She gasped as I left her skin and pressed my sponge right between her legs. Hard. Hard enough to squeeze black paint and watch it dribble over her knickers-covered core.
“Why?”
“Because she knew I loved you.”
“But why didn’t you come to me when she left school? She wasn’t there to terrorize you anymore.”
I fought back the lashes of regret as I traded black for magenta. “I was going to.”
“What?” She froze, her eyes locking onto mine.
“I had a plan. I waited to be sure she’d gone for good. I made up a script so I could talk to you without blurting nonsense. I had full intentions of finding you on Monday and begging your forgiveness.”
Her face twisted; her eyes glazed with wetness. “But you ran away.”
“Tallup visited me.” I painted faster, my brush becoming an extension of my pain, using my secrets as its colour. “She brought Olive.”
Silence once again whispered in as O stood still.
“The moment I saw her, O...I couldn’t stop it. I fell in love.” I painted harder, cursing the design that only now I recognised. “I fell in love and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that her life came before mine. I didn’t have a choice.”
O continued to shiver silently, giving me far too much space to fill. “I stole from my old man that night, and ran away. I didn’t say goodbye. I made it work in London for a bit. Made enough cash with painting and selling my work to get by. Then I earned a few bigger jobs. I was hired to graffiti a local hostel and its dorm rooms with images of downtown. While Olive grew, I tried to find a more reliable income. However, time passed. Olive went to preschool. Then kindergarten. And I kept painting.”
I looked up.
I ignored the scene I’d painted on her thigh.
A scene of a boy holding a fleece blanket, the blanket trying to escape on a kite string, hiding something priceless. “I’d already given you up, O. I couldn’t give up my art too.”
She trembled again. Her stomach fluttering as I once again traded brushes for the airgun. I didn’t have control anymore. My body bypassed my mind and painted purely from my heart. Whatever masterpiece O became tonight would have no input from me, just instinct, just hope, just pain.
“But you became the Master of Trickery.”
“I did.” My voice sounded rough, strangled. “Thanks to Jeffrey.”
“What?”
“He appeared one night, knocking on my one-bedroom apartment. Olive was asleep. He claimed to be my dad’s brother. He’d been looking for me and heard my name at a local market where a wholesaler sold my paintings.”
“Why had he been looking for you?”
I continued painting, switching methods and mediums, trading pigment and metallic. “Dad died. Alcohol poisoning. He told me the whores left town, and the bank seized the house and sold it. Jeffrey was the one listed as next of kin.”
“So...he came to give you an inheritance?” She sucked in a breath as I took her hand, painting a row of dying blackbirds up her arm.
“No. He’d already spent what pittance he got from the foreclosure.” I swallowed, bowing my head over her shoulder as I traded birds for feathers, mimicking her tattoo, dressing her in a cape of them. “He tracked me down ‘cause he thought I might have more money.”
Her body swayed as I went behind her, tracing my brush over her scars, adding another picture to her ink. “He blackmailed you right from the start?”
My heart hurt. I didn’t want to tell this part of my tale. It once again showed how gullible I was. How stupid. “No. To begin with, he was the perfect uncle. It took a very long time for me to drop my guard. To stop throwing the door in his face or walking across the street if he tried to talk to me. I kept Olive away from him at all costs. I told him to leave me alone.”
I bent my knees, and my eyes became level with her gorgeous arse. The muscle definition and sexiness of her grace fogged my thoughts, conjuring more explicit designs. It was easier to tell her this way. Where she couldn’t see me. Judge me. “A year passed, and he still stuck around. My resolve to continue hating him just because he was my father’s brother faded a little. I let him buy me lunch. I actually listened to what he had to say. I began to trust.”
My lips pulled back in a snarl. My brush slipped down her crack with temper.
She flinched and went to move away, but I grabbed her hipbone, smudging my previous work. “Don’t. Don’t move.”
It took a few heartbeats until I could uncurl my hand and continue. “I learned we were more similar than I wanted to admit. He painted cars for a living. Doing decals and pinstripe, special one-of-a-kind commissions on boy racer’s wet dreams.”
I made my way around to her side again, drawing a tiny car on her foot. “He let me set up an easel in the back. I painted there while Olive was at school. It was...nice.”
My voice once again slipped into unbridled rage. “He was the one who taught me to paint other things than walls and paper. He showed me how to do bold lines on the panels of a jeep and airbrush wings on a Ferrari. Anything was paintable. Cups and plates. Glass and fabric.”
“Women,” O murmured.
I nodded. “Women.”
“Is that how you got into painting girls?”
“Yes.” I moved onto her calf, not caring what I painted just that I did. That I bled out the pain in purple and blue and grey. “He joked about it, showing me other artists who’d transformed human into landscape and animal. The moment I saw the pictures, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to create magic. To twist reality. To form an illusion just like others had.”
I forced myself to chuckle rather than fucking cry. “The first few I did were terrible. The next were passable. Woman after woman. Night after night. I dabbled with camouflage and shadow. Olive was kept safe with a babysitter. I told myself I did this for our future. So I could afford to buy any dream she desired. I grew better. My skills improved. Until one night, I nailed the perfect illusion.” I let my brush hypnotise me for a moment, needing a break.
O waited for several heartbeats before asking, “What illusion?”
“I made a girl vanish into a backdrop of vineyards and wine barrels. A huge movie poster for some rom-com that had been thrown out.” I swallowed hard, chasing back the acid in my mouth. “Jeffrey congratulated me. Took me out. Praised me. And I let down my fucking guard. I told him about Olive. I offered to let him meet her. I invited him into our lives.”
O stayed quiet but tangled up enough in my story to ask, “If he spent all that time helping you, why did he start hurting you?”
I shrugged. “Jealousy? Hatred? I never found out.” Changing to my airbrush again, I went to her other side, allowing the vibrant aqua to highlight her skin. “Thanks to him, I started painting women all the time. Most of them for free, salvaging paints from second-hand suppliers, begging for finished tubes to do as much as I could on the cheap. One girl brought her friends to watch. They filmed me painting, and put it up on social media. The rest...is history.”
I looked up for the first time in a while. I needed to see her now. “The post went viral. I can’t even remember what I’d painted. But a few weeks later, I had a business profile, email account, and companies asking me to paint for them.”