Radiant (5 page)

ANGELA

That first summer, Phen followed me back to Rome. He set a place and time for us to meet, always the same—a small café a short distance from my grandmother’s house, at nine o’clock in the morning on Tuesdays and Fridays—and when the sun began to sink below the horizon he’d bring me back to the café, and he’d say, “Thank you for the lovely day, Angela. See you next time.” That’s the way he kept it, in the beginning. Careful. Courteous. A temporary arrangement where he, the centuries-old angel, would instruct me, the naive little angel-blood schoolgirl.

We took a lot of walks. At first he was hesitant to tell me about the angels and the war between them, but he did let me in on the ways to tell the good from the bad. I thought that the wing-color thing was a bit cliché, really—white for good, black for bad; definitely not politically correct—but it wasn’t about color, he said. It was about light. Black is the absence of light. White is the gathering of it.

He showed me a secret Rome, one I’d never seen in all my touring and being dragged around by my relatives. Phen’s Rome was different: a Rome born out of his perfect memory, the way a grandfather could show you his hometown. Every place was a story, and Phen’s stories stretched back to the days when this sprawling, magnificent city had been a couple of primitive thatched huts. At the Coliseum, he told me about a brave man he once knew, a man who would never show up in the history books. He pointed out the exact spot where the man died. He showed me a house where the most powerful woman in Rome had lived in the year 1636. He told me that she’d invited him inside and boldly tried to seduce him, and I tried to act like the image of this jewel-bedecked Italian broad running her slutty hands all over him didn’t bother me.

But it did bother me.

Because there was nothing grandfatherly about Phen. Most of the time I forgot about his age, or lack thereof. I knew he’d been around since before man had taken his first crawling steps on this planet, but in Rome he passed easily for a run-of-the-mill Italian man in his midtwenties. He wore the right clothes. He used the right slang. He wasn’t like those vampires you see on television who are so clearly old men stuck in young bodies, the way they talk like they’re still in Victorian times, their lips curling up in disgust at the idea of modern frivolities like electricity and gasoline-powered engines. Phen was part of the world; he embraced it. He loved it.

He made it easy to forget, sometimes, that he was more than the most remarkable guy I’d ever met. My heart leapt every time he touched me, even the most innocent, casual of brushes: his arm bumping mine as we walked together, his hand on my back as he guided me through a doorway.

I wasn’t a fool, though. I tried to talk myself out of falling for him. He’s an angel, I kept telling myself. You’re a teenager. Get real. You have almost nothing in common. It would never work. Don’t kid yourself. He probably thinks of you as a child.

“Why Italy?” I asked him one Friday afternoon as we sat down for a late lunch at a restaurant we’d found by following our noses. “Why stay here, out of all the places in the world you could go?”

“The food, of course,” he answered, taking a bite of his calzone.

“It’s a good thing angels don’t need to worry about high cholesterol,” I joked.

He laughed, and the sound warmed me. “Actually, it’s the language. I find Italian to be the most beautiful and expressive of all the human languages.”

I shifted into Italian immediately. “So, Phen,” I asked, “what do you do? When you’re not playing tour guide to American angel-bloods?”

“Many things. I write. I paint. I think about things. . . .” He leaned forward, caught me in his magnetic smile.

I blushed. I wanted him to like me so much.

“What do you do,” he asked, “when you’re not startling angels in churches?”

“I have a thing for horror movies. And I play the violin. And I read.” I skimmed over the part where I researched everything I could get my hands on about angels and the Nephilim and their ways. It sounded too nerdy. “I write some, too. Poetry. Not very good.”

“I would love to hear you play the violin sometime,” he said.

“I would love to see your paintings sometime,” I said right back at him.

He nodded. “After lunch, then,” he said, as if that settled it. “We’ll go back to my flat.”

His flat. I gulped down a glass of wine.

Once we were there, enclosed by the walls of his apartment, I was so nervous that I kept bumping into things. His flat was just as he was: tasteful and elegant but not old-fashioned, a mix of modern furniture and well-kept antiques. The art studio was at the back. He led me inside and turned on the lights. I wandered from painting to painting, from cityscapes of Rome to close-ups of flowers, to canvases crowded with people or stunning singular portraits. The subjects of his paintings were all different, but there was something similar about them, a unifying factor that marked them as created by the same hand. It had to do with the use of light and how he used it to show the life of the thing he painted, like there was something bright pushing out from inside a child’s body or a flower’s petals or from some particular archway of an ancient building, radiating outward, something that transcended the physical. He cleared his throat like he was embarrassed, exposed through his work.

“So. You’ve seen my paintings,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”

From somewhere he produced a violin, a bow, then led me out to the living room, where he sat down on the sofa, his elbows on his knees, and waited for me to play. It was an old, gorgeous violin, so much nicer than the one I had at home. I tucked it under my chin gently, closed my eyes, and began to play a song I knew by heart from Bach’s
Chaconne
, a difficult piece but one that never failed to sweep me away. The music swelled around us, filling the room, and I poured all my longing into it, my desires, like I was telling my life story through the notes as they winnowed up and around me. Like I was telling Phen the things I didn’t dare to say out loud.

When I finished and opened my eyes again, Phen had tears on his cheeks. So did I.

“Beautiful,” he murmured, and I knew that he was talking about more than the song. He was gazing at me like I was a butterfly trapped in his net, like he was tempted to pin me up behind glass even though he knew he should let me fly away.

I swallowed. My heart was dancing, my head swimming, my body alive with sensation.

Finally. So this is what it feels like, I thought, to be in love.

I spent a great deal of time the following year thinking up ways to seduce Phen. I didn’t know how just yet, since I didn’t know anything about how one goes about seducing anybody, at that point. But I would learn. I would figure it out. I didn’t care if it was crazy. I was going to live my life without holding anything back, I told myself. I was going to taste those perfectly sculpted lips of his. I was going to feel his arms around me.

I was going to be his, and he was going to be mine.

I threw myself into the research of how one might tempt an angel, with the same kind of passion I used for all my other research. It was the painting, I thought. That was my way in. He liked beautiful things. I would become a beautiful thing. I would become a muse.

He emailed me a few days before I flew to Rome for the second summer. I’d given him a piece of paper with my contact information on it, but he hadn’t been in touch until now: this brief message from [email protected], no kidding.

It said,
I am looking forward to seeing you
.

I took that as a good sign.

For the first couple weeks back in Rome we fell into the same routine from the year before. Tuesdays and Fridays. We walked. We talked, although mostly it was Phen who did the talking. I was suddenly, inexplicably, tongue-tied around him. But he didn’t bring me to his flat again. He took me to museums and cafés and churches, always bringing me home at sunset. “See you next time,” he’d say. Next time.

“See you,” I’d answer. Plotting, plotting, how next time I would make my big move.

Then one day I simply worked up the guts and showed up at his flat. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I knocked. He answered, wearing a paint-splatted white T-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees, wiping his hands on a cloth. My head spun, seeing him like that, in the middle of his process. My heart felt like it would burst. I love you, I thought immediately, and it was embarrassing, the way I’d fallen so hard and he didn’t have a clue.

He looked genuinely surprised to see me.

“Hello,” he said in Angelic, our private joke.

Here goes nothing, I thought.

“I want you to paint me,” I said, jumping right to the chase. “Will you paint me, Phen?”

His eyebrows rumpled at my request.

“Please?” I asked, my voice wavering. I’d been planning this for months, but at that moment I was scared.

He nodded and stepped back to let me come into his apartment. He dragged his green sofa into his studio and told me to lay down on it. I had a flash of Leonardo DiCaprio painting Kate Winslet aboard the
Titanic
, the way she held up the diamond and said something like, “I want you to paint me in this. In only this.”

He went into the kitchen to clean out his brushes and prepare a new set, and I fumbled around getting into a slinky black nightie I’d brought for the occasion. It was too much, I knew immediately after I’d put it on. This whole thing was a huge mistake. He’d think it was lewd.

Too late. He came back into the room and stopped short when he saw me. I fought the urge to pull down the nightie, which ended at the tops of my thighs. Too short. Indecent. Improper. Crass. I’d screwed up. I’d messed up any chance I would have ever had with him.

I bit my lip.

“Sorry,” I said.

His eyes raked down my body almost critically for a few seconds before he glanced down at the floor. I braced myself to hear him tell me to put my clothes back on. He looked at his hands, where the backs of his fingers were smudged with red paint. Then he nodded.

“Take it off,” he murmured.

My throat closed.

“What, now?” I choked out.

“Now,” he answered with the hint of a smile, not looking up. He turned and picked up a crocheted afghan that was draped over the back of a chair in the corner. “Cover yourself with this,” he instructed, handing it to me without looking. When I’d done as he asked he set about pulling the fabric across me how he wanted it, revealing parts of me and hiding others. When he was finished he went to the window and opened the shades. The room flooded with light. He set a new canvas on an easel, spent a moment angling it just so, and then picked up a single black charcoal pencil and started to sketch me.

I held as still as I could. It was quiet. All I could hear was the rough scrape of his marks against the canvas. I almost didn’t dare to breathe, for fear of spoiling the moment.

Suddenly he laughed.

“Relax, Angela,” he said. “Talk to me. Tell me more about your life this year. I’ve been thinking of you all these long months.”

I sighed and spilled. That’s when I told him about Clara, how she’d stumbled around Jackson that past winter with what might as well have been a neon sign over her head that read
ANGEL-BLOOD
in flashing letters. I talked about how Clara was obsessed with Christian Prescott because she thought he was her purpose.

“Ah,” he said. “Purpose. I haven’t heard that word in a long time.”

I told him about the man in the gray suit.

“How mysterious,” he said with a smile. “Well, we’ll see how that goes, won’t we?”

He didn’t say anything else about purpose, and I didn’t press him. I was too busy feeling the strokes his hand made on his canvas like real touches on my skin. I stayed like that for an hour, maybe more, until suddenly he stopped working. He put his pencil down.

“Enough for today,” he said. “We’ll pick up tomorrow. I’m hungry.”

He stepped past me into the living room, leaving me to get dressed alone. My disappointment was a lump in my throat. He didn’t see me as anything but another subject. A way to pass the time. But then, he wanted me to come back tomorrow. I hadn’t completely blown it.

I posed for him every day that week. He never let me see his progress, but when it was all done he announced that I should come to dinner at his place, and we’d celebrate my return to Italy, and he’d show me the painting. I stood next to him, fully clothed this time, and he pulled the cloth he’d been using to cover the canvas aside, and I sucked in my breath.

It was me—not just my body, my nose and my blue-black hair and my legs stretched out against the soft, green velvet of the sofa, but what was inside: the light in me almost seeming to pulse from the canvas, gleaming along my bare shoulder, shining in my eyes.

A woman, not a girl.

A shining woman.

He saw me.

“It may be the best piece I’ve ever done.” He turned to gaze at me with a warmth that spread all through me. “You are a wonder, Angela.”

Oh geez, I thought dizzily. I haven’t even kissed him yet, and I feel like my sky is full of fireworks. Lightning strikes. Magic.

“Kiss me,” I whispered in Italian.

Something in his eyes flashed, like pain and triumph at once. “Angela . . .”

“Kiss me,” I said again, and put my arms around him. I looked up into his face, his dark-with-secrets eyes, and I smiled.
“Ti voglio baciare,”
I said.
I want to kiss you.

He lowered his lips to mine.

I was undone.

I was reborn.

This was actually happening. I was kissing him, my fingers in his hair, and it was like setting a match to gasoline. I couldn’t get close enough.

He pulled away, his breathing ragged. “Wait. I can’t do this, as much as I’d like to. As beautiful as you are. We can’t.”

“Why?” I wanted to know, my knees still quaking from the force of the kiss. “I’m not asking you to go steady or anything. I want you to be the first, is all.”

His eyes flashed up to mine at the word
first
. “Why?” he asked hoarsely. “Why would you possibly want me?”