermined, while you drift around, unmoored, stranded, left behind. You feel like a rotten, greasy sandwich wrapper discarded on the street. Like a stray dog watching another dog sleep by a fire, separated by glass.

You try to text him but your hands are too shaky, your mind too loud. You call instead. And he must hear the panic in your voice because he’s immediately full of worry.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah—“

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know…” You start crying.

“Do you want me to come get you?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” You cry harder.

“It’s okay, just tell me where you are.”

“It’s so loud, everything is so loud.”

“Baby—tell me where you are.”

“Can I stay with you tonight?”

“Yes, yes of course you can. Tell me where you are, please.”

You curl into him, stain his white shirt with black tears until you cry yourself out. When you finally lift your head, your eyelids weigh a ton each. His eyes meet your own, blue and brown scanning your face. His face falls. He looks his age for once.

Sweetheart, you’re killing me, he exhales.

Your head lolls back onto his shoulder, heavy with the beginnings of a migraine. You’ll deal with the humiliation tomorrow. For now, you close your eyes and imagine him piercing the side of your skull with a fine needle, aspirating all that slimy, viscous, throbbing ache out. He gives you an ibuprofen and a glass of water instead, before taking you into the shower; holds you under the scalding water until you stop shaking and both your clothes are soaked.

Shh. My dear girl, my darling girl, you’re alright.

Afterward, engulfed in his sweater and the scent of his shampoo, he kneels in front of you, carefully pulling his socks over your feet, one at a time.

“Talk to me,” he murmurs softly, lips pressed to your temple. “Tell me what’s hurting you.”

There are a million things you want to say but can’t: I’m so lost. There’s something wrong with me, I’ve never felt right. What are you doing with me? What will I do when this stops? When will all this patience run out?

“Nothing. I’m just fucked up.”

And you throw your head back and laugh.

He pulls you onto his lap, his arms circling you protectively. He’s silent for a long time; maybe he’s trying to figure out what it is that has damaged you so beyond repair, tracing the dark crack that ran down the length of your soul with his fingers, trying to gauge the extent of it, to figure out how to heal it, because he’s good, or how to exploit it, because he isn’t, really, and he knows what he’s doing.

He covers you with a blanket and makes you a grilled cheese sandwich, puts on your favorite show. You fall asleep tucked into him, warm and damp, your head in his lap and his fingers in your hair. His hand only leaves you long enough to reach for the remote and lower the volume of Derry Girls playing on the TV.

You try to paint, but your mind is blank. There’s nothing to hack into, to carve out. You sit staring at the empty white canvas, a flag of surrender.

It’s Christmas Eve-eve and you can’t go to him because his sons are visiting. You’ve already exchanged gifts, knowing you wouldn’t be able to see each other for a while. He spoiled you: a Dior necklace, a rich, dark brown leather portfolio—your name engraved in gold, commissioned all the way from Italy—a book about prehistoric cave paintings, and enough candy corn and pop tarts to satisfy your sweet-tooth through the winter. In return, he asked for a self-portrait, so you painted him a nude. It has that high contrast he admires so much, your skin like melted pearls, luminous in the dark. Completely unadorned, save for the silver ring on your finger winking faintly from the shadows, like a secret. A small, deliberate addition, easy to miss, unless one is really looking.

He had hung it in his office. Sometimes you picture his sons passing by it, oblivious. You wonder if they feel the ghost of your presence. A hint of perfume lingering in the air, dewy, floral; a hair tie on the coffee table; lip gloss and an extra toothbrush on the bathroom counter (a used tampon in the trash can, a condom, a ripped pair of black panties). Only a fantasy, because Baelor would never be so careless.

You’ve heard him talking to them over the phone, learned to recognize who’s on the other line based on the tone of his voice. He’s stern with the younger boy, the one constantly testing his father’s limits. He was going through a rebellious phase, and the phone calls were becoming increasingly frequent. A fight with another boy, caught leaving a dirty note in a girl’s locker, detention one time, suspension another, a call from the principal’s office. A weary Matarys, a softly sighed, Why do you do this? And speeches about the importance of good judgment and thinking before acting and the kind of man he wants to become.

He’s formal with the ex-wife, polite and courteous, their conversations never allowed to veer from the boys. He offers to come over, and you hold your breath until he sighs out his own, defeated.

He talks more like an equal with the eldest son, his mini-me, discusses college and grades and his future. You listen with intense fascination from his bed, you of the absent father, your thighs pressed together, sticky with his spend, your fingers working between them quietly, coming apart just as he says, I’m proud of you.

Now he’s with them and you’ve abandoned your paints and brushes and you’re in the bathroom of a club and the walls are pulsing with EDM and breathing is hard and you haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours so your head is also pounding and your hands are shaky because you haven’t taken your pills either, because he was trying so hard to wean you off of them and you want to make him proud, and all you want is the quiet of his apartment, to curl into the warmth of him, on his couch, in his bed, surrounded by his cologne, to listen to that soft English voice recite The fucking Odyssey from memory until you fall asleep.

“What do you paint?”

You blink and find yourself seated at a booth. Clark Kent smiles across from you. Political science major, and not his actual name, but he has the glasses and dark hair and chiseled jaw, and you forgot his name before it was fully out of his mouth. He’s nice, better than the last one.

“Uh…” you blow out a breath. “Lots of things. Whatever catches my attention.”

“What’s the last thing you painted?”

You fish out your phone and show it to him.

“Wow,” he says, leaning forward as he takes a glance at what took you months to finish before his eyes are immediately back on you. The screen of your phone is cracked and too small; he doesn’t notice the lock of hair in her hand, the serpent in the background, the mourning clothes whose shades and textures you sacrificed countless nights obsessing over. You feel hot. “Looks epic. What’s the story?”

“Um, Electra. It’s a Greek myth.”

“Don’t think I’ve heard of that one,” he admits sheepishly, smiling again.

You smile back, try to still the tapping of your foot. “It’s about a girl who decides to avenge her father after he is murdered by her mother.”

“It’s incredible. You’re very talented.” He nods at you earnestly.

“Thanks.”

You excuse yourself and stand up, buttoning your double-breasted pea coat before walking out onto the sidewalk. The cold air is like needles through your sheer black tights, ice fills your lungs with every inhale, but your cheeks start to cool and your heart rate is back down to normal. Leaning against the wall, you unlock your phone and open his messages, type, delete, type again, delete again. The last photo you sent him was a mirror selfie at some fancy club a few hours ago, all dolled up, trying indirectly to show him and yourself that you did, indeed, have a life outside of him. He replied a few seconds later.

Very pretty.

And then: Where are you, pretty girl?

just bar hopping with the roommate and some friends

Try to have a good time, not a great time.

You giggled a little, reading that. You’d heard him say the same thing to his son once, his tone comically exasperated.

i just spent five minutes talking to a finance bro, i promise you you have nothing to worry about

It’s that bad?

it’s bleak out here

I don’t need to give you the responsible-drinking spiel, do I?

you’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?

You bite your lip to hide your smile, even though it’s dark and no one cares or is even looking.

You take your time getting ready. It’s after Christmas, his boys are safely back under the baroness’s wings in England, and you can stay over until classes resume. He told you so.

You take your time because you want to look beautiful for him. Growing up, your mother always lectured you about the importance of appearances and first impressions. You’ve always wondered if that’s why she stayed with your father for so long, why she had no qualms about giving you prescription pills like they were M&Ms. Appearances.

You’ve internalized some of that. You’re terrified of looking stupid, especially in front of Baelor. You joke about being poor, which troubles him, but actually do your utmost to hide the embarrassing details of your poverty. You try to be well-read and well-informed. You spent years expunging that small-town twang out of your voice. You try not to be one of those like-ridden girls. You take care of your appearance, keep yourself well-groomed, dress well, despite the fact that virtually every piece of clothing you own is thrifted. You hide the dark circles under your eyes with concealer and don’t go out with paint smeared on your face and fingers, like some of the other students do. And it’s fine that you can’t afford skincare products or a gym membership because you have youth on your side for now.

Mostly, though, you take your time because you want to make him wait the way he makes you wait. Every movement is deliberate and slow. The slide of sheer, lacy panties, almost weightless between your fingers. A black, long-sleeved, knitted dress that clings to every dip and curve and stretches all the way down to your calf. Leather boots, heavy teardrop earrings. A simple red lip and your hair down. Every movement a conscious effort to avoid checking your phone for the time.

You arrive early anyway.

The only thing your upbringings have in common is that you’ve both grown into emotionally constipated adults. Your lipstick is ruined almost immediately. It’s smeared on his cock because he doesn’t know how to say I missed you so he fucks your mouth instead.

The mismatched eyes gaze down at you, light and dark, guilt and desire, and it makes your core ache. He slows, brushes your hair back, wipes your cheek with his thumb. You wait, throb with anticipation. Desire wins—he fucks your mouth so thoroughly you choke and drool all over his Italian pants and expensive carpet, face streaked with mascara. You look up at him the entire time, search for that hint of guilt that makes your cunt clench around nothing.

He comes in your mouth with a groan. It drips down your chin, it catches on your nipple. You suck it off his tip. It makes him hiss.

Your throat is raw, your cheeks ache, you try to swallow and wince. Later, on the phone, your mother will ask you if you have a cold.

He tucks your hair gently behind your ear, looking you over before shutting his eyes. His voice breaks as he says, God. Where did you come from? What are you doing to me?

It’s becoming an addiction, that… smallness you feel around him. Not spread thin, not so fragmented and scattered you feel as though a breeze could finish you off. Whole. The thought chafes a little.

“That’s just sugar and food coloring.”

“How dare you.” You offer him a gummy worm over the kitchen island. “Try this one. It’s almost better than sex.”

He pauses, knife hovering over the tomatoes he’s dicing, and leans forward so you can place it in his mouth. He chews and makes a face. “If this is your benchmark, I feel I ought to defend my reputation.”

“I said almost. Like a little… mini-orgasm.”

“I wouldn’t call it that, either.” He spits it out into a tissue and drops it in the trash can, washing the taste down with a sip of his scotch. “Good God. They give this to children?”

“And girls in their twenties.”

“Your teeth are going to rot, baby.”

You shrug, bite off another piece.

He smiles, giving your nose a little tap, his finger wet. “They’ll fall out one by one.”

You swing your legs on the stool and give him a toothy, slimy, gummy-worm-smile.

“Charming,” he says drily and goes back to making dinner. Pasta, again, because you have the palate of a three-year-old, sweetheart.

“I was deprived as a child.” It’s true. Your mother may have allowed antidepressants and anxiety medication, but she drew the line at jelly beans and Twinkies.

Baelor keeps a stash of them in his kitchen cabinet at all times, just for you.

He makes no effort to mask his disapproval of your casual dependency on prescription medication. How could you explain—to him, of all people, Mr. The-mind-is-its-own-place, Mr. I-was-my-mother’s-favorite, Mr. I-thought-every-house-had-a-maid-and-nanny—that you needed those pills to differentiate between receiving a phone call and being hunted for sport, needed to take them at the same hour every day to be able to open the door when a package arrived, instead of cowering behind your shabby, secondhand sofa at the first sound of a knock? Needed them to breathe when the existential dread of I’ve never known human connection and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and I’m wasting away my youth threatens to choke you. That, while he spent his youth in private school and… you don’t know, riding horses or whatever rich kids did in England back in his day, you had spent yours in the offices of one doctor after another, hospital rooms, had to take extra classes in school so you wouldn’t fall behind because you had stressed yourself out so much your insides had started bleeding. Literally.

Being with him, just the two of you alone, hundreds of feet above ground, silenced that awful noise that drowned out everything else, the terrible sound of the mind choking on itself. But it was not the same as the empty silence of the pills.

“You’re still a child, sweetheart.” It’s a little fond, a little tender. Maybe you imagine it. It pierces you.

He holds your chin gently and leans over to kiss you on the lips, shakes his head, chuckling when he pulls back.

“What?”

“You taste like strawberries.”

You begin to fear that you’ve traded one addiction for another.

He says it again, a few months later, as the end of the semester looms. You’re a child. Except this time his eyes are a conflicted storm of guilt and anguish.

It’s followed by some bullshit about you being his son’s age and I’m going back to England. I don’t think I could stay away from you if I remained here.

And you stare at his mouth as he forms the words, uncomprehending, but some nervous, ugly thing deep inside you clicks into place. And all you’re thinking is that there are some people who are intrinsically unlovable, easy to abandon.

His face falls, like he knows exactly what you’re thinking. “Sweetheart, it isn’t—”

“It’s not me?” You hiss viciously. “You’re right, it’s not me. You’re a coward. You love to play the wise old man but you’re a hypocrite, you’re a—”

Back in your apartment, you cringe with shame at the poison you’d spat at him, at how you’d shoved him, cursed him, and how that steady gaze and calm English voice had only fueled your rage into further humiliation because all it did was emphasize your own vulgar origins, your rotten family tree—impoverished, overweight, undereducated—and all the things you’d spent years burying like a shameful secret. Your mother’s split lip and your father’s red face. You wish he had yelled back at you instead.

You lie in bed and try to ground yourself when breathing becomes difficult, but all you hear and feel and taste is the tick of the clock, accelerating until it matches the rhythm of your heart, ticktockticktockticktock, the blood rushing in your ears, the bitter taste on your tongue.

And Baelor saying, I don’t want to mess you up.

The great irony of your life is that the desire to paint works against the desire to live, that you thrive artistically when you’re at your lowest. The deeper the spiral, the more creative the work. And that… spiraling into the abyss is the only thing that breaks your paralysis.

Content only dulls your talent, softens your edges, like a fat, well-fed tiger in a zoo. No real hunger, no sleepless urge to hunt or create or consume.

You remember mentioning this to Baelor one night, when you first started sleeping together. He considered it for a moment.

“Not quite. Art is… the backup generator that keeps your heart beating and lungs pumping—hardly the antithesis of life.”

You shrugged. “All I know is, the worse I feel, the better the work.”

He smiled faintly, glancing down at you. “‘One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star,’” he said, quoting a line you'd used in your recent paper. He knew you, even then. “You’re hardly lacking in that, sweet girl.”

You thought: that’s your polite way of calling me unstable.

“That star will collapse sooner or later,” you muttered. “And then what?” What will you think of me then? When the only thing that made you notice me in the first place is gone?

He frowned. “Strong emotion removes your internal filter, that’s true of anyone. But if you insist on it, you’ll end up manufacturing your own paralysis. I’ve seen your recent work,” he added. “It isn’t any worse or better. It just isn’t saturated with darkness. That’s not a defect, it shows you have range.”

You skip classes for a week. By the end of it, half-collapsing from exhaustion, there are fifteen canvases leaning against the walls of your room—bare skeletons still, only concepts, beginnings.

But enough to prove a point.

You stare at the email in disbelief. It had been poverty, the leitmotif of your life, that compelled you to do what you did. Your bills were piling up and your money was running out, and your search for a part-time job was looking more and more bleak.

Yes, it had been desperation, not confidence, that drove you to send your portfolio to every gallery you could think of. And now—

“A solo what?”

The hollow rush of a vacuum cleaner almost drowns out your mother’s voice on the other end of the line.

“A solo exhibition, it means they’ll only show my work. It’s kind of a big deal.”

“Oh. That’s great, honey.”

“And it’s one of the biggest galleries in the world. People actually go there. Important people. Critics and collectors. They’ll write reviews—”

“Collectors?”

“People who buy the work.”

“Okay. Wear something nice, please.”

You rub your forehead, mouth twisting. “I will, mom.”

“Well,” she says distractedly. The noise of the vacuum cleaner stops, now you can hear her new husband in the background. “I have to go prepare dinner. Good job, honey.”

“Thanks,” you say, and hang up.

You stare at your phone, the email still open, the words still there.

Your mother didn’t understand. She didn’t care; she’d never expressed any interest in your art, even when you were a child—not out of neglect or indifference, art was just not something she had the luxury to notice. It was sheer stubborn will that got you where you are today. Baelor always marveled at the fact that you’d never received any formal training prior to university, naively unaware that you occupied a completely different tax bracket from him.

Baelor.

Baelor would understand. He would laugh with joy. He knows what this means for your future, appreciates how difficult it is to achieve it at this age, the talent it requires. He would say something precise and measured that somehow made it feel even grander, even more real.

People stand in front of the paintings the way you used to stand in front of others’, head tilted, arms folded. Men in suits and women in elegant dresses, all so much older and worldlier than you.

But it’s your name on the wall.

You catch pieces of conversation as you drift past them. A man says one of the pieces reminds him of martyrdom; another—a writer—says it feels autobiographical, confessional. A woman claims it’s about love and control. Someone else insists it’s about the body as architecture. So many words, so much meaning ascribed to a single thing. Violence, corruption, fragmentation. Ritualistic and visceral, and the hand here, do you see? It’s almost devotional.

You grip the glass in your hand, something pale and cold inside it, anchor more than drink. You nod and smile until your jaw aches, gaze up at each canvas with them like you’re seeing it for the first time, like it’s someone else’s work. The time you spent on their creation is all a haze. Sometimes, they shock even you.

“Congratulations.”

You turn. It’s one of the gallery staff, holding a clipboard to her chest.

“Thank you,” you say.

“We’ve had a very strong response.”

Your stomach tightens, just a little. You set your glass down. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” She points to one of the paintings. “That one has already sold.”

For a second, you can’t quite process her words. You glance past the heads crowded around The Tower and The Artichoke and Bird of Prey, toward the last painting on the far wall.

Disfigurement Oil on canvas

It’s the one people linger on the longest. It’s grotesque, revolting, the shape of a man and woman inside a thin, bruised membrane, disappearing into each other. But there’s a fragile tenderness to it that you hadn’t intended.

“And a few others have been reserved, which is excellent,” she says with a smile, laying a hand on your arm. “Especially so early in the evening.”

“Right,” you say, hands slipping into the pockets of your slacks, eyes drifting again. “That’s goo—”

All the noise falls away the second your eyes catch his familiar side-profile.

There’s a scene from a movie you watched when you were a kid. The name and plot you’ve long forgotten, but you remember that one part so clearly: the heroine, walking down a street, sees her long lost lover through a café window. She pauses, and then dissolves into tears. Literally: she dissolves into a puddle on the ground.

That’s how you feel when you see his figure in the crowd. Like dissolving into a puddle.

“Baelor.” You breathe out, stopping in front of him before even realizing you’d started walking.

He turns. Like you, he towers over most people. Black suit, hair shorter and grayer than when you’d seen him last.

“What are you—I mean, I thought you were in England—”

Those strange, intense eyes scan your face for a moment, before shifting back to the canvas on the wall. He shakes his head in wonder. “Remarkable.”

“I’m sorry, about the way I behav—”

“I always knew you were special. I’m proud of you.”

You swallow. All your rehearsed lines, defenses, excuses, apologies, fade away.

He nods, still looking up. “I see what you meant now. A losing struggle, indeed.”

You look up too, at the man and woman consuming each other, like a two-headed Ouroboros. Their margins are dissolved, no matter how closely one looks, it's impossible to tell where one person ends and the other begins. You made it so.

You start to shake your head. “No—no, I was wrong.”

“You called it narcissism. You might have been right on that count, too.”

He lowers his head. Finally, finally, he turns to you, his voice so quiet when he says—

“Perhaps I would love you less if you weren’t so much a part of me.”

Your throat constricts around a sob. He lifts a hand to wipe your cheek, then thinks twice about it. Some of his students and colleagues are here.

One comes over to shake his hand, giving you an odd look. You wipe your eyes surreptitiously and let Baelor do the talking, wait impatiently until he finally gets rid of the man.

“Not here, sweetheart,” he hushes entreatingly when your face crumples. “Will you come home with me tonight?”

You laugh in shock a few weeks later when you walk into his room and see Disfigurement hung over the bed. The sound is throaty and choked. He comes up behind you, engulfs you in his arms as you both stare at it. You can’t really see it because your eyes are wet and your vision is blurry.

“It arrived today.”

“I didn’t even kn—” you shake your head. “It wasn’t worth that much money.”

“It was to me.”

“You want to terrify your guests, be my guest.”

You feel him shrug against you. “This is fine. Goya had Saturn Devouring His Son in his dining room.”

“I know,” you smile. “He’s one of my favorites.”

“It’s in The Prado now. I’ll take you to see it one day.”

“To Spain?” You crane your neck back to look up at him.

“Hmm.”

“I don’t have a passport.”

He kisses your hair. “We’ll get you one, my little nihilist.”

You’re in a hotel room in Vienna that once housed emperors. You’ve seen Velázquez and Schiele and Bruegel, walked the cobblestoned streets of Europe in his arms, sat front-row in an auditorium among writers and intellectuals who had all come to listen to him speak.

In the evenings, you get to wear beautiful dresses and sit across from him at restaurants. He makes you laugh all night long with stories of his youth (“They used to call me Hammer—” pointing to the scar across his brow) and occasionally gives you one of those rare Baelor-laughs in return, shoulders shaking, eyes crinkling, revealing a row of charmingly crooked teeth, the sound rich and so beautiful it hurt—or he makes you go into passionate soliloquies about subjects he initiates to keep you talking, lips curved gently and eyes so soft you’re counting down the minutes until it’s polite to leave, to go back to the hotel and ride him senseless.

His phone is filled with pictures of you: blurred ones, candid ones, closeups; you in dresses, in shorts, in lingerie; you in museums, cathedrals, in a yacht; you posing by a statue, you on the street licking ice-cream, kneeling to stroke a cat in some sunlit square, you with your face buried in a book in your white bikini. You, suntanned and bright-eyed and all legs. You, you, you.

He leans against the headboard of that emperor’s bed as you straddle him, looking every bit a king himself, the cool air from the open window caressing your heated skin. He holds you close, your chest pressed tight against his, one hand steady at your back as you grind against him, the other hand guiding you with gentle firmness.

You keep your eyes on each other as he lowers you onto him, over and over and over, penetrating you so deeply you feel something give in your chest. A sliver of a tear. He doesn’t stop, leans down to kiss the space between your breasts like he sees exactly where you’re being cleaved into two. You grip his shoulder and watch in fascination as your fingers melt into his skin, then your hand, then the whole arm. You look down, past his salt-and-pepper hair; your nipples are wet with his tongue. His head disappears into your chest. You feel his lips on your beating heart.

You both shudder.