Her pussy covered by her black G-string.
Watching her strip had almost stolen everything I had left. My cock threatened to snap off. The tension between us hissed and crackled. And my lungs refused to deliver more than a few sips of oxygen.
I’d meant what I said.
Waiting for her to come home had given me far too much time to imagine what it would feel like to be with her one last time. If she hadn’t agreed...I honestly didn’t know what I would’ve done.
I’d like to think I would’ve had the strength to walk out the door.
But...
This was O.
This was the only woman I could be with without reliving the night Olive was created.
This was the other piece of my heart, and I couldn’t go to jail without feeling whole one last time.
Keeping my distance, I brought my paints onto the sheet by her feet. I arranged my brushes and sponges, positioned my airbrush, and drank in every inch of her.
We didn’t speak while I prepared.
Our silence only added pain to the quietness already torturing us.
With shaking hands, I turned on the small video camera I used to capture my creations. I muted it so no sound was captured. I angled it so O took centre stage. And I made sure my hood tugged low over my face so I remained anonymous, even though mug shots and newspapers had shown the world who I was.
I wasn’t a talented artist.
I was a murderer.
Forever and for always.
Moving toward O, I sucked in a useless breath as she trembled. I couldn’t tear my eyes off her perfection. Off the scars on her back. Off the ink on her skin. Off her strength and femininity and broken dancer’s grace.
“You’ve always been the most beautiful creature in the world to me.” I ducked to my haunches, unscrewing a midnight blue vial, already diluted and ready for my airgun.
She bit her lip, keeping her gaze on the wall beyond. I hadn’t asked her to hold a pose. She didn’t need to. Just the way she stood echoed with angelic poise. Her wrists always delicate. Her fingers always curved. Her neck arched with royalty.
She looked as if she’d once had wings, weightless and balletic before a car crash stripped them from her, leaving her to the mercy of monsters like me.
“Wh-What design are you going to do?” her voice remained just above a whisper.
“I don’t know yet.”
“You don’t have a concept?”
“I have a feeling.”
“A feeling?” Her gaze snapped to mine, despite herself.
I loved watching her study me, bowed at her feet.
I wanted her to remember me like this, worshiping her, wanting her.
“Secrets.”
She frowned. “Secrets?”
“The piece will be called Secrets.”
Her eyes leapt from mine, fully aware of the connection binding us exquisitely tight together. I felt it. She felt it. Fate fucking felt it.
Her eyes glossed. “Secrets are always drenched in pain.”
I nodded, testing the spray before standing in front of her. “They are. That’s what you are.” I kissed her softly. “Love painted in pain.”
She swayed as I pulled back and pressed the button on my airgun. The spray of midnight shot from the muzzle, instantly changing skin to canvas.
I didn’t normally cover a girl in one shade.
I didn’t usually allow creativity to control me.
But this wasn’t a commission.
This wasn’t prepaid and scripted.
This was just us.
A canvas and a body painter.
Both in love.
Both in agony.
Both fighting goodbye.
Time slipped between the silence, blending the two until the world no longer existed. All I saw was O. All she felt was my paint. Slowly, I covered her from head to toe in deep, distressing blue.
The longer I painted, the tighter her muscles became. Her face strained and eyes full of memory. She was back in my warehouse the night I’d drugged and kidnapped her. She was back to cursing my existence.
“Jeffrey was my real uncle...did you know that?”
My voice snapped her from the past and did exactly what I hoped. Her eyes narrowed, locking onto me as I shaded the inside of her thigh. “What?”
“Jeffrey...I know you would’ve heard Olive call him uncle.” I wiped the excess off, leaning in to spray again. “He was her great uncle. My father’s brother.”
“What are you doing?” She shifted a little, breaking the position she’d chosen.
Wrapping my hand around her ankle, I shook my head slowly. “Don’t move.”
She locked in place all while her voice rained from above. “Why are you telling me about Jeffrey? Why bring his name into this...when you’re painting me?”
“To distract you.”
“Distract me.”
“To talk to you.”
“To confess.”
I nodded. “To confess.”
She shivered as I added a final lashing over her kneecap and reared back. The whites of her eyes and teeth popped from the darkness of her face, body, and hair. She wasn’t O anymore. She was a faceless secret with no substance. A white lie that hadn’t been told yet.
As I added more depth and detail, the lie would grow, the secret would swell, and the damage it reaped would magnify.
I no longer had frost around my heart. No icicles in my blood or snow within my voice. I was done freezing O out from my truth.
I wanted her to ask.
To know.
Unscrewing the empty vial from my airbrush, I reached for quicksilver.
She swayed as I added a splattering of stars on her leg. A twinkling galaxy over her stomach. The admission that secrets didn’t just affect a single planet but the cosmos.
“Why did you sleep with her? You had to have known people would have helped you?” The question strangled in her throat. “Why did you throw us away?”
Finally.
Finally a question.
A question shooting a dagger straight into the heart of all our problems.
I looked up as I dipped a fine-tipped brush into blood-red pigment. “If we do this...no more secrets.”
She held my stare, trembling beneath my colours. “No more secrets.”
“Okay then.” I cleared my throat again. “I threw us away because I was a fucking idiot. Tallup threatened your future. I kept it to myself because I was afraid.” I drew a line over the top of her hipbone, tracing what felt right, but unsure what it would become. “I wanted to protect you, not ruin you.”
“You ruined yourself.”
I continued painting, half in the otherworld of creation where noise was muted and reality dulled and half with her in a dreamlike state of confession. “I was young and stupid.”
“You were targeted and molested.”
“I should’ve trusted someone.” I drew my brush down her leg. “I should’ve trusted you.”
She shivered as I continued staining midnight with blood. “Instead you broke up with me.”
“I kept my distance because even though I’d done what she’d asked, my freedom came with consequences.”
Her stomach tensed as I swapped red for black. Soaking up the ink, I sponged sinister shadows above her G-string and along her belly.
She breathed, “Consequences?”
“One of her conditions was that I could never talk to you or any other girl in school.”