by Holly Rayner
Angry at Rafiq’s presumptuous act in the car, I found myself pacing his expansive penthouse, upset but unable to relax. All this time, I thought I had found a fantastic deal, but I should have known it was too good to be true. Of course a playboy like Rafiq was going to try and get whatever he could out of me; he didn’t seem to go a day without bedding a new woman.
My anger felt like it was going to hit a boiling point, until I abruptly remembered the painting room. Quickly, I changed out of my dress and went to my bedroom to find my yoga pants and a T-shirt, the outfit I usually slept in, and the least valuable clothing I had brought to Rafiq’s. On a hunch, I snooped around further inside the cabinets of the painting room, and found spotless, brand-new painter’s robes to put over my clothes.
It occurred to me, even in my anger, that Rafiq really had thought of everything to put in the painting room—even the little details the average person wouldn’t have thought of. But then, he probably just hired someone to put it together, just like he hired me to fix his problems with his father.
All the assumptions I had about him being a capable, successful businessman felt like a girl’s fantasies, now. Rafiq was just another trust fund kid trying to have his cake and eat it too, access daddy’s fortune without any of the responsibility or pressure it took to earn the money. Typical, and so cliché it was almost boring.
He was the opposite of everything I was: spoiled, entitled, and ungrateful. He threw more money at strippers than I made in a year. And instead of being an honest person and living his life in some sort of earnest, forthright way, he just hired people to get around the rules. How much energy had he wasted on schemes and plans like this, instead of just being honest with his father?
He made me furious. I could still feel his warm hand on my leg, and while the sensation wasn’t totally unwelcome, the context certainly was. He may have hired me, but Rafiq didn’t own me, and if he thought that our arrangement was going to transform into that, he was in for a very rude awakening.
I stuffed my long black hair into a hair tie to keep it out of my face. For a few minutes, I went through the sizes and shapes of canvases that were stacked against the wall, and eventually settled on a tall rectangle, which I placed vertically on the biggest easel in the room. The shape gave me the sensation I felt in my chest when I thought about Rafiq: the sensation of falling, of simultaneously ascending, being trapped in a thin moment of time where I couldn’t tell which end was up.
I mixed my paints and let out all my rage and emotion on the canvas. The sun set through the living room windows behind me without my noticing, lost as I was in creating the dark, toxic gradient out of deep blues and grays on the canvas. My strokes were thicker than usual because the muscles of my arm were full of adrenaline, but I didn’t try to correct them or smooth them out. I allowed them to be big and angry; that was exactly the way my heart felt right now.
I must not have heard the sound of the elevator arriving; I certainly hadn’t heard the buzzer from the doorman. One moment, I was leaning very closely against the canvas to apply white detail with a thin horsehair brush, the next, I started at the sound of rumbling laughter and exaggerated screams coming from the living room.
I jerked forward, startled, and my face hit the canvas with a smack, bumping my nose into the wooden frame and smearing paint across my skin. With a growl, I threw my brush down on the tray full of paints and rags and stalked to the living room to confront whatever was happening in the penthouse.
My jaw dropped at the sight of people spilling into the apartment like someone had opened a floodgate to the hallway. There must have been over forty people filling the living and dining room, and every single one of them seemed drunk. Someone quickly found Rafiq’s stereo, and dance music started to blare throughout the house, rattling the glass in the windows and drowning out the sloppy conversational din.
The revelers cheered when the music started up, and someone turned out most of the lights in response in some feeble attempt to create a nightclub atmosphere. Like locusts, the drunk partiers swarmed over the rooms of the penthouse, heading for the fridge and the liquor cabinets, collapsing on the couches and chaise lounges, and starting up the fireplace. A stumbling couple were making out and pulling at each other’s clothes, already looking for a quiet place to go have sex—and they were headed right for my bedroom.
“Oh, hell no,” I said out loud, and stalked over to block their path. Slamming my door shut, I gave them a sour smile when they looked at me, and pointed them instead to Rafiq’s room, “Try over there.” They obliged, and I didn’t feel even a little bad about it.
A headache rocked its way up into my skull as the music pounded away. People danced and touched like they were the only ones in the room. They were all dressed like Rafiq, in fancy cut suits and expensive but revealing dresses, the party crowd of the one percent, here to ruin my night and keep me from even being able to paint. Fury raced through my veins.
The sensible part of me knew I should just head to bed and talk to Rafiq in the morning. If he was going to be raging like this every single night, he might have to add some cash to that total he had already paid me for this arrangement, because this was not my scene and I wanted no part of it.
But my anger was too much to ignore. I wanted to tear his head off, even just with my words. At the very least, he couldn’t expect me to sleep with all this damn noise. If this was some pathetic revenge plot to get back at me for rejecting him, he surely wasn’t going to get away with it cleanly.
In the dancing light of the fireplace, I spotted Rafiq across the crowd, grinding against a beautiful redheaded woman in a tight white dress. He held her tiny body against him, running his hands over her curves with abandon. She suckled at his neck, her thin arms wrapped around his neck, her fingers combing through his jet black hair.
The sight pierced my heart in a way I didn’t understand—or didn’t want to understand. I tried to push through the crowd to get to him, but I was met with so many drunk, groping hands that it quickly became much more hassle than it was worth, and I gave up.
I left Rafiq and his wonderful friends to their debauchery and, after making sure the door to my studio was shut and my new canvas was safely stored, I retreated to my bedroom and locked the door for safe measure, fearing another horny couple would stumble their way in while I was sleeping.
The music blared through the walls for most of the night, and I only managed to fall asleep after wrapping one of the fine memory foam pillows around my ears. As I drifted off, I couldn’t help wondering if I had made a huge mistake by accepting this devil’s bargain with Rafiq.
EIGHT