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“Nothing,” Leo admitted. “But at least you wouldn’t have to be alone.”
Words were building behind my teeth, chalky, like old bone, and sharp enough to make my gums bleed. I was frightened of uttering them—of what they could make real—but they broke free anyway. “I don’t care about being alone. I care about my art. My fucking art.”44
“Okay.” It was so quiet upon the river, I heard the ripple of Leo’s breath. “I can’t imagine how any of this must feel. But the reality is, you probably have years before—”
“This isn’t about years,” I snarled. Sobbed. I couldn’t tell “This is aboutnow. I can’t—”Can’tbarely scratched the surface of the nothing that had rooted itself inside me, spreading like knotweed in some once-blooming garden. “I don’t know how to do it anymore.”
“Oh, Marius,” said Leo again.
And this time—with my composure in tatters, naked amidst my truths—I couldn’t bear it. Him. Anything. “Don’t.”
“Okay.” He pulled back the hand he had been reaching towards me. “Sorry.”
The silence that followed was full of my breath: too harsh, too quick, too close to weeping. I wanted him to put his arms around me and hold me, tighter than I’d ever let anyone hold me, tight enough to keep me together. But I also knew if he touched me, I’d lash out like the lost and ferine creature I’d always been.
Eventually I calmed enough to dash the moisture from my eyes with the side of my wrist and pretend it had never been there to begin with. The sun was buttermilk pale where it gleamed upon the river—light at its most transient, belonging only to a single moment.
“I’m not an expert,” Leo began.
I sniffed, hoping it might come across as a disparaging sniff, rather than a just-been-crying-my-fucked-up-heart-out sniff. “Not an expert but about to offer advice anyway. Bold.”
“No advice. But I’m sure every kind of creator in the world must go through periods where they’re stuck or stressed or uninspired. Isn’t that normal?”
I curled my hands over the side of the boat. The wood wasbeautifully smooth, splinterless, but it was cold enough to hurt. “You know Cole Porter wroteKiss Me, Kateafter he had both legs and his pelvis crushed by a horse?”45
“And?”
“Daudet produced at least eight novels while he was wasting away from neurosyphilis.”
“So?”
“And then there’s Picasso. Probably easier to list whatwasn’twrong with him. Or what about Homer Martin or Henri Harpignies? Jules Chéret even.” My mind swooped and whirled. My voice rose. “Auguste Ravier. Louis Valtat. Roger Bissière. I think George du Maurier went completely blind in one eye.”
“You do realise you’re just saying names at me now?”
“I was going to be like them.” Below me, the ice spread across the water in baroque tendrils, as intricate as feathers or fern leaves. “I wasn’t going to be stopped. Or defeated. At first, I was so…defiant. There was this collaboration that everyone says is one of the best things I’ve ever done. But afterwards…” I hunched over the railing, my body ready to fly apart, shatter itself against the river, the sky, the stinging air. “I don’t know. I didn’t feel defiant anymore. I didn’t feel brave. Or anything really except crushed. Crushed and hollow and worthless.”
“You’re not worthless.” At last, I had ruptured Leo’s calm. He sounded stricken. “And you’re more than your art.”
I spun around, forgetting he would see the leftover tears on my cheeks. “I’m not. Or I don’t want to be. You’ve seen what I’m like. I can’t…I can’t only be this.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Leo said, so sweetly, hopelessly desperate it could have broken my heart, “you’re lots of things. Most people are.”
I shook my head. “Not me. Without my art, there’s nothing but ugliness inside me.”
His hand came up again, reaching out to me again in comfort or kindness I supposed, some other gift of his goodness I still didn’t know how to let myself have. For a second or two, we were caught upon each other, entangled like sea wrack, and then Leo whispered, “Marius. Please,” and I staggered, bereft, into his arms. Regretting it almost immediately because this was not who I was. This weeping craven, clinging to a stranger.
I shuddered, trying to find the will to push him back. “Enough.”
“It’s okay to—”
“Enough,” I said again.
He’d moved away by the time I started to struggle, and I was already unbalanced from my sprain. What happened next was, I suppose, weighted with farcical inevitability. Leo trying to steady me. Me knocking his arm aside. Hard enough that the sound of it—my skin against his—cracked through the silence like crows startled into flight. A rumble of warning from him. A half-formed apology from me. And then an ill-advised step when there was nowhere farther to step. My ankle giving way beneath me. The edge of the boat catching me in just the wrong place. My knees buckling.
No way for me to get my balance.
Time slowed—I saw the shock widening Leo’s eyes, the skybehind him azure, pristine—and sped up. I had seconds to understand I was falling, to feel the lurch in my stomach and the emptiness at my back, and then I crashed into the water, ice splintering beneath me, followed by the pure, sharp shock of cold. The coldest cold, endless and remorseless, as if you could plunge into it, and through it, and never get out again. I surged to the surface, spluttering, gasping, thrashing. Only to find Leo beside me, the utter arsehole, turning me onto my back and telling me—or trying to, because he was shaking so hard his teeth were clacking together—not to panic. I wanted to insist I wasn’t panicking. Except I might have been. Just from the sheer physical impact. Beside me, I could hear Leo taking harsh, doggedly even breaths. I tried to match him, and my heart slowed a little.
