by Chloe Cox
Furious with himself, Jackson jabbed viciously at the ‘14’ button.
“Whoa, man. Chill out,” said Goatee number two.
Jackson turned to face them. He took a moment to look them up and down. Finally he said, “I advise you very seriously to mind your own fucking business. Is that clear?”
The two goatees mumbled something and turned to face forward. Jackson knew he’d regret the outburst later; losing control in any facet of his life wasn’t acceptable to him. But damn it, Ava. And now he’d been torn away by some apparently unmanageable crisis at his company, the place he’d painstakingly built over the last decade, the thing he’d lived and breathed until Ava had come back into his life.
Whatever it was had to be bad. Lillian wouldn’t waste his time on the stupid stuff.
“Come on,” Jackson muttered as the doors closed on twelve.
It was just before the doors opened on 14, ArTech’s floor, that Jackson realized there was something even worse than Ava not remembering: Ava remembering.
And freaking the hell out.
“Fuck!” Jackson said, and pushed his way through the barely open doors, immediately in search of Lillian. Whatever it was, whatever the giant freaking crisis was, he’d damn well better find a way to deal with it within the hour and get back to the woman who made him absolutely insane. Ava’s well documented history of running away from anything approaching closeness, or anytime it looked like she might get hurt—like if the guy she’d just confessed her love to fucking vanished the next morning—gave him more than enough reason for concern. The idea of her waking up under those circumstances, with him gone, caused an actual physical pain in his chest.
Christ, that’s why they call it heartache.
He’d never forgive himself for being so monumentally stupid. Never. Whatever was wrong with ArtLingua had better be worth his time. He found Lillian off in a corner.
“Lillian,” he said tersely, taking her elbow and pulling her out of a group of programmers.
“Jackson, you made it in.” He looked at her. Her voice was slightly sarcastic, but she looked as impeccable as always. Maybe a touch more make up, but softer. There was something about her posture, too, something he hadn’t seen in her in a while. She went on, “What happened to your coat? You look like a ski bum.”
I don’t have time for this.
“What the hell is the emergency, Lillian?”
She smiled brilliantly. “I have something to show you.” And she walked briskly towards her office.
Something to show me?
Jackson wasn’t in the habit of second guessing his COO. It would’ve defeated the purpose of hiring top-tier talent like Lillian, and insulted her skills, besides. So the feeling that gathered in his gut, that told him this was about to be a giant clusterfuck, was both unfamiliar and unwelcome.
Lillian punched in her personal security code and unlocked her office door. She gave him a wicked smile over her shoulder and opened the door.
“See anything unusual?” she asked.
Her office was full of canvases. Beautiful canvases, canvases with some of the most provocative art from the most recent gallery shows. Stuff he had personally scouted out and brought into the conversations about ArtLingua. Stuff that was all on the verge of busting out big, but hadn’t quite yet. The biggest, most impressive piece—the one that dominated every room he’d ever seen it in, including this one—was leaning up against the far wall. It was a kind of controlled explosion of reds and blacks and various mixed media, all of it coming together until you realized it was a crowd, a sea of humanity. It was by a guy named Moreau out of Detroit, and it was Jackson’s second favorite painting. His first favorite was still hidden in the back of his closet at home.
Where Ava was.
“What am I looking at, Lil?” he asked quietly. One thing Jackson was certain of: this did not add up to a crisis.
“I asked Arlene—you know she’s dating the owner of the Borsa Gallery?”
“Yes. Get to the point. What’s the problem?”
Lillian looked at him. She finally seemed to be catching on to the fact that he was in no mood.
“We’ve acquired all of these, on loan, for the ArtLingua launch party. We’ll have them set up next to demonstrations of the functionalities they inspired. And this,” she said, pointing to the big red and black Moreau, “will be the centerpiece. I wanted to show you in person.”
Jackson felt all emotion drain away from him, the way it did before it was replaced by a cold anger. Lillian didn’t look confused that he thought there had been something wrong. She looked satisfied. She wasn’t a woman who made mistakes.
“This is why you called me in?” he asked quietly. “There was no emergency? No problem with the launch?”
“Oh, no,” she said, waving her hand like it was nothing. “I was just excited. I thought you’d be in, actually. I saw that your companion left separately this past weekend, and I just assumed… Why? Is everything ok?”
Jackson closed his eyes. He couldn’t believe he used to think of Lillian’s constant, manipulative games as entertaining. He had looked at is as jousting, the kind of thing where it was satisfying to gain the upper hand. It had never really suited him, but he’d had to try it to find out for sure.
“Arlene’s been working on this for months,” he finally said. “This isn’t new. You know I came here thinking there was some kind of emergency, Lillian, and you know it because you deliberately gave me that impression. Don’t give me any bullshit. And don’t call me again unless there’s an actual goddamned reason.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but one look at Jackson’s face made her think better of it. Jackson stood still for another beat until he was sure he had control of himself. He had a plan. That plan was to get back to Ava and make sure things hadn’t gotten royally screwed up. A terrible feeling had descended upon him, one he recognized from the depths of the childhood he tried not to think about, and that feeling was dread.
Wordlessly, he turned around and headed back toward Ava.
After that, Jackson’s self control was tested mightily. He hopped in a cab, determined to get home as fast as possible, and the cab proceeded to hit every possible type of traffic. Roadwork, a delayed delivery truck, a branch down on some power lines from the weight of the ice. By the time he decided to run the rest of the way, cursing when he stepped in a slush puddle as he jumped out of the cab, he really had been gone for an hour. At least.
Don’t get worked up, Reed. It’s probably nothing.
He managed to calm himself with that thought in the elevator ride up. Right up until he opened the door to his empty apartment.
Ava was gone.
chapter 19
The first time Ava had woken up, warm and safe and cradled in Jackson’s arms, she couldn’t quite believe what had happened. Any of it. Not that she’d run to his apartment, finally driven by fear and desperation and sense that she deserved a shot, and demanded that he…what? That he show her what he had to offer. And holy crap, he had. If it weren’t for the persistent but pleasant aches of various parts of her body, she’d be convinced that what had happened on the roof must have been a dream.
But no, it had been real. The strangest part for Ava was that when she woke up in the middle of the night with a sleeping Jackson wrapped around her, hours after the roof, hours after he’d carried her back to bed and talked her down, hours after they’d fallen asleep together, she still felt the same. Open. Safe. Strong.
Maybe this thing will stick, was the last thing she thought as she fell back asleep.
When she woke again in the morning, however, Jackson was gone. There was only a note: Emergency at work. I’ll be back in an hour.
The most extraordinary part of this whole experience—waking up alone after such an intense night, finding a very brief note—was how much it didn’t bother her. Or rather, didn’t panic her. Didn’t immediately play on her insecurities, or trigger all of her myriad defenses. It wasn’t
ideal, but Ava was sure there had been an emergency, and at some point it became unrealistic that a CEO would be able to just play hooky indefinitely.
Those were all things she would have always known rationally, but actually feeling calm was pretty new to her.
She liked it.
And it gave her plenty of time to settle in and sort herself out. The events of the past week were of the life-changing variety, and she had to make sense of what those changes were.
Her mother was getting married. Her mother was sober. Ellie seemed happy. Ava couldn’t seem to care about her job, which, if she didn’t call in soon with some incredible news, she might very well lose. And then there was Jackson…
Then there was Jackson.
She tried to imagine her reaction to her mother’s announcement if she hadn’t spent all that time with Jackson, if she’d never taken him up on his offer. On her debt. He kept saying she owed him the opportunity to repay her, or something like that, but she’d never gotten an explanation out of him. She hadn’t had time. She’d been…distracted.
There was no way she would even be contemplating calling her mother to offer her congratulations—and an apology—if it hadn’t been for Jackson. None—no chance in hell. Obviously, she hadn’t yet; there were some things that were never going to be easy. But she was thinking about it.
All of these emotions and thoughts and new, frightening ways of looking at things swirled around inside her, brewing up a tempest, until Ava was left with only one stable desire at the furious eye of the storm: she needed to paint.
It was the only way she was going to see things clearly. She hadn’t felt the need to paint like this in…God, she couldn’t remember. But the only time in her life she’d ever felt anything like the way she had while surrendering such control, filled with peace, had been when she was painting.
Ava smiled to herself. She’d only felt full of peace for part of the time on the roof. The rest had been of a different nature. She’d never managed to paint that kind of picture, but with Jackson as inspiration, anything was possible.
Ava froze. Inspiration. That was it. That was undoubtedly, profoundly, wretchedly it. He had inspired her in every possible way. He was still…
Oh God, I said it.
She was alone, but Ava covered her eyes with one hand anyway. No, she was sure. She had absolutely, one hundred percent, told Jackson Reed that she loved him. While curled up against his chest and blissed out beyond all belief on the things he’d done to her, granted, but she had still said it. She had meant it, she had been past the point of keeping stuff like that to herself, and she had said the actual human words, in English, out loud.
“Oh, fuck me,” she said to an empty room.
Ava knew just what she had to do. She scribbled her own terse note on the back of the one Jackson had left, and got dressed.
~ ~ ~
Ava’s crappy apartment building felt both familiar and totally foreign. It simply wasn’t the same after the past few days, and it was hard not to see it with new eyes. She picked her way over the iced-over sidewalks, not surprised in the least that no one had bothered to properly salt the sidewalks in front of the buildings like they were supposed to. It was dangerous, no doubt about it, and just one more piece of evidence that she lived in the only horrible old tenement building that the developers hadn’t gotten to yet. It was probably inevitable that it would become another set of luxury condos, not all that different from the one Jackson lived in, if considerably less expensive. The slum-lord who owned her building was probably just waiting for the zoning commission or a bidding war or one of the many other scenarios made possible by the city’s arcane real estate laws.
Yet this was where Ava chose to live, just so she could have a two-bedroom. Just so she could have a room to paint in. That probably should have clued me in, she thought as she gingerly made her way up the frozen stoop. She stopped to say hi to Jim, the homeless guy who hung out over the heating grate in front of her building. She dropped some change in his cup and waved.
“You have anywhere to go if it gets really bad?” she asked. “They say this cold snap’s going to last another night.”
“I got a place,” he said, blowing into his hands. “Unlocked boiler room. Don’t you worry about me.”
Ava didn’t push it. Jim was famously resistant to what he called “being tied down.” Ava didn’t know much about the guy except that he’d obviously had bad experiences with state services, and he seemed to take responsibility for making sure no one hassled the residents of her building, which she appreciated. Heroin deals were kept to the park a couple of blocks away, at least. He was like the poor man’s doorman. She asked him, “New coat?”
Jim smiled. “Nice, ain’t it?”
“Keep warm,” she said, and pushed her way into the building, dismayed to find that the locks on the building door still hadn’t been fixed. There had been a wave of push-in robberies in the neighborhood over the past few months, and there was nothing more terrifying to a single woman living in the city than the phrase “push-in,” when someone pushed open your door and forced their way in. It was probably foolish to take comfort in the fact that Jim kept his post downstairs, but it was what she had. She made a mental note to have new deadbolts put in on her apartment door, landlord be damned, and thought hard about the cherished studio she was there to see.
The hallway was unheated, and Ava hurried up the three flights of stairs to her apartment, where she’d at least be able to turn the radiator on full blast. When she’d first moved into this place, she’d taken a silly kind of pride in the gritty romanticism of artistic New York poverty. Now it just seemed cold and uncomfortable.
But she did have her studio. And she wouldn’t need the heat for what she had planned, anyway.
She let herself in and looked around as she slowly unwound herself from all her winter gear. Her apartment didn’t really feel like home. It felt like a temporary sublet. She’d never properly decorated or put much effort into making it hers. Except, of course, for the second bedroom, where she painted.
In there, it was a riot of messy, unrestrained color, paints and canvases all over the place. Ages ago, she’d strung up sheets on all the walls and taped them carefully around the one window so she didn’t have to worry about getting paint everywhere, and then she’d taken full advantage of that security. It looked like she’d had a constant paint party for the past few years. She couldn’t help but laugh; it was like she had her own playroom.
And I’ve been terrified to let anyone even know it exists.
Ava wanted to roll her eyes at her own foolishness, but she still felt too raw. Even now, standing in the middle of all of it, she could still feel that familiar anxiety start to come back. Some things wouldn’t change overnight. But she’d come here with a purpose, with the kind of sudden inspiration that she knew to trust, and just because she was starting to get cold feet didn’t mean she could chicken out.
Or run away.
She was definitely determined not to run away ever again. She wouldn’t do that to Jackson, or to herself.
Jackson, who’d already given her so, so much. Ava looked around at her most recent paintings, the ones she’d done just prior to Jackson’s sudden reappearance in her life. They were troubling, but not totally surprising. Lots of splitting, as she thought of it, diametrically opposed color choices, split compositions. And a general sense of claustrophobia, of the world weighing in, of being trapped. They were actually pretty good, but not if you were the person who had painted them. Not if you wanted to be happy.
Holy crap, am I happy?
Ava did the mental equivalent of patting herself down. In the absence of any other evidence, she was going to have to say…yeah. Maybe.
Whoa. How did that happen?
She supposed the pictures told part of the story. The first half, anyway. Ava hadn’t always painted like this. She used to do portraits. Those portraits were always her little love letters to the people she painted,
and to the world at large. They were her fervent attempts to capture the best things she saw in people, and for a while, they’d helped her to feel close and connected to the world around her. But they were also very intensely personal. Ava didn’t know if it was possible to paint the way she wanted to and not reveal so much of herself to the world, but if it was, she hadn’t figured it out, and she was pretty sure she didn’t want to. That was the promise of those paintings: real connection.
So, of course, she’d stopped showing them to people. And then she’d stopped painting them entirely.
But then Jackson had happened.
And now I’m going to start again.
Ava turned on the old, paint-splattered boom box that was her constant painting companion, turned up the equally old Bjork CD she had in there, and started to gather her materials. She was just getting into the groove when she heard the door smash in.
chapter 20
Jackson ran through his apartment, trying to fend off the worst of his thoughts, opening every door, looking insanely in closets and bathrooms, but then he’d seen the note he’d left on the floor on his side of the bed, and he’d realized she probably hadn’t seen it. Not that it necessarily would have made a difference, if she were freaking out over having told him she loved him. But he might have felt less guilty.
No. There was nothing that was going to make him feel better—not now. Ava Barnett had run away from him again. He had lost her. Again.
“No,” he said aloud in his now lonely apartment. “Fucking…no.”
This was not happening again. It couldn’t.
Jaw clenched tight, he methodically called her cell phone. He’d only recently gotten the number, as though that made any goddamn sense. Yes, he thought viciously, I’ll trust you to tie me up and fuck me, but giving you my phone number is a big step.
