Damien

The portrait sitting gets rescheduled twice before Anastasia finally pins down a date that works for all three of us, and by the time it arrives I’ve almost convinced myself I was over the whole tension with Lucas.

Almost.

I tell myself I’m over it during the drive home.. I tell myself again while I change out of my suit into the outfits picked for the portrait a black and blue custom made Tuxedo perfectly tailored, I was still in my head as I walk down the stairs

I pause…staring at Lucas who was setting up in the front room easel angled toward the light, sleeves pushed up, entirely too composed for someone who ran out of this house apologizing three weeks ago I didn’t realize he had arrived.

“Mr. Voss.” He look up from arranging his brushes.

“Damien” I say, again, like last time didn’t happen. Like we’re starting fresh.

“Right. Damien.” He finally glances at me, and there’s something careful in it, something deliberately neutral, and I realize he’s decided to play this exactly the way I would pretend it didn’t happen, get through the sitting, move on with our lives or so I thought.

It should be a relief but it isn’t, not quite.

Anastasia comes down a few minutes later in her beautiful blue dress which is a match for my outfit, and the sitting begins the two of us arranged on the settee the way Lucas directs, my arm along the back of it, her hand resting on my knee, both of us angled toward each other in a pose that’s supposed to read as intimate and instead just feels like work.

Lucas works in near silence at first, sketching, adjusting the light, occasionally asking one of us to turn a fraction this way or that. I find myself watching him more than I mean to the concentration in his face, the quick, sure movements of his hand across the paper, the way he chews the inside of his cheek when he’s working something out.

“You’re tense,” he says, without looking up, maybe forty minutes in.

“I’m fine.”

“Your jaw’s doing a thing.” He glances at Anastasia. “Both of you, actually. You look like you’re posing for a hostage photo, not an engagement portrait.”

Anastasia laughs genuinely, surprised into it and some of the stiffness goes out of her shoulders. I feel the corner of my own mouth pull despite myself.

“Better,” Lucas says, already sketching again. “Whatever that was, do more of it.”

“What, laughing at your expense?”

“If that’s what it takes.” He doesn’t look up, but I catch the ghost of a smile before he schools his face back into concentration, and something in my chest tightens in a way I don’t examine.

We break after an hour. Anastasia excuses herself to take a call from her father, and I should go with her, should use the interruption to put some distance between myself and this room, but instead I find myself still standing there while Lucas packs away his tools.

“You’re good with her,” I say, before I’ve decided to say anything at all. “Getting her to relax like that.”

“She’s easy to work with.” He looks up from his supplies. “You, less so.”

“I’m not the one who wandered into the wrong room.”

It’s out before I can stop it sharper than I mean it, but also the first time either of us has acknowledged it out loud, and I watch it land. His hands go still over his case for half a second.

“No,” he agrees quietly. “You’re not.”

Neither of us says anything else about it. But when he looks up at me this time, there’s nothing neutral in it at all, and I understand, with a kind of dread that feels uncomfortably close to want, that pretending isn’t going to be as easy as either of us hoped.

“Same time next week?” he asks, voice perfectly even, like he hasn’t just looked at me like that.

“Same time next week,” I say, and immediately hate how much I mean it.