Page 67 of Into Pitch

I glance to him now despite myself. “That’s all you’ve got for me?”

“For now,” he muses, glances over his shoulder at me once before stepping closer to the canvas. My gaze tracking the way his hands fold behind his back and clasp there as he studies my painting.

“It seems to me, little fox, that you are mapping space and not people.”

“Congratulations,” I mutter. “You’d get a cookie, but I’m short up on consolation prizes.”

“You’re externalizing containment. The tension between isolation and observation.” He goes on.

I cross my arms to my chest, nostrils flaring in indignation. “Stop.”

He does to my shock, immediately. I narrow my gaze at his newfound restraint. “You don’t get to dissect this too.”

“I wasn’t meaning to. I was meaning to acknowledge it.”

I push up from the floor, crossing carefully around him so that I can get a clean view of his face and expression. Searching for some angle or the hook, for the manipulation I have come to know so intimately with him.

It irritates me to high heaven that I can’t find one.

“Is it good?” I ask instead, hating myself a little for the question.

He tears his focus from me and places it back on the painting. “Yes, and it’s worth something.”

Something primitive in my chest sparks hot and entirely too satisfied. My lizard brain perks up, her tail flicking like she’s been handed the compliment of a lifetime. It’s pathetic.

And it is what it is.

Unfortunately.

“I didn’t do it for you,” I hastily add to knock the lizard part of me back in the box where she belongs.

“I know,” he hums.

That doesn’t deflate the lizard in the way I had hoped it would, and I stiffen as he turns fully to me. “You did it because you were angry and you needed to reclaim agency.”

Obviously.

“And because you wanted to see what would happen if you made something without permission.”

Also obvious.

He holds my gaze, eyes sharp but unreadable. “That in itself is progress.”

I let go of a humorless laugh. “You really don’t give up, do you?”

“I thought we established that a while ago?” He muses.

My mouth twitches despite my blatant will for it not to and I tear my gaze from him. From the Venus fly trap that is the gravity he makes and consumes. I don’t know how else to push forward from this moment, so I do the only thing I know to do and defy him.

“I’m not staying here forever,” I tack on quietly.

“I know you aren’t.”

I don’t pull away when he reaches out, his fingers finding the stray strands of my hair that have escaped my ponytail. My throat bobs as he pulls them further between his fingers, studying them as intently as he had my painting.

“This isn’t a cage, Sadie.” He whispers, his eyes finally rising from the hair to my own. “Think of it as a maze and all you have to do is quit slamming into the walls and instead find a way to work your way forward.”

My jaw hardens and he tracks it instantly.