The Rules We Broke

The gallery smells like turpentine and white paint, and Tiff walks the long floor alone at seven, tapping her pen against a clipboard she does not really need. The motion lights click on ahead of her and click off behind her, one row at a time, and she mutters her rules under her breath like a woman saying grace.

"Rule one. Don't touch the wet paint. Rule two. Don't trip the motion lights after ten, they're timed. Rule three. Don't move the sculptures, they're balanced, if one of them goes over it's a lawsuit."

She stops in front of the big canvas near the east wall, the one with the blue field that still shines wet in the middle. It has been drying for six days and it is not drying. She wrote that down too.

"Rule four. Don't undress in the studio. Rule five." She lowers her voice even though nobody is there. "Don't say the model's name aloud."

Tiff is thirty-four and has worked here two years, hired by Rashid to do numbers and insurance and the million small things that keep a gallery from eating itself. In two years she has never once dated anyone at work. She wrote it on a sticky note her first week and stuck it inside her desk drawer, where she can see it every time she gets a pen.

The note has not helped lately.

She checks the blue canvas one more time, holding her hand a careful foot away from the surface. Yesterday she watched Rashid paint a model, nude from the waist up, on a platform in the studio, and Tiff stood in the doorway with a shipping manifest and forgot every word on it. The model had laughed at something he said. Tiff had gone back to her office and eaten a granola bar she did not want.

And she wrote rule five partly because of the model, though she told herself it was for legal reasons. Names in press releases, names on consent forms, no names spoken in the gallery space itself. Rashid had read the list, all five rules, and looked at her over the top of the page for a while.

"Strict," he had said.

"Professional," she had said.

"Both things can be true," he said, and handed it back, and smiled, and she had thought about that smile for the rest of the afternoon.

So now she walks to the back of the gallery, past the sculptures she is not supposed to move, and pushes open the studio door without knocking because it is her job to do the final walkthrough. The studio is cluttered the way it always is, half-finished canvases leaning against every wall, two lamps with bent necks, the worn leather sofa pushed under the window.

Rashid is there. He is forty-two, coat half off one shoulder, and his jeans are already open, and he is looking at her like he has been waiting exactly for this.

"Oh," Tiff says. "You're still here."

"Final walkthrough, right?" He does not close his jeans. He does not look away either. "I heard you muttering out there. You do that every night, you know."

"I do not."

"You do. It's kind of great." He hangs the coat on the lamp arm and steps away from the door. "Stay a minute. I want to show you something."

Tiff should say she has a report due. She has a report due. But she stays, and she sets the clipboard down on a stack of catalogs, and she looks at the open waistband of his jeans and then firmly at a half-finished canvas of what might be a harbor.

"I saw you painting yesterday," she says. "The model."

"Yes."

"She's good. The painting, I mean. It's good."

"Thank you."

"It's not the painting I'm asking about." She hears her own voice go stubborn, which is a thing her voice does when she is nervous. "Why her? Why not..."

She stops. He waits. He is good at waiting, it turns out, two full years of it.

"Why not me?" she says.

Rashid crosses the studio without hurrying. The floorboards are old and they give a little under his weight. He stops close enough that she can feel the warmth off him, and he says, "Because I was waiting for you to ask."

"That's a stupid reason."

"It's the truest one I have."

"You could have asked me."

"I could have," he agrees. "I didn't want to make it weird at work. So I waited. And then you wrote me a list of rules, and rule five made it very hard to keep waiting, because I realized you'd been thinking about her too. Jealousy is a kind of thinking about someone, Tiff."

"I wasn't jealous."

"You wrote a rule about not saying her name."

"It's a legal thing. Press releases."

"Sure," he says. "A legal thing."

And then he asks, plainly, no hand anywhere near her yet, "Can I kiss you?"

Tiff's heart does something she declines to describe even to herself. She says, "Yes," and it comes out rough, and he kisses her, one hand cupping her jaw, slow at first and then not slow. She makes a small noise into his mouth and grips the front of his shirt, which is still mostly under the half-off coat, and he walks her backward two steps until her shoulders meet the big canvas propped against the wall to dry.

She feels it, the slight tack of fresh paint against her jacket, and starts to pull away.

"Wait, the canvas, it's still..."

"It's fine," he says against her mouth.

"It's not fine, it's rule one, don't touch the wet paint, I wrote it, there's a whole..."

"Can I touch you?" he asks. "Over your clothes. Just that, for now."

"Yes," she says, "yes, okay," and his hand slides down her side, and then he does the thing she will replay for weeks afterward. He puts his palm flat against the wet canvas behind her and drags it up, and when he brings it back it is smeared with blue, and he presses it, warm and paint-slick, right down the front of her shirt, over her sternum, between her breasts.

Tiff shudders. The blue is cold at first and then it is not cold at all, and it marks her straight down the middle of her white shirt like a road on a map.

"Rule one," she whispers, "you just broke rule one."

"I know," he says. "I've been reading your list very carefully."

The paint on her chest seems to pulse, one slow beat, like something under her skin is breathing with her. She looks down at it. The blue is brighter than it was on the canvas. She would swear the blue is brighter than it was on the canvas.

"That's..." she starts, and does not finish, because his thumb is moving in the paint, tracing up toward her collar, and her whole body has gone strange and attentive, like the gallery after hours, every light on.

"Do you want me to stop?" he asks. His hand is still.

"No. Don't stop. But the shirt is ruined."

"The shirt was a casualty of art," Rashid says. "It happens."

She laughs, breathless, and looks down at the blue handprint again, and it does the thing again, that slow swell under the fabric, once, like a heartbeat that is not hers. She decides not to say anything about it yet. There is a version of her that would run out of the studio right now, and that version is losing ground fast.

"Rashid," she says.

"Yeah?"

"The rules. I wrote them for a reason."

"I know you did." He kisses the corner of her mouth, then her jaw, unhurried. "Tell me the next one. I want to hear you say it."

Tiff closes her eyes. Behind her, through the canvas, something gives one faint push against her shoulder blades, gentle as a hand.

"Rule two," she says. "Don't trip the motion lights."

"They've been on since you walked in," he says. "We haven't tripped anything yet."

But the lights out in the gallery click off, all of them at once, and neither of them touched a switch.

They move out to the middle of the studio, away from the canvas, and Tiff notices she steers them there without deciding to. There is a worn leather sofa under the window, and Rashid sits down on it and pulls her toward him, and she lands half on his lap with one knee on the cushion.

"So we're breaking rule two," she says. "The motion lights. Technically you just broke it. I was standing here."

"Technically," he agrees, and his mouth is at her neck, and his hands are at the hem of her paint-stained shirt, and she is very carefully not thinking about the report due on her desk at nine tomorrow.

"Rule four," she says, and her voice comes out lower than she means it to. "Don't undress in the studio."

"Read that one to me."

"Rule four. Don't undress in the studio." She swallows. "It's for the models. Liability. Insurance."

"Are you a model?"

"No."

"So the rule doesn't apply to you." He says it like it is obvious, and it is not obvious, but she wants it to be obvious, and that is worse.

"I wrote the rule," she says. "It applies to whoever I say it applies to."

He sits back a little and looks at her, and his hands go still on her hips, and he says, "Okay. Then tell me what you want. I'm not going to talk you into anything."

And that is the moment, she thinks later, when she should have left. Not because of the paint. Not because of the lights. Because he put the choice in her hands and she took it with both hands.

"Take my shirt off," she says.

He lifts it over her head slow, careful of the wet blue, and drops it on the arm of the sofa. Her bra follows. The air in the studio is cool and smells of turpentine, and her skin is everywhere at once, aware of everything. Then he hooks his fingers in the waist of her skirt and tugs it down her thighs and she steps out of it, standing half naked in the studio at ten at night in a building where every motion light has just quietly gone to sleep.

"Rule two," he murmurs. "Broken."

"Rule four too," she says. "That one's mine."

"I know. I heard you say it."

He turns her gently by the hips, and she understands what he wants before he says it, and her face goes hot. "Bend over the arm," he says. "If you want. Tell me yes or no."

"Yes," she says. "God, yes."

She leans forward over the leather arm, forearms down, and the leather is cool against her skin. Behind her she hears him shift, and then his hands are on the backs of her thighs, firm, spreading her, and then his mouth.

Tiff has been with men before. She is thirty-four years old and she has a body and a history. But nothing has ever hit her like this, his mouth open against her, blunt and greedy, tongue working her clit in slow flat strokes and then fast ones, no warning for any of it. She cries out and claps a hand over her own mouth, and he pulls back just enough to say, "Don't. I want to hear it. Nobody's here."

"Rashid," she gasps.

"Right there. Say it again."

She says it again. He works her harder. Her hips are moving without her permission, pressing back against his mouth, and her elbows are sliding on the leather, and she is making sounds she does not recognize as hers. One of his fingers joins his mouth, pressing up inside her, curling, and that is nearly the end of her right there.

And it is somewhere in the middle of this, with her cheek flat against the leather and her eyes open and unfocused, that she looks up.

The ceiling of the studio is dark. The two lamps with the bent necks are the only light, and they pool yellow on the floor and leave everything above them black. And in that black, she feels it. Not sees it. Feels it. Something up there among the beams and the stored canvases, paying attention. The way the gallery felt at seven, except pointed at her, hungry, patient. The blue mark on her chest pulses once, hard, and she gasps, and Rashid takes it as encouragement and redoubles his efforts, and she comes apart, shaking, one hand slapping flat against the leather, crying out into the empty studio