"Yes." I swallowed, struggling to articulate what had been instinct that night. "The absence felt more true than any face I could have painted. More sacred, somehow."
Professor Bishop leaned back slightly, his expression thoughtful. "Your religious iconography is technically impressive, but it's the violence you do to your own work that interests me most. The way you create beauty specifically to corrupt it." He paused, studying me. "What drives that impulse, I wonder?"
Something long bound began to uncoil inside me. No one had ever asked me this directly. They'd psychoanalyzed, medicated, prayed over me, but never simply asked.
"There's something wrong with me," I said, the words emerging before I could filter them. "Something that's been there since I was small. People see the art, the quiet manners, the academic achievements, and they think that's me. But underneath, there's something... hungry. Something that wants to destroy beautiful things just to watch them break."
I stopped, horrified at my confession. This wasn't the kind of truth you confessed to anyone still willing to look you in the eye.
But Professor Bishop didn't look shocked or disgusted. If anything, he looked pleased.
"Do you know why I chose you from all the applicants, Micah?" he asked, his voice dropping slightly in tone. "Not for your technical skill, though that's considerable. Not for your academic record or recommendations."
He opened the leather portfolio on his desk, revealing a series of photographs. My work from the past three years, including pieces I'd destroyed or hidden away. Pieces no one should have seen.
"I chose you because I recognize what's inside you," he continued. "That hunger you speak of isn't a flaw to be contained or cured. It's a gift few possess. The capacity to see beyond conventional beauty to something more profound."
My heart hammered against my ribs. This couldn't be happening. No one looked at the darkness and saw anything but pathology. No one.
"You've been taught to fear what lives in you," he said, his voice gentle now, intimate in a way that made my skin prickle. "To bind it with religion, with therapy, with artistic convention. They've convinced you that your darkness is pathology rather than potential."
He leaned forward, his eyes never leaving mine. "They've made you a chrysalis that never breaks, denying the emergence of what waits within."
"What are you suggesting?" My voice sounded strange, breathless, as if I'd been running.
"That you stop fighting yourself. That you consider not containment, but becoming. What if that darkness isn't a demon to be exorcised, but a god waiting to be born?"
The shadow inside me twisted violently at his words, clawing closer to the surface. "It would destroy me," I whispered.
His smile was slow, transforming his austere features into something almost predatory. "Or complete you, Micah. That is what I intend to show you, if you're brave enough to see."
A normal man would be afraid. Afraid of Ezra, of the possibility of confronting their inner demons, of failure at the very least. But a strange calm washed over me, as if my entire life had been leading to this moment, this choice.
"Yes," I said simply.
His smile deepened and he inclined his head. "Good. We'll begin tomorrow. I have a private studio where I conduct my most important work. Away from the academic environment with its limitations."
He wrote an address on a crisp white card and handed it to me. His fingers brushed mine in the exchange, a brief contact that sent a shock of awareness through my system.
"Tomorrow evening. Eight o'clock." His eyes held mine. "Bring nothing but yourself."
I nodded, unable to speak past the tightness in my throat. My fingers closed around the card, its edges sharp against my palm.
"Until then, I want you to consider something," he said, standing. "The masters of the baroque understood that true beauty requires darkness. Caravaggio didn't merely paint light. He cultivated shadow to make the light meaningful. Remember that when you feel the urge to destroy your work. Perhaps destruction isn't the goal, but merely the beginning of a deeper creation."
I stood as well, feeling strangely unsteady, as if the floor beneath me had subtly shifted.
"Thank you, Professor," I managed.
"Ezra," he corrected, coming around the desk to stand before me. "When we're working together, I'd prefer you use my given name."
He was close enough now that I could detect his scent, something woody and complex that made my mouth water instinctively.
"Ezra," I repeated, the name feeling like a covenant in my mouth.
He reached out slowly, deliberately, his fingers ghosting along my jaw in the briefest of touches. The contact was electric, sending a current of awareness through me that was neither entirely pleasure nor pain, but some exquisite territory between.
My knees nearly buckled, an instinct to bow, to kneel before him, nearly overwhelming. I leaned into his touch, starved for contact that didn't ask me to pretend.
