About Last Night

Please let Christopher not want to go.

“Sounds lovely,” Christopher said.

Crap.

They rounded a corner, and a warehouse came into view. Expensive cars choked the narrow street. It was the rich-people-slumming sort of opening, then, not the humble kind. Maybe there would be champagne. She could use a drink.

They made their way toward the entrance, weaving among people who seemed to be waiting to get in and others who’d simply chosen the single most obstructive place to plant themselves. Nearly everyone in attendance wore black tie, making Cath feel seriously underdressed in her black shirtdress, fishnets, and ankle boots. “Whose show is this?” she asked as they neared the door.

Judith didn’t answer. Maybe she hadn’t heard the question.

Cath was about to ask again when she overheard the name “Chamberlain.” Suspicion tightened her shoulders. “Judith.” She grabbed her boss by the arm. “Whose show is this?”

But she didn’t need an answer, because just then the last two people standing between her and the inside of the room stepped aside, and she saw a wall full of paintings that sucked all the air out of the night sky.

Oh, shit. She set me up.

Cath wanted to get angry so her righteous indignation could propel her back down the street and onto the Tube and home. She intended to. In a minute. As soon as her feet stopped marching her directly at those paintings for a closer look.

“Hey, that’s her,” someone said.

“Don’t be such a gobshite,” a man answered.

It was her. The white wall presented five large images, each labeled with a numeral in the same font she’d used on her skin. Each featuring one of her tattoos, a thick, black swirl of pigment resembling wrought iron, like a gate. And behind it, a scene from her life.

Number one. Wren in the foreground. Behind her, a visibly pregnant adolescent on a stepladder, stringing tiny Christmas lights along the ceiling of a beige suburban living room. Her face filled with hope and the naïve light of childhood.

Number two. A lit match, its black flame illuminating a burning house and the young woman sitting on the curb in a huge fireman’s jacket, her arms wrapped around her knees and her hands missing in the sleeves. A policeman’s uniformed legs and belt crowded the side of the frame, suggesting the woman’s culpability. Her expression spoke of loss, anger, and abandonment.

Number three. A series of books forming the black squares of a checkerboard, and each square in between featuring a scene of Cath in college. Daydreaming in a classroom. Drinking from a plastic cup at a party. Wrapping her arms around the neck of an anonymous boy and smiling flirtatiously. Sitting on a thin, narrow dorm room bed and staring into space. In every image, her eyes were edgy, tormented.

Number four. A black maze of tangled lines covering the entire canvas like a thicket of brambles, and a series of tiny renditions of her figure wandering through it. One small Cath in a nightgown, trying to free the fabric from a thorn that protruded from the labyrinth. Another sitting in a corner, her head back to look up at the sky. A third holding a passport in one hand and a duffel bag in the other, striding forward as if she knew precisely where she was headed. More of them. All alive, all lost. All carrying on bravely, if purposelessly.

And in the middle, the largest painting of all. Number five. In this one only, the tattoo was no overlay. It was the shattered urban skyline on her own bare stomach. A man knelt in front of her, half in the frame and half out, the back of his head and the breadth of his shoulders as familiar as the shape of her fingernails. He wore the red T-shirt he favored for the studio and a daub of green paint below his ear. She wore a pink cowboy hat emblazoned with the image of a phoenix rising from the ashes. She wore his hands, too, one on her breast, the other at her waist. His thumb sank into the spot where the word CITY was supposed to be. Under his fingers, the tattoo smudged, as if he were wiping it off. She looked down at him. She smiled. Her eyes were in love.

A small paper placard on the wall offered the title of the series. Mary Catherine: A Life. The paintings were unbelievably good. The paintings weren’t for sale.

Something was crushing her lungs, squeezing hard and tight until black spots danced before her eyes. “Breathe,” Judith’s voice instructed, and she opened her mouth and sucked in a loud, gasping breath. Hands to her stomach, she shut her eyes and inhaled, inhaled, inhaled.

He’d painted her. Everything she’d told him, he’d painted. In ocher and vermillion, rendered by Nev’s hands, her life looked different. She looked different. She looked like a victim and a survivor, the final painting a redemption. He promised a happy ending. Her happy ending.

Her lungs still hurt. “Exhale,” Judith said, and she did, and then she inhaled again.

“I have to get out of here.” Her voice filtered up from the bottom of the ocean.

But when she turned around, she spotted him off to her right, surrounded by strangers. He wore a tuxedo with the bow tie undone. His cheeks were pink, his collar button unfastened, and he was saying something to a woman Cath recognized as the arts reporter from The Guardian who had interviewed her the week before. He looked absolutely, devastatingly handsome. Water in the desert. A life preserver thrown to her drowning heart. He was everything in the world she wanted and couldn’t have.

He saw her. He saw her, and then he smiled the way he’d always smiled at her, as if they were the only two people in the room, and he loved her, and he’d very much like to find out what she had on under her dress. That shark smile. That Big Bad Wolf grin. It got to her like nothing else ever had or ever would.

She needed a wall to lean on. A column. An arm. Anything. She reached out for Judith, but Judith had disappeared. There were only strangers, and the paintings, and Nev striding toward her looking like 007.

He arrived, and so did the smell of him, that blend of turpentine and peppercorns and forest floor and man that her nervous system had filed away under the heading “Sex.” The room got smaller and hotter, more crowded and empty of anyone but Nev.

“Hello, love,” he said.

Put up a fight.

She gave it a try. “I could sue you for this.”