Page 65 of Riot House
“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.AndWren. 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 stayed 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 fuckingknock? Like that would have been asanething 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 atotallysalvageable situation.
It isn’t, though. And breathing makes things worse. The bedroom smells so acutely of Wren—all salt sea air, and 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: 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 floor. There most definitely is a subject to this painting…and that subject isme.
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 was taken to carefully stroke in 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 makesmelook 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 atme, 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.
He enters the room, approaching with slow steps that seem designed to give me time to react and escape. I remain rooted to the spot, not daring to breathe as he gets closer and closer. He stops, close enough that his arm brushes up against mine as he comes to stand in front of the painting, his sharp green eyes assessing his work with a cold detachment. “I don’t like painting people,” he says quietly. “No matter how well I capture their likeness, I always end up projecting my own emotions onto them. They always end up angry and ready for a fight.” He touches his fingertips to the deep furrow he painted in between my eyebrows, rubbing them as if he might be able to ease the tension he created on my face.
“You shouldn’t have come here, y’know,” he says tightly. “This isn’t exactly a safe place for someone like you.”
“Someone like me? God, I’m not some weak, pathetic, defenseless girlchild who can’t look after herself. I think Pax’s esophagus will attest to that. And this is your home, anyway. What the fuck do you get up to here? Am I supposed to be worried for my safety?”
“Yes!” He sounds so exasperated. Looks it, too. Dragging his hands back through his hair, he wheels away from the painting, stepping toward his bed. “I can’t spell this out for you, Elodie. It’s too…it’s fucking complicated, and I should never have pursued you the way I have been doing, but I’m a prick, all right? I’m not known for doing what’s best for other people.”
Biting down hard, clenching every muscle in my body, I gather up what little courage I have, and I ask the question I came here to ask. “You disappeared, Wren. You vanished for three whole days without any word of explanation. Are you gonna tell me where you’ve been?”
He shakes his head so slowly, looking down at his hands. “No. I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
