Chapter 1
ONE
STERLING
Four months ago
Adjusting my noise cancelling headphones over my ears, I keep my attention focused on the pavement beneath my feet then turn left onto 52 Street, which leads back towards my apartment in the heart of Brooklyn. The open plan loft has bare brick walls, a raised area where my bed is situated, kitchen, bathroom and, more importantly, there’s another room on the top floor of the building with floor to ceiling windows that bring in lots of light, making it perfect to rent out as a studio to create my art.
Since leaving the picturesque English town of Princetown a month ago, I’m finally beginning to feel as though I’ve found a place I fit, but perhaps not in the way you might think. In Brooklyn, everyone is too busy with their own lives to be interested in what the heir to a billion pound fortune is up to. I can disappear here. No one gives a shit about my family name, my father’s money, or the fact that I have synesthesia, which is both a blessing and a curse.
A blessing because it enables me to express myself through art, a curse because every time I hear music, or more specifically, someone singing, I have this desperate need to paint and can’t stop until the piece is done. Ten hours, twenty-four hours, days even, it doesn’t matter. I’ll barely give myself a moment to take a piss, and throw back some water, let alone eat. I’m in this indescribable place where nothing but putting colour to canvas is important. I’m just a vessel for the art to flow through, like the music notes that tantalise my ears and fuck with my senses, which is why I have to wear noise cancelling headphones and listen to white noise on a loop when I’m not holed up in my loft in blissful, soundproofed silence.
Sound is as vibrant as Brooklyn itself, and I learnt very quickly upon arrival that if I were to survive here I’d have to protect myself from the incredible array of music pouring out of every bar, night club, shop, and street corner where buskers perform daily. Occasionally, however, I spot someone singing and I remove my headphones, close my eyes and just listen .
And fuck me, the sensation is always immediate and overpowering.
With my eyes shut, and my fingers twitching, desperate to grab hold of my paintbrush, I become someone else entirely. No longer me, I become more . I become a vessel through which magic flows, a body filled with colour, with sound, with light and dark, with pain and elation, with suffering and freedom.
I get a physical reaction as much as a mental and emotional one. I feel the notes seeping into my skin, flooding my veins, travelling through my bloodstream with every frantic, overstimulated heartbeat. Musical notes reform into startling swathes of colour, the singer’s voice exploding into violent paint strokes behind my eyes. Then a kind of magic descends, and I can see the artwork begin to form with every rapid fluttering, frantic, throbbing of my pulse. Each note is a metaphorical dip of my paintbrush into colour, reshaping, twirling, swirling into glorious, painful, all-consuming, delirious art.
In those moments, as I allow myself to listen, I become obsessed. I fall deeply in love with the sound, the voice, but mostly, the mesmerising, mind-altering colour . I’m both trapped and wholly, and completely free. My body trembles, my jaw grits, my bones rattle, my cells spark and alight.
Then, as the last notes linger in the air, other sounds filter in, adding more stimulation to an already overstimulated brain. It’s in that moment, as the music is replaced with everyday sounds, that an unknown force drives me back to my loft to paint. Overcome with the need to purge myself of the colour swarming in my head and onto the canvas, immortalising it forever.
Nothing else matters.
Not the grumble of my belly needing sustenance. Not the lonely ache in my chest for companionship, understanding, acceptance, and certainly not the buzz of my phone in my back pocket telling me my father has called me for the fiftieth time that week. No doubt in an attempt to guilt-trip me, or bully me into returning home. All that matters is my need to paint.
It’s all that has ever mattered.
Art is freedom, expression, hope. My neurodiversity, a colour-splattered palace I never want to escape from.
For years my father tried to cure me of my ‘sickness’, his words not mine. He spent thousands of pounds on private healthcare, on endless hours of therapy, and when that didn’t work he’d try to use cruel words to drive the so-called sickness out of me.
I’m everything he hates.
I’m different.
Unable to shape me into the perfect son, my father made my life a misery. Divorcing my mother a year ago was his final attempt at breaking me. He knows that she’s the only person who truly understands the real me. Her love has always been a grounding force that has kept me from falling headfirst into depression. To her my uniqueness is a gift, something that should be nurtured, encouraged, welcomed .
She was the one who gave me my first set of paintbrushes and paint. She was the one who stood me in front of a blank canvas as a young boy and pressed her lips against my ear whispering to me those sweet words I’ve never forgotten.
“You’re father is wrong. You have a gift. So when it all becomes too overwhelming, paint, my darling. Paint what you hear, what you feel. Embrace who you are. Embrace the music and the colour it fills your existence with. You are loved. I love you. Trust in that. Always.”
But for my father, my existence is nothing but a curse. My paintbrush, the blade he never wanted his son to yield. I’m a disappointment, an embarrassment.
Well, fuck him.
Fuck that man and everything he stands for.
Fuck that person he wants to mould me into.
Fuck that life.
So here I am, focussing on the ground beneath my feet, thousands of miles away from home as I traverse through a crowd of people, most of them heading out for a night dancing at the clubs, or drinking at one of the bars that line the streets. Unlike them, I walk against the tide, heading back to my loft for a night of solace, needing those moments of silence to regroup, to recentre myself until I’m ready to remove my headphones once again and fall into a world where only colour exists, and my soul is free to express myself with art.
“Look where you’re going, asshole!” a burly fucker shouts as he shoulders into me, knocking my headphones off as he passes by.
“Fuck,” I grunt, shoved sideways as a sudden flood of sound bombards my ears as the prick strides off, giving me the middle finger as a parting shot.
I open my mouth to curse his retreating back, but the words don’t come. Instead, my spine snaps straight and a cascade of goosebumps covers my flesh as a haunting voice rises above the tide of Brooklyn’s orchestra and floods my senses, swamping my vision with a dazzling array of colour. Bright red pulses at the corners of my vision, blurring into burnt orange and sun yellow, narrowing into a pin-prick of virgin white, teased and tormented by swirls of cerulean blue, and damask pink that bubbles outwards, consuming a velvety purple. Ripples of colour form and reshape, constantly moving, ever shifting and changing form.
“Christ!” I exclaim.
Unable to move, my discarded headphones forgotten, I find myself stuck in a vortex of stimulation that batters every part of my mind, body and soul. I’m vaguely aware of thunder rumbling overhead, the humidity caused by a long week of scorching late August sunshine finally making way for a cooler few days. Rain begins to fall, and the squeals of laughter and shouts of surprise barely register as people rush past me for shelter from the sudden deluge.
I’m drenched in seconds, my headphones shunted across the pavement by another passerby as my mouth parts on a guttural moan.
Who the fuck is that?
A woman, definitely.
I’ve heard, and dissected enough voices that I’m pretty certain I’m correct. The pitch and intonation is uniquely feminine, it’s bone-achingly chilling. Fuck, her voice is both light and angelic, yet rich and smooth, darkly devilish. It’s a catastrophe of possession, a cacophony of emotion, a symphony of sound that engulfs every single part of me.
My reaction is bone-deep, and I feel my body vibrate with the uniqueness of her voice. It’s a voice that’s so pure, so filthily perfect that the delicate notes, the soft, sultry cadence is like a beacon of light drawing my attention like a comet ripping through the pitch black of night.
I don’t hear the words, yet I feel them, I see them, translated into a language only I can comprehend. Perfect notes of colour trip through my nervous system, making my skin itch and my cock ache with a mixture of intense pleasure and indescribable pain.
Blinking back the flood of colour, I take a drunken step towards the sound, following it towards a dark alleyway caught between two tall brick buildings. My palm slaps against the rough brick as I force air into my lungs, bracing myself against the overwhelming desire to seek out the owner of such a voice. I sway on my feet. I become rock hard, brutally turned on, mindless with need, the need to seek out the owner of such an incredible voice, the need to paint, and more surprisingly, the sudden overwhelming need to fuck.
Never in my life have I had that kind of reaction, so uniquely sexual. It pulses low, a heady feeling that makes my cock ache. Around me, the colours are so bright, so vital, so vivid and pulsing and alive, and try as I might I can’t find it within myself to search for my headphones and replace them back over my ears to block out the sound.
It’s too late now anyway. I’m already too far gone.
With colours weaving and twisting at the corners of my vision, I stumble towards a red neon light blinking up ahead.
Smokey Joe’s it says.
I don’t know anything about the place, but I can guess well enough that it’s an establishment on the seedier side given the hidden, tatty entrance, and rough-looking doorman who looks like he’s just snorted several lines of coke.
“Evening,” the doorman drawls as I approach, eyeing me with disdain, his sneer doing nothing to put me off from entering. Neither does the thick smoke that seems to roll out of the entrance like mist across the ocean.
Tethered as I am to an invisible force pulling me towards her, I’m helpless against the need to lay eyes on the woman whose voice is a leash of colour drawing me forwards.
“Evening,” I mutter in response, my voice hoarse as my gaze flicks behind him and into the darkened hallway beyond. Pulses of colour gather motion as the faceless stranger with the voice of a fucking angel continues to sing somewhere deep inside the club.
The doorman lifts a brow, his sneer turning into a knowing smile. “You high?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Are you?”
“No,” he scoffs, very clearly fucking high.
“Then neither am I.”
Which is debatable, frankly. I might not have inhaled coke or downed Molly, but I sure as fuck feel as though I have. I’m wired. Alert in a way I haven’t been in so long. The doorman nods, giving me another once over, before shrugging and stepping aside.
“Knock yourself out.”
I don’t bother to reply as I step over the threshold, shoving a twenty dollar bill at the woman seated behind the entrance kiosk as payment for entry. She eyes me with interest, but I barely take in her features let alone mumble a response as she grabs my hand and stamps it with black ink.
“Enjoy!” she trills, her voice lost beneath the pounding of my heart and the throbbing colour, pulsating all around me.
Ripping off my beanie hat, I cram it into the back pocket of my jeans and swipe a shaky hand through my rain-slicked hair, then stalk towards the top of the stairs that leads to the caverness well of noise. Even though her voice is fucking angelic, I feel as though I’m about to step into Hell despite the colour wrapping around me in ribbons of kaleidoscopic light. How can something so beautiful feel so deadly? My heart skips in warning. A voice somewhere deep inside tells me not to enter, to turn around, to leave, that whoever this voice belongs to is someone who’ll be the death of me.
“Fuck,” I mutter, barely able to hang on to my motor functions let alone my ability to think straight or make a cognisant decision.
I’ve never been more affected. Grossly overwhelmed. Utterly consumed. I know myself enough to know that this is going to end in one of two ways. A week from now, I’m either going to be covered head to toe in splatters of paint, a masterpiece on canvas before me, my body exhausted, my soul momentarily free, or I’m going to be surrounded by a mess of unfinished canvases, unable to capture what I see, frustrated, overwhelmed, trapped, fucking depressed.
Neither outcome prevents me from descending into the bowels of the club as I step into Hell, or perhaps it’s Heaven, depending on how you look at it. Either way, my body makes the decision for me as I trip down the stairs and stumble into the club.