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I stared at the blank canvas before me now.
What the hell was I supposed to paint today? I couldn’t paint last night. It was too personal. Too…
Flashes of feeling Rafe push inside me, taking me so roughly, without pause and without other eyes watching us—just because he’d wanted me, he’d needed me in that moment.
God, what was I supposed to do with that?
I arranged my usual base paints on my palette and dipped my medium brush into the glob of black and mixed it with white and blue until I had a moody gray.
I lifted the brush to the canvas, still not sure where I was going with it. I wasn’t sure how I even felt. About last night. About anything.
In college, for a while after I’d left this place, I felt like I’d finally found myself.
I’d shed the goth make-up. I’d let the real me come out. Or at least I thought I had.
But what if that was just another mirage? Another facade I was trying on? Healthy girl, far away from her lonely mom and the tiny apartment where we’d lived with just enough money to get by but never thrive?
Living paycheck to paycheck under someone else’s thumb, and now knowing it was Rafe’s parents who’d been keeping me there that whole time. Wielding their power over my mother whom they considered “less than” just because they could, because she had a dangerous secret about them and their society friends. Because she knew too much and was using me to keep her in line.
But when I started sketching the outline of a woman, it felt right. I didn’t paint the lines, just the shadows. It’s one of the first things they teach you in art school.
Lines are just illusions. Our limited brain’s way of processing a visual reality too complex for it. No, there weren’t any lines in this life, just infinite shadows and occasional light.
But… my mother also chose to stay. She’d come to these parties week after week even when she knew she wouldn’t win any money or a better life.
And afterwards, she stayed in town with me.
Why?
Why couldn’t she have left, broken free, run away, tried to start over?
But even as I thought it, I looked at the canvas before me.
There was no black and white, didn’t I know that? Hadn’t art school taught me that? That wasn’t how paint, or life, worked. Black darkened and gave depth and complexity to a picture. White lightened and lifted a color. So did yellow.
But it was all such a wild mix.
Rarely did I know when I started where I would finish.
Maybe my mom didn’t either.
My eyes drifted to the door.
It was so easy for me to paint Rafe with one big paintbrush swath of bad guy along with his parents, too.
He didn’t call or write when I left. He never tried to find me. The only reason I was in his life now was because I’d forced my way in, but even now, he didn’t want me here. Maybe for a little while last night when I’d been a warm body to lose himself in to forget about his nightmares.
I frowned and my brush strokes grew firmer as I worked in the figure’s eyes and brows. I dabbed my brush in the brown, pink, blue, and white to create a skin tone, then continued.
Slowly, carefully, I painted a face. The shadowed depths of a brow and two embedded shallows for eyes. I shaped a nose, the least straightforward of any face, coaxing the paint to mimic three-dimensions. I painted the dip right above my top lip, in the center right underneath my nose.
Dipping my brush back into the pink I’d made, I started to craft the outline of lips, familiar lips that I saw in the mirror every day.
And then, after a deep breath, I went back to her eyes.
I started with the iris and built up from the bottom. A swipe of dark black and brown ocher in the center of each eye. Then I went in with my detail brush to add the flecks of gold, the shine of light, the spark of life.
Then I moved back out again, shaping her expression.
She was sad.
She was lost.
She was defiant.
She would survive. She would always survive, and she would never bow down or bend to kiss their ring. Even if they only ever saw her as fit to be on her knees, scrubbing their toilets.
She was more.
“Is it a self-portrait?”
Rafe’s voice from behind me almost made me scribble a black paint smear across the cheek, but I yanked back just in time.
“Jesus,” I swore, spinning around to see Rafe propped in the doorway. He looked comfortable, like he’d been there awhile. I hadn’t even heard him open the door.
“Stalker much?” I asked while I tried to get my thumping heartbeat back under control.
