December made her realize what she was doing. The slick, icy tongues of winter slapped against her bare legs as she waited outside Donovan’s apartment, though he only went by ‘D’ online. D, 45, three photos, one video, immediate match and message to follow. It was not like summer, when nothing could rupture the fantasy of the man she was to meet, when the sun heightened her sense of illusion. She almost turned to go, letting her better senses guide her back to the warm and familiar bedsheets back home, before she was buzzed in. 

Donovan lived on the thirteenth floor in a modernist, luxury apartment building with multiple functioning elevators. She compared it to her own apartment building with five floors of sagging wooden steps. From his profile she could tell that D was a tall, wiry man and a medical doctor. He had only one blurry photo of his face. What drew Lucille—what halted the flow of bored disinterest—was the short video he had posted of his hands playing the piano. 

He had spidery fingers, long and boney, all edges and points. He had written in his bio that he appreciated art, but it did not really seem so. He played the piano by commanding it. He played the piano until it reluctantly yielded the music to him, each note a struggle, each sound a defeated and dying breath. Lucille wanted him to want her so, so badly. 

She had dated older men before, so she knew how to behave at the firsting meeting. She knew not to tease them about their age unless it was in the context of sex. Referencing the difference of age was only acceptable if it was directly leading up to the act, during it, or after the fact, when they led her out of their apartment with all the tired glory of a trophy hunter, finally bored of the limp and bloodied carcass. They liked her youth, they liked to imagine themselves through her eyes, but they did not like to be reminded of what she really thought of them. How, to her, they might as well have been ancient beasts or her banker. 

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When he greeted her at his door, he was nothing like she imagined. He seemed nervous, which put her more at ease. He smiled down at her with a toothy grin and inky, wide pupils. “Would you like something to drink?” He asked. “I have water and wine.” She accepted a glass of wine. She never much cared for wine, but water felt unsuitable and somehow juvenile.

So, this was the type of person he was. Crystal glasses and an induction stovetop. White, bare walls and floor-to-ceiling windows. Not a thing out of place. Lucille had an urge to tear open all the cabinets, open all the doors and turn on all the lights. She wanted to shatter her wineglass against the walls and pluck the keys from his piano like teeth. There it was, his piano, placed in the corner of the living room, in front of a window that surely let in the light of sunrise every morning. 

“You’re welcome to explore.” He said, perhaps sensing her twitching urge to violate his home. Most of the doors revealed empty closet spaces or storage, until she reached a door that opened into a dark and windowless space. The overhead light revealed a mattress at the center of the floor, covered in layers upon layers of thin, white linen sheets. Two heavy-headed studio lamps were placed on either side. Directly across from the mattress sat a single stool and an easel, upon which an untouched slab of watercolor paper had been placed. There were no paints to be seen, only an array of paintbrushes laid out like a medical examiner’s tools, a single cup of water, and a plastic pipette. 

“This is the strange request I mentioned.” He said, coming up behind her. He stood close to her, so close that she could feel his breath on the top of her head in the space where her hair parted. 

“I would like to take your blood. To paint with, nothing more.” He waited for her reply, but she said nothing, so he went on. 

“I will only use what I need and safely dispose of the rest. I would like you to lay on your side, or in whatever position I put you, and you will remain unmoving until I have finished painting. I understand fully if you would like to leave.”

Lucille had no sense of self-preservation. She took a step toward the mattress. 

+

The first time he touched her was when he took her blood. 

“You have very narrow veins.” He said, holding her arm in both his hands. His touch was clinical, though gentle. Following the direction of his gaze, she saw what he saw: blue veins thin as thread. Every nurse who had ever taken her blood sent her away battered, with cotton and bandages plugging up the missteps, bruises that lasted a week or more. He looked at both arms very closely before deciding on the left one. 

With his thumb, he rubbed warmth into the skin above the vein to ease it to the surface. When he was satisfied, his hands went to action, swiping alcohol onto her arm, removing the needle from its packaging. 

“I’m going to insert the needle now. You may look if you like, but you don’t have to.” She watched the needle break the skin, finding the vein instantly. She watched as the blood was taken from her, as it ran down the narrow tubes, filling three vials. She watched as he removed the needle and fixed her up. 

+

He did not watch as she undressed, which both surprised and disappointed her. She went slowly, letting her clothes drop to the floor, giving him time to turn and look. He only adjusted the lights, carefully selecting the correct filter and position. He settled on a warm, buttery light. The second time he touched her, it was with his fingertips at the small of her back. He guided her to the mattress, where the linen sheets gathered in big loops, intentionally folded to look disheveled. Her nude skin prickled in the cold. 

“Lie down and get comfortable. You won’t have to do anything, I’ll adjust you.” He went to his easel and she got to her belly. 

She tried her side, propped up by her left arm, but it felt unnatural. She tried lying on her back, but it felt too casual. He watched her struggling, but did nothing to correct her, even after promising her that he would. He sat there, half on and half off the stool, a dark, faceless figure observing her from behind the studio lights that smudged her vision. She could see it in his posture, the dissatisfaction outlined in the lines of his crossed arms, the way he reclined, in the curve of his neck as he cocked his head. 

He sighed, clearly frustrated with her. He frowned, she could tell from the sound of his breathing alone. He was not looking at her face but scanning her body, searching for the thing that wasn’t right. He was trying to find the error. She waited for him to tell her to leave, that this wouldn’t work, that she was not the muse that he had hoped she could be. Her cheeks went red, her forehead felt hot. The dignity inside her crumpled together and she felt she regressed into a stupid child again. She felt shy, so shy, so inadequate. 

And then he was upon her, face in hers so closely she could see the pores on his nose, the fine lines at the corner of his mouth, the little, wormy capillaries in the whites of his eyes. In one motion, he wrapped his hands around her wrists, adjusted her arms, throwing them over her head, and then he went to her legs, and then to her waist, where he formed the curve he desired. He stood back a couple feet, viewed her from a different angle, and continued to adjust until he was satisfied. He worked with such efficiency, such command, and she noticed that his nervous, former self had entirely dissolved to make way for Donovan, the painter and pianist, the artist with no sense of mercy or compromise. 

In the end, she was lying half on her back, half on her side. Her legs had been bent and were stacked on top of one another, and her feet were pointed. She had one arm draped over her belly, her hand resting just above her navel, with the other pointed up and folded so her hand was cradling the base of her head. The position of her head, which he had fussed over the most, was positioned now so that she looked directly at him. The light, which had been so soft at first, was now everywhere. Brighter than day, brighter than summer.

Donovan went over to his stool and looked at her a while longer. 

“Relax into it or it won’t work.” Was all he said, so she did, and he seemed to be satisfied with it. 

And then came the sound of brushes swirling and tapping on the glass of water. Paper torn from a pad, wetted bristles on paper. He painted, unspeaking, sometimes stopping to simply look and calculate the depth of something, the dark of shadows, the points and swells on the surface of her body. 

“The wine has worn off, it seems.” He said after what might have been minutes, hours, days, for all she knew. She had lost all sense of time in that windowless room with Donovan. He rose from his seat and stood above her, looking at her without a smile or even the slightest softness in his expression. He crouched down until he was close. There, buttons undone from his shirt, buttons that had been done up before. She finally was able to see uncovered skin, and his small, pink nipples. 

He pinched her cheeks and she almost cried out. His fingers were like the steel tips of scissors, so sharp and unrelenting he was, so badly it hurt, until she thought it very likely that she was bleeding. He then went to her nipple, to nip at it, to inspire color in her body. She broke the position he had worked so hard to form, reaching out, feverish, cupping her hands around his neck to pull him in, to pull his body to hers so he could touch her and just do it, just do it. 

He would not be moved. He held her away from him and fixed her back into the original position. He understood her as a doctor knows a patient, as an artist knows the wooden reference model. He saw her parts, he saw what the trained eye sees. He had peeled her apart, layer by layer, examining her and refusing to be examined in return. When he was satisfied with the flush of blood that flowered in her cheeks, he returned to his work. 

As she lay there and he continued to paint, her chest heaved and heaved and she felt she might be dying. She almost shook with how wrong it was, how unrequited and abandoned she felt. That unmet wanting was a distant sound of drums, a steady pounding in her ear like the echo of ritual. The bristles of the brush scraped faster and faster, capturing her, all the desire that he had inspired in her and then tossed to the side. She waited until he was done. 

+

“Would you like to see?” He asked her. “You may look if you like, but you don’t have to.” She was not aware that he had stopped. She didn’t feel cold anymore, the lights didn’t bother her. When she began to move again, to remove herself from that position, she felt that she could no longer recognize her body. Her joints lit up in discomfort with each movement. It made her feel years older and lost in time—the pinching feeling in her hips, her stiff neck. She had to rediscover herself with each step towards Donovan. Her nudity felt strange; she felt more naked now than before, and he was so clothed, so covered, his shirt again buttoned up to the collar. 

She did not recognize herself at first. It was a woman painted in red, dark red, almost brown. She was in Lucille’s exact position, a body painted expertly. But the face was unrecognizable. There was no serenity in her expression, no sense of peace. The woman’s face was turned up, as if looking into the eyes of the watcher and expecting something. Her cheeks, her lips, her eyes were formless blotches of red. Desire, its thunder hooves of want, had trampled her face and now she was bloodied and pulpy. She was a skull smashed against the pavement, nothing more. 

He didn’t ask if she liked it. She didn’t offer any comment either, but he didn’t notice or didn’t care. He slouched in his seat and yawned. He asked how she planned to get home that night. 

+

Hunger made her delirious. Upon leaving Donovan’s apartment it came over Lucille all at once, a sudden and overwhelming sensation, as if she hadn’t eaten in days. She bought meat on her way home, lots of it. She filled her shopping cart and arrived home with two full shopping bags. While roasting duck and potatoes in the oven, she ate potato chips by the handful, washing it down with diet soda. She was possessed by hunger; she ate everything. Fatty-skinned roast duck, plump red potatoes with gravy and yellow onions that fell apart in fleshy layers. She ate all of it with her hands, grease slathered across her face, dribbling down her chin. She ate until she couldn’t anymore, until it hurt, until her guts were stretched and tired. 

Dishes in the sink, a hot shower, Lucille turned the temperature all the way up and it still wasn’t hot enough. The water left red marks on her chest, trailing down her body, down her belly, her thighs. She made herself clean, cleared herself of the grease and oil. She scrubbed and exfoliated, lathered lotion into her raw skin; she made herself new. Lucille went to bed and fell asleep under heavy sheets, not thinking to check the time, not thinking to set an alarm. 

When she woke, it was night again. It took her a moment to adjust. She could only remember that it had been some version of night when she left the house and came home again. The time on her phone read two a.m. She had piles of notifications, but she did not see his name on any of them.

She opened the app and found his profile. There it was—the anonymous and blurry figure of D. The profile was exactly as before, but now it seemed somehow empty. She stopped at the video of his hands playing the piano. She watched the video over and over again, trying to recall her feelings from before. But the night had already filled up and burst. It was over. She didn’t care anymore. She unmatched D—the pianist, the doctor, the painter.   

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Amanda Minkkinen is a sociologist and writer who lives in Copenhagen. She has work published in Mycelia, Odd Magazine, among others. You can find her on Twitter as @aljminkkinen.