Page 77 of The Winter Princess
I make my way to the restoration studio, trying to stop my fidgeting fingers, but when I brush through the doors, he’s nowhere to be found.
“Oskar?” I call.
“In the storage room.” The voice is muffled, and I follow it, entering a high narrow space with a series of large shelves painted dead black, holding row after row of boxes and canvases, a whole cubby of stretcher bars, and rolls of bubble wrap. A black curtain is hung against the back wall and an easel set in front of it holds one of those over-heated Rococo images of young French lovers hiding in shrubbery and getting away with all kinds of nonsense while their chaperones, on the other side of the shrubbery, scratch their heads in bewilderment.
I tsk. “Who do you sympathize with?” I ask.
Oskar straightens from adjusting the lighting equipment.
I nod at the painting. “The lovers or the chaperones?”
He grunts. “I sympathize with the restorer who has to see what he’s up against. Have you come to film me again?”
Ah. So we’re not going to talk about the kiss. The tension, winding more tightly as the weekend went on, releases in a rush. I could use a cookie and a sit, but he’d probably want to know why.
“I haven’t been in the storage room before. It would make a good subject—something quick. We’ll do it live.” He grunts again, and I swap out disappointment for irritation. Let Adeline have him if she wants. Let them be happy together. Let them choke on it. Asking him on a date was a fever dream. Madness. “What are you doing here?”
“Get your camera out. I’m not going to repeat myself.”
My brows lift, and he makes a conciliatory gesture with his hands. “I haven’t been sleeping. I’m sorry.”
Digging into my purse, I retrieve my camera. “Neither have I, but I haven’t taken anyone’s head off.”
His hands still. “Tell me why you haven’t been sleeping.”
Over my dead body. “You first.”
We are in a tense, cold standoff until he nods. “Fair enough,” he whispers. “Ready?”
I hit the record button, and we introduce ourselves. Oskar explains the basics of UV photography and light absorption.
“What’s the upshot of what you’re trying to accomplish?” I ask, feeding him a question.
“Some problems hide, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. If I don’t drag them into the light, I can’t sort them out.” I blink, my smile fixed, but he continues. “When I inspect a piece for restoration—when I look at it with a raking light or under a microscope or in a UV photo—I try to see things from as many different angles as I can, to really get to know it, so that when I’m working, the only surprises are good ones.”
He lifts his eyes to mine. In this dark, confined space, it’s difficult to remember that my phone is a window to the entire nation. He bumps his chin. “Are you ready to turn the lights off?”
Oh, Oskar. Someone in Sondmark is already turning his words into a meme. He has an enthusiastic fanbase, and they haven’t spared themselves, shouting their love of him from the wastelands of ReadHe threads to YouTube edits of our most romantically ambiguous moments set to power ballads to the heights of royals fanfic. Girls wearing Team Oskar t-shirts have started coming to my royal engagements. Words like these will launch a thousand Pixy shorts.
“Freja,” he prompts, then strides towards me, reaches past my shoulder, and flicks the switch. The room plunges into darkness, but the camera’s still on. The country caught all of that.
“As you can see,” he says, voice too rough to miss. He clears his throat. “We’ll have to turn off your phone to get a good image. Even that light will contaminate the final photograph.”
I cast about for enough breath to speak, gleaning for tiny grains in a field already harvested and bare. He is close, so close, and I’m clutching my phone in my hands between us. “But this is what it looks like when it happens?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” I don’t dare step away, as dark and unfamiliar and full of priceless art as this space is. “When we return, I’ll show you the pictureNeer Velasqueztook.”
I rub my thumb along the outside of the phone case until I find the power button. In seconds, the little light we had is extinguished. I can hear my breath, the shortness of it. I hear a click.
“That’s the camera,” he says. He must have a remote because I can feel the warmth coming from his body, hear the drag of his lungs. He hasn’t moved a centimeter.
“Is it over?”
“These projects need a long exposure time.”
I don’t know a thing about photography. He could tell me a long exposure is forty-five minutes and I’d have to stand here, nerves screaming the whole time.
