“The food, of course,” he answered, taking a bite of his calzone.
“It’s a good thing angels don’t need to worry about high cholesterol,” I joked.
He laughed, and the sound warmed me. “Actually, it’s the language. I find Italian to be the most beautiful and expressive of all the human languages.”
I shifted into Italian immediately. “So, Phen,” I asked, “what do you do? When you’re not playing tour guide to American angel-bloods?”
“Many things. I write. I paint. I think about things. . . .” He leaned forward, caught me in his magnetic smile.
I blushed. I wanted him to like me so much.
“What do you do,” he asked, “when you’re not startling angels in churches?”
“I have a thing for horror movies. And I play the violin. And I read.” I skimmed over the part where I researched everything I could get my hands on about angels and the Nephilim and their ways. It sounded too nerdy. “I write some, too. Poetry. Not very good.”
“I would love to hear you play the violin sometime,” he said.
“I would love to see your paintings sometime,” I said right back at him.
He nodded. “After lunch, then,” he said, as if that settled it. “We’ll go back to my flat.”
His flat. I gulped down a glass of wine.
Once we were there, enclosed by the walls of his apartment, I was so nervous that I kept bumping into things. His flat was just as he was: tasteful and elegant but not old-fashioned, a mix of modern furniture and well-kept antiques. The art studio was at the back. He led me inside and turned on the lights. I wandered from painting to painting, from cityscapes of Rome to close-ups of flowers, to canvases crowded with people or stunning singular portraits. The subjects of his paintings were all different, but there was something similar about them, a unifying factor that marked them as created by the same hand. It had to do with the use of light and how he used it to show the life of the thing he painted, like there was something bright pushing out from inside a child’s body or a flower’s petals or from some particular archway of an ancient building, radiating outward, something that transcended the physical. He cleared his throat like he was embarrassed, exposed through his work.
“So. You’ve seen my paintings,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”
From somewhere he produced a violin, a bow, then led me out to the living room, where he sat down on the sofa, his elbows on his knees, and waited for me to play. It was an old, gorgeous violin, so much nicer than the one I had at home. I tucked it under my chin gently, closed my eyes, and began to play a song I knew by heart from Bach’s Chaconne, a difficult piece but one that never failed to sweep me away. The music swelled around us, filling the room, and I poured all my longing into it, my desires, like I was telling my life story through the notes as they winnowed up and around me. Like I was telling Phen the things I didn’t dare to say out loud.
When I finished and opened my eyes again, Phen had tears on his cheeks. So did I.
“Beautiful,” he murmured, and I knew that he was talking about more than the song. He was gazing at me like I was a butterfly trapped in his net, like he was tempted to pin me up behind glass even though he knew he should let me fly away.
I swallowed. My heart was dancing, my head swimming, my body alive with sensation.
Finally. So this is what it feels like, I thought, to be in love.
I spent a great deal of time the following year thinking up ways to seduce Phen. I didn’t know how just yet, since I didn’t know anything about how one goes about seducing anybody, at that point. But I would learn. I would figure it out. I didn’t care if it was crazy. I was going to live my life without holding anything back, I told myself. I was going to taste those perfectly sculpted lips of his. I was going to feel his arms around me.
I was going to be his, and he was going to be mine.
I threw myself into the research of how one might tempt an angel, with the same kind of passion I used for all my other research. It was the painting, I thought. That was my way in. He liked beautiful things. I would become a beautiful thing. I would become a muse.
He emailed me a few days before I flew to Rome for the second summer. I’d given him a piece of paper with my contact information on it, but he hadn’t been in touch until now: this brief message from [email protected], no kidding.
It said, I am looking forward to seeing you.
I took that as a good sign.
For the first couple weeks back in Rome we fell into the same routine from the year before. Tuesdays and Fridays. We walked. We talked, although mostly it was Phen who did the talking. I was suddenly, inexplicably, tongue-tied around him. But he didn’t bring me to his flat again. He took me to museums and cafés and churches, always bringing me home at sunset. “See you next time,” he’d say. Next time.
“See you,” I’d answer. Plotting, plotting, how next time I would make my big move.
Then one day I simply worked up the guts and showed up at his flat. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I knocked. He answered, wearing a paint-splatted white T-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees, wiping his hands on a cloth. My head spun, seeing him like that, in the middle of his process. My heart felt like it would burst. I love you, I thought immediately, and it was embarrassing, the way I’d fallen so hard and he didn’t have a clue.
He looked genuinely surprised to see me.
“Hello,” he said in Angelic, our private joke.
Here goes nothing, I thought.
“I want you to paint me,” I said, jumping right to the chase. “Will you paint me, Phen?”
His eyebrows rumpled at my request.
“Please?” I asked, my voice wavering. I’d been planning this for months, but at that moment I was scared.
He nodded and stepped back to let me come into his apartment. He dragged his green sofa into his studio and told me to lay down on it. I had a flash of Leonardo DiCaprio painting Kate Winslet aboard the Titanic, the way she held up the diamond and said something like, “I want you to paint me in this. In only this.”
He went into the kitchen to clean out his brushes and prepare a new set, and I fumbled around getting into a slinky black nightie I’d brought for the occasion. It was too much, I knew immediately after I’d put it on. This whole thing was a huge mistake. He’d think it was lewd.
Too late. He came back into the room and stopped short when he saw me. I fought the urge to pull down the nightie, which ended at the tops of my thighs. Too short. Indecent. Improper. Crass. I’d screwed up. I’d messed up any chance I would have ever had with him.