Stone gave me a side eye, the corner of his mouth lifting. “You are distracting me.”
“What are you drawing? Let me see.”
He only considered for a second, gazing down at me with woeful black eyes. He was vulnerable. Like I’d cut him open days ago, and neither of us had stitched him closed. Then he closed the sketchpad and handed it to me, wanting me to see, wanting to share it with me.
I opened the sketchpad to discover a crushed black lily tucked into the spine.
He kept one, my heart sang.
I plucked it from between the pages and swept it across my lips as I read the script at the top of the page.“She’ll sting you one day, oh, ever so gently, so you hardly ever feel it. ‘Till you fall dead.”Then under it, in fine penmanship, it readJacob Grimm.I looked at him again.
Stone cleared his throat. “As you suggested, I watched a film on the projector. Those words were in Queen Bee, but I remembered them first written by Jacob Grimm.”
“Did this passage remind you of me?” I asked from soft lips.
He leaned back, stretching out his legs, looking down at me from behind hooded eyes, silent, a knowing look. One that required no words. I looked back at the sketchpad and flipped through the pages.
Stone had drawn a collection of eyes, delicate mouths, and profiles in a way that someone in love would. Then I landed on the last picture. This was of me in the bathtub at this very moment.
“You were drawing me,” I said, feeling a blush creep across my cheeks as I looked at the girl in the drawing. It was the first time I could look at myself and not see evil. I didn’t know what that meant to him, but it meant a lot to me. “It’s good. It’s really good. Who taught you how to draw like this?”
“Art has no master.”
I felt his eyes on me as I traced a dry finger around the curve of my sketched face, across my collarbone, and the crescent of my breast.
His style was also grieving, longing, and passion. His art provoked the heart, as one would be affected by music, a novel, or a scene in a movie. It was beautifully devastating.
I looked up at him. “I don’t know a damn thing about love, but this screams you’ve once known what it felt like.”
Stone was staring down at me, chewing on the end of his thick drawing pencil. “The only ones who know a damn thing about love, I believe, are the artists. And only during occasions they’ve completely lost themselves in their work. So, if I’ve ever felt love, I would have later mistaken it for obsession. And if I ever feel love, I’m afraid I won’t know until it’s too late.”
Sadness crept inside me.
Sadness for both of us.
“Sounds like a slow death.”
“We can survive a lifetime without love, as long as it doesn’t touch us.”
“Seems like an impossible task. What happens if it does?”
A beautiful smile ripped across his face.
“Then, my darling, we become mad fools.”
I closed the book, handed it to him, and sank back into the tub, wanting to say something. That maybe … I was the mad fool for wanting this thing called love.
Though attentive to my every moment, Stone’s audacious eyes followed me, as they always did. They observed me, bold and brazen, in such a way, it seemed, that he was either afraid I’d fade away or suffocate him.
But then those smoldering fucking eyes raked down my face and breasts, and the air in the room thickened.
The shared space was no longer light and playful but thick and intense.
Torturous seconds passed, and he laid his pencil and sketchpad on the counter behind him. With his eyes never leaving mine, he rolled his sleeve to the elbow, leaned in, and supported one hand on the tub’s rim behind my head.
Mouths inches apart, a gloved hand trailed across the inside of my leg, from my ankle bone to my knee, and I sucked in a breath.
“Stone,” I shuddered.
