I can feel myself growing more and more dazed, hypnotized by the bulging veins and tattoos crossing paths along his forearm with the dusting of dark hair and lightly tanned skin. I’m leaning onto the studio’s large-basin sink, now filled with brushes in need of saving, and praying it keeps me steady as my legs refuse to do that work for me. My eyes are undoubtedly wide and unblinking and probably freaky-looking as I fight with myself to gain back consciousness.
Seriously, what is wrong with me?
“Yoo-hoo! Killer! Are you in there?”
“Yes,” I say, snapping my eyes away from him. My thoughts are stuck with the web tattoo covering his elbow. “Sorry, I thought I saw…a spider.”Yes, clever. Fooled him, Prue! Well done!God, the laugh my mother would have at my expense.
“A spider, right.” He chuckles, before lifting a paint can off the floor and reading the text on the side.
It took me twenty minutes to get Milo to start working. He was a kid in a candy shop running around eagerly taking in each of my mother’s paintings. I swear I saw him almost cry at the long rectangular one by the door. It’s literally just a big white canvas with a single blue dot in the center, small, the size of a pencil eraser. It’s arguably my least favorite of the hundreds here. But he gave it five whole minutes of the two hours heclaimedto have.
Art lovers are weird.
“What kind of spider?” he asks, tossing an emptied can into his black trash bag.
“I don’t know.”
“Was it furry? Purple? Black? Orange? Big? Small? Wearing a hat of some kind?”
I officiallyloathehim. “Shut up.”
“Interesting…” Milo nods slowly, dropping another can into the trash bag he holds open. “You a big fan of spiders, Killer?”
I don’t know when that became his nickname for me, and I’ll deny it if ever questioned, but I don’tentirelyhate it. I like a little healthy, fearful reverence as much as the next girl. It’s at least better thandarling, princess, love, sweetie,or any of the other delicate type of nicknames I’ve earned from my parents or the townies. Those never felt quite right.
“Not particularly,” I mumble, picking up pieces of ripped-up sponges off the floor.
He pouts disingenuously, and his eyes widen as he nods in performative disbelief. “Wow…Really?”
I sigh, tired of his teasing. “Yes.”
“Huh,” he says dryly. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“All right,” I answer absently, lowering onto all fours to try to scrape some old paint off the tiled floor.
“From where I was standing,” he says, much, much closer now, his voice filled with arrogant glee, “it seemed like you werereallyinto spiders for a second there.” His tone threw quotation marks over the wordspiders.
I refuse to look at him or give up on removing this stubborn paint splatter baked into the floor. “It’s interesting you mention that, because I was just reading the other day that spiders have narcissistic tendencies…” I say, chipping off a small corner of the dried paint splatter with my thumbnail. “Fascinating, right?”
“Oh, do they?” His laugh is a short, punctuated point—ha.
“Yes, they are deeply, deeply arrogant creatures.”
“It’s true what they say, I guess…youdolearn something new every day.”
I roll my eyes even though my back is to him.
“Or, maybe, possibly, you weren’t looking at a spider at all. Maybe, if you’d like to be honest with your new neighbor, you were looking at something else….Someoneelse.”
“Can Ihelpyou with something?” I turn over my shoulder and immediately regret it.
Oh. My. Everloving. Fuck.
Milo has taken off his button-down shirt, revealing the white tank he is wearing underneath that puts so much more of him on achingly salacious display. If rolling up his sleeves was to be considered pornographic, this is…well, this is the real deal.
I get lost in the curvature of his shoulders, the muscles that blend and stack on top of one another to form the mountains that flow into perfectly carved biceps. Every inch of his arms is tattooed, covered in varying tattoos each drawn in black ink. It’s all so suddenly, stunninglyavailablefor me to view and though I suspect it shouldfeelwrong to stare, it doesn’t.
Probably because he looks so pleased with himself. Probably because he clearly loves the attention. Probably because he’s placed a paintbrush inside of his jeans’ waistband, as if to purposefully draw my eyes down to his beltline, forcing me to wonder what lies underneath it.
