Dark Art

a pov change...?! ( ˘ ᴗ ˘ )

Episode 6: Now, we drink

Ancient latin."Nunc es bibendum"

Serafine was standing at the kitchen sink, sluicing water down her face and picking tiny white clumps of semen from her hair when she heard the bathroom door open.

With shaky fingers, she reached for a towel, blotting the water from her cheeks as she tried to make herself look normal before a familiar face rounded the corner.

Her roommate, Elizabeth, dressed in one of those cute, preppy outfits she always managed to pull together. Her face and skin were still flushed pink from the heat of the shower, and at the sight of Serafine in the kitchen, she drew a hand to her chest, visibly startled.

"Oh, it's you. I didn't know you were back yet. I heard voices out here and was like, um, I'm pretty sure I turned off the TV," she laughed nervously. "I thought it was going to be, like, a rapist or something."

You just missed him,Serafine thought, but only said. "Just me."

Oblivious to the events that had just unfolded, Elizabeth continued talking as if nothing were amiss. "So, how was your thing at the Burling Mansion? That was today, right?"

By 'The Burling Mansion' she meant the historic building downtown that Beauregard had sent her to -- Ivan's place -- or his dead father's place, or whatever it was.

Not that she cared. The building could burn to the ground for all it meant to her. In fact, if it did, she might feel a little better.

Some opportunity,Serafine reflected, washing a few stray dishes, glad to have a reason to keep her face turned away.

"Uh, it was...fine," she shrugged. "I mean... it's just a house."

"Fine?" Elizabeth echoed, sounding unconvinced. "Just a house? Some of us would kill for a private tour like you got, you know. It's not open to the public anymore."

Serafine fixed an emotionless smile to her face when she turned back around. She doubted very much that her small-town hailing roommate would have even survived a tour like the one she'd received from Ivan Masters, but all she said was, "Well, I hear they're selling the place. So there will be an open house or something soon enough."

"Selling?" Elizabeth gasped. "How horrible. What if someone buys it and puts a Tao inside, like what happened to the old Society building?"

"A Greek tragedy," Serafine agreed monotonously. "You should protest. We can make signs."

"Did you get any pictures at least?"

Serafine blinked, thinking back to the time she'd spent alone with Ivan in the attic. The way he'd watched her from the darkness, then explored her body like it was his own personal plaything.

"They're on a different camera."

"Bummer," said Elizabeth, opening the refrigerator door and staring at its contents boredly. It was almost empty. Water bottles, a few hard limes rolling around the top shelf, a bottle of Sriracha. "Oh, you know, I'm meeting up with Noah tonight, you should come."

"Uh-" Serafine searched for an excuse. "Isn't it raining?"

"We're just going downstairs," Elizabeth smiled.

Serafine hesitated, biting the inside of her lip as she tried to figure out what to do. She could barely think straight right now, let alone talk in complete sentences. It was as if the world was completely different, like she was seeing colors nobody else was aware of...but for some bizarre reason, she was desperate to seem normal, and didn't think she could bear answering questions about why shedidn'twant to go out tonight, so she shrugged.

"Uh, sure, yeah, just, uhm, let me take a quick shower."

Serafine felt relieved to walk away, but it was still difficult to focus. Alone in her bedroom, she touched her neck and winced, wondering if the skin would bruise. Then she remembered she needed to find a change of clothes, and scooped up some garments from around the floor.

Locking herself in the apartments tiny, shared bathroom, Serafine turned up the heat on the shower and looked at herself in the mirror while she waited for the water to get hot. Her face was red, her eyes were red, and her neck was definitely beginning to swell.

It's a good thing Elizabeth hadn't noticed,she thought, her worrying now cast toward the impending meeting with their friends instead.

The act of pulling off her clothes brought back more uncomfortable memories, but she forced herself to undress and step into the shower, the hot water pleasantly stinging her skin.

The pain was a welcome distraction, but it didn't last long, and as she got used to the temperature, there was little to keep her mind off of what'd just happened.

It wasn't that she cared about keeping Ivan's secrets, but the idea of admitting what he'd just done to her felt somehow even worse.

Especially when she thought about how her straight-edge roommate would react. Elizabeth would insist on going to the police, the dean, their professors. By the end of the week, there wouldn't be a single person in Chicago who didn't know what'd happened to her -- and for what?

No good would come of it, and who knows what Ivan might do in retaliation.

He was a member of a powerful family in the art world, and beyond that, he seemed like the type to enjoy engaging in acts of vengeance. Who knew what he was truly capable of? Trying to confront him and causing trouble for the university or bringing any negative attention on the people in charge of things could easily backfire, so she thought it best to hold her silence.

In a way, by not talking about him she maintained a sense of power over the situation. By refusing to acknowledge anything had ever happened between them, it was as if she was bending reality to create her own truth... but when a tangle of hair came away around her fingers as she was shampooing her hair, she took a shaky breath and started to cry.

In hindsight, she was ashamed to admit that shehadbeen attracted to him at first.

Ivan Masters was well-dressed and tall, with a chiseled jawline and tousled black hair like a book character. To a student trying to make ends meet in a big city, seeing him in person was like running into a real life prince, and the more details of his life that were revealed -- a vast inheritance, his family's sprawling influence, his new executive title -- the more like royalty he seemed.

Initially, she'd found his attention flattering. She thought it must have been the dress and heels she'd been wearing at the preview event that made him come on so strongly that night, but she was quickly left feeling intimidated and scared by what'd happened next.

None of the boys from school acted like he did. Sure, plenty of them were assholes and enjoyed catcalling and making little comments about her in class, but it stopped there.

Ivan was different. He was much older, for one. All action, little talk, and more disturbingly, she got the sense he was used to putting his hands on people the way he'd done to her, like he did it all the time. Some kind of twisted little hobby he had on the side.

She'd only read about guys like him until now, or seen them portrayed in films. The domineering, cocky types, usually seen doing drugs and driving flashy cars at reckless speeds. In person, it was a lot harder to be around than pop culture made it seem, and there was a dark side to that personality type that she'd never really registered the existence of before, until now.

He made her feel small. Physically small, but also, like her words mattered less in his presence, the way he talked over her or ignored her questions altogether. Doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, as if he'd never experienced a consequence ever in his life.

"Fucking asshole," she winced as another knot of hair came away in the water.

She went through a range of emotions in the shower, regretting over and over again that she'd ever met the man at all. He was an evil piece of shit and her thoughts rapidly twisted toward fantasies of him meeting a short end on a dark street on his way home that night, the headlights of a screeching semi-truck rendering him flat as a sheet of drawing paper.

Or maybe he'd get attacked by a stray Rottweiler. A pack of them, rabid and snarling and tearing him limb from limb, starting with the one between his legs.

That would be nice, and it felt nice to daydream, but after a while, she realized she was just standing in the shower staring. Not moving or thinking about anything at all, barely aware of the waters warmth slipping away, when suddenly she snapped out of the reverie and turned off the spigot.

Act normal,she told herself as she stepped out of the shower toweling off her hair.Don't think about it. Don't think about him. Just, don't think at all.

She pulled on a pair of jeans and an oversized t-shirt, the standard outfit for someone who spent most of their day mixing pigments and working with the dusty tools in the MFA program. In class, she'd usually add an apron or smock, but otherwise she'd dressed this way as long as she could remember, her wardrobe primarily made up of clothes with holes, bleach splatters, paint stains or all three.

It'd never struck her as a problem. Although she did sometimes wonder how the skirts and dresses other women wore would look on her, she rarely braved such outfits in real life. The attention cute clothes got her always made her feel deeply uncomfortable... that night at the gallery, for example, she couldn't wait to get home and change into something more comfortable when she ran straight into Ivan.

She did her hair into two long braids to keep it out of her face and then opened the bathroom door to find Elizabeth standing in the living room, staring at her phone while she waited.

"Are you ready?" her roommate asked. "I'm dying of hunger out here. The boys are already downstairs."

"I'm coming, I'm coming," Serafine replied, pulling on her shoes as she thought of whatthe boysimplied.

Elizabeth's current crush Noah Divello was a computer whiz, but he went to Northwestern, so they rarely saw each other and weren't officially dating yet, which is what prompted her roommate to constantly set up these little hangouts. As for Serafine, it was Noah's friend she was interested in, and if "the boys" were downstairs, she had no doubt it was his best friend Ricard that was with him.

Ric for short. Besides being from a wealthy family, he had a reputation on campus for selling the best weed, and Serafine could really use a re-up on that right about now. He usually gave it to her for free and paid for dinner too, both things she hated to admit she often needed help with, but given the circumstances she was willing to look past her own feelings for the time being.

It'd been her dream to go to art school, but now almost two years in, she was keenly aware that her university experience was not going quite as it had been advertised on the pamphlet. When she'd gotten her scholarship, she'd had this rose-tinted fantasy of how life would go; she'd spend her days drawing, painting, being intellectually challenged and learning from an expansive collection of works by the old masters, before becoming a wealthy collector herself and retiring, all before the age of 25.

In reality, college turned out to be a constant struggle of making rent and trying to keep her checking account from getting so many fees it went into the negative. Things were usually so bad she had to ration her food, which was part of what attributed to her slender figure. Everything in the city was justsoexpensive, it didn't make sense how anyone could keep up.

At first, she couldn't understand how all her friends seemed to be doing so well, with credit cards and their own cars like it was nothing. Until she gradually realized that this was not actually aschoolshe was enrolled in, in the traditional sense, but more like a playground... for rich kids.

Her peers were here to make connections, do drugs, and stay out of their parent's hair for a little while, not actually pursue a career after graduation. They were all born into money, so the idea of a job of any kind meant very little to them -- with the exception of her roommate, Elizabeth, who was the only person around that Serafine knew for a fact was just as broke as she was -- everyone else talked nonstop about their trips to Europe, their parents bougie jobs, expensive hobbies like horseback riding and rowing, each story as tantalizingly out of reach as the one before.

Serafine hated that she was so curious about their lives...in truth, what she really wanted was to become one of them somehow, living in the same wondrous modern renaissance her peers described; summers in Italy, yachts and estates, acres of land and horses and never, ever, having to worry about getting screamed at by a landlord for being fifteen days past due on rent.

Must be nice,she reflected.To be spared this bullshit.

When Elizabeth opened the door to the apartment, Serafine half expected to see Ivan there waiting for her and flinched, then forced herself to keep walking with a shake of her head.Act normal,she reminded herself, but she was a little concerned by the way her own imagination seemed to draw him everywhere. Behind every door and in every shadowy nook, she now feared him lurking.

Their apartment was conveniently situated above a small ramen restaurant, which had become the de facto location for their friend group primarily because they served beer and nobody hassled them for ID. It was also the reason their living room always had the lingering smell of pork grease, but they both chose to look past that for the steep discount they received on rent.

The food was really good, too. Big bowls piled with noodles and toppings. When they got to the street level, they only had to walk a couple of feet before they arrived at the front door of the restaurant, where Elizabeth lead the way to a cramped table in the back, where two boys were already seated side-by-side.

One of them had a laptop open in front of him, the other, with black hair and tattoos who looked like he'd just stepped out of practice for his Punk Rock band, was grinding a pair of chopsticks back and forth, talking.

"...no excuses, Divello. You have to be there, it's the big two-one."

"We'll see," said Noah in his usual distracted, analytical tone, before looking up at them. "Sup."

"Hey," said Elizabeth, picking the chair closest to him, while Serafine sat across from Ricard, who nodded at her in greeting, licking the silver rings that ran through both corners of his bottom lip.Snake bites,he'd called them.

"Hello, beautiful."

Serafine smiled at him a little, then looked away, recalling the first time she'd ever seen him. His towering height and bizarre gothic clothes were impossible to forget, and when she'd asked Elizabeth if she knew anything about him, she'd informed her that he was Noah's friend, a graduating senior, who spoke Greek and studied Ancient Art. All traits that, to her, made him seem intensely unapproachable and cool.

"How was your day?" Ricard continued from across the table.

Serafine knew she still wasn't prepared for this conversation, but cleared her throat anyway, a sensation that turned out to be unexpectedly painful.

"Fine," she said softly. "Just the usual, you know. School."

Overhearing this, Elizabeth chimed in. "She said the same thing about the Burling Mansion earlier," miming Serafine's clipped tone. "Fine. Nothing. Just a house. What's up with you today?"

Serafine was going to cut in to defend herself, but before she could, Ricard raised his eyebrows and asked. "Laurent Masters place?"

"I think his son inherited it," said Serafine quietly. "After..."

She didn't say it out loud, but they were all thinking it: After hedied of a heart attack on the museum floor.

Ricard slapped the table unexpectedly, making everyone turn to look at him, his expression now somewhere between amusement and surprise. "Oh, yeah, yeah, what's his name? Fuck. God, father can't stand that guy." He nudged Noah in the arm. "She's talking about him. The guy they called your ma over."

Noah looked at her over the rim of his laptop. He had curly brown hair and a freckled, innocent-seeming face. Compared to Ricard, he seemed like a nice kid -- in fact, it didn't really seem like the two of them should be friends at all -- but it turned out their parents all knew each other, so they'd been destined for friendship long before college.

"Isn't he like, forty?" Noah asked prudently. "Bit old for you, no?"

Noah's parents werebothlawyers, and Elizabeth had told her he lived in some shiny top-floor condo downtown. Another of the upperclass elite that didn't look it. She tried not to blush as she explained the situation, careful to leave out every detail that wasn't strictly necessary to getting her friends off her back.

"He came to the conservatory asking for records. He's trying to sell some of the stuff at the house, I guess, so I gotvolun-toldby Beauregard to go take pictures."

Everyone seemed satisfied with her answer, but for some reason, even these details made her forehead shine with sweat. Talking about Ivan was still too much, and it was impossible to leave the details of what had really happened out of her memories, even if she could control what shesaidout loud.

"You should see his TikTok," Noah said before looking back down at his computer, a twinge of disgust pushing his eyebrows together. "Mother loathes him."

"What's his name? Ivan Masters?" said Elizabeth wryly, pulling up his account and turning her phone so that everyone at the table could see.

"I think it'sEvaughn, actually," Serafine mumbled, but the groups attention had already shifted.

Ivan's feed was filled with clips of him in extravagant houses, wearing suits, and leaning against exotic sports cars. Elizabeth tapped on a video that featured him kicking a punching bag multiple times, before scrolling to another one of him waist-deep in pool water, his arms around two scantily-clad women, one of their fake tits in each of his hands.

"Well, doesn't he seem charming?" she sniffed disdainfully.

"He's not even rich," said Ricard, with that sort of holier-than-thou tone possessed only by the super wealthy. "I hear he does real estate, for God's sake. Laurent was the collector. That man was a genius."

"He seems like one of those guys that talks about stepping out of the matrix," Elizabeth commented, to a few laughs from the guys.

"I'd stay away from him if I was you," Noah warned. "Mother says he's caught a few assault charges in his day, if you know what I mean. And his entire family is fighting to get him off the board. The way I heard it, it was supposed to be Laurent's brother that got the seat, not his son. Total shock."

"Really," said Serafine lightly. Ivan had alluded to issues with his family, but he hadn't mentioned anything about working as a real estate agent, nor that the situation with his inheritance was as dire as Noah made it seem. She'd just assumed he was born rich, like everyone else around her seemed to be. It hadn't occurred to her for a single second that that Ivan Masters might be struggling for something, too.

When the moment passed, Serafine turned confidentiality to Ric and lowered her voice, eager to change the subject.

"Hey, um. I was wondering. Do you have any... you know... on you?"

"Any what?" he asked coyly.

She shot him an imploring glare.He knows damn well what I'm talking about.

She didn't know why Ric sold drugs. With the type of money he had, he'd never have to work a day in his life, but everyone knew he did it. She suspected part of him just enjoyed irritating his family, as he often liked to say, "For them to do something about it, they'd have to first take notice."