Paint Me Again

Clara didn’t remember placing the ad, but there he was—standing in her studio doorway like a portrait waiting to be painted. Rain dripped from the hem of his coat. He smiled, soft and curious.

"Are you the one looking for a model?"

She hesitated, then nodded. "Yes. I—yes."

He introduced himself as Jonah. The name struck her like a tuning fork—vibrating somewhere in her ribs. She let him in.

The studio was an airy, converted greenhouse, full of light and silence. Jonah seemed to belong there, sitting beneath the skylight, framed by hanging brushes and half-finished canvases. She set up her easel, adjusted the light, and asked him to sit.

He did, like he’d done it before.

As she mixed paint, he hummed something familiar. When she chose her palette, he smiled and said, “Gold ochre. Like last time.”

She froze. “What?”

“Nothing. Just a guess.”

But her hand was already moving. The brush found his jawline like muscle memory. She didn’t even think—just painted.

After that first session, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Not in a romantic way—at least not yet—but in the way she thought about color and form, texture and movement. He’d imprinted himself onto her mind like light through stained glass.

He came again the next day. And the next.

She asked few questions. He offered fewer answers. Every session was quiet, natural, familiar.

The dreams began around the third sitting.

In them, she painted in unfamiliar places: a sunroom with red curtains, a stone balcony overlooking a violet sea, a candlelit cathedral with her easel before an altar. Always, Jonah was there—watching, guiding, sometimes painting beside her.

Sometimes they kissed.

Sometimes he wept.

Each morning she awoke breathless, hands twitching for the brush.

By the fifth session, she stopped asking who he was.

By the sixth, she began to suspect she’d always known.

They never made formal plans. Jonah simply arrived. Rain or shine, sunrise or moonlight. He always looked the same—clean but not polished, a little timeless.

She painted him slowly, carefully. Every detail mattered. His eyes—shifting between steel and seafoam. His collarbone, the birthmark just below it. The crease beside his mouth when he smiled.

“You always forget the birthmark at first,” he told her one afternoon.

She paused. “Have I painted you before?”

“In ways,” he said. “You remember more each time.”

Outside of the studio, they drifted into something close to a relationship. He joined her for walks through the market. They shared wine on the roof of her building. He knew what flavors she hated, what songs she once loved. He never checked his phone. She never questioned why.

It felt effortless. Quiet. As if they’d already lived a lifetime together and were simply repeating the softest parts. She never had to explain her moods. When she stared too long at a painting and forgot to speak, he would refill her tea and sit beside her in silence. When she laughed too hard at nothing, he’d laugh with her—never asking for a reason.

There was no beginning to their intimacy. No defining first kiss, no awkward firsts. Just a sense that they had always belonged to each other in this subtle, looping way.

They danced once, in the kitchen, barefoot and clumsy to the static of an old radio. She forgot what day it was. He said, “That’s the good kind of forgetting.”

He never told her where he went when he wasn’t with her, and she never saw him arrive. He was simply there when she needed him.

She didn’t ask questions.

Not at first.

Because the days were golden. They’d linger in bed after morning light crept across the floor. He’d touch her cheek like he was checking if she was still real. She’d run her fingers along his spine as if memorizing it. They made up memories for the future—driving up the coast, learning how to cook Italian food, building a greenhouse of their own.

And in the studio, she kept painting.

Each session, she’d add something new. A glint in his eye. The ripple of fabric around his chest. The faintest hint of movement in the background, like wind frozen in time.

“Almost done,” she murmured once, stepping back from the canvas.

“Don’t rush it,” Jonah said, brushing his thumb along her wrist. “We still have time.”

But sometimes—just sometimes—she’d catch a flicker in his gaze. Like sorrow behind his smile. Like he knew something she didn’t.

On the edge of sleep one night, she asked him, “Do you think this will last?”

He didn’t answer right away. His hand rested on her ribs, counting breaths.

“I think it lasts every time,” he whispered. “Until it doesn’t.”

She didn’t know what that meant, but she let herself believe it was poetry.

Because it was easier to believe that than to admit she still didn’t know where he lived. Or why the pages of her journal, the ones where she meant to write about him, always stayed blank.

Instead, she painted.

And he stayed.

As long as the painting remained unfinished, as long as the brush hadn’t yet defined the final edge of his form—he stayed.

But the background was filling in now.

The edges were creeping closer.

And when she caught her own reflection in the window one morning, she saw herself standing alone.

Still, she saw him. Felt him. Believed in him.

He was thoughtful and playful. Mysterious, but warm. And he never asked her to stop painting.

The painting neared completion. She’d finished his face, his hands, even the faint scar along his jawline.

Only the background remained—an abstract swirl of stormy sky and golden light.

“You never finish the sky,” he murmured.

“I’m afraid if I do… something will end.”

He didn’t deny it.

But he stayed. Stayed as she painted. As she laughed. As she forgot to care about logic.

He stayed through dinners, dreams, the aching joy of something perfect and unexplainable.

Until she noticed something wrong.

It began with a photograph.

She took a selfie with Jonah on the roof—the sun setting behind them, golden and bright. When she checked the image, only she was there. Her shoulder angled toward someone who didn’t exist.

She asked the waiter if her date had left his jacket behind. The waiter blinked. “You came in alone.”

Her neighbors stopped saying hello. Her phone had no missed calls, no messages from Jonah. Yet he still showed up, smiling as if nothing had changed.

One morning, she couldn’t recall the sound of his laugh.

“Jonah,” she whispered. “What’s happening to me?”

He looked at her, sorrow in every line of his face.

“You’re forgetting again.”

“I don’t want to forget. I want this to be real.”

“It is real,” he said. “To you. Because you made me.”

Her knees went weak. She sat on the floor of the studio.

“I don’t understand.”

“You always forget,” he said gently. “But it’s alright. You created me. You gave me breath. With your longing. With your hands.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “But why can’t you stay?”

“Because eventually, the painting ends. And your heart moves on.”

“No,” she said. “Not this time.”

“You said that last time too.”

The portrait sat on the easel, nearly complete. But she knew she wouldn’t touch it again.

Jonah knelt beside her. He kissed her temple.

“Paint me again,” he whispered.

And when she opened the door the next day, he was standing there. Rain on his sleeves. A soft smile.

“Are you the one looking for a model?”