She held the delicate stem of the flower between her teeth and wanted to do nothing but feel it give under the points of her canines, to have teeth scratch against teeth. The rose petals were hanging precariously from the center, threatening to detach themselves by way of silent suicide.

She flicked her eyes sideways, feeling suddenly very aware that he was there, oblivious to anything but his fingernails, and she was fascinated by the way that he examined his hands, nondescriptly, yet as if nothing interested him. Fucker. Narcissist, egoist, perfection. Her heart had one of those motherfucking implosions once again and she felt like some washed up tango dancer with a shrunken rose in her mouth, partnerless, dead at the dance.

Where she had drawn the like between poetic and pathetic had been forgotten when she heard him sing. Or maybe when he played and how his fingers would move deftly over the strings, like they were putting life into them, music, or maybe pulling life out, but there was always more and that was what she needed. He had this voice that to anyone else might have sounded a little high, a little strained, but to her it sounded like—like what? She thought maybe an angel but once she thought that she cringed inwardly.

She couldn't quite recall what his voice reminded her of, but it didn't matter at the moment.

They had roses as the focal point of their latest project. Not they as in, they were working as partners—she would die, and anyway, she couldn't see how she could work with anyone on something like this, let alone with him. Art wasn't something whose expression you could easily share. This was something of there choosing—for the most part anyway. No, they did not work together. It was a class thing.

They had received instructions days ago and each a dozen long stemmed roses (they were quite a surprise to everyone) and she had been compelled to sever them with her teeth when she had first gotten them. They were gorgeous blossoms with slender green stems, the red plumage of silent cardinals. And now she was down to one, scarred with bite marks, almost dead and close to withering.

Knots were forming in her hands and her knees and at some point behind her bellybutton. She thought that maybe the lightheadedness was because of the turpentine but also that she could be wrong, very wrong. And she damned it all with feeling. He turned in her direction, once, and instinctively, her eyes darted to his face, quickly, searching, then she averted her gaze when she noticed he had seen her staring, like a fool, stealing glances where she shouldn't. His eyes were bits of midsummer sky, glowing moons in contrast to his pale face. He bit his lip and turned away.

Her stomach dropped and she felt acutely aware of her tongue on the stem and a sharp burning behind her eyes and the way the air felt—tighter? Colder maybe? She ground her teeth and then, when she couldn't hold back any longer, she looked at him again.

He had gone back to his hands.

Well, fuck him.

The substitute for the professor saw her as she sunk her teeth slightly into the rose stem and asked if she could please not eat the subject of today's lesson. Some students laughed but she didn't really listen and she didn't see the boy behind her and to the right who was staring at her. Still, the boy she had fixed her eyes on was riveted on his hands, maybe even more than she had been at one point. She wanted to take one of those long rough fingers—she remembered, they were much softer than they looked—she wanted to bite one, draw blood, even just to see his startled reaction. She'd never had to do anything like that to get his attention and there was a bit of violence behind the thought that made her feel like she was defective for wanting it.

They got up, moved to the back of the room to finish their works. She had already done most of the basics. Now she could do what she wanted. Charcoal. Watercolors. Acrylics. Multimedia. Whatever they wished. She had been halfway done with what she had wanted on the canvas when she began to paint in the thick dark petals she had begun to peel away. Roses on roses and something a little darker. But after pulling and pulling at one point all the petals fell way into her hands and onto the floor. She looked down and through her blurred vision they looked like splotches of dark dark blood at her feet.

Wind, she thought suddenly. Wings.

She had known him for a long time, shallowly, from hallway talks and maybe he did look at her for a little too long and smiled a little too indulgently and crookedly when she had been going out with that criminal justice major. And maybe there was something unspeakable that initially drew him to her—her to him? Whatever the case, it was wrong in a way she couldn't name. But he was there.

It took two years and a summer and by then she was entangled with him and however fast it all came together it fell apart.

She had been in a hallway once, before he had ever really given her any thought. He was singing and her had sung her name out, jokingly, to catch her attention—not said it, but sung it. The way he said it sounded like maybe it was on the wind, and she grimaced inwardly at this, again, feeling that lately she never had the right words for anything. She could not turns feelings into words. Art, sometimes, but that was it. But that's how he sounded to her. Like wind and the sound of rain when it hits the rooftops and the beating of birds' wings. It seemed a strange way to describe a voice but that's what it reminded her of.

Like something that you couldnt hold in your fingers, that coldened you, that fell out our your grasp, intangible, a means of displacement. And, she would discover later on, the static of phones did not dull this effect in any manner whatsoever.

If his voice was wind then his touch was lightning. Not fire, slow burning and painful and hot, but electricity, lightning, shocking and numbing and once it strikes you never quite feel the same without it.

She remembered, once, a night in a field looking up from the grass at a crushed velvet plane of stars and feeling, as she held his hand over her heart, that she was holding a fistful of stars, light and shining and like no one else in the world could feel them, touch them like she could.

She had been right, in a sense, but she did not know where that boy with the hands like stars was now, and she knew he was not beside her painting flowers like bleeding skulls on a canvas littered with lines of earth tones, and he was not the boy beside her who was staring with slanted blue eyes at that girl with the fake platinum wavy hair and the hemline of her short short pleated skirt.

She bent down to pick up the petals but they were all off the floor and there was this boy getting up, an awkward boy with dark hair and red-framed glasses and long willowly and all the petals were in his calloused hands. She stared at them for a miute. They seemed too big for him.

Some of the black from the paint on his hands had gotten on the rose petals and he's sorry, he hoped she didn't mind. She blinked and after a long silence she told him that she didn't. But why black? She arched an eyebrow and he looked sheepish for a minute and when she turned she knew why.

Instead of roses she saw the portrait of a girl—a girl with shorn black hair and a sweatshirt a little too big for her, sitting at a desk, her back at an angle to the artist. Her face was turned to that from the right, you could see the profile of her face - not pretty, necessarily, but definied and smooth of line. And between her lips, between tiny pointed canines, was a rose, a rose whose petals barely stayed put together.

And in that minute, at least for that minute, she didn't need to feel a pulsing voltage, a shock, or the sound of a bird's wings or for a pair or seaglass eyes to be looking at her. When she looked back at the petals in this artist  boy's hands she saw, not blood red, but a flash of brilliance. But when she blinked they were darkened petals again, smooth and waiting to be plastered to a canvas with a painting that suddenly seemed too dark and foreboding for her taste.

And it was then that she smile, and finally really looked at him, and told him thank you, and she didn't just mean for picking the petals up off the floor.