Page 61 of Art of Sin

27fantasy

“Are you hungry or thirsty?”

I shake my head.

“Is it chilly in here? Do you need another blanket?”

My lips twitch. “I’m fine. Stop.”

Gideon looks up from adjusting a blanket on my legs. Calm expression. Eyes a bit wary. I’m reminded of those rare glimpses I’ve had of the inner man—the agony and guilt and confusion inside him. I’m starting to see the bigger picture of him. The one so few have seen.

And he is magnificent.

I don’t have him—haven’t lost him yet. But the mere notion of saying goodbye drives a spike of pain through my heart.

“Don’t leave,” I blurt. “Tell me a story.”

His expression shifts to curious. “What kind of story?”

I shrug, snuggling deeper into the cloud-like surface of the guest bed. “Tell me about a time you were happy.”

He sits at the foot of the bed, half turned, a knee on the surface. My toes graze his calf, our skin separated by a blanket barrier. The solidity of him, the realness of the moment, ignites warmth in my belly and a nearly unrecognizable sense of peace and belonging.

Fear still lives in me—I feel it, prickly and thick, pressing against this insulated moment. I’ll have to leave him soon. Leave everyone to finish what was started so many years ago.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I belong only to myself.

And him.

Gideon clears his throat. “When I graduated college, I bought a one-way ticket to Europe. I didn’t tell my father I was going. When I called him from the airport in Prague, he was less than thrilled. He demanded I get on a flight home immediately. I was supposed to start law school that fall—his caveat for paying for college after he found out I was majoring in Philosophy.”

“This doesn’t sound happy,” I murmur.

His lips twitch. “Patience, Snowflake. Suffice to say, that conversation didn’t end well. Within a day, he’d cut off my credit cards and turned off my cell phone. I used the cash I had on me to get to Paris, which wasn’t nearly as romantic as I’d been led to believe. It was winter and raining nonstop.”

I smirk. “Poor boy.”

He laughs. “I did feel poor. Probably for the first time in my life.”

Standing, he stretches languorously, then flops onto the bed beside me with his arms tucked behind his head. I roll onto my side and stare at his profile. Trace the tiny bump on the bridge of his nose. A little scar at the corner of his left eyebrow. The faint freckles on his cheeks and auburn scruff on his jaw.

“I lived on the streets for a few months,” he continues, voice soft and gaze vacant, pointed inward. “I found an incredible community of buskers, artists, performers… mostly kids my age who’d either run away from home or didn’t have one. We stuck together like a big, noisy family.”

“That sounds nice,” I murmur.

He slants me a warm glance. “It was. I’d never felt that before. Family, that is. Unconditional support and encouragement. Sure, there was bickering and bullshit, but at the end of the day we were all rowing in the same lifeboat.”

Afraid the story’s over, I say, “Tell me more, please.”

His lips purse in thought, then soften. “The first real painting I sold was a complete fluke—a girl who did caricatures for tourists outside the Louvre was sick and asked me if I wanted to fill in for her for a few days. I’d use her supplies, give her a percentage, and hopefully make enough to get my own paper and paint. Sketching and drawing had always been a hobby I was pretty good at, so I jumped at the chance.”

“What had you been doing until then, if not art?”

He smirks. “Pickpocketing. But I was horrible at it. I felt so guilty every time. And the red hair didn’t help. I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Anyway, turns out I was a shitty salesman, too. My second day out there, I’d only done one caricature for some Americans who felt sorry for me. They kept asking if I needed help finding my parents.”

Laughter bubbles out of me. Gideon grins.

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