Chapter Twenty-Three
MILA
The studio doors creaked when I pushed them open—same old hinges, same hollow sound echoing off the light wood floor. The building smelled of turpentine and old memories. Today it wrapped around me, a second skin that clung close in familiarity. Comforting. Dangerous.
The lights were half off—motion-sensor sensitive—so the hallway glowed in patches, casting long shadows between each frame lining the wall. I moved through them slowly, fingers grazing the smooth plaster as if touching the space might slow my heartbeat.
From somewhere deeper in the building, muted voices carried—other artists working in another room. But not here. Not in the room with windows that framed the ocean I was most drawn to. The one I’d left behind.
Elise’s voice wouldn’t leave me. “I had him before you—and after.” Every time I replayed Luke’s kiss, it threaded through. Poisoning the memory. He kissed me like I was the only thing that mattered. But what if it was the same with her too? Was I just another distraction for him?
Thinking that way was what Elise wanted. Screw her. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. She’d taken up enough space in my head. I was in the studio for a reason, and she did not belong here.
I froze when my gaze settled on a row of oil paintings. Many of them were mine. Shock rooted me in place that they were still there.
They hadn’t been moved. Or replaced. Just… there. Tucked among newer ones, older ones. I could pick mine out easily. Rich colors, bold lines, as if I’d bled onto the canvas and didn’t know how to stop.
I paused in front of one I’d done of a stormy sea, my fingers tracing the lines I knew by heart, and the past cracked open, rolling through my mind, echoing the thunder outside.
Indigo bled into cerulean, rippling across the canvas, veins frozen beneath ice.
I’d swept the brush lower, where a jagged slash of white broke through the darker blues—a foaming crest, violent and alive.
I’d added hints of gray, deepening the shadows beneath the waves until the water churned with motion.
With each stroke, the sea clawed higher, angry and aching, and still that tiny boat—my boat—tilted into the storm.
It didn’t take a genius to know what it meant. That boat was me. Tossed. Isolated. Barely staying afloat.
This was the only place I’d ever felt safe enough to bare everything inside me without fear of it being used as a weapon. Until him.
Here, the past was too close, and because of that, my mind tripped back to a time when warmth wrapped my waist, his chest pressed to my spine. Then scratchy stubble grazed my neck. I jolted a little, a laugh bursting out before I could help it.
“Luke,” I said on an exhale, trying to squirm away. “That tickles.”
His arms tightened. He nuzzled the hollow beneath my ear, lips brushing over my skin, a quiet promise in the contact. “I thought you liked when I tickled you.”
I leaned back into him anyway. “I thought you had a family thing?”
Late afternoon sunlight spilled through the studio’s massive windows, painting the floor in gold hues.
I stood in front of the easel, facing the wide-open view beyond—the glittering stretch of sand, the skeletal curve of the boardwalk, and just past all that, the ocean I was trying to capture. Feral and endless. Familiar.
“I do,” he murmured.
His lips skimmed my neck again, trailing lower. I shivered. My paintbrush clattered to the table beside me, forgotten, landing in a mess of blues and grays and saltwater.
“I did. Don’t care. Not going.”
I turned my head, just enough to see him in the edge of my vision—windblown hair, cheeks flushed, eyes lit up as though he already knew how dangerous this was. How dangerous I was. But he didn’t care. That was the problem. Or maybe the miracle.
“Luke—” I started.
He spun me gently until I faced him. His fingers ghosted over my paint-splattered tank top, tracing where the fabric clung to my ribs.
“You looked like you were painting something that was pulling you under.” His gaze flicked to the canvas. “So I figured you might need a lifeline.”
A breath hitched in my throat. He said things—soft, reckless words—that left bruises in their absence.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I rose on my toes and kissed him—quick, salty, paint-scented. Because I couldn’t say what I wanted to. Couldn’t promise what he needed. Not when I already knew I was the storm.
I blinked back into the present, the past leaving like an old friend slipping through the doorway, and I swallowed hard.
The hallway pulsed with silence, broken only by the soft buzz of overhead lights and the echo of his voice in my head.
The ache clawed up my spine before I could bury it.
We’d almost had everything, until we didn’t.
And now? There was so much distrust between us, and rightfully so—every step forward wading through quicksand.
I needed space. Movement.
The shared studio was still open, dimly lit but quiet—no one else inside. Thank God.
I crossed to the lockers in the back corner, the ones artists claimed but never really owned. Mine sat third from the end, a streak of dried paint on the edge that could’ve been anyone’s—except I knew it was mine. I’d bled indigo there once. From shaking hands. From not knowing how to stop.
I hesitated, fingers hovering over the lock. The combo came to me before I asked for it. Muscle memory. One right. Two left. One right again. Click. The door creaked open, and air whooshed out of me so fast I had to grip the metal to keep from sinking.
Everything was still here.
Sketchbooks stacked in uneven piles. Half-used tubes of oil paint. A sweatshirt I'd left behind with his last name and hockey number printed on the back. A tin of graphite pencils I hadn’t touched since the last time I drew Luke asleep on my couch. Messy. Barefoot. Home.
They hadn’t cleared it out. No one had cut the lock or claimed the supplies. I hadn’t been erased. I’d been… preserved.
Did he do this? Did Luke make sure they left it untouched?
The idea twisted through me—half agony, half comfort. He was the only one who ever made me feel seen and cared for this way. As though I was more than the hurricane in my blood. Like I could be known and still wanted.
And that was the most dangerous thing of all.
Because this ended. It always ended. When my mom lost control, when her schemes unraveled, when whatever tower she built herself into crumbled—she dragged us with her. And we ran.
She made a game of it when I was little. Pretended we were spies escaping danger, choosing new names, new houses, new lives. But that illusion shattered years ago. Now I just braced for the end of whatever place I managed to carve out.
And this place with Luke? It was never built to survive the blast.
I rested my forehead against the cool metal of the locker, fingers still gripping the edge. I’d promised myself I would never come back here. And yet here I was. Still chasing dreams. Still painting storms. Still wishing for a different ending.
My eyes fell to the pile of tubes stacked in the locker—dried caps, labels smeared with fingerprints I recognized as my own. Graphite tins, familiar brushes, half-crushed rags stiff with old color. Supplies I’d abandoned, still waiting. Still mine.
Before I could think better of it, I scooped up a handful—burnt umber, French ultramarine, titanium white—and carried them to the nearest easel.
The sweatshirt with Luke’s name still hung over my shoulder, paint-stained and familiar.
The smell of turpentine rushed up the second I twisted a cap, thick and sharp, like no time had passed.
The first stroke dragged shaky across the canvas. Then steadier. A sweep of blue, darker at the edges, pulling me under. My hands remembered even if my head didn’t want to. Motion took over thought. Shadows. Light. The bones of another storm clawed to life in front of me.
I painted until my breath evened out, until the ache in my chest dulled to something manageable. For a flicker of a second, the canvas didn’t look like survival—it looked like possibility. Like I could keep doing this. Make it mine.
The thought scared me more than the truth about my mom. More than Elise. Because wanting a future meant admitting I believed in one.