Chapter 2

Luna’s POV

The smell of turpentine clung to my skin like guilt I couldn’t wash off.

It was 3:17 a.m., and I stood barefoot in my studio, wearing nothing but an oversized, paint-streaked shirt and a pair of underwear I couldn’t remember putting on. My fingers trembled from too much coffee and too little food, hovering just above the last blank canvas. My bank account was a joke. I hadn’t paid my rent. I’d been living off wine, cigarettes, and instant ramen.The final piece for tonight’s show. My chest tightened. I still hadn’t touched it.

Twelve hours until the gallery opened, three hours to sunrise. I kept glancing at the clock like the hands might slow down out of mercy, but they didn’t. I was out of time and nearly out of nerves. The anxiety gnawed at my stomach like it had teeth.

I dipped the brush into blood-red oil, and without letting myself hesitate, I made the first stroke. Then another. The canvas responded like skin. Each line I drew felt like opening a wound.

A mouth. Open in ecstasy—or agony. My strokes blurred the difference. Her body arched like she’d been caught mid-climax, hips twisting, spine bending. Each brushstroke vibrated through my wrist like a whisper I couldn’t say out loud. I painted what I never told anyone. The moments we couldn’t speak about. What I craved but hadn’t tasted in months. Years even.

Lust. Hunger. That aching, pulsing desperation.

I didn’t paint pretty flowers or moody landscapes. I painted what pulsed under the skin. I painted what people looked away from too quickly. I painted the raw, sticky stuff of obsession and the quiet destruction it left behind.

By the time sunlight leaked into the studio, I was soaked with sweat, paint streaked across my thighs, my face, even my chest. My shirt clung to me in patches, and I didn’t care. I looked at the canvas and felt something in me still vibrating.

The woman I’d painted looked like she was coming undone.

And she looked like me— is me.

Not in the features, no. But in the way her body strained, like she’d surrendered to something that didn’t ask permission. Her eyes were closed, lips parted. Her hands gripped invisible shoulders. I stared at her and felt exposed, even alone in that paint-scented room.

I signed the corner with a shaky hand.

Done.

The gallery in El Raval was small and imperfect, wedged between a tattoo parlor and a bakery that always smelled like burnt sugar. Nico had promised me this show would matter. He was the kind of man who called all women “mami” and always had paint under his fingernails, but he believed in me— or at least believed that sex sells. That counted for something.

The space was old, the plaster cracked in places, but the lighting was warm and deliberate, the air carried that faint sterile art-smell, and the wine—cheap but drinkable—was being poured generously. I’d hung my more intimate works in the back room, separated by a thick velvet curtain. That space felt sacred. The kind of room people entered slowly, like stepping into someone’s diary.

By seven, people started coming in.

Mostly locals, fellow artists— artists I had slept with or refused to sleep with, a couple of writers who pretended they weren’t looking at the erotic pieces. They sipped cheap white wine, dropped vague compliments, and nodded in that rehearsed way people do when they don’t understand what they’re seeing.

I floated around, offering rehearsed smiles, answering questions I didn’t care about. But beneath the surface, I was still wired. Still vibrating with something I hadn’t shaken since that last painting.

Then I felt it.

That subtle shift. Like the air had thickened. Like something—someone—had entered the room who didn’t belong.

I turned toward the back.

And I saw him.

He stood by the velvet curtain, tall and composed, dressed in a dark suit that fit like a sin. No tie. His shirt open at the collar. He hadn’t touched a wine glass. He hadn’t spoken to anyone.

He wasn’t looking at me.

He was staring at her—the painting.

The one I’d finished hours ago in a fevered trance.

His posture didn’t waver. His hands were in his pockets, his jaw tight. There was a stillness about him, a kind of power that didn’t have to announce itself.

Then his gaze moved.

Slowly.

To me.

And my breath caught.

I’ve never been shy, but that stare—it sliced through me like heat. He didn’t look at me like a man seeing a woman. He looked like a man discovering something he’d already claimed in his mind. Like he’d already touched me. Tasted me. Broken me in half and left me begging for more.

I couldn’t move. His gaze pinned me like a brushstroke to canvas.

Something fluttered in my belly. Not butterflies—something heavier. Darker. Want.

He didn’t smile. Didn’t nod. Just… looked.

And then, without a word, he turned and walked out.

Gone.

The noise in the gallery returned, but it all sounded like static now. The lights were too bright. My skin, too tight. I felt like I’d been peeled back and examined with gloved fingers.

Later that night, after the last guest had left, I stayed behind to clean.

No sales. No offers.

A few compliments. Some admiration.

One critic had called the work “almost pornographic.” Another had muttered “emotional instability masquerading as art.”

But mostly silence.

I sat on the cold floor of the gallery with my knees pulled to my chest, staring at the red painting like it might answer something.

It didn’t.

But I knew what I’d felt.

He’d looked at it—at me—like it mattered. Like it made him feel something dangerous.

I didn’t know his name. Didn’t know why he’d left so abruptly.

But I wanted him to come back.

And worse—I wanted him to touch me like he’d already done it in his mind.

And I hated how much I needed that.