Chapter Text
The National Gallery’s art collection sprawls across sixty rooms. By the time she reaches the twentieth room, Rey’s feet ache, but she continues to traipse alongside Rose and Finn, keeping her camera trained on them. From behind the lens, she experiences the museum through their eyes, capturing their laughter and furtive touches as they flit from frame to frame.
When the couple reaches the impressionist wing, they pause to study Pissarro’s famous depiction of Paris at night. Equal parts warm and wintery, it draws Rey out from behind the camera. Ignoring her friends, who have drifted on to the next display, she leans closer to examine the bustling boulevard, all broad navy strokes and yellow pinpricks.
“Step black,” a tall man suited in black commands from his archway post. Rey startles at his flat American accent, jerking away from the painting in question. Its thick, bright brushstrokes imitating lamplight tug at something deep in her soul, but she refuses to let this man see it. So she disciplines her mouth into a scowl and leans away, only now registering the thin black cord strung along the room’s perimeter to discourage patrons from stepping too close. Just her luck that she crossed it and that London’s most ornery security guard caught her in the act.
“Further,” he barks until Rey slides back half a meter, dragging her boots across the polished wood floors in protest. Their squeak echoes to the gilded gallery ceilings, turning inquisitive heads in their direction. Perfect. An audience. Would that she could sock him square in the face, knock off his self-righteous scowl. Give the tourists something to whisper about. But she settles for balling her fists into her coat pockets, and matching his scowl with one of her own, so fierce that Rose elbows her into moving away from the guard and into the next room.
Amid marble and oil, Rey turns on Rose. “I had it under control.”
Rose snorts. “Right.” Before Rey can retort, Finn smiles—so gentle, but knowing that she swallows her protest. Her friends know her too well.
“Thank you,” she mutters before following them to the next star on Rose’s dogeared map and replaying her encounter with the scowling security guard. She hates how her mind skips over his curious expression and stutters at the growl in his throat. She wonders if he senses how out of place she feels here, her years of photography practice outweighed by the fancy art degree he probably holds. A nobody like her with a talent for timing the shutter isn’t an artist. No wonder he stared her down, like gum on his shoe, until she moved out of the painting’s range. She was foolish to think she could keep up with Rose here.
She trails Rose and Finn from room to room, the artwork blurring together in swaths of gold frames and deep frowns. She follows them to the museum cafe, wincing at the price tag for a pastry and pretending to protest when Rose catches her counting change and slides her gleaming black credit card to the cashier. “I had it,” Rey mutters.
This time Rose doesn’t push back, passing her a steaming cup of hot cocoa that warms her from the inside out. They camp out over a spindly-legged table that wobbles whenever Rey rests her elbows on it. She shows her flatmates the morning’s shots, a handful of stolen moments she snapped before the sour guard overshadowed their day: Rose standing before a mural, hands on hips; Finn’s hand lingering on Rose’s back; their hands intertwining as they examine a portrait of a little girl.
“They’re beautiful,” Finn says, shooting Rose that private goofy grin he only shares with her.
Rose returns it before glancing back at Rey. “They’re nothing new,” she says, correctly interpreting her friend’s furrowed brow.
“Exactly.” Rey tears into the chocolate croissant that faintly tastes like charity. Rose has always been generous, but it wears on Rey. Not that it stops her from eating when her stomach growls this much. “The Falcon’s not looking for this. It’s their winter gallery show, not amateur hour.”
“So make something new.” Rose is right, but it’s not that easy. If it were, Rey would have an SD card full of potential submissions. Instead all she has are stale croissant crumbs dissolving too fast in her mouth.
When Rose announces that the docent-led tasting tour begins in five minutes on the other side of the museum, Rey’s feet protest anew. But there’s no dissuading Rose, who loops an arm around Finn when he makes a break for the restroom. “No time,” she chirps, slowing once they reach the appointed meeting place, a long hall on the second floor. As Rey’s watch strikes noon, museumgoers throng the tasting tour sign, but the guide is nowhere in sight.
After waiting a few more minutes, she plans to beg off under the pretense of seeking inspiration for her winter gallery submission. If only inspiration waited to greet her between the portraits in the Sainsbury Wing instead of deserting her a month before The Falcon’s submission deadline. As she watches the crowd shift anxiously in search of their guide, she wonders why Rose thought that visiting this museum might help to end Rey’s creative drought. After all, painting and photography are separate fields.
Brusque, measured footsteps approach the group, but Rey’s eyes stay locked on her watch. Then a familiar American voice announces that the tasting tour has begun, and her gaze snaps to its owner: the tall man in a black suit from the impressionist wing, now adjusting his blazer and balefully eyeing the small crowd forming a semi-circle around him.
“You’re kidding me,” Rey hisses to Rose, refusing to conceal her disapproval. “The security guard again?”
The guide seems not to notice their whispers, stalking ahead of the group trailing at his heels. His poorly disguised disgust prompts a couple to peel away from the tour, but brings Rey some small comfort as she grapples with the idea of having to spend the better part of an hour in this unpleasant person’s company. At least his irritation extends to everyone. Not like she spent the last two hours worrying that she had done something to personally offend him beside leaning over the rope.
Rose shakes her head as the group halts under a glass ceiling illuminating a room of ornately framed paintings. “Ben Solo’s no security guard.”
Curiosity sears Rey’s tongue, but she lets it burn since the guide—Ben—has started speaking again and Rose has turned her full attention to the massive oil paintings stretching across red damask walls. Six of them depict a series of figures, both robed and nude, some embracing, some screaming, some fighting mythical beasts.
Sharing a flat with Rose means that Rey has attended her fair share of tasting tours at museums across London, often with Rose’s sister, Paige, an assistant exhibitions designer for the National Gallery. Each tour is unique, showcasing the docent’s personal tastes in an attempt to condense an expansive collection to a digestible highlight reel. These paintings that Ben selected, longer than Rey is tall, possess bright colors and contorted figures that demand their viewers’ attention as tribute, promising secrets to those who stare long enough. She wonders why this grumpy American dragged the party here of all places, what it says about him. Probably a chance for him to show off his obscure art history knowledge.
Once again, he proves her wrong. “During the Renaissance, every wealthy European wanted a Tiziano Vecellio piece.” Ben pauses, staring at his audience clustering around the canvas or vying for seats on the solitary bench. They stare blankly back, except for Rose who nods confidently. She might be able to lead the tour herself, but she hangs on his every word.
“Titian,” he sighs when no one responds. Only then do a few tour members nod as if the name triggers some prior knowledge. Rey just stares, steely and cold, waiting for him to continue. His gaze sweeps past her as if she doesn’t exist. She pretends it doesn’t sting.
“They liked his colors, his composition, his fame. His name mattered more than the art.” Something bitter twists his tone, but he fights to keep it neutral after another brief pause. Rey perks up, hating herself even as she leans in. “He could’ve settled. Coasted. But he let his past techniques die. He painted looser strokes, sometimes with his fingers. He embraced abstraction and human expressions. That’s the way he became the master he was meant to be.”
Although his tone remains flat, his eyes remain locked on the nearest painting as he speaks. The audience fades into scenery as the artwork comes alive with his passion. He tells the story of the goddess Diana who bathed with her nymphs until the hunter Actaeon stumbled upon the pool and beheld her naked. She cursed him to transform into a stag—“a monster,” Ben explains, and Rey lingers on his unique wording for longer than she’ll admit—before Actaeon’s hounds tore him to shreds.
The painting captures the moment the hunter seals his own fate by bursting in on the forbidden scene. His expression flickers between regretful awe and curious desire; Diana’s expression speaks of rage at the disruption, and an inexplicable shame that Rey studies until Ben’s narration jerks her back to reality.
“Nobody painted the gods like this. With human emotions. Titian made them relatable, no matter how high they loomed over mortals.”
Rey doesn’t know what possesses her—when Rose asks later, she mumbles something about testing the glass ceiling’s lighting. In one swift swoop, she uncaps the lens and draws the camera to her eye, snapping a photo just as Ben raises his arms to gesture at the artwork, an echo of the man trapped in the canvas. Although Ben’s arms remain hidden by his blazer, something in their curve suggests muscles like the ones revealed by the hunter’s skimpy robe. Like the hunter, Ben’s hands curve in almost a startled, defensive curl. With his face cocked toward the painting, the resemblance is uncanny, something defiant and hesitant in both men’s body language that Rey can’t quite pin down.
The shutter echoes above the guide’s terse explanations, but he continues speaking without missing a beat, never glancing in Rey’s direction. Several tour group members turn to locate the click’s source. In an effort to appear nonchalant, Rey glances around the room through her camera’s viewfinder as if she were photographing the art on the wall instead of the cantankerous docent, like a normal tourist and not some pathetic photographer desperate for inspiration. The moment passes and the group’s attention returns to Ben, frowning under their scrutiny.
Only once he stops speaking, so sharp and sudden that the group pauses, waiting for more, does he look toward Rey. His withering stare could peel paint from canvas, strip the gilt from the glass ceiling, splinter the wooden floorboards. Instead it sends a flush racing down Rey’s throat and chest, disappearing into her thick sweater collar and leaving her wondering again what she did to invoke such distaste.
The tour blurs into a spiral of indecipherable glances that soften as Rey keeps her camera firmly pointed away from the guide and her eyes trained on the paintings he points out. She notices that he speaks more to the artwork than the audience, keeps his hands stuffed in his trouser pockets, and waits to glance at her until he finishes speaking.
Once the tour group disbands, Rey follows Rose and Finn toward the medieval wing. “Who is he anyway?” she asks Rose instead of listening to her instinct to ignore the subject.
“Son of one of the museum trustees. Paige says he’s not even a real art scholar, just filling in at his mom’s request since one of the docents quit for the holidays.”
Like marble whittled away under a sculptor’s hands, this man comes into sharper relief: a temporary replacement, a man out of his element. No wonder his shoulders pinched to mimic his mouth; no wonder he barked at Rey for leaning over the line. While he spoke about the paintings in clipped sentences, he packed those sentences full of observations that casual museumgoers wouldn’t know, using terminology that suggests he has more of an art background than Paige claims.
But Rey has more important things to do than fantasize about this mercurial stranger. So she banishes Ben Solo from her mind on the brief Tube ride home to the flat she shares with Rose and Finn. She refuses to think of him as she uploads her SD card contents to her laptop and sifts through the images from the National Gallery. As she edits a selection of photos, the ones she showed Rose in the cafe, she notes the closeness between Rose and Finn in every shot, but refuses to allow herself to imagine herself and Ben in their places.
While the photos of Rose and Finn won’t impress anyone at The Falcon, they’re good enough for Rey to add to her Instagram, a romantic carousel post in olives, reds, and golds that herald the end of fall as it teeters on the cusp of winter. But her attempts at distraction have failed. Ben still commands a corner of her mind as Rey’s fingers hover over the stolen photograph of him telling Diana’s story. On impulse, she edits it, some color balancing to adjust for the weak winter light pouring through the glass ceiling and sharpening to bring out the painting’s finer details. Then she publishes it in a post all its own: a broad-shouldered echo of a hunter and a goddess, awe and disgust, dark and light.
When she wakes up the next morning to triple her usual number of likes, with comments lighting up her phone screen every few minutes, Rey knows that she’s stumbled onto something right.