“Oh—her successes don’t count, because she killed herself? That’s completely unfair. We all die, Tyler. I want to know how she lived.”

“I realize that. You’ve begun to make that very, very clear.” He sounded furious.

I didn’t care. “But you won’t say anything.”

“I can’t tell you. It’s not that I won’t. It’s that I can’t. Don’t you understand the difference?”

“You’re telling me that the allegiance you have with your friends is more important than sharing her with me.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that.”

“But it’s like that.”

“What do you want from me?” He sounded so pained. “My career—my life—my friends—those things are mine. I made them.” He pointed at himself. “I won’t give them away because you don’t have any heroes.”

“You have been given so much. You had a blue-chip gallery at twenty-four. You’ve had sixteen years of a career that I’m thisclose to never starting. You have friends, property, legacy. You’re right: I don’t have any of that. I don’t have that many friends. I don’t have any money. I don’t have any family. I don’t own anything except these paintings. I don’t have anything at all.”

“You have me,” he yelled.

“No!” I yelled back. “No. I don’t.”

It was so sharp that everything deflated immediately. He took a step back.

I did the same, then looked away, at Temperance.

It became clear to me, in that exact moment, that she was complete; there was nothing else to do. In the horrible silence between us, I took a breath and motioned to Tyler to help me shift her panels closer to each other, and when they were properly assembled we walked up to the loft to stare down at her.

“Oh my God,” he said, and his voice broke a little bit, and he was folding himself around me, pulling me into his body, and then we were kissing, those endless kisses, and I tasted a tear in my mouth.

“How can you be the person that you are?” he asked me. “How do you walk around full of that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, pushing my face into his shirt, realizing the tear was mine, it had leaked out of me somehow, and then I made myself let go of him, and held open the door to the studio and forced him to walk through it.

“Goodbye, Tyler,” I said, shutting the door in his face. I reached for my eyes, expecting to feel another tear, but nothing came out.

Purity & Obedience

Purity
&
Obedience

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

Max answered the door with an unlit cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, mid-laugh. It took less than a second for her smile to fall and her long arms to wrap me in a hug.