His nails scrambled across my shoulders, scraping my skin and leaving it stinging behind his trail of touch.
He was speaking, but none of it was English at this point. They were just laced with pleading and desperation as he took what I gave him.
“Knox,” he whined, voice a warning as his body curled and tensed beneath me.
“Come for me, baby. I want to feel you from right here.” I nipped at his ear before sucking one last angry hickey into his neck and pounding into him even harder as my own climax neared.
In no time at all, he clenched around me and came with a choking gasp between us, drawing my breath and finishing me inside the condom.
I barely had the wherewithal to pull out and collapse beside him, both left gasping for air in a somehow sweltering tent in the middle of February, our hands finding each other on the sleeping bag between us.
“That was…” Lucy’s voice was soft in the stillness, and he was looking at me with those soft brown eyes that I loved.
Or…liked very much. Eyes I simply felt a certain fondness for. Because three weeks was too soon.
I smiled at him, letting us have this moment now, at least, before the real world crept back in. “Yeah. It was.”
Then I pulled him closer, where he settled against my chest and rested his hand on my waist.
Maybe this was something that could survive outside of this tent. Maybe, after my month with his father was over and we could just be people with each other, we could make this relationship work.
I wanted to see him like this every night. Wanted to wake up to him in bed with me. Wanted to bring him coffee while he was painting something he truly loved instead of that torture device in his living room now.
Lucy’s soft snores filled the tent, his cheeks squished against the pillow under what little light we had from the dusk outside—or had my eyes adjusted to the darkness?
Maybe I could keep Lucy after all.
17
LUCY
Paint slid across the canvas with each stroke I made. It was like each stroke pulled something out of me from that night on Knox’s back porch.
The darkness outside, the flickering of light in his eyes, the snapping tension that crackled between us.
How he spoke to me. How he touched me. Like I was something special to him that he wanted to hold but wasn’t afraid to break.
I’d always been treated as delicate, unearthly—things that came from being from a rich family. The respect I’d seen strangers have for me was never real; it was made from fear, or from greedy desire to have what I had.
But he didn’t see me like that—he’d even told me as much, with his view on people like my dad. He saw me as Lucy.
I dipped my brush blindly into another color and layered it over the midnight blue already on the canvas.
Red streaked across the night sky, blending into it roughly in a way that joined the blue and the deep red, yet still held layers of perfect purple.
I was finally painting again—really painting. Not the one for Mr. Vender that, now finished, was propped against the wall in the corner, where Jackson was inspecting it, rubbing his little nose and paws all over it.
No. This one was mine. The shapes in it were more abstract, as one form morphed into another—such was the dark surrealism I loved, which ached in my core.
This wasn’t just me on a canvas. As I speckled white onto that deep night sky, as the specks swarmed together to form a whiplash of a moon, it was Knox and me under the night sky. Sharp strokes from the bottom left, pitch black, and feeling like the shadows we both had around us, but not any more between us. Sparks of light from the top of the canvas, raining down onto where one shape met another and became something else, showed those sparks I always felt between us.
As instantly as I started the painting, I stopped. The intense need to paint I’d felt itching at my skin since we’d left that tent now eased until I felt a sort of peace in fully living in the moment instead of remaining detached from my mind.
I dropped the paintbrush into the water cup, and drops of water sloshed over the side to join the mess of stains on my painting stand.
It was done.
There was no question that this was the painting I’d started at 9:15, when Knox had left the apartment for another interview—this time a sous-chef position at the French bistro a few blocks away.
