“Do you want to explain?” I asked, glancing at Ryan over my shoulder.
“But you’re doing such a wonderful job,” he countered with a laugh.
I rolled my eyes. Well, at least one of us was having a good time. “Okay, you know how Brooklyn and Joe’s humping sessions have been making my dorm life a living hell?”
“Yeah.”
“Ryan came up with a plan to give Brooklyn a taste of her own medicine. We met up in my room, stripped down to our undies, and pretended like we were in the middle of a hook-up when Brooklyn came home from class.”
I watched as Wren’s face lit up like a freaking fireworks display. “Oh, that is simply masterful. Why didn’t we think of that?”
“Well, it’s not like you and I could have faked something like that.”
“We could so pretend to be lovers!”
“Yeah, but then there wouldn’t have been any evidence for Brooklyn to clean up,” Ryan stated.
“What do you mean by evidence?”
“We may or may not have planted unused condoms filled with a little lotion and some water around the dorm for Brooklyn to find.”
Wren howled with laughter at my explanation. “This is the best fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. I so wish I could’ve been there to see the expression on her face.”
“It was priceless. Especially considering that she and Joe have zero shame when it comes to their sex lives. I’ve gotten enough free shows that I didn’t even need to study the human anatomy for my art classes.”
“Sounds like she got a little taste of her own medicine, and I hope it was bitter as hell. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of shit at the hospital, but at least I don’t have to listen to people screwing all the time.”
Jumping to my feet, I threw my arms around her. “And now that I have a key to your place, neither will I!”
“Yay!” Wren called out as she headed for the bathroom.
As soon as she was out of earshot, it was as if someone had cranked the thermostat up a few degrees.
“How do you think she is doing?”
I blew out a deep breath as I considered Ryan’s question. He didn’t know about everything that went down between Wren and Liam, but he could still sense something was off. “Honestly, this is the most I’ve heard her laugh in a really long time. Even before everything went to shit, she wasn’t happy.”
“Her ex cheated on her?”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not my life we’re discussing, so it isn’t my place to say, but I don’t think Wren would mind if I filled you in a little bit,” I answered in a low voice. “She walked in on him while he was screwing his ex.”
“Damn.”
“She caught him on her birthday too.”
The sound of knuckles cracking distracted me for a moment. When I glanced at Ryan’s hands, his fists were balled so hard I thought he might break a finger. “Fucking piece of shit,” he muttered.
“I won’t argue with you there.”
“What’s his name?”
“Liam.”
“I’ll remember that.”
There was an unfamiliar edge to his voice. Sure, I’d only known Ryan a few days, but I’d never heard him take that tone before. I wasn’t stupid. I had no doubts that if we ever ran into Liam, Ryan would make him pay. It was the way he was raised—to always make sure a woman felt safe with him.
And part of me couldn’t help but wonder if the sentiment would hold true for me as well.
“YOUR FACE ALWAYS GETS a really serious look to it whenever you’re painting.”
I moistened my lips with my tongue as my focus shifted from the canvas in front of me to the voice speaking to me. Who the hell was I kidding? It wasn’t just any voice.
It was his voice.
“Yeah, people tend to do that whenever they are engrossed in something,” I countered, my gaze finally meeting Ryan’s.
“So, where should I strip?”
Grabbing the spare rag hanging over my shoulder, I tossed it in his direction. “I draw you one time and you act like you’re the freaking statue of David.”
“You mean I’m not on that level?” he questioned, feigning shock. The tips of his fingers curled underneath the bottom hem of his shirt. Lifting the fabric just a tad, he glanced at his abs. “And here I thought all that time I’ve been spending in the gym was paying off.”
“Stop being such a drama queen. We all know your abs are wonderful.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I silently cursed. I seemed to be on the losing side of our never ending battle of wits, and any day now, I’d be reduced to cannon fodder. It wasn’t like the man needed any more ammunition.
“So you can be nice to me.”
“I’m nice to you all the time.”
“You say that, but you coupled your reply with an eye roll that most likely allowed you to see the inside of your skull. You can see why that makes you seem less believable.”
“So . . . what are you doing in the art annex, anyway?”
“I came to see you, duh.”
“Why?”
“Do I really need a reason to come stare at a beautiful woman?”
“In my experience, yes, you absolutely fucking do.”
Ryan rounded my easel and moved close enough to lean over my shoulder. He now had a full view of the piece I was working on. As an artist, some creations were so close to my heart that the thought of sharing it with another soul was daunting. And that was exactly how I felt about this painting. It was a fragment of me, of my memories. We’re never capable of realizing the void a loved one can leave behind until the gaping hole is staring us in the face. I’d had some amazing years with my mom, but I wanted more. I wanted to hear her voice as she sang her favorite song or smell her perfume wafting throughout the house. And if that made me selfish, then so be it. Call me selfish, call me any imaginable name under the sun, cover my flesh with wounds, and take every single possession I own. I didn’t care as long as I had her.
The soft touch of a hand at the base of my neck disrupted the thoughts plaguing my mind.
“Take a deep breath,” Ryan whispered in my ear.
“I’m okay.”
“Are you?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
“She’s exquisite.”
“Huh?” Between the touch of his flesh and my train of thought, I was at a complete loss of who he was talking about.
He smiled, his hand moving to point at the painting. “Your mother.”
“How did you know who she was?”
“She looks just like you.”
“You can barely see a side profile of her face.”
“Yeah,” he answered, his eyes staring into mine. “But I’d know your face anywhere.”
My heart pounded inside my chest. Wren probably knew the medical term for the way my body was reacting, but all I knew was that it felt like my heart was moving at a million miles per minute. Just how intimately did he know my face? The question, while filling me with elation, was also daunting. Whenever things got serious with a guy, I bailed faster than a fighter pilot ejecting from a nosediving plane. It was the only way I knew how to live. And the strength needed to break that habit was more than my heart could withstand.
“Is that so?” I leaned toward him, my need to be closer suddenly overpowering every ounce of apprehension.
“Yes.”
The space between our mouths seemed to lessen by the second.
“Ry,” I breathed. “If I share something personal, will you?”
“What do you want to know?” He responded without a moment’s hesitation. Did he want to learn my secrets as much as I wanted to learn his?
The question I’d been mulling over since the night we pranked Brooklyn couldn’t be silenced any longer. “Why do you hate your dad so much?” There was every possibility that this question would infuriate him, but I needed to know if the pain resonating inside of me als
o resided within him.
He exhaled sharply, and for a minute, I wondered if it had been the right decision to ask the question at all. It was obvious he harbored a lot of contempt for his father, but I wanted to help. He’d done so much for Wren in the past few days, and if there was something I could do to repay him, I would see it done to the best of my ability.
The room around us was drowning in silence. Even though we were the only people in the art studio, pressure intensified all around me, making me feel as though I was suffocating. I knew the pain, the heartache, written all over his face.
“That question has a really long answer.”
“I’ve been known to be a good listener,” I teased, hoping to lighten the mood a bit. My fingertips lightly brushed his shirt. The gesture was so intimate, so unlike me, that I wasn’t sure if I should continue or pull my hand away.
Ryan, it seemed, already had the answer to my internal debate. Placing his hand over mine, he held me in place. His heart drummed beneath my flesh, the pace quickening just a bit as his eyes met mine.
“I would rather be tortured than talk about that man,” he admitted. “But at the same time, I want you to know.”
“Which do you want more?” The question rolled off my tongue as little more than a whisper. “Safety or confession?”
“And what if I want both?”
I shook my head, not understanding what he meant. “You can’t have that.”
“I could if I trust the person I confess to.”
“You hardly know me.”
“Do you trust me?”
I sighed. He already knew that I did, but such a notion was insanity, right? “I don’t really know you,” I answered.
“We’re both masters of hesitation.”
“So it would seem.”
“Well, I’ll cut you a deal. Whenever you’re ready to tell me about her, I’ll tell you about my father.” His hand released mine, and as soon as the connection was severed, I longed for its return. Ryan turned toward my painting, moving close enough for the tip of his nose to be but a breath from the canvas. “Was your childhood home near an open field like that?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Then what made you decide to draw her sitting in a bed of grass?”
“It’s my dream.”
Lines formed across his forehead, scrunching together as he forced his attention away from the picture of my mother. “Come again?”
“My dream is to find my mother lying in a field, gazing up at the sky as she waits for me to join her. Once I’m there, I’d lie down next to her and tell her about my day or confess all of my deepest secrets. I’d describe my latest art project, including every single color I painted with.” My fingers combed through my hair as I willed myself to continue. “It’s hard to explain it, but I simply want a reminder of what our lives were like before she was taken away.”
“I get it. You want to halt time and preserve that image of her forever.”
“Yeah.”
Shaking his head, Ryan’s lips stretched into a smirk. “I really like that about you.”
Settling on a nearby stool, I reached for my palette and brush. “What are you talking about?” I dabbed the brush into a mixture of yellow and green, blending the colors together until I had the perfect shade to highlight the blades of grass.
“It’s easy to judge a book by its cover. I mean, I did that with you,” he explained, combing his fingers through his hair. “Most people look at you, see that face, and never realize all this depth exists just beneath the surface.”
His words touched something deep inside me. Wren had said similar words to me on more than one occasion, but I always ignored her. I didn’t care what people thought about me, but I realized Ry was different. His opinion mattered.
Well, shit.
Even if I was totally screwed, there was nothing I could do about it now. The blond-haired, blue-eyed hottie from my statistics class was working his way underneath my skin. And if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t hate it.
However, this acceptance of my fate was quick to be replaced with an overwhelming sense of panic. I prided myself on knowing, on obeying, the caution signs. But at the moment, I began to realize all my preparation was for nothing. Because if my heart wanted to fall for the man standing close enough to catch a whiff of my perfume, then there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it.
“You need to get out of there,” Ry said, tapping his finger against my forehead. “You always seem to be so deep inside your head.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Usually nothing. But when I can tell you’re thinking about something upsetting, I feel like it’s my duty to draw you out of the rabbit hole.”
“Does that mean I’m Alice and you’re the Mad Hatter?”
“Only if you want it to,” he answered with a wink.
“So is there a potion lying around that will shrink you down to size? Because I’m a tad busy, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“You’re the one who wanted to meet with Wren and me to discuss the idea you had for your next art assignment. I’m simply being a good friend.”
I considered his reply for a minute. He was right. I had asked Wren and Ry to meet me tonight so I could explain my concept of using color on mediums other than paper or canvas. Not to toot my own horn, but I thought it was innovative to use our bodies as the canvas. My idea was to fill giant water guns with tons of food coloring and water. Then, while wearing solid white clothes, we would have a water gun fight to end all water gun fights. I’ve dubbed it the Crayola War, and I was hoping the results would be reminiscent of Monet. His impressionistic style—coupled with Seurat’s pointillist technique—was the inspiration behind my idea.
Not to mention, soaking Ry with a water gun sounded pretty damn fun. He’d only known me for a matter of days, but he had the ability to annoy the hell out of me unlike anyone I’d ever known before. Wren would no doubt say that was a wonderful thing, but then again, Ry was sweet as pie whenever he was around her. And I appreciated that—the girl needed to be treated like a queen every single day for the rest of her life for all the shit she’d been put through.
“Is being a nuisance slang for being a good friend?”
“This is how you treat me after I helped you understand the Kirkwood approximation and offered to tutor you in statistics?”
“Well, maybe you should make good on your offer to teach me.”
“It’ll cost you.”
“Alright, what’s your rate?”
Breath caught in my throat as Ryan bent toward me. “Depends on the currency,” he whispered with a wink.
“What did you have in mind?”
“Oh, I think you know.”
I stepped backward, desperate to create a little space between us. “I should’ve known that your mind would go straight to the gutter.”
“You say that as if it has ever left the gutter.”
I groaned, my eyes making their regular upward arc. “Do you even want to be liked by people?”
“People? Fuck no,” he answered. “But you? That’s another story entirely.”
I chewed on the end of one of my paintbrushes. I wasn’t the nervous type, but Ryan had the ability to drive my sense of composure straight into the damn pavement. I needed to shift the direction of this conversation before I flung myself headfirst into the danger zone again. “What days do you have to work this week?”
“Thursday and Friday.”
“Does that mean you’re available Wednesday for my art project?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, good. And where is it you said you work again? I know you told me the other day, but I couldn’t remember the name of it.”
“Right now, I’m working at Halstead Accounting. I mostly prepare or read over reports and collect data, but I’ll be able to do more once I graduate.”
I nodded, my attention never turning from his face. “Does that mean you’re going to stay he
re after you graduate?”
“Actually, I want to move to a bigger city. Being an investment banker would be awesome because it’s interesting work, and would be a huge pay bump. Not to mention, it’s impressive.”
“And are you trying to impress your father?” I don’t know what possessed me to question him further about his father, but the relationship between Ryan and his father had to be strained in more ways than one. Ryan was intelligent and ambitious by nature. However, there were reasons behind his motivations. He had something he wanted to prove.
He remained silent for a long moment. The majority of the population tended to be easy to read. You could tell what most people were thinking just by reading the lines of their face, but that wasn’t the case with Ryan. Most of the time, his emotions were kept on a need-to-know basis. Unless you could catch him off guard like I did with the imaginary string in his hair at Wren’s apartment the other night, you were shit out of luck. “Are you ever going to tell me what this project entails? Or are Wren and I going to be kept in the dark?” he finally asked in a clear attempt to steer our conversation in a different direction.
“I’m going to explain everything as soon as she gets here.”
As if my reply conjured the very topic of our conversation, Wren burst into the art studio, still wearing her nursing school scrubs. “Hey! I’m not late, am I?”
“Not at all,” Ryan answered, stepping in her direction. He slid her messenger bag off her shoulder before ushering her further into the room. “I got here early because I wanted to see Ter.”
“Thanks, and of course you did.” Her tone was the epitome of amusement. At least one of us was getting something out of this new friendship.
“I mean, can you really blame me?”
She elbowed him in the arm, a smile cutting across her face. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”
If I hadn’t known that they’d met only a couple days ago, I would’ve thought Ryan and Wren were old friends. People just click sometimes—there’s no rhyme or reason to it.
“Did the two of you have some secret Baby-Sitters Club meeting without me?” I asked in a teasing tone.
“Nope,” Wren replied, sliding her arm around my waist. “This is just the kind of compassion I show people who feed me. You know how I am about food.”
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