_OceanofPDF

“Did you do the one out front?” He leaned in the doorway. “Break
shit?”
I saw the living space the way a stranger did. Mismatched canvases
covered the walls. Beat-up concrete floor. Shit kitchen. The bed visible on
the other side of the half-wall. He was looking right at it with those damn
eyes.
“That was a bunch of us,” I said. “The stuff on my own is tiny.”
He looked back at me, and I zipped my hoodie, as if that would keep
him from thinking I’d take my clothes off just because we were in
proximity to a bed. Which—I admit—was a temptation. It had been a while
since I’d been around a man I wanted to take my clothes off for.
“So all this…” He waved his hands at the art on the walls. “Some’s
pretty big. It’s not all yours?”
He was looking right at Kira’s painting, of course. A woman sat with
her robe open as wide as her bare legs, straight blond hair covering her face
as she looked down at the nude woman on her hands and knees, eating her
pussy.
Great.
“Friends, mostly. We trade, or buy if we can.”
He was still looking at it and it was making my neck break out in
prickly heat. Did he think I’d bought it? Because I fucking had.
“There’s an iPod on the table by the red chair. Pick something, would
you?”
“Good idea,” he said. “Break the tension around here.”
I laughed nervously, grateful he’d acknowledged what we were both
feeling.
He unbuttoned his jacket and sat in the shitty chair Nerfy had given me
when he moved. I always hoped for free furniture for the studio, because it
could get paint on it, but seeing him there, I wished I had something nicer
for him to sit on.
“You left Wildwood.” He scrolled through my music, making himself
heard from the other side of the wall without raising his voice. “No one
knew why. It was the biggest mystery of the year.”
“Was it?” I called out, because whatever power his voice had wasn’t one
I shared.
“Solve it for me.”
“I smashed my stepmother’s car window with a pattern weight.”