His Masterpiece

by Ava Lore

  I walked like the dead. Shambling. Unable to think. I hurt. I don't know how I made it to the front of the warehouse, but I did. I somehow found it in the maze, and when I fell against the door the metal slats clattered so loudly I thought I would fall apart.

  I had to bend down to reach the handle. I had to let go of my side.

  Dizziness overwhelmed me as I removed my left hand and wrapped it around the handle. I watched from inside my head, trying to figure out what was wrong when I couldn't get a grip.

  Red, I thought. Blood, I thought. My hand fell from the door, limp against my jeans, and with supreme effort I wiped it clean and tried again.

  Metal screamed, and so did I.

  It was almost impossible. It hadn't been heavy before, I had just been pretending, but now it weighed a million pounds. But I had to get out. I had to. I had to get to Malcolm, prove his innocence, or all of this was for nothing.

  Red blood gushed from my side. Ruined muscles screamed in pain, unable to do what I asked of them. I panted. My mouth was dry. I wanted water.

  Focus. Focus. Squat. Lift with the legs, not the torso. Oh god.

  Three feet. That's as far as I was able to lift it. It was enough. I fell to my hands and knees and crawled under the door, into the blinding gray light of the windy March day.

  The sound of a car door opening. Wind whipped over my clammy face. I was going to be sick, but I forced myself to look up. The black car we'd taken here loomed like a hulking black beast in the street. On the far side, the driver was getting out, his mouth hard and set, his eyes glowering at me as though I were a naughty puppy. He was huge, enormous, a giant unfolding toward me.

  If he gets me, I thought, it'll be all over.

  I lifted the gun and fired.

  A look of surprise flashed across his face, as though I'd just grown a clown nose. Then, silently, he folded up and slumped over.

  I didn't even bother to check if he was alive. I crawled along the narrow sidewalk. A chainlink fence on one side of me, and I reached out and pulled myself to my feet before I staggered onward.

  A corner. There were always people at a corner. Stores. Human beings. I had to get to a corner. If I could get away from Don, I would be okay.

  Well. Malcolm would be okay.

  Help me, I begged silently, and then I was stumbling down a long tunnel toward two men. Dark faces, dressed like me. They were staring. They'd heard the gunshot, and as I staggered toward them they backed up. I realized they were afraid of me.

  I looked down and saw the gun still in my hand. I dropped it. Mercifully it just fell to the concrete and didn't go off. I looked up again, peering down the tunnel.

  They were still there. Not running. Thank you.

  I reached out, but my vision was blurring, the world tilting. The wind nipped and bit at me, cold against my skin, but nothing compared to the dark void opening up inside me, blooming like a black rose.

  I remember their faces. One looked scared, the other horrified as he lunged forward to catch me, but, as though from far away, I saw myself hit the pavement, crumpling, and then I closed my eyes and turned inward and fell into the blackness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When I opened my eyes again, I was in a hospital. White and cream and blue and sterile. Felicia sat by my bed, staring at her phone, a line of worry between her brows as she restlessly scanned the screen. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but a bone deep exhaustion filled me and my mouth was dry as desert sand.

  I wheezed, but it wasn't even loud enough to catch her attention. I let my eyes close.

  I woke again, this time as nurse bent over me, her perfume overwhelming my nose. My stomach heaved and I choked on vomit. She took one look at me and slammed a button on the wall.

  Doctors and nurses and interns flooded the room. Tubes fed down my throat, sucking the vomit out. This time I felt pain, but it was far away, happening to someone else.

  It must suck to be that chick, I thought, and fell asleep again before they even finished clearing my airway.

  When I finally woke up for real, Malcolm was there.

  If I could have commanded my lungs to sigh in relief, I would have, but the pain that had been at bay suddenly reared up and struck, and I could hardly breathe.

  Malcolm noticed my eyes opening almost immediately, and in a flash he was at my side, his large, sweet hands running over my forehead, stroking down my cheeks, his thumbs running against my temples as he leaned over the hospital bed and kissed my brow, soft and gentle, over and over again.

  Warmth spread through me, chasing away the pain. Malcolm, I thought. Malcolm, you're free. I must have done it somehow. They must have found the files. He must have proved his innocence.

  I did it, I wanted to say. I freed you. But I couldn't talk. My mouth had the sticky, bone dry feel of too much morphine, and I tried to lick my lips to wet them. It didn't matter. It was like my tongue was plastic.

  “Wait, don't strain yourself,” Malcolm said. His voice rumbled through me, the sound painful in my head, but burrowing deep into my aching heart, and I subsided, willing, at last, to let him do what he wanted, completely and totally. I closed my eyes, and I drifted into a snap of sleep before I felt the sting of cold on my lips and I opened them again.

  Malcolm stared down at me, his face so tender I thought I would shatter. I need to be handled roughly to survive. Be kind to me, and I break.

  His warm hand landed on my throat, his thumb coaxing my chin down, and when I opened my mouth he slipped a chip of ice into it. It hit like a balm from heaven.

  Patiently, Malcolm fed me ice until I fell asleep again.

  That was how it went for a while. I would wake, and Malcolm would be there. With each waking I felt a little stronger. Doctors and nurses came and went. Felicia and Anton fluttered in and out. Friends appeared and disappeared.

  But Malcolm was always there, slipping ice onto my tongue like a sacrament, and with every kiss he pressed to my brow I crumbled a little inside, my armor breaking under his tender assault. I learned later that it was only about twelve hours between my vomiting incident and the first time I was able to speak, but it felt like a year. Ten years. A lifetime.

  So after a lifetime I opened my eyes and saw him curled over the edge of my bed, sleeping. He looked exhausted, the same way I'd seen him when we'd first met, when he'd resolved to die, except now the dark circles under his eyes were almost black with the beautiful tan he had obtained on the sea. His shaggy blond hair, now sun-bleached and far messier than it had been when we first met, fell across his forehead, and I had the urge to reach out and brush it from his eyes.

  I got as far as lifting a hand before I realized it was stuffed full of needles and tubes, and I remembered I'd been shot.

  Damn.

  I drew breath, meaning to say something, but I started coughing. It hurt like hell. I gasped as I coughed, feeling as if I was going to rip apart at the seams, and Malcolm woke up at the first expulsion.

  “Sadie?” he said, panic coloring his voice. He sat up immediately and moved to the head of the bed, his beautiful artists' hands reaching for me.

  I stopped coughing and gave him a weak smile.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Sadie,” he replied, and his cherrywood eyes filled with tears. He started shaking his head, leaving me confused. Was he upset I was awake?

  I couldn't even get beyond the next thought. I felt like complete ass. It was hard to rally my brain into a coherent pattern, and when I tried to lift my head the room dipped and swirled around me.

  Warm hands landed on my shoulders. “Shh, shh,” Malcolm murmured. “Just lie back and rest.”

  “I got shot,” I said.

  His face became lined with concern. “I know,” he said. “Shit, I'm so sorry, Sadie. It's all my fault. I shouldn't have been so stupid...”

  I felt my brows moving into some position or other—probably frowning—but I was still high enough on morphine that I could hardly tell what my face was
doing. My confusion must have showed, though, because he drew his lip through his teeth, clearly upset.

  “I mean I treated it as a game” he tried to clarify. “I didn't think Don would be that ruthless. I have no idea how he thought he could get away with it, but people backed into corners do crazy things. I should have known he would do whatever it took. I played with your life, all of your life, just to feel something other than emptiness or pain. I'm so selfish... I understand if you won't ever forgive me.”

  He is crazy, I thought to myself, vaguely amused. It wasn't like I hadn't known what I was doing, trying to throw myself in front of a man hellbent on self-destruction. I'd done it before, and got a lot less out of it for my trouble. But there was something special in Malcolm, and I felt an answering spark in me when we were together. Those days on the boat, dancing closer and closer together, had been some of the sweetest of my life, and I couldn't have born the thought of never having that again. So I'd fought hard to save it, and now that was done and Malcolm was here beside me.

  Worth. It.

  “Sadie?” He seemed to be waiting to hear his fate.

  I gave him a little half-shrug, more that I couldn't really move rather than out of any insolence on my part. “Nobody's perfect,” I rasped at him.

  “But... I'm so sorry...”

  I managed a tiny smile. “Just don't do it again.”

  The sheen of tears disappeared and he smiled at me. A real smile. It took my breath away. Then he lowered his face and buried it in my shoulder.

  “You need to rest, Sadie. You have to recover.”

  I licked my lips. “Don?” I managed to say.

  “In jail, as is his driver, and one of my lawyers... I couldn't trust my legal team, so I had to rely on you, and I wish I hadn't. I should have found another way...”

  I shook my head, even though he couldn't see it from where he had buried his face. “No big deal,” I managed to tell him.

  He lifted his head. “Yes, big deal. You could have died.”

  I closed my eyes. His warm hands moved up my throat to my face, smoothing over my cheekbones, covering my brow. “Sadie...” he said.

  I fell asleep, just happy to be with him.

  The bullet had torn through my side, but miraculously had missed most of my major organs, though I'd been nicked in the liver. The blood loss had been the worst of it, and I learned I'd malingered for a day or so until I was able to be stabilized. It still felt totally wretched, but I got off easy. The driver of the car hadn't been quite so lucky with a bullet bursting a kidney. He'd live, but when I learned about it I felt awful. He probably hadn't known I was going to be killed.

  Don, of course, got the least of it with a major concussion and a broken nose, though I guess it was lucky he was coherent because, as I guessed, he tried to tell everyone I was a thief, stealing from my disgraced lover. The thumb drive found in my underwear, of course, told a different story. I wished I could have been awake to see the doctor's faces when they found that. But it freed Malcolm and though there would be an ongoing investigation into what exactly had happened, I had a feeling that Felicia's lawyers would figure out a way to get any charges dropped without my intervention. I focused on getting better.

  Eventually the hospital staff let me go home, although Malcolm insisted that the home I go to was his. I didn't really feel like arguing with him. I still needed a lot of help, and it was a bright, sunny day late in March when I was let out of the hospital. When we arrived at his house, Malcolm helped me hobble up the front stairs. The place was still empty, but it felt like a better empty now. The emptiness of possibility, rather than the emptiness of ending. Malcolm cradled me in his arms and carried me all the way up the stairs to the fourth floor, and I wrapped my arms around him and let him. It felt good to be carried. It felt good to be taken care of.

  He installed me in his bedroom. I have to say, if you're recovering from a gunshot wound, an open room full of light in a mansion in upper Manhattan is a great place to do it. I slept in the sinfully luxurious sheets, covered in the puffy white down comforter, and Malcolm, so as not to disturb my healing wounds by sleeping in the same bed as me, hauled a mattress up the stairs and slept on the floor.

  The world whirled by, but that beautiful, light-filled room was a haven. Felicia called every day, but had the good sense to stay away, and I was grateful for that. I wasn't ready for our sanctuary to be invaded yet. Malcolm and I would lay in bed and talk, or read together, or watch a movie on his iPad. His long, hard body warmed me up, and once I started physical therapy I'd be beat at the end of my sessions, and he would lay in bed next to me and stroke my hair until I fell asleep.

  When I needed a bath, he would carry me down to the third floor and put me in the tub, fill it with a few inches of water, add lavender and chamomile perfumed salts, and wash me with gentle hands and soft cloths. His fingers slipped over my breasts, up my throat and down into my pussy without demanding anything, leaving me hot and aching for him, though sex—or even a soothing orgasm—was out of the question, and even the sweet tensing of sensual pleasure made my side hurt.

  “Patience,” he would say then, and kiss me, calming me. We were the only two people in the world, it seemed, and even if we weren't Malcolm acted like it was true. He was there. Gentle and attentive. Caring. Entirely present, entirely with me.

  It was a side of him that I'd never thought I'd see, and it was sweet as the honey-spiked tea he would brew for me on the days the clouds covered the sky and the rains poured down the windows.

  He was focused on me like a laser, and at the time I thought it was because he was wracked with guilt for his part in my indisposition, but I found I couldn't care less about the wound. People get shot every day and for way stupider reasons. This was one scar I was going to whip out at parties and show off. I'd totally earned it and it would make a great story. So this one time I took a bullet for a guy who wasn't even my boyfriend...

  A few weeks passed and I was finally up and around again, stretching my legs, walking the length of his absurd bedroom, from the bed to the computer and back. It was only then that Malcolm started to take his eyes off me, as though he hadn't really thought my recovery was for real until he actually saw me standing on my own two feet. A tension I hadn't even known was in him disappeared.

  He began to work again, lying next to me in bed or curled up on the white couch and overstuffed chairs he had dragged up the stairs one afternoon. He'd arranged them in a little semi-circle, giving us a little suite in the bedroom. I wondered what part of the house he'd cribbed them from since I'd never had a grand tour when it was full of stuff, but when I finally trusted myself to go downstairs on my own, I was shocked to find the house still empty.

  “Where's all your junk?” I asked him when I came back up the stairs. He sat on the white couch, a book on his crossed legs as he wrote on a piece of paper.

  “I told you,” he said, “it didn't make me happy so I'm getting rid of it. I've decided that I'm not going to keep anything that doesn't make me happy.”

  I felt my mouth twist. “I liked the Rodin,” I said. “Sorry I had to ruin it.”

  A faint smile graced his lips at that. “Don't worry. I've lent it to the Museé Rodin where it will be meticulously restored and displayed, then returned. I always liked that bust, but if it makes you happy then it is a definite keeper.”

  I couldn't help but grin at that, relieved. “That's good to know.” Then he turned the piece of paper in his lap and I frowned, realizing that he wasn't writing—he was drawing. “What are you working on?” I blurted, then bit my cheek. I thought he'd given up sketching in his angry outburst on the boat.

  The look he gave me could only be described as smug. “My masterpiece,” he said.

  “Can I see?” I asked him.

  “Oh no. That would ruin it.”

  I scowled. “What, is it like a quantum masterpiece, where it's genius if you don't look at it and it sucks if you do?”

  He laughed. “No,
but that's a pretty brilliant idea for a piece of art. I don't think I could pull that off, but I bet you could.”

  I blinked. “What? I haven't painted in months...”

  “You don't have to paint, just make art.” Delicately he placed the eraser of his pencil between his teeth. “Or perhaps you have already made such a piece? The theoretical piece of art that you could produce, and yet persist in not producing because you have a job and are now respectable?”

  Ouch. “I'm not that respectable,” I said.

  “Fair enough,” he replied. “But still. You should make art, Sadie.”

  He said it as though it were easy. And maybe it was. “I'll have to think about it.”

  “Do. I think you get sidetracked into other people too much and don't take care of yourself.”

  “I've been letting you take care of me, haven't I?”

  The hangdog look he gave me was almost comical. “Yes, after you took a bullet for me.”

  “Well, yeah.” I shrugged, as if that was no big deal. Brush with death? Please. The blowjob on the police moped was way more dangerous. It could have fallen over and we could have been seriously hurt. “Whatever. Are you sure I can't see it?”

  He nodded.

  “You won't even show it to the woman who took a bullet for you?”

  He snorted and shook his head. “Especially not you, my muse. You'll just have to wait and be patient.”

  I don't usually pout, but I was sorely tempted to do so. If there's one way to get me all worked up about something, it's forbidding me from it. I huffed and sighed very passive-aggressively for a minute or two, then gave up and grabbed my e-reader and snuggled back into bed.

  I woke up later, after the sun had gone down and the ghostly lights of the city filtered in through the windows, leaving the room eerie and beautiful. Malcolm slept like the dead on the floor next to the bed. I sat up and rubbed the sleep from my eyes, feeling hungry. Slipping off the mattress, careful not to wake him up, I padded across the floor towards the stairs. A dark square on one of the overstuffed chairs caught my attention.