29. Chapter 27
Emery
A warehouse?
This is not at all what I was expecting Darcy’s space to be. Honestly, I thought I was headed to an art gallery, but that’s stupid, right? Why would he be creating his art in a gallery? He’d need a studio.
I just hadn’t expected it to be in a rundown red-brick warehouse, in an industrial area, with trucks coming and going from other buildings.
There is a blast of a truck horn, and I jump, stepping farther onto the sidewalk, even though I was in no danger of being run over.
The strap of my backpack is cutting into my hand from how hard I’m strangling it, the weight of it on my back isn’t as comforting as it usually is, the lack of my sketchpad and graphite still causing me pain.
The journaling session helped a little. And I ended up adding in sketches around the words when it felt like the words weren’t enough. But even those little inked-in pictures barely scraped the surface of my need to draw. To express myself.
But it’s fine. Today is a new day. Derek said he would check the apartment again, and it’s not like I can’t buy myself new supplies. I have the art store gift card. I can start again. It was just a sketch pad.
And maybe I could do an occasional dinner date with another daddy or mommy or something, just to give me a little spending money. Like Oakley. Something purely platonic, where my feelings and emotions won’t get all twisted up. And eventually, I’ll get paid for this modelling gig with Darcy.
Everything is going to be fine.
I want to stop this heavy-heart feeling from ever happening again. At first, I thought the constant, almost-sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was a side effect of the concussion. But the headache hasn’t made itself known today, and yet I still feel sick.
It’s like I’m in withdrawals or something, but I can’t quite kick the habit because just as it starts to get better, one of them pops back into my life.
I can’t keep doing this. I’m way more invested in this relationship—ex-relationship—than I should be.
It hadn’t even been that long. Like, what, a month?
And for most of that, they weren’t even with me.
This was supposed to be a hit-it-and-quit-it situation, except they kept adding more and more, and I couldn’t say no. They made me crave them. They got me hooked and addicted, and now I’ve got to find a way to put myself back together while the temptation sits there, staring back at me.
It’s not fucking fair. Why won’t they just cut me loose?
Maybe I need to cancel this thing with Darcy. It’s not like he won’t be able to find another model. I’m sure he could ask his agent, and she’d snap her fingers and produce a girl out of thin air or something.
The craving I have for them makes my chest ache at the thought of cutting off even this platonic contact.
It’s fine. I’ll see how it goes. If he pushes me in any way, I’m out. I’m done. I’ll email whatever-her-name-is and cut ties. No money has been sent my way, so it’s an easy thing to cancel.
My sneakers feel like they are magnetized to the sidewalk as I make my way past the loading dock and over to the ramp that leads up to the front door. Just as I get to the top, it swings open, and for one heart-stopping second, I think it’s Darcy. But it’s not.
A super lanky, hipster-type guy comes bustling out, pulling on some headphones, and gives me an up nod as he passes, eyes ablaze with the remnants of what I recognize as a creative fever.
His floppy-beanie-covered head disappears around the corner before I’ve finished catching my breath, and I’m back to questioning if I’m in the right place.
Darcy never mentioned that he shared space with other people.
I push through the door and am immediately assaulted with more smells than I can handle. Turpentine. Clay. Acrylic paint. Some sort of glue, maybe? And a hard, acidic smell I’ve never encountered before. And noise. There are at least three kinds of music playing and even more conversations.
As I adjust to the sudden shift from the concrete wasteland outside to this vibrant clash of everything, I look around the foyer, which has art everywhere.
The building has all unpolished wood, with high rafter ceilings, exposed brick, sectioned-off spaces to give privacy, and then huge sheets of glass form walls in other areas. It’s a creative co-op.
Blood pounds through my veins, and I feel slightly lightheaded in a good way.
This space is so alien, so unlike what I was expecting.
Except not. It’s everything I have ever dreamed of my creative space being.
My studio, where I’m able to lose myself completely and just let the art out. Be the tool it needs to create itself.
My gaze slams into an absolutely massive painted canvas to my right that is easily two stories tall, almost reaching the ceiling of the foyer, but not the ceiling of the main section of the warehouse.
It looks like someone took several massive buckets of paint and drip-poured them all over the white canvas, creating a riot of splattered color.
Something about it calls to me, and I shuffle in that direction.
It feels familiar. Like I should know its name, but I know I’ve never seen it before.
I try to count each of the colors but keep getting distracted by how the dots have merged together here and there.
Does that mean they were still wet when the next layer was dropped on?
Or were they all poured at the same time? But how would someone even do that?
“What do you think?”
Heat flows up my spine as Darcy’s words penetrate the bubble I formed around myself while I admired the piece in front of me. Even though he isn’t touching me, isn’t even standing all that close, his presence behind and to my side makes my insides ache.
I take a shuddering breath before I answer. “It’s…ah, what do you mean?”
He raises his arm and gestures up and down at the painting, the dark shadows of his tattoos appearing in my view. “When you look at it, what do you see? What do you feel?”
Shifting, I try to look at him from the corner of my eye, but he is staring up at the canvas like this isn’t the first time we’ve actually had a conversation since I posed nude for his art class.
And then just for him. That the last time we were in each other’s presence, I didn’t let him fuck me where anyone could have found us.
“Um, it’s obviously colorful,” I start, and he responds with a noise that is part amused and annoyed.
“And, I mean, it’s chaotic, right? My first thought was that it’s a riot, like the paint fell onto the canvas without any guidance.
Just dripped from somewhere. The drops are too round to have been thrown, so they must have fallen straight down. ”
This time, the noise he makes is more appreciative, so I keep going, not really sure why I feel the need to explain my interest in this art to him.
I raise my arm and point at a section of splatters that have run into each other.
“Those colors have run together, so they must have been dripped at the same time, but the more you look, the more you can see overlap, and it becomes less and less clear which colors were poured first. So, yeah, it’s chaos, beautiful, captivating, but still chaos.
Kind of like a scream that is filled with all a person’s emotions. ”
I clamp my mouth shut on that last bit, and it’s my turn to stare at the canvas and pretend he isn’t staring at me. There is a light brushing of skin against the back of my hand, and it shoots a bolt of electricity up my arm, causing me to quickly snatch it away.
Turning, I glare up at him and find his dark brown eyes overflowing with things I refuse to see there. “I know that you are going to need to touch me to position me for your poses, but you don’t have permission to touch me outside of our sessions.”
Something flickers through his eyes so quickly, I don’t catch what it is, but his features lose some of their warmth as he raises both hands in the air. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure if you were going to show up this morning, and I forgot, for a moment, that you aren’t mine anymore.”
My throat locks up so tightly, it’s almost like someone reached up from my chest and is strangling me from the inside.
Not his anymore?
I was never his. Not really. It was all temporary. And now it’s over.
Breaking eye contact, I gesture in the direction of the warehouse. “Can we get this over with, please?”
For several seconds, Darcy doesn’t move and we stand there, awkwardly, but I don’t look at him again, instead concentrating on the grains in the wood floor.
“This way,” he mutters as his paint-splattered sneakers shift and start to walk away from me.
With one final glance back at the painting, I follow Darcy to what is surely going to be two hours of utter torture.