Crazy Madly Deeply

by Lily White

  “It’s not a good time,” I muttered, my arms crossing over my chest that I just now remembered was bare to her eyes. Music blasted from the studio at the back of the long hall, Kaley’s eyes darting in the direction of the noise just before suspicion rolled in to mix with the brown color.

  “Do you have somebody here?”

  My heart stuttered. “No. Why?”

  “I thought I saw someone move past the front window when I knocked.”

  “Yeah, no,” I lied, adding yet another one to the pile of lies I’d been building since two nights ago. “Let me go take care of the stuff I was working on in back real quick, and I’ll throw on some clothes and walk you home. We can talk on the way.”

  Pivoting on my heel, I stepped toward the hallway, Kaley’s hand gripping over my wrist before I could escape. “Actually, I was hoping you’d invite me to stay the night.”

  Twisting to look at her, I locked my gaze on the hesitant smile pulling at her lips.

  She shrugged. “I thought with your sister being gone, it could be the first time we stayed an entire night together.”

  Floored by the amount of hope that dripped from her words, I struggled to think of a way to tell her no. If Deli were around, I’d ask her what to do. She was always quick with girly advice, always my savior when it came to avoiding the pitfalls that left a trail of broken hearts in my wake.

  But Deli wasn’t here.

  Only Michaela.

  It wasn’t the best idea, but it was worth a shot.

  “I really need to get back to my studio and take care of some things real quick. Can you hold on for a second?”

  Kaley hadn’t finished nodding ‘yes’ before I was racing down the hall. Opening the door to the studio, I slipped inside, and turned to find Michaela staring at a painting of Deli I hadn’t yet finished.

  Her head swiveled to look at me, genuine admiration in her green gaze. “Holden, these paintings are amazing.”

  It irked me to have someone in my space, to have my work exposed to new eyes when they weren’t finished. There was nothing I could do about it at the moment. Crossing the room, I turned down the music, my mouth running dry when I forced myself to ask the question.

  “Michaela, listen, I need your help.”

  She stood silently, her brows arching above her eyes.

  “If you were sleeping with a guy and it had been casual at first, but you suddenly had feelings for him, what would be the best thing he could say to let you down easy?”

  Her expression relaxed, a grin tugging at her lips before she shook her head and smiled brighter. “Oh dear. It sounds like you’ve got a slight problem on your hands, Holden.”

  Nodding emphatically, I couldn’t have agreed with her more.

  Soft laughter shook her shoulders. “How much time do we have to work this out?”

  “Like three minutes,” I admitted.

  “Okay. Then tell me the details as quickly as you can and I’ll give you my advice. But, in all honesty, I’m not sure there’s anything you can say or do to prevent hurting her.”

  That’s not what I wanted to hear. Taking a deep breath to steady the erratic beat of my heart, I leaned against the door behind me and spilled the details.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Michaela

  After listening intently to everything Holden had to tell me about the problem that had just knocked on his front door, two thoughts were front and center in my mind:

  One, I now understood exactly why the waitress at the all night diner hated me the minute she laid eyes on me. And two, there was no way in hell Holden would be able to let this girl down without breaking her heart.

  Especially not a girl who was willing to walk over in the freezing cold with the hope for an overnight invite.

  Sighing, I pursed my lips, and tried to decide whether I should find a delicate way to tell him, or just be blunt. “Well,” I said, going with delicate, “my first bit of advice would be to put on a shirt.”

  Holden glanced down, confusion wrinkling his brow.

  Smiling, I explained, “It’s kind of hard for a girl not to want you when your abs are all exposed and asking to be stroked, and stared at, and licked. Those are pretty much rational mind kryptonite, so putting them away would be in your best interest.”

  His blue eyes met mine and I could feel my cheeks flare red. Shaking his head, Holden moved to grab a t-shirt from a nearby table and pulled it on to cover his chest and stomach. Disappointment filtered through me to have such a beautiful sight hidden from view.

  “Okay, what next?”

  “Next,” I said, going with blunt, “the only thing you can do is be honest with her.”

  His expression fell. “That’s it?”

  Nodding, I flashed him an apologetic grin. “Sometimes honesty is the best thing you can do. If you beat around the bush, she might cling on to hope that she can change your mind. And believe it or not, women are a lot tougher than they look. She’ll appreciate your honesty, maybe not at first, but eventually.”

  Swallowing hard, he nodded his head and glanced at the door. “I hate to do this to you, but I need you to stay in here for a little while longer. I know its boring-“

  “I’ll be fine. Go. Do what you need to do and I’ll play captive until you release me from my prison.”

  Giving me a sharp look, he growled, “Not funny.”

  I held up my wrists and grinned. “I have the rope burns to prove it.”

  Turning between the door and me several times as if he wanted to respond but couldn’t decide, Holden finally locked his eyes to mine and did something unexpected. He laughed, the sound low and soft. “Try not to get in too much trouble while I’m gone. I’d hate to have to tie you up again.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  A quick shake of his head and Holden was leaving the room on his way to break some poor woman’s heart. Staring at the closed door for several seconds, I listened as voices carried down the hall from the living room, several minutes passing before the front door opened and closed, the house returning to silence.

  I returned my attention to the unfinished paintings on their easels, my mind unable to comprehend the amount of talent hidden in a man born into a town that took everything from him, including his freedom. Piece by piece, we’d broken him down. Chained him. Enslaved him. Kept him living a life that was so far beneath him. Holden didn’t belong on the wrong side of the tracks in Tranquil Falls. He belonged in New York. In Chicago. In some big city where his art could hypnotize and entrance, where the tragic bindings holding him to this place could be cut away to let him fly.

  We’d called him crazy, when in truth, we were the crazy ones.

  Crazy for not recognizing a good person among us.

  Crazy for judging him when we were the ones who should have been judged.

  Crazy for so needlessly hurting a man that wanted nothing from us but the respect to let him live in peace.

  Crazy for not seeing that he had more raw talent in his pinky finger than any of us had in our entire bodies.

  But maybe that’s the way it is for shallow people. Maybe we do recognize those souls among us that are special, and out of jealousy and spite, we tear them down.

  Stepping back to get a better view of all his paintings at once, my heel hit something lying on the drop cloth. I turned to see what I’d stepped on and found a sketchpad lying face down, a pencil hastily abandoned beside it. Remembering the black dust staining his finger and hand when he’d opened the studio door, I thought that whatever was on that pad was what he’d been focused on when I knocked.

  It would be invasive of me to flip it over and take a peek, but I couldn’t help it. The need to know what was pressing on Holden’s thoughts was too strong, too compelling to ignore.

  Would it be another memory of Delilah? Another thought of the parents he’d lost? Would it be like the art standing at my back on the easels illustrating how Holden saw the people that surrounded him?

  Sitting down, I
pulled the sketchpad toward me, lifted a corner as if to flip it over, but paused. I hated invading his privacy like this, hated taking advantage of Kaley’s interruption.

  I flipped it over anyway...and froze.

  A woman lay sleeping on a bed, her head facing one direction while her dark hair splayed over a pillow behind her. Delicately folded, her hand lay near her face, her lips parted, her nose coming into view. But her eyes were missing, only the top half of her body fully completed.

  Even halfway done, I recognized the angles of my face, the line of my jaw, the length of my dark hair. Turning a page, I saw myself again, the image hastily drawn and abandoned. Five more pages were the same, each abandoned, each one revealing less of the woman I’d seen in the first sketch.

  He was creating me from an image in his mind, but something was missing, something that had driven him to attempt it over and over again, the outlines and shading shifting and darkening with each new attempt.

  Setting the pad down on the drop cloth, I stared at the image he’d attempted to bring to life, my heart beating harder as sorrow filled me. Why couldn’t I have known this person before his life became so complicated? Why hadn’t I been strong enough to reject the hatred everybody had thrown at him so that I could stand by his side?

  I was an awful person, and I was being torn apart inside by the fear that there would be nothing I could say or do to fix the present situation we were in.

  Flipping the sketchpad over, I moved away from it to sit against a wall. My legs were bent in front of me, my arms wrapping around my shins to tug them closer to my body. Resting my cheek against my knees, I breathed out a heavy sigh.

  There was no way in hell I’d let Holden be destroyed completely. I just had to find a way to correct the wrongs we’d committed against him and set everything back to right.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Holden

  Snow had started falling while I’d walked Kaley back to her house. It was the perfect complement to the conversation we were having, the frozen flakes freezing to our faces as quickly as her hot tears turned cold. Following Michaela’s advice, I was honest with Kaley. I’d explained that I’d assumed from the beginning that she wasn’t looking for anything beyond casual sex, that her heart wasn’t ready for the emotional toll a relationship could take from two people. Casual had been fine for me, but given my situation, a relationship wasn’t feasible. I’d used Deli as an excuse only to protect Kaley from the truth of why I wasn’t in a good place in life to have a girlfriend.

  So, why was it that after walking one woman home with the rationale that I was very much emotionally unavailable, I had another woman on my mind?

  Tucking my hands deeper into my pockets, I curled in on myself in as desperate a bid to avoid the cold as it was to avoid thinking about a woman sitting in my studio - a studio that nobody saw. Not even my sister. Those four walls were my space, those paintings were my thoughts. That sketchpad...

  I quickened my pace, almost busting ass on the slick roads several times. That sketchpad had Michaela all over it. Reaching the house, I was half frozen, but I brushed the ice and snow from my body as I walked inside and practically slid down the hall. Bursting through the door, I half expected Michaela to be sitting in the middle of the room looking at the drawings I’d dedicated to paper moments before she knocked, but instead, she was sitting against the wall, her legs tucked to her body, her cheek resting on her knees, a tear slipping from her eye that she didn’t wipe away fast enough for me not to notice.

  “You look frozen,” she said, attempting a laugh that wasn’t quite believable.

  “I feel frozen,” I answered. “Is everything okay?”

  Why was this happening to me tonight? Every female who came within five feet of me was leaking tears like a dam had broken somewhere that the male mind was forbidden from traveling. Walking over to her, I leaned against the wall and slid down to sit next to her, my position mirroring hers.

  “Everything’s fine,” she lied.

  “It doesn’t look like everything’s fine. Did I do something to upset you?”

  She swiped at another tear, the tip of her nose red, her bottom lip puffed out where a tiny split in the skin was still visible. Sitting up to press her back against the wall, she swept out with her hand toward my paintings. “It’s just those, Holden. Your art.”

  Glancing over, I quickly perused the half finished pieces. “I didn’t think they were that bad-“

  “They’re not bad at all. They’re wonderful. You’re wonderful. And we-“ Her voice trailed off, her expression darkening as her eyes closed and forced more tears down her cheeks. Resting her head against the wall, she admitted, “We treated you so horribly.”

  Her words stunned me, stole the strength from my voice when I asked, “Why does that matter enough to cry about it?”

  “Because it’s destroying you,” she breathed out, still not opening her eyes to look at me. “If anybody in this entire town deserves a fair shot, it’s you. But because everybody who lives here is a self-righteous prick, you’re facing jail while we’re flitting off to college to continue the same tired bullshit there. And once we graduate, we’ll move on to our careers to be just as mean and nasty as we’ve always been. But you - the one damn person that never did a thing to hurt anybody else - you’ll be locked up for the rest of your life when you should be standing in the middle of an art gallery somewhere being praised by whoever praises art. You should be making a mark on history, or culture, or whatever, and half the jerks who attacked you should be locked up instead.”

  Her forehead fell to rest on her knees, her arms hugging her legs tighter. “It’s not fair,” she mumbled, the sound muted by the position of her body.

  Unsure what to do with her sudden epiphany, I stated the obvious. “I broke a guy’s nose. And that wasn’t exactly the first time. I killed someone, Michaela. So it’s not like I never hurt anyone.”

  “Jack deserved it,” she argued. Turning her head so that her cheek was pressed against her knees, she locked her green eyes with mine. “He deserved everything that came to him. But you don’t deserve taking the fall for it. He attacked you.”

  Grinning, I had to blink a few times to believe this version of Michaela was real. “Try telling the police that.”

  “I will,” she answered with more strength in her voice than I’d ever heard. “I’ll tell them aliens came down and abducted Jack if that leads them away from you. The jerk deserved a good anal probe.”

  Laughter burst out of me, her eyes widening in surprise as an unsure smile tugged at her lips. For both of us, the tension had dissipated, our shoulders relaxing as we sat staring at each other. Despite the impossible circumstances, this woman who I’d always thought less of was somehow easing the load I carried. To say I was stunned would be an understatement.

  “Why couldn’t you have been like this in high school?” I asked, curious about this evolving creature that was proving to be full of surprises. Her spirit was starting to shine through the veil, making my fingers itch to capture it on paper.

  Sorrow filled her eyes. “I’ve always been scared, I guess. Of Jack. Of my family. Of the people who expected me to be one thing when all I wanted was to be myself. I was afraid of being rejected, of being harassed, of being labeled as-“

  “A crazy freak?” I finished for her.

  Silence fell, heavy and pregnant with her guilt. On a whisper, she reminded me, “I never used those words to describe you.”

  “I know,” I whispered back.

  Wiping away the last of her tears, she straightened her posture to lean back against the wall. I straightened mine as well, both our eyes now focused on the unfinished paintings on their easels.

  Changing a subject that had become far too depressing, Michaela asked, “How did it go with Kaley?”

  A deep breath poured from my lungs, “Well, she cried.”

  “That’s to be expected.”

  “And then she called me a selfish asshole.”
/>
  Her laughter was soft. “That’s to be expected too.” Smile fading, she asked, “Did you ever promise her anything more than sex?”

  “No,” I answered, leaving out that I’d known Kaley was getting attached. I should have ended things then, but I didn’t know how.

  “You’re not an asshole, Holden. The few girls you slept with in high school had good things to say about you, and all of them knew it was only sex. Even then, they said you treated them better than anybody they’d dated, both before and after you.” Her head turned my direction. “The only thing they had to be mad at you for was spoiling them. They never could find someone else who showed them the same respect.”

  With my eyes still trained to the paintings, I was all too aware of the way Michaela was staring at me. I couldn’t meet her gaze. I was too afraid of that odd pressure in my chest and catch in my breath that occurred when our eyes met. “You talked about me with people in high school?”

  “I overheard the locker room gossip.” She sighed. “Okay, and maybe I asked your sister about you whenever I could. She loved to brag about your art and your music. Now, that I’ve seen the inside of your studio, I can understand why. I’m not exaggerating about how talented you are. It’s breathtaking, even if the paintings aren’t finished.”

  Although, I knew Michaela was, in fact, exaggerating, I still felt a small spark of pride to hear the compliment. My art was my voice. It was my therapy and my solace. I’d never intended to do much with it other than create it, but it was uplifting to hear someone besides my family who appreciated it. “Well, I probably won’t be able to paint for much longer, but maybe they’ll let me design some artsy license plates in prison.”

  “You’re not going to prison.”

  Finally giving up on the battle not to look at her, I swiveled my head in her direction. The look in her eye caught me off guard, a quick shot of something bursting inside my chest at the sight of her. Michaela was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever known - at least on the outside. It wasn’t until tonight that I was beginning to learn the inside might be just as magnificent. The timing couldn’t have been worse.