Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
C lay ran.
He ran along the San Francisco streets, pulling down five-minute miles on the flats, seven on the hills. But the punishing pace didn’t work. He was only more worked up, especially when he passed a building covered with street art, even if it wasn’t San Holo’s.
How had he missed it? Her identity was so obvious now. But everyone—all those intelligent people—thought San Holo was a man, that he was British.
The ache filling his body wasn’t the grueling run or his stupidity at not figuring it out. It was the realization that he’d made love to her without even knowing her. The thought hurt so badly his legs might have crumpled beneath him if he hadn’t already been running on muscle memory.
She’d never cared for him at all. Because you couldn’t lie to someone you cared about.
He thought of his parents. They had been everything to each other, to the exclusion of everyone else in their lives, even their kids. They told each other everything. They were devoted. They did everything together.
They even died together.
That was what love meant to him. Total immersion in each other. Total transparency.
But Saskia had excluded him from the most important aspects of her life.
It meant she wasn’t in love with him. Maybe it meant she could never love him.
The thought crippled him, and he stumbled, catching himself on a light post before he could fall. Then he went on running. Barely able to breathe, he rounded the corner on which his warehouse sat.
There she stood. Alone, lit only by a flickering streetlight.
Dressed in all black, she was like a wraith in the night. A ghost. A phantom. Wearing a baseball cap pulled low. He couldn’t truly see her face, but he knew it was her by the lines of her body.
But he didn’t know her . He never had.
He watched her for a moment as she paced back and forth. A pulse of love beat through his chest, rising up his throat to strangle him. But he shoved it back down. She’d lied to him. Over and over.
How could he ever trust her? She could lie again, and he would never know.
This morning, everything had seemed within his grasp. True love. Though he’d always shied away from the intense love his parents had, he’d wanted it. With Saskia.
But there was no coming back from this.
Then she saw him.
Saskia paced the corner. He’d have to return eventually. It was late now, and she felt like San Holo, dressed all in black, baseball cap masking her features as if she were sneaking into an alley to paint.
The comparison chilled her. She wanted to come off as open to Clay, but instead she just looked disguised.
She hadn’t called Adrian or dealt with Hugo. She needed to talk to Clay first before anyone else. He was more important than all the secrecy. More important than any other person.
She’d totally screwed up. Her body felt like a mass of tensed muscles, the sensation so painful she wanted to cry. She’d only just admitted that she wanted some kind of relationship with him, and for a little while, she’d hoped the truth would set her free.
But now that seemed completely out of reach. If she’d told him the truth yesterday, it might have been repairable. But learning it from a stranger on social media? No, he wouldn’t forgive that.
After all the glorious nights they’d spent together, after working on his plans for classes and lectures to help his artists through the emotional baggage that came with being a creative?
After keeping her history secret from him—about her parents, about Hugo, even when he’d told her about Gareth and how that affected him? No, he wouldn’t forgive any of that.
Then she saw him.
Running down the hill, hell-bent on getting to the warehouse, maybe even to seclude himself in his loft, he stopped, he came to an abrupt stop so violent it must have hurt his knees.
He just looked at her.
Everything she might have dreamed of having with him ended there.
The seconds ticked by.
Clay’s entire body ached from the demanding run. He wasn’t ready to confront her. But she was here. She’d seen him. He couldn’t get away. They had to talk sometime.
He walked to her side, trying not to stalk her like a raging bull, trying to keep his emotions bottled up.
His insides were knotted, his heart and lungs in a bind that made it hard to breathe, hard to pump the blood through his veins. Yet he stood before her, and in the nicest way possible, without a single betraying inflection in his voice, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me that you’re San Holo?”
Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.
He wanted to punch his fist into the wall. Because she had no justification for not being honest with him. Because she didn’t even have an explanation.
Even as he tried to remain calm, harshness crept into his voice.
“You’ve been dishing it out, but you can’t take it?
Why are you anonymous if the reality of art is that once you’ve put it out there, it’s no longer yours?
Why are you telling Dylan he needs to take the criticism when you don’t take yours? ”
Pain reverberated through his fist and body as if he had actually hit the wall.
Finally, her voice washed over him. “San Holo’s name is attached to everything I do. I see the reviews. I get the criticism. Just because it’s a pseudonym doesn’t mean I don’t know what people say.”
Leaning close, he breathed in her sensual scent, remembered the taste of her lips, the sweetness of her skin. “Then why weren’t you honest with me?” Then, because the hurt was a living, breathing part of him, he said, “You led me on. Nothing we did meant anything to you.”
She reached out, and he automatically backed away, one step, two. Under the lamplight, even with the brim of her baseball cap, he saw the leap of anguish in her eyes.
He steeled himself against it. “After everything we’ve been to each other, why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked down at the sidewalk, shuffled her Doc Martens on the concrete, then met his gaze.
“Hugo Lewis is my ex-boyfriend. He stole my art, and I couldn’t get it back.
My parents burned me. My ex-boyfriend burned me.
I have to admit to being a little gun-shy.
” As she spoke, her voice got stronger. She grew taller, no longer the slumped figure he’d first seen huddled beneath the streetlight.
He felt for her. He remembered Gareth’s torment when he’d been trashed. He’d seen Dylan destroy his own work. To know that someone had stolen her art from her, her very soul from her, hell, yes, he felt for her.
But he wasn’t Hugo Lewis. “I hear all those reasons. I totally understand them.” He spread his hands as if he were giving her the world. “But I’ve been falling in love with you.”
She hugged herself, her shoulders rolling together as she curled in on herself again. But he couldn’t stop the flow of his feelings. “Every time I made love to you, I didn’t even know you. Now you’re implying I’m just like your ex-boyfriend, that I might harm you.”
Crazy that it didn’t even hurt to say he’d been falling in love with her. He’d never said that to any woman, ever. But he’d wanted to tell her, wanted her to know how special she was.
Yet her words had been like a knife, a betrayal of everything they’d done together. “You should know me better than that by now. I would never steal your art. Or hurt you in any way. Even if it’s only been little more than a week, you should know that.”
Maybe he should have grilled her for every single detail about Hugo Lewis. About her parents. Made her explain it all.
But he didn’t have another piece of his soul to give her.
His pain was written in his eyes, on his face, in the tense lines of his body.
His words gutted her in return.
I’ve been falling in love with you.
Now, when it mattered, she’d lost him. She wanted to fly into the night like a bat, to some dark place where she could wrap her arms around herself and hide. Her voice barely above a whisper, all she could say was, “I thought about telling you so many times.”
His eyes bored holes straight through her body.
More words rushed out of her. “I swear I was going to tell you today. Didn’t Dylan tell you I was looking for you? Didn’t you listen to my voicemail?”
He planted his feet firmly on the concrete. “Really?” The disdain in that word spiked through her. “Today? You were going to tell me today?”
She cringed, wanted to run, but she held her ground.
“Why were you going to tell me today?” he asked. “Because you got wind that your dick of an ex was going to out you?”
His words were an assault even worse than Hugo’s, because she deserved Clay’s anger.
But she couldn’t let him think she’d planned any of this.
“I had no idea Hugo would do that.” Her hands, her arms, her whole body wanted to reach out to him.
“Fernsby already guessed. But I was going to tell you even before he talked to me.”
He barked a humorless laugh. “Oh, so Fernsby told you to come clean.”
She shook her head, her hair flying as the ball cap fell to the ground. “I promise I was coming here to tell you, but Fernsby found me before I found you.”
He stood as still as a tree trunk. The moment seemed to go on and on, his gaze like a laser beam scanning her. Finally, in a voice so soft she almost couldn’t hear it, he said, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Then he turned and walked away.
And took the broken pieces of her heart with him.
Clay sat alone in an all-night fifties diner filled with tourists, couples out for a late meal, and teenagers laughing and screeching at videos on their phones.
He’d ordered a hamburger because he felt guilty taking up space and drinking only coffee.
But he’d been unable to touch more than a bite of one French fry.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he dialed Adrian Fielding’s cell number.
Without allowing her even a hello, he spewed the words at her. “The deal is off. I don’t need Saskia—if that’s even her real name—to paint even one damned wall for me.”