I pull her closer and duck my head, my mouth seeking the heat of her center. She rakes her nails across my back and I’m on fire, every nerve tuned to who she is and what she needs.
She whimpers as I nip at the inside of her thighs, teasing her as my mouth gets closer to her pale curls.
Soft. So soft, beneath her tough exterior. I run my nose across her, inhaling her scent, and I find the edge of her pussy with my tongue. I trace her reverently, slicking her lips, and she moans more loudly this time.
I want her to feel something besides the sadness and desperation that left her crying in the corner. I want her to feel hope and joy and … elation.
I stop before I’ve even reached her clit, pushing her back from me slightly, and her face falls.
“What—why …?” She falters, nervous in her nakedness.
I stand and shuck off my jeans, my hard-on thoroughly apparent through boxer briefs. I take her hand. “I’m not stopping. I just want us to try something.”
I lead her toward the painting studio side of her apartment, grab a clean canvas dropcloth and spread it on the floor.
“Hands out.” She quirks a brow in question but obeys. I grab the nearest tube of acrylic and squirt a quarter-sized dollop of blue in her palms. “Rub them together.”
“Are we finger-painting here? I thought were—” Her cheeks color in embarrassment.
“Both,” I promise, a wicked gleam in my eye. “Turn around.” I anoint her skin with a dozen more blobs of paint, deep red and vivid purple, rubbing each into her skin. Her shoulder blades, her ass cheeks, the back of her thighs and calves. “Lie down.”
My art project seems to take shape in her mind and she follows where I point her, wriggling as I add a deep cobalt blue to the soles of her feet.
I kneel between her legs and see pupils dilate, her lips part. My hands are covered with paint and I lean over her, balancing on my arms, to take her lower lip and then each nipple between my teeth, sucking until her back arches.
I shuck off my boxers and scoot down the canvas, licking her center again, long strokes that part the seam of her lips, and mingle her moisture with the saliva on my tongue. I swallow her heady taste, something so primal that it sets off an explosion in my body that throws me into overdrive, no longer teasing but demanding more, more, more.
I plunge my tongue inside her and I hear her voice rising, begging, saying my name like it’s the key to another world. I dance my tongue across her clit and she writhes beneath me, desperate hands gripping the canvas. As my tongue moves deeper, she scratches her nails up my back, leaving my skin raw with desire.
“It’s too much,” she chokes out, and I lash my tongue against her nub as fast as it can move. I feel her tipping point like the instant of silence when my band plays its last note, the breath before the audience erupts. She tips, her whole body compressing around a single, explosive moment.
She’s in freefall, screaming something I don’t even understand, and then she’s clawing and pulling to bring me above her, to settle on top of her. I’m conscious of my weight, especially with her back on the hard floor, but her arms tighten around my chest, and I don’t want to pull away.
I just feel her against me, her breathing coming back from a panting sprint. My cock is rock-hard and throbbing, impossible to ignore on her stomach, but I’m afraid to shift and burst this perfect bubble of pleasure.
I turn to her cheek, paint-streaked and beautiful, and kiss her the way I see her, something precious and original. Like art: priceless, rare. I’ve been here before, this postcoital taking stock, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman as clearly as I see Willa.
It hurts. Hurts to see her in pain, and now it hurts, knowing the pleasure that’s possible when I’m all kinds of fucked up and I can’t give her what she deserves.
I can’t make her pain go away.
Willa stills beneath me and then her hand reaches to the side of the canvas for a tube of paint. I feel the cool squeeze of it on my back, her hands rubbing it in, and then we roll.
She straddles me like a goddess on horseback, light from the windows behind her illuminating her pink hair in a halo. Her cheeks are flushed, eyes bright, and she moves her hips to take my cock in her cleft, slicking me with her moisture.
My eyes roll as the sensation of her sends my nerves into overdrive, as if there’s no skin, only sparks between us. She bends to my mouth for a kiss and then executes a perfect push-up—more evidence of her badass strength—and flees to her bathroom with two words: “Don’t move.”
She’s back in seconds, and I hear the rip of a wrapper before I open my eyes. She rolls the condom over me, thick and pulsing with want, then straddles me again, hips angling to find the tip of my cock.
I reach for her face, cradling it in my hands with soft reverence, even while the rest of my body begs me to thrust inside her. “Willa,” I say, and it’s enough. She understands.
She presses back, taking me inside her in this ancient, sacred union that feels unending in its delicious slowness. Her heat, her wetness, her muscles inside gripping me—it slices away my self-doubt and self-pity until all I see is her.
And us. Perfect. Together.
Willa straightens, leaning back to sitting, my cock buried deep as I feel her pulse around me. I reach for her breasts, thumbs caressing the sides of them, palms testing their weight, until I have to pull her back toward me to taste their tips.
My teeth come out, insatiable, nipping and biting harder than before. It sends her hips bucking on me and I buck back harder against her, letting her ride but setting the pace, pushing our rhythm faster.
I feel my senses slipping away—sight, and I am blind to the room. Sound, and I can’t hear anything but the blood rushing in my ears. The taste and smell of her sinking deep into my sense memory.
Then there is only touch. This wild and intense connection where my body shifts from being mine, to being an animal all its own. It races to a place where nothing matters but release.
Nothing but the climax. I buck and plunge and Willa screams her release, collapsing on me and sinking her teeth into the muscle strung from shoulder to neck. And that painful twinge amplifies everything, setting off a roaring torrent that rushes through me.
I am filled and emptied and filled again. I’m taken apart and put back together. I am hers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I pull my head up, balancing myself on shaky arms and look at Dave.
He’s blissed out, like he’s not sure what hit him. Paint streaks his face, his forehead, and who knows where else, and I can’t help it.
I laugh. A chuckle that rolls into a full belly laugh and I’m straddling him, with his dick softening inside me, the laugh pushing him out as surely as it lifts the funk of sadness in this room.
He grabs the condom and ducks into the bathroom to take care of it. I stand as he comes back and wraps his arms around my waist from behind.
We shake with giggles as we stare at a canvas where there is absolutely no question what just transpired. The prints are smudged with passion. The outline of my ass is an inverted heart, the prints of his knees between my outstretched legs leaving little to the imagination.
“I think it’ll match some rich collector’s couch,” Dave says, nuzzling my ear. “Definitely a conversation piece.”
I turn in his arms. “If I look as crazy with paint as you do right now, this is going to be a bitch to get off.”
“But worth it.”
I lead Dave toward the shower, giving the canvas one more glance. “Definitely worth it.”
***
“So that’s one down. How many to go?” Dave works on my back beneath the trickle of the shower, scrubbing at the paint.
“Oh, I could never sell that.”
“Why not? It would definitely cause a stir.”
I turn and take the sponge to his back. Aquamarine paint-stained soap suds slide toward my rust-speckled drain.
“For one thing, even if I di
d want to sell it, I’d have to get it stretched and mounted. That’s money I don’t have right now. And I’m out of time—I can’t do twenty canvases in a week. It’s impossible.”
I bite my lip to control the quiver in my voice. The truth of my loss is still so raw that it’s hard to avoid dissolving in another round of tears.
Dave keeps scrubbing me, quiet for a moment. “What would it take? To finish them all?”
“Weeks at least. A couple of months would be better.”
“Could you get Thomas to give you time off?”
I mentally review my upcoming appointments. Not a ton, but I’d take the hit on commission if I rescheduled them all. “I can’t afford it. I can’t even afford to buy new supplies.”
Dave turns me around, dabbing at paint on my chin tenderly before he pulls me against his chest and the warm water washes over us. “Would you let me help?”
I try to pull away. “You can’t.”
“I’m serious. I know you don’t want me to ‘wave a magic credit-card wand,’ but if there’s one thing I can give you, it’s some more resources to finish the job.”
I keep shaking my head no, but an idea strikes me, something the bleak emptiness of my apartment stole away when I was crushed in despair.
I yank open the shower curtain and run over to my paint area, still dripping wet. High on top of an industrial metal shelf where I keep most of my paint is a bunch of rolled-up stiff plastic.
It looks like junk.
But it might be my salvation.
I pull down a couple of rolls and remove the rubber bands. The paint-stained clear plastic mostly comes from dumpster-diving, sheets that used to cover binders or protect products.
Each one of these sheets was painstakingly cut with my box-cutting knife over cardboard, creating the stencil I use for graffiti art and for my canvases. The plastic is curling and unwieldy.
“I never planned to use these again, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away,” I explain. “Most of the effort is right here. In the stencil.”
Dave wraps a towel around my dripping shoulders and tucks a towel around his waist, then crouches to look closer. “Wow. These are really intricate.”
“Sometimes I use a handful of stencils for one painting. And they’re all jumbled here, but if I can separate them and flatten them…” I keep pulling at the sheets that stick together with remnants of paint.
“You can do this, Willa,” Dave whispers. “They can steal your canvases, but they’re not going to steal your chance at this show.”
I barely know where to start on this mess of plastic, but I do know where I need to start with Dave. I banish the alarm bells in my head that demand I’ll never accept another handout.
I want to believe his offer comes from a better place, that Dave’s not dangling a promise in exchange for a favor owed.
I swallow my pride and say the words I swore I’d never utter again. “I need your help.”
***
Dave acts like a kid at Christmas, taking gleeful delight in dragging me to two different art stores. He carries a half-dozen bags of supplies cheerfully and I can’t even fathom how much money he charges on his credit cards.
It’s like I’ve made his day. (Or maybe that was just the brain-melting orgasm.) But who knew asking for help could feel this … good?
We make several trips to get all of the canvases up to my place, plus tons more paint, turps, brushes and daubers.
The late summer sun dips low and Dave leaves me to sort out the pile of supplies while he runs to a hardware store, returning with a drill and four new locks for my door. I blink back tears of thankfulness and hope.
Dave hums while he works, so unbelievably cheerful that I warm a bit more to this idea of letting someone help me. It’s like we’re a team. I’m cleaning caked-on paint from plastic sheets while he removes my busted lock.
“What’s that?”
Dave looks up from my doorway. “What?”
“That song?”
“Nothing. I mean, I’m not the guy in the band who writes songs. I was just messing around.”
“Maybe you should mess around with that a little more.” I smile, wondering if a little bit of my urge to create is rubbing off on him, too.
As the paint falls away and I stack up the plastic stencils, a tiny voice inside me whispers, this is possible.
“When did it start? You doing art?” Dave speaks around the screw clamped between his lips as he works on my door locks.
“I was little.” I try to piece together an answer as I sort the plastic sheets into piles that go together. “I remember hiding in my room when my foster parents were yelling at each other. I made dioramas at first, like a dollhouse. I always wanted a dollhouse but there was no money or Santa to buy one. Then I figured out stencils made really cool shadows with a flashlight. I remember poking tiny holes in the paper with a pin.”
Dave hums as he keeps working, his movements precise and syncopated. “And painting?”
“If there’s one art supply street kids have, it’s spray paint. I ran around with some kids who just did graffiti, but then I started hanging out with people who were trying to do real images, not just tagging. So I started painting too.”
“You wanted to make your mark on the world.” Dave looks up from the locks and his gaze shoots right through me, like he’s found an essential truth.
It makes me feel more naked than I was a couple hours ago. I duck my head in a nod.
“You’re going to do it, and I’ll be damned if this thief proves otherwise.” Finished with the locks, he fishes his phone out of his back pocket and touches the screen, then puts it to his ear. When he speaks, Dave transforms from this gentle man who washed my back into a tightly coiled spring, a commanding presence across the line.
“How many do you need for the catalog shoot?” he asks, pacing as the person on the line responds. “We’ll give you seven. She’ll deliver as contracted with the full amount, but the first deadline was for the shoot, and we’ll bring those over Friday.”
Another few clipped words to the gallery and he clicks off his phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Buying you time. You’ve just got to have seven ready by the end of the week, and you’ll have another week and a half to produce the rest.” He crosses the loft to me and inspects my progress on the stencils. “Can you do that?”
“You just said I could.” My voice is thin and full of doubt. It’s a small extension, but it only moves the deadline from impossible to really fucking hard.
“You say it.”
“What?”
His squats down to where I’m seated on the floor and his dark eyes meet mine. “Tell me you can do this. Tell yourself. Just say it.”
“I can do this,” I mumble.
“Come on, believe it this time.”
I square my shoulders. “I can do this.”
That wins me a confident smile. “Say it louder.”
I feel thoroughly ridiculous but I stand up and bellow, “I can do this!”
Dave wraps me in his arms and kisses me hard. “That’s my girl. You’ve faced worse odds than this.” His lips meet mine again, his teeth tugging my lower lip, but the words my girl are what has my stomach doing flips. “I know you can.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I’m a producer, not a manager,” Ravi says. He takes a long guzzle of his energy drink.
The air is too hot and too close as Gavin and I crowd into Ravi’s New York production studio and make our pitch. We need to wrap up our next album, Wilderness, and book our next concert series. But with Chief officially gone, there’s no one to handle the next steps.
Not true. I could handle them. But the band doesn’t trust me to do it, and considering the colossal dick I’ve been to them, I don’t blame them.
Much.
“Production is the majority of what we need,” Gavin insists. “We don’t need a slimy PR guy, we need someone who can drag this al
bum across the finish line.”
Ravi snorts, his thick glasses glinting off the studio’s directional lights. “Nice visual. So enticing.”
I ignore the sarcasm and try to make the sale. We need Ravi to keep us on track after the shitshow of the past few months. “You wouldn’t even need to work on the stadium-show contracts,” I offer. “I’ve been working on the contracts since we fired Chief, and I can keep handling them. Just help us get the album out.”
Gavin turns and gives me a strange look. “You want to go back to planning shows?”
“If it will keep us going, hell yes.”
Ravi gives me an appraising look. “You can’t do both—be a drummer and a manager—any more than I can try to double as your producer and manager.”
“Forget it, then. It was just an idea.” I squeeze the back of my neck, trying to work out the tension that’s got my shoulders hitched up to my ears. “But I could at least book us one show to keep the momentum going before we release Wilderness. Something close and easy, like a homecoming concert in Pittsburgh.”
Ravi drains the last of his energy drink and stacks the empty next to a half-dozen others. His head is bobbing slowly as his long, slim fingers move across the sound board, like a pianist itching to play. “That has merit. That could be real good, actually.”
“We haven’t done Pitt in more than a year,” Gavin says, and by his tone I think he might actually like this idea. “If we did that one and blew it out, gave the hometown crowd a taste of Wilderness, that could even set the stage for the big stadium tour and the album release.”
I catch his excitement, and I’m slingshotted into full manager mode. “We’d do a VIP meet and greet with some of the friendlies from the music press. We’d go wall-to-wall with local radio and free tickets, pimping the new album even before it drops.”
For the first time, Ravi flashes teeth. He digs this idea. “No wonder you used to be manager. That’s all good stuff. I’ve been going over your session recordings. We’re close, but we’re not there yet.”
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