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A dark grin splits across his face and he pulls me closer, his hand snaking around my waist, his lips pressing to my ear. “I’ll need you naked before I can start.”
I huff out a laugh. “James, that’s not exactly making anything up tome.It’s not an apology if you’re the one benefiting from it.”
“Tell me that after you’ve come all over my face a few times,” he says, dropping his voice. His breath heats my neck and I feel flushed, warm, overwhelmed by how close he is to me, by the slickness I feel pooling between my thighs.
And I have to remember that we’re in an airport, that I can’t have him yet, that I can’t take his drifting hand rubbing against the base of my spine and push it up my skirt. I clear my throat and pull back. “Maybe we should… get going?” I ask, biting at my lip.
His eyes darken and he traces my bottom lip with his thumb. “What did I tell you about biting this Katie? What it does to me. Keep that up and I’ll have to find a bathroom to fuck you in. Let’s go,” he says, picking up my giant bag and dragging it behind him. He leads us outside and flags down a taxi.
“Where’s your car?” I ask.
“No one drives in LA, babe,” he says as he ushers me into the back seat.
The drive feels long with his hand on my thigh that seems to get higher with every bump and turn and swerve. By the time we reach his apartment, his fingers are treading dangerously close to the edge of my underwear, and I realize I hadn’t paid much attention to the city as we drove through it. What I do notice, though, is how clean his hands are. No darkened fingernails, no flecks of paint staining his skin, no streaks across his wrists from the drip of a spray paint cannister. He’s clean.
James isn’t painting. It’s never good when he’s not painting, and I can’t help but wonder what other vices he’s using to distract himself from his thoughts. Besides me, that is. I’ve always been an excellent distraction.
If he notes the concern on my face, he doesn’t let on, and instead relieves me from the iron grip he’d had on my leg and pushes out of the car. His building has one of those old cagey looking freight elevators instead of one built for passengers.
“An old brewery converted to lofts,” he tells me, and then he laughs when I point out how that’sso LA.
His apartment is alsoso LA, but it’s alsoso him, evident from the massive mural he’s painted on the back brick wall. The place is much nicer than the last one.Muchnicer. It’s mostly one room, but big, with soaring ceilings, all-brick walls, and giant windows that make the industrial style décor look bright and cheery instead of harsh and masculine.
“I guess… your last exhibit at the gallery went well?” I ask, eyeing the white sheets of his unmade bed.
He smiles and drops my heavy bag at our feet. “It’s a sublet,” he says. “Got it for cheap.” But he’s being modest. I saw the price tag his last piece sold for. I tell him as much, but he only says, “Must be some other James Ryan.”
“Well, I hear he’s brilliant.”
“Yeah? Shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”
“I hear he’s a bit of an asshole.”
He grins. “NowthatI believe.”
I dip my head back to take in his mural. It’s all James. All dark with harsh lines and splashes of colour. He’s got this level of savagery to his art, of rawness and feeling, like he takes all the fucked up things that haunt his mind and throw them onto a canvas. It’s something I’ve never been able to do—be so honest in my work. It’s why James grew to be what he is, even at twenty-five, because he can speak through his art, and when he speaks people listen.
My James the artist.
It’s how we met. Art class, tenth grade. The assignment had been hands. Drawings or paintings or sculptures. “Anything with five fingers and feeling,” Mr. Fredette, our art teacher had directed. My painting had been simple and safe and perfect. Tame, like most of my work. It had none of the angst you’d expect from a fifteen-year-old girl who’d just lost her father. None of the anger or the torment, none of the pain. I saved the dark shit for my sketchbook and kept the art I showed the world to the same stroke as I kept my face—composed, together, unbothered.
I’d felt James behind me, watching. Even then I could sense him,feelhim. When I turned to glare at him, he’d smirked at my canvas.
Smirked.Like it was some kind of joke, like it was something to laugh at.
“Got something to say?” I’d bitten out.
“Typical,” is all he’d said.
“Typical?”
“Yeah, Katie, typical.”
“It’sKate.”
“WhateverKatie,” he’d said. “Typical and boring.”
“And yours?Anyonecan take spray paint to a canvas, asshole. You’re not special.”
