by Megan Hart
Her parties had always been open-door—expansive guest lists, nothing formal. So when the doorbell rang while she was in the living room collecting empty Solo cups and discarded napkins, Stella at first didn’t do more than look up. The party had spilled over to both the front and back lawns, so even if there was an oddball guest who felt shy about walking right in, he or she could surely walk around to the back. She dumped the trash into the pail she’d set up in the corner of the room for just that purpose, not that anyone seemed to have noticed it...and the bell rang again. Dusting off her hands, Stella went to answer it.
On the step stood Matthew, in all his glory. “Hi,” he said.
Stella closed the door in his face.
She opened it again a moment later, finding him still standing there, this time with his mouth open and brow furrowed. She’d imagined this moment in so many different ways. Playing it cool. Jumping into his arms. Telling him to get lost. But when it was real and true, when he was right in front of her, all Stella could do was stare.
Gently, Matthew reached for her wrist and pulled her forward a few steps onto the front porch. The door closed behind her. Stella stared. Matthew smiled hesitantly.
“It took me twelve hours to get here. Aren’t you going to say anything?”
He’d driven here. Not flown, then. But still, he was here. Baby steps.
“It’s just that I thought...I thought I would never...” The tears came then. Fat, burning, sliding down her cheeks and wetting her lips with the taste of salt. Stella drew in a sobbing breath, embarrassed but incapable of holding any of it back. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Aww, now, now,” Matthew said as if this were all some kind of joke. A fucking joke. “How could you think that?”
Stella drew herself up. “Because you made me think so!”
They stared at each other in silence pierced by the sounds of the party and Stella’s hitching breaths. Then by Matthew’s small, sad sigh. He reached for her but didn’t grab. Didn’t pull or force. He reached and waited for Stella to let him take her.
Had there really been a question of her refusing him?
They clung to each other on her front porch, neither of them speaking, her face pressed into the hollow of his shoulder. She breathed in the scent of him. Fabric softener, soap, that distinctive smell of him that she’d been so sure she’d never breathe again. She shook a little, and his hands smoothed down her back, until at last she looked up at him.
“Shhh,” Stella rasped, her own swollen eyes and streaked cheeks making this ironic, “don’t cry.”
Matthew held her close. “Stella,” he whispered in her ear. “I just drove twelve hours on gas station coffee and determination. I need to use your bathroom and get something to eat, or I’m going to pass out on your front porch.”
Stella laughed and wiped at her eyes. “Come inside. There’s plenty of food.”
“In a minute,” Matthew said. “I can wait another minute.”
Then he kissed her. And again. He kissed and kissed and kissed her, and suddenly everything felt as though it was all going to be all right.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from TEAR YOU APART by Megan Hart.
“Hart’s beautiful use of language and discerning eye toward human experience elevate the book to a poignant reflection on the deepest yearnings of the human heart and the seductive temptation of passion in its many forms.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Tear You Apart
If you loved Flying, look for these other great reads by New York Times bestselling author Megan Hart, available now in ebook format:
Stranger
Tear You Apart
Naked
Broken
Dirty
The Space Between Us
Also, don’t miss the Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin title Tangled Up (May 2014), also by Megan Hart!
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Chapter One
I came in on the train and then took a cab, but that didn’t stop the late March drizzle from destroying everything I’d carefully put together at home earlier this afternoon. My hair hangs sodden against my forehead and cheeks. My clothes cling, damp and heavy and chilled. I stripped off my dark, soaked stockings in the gallery bathroom and wrapped them in paper towels to tuck inside my purse, and my legs feel glaringly pale. Instead of the glass of white wine in my hand, I’m desperate for a cup of coffee, or better yet, a mug of hot chocolate. With whipped cream.
I’m desperate for the taste of something sweet.
There should be desserts here, but all I can find are blocks of cut cheese, sweating on the tray among the slaughtered remains of fancy crackers. The bowl of what looks like honey mustard is probably all right, but the companion bowl of ranch dressing looks like a playground for gastrointestinal distress. Courtesy of the rain, I’m more chilled than the cheese, the dips or the wine.
I haven’t seen Naveen yet. He’s flirting his way through the entire crowd, and I can’t begrudge him that. It’s exciting, this new gallery. New York is different than Philly. He needs to make an impression with this opening. He’ll get to me eventually. He always does.
Now I hold the glass of wine in one hand, the other tucked just below my breasts to prop my elbow as I study the photograph in front of me. The artist has blown it up to massive size. Twenty by forty, I estimate, though I’ve always been shit with measurements. The subject matter is fitting for the weather outside. A wet street, puddles glistening with gasoline rainbows. A child in red rubber boots standing in one, peering down at his reflection—or is it a her? I can’t tell. Longish hair, a shapeless raincoat, bland and gender-neutral features. It could be a boy or girl.
I don’t care.
I don’t care one fucking thing about that portrait, the size of it just big enough to guarantee that somebody will shell out the cool grand listed on the price tag. I shake my head a little, wondering what Naveen had thought, hanging this in the show. Maybe he owed someone a favor...or a blow job. The BJ would’ve been a better investment.
There’s a crinkle, tickle, tease on the back of my neck. The weight of a gaze. I turn around, and someone’s there.
“You’d need a house the size of a castle to hang that piece of shit.”
The voice is soft. Husky. Nearly as gender-neutral as the face of the child in the picture. I pause for just a moment before I look into his eyes, but the second I do, my brain fits him into a neat slot. Male. Man. He’s a man, all right, despite the soft voice.
He’s not looking at me, but at the picture, so I can stare at him for a few seconds longer than what’s socially acceptable. Hair the color of wet sand spikes forward over his forehead and feathers against his cheeks in front of his ears. It’s short and wispy in the back, exposing the nape of his neck. He’s got a scruffy face, not just like a guy who’s forgone shaving for a few days, but one who keeps an uneasy truce with his razor at best. He wears a dark suit, white shirt, narrow dark tie. Retro. Black Converse on his feet.
“And who’d pay a grand for it? C’mon.” His gaze slides toward me just for a second or two. Catching me staring. He gestures at the photo.
“It’s not so bad.” I’m not sure why I’m compelled to say anything nice about the picture. I agree, it’s an overpriced piece of shit. It’s a mockery of good art, actually. I should be angry about this, that
I’m wasting my time on it as if the consumption of beauty is something with an allotment. Hell, maybe it is.
Maybe I actually have wasted today’s consumption of beauty on this piece of crap. I study it again. Technically, it’s flawless. The lighting, the focus, the exposure. But it’s not art.
Even so, someone will buy it simply because they will look at it the same way I did. They’ll note the perfectly framed shot, the pseudowhimsical subject matter, the blandly colorful mat inside a sort of interesting frame. They will convince themselves it’s just unique enough to impress their friends, but it won’t force them to actually feel anything except perhaps smugness that they got a bargain.
“It looks like art,” I say. “But it really isn’t. And that’s why someone will pay a thousand bucks for it and hang it in the formal living room they use only at Christmas. Because it looks like art but it really isn’t.”
He strokes his chin. “You think so?”
“Yes. I’m sure of it. Naveen wouldn’t have priced it if he didn’t think he could sell it.” I slant the man a sideways look, wishing I could be bold enough to stare at him when he’s facing me, the way I was when he was looking at something else.
“Good. I need to pay my rent. A coupla hundred bucks would be sweet.”
Of course he’s an artist. Men who look like that, in a place like this—they’re always artists. Usually starving. He looks lean enough to have missed a few meals. Standing this close I get a whiff of cigarettes and corduroy, which should make no sense, since he’s not wearing any, but it does because that’s how I work. Tastes and smells and sounds link up for me in ways they don’t for everyone else. I see colors where there shouldn’t be any. The scent of corduroy is par for the course.
“You took that picture?”
“I did.” He nods, not without pride, despite what he’d been saying about it earlier.
If he’d been talking shit about another artist’s piece I’d have liked him less, even if he was telling the truth. I can like him better now. “It’s really not so bad.”
He frowns. Shakes his head. “You’re a bad liar.”
On the contrary, I think I’m an excellent liar.
He looks again at the picture and shrugs. “Someone will buy it because it looks like art but doesn’t ask too much of them. That’s what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“You’re the expert.” He shrugs again and crosses one arm over his chest to rest his elbow on as he stares at the photo. I don’t miss the stance—it’s a mirror of my own. He bites at his thumb. It must be an old habit, because the nail is ragged. “The only reason I did this thing was for Naveen, you know? He said he wanted something more commercial. Not, like, doll heads with pencil stubs sticking out of the eye holes and stuff like that.”
I’m a good liar, but not a good poker player. I can’t keep a stone face. I know the piece he’s talking about. It’s been in the back room of Naveen’s Philadelphia gallery for months, if not years. Of course I assumed he couldn’t sell it, which didn’t explain why he kept it hung back there for so long. I joked with him that he kept it for some sentimental reasons; maybe this was true.
“That was yours?”
He laughs. “Will Roberts.”
I take the hand he holds out. His fingers are callused and rough, and for a moment I imagine how they’d sound against something silk, like a scarf. His touch would rasp on something soft. It would whisper.
“Elisabeth Amblin.”
His fingers curl around mine. For one bizarre second, I’m sure he’s going to kiss the back of my hand. I tense, waiting for the brush of his mouth against my skin, the wet slide of his tongue on my flesh, and that’s ridiculous because of course he wouldn’t do such a thing. People don’t do that to strangers. Even lovers would hardly do so.
My imagination is wild, I know it, yet when he lets my hand drop I’m still a little disappointed. His touch lingers, the way his fingers scraped at mine. I’m not soft as silk, no matter how many expensive creams I rub into my skin. And yet, I’d been right. His touch whispered.
“You’re Naveen’s friend.”
“Yeah. You could say that. We have sort of a love-hate thing going on.” I pause, judging his reaction. “He loves that I work for next to nothing, and I hate that he doesn’t pay me more.”
Will laughs. It ripples in streams of blue and green that wink into sparkling gold. His eyes squint shut. He has straight white teeth in a thin-lipped mouth. He shouldn’t be attractive in his laughter, the way it changes his face, but there’s something infectious about him. I laugh, too.
There’s music in the gallery, a string quartet in the corner painfully strumming their way through Pachelbel’s Canon and Für Elise. They must be students, because Naveen would never have paid for professional musicians. I wonder which one of them he used to fuck, because like that painting in the back room and other things here in the gallery, including me, Naveen hangs on to things for sentimental reasons. There’s food in the gallery, too, a little lackluster. And there’s wine. But there isn’t much laughter, and we draw attention.
Will tips his head back for a few more chuckles, then looks at me. “I’m supposed to go mingle.”
I want him to linger. I want to keep him from something he should be doing but chooses not to because of me. And I could make him stay, I think suddenly, watching his gaze skip and slide over my body, my damp clothes, my bare legs. He’s already touched my skin. He knows how I feel. I want him to want to know more.
“Sure, go.” I tip my chin toward the rest of the room. “I have some things I need to do, too.”
I am a good liar.
“It was nice meeting you, Elisabeth.” Will holds out his hand again.
This time I entertain no fantasies of his lips on the back of it. That’s just silly. We shake formally. Firmly. I turn away from him at the end of it, feigning interest again in his piece-of-shit-that-isn’t-art, so I don’t have to watch him walking away.
Naveen finds me in front of a few pieces of pottery on their narrow pedestals. I don’t like them. Technically, they’re lovely. They are commercial. They will sell. What’s good for the gallery is good for me. Still, they reek of manure. Maybe it’s the mud they’re made from. Maybe it’s just the twisted signals in my brain that layer and mingle my senses. Whatever it is, I’m staring with a frown when my friend puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close.
“I already have several more commissioned from this artist. Lacey Johnsbury.” Naveen’s grin is very white. He smells of a subtle blend of expensive cologne and the pomade he uses in his jet-black hair. Those are actual scents; anyone could smell them.
When Naveen speaks, I taste cotton candy, soft and sweet, subtle. There are times when listening to my friend talk makes my teeth ache. But I like the taste of cotton candy, just as I like listening to Naveen, because we’ve been friends for a long, long time. He might be one of the only people who know me as well as I know myself. Sometimes maybe better. I run my tongue along my teeth for a second before I answer him.
“I don’t like them.”
“You don’t have to like them, darling, they are not for you.”
I shrug. “It’s your gallery.”
“Yes.” Those white teeth, that grin. “And they’ll sell. I like things that sell, Elisabeth. You know that.”
“Like that?” I nod toward Will’s atrocity.
“You don’t like that, either?”
I shrug again. “It’s a piece of shit, Naveen. Even the artist thinks so.”
He laughs, and I’m in front of a Ferris wheel under a summer sky, my hair in pigtails and my fists full of spun sugar. Not really, of course, but that’s how it feels. “You met Will.”
“Yes. I met him.” I look for Will in the crowd and see him in one of the alcoves, flirting with a woman whose hair is not flat and limp, her lipstick unsmeared. She looks as if she hasn’t eaten in years. She leans in close to him. He laughs.
I hate her.
I look away before Naveen can see me watching, but it’s too late. He shakes his head and squeezes my shoulder gently. He doesn’t say anything. I guess he doesn’t have to. Someone calls his name, and he’s off to schmooze. He’s better at it than I am, so I leave him to it.
It’s late and getting later, and I should leave. Naveen offered to let me stay at his place. I’ve done it before. I like his wife, Puja, but their kids are still small. When I stay there I’m treated to lots of sticky hugs and kisses, am woken at the crack of dawn and feel as if I have to give Puja a hand with things like diapers and feeding times. My daughters are long beyond needing that sort of care, and I don’t miss it.
“You’re still here.”
I turn, the sound of his voice tiptoeing up my spine to tickle the back of my neck. “I am.”
Will tilts his head a little to look at me. “Do you like anything in this show?”
“Of course I do.” It would be disloyal to say otherwise, wouldn’t it?