How did I tell him that every time he touched me, I could see the fallout already written across my future? That I wasn’t the type of woman he wanted to get mixed up with.
Misty shifted under my hands. “You’ve gone quiet.”
“I’m working.”
“You were working before, and we were having a great time.”
I dipped the needle into the ink cap and wiped it against the rim. “He’s not my boyfriend, if that’s what you’re circling around.”
“Oh.” She studied the ceiling tiles for a beat. “Ex, then?”
“He’s not that either.”
“So what is he?”
I focused on the curve of a petal, pulling the line in one steady pass. “We’re not even friends.”
She snorted. “Could’ve fooled me.”
The words lodged somewhere under my ribs, and I sighed.
Because she wasn’t wrong. There’d always been something between Aiden and me. It had been there in the way his hand found my waist without asking, in the way I’d fit against him too easily. I’d told myself it was temporary. Physical. A bad decision with good chemistry.
But I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about his mouth. The weight of his body between my thighs. The way my name sounded when he moaned into my ear.
I wiped Misty’s skin again, if only to just collect my runaway thoughts. “It doesn’t matter what we are.”
“It matters to him,” she said.
“Yeah, well. It’ll never happen.”
She turned her head to look at me again, brows raised. “Why not?”
“It’s a long story.”
Misty settled deeper into the chair, adjusting her grip on the armrests. “Looks like I’m gonna be here for a while. So a long story is perfect.”
I ended up avoiding it expertly, thanks to several years of practice. It didn’t take much to dupe Misty into taking over the conversation. She talked while I worked, and I let her. It kept the booth from feeling like a pressure cooker.
I built the peony petal by petal, deepening the black at the base, feathering it outward until the gradients caught the light instead of swallowing it. Earlier she’d wrinkled her nose when I’d told her we were sticking to one color. She’d wanted pink. I’d told her to trust me, that one pigment didn’t mean one dimension, and she’d rolled her eyes but settled back in the chair.
Now the layers did the arguing for me.
Every few minutes the chair in reception creaked. Aiden was still out there. And I still had no idea what I was going to do with him.
My hand stayed steady. I wiped away excess ink, checked the symmetry, went back in to darken a fold that needed weight. The flower began to push off her skin, not flat anymore but alive with contrast.
I capped the ink and pulled back, scanning the whole piece the way my mentor had drilled into me. Balance. Flow. No rushed lines.
“All done.”
Misty lifted her head and craned around. “Don’t mess with me.”
I swiveled the light toward her wrist, and the sudden flash made it look as if the flower were real.
Her mouth dropped open. “Oh, my God.”
She held it up carefully, trying to catch every angle. The black shifted from dense at the core to smoke at the edges, each petallayered over the next. It didn’t read as one color. It read as depth.
