Radiant by Cynthia Hand Read Free Book Online Page B

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