The Proviso

by Moriah Jovan

  It was the sixth painting at which Sebastian felt moisture on his hands and he realized Eilis was crying, her head bowed, her tears dripping onto his skin. He’d been so caught up in seeing how much the lot of them would fetch, he’d nearly forgotten that he had his arms around one very heartbroken woman.

  “Hey,” he said softly, shaking out a handkerchief. He caught her chin and pulled her face around until she looked at him. He gently wiped her tears, then turned her in his arms so she couldn’t see—and she took him up on that immediately. She clung to him, her hand wrapped around his neck, her fingers in his hair, and sobbed quietly in his neck.

  Eilis’s pain was so great that Sebastian felt no satisfaction that the eight pieces had fetched fifty-five percent of her debt. Now, if she’d only put Morning in Bed up, too . . .

  At least Sebastian had managed to buy her three favorites.

  The room emptied and still she leaned on him. Her face was a mess, but she wasn’t crying anymore.

  “I’m sorry to have made you do this, Eilis,” he murmured. “It was for the good of your company and your employees and I’m proud of you for putting them first.”

  “Sebastian,” she whispered, “make love to me, please.”

  Sebastian’s breath caught in his throat and his eyes widened. “Eilis, do you remember how you ended up in the saleroom at Christie’s?”

  She hiccuped. “Yes, but I trust you.”

  He grasped her upper arms and set her just far away from him enough so she could look in his face and see just how angry he was.

  “Do you take me for a fool?” he hissed and her tear-streaked face betrayed her complete and utter shock. “Dammit, Eilis, what do I have to do to knock some sense into your head? You don’t want me. You want comfort sex and any cock will do.” She flinched and he didn’t care. “I’m tired of being your fan club, Eilis. I won’t be the stopgap between nobody and this asshole you have in your head who does not exist who you want to give you something you can’t define. Whatever it is you’re looking for? Not here. Not in my pants. Not in my bed.

  “Vacation? Done. One month. I’ll take over your job so you can find your precious Ford,” he snarled as he released her. “Maybe he can fix whatever it is I can’t reach and you’re apparently not willing to.” He walked away from her without a backward glance. She could find her own way back to the hotel.

  That night he paced his hotel room, his headset practically melting from the heat of his rage, barking orders at Giselle and getting angrier every time she tried to talk him down, to plead with him not to do what he planned, to tell him it’d backfire and he’d be sorry.

  “I’m going to kill that bastard!” he roared at her before hanging up on her. “And you’re going to help me. You owe me, Giselle.”

  * * * * *

  “I love you,” she sighed into his mouth, his cock sliding easily, oh! so easily in and out of her, the weight of his body comforting and not at all heavy.

  He chuckled. “I love you, too, Eilis.”

  The snow under her naked body was not cold and the December air didn’t sting her skin. Snowflakes melted on his body as they landed. She opened her eyes, but his face lay in shadow and shade. Beside her, crocuses and hyacinths, tulips and daffodils sprang up in her line of sight and she thought she had never seen such a beautiful thing in her entire life: tulips and daffodils in the snow.

  She ran her hands up his body, from those buttocks she knew so well, up his rib cage, to his shoulders. She was about to come and the shadow passed from his face. For the first time, she would see him, who he was—

  Eilis awoke abruptly, her hand between her legs, and she came. When her breathing had calmed, she buried her face in a pillow and sobbed. It was the same every time she had this dream, only the locales changed. She would awaken on an orgasm she’d given herself and never remembered initiating.

  Only tonight, she’d seen his face and she was horrified. It was everything she had never expected. Terrible. Frightening.

  Sebastian’s face. Ford’s body. How had that happened?

  First her company, then her garden, then her vault, then her fridge, then her diet, then her body, and now her dreams. Would that man leave nothing of hers untouched?

  Eilis clicked on her bedside light so she could look at her painting, her Morning in Bed. She wished she could bleach her brain so she could get rid of that visual.

  She didn’t want them mixed. It was . . . wrong.

  Ford she had wanted to do a specific thing, once.

  Sebastian she needed. For a long time, maybe forever, if she thought he wouldn’t turn away from her on learning of her past.

  But she had burned that bridge because she never suspected he resented Ford until he left her on her conference room table. She certainly wouldn’t have known how deep his resentment of Ford went until he’d lashed out at her at Christie’s.

  In retrospect, she saw it clearly: Chanel and Ford—the two things guaranteed to make Sebastian’s expression freeze, his body tense, his temper flare.

  Her breath came short in panic when she thought of the look on his face, the anger of a man utterly betrayed, and in that moment, she understood how foolish she’d been not to take what Sebastian had offered her to begin with.

  But had he offered her anything, really?

  Shouldn’t she expect that a man who wanted to offer a woman something would talk to her, let her know his thoughts? That he hated how she looked in Chanel? That he hated her obsession with Ford? That he wanted to be with her and he found these things hurtful?

  Shouldn’t she expect him to open his mouth and speak? In words?

  She didn’t know because she had never had a relationship like that, nor, apparently, had Sebastian.

  Hurt to her soul, she sighed. It didn’t matter. He’d turned his back and wouldn’t listen to a thing she had to say at this point.

  She knew because she’d tried. Every phone call she made, she got voice mail. When she’d shown up at HRP to talk to him, he disappeared. Every email and text message she sent, she got the same auto-reply: YOU’RE ON VACATION

  Now she had nothing to hold onto but Ford.

  * * * * *

  50: TIME TO SAY GOODBYE

  MARCH 2007

  Eilis sat on the floor with a magnifying glass going over every inch of the painting leaned against the wall. She sighed. If this portrait contained any clues as to Ford’s identity, they were too cryptic. After years of studying it, she suspected the rumored “clues” simply didn’t exist. The only option she had left was to hire an art historian, but the thought made her uneasy.

  After several long teleconferences with the private investigators she had spread out over the country, the truth had started to gel: Ford didn’t exist. His ephemeral trail stopped in Chicago.

  Eilis dropped her forehead in her palm, at her breaking point. She must find Ford.

  Soon.

  After that dream, she’d barely slept again and spent every waking moment playing Sherlock Holmes. In the last three days, she had managed to doze off only far enough for the dream to start again. She couldn’t remember the last time she ate; it wasn’t important.

  Frustrated, she gave up for the time being and dressed to go turn her compost, something she could do in the dark by the light of the floodlights. She headed out the back door only to stop when the phone rang. At first, her heart thudded, but then she remembered: She’d dismissed her private investigators at their last conference call when each agreed Ford could not be found and they all had better things to do. She nearly ignored it, but she’d never ignored a ringing phone in her life.

  “Hello?”

  “Um, hi. Is this Eilis Logan?” said a woman whose voice Eilis didn’t recognize.

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “I’m an agent for the artist Ford. You can stop looking for him.”

  Her heart thundered and her breath caught. Her mouth was so dry she could barely speak.

  “What does that mean, precise
ly?” Eilis asked carefully.

  “It means you got his attention. He’ll paint you.”

  They’d done it. Whichever PI had done this would get a nice fat bonus.

  Eilis paused. “Is this a joke?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” The woman’s voice was hard, flat. “If you really do want him to paint you, you’ll be picked up from your house and taken to his studio blindfolded.”

  “He’s here?” Eilis whispered. “In Kansas City? I thought—”

  “No. You’ve been looking in all the wrong places. And F-Y-I—there aren’t any clues in the painting, either. If you want Ford to paint you, these are the terms. You won’t be able to find him on your own.”

  “Does he even know what I look like?”

  The woman gave an unamused bark of laughter. “You have your people. He has his. So. Can you be ready in an hour? Eleven o’clock? I’ll pick you up. I’m driving a silver-blue BMW.”

  An hour! “What— I can’t— Not that fast.”

  “You have an hour,” she repeated. “And pack a bag. You never know with him.”

  Eilis dropped the phone and looked around her kitchen like she’d never seen it before. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move until she walked like a zombie up to her room to shower and pack.

  Then she closed up her house and sat down in her courtyard to wait, her bag by her side, unable to do anything but stare at the cleverly lit obelisk in her roundabout, wondering what she had set in motion and why she felt so . . . not thrilled.

  Sebastian’s words came back to her: Do you remember how you ended up in the saleroom at Christie’s?

  And so now, instead of having sex with and then marrying David in the aftermath of a front-row seat to September 11, or begging Sebastian to make love to her after watching the sacrifice of her precious art, she intended to go to an unknown place blindfolded with an unknown woman presumably to be painted by an unknown man who painted pictures of nude women. After he’d had sex with them.

  She knew her judgment was severely stunted and she figured she’d deserved to lose those paintings. Still here she sat, willing to play this through to the last hand to see if she could win anything back.

  You’re not a good gambler.

  Not when she gambled on emotion, she wasn’t.

  Like tonight.

  Soon she heard an engine outside her gate and opened it. As promised, a silver-blue BMW drove up to the courtyard and obscured her view of the obelisk. A woman emerged, and Eilis stood to walk toward the car, bag in hand.

  She stood much shorter than Eilis and had a very compact body, muscular yet slightly curvy. Wisps of her shoulder-length curls flickered different shades of a rich blonde in the light from the obelisk, but then she turned—“You— You’re the Virgin,” she whispered.

  “Yup, that’s me. Only not a virgin anymore. Got your stuff?”

  Eilis breathed a sigh of some relief, her unarticulated fear of a hoax laid to rest.

  The Virgin, who didn’t seem particularly happy to be there nor inclined to tell her her name, picked up her bag and put it in the trunk. She gestured to Eilis to get in the car and then she did. Once they reached the end of the driveway, she stopped for Eilis to close the gate. That done, the Virgin tied a wide black scarf around Eilis’s face, making sure she could see nothing.

  Eilis tried to track their course from the map in her head, but after the first turn north and the first turn east, a curve threw her. She’d lost her bearings.

  The ride was a long one.

  Eilis didn’t speak because the Virgin didn’t until— “Eilis, do you really want to do this?”

  What an odd question from the model of the most infamous Ford painting since Morning in Bed.

  Eilis swallowed. “Yes. Why?”

  “Mmmm, seems to me you could go about gathering enlightenment in a less dangerous way.”

  “And . . . you’re different from me how?”

  Jealous I’m taking your place?

  “Ha! That’s funny. He badgered me into it.”

  Eilis blinked, not having expected such an answer. “Did you— Him—” Eilis stopped. It was rude and no, Eilis didn’t really want to know.

  “Not on your life,” she replied anyway. “Dude doesn’t do anything for me. Eww.”

  Eilis bit her lip. “Morning in Bed. Is that really him?”

  “Yes.”

  A thrill ran through her, curiosity hard on its heels. “And he doesn’t attract you?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said flatly. “Does it look like he fucked me?”

  No. Which was why it was notorious.

  Eilis started when she felt the Virgin’s hand lightly cover her clenched fist. “Eilis,” she said, her voice softening. Eilis was only too eager to listen to any conversation because she couldn’t see. One more second of silence would crush her. “That painting happened because I had met a man I thought I couldn’t have, so it made me ache for the rest of what would come with a man, a lover, a husband. So I was in pain. And he wanted to capture that.”

  Eilis let that settle. “It is devastating,” she murmured. “I almost cried when I saw it.”

  “I guess that’s a common reaction. Neither of us thought it would be that powerful.”

  “What—what’s the significance of the books on the bed? It was a Bible and— I don’t remember the other one.”

  “Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin.” The Virgin took a deep breath, then expelled it with a whoosh. “Religion and radical feminism have one thing in common: They seek to denigrate women for wanting sex with men. In religion’s case, woman is the enemy, the sinful Eve figure if not the Lilith one, the succubus, the seducer of righteous men into evil deeds. It presupposes that men are without evil inclinations in the first place. It’s the thinking that positions a rape victim as asking for it because obviously, the rapist was just an innocent bystander. A woman should have only one interest in sex, and that’s to procreate.

  “In the case of radical feminism, man is the enemy because, of course, all men seek to dominate and entrap women into indentured servitude or worse. While this is true for some men, it isn’t true of all men and not all women want the same things from a sexual relationship with a man. A woman who wants sex with a man is seen as unenlightened at best and weak at worst. It gives no quarter for women who, you know, maybe want sex with a man because they like it and maybe want to have a baby. And that’s not even getting into any kink. I knew what I wanted and that painting was a statement on the fact that I couldn’t get it.”

  “Was all that symbolism your idea?”

  “Between us, we narrowed it down to those two factions and those two books, but he already had a solid idea of what he wanted to do. Ford can cut through bullshit faster than anybody I know and distill everything down to its essence. He looked at me and that painting is what he saw.”

  “What’s he like?” Eilis whispered, eager to know more about him, more about the way he thought, more details that would give her two-dimensional painting its third dimension.

  “Not sure how to answer that. He just is. He’s different things to different people. I mean, he’s pretty much always the same; it’s just that people see him differently according to context and their own issues.”

  “Everybody sees everybody else like that.”

  “Mmmm, yeah, but with him? You know how people say, ‘Actions speak louder than words’? Not true with him. His reputation—undeserved—speaks way louder than his actions. So loud that nobody sees what he actually does.”

  Eilis suddenly felt like they were talking about someone else; Ford didn’t have a reputation. She opened her mouth to ask more, but the car stopped and died. “We’re here. Don’t take off your blindfold or I’ll take you back home right now.”

  She sat in the car until the Virgin came around to help her out onto a steeply sloped sidewalk. The Virgin walked on the downside of her and guided her to a door that opened to cool air reeking of turpentine and oil pa
int.

  The Virgin came back with her bag and closed the door behind her. “Okay. You can take off the blindfold now.”

  She didn’t know what she’d expected Ford’s studio to look like, but this wasn’t it.

  It was an enormous concrete rectangle with harsh fluorescent lights overhead. A heavy canvas tarp haphazardly covered most of the concrete floor. Boxes of art supplies were piled high along an entire stretch of wall beside which stood a large cabinet with an enormous sink. Five-by-five-foot canvases lined another wall. One very large tarp-covered canvas, perhaps ten feet wide and eight feet high, leaned against a different wall.

  A magenta Victorian velveteen chaise, the only furniture in the room, stood in the center of the room. Just ahead of her, a switchback staircase rose into darkness. To the right of that, eight wide, richly carved cherry panels with elaborate filigree iron wheels at the top and bottom floated between tracks in the ceiling and floor.

  “Come with me,” said the Virgin and led her to the cherry panels. She pulled back two panels and turned up the lights. Eilis stopped and gasped. The Virgin stepped aside to allow Eilis to take in details.

  A massive dark cherry four-poster bed, hung with velvets and chiffons of green, gold, and purple, sat on a broad two-step dais at a diagonal. A footstool sat on the floor to its left. The linens, the pillows, neck rolls, shams of all sizes and textures, and decorated with beads, fringe, and tassels, perfectly matched the fall of drapery from the bedposts. In the corner above the deliciously carved headboard of the bed hung a matching shelf, both color and carvings. Candles of all different shapes and sizes, in all the colors of the room, jockeyed for position.

  The walls were painted a rich purple and dotted with gold-leaf fleur-de-lis. The crown and base moulding were also gold leaf. The carpet, a dark, rich green also dotted with gold fleur-de-lis, oddly, didn’t clash with the purple walls.

  Feathered masks of all descriptions decorated the walls and ropes of green, purple, and gold beads draped and looped haphazardly. No other art. A bookcase on one wall was bursting with books whose titles she couldn’t read. A sleek machine she assumed to be a sound system hid in the shadows, hung at eye level.