Lessons in Rule-Breaking

by Christy McKellen

  Her chest felt tight and her lungs seemed to be having trouble drawing air. ‘You want me to go all the way back to Italy to find out what he’s working on?’

  Pam gave her a withering look. ‘Don’t you read the gossip columns? He’s back in London. Although they’re all chatting about the fact he left a party early for once instead of indulging in his usual bad behaviour.’

  ‘Xander’s b-back in London?’ Jess managed to stutter through frozen lips.

  When she’d thought he was still in Italy it had been easier to keep her heartache under wraps, but it felt as if he were close enough to touch now—close, yet still so far away.

  Pam sighed and looked at her as if she thought she was talking to a total idiot. ‘Yes, Jess. So get your hide over there and source what we need so I can put this issue to bed.’

  Sliding off her chair and standing up on jellylike legs, Jess gave her editor a stiff nod. ‘Okay, Pam, I’ll see what I can do.’

  * * *

  Jess stood outside the door to Xander’s studio, her body quivering with nerves and her heart in her mouth.

  She had no idea how she was going to play this. She also didn’t know how he was going to react when he saw her again. They hadn’t exactly parted on bad terms, but there hadn’t been a fond farewell either.

  Perhaps this was fate or serendipity, or whatever you wanted to call it, handing her an opportunity. Perhaps when he saw her he’d realise how they were meant to be together and ask her not to leave again.

  Perhaps.

  Only one way to find out.

  Before she lost her nerve, she lifted her shaking hand and banged hard on his door, hoping he was in there.

  After a couple of seconds the door flew open to reveal Xander in all his splendour, regulation paintbrush in hand and a look of acute surprise on his face when he clocked that it was her on his doorstep.

  ‘Jess!’ His beautiful voice rumbled through her, waking up every nerve ending and sending a rush of pure longing south through her body. He was even more gorgeous, more virile, than she remembered. It had been less than a week since they’d last seen each other, but to Jess it felt like a lifetime since she’d been allowed to touch him.

  She wanted him back. So badly it physically hurt.

  She needed to be cool here, collected and poised. No way was she going to go to pieces and make a fool of herself.

  Opening her mouth to speak, she froze, totally at a loss for what to say now she was standing there in front of him again.

  Say something, Jess. Anything.

  ‘I love you,’ she blurted, her brain too late to catch up with her mouth and circumnavigate the damage she’d just wreaked.

  He just stared at her with those mesmerising eyes of his and didn’t say a word. There wasn’t even a flicker of emotion on his face.

  Her heartbeat accelerated as she waited for something—anything—to give her a clue about how he felt about her laying herself on the line like that.

  There was a sound of heavy footsteps behind her and, grateful for the distraction from her humiliation, she broke her awkward eye contact with Xander and turned around to see a thickset, silver-haired man reach the top of the stairwell and raise a hand in greeting to them both.

  ‘Xander, glad I’ve caught you in. I’ve been speaking to the guys at the Brick Lane gallery and they have a couple more questions about how we want to set the exhibition up. I was in the area so I thought I’d drop in for a quick chat about it.’

  Jess heard Xander clear his throat behind her. ‘Sure, Paul, yeah. Tell you what, come down to the kitchen with me while I make a drink for my guest and we’ll chat on the way.’

  Jess’s skin prickled as she felt him move from behind her and she watched in stultified silence as he walked towards his visitor.

  He turned back to look at her, his face still devoid of any emotion.

  ‘Jess, why don’t you wait in my studio? I’ll be back in a minute and we can talk,’ he said levelly.

  She gave him a nod and a tentative smile, then watched him disappear down the stairs after his visitor.

  Stumbling into his studio, she closed the door behind her and put her head in her hands. She stared at the floor in horror, utterly incredulous that she just told him that she loved him.

  Well, at least no one could accuse her of beating around the bush.

  What must he be thinking right now? And what was he going to say when he finally came back into the room?

  Her heart thumped against her chest as she considered the possibilities. Rejection or acceptance. Whichever he chose, it was going to turn her world upside down. Again.

  She paced the room for a minute trying to get her head together, managing to knock into one of the paintings propped against the wall and jumping back when it fell flat against the floor with a clatter.

  Picking it up, she propped it back against the wall and knelt there for a moment, breathing slowly and deeply. As she stared at the back of the painting it suddenly occurred to her that she was alone, in Xander’s studio, surrounded by his exhibition paintings. Well, she might as well get what she’d come here for while he was out of the room. Even if he gave her the brush-off she could still go back and give Pamela what she needed for the article before heading off home to crumple into a sobbing heap.

  She walked unsteadily over to where his largest paintings stood, their paint-stained tarpaulins hiding them from sight. Her hand shook as she pulled up the bottom of one of the tarps to reveal the painting underneath.

  Her heart rattled in her chest as she stood there, staring at it, hardly able to believe what she was seeing. It was a picture of her, standing naked, covered in paint with an embarrassingly provocative look on her face.

  She could barely breathe, the horror of what she was seeing making her chest contract painfully.

  Turning round, and with a sense of impending dread, she lifted up the tarp on the painting propped against the easel in the middle of the room. It was another one of her, lying trussed up to his bed, fully clothed in her linen suit and another image of her naked body above that in some subversive sexual pose.

  He’d taken their most intimate, most intensely personal moments and was intending to use them for commercial gain.

  The thought of these pictures being displayed in public view, her face clearly recognisable, made her want to vomit.

  He didn’t care about her at all; he’d been using her.

  * * *

  Xander somehow managed to deal with his agent’s jovial banter and answer his questions about details for the exhibition while Jess’s declaration that she loved him whirled like a tornado around his head.

  He’d been amazed and strangely uplifted to find her standing there at his door, and seeing her again had brought home to him just how much he’d missed her company. But her announcement had thrown him for six.

  Even though she’d clearly let it slip by accident—in her usual impulsive fashion—he could tell from the look in her eye that she meant it.

  And it scared the crap out of him.

  For the first time in his life he had no idea how to deal with a situation. Usually he’d just blow a woman off if she suddenly announced she was in love with him, but he didn’t want to do that with Jess. She meant more to him than that.

  He just wasn’t sure how much more.

  They needed to talk about this, that was for damn sure.

  After finally getting rid of Paul, he walked back into the studio to find Jess standing in front of the final painting he’d been working on for the exhibition—the one of her sexual epiphany. His first instinct was to stride over there and pull the tarp back down and yell at her for peeking, until he saw the look of bewildered disbelief on her face.

  ‘You sketched me naked? While I was asleep?’ She sounded so shocked, s
o hurt, it stopped him in his tracks. He approached her with his hands held out in a placatory gesture, as a dark, disturbing burn wove through his chest and pooled in his belly. ‘Jess, it was amazing. I had this moment of clarity—I haven’t been this excited about a painting in a very long time.’

  She stared at him, aghast. ‘You thought it would be okay, when you knew how much I hated showing my body? I haven’t exactly been coy about that, Xander, but you thought you’d go ahead and do it anyway without me knowing about it?’

  A cold shiver tickled down his spine. ‘I thought maybe you’d got past the worry about how you look naked.’

  ‘You thought you’d fixed me?’ she interrupted. ‘That after you’d thrown a few orgasms my way I’d suddenly love my body enough to have you expose it for all the world to see?’ Her voice was shaking now. ‘It was meant to be just for you, Xander. I never would have let you seduce me if I thought you were going to do something like this. You exploited my trust.’

  ‘Jess, you’re overreacting...’

  ‘Do you have any idea how humiliated I feel right now? I trusted you. I thought you were a good guy—a messed-up egomaniac, but a good guy at heart. But this was only ever about the art, wasn’t it, Xander? For your own benefit. For your career.’

  He was floundering now, at a loss how to explain himself. ‘But you look so amazing.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Xander,’ she said, giving him such a cold look he had to take a breath to steady himself.

  Frustration twisted his guts. ‘You want me to pull the picture from the exhibition? It’s the best thing I’ve done in years, Jess. You inspired it. You should be proud.’

  ‘Proud!’ She spat the word out. ‘Proud for everyone to know I was just another of your saps that you slept with to get what you wanted, then tossed aside? Judging by the fact you thought it was okay to produce pictures like this of me—’ she jabbed her finger towards the canvas ‘—I don’t think there’s any chance you could love me back in the way I need you to. I thought perhaps you understood me, that our time together meant something, but apparently I was wrong. I was naive and stupid to think I could be the woman to tame you. This was never about me, Xander, was it? It was always about you and your art.’

  He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even get his response to that straight in his head. He hadn’t been looking for a relationship and this thing with Jess had just come out of the blue and now his creativity seemed to be peaking he was afraid to let anything get in the way of it. Thinking about someone else right now would take precious mental energy away from his work and he couldn’t afford to let anything damage his muse again. Not even Jess.

  He needed to prove to the world he was back, bigger, badder and stronger than ever. He’d won against the disabling inertia that had held him hostage for so long. He could prove his earlier talent hadn’t been a fluke and stick two fingers up at all those naysayers.

  To not let his father have been right about him.

  Jess stared at him angrily for a beat longer, waiting in vain for him to pull himself together enough to answer her. When he failed to open his mouth, she turned on her heel and stormed out, slamming the door of the studio hard behind her.

  He slumped into a chair, unable to process all the thoughts raging through his brain. He wanted her to be pleased and proud of his pictures, to tell him what good work he’d done, but instead she’d been more concerned about how she looked in them.

  A disabling indolence kept him in his chair and he sat, staring into space as the silence echoed in his head.

  * * *

  Over the next few days he began to hate looking at his last painting of her, the initial joy of creating it marred by the pain and distress he’d caused.

  After a couple more days of staring into space, he tried calling her, first on her mobile, only to be sent straight to voicemail, then at her magazine, only to be told she wasn’t available and could they take a message?

  He left numerous messages asking her to call him, becoming more and more irate when his phone remained steadfastly silent.

  She’d cut him away like the bloodsucking leech he was.

  It wasn’t the first time a woman had walked out on him, but he’d never liked any of the others enough to care that much before. He liked Jess, though, an awful lot.

  She’d twisted herself into his thoughts and he found himself on edge and preoccupied by the hole she’d left by her desertion. He barely knew her, but she’d done something to his psyche by forcing him to think about someone other than himself for once—as if she’d opened up a gaping chasm in his consciousness, which he was having trouble knitting back together.

  He should have been honest with her about how he really felt, instead of treating her like something fun to do. He cringed at the memory of telling her that.

  But he’d been scared. It was his standard defence mechanism, to keep his lovers at an emotional distance so he’d never have to deal with more of the painful feeling of rejection he’d been living with since he could remember.

  His whole life had revolved around getting people to buy into the image of the bad-boy loner he wanted them to see rather than the real him and he seemed unable to drag himself out of its deathlike grip.

  Without meaning to he’d let Jess glimpse the real him, but when she’d pushed for more he’d thrown up his barriers, keeping their relationship purely physical, keeping her out.

  Using her for his own ends.

  He’d unequivocally demonstrated that his career was the most important thing in the world to him and that she’d meant nothing. He’d used her to fix himself, drained their relationship of everything good, then spat her out. Because he was a selfish idiot. His father had been right, after all; he didn’t deserve to be loved, not when he acted the way he did. He took everything he wanted and gave nothing back.

  He was pure, unadulterated greed.

  If he was ever going to be good enough to be the right man for Jess he needed to learn how to let go of his anger and jealousy and fear and give her back what she’d given to him.

  Humility and kindness and altruism. To learn how to give for the sake of giving, instead of looking for what he could get out of it.

  He’d drawn himself into such a hard shell nothing had been able to penetrate it. Until Jess had come along and started tapping at the seams.

  She’d been absolutely right about how distanced he’d allowed himself to be from everyone else, how hyperfocused he was about how things affected him. He’d completely overlooked how he’d messed up everyone else who came into contact with him, just so he could get what he wanted.

  He’d been alone for so long he had no idea how to let someone else into his life. How to care about them and let them care for him. Deep down he accepted now that he’d thought of himself as unlovable, after having it rammed home over the years through his dad’s total lack of interest in him. He’d never admitted to his father how that had made him feel, he’d just shrugged it off as how things were, but he should have been braver. He should have stood up for himself instead of shutting himself away.

  And now Jess had given up on him, too.

  He wanted her back so much it made him ache, but how could he ever make her believe he meant it?

  It was time to face up to what kept him so distanced from everyone else in his life.

  He needed to let go of this feeling that he still had something to prove to a father who had never cared about him. The old man was dead and he needed to move on with his life now.

  Then he needed to find Jess and convince her that he was sorry and that he was worth taking a risk on.

  After days of not being able to face going in to his studio and hiding away from the world in his flat, he finally made the journey back there. Picking up a scalpel from in amongst the mess of paints and modelling equipment on his art table,
he walked over to the painting of Jess. It was the piece of work that could prove he wasn’t the flash in the pan that he, and pretty much everyone else in the world, it seemed, had feared he was.

  Raising the scalpel, he brought it down hard across the canvas, cutting a large gash from corner to corner, then another, and another, until all that was left was a frame with colourful strips hanging from it like ragged paper garlands.

  It was time to start again.

  TEN

  After a few of weeks of going through the motions of getting up and going to work in a stultified daze, Jess finally began to come out of the emotional coma she’d put herself in in an attempt to block the pain and humiliation of how Xander had used her.

  He’d tried calling her a couple of days after she’d first stormed out, which she’d ignored in her anger at him, but she hadn’t heard from him since. He’d obviously given up on her now and she didn’t expect ever to hear from him again. But then, why the hell would she be any different from the tens of women he’d already used up and cast aside? He’d probably moved on to a new love affair already.

  She wouldn’t know. She hardly looked at social media any more for fear of seeing something about him and a new lover that would bring back the flood of heartache she was only just starting to break through.

  It was for the best. They would never have worked as a couple anyway. He was too self-involved, too wild, too ephemeral in nature for her and she couldn’t match that.

  Pulling off her coat and slumping into her chair at her desk, she was just about to turn on her computer when she noticed an envelope next to her keyboard, addressed to her at the magazine. The handwriting was loopy and messy and something about it made her heart beat a little faster. Tearing it open, she took out a piece of shiny black card and stared at it for a moment. It appeared to be blank, but when she went to flip it over something caught her eye. She tipped it back slowly until the fluorescent overhead lights in the office shone up the words: Out of the Shadows. A new exhibition by Xander Heaton.