The Artistry of Love

by C. J. Scarlett

  So much had happened since then. But I was still that girl. I had just learned a lot of hard truths about the world. More importantly, though, I had found someone to stand beside me. Someone who cared about my thoughts and my opinions. Someone who didn’t want to control me. Someone who would allow me to be me.

  As we walked back to our room, I looked over at him. I could never stop looking at him, and not just because he was beautiful. When I looked at Atik, I finally saw somewhere that I belonged. I knew that when I was by his side, I didn’t want or need to be anywhere else.

  “I love you,” I said. I couldn’t say it often enough.

  “I love you,” said Atik, turning around to me and leaning down, tracing his lips over mine as he tangled his fingers through my curls. I closed my eyes and breathed in softly as those lips trailed down, tracing a path along my jaw and my throat, finally coming to rest at that sweet spot on my chest that he knew drove me crazy. Then I felt his fingers undo the closures of my jumpsuit, and a chill crept along my skin as it was exposed to the cool air.

  Atik eased back onto the furred bedding, pulling me down with him. I smiled gently, laying my hand on his cheek as I stared deep into his eyes, still unable to believe that I had been so lucky to find him in all the trials and tribulations. Sometimes, I still thought I was only dreaming. But no… this was no dream. No dream could feel like this, I told myself as his hands reached up to touch my bare skin, to cup my breasts, and tease my nipples, sending shockwaves through my body.

  I made my way astride him, and eased myself down, feeling him push inside me. Then holding his hands, I moved, building up a rhythm, slow at first, then faster and faster…

  “You’re everything,” I said as I rode him. “You’re everything that I ever wanted.”

  He was my light in the darkness. He was my heart. But more than anything, he was the thing that had brought me out of the depths when I had most needed a way out. He had given me a reason to finally realize that it was all right to love myself. How could I not love the thing that he loved so much? I knew that things wouldn’t always be easy. I knew that challenges still awaited us. Things hadn’t turned out the way we thought they would. But whatever happened, we could keep on fighting, because we had each other.

  I had been through so much, but with Atik by my side, I was healing.

  Spark

  Flames of Freedom (Prequel)

  C.J. Scarlett

  ***

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  Chapter 1

  Diego was late. Andrea knew what that meant, though she didn’t like admitting it, not even in her head to herself. She was in the restaurant. They never celebrated Valentine’s Day in February. The three years they’d been dating, they agreed it was something of an atrocious holiday invented by the candy and card companies to squeeze pennies out of people stuck in their honeymoon phase and people who were a little too lonely for their own good. So, they decided to do what any rebellious college kids would do—make a passive-aggressive statement.

  They celebrated in June when they could actually enjoy the weather. Diego always made the argument that they could actually sit on a restaurant patio and not worry about the slush getting on their shoes from the recent snowfall that always seemed to center itself around the middle of February.

  And now Diego was late. The restaurant was expensive and it had taken them several tries to get reservations after some couple finally gave up their table. Andrea liked to think they broke up or one of them tragically was shipped off to some other country. She’d managed to come up with the whole plot of it just by sitting there waiting, the water level in her glass getting higher and higher as the ice melted. She’d held off on ordering wine for fifteen minutes before she broke and got herself a glass. And then another.

  She checked her phone. Nothing. Part of her wanted to be worried. She wanted to believe something might be wrong. It was an awful way to think. She hated herself for it. But it was better than all the alternatives running through her head: some blonde bitch with her legs spread for him. She’d rather him hurt in a ditch than fucking another woman. That was love, right?

  She finished her third glass of wine and her patience wore thin. It was logged with California’s most expensive merlot because he’d given her his credit card to put collateral down on the reservation, like an idiot. Now he just paid forty-five dollars in glasses of wine alone. That was before she would order the caviar appetizer.

  “Anything to eat yet, ma’am?”

  She could tell the waiter was getting agitated. He paced back and forth and she could feel his eyes on her from wherever he stood across the room. He’d started with several tables to distract him from watching her like a hawk. But the longer she waited, the more the others began to shuffle out and he was left to notice just how long it was taking her date to arrive. Sorry, my boyfriend is an irresponsible fuck apparently, was what she wanted to say. She wanted the attention off her. Diego’s inability to show up anywhere on time recently wasn't her fault.

  “Caviar, please,” she said, punctuating her request with a loud pop as her lips connected with the glass and sucked down what was left. “And another glass.”

  “Right.”

  Little did he know she would tip him a horrendously large amount, thanks to Diego’s Capital One card tucked neatly into her clutch. This wasn’t the first time in the past few weeks he’d stood her up, but it was the last straw. This restaurant was expensive, the reservations had been hard to get. And now she was sitting here, nearly an entire bottle of wine deep by herself and she hadn’t even ordered appetizers yet.

  At the bar, there was a ruckus going on and she assumed it was something to do with the local sports team doing poorly or well. She didn’t care. Diego liked to wear a Lakers hat even though he’d never once been to a game, even when they came to play all the way out in their city. He liked screaming at the TV in bars and high-fiving strangers when something good happened, and they all spent way too much money on rounds of drinks for the table.

  Maybe he was doing that now; he got carried away with his plans to meet up with the guys and got too invested in the game, too drunk to meet her. She’d kill him for that too.

  She looked over at the TV and, instead of ESPN or some other awful sports channel with an acronym she didn’t know the meaning of, she saw the news up and on. A giant banner across the top flashed that the news was BREAKING and that a frantic reporter on the screen spoke fast into her microphone.

  “Turn that shit up,” someone yelled. “The captions are off.”

  The bartender unmuted the TV and turned up the volume to rival the jazz music that had been playing overhead in the restaurant proper. Andrea lazily turned in her chair, deciding to devote her attention to something other than the elderly couple in the corner constantly looking at her with pity all over their faces.

  “The store owner says the vandals wore Shifter Alliance logos on the ski masks, demanding every emergency road flare he had to sell. No word yet on what the motive was or the plan for the use of the flares, but police are on high alert for two suspects. Both are believed to be male in their mid to late twenties standing between six feet and six feet four inches. If anyone has any information on them, please contact the number below. Meanwhile…”

  Andrea tuned out. It was more of the same garbage political crap clogging the airwaves. Shifters this and shifters that. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on the situation, especially when Andrea didn’t care. Shifters existed, terrorists existed, neo-Nazis existed. There were all sorts of bad seeds in the world and she wouldn't get herself worked up over a group of people she’d never come in contact with.

  She’d never known a shifter, though she had heard a rumor in high school that Karen Gryke had been one, some kind of wolf shifter. She’d never talked to the girl and never seen it for herself; most shifters kept that part of their identity a secret. Though, if whatever fucking bill everyone was talking about rec
ently went through, they’d all be wearing big bright signs identifying them on the street.

  Andrea finished her wine and conceded that Diego wasn't coming and he wasn’t planning on calling, so she asked for the check and the filet mignon to go. She would track him down and eat it in front of him.

  #

  She banged down on Diego’s door, the doorman letting her into the apartment building. He’d seen her plenty of times going in and out with Diego, but she wasn’t discounting the effect her deep-neck shirt had on revealing her cleavage. She’d worn it for Diego, but willing to use it wherever she needed to if that was the case. Maybe she’d give the security guard something to think about when he was alone tonight, just to get back at him.

  Now there was no answer on the door.

  “Diego!” she shouted. “You asshole, open the damn door right now!”

  She heard a shuffle inside the apartment. If the door didn’t open in five minutes, she was prepared to make a scene that his neighbors would never forget. But she saw something move across the shadow under the door, in the narrow strip of light between the bottom and the ground. She heard several clicks. Diego always had several locks on his door, claiming he thought the crackhead down the hall was stealing from people.

  When he opened the door, Andrea hadn’t expected to see what she did. He was dressed in ratty black sports clothes, his hair a mess. It looked like he’d just come back from playing football and hadn’t taken off all his underclothes. He yanked her in the apartment and slammed the door shut behind her, going back to reattach all the locks he’d just removed.

  “What the hell is going on?” she asked, slamming the to-go box on the table. She tossed the credit card at him. “By the way, thanks for taking me to dinner.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He sounded stressed, but not like he meant it.

  He paced around the apartment, shoving things away. His cleaning spree should have been a sign that something was very wrong. He never cleaned. Not for her at least. She never once saw him exert effort to make his apartment look presentable in the many years they’d known each other. But there he was, shoving things away and out of sight.

  “What is it? Porn? Letters from your secret girlfriend?” she asked, crossing her arms.

  “No, it has nothing to do with any of that,” he said, sounding frustrated.

  “Not giving me much to go on here,” she said. “I’m three seconds from walking out that door again, but somehow I don’t think you’d care.”

  That got him to pause. He turned around with a desperate look in his eyes and dragged his hand down his face, massaging at the muscles there quickly. It didn’t do much. Bags still sat under his eyes and the visible vein in his neck and one in his temple both still throbbed.

  “I would care,” he sighed. “I promise. I’ll explain everything. I just need to make sure things are safe.”

  She felt something dark wax in the pit of her stomach and swallowed a little too painfully. He was scaring her now, rushing around the apartment in his strange clothes, hiding things away. Every time he passed the window, he peeked out of it through the crack in the curtains. The lights were off and three new locks that she’d never seen before now bolted the door shut. Something was very wrong.

  “Diego,” she said, softer.

  But it wasn’t enough to get his attention; instead, he raced around the apartment until every last scrap of what he looked to clean up had been shoved away. That’s when he dropped onto the couch and let out a breath. He ran his hands through his hair, succeeding in only making it messier. It had a sheen of sweat visible, even in the dark tufts sitting on top of his head. Some of it stuck to the base of his neck and behind his ears.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, walking over to him and putting a hand on his shoulder. It was fascinating how quickly she could turn from scorned lover to concerned girlfriend. She cared about him too much for her own good sometimes. She squeezed his shoulder and ran her fingers through his hair, ignoring the ick factor of feeling the sweat gathered all across his head. What had he been running from?

  He didn’t answer but he didn’t have to. Her eyes caught sight of something she was probably never supposed to see, but there it was anyway, sitting out in the open, the one piece of evidence that Diego had missed in his cleanup. A beanie sat on the coffee table. It was small and black, but there was a logo on it she vaguely recognized, though she couldn’t quite place it from how far away she sat. She reached for it before he could stop her.

  Shifter Alliance in red and black and that familiar logo was now suddenly so clear to her. She could feel the blood rushing around in her own head, trying to get control of her spinning brain. She turned to look at him and he stared back at her, pale and terrified.

  “It’s not what you think,” was all he got out to say to her as she got up and moved away, attempting to make a run for the door.

  Chapter 2

  Andrea learned a lot that night that she didn’t know only several hours previous. It was the kind of thing that made her grateful she’d managed to down an entire bottle of wine at her disaster of a date night dinner, but also made her wish she had more.

  “How is this not what I think?” she said, standing up with the hat in her hand. “I heard the news broadcast, Diego.”

  “It wasn’t dangerous, nobody was hurt,” he said.

  She didn’t know what she wanted to focus on first: the fact that her boyfriend missed their date because he was busy robbing a store, or the fact that he was somehow involved with the shifter movement. More than involved. He wore the logo of a known terrorist organization, one linked to some of the most violent shifter extremist activities in history. And according to the news, he’d been stealing road flares, flammables.

  “You have three seconds to explain it to me or I call the cops,” she said, reaching for her phone. He dove across the room in a violent launch, grabbing the phone right out of her hands and yanking it in. She let out a yelp and he shushed her, slapping his hand over her mouth, and she recoiled. He’d never touched her before, never so much as laid a hand on her. But now she could feel the tension rippling underneath. If she didn’t watch herself, she thought he might actually deck her, knock her out, remove the threat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, instantly, pulling his hand away. “It’s been a trying day. I’m sorry. I would never hurt you.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I’m a shifter,” he said. “I think that’s obvious by now. That’s the first secret out in the open.”

  “You mean the first lie,” she said darkly.

  “I never lied. You never asked.”

  “And what about when you said you’d be at the restaurant for dinner?”

  “I thought I would. We got held up.”

  “No, you were holding someone up.”

  She was more than a little proud of that play on words but he looked positively ready to burst with nervous energy. He growled and got to his feet. Taking his frustration out on some old, empty beer bottle instead. It shattered hard against the wall, leaving both a skid mark and a stain from the minuscule amount of beer that had been sitting at the bottom. The pieces fell to the floor, one by one.

  “It wasn’t supposed to go this way,” he said, turning back to her with that pleading voice again.

  “What was the end game, Diego? Were you planning on telling me on our wedding night? When our kids suddenly started sprouting claws or wings or God knows what else?”

  “It’s not like we were engaged,” he said, darkly.

  “I told you I just needed time to think about it; it wasn’t a no,” she said. “And you’re not turning this around on me. You’re wanted for robbery and battery and I’m sure five other things they didn’t say on the news. You didn’t make it to our date. You’ve been lying to me for years—”

  “Okay. I get it. I fucked up.”

  “Do you get it? Do you get how scary this is for me?” It was her turn to stand, her turn to
feel powerful. She got to her feet and walked right up to him, making him seem smaller than he’d ever been before. “I was considering marrying you, Diego. And now I’m finding out everything about you was a lie the entire time.”

  “Was considering?” he parroted back with such hopelessness, she thought she might cry just a little bit but held it in.

  “You think that’s the first thing on my mind right at this moment?”

  “If I can explain it all to you, would you let me? If we sit down—it can be somewhere public. You pick the place, you’re not in any danger—and I can just explain to you what’s been going on. Would you listen?” he asked, taking her hands in his shaking ones.

  She looked at him. It was hard not to see the boy she met all those years ago in school, sitting there in front of her. He’d looked just as vulnerable the first time he asked her out and she had to decline because she’d been dating a boy from her English requirement at the time. But he waited for her with that pining look on his face. He never asked twice. She asked him out the next time.

  She remembered their first date, their second date, several dates in between. She knew Diego was a good person. She knew he had a good heart. How could he not? But people could also change, they could become something terrible or different or wrong. Just look at Voldemort for God’s sake. But she owed him the chance to explain. They’d stuck by each other’s sides for so long, she had to see this through.

  “I’ll give you an hour,” she said. “After that, if I want to disappear, you don’t follow me, you don’t look for me.”

  He looked devastated at the mere idea of it but nodded and said okay. He offered to walk her home, but she vehemently declined. Despite how late it was, how dangerous she knew it could be, she needed the time alone and away. She took the long way back to her apartment, going over several residential streets. It wasn’t the smartest thing she ever did but she needed to work out at least some of the energy or she’d never be able to sleep.