I knew I overreacted, but seeing anyone in my space had triggered me past the red zone.
My hands shook as I sat back. My box of chalk was the only thing disturbed on the desk. Behind it, a tiny, intricate drawing of a porcupine peeked up from behind my power strip.
The fact that she did that with my fat pieces of chalk dented a little of my spiral.
I turned in my chair to where the pile of chalk was scattered on my floor.
The baseboards were a frame for a whole storybook city of flowers, blades of grass, and intricate dandelions in their end stages. The seeds were floating up from her beautiful illustrations into the sky which was my empty wall of blackboard paint.
The wall that felt like it would never be full of my words again.
But the seeds on the vast emptiness activated something in me.
Under it was still that anger.
I swiped the side of my hand through one of the seeds and instantly wished I hadn’t.
Fuck.
I stood and crashed to the floor when my ankle collapsed under me.
The delicate dandelions taunting me as they bent gracefully in the swirls of wind.
The opposite of my rigid, sharp edges.
I hauled myself off the floor with the legs of the desk and left the beauty behind me and through the door, down the hallway.
The house was empty.
A trace of honey haunting the air.
SEVEN
Phoebe
“Asshole,”I muttered as I waded through the drifts on the road between our houses. Dylan and his brother Micah had been by with the plows, but the brutal wind off the water was already erasing all their hard work.
The cold sunk into my bones and even worse, into my chest.The ache annoyed me more than anything. It was my own fault.
I often forgot myself when it came to private spaces. Just because I was an open book didn’t mean other people were. But four walls of literal blank canvases was too much for me to resist. It had been a long time since I’d worked with chalk and I’d lost myself in the process of using both negative space and my signature line work.
But it seemed a little intense for him to be so angry about it.
If he hated it he could just erase it for God’s sake. It wasn’t that serious.
Though it did make me a little sad to think about my little Fred being deleted off the dark wall. Maybe I’d order some paint and chalk for my studio. It was a great way to recycle when I was practicing a new style or flower.
Flowers were my bread and butter after all and they took a long time to get right. Perhaps I’d add a few succulents to my repertoire. The prickly little plants were suddenly at the top of my mind.
Gee, I just couldn’t think of why.
The gentle giant of a dog circled me, booping his nose at my hip as he tried to herd me back toward Dutch’s house. I shook my head. “We’ve intruded long enough.”
He stopped in the middle of the road, his feather duster of a tail swishing as he looked at me, then to the stone cottage.
I shook my head. “He doesn’t want us.”
I hated the sudden lump in my throat. Dutch was a stranger. What the hell did I care if he didn’t want me around? Just because those stunning gray eyes were swimming with so much pain it was practically overflowing—it wasn’t my problem, dammit.
