“The trousers,” she said.
He stepped out of the briefs and stood entirely naked save for his navy socks and oxford shoes.
“Monsieur Gay,” she said, her voice a low, cultured alto. “You understand the protocol?”
The click of the lock was soft, but in the silence of the gallery, it sounded like a rifle shot.
She circled him slowly. Her heels made no sound on the antique rug. She opened the portfolio to reveal a charcoal sketch: a man’s torso, the muscles rendered not as anatomy, but as landscape—hills of pectoral, valleys of abdomen, the dark well of the navel.
She did not remove them herself. That was not the protocol. The subject must volunteer his own unmaking.
His judge entered.
