Page 164 of Valentino

For a second, the painting stops feeling famous and starts feeling alive.

Every pope crowned under these frescoes. Every conclave. Every secret. Five centuries of men deciding the fate of the world while Adam lounges above them like he's waiting for someone to bring him a drink.

My eyes sting.

In a museum.

Over paint.

I blink it back and turn to find Valentino.

He's standing maybe ten feet away, and he isn't looking at the ceiling.

He's looking at me.

Tourists crowd around him in bucket hats and sensible sandals. Selfie sticks. Fanny packs. A tour group from Ohio in matching lime-green lanyards. He should look ridiculous among them.

He doesn't.

He looks like he belongs to the stone more than the rest of us do.

Dark shirt. That stillness he carries, the kind that makes people move around him without realizing they've made room. The painted prophets above us are all muscle and gravity and terrible knowledge, and he matches them so well I have one brief, unhinged thought.

If Michelangelo had painted Valentino onto that ceiling, tourists would've been falling in love with him for five hundred years. They'd put him on postcards. Sad art students would cry in front of him.

Instead, he's mine.

And he's watching me look at the ceiling like I'm more important than this place.

I pull out one earbud and drift over to him, hip-checking past a man filming the entire ceiling in vertical video, which should be a crime tried at The Hague.

"You're missing it," I whisper. "The most famous ceiling on earth is up there, and you're staring at some blonde."

"I've seen the ceiling," he says, low, his mouth barely moving.

"It's the Sistine Chapel. You don't get to be over it."

"I didn't say I was over it."

His eyes lift for two seconds, then come back to me, and something in my chest tips sideways.

"I said I've seen it."

"Silenzio," a guard barks somewhere to our left.

We both go quiet.

His hand finds the small of my back, light and steady, and the warmth of his palm bleeds through my shirt. I lean into it without deciding to. The audio guide chatters on in my dangling earbud, tiny and far away, telling no one in particular about the Last Judgment.

I look at that wall instead. The massive chaos of it. The saved rising. The damned dragged down. Christ in the center with his arm raised mid-decision.

The British voice told me earlier that Michelangelo painted his own face onto a flayed skin held by a saint. He put himself into heaven as an empty sack of himself. Four years on his back making God, and that's how he signed it.

"He painted himself as dead skin," I whisper. "Did you know that? The saint with the droopy skin. That's Michelangelo's face."

"I know."

"That's the most Catholic thing I've ever heard."