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The sensation of people looking at me let me know one of the men kept an eye on me. It wasn’t a surprise, and while it would have annoyed me any other time, I found myself smiling at the familiar feeling. Even if I looked up, I doubted I’d spot whoever it was.
They wanted me to feel like I had time alone even if I didn’t.
Which brought me back to this morning, to when I’d woken naked in Tor’s bed.
No, notjustnaked, but beside the man himself. Seeing him like that had startled me, the way his hair seemed messier, the relaxed muscles of his face. I still couldn’t tell what he was thinking, of course, but his expression didn’t have the same forced blankness I normally saw.
Unable to face him, I’d slipped from the bed. A part of me thought he’d woken—I couldn’t really believe I could get out of his bed without him noticing. His fingers had tightened for a moment around me, as if to hold me there, before loosening again and letting me escape.
Later, when he came to get a cup of coffee, he hadn’t mentioned the night before.
Was that for his comfort or mine?
Did it even matter?
Not really.
My cheeks burned as I remembered how he’d looked at me, and that hadnothingto do with the hot sun.
My fingers itched, as though to pick up a pencil. Wait…did I want to draw that?
That lust in his golden eyes, the pressing of his fingers into my skin, the heartbeat long seconds where we had both rested on the precipice between what we wanted and what we couldn’t have.
Grisham’s words hit me again, about art that made people feel. An image like that would make them feel for sure…
However, the last thing I wanted was a lecture about how foolish I was, how I didn’t want what I wanted. I’d had enough rejection already—I didn’t need to court any more.
The idea took me back to my last piece of Nem. Grisham said I needed to put myself out there, to tear off my skin to expose the nerves. Could I do that?
And if I could, how?
My mind wandered as I worked at the weeds. What mattered most to me? What moved me?
I thought back about growing up. I remembered so little of it, at least before my mother died. I had a few memories of her, but not many. I recalled the painting I did of her, one based on pictures, but that was just her.
What if I painted us all? The four of us who made up that family. My mother, my father, Nem and me. Could I show the cracks between us? The pain? The distance? The blood?
Before I considered it, I took out my phone and dialed Colton’s number.I turned off my headphones and hit the speaker button to make it easier to listen.
He answered with a voice I rarely heard from him, one colder and darker than I knew. “What?”
“Answering the phone like that won’t make you any friends.”
I could almosthearhis smile across the line, as though the dropping of his guard made an audible noise. “I don’t recognize this number, Kenz.”
“That’s because it’s new. You should be grateful you have it, now.”
“Oh, trust me, I am.” He chuckled, then the sound of muffled shouting came through from his end. A grunt, then the tearing of tape, and finally silence. “You don’t normally call me. Is everything okay?”
I decided to tactfully ignore the fact that he clearly had someone tied up. Sometimes relationships required some willful ignorance, after all. He pretended not to notice that I used to feed my vegetables to the family dog, and I pretended not to know that he killed people for a living.
Maybe our family is more normal than I thought.
“I have an end-of-year exhibit coming up.”
“It’s in eight weeks, right?”
Normal people might have wondered how he knew something I’d never told him, but I had long ago stopped worrying about such things. If I called and he didn’t know something, that might have concerned me. “That’s right. It’ll determine my placement for next year. The thing is, I’m having trouble coming up with work that’s good enough.”
