The footsteps stopped abruptly at the foot of my pedestal, and for the first time in centuries, I felt the weight of a living gaze upon my stone shoulders. Not the idle curiosity of tourists, not the clinical detachment of restorers, but recognition. The kind that burns through marble like sunlight through morning mist. Her breath hitched, warm against my frozen jawline, and I heard the rustle of fabric as she reached up, fingertips hovering just above my cheek. With the “shadoo” of her smile, the curve of her lips, eyes dark as burnt coffee, blinded by cataracts, sending chills down my spine. The way she used to look at me, the way she used to smile, the way she used to touch me, love me. In reality, Quasimodo.
Now dancing with Leonardo’s ghosts. Her footsteps echoing through the halls and the museum’s ambient hum, distant murmurs of visitors, the mechanical whir of climate control, vanished under the sound of her whisper. “You remember me.” The pads of her fingers traced the invisible line of my jaw, and somewhere deep beneath layers of pigment and varnish, I ached. Not with the stiffness of centuries, but with the unbearable lightness of being known. Her touch was different from the restorers’ brushes, different from the accidental grazes of gawking crowds. She thinking I was Michelangelo’s David.
