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I rolled my neck on my shoulders, listening to the satisfying crack, snap, crick. My eyes ached after too many nights of interrupted sleep, and I was fairly sure I was working on this latest piece with my vision offline, but it was nearly done now and I...
I stepped back, reaching up with the hand still holding the brush to rub a hair away from my face. A cold smear crossed my cheek, and I sighed. Paint. Great.
The light in the attic was changing, and I winced, realizing that I'd been up here so long morning had arrived. The attic of my little coach house was actually a finished room, with a lovely beamed dome ceiling. It'd had a pull-down ladder when I'd first arrived, and I'd managed to install a set of spiral, faux-iron stairs instead. There were only three windows and the light wasn't particularly good, but it was my favorite room in the house. The beams and curved ceiling gave the space a sacred quality that made me feel safe in my work.
I blinked at the easel in front of me. I'd started something of a collection, and it wasn't hard to guess why. A dark, enchanted woods, shadows and strange greenery, imaginary creatures watching from the corners, seductive blooms that glowed with poisonous luminescence. A heroine caught in its trap, feminine figures in diaphanous dresses, branches of willows twisting around their wrists, skirts caught in the mouths of little beasts. I wanted to be the girl running through the woods again, giddy and waiting to be caught.
I missed Khell giving me baths and feeding me and hiding his smiles, although I preferred it even more when he didn't hide them at all. I missed the night in the moonlight, when I'd pretended we were more than client and partner. And a small part of me missed the games too. Being trapped and out of control. The simplicity of following orders to their delicious end.
On the canvas, a girl spun in the grass, her long braid—it reminded me of Khell's—twisting around her like a rope. The shadows were at her back, the woods quiet and peaceful there, and ahead of her was glaring brilliance and a mass of strange creatures with bright eyes and sharp teeth, perfectly crisp and clear in the light. In the midst of them was a monster, bare and naked and golden, a lion's mane and a satyr's strong legs and the dense muscles of an orc's torso all melded together. He shone brighter than anything else in the frame, his vivid white gaze on the girl, a long golden arm and articulated fingers tipped with blood red claws reaching out to her.
She was rearing back, eyes wide and lips parted on a gasp or scream, but her own hand was floating toward him too, toward the violent clarity of the bright side of the woods, the outrageous strangeness of the creatures calling to her. She was hesitating, still deciding between the dim safety of normalcy and the monstrous exposure of the light.
Before Khell, the most frightening possibility was to know myself, accept myself, and love myself for who I truly was. Because what if no one else ever felt the same way for me in that truth?
Now I was terrified I might sink back into those mild and unchallenging shadows.
My blog was more active than ever. I had stacks of new art to get ready to scan and have available in prints. My home was growing more my own as I played in my spaces and reshaped the rooms.
But it was as if I'd stepped into that brilliance, experienced its warmth and peace, learned every bit of myself and embraced it, and then had been promptly shoved back toward the shadowy edge of the wood.
I squinted at the canvas. The bright edge of the wood almost blended in with the creamy yellow of my walls as the sun blinked in through the window and struck them both.
I twisted, looking at the mess of my studio, at the gentle slope of the beams up to the roof, like trees leaning to cover me, at the bare, cream-colored canvas of the walls.
Inspiration struck hard, clearing some of the fog of sitting at work too long, a fresh shot of adrenaline to my brain before I grew maudlin and mopey again.
I needed more paint.
"I love you, and part of loving you is telling you when I think you look like shit," Natalie said, leaning over the broad arm of the pedicure massage chair.
I nodded, pressing my back into the rolling knobs of the chair, pretending they were Khell's fingers as I let my eyes blink slowly shut. When I opened them again, I was back in the city, sitting in front of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked busy Clark Street.
"Are you eating?" Natalie asked.
"Are you practicing this kind of interrogation for when Emmett gets older?" I asked, before adding, "Yeah. Irregularly, but that's not my problem."
"Showering?"
The small woman with incredibly strong fingers, and slightly pointed ears peeking through a curtain of what I was pretty sure was bottle-purple hair, gave me a speculative glance from under her bangs.
"Daily," I said, for both their sakes.
"'Cause you have paint on your face," Natalie pointed out, and I blushed. "You haven't had paint on your face since college. Are you sleeping?"
The tears that sprung to my eyes were spontaneous but not surprising. I got weepy when I was tired, and I'd been tired for weeks now. I shook my head, unable to speak through the sudden knot in my throat, and Natalie only reached across the arm rests to take my hand.
"Okay," she said softly, our pedicurists taking care to keep their heads ducked as they bundled us up in warm, damp towels. "Do you want me to come over tonight? Theo can watch Em, and we can order food and drink wine and watch movies. You always pass out during a movie."
I smiled at the thought, and at having a friend who knew me so well. But then I thought about waking up in the middle of the night again, at the edge of an orgasm that wouldn't crash, feeling lonely and awful and horny and simmering with the urge to go and do anything else.
I opened my mouth to offer Natalie an excuse. If I could stall a few more days, we'd be near the full moon, and then she'd be busy with Theo and I'd be off the hook for another week or so.
Before anything could come to mind, a figure on the sidewalk across the street caught my eye. Tall and beautifully broad, a dark hoodie covering his head, a rich green fist wrapped around the handle of a gym bag. And that ass, hugged in gray sweatpants, flexing with every step toward the double doors of the Crossfit complex.
Khell!
My pedicurist squawked as I stood, feet tangled in the towel, planted in the mini jet tub. My cunt throbbed at the thought of him, the sight of him, already growing wet and ready for the orc who'd trained it so well.
