You’re going to make a mistake with him, Charlotte. I don’t know what that mistake will be and neither do you, but it doesn’t matter, you and I both know you will. Will it be worth it, just for his hands on your skin? Will it be worth him slipping through your fingers, bleeding through the cracks in your constitution, just to be reminded you’re the kind of person people leave? Maybe it will, because look at his mouth, look at the shape it makes when his eyes are on you. You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It’s the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It’s him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he’ll be a specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now. This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you’ve always understood that. You’ve always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.
Grow up, Charlotte, and accept things as they are. You are not in love with Rinaldo Damiani whose hair smells like Sunday morning in the sun, you do not even know him, he doesn’t know you. You can rest your hands on the scars of his shoulders and long to rid him of every breath of pain and still, you will not be in love with him, because this isn’t love. Love is a home and a mortgage and the promise of permanence; love is measured and paced, and this, the too-hasty sprint of your pulse, that’s drugs. You know drugs, don’t you, Charlotte? Euphoria can be bottled, it can be smoked, it will dissolve on your tongue and burn through the vacant cavity of your empty fucking chest. His hands on you, that can be preserved, it can be painted, it can be committed to the canvas of your imagination, and it can stay in the vaults of your private longings, your little reveries, your twisted dreams.
Accept it, Charlotte. Accept it and grow up. You’re an adult, Charlotte, act like one.
Charlotte Regan, you fool, you’ve been stuck inside a trance, wake up.
Wake up, Regan.
Regan, look at me. Wake up.
Tell the voice in your head to be quiet, would you? I know you’re not here right now, I know you’re lost somewhere that I can’t go or touch or see, but look me in my green eyes and tell me what else matters. Bees, Regan, think of the bees, think about the implausibility of time and space, think of impossible things. Think about the stars in Babylon and tell me, Regan, all this time we’ve been talking and you’ve been syncopating your breath to mine and your pulse to mine and your thoughts to my thoughts, you’ve been learning how to love me, haven’t you? If I am a lover of impossible problems then you will have loved me for my impossibilities, so tell me, Regan, what else matters but this, me, us?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Welcome back, Regan.
I missed you while you were away.
* * *
“ALDO?”
His eyes snapped open. He hadn’t been sleeping, obviously—the weed had helped, but even so, he was in John and Helen Regan’s guest room, which was too foreign a thought to lull him to even the vaguest approximation of sleep—but still, her voice in the dark was startling. She was half a dream as she carefully pushed open the door.
He sat up slightly, catching the motion of moonlight from the window falling on bare legs. She crept across the wooden floors with an air of practice, avoiding a spot near the door, and bounded lightly over to where he lay in the bed before perching on the edge of the mattress.
“Did I wake you?” she asked him. Her hair fell loose and half-dried around her face, parted like a curtain in the center.
“No,” he said, “not really.”
“Good.” She nudged him over, sliding in next to him. “Did you have fun? Or, you know. Something like it.”
“Something like it,” he confirmed, turning on his side to face her. “Definitely something like it.”
“Good.” She was buzzing a little, almost vibrating with something indefinable. Excitement, maybe. She had, after all, snuck into his room, and perhaps not all elements of youthful rebellion faded with age. “You’re a good dancer.”
So was she. The rest of her family had mostly left them alone for the remainder of the evening and her mother, Helen, had looked deliberately at the wall behind his head. He could tell （he wasn’t stupid） that it was a distasteful sort of apathy, something he should resent or, more helpfully, repair, but he wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea of them communicating as little as possible.