Chapter 54
The ELODIE
THE COFFEE’S bitter and warm and sends a shiver of pleasure running down my spine. Dash sits on the very edge of the leather sofa, watching me drink from the cup with a level of fascination that makes it seem like he just woke from a three-thousand-year coma and he has no idea what coffee is. Or mugs. Or sofas. Or girls who know Krav Maga.
“That was quite impressive,” he says, resting his chin in his hand.
“No, it was fucking dumb,” Pax snaps, massaging his throat. “She knew I was fucking around. She cranked that shit up to eleven for no reason.” He’s sitting on the floor, leaning up against the wall by the open fire, glaring balefully at me while he tends to his ‘bruised’ windpipe. I barely fucking touched him.
Wren hasn’t said much. He stands by the doorway that leads through to the kitchen, his shoulders tensed, as he watches his two friends. His jade eyes have skimmed over me once or twice, but his main focus has been on Dash and Pax as if he’s waiting for something to happen. He’s wearing a black hoody and some loose sweatpants, and boy does he make them look sinful. The son of a bitch could make a garbage bag look good, though. I look away from him, only to catch Dash frowning deeply at me.
“What brings you over, love? We adore receiving people, but the place is kind of a bombsite. It’s past midnight and we just got back from a very long trip. We were about to start some party planning.”
The house is spotless. The thick cream rug that Pax’s annoying ass is sprawled out on looks recently vacuumed. The glass coffee table doesn’t have a single fingerprint on it. The beaten brass panel above the fireplace is so polished, that it’s as reflective as a mirror. The moody paintings on the walls —black, blue, white, slashes of emotion on canvas—are much more breathtaking now that I’m seeing them properly lit, and don’t have a fleck of dust gathering on their frames. The magazines and books on top of the sideboard are so perfectly aligned that not a rogue corner or dogeared edge pokes out from their stacks. The place looks like a fucking hotel lobby.
Wren coughs into his balled-up fist, apparently trying to muffle his snort of laughter. The corner of his eyes is crinkled, betraying his amusement, though. I never thought it possible for him to smile, but it happens pretty frequently. You just have to be paying attention to catch it—
I catch something else, as he holds that hand in front of his face: his knuckles are bruised. One of them is split open, red, and raw. They weren’t like that the other night in the attic, nor the library, either. I would have noticed. He’s hit something since I saw him on Saturday, and by the looks of things, he hit that something hard. As if he can feel my gaze on him, Wren unclenches his fist, stretching his fingers out, and lazily shoves his hand back into the pocket of his sweatpants, looking down at his feet.
“Sorry for interrupting your party planning,” I say in a droll tone. “I just…came to return a book I borrowed from Wren.”
I pull A Study in Scarlett out of my bag, holding it sheepishly in the air, as if showing them the book will inexplicably make my excuse less lame.
Wren looks up at me from under dark, banked brows, giving me all of his attention at last. He looks pained, though. His mouth twitches, slanting up at the side. “Ahh. Sherlock Holmes. Yeah. I wondered where that had gotten to.”
“God, you’re pathetic,” Pax laughs. He rips the sock of his right foot, balls it up, and hurls it at Wren’s face. “A girl skipped down the hill in the dark, by herself, and you’re standing over there, all, ‘Ohhh, Sherlock Holmes. My favorite book of all time? Credit us with a little common sense. She came here to get some dick, Jacobi.”
Dash laughs down his nose but manages to cut it off pretty quickly. He studiously stares up at the ceiling, looking anywhere and everywhere but at me. The only person who does look at me is Wren. He must see the bright red stains on both my cheeks. My embarrassment can probably be seen from outer space. Ducking my head, I crack my neck, letting out a steady, even breath. What does it matter if that’s what they think? Who fucking cares anyway? They’re a pair of jackals, these two. Equally detestable, for a variety of reasons. I won’t be cowed by their stupid, inane comments or their adolescent tittering.
Slowly, I get to my feet, still holding the coffee mug and the book in my hands. “Whatever. I’m gonna go up to your room, Wren. I’ll give you a beat to figure out those party-planning duties. No rush.”
The three of them just stare at me as I waltz across the open plan living room area and I begin to climb the stairs. My heart slams like a jackhammer, my pulse roaring, but I don’t falter. I hold the mug steady in my hands. I put one foot in front of the other, cool and even, a picture of calm. Until I reach the second-floor landing and they can no longer see me, that is. My hand shakes so violently that the coffee in the mug sloshes over the side, splattering to the polished floorboards. Thankfully the liquid misses the plush grey carpet runner, but I’ve still made one hell of a mess.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Quickly shrugging out of my zip-up hoody, I drop it to the ground, stepping on it and using my foot to mop up the coffee, shaking all over now. What the fuck did I just do? In front of Dashiell and Pax. And Wren. What the fuck? I’m gonna go up to your room. I’m gonna go up to your room. Oh my god. I barely know the guy. Sweet Baby Jesus, why couldn’t I have just sent him a shitty text message for ghosting me and staying in my fucking room?
Lord knows how I make it up the second flight of stairs or the third, but I do. My legs are unsteady, barely holding me up as I open the door to Wren’s room and go inside, hurriedly closing it behind me. Well, this could not have gone any worse. I should have made a plan. I mean, even if they hadn’t found me stalking about outside the house like a fucking psychopath, what was I gonna do? Just walk up to the front door and just fucking knock? Like that would have been a sane thing to do?
I toss the book on the bed, and then I discard the half-empty mug of coffee on a shelf by the door, no longer needing the prop to make myself look normal, definitely not needing the caffeine—I’m already jittery enough, thank you very much—and I turn around, leaning back against the wall, closing my eyes for a second.
Breathe, Elodie.
Just breathe.
In and out, in and out.
Everything’s okay. This is a salvageable situation.
It isn’t, though. And breathing makes things worse. The bedroom smells so acutely of Wren—all salt sea air, fresh wood shavings, and the faintest hint of citrus—that my slowing heart rate ratchets up all over again, the pounding, pounding, pounding threatening to blow out my ear drums.
Calm down, Elodie.
Calm down.
Name five things you can see. Come on. Five things you can see. You can do this. Just calm the fuck down.
I lock onto the first thing I lay eyes on: a tattered notebook, sitting on top of Wren’s bed. Even from the door, I can see the scribbles of black ink all over the lined paper. It looks like some kind of journal…
The second thing I see: is a canvas, set up on an easel in the corner of the room, right by the floor-to-ceiling windows. There’s a sheet on the floor underneath the easel, splattered with paint. A pot full of brushes sits on Wren’s desk not far away, their bristled ends sticking out of the glass jar, their wooden handles flecked with even more paint. On the canvas itself…I walk over to it, my heart finally calming a little as I take in what I’m seeing.
Black, and moody, midnight blue, and grey and white. I remember thinking to myself, when I broke into Riot House with Carina, that the paintings downstairs all looked like raging, angry storms. They had no point of focus or subject, but I could feel the unrest radiating off of them even in the dark. This painting is a far cry from those pieces of art hanging on the walls on the first floor. There most definitely is a subject to this painting…and that subject is me.
Broad, flat, sweeping brushstrokes make up the lines of my torso and my shoulders, but the details of my neck and my face are finer and more delicate. Half of the painting looks like it was done quickly, angrily, with resentful slashes, while the other half appears as though great care and effort were taken to carefully stroke each minute detail.
I’m not smiling in the painting. I’m sitting on a couch, the floral print of the fabric smeared and blurred out of focus behind me. The jumble and confusion of shapes and patterns directly behind my head tells me where I am—sitting beneath the print of Gustav Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ that hangs in Doctor Fitzpatrick’s den. I’m looking off to one side, the line of my jaw hard like I’m clenching it, and there’s a detached, aggressive light in my eyes that makes me look hard, too. Fierce.
“I liked you best when you were angry. In the beginning,” Wren says. He stands in the doorway with his arms loosely folded across his chest, watching me with another of his unreadable, unfathomable expressions on his face. “I don’t know anymore, though. Now, I like seeing you smile, but it’s hard to paint you like that.”
“Why?” The word comes out as a whisper. A single, rush of air past my lips.
“Because you’ve never smiled at me, Little E. I could steal those moments where you looked angry when you weren’t looking because they were familiar. I’d already earned the anger and the hate you wore. But when you laugh with Carina, or you smile at someone you don’t even fucking know as they pass you in a hallway…” He shakes his head. “I don’t own those moments. They don’t belong to me. I sure as shit have no right to take them and make them my own.”
“I didn’t even know you painted,” I whisper.
He arches a dark eyebrow, canting his head to one side. “Didn’t you?”
“Urgh, yes. I did. I don’t even know why I said that. I just…”
“You don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to feel. You’re scared of the truth and what it could mean. Down is up, and up is down…” He makes it sound so confusing. It’s as though he’s reading my mind. “Yes. All of that,” I agree.