The Cost of Wanting You

CHAPTER 4 — The Color Grey

ELARA'S POV

Camille arrived at the townhouse at two in the afternoon with an iced coffee in each hand and the particular expression she wore when she had already decided she was going to get information out of someone and was simply being polite about the method.

Elara let her in before she knocked twice.

"You texted me the word come with no other context," Camille said, stepping inside and handing over one of the coffees. "Which means something either very good or very strange happened. Possibly both."

"Both," Elara admitted.

They went up to her room past the formal sitting room her mother kept for guests, past the study her father had claimed as his territorial center, up the creaking staircase to the third floor where the air smelled like linseed oil and turpentine and was the only air in the building that felt breathable.

Camille dropped onto the small loveseat near the window. She was wearing an oversized blazer over a slip dress, her locs pinned up, reading glasses pushed to the top of her head that she wore everywhere and used for nothing. She looked at Elara the way she'd been looking at her since they were nineteen and met in a campus coffee queue like she could see through the version of Elara that had been trained to present itself and was only interested in the one underneath.

"Talk," she said.

Elara sat cross-legged on her worktable the only seat in the room she ever truly relaxed in and wrapped both hands around her iced coffee.

"He was at Provisions this morning."

Camille's eyes narrowed precisely one millimeter. "Adrian Cole."

"He said he works two blocks away."

"Does he?"

"I looked it up after." Elara paused. "Cole Enterprises has offices on 51st. Which is technically four blocks."

Camille stared at her. "Elara."

"I know."

"That is not two blocks."

"I know."

"That is a man who knew where you'd be."

Elara looked at her coffee. This was the part she'd been turning over since she walked home the clean logic of it that she didn't want to be logical about because the morning had felt real and light and like the first genuinely unscripted conversation she'd had in longer than she could easily remember. "Maybe it's a coincidence," she said, with the specific tone of someone who doesn't believe the thing they're saying.

"You don't believe that."

"I don't know what I believe."

"What happened?" Camille leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "Walk me through it. Everything."

So Elara did. She told her about the coffee shop, the way he'd sat down without performing the asking, the way he'd looked at her sketch and said the light is accurate like it was simply a fact and not a compliment. She told her about the questions not the surface questions people asked at galas, not what do you do meaning what is your family worth, but the ones that went underneath. What fits for you. She told her about the laugh she hadn't planned and the forty minutes that passed without her checking the time once, which hadn't happened to her in a social setting since she couldn't remember when.

She told Camille about the paint on her bag and the way he'd said does it bother you like the answer genuinely mattered to him.

When she finished, Camille was quiet for a moment.

This was concerning. Camille was quiet for approximately no moments under ordinary circumstances.

"What," Elara said.

"I'm thinking."

"That's what worries me."

Camille looked at her with the expression of someone choosing their words with surgical care, which was also not her default mode. "He's either exactly what he seems a self-made billionaire who ran into you twice and is genuinely interested or he's something else."

"Something else like what?"

"I don't know yet." Camille picked up her coffee. "What did he want? Did he ask for anything?"

"No. We just talked."

"About?"

"Art. The initiative. What we find useful versus what we enjoy." Elara looked at the canvas across the room the one that had been unresolved for two weeks. She'd been looking at it since she got home. "About what fits."

Camille followed her gaze to the canvas. Looked at it. Looked back at Elara. "Elara."

"Don't."

"The center of that canvas."

"I said don't."

"It's grey now."

Elara said nothing.

It was grey now. She'd mixed it the moment she'd gotten home, before she'd even taken off her coat standing at the worktable with her hands moving ahead of her mind, reaching for raw umber and ivory black and the smallest pull of cerulean and finding the exact shade without having to search for it. She'd blocked it in with a palette knife in three minutes flat. Then she'd stepped back and looked at what she'd done and felt simultaneously relieved and unsettled in a way she didn't have language for yet.

The center of a painting she'd been struggling with for two weeks. Resolved in three minutes. By a color she'd seen in someone's eyes that morning.

"It's just a color," she said.

Camille gave her the look this statement deserved.

"I'm not saying anything is happening," Elara said, more firmly. "I'm saying I had a conversation I didn't expect to have, and it was good, and I don't know what it means yet."

"What does it feel like?"

Elara looked at the grey center of the canvas. At the color that had unlocked something she'd been stuck on not because it was the most technically correct choice, though it was, but because it was the one that felt true. That was always how she knew. Not analysis. The feeling of rightness landing in her chest before her brain could argue it.

That was what the conversation had felt like. Like something slotting into place before she'd had time to question whether it belonged there.

She did not say this to Camille because Camille would write it on a banner and hang it somewhere.

"It feels like something I should probably be careful about," she said instead.

Camille pointed at her. "That. That is the correct instinct. Hold onto that instinct, Elara, because the last time you ignored it you dated Marcus for eight months and he turned out to be emotionally available to exactly no one including himself."

"Adrian Cole is not Marcus."

"No," Camille agreed. "He sounds considerably more dangerous."

"He hasn't done anything."

"Men who are going to do something rarely do it immediately." Camille stood, smoothed her blazer, picked up her coffee. "I'm not saying run. I'm saying keep your eyes open."

"My eyes are always open."

Camille looked at the canvas. At the grey center that hadn't been there this morning. "Mm," she said, in the tone that meant we both know that's not entirely true but I love you so I'll let it go for now.

She stayed for another hour. They talked about other things Camille's latest piece, a profile of an emerging designer that her editor was being difficult about; a restaurant they'd been meaning to try; whether Elara's initiative grant timeline was realistic. The ordinary architecture of a friendship that had survived both of their worst years and come out more solid on the other side.

When Camille left, the house settled into its late-afternoon quiet. Her father wasn't home. Her mother was somewhere in the lower floors doing something Elara wouldn't be informed of. The third floor belonged to her in the way it always did after three o'clock air and light and the smell of paint and the particular freedom of no one watching.

Elara stood in front of the canvas.

It was better. Genuinely better the grey center gave the deep blue something to push against, a stillness at the core that made the surrounding color feel more alive. She'd been trying to resolve it with warmth, with gold and rust tones that fought with the blue rather than anchoring it. The answer had been a cool stillness all along.

She picked up a brush.

She worked for two hours. She forgot to eat. She forgot to check her phone. The light outside shifted from afternoon pale to evening amber and she chased it, mixing, adjusting, the canvas becoming something that hadn't existed this morning and was now becoming inevitable the way the best work always felt, like you hadn't made it so much as uncovered it.

At six forty-five she stepped back and looked at what she had.

It wasn't finished. But she could see what it was going to be now, which was the thing she'd been missing. The center held everything together that particular grey that was not cold, not warm, simply present. Steady. The kind of color that made everything around it more itself.

Her phone lit up on the worktable.

Unknown number.

She almost didn't answer. She had a rule about unknown numbers her father's world generated too many calls she didn't want. But something made her pick up. She would think about that later. The something.

"Elara Voss."

"You looked up the address." His voice was the same as in person even, unhurried, with that quality of giving you exactly what he intended to give and nothing by accident. "Cole Enterprises is four blocks from Provisions. Not two."

She went completely still.

Then, slowly, she sat down on her worktable stool.

"How do you have this number?"

"I asked Noah West. He knows your friend Camille Okafor. The connection wasn't difficult."

"That's" She stopped. Turned the phone slightly in her hand. "You called to tell me you lied about the distance?"

"I called to tell you I knew where you'd be," he said. "Because you noticed the discrepancy and I'd rather you hear the correction from me than sit with a half-answer."

The honesty of it landed strangely not like a confession, not performed. Like someone who had made a choice and was presenting it plainly and waiting to see what she did with it.

Elara looked at the grey center of her canvas across the room.

"Why did you want to know where I'd be?" she asked.

A pause. Not long. The kind of pause that meant the answer was being chosen carefully not because it was a lie but just because the truth required precision.

"I wanted to see you again," he said. "I didn't want to wait for the next event where we'd have forty people and your father's orbit between us."

Her heart did something she told it firmly not to do.

"You could have called first," she said. "Before just showing up."

"I didn't have your number."

"And now you do."

"And now I do," he agreed. Quiet. Even. Impossibly steady in a way that should have been unnerving and was instead the most settled she'd felt during a phone call in recent memory.

She exhaled slowly. Looked at her paint-stained hands.

"Next time," she said carefully, "call first."

Another pause. Then and she could not be certain but she thought, she thought something shifted in the silence that might have been the very beginning of a smile. "Noted," he said.

"Goodnight, Adrian."

"Goodnight, Elara."

She hung up.

She sat on her worktable stool for a long time without moving. The canvas watched her from across the room the grey center steady and patient and present, the surrounding blue alive with it.

Keep your eyes open, Camille had said.

Elara looked at her hands. Paint under her nails. Blue on her left palm. The faint ghost of grey on her thumb from where she'd tested the mix.

Her eyes were open.

She was looking.

She just wasn't entirely sure yet what she was seeing.