Anyone could see she was emotionally frayed around the edges, much like her sweatshirt. Did it make me a bad person to want to dismantle that? Challenge it?
Our family was no stranger to emotional turmoil after all. With all we’d endured with my mother, and the aftermath—it’s something easily identified in another.
With a turn on my heel, I took the painting to the back of the room to a set of double sliding doors. After punching in a code on the door latch, the door clicked. I slid them apart.
I stepped into my private gallery. The lights came on with my presence. The room was empty, all previous treasures delivered to the clients or organizations that hired me to ‘procure’ them. It wasn’t a large room, only about 8 ft deep and 12 ft wide.
I hooked the wired art onto a nail on the back wall. It sat under a central light fixture that deepened the shadows andgrooves in the heavy paint. It was perfect there.
I left the doors open as I made my way back to my desk, peeling off the gloves and tossing them in the trash. The decanter clinked against my tumbler as I poured myself another finger of bourbon from my bar cart. I sat in my leather armchair behind my desk, facing the art.
Taking a hearty sip, I turned to look out the front windows. Being on the top floor of the townhouse, my office window was floor to almost ceiling, rounding at the top. There were skylights overhead, black with night. My townhouse, being tall, offered a better view than the ones on the other side of the street. City lights peppered the distant expanse.
My gaze dropped five floors to the sidewalks, trying to peer between trees, hoping to catch a little black shadow, towed by an animated and excited black and white dog.
There was nothing.
My chest constricted, a physical manifestation of the tightening grip of anxiety, a hollow, lonely ache in the pit of my stomach.
There was an enormous bang of garbage trucks in the distance, beginning their rounds, a pizza man leaving an order on the stoop across the street.
I looked back at the painting, tilting my head until it rested against the back of the chair for a moment. Focusing on the colors, I worked to resolve the anxiety and excitement of the evening. After several moments and breaths, it fell away from me.
Twisting again to look back at the street, I noticed the delivered pizza was gone from the neighbor’s porch. Thegarbage truck was outside as the driver tossed bags into the back. There was a hint of light on the horizon, showing morning would be here soon.
Downing the last sip of bourbon, I returned to the gallery and slid the doors shut once more, securing the locks.
Descending the spiral stairs, I found my bed and slid into it. My tired muscles relaxed as I sank into the familiar softness, the quiet broken only by my breathing. Behind my lids, the colors of PERL danced across my vision, haunted by the crystal blue eyes of a beautiful stranger, and the excited dance of a little black andwhite dog.
CHAPTER 6
Sybil
“You should march across the street and say hi,” Dr. Cat urged, acting the friend and less the therapist.
“Listen, Cat, I only told you about him because—I’m not even sure why. I’m regretting it.” I tried to backtrack, cursing myself for telling her about Nash.
We were on FaceTime, reviewing the construction plan that Daniel, our contractor, had just put together the following morning.
I could feel her burning glare through the screen. I was too tired for this.
“My dear, this is the first time you’ve experienced an opportunity of this nature. Sybil, this is your chance to make afriend, and I’m going to insist that you pursue the possibility.” She’d put on her therapist-mom hat now. “If not with this Nash gentleman—”
I snorted. “He’snota gentleman,” Imuttered, bringing my hand to my still tender cheek. Then again, he had offered to get me ice.
She went on, not hearing me, “—then with someone else. I think it’s high time we tried to make a friend.”
My eyes rolled, and I let out a deep, childish grumble.
Friendwas not even close to what first came to mind when I saw Nash, but that was the romance novels talking. I was a geriatric-virgin, for heaven’s sake. I’d thought about being with a mana lot. However, it often concerned book characters—and book men were perfect.
Real men? Not likely.
My vibrator and my imagination,plenty.
No man could live up to the charm, stamina, and outrageous good looks of a fictional man-cannon.
They were flawless.
