🌿🌈Xoro✨🌌💫

The studio is warmer than you expect. Old brick. Tall windows dripping with rain. Canvases stacked against every wall, most of them turned backward, their painted faces hidden from you. It smells of linseed oil and damp wood and (- the sharp stench of a cave where things lie nestled in the dark with sharp teeth and sharper claws, maw dripping with hunger for every unsuspecting little thing that crosses in front of it’s eyes, too close too see the danger until its dragging them across stone floor- )

(And you’ll think about those canvases later. About how each one had been carefully turned toward the wall before you arrived, how easy it had been to assume this was modesty instead of concealment. Artists are strange, you’d thought. Private about unfinished things. You hadn’t yet considered that there might be things Johnny didn’t want looking back at you.)

Johnny puts you in an oversized white shirt (‘s mine, Bonnie, but ye can borrow it- ), says the fabric catches shadow better. Leaves your own clothes folded on a chair near the door (- farther away than they need to be- ) and settles you on a low platform beneath the windows, your knees drawn loosely beneath you, one hand resting against your throat.

The first few minutes pass in silence.

Charcoal scratching.

Rain needling softly against the glass.

Johnny looking at you, baby blue traveling slowly, steadily, returning to the same places over and over- the soft inside of your wrist, the hollow beneath your throat, the place where the shirt slips away from one shoulder whenever you breathe too deeply.

You try to hold still, but your back starts to ache. Your fingers curl against your collarbone. Each time Johnny looks up, you remember you’re being watched and flinch, shoulders rising, knees pressing closer together, chin sinking protectively toward your chest, too stiff.

His charcoal stills.

You apologize.

Ach, dinnae apologize. He smiles when he says it, but something in his expression stays still. His mouth curves. The rest of him doesn’t.

Ye keep foldin’ in on yourself every time I look at ye. Ahm not goin’ tae eat ye.

It’s too perceptive and your laugh comes out smaller than you meant it to. Johnny’s gaze sharpens at the sound, charcoal held motionless between fingers stained black nearly to the knuckle. He sets the charcoal on the easel tray and walks toward you, wiping blackened fingertips against his trousers.

His hands settle on your shoulders and press them down, thumbs sweeping slowly along the tight muscles beside your neck, working circles into the ache until your head tips forward despite yourself.

(That should’ve frightened you too, perhaps, the ease with which he found the softest part of you and pressed his thumb into it. But cruelty rarely introduces itself as cruelty.)

Can feel ye fightin’ me, he murmurs.

You tell him you’re only nervous.

I know, hen.

His mouth brushes close to your ear when he says it- That’s the problem-

You’ve never done anything like this before. Never sat beneath someone’s attention and been expected to let them take whatever they saw.

Johnny hums.

- Got somethin’ that might help-

He leaves you there and crosses to a cabinet near the sink. The bottle he brings back is already open. Red wine, dark enough to look black where it gathers in the bottom of the glass.

He pours while you watch, the glass filling nearly to the widest part before he seems to remember himself and stops.

You tell him that’s more than a little.

Is it?

The dimples appear.

Scottish measure.

You laugh despite yourself, and that seems to please him. He passes you the glass, waits until your fingers close around the stem, then returns to the easel as though the matter is settled.

It’s sweeter than you expect.

Dark fruit and spice, something thick and jammy that clings to your tongue after you swallow. It warms your stomach on the way down and then sits there, a small red coal beneath your ribs, heavy in your stomach, spreading outward in a slow bloom that reaches your fingertips first.

Johnny starts drawing again once you drink, charcoal moving with renewed purpose, and each time you begin to tense beneath his gaze, he tips his chin toward the glass.

You obey because you don’t want to be difficult (- not after he told you that you were the first beautiful thing he’d wanted to draw in months. Pride and vanity always did come before the fall-)

The first glass disappears without you noticing.

Johnny refills it.

You watch the wine climb the crystal, a dark red tide swallowing the clean sides. He pours generously this time, his wrist turning until the glass is almost full.

Johnny-

Ye’re still wound tight.

He presses the glass back into your hand, cups the base and tips it toward your mouth, red wine spilling over your lower lip, a thin ribbon escaping the corner of your mouth to trail down your chin- Swallow, hen, that’s it, good girl- thumb catching the crimson streak on your chin, smearing it gently across your swollen mouth, bringing his thumb to his own lips and dragging his tongue slowly over the wine stained pad, his gaze still fixed on your (- tasting one thing and thinking of another entirely- )

The room softens, hard corners of the platform blurring, rain beyond the glass stretches into silver threads. Johnny’s face becomes something painted in oils- dark lashes, blue eyes, the warm cut of his mouth- each feature bleeding gently into the next whenever you look too quickly.

(You’ll try to remember how many times he filled the glass after that. You’ll count backward later and find nothing solid enough to hold. One glass becomes two only because you remember him pouring. Two becomes three because the bottle was lower when you finally noticed it again. Memory is unreliable even when sober; drunk, it becomes something else entirely)

Your thoughts begin losing their edges.

That’s the strangest part.

Not the warmth or the heaviness gathering behind your eyes, but the way one thought stops connecting cleanly to the next. You think you should check the time, but the idea floats away before you remember where you left your phone. You think you’re thirsty, although there’s still wine in your hand. You think Johnny has been staring too long, but then he smiles and the concern dissolves before it can settle into fear.

Your brain turns liquid. Loose.

Everything inside your skull has melted into something warm and buoyant, thoughts drifting past one another like pale shapes beneath dark water. You can see them. Almost touch them. But each time you reach for one, the motion sends it farther away.

The warmth moves deeper with each glass. Into your thighs. Your cheeks. The soft tissue behind your eyes.

Nothing has edges anymore. Johnny’s charcoal scratches from very far away, scraping down the back of your mind.

You take another sip.

Your tongue feels too large for your mouth.

The wine sits syrup thick in your veins, turning your body slow and porous. You can feel yourself dissolving from the inside, bones losing their hard white calcifications, thoughts melting down into something warm and red and viscous. Your mind becomes a glass overturned on its side, everything inside it pouring lazily toward the lowest point.

Johnny tells you to lift your chin and it takes you a moment to understand him.

Your head feels full of warm red water. Too heavy for your neck, too light to belong to your body. When you turn toward him, the studio follows a moment later, swaying gently around its fixed point. Your stomach seems to remain behind while the rest of you drifts forward.

Johnny smiles. Feelin’ better?

Mmm. Floaty.

The word leaves your mouth thick and childish. You hear yourself say it from somewhere above the platform and start laughing, embarrassed by the way your tongue seems to have grown too large for your teeth.

Floaty, he repeats. Aye, I can see that.

The glass slips sideways in your hand when you try to lift it again, wine cresting the rim, pouring over your fingers in a slow, dark sheet, slipping between your knuckles and tracing along the inside of your wrist. You make a startled little sound at the coldness that breaks apart into a thousand shards against the brick of the walls.

Johnny catches the stem before it can tumble from your loose fingers- careful, hen- and you try to straighten it but some how make it worse. Another red thread spills across your palm, and your laughter returns, thick and breathless, your head bowing beneath the weight of it.

Can’t hold it, you confess.

Johnny looks at your hand.

His smile doesn’t disappear, the warmth staying arranged across his face, but everything behind it grows watchful and still, his gaze following the wine as it crawls toward the soft bend of your elbow.

Aye, he murmurs. I can see that.

He takes the glass from you and places it beyond your reach.

Then he closes his hand around your wrist.

(There are moments when the body understands before the mind does. A pulse quickening beneath someone’s thumb. Fingers curling uselessly toward the palm. Some small animal instinct lifting its head inside you and finding every door already underwater. Yours tries to warn you now, but the wine has made a soft, red grave of your thoughts, and whatever is screaming has sunk too deep to be heard.)

Johnny raises your hand slowly, turns your wrist upward and studies the dark streaks shining there as though you’ve offered him something.

His tongue touches the center of your palm.

Tickles, you mumble, trying weakly to pull your hand back.

Johnny doesn’t let you, fingers tighten around your wrist, dragging his tongue between two of your fingers, gathering the wine with slow, deliberate strokes, his eyes lifted to your face the entire time, stubble scraping your skin, your head tipping drunkenly toward one shoulder while he follows the spill downward. His mouth moves over the heel of your hand, then the tender inside of your wrist, tongue tracing the dark path until it reaches the quick beat of your pulse.

Johnny, you breathe, his name breaking apart around another shy (nervous) giggle.

Shh.

His lips close over the fluttering place beneath your skin, sucking gently at the flesh, and the laughter catches strangely in your throat.

For a second, the floating stops.

Your eyes find his. There’s no boyish embarrassment there now. No artist’s wonder. Only concentration, calm and proprietary, as if he’s discovered the precise place where you’re weakest and is committing it to memory.

Then the room tips again.

The fear slips away before you can name it.

Johnny lifts his mouth from your wrist. A faint red stain shines across his lower lip, though you can’t tell whether it’s wine or the shape of his teeth pressed too hard against your skin.

Couldnae leave ye all messy, he murmurs.

You smile at him, heavy eyed and grateful.

(That smile will return to you later. Not his. Yours. The soft, trusting curve of your own mouth while he held your pulse between his teeth, already learning how much he could take, could take, could take before you’d realize something was missing- )

His hand slides behind your neck when your head lists toward one shoulder, catching you with a palm spanning the base of your skull, fingers sinking into the soft place beneath your hair, and the strength of him feels like a pillar rising from the black water at the exact moment your feet stop finding the bottom.

You lean into him, body pouring toward the nearest solid thing with the blind obedience of water finding a crack.

(That’s the part you’ll hate most afterward. Not the touch itself, but the relief. The soft, grateful sound your throat makes when he holds your head up for you. The way your body, stupid animal that it is, mistakes restraint for shelter because the room has become a dark and gently turning sea, and Johnny- Johnny, who tipped the bottle into your mouth, who stood on the shore and watched the red water climb over your face- feels like the only thing left that won’t move beneath your hands.)

Can barely hold yourself up, can ye?

There’s laughter curled inside his voice. Warmth too. Enough warmth to blunt the edge of it, enough tenderness painted over the words that you don’t see the teeth beneath until much later, when you’re sober enough to pick each moment apart and find where the sweetness spoiled.

You mumble that you’re fine, word coming loose and swollen, a soft little shape that collapses against his chest before it properly leaves your mouth.

Course ye are.

His thumb moves behind your ear, slow enough to feel fond, presses into the tender hollow there and draws a circle, then another, while your thoughts slosh heavily from one side of your skull to the other.

Jus’ need a wee bit of help holdin’ the pose.

He reaches past you.

Something drags from the shelves, whisper of fibres over unfinished wood, dry and soft, the sound stretching strangely inside your head, unspooling through the wine until it becomes the scrape of something moving beneath a bed, the hush of grass parting around a body.

When Johnny settles back into view, there’s a pale coil resting in one charcoal stained hand.

You stare at it.

The meaning is there- somewhere- can feel it beneath the surface, pressing upward through the wine. But your thoughts are no longer thoughts, drifting pieces of them, each one separating when you reach, each one slipping wetly through your fingers before you can force it into words.

What’s that for?

The question sounds very far away.

Johnny looks at the rope, then at you.

You.

He says it so easily that you blink up at him, chin hooked against the hard planes of his abdomen.

Then his grin breaks wide, dimples cutting deep enough to make the answer harmless again.

The pose, hen. It’s for the pose.

He kneels beside you and takes your wrist, winding the rope around your skin once, then twice, explaining tension and composition and the body’s instinct to protect itself when it tires.

Always curls inward, he murmurs, thumb smoothing the inside of your wrist. Always tries tae hide the soft parts.

You watch his fingers move.

Over.

Under.

Through.

Cream colored rope, the shade of old lace or clean bone, pretty where it crosses your skin, fibres blurring at the edges when your eyes lose focus, becoming something delicate, ornamental. A bracelet. A ribbon. (Gift-wrapped and hand delivered-)

Johnny-

Too tight?

You don’t know.

You should know. The answer ought to exist inside your own head, but your body has gone dim and distant, a house seen through fogged glass. There’s pressure around your wrist. Heat beneath it. A pulse knocking weakly against the rope like someone trapped behind a wall.

Johnny slides one finger under the knot, fingertip stroking over your pulse while he looks up at you, eyes bright and attentive.

Wouldnae hurt ye.

You nod because he sounds so certain and rational thought is a stone tied to your ankle asking you to climb through red waters.

He binds the other wrist before you understand that the first one is finished. Lifts both arms above your head, and your body follows with a slow, boneless obedience that makes him smile. The stretch pulls through your shoulders, arches your back, tits pushing at the fabric of his shirt, body bent sharp enough to split the soft haze for half a second, and a whimper escapes before you can swallow it.

Shh. Easy, bonnie.

His hand slides down your arms, your sides, soothing the hurt he created, and the wine rushes back into the space pain briefly cleared. Warm. Heavy. Merciful.

He secures the rope to an iron ring sunk into the studio floor.

You hadn’t noticed the rings before.

There’s one near either side of the platform, black metal half hidden beneath old paint and dust. More beside the mattress in the shadowed corner, arranged at careful distances from one another.

The pattern should mean something.

(It does mean something.)

Your gaze catches on them and then drifts helplessly away.

(Fear needs a body that answers when called, and yours has become warm wax beneath his hands, softening wherever he presses, cooling around whatever shape he leaves behind.)

Your legs are next.

He cups one ankle and draws it outward. Then the other. Your heels drag over the platform with a soft rasp, your knees falling apart beneath the loose white shirt. The fabric slips higher along your thighs, and the first clean spark of alarm pierces the drunken fog when you try to close them again.

Johnny feels the resistance and his hands stop on your thighs, heat from his palms sinking into you until you can feel his fingerprints burning their marks into your bones.

Easy.

The word is quiet. Almost kind.

You shake your head, but the motion tips the ceiling sideways. The windows pour rain upward. Johnny’s face splits into two softened versions of itself, then swims back together as nausea rolls lazily beneath your ribs.

I don’t-

The sentence knots behind your teeth.

Don’t what?

The words are all there, drifting separately through the dark, but you can’t gather them into the same mouthful.

Johnny leans closer- what was that, doe- gives you every appearance of listening, eyebrows drawn with concern, mouth softened at the corners.

You try again.

Your tongue feels soaked through. Heavy as nebula, the sounds smearing against one another until even you can’t tell what you meant to say.

Johnny waits, watches the effort drain out of your face and only then strokes both hands down your thighs.

Thought so.

The ropes tighten around your wrists. Your ankles. A careful loop above your knee when your leg keeps listing inward, another where the position pleases him but your body won’t hold it on its own.

His hands guide the white shirt higher whenever it catches beneath you.

It’ll wrinkle, hen-

A little farther-

Hold still-

The fabric gathers in pale folds until it rests beneath the curve of your breasts, baring the plane of your stomach, the flare of your hips, your soft, silky cunt he has spread open for himself. His thumbs stroke once along the crease where thigh meets hip, pressing into the give of flesh (- as though he is already imagining how it will feel when he is between them- )

He looks at what he has done and the boyish grin is gone. What remains is quieter. Hungrier. His eyes move over you like he is deciding which part to taste first.

There we are, he murmurs. Much better.

You drift.

Fear is still there, but it has risen above you now, trapped on the other side of the wine. You can see its shadow crossing the surface while you float beneath it, black and frantic and distorted by the red water between you. Your shoulders ache. Your wrists burn dully where the rope takes your weight. Your legs are held apart by pale fibres and Johnny’s careful arrangement, but the body enduring it feels impossibly far away.

A figure at the bottom of a lake.

A pale thing laid open in the silt.

You’re near the ceiling. You’re inside the rain crawling down the glass. You’re suspended somewhere behind your own eyes, watching a woman in a white shirt test the ropes with small, weak movements she won’t remember making.

She looks frightened.

You wonder why she doesn’t leave.

(Drunkenness makes a cruelty of distance. It lets you watch yourself suffer without understanding that you’re the one inside the body. Lets the mind climb out through a crack in the skull and hover somewhere clean while the flesh remains below, warm and obedient and available. It feels almost like escape until you realize Johnny can still touch what you’ve left behind.)

Christ.

The reverence in his voice draws your gaze back to him.

He’s looking at you, eyes moving slowly over your arms lifted and secured, your knees drawn apart, the shirt bunched high where his hands kept moving it, pausing at each point of strain as if pain is another line he’s finally managed to place correctly.

Something in his face has gone still, colder than lust. The deep and emptied devotion of a man standing before an altar built for a god that cannot refuse him now.

There ye are, he whispers, as if you’d been hidden from him, as if the rope has finally uncovered something true.

Then he crosses to the studio door and you follow him with your eyes slowly, the room dragging several seconds behind his body.

Johnny turns the lock and the click enters your head like a stone dropped into deep water. He slides the bolt into place and the sound travels down through the wine and settles somewhere beneath your heart, where the part of you that still understands begins, very quietly, to drown.

Then his hip catches the corner of a canvas on the way back.

It happens slowly from where you’re floating. The frame tips away from the wall, knocks against the one beside it, and then the whole uneven stack begins to slide. Wood scraping brick. Canvas whispering against canvas. Johnny swears beneath his breath and reaches for them, but they have already fallen face up across the floor.

And…

There you are.

Your face.

You blink at it, wondering for a syrupy moment whether it’s the sketch he’s just made, though the woman in the painting is wearing your green coat from last autumn. Her hair is damp, cheek tucked into the collar against the rain. She’s standing beneath the yellow shelter at the bus stop near your work, eyes lowered toward the phone cupped between her hands.

Another canvas has you carrying groceries against your chest. The paper bag splitting at the bottom, oranges bright through the tear, your mouth caught open in a laugh you don’t remember giving him.

Another-

you behind the steamed glass of the little cafe on Bell Street, both hands curled around a mug. There are Christmas lights reflected over your face. Red and gold smears threaded through your hair like something festive and burning.

That’s me, you say.

Or think you say.

(There’s a truth arranged across the floor in front of you, patient and chronological. Months of it. Seasons of it. Proof painted in oils and hidden with its face toward the wall, waiting for the moment when you could no longer count backward clearly enough to understand what you were seeing. But your brain has become a red tide inside your skull, and recognition is a small animal trying to swim through it. You watch its paws break the surface once. Then it sinks.)

When did you- ?

The question dissolves halfway out.

Johnny crouches and turns the first canvas over, handles them gently. (More gently than he’s handled you.) Checks the corners for damage, thumb brushing dust from your painted cheek before he hides it against the wall again.

Clumsy bastard, he mutters.

You stare at the remaining portrait. The one at the corner shop. Washed out lights. Coins scattered across your palm. Your face turned slightly to the side as if someone has just called your name.

- The moment he told you about-

- The first time he saw you-

Except the painting of you at the summer festival last year is underneath it.

Your eyebrows pull together and the thought almost forms.

Johnny looks over his shoulder and sees you struggling there and his expression softens.

Dinnae hurt yourself, hen.

He rises, steps over the paintings and comes back to you. One blackened fingertip presses between your brows, smoothing the crease away as though confusion is another flaw in the pose.

Ye’re thinkin’ too hard.

You try to tell him there are paintings of you. You try to ask how long.

You try to but the words leave your mouth sodden and misshapen, each syllable dragging another behind it until the sentence reaches him as little more than a murmur, the beginning falling away before you reach the end.

Johnny understands anyway. (He always seems to understand you when it suits him.)

He watches your mouth with that same fond concentration he wore while sketching (the patient attention of a man waiting for something soft to finish struggling) then glances toward the canvases he hasn’t managed to turn over.

Did tell ye I’d been stuck for months.

The dimples sink deep.

Never said how long I’ve been working since then.

You look back at the paintings.

The woman beneath the bus shelter has your green coat buttoned neatly with a button that broke last September. The woman at the cafe is holding the chipped blue mug they stopped using sometime around Christmas. Another version of you is walking beneath trees still fat with summer leaves, bare legs flashing beneath a dress buried now at the bottom of your wardrobe.

Your mind touches the sequence and recoils, but there’s nowhere for the thought to go. The wine has flooded every corridor inside your skull, filled every room up to the ceiling. Understanding swims toward you through it- slow, pale, terrible- but each time it comes close enough to recognize, the current rolls you gently away.

Something cold opens inside you, but the wine pours into it before it can become fear. It fills every clean edge, rounds everything off, turns horror into a distant pressure beneath the sternum. Johnny strokes your cheek and waits until your eyes lose focus again.

(He hadn’t found you beneath the lights of the corner shop tonight. Not in the way he’d made it sound, not like lightning or providence or some dead part of him suddenly shocked back into motion. He’d already known which bus carried you home. Which cafe you preferred. What store you used. He’d watched summer soften into autumn around you, watched autumn die into winter, and called it inspiration because obsession sounds beautiful when an artist says it.)

Johnny collects the last canvas and turns it toward the wall and your painted face disappears.

There, he murmurs. Nothin’ tae worry about.

He comes back to you slowly, hands settling on your thighs, hot enough to feel like brands through the wine heavy numbness, heat sinking in around the breadth of his palms and the effortless weight keeping you where he put you.

You shake your head.

Or perhaps it only falls weakly to one side.

Johnny’s mouth brushes your trembling knee, almost gentle, while his thumbs draw slow circles against your skin.

Easy, hen.

You try to tell him you want to go home but all that emerges is a broken little breath.

He lifts his head and watches you struggle to assemble the words, patient until the last of them dissolves behind your teeth. Then he smiles tender enough to make it seem as though he’s forgiving you for being afraid.

(And somewhere above the wine, the small surviving part of you finally understands why the paintings were turned toward the wall.)

Johnny reaches back without looking and the amber lamp beside the platform clicks off.

Darkness folds over the studio, warm and absolute, and his hands tighten around your thighs when the ropes instinctively draw taut.

The doctor was off the deep end. Everyone knew it. Whispers among the faculty, among the reagents, eventually reached you. A fun little game of telephone. Hence, why you're in his office. The head of a very much spiraling man with balding hair in your lap, nursing a cigarette to his lips like it did less harm than good.

“I can't believe it.” he says, shadows hiding his face in the dimly lit room. Various awards hang at an angle, lining the walls in achievement. They look almost mockingly down at Easterman, who presses his cigarette-holding hand more towards his lips to soothe his frayed nerves.

“All these people threatening to leave me.” He sounds hurt, almost. Almost. Easterman shakes his head, strands of hair falling past his hairline. “After all I've..” He pauses to exhale. The smoke swirls from his lips. The cherry glows a bright red. “Done.” He finishes, feeling slightly more loose now with nicotine running freely through his system. Along with his own personal cocktail of drugs that he had taken in the morning.

“Those ungrateful little..” He shakes his head again, deciding not to say what's exactly on his mind.

Easterman gets up, fixing then tugging down a couple inches off his tie to breathe. He leans back against his desk. The backs of his tweed slacks press comfortably into its carefully carved edge. “You won't leave me, right?” he asks. “I know you won't.” He cuts you off with a laugh that goes on a little too long than you wanted it to.

He's slipping more and more each day.

You were one of the very few reasons Easterman had left for him to stay sane. It was a dangerous game, playing along with him. Whatever antics Easterman had at the time, you went along. Happily. Willingly. God's favorite lamb yet to be slaughtered, as he so lovingly put it.

“Come here, lamb.” He says, tired. With a small gesture, he summons you forward, and you obey. Just like he taught you. It's enough to make him smile, really. Leather creaks under your weight as you push off the couch. You already know where this is going.

It was almost routine.

Easterman's arms wrap around your form. He presses you to his chest and takes a deep inhale of your scent. It does more to calm his nerves than the long forgotten cigarette on his table. He pauses for a beat of silence. Then he starts to speak. That charismatic, all-knowing, all-forgiving tone hitting your ears in real time, not through a radio.

“Do you know what makes a relationship, my dear? The foundations of someone like me being with someone like you?” Easterman looks down at you, harsh shadows casting his deep-set eyes in darkness. “A relationship, my dear,” he continues, his voice bordering on affectionate as he hooks a knuckle under your chin. “A relationship is more than just gentle touches like this. More than just frilly words and silly little rhymes to show how much you love me.”

He leans closer, his eyes boring into yours with unnerving intensity. “A relationship requires discipline, my dear. Discipline. Guidance. Unwavering loyalty to the strong,” his grip on your chin tightens. Easterman's thumb digs into your skin, weighing down your lower lip. “Firm hand that guides you in the right direction.” He smiles too widely as the gears in your head start to turn. The wrinkles from countless tired nights in the office seem worth it with the way you looked up at him. It's enough to make him proud, almost. But it took more than just a look in your eye to satisfy a man like him.

You'd be so lost without him. Without all the work he put in to help you. You'd probably lose your head if it wasn't screwed so tightly between your shoulders. You need him as much as he needs you.

Easterman holds you closer, his other hand on the small of your back.

“Can you trust me, lamb? Trust me to guide you?”