by Ryan, Emma
Okay, now I could feel the flush on my cheeks. I tried to keep my face impassive, but something in my expression must’ve given me away. He gasped, slapping his hand down on the surface of the table.
“I knew it. Big Bucks Boy finally put out. Tell me alllll about it.”
Where was I supposed to start?
I wasn’t shy when it came to sex. Most artists weren’t. Sex was almost an art in and of itself—with the right partner, anyway. There was the same kind of passion and unrestrained abandon that went into the two. All through college, Alex and I would swap stories with each other. When we made the choice to drop out to pursue a less ‘academic’ route for our art, that didn’t change.
But there was something different about talking about sex with Walker. It wasn’t that it was somehow more magical, or more private. I just honest-to-god didn’t know how to describe it. Simply relating how he’d held me, how he’d dominated and cherished my body, how he’d made me feel, seemed inadequate.
“It was… beyond any of the best sex I’ve ever had,” I said finally, Alex’s needy expression making me not want to leave him hanging. “I mean, we’d had sex before, but that was—”
“In high school, and therefore the erotic equivalent of two people flopping around like wet fish?” he interjected. “Trust me, we don’t need to go there. So… I assume he’s improved? He must have surprised you, you’re walking around like you’re on cloud nine and climbing higher and higher than that.”
I flushed but gave him a self-satisfied smirk. Actually, Walker and I had had some damn good sex in high school—not a floppy fish to be found, thank you very much. But still…
“Oh, he’s definitely learned some new moves since then.”
Alex wolf whistled. “Well, I’m proud of you, Mackers! It’s about time you got laid, it’s been ages.” He tilted his head. “So how does that affect your real but fake marriage?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t. We’re just… friends with benefits. We’re going through with everything as planned. The marriage, the divorce, all of it. Nothing has changed.”
“Except for the apparently mind-blowing sex.”
I threw a balled up napkin at him. “Except for the mind-blowing sex. We’re taking it as it started out. We’re just… adding a little bit of flavor into the mix. That’s all. Besides…” I arched a brow. “A man and a woman living together in that close proximity? It was bound to happen anyway.”
Alex laughed. “Only because he’s straight.”
I wadded up my napkin and threw it at him.
“What? It’s the truth.” He smirked. “But you can keep him. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re going to.”
12
Walker
It was strange, the contrast between how my life was now and how it used to be. I used to think that I loved the high-octane environment that work cultivated. And I supposed to an extent, I did. But damn, was it wearing on me. Maybe it was because I had something so amazing waiting for me back home now. Before Mackenzie came back into my life, it was just work, work, work. That’s all I had to look forward to, so I never thought about anything different.
Now, work feels like more of a chore than it used to. That’s what I got for running a business almost single-handedly.
Coming home became the highlight of my day as opposed to my lowlight. I found myself stepping through the door every night with more enthusiasm than I could ever remember when I’d lived on my own.
It had been weeks, and I still marveled at the welcoming nature of the music that filtered through my apartment. It always came from Mackenzie’s back art room, and I never went in there. I still hadn’t been invited.
“Nothing in there is good enough,” she had told me the first time I’d tried to take a peek. “None of the pieces are ready. I’d rather not show them until I know that they’re at their best.”
I found the idea that any of her work might be subpar absurd. I’d come across a lot of so-called artists in my time; it was hard not to when you lived in New York City and your peers were millionaires and billionaires with connections everywhere across the city. But Mackenzie had always been the real deal—and so had her art.
She hadn’t heard me come in; she rarely ever did. Some kind of cutesy pop ballad filtered out from the art room, and Mackenzie’s voice with it. I laughed at the wobbliness of her voice. It had… character. The thing that surprised me as I approached the room was the fact that the door was partially ajar. Macks usually left it closed tight.
Maybe it made me a nosy asshole, but I couldn’t help myself.
I peeked.
Through the sliver of open door, I spied Mackenzie, surrounded by a rainbow of canvases. Grand, yard-by-yard paintings were displayed all around, intermingled with smaller ones. Mackenzie’s forte was fantasy, and it was elegantly displayed in hyper-realistic depictions of faeries and sirens, great elven battlescapes, and witchy scenes. The real and the mystic married together as I watched her carefully laying strokes of auburn, likely expertly mixed to the perfect custom shade on her pallet, in thin strands of hair on her current subject, a freckle-faced beauty of whimsical proportion, dressed in gossamer green robes.
“She’s beautiful,” I eventually spoke up. “Have you named her?”
Mackenzie jumped, looking over her shoulder at me. Her eyes widened, and a flush came to her cheeks. I chuckled as a small container of paint clattered to the floor, spattering paint all over the stretch of cloth that covered the space, keeping the marble clean.
“Shit, Walker, you scared me,” she breathed. She had her hand on her chest, holding her heartbeat inside it. Something stirred in me, something a lot like the passion that rose the first night we made love in this very house. I wondered for a moment if it was possible to continuously relive the intensity of loving someone, then I pushed the thought aside to step into the room.
“I see that. You made a mess,” I commented dryly.
“To be fair, it was your fault,” she countered.
I smirked. “True.”
I bent down, eyeing the small pool of paint on the floor. It would have—probably should have—irritated me. But for some reason, I couldn’t find it in myself to be annoyed. It was just a fucking floor.
Damn. Macks really has gotten under my skin.
When we’d been together in high school, she had constantly reminded me there were more important things than money. Not because of anything she said, but just because of who she was. Macks had been the most important thing to me back then; I would’ve thrown my entire fortune away for her. At least, until my mother died and everything changed.
To her surprise—and possibly my own if I cared to think about it—I dipped my fingers in the paint and, locking eyes with Mackenzie, flung a large gob against the wall. “Damn, will you look at that? Now I made a real mess, all on my own.”
Before Mackenzie could process that, I stood up, smearing a healthy glob of bright green acrylic on her nose.
Her eyes widened more, as though I had grown two heads, or maybe a fifth limb. Her surprise only lasted a few seconds though. Then a wicked gleam flashed in her emerald eyes as she realized I’d started a war—and she had all the ammunition.
I darted out of the way as, lightning fast, she reached down to dip her fingers into the same mess of paint I had and chased me around the art space.
“Get back here!”
I laughed. “Not a chance, sweetheart!”
We darted around the plethora of paintings that Mackenzie had managed to muster up, laughing as we covered each other with splats of paint and near misses. I was careful to avoid getting paint on any of her projects. I actually would’ve felt worse about those than the floor. If anything in this room besides Macks herself could be called priceless, it was the beautiful shit that came out of her mind, channeled through a paintbrush.
Mackenzie managed to get a couple of good swipes across my chest; I got paint in her hair before we ended up colliding, collapsing to the groun
d in a heat of sweat, paint, and laughter.
“Your suit is all dirty,” she said, snickering.
“It’ll wash out,” I said. “And if it doesn’t then, fuck it. I have other things to wear.”
She gave me a puzzled look.
“What?” I asked, flopping onto my back with my arms around her.
“You,” she said. “You’ve changed so much since I first saw you in your office. It’s like a whirlwind.”
“How do you mean?”
She leveled a look at me. “Well for starters, when I first moved in, you were super uptight.”
“I was not.”
“Was so.”
“Agree to disagree?”
“You have a complete organization system for your ties,” she deadpanned.
“Okay. Fair point.”
A laugh bubbled from her chest, and I wrapped my arms tighter around her, enjoying the feel of her good humor.
“You just… I dunno. You matured so much since high school. Which I like! But it’s nice seeing you have fun again, too. I like you when you’re having fun. It’s like… back then.”
She didn’t have to explain. I understood the feeling. It was like the best parts of our relationship all those years ago. Back when things really were carefree and our lives weren’t complicated by fake marriages and strings-attached inheritances and struggles to prove ourselves in our chosen lines of work.
Fuck. We really had gone down the rabbit hole together. This whole situation was beyond insane.
But right now, I didn’t care about any of that. I didn’t care about the circumstances that had brought us back together, that had put Mackenzie under the same roof as me, that had left us both on this messy marble floor covered in paint.
She was here. In my arms.
That was all that mattered.
Before my thoughts could drift any further, I turned my head, pressing my lips to hers. Sweet, sweet Macks…
Why had I ever let her go?
13
Mackenzie
Walker was warm and welcoming, holding me in his arms on the floor. It was so different from what I was used to—with anyone. I had never shared my art with the men I dated. The only person I’d ever shown my pieces to while they were in progress was Walker. After him, I kept things closed off and close to my heart.
Even after we’d decided to be ‘friends with benefits’, or whatever this weird thing was, I hadn’t been ready to share my latest pieces with him. I had confidence in my skills, but not necessarily in the marketability of my art. My pieces were beautiful but strange; I knew that. And the thing was, they were all me. I put a piece of myself on every painting I created. I bled onto the canvas. So to take the risk of sharing them and have someone whose opinion I valued, who I cared about—whether I wanted to admit it or not—was terrifying.
But tonight, I had left the door cracked open on purpose. It hadn’t been an open invitation, just a… possibility. A chance for him to peer into my world if he wanted to. I honestly hadn’t known if he would. Several of the guys I’d dated post-college had condescendingly spoken about my painting as a ‘fun hobby’ and had never once even asked to see anything I was working on.
Then, of course, I’d gotten so wrapped up in the music and my latest project that I’d completely forgotten I had left the door cracked and had nearly had a heart attack when Walker snuck in.
As we lay tangled in each other’s arms, I watched his gaze dart around to all the canvases set up around the room, and even though his words when he entered had been complimentary, I studied his face for the truth. And his expression didn’t lie—he really did like them. His features softened, the corner of his lips quirking up as his head tilted slightly toward the canvases, as if drawn by the magical images painted on them.
“These are all so beautiful.” His gaze darted to me before scanning the paintings again. “You’ve really improved. Everything about your work that was amazing when we were in school is even better.”
I bit my lip against the smile that wanted to explode across my face. “And the flaws?”
“What flaws?”
I knew they were there—the flaws in my work. No artist went through life without flaws. I used to have the worst time with faces. Doing hyper-realistic art meant that any strange, imperfect aspect of your art was made ten times more noticeable than if you were working on something abstract.
Now, looking at the freckled fae woman I’d been working on when Walker poked his head in, I saw she was truly, very nearly flawless.
I sat up a little on my arm, looking down at Walker. The clean lines of his suit hugged his perfectly muscled body in a distracting way, and the paint on his cheek only made him look more handsome.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” I said. “You say the same thing Alex does, or the others down at his studio. Or my teachers, or the people on Insta that see the few final pieces I deem fit enough to share. But it’s hard to see that myself, you know? Really hard. I don’t know. Nothing I do seems like it’s ever enough to really take off, and after—”
I paused. I didn’t want to say it out loud because it sounded like a bad thing, hinting at something in the past that was better left there—in the past.
Walker nudged me. “What? What’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. It’s just… after you left, I didn’t have a soundboard anymore. That guy rooting for me in my corner.”
A dark shadow passed over his eyes. He looked away, just for a moment, before turning back to me.
“I shouldn’t have done it like that,” he admitted. “Calling you from the airport. Leaving you that voicemail. I should’ve said what I had to say in person. Maybe it would’ve been different if I had.” He tilted my head toward him. “But you shouldn’t be scared of your own work just because I’m not around. You were always strong enough to let your art stand on its own. Even before we came back into each other’s lives.”
A pleasantly painful lump formed in my throat at his words, and I tried to push down the warmth spreading through my chest.
Keeps it together, Mackenzie. This is just the ‘friends’ part of ‘friends with benefits’. He’s cheering you on as a friend.
Still, his words meant more to me than I could ever say. His simple belief in me bolstered my belief in myself. Maybe, after all this was over, I could hang onto that feeling.
The reminder that this would all be over soon was like a bucket of ice water poured over my head, and I had to force a smile as pressed my body closer to his.
“Thank you, Walker. Really.”
He grinned, rubbing a dab of red paint from my cheek with the pad of his thumb. “I have an idea. A great idea. An amazing idea. And I want you to say yes, no matter how you might initially feel about it.”
I looked at him, my brow raised.
“That sounds like a trap.”
His chuckle rumbled in his chest. “It’s not. I promise.”
Chewing my lower lip, I considered for a moment. But the truth was, I did trust him. Maybe not with my heart, but with this. I knew however crazy his idea might be, it would come from a good place.
“Okay. Yes.” I pinched his side. “Now ask me.”
He grabbed my hand, pulling it away and threading our fingers together before his eyes met mine.
“Take me to your studio, Macks. I want to see you in your element and around your people. I want to see if maybe we can get that spark of yours back.”
* * *
I had never taken a man to the studio before. Alex brought plenty of ‘boyfriends,’ showing off the art, the people there, and his own penchant for the flashy.
I didn’t like sharing this part of myself. At least not with men who weren’t important to me.
Walker was important. The cadence of my heart in my chest the entire drive from the house to the studio was enough indication of that. I was jittery. What would everyone think? How would they react?
The studio was in the bones of an old apa
rtment building, long since past its initial purpose. It was five stories tall. The first floor was set up as a relaxed area where the members of the studio ate, chilled, and socialized. The middle two were galleries; the remaining top two floors were where a lot of the members worked exclusively.
As we walked in, we passed by dozens of pieces of art on the walls, all done by old and new members of the studio. It was a collective; a monthly pool of funds kept the lights on, alongside donations from various interested parties here and there. Millions weren’t being funneled in, but it had enough recognition that we weren’t getting evicted.
Yet.
Hand in hand with Walker, I led him past a few familiar faces who grinned and nodded my way from their places on the beat-up couches, or sitting at tables with mismatched chairs. A pair of twins paused their ping-pong game as Walker and I came near.
“Mackenzie!” The female twin, Ash, with her shock of red hair cropped close to her head, waved at me. Her brother, Aven, nodded. Today, his red hair was braided down in two plaits on his head; tomorrow, it would likely be in some other style. My bet was on a fauxhawk; he favored those.
I smiled. “Ash, Aven. What’s up?”
“Oh, you know, nothing much. Trying to get the creative juices flowing.” Ash pulled herself up onto the ping-pong table to sit. She swung her legs to and fro and smiled between the two of us. “Who’s the beefcake?” she asked, utterly shameless as always.
Walker snorted, hiding his laughter behind a cough before he held out his hand. “Walker Prince. Mackenzie and I are married.”
Ash’s eyes went wide, and even Aven looked over, a curious look on his usually apathetic face.
“Woah! Married? So that’s the big secret ‘I know something you don’t know and I’m not telling you’ Alex has been teasing us with, like, for all of forever.” She laughed. “Congrats! I can’t believe you didn’t invite anyone.”
I shook my head, waving her off. “It was a small, intimate wedding. But speaking of Alex, where is he? I wanted to show Walker around the whole place; he’s never come to the studio.”
