by Ace Gray
“Now, don’t see it as a whole image like a photograph, but instead see it as shapes. Use the difference in lighting to simplify it. Where is there a long line? Where is there a circle, a curve?”
She started to form in my mind—the straight line of her shin, the circles that were her wide eyes, the curve between her ribs and her hips. The darkness that surrounded her made her shine bright and stand out all the more vividly than she usually did.
“When you start to put that image on canvas, think about the shape first, connect them gently, then we’ll talk about giving them life.”
A brush I’d never held painted behind my closed eyes, developing the beautiful body next to me.
“You can sketch first if you want.”
I shook my head knowing that she deserved nothing less than the technicolor I saw her in. She went over how to hold a palette and how much paint to use, when to wet my brush and what the water would do, but I couldn’t get my mind off of the form. The shapes moving fluidly into one body. It reminded me of being broken until she pieced me back together.
I smiled.
“Ready?” she asked as she stood and reached out for me. I grasped on and let her do what she could to pull me to standing. I didn’t mind one bit when the momentum made me grab her and pull her in.
Her small paint covered fingers lingered just above my bandage and the floated around the shape.
“Remember shapes are just shapes. Mistakes are just mistakes. You can always turn them into something abstract, something beautiful,” she whispered and my knees wobbled. She seemed to say those things about me, not about art.
With a small twirl, she was out of my hold and I was left staring at an empty canvas. It was as intimidating as it was exhilarating. I looked around at all the paintings I loved most and the enormity of creating consumed me. I was putting myself out there like I never had, I was being vulnerable. I could cock it all up and yet I still wanted to try.
The metaphor wasn’t lost on me.
There were things I wanted to say to her about it, about us, but this slight tickle in my stomach told me, paint it.
So for the first time in my life, I stepped to the easel and did just that.
I fucked it all up. The shapes were okay, the curves wonky at best and I wasn’t sure whether it could even pass for her, but I loved it. I loved it because it came from my fingers and was my heart shaped into some glob on a canvas. I had created something however small in this world. I had created rather than destroyed.
And it made Filly laugh.
She wasn’t laughing at me. In her own way, it was with me. An intimidating and ruthless savage, with blood on his hands and sins forming his shadow, couldn’t paint. Not even a lick.
“Okay, give up the goods,” I said over top of a glass of scotch, curious as to what she’d created in the last hour.
“It’s not my best…” she said but it wasn’t filled with sadness or frustration. “But I kinda like it.”
When she stepped aside my heart clenched. Kinda liked it was something I would say about French fries or reading the classics. But this?
“It’s amazing,” I breathed.
She’d made my body blue with highlights of white, swirled in like an ocean. The paint was thick, stark as it rose up from the hash marked canvas. I was bent over a barely formed bench, my back on display. She’d carved my tattoos out with something thin, making them the splice in my skin I sometimes felt they were. She’d hinted at the scars with layers of color, making them seem beautiful rather than deformed.
“You see me,” I said softly.
“I do.” She reached up and cradled my chin, her thumb brushing my cheekbone. The whole world felt like it revolved around her thumb. There was so much to say that I got choked up. Until paint smeared wet and cold across my skin. “And I see something on your face.” She laughed.
“Oh, now you’re going to get it.” I darted after her and drug my fingers through the paint as I went.
Filly squealed as I hurtled the bench at the bottom of the bed and grabbed her. My hands on her waist spun her little body until she puffed onto my down comforter. She struggled beneath me, giggling, writhing and I pressed against her all the harder. Paint colored her wrists and the pure white beneath her as she bucked her hips. I pressed against her harder.
She stopped with a heavy sigh and the down cradled her the way I wanted to. I wetted my lips and let my eyes roam from the stray paint on her forehead to her sea glass eyes. Then to her sinful lips where the parted, waiting. I bent down, pressing more of my weight against her. She sighed and her eyes fluttered shut.
I tapped the tip of her nose and drug my finger down to the deep V crowning her pouty lips leaving blue in my wake. Her fingertips found the contours of my triceps and she traced them feather light but steady against my skin. I shuddered at the touch then bent down and got the gift of a whisper breath from her.
She didn’t stop me or turn away, instead she arched her neck, bringing her lips even closer. I kissed the paint I’d smeared on her skin and it stained my lips. I pressed them to the corner of her mouth and a faint blue kiss was left in my wake.
Her eyes found mine and there was something new and different about them, some spark that begged me. I didn’t wait to find out for what.
I kissed Filly. Hard.
My hands slid in different directions, one up to her wrists as I straightened her arms overhead and the other down her ribs. Her body stretched and rolled with me as her lips tumbled over mine. I hitched her knee up, and settled into her open legs, the feel of her heel digging into my thigh was the only thing that grounded me.
Her tongue ran along the seam of my lips begging me to open. The taste of her, the smell of her filled my senses and I opened my mouth to swallow it all. Our tongues tumbled until she sighed, slid her hand from mine, and shoved at my shorts.
“Wait,” I gasped.
“What do you mean, wait?”
“I don’t want to rush this,” I answered with another kiss. “We tried that once and it didn’t go so well.”
“So you want to wait?” She asked almost disbelieving.
“I just want to kiss you like I’m learning how to paint a masterpiece.”
Brye had kissed me until my lips were chapped, raw and blue paint covered not only me but the blankets and sheets I was wrapped in. The streaks were their own artwork when I woke and reached for him, pausing to study the cracked paint covering my palm.
I hated myself a little bit for caving. Canvas and paint shouldn’t have been enough for forgiveness. Not even his sad story earned him a clean slate. But being vulnerable in a world that he needed to be stone for, and showing me such deep pools of adoration when he obviously didn’t mean to, that was something I seemed to be a sucker for.
“Morning,” he said as he reached for my hand and laced his equally blue fingers into mine.
“I don’t even get a good morning?” I laughed.
“It’s not that bad, is it?” He used his grip to turn me and press our hands into the pillow beside my head as he smoothly slid on top of me. “I mean, I get to kiss you.”
He moved slowly, his eyes fixed on my lips as they parted and barely moved with my breath. My heart thudded against my chest—against his. The whole world slowed and I felt every single molecule in my body vibrating even as my chest tightened. I could have lived in that moment of anticipation forever.
Except then I wouldn’t get to kiss him.
That was the other thing I was a sucker for. He had a pillow soft bottom lip that I liked to suck on. His teeth always found a way to nibble on mine. We knew how to move with each other, he knew how to steal my breath.
Brye pressed his lips to mine and the anticipation that had been twisted up in my chest unwound, seeping through my veins like honey. His nose swept along my skin, and though his breath wasn’t the best this early, when I breathed him in, he still smelled like home.
His hand slid up my thigh and I remembered every to
uch from last night—half of them I felt as his palm rubbed over rough, stuck on paint. I’d kicked off my shorts last night, and Brye had explored every curve and sway of my breasts, but otherwise our make-out session was pretty PG. But now his hand was tracing the curve of my hip and sliding lower.
I pinched my legs together and tried to swallow. This time this was something heavier. We were something heavier. If I slept with him this time, it erased everything, the hurt, the pain, the hate, the history—as short as it may be.
Brye’s fingers pushed in between my legs and slid in the slickness between my thighs then he crooked a single one up into me. His kisses were long and leisurely just like his strokes. I gasped and the sound echoed in his warm, open mouth.
“Is this okay?” he asked, his voice feeding into me.
It wasn’t. Not really. Sort of. But it also felt amazing.
“I dunno,” I murmured.
“I can stop.” He was definitely not stopping.
Fuck if I knew whether I wanted him to.
“It’s…” I didn’t finish my sentence as he crooked his finger upwards and started massaging me, a moan was all I could manage.
When I let out another incoherent sound, he locked his sinful lips back over mine and kept it for himself.
If kissing him was good, combining it with this would make me lose my mind. My hips shoved up into his hand, the rough of his palm rubbed on my clit. I shook my head away from his kiss, feeling like I might suffocate if I didn’t breathe, feeling like I might explode if I didn’t shriek.
“Oh, Filly,” he groaned as he rubbed his steel erection against my thigh.
My hand fell from his sculpted body and I balled the sheets beneath my body in my hand. God, it was the only thing that kept me earthbound.
“Please,” I begged, but I didn’t know what for.
I wanted the orgasm. I wanted Brye. But I didn’t want to lose my mind completely. Or did I? I’d lost so much already…
“I’d give you anything if it was mine to give. Just tell me what.” He pressed his lips to my neck as he slid a second finger into me.
It was the words that got me, not his big thick fingers that dwarfed a paint brush. I wanted to hold back, to actively choose how I felt about him—so many of my choices had been taken—but my body only wanted affection and release on the back of that promise.
“Brye.” His name was a whisper, a plea, but I still wasn’t sure what for.
But then the pleasure was claiming me. A buzz, a hum, all pouring thick and slow through my veins like it was electrified molasses. My fingers hurt where they clenched the sheets, my hips twinged where they made space for him, but there was a beautiful, golden hue behind my eyelids that was everything good and delicious.
I whimpered, more wild gasps and lost words than porn star moans, until I could finally find the shape of his name. When I did he pulled his hand from my trembling sex and ran a single finger coated in me around my open mouth only to kiss me all over again.
His hand trailed from my lips with a skip and then down my neck and the cotton of my shirt. It found its way back between my thighs, but it wasn’t tempting me this time. It was at his waistband, pushing.
My pulse quickened and a full flush burnt my skin it’s fevered crimson. Stop was right there. No too. But my body would do anything, be anything if only he asked. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The intoxicating scent of him and us and sweat was bewildering, and just like the idiot I was, I surrendered.
“I’m so hard it hurts,” he murmured where he was bent against my neck.
I shuddered as I felt him between my legs. The head of his cock was right there, the warmth of skin so close familiar but new, thrilling.
“Well, it looks like I’m interrupting breakfast.” Emmett cleared his throat from a suddenly open doorframe. “Looks delicious.”
Brye snarled and readjusted himself beneath the covers before flopping beside me. Emmett looked like he’d been beaten to hell and back. He had a cut on his nose and two dark circles beneath his eyes. He lifted his chin like it was his natural makeup.
“What the fuck do you want, Emmett?”
“I’m real interested in not getting my throat slit.”
“Then I’d recommend turning the fuck around.”
“Ahhhh but this family likes to watch.” He arched his eyebrow and wore a fuck-all smirk as he tried to find my body beneath the sheets.
“Not this,” Brye dismissed him as I tried to hide deeper under the covers.
“Two minutes,” Emmett said as he spun on his heel.
Brye waited for the footsteps to fade before he turned on his side and cradled my face, letting his hand shove up into my hair. “Two minutes is not enough time for what I have in mind.”
“Two minutes is not enough for me to decide if I want it.”
His face darkened and his eyes darted around my face then the paint streaks surrounding us.
“After everything?”
“Everything is quite a lot don’t you think?”
“I thought…Last night?”
“Last night you showed me your heart was worth my kisses.” I sat up and pressed my lips to his chest. “But before that…”
“Oh Filly,” he snarled at the challenge. “I’ll show you I’m worth so much more.”
I was left holding onto Brye’s promise all day like a favorite wishing stone. I caressed it, memorizing the shape of the letters and the weight of it on his lips. I wished for him. For the small bit of home he seemed to be becoming.
There was no way in hell I was getting my life back, the first lash of that whip tore it from me, but there was Brye and he was something I wanted so bad that I risked my life like it was poker chips. By some miracle, all the gambling, hadn’t cost me him.
My hands skated over the sheets, tracing the shadow of us rolling through them before I grabbed them and stripped the bed. As much as I wanted to sink into them and the memories, we couldn’t sleep in oil crust. I gathered the royal blue and crisp, clean white up to my chest, ready to soak them but I couldn’t help myself when I leaned in and sucked in a deep breath that smelled of paint and us.
“You love him, don’t you?” Deirdre’s voice invaded my peace, making my shoulders tense as I turned.
My skin crawled. She wore a simple, curve-hugging cream sweater dress that made her dark hair and red lips reminiscent of Snow White. She was beautiful and the way her hips swayed was almost hypnotic. I could watch her body and forget, then remember that night and a million things I had no interest in recalling.
“What do you want?” I did what I could to hide behind the bedding.
“You first.”
“Huh?”
“You love him. Even though he hung you up to dry. Even though he fingered me…”
“Well I fingered you too,” I spat. “Sort of. Besides he was on ecstasy.”
“Awe honey,” she stepped closer and placed her hand over her heart, “It’s like the most fucked up Romeo and Juliet ever.”
“So you think we’re both going to die over this?”
“I certainly hope not.” She held her hand out and inspected her manicure. “That would be so much less entertaining.”
“You’re disgusting.” I threw down the sheets and my hands balled automatically.
“It’s all relative here. You should know that by now.”
“Slut,” I shot.
“Survivor,” she countered.
She circled me and I felt her eyes sweep down to the bone of me. “I was like you once, entranced by the dark, in love with the boy beneath. I would have given my life for him. Just like you will for Brye.”
“I didn’t say I love him.”
“You didn’t have to. You forgave him.” She stopped in front of me and stepped even closer to me.
“You didn’t?”
My words hadn’t been particularly harsh—I mean, my voice had been venomous and her story short—but apparently they were a sucker punch. Her fac
e contorted as she stepped back from me.
“You don’t know me.” Her voice thinned and betrayed her hurt.
“Same.” I straightened.
“And you don’t know what’s coming.” The click of dress shoes echoed down the hallway and something flashed behind her eyes.
I prayed it was Brye but somehow knew God didn’t hear my invocation.
Before I had a chance to think through the ramifications of either MacCowan walking through the door, Deirdre stepped back toward me. Her hand came to my throat again then slid back to the curve of my neck and pulled me forward. My hands splayed forward but only found her curves, which I shoved against. She didn’t falter, she didn’t waver, she just…
Kissed me.
Hard.
Her lips were more tentative than I would have guessed considering her fingers were digging into me. She grabbed my hip just as roughly but her fingers just found their way into my belt loop and held me tight. Her tongue swept across the seam of my lips and I tried to dart back, but she yanked me back flat to her. Her chest, her hips, the pure woman-ness of her.
It was different than the dinner party. She wasn’t taking from me, she was tentative in everything besides keeping me rooted.
“This is quite the afternoon surprise.” It was Connor’s strangely calm voice that that commented from somewhere nearby, but I couldn’t tell where. Deirdre wouldn’t let me up for air, no matter how hard I shoved.
She let her hands rove my body, every inch, but the pressure lessened anytime she crossed into somewhere private. Her lips were taking mine over and over, but she didn’t push past. It didn’t make sense.
Well, nothing in this godforsaken house did.
I shoved again and this time she stutter-stepped back with a wicked, hungry smile on her face. “Mmmm, she tastes like cherries,” Deirdre purred as her whole body tensed like she might pounce.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I screamed.
“Nothing besides the ache pulsing between my thighs.” She pressed her hand lewdly between her thighs and let it hitch up her sweater dress.
