As it turned out, my mother had other plans for us that night.

"What are you doing tonight, Amy?" she asked casually, after the wafting scent of pizza had drawn me from my lair.

"Nothing, I guess," I said.

She clapped her hands together. "Great!" Rather than noticing my dismayed expression, she bustled around the kitchen in her scrubs, pulling out paper plates and napkins. "We're going to have a girl's night out. What do you think?"

"Sure..." I said slowly, mulling over the word "out." We'd only ever done Girls' Nights in. Facials, manicures, and a chick flick. What did the outside world possibly have in store for us?

"We're going to get dressed up, and go into Boston to an art museum, and have wine and cheese, and mingle. Isn't that a great idea?"

"Is there a new exhibit at the MFA?"

She shrugged. "There are a lot of wealthy, sophisticated men who go to these things."

Ah, so it was going to be several hours of my mother getting tipsy and flirting shamelessly, not an art-related event.

"Don't you want to go with, like, one of your friends? I mean, won't it be weird when you're 'mingling' and your teenage daughter is hanging around?"

Her face looked so crestfallen I caved. Like usual. "Fine. But I'm going to wander around the exhibits."

That was how, on a Saturday evening, I was dressed in a black sheath dress and pearls and wandering around the echoing galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts by myself. At least I had kept my makeup the same, and I wore my black boots and a fringed shawl.

I had preemptively packed my small sketchbook in my purse, and when I reached the gallery of Italian paintings, I found myself a seat and pulled it out. The angels of Botticelli flowed from my pencil, overlooking a gory scene: a man with the face of Lane bending over the breast of a maiden who resembled Veronica. In the background, Frank and I, dressed in the robes of angels, looked on disapprovingly.

I had barely finished the rough sketch when a voice near my ear breathed, "Interesting subject, miss."

The breath tickled my ears and I jerked away, then spun my head to face Lane.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

He was already walking away with that preternatural grace, waving a hand casually at the paintings on the wall. "I came to look at art, the same as you."

I was not entirely convinced. Of course, knowing so little about Lane, I couldn't exactly accuse him of stalking me. I'd had my fears that he would be over at Veronica's or Frank's, sucking their blood.

His fluid walk was carrying him further and further away from me. It would have seemed rude to not speak to someone I might have called a friend. After all, we had hung out together on several occasions.

And so I tucked my sketchbook away and rushed after him, feeling clunky and clumsy and ridiculous.

When I reached his side, he presented me with that gorgeous smile, his pale eyes twinkling at me in the recessed lighting. His skin glowed a faint bronze, the paleness reflecting the golden light around him. In that light he might have stood among the gilded frames and marble masterpieces and called himself art.

He smiled and said nothing, and my brain sought to fill the conversational void.

"Um, do you like art, er, I mean, do you go to a lot of art museums? Wait, that's boring, and I meant to ask, what artists, I mean, what kind of art is your favorite?"

I shamefully ended my stammering and staring down at my shoes. What was I doing? The soles of my boots squealed on the polished tiles. My eyes moved to take in his shoes, matching my stride.

I might have assumed previously that Lane wore clothes similar to Frank's: Doc Marten boots with tattered jeans. But I could see now that his shoes were not Doc Martens. They looked expensive, and a little bit like loafers. His jeans were not some faded and hacked up pair of pants from a discount store. They were fitted perfectly, and artfully torn to reveal patches of his chiseled legs. Instead of a trench coat, like Frank, Lane was wearing a long black wool pea coat, and a scarf.

He was every inch some debonair art lover, possibly European.

My trailing gaze had travelled back up to his magnetic eyes again.

"Of course I prefer the artists of my own era," Lane said. "Had you chosen the Egyptian Gallery, I might never have run into you."

He linked his arm in mine, a move that entirely unsettled me. My knees went weak, and if Lane hadn't had my arm at that point, I might have melted to the floor. As it was, his arm supported me like a stone pillar. My entire body buzzed.

Was this how Veronica felt every time he touched her?

No wonder then at her reaction of ecstasy.

"Amy?"

Lane's voice finally reached through all that buzzing, and I had to stumble back to reality with, "Hmm? What?"

"I asked which of these artists you were drawn to?"

"Um, yeah, well I wanted to see some of Fra Angelico's art, because, you know, Anne Rice mentions him in a few of her books, but I like Botticelli better. I guess if I had to pick one Renaissance artist, Michelangelo is my favorite - his sculptures, not the paintings. But they don't have any of these here. Like, one day, I want to maybe study art in Paris or Rome, so I can sit in the Louvre all day and draw everything, but probably I'll end up going to MassArt or RISD, you know, Rhode Island School of Design, because that's supposed to be, like, the best art school on the East Coast, but I haven't decided yet."

Lane smiled at me. Had I rambled on and on there? I thought I had, but the way he was smiling, like I was some beatific child, made me question whether I had.

He led me through crowded galleries, occasionally asking me about whether or not I liked a particular piece, to which I usually gave some inane and meandering reply that may or may not have had anything to do with the actual artwork in front of me. My brain seemed filled with some pleasant gas that was making me both giddy and numb.

We wandered through centuries of art, until an announcement that the museum would be closing in half an hour came over the PA system.

"My mother... she's probably wondering where I am," I said.

"Where is she?"

"Down at the Koch Gallery," I explained.

Lane led me downstairs at a brisk rate, but before we entered, he leaned in to hug me. Though I found myself hugging him back rather tightly, his hands lay feather soft against my back. He whispered through my hair, "I will see you again very soon."

Before I could even comprehend that he was no longer in my arms, he had disappeared. I shuddered with a sudden chill and pulled my shawl around my bare arms.

"Amy! There you are," said my mother. "Who was that boy?"

"His name is Lane," I said.

I must have sounded completely different from my usual monotone self, because my mother exclaimed, "Amy Leigh Vaughn, if I didn't know better, I'd say you have a crush on that boy!"

"No." My face blushed a deeper red than I imagined would show through my face powder.

"You can't pull one over on me, missy. You haven't hugged anyone since you were in fourth grade, and you were hugging that young man for dear life. I hope you gave him your phone number at least?"

"No..."

"That's too bad."

"No, I mean, he lives near us. I've hung out with him before."

The knowing smile clung to my mother's face as I drove us all the way home. She'd had a few cocktails, and she gushed about all the eligible bachelors she'd flirted with.

I didn't say much about Lane. His absence had left me feeling the same as I had before: suspicious and disbelieving. Still, I remembered how I felt around him, and wondered if perhaps I was experiencing that teenage phenomenon called hormones.