Page 87 of Riot House
“I assumed you'd just come in through the back. We always leave the kitchen door unlocked.”
“Shit.” She laughs nervously. “That would have been nice to know back then, I guess. Here, can you...let me by?” She slides up the steps next to me, her tits brushing up against my chest, and my cock immediately stiffens. She smells like spring and sunshine and floral like the tiny little white flowers that grow all over the ancient, crumbling walls of my father’s chateaux in France.
I want to kiss her so fucking badly. My body wants far more than that but now is not the time. I press my back against the wall behind me, managing to give her just enough room to sidle by so that she's in front of me. I hear her fiddling with the lock—a light rattling, and then silence as she stoops over, her breath no longer labored; it evens out, into long, steady and even pulls at the air, as she focuses on her work. She's only been working over the thing for a couple of seconds when I hear the metallic snap and a loud clang as the padlock drops to the top step.
She opens the door and walks through it, into the light corridor ahead. Her cheeks flame when she turns and sees the expression on my face. “What? What's that look for?”
I'm reeling from the fact that she managed to get that lock to open. Fucking reeling. I know precisely why she learned that skill, and I know precisely why she would carry the tools required to pick a lock with her at all times. It’s just still pretty fucking amazing. “You’re just full of surprises, Little E,” I tell her, winking playfully. She still hasn’t told me anything about her past in Tel Aviv. I’ve been waiting patiently for her to open up about it, but I’m not gonna fucking push her.
“You can learn all kinds of things on YouTube,” she says. “I watched a thousand videos, learning how to do that in as many situations as possible.”
A cold, sickly feeling creeps up my back. I quickly brush it off, forcing a smile onto my face.
“Why would your father lock that door? Seems like a weird thing to do,” she says, smoothly changing the subject. Scanning the hallway with the little porthole windows along its north-facing side, and the four doors leading off from it on the other side, she frowns deeply.
“This was my mother's place,” I say. “She would come up here to paint and read. She used to sleep up here sometimes. I've claimed it as my space now, but my father doesn't like it. He says it upsets his new wife. It has nothing to do with Patty, though. He just hates that I'd rather spend my time up here with the ghosts of my dead mother instead of suffering downstairs with the rest of them in the land of the living. He threatens to clear everything out of here and brick up the door sometimes.”
“Why hasn't he?”
“Because he knows I'd burn the entire fucking house down if he did.”
She just nods, accepting this as something I would do. A truth about me that makes sense. “Are we gonna get in trouble for coming up here, then? Is he gonna be angry?”
“He's always angry. Don't worry, though. He won't be angry with you. You're a guest. When you meet him, he'll be sweet and interested, and charming, and you'll wonder how I could possibly hate him so much. You'll take his side and think I'm completely unreasonable when I don't fall down and worship at the fucker's feet.”
She blinks at me owlishly. She's so fucking beautiful that the sight of her feels like a punch to the gut. Again, she shakes her head. “No, I won't. I know all about sociopathic fathers, Wren. I've been dealing with one my entire life. I know the front they put on for the rest of the world. I’ll always see through that charade, no matter how many other people it might fool. Come on.” She smiles gently. “Why don't you show me around? Tell me about your mom. I want to know all about her.”
* * *
The paintings are calmer than mine. The blues, blacks, greys, and whites are softer, so much subtler and more intentional than mine, too. Elodie paces the floorboards of my mother's studio, studying each canvas in turn, pulling back the dust cloths and letting the heavy sheets sigh to the floor. Her inquisitive eyes pick over the brushstrokes, her fingertips poised just above the surface of the oil paint, as if she's reaching inside the painting in her mind, stroking them over the subject matter with a reverence that makes my chest pull tight.
I'm far more comfortable painting my stormy landscapes. My mother painted people. She loved capturing the emotion and the intelligence in someone's eyes, and she was damn good at it, too. “She was so talented,” Elodie breathes. “Who's this?” She gestures to the painting in front of her, of the man with the staunch expression and the curious light in his eyes. My jaw's so clenched that it takes real effort to work my teeth apart.
“My father. A couple of years before she found out she was pregnant. Amazing how twenty years can change someone.”
She steps closer, investigating the lines of the man my mother captured with her art. She was generous with him. Made him look less stern than he was, even then. I've never seen the softness she depicted in his face. There's a glimmer of love in the bastard’s eyes that's been missing my entire life.
“She was far better than I'll ever be,” I say.
Elodie shakes her head. “That's not true. You're just as good, Wren. Just different. You use the same colors that she used. The tone isn't the same, though.”
I grunt at that. “Yeah. She was optimistic. I've never had that in me.”
Elodie's eyes convey many things as she looks back at me over her shoulder. Sadness. Regret. Kindness. The smallest ounce of pity that makes me want to claw my way out of my skin. I suddenly don't want to be in here anymore. As if she can feel me withdrawing, Elodie steps away from the paintings, coming to me, taking my hands in hers.
“Show me where you sleep?” It's a small request, but I'm shot full of nerves by the prospect of showing her my room.
“Where I'm supposed to sleep, downstairs? Or the room I claimed up here?”
“Up here.”
My heart skitters treacherously as I walk her down the hall and into my room. It's not much. The slope of the roof is steep and means I have to bow my head; there's only a small section of the space where I can stand up straight without risking a concussion. I smirk to myself when I realize that Elodie doesn't have that problem. She's so short that she can stand tall the whole time. She wanders around, inspecting the room from one end to the other: the bookshelf, with the well-thumbed copies of my favorite books; the small bed, bigger than a single but a far cry from the huge California king I have back at Riot House. The sweatshirt, slung over the back of the chair beneath the tiny window, that I forgot when I last came here; the old tennis shoes, and my grandfather's old, cracked compass on the window sill; the notepads, and the sketches pinned to the walls, and the candles, melted into puddles of wax on the dusty floorboards.
She pores over each little detail of the room, assessing and weighing each little thing like she's putting together the pieces of a puzzle that have been missing until now. I watch her silently, my chest aching, my hands burning with the need to touch her. I keep them to myself, though, leaning against the wall, savoring the unfamiliar, troublesome emotions that are digging their roots down deeper and deeper into me, wrapping their tendrils around my bones.
I always thought I'd find ultimate happiness within the pages of a book. I've been so convinced of that fact that I've devoted so much of my life to disappearing inside them, searching for that which has always eluded me. I should have known that I wouldn't find what I was looking for on ink and paper. Even the poets entrusted their foolish hearts into the hands of others.Especiallythe poets. That was both their salvation and their ultimate downfall; without knowing the joy of loving another human being, they would never have been able to write about the soaring joy that always made my heartbeat quicken. And they'd never have been able to capture true desolation and sorrow without enduring the kind of suffering that can only come from lost love.
As Elodie spins around, breathing deeply, taking everything in for a final time, I admit something that I've stubbornly refused to ever admit to myself before:I am fucking scared.
