When artist-turned-office-worker Phainon attends the funeral of his former mentor, the infamously uncompromising painter Anaxagoras, the last thing he expects is to see the man’s ghost standing beside the casket. Trapped in limbo with “unfinished business” Anaxa is convinced the key to moving past this life lies somewhere in his chaotic artistic legacy.
Phainon, unconvinced, ends up dragging the stubborn spirit through experiences Anaxa never let himself have in life, hoping they might find answers there instead. As they retrace the shape of something they’d lost and thought was long gone between them, Anaxa begins to wonder if what’s keeping him here might have little to do with the work he left behind after all.
“Love’s / merciless, the way it travels on / and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove / we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers / on the table. And we still had hours.”
— Kim Addonizio, Stolen Moments
Anaxagoras sits slouched on a wooden stool in the center of the studio. The old thing wobbles beneath his weight. A loose cardigan droops from his shoulders like a heavy shroud; its sleeves slip toward his elbows.
One slipper clings to his foot. The other lies marooned under the table amid a drift of paint rags and spent tubes, the whole pile tangled like the remnants of a restless night.
Gray light floods the room. He reaches for his coffee and touches a cup gone cold.
The north windows, tall as doorways, hold up a sky the color of wet cement. A film of grit dulls every pane—three months since he last wiped them clean. Through that veil, the construction cranes three blocks away rise like skeletal ghosts.
Anaxagoras lifts his brush. No clear image forms with the stroke he chances on the canvas, only a blurred shape that trembles with it. Dust motes hover between him and the work. His fingers resist him.
It’s November again with its bitter mornings and early darkness that swallows the day before he can finish anything he starts.
Varnish dries on a canvas propped against an adjacent wall, the scent thick enough to sit on the tongue. The canvas itself stands too large to move by himself and too unfinished to earn a name. It waits like a question he still has no answer for.
For at least over a decade now, his studio has also technically been his apartment. Outside the doorway lies a small kitchen with a few cracked tiles on the counters and a steel sink choked with mugs that have gone two weeks without washing. In the bedroom, a mattress sags toward the floor at the center. Next to it slumps a stack of books that he once attempted to arrange by color. They lean now in a lopsided tower, their spines faded, their order long surrendered.
In the studio, where Anaxagoras sits, all three easels stand occupied.
One is the painting of a young woman whose eyes resemble the color of split figs—the portrait of someone who no longer belongs in his life, although there are many such specters on these walls. Next to the window stands a larger canvas, still blocked in with rough patches of blue and yellow that he cannot recall if he has been working on for three days or three months or three years. The passing of time here has become both continuous and fragmentary, like a broken film reel: flickers of light, and then sudden dark.
The space is cluttered, but not with any kind of bohemian charm that might suggest an untamed mind on the verge of brilliance. The place simply bears the shape of a quiet collapse that is going slow and going steady, but going all the same. A fatigue that radiates from the floorboards upward, carved out by long seasons of neglect.
Today, Anaxagoras’ chest hurts.
The ache presses into him as dull and insistent, like a heavy book set against his ribs. He coughs into a stained cloth. Something wet shifts in his throat and he waits for it to pass, the sound rasps in the stillness between him and the canvas.
He smokes less now, but not never. An ashtray rests at the foot of an easel, half-filled with burnt-out ends. His hand twitches toward it out of habit before he foregoes the thought, that small motion demanding too much on its own.
He lifts his hand again and it feels heavy and almost separate from him, as though on loan from someone else. His brush wobbles between clammy fingers. He guides a stroke of mint green across the rough lines he’d sketched earlier. The brush trembles. The pigment bleeds into the raw linen. He watches the color spread with slow fascination, the way a thought disperses before it can become language.
He once said that not making art was a small death—that chasing the higher meaning of things through paint and line was the only way life made sense. They had called him rigid for it, even simple-minded, and somehow too cerebral at the same time.
The room tilts when he breathes. The edges of his vision blur. He tells himself he is only pushing the limits of his creativity and endurance and testing what the body can tolerate when the mind refuses to stop.
He paints instead of eating.
He forgets water until dizziness forces him to sit. He sleeps upright. He has always been fragile, even before this. It is too easy, after all, to misplace the body when the mind keeps wandering ahead of it.
He thinks of Hyacinthia, who used to visit every few weeks with the earnest, too-bright seriousness of the young. One of his former students and perhaps the last he could call a protégé. She watched his hands as he worked, her attention fixed on every small movement, as if the gesture mattered as much as the stroke it produced. She would worry, he tells himself. Or she will come back someday and meet only the quiet ruin he has become. He is already a little bit apologetic about this.
Castorice used to call often. Her voicemails never ran long, but they carried a quiet cheer and a touch of gentle fretting that softened her otherwise brisk manner. She left them late at night, her voice warm and amused as she asked—always half-joking—if he was still alive.
And Phainon. He has not seen the boy in a long time. People liked him, questioned him constantly for chasing Anaxagoras’ mentorship with such persistence that Anaxagoras finally gave in. He remembers the faint echo of a laugh that once unraveled his focus. He remembers how Phainon looked at things from angles Anaxagoras sometimes failed to notice. Phainon studied the paintings, yes, but he studied Anaxagoras too. At times Anaxagoras suspected he played a private game of trying to guess the gesture before it reached the canvas. Whether that was true or not, he would never really know.
He tells himself he has taught everything that can be taught. What remained unteachable lingered between them like a quiet, unresolved chord.
He exhales and surveys the room. Canvases lean in awkward piles. Stretchers bow under the humidity. Easels sag beneath the weight of unfinished thought. The oil in the air thickens as the light dims.
Everything feels too still.
His gaze falls to the portrait before him. Many things demand correction. The face looks too young, too clean. The mouth is just… wrong, although he does not have the words or wherewithal to explain how or why. He has only painted over the sketch of one eye, unsure whether to cover the other, or for this, show the distortions hidden beneath.
He thinks he might fix the color of the mouth, might go over the lines of the hair, he might color in that other eye. Maybe in the next minute. Ideally in the next hour.
But his hands are so, so cold today. At some point he sets the brush down on the tray. He does not remember when.
Anaxagoras sits on the stool, wrapped in his cardigan, drawing shallow breaths. The ache hums through him as something familiar and constant. It skirts memory and regret, something shaped like a voice he has not heard in years.
Evening settles as the low light crawls across the floor and withdraws. The room drifts out of focus, shapes dissolving into each other. He does not rise to to turn the lamp on; he lets the darkness come.
Anaxagoras lets out a slow and careful breath, as though a sudden movement of air could break his fragile balance. He sits motionless, and the face on the canvas seems to wait with him, two lonely presences braced against the lengthening silence.
The day is already wrong.
It starts with an hour of sleep missed to the insomnia that has lately begun to find purchase in the softest hour before dawn, and then the jarring sound of the subway doors nearly closing on the hem of Phainon’s coat, and then the rubber heel of his left loafer grinding down in a way that makes each step half a beat behind the rest of his body, as if his own feet were trying to sabotage him. Even the glow of his phone is gray and unpromising when he unlocks it. An email from a no-reply address telling him that the water will be off for routine maintenance all weekend. His right eye throbs with what feels like a dull, stinging reminder rather than a true ache.
He tells himself this is only a pattern of little things. That there is no such thing as a day gone bad from the root and that he’ll eventually find the vein of good luck if he can keep digging.
At the office, he brews coffee first. It burns his tongue, and the numbness flattens every taste that follows for half the day. He slips into his cubicle. The dividers fail to blunt the morning noise. He hears the printer stutter. Someone laughs too loudly at a meme. Overhead, the fluorescent lights fizzle with the thin, insect hum of exhaustion.
He checks his schedule. The digital calendar is color-coded and lies to him as usual about the density of the day. He at least has a paper backup, a graduation present from his old mentor he’d unearthed in January at the same time he’d been contemplating an expensive planner purchase despite the lack of a raise. It’s a thick, hardcover journal with a monthly layout and squares big enough to make boxes around his to-do lists. Each morning he ticks off boxes and migrates the stragglers to the next available slot.
He has a system, and the system lets him pretend he will someday catch up.
He flips through the journal and finds his place by a marked page. Someone calls his name—just “Phainon!” in the tone of someone trying to corral a household dog. He slips a slender, elaborate bookmark into the crease. The thin sheet of metal catches the fluorescent light, its surface etched with ornate swirls of blue and gold. He runs his thumb along the edge, the way someone might touch a scab without thinking, then presses it flat between the pages and closes the book.
The call comes from the meeting room.
Inside, the new account sprawls across the screen, the one everyone has been pretending was the opportunity their company was waiting for. The glass walls glare under the lights, spilling the room’s collective nerves straight into the hallway.
Phainon takes a seat. Mydei is there, early as always, looking like he hasn’t slept in three days and is fine with it. The rest of the team floats in on wisps.
The slideshow clicks forward and it’s becoming dreadfully clear how much more the client wants than what was offered and what was initially agreed to. They want something “edgier” and “interactive” and they want Phainon to oversee the rollout and, the boss adds with an apologetic tilt, maybe do a bit of on-camera work for the promo? This is far from his job but he has the right look and the client “responded well to his presence.”
Heat rises under Phainon’s collar. He keeps his hands still on the table and waits for humiliation to settle.
But before he can respond, Mydei cuts in—“what are you talking about?” he says, already giving the higher ups some pause. “We’re all maxed out until Q4. It’ll be a time sink if we let Phainon commit to this.” And since everyone knows that time = money, or perhaps, because they suddenly remember how little they’re paying, they nod and move on to the next item on the agenda.
The meeting dissolves into more tasks and less clarity. When it ends, everyone is quick to scatter.
Phainon walks back to his desk and catches his reflection in the dark surface of his second monitor. His face looks wrong—too blue, the overhead lights too harsh. A vein pulses near his temple. He rubs the bridge of his nose and opens the journal again. His thumb trails along the bookmark’s metal edge. The page stays empty.
A text flashes from Castorice about how she’s stuck at a long outdoor shoot. He messages her supervisor before she can, telling them she won’t make it back today.
Lunchtime passes in a blur of microwaved soup, Slack pings, and replies that stack faster than he can track. He eats at his desk, answering two messages at once (on his phone, on his computer screen) and forgetting which is which.
Eventually he stands and heads for the restroom. Two of the stalls (out of four) are out of order, each one marked by a paper sign that sags under the weight of bad plumbing. He chooses the last stall tucked in the corner, and closes the door.
He lowers himself onto the closed lid and leans forward, elbows to knees, forehead in his hands. The hush is total here; the only sound is his breathing and the distant, phantom vibrations from his phone in his pocket.
When he leaves the bathroom, he bumps into Mydei by the copy machine.
“Hey,” Mydei says in a tone that, historically, Phainon has not liked very much because it means he’s onto something. Mydei studies him a moment, probably reading the day on his face. “Grab a drink after work?”
Phainon shrugs, noncommittal. “Maybe. I’m pretty behind.” (He said this last week too.)
“Pretty sure it’s nothing that can’t wait? You look like hell, to be honest.”
“Then please don’t be,” Phainon grumbles. “But I’ll think about it. Friday anyway.” He taps the copy tray as if the paper jams only for him.
Mydei doesn’t really push, except to just say, “yeah, do that,” as he disappears out the copy room with a stack of bright yellow fliers under his arm.
The afternoon grinds on. The new account is somehow worse than expected; the files are a messof contradictory feedback, and Phainon is getting the sneaking suspicion that this is just the sort of client that was never going to be satisfied.
By four he’s sporting a tension headache and he finds himself fantasizing about hurling his monitor out the window. Instead he leaves a passive-aggressive note on the project Slack and closes his laptop with a precision that feels somewhat violent.
The office is already half empty by now. He makes his way down the hall, ignoring the ping of new messages, and steps out into the brittle November air. He waits on the steps until the city smog clears the last of the recirculated air from his sinuses.
He considers going home and burrowing under a pile of unwashed laundry, but his feet take him to the bar instead—exactly on time, exactly as Mydei must have predicted. The place is low-lit with polished floors. He finds Mydei at the corner of the bar, already one beer in.
Phainon orders a whisky, neat, and lets the first mouthful burn. He listens with half an ear to the chatter around him, which are mostly office goers, some even from the same company. Someone is gossiping about a mutual acquaintance, someone recounting a disastrous team-building event, someone else is ranking the best office snacks but the sounds all end up a blur and he finds himself staring into the drink in his glass, searching for omens there, too.
The crowd thickens once dinner hours turn into weekend hours. Mydei, likely gauging the wreckage of Phainon’s day, offers to cover another round. He flags the bartender who has been flirting with him for half an hour and asks him to watch their seats. The guy nods, says he’ll drop the next drinks at their spots, and Mydei steers Phainon to the back patio for a smoke.
Phainon doesn’t smoke, never has, but he goes anyway. The cold hits him immediately, sharp enough to sting his ears.
“Today was awful,” he says, as soon as they’re alone, putting his head in his hands to rub at his face, mostly to be a little theatrical, just to prove a point to no one.
Mydei laughs and sends a ribbon of smoke toward the streetlights. “When does it not?”
Phainon almost tells him how each small thing felt like a warning for something worse, but even thinking it sounds absurd. He settles on, “it feels like we’re running out of time when the new account literally just signed.”
Mydei just nods, seeming to agree.
They stand in silence, letting the quiet stretch. Mydei checks his phone, thumbing through his own set of notifications, there is a small trill that rings faint in the air as he does. Phainon sinks deeper into the scrap of peace he’s managed to find today.
He doesn’t notice that the ringing persists until Mydei nudges his shoe with his own and says, “Hey. You’re getting a call.”
He blinks, clearing the dark spots left from pressing his palms too hard against his eyes, then pulls his phone from his pocket. Given the trajectory of the day, he expects a recruiter who refuses to take a hint. Instead, Castorice’s name lights the screen and so he answers it immediately.
“Hey, what’s u—”
“Phainon,” says Castorice, voice hoarse, the syllables of his name all knotted up in her throat, trembling as she speaks. Noise swells behind her: a small crowd of people, the sound of wheels, and distant clinking metal.
“Listen, I—”
It’s Phainon who chokes on whatever’s next.
“I’m at the hospital. It’s the professor. He’s—he. He died. This morning. They called me a few hours ago to come. I don’t—”
The rest is just static, or Phainon’s brain refusing to process sound. A low, dense ringing settles behind his ears, thick enough to drown out everything else. He waits until the voice on the line stops, and then he is left standing there, the phone heavy in his palm, the cold sinking in bone-deep all at once.
He exhales, pocketing his phone. He puts a palm to his forehead for a useless temperature check like the motion might ground reality for him, one hand at his waist as he paces and tries to will himself to breathe. He only tells Mydei that he is sorry and that he doesn’t have any answers yet just more questions too. He doesn’t go back inside and slips out of the bar, Mydei telling him not to worry about the tab and to message him when he gets home and to send him the details once he knows more, when he can. He remembers absentmindedly nodding and thanking him.
Phainon walks home through streets that have never looked more strange and unfamiliar to him in all the years he’s had to live in this city, every car headlight like a staring eye, every window a small, contained universe. He feels outside all this, suspended elsewhere but also frustratingly just trapped in here and now and at a loss.
He thinks of Anaxagoras as he last saw him, standing alone in the corner at Hyacine’s exhibit two years ago, nursing a flute of champagne, his form caught under the harsh gallery spotlights. Even then, somehow more frail as he’d become, there was something beautiful in the severe angles of his face, the way the overhead halogens carved shadows beneath his cheekbones while illuminating the soft fall of his hair around his shoulders. His good eye fixed on a towering print on the wall, as if waiting for the photograph to speak, to answer some question only he could think to ask.
Phainon had frozen when he spotted him across the gallery. His throat tightened around lines he may or may not have rehearsed for years—all those apologies he had lined up, explanations, questions about what came after all those extra semesters he’d lingered in post-grad work orbiting the professor’s gravity. In the end, he’d managed only a slightly stilted hello with at least an accompanying smile that the professor had simply nodded at, not pushing for any more than he was. Anaxa’s gaze had lingered on him, though, in that way they used to when the studio emptied of other students, when the afternoon light caught the specks of dust between them and time seemed to stretch like warm honey. Phainon realizes now that he had not understood the pattern then.
Tonight he thinks too of all the tiny misfortunes scattered through his day and realizes that none of them pointed to one thing exactly except the obvious: that loss could not quite be determined by pattern exactly, but that it was just fact. And, also, when it arrived, it would not wait.
Phainon walks until his feet hurt, then sits on bench somewhere he might recognize better if he could gather enough sense within himself to, and he watches the city pulse, bright lit and nearing the holidays. Around him people keep on with their tired exodus home. Couples laugh, a dog being walked nearby barks, the shutters of a shop are dragged shut. His journal sits heavier in his bag, the bookmark, a handmade piece that had come with it, still holds its place, but he is not sure what page he’s supposed to be on anymore.
It begins with an iron-sweet ache, the old signal of a migraine on approach.
For a time that might be seconds or centuries, there is only the absence of light, and it is neither bright nor dark. Anaxagoras drifts inside it without breath and without weight. He reaches for air, for lungs to gulp what should be that, but only finds the memory of an ache that lands somewhere between a cough and a sob that once lived under his sternum. His hands appear in front of him like the after-image of a photogram before the fixer pulls detail back into it. When they distort, no wind moves them; only the thought of wind, thin and useless.
Something walks towards him from the nothing.
At first he mistakes the shape for color forcing itself into form. Then it gathers into the outline of a woman carved from the same blankness as the air around her.
A moment later her face clicks into place. Long pale hair settles around her like a falling veil. Gold flickers along her closed eyes. Her garments unfurl next in mostly layered ivory cloth, draping with the solemn weight of ritual.
She stands there with a stillness so complete it feels ancient, as if she has been waiting for him far longer than he has been capable of arriving. She stops three pace-lengths away. She speaks in a way that’s dry and unhurried when she addresses Anaxagoras. “You came to slower than most. Thought you’d left another body decomposing in that chair.”
He tries to speak. The words tumble out upside down, unravel in midair, and hover before his face—why, why here, why me.
“I’ll save you the existential grammar exercises,” she says, folding something in the air that is maybe time or maybe the idea of a cigarette. “The short version: you’re dead. Longer version: you’re not dead enough.”
He wrestles for the invisible tongue in his mouth to speak up, and sound finally comes out. “So, what, are you supposed to be an angel or a demon? Or no, let me guess. Something in between?”
“Close,” she responds, tilting her head to the side, although she doesn’t really elaborate. “No need to worry about it. But if you must, you may call me Cerces.”
Cerces stands by the window, or what passes for a window in this place: a rectangular negative space outlined by frost and the dull green of sick plants in plastic pots.
“I’m supposed to trust that?” he rasps.
“Why, you’re not supposed to do anything at all,” she replies. “Trust is a luxury of the living. Right now you’re a surplus of that. Half chalk, half breath, so to speak.”
The air in the studio feels heavier with her presence. He wonders if she’s the reason for this god awful headache. “So what business is this, then? Have you come to repossess my soul? Sell my organs to the next highest bidder?”
She just smiles serenely at him, as if waiting for him to finish his tiresome little questions.
“Or, no, this is about unfinished business, isn’t it? Don’t tell me. I have to resolve some childhood trauma before I can get on with the afterlife.”
Cerces’ mouth quirks. “So quick to assume you are entitled to such.”
Finally, she continues before he can say anything back. “Do not strain yourself naming landmarks, Anaxagoras.”
He doesn’t bother with a response, only narrowing his gaze at her general direction, waiting for her to speak more in mostly challenge rather than actual patience.
“It seems most people waste their afterlife certain they deserve reward or punishment and strive to obtain one or avoid the other. You sound convinced of neither. Interesting.”
Anaxagoras shakes his head, or does what seems to resemble the act of doing so. “I’ve spent thirty-three terrible years on certainty and look at where it’s brought me.” He swallows. “So I couldn’t care less for where I fall on your little dead people spectrum.”
Cerces brushes the words aside with a flick of her wrist, a gesture as dismissive as dusting off a cobweb, and she chuckles without mirth. “You are exactly where the record left you,” she says. “In the early stages of rot, but only at the threshold of ruin. And you have neither burned nor crossed any bridges.” Her gaze shifts to something beyond his shoulder, something he cannot see.
“Some journeys, Anaxagoras, must be walked even if the legs are no longer there to move you forward in expected ways.”
He understands her perfectly, although he wishes he didn’t.
Recognition crawls beneath his skin, settling into the hollow where his stomach once churned acid. All those studio lights he’d switched off before the shadows had fully stretched across the floor. All those morning coffees gone cold beside ringing phones he never answered. The way he’d turn his face whenever someone leaned in too close, offering only the sharp edge of his profile instead of the full weight of his gaze. The way he used to watch those talented hands mix the perfect shade of ocher, swallowing words that might have carried things along in a very different direction had he not let the silence between them calcify like dried paint. Even at the end, he’d slipped out between breaths, denying the world the final stroke.
“A deadline then?” he asks. The question scrapes out of him with a metallic tang.
She laughs at that, the sound a rusted gate dragged over gravel for the sheer acoustic cruelty of it. “My, my. Deadline is human law. Here, the calendar is blank until you ink it.”
The irony isn’t lost on him, because to self-start and set things in motion are all fundamentally human acts requiring intention, the very thing his death has supposedly stripped him off. Or perhaps is looking to. But he doesn’t bother debating this with her. Instead, he looks down at his spectral hands again. He holds no brush, no stains of paint only the quiet pulse of memory slowly coming to him once more. It returns to him in a slow, tedious bloom, like distemper mottling ancient wall plaster. He sees his studio first, not the deathbed version he imagines fumes archived in corners, but earlier. Earlier today, yesterday, a year ago, many of them until that image too collapses again.
His easel: the left canvas waiting under half-formed strokes; the center one burdened by the portrait he should have abandoned months ago; the right, a nearly empty sheet of linen touched only by blues and yellows he no longer remembers laying down. He recalls the scrape of a palette knife across dried pigment, the sour mix of linseed and solvent in the air. He recalls the drip of coffee from the pot he refuses to wash, the morning the handle cracked while he lectured a student on the difference between innovation and gimmickry—larger hands steadying him from behind, thumbs pressed into his hip bones, holding him against the table edge. He recalls the dark water rings on the maple worktable, the hiss of the radiator, his own body swallowed in a paint-stained sweatshirt he peeled off with bony fingers, and the times other hands helped, tugging the fabric free with quiet insistence.
And much closer to the surface: an exhibition catalog smudged by loud disdain, his own refusal of an introduction note. The clipped phrases of critics that would read like “volatile iconoclasm” or “a tantrum stretched over seven feet of linen.” He remembers burning the notice in a university restroom, flames licking the glossy paper before the ash spiraled into the toilet bowl.
The memories arrive out of sequence. He tastes turpentine and smoke. Beneath it: the older ache of his sorry lungs. No diagnosis had come soon enough; the doctors skimmed his habits and filed him under inevitable decline. He does not remember the exact moment his body finally surrendered. The scene before those last breaths never mattered to him anyway.
“Perhaps that one?” Cerces says, her tone almost lazy. Her fingers trace a shape in the air only she seems able to see. “Your most recent study. No title, no date. You left it just beyond your body’s reach.”
Anaxagoras ignores her lead. “Or people, I suppose?”
His list is short and mostly inconsequential. He’d taught his protégés everything worth knowing already. Castorice and Hyacinthia had at least received his occasional, if stilted, correspondence. But Phainon... his thoughts snag on him for a moment. Nothing of substance to say to him either, surely. But it stays a pentimento beneath layers he’d painted over too hastily.
No, impossible. He dismisses the notion with a spectral shake of his head.
Cerces watches him think. He senses her cataloging every tic of hesitation. After a beat, she speaks again.
“You could think about death as another occupation at this point,” she says, and he’s not sure if she’s really out here to help or make things harder for him. “It merely requires different paperwork.”
“And your relation to this all…?” He insists, although he’s already weary of the answer.
“A custodian, of sorts. Miles to go before your sleep and so on.” Her eyes are closed, the picture of serenity despite the drier thread to her words. Somewhere on the horizon a seam flickers pure black. Just one, like scratch on film.
Anaxagoras focuses on the single black hairline. The void it offers looks more inviting than sunrises once did. He thinks of the canvas left face-to-wall because the sketch had shown too much pity in the sitter’s smile.
“Then what’s stopping me from just refusing all this?” he asks.
Cerces goes still. Only a slight shift in her features shows that she’s listening rather than drifting away into whatever passes for thought in this place.
“Nothing,” she says at last. “Refuse if you want. You’ll find out soon enough whether your assumptions about your destination hold any truth. You can watch the world move without you for as long as it interests you.” Her tone stays level, almost gentle. “When you’re ready, step forward. The line at the edge of limbo will wait. My part ends once your permanence negotiates itself.”
“Wait—” Anaxa rises. The stool collapses behind him, though no weight of his sends it over. “You can’t just—”
But Cerces has already vanished, slipping into the muted haze of his studio as if she were never there at all.
Anaxagoras studies the promised line pulsing first like a vein hidden by pallid skin, before that too shutters for him. Closing this distance is supposed to become his first intention after death; the way forward could not have been more clear, and yet he cannot feel lungs with which to inhale courage or surety of the exact method through.
He thinks of the conversations he never had: about Hycinthia’s newest installation; about the residency Castorice was considering quitting her job for; about Phainon and what they might talk about if they still did. The mess of his life’s work strewn before him and then some.
The studio window waits nearby, close enough for him to imagine pressing spectral palms to its dusty glass. Beneath the crust of cooled light on the pane, the dwarf cactus he neglected still clings to its stubborn life. No one remembers to water it. It persists anyway, small and unyielding on the sill.
He performs the thought of an exhale. The floor doesn’t creak when he moves.
Am I ready?
The question does not arrive with weight. He listens to absence until listening is an act of painting with silence. Then he steps half-forward, half-inward, a foot that is not a foot passing the threshold. Where the world hums back a single timid note: he wished. The return of all the colors of his apartment offers no answers, only silence and the faint impression of waiting. He stands at the window, staring into the gray beyond the glass, and begins the delicate, unfamiliar work of remembering a life he never fully stepped into, even when it was his.
The funeral parlor looks the same on its third night as it did on the first, except now the echoes in this place feel like they travel a little farther. Daylight brings a handful of stragglers: former students who come out of obligation, a neighbor who arrives with fruit wrapped neatly in plastic, two gray-bearded men who carry with them the gluey hush of academic politics. By evening, they vanish. Silence replaces them, filling every corner of the room.
Phainon stays behind because someone should. His jacket lies draped across the reception chair. If he sits too long, his spine protests and his legs fidget against the stillness. The smell of lilies thickens cloyingly as the air grows stale.
He starts to memorize the place. The dust pattern along each baseboard. The speed at which wax slumps down every candle. The faint, oily crescents of his fingerprints on the glasses he rinses between visitors. He counts these small markers the way he counts days. Three now.
The door hisses open, signaling Hyacine’s return from a convenience store run, a plastic bag swinging at her side. She steps out of her shoes at the threshold with care—an old habit from years spent tiptoeing through the professor’s studio, navigating towering and half-fallen canvases. Her hair sits in a bun, but tonight it lists to one side, as if sleep had left it so and she’s given up pretending to care. Her dress is wrinkled. The right sleeve damp with something she will not explain.
“Hey,” she says.
Phainon sits up straighter. “Hey. You’re back.”
She walks past the other empty chairs and stops beside him. “I could’ve taken the night, you know.”
“And let me miss all this?” He gestures at the stage of empty seats, the reception table stacked with uneaten crackers and the fine mist of dust that forms atop any surface left undisturbed in winter.
Hyacine sets the plastic bag on the table’s edge and drops into the chair beside him. “Oh, come on. You’re not the only one who owes him.”
“That’s true,” Phainon says, but doesn’t add that he’s likely the one with the most to be grateful for. And sorry, perhaps. He nods toward the plastic bag dangling from her fingers instead. “What’d you get?”
She reaches inside, pulls out five tallboys of pale beer, and lines them up like someone arranging chess pieces on a board.
Phainon lets out a low whistle. “Two each?”
“Just one for me,” she says demurely while cracking open a can. “I’ve got an early morning.”
His eyebrows lift as she hands him one. He takes it anyway. “Classy. I respect it.”
Two cans open with a sharp pop and a quick, wet hiss.
“To…” she begins, brow furrowed, can raised but thought trailing off.
“To the professor’s storied career and… legacy?” he offers.
A small smile tugs at her mouth.
“To the professor,” she echoes.
They tap their cans together, careful to spare the reservation log from a splash of beer.
They talk for a while about nothing, which is all Phainon is really built for these days.
Hyacine tells him about her flight from Europe, the customs dog that barked at her suitcase, the man who offered to carry her luggage up the metro stairs and then spent six stops berating her when she declined. Phainon recounts the reporter who called at three in the morning, breathlessly insisting she had a tip from someone “close to the family” about a secret trove of paintings Anaxa left behind. He’d nearly laughed into the phone. Anaxa’s family? That man’s emergency contact had been his landlord for three years, until Castorice nudged him into updating it, assigning one number for each of them.
Hyacine laughs, too. She’s always laughed easily, but tonight the sound rings like a cracked bell: bright, then hollow.
They keep drinking. Phainon loses track of the pauses between words. They accrue with the weight of every conversation they’ve been putting off, all week, all year, all decade.
At last, Hyacine asks, “do you think anyone’s going to show tomorrow?”
Phainon considers. “Maybe a news crew. Mydei, probably. A few others. Castorice said she’ll be there early too.”
“I see,” Hyacine says, tracing her finger around the rim of her can. She stares at the casket for a long moment, then back at her drink. “Will you be okay to sleep here tonight? Or I can call you a car, if you want. We can just lock the door.”
He shakes his head. “Not tired yet. And I said I’d hang back, remember?”
She nods and takes another sip.
Her eyes skirt past his, never landing, when she finally asks, “did you ever… did you ever talk to him again, after you left?”
Phainon studies his own hands. They are too steady for what she’s asking of him to talk about right now. “We emailed, a bit. Mostly through Castorice, she’d forward the important stuff. He did a few exhibitions managed by our company years back.” He lies, but only a little.
He traces a scar across his thumb, souvenir from a palette knife from years ago. “We exchanged a few pleasantries, I guess.”
“Pleasantries,” Hyacine echoes, and the word withers between them.
He tries not to grimace. “You know what I mean.”
“I remember Mydei getting that email with fifteen attachments of badly taken photos of his latest works to add to the show.” Phainon adds, chuckling at the memory.
“Sounds just like him,” Hyacine murmurs, her voice soft with recognition. A laugh escapes her as she thinks about it more, briefly whole. “God, that man.”
“Right,” Phainon agrees.
Hyacine crushes her can at the middle with a soft metallic crunch that cuts through the hush of the parlor. She lets it sit on the table. Her eyes drift toward the casket again, then back to Phainon.
“It’s good, though,” she says. “He would never say it, but you were his favorite. He still checked your Instagram pretty regularly for a time—those little sketches you’d post, exhibition photos. Even after everything.”
Phainon’s face heats, as if he’s been caught out. “Maybe just to laugh at my captions. Or spellcheck them.”
She smiles, small and private. “Especially those.”
“Maybe it’s easier this way. For him, at least. I—” Her voices catches, and she looks away, blinking rapidly at the casket. “I couldn’t bring myself to watch him like that so I just…”
Phainon reaches out and pats her shoulder. His hand feels heavy, clumsy against the wrinkled fabric of her dress.
But then she straightens suddenly, squaring her shoulders, and she slips into a startlingly precise imitation of Anaxa’s clipped tone: “oh, get it together, Hyacinthia. You’ve got a whole life to live. Have you finished your most recent commission? Move on—” She cuts herself off with a faint huff. “...is what he would say.”
Phainon smiles, a small upturn at the corner of his mouth. “That’s exactly what he’d say. Word for word.”
He wonders if they all carry these little fragments of Anaxa within them now, like shards of stained glass.
“I should go,” she says after a moment, reaching for her purse. “One last chance—sure you don’t want to swap? I can stay.”
“Well, as the favorite, after all...” Phainon says with exaggerated pride.
She laughs again, that cracked-bell sound.
He walks her to the door and waits until she’s safely in a cab. He memorizes the plate number to be safe, and returns to the empty hall.
The casket sits in the center of the room, an island in a sea of polished marble and failed floral arrangements. Phainon has not looked inside it, not once. He has said, to everyone who asked him to come with to the front, that he does not need to: he remembers the face well enough. In truth, the fear is that he will not recognize it, that it will have changed in some essential and unfixable way. Or worse, that it will not have changed at all, and an old ache will come back to colonize him again.
He cracks another can open, though he can’t remember opening the last. He sips and lets it sit on his tongue.
He exhales a deep, shuddering sigh that empties his lungs completely, like he’s just set down something he’s been carrying for years. Then he stands, and finally moves to the casket.
His fingers hover at the edge of the lacquered wood, not quite touching. Inside, Anaxa lies with his hands folded over his stomach, face composed in a serenity Phainon never witnessed in life or perhaps in what the mortician probably considered peace but what Phainon recognizes as the absence of argument. Phainon’s throat constricts. Three days of mental rehearsal hadn’t prepared him for this moment, this terrible stillness. Tomorrow they would close the lid forever, and he finds himself wishing he’d looked sooner, looked longer, looked at all during those last years and these last few days when looking was still possible.
“Professor, I...” he starts, the words barely audible.
“Oh, save it,” comes a voice, clear as a struck bell.
Phainon freezes.
There is a flicker at the edge of the casket, not quite a shadow and not quite a light. When he turns, there stands Anaxa beside his own casket, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised in that particular way that always preceded a lecture on technique or concept. The same look he might wear on just another Tuesday after a particularly bad review and he had just had enough of Phainon’s wallowing. That same impatient tap of his foot, that same slight forward tilt which could only mean: enough of this nonsense.
Anaxa just looks up at him. After a long moment, his eyes widen slightly.
“You can see me,” he says.
Phainon blinks. The apparition doesn’t shimmer or fade. It just stands there, solid as memory or a dream. Phainon’s fingers twitch at his sides, afraid to reach out and dispel whatever this might be.
“I guess I can...” he trails off.
Anaxa turns toward the casket, studying his own waxy face with detached curiosity. Phainon steps forward instinctively, as if to block the view, a sudden, irrational urge to protect Anaxa from the sight of himself, emptied and arranged by strangers’ hands.
Anaxa just clicks his tongue.
“They didn’t do too bad,” he says. “Castorice picked a good morgue.”
Phainon doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
After tearing his eyes away from his own body, Anaxa looks at Phainon and seems startled anew. He blinks, not unlike a cat, and then after a long moment his expression gentles, although not by much, when he says, “you have a look about you that says you’d believe anything I say right now.”
Phainon tips his head to the side. “Didn’t I always, though?”
Anaxa narrows his eyes, unimpressed. “And still so shameless, I see.”
This time, Phainon laughs. With every exchange, the moment grows more impossible and more real, and he feels himself opening to the odd, dizzy logic of it.
“Well, since I have you here,” Anaxa begins, then stops. His gaze drifts to the middle distance between them, his mouth working silently as if testing words before committing to them. It’s a hesitation Phainon recognizes from its first movement—Anaxa wants something he doesn’t know how to ask for. Just as Phainon knows this dance, Anaxa knows its partner.
“I find myself in something of a predicament,” Anaxa says at last, “and it seems only you can assist me.”
The words strike him like a match to dry tinder. That old warmth flares in his chest, the familiar pull of being wanted, of being necessary to this man, filling the hollow under his ribs.
“Of course,” he answers, not bothering to ask what this means or why.
Anaxa gives him a baffled look, almost offended by how easily the answer comes. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s talk somewhere else. I’m sure it’s making you uncomfortable, standing beside a rotting corpse.”
Phainon glances at the casket and nearly says to him, that, technically it isn’t rotting yet, but swallows the impulse to do so. He falls into step behind Anaxa, who moves with the same impatient stride he had in life. He’s dressed exactly as he was when he died, in faded jeans, the paint-spattered shirt with its constellation of stains across the side, an oversized ash-gray cardigan hanging loose around his shoulders. His feet are bare against the marble. Anaxa sidesteps a flower arrangement with habitual care, as if he might still disturb the lilies. Only the absence of footfalls on the polished floor betrays that he isn’t flesh and blood; otherwise, he appears entirely solid, not ghostly or translucent at all, just Anaxa, exactly as he was, impossibly present.
Clouds have held back the light all day, and by the time the funeral empties, the sky has dulled to pewter with a thin margin of blue trembling across the horizon. The cemetery grass is clipped short, patchy and brown in places, straggling in others. Dew, or perhaps a recent drizzle, blurs the borders between plots, and the softened earth exhales a green mineral scent. Above ground: the last neat arrangement of the professor’s life. Below it: his absence, raw and settling into the dark.
Phainon stands a measured step from the grave, arms folded tight across his chest, watching a groundskeeper collapse a folding canopy near the service road. The final guests drift toward their cars—a few former students, one faculty peer, Hyacine among them. None pause to cluster or exchange stories. No reminiscences surface, no fond memories offered up into the gray air. Some funerals are for the living, but this one seems not to belong to anyone at all.
At the grave’s edge, the dark granite surface glistens with beaded moisture from an overnight drizzle. The stone is simple, scored with only two lines: his name and the years in a crisp sans serif, evenly kerned. Above the name floats a spiky, eight-pointed star, cleanly sandblasted and incongruent, as if it had been stenciled on by a child with no patience for symmetry.
“Thirty-three years,” Anaxa says.
He is standing, with unusual discipline, next to Phainon whose hands thrust into the too-deep pockets of a windbreaker over his suit. There is nothing supernatural about Anaxa’s appearance; he is not gauzy, not even remotely spectral, or even slightly paler than memory would have him. The only way to know he’s dead is that no one else sees him.
Phainon has not yet spoken.
He stares at the marker, at the star especially, and recalls the unceremonious exchange that preceded it, where, three days ago, he had been arguing with Hyacine who was handling part of the arrangements over the phone.
“They wanted to put a Horace quote on your grave,” Phainon explains to him after a beat. “Or something from Yeats. Hyacine’s favorite, apparently.”
“She can put Yeats on her own headstone,” Anaxa responds, and then his mouth twitches toward what might be a smile. “You did good, by the way. No poetry; no Latin. And if they really had to carve something, it, at least is…”
“A star,” Phainon clarifies.
“Mm, whatever that is. Most people can’t resist the urge to pretty up a death.”
Phainon feels warmth creep up his neck at the praise, small as it is. Even in death, Anaxa would remain stubbornly contemporary.
“I don’t know either,” Phainon says quietly. His voice, deprived of its usual scratch and floats away on the breeze. “Felt right.”
“Really? I see. I would’ve thought the lack of sentiment would bother you.” Anaxa’s eyes are fixed on the design, on the way one spike juts out, thick and crude, like a flare of an unrepentant ego.
“It’s not… totally devoid of it,” says Phainon, again stifling the layers in his words. “Could have fixed it in Illustrator too and made it more symmetrical. I didn’t.”
“You’re just gloating now, boy.” Anaxa smiles, a thing that always looked more like a tic than a pleasure.
The wind picks up, flattening the wet grass. Down the path, the groundskeeper slips behind a hedge of dwarf cypress, leaving the cemetery so empty it feels not just post-funeral but post-human. Even the birds have withdrawn. Somewhere far off, a dog barks at nothing but its own echo.
Phainon clears his throat. “About the eulogy...”
“You mean when you stood there for forty-five seconds before mentioning my palette knives?” Anaxa’s mouth quirks upward. “I was there, you know.”
Phainon makes a sound, half laugh, half cough, like he’s clearing smoke. “I thought I’d improvise, but all I could think about was you hurling those knives from the back stoop, then cursing for hours when you had to fish them out of the dirt.”
“I never hit the fence,” Anaxa corrects him. “Only the shed.”
“No, you definitely hit the fence. I watched you do it twice.”
Anaxa gives a half-shrug, as if to say, then I meant to.
The conversation is as easy as ever, though the gap between words is wider, like a muscle gone atrophic. Phainon wonders if this is what it will be now, meeting the dead on equal terms, passing judgment on the particulars of memory, neither comforted nor unsettled by the fact.
They stare at the grave together. The candles at the foot of them flicker and then go out when the wind whips and subsides. A low pressure front is coming; it will rain tonight.
“You really didn’t think you’d make it this long?” Phainon asks, circling back to Anaxa’s earlier words.
“No,” says Anaxa, “I didn’t think anyone would care to see me buried.” He flexes his hands, which no longer shake, and glances sidelong at Phainon. “I never liked being the center of attention.”
“You and I both know that’s a lie,” Phainon says, and the corners of his mouth give an involuntary twitch.
Across the cemetery, the other mourners are almost gone. Hyacine’s car is visible through a gap in the cypress, her silhouette a bent comma in the driver’s seat. She is waiting, perhaps, for Phainon to walk over, to say a few last words or perform a closing ritual of social obligation. Or perhaps she is just tired, marooned in the parking lot by the weight of memory and funerary inertia.
“She’ll be okay,” Anaxa assures.
“She will,” Phainon agrees. “She’s probably the best equipped to channel this into her work.”
Phainon watches a thin stream of condensation trace down the stone, catching at the serif of the X and pooling in the shallow trench of the star. It occurs to them that Anaxa, in his final days, had begun to resemble his own signature: all points and slants, hurried and uneven.
He bends down closer to the gravestone, and presses the palm of one hand to the rough top, unable to help himself. The chill radiates up their arm, bone-deep. For a moment, he tries to imagine the body underneath, when flesh eventually gives way to decay into mulch, the black suit moistening at the cuffs. It feels impossibly remote, like seeing a landscape only through a description of its geology.
“So how long will this haunting be for?” Phainon asks.
Anaxa laughs, and this time it sounds almost healthy. “However long you want me here.”
Phainon adjusts the way he’s crouched to turn to face him. “Don’t threaten me with a good time, professor.”
Anaxa just rolls his eyes.
The wind stirs again, picking up a fine grit and slinging it against Phainon’s cheeks, pushing his hair back slightly. He blinks away the sting and stands up, turned to face Anaxa still, who stands in the exact posture he always assumed before a blank canvas: braced, expectant, and resigned to the inevitability of error.
Phainon shifts to stare at the gravestone again.
“Where would we even start?” he asks. “With your... you know.”
Anaxa’s eyes drift to the horizon. “My studio, maybe? There must be something in the work.”
“There must be dozens of unfinished pieces,” Phainon marvels quietly.
Anaxa nods, as if the magnitude of the task were merely a technicality.
“And if not?” Phainon ventures.
Anaxa’s shoulders lift in what might be a shrug or might be surrender. “Then I might be rearranging your brushes for eternity.”
Phainon doesn’t correct him and doesn’t mention that his apartment holds only three dull pencils in a coffee mug and a sketchbook that he can only touch in stolen moments—a quick gesture study on the back of a meeting agenda, a hasty contour of a subway station clerk, or rare weekends when the office doesn’t call. Perhaps, he thinks, watching the ghost’s fingers flex, that might be enough to start with.
A moment passes, stretched thin by the muffled sky. There is nothing left to say, but neither of them moves to leave.
At last, Phainon straightens, flexing the ache out of his knees. He starts down the path toward the cemetery gate. Behind, the gravestone shines slick and fresh, the star’s asymmetry throwing a lopsided shadow in the direction of the storm. Beside him, Anaxa falls into step. There are no birds. There is no one to see them off. But the wind, for a moment, sounds almost like the whispers of a thousand hushed voices passing secrets between the headstones.
Phainon counts the hours until he can leave the office.
Between the fluorescent grind of his company and the slow labor of resuscitating Anaxa’s legacy, the walk home becomes the only transition he allows himself—a narrow corridor of time bookended by the street’s soupy heat and the brittle, paint-fumed air of the studio. His days repeat this way—drift up familiar stairs, unlock the door, and step inside.
The first day he does this, he listens. The building hums with tired plumbing and neighbors who seem to only remember how to move at midnight. Somewhere overhead, a baby cries. In the studio, Anaxa waits on his stool the way he once did after class, except now he’s dead, and the stool wobbles beneath nothing at all.
Still, Phainon looks for him. The shape of absence sits exactly where presence should be, as if expectation alone might conjure substance. He drops his bag on the couch and nudges aside a heap of canvases that have colonized the path toward the studio. Every flat surface leading there has surrendered to the sprawl.
Claiming these post-funeral tasks from Hyacine and Castorice came too easily to Phainon. The two had done much to carry the professor’s career for years; now, at the hour of burial, he has the audacity to step in, rearrange the debris, and call it tribute. Perhaps, in their own quiet grief, they might not have been ready, which suited the situation well enough.
He tells himself it’s the right thing to do. Anaxa left no kin but this orbit of former students and long-tolerated colleagues, all sending condolences and cheerful batches of memorial photos that clang against the mood of the hour. But the truth is simpler: the studio is the only place Phainon can stand to be. The only room in the city where the light seems to fall with intention. Tall windows, echoing floors, the bones of the building tuned to every intrusion—the honk of a car, a slammed door, a rainstorm gathering itself to burst. There is a pocket of late afternoon when shadows spill molten and gold along the walls, and in that hour the room feels like a lung. One only he and Anaxa know how to breathe.
He sets to work.
The studio had been an inheritance, though Phainon had never known the dead sister.
Anaxa had moved in after a short period of living above a grocer’s, the last time he ever had a landlord. That had been in the early days, when Phainon was still in the second year of university, hungry for guidance and sure that the correct proximity to genius could wear it into his bones. He had helped with the move. He remembers, too, the way Anaxa folded into his embrace once the work was done, how the man’s body seemed to give way as though the collision had been waiting for them.
Phainon remembers carrying the last box up the narrow stairs, setting it down carefully in the bedroom. When he’d returned to the studio room, Anaxa was stood by the window, hair loose over one shoulder, cradling a steaming mug between his palms. The late afternoon light softened the usual stiff line of his features, turning his profile into something welcoming, almost vulnerable. A pitcher of iced tea waited on the hardwood table beside a plate of sliced cake in quiet thank you that Phainon had answered by crossing the room and wrapping his arms around Anaxa’s slight waist from behind.
He can’t think about this without the flush burning up behind his ears, remembering how brazen he was and could be. Even now, with the ghostly aftermath of Anaxa’s presence lurking in every corner, the memory presses itself forward, wanting air.
He’d known exactly what he was doing throughout Anaxa’s entire move into this apartment, the calculated brush of fingers whenever he had to hand Anaxa a glass of water, the way he’d stretched to reach high shelves, shirt riding up. The first time had been against this very desk, initiated by Phainon’s hand sliding up the back of Anaxa's neck, fingers threading through his hair. He remembers the startled intake of breath, how he’d pressed forward until the older man yielded. Anaxa had trembled beneath him, all resistance dissolving like sugar in rain.
There was an urgency to how Phainon had held him that night, like they were on borrowed time. Every movement was a question. Every sigh from Anaxa, an answer. He remembers pressing their foreheads together afterward, sweat cooling on their skin, listening to the uneven sound of Anaxa’s breath. He remembers not knowing what to say, and had somehow come to the conclusion, that, at the time, it didn’t matter. He’d never known whether it was affection or his own desperation, if the act meant anything beyond the flattening of loneliness by shared weight.
Today, he’s sweeping the desk clean. He means to just set aside a few graphite pencils that instead roll and clatter to the floor. Anaxa perches beside him, flickering between visibility and something more kinetic, a tension in the air, a gravity that tugs at the nape of Phainon’s neck.
“So clumsy still,” Anaxa mutters, eyeing the spillage.
“Sorry,” Phainon answers, defaulting to an apology.
He bends to gather the pencils, his fingers trembling just enough to betray the memory of that first time, the taste of iron and varnish and whatever they had shared which lingered in the wood.
When he straightens, Anaxa is inspecting a row of finished paintings propped against the far wall. The set is uneven. There are two large canvases, one thin as a placement, but all three speak in a private language of color and hesitation. Phainon sees the professor’s hand move to touch a brushstroke, and for a moment it seems possible that he might be able to bend the canvas where his finger might make the fabric dip slightly under his touch, that the membrane between worlds might be thin enough for oils to cross, but it doesn’t.
“You’ve improved,” Anaxa says finally. His tone is mostly flat, but the words land with the force of a small benediction.
Phainon lets out a quick, nervous laugh. “I’m just copying you.”
“That’s the point though.” Anaxa’s smile is a brief, upward glitch in the air.
Phainon finds himself wanting to protest, to say that this isn’t true, that he’d come for something beyond imitation, that what they had was more than repetition. But the words stick; he settles for picking up a paintbrush and twirling it between his fingers until the gesture feels thoughtless.
Time at Anaxa’s apartment and studio is viscous. He loses track of it, slipping between cleaning and painting, between errands and the long, suffocating silences that neither of them seems willing to breach. The third canvas is nearly finished, an abstract wash in tones of blue and bone, interrupted by a single flare of viridian that catches the eye and refuses to let it go. He spent a week on it, uncertain whether it resembled a coastline or the residue of a dream. Anaxa had pronounced it “passable” and told him to start the fourth.
Sometimes, when the light is right, Phainon thinks he can see the outline of the professor’s younger self just at the edge of his vision, leaning over his shoulder, or pacing the perimeter of the room with hands clasped behind his back, as he used to do. It is surprisingly easy to get used to a ghost, especially one you’d already spent years orbiting.
And so the days pass like this: paint, clean, pop into work, listen to the city’s slow exhale.
The studio is mostly tidy now. Phainon has replaced the sagging mattress in the bedroom, bought sheets that don’t scratch, and restocked the kitchen with groceries for two despite knowing he is the only one who will ever eat. Anaxa allows it. He even encouraged it at one point, citing the need for “normalcy” in the face of such cosmic insult.
When Phainon had shyly suggested he might sleep at here every now and then, Anaxa had shrugged. “No use ferrying yourself back and forth. You’re here for a reason.”
Phainon had nodded, and let the comment stand, though he isn’t sure what reason Anaxa might imagine. Some nights he lies awake and tries to guess if it’s atonement, or loyalty, or if the studio itself had been rearranged to hold him in place, as if the act of painting is its own quiet entrapment.
By the start of the third weekend, the room is almost unrecognizable. Where once there had been a century’s worth of accumulated pigment and dust, there is now only the smell of linseed oil and something like clean linen. Even the north windows, long darkened gray by soot, let in more frail light.
Phainon stands in the center of the space, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a smear of white paint tracking along his forearm like a vein as he looks on at the current canvas. Anaxagoras is seated at the stool, eyes narrowed at it.
“You’ve been painting too slow lately,” Anaxa muses.
Phainon shrugs, tilting his head as he lets the brush hover betwen two colors he’s still choosing from. “You always did say slowness was a method.”
“I lied. I believe you talked about a bad grade in an elective and I simply felt compelled to… indulge. At the time.” He moves on from that anecdote quickly. “Only bad paintings that are destined to be bad require so much patience.”
“Good thing I only make bad paintings,” Phainon mutters, but he sets to work, priming the canvas in methodical verticals as Anaxa leans in to direct every move. The instruction is half command, half mutterings of a scholar whose old habits die hard (hah), but Phainon likes it anyway because it feels familiar.
When he pauses to rinse a brush, Anaxa asks him, “what do you make of that one?” and nods toward a smaller canvas propped on the radiator. It is an abstraction in sky blue and ragged lines, a kind of visual static. Phainon feels the old worry return: that he is being tested, that the right answer will always be out of reach.
“I don’t know. The colors are nice, I guess.”
“That’s what I thought at the time.” Anaxa’s voice is distant, as if remembering the memory rather than the painting itself. “It doesn’t really mean anything.”
Phainon considers this. He wonders what strange fixation the old man had developed in the last years—why the blue, why the dissolution of form, why the gentle unspooling into nothing. Did Anaxa want to die? Is that why he didn’t seem to resist his slow decline, why he’d drowned himself with work and cigarettes and nights spent alone at this same desk? Phainon does not ask, because he knows there is no answer. Ghost or not, Anaxa could talk at him for hours on anything else, but has and likely will always be stingy with information if it had to do with himself. And so, Phainon paints in silence, letting the process hollow out the rest of his thoughts.
After a few hours, Anaxa deems this canvas “acceptable” too and dismisses him from the studio for the day.
Phainon always braces himself for something uncanny whenever they get to this part of the work. When Anaxa passes his judgment, Phainon half-expects a flicker of light, a voice echoing past the edge of hearing, a shiver of paint rearranging itself while he isn’t looking to finally signal the end of a dream. But nothing ever happens. The room just grows quieter, the dust settles, and Anaxa resumes his vigil in the space.
Phainon washes his hands at the utility sink, watching the blue pigment whirl down the drain, and then goes to the kitchen to make dinner. It is just the start of the weekend. There are likely more paintings to come. For a moment, Phainon stands at the threshold of the studio, watching the last light tilt through the windows, and thinks about the weight of repetition; the way some patterns outlive the people who make them. His intake of breath tastes like turpentine and the cold smell of evening, and wonders how many more canvases it will take before the ritual ends, or if it ever does.
There is no noise in the apartment except for the gentle hum of the refrigerator and the muted clinks of pipes behind the apartment’s walls. The lights are dim, half of them having long ago surrendered to burnout, and Phainon wanders the rooms as if wading through dusk. Anaxa has not moved from room to room since early evening. Phainon assumes he’s still hunched in the studio, lost in the collapse of color, the way he always is when a particular restlessness seizes him.
For the first time in awhile Phainon finds himself alone in another’s space. He pads through the kitchen, bare feet over tile he’d spent yesterday scrubbing, and opens the fridge to survey his handiwork: neat rows of containers labeled in his own handwriting, produce arranged by color in the crisper drawer. He closes it again, not hungry yet. The kitchen counter gleams under the dim light, mismatched mugs now arranged by size, glass jars re-purposed as vessels for fresh herbs—a sprig of mint he’d planted last week already reaching toward the window.
He slips into the narrow corridor, letting his hand trail along the wall where years of steam have blistered the paint into soft, uneven ridges. It still feels like trespassing every time he’s in here, even though this is where he sleeps every time he stays (which has been more often throughout the week these days). Each step announces itself with the faintest creak, as if the floorboards are reluctant witnesses. In the bedroom, offered by Anaxa without even the pretense of hospitality, the mattress now carries the blankets and pillows Phainon brought over last week. Small domestic comforts imposed on Anaxa’s old monastic austerity.
A crooked lampshade draws his eye, its tilt making shadows stretch across the wall. As he leans down to straighten it, his foot connects with something solid that scrapes across the hardwood floor with a hollow metallic sound. He glances down to find a tin box, previously hidden between the legs of a broken chair, now exposed by his inadvertent kick.
He knows he should leave it alone—this is Anaxa's private space, after all. But the night is too quiet and his body too awake, curiosity a physical itch under his skin. He crosses the floor and crouches down for it. The box is battered with an enamel scene of a mountain lake, its lid speckled by rust and something that looks like dried honey. The clasp resists, but the hinge gives, and he lifts the lid with the care of someone opening a stranger's diary.
Inside, there is an order to the disorder. Paper objects, flattened and stratified: two blue tickets with a cartoon dolphin leaping above a castle (Aquatic Kingdom, admits two), four movie stubs with their perforated edges still intact, the titles faded but the showtimes still visible, all evening screenings on Fridays, all passed years ago, the tickets never surrendered to an usher’s hand. A pair of green zoo passes, their corners browned and curling. None are torn, none spent. Beneath these, a bundle of receipts folded small, and some napkins with ink sketches, of faces, mostly, or abstract shapes that could be clouds or scars.
Phainon counts the tickets, letting his eyes graze the dates printed in ink (2014, 2015, 2017) and knows, without knowing how, that these things were collected for another. For a future that never arrived.
He feels the weight of all those unspent days and an answer to his question he can grasp but isn’t yet ready to reach for. He could inventory his own life this way: unopened letters, the gifts still in wrapping, and promises to himself unwritten but never rescinded.
He reaches for a slip of paper but stops before his fingers touch it. Some envelopes are sealed, others gaping with dog-eared mouths, but he can see the scrawl of handwriting on the back of one that just says: for when you’re ready in his looping handwriting. He feels a prickle in his scalp.
Phainon closes the box with slightly trembling hands and sets it exactly where it had been, and then stands.
The room feels smaller now, more occupied before he learned of the box’s existence. The light outside has slouched into a different shade. He crawls onto the mattress, turning his back to the tin. The sheet smells faintly of dust and the sharp, mineral scent of bleach. He does not expect to sleep. He is never sure when he does anymore, or if what follows is sleep at all.
Still, time slips.
He dreams of a hand, pale and soft, gripping his wrist with playful force. He knows that hand. The hand pulls him forward, through a haze of gold, toward a bench by the river, toward a mouth, no, a version of himself whispering tired promises. He does not want to let go. He never wants to let go. But at the crucial moment, he wrenches free anyway, some old fear clenching inside him and Phainon will walk away. The hand stays suspended in that moment, fingers splayed, each one naming a regret.
When he turns to look back, it is gone.
Phainon wakes with the impression of cold on his skin, a single bead of sweat tickling down his temple. And on his brow, an absence: as if something invisible had pressed there, briefly and with great tenderness.
The apartment at dawn is neither silent nor awake; the sounds are small, the low, constant murmur of the refrigerator, a faint creak in the floorboards, and the distant hush of a car passing somewhere below. Phainon is first up, though “up” is relative, since it feels like he hasn’t truly slept. He’s been perched on the edge of the bed since the dark hours, watching the blue-white square of the window as it melted from navy to a foggy, low-grade silver.
He rises, careful not to disturb the uneven stack of books that lean beside the mattress. He rubs the crust of what little sleep he got off the corner of his eyes. He moves with the slow economy of someone who is being watched.
The kitchen is colder than the bedroom. His first order of business is the kettle, which he fills from the tap, its gurgle echoing into the sink’s steel throat. He sets it on the burner and then reaches for the knob, turning it until the stove starts to answer with its sharp ticking. Then he waits, hands braced on the cool tile countertop.
A muted cough comes from the general direction of the studio.
Phainon keeps at what he’s doing at the counter but calls out a, “good morning,” projecting the words toward the apartment’s other occupant the next room over. No answer. He pours coffee grounds into a conical dripper, watching the water bloom over them. Steam rises in thin threads; he inhales, letting the scent calm his nerves.
When he looks again, Anaxa is standing in the doorway, a smear of ash-gray cardigan thrown over the slumped bones of his shoulders, the same one he’d worn yesterday, and the day before. Phainon had noticed how objects seemed to stick to Anaxa temporarily, like static cling, before eventually falling through him. His hair sits a little out of place; when Anaxa sometimes runs his fingers through it, the strands move but don’t stay put, returning to their original dishevelment like they’re remembering the position they were in when he died. Phainon suppresses the impulse to smooth it down.
“Oh, you’re here,” Phainon says.
Anaxa considers the statement for a long moment, as if he must confirm it against the evidence. “Am I?”
He has not crossed the threshold from the corridor into the kitchen. It’s as if the division of space matters. Phainon wonders whether ghosts are bound by such rules. He wonders, not for the first time, what else Anaxa might be bound by.
“You want coffee?” he asks, already pouring into the largest mug.
Anaxa snickers. “Hah. Playing house now, are we? Looks nice, though.”
His fingers twitch in the direction of the cup, but he lets the gesture die.
Phainon brings the mug to the table and sets it at Anaxa’s usual place anyway, then sits opposite. He arranges his own breakfast with almost childish care: a stack of toast, the good butter, a thumbprint of marmalade in the lid of the jar. He waits for Anaxa to sit down, which happens after a period of hesitation that feels like a negotiation.
Anaxa folds himself onto the chair, eyeing Phainon over the rim of the coffee. “You always eat like this?” He gestures at the plate, half-mocking, half-impressed.
Phainon shrugs over a mouthful of toast. “Not always. But I figured it might be nice. Make things feel normal.”
Anaxa’s lip curls. “Nothing about this is normal.”
They sit in a not-quite-silence. Phainon chews. He tries not to look at the hands that used to belong to a living person; how they hover over the cup, or tap on the table in patterns that remind him of Morse code. He wants to say something about last night, but he feels the words harden in his chest.
He decides to take the long way around.
“You ever wonder,” he says after taking a grounding drink of coffee, “if it’s not the work that’s keeping you here?”
Anaxa narrows his eyes. “You think you’re clever, aren’t you?”
Phainon picks at the crust of his toast, smiling gently. “Just a theory.”
“What else could it be?”
Phainon drums his fingers on the tabletop, choosing his words.
And then he clears his throat. “Well,” he says finally, voice bright to mask how awkward he actually feels bringing this up, “maybe… we’re approaching this wrong.”
He looks on back at him, careful to keep his gaze steady. “You ever thought about what you might have wanted to do while you were alive? You know, like a bucket list—things you never got around to experiencing?”
Anaxa snorts. “A bucket list? Ridiculous.”
“Why ridiculous? Everyone has things they wish they’d done.” Phainon leans back in his chair, watching Anaxa’s face.
“Of course,” Anaxa says, voice rising slightly, “but what more could I possibly need than what I already had?” He gestures with a kind of desperate sarcasm at the general direction of the room where his studio is, at the peeling paint on the walls. “This was it. I did it all.”
Phainon raises an eyebrow, challenging him despite the nerves spiking up in his system. “All of it?”
For a moment, the only sound is the whisper of the radiator. Anaxa’s fingers clench and unclench.
Phainon leans forward, elbows on the table. “So if you’re satisfied with that, then maybe that’s not what’s keeping you here. Not anything in here at least. Maybe it’s something else.”
Anaxa laughs, but it’s a brittle thing. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
Phainon shrugs, smiling. “Guess not. But if I were—”
“You’re not,” Anaxa snaps, then looks away, as if ashamed of the outburst.
Phainon softens his voice. “Look, I just mean... Sometimes, people don’t realize what they actually want until they’re forced to slow down.” He thinks of the box in the bedroom. The slow, accreting weight of all the small things you promise yourself you’ll do someday. “You ever just want to do something stupid, like, I don’t know... go on a date?”
Anaxa’s head snaps back around. He looks genuinely startled, a single syllable caught in his throat.
Phainon takes pity on him and maybe himself. “Not with me!” He says immediately in defense. “I just mean, in general.”
But the damage is done. Anaxa is blushing, a thin spread of color under his skin, but he is also frowning. Deeply. “That’s not... I mean, I wasn’t—”
Phainon finds it in himself to grin, letting the silence stretch.
Anaxa glares, but there’s no force behind it. “Nonsense. Did you wake up this morning and decide to be exceptionally obtuse, or is this just how your mind works now that you’ve spent years filing paperwork instead of making anything worthwhile?”
“Probably,” Phainon agrees, letting the deep cut roll off his shoulders. He finishes the last bite of his toast and stands to bring his plate to the sink. The water hisses against the ceramic, and he watches as the soap forms bubbles and dissipates. He can feel Anaxa’s eyes on his back.
Behind him: “You really think that’s what I need?”
Phainon shrugs, not turning knowing what it might do now that his professor’s slowly started to relent. “Honestly? I don’t know what you need. I just know anything we’ve tried so far related to your work isn’t working. And that, for someone who says they did everything, you seem pretty pissed off about being stuck here.”
Anaxa grumbles. “You don’t know anything.”
“Maybe not,” Phainon says. He puts the plate in the drying rack, wiping his hands on a towel. “But I do know I want to go to the museum today. You coming?”
He turns, finally, expecting to see him roll his eyes again at the opposite end of the other counter, but instead finds Anaxa standing there, right in front of him, impossibly close.
“Boo,” Anaxa says, deadpan, in greeting.
“Shit—” Phainon stumbles backward, hand to his chest, his back hitting the edge of the counter.
Anaxa’s face splits into a rare, brief smile. “Got you.”
“Professor,” Phainon whines, more from embarrassment than fear.
Anaxa steps back, relinquishing the space.
“You’re in over your head with that suggestion,” he says, voice gentler now. “I almost regret haunting you.”
Phainon laughs, relief and something else winding together in his throat. “Well, by the way you explained it, it sounded like you didn’t really have much of a choice here. No one else can see you, remember?”
Anaxa makes a small, dismissive noise. “Tsk.”
Phainon leans against the counter. “Okay, so maybe not a date... date.”
He can hear how stupid it sounds. His life, up until now, had been a parade of nots. Not-date. Not-artist. Not-lover, not-anything. The memory of it is metallic on his tongue. But he makes himself smile anyway.
Anaxa’s gaze is unreadable. He looks at the floor, the fridge, anywhere but Phainon’s face. “You really want to drag a dead man to the museum?”
“Why not?” Phainon says. “You can haunt the impressionists instead of me for a while.”
Anaxa gives a small, genuine laugh. It makes his eyes crinkle, changes the shape of his face.
“Alright,” he says with a sigh. “But if you start explaining the art to me, I’m leaving.”
Phainon puts a hand to his chest, already moving past the kitchen. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Phainon retreats to the bedroom, emerging minutes later in a pressed oxford shirt and his better pair of dark jeans. He catches himself in the mirror, smoothing a hand over his collar, then feels ridiculous. Anaxa can only ever be barefoot in that gray cardigan and the clothes he died in. Still, he slips on the navy peacoat he’d thrifted last winter, aware of how the blue complements the outfit, not wanting to look too sloppy in front of him.
He grabs his wallet from the side table, checks for his keys, and hesitates when he sees how Anaxa hovers by the doorway, looking like he needs to practice going outside.
He pulls a scarf from the hook and wraps it around his neck, smiling a little as he tucks the ends in with a nervous, habitual gesture.
“Shall we?”
“Mm,” Anaxa hums.
Phainon is halfway to the stairs when he realizes Anaxa isn’t following.
He turns and sees him still in the threshold, looking back at the apartment with something like longing.
“You alright?” Phainon says, soft.
Anaxa startles, then shakes his head, as if to clear it.
“Fine. Just—” he swallows, tongue wetting his lips. “It’s been a long time since I left.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Phainon says. He holds out a hand, knowing it’s only for show. But Anaxa reaches out anyway, fingertips brushing against the air beside Phainon’s palm.
They go down the stairs together. Outside, a taxi honks three blocks down. The city is cold, the air biting at Phainon’s cheeks like tiny needles, but he can feel the warmth of the day starting to rise, sunlight catching on frost-rimmed windows and turning puddles into mirrors. Anaxa moves through it all untouched, a shadow among shadows.
He doesn’t know what happens to ghosts who finish their business, or to the living who try to help them. He’s not sure he really wants to know, but it’s highly likely he has no choice in whether he actually gets to find out or not.
At the corner, Anaxa pauses. The light slants over his face, making him look almost alive. Phainon’s chest tightens, these moments of whiplash might soon become unbearable with the way Anaxa shifts between specter and flesh before his eyes. One second otherworldly, the next so achingly human that Phainon could almost forget he’s gone. Though he supposes that’s the cruel paradox of ghosts: they are, by definition, the most human things that aren’t.
“Lead the way,” Anaxa says, and Phainon, despite the gnawing ache, does.
The museum stands in the early-morning quiet, imposing in its height. Its facade is a hodgepodge of neoclassical pretensions in columns, pediments, a massive bronze urn that nobody has bothered to polish in decades, but it’s the only building on the block that doesn’t look like it’s waiting for demolition. The banner above the doors says they’re exhibiting ‘THE NEW ROMANTICS: ART AFTER THE END,’ with the subtitle half-obscured by rainwater stains.
Phainon angles his chin up at the sign and mutters, “if they don’t have at least one painting of a wolf on a cliff, then I want my money back.”
Anaxa makes a noncommittal noise. His hands are buried in the pockets of his cardigan, which looks even more limp and defeated in daylight. He hovers close enough to catch Phainon’s scent, sweet oranges, fabric softener, the tang of city air, but not so close that their arms could touch by accident. It is as if he’s learned to haunt Phainon at exactly the distance of a remembered embrace.
Inside, the atrium is full of echoes and dust. A single ticket-taker sits hunched in her booth, flicking through her phone with the indifference of a minor deity.
“Two adults?” she asks.
Phainon nods before he can stop himself. “Yes. Two.”
Her eyes flicker from him to the empty air at his side without even a pause. “Great. Eighteen each.”
He hands over his card, and she hands him two printed tickets. He feels the material weight of both before sliding them into his coat pocket. He steps aside to let the next visitors through.
Anaxa leans in. “She didn’t even blink.”
Phainon lowers his voice to a whisper as they pass other museum goers. “Are you disappointed?”
“A little,” Anaxa admits. “I thought it would be fun to spook her too.”
Phainon snorts. “She probably thought I was on a date and my boyfriend’s in the bathroom or something.”
Anaxa gives him a look. “Do you often take these imaginary boyfriends to museums?”
Phainon pretends to straighten his coat. “Only the most handsome ones.”
Anaxa stares at him for one full second, unimpressed. “You are insufferable.”
“Come on.” Phainon jerks his chin toward the nearest gallery, choosing to ignore that. “Impressionists first. Promise I won’t explain anything.”
“Oh, please. You will,” Anaxa says, already sure of himself. “Because you can’t help yourself.”
But he follows anyway.
They walk the first gallery in silence.
The art is arranged in semi-chronological confusion: three centuries of longing and grief shuffled together by curators who believe narrative is for the weak. There are portraits of men in lace collars, women with translucent skin, landscapes where the horizon bends and splinters. In here, the lighting is too bright, pooling on the canvas surfaces and making everything seem flat and overexposed.
Phainon meanders. He reads most placards, even the ones with names longer than the work itself. His eyes flick across the text and then the painting, as if cross-referencing some private database of trivia. Anaxa lags behind, drifting from wall to wall.
It isn’t until they reach a gallery hung with watercolors that Phainon slows, gaze snagging on a painting of two girls under an apple tree. The work seems nearly abstract in that the faces are half-smudged; the hand of one girl is reaching out for a branch, the other catching a falling apple. The title is printed on a card below: “After the Rapture, Only the Fruit Remains.”
Phainon looks at it for a long time. His mouth does a small, downward turn at the corners.
Anaxa, unmoored, asks, dubious, “Apples?”
Phainon smiles sideways at him. “I think… it’s about loss? The apples are a metaphor.”
“For what? Waste?” Anaxa keeps his tone dry.
Phainon tips his head back, considering the image in front of them. He has no idea actually, but sometimes he likes to pretend he does. “Maybe. Or maybe, it’s just about two idiots who didn’t pick the fruit when they had the chance.”
Anaxa feels a chill spark at his fingertips. He has the impulse to reach out and touch Phainon’s sleeve, to pin him to this moment, but he resists. Instead, he just says, “that’s a little on the nose.”
“When were you ever the type to hold back?”
“I’m not holding back,” Anaxa says, folding his arms, tucking his own hands deeper into hiding. “I’m simply stating an observation.”
Phainon looks at him full on. He opens his mouth, then closes it, his gaze dropping momentarily to the floor between them. When he looks back up, his voice is softer than before. “Did you ever make something just for yourself? Something nobody else was ever supposed to see?”
Anaxa shakes his head, slow. “Me? Personally? It all ends up on the wall, eventually. Somehow. Or a dumpster if it’s not so lucky.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Phainon says, but he says it gently, although he doesn’t really elaborate. Anaxa doesn’t want to unearth anything from it either.
They move on to the next room. What greets them there is an installation of half-finished skeletons of machinery, bones made from rebar, chairs upholstered in linen. There is a large sphere in the middle of the floor, covered in cracked mirrors. The plaque identifies it as “With Every Regret.” Phainon circles it, peering at his reflection in the jagged shards. Anaxa stands off to the side, watching Phainon as if he’s the actual exhibit.
“Which one is you?” Phainon asks, pointing at the glass.
“None of them,” Anaxa replies, and it’s true, the sphere reflects nothing where he stands. He feels a strange satisfaction at this absence. Phainon, by contrast, appears in every facet: split, repeated, and infinitely multiplied.
Phainon pouts. “Cop-out.”
“I never did like mirrors,” Anaxa says.
Phainon leans closer to the art and squints.
“There’s a chip in one of the pieces. See?” he points. “You think the artist meant to do that?”
Anaxa examines the flaw, then shrugs. “Probably not. The rest of this doesn’t exactly strike me as well thought out.”
“What gives you that impression?” Phainon asks. “For all we know that could be intentional too.”
Anaxa wants to say something scathing, but the words congeal into a lump in his throat.
Phainon moves past this too eventually, weaving between exhibits, never still for more than a minute. He reads aloud from the wall text, sometimes translating the curatorial jargon into bad puns, sometimes inventing elaborate backstories for the artists. At one point, in front of a black-and-white photograph of two men kissing at a train station, he deadpans, “these are the real star-crossed lovers. You can tell because only one of them is wearing sensible shoes.” Anaxa almost laughs.
They pass through a hallway lined with tiny oil studies, all portraits of the same man at different stages of life. The man has a nose like a dagger and exaggerated eyebrows. In the last painting, he is stooped and frail, but there’s a kind of peace in the way his hands are folded. Phainon lingers here, eyes tracing the progression from young to old.
“Why do you think people do it?” he asks, quietly. “Paint themselves over and over, like that.”
“Maybe to see if they’ve changed,” Anaxa answers, before he can stop himself. He realizes too late how much it reveals.
Phainon looks at him, then at the paintings, then back again. “Do you think it works that way they want to?”
“Of course not,” Anaxa says, and it’s the truest thing he’s said all day.
They reach the end of the exhibit, a single room with a wall of glass facing the courtyard. Sunlight pools on the floor, casting long rectangles across the polished wood. There is a bench. Phainon sits; Anaxa stands, arms crossed again, unwilling to let himself relax.
After a minute, Phainon pats the space next to him. “You can sit, you know. I won’t bite. Can’t either, for that matter.”
Anaxa hesitates, then perches on the very edge. He is acutely aware of the distance between their knees. Phainon’s foot is tapping, almost in rhythm with the ticking of the wall clock.
“You ever come here with anyone before?” Phainon asks.
“No,” Anaxa says. “You?”
“A couple times. But not like this.”
“Like what?”
Phainon laughs, and it is brittle. “Not everyday you can say you went out on a date to a museum with a ghost.”
Anaxa smiles wryly at that, but doesn’t say more. He looks out at the courtyard, where a bronze sculpture of a bird is locked in the act of flight, wings stretched. He wonders if the sculptor meant for the bird to look so desperate, as if it knows it’s never leaving the pedestal.
Phainon says, “But uh… you… you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“What?”
“Do any of this. The art, the company, the…” He trails off, mouth twisting. “Whatever it is I’m trying to do.”
Anaxa doesn’t answer right away. He thinks to say “I want to” first, but his throat can only constrict around the words.
“I know you’re just trying to help, Phainon,” he says instead, each syllable scraping against his pride.
Phainon grins. “Good. Because I was about to propose we go to the gift shop and buy the ugliest magnet they have.”
Anaxa rolls his eyes, but there’s no real venom in it. “That apartment needs no more clutter. The fridge is already covered in takeout menus.”
“So? We can make room for it.”
Anaxa almost says there wouldn’t be a use for one anyway, for someone who’s dead, but the words curdle before he can speak them. Instead, he stands, stretches his arms above his head, and says, “well, get on with it, then.”
The gift shop is a cramped annex, full of postcards and novelty pencils and tote bags printed with the museum’s logo. Phainon beelines for the display of magnets, which are mostly hideous: neon landscapes, misprinted famous paintings, an acrylic block replica of a wolf painting they did not see at today’s exhibit.
“Ha!” Phainon crows, brandishing the wolf at Anaxa. “It’s even worse than I imagined.”
Anaxa gives a nod. “It’s perfect.”
Phainon grabs two, one for each of them, apparently, and heads for the counter.
Anaxa follows, standing a half-step behind while Phainon banters with the cashier about how many wolves is too many for one apartment. The cashier, a grad student by the looks of her, does not dignify the question with a response outside of an acknowledging grunt. She rings him up and slides the magnets into a brown paper bag.
Outside, the air has gone cold and flat, the winter sun already retreating behind the office towers. Phainon tucks the bag into his coat, then looks at Anaxa as if expecting something. The street is busy, people hurrying past with heads down, but for a moment, it feels as if they are alone.
Phainon’s breath clouds the air between them. “Where to next?” he asks.
Anaxa raises an eyebrow. “This was your brilliant idea. You’re the one with the plan.”
“Fair enough,” Phainon concedes with that familiar half-smile. “Alright then, leave it to me.”
Phainon leads them out of the museum courtyard. Anaxa walks slightly behind him as if testing the weight of the world beneath each step. By the time they reach the corner, the sun has slipped behind the buildings and left the sky bruised purple. Phainon gestures toward the main street.
“Alright… how about dinner first,” he starts to say. “Then a movie?”
Anaxa tilts his head, studying him. “A movie? Look at you, committing to the whole date bit.”
“It seemed like the safest option,” Phainon shrugs.
“Let me guess, you’re subjecting me to a grand romance?”
“Not unless you want one, professor,” Phainon says, just to be cheeky. “Also, you can pick this time. I’m flexible.”
Anaxa huffs, amused. “You say that now. Wait until it’s three hours of experimental soundscapes.”
“Then I’ll get to see how long I can keep pretending to understand what’s going on,” Phainon says. “Which is half the fun of being around you, to be honest.”
They reach the sandwich shop a block down. It’s warm inside, fluorescent and cluttered with laminated menus and high tables that wobble even without a ghost passing through them. The cashier glances at Phainon.
“Two?” she asks for some reason.
“Two,” Phainon confirms before Anaxa can scoff.
He orders two sandwiches, two drinks, two plates. When they sit, Anaxa takes the seat opposite him, hands folded with academic dignity as if he is inspecting the arrangement of cutlery. Phainon unwraps both sandwiches and pushes one forward.
“You know I can’t eat it,” Anaxa says.
“Sure,” Phainon replies, biting into the first sandwich. “But we already got it so...”
Anaxa just sighs and watches him finish the first sandwich, then the second.
When Phainon is done eating for them both, they make their way to the nearest mall cinema. The lobby smells of popcorn and that faint metallic coolness of an overworked air-conditioner. Phainon, as he’s previously done, buys two tickets without a second thought. Anaxa tilts his head, taking this in.
“You keep doing that,” he murmurs.
“Well, it’s at least proof,” Phainon starts to explain, slipping the tickets into his coat pocket. “That I didn’t come here alone.”
Anaxa leaves that thread of conversation well enough alone.
Inside, the theater is mostly empty. They pick seats halfway back. The lights dim, the previews roll, and the room settles into that soft collective hush of strangers facing the same direction.
The actual movie ends up interesting Anaxa a considerable bit, a feat in and of itself. Within minutes he’s murmuring guesses to himself. Phainon shifts in his seat to hear better: a villain introduced too early, the shape of the plot telegraphed by the actress’s first line, the way the camera lingers on the wrong props. Anaxa’s thoughts tumble one after another in a quiet whisper even though others can’t hear him. Phainon challenges some of them, plays devil’s advocate, argues angles he doesn’t quite believe just for the fun of it. Each time, Anaxa revises his prediction or doubles down with increasing satisfaction.
Phainon glances at him often. There is something light in his expression and almost unguarded. A spark he knows he never saw often enough when Anaxa was alive. He wonders, for a strange moment, why he never thought to do this before. Why he’d kept a whole world of simple pleasures away from them both. Anaxa, of all people, had never asked much of him. Perhaps that had been the problem in the first place. Expect nothing and people give you exactly that.
When the movie ends, they step back into the night. People from the last showing spill out onto the street, laughter echoing from the bar nearby. Anaxa walks close beside him, almost brushing his shoulder though, for obvious reasons, he never quite touches.
Phainon watches the crowds pass, then makes the approximation of nudging him although he just nearly trips over air.
“This is the part where I’m supposed to hold your hand.”
Anaxa stares at him like he’s lost his mind. “Why.”
“Couples do it.”
“We are not a couple.”
“We could call it method acting.”
“Unbelievable,” Anaxa mutters under his breath, but it’s also without heat and with that specific tone he takes with Phainon when he’s more endeared than annoyed. Phainon has known this man too long not to pick that apart.
“Take it up with management,” Phainon just says, holding out his hand and wiggling his fingers in mock invitation.
Anaxa scoffs, unyielding. “I’m dead. I can’t hold your hand even if I wanted to.”
“That sounds like something someone says when they’re afraid I’ll double down.”
Anaxa rolls his eyes. “Absolutely not.”
“Alright, alright,” Phainon says, laughing. He drops his hand, but the warmth of the joke lingers.
They walk the rest of the way in mostly companionable quiet.
When they reach the apartment building, Anaxa surprises him by telling him, “I actually enjoyed that.”
Phainon hides his smile by pretending to adjust his coat. “Yeah? Me too.”
Inside the apartment, the heat kicks on with a soft rattle. Phainon hangs his coat. Anaxa waits in the entry, looking strangely smaller without the outside world around him.
“So,” Phainon asks, almost too casual, “nothing still?”
What he really hopes for, is that the answer is no.
Anaxa shakes his head. “Nothing.” His voice is steadier than earlier, but a faint disappointment leaks through, which makes something twist inside Phainon once he recognizes it too.
Still, he feels the relief bloom quietly in his ribs. “Tea?”
“...sure,” Anaxa says eventually. “I’ll look at my work again in the meantime.”
Phainon doesn’t argue point with him about what good that would do and heads toward the kitchen as Anaxa takes the short walk down the hallway, back toward the studio. The walls catch the faint shape of him as he passes, bending the light in small ways.
Phainon wakes early the next morning and spends far too long fussing over food he knows Anaxa cannot physically taste. He spreads the blanket on the kitchen floor first to check for holes. He sorts containers twice. He debates packing pastries at all, then decides it would feel wrong not to. By the time he slings the bag over his shoulder, the winter light has gone pale, the kind that makes every breath look like exhaust.
They walk to the park in silence. The grass is brittle under a thin crust of frost. A few joggers pass, red-cheeked and determined. A bundled couple sits on a bench sharing a thermos. A dog barks at nothing, which earns a quiet “hmph” from Anaxa as if being barked at by a mortal creature is beneath him.
Phainon sets the blanket down near a stand of stripped birches. The ground crunches under his palm as he smooths the fabric. He unpacks the containers one by one: sandwiches, apple slices, a small jar of olives, a thermos of hot chocolate, a half loaf of sweet bread from the bakery across town. He places everything carefully, as if arranging a still life.
Anaxa watches the whole operation with a baffled expression.
“Why all this?” he asks as Phainon settles in and opens the first container.
Phainon shrugs and looks at the frozen pond beyond the trees. “You used to enjoy reading with me at the park.”
He doesn’t add that he remembers exactly which book Anaxa held the first time he dared put his head in the man’s lap, and how Anaxa didn’t move for an entire chapter just so Phainon wouldn’t shift away.
The memory flickers between them. Phainon does not speak it aloud. Anaxa does not ask for details. But the air changes slightly, threaded with something old and thin.
“Oh,” Anaxa says finally. “That.”
Phainon’s smile is small. “Yeah. That.”
Anaxa sits on the blanket. Something in the way he folds his legs is careful, as if muscle memory persists even when muscle doesn’t. Phainon pushes a napkin toward him out of habit.
“You can at least pretend,” Phainon says.
“I always pretend,” Anaxa replies. “Seems that it’s my primary occupation now.”
Phainon huffs a laugh and breaks off a piece of bread. His fingers sting from the cold but he keeps eating anyway. Anaxa watches the steam rising from the thermos as if trying to convince himself he can smell it.
They talk about nothing for a while. The shape of the clouds. The bird that keeps circling the pond. The fact that Phainon’s coat is definitely not thick enough.
“Whose fault is that,” Anaxa mutters.
“Yours,” Phainon says. “Obviously.”
Anaxa snorts. “You chose to drag a corpse outside in winter.”
“You’re not a corpse.”
“That is debatable.”
Phainon laughs again and reaches for an apple slice. He hesitates before biting into it, then glances sideways.
“Can I ask you something?”
Anaxa doesn’t look at him, but his posture shifts. “You usually do regardless.”
“When I didn’t… when I decided not to become a real artist. Were you disappointed?”
Anaxa is quiet. A cold draught moves through the trees and rustles some of paper liners of the containers. Phainon waits. He watches his own breath dissipate.
At last Anaxa says, “there’s no such thing as that.”
Phainon watches his face. “But.”
“But yes,” Anaxa continues. “I was.”
The answer falls between them lightly, without reprimand and without drama. But it hits Phainon harder than he expects.
Anaxa’s gaze stays on the bare branches above them. “Not necessarily because you had infinite potential, although I will say, yes, you did. Or do. Likewise, not because I wanted you to follow my path. But because at that time, nothing you chose could have made you happy. You always were running on the momentum of other people’s expectations.” He pauses for only a breath, as if he was thinking carefully of what to say next. “My only hope is that whatever you are doing now, even if it isn’t art, is at least gratifying.”
Phainon swallows around something thick. “...I don’t know if gratifying is the word.”
“Then find another word,” Anaxa says. “One that feels true when you say it.”
Phainon nods despite himself and tells him, “I’ll give it some thought.”
They pack up after a while. Phainon brushes frost off the blanket and tucks everything back into the bag. As they cross the park path, he holds his hand out between them as a joke. Anaxa glances at it, then, after a moment, positions his own hand near it anyway. Their fingers float parallel, close enough that Phainon imagines warmth where there is none.
They walk back like that.
Inside the apartment, the warmth is jarring after the cold outside. Phainon drops the bag near the door and rubs his hands together for heat. Anaxa steps toward the hallway, toward his studio as he usually does.
Phainon’s throat tightens. He bites his lip, but chooses to speak all the same.
“Wait,” he says quietly.
Anaxa stops and turns to face him again.
Phainon shifts his weight and looks at the floor. “I’m sorry for running away.”
The words feel like they scrape something inside him on the way out.
Anaxa blinks. For a moment he looks like he might ask for clarification, but then his posture softens with recognition.
“That was my mistake too,” he accedes. “Although I was partial to thinking that you were simply chasing something more you wanted.”
Phainon lifts his eyes. The space between them feels sharper.
“You thought that?”
“Of course,” Anaxa says. “You were always reaching for something just out of sight.”
“And you thought I’d eventually catch it?”
“Well, no,” Anaxa tells him truthfully. “But, I thought you needed to try.”
He gives Phainon a quiet, assessing look, before he turns and leaves the room, walking toward the studio’s corridor again. His form blurs slightly as he passes into shadow, the way it always does when he retreats.
Phainon watches him go.
He stands alone in the quiet, listening to the faint shift of the apartment settling around them both.
That evening, Phainon stands at the stove, stirring noodles in the pot and tasting sauce from a wooden spoon in tandem. The kitchen smells faintly of garlic and the cheap red wine he splashed in at the last minute. He hums under his breath, distracted, thinking through deadlines and grocery lists and the slow dread of Monday coming up once again.
Then he hears a sharp, startling clatter from the general direction of the studio, loud enough that the spoon slips from his hands and hits the floor.
“Professor?” he calls, already moving.
“Anaxa?” When he hears no response.
He hurries down the hall, heart thudding, and pushes into the studio.
Anaxa is on the floor.
For once, he looks as startled as Phainon feels. One of the canvases has fallen off its easel, lying face down against the hardwood but Phainon ignores it and he goes straight to Anaxa, instinct pulling him down to his knees.
“Hey, are you alright?” Phainon asks, hand already reaching for him. He grips Anaxa by the upper arms to help him up and only then does he realize he’s holding something solid and flesh-warm and weighted.
He freezes.
Anaxa stares back at him, wide-eyed too. “Phainon.”
“What’s wrong?” Phainon says, all breathless panic. “Does anything hurt?”
“Well,” Anaxa says slowly, “yes. Apparently.”
Phainon blinks. “What? Where?”
Anaxa lifts a hand in dazed demonstration, flexing his fingers. “Do you see what’s strange about that?”
“I—no, I don’t—”
Then it hits him, finally, that he can feel him.
Anaxa can feel him.
Phainon looks down at his own hands, gripping Anaxa’s arms. He looks back up and catches the bewilderment flooding Anaxa’s expression, something painfully human in it.
“Oh,” Phainon whispers.
“Mm,” Anaxa murmurs.
A suspended moment stretches between them, warm and real and somewhat terrifying. Phainon helps him fully upright after a beat, steadying him carefully, trying not to think too hard about how natural it still feels to hold him.
Once Anaxa is balanced, Phainon steps back half a pace and clears his throat.
“Well,” he says, voice unsteady and yet still trying for some semblance of normalcy, “good thing I made dinner for two?”
Anaxa blinks at him like Phainon has spoken an impossible spell.
But minutes later, they are both sitting at the small kitchen table. Phainon tries to act normal as Anaxa picks up a fork. The metal doesn’t fall through his fingers nor does his hand vanish through the utensil.
He scoops a bite of noodles and hesitates before tasting it.
Then he chews and swallows.
“Ah,” Anaxa breathes, somewhat stunned. “I can taste it.”
Phainon laughs weakly, a nervous bubble of sound. “This really should’ve happened at the picnic.”
Anaxa’s brows knit. “We can always have another one.”
Phainon stills.
Something about the ease of that sentence lands in his chest with a soft, heavy ache. Anaxa doesn’t seem to notice it, already reaching for another bite, marveling at the simple sensation of flavor and texture and the warmth of food in a body that isn’t supposed to have one.
Phainon gathers himself and smiles. “Yeah. Of course. We can go on as many as you want. Maybe you’ll actually finish reading something this time.”
Anaxa doesn’t hear the layering beneath his tone. He’s too busy turning his fork over in his hand as if it’s a miracle. He presses his palm against the table and watches how the wood pushes back. He shifts in the chair and feels the faint give of the cushion. Every new sensation seems to capture him fully.
Phainon watches him in quiet awe, trying not to stare, trying not to think about the way Anaxa had felt in his arms on the floor. The way this new solidity might change the rhythm of the room. The way it might change everything.
Anaxa takes another bite, eyes bright with something close to wonder.
Phainon swallows hard and serves him more.
Anaxa cannot explain how he ends up here. One moment he is in the kitchen, experiencing the small miracle of taste as a would-be ghost. Then he must have wandered, or drifted, or perhaps the body given to him had tugged itself toward warmth by instinct.
But now he’s in bed.
The mattress sinks under his weight, blankets trapping heat around him. The air smells faintly of detergent and whatever shampoo Phainon uses. More confusing still, is that Phainon is beside him, shirtless, asleep, sprawled with the same graceless comfort he always had as a student.
Anaxa sits propped against pillows, slightly upright, his legs stretched out beneath the sheets. He is dressed in a shirt that isn’t his but must have been placed on his body sometime earlier, though he cannot recall when. The fabric is soft at his elbows and warmer than he expects.
He touches the blanket. It gives the way cotton should under hands.
Then he looks at Phainon.
Phainon’s hair has fallen over his forehead, breathing steady and deeply unguarded. Anaxa lifts a hand almost against his will and brushes the hair back from Phainon’s temple in a gentle sweep. The movement comes too easily, as if his body remembers something he hasn’t dared recall fully. His heart knocks once against his ribs in a way he hasn’t felt in a very long time.
Phainon shifts a little in his sleep, but does not wake.
A soft pressure moves the air near his side of the bed, and Cerces, almost somewhat predictably, stands there. As before, she is composed of nothing and too much at once.
“Enjoying your gift?” she asks.
Anaxa keeps his hand in Phainon’s hair and does not look away. “Gift?”
Cerces folds her arms. “A push,” she tells him. “To get you where you need to go.”
He stares at her in open scrutiny. “Why this.”
“You were not moving,” she answers, as if it were obvious. “So I moved something for you. Temporary, of course. As all things are.”
Her eyes travel to the rise and fall of Phainon’s breathing. “Were you maybe hoping for permanence? That something had changed in the order of your condition?”
He looks down at Phainon, still asleep, cheek half-buried in the pillow. The blanket has been pulled up to his waist, revealing the curve of his spine and the soft expansion of breath.
Anaxa’s throat tightens. He strokes Phainon’s hair again, softer.
“I might be starting to understand,” he says, what he really means is the shape of his regret is becoming clearer to him and he does not appreciate that she’s made it easier.
“Good,” Cerces replies, and Anaxa hates that it feels like she can read his mind too. “You have been slow.”
Anaxa ignores that and just asks her, “how long?”
“With this form? Not very. Although you can spend much as you like the usual way if you prefer. I feel though, it might be just enough.”
No it will not, he thinks, mostly without meaning to. But the thought itself is a step toward the truth she wants him to see. He doesn’t respond.
“Enjoy it while you can,” Cerces only says after a beat, and she gives him a look that resembles pity without ever truly touching it.
When Anaxa chances a glance at her again, Cerces is gone.
Phainon stirs, shifting closer without waking. He nudges against Anaxa’s side like it is the most natural place in the world for him to be. His arm drapes across Anaxa’s thighs over the blanket, warm and heavy. It is the same weight he used to carry years ago, back when they would fall asleep in tangled sheets after nights spent talking until dawn or kissing until silence overtook them.
Anaxa feels the weight of him now. He is pinned gently to the bed by the warmth of Phainon’s cheek against his side. His hand remains in Phainon’s hair, frozen in place by disbelief.
“What do you want for breakfast,” Phainon mumbles into him, voice scratchy from sleep.
“Pancakes,” Anaxa says before he can think of a more dignified answer.
“Okay,” Phainon breathes. He presses an absentminded kiss to Anaxa’s side, the soft space just above his hip. The contact is feather-light but impossibly real, like the memory of warmth finally made tactile.
Phainon shifts again, guiding Anaxa down under the sheets, coaxing him to lie properly. Anaxa follows, quietly stunned at how easily he surrenders to the motion. Phainon wraps around him, arms sliding around his waist, one leg tangled with his. The position is intimate and something they must have learned together by muscle memory long before either of them were ready to admit as much.
Anaxa settles against his chest. He can hear Phainon’s heartbeat against his ear.
“Is this okay?” Phainon asks, barely awake.
“Yes,” Anaxa says, tucked into him. “It’s warm.”
“Good,” Phainon murmurs, kissing the side of Anaxa’s face this time, even softer than before. The warmth pools under Anaxa’s skin, strange and sharp in the ruinous way that old comforts can be.
Anaxa closes his eyes. He feels the weight of the arms around him, the steadiness of Phainon’s breathing, the gentle rise and fall of a living chest pressed against his back. It is jarringly different from the cold distance of death. It is also achingly familiar, like a memory he had exiled from himself and now finds returned without warning.
He allows the illusion to hold him. He lets his body relax the way it had once, when life still offered simple comforts and Phainon still sought his warmth without hesitation.
He drifts into the closest thing his body remembers as rest.
The new ease between them accumulates quietly until Phainon finds himself doing things without really giving it much thought, like dressing them both before they leave the apartment, fussing with Anaxa’s sweater, straightening its collar and carefully tying a scarf over his neck. Phainon buttons his own coat with a strangely buoyant energy, reminiscent of days they both had thought were long gone.
It’s the proximity, Anaxa sometimes reasons with himself, if not convenience, or coincidence, that Phainon leans into this sort of thing again—but the truth is really so much simpler. That, perhaps he just means to fill the empty years with something bright, although fleeting.
Today their small adventure is an arcade tucked under a subway overpass. Neon lights stutter in the windows, and the faint electric buzz of old machines spill out into the cold air whenever the creaking automatic doors open.
“Come on,” Phainon says, nudging Anaxa’s shoulder with his own, dragging him along inside.
Anaxa says nothing but follows closely, the corners of his mouth already softening in faint amusement. Inside, rows of cabinets line the walls and the room smells faintly of aged metal and fried snacks. A few children shriek at racing games, some people in another corner are playing a half-hearted game of air hockey.
Phainon hands him a card.
“You planned this,” Anaxa points out.
“And you can’t pretend you haven’t been making eyes at those machines,” Phainon counters, already tugging him along the narrow spaces between games.
They find themselves lingering in front of a pixelated space shooter and Phainon watches as Anaxa approaches it with careful skepticism at first before he sees the years nearly melt away from his expression. He plays with surprising (and frankly, unfair competence), his shoulders relaxing, although his concentration does visibly deepen.
“You’re good at this,” Phainon murmurs close to him, watching the screen intently, hovering close enough so that it seems like he’s the one playing to average passerby.
Anaxa gives a quiet, almost dry response with a shrug as he kills an oncoming sprite with a quick tap of a button. “It’s just pattern recognition.”
When the game ends with a triumphant flicker of lights, he steps back and Phainon looks at him surveying the high score list with mild pride. He bumps his shoulder, softer this time.
“Try that one next,” Phainon says, pointing toward the claw machine.
Anaxa lifts an eyebrow. “That’s a cash grab, if I’ve ever seen one. Does anyone actually win from those?”
“You’d be surprised.”
The machine is full of ridiculous plush animals in bright colors and somewhat floppy limbs. Anaxa studies it the way he might study a painting, looking for structure and balance, or the hidden tension beneath the randomness. He leans down slightly, tracking the arc of the claw, the angles of the plushes, the likely snags.
“Hmm,” he says.
And then he plays.
The claw descends into the fluff, seems to grip something before it briefly falters, but then grips tighter. The clunk metal rises again and when it does, it’s holding a purple dinosaur with stubby legs, a long neck and an unreasonably cheerful grin.
Phainon laughs, loud and genuine, eyebrows raised. “Hah! You’re kidding.”
Anaxa retrieves the plush from the chute.
“Well, what do you know?” He says, patting the thing, before he tucks it under his arm. The sight is so absurdly tender that Phainon has to look away for a moment to hide the warmth climbing up his throat.
They wander more of the arcade after that. Phainon watches Anaxa play through more old puzzle games with near-perfect scores, loses to him at the zombie shooter, watches him tilt his head at a rhythm game that Anaxa insists is “a sensory nightmare,” but finishes multiple rounds of anyway.
When they leave, the air outside has turned colder. Anaxa still has that ridiculous purple dinosaur tucked under his arm as Phainon moves to collect their dinner from a food stall they pass on the way to the nearest station.
“Did you have fun?” Phainon ventures asking, as they descend the stairs down to the subway.
He blinks when he gets no response and looks back to find him a few paces up, still clinging to his prize, reading over a peeling poster on the subway walls.
It isn’t quite rush hour yet, so there are no other people walking down with them, and so Phainon reaches into his pocket and brings up his phone. He doesn’t know if this will actually work, but something tells him he should at least try.
The sun is just beginning to set beyond the subway entrance, spilling a thin wash of late afternoon light down the concrete steps. It hits Anaxa at just the right angle, catching in the strands of his hair, giving them a faint sheen.
Something in his chest tightens.
For a moment everything feels still, like the world has thinned enough to let him see clearly for a second. Anaxa looks softer than he has ever allowed himself to look, at least in front of Phainon, gentled further by the faint glow of the day’s close. The ridiculous plushie tucked against him only adds to the unbearable familiarity of it—some version of the man Phainon knew, and the one he didn’t have enough time to know.
The screen on his phone lights up, framing Anaxa within it, a figure outlined by golden dusk, cardigan slightly rumpled, the plush grinning under his arm, posture relaxed.
Phainon breathes out and steadies the frame, and then he takes the shot.
The shutter makes an audible sound, and though barely more than a click, Anaxa’s head lifts to his direction. He glances down, eyes narrowing slightly as they land on Phainon holding his phone up at him, caught mid-act, looking mildly curious and faintly surprised.
Phainon clears his throat and forces a grin.
“Smile,” he calls up, mostly to tease, mostly for lack of nothing better to say, expecting the usual dry retort.
Anaxa blinks down at him. Then, to Phainon’s complete shock, his mouth curves into something quiet and small, lifting gently into something private and warm and just for him.
Phainon’s breath catches, but he manages to snap another photo, hands shaking slightly. He takes three in quick succession for good measure.
“Happy?” Anaxa asks, back with his usual eye roll now as he walks down the stairs to meet him halfway.
Phainon swallows around the sudden warmth in his throat. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, actually.”
“Come on,” Anaxa says, nudging him forward with a light press of their shoulders. “We’ll miss our train before rush hour.”
At some point, Phainon suggests they go drinking too. Anaxa brightens at the idea. He always did enjoy a good drink. The bar Phainon picks is one tucked down a narrow side street, its sign glowing faintly blue above the door. Inside, the lighting is low and the bottles behind the counter catch the dim light in long, quiet glints. The first round is better than good. Anaxa rolls a sip of whisky along his tongue and nods with clear satisfaction.
But the crowd shifts as the hours move. A group stumbles in and grows noisy almost immediately. The music jumps two notches the later it gets and as the tables fill, voices raise with it. The air becomes tight and crowded, pressing in around them.
Phainon glances at Anaxa and sees the subtle change in his expression: a small downturn at the mouth, the slight withdrawal of his shoulders.
“Sorry,” Phainon murmurs, leaning close so he can be heard. “I didn’t know it’d turn into this. We can go if you want.”
“I want,” Anaxa says, already rising from his seat.
Phainon smiles despite himself and follows. They leave without finishing their drinks.
Outside, the night air is crisp and clean, a relief after the heat of the bar. Phainon rubs his neck, embarrassment simmering under his skin.
“Seriously, I’m sorry. I thought it’d be—”
“Come on,” Anaxa interrupts.
Before Phainon can ask, Anaxa hooks two fingers into his sleeve and tugs him toward the bright glow of a convenience store at the corner just down the street. Anaxa makes a beeline to the refrigerated aisle, scanning the shelves with a level of discernment that might suit a wine merchant.
“Pick something,” he says.
Phainon laughs. “I thought this was your rescue mission.”
“Pick,” Anaxa repeats, as if the quality of the evening depended entirely on what bottle Phainon would choose. So he picks two different types of red and a few cans of a tried and tested brand of beer in case that somehow isn’t enough.
Anaxa approves with a small nod.
They head home through the quiet streets, their shoulders brushing now and then. When they reach the apartment, Anaxa hangs his coat on the hook without thinking and follows Phainon to the couch like they have both always inhabited this space together.
They open the bottles. The first sips are warm and slow, spreading through them in gentle heat.
They stay curled together on the couch for a while, until the drinks are half-finished on the table growing cooler as the late hour settles around them. The blanket has slipped down to Anaxa’s waist. Phainon’s hand rests just above his hip, thumb tracing a slow arc that pretends to be absentminded.
Anaxa shifts slightly, letting his head settle more comfortably against Phainon’s shoulder. They began with small talk, mostly of the kind they used to share in the studio between critiques and long silences. Phainon mentions a project at work that has always refused to cooperate with him, a client who keeps badgering them about minor changes not part of their contract, and someone in the executive team who sends emails at unreasonable hours.
“I figured you would end up doing something managerial,” Anaxa remarks, his tone more amused than cutting. “You always did have a knack for trying to keep things aligned.”
“Aligned is generous,” Phainon says with a slight grumble. “Half my time’s spent patching holes someone else left.”
“That’s also something you’re good at.”
Phainon huffs out a quiet sound, unsure whether to take it as praise or more commentary. The warmth of Anaxa leaning against him makes it easier to accept the ambiguity.
They drift from the present into the stretch of intervening years; this conversation begins cautiously. Phainon avoids broaching anything that might open old wounds or stir questions he doesn’t know how to answer. He sticks to the broad strokes: exhibitions he attended from a distance, jobs he tried and abandoned, interesting people he’s worked with and then some.
Anaxa listens quietly. His attention feels steady, as though each detail Phainon offers slots into a pattern only he can see.
He remembers how they used to talk like this too in the studio on old winter nights: Anaxa in the middle of working on something as usual, Phainon sitting on the floor mixing paint or grading papers, their words drifting gradually from art to whatever lay beneath it, until the hour grew late and they realized they had run out of topics and excuses at the same time.
“What about you,” Phainon asks, unable to help himself as he finishes off his glass, “after I left?”
“There wasn’t much,” Anaxa answers. “Students came and went. Work was always there. I meant to take a break at one point, but... well, you know how it is.”
“Hyacine said you were still showing pieces.”
“Yes, something like that.”
Phainon runs a hand slowly along Anaxa’s side, more to steady himself than anything and mostly because Anaxa seems to be letting him and he is nothing but opportunistic. He bites his lip, and then takes the leap.
“You could have called.”
“So could you.” Anaxa counters immediately.
The exchange lands without accusation, and settles between them like two stones placed side by side.
Phainon shifts, adjusting the blanket over Anaxa’s legs. Their shoulders fit together without effort. A faint warmth lingers along Phainon’s cheek where Anaxa’s hair brushes him. They remain like that, the quiet punctuated by the faint hum of the refrigerator and the muted glow of the lamp in the corner of the room and the small lights from the nearby kitchen.
Anaxa turns slightly, enough for their faces to fall into the same line of breath. The shift is small, but Phainon feels it ripple through him all the same. Up close, Anaxa’s expression carries a kind of weathered quiet, something measured by years rather than in moments. Phainon watches the tension that guarded his features earlier ease by degrees, as if the comfort of leaning against him is slowly loosening a knot that’s been there longer than either of them were willing to admit.
Phainon doesn’t look away.
He absorbs this closeness accorded to him, the faint scent of soap clinging to them both, the warmth that radiates through the blanket pooled around them. His hand, still resting on Anaxa’s thigh, feels the slightest shift against it, an unspoken invitation that isn’t quite so deliberate but isn’t entirely accidental either.
He lifts his other hand, moving slowly enough so that Anaxa could decline if he wished. His palm comes to rest along the line of Anaxa’s jaw, thumb brushing the beneath his cheekbone.
“Come here,” Phainon murmurs.
Anaxa’s eyes lower in that old familiar way. Phainon leans in first, meeting him with a gentle kiss carrying no demand, only intention. He guides Anaxa into it with soft pressure, coaxing rather than taking, giving him space to answer at his own time.
Anaxa does.
He tilts forward, letting their mouths fit with a tentative pressure, his hand drifting up to rest against Phainon’s chest. The kiss deepens gradually, shaped by years of restraint unraveling in the slow heat unspooling between them. Phainon draws him closer with a careful pull at his waist, and Anaxa shifts into the space offered to him, settling across Phainon’s lap at long last.
Their mouths move together in unhurried against one another, each kiss unfolding into the next. The wine lingers faintly, softened now by warmth and breath. The lights filtering from outside scatter dim colors over the walls, catching briefly in Anaxa’s hair as Phainon angles his head, kissing him again with more surety, more devotion than he trusts himself to speak of out loud.
They continue like this until time seems to thin around them, until the small room feels made for two people sitting close enough to share a single breath.
When they finally pull apart, their foreheads brush. Anaxa doesn’t pull away yet and Phainon doesn’t loosen his hold.
For a moment, neither of them speak. The soft rattle of the radiator fills the distance where words might have gone.
Phainon exhales, feeling the weight of every year they lost settle and then lighten, if only marginally, just enough to give a name to what rises in him.
“I missed this.”
The confession leaves him in a mostly even tone, but it alters the space between them. Anaxa’s hand tightens minutely on his knee and he looks down, away.
“Did you?” Anaxa says, voice softer than before.
“More than I knew how to say,” Phainon answers, lifting a hand to gently coax Anaxa’s chin upward with a careful touch, inviting him to test the sincerity in his gaze.
Phainon leans in again to close the last inch between them. Their lips fit together and then part just enough to draw more breath from one another. The kiss warms quickly, soft as it had been earlier, then firmer as Anaxa leans in too, his lips sliding against Phainon’s slowly. There’s a faint tremor in Anaxa’s exhale, a quiver that Phainon tastes as their mouths open slightly, brushing deeper, trading heat and the subtle give of their lips learning each other again. Though unhurried, it’s hungry, moving in small, attentive adjustments.
The room holds still around them, as if it, too, remembers.
They get Christmas too.
Phainon prepares for it like someone making up for every year he hadn’t been allowed to do this. He insists on a tree, even though the apartment barely has room for it. He finds a tiny one, half-dead but still bravely green, and he sets it crookedly in an old clay pot from the studio. The roots barely cling to the soil. It leans to the left like it too, is exhausted from existing.
“It has character,” Phainon says.
“It’s listing to one side like a drunk,” Anaxa replies, narrowing his eyes at it.
“Very festive of it, don’t you think?”
Anaxa snorts, unimpressed, but Phainon can see the faintest amused curl at the corner of his mouth.
They string lights across the bookshelf, carefully weaving them around the uneven stacks of books. They drape thin garlands along the radiator which has mostly been coughing out lukewarm air. Anaxa adjusts one of the garlands by a centimeter, then steps back as if the entire night depends on this precise placement.
Phainon cooks too much dinner. Possibly enough for four people at minimum. A roast, two side dishes, a pot of soup, and a loaf of bread he’s a little disappointed he couldn’t bake himself.
“I forgot to halve the recipe,” he lies, which is so blatantly false that when Anaxa hears it, he huffs a short laugh into his glass of wine.
He doesn’t call it out and just watches Phainon bustle around the kitchen.
They don’t say anything about presents, but Phainon gives him one anyway.
It’s a sweater in a deep maroon and looks soft as brushed wool.
Anaxa holds it up.
“I would drown in this,” he says flatly.
“You’ll look cozy.”
“I will look like a poorly assembled puppet.”
“Try it on.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
They both smile. The little tree lights flicker against Anaxa’s hair.
Later, when Phainon hands him a cup of hot chocolate spiked with whisky, Anaxa wordlessly slides a piece of heavy paper across the table to him.
Phainon picks it up, flips it over, and his breathing nearly stops.
It’s the three of them at the studio table. Himself on one side, Castorice on the other, Anaxa in the center. A call back to the grainy photo that only exists in Castorice’s wallet. The sketch is loose in places, sharpened in others, full of motion and memory. The lines are unmistakably Anaxa’s.
Phainon swallows hard. His thumb brushes the corner.
“I didn’t know what else to give,” Anaxa murmurs.
“It’s perfect,” Phainon says. His voice sounds cracked open. “Better than perfect.”
Much like most nights these days, they end up on the couch with the blanket draped over both of their legs. The tree stays slightly sagging in its pot, the lights dimmed to a soft thrum that barely illuminates its side of the room. Outside, the windowpane reflects the room back at them: two figures sitting close, the faint outline of steam rising from their mugs.
Somewhere in the hallway, a neighbor’s door closes and every other hour, a car will pass muffled in the street below. The apartment absorbs these sounds, softening them, letting the quiet grow dense around the two of them until it feels like they’ve stepped sideways from the rest of the world.
Anaxa shifts closer, brushing Phainon’s jaw with the side of his head as he settles against him. The movement draws Phainon’s attention immediately. He turns, lifts a hand, and rests his fingers along Anaxa’s cheek with a careful, almost tentative steadiness. Anaxa meets the touch without pulling back, his gaze lowering in a way that leaves space for whatever comes next.
Phainon leans in and murmurs, “hey.”
Anaxa answers quietly, “hi,” and moves fully into Phainon’s lap, his knees bracketing Phainon’s hips as if he has always known exactly where to sit. The shift adjusts the blanket around them, but neither of them reaches to fix it.
They kiss softly, testing the fit of an old pattern. Phainon guides it with one hand at Anaxa’s waist, the other steady at the back of his neck. Anaxa responds by sliding a palm along Phainon’s chest, fingers spreading lightly as if reacquainting themselves with its shape. Their mouths meet and separate in slow intervals, each return more certain than the last.
The room is mostly quiet except for the minute sounds of them adjusting to each other: a faint catch of breath, the shift of fabric as Anaxa settles closer, the soft exhale against Phainon’s lips when the kiss deepens. Phainon’s hands tighten slightly along Anaxa’s back, guiding him into every new kiss longer and warmer.
Most evenings pass like this now and Phainon has stopped going back to his own house. They stay close without thinking about where it should lead. Sometimes they kiss for long stretches, drifting in and out of it with the same unhurried ease as turning pages in a familiar book. Other nights they trade only a few slow ones before settling against each other, letting the quiet fill the room in soft, uneven layers. It feels like inhabiting a dream that neither of them want to wake from, built from borrowed time and the smallest gestures they had once denied themselves.
It’s also during one of these nights when Phainon falls asleep with his face tucked near Anaxa’s collarbone and an arm wrapped loosely around his waist, that Anaxa notices the shift again. That faint thinning. A pull at the borders of his form. He tries to reason with himself: he could stay as he was before in any case and that things would not have to change. He could linger in the apartment, unseen but present. He could watch over Phainon, at the very least.
But in hovering that way, Anaxa is also cognizant of how he would trap Phainon in this half-life; that Phainon, left unchecked, would also welcome it. Anaxa knows him too well to pretend that that would not be the case.
He doesn’t say anything yet to him that night about it, or the next. Phainon doesn’t see his physicality faltering yet, only the renewed warmth in front of him, the rhythm they’ve fallen into with the confidence of two fools who keep stumbling into the same step and laughing at the fact that it works anyway.
Today, Phainon is standing at the kitchen counter, head bent to peer into the refrigerator. He shifts two containers around, looking for something.
“What should we do this weekend?” he asks, without looking back. “Museum again? Or maybe try that cafe near the river? People say they make good pastries.”
Anaxa stands in the doorway, watching him. Something inside him slows, then steadies. The overhead light flickers once against his skin, catching on the edges of him in a way he feels rather than sees. The boundary of this borrowed body is starting to loosen like a seam tugged by time.
He looks at Phainon, at the familiar domestic scene arranged so casually before him: the open fridge, the leaning tree in the corner in the nearby living room, the mugs still drying by the sink. A life Phainon stepped into without hesitation, and a life Anaxa cannot remain in.
“I haven’t seen the sea in a long time.” Is all he says to that.
Phainon closes the refrigerator door and turns around to face him fully. “The sea?”
“Didn’t you used to live near one?” Anaxa asks. “Your hometown.”
Phainon blinks, a bit baffled. “We can’t go there. It’s too far.”
Phainon hesitates only a second afterward, before he eventually relents, considering it anyway. “But, I mean, yeah. We can do that. Somewhere just out of town, okay?”
Anaxa nods, crossing the rest of the way to get on the tips of his toes to kiss him on the cheek.
When the day comes, the drive is long and quiet. Anaxa sits with his hands folded in his lap, watching the winter outside blur past. Barren trees, skeletal fields, the glow of highway lights reflected in the window he doesn’t fog with real breath.
By the time they reach the coastline, the sun has already started its slow descent. The sky is turning a heavy blue and bruised with portions of the evening dotting the horizon. The wind cuts sharp. Phainon zips his coat to his throat. Anaxa pretends he doesn’t feel the temperature sliding away from him.
They walk down a short slope of sand to the beach, their boots sinking slightly in the sand. The sea is dark and heaving in long, slow breaths. Foam gathers in pale streaks on the shore.
Phainon reaches out his hand without a second thought and Anaxa lifts his own and threads their fingers together.
They stand like that, facing the water, the cold biting at Phainon’s cheeks, the wind threading through Anaxa’s hair. Anaxa squeezes Phainon’s hand once, lightly, uncertain whose sake it might be for.
Phainon only watches the small puffs of breath before him and waits for Anaxa to speak.
Anaxa looks out at the water as if searching for something beyond the darkening. His face is thoughtful, almost serene, but the shadows under his eyes hold a quiet finality in them. “I think we both know what I need to do to go,” Anaxa says eventually.
A wave collapses onto the shore, white foam blooming in the dark. Phainon watches it recede before he speaks.
“You don’t have to,” he says softly. His voice cracks. “I don’t need to hear it to know. I—”
“Phainon,” Anaxa interrupts, not unkindly, but reminiscent of how he’d chastise him as a student.
Phainon falls silent. The sea fills the space between them with the steady hush of something ancient.
Anaxa shifts their joined hands closer to his chest as if weighing them. He lifts his gaze, regarding Phainon with that same knowing look. It isn’t cruel by any means, but it is one that is steady and settles on Phainon with a heaviness that feels like being seen too clearly, a difficult truth offered without a chance for reprieve.
He considers telling him the whole of it: that years cannot be rewritten, that their lives had diverged in ways that no confession, no winter shoreline might be able to unwind to an easier time or to when the path had forked to go down that road untaken. That nothing Phainon says or doesn’t say will change how this is supposed to end. But Anaxa has also always been of the terrible habit of speaking to him with a gentleness that might risk misunderstanding and often did. His care for Phainon has always been a sort of concession, not because he’d ever thought Phainon fragile, but because hurting him has always felt like the one line he could not cross in this lifetime and so too in the next.
So he only tells him, “it’s important that it’s said to you.”
Phainon bites his lip, breath shaking slightly. The wind stings his eyes. The world feels hollow around them, filled only with the crash of waves and the cold press of fate closing in on them.
“Well,” he says quietly, “if you must, but not here. Not like this.”
Anaxa glances at him, questioning. Phainon straightens, lifting to his full height on instinct, shoulders pulled back like he can brace himself with posture alone. He shifts closer and brings a hand up, touching Anaxa’s cheek. The kiss he gives him is a gentle one, nothing like desperation but every bit like grief softened into longing. Anaxa doesn’t resist. His hand lifts and rests against the back of Phainon’s neck, an old gesture learned years ago, resurrected now without hesitation.
Phainon breathes against his lips, “There’s a place nearby and we can—”
He doesn’t get to finish. Anaxa pulls back just enough to search his face. For a heartbeat he studies him—this earnest, transparent man trying to offer something tender in the middle of a goodbye they both know is coming. A soft laugh escapes him, warm and almost fond, because, if anything, Phainon’s stubborn hope might still charm him despite everything.
“Let’s go,” Anaxa says, the words threaded with that quiet amusement, as if he can’t help but be touched by the way Phainon reaches for him even now, knowing exactly what it means to take every next step forward.
The hotel room door barely gets to click shut before Phainon pulls Anaxa against him and into a kiss. There is no hesitation in it, only the ache of years collapsing all at once. Anaxa meets him halfway, hand curling in Phainon’s coat and drawing him in impossibly close. They move together like the intervening time never happened, like the past never split them apart.
Phainon nudges him backward, mouth still on his, walking him slowly toward the bed. His breath tangles with whatever mimicry Anaxa can offer.
Anaxa’s hands slide under Phainon’s shirt, finding heat and muscle, and the familiar shape he had always been careful not let himself remember too often. Phainon answers by kissing him deeper, slow and hungry, tongue coaxing him open.
When the backs of Anaxa’s legs hit the mattress, Phainon guides him down with careful insistence. Anaxa sinks onto the bed, propped on his elbows, hair fanning across the pillow. Phainon follows him, bracing one hand beside his head as he kisses him again, slower this time, tasting him with each press of their mouths against one another. They break only long enough for Phainon to strip off his coat and shirt, then help Anaxa out of his own layers. The cardigan slips aside first, then the too-big sweater, leaving Anaxa pale and slight beneath him. It makes Anaxa self-conscious for a heartbeat, but Phainon touches him with such steady, reverent patience that whatever he’d worried about initially ends up dissolving into a helpless tremor.
Phainon kisses down his throat, the curve of his shoulder, the center of his chest. His hands map every inch with a kind of devotion that borders on worship. Anaxa feels his breath stutter.
“You don’t have to—” Anaxa murmurs, embarrassed at being handled in this way.
Phainon cuts him off with a soft sound, raising an eyebrow with a gentle smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “What do you mean? I want to.”
He goes back to kissing him lower, slow and open-mouthed, savoring every small shiver he pulls from Anaxa. The sheets rustle under them. Anaxa’s fingers curl weakly in Phainon’s hair, his breaths coming quicker.
Phainon mouths at his ribs, his stomach, the sharp little indent above his hip. Anaxa’s back arches without meaning to, his body reacting before he can think. It has been so long since he has felt anything like this, so long since he let himself be touched or even seen in this way.
Phainon’s hands slide up to the sides of his thighs and then his mouth follows at the center of him. He works him open with deliberate care, licking and kissing until Anaxa’s breath breaks into harsh little gasps, his fingers tangling in the sheets. Phainon holds him steady, coaxing sound out of him, as if he knows every place Anaxa tries to hold back and how to undo it.
Anaxa’s head tips back against the pillows. His chest rises and falls in uneven arcs. His thighs shake around Phainon’s shoulders. Every movement feels shockingly alive, too alive, almost painful in how much he feels it.
Phainon takes his cock into his mouth with slow pressure, focused, attentive, letting Anaxa feel every inch of it. The sensation hits like a jolt, raking through him and forcing a raw, helpless sound from his throat—one he would have been mortified to make if he weren’t already falling apart. Phainon hums softly around him. His hands hold Anaxa’s hips steady even as those hips try to jerk up.
“P-Phainon,” Anaxa breathes, a broken whisper that tastes like surrender.
Phainon only murmurs something low against him, wordless, a promise in vibration, and draws him in deeper.
It’s too much. Too much after death, too much after years of silence, too much after the slow ache of longing he never allowed himself to speak of out loud. Anaxa tries to hold back but Phainon, of course, still knows him too well.
“You’re good,” Phainon insists against him, quiet and coaxing. “I’ve got you.”
The orgasm that takes Anaxa is one that’s sharp and consumes him a wrenching rush, his body tightening under Phainon’s hold. His muffled cry is swallowed back into the pillow as pleasure rips through every fragile inch of him.
Phainon keeps stroking him through it, softening only the intensity by touching him slowly, and stopping only when Anaxa collapses against the sheets, trembling.
He stays close to him as the tremors fade, coming back up to kiss Anaxa’s mouth, his cheek, the corner of his jaw. Each touch is aching with purpose, as if he’s trying to memorize the shape of him with his lips. His hands slide down Anaxa’s sides. He murmurs something too, into his skin, too soft to catch in the haze, before he reaches for the small bottle of lubricant on the bedside table. He coats his fingers and brings them between Anaxa’s thighs. Anaxa spreads for him, body yielding easily, although the sensation is still startling in the way that equal parts warmth, pressure, the faint, unmistakable pull of being opened always is.
When Phainon slides the first finger in, Anaxa exhales something tense, shaky. Phainon watches his face the entire time.
“You alright?” Phainon asks, voice barely above a whisper.
Anaxa nods, eyes half-lidded. “Go on.”
Phainon presses in deeper.
It isn’t long before a second finger starts working Anaxa open slowly with the first. The tightness gives way around him, heat gathering between them. Anaxa’s head tips back. His lips part, soft and involuntary around muffled moans into his own hand.
Phainon feels desire coil low and hard in him at the sight.
Once Anaxa loosens enough after the third, he withdraws and slicks himself, his cock thick and heavy in his own hand, flushed deep at the tip. When he lines himself up against Anaxa’s entrance, Anaxa’s breath hitches and his eyes flick down to watch.
He looks almost startled at the size of him.
Phainon lets out a quiet laugh, leaning in until their foreheads touch. “Nothing you haven’t seen before.”
“Yes, exactly,” Anaxa mutters. “I know. And I complained every time.”
Phainon’s laugh drops into a low sound in his throat. “We’ve always managed.”
“That remains to be seen,” Anaxa answers, though he lifts his hips in quiet invitation.
Phainon lines himself up, and Anaxa’s breath catches the moment the head of Phainon’s cock nudges against him. His eyes trail downward again, still a little taken aback despite their history, despite the way his body seems to remember this.
“Tell me if you need me to stop.”
Anaxa shakes his head, jaw tightening. “I won’t.”
Phainon grins, or grits his teeth, and then he pushes in.
The first stretch forces a raw sound from both of them. Anaxa’s hands clamp onto Phainon’s shoulders, anchoring himself, while Phainon’s breath shudders out against the side of Anaxa’s neck, the heat of it trembling between them as he sinks in deeper.
“Fuck,” Phainon whispers. “You still feel—god—”
He eases forward slowly, inch by inch, until he’s fully seated inside him, hips pressed against the cradle of Anaxa’s thighs. Anaxa’s eyes flutter shut. A soft, disbelieving sound from his throat slips out of him.
He wonders, distantly, what he feels like to Phainon like this. If he feels alive or if he even feels real at all, but he doesn’t ask.
Phainon cups his cheek, thumb brushing lightly over the bone.
“You’re perfect,” he murmurs, as if he’d heard the unspoken question anyway.
Phainon eases back an inch, the withdrawal creating a brief, trembling space between their bodies. The air shifts with it. Then he presses forward again, letting the movement unfold with deliberate patience, feeling the way Anaxa yields around him. His breath slows to match the pace he sets, each inch gained with care, each return measured so he doesn’t overwhelm the momentum they’re building.
“Still with me?” he murmurs, voice low against Anaxa’s cheek.
Anaxa nods, breath catching. “Keep going.”
He moves again, a little farther this time, guiding Anaxa into the rhythm with a subtle tilt of his hips. Anaxa exhales against his collarbone, the sound shaped by effort, relief, and something he isn’t ready to voice. Phainon continues, letting the depth increase through a sequence of small adjustments, each one a negotiation between tension and give. Their bodies find the alignment they once learned by instinct. Phainon’s hands frame Anaxa’s waist, helping him absorb the next movement, then the next, creating a steady rhythm that draws them closer by breath.
Anaxa gasps, the movement slipping through him with a molten ache. Phainon watches him with startling focus. Every shift of his hips is controlled, tuned to the sound of Anaxa’s voice, to the way his body tightens around him.
“Phainon,” Anaxa manages, the name breaking on his breath.
“There you go,” Phainon answers, guiding him through the next slow pull and return.
Phainon moves with a kind of solemn hunger, kissing Anaxa’s lips between thrusts, then his throat, then the hollow beneath his ear. Anaxa tangles his fingers in Phainon’s hair and pulls him closer, letting each movement wash over him in slow-burning waves.
“More,” Anaxa whispers, almost without realizing he said it.
Phainon answers with motion rather than words. His breath grows rougher, hotter, falling against Anaxa’s collarbone. Sweat gathers along his spine. His hand slides down to grip Anaxa’s hip, steadying him as he begins to build harder into it, each movement pulling a deeper sound from Anaxa’s throat.
Phainon’s pace shifts almost before either of them notices, each thrust grinding against him with more surety, drawing a startled moan from Anaxa that spills against his ear; Phainon follows it with a needy sound of his own, almost boyish in how eager he sounds when he breathes, “good? Is it good?”
Anaxa’s answer breaks out of him in a sharp cry—“yes, don’t stop, ah, Phainon—” his arms tightening around his shoulders as if anchoring himself to the motion, hips lifting to meet the next push.
Phainon groans at the response, nuzzling blindly at Anaxa’s jaw, and drives in again, guided by the way Anaxa clings to him, guided by every choked gasp and every tremor of his body urging him deeper, again and again, the bed creaking under their shared weight.
The room narrows to just this: their heat and breath and the thick, steady slide of Phainon’s cock inside Anaxa. Every time their bodies meet, something in Anaxa stirs—grief, nostalgia, memory, all tangled into a single, unbearable sweetness. It rises in him like pressure behind his ribs.
Phainon too, is focused on nothing but him.
His eyes never leave Anaxa’s face. His hands roam every part of him like he’s relearning the topography of someone he once knew by heart. His movements grow stronger, more urgent, until he’s fucking Anaxa in long, deep strokes that punch whispered moans out of both of them.
“Fuck, Anaxa,” Phainon breathes, voice raw.
Anaxa arches into him, nails dragging lightly down Phainon’s back. “Just like that, Phainon—don’t stop,”
Phainon groans, thrusts faltering for a second from the sheer intensity of hearing Anaxa say his name like that again. He grips Anaxa’s hip harder and then pushes in deeper. The air in the room grows thick with heat and the sound of skin meeting skin.
Phainon lowers his forehead to Anaxa’s again, panting hard. Their mouths meet again in a kiss that’s all teeth and desperation and years of unspoken wanting finally clawing its way out. Their kiss breaks on a gasp when Phainon fucks into him again, the movement sharp enough that Anaxa’s voice slips out in a trembling sound he can’t restrain. Phainon swallows it as if he needs every piece of it, his hips falling into a rhythm shaped entirely by how Anaxa responds beneath him. Each time he thrusts, Anaxa’s breath stutters in a different way, and Phainon chases those reactions with single-minded focus, groaning when Anaxa tightens around him.
“Phainon!” Anaxa gasps, fingers curling at the nape of his neck, pulling him down into another kiss that barely holds together. “Feels good. Don’t—ah—don't slow down—”
Phainon moans into his mouth, the sound rough and unsteady. “Can’t—god, you feel so—”
Anaxa drags his hips up to meet him again, harder this time, and the pleasure hits him fast enough to make his eyes squeeze shut. His voice breaks. His body tightens around Phainon in a way that makes Phainon shudder violently.
“Phainon, wait, wait—” Anaxa gasps, breath unraveling. “I’m—”
The rest dissolves into a cry as his orgasm hits him in a sharp, rushing wave. His thighs tense around Phainon’s hips; his hands grip Phainon’s shoulders like he’s trying to hold the world still. The sound he makes pushes Phainon right to the edge, his own rhythm faltering into short, desperate thrusts.
Anaxa rides out the last tremor of release, chest heaving, and then cups Phainon’s face with both hands, guiding him into a kiss.
“Go on,” he whispers against his mouth, coaxing him gently. “You’re close. I can feel it. Don’t hold back.”
Phainon groans helplessly, his whole body tightening as he pushes in deep again. “Anaxa, please—”
“That’s it,” Anaxa murmurs, legs wrapping around him with deliberate insistence. “Give it to me. I want to feel you.”
Phainon’s answering moan is wrecked, already tipping into surrender, his movements growing frantic as Anaxa pulls him closer, whispering encouragement against his mouth. After a few more thrusts, Phainon finally breaks. His whole body locks around the sound he makes as he spills into Anaxa, his release shaking through him in a long, shuddering pulse. He clings to Anaxa’s body without thinking, one hand sliding from Anaxa’s hip to his waist and back again, the skin beneath his palm slick with sweat.
His breathing stammers first, then slows by degrees as his high starts to ebb. He doesn’t pull away. He stays pressed against Anaxa, chest rising against chest, forehead rubbing lightly at Anaxa’s temple. He noses along Anaxa’s cheek, down to his jaw, dropping small, unsteady kisses wherever his mouth lands. Some fall against skin already damp with sweat; some land on places he remembers liking, half-blind with exhaustion and want.
Anaxa threads his hands into his hair, steadying him through the remnants of the tremors. Phainon exhales almost soundlessly at the touch, then lifts his head just enough to kiss Anaxa again, slow and loose, more affection than hunger now. He doesn’t remember how long they stay like that, only that they keep finding each other again and again. Another round building out of his need to keep touching him, then another after that, each one slower, lazier, less frantic than the last.
Here, time slips around them in a way Phainon can’t track. At some point the night folds into itself, into a thick, quiet warmth. Their limbs tangled without intention, damp with sweat and the heat of their bodies still clinging to the sheets. Phainon tries to stave it off, blinking up at Anaxa with the heavy-lidded stubbornness of someone who has already given everything he had to give. His arms stay locked around Anaxa’s waist, though his grip slackens each time his eyes droop, blinking heavily and pulling Anaxa closer as if he can hold off whatever morning might threaten to take from him.
Anaxa smooths a hand through Phainon’s damp hair, combing it back from his forehead gently. “Sleep, Phainon,” he says softly.
Phainon tries to protest, a faint shake of his head, a hand flexing weakly along Anaxa’s back. “Don’t go yet,” he whispers, the sound slipping out in a thin, helpless whine, half a sob he’s too tired to swallow.
He presses his face into Anaxa’s shoulder as though trying to hold the moment in place, but the fight drains out of him. The warmth, the exhaustion, the aftershocks of pleasure—all of it pulls him under, and finally, he falls asleep.
Phainon wakes slowly, blinking against the early morning light that slips in through the thin hotel curtains. His first instinct is to reach for Anaxa, expecting to find only the impression of warmth left behind. Instead, he finds the real thing still, Anaxa beside him, sat up and watching the dust shift in the morning air.
Phainon’s breath catches. “So that wasn’t it?”
Anaxa turns to look at him, raising an eyebrow. “You sound neither relieved nor disappointed. Hm.”
Phainon pouts at him, the expression softening his whole face into something younger. He gathers himself up too and lifts a hand to rest against Anaxa’s sternum, fingers splaying as if assuring himself he’s still tangible. “Because I’m not either. But you seem to know now.”
“I’ve had an inkling,” Anaxa murmurs, his tone mild and unhelpful in the way that used to drive Phainon to distraction. The corner of his mouth twitches, almost a smile, almost an apology for not saying more.
Phainon sits up a little, studying him in the muted morning light. Something about Anaxa’s outline looks less tethered to the space than earlier, although he’s not quite translucent or, well, completely gone, it does feel as if the world was already pushing him gently back toward where he came from. Phainon doesn’t say anything about it. He only reaches for him again, pulling him close enough to brush a slow kiss to his forehead.
They leave the hotel without speaking much. Phainon drives them back. Anaxa watches the seascape recede and the fields and warehouses slip by, the quiet of dawn softening the city into something featureless. When Phainon glances over at a stoplight, Anaxa is fading in and out of the dashboard reflection, and it tightens something inside him that he struggles to keep carefully sealed.
Back at the apartment, the return to an ordinary space feels almost ceremonial. Phainon hangs up his coat, and moves to turn on the bathroom light. Anaxa follows in without a sound.
They step into the bath together, warm water rising around them, steam clouding the mirror until their reflections blur. Phainon sits behind him, legs bracketing Anaxa’s hips, arms wrapping around his waist. He rests his chin against Anaxa’s shoulder, breathing in the faint scent of soap and skin warmed by the bath.
Neither of them talk much here. The water does most of the work, softening muscles still tender from the night before. When Phainon drags his hands along Anaxa’s arms, the contact feels different.
They stay until the water cools, until Anaxa leans back into Phainon with no resistance left, until the quiet wraps the room in stillness.
Afterward, they dress in whatever might be soft and familiar—old shirts, loose pants, layers that feel like home; dressing comfortably, even though they know what the next part has to offer them. Phainon watches Anaxa pull on one of his sweaters and he helps right it on his frame.
They move to the studio at Anaxa’s request. He walks ahead of Phainon, moving with a careful, weighted pace. The light in the room hits him unevenly now, revealing faint shimmers at the edges of his outline before settling into a more fulsome shape again. Phainon notices but doesn’t draw attention to it. Anaxa has chosen to spend what remains of his strength here, and Phainon will not take any of that away from him.
“Put that one up.” Anaxa gestures toward the canvas that has remained turned down against the floor like something too private to witness light.
Phainon lifts it carefully, the weight familiar in his hands even if the meaning feels heavier. When he sets it on the easel and steps back, the unfinished portrait stares back at him: Anaxa’s face sketched in charcoal, some strokes sharp enough to suggest the planes of his cheek, others blurred by hesitation or time. There are patches of muted color along one side of the canvas in just the beginnings of skin tone, half an eyebrow, the shape of a mouth he knows too well.
“Do you know what you want to do with this?” Phainon asks, fingers flexing at his sides, uncertain whether completing a portrait of Anaxa feels like honoring him or losing him.
Anaxa tilts his head slightly in consideration. “Not really.” Then, after a moment: “Somewhat.”
It is enough direction to begin.
He spends the next day—whatever remains of it—guiding Phainon with the same care he once brought to him as a student. He points with two fingers, or rests a hand lightly at Phainon’s elbow to shift the angle of his brush. Sometimes he leans in close enough that Phainon can feel the faint warmth of him against his arm before the sensation flickers out again. He never rushes him, even when Phainon’s strokes slow almost to nothing. He sometimes teases him for hesitating as he would, but he’d often let Phainon sit back in silence to study the canvas and wait, the way he used to while Phainon struggled through a composition or questioned every choice he made.
“Mm, too heavy on the dark,” Anaxa murmurs once, guiding Phainon’s hand away from a shadow.
“And maybe lift the color here a bit,” he says another time, tapping lightly near the edge of a cheekbone.
“Try again,” comes a third instruction, gentle rather than corrective.
There are moments when Phainon forgets how the years separated them. Anaxa stands at his side again, attentive to his work, watching him with the same calm intensity he did when they were younger. Phainon carries himself differently now—taller, broader, his presence grounded in a way it never was before. When Anaxa’s shoulder touches his arm, the brush is so light it feels closer to a tap of fabric than a person. Phainon looks down, noting the difference in their frames, how easily Anaxa fits against him, how minimal the pressure is compared to the solid weight of his own body. The contrast startles him: Anaxa’s touch is slight and fleeting, set against a strength Phainon hadn’t realized he’d grown into.
Yet Anaxa still leans in with the same quiet authority, offering soft-spoken guidance, as he once had. And Phainon, brush steadying under that presence and familiar weight, finds himself responding with the same unspoken trust he thought he would eventually outgrow.
For a few hours, the room holds them as they were and as they are now: two figures at a shared canvas, working toward a portrait they both understand is meant to carry its likeness forward or let it go.
One afternoon, Phainon is working in full concentration, paintbrush angled shallowly as he shapes the last strokes around the cheekbone. The silence has been companionable for hours, broken only by the tap of rinsing water or Anaxa bustling nearby, cutting into into his thoughts briefly with his commentary every now and again. He leans closer to the canvas, narrowing a line that will define the edge of an eye.
“I’m going with no eye-patch, by the way,” he murmurs.
He waits for the familiar hum of acknowledgment or something said in contrary, but nothing comes.
Phainon turns, expecting to find Anaxa leaning against the windowsill or hovering behind him with another small correction, only to find the space empty.
His stomach drops. The paintbrush slips from his fingers, hitting the floor with a clatter. Wet pigment spatters across his shoe and the ground. He doesn’t stop to pick it up.
“Anaxa?” he calls, voice thinning.
He moves through the hall, checking the kitchen, each doorway too quickly to see any details he blurs past. Panic rises faster than his breath can keep up with. He pushes into the bedroom, breath ragged, and finally, he finds Anaxa there.
He’s seated on the bed with the tin box open in front of him. Inside lie scraps of their days and then some: crumpled ticket stubs, a metro card with fading print, museum receipts, a torn wrapper from a snack they shared that Phainon swore he had thrown away, and the old, unused ones from years past. His coat is beside Anaxa, emptied of its pockets.
“I see you had an ulterior motive,” Anaxa says, surveying the small pile, cataloging the meaningful artifacts of his life. His voice carries a soft amusement.
Phainon stops in the doorway. The breath he was chasing finally finds him.
“I—” he begins, but the words collapse.
Anaxa studies him a moment longer. Then, very gently, says to him, “well, these were for you anyway.”
Phainon looks down. His hands shake before he can hide them. His eyes sting with the force of finally seeing something he had been avoiding looking at fully, head on.
“I figured,” he says slowly, with a wry smile. “Always did spoil me. Even now.”
“Really?” Anaxa asks, tilting his head as he rises from the bed, perhaps sensing the distress he’s been trying to quell.
He crosses the short distance between them and reaches for Phainon’s face, brushing a light kiss to his mouth, warm in a way that threatens to undo him. Phainon nods faintly when Anaxa pulls back.
“Mm,” he manages, feeling younger and more transparent than he wants to be in this moment, as though every layer of distance he had ever built has been quietly set aside.
They return to the studio without further conversation after Anaxa closes the tin and leaves it on the bed. Rain taps steadily against the high windows, a muted percussion that fills the space without drowning it.
Anaxa stops before the canvas, taking in the latest layers with an unreadable expression. Phainon comes up behind him, sliding his arms around Anaxa’s waist. Anaxa’s hands rise to meet his, resting lightly over them.
“No eye-patch?” Anaxa asks.
“Just felt like your features shouldn’t be obscured by anything,” Phainon answers. His voice stays steady, though his chin rests briefly on Anaxa’s shoulder, as if grounding himself on that one shared point of contact.
“I see.” Anaxa squeezes his hands once. “Well, do as you like.”
Phainon bends and kisses the back of his head, then the curve of his ear. Anaxa’s eyes fall shut at the touch.
Outside, the rain thickens. The winter day presses close around the building, drawing the light into a softer gray. The calendar on the wall lists only a few days before the turn of the year.
Phainon thinks, unbidden, with a bitterness he cannot find in himself to soften, that they will not make it to that morning together.
He tightens his arms around Anaxa, as if this small circle of warmth might hold the world still a little longer for them both.
“Phainon,” Anaxa says, enough to pull him out of whatever thought he was clinging to. The sound of his name lands with an odd clarity, said in a tone that Anaxa has never used carelessly. Phainon lifts his head out of habit.
Anaxa steps back a half pace and turns around to look at him, as though he needs room to take him in fully. His eyes search Phainon’s face, lingering a little too long at the corners of his mouth, the set of his shoulders, the faint tremor in his hands. Phainon feels the shift as soon as Anaxa looks at him like that: an understanding passed between them without spoken confirmation. This is the moment and there won’t be any more.
“It might not come to you as much of a surprise,” Anaxa begins, clearly weighing his phrasing, “but I care about you very much.”
Phainon lets out something between a laugh and a choked off sound in the back of his throat. “Try again,” he wipes his eyes with the back of his wrist. “They might not take you with just that.”
Anaxa shakes his head, folding his arms loosely, almost defensive in a way that feels familiar. “You are very talented,” he continues, “and I think you are wasting away at your desk job, which you don’t even pretend to like anymore.”
Phainon huffs out another wet laugh, shoulders shaking once. “That’s more like it.”
“I’m not saying you should return to it entirely,” Anaxa adds as an afterthought. He steps closer to Phainon and reaches for his hand, his smaller fingers closing around it before lifting it between them. His thumb traces the dried paint smudge near Phainon’s knuckle. “But I hope you’ll remember what it feels like to make something with your own hands. To shape something that didn’t exist before you touched it.”
He hesitates only a moment before speaking. “You know,” Anaxa says, “I did enjoy watching you work back then. Even when you argued point about some of the assignments I gave you.” He smiles, recalling a faraway memory.
He draws in a breath for the next part, almost bracing himself. “And I’m—” He pauses a new, for grounding. Phainon tries to smile at him, taking in the sight of his professor struggle for language. This man who could dissect color theory without blinking, or who could dismantle arguments in theory with a single arch of his brow, now fumble through something raw and human and his. The sight aches in a way Phainon isn’t prepared for, a ribbon of sweetness pulled tight with the knowledge that this is the first time he’s hearing it, but also the last.
Anaxa’s fingers tighten around his, in a brief, steadying clasp.
“I’m proud of you,” he says eventually, almost as if he expects the words to break on the air. “More than you ever let yourself imagine.”
Phainon exhales, not trusting himself to speak, afraid that if he does the moment will dissipate. He holds Anaxa’s gaze, trying to memorize the shape of it—the gentleness there, his faltering resolve, the sincerity he used to dream into existence.
When he’s sure Anaxa has finished, Phainon drags a sleeve across his face with his free arm, breathing already uneven. “Is that all you’d like to say to me, Anaxa?”
Anaxa’s mouth pulls inward slightly. He shakes his head.
“…and that—” He pauses, eyes lowering before he lifts them again, “that I love you. And I am sorry.”
“Sorry?” Phainon repeats, confused. “For what?”
“For not staying longer to show you.”
Phainon’s breath stutters.
“Now, you don’t be ridiculous,” Phainon says eventually, eyes crinkling, tears falling with the motion of it. “I should be sorry for not staying all those years ago to bask in it.”
“Anaxa,” Phainon clarifies, “that’s all you ever did.”
Anaxa looks at him for a long stretch of silence, then wets his lips, worrying the lower one between his teeth before speaking again. “I suppose, that’s all I ever really knew how to do properly.”
He lifts a hand as though to touch Phainon’s cheek, though his fingers flicker faintly before finding their mark. He doesn’t pull away when Phainon leans into the touch.
Neither of them says anything else for a long while. The room holds the weighted silence between them carefully, as if it has one last duty to perform for them both.
Phainon feels the pull toward the canvas before he fully understands it. He turns back to Anaxa first, though, and gives him a small, final smile. Their hands are still joined; he squeezes once, a quiet promise, and Anaxa squeezes back. Phainon leans in, brushing their mouths together in a tremulous kiss, and they both laugh under their breath—soft, stuttering and wet with everything neither have anymore words for. Then Phainon lets go, only enough to move toward the easel, settling himself before the canvas as his fingers tighten around the brush.
Anaxa comes with him, standing close enough that Phainon can almost convince himself the faint warmth at his side is real, a last companionable presence guiding him back into the work they began together.
Phainon glances over and finds Anaxa watching him with the same intent expression he used to give his students when they were on the cusp of understanding something he was trying to impart. Phainon leans in again, tipping forward just enough to reach for him. He chases one more kiss that Anaxa returns with his own, his thumb smoothing away a tear from Phainon’s cheek.
“You smudged this part,” Anaxa murmurs, tilting his chin toward the canvas, guiding him back to the work. There’s a faint curl at the corner of his lip, almost teasing.
Phainon huffs a breath that wants to be a laugh, but also wants to be a sob, and lifts his brush. He adjusts the color over where Anaxa pointed, following their old rhythm. It feels like stepping back into a room that always existed for them.
With each new brushstroke, something tightens behind his ribs. He knows this is their last shared moment like this—painter and muse, student and teacher, two people who may have loved each other too late and somehow still in time. But Anaxa is here now, close enough that Phainon can feel his attention like a hand at his back.
Phainon swallows around the tightness in his throat. His voice comes out quiet.
“I’m sorry too,” he manages. “Very much, actually.” He draws a line of shadow along the cheekbone, his hand trembling. “And I—” He stops, breathing once, before he tries again hoping his own words, though likewise simple, are adequate. “I love you. I do. And I hope you… whatever the after holds for you is rest.”
Anaxa exhales with something like a laugh. “Much later, I hope. You better keep me waiting.”
Phainon’s brush moves again, finding the exact color he needs, smiling despite himself. “I’ll do my best.”
And because Anaxa has to get in the last word, he steps in just close enough to kiss Phainon’s cheek that feels almost playful in its gentle delivery, though it carries a weight that folds something inside Phainon in on itself. “Thank you,” Anaxa says, to punctuate the gesture.
He doesn’t specify for what. But with the past month written across every scrap in the tin box, every half-finished meal, every walk home, every kiss they stole from borrowed time, he doesn’t really have to.
Phainon dips his brush once more, expecting another instruction, another small sound beside him, but finally, nothing answers.
The space where Anaxa stood feels suddenly bare, like the air has forgotten how to hold its shape. Phainon’s hand tightens around the brush as he takes a sharp intake of breath. He forces himself to keep painting—the curve of the jawline, the soft transition of light down the line of his neck—but the strokes blur as the wetness collects too quickly at the corners of his eyes for him to blink away.
He tries, once again, to breathe through it.
The next sound is a broken, choked sob that escapes before he can smother it down properly. His vision swims. Every line on the canvas in front of him wavers. He sets the brush down with a clatter louder than he meant and presses his palms to his eyes, shoulders tightening as the sobs come harder, no longer something he can hold at bay.
The studio is quiet around him. Rain taps weakly at the window. The unfinished portrait waits with features that look back at him through the blur.
Phainon stands there, breath stuttering, unable to see the canvas clearly anymore, and knows he will have to stop for now. He knows tomorrow will be the first day he must learn how to carry on with the work alone.
Phainon finally peels himself away from the knot of reporters clustered near the entrance. His agent, Aglaea, intercepts him with a quick nudge and a brisk nod toward the rest of the gallery.
“You’re free to mingle,” she says. “Everyone wants a word.”
He thanks her, exhales once, and starts making the rounds. Guests stand at tall tables, wine glasses catching the gallery’s light in small, uneven reflections. Each time someone stops him—congratulations, praise, questions—he stays just long enough to acknowledge them before moving on with polite efficiency.
He’s halfway across the room when he notices someone standing alone before the centerpiece of the exhibit. The figure is unmistakable, even from behind.
“Hey, you made it!” Phainon calls as he approaches.
Castorice turns, and they share a long hug before she steps back to look at him properly. “Oh, I wouldn’t miss your debut,” she says, smoothing a strand of hair behind her ear. “Congratulations, really.”
“What do you mean?” Phainon says, shaking his head. “I literally could not have done this without you.”
She waves off the credit, the way she always has.
They both look up at the large painting dominating the far wall. The patches of blues and yellows shift subtly across its surface and gold cuts across it in several harsh, jagged lines.
“You’ve outdone yourself with this one,” she says with a small smile. “I’m sure he would’ve been proud.”
Phainon swallows once and doesn’t say that he knows, at least, for a fact, he is.
He nods along as they exchange a bit more small talk (how she got in, how her current commission was going and how she could make it despite the tight deadline waiting for her). When her words taper off, he glances past her toward the gallery proper, then back to her, a small smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.
“Come on,” he says, shifting his weight as though gathering the whole room around him. “Let me show you the rest.”
He steps aside, leading the way toward the rest of the gallery, the tall white walls carrying his canvases in even intervals, the polished concrete floor still faintly cool where foot traffic hasn’t warmed it, the wide windows pull in the tail end of evening as the light thins out across the space.
He doesn’t explain much of the concept, but Castorice doesn’t ask much either. The paintings which encircle the gallery space are gradations of the sea in deep blues, pale greens, muted steel grays, each one tuned to a different season and time of day. Most guests assume they reflect Phainon’s hometown by the coast. He does not correct this version in their features and the arm-chairing that comes with it.
As they make their way around the room, Castorice spots Hyacine and the others. Their faces brighten when they notice her, and she breaks from Phainon with a laugh, pulling them each into warm greetings. Phainon steps back, giving her room to settle into the circle of familiar faces.
With her occupied, he resumes his own slow lap through the gallery. It’s the first time since the doors opened that he’s had a moment alone to actually look at what two years of work has assembled in this room. He studies the palette transitions, the tilt of a horizon line he reworked twice, the brush direction he worried over in the early hours of a winter morning. Seeing them all together in his own time like this grounds him in a way the applause never will.
Eventually, the circuit of the room brings him to the far back wall and he stops.
The track lighting above hums faintly, angled so that one warm beam settles across a solitary painting. It is framed simply, the canvas modest in size. Nothing about it demands the kind of attention his sweeping seascapes and coasts command. Yet the eye gravitates toward it anyway, as if the air around it is holding its breath.
The canvas shows only one figure, done up in intimate brushwork, painted in attunement to small shifts in expression. A discerning viewer might notice the quiet seam running through its creation: the jaw set one way beneath the paint, the finished contours softened into something else; the underlayers rendered with the discipline of technique honed over several years, the upper layers with the confident tenderness of someone acquainted to the subject in a different manner. It carries the evidence of something that had begun by one hand and then completed by another changed by time, by memory, by loss.
The mouth holds the suggestion of softness at its corners. The eyes reflecting a warmth that might not have been present in its earliest rendition, but no one would really know this.
Of all the works displayed today, this one took Phainon the longest and he had finished it just in time to include it in at the start of his showing today. He can hear, vividly, an imagined scolding at his back, warning him not to rush a piece for the first day of a showing.
Most people here wouldn’t associate the portrait with anyone they know. By the time its likeness had passed, his career had thinned to a whisper. Few remember the artist at all, let alone this version of him, without the severity of later years, without the aloof expression from his catalog photographs. Gone is the contemplative glare he wore at lectures and openings. This face is almost different: the lines are gentler, the gaze marked with an affection unfamiliar to most. Yet, it is the one that Phainon remembers with startling clarity.
The card beside the frame is plain white cardstock. No gilded edge or embellishment. Just the title and the date, and the only explanation Phainon was willing to give:
Self-Portrait of My Lover, 2025
Oil on canvas