Page 49 of The One Who Won’t Get Away
He shrugged.“Fine, I lied.But I did go to quite a few galleries for one of the cases I was working.”
We bantered back and forth like that, easy and dumb, until the food was gone and the coffee was refilled twice.Every now and then, our knees bumped under the table, sending sparks through my entire body.No man should have this effect on me, yet here I was, with the one guy who really didn’t need my brand of crazy in his life.
When the bill came, Nick snatched it before I could protest.“You can get the museum tickets,” he said.
Yeah, that didn’t make me feel any less like this was a date.I mean...It wasn’t, of course.He was just being nice.But if it was, it’d be the best date I’d ever been on simply because of how easy it was to be around Nick.There were no games, no pretense, no trying to impress each other.
When we emerged from the diner, the sun was higher, the sky scrubbed clean of clouds.The world looked perfect, so much better than when we had first arrived here.
Weird.The way I viewed the world around me usually depended on my mood, so after facing my past, I should’ve been focusing only on the negatives.So why was everything so pretty all of a sudden?
Chapter 21
Nick
THE ART MUSEUM WASonly three blocks from the diner, but we took our time getting there.Nadya moved like a different person than yesterday.Not bouncy, exactly, but there was an absence of the usual tension—the kind that coils around her spine and makes her walk a half-step behind.Today, she walked next to me, close enough our sleeves brushed.
Maybe it was the pancakes.Maybe it was the leftover buzz of not waking up haunted.I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to jinx it.
The museum itself was an old brick building sandwiched between two office towers.We entered through a double set of glass doors to find a whole lot of white walls with art hanging at a respectable distance from each other and an occasional pedestal on marble floors.
It was early, so only two other visitors wandered the galleries—an elderly woman with cloud-white hair, and a man who looked like he’d been abandoned here by a tour group.
The front desk was manned by a college-age girl who handed over two passes with a smile and waved us toward the main exhibit.
We started in the modern art section.Huge canvases, stripes and blocks of color, shapes that looked like an accident.Nadya moved from piece to piece with a predator’s focus, as if she might catch the artist lurking behind the paint.Sometimes, she’d lean in, head cocked, reading the little plaques.
“What do you think about this one?”I asked about a hideous piece with so many colors it should come with a seizure warning.
“You can tell from this blob of red that the artist was haunted by the ghost of a clown,” Nadya said with all the seriousness of an art critique.
I shook my head, unable to hide my smile, then moved right on, following Nadya like an overeager puppy.
The longer we walked, the less I watched the painting, shifting all my attention to the fascinating woman next to me.The way she moved—restless but deliberate.The way her eyes never let anything slip by, even if she pretended not to care.
We reached an exhibit with old portraits, all oil paint and gold frames.The effect was like walking into a room full of eyes.Nadya stopped in front of a girl in a blue dress, maybe eight or nine, posing stiffly with her hands folded and her face too serious for a child.
