Love Uncharted

by Berinn Rae

  Lily rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. I’m one of five featured artists.”

  “Have I seen these paintings?”

  “No. No one has.” Her brows furrowed and she dropped back to sit in the chair. “The paintings … Ellen, I’m nervous about them. They’re, well, strange doesn’t begin to describe them. They are unlike anything I’ve ever painted.”

  “I’m intrigued.”

  “What if Daniel doesn’t like them? I couldn’t bear it.”

  Ellen leaned across the desk to squeeze Lily’s hand. “Gradyn wouldn’t accept any work that wasn’t brilliant, Lil. Not to mention passing the rigors of your own obsessive perfection complex. Stop hiding behind excuses.”

  Lily chest felt tight and then words exploded. “My internal glue has gone tacky, Ellen! I’m slip-sliding all over the place. Daniel and I kissed. My God, we more than kissed! He’s not … he isn’t simply a friend anymore.”

  Ellen crossed her arms in satisfaction. “Like I said. A force. Are you in love with him?”

  “I might be. And now I’m afraid he’s picked up a Megan!” Lily exclaimed.

  “A what?”

  “This Megan person came home with him the other night. I’d locked myself out, again, and was waiting and there she stood, all beautiful and tall and … well, Megany.”

  Ellen laughed. “You’re ridiculous.”

  “I’d gotten bored waiting and started drawing on the wall — ”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did. And he caught me.”

  “Was he mad?”

  “No, he laughed.” Lily looked up. “I’ve never been in love before. I’ve cared for a lot of things, even people, but never have I felt anything like this fluttery mad passion … it must be love, right? I mean, it’s sort of like how I feel about color. I want to wrap around him, melt into him, know his essence.” She drew a breath. “Does that sound corny?”

  “Not from you, oddly enough.” Ellen came around the desk and dropped a kiss onto Lily’s head. “Ask him to the opening, for pity’s sake. Because when push comes to shove, a Megan can’t hold a candle to a Lily.”

  Lily spent the day locked in her studio at Faces in Time, refusing admittance to one and all so she could finish her third painting for Gradyn’s show. She’d promised him four new pieces and still hadn’t a clue what to paint next. Which was why she hadn’t left him a message. He’d asked her to deliver the work by Sunday, at the latest. Five days to go and no inspiration. Odd for her, no ideas tumbling like lotto balls inside her head. The empty space was driving her mad!

  Standing back, Lily cocked her head at the painting perched on the easel, a large abstract oil. She blinked, drew an unsteady breath. Moving to her worktable, she flipped through a pile of sketches until she found her first conceptual drawings. She’d strayed completely from the clean lines and healthy delight of her original idea. The mood on the canvas had entirely changed.

  Instead of a bright playful interaction with light, the painting projected a formidable presence in the undercurrents of color. When had this happened? Her painting style was intuitive, yes, but she’d always been a very deliberate artist with a tendency to over-sketch in order to develop just the right emotional context for a composition.

  This painting resonated a darkness completely alien to who she was! Where had that darkness come from? Lily sat down hard on the stool. Never in her life had she painted anything that so utterly frightened her. And that included the two men who’d stepped from her canvases!

  Sure, style and technique did evolve, but for emotions so out of character to show up in a composition … was Ellen right? In attempting to change herself into a more responsible person had she corrupted her spirit? Lily turned her back on the easel and paced the room, refusing to look at the painting while trying to clear her mind and think.

  The emotion in the painting was despairing, the colors foreboding and bleak. Not unfamiliar to her, these emotions, this colored atmosphere, but they’d never dominated her to the point she couldn’t manage them while she painted. Damn it, she had more strength and skill than this. Being an artist was more than just what she did. Creating defined the essence of her being, her soul. She was a painter! Not some depressed, despondent mope. And certainly not demented …

  At least not until recently. Lately, she’d been driving blind down unlighted streets. Always when she painted, Lily knew her head and heart worked as one. Now both seemed powered by raw, unruly emotion more than intellect. Why? Had the magical love potion changed her that much? Somehow she needed to rediscover trust in herself and find a way back to her heart.

  Lily closed her eyes and dove inward to sort through her most intimate thoughts. More angry than afraid of these dark feelings, she shoved and prodded at long pondered questions, unresolved issues and deep-rooted insecurities until at her center she felt a release of pressure like the cracking open of an egg. Warmth filled her chest and spread like liquid gold through her limbs, a thread of power not dark at all, but airy and light. It left her gasping and opening her eyes; she saw her skin glowing as if every pore leaked phosphorescence.

  And that’s when she understood. Her magic had at last slipped its leash! Once it had lived quiescent and contained inside her, in ideas, in technique and paint. Now, inexplicably, it beat with her heart, surged through her veins and folded around her bones. Waves of energy as capricious as the wind raced through her. Spreading her arms, Lily fell to the floor and in laughing defeat, surrendered to her power.

  Time passed, she floated … maybe. Or simply disappeared inside the magic. When eventually the room spun back into focus and she could stand, Lily opened her eyes to a new world. Every sensation felt enhanced, the droplets of rain whipping against her window pane, the smell of linseed oil and wet canvas thick on her skin. All objects, every sense, throbbed with a multi-dimensional brilliance she’d never imagined existed.

  She turned then and looked at the painting, watched each detail pop out at her. For the most part the composition was sound, an abstract landscape with planets swirling in nebulas of color … no, not quite planets but eggs. Stepping back, Lily saw how adding dabs of warm ochre could turn the eggs into pebbles on a river bottom. A more definite light source might create effervescent ripples across a surface no longer murky but fluid and living, like river water. Planets, eggs, pebbles … all this painting lacked was a source of hope, a sense of cosmic optimism.

  And that meant more light. Did she have the artistic skill to change murky chaos into beaming brightness? Reaching up, Lily pulled a clean paintbrush from the nest of her hair and without hesitation, lost herself in gleaming oranges, warm yellows, hot titanium whites. Two hours later she stepped back and for a moment stood breathless. She’d done it! She didn’t know how, but she’d transformed a disturbing, desolate painting into one that uplifted and inspired.

  Exhaustion hit her then like an avalanche, brutal, fast, nearly toppling her off the stool. Lily realized she was starving for food. So weak she could barely lift the painting off the easel, she set it facing the wall to dry overnight. It took forever to clean her brushes and palette knives. All movement had become a sluggish crawl but at last she pulled on her wool jacket and cap. Somewhere she found the energy to walk to the bus stop and dropped onto the bench to wait.

  • • •

  A last streak of daylight broke through the clouds, slanting in stark, horizontal beams between the downtown skyscrapers rising in rows of crooked teeth. And then night fell like soft velvet over New Chicago. Traffic sounds became manic as people poured out of offices to head home. The e-bus finally arrived and Lily sank into an open seat, grateful and for once unbothered by the press of bodies and smells that usually drove her to walk the long miles home.

  Altering the painting had drained her utterly, and though she’d managed to fix it, she knew the darkness she’d seen on the canvas had come from a place inside her. If she couldn’t recognize what had precipitated it and then come to understand it, Lily kne
w all that she loved, her vision, her passion for color, her restless need to create, would slowly bleed away. Her essence could dissolve as easily as her painted men.

  Resting her forehead against the smeared window, she closed her eyes, heard the drone of voices around her and as ever these days, thought of Daniel. How was he able, with his psychic sensitivities, to live in such a rabid press of humanity? She remembered the gentle circle of his fingers around her wrist and wondered why, if he was her best friend in the world, had she never recognized that his reserve masked such penetrating isolation.

  A sudden thought struck her … he must know some of what she felt for him. He’d certainly made no secret of his feelings for her. And yet he’d kept a careful line drawn between them. Even with her throwing sexual heat at him like lightning bolts. Which meant he also knew of her confusion and fear … God and Saints! She’d been torturing him for weeks and didn’t even know it! No wonder his temper frayed so easily of late.

  Lily walked the last few blocks from the bus stop and paused on the sidewalk to look up at the Lennox building. Granite stones rising in old-fashioned grandeur shone a pearly lavender under the halogen street lights. Her breath caught at the sweeping beauty of the building’s art deco curves, the colonnade porch, the embrasures, louvered balconies, and long windows. It had been awhile since she’d stopped long enough to truly look at her home and haven.

  She saw the shadow of a man, indistinct under the spreading branches of the towering spruce tree at the corner of the building. He stepped forward under the light. It was … Rodney!

  Lily ran for the protection of the porch, her heart exploding with fear. Her mind screamed that Rodney did not exist! She’d melted him, she had! Under the safety of the porch ablaze in lamp light, Lily glanced behind her. Rodney hadn’t moved. Only his head had swiveled to watch her flight. Now he simply stared, face indistinct, body a murky blur in the shadows of the tree. When he didn’t pursue her, Lily stopped, took two hesitant steps down the porch towards him.

  “You aren’t real!” Lily found voice to say. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

  Rodney stood mute. His eyes burned red and hungry, scary as hell. A darker shadow shifted beyond him and stepped forward, and Lily stumbled with a cry. Her first painted man stood at Rodney’s shoulder, blurry and paper thin. Scrabbling back up the steps, Lily slammed through the front door. She didn’t stop until she stood behind the new security door and flipped the dead bolt with fingers that quaked. Squinting through the glass she waited, skin crawling, for the two men to suddenly press themselves against the door like androids gone haywire.

  Quite suddenly her legs gave out and she collapsed at the base of the stairs. Her satchel and sketchbook fell from hands gone numb. Only then did it hit her. She hadn’t been seeing the real Daniel in cafés and e-bus windows this past week, but his look-alike! The first man she’d painted and accidentally dissolved. Hysterical laughter bubbled in her throat. Gods afire, she was being stalked by the ghosts of her own portraits!

  • • •

  A visceral fear swept through her, the kind of fear that screams Run! in your nightmares. She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. How was this possible, this animating of something never real in the first place? The answer rose from deep within her … magic. Here was the sinister side of her newborn powers, twin to the strange, alien darkness she’d seen today in her painting and now manifested in apparitions standing on the Lennox lawn.

  Lily remembered queasily cleaning up every speck of the painted men’s existence. Were they now reconstituted, made of paint once more, or had they somehow become flesh and blood? Cold to the bone, she clasped her arms about herself. She never took her eyes off the rectangle of window framing a lit portion of the front porch, the steps, and a small patch of brittle grass. But Rodney and the disturbing Daniel look-alike did not appear. Time passed, endless minutes that helped her mind stop skittering about like bugs on water, though her heart still pounded loud enough to wake the dead.

  Above her head, Lily heard the sudden rattle of the elevator’s accordion gate open and then close. Under her feet, the floorboards began vibrating to the hum of the ancient motor. This familiar sound, heard so often she thought of it as the Lennox breathing, reminded Lily that Daniel, the true Daniel was somewhere in this building. Here she would be safe, protected. Loved. And he understood magic, was in fact a creature of magic himself. Like her. The sudden acknowledgement made her half sick. Yes, Daniel could help her.

  Except constraints now lay on their once-easy friendship. She could no longer burst into his apartment and flop down on his couch to tell him in an exaggerated whine that always set him laughing how she’d tried to paint a perfect man and ended up getting stalked by their ghosts instead. No, there would be no talking this situation through over companionable wine until, slightly sloshed and giggling, they’d begin competing with ever more absurd stories of past stupidities.

  Looking up, she watched the elevator descend inside its polished cage of brass, dropping from the third floor. Which meant it carried the McCready sisters. She stood up, still unsteady. Her hand went to her unkempt hair. Eleanor McCready, sharp eyed even behind the thick glasses, would notice her shell-shocked disarray and start probing. Lily looked about for her hair clip and unable to find it, twisted her curls into a tangled knot and tucked them down inside her collar.

  She had the presence of mind to unbolt the security door before seating herself on the bottom step, flexing her hands to stop them shaking. The elevator cage dropped towards her. Inside, two pairs of sturdy shoes appeared followed by four thick legs in support hose. Yes, the McCready sisters, dressed in fur trimmed woolen coats long out of fashion. Lily pasted a smile on her stiff face. Ruth waved through the grate as the elevator settled to a noisy stop. Lily stood to fold back the outer gate as Ruth wrestled with the inner one.

  “Oh, Lily, you look terribly pale. Are you all right?” Eleanor’s glance was sharp, but she turned to take her more fragile sister’s elbow and guide her from the lift. “We’re off to dinner. There’s no electricity upstairs at the moment. Daniel’s cleaning the chandeliers in our hallway, took them completely apart, you know. So we’re using that as an excuse to dine out.”

  “Meatloaf special at Tappy’s.” Ruth smiled.

  “Want to join us?” Eleanor asked. “We’d love it, Lily. Haven’t seen near enough of you lately.”

  Lily tucked her arm through Ruth’s elbow. “Thanks so much, but no. I’m beat and I’m looking forward to a long soak in a hot bath.”

  Eleanor said. “Don’t worry, he’s near done. And the chandeliers do look lovely with the bronze all polished to a shine.”

  “The glass sparkles like little suns.” Ruth’s pixie smile broadened.

  Eleanor took Lily’s other arm. “You do look done in, child. Be a good girl and take the lift up, let Daniel make you some tea.”

  “He needs tea,” Ruth leaned to whisper. “He only cleans chandeliers when he’s specially upset.”

  “Then I’ll fix him tea.” Lily hugged their arms close. “You two look very dashing tonight, all dressed up.” Lily escorted them out the front door, her eyes scanning the shadows for the skulking Rodney. And there he stood back under the big spruce again.

  Eleanor followed her glance. “Why, isn’t that your loud friend from the other night?”

  “He’s not my friend,” Lily stifled a shudder and raised her voice to call, “and he’s certainly not welcome here. Go home, Rodney.”

  Beyond Rodney she could see the faint outline of the second apparition and quickly hustled the two sisters into the waiting cab before he, too, stepped into light enough to be recognized. How in Mary’s name would she ever explain a man who could be Daniel’s twin?

  “Have fun!” She waved them off, watching the taxi cab disappear before turning back to the two men. But they had gone, dissipating like mist. Lily felt an enormous relief and with it, an equal wave of exhaustion that left her lightheaded. Stumbling back insi
de, she gathered up her fallen portfolio and satchel and dragged her weary body up the stairs to Daniel.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lily decided for tonight at least, Rodney and Look-Alike could kiss her ass. Because she was home. Her family lived here. Every person in this building would dash to her rescue if she needed them … except maybe Lonnie Ranchero, who would expect some carnal reward. Pausing on the last stair landing to dig for her keys, Lily glanced up and saw Daniel standing high atop a ladder on the floor above her. She felt a rush of tender gratitude so intense she had to grab hold of the railing. More of the ache in her chest eased. He hadn’t heard her, didn’t even seem aware of her.

  Knowing this, Lily allowed herself to just look at him and glory in the strong, lithe line of him from ragged tennis shoes all the way up to the dark hair curling out from under an old Cubs baseball cap he wore backwards. His hands were full of the cumbersome light fixture, his mouth sprouted half a dozen screws. Behind his glasses, his bold brows frowned in concentration.

  God, he was beautiful with his striking dark looks; his long, athletic body; and large, capable hands. She wondered what other delights she’d discover in him with her new magically enhanced vision. As if in answer, an effervescent power stirred deep within her. With no idea what else her magic could do, Lily called on the fizzing energy. For a flashing instant she saw Daniel’s aura, radiant blues and silver that quivered with a tremendous power. Then her senses slammed hard against the barrier of his own magic. Hurt, even knowing he used the barrier to protect himself, Lily wanted to smash all her own power against him.

  Instead, she let her breath out slowly and eased up the last turn of stairs. He still didn’t see her, his hands busy among the tangle of wires dangling from the housing box set in the ceiling. Lily’s gaze moved up the length of his legs in frayed, faded jeans. A tool belt rode low on his hips, baring the flat muscles of his belly and a faint line of dark hair disappearing into the waist of his jeans. Heat exploded in her veins, a flash of pure lust. How the hell did a tool belt make a man look so damn sexy?