by Alexis Anne
“It really was,” I gushed. “It’s one thing to sell paintings out of my flat, but to see them in that gallery, to know people are going to go and pay money while standing there because they have to have something I created? Wow.”
His smile never faltered as I rambled and for the first time I felt a little pang of desire for Ian.
“I can’t wait for the opening. I’ve set aside the entire night.”
My excitement ticked up another notch. “Oh good. Someone will need to hold me together. I might just vibrate out of my own skin. Jenni said they’re sold out. That everyone’s excited to see my work.”
He put his hand on the small of my back and guided me toward the street. “Well of course she said that, darling. They probably say that to all their artists. They want them to be excited and feel special.”
All the air disappeared from my lungs. Poof. As if I’d never had air in there in the first place.
“Yes of course,” I managed to murmur.
The cool evening air barely made a difference as we turned toward my flat.
“Besides, Donald and I have already arranged to purchase all the pieces leftover at the end of the installation, however many that might be. We want you to have good buzz coming out of it.”
I kept trying to pull air into my lungs but nothing happened. It was like I’d just been punched in the gut and had the wind knocked out of me. My eyes stung, my chest ached, and I was hyper aware of every sound around me.
Ian and Father…they didn’t think I’d sell a thing. Neither of them thought anything of my abilities at all. Just the buzz. Just the perception—including mine. As long as I thought I was an artist I’d be the good little girl they needed to control.
My vision started to narrow as darkness crept up on the sides of my vision. Probably from the lack of oxygen. I was barely paying any attention to where we were going. I guess that was how I managed to walk right into Darcy.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, there love,” he chuckled as he stumbled backward, catching me at the same time. “What am I? Invisible?”
I blinked several times as I looked up at his familiar face. It took me a moment to focus on exactly what was happening. Darcy had his hands on my arms and a very concerned look in his eyes, while Ian stood beside us looking bored.
“She’s been walking so fast I could barely keep up. Thank you for catching her, Higgins.”
I’d been walking fast? Was that why I was so out of breath? “Yes, thank you. I’m so sorry I wasn’t paying more attention.”
But he just laughed and shook his head. “It’s not a bother at all. I probably should have looked both ways before sticking my big fat head out onto the street.”
He kept looking closer, harder.
Could he see that I was in the process of falling apart? That I’d just realized how incredibly foolish and stupid I was? That I’d bought Jenni’s praise hook, line, and sinker and had delusions of grandeur?
God, I was such an idiot.
“We were just discussing the opening of Nicole’s art at the gallery. I think she’s nervous.”
Darcy’s smile grew. “I can’t wait to see you in action. Theo and I will both be there. Nothing to be nervous about, love. We’ve got your back.”
More tears stung my eyes and the harder I tried to stop them the more painful the twist in my gut became. I wasn’t supposed to feel things. Not out here. Not in front of people.
I needed to go.
“I’ll see you both there.” My voice sounded like it came from far away instead of my own mouth.
I stepped around him and continued my fast pace all the way home, frantic to escape what suddenly felt like a very large magnifying glass. I was blind to everything around me so I was surprised to see both Ian and Darcy behind me as I stuck my key in the outer door. Ian I understood, but Darcy? Why was he following me?
“I’m home now. You can both calm down.”
Darcy made a face and Ian stepped into me. “Good night, darling. I’ll see you tomorrow night for dinner.” Then he planted a stiff kiss on my lips and handed me my bags.
“Yes, tomorrow,” I murmured.
“You okay?” Darcy said with absolutely no tact whatsoever, right in front of Ian.
For some reason his bluntness hurt even more. The pain I was feeling multiplied by a thousand.
I didn’t understand anything I was feeling which was precisely why I needed to get inside. I needed to sit and feel and try to make sense of all this emotion.
“I had mimosas at lunch with Margaret. I think that was a poor choice.” And then I stepped inside and shut the door.
* * *
I stripped naked and grabbed my paints, spilling red and black onto the canvas. At first all I could see was pain.
Pain. It was red and thick. It was everywhere. And then I mixed in the black until I surrounded the red. The darkness. Me. I was darkness. I was small and scared and a million unworthy things.
I’d heard Jenni’s praise and believed it, but Ian was right. Of course she said those things. Her job was to get me ready for the opening. She needed a happy, hopeful artist to sell those canvases, not that she needed to worry. Apparently my show would sell out no matter what.
But she’d also said those tickets were bought by real people. I’d sold out that show on the power of my own marketing.
Didn’t I?
The two halves of my brain were at war and I didn’t know which one was right. My head and my heart both hurt and somewhere in the middle of it all, I cracked. Just a little. Just enough to feel those first cravings I hadn’t felt in nearly two years.
I wanted relief. Sweet relief.
Moments like this were when I felt the most insane. It was like I didn’t know what was real and what was fake—as if my mind weren’t capable of sifting through the available information to find the truth.
And that hurt.
It made me doubt everything I thought I knew.
I was an artist, but not a very good one. Just good enough to get by with some marketing luck and a very rich father, but not good enough to ever warrant any real attention.
I thought my mother loved me. I knew she loved me, but the facts didn’t bear that out. She left and she never came back.
So maybe I didn’t know anything at all.
Maybe my instincts didn’t work. Maybe I broke them.
It was always somewhere lost in this madness between what I thought I knew and the facts I could hold in my hands that the voices would start to call to me from the darkness.
My demons.
Like my painting that scared Mrs. Brighton, they scared me too. That was why I had to paint them. They were loud and vicious, but always accurate. And, most importantly, they offered me the two things I craved most: punishment and relief.
First one, then the other.
At first I would resist the horrible things I thought about myself, but then after a while I’d start to crave the punishment from my mind. Need it to tell me who I was, need it to remind me I was nothing. Then the darkness would offer me relief from my pain and I’d be so grateful for it that I’d take whatever relief it had to offer. Sex was always good but drugs were my preference.
The harder the better.
But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to let the voices scream at me tonight. No matter how real they felt or how true they sounded, I knew they weren’t real. The darkness was a lie. I created that darkness. I let myself walk inside it and it was my mind that told those voices what to say.
And my mind was a liar—trained and molded by my father to make me as obedient and pliant as possible without completely breaking me.
Except that he had.
Maybe that was why he treaded so carefully around me now.
I forced myself to stand in front of the mirror because there was no reminder as strong as the haunted look in my own eyes. I’d taken enough heroin to kill a horse that night. At least that’s what they said. Maybe they were exaggerating.
Maybe they weren’t.
All I knew was that I was willing to do anything to end the pain and the voices in my head.
It was a miracle I was alive. I wouldn’t come back a second time. I knew that. I did.
But the craving…it was strong. It was what I knew—like a habit. My first instinct when the pain rose up inside me was to squash it back down. Even now, two years of therapy later. A kneejerk reaction that had me yearning for something that would kill me.
Luckily I was saved from my mental downward spiral by banging on my door.
“Nicki!” Darcy’s familiar voice sounded muffled as he shouted from the other side. How had he gotten inside my building? Knowing him he’d either charmed his way inside or stolen Theo’s keys. Why, I had no idea. All I knew was that it was midnight and he sounded angry.
“Nicki! I know you’re in there. Open the fucking door.” When I didn’t answer he kept talking. “I’m not leaving. I will stand out here and swear like a fucking sailor and knock down this fucking door until they drag me off.”
The gruffness to his voice, laced with the barely restrained frustration, shocked me. I was frozen right to the spot where I stood.
“I just want to talk to you. I’ll leave as soon as we speak. Please?”
Please? The way he said it…it was sad, maybe?
Knock, knock, knock. “It’s just me, Nicki. I didn’t bring Theo and I won’t ever tell him I came over.” Knock, knock, knock. Like a sad lullaby.
I grabbed my robe and opened the door but didn’t stand aside to let him in.
He was leaned up against the doorframe looking exhausted. His face was smooshed on one side and his dark hair flopped to the other. I hadn’t taken the time to notice his attire earlier on the street, but now I could see that he was wearing jeans, a sweater, and a jacket.
He looked good in a rugged way. Why was I still attracted to him?
“Can I come in?”
“It’s midnight.”
He stood straighter, towering over me. “I don’t care if it’s fucking three in the morning.”
There was that feeling again. The one I couldn’t name earlier when he’d so bluntly asked if I was okay in front of Ian.
I stepped aside.
“Fucking finally,” he grumbled as he stormed past me.
I closed the door and pulled my robe tighter around my naked body as I followed him into my kitchen. He acted as if he belonged in my flat, opening cabinets and putting a kettle on to boil, putting out mugs and tea.
“What are you doing?”
He arched an eyebrow as he glanced back at me over his shoulder. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
Not exactly the answer I was going for. “Why are you making tea, Darcy?”
“Ah, so I’m Darcy again?” He slid off his jacket and slung it over the kitchen table. “Good to know.”
I took a calming breath because somehow this man had managed to barge into my flat and frustrate the hell out of me in less than a minute. “I apologize for the other night. I lashed out at you and shouldn’t have.”
He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. His sleeves were pushed up revealing his forearms. His really muscular forearms.
I swallowed.
“I deserved some of it. Ian is an asshole but I was a jerk.”
“Jerk or not, I should not have said you ruined Theo’s life. You didn’t.”
“I did.”
The hurt and regret in his eyes tugged on my heart. Darcy felt so much about everything that had happened with Theo, which was why I knew underneath everything he was a good man—even if he didn’t want me the way I wanted him.
“Our Father set us all on this train. You just got caught on the wrong tracks at the wrong time.”
His jaw thrust forward. “Let’s not talk about your father right now. That’s not why I’m here.”
I was always on board with removing Father from conversations. “What are you doing here Darcy?”
“You’re not okay.”
I froze again. It was all so unusual and I didn’t know how to react to the way Darcy was treating me. It took me more than a few seconds to formulate a reply and he was staring at me pretty hard by the time I opened my mouth. “I’m fine.”
His brow furrowed and he cocked his head to the side. “Why do you lie to me? What purpose does it serve? I’m not related to you.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I shot back more out of kneejerk reaction than anything else.
The water started to heat in the kettle and Darcy glanced back at it as he spoke. “I get why you both lie to Donald. You tell him what he wants to hear because he doesn’t hear anything else no matter what you say. You do what he asks because you don’t have a choice. I get that part. But I’m not him. And I’m not Theo. You don’t have to pretend to be all right to keep me happy. You don’t care about me at all, so why lie to me? What purpose does it serve?”
“I care about you, Darcy.” The answer was automatic. A lie I had to correct because it was so wrong it hurt.
He didn’t reply and my words hung in the air between us until the kettle whistled. I waited and watched as he poured the water into the mugs and gently tugged on the bags. He took such care and attention to each movement. Then without asking, he rummaged through my cabinets until he found the honey and added that to the hot liquid.
“How do you know I want honey in my tea?” I asked while he stirred.
“I know how you like your tea, Nicki.”
This. It was times like this when I didn’t understand Darcy at all. Why did he know how I took my tea, or for that matter, that I drank tea at all? Why did he care if I was upset earlier, and even if he noticed, why did he feel the need to come back in the middle of the night?
“You confuse the hell out of me, Darcy.”
He grimaced. “I know I do.”
What was that supposed to mean? “Then why do you do it?”
“Because I remember things you don’t,” he growled.
I blinked. “What?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head, swearing at himself before picking up the mug with honey and handing it to me. “Sometimes I forget you don’t remember what happened that night. I say or do things because I live in a different universe than you do.”
He was sad. Very sad. “I’m sorry you saw me like that.”
“I’m grateful everyday that I was there.”
I wondered if I said something while I was high—lashed out at him for what happened in Edinburgh. That would explain his changing moods around me. “What don’t I remember?”
“Quite a lot, actually,” he murmured, his voice strained.
“I’m sorry if I was angry at you. I wasn’t in my right mind.”
“You weren’t angry at me.”
Not Edinburgh then. Perhaps this was just a simple case of trauma. I did such an incredible number on him it was a wonder he bothered to spend any time near me at all.
“Why are you here?” I asked again, this time hoping for more, a clue into what was going on in this confusing man’s head.
He blew on the hot tea, not looking at me, but he did make some grumbling noises about biscuits, then he took a sip. “I was worried Ian had said something that hurt you. The look on your face as you ran away…I couldn’t forget how you looked. I couldn’t sleep.” Then he looked up at me, locking his gaze with mine. “I needed to make sure you were all right.”
He was still watching over me like a big brother. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
For some reason that made me angry. “Don’t tell me how I feel.”
“No, that’s Ian’s job.” He set his mug down and stalked towards me. “Tell me that fucker didn’t say something. Tell me I’m wrong.”
All the training inside me told me to lie. To square my shoulders, throw back my head, and look Darcy in the eye as I said Ian was a perfect gentleman, but the training got lost somew
here between my eyes and Darcy’s. Instead I stood there with a mug in my hands and my mouth hanging open.
He stepped closer. “Tell me, Nicki. Tell me I’m wrong.” There was fire in his eyes…fire and something else. Something I hadn’t seen since that night in Edinburgh.
“I have nothing to say to you.”
He took the final step, towering over me, our bodies a mere inch apart. I could feel his heat and the tension rippling throughout his body.
“Because I’m right.” Then he softened. “You’re upset. When people are upset they talk about it.” He paused, searching my eyes, igniting something inside me I was much better off not feeling. “Talk to me.”
Panic rose up inside me. I hated these feelings because they weren’t reciprocated. When he was close to me like this, passionate and kind, I wanted to rip off his clothes and give myself to him.
But he didn’t want me.
I dropped my gaze to his chest. “I don’t have anything to say.”
His breath deepened in the silence of my kitchen. “Please?”
I closed my eyes, hoping it would somehow protect me. “It was nothing.”
“It’s not nothing if it makes you feel like this.”
You make me feel like this.
Sometimes I thought the things Ian and Father made me feel were a walk in the park compared to the rejection from Darcy.
I stepped back, needing air and space and an alternate universe where being close to Darcy was normal because he loved me as much as I loved him. I set the hot mug on the counter so I wouldn’t spill it. “Why are you here? Why does any of this matter to you?”
He followed me, refusing to give me any space whatsoever. “Because you matter to me.”
I stepped away again. “Stop. Just…stop. I can’t do this.”
“Talk to me? Or let me care about you?” He sounded angry. Why on earth was he angry?
“You had nothing to do with my overdose. You don’t have to watch over me. Let the guilt go.”
His head snapped back as if I’d slapped him. “What? No.” He grabbed my arms, pulling us together. “Nicki, no. I am not here because guilt compels me to watch over you.” He shook me a little. Just enough to get me to look at him. “I’m here because I care about you. I’ve always cared about you.”
