And then there was the very last task, one she’d checked off with alarming swiftness.
7. Do something bad.
Oh, she’d done something bad, all right. Not that she could ever tell her sisters about that. Just the thought made her cheeks heat. But when she took her notebook back into the living room, guilty memories dragged her gaze, kicking and screaming, toward the window. The forbidden portal to her something bad. The curtains were still closed, the way she’d left them ever since her last transgression—but there was that little gap of light trickling through.
Perhaps she should go and pull the curtains tighter, cut off that gap completely, just to make sure. Yes. Definitely. She crept over to the wide living room window, raising a hand to do just that . . . but some sort of malfunction occurred, and before she knew it, she was twitching the curtain to the side, widening the gap instead of closing it. A faint shard of light stretched toward her across the courtyard’s patio, merging with the last gasps of the dying sun, and she thought to herself, Don’t. Don’t. This is horribly invasive and more than a little creepy and you’re just making everything worse—
But her eyes kept on looking anyway, staring across the narrow courtyard, through a not-so-distant window to the figure limned within.
Redford Morgan was hard at work.
Call me Red, he’d told her, months ago. She hadn’t. Couldn’t. The word, like everything else about him, was too much for her to handle. Chloe didn’t do well around people like him; confident people, beautiful people, those who smiled easily and were liked by everyone and felt comfortable in their own skin. They reminded her of all the things she wasn’t and all the loved ones who’d left her behind. They made her feel prickly and silly and frosty and foolish, twisting her insides into knots, until all she could do was snap or stammer.
She usually chose to snap.
The problem with Redford was, he always seemed to catch her at her worst. Take the time when some yummy mummy had cornered Chloe in the courtyard to ask, “Is that a wig?”
Chloe, perplexed, had patted her usual plain, brown bun, wondering if she’d slapped on one of Dani’s platinum blond lace fronts that morning by mistake. “. . . No?”
The yummy mummy hadn’t been impressed with Chloe’s lack of conviction and had therefore taken matters into her own hands. Which, in this case, had involved grabbing Chloe’s hair as if it were a creature at a petting zoo.
But had Redford witnessed that disaster? Of course not. Nor had he heard the woman’s chocolate-smeared child call Chloe a “mean, ugly lady” for defending herself. Nooo; he’d swept onto the scene like a knight in tattooed armor just in time to hear Chloe call the woman a “vapid disgrace to humanity,” and the child a “nasty little snot ball,” both of which were clearly true statements.
Redford had glared at her as if she were Cruella de Vil and let the yummy mummy cry on his shoulder.
And then there’d been that unfortunate incident in the post room. Was it Chloe’s fault that some bonkers old lady named Charlotte Brown lived directly above her in 2D? Or that said bonkers old lady, sans spectacles, had mistakenly broken into Chloe’s post box and opened the letters within? No. No, it was not. It also wasn’t Chloe’s fault that she, incensed by the literal crime committed against her, had reacted in the heat of the moment by finding the old lady’s post box and pouring her morning thermos of tea through the slot. How was she to know that Charlotte Brown had been awaiting seventieth birthday cards from her grandchildren in the United States? She wasn’t to know, of course. She wasn’t psychic, for heaven’s sake.
She’d attempted to explain all of that to Redford, but he’d been glowering so very hard, and then he’d said something awfully cutting—he was good at that, the wretch—and Chloe had given up. Superior silence was much easier to pull off, especially around him. He turned her into a complete disaster, and so, by day, she avoided his company like the bubonic plague.
But at night, sometimes, she watched him paint.
He was standing in front of his window, shirtless, which she supposed made her a pervert as well as a spy. But this wasn’t a sexual exercise. He was barely even attractive in her eyes. She didn’t see him as an object, or anything like that. From a distance, in the dark, with that sharp tongue of his tucked away, she saw him as poetry. He had this visceral quality, even when he was glaring at her, but especially when he painted. There was an honesty, a vulnerability about him that captivated her.
Chloe knew she was flesh and blood and bone, just like him. But she wasn’t alive like he was. Not even close.
He was in profile, focused on the canvas in front of him. Sometimes he painted haltingly, almost cautiously; other times, he would stare at the canvas more than he touched it. But tonight, he was a living storm, dabbing and daubing with quick, fluid movements. She couldn’t see what he was working on, and she didn’t want to. What mattered was the subtle rise and fall of his ribs as his breathing sped up, and the rapid, minute movements of his head, birdlike and fascinating. What mattered was him.
His long hair hung over his face, a copper-caramel curtain with shreds of firelight throughout. That hair, she knew, hid a strong brow, probably furrowed in concentration; a harsh, jutting nose; a fine mouth that lived on the edge of smiling, surrounded by sandy stubble. She liked to see the fierce concentration on his face when he painted, but she knew it was for the best when his wild hair covered all. If she couldn’t see him, he wouldn’t see her. And anyway, she didn’t need to see his face to drown in his vitality. The spill of copper strands over those broad shoulders; the ink trapped beneath his pale skin; that was enough.
If someone asked her what his tattoos looked like, she wouldn’t be able to describe the images they displayed or the words they spelled out. She’d speak about the dense blackness, and the pops of color. The faded ones that seemed ever so slightly raised, and the ones that flooded him like ink spilled into water. She’d speak about how strange it was to choose to bleed for something, simply because you wanted to. She’d speak about how it made her feel and how she wanted to want something that much, and on a regular enough basis, to build her own equivalent of his countless tattoos.
But no one would ever ask her, because she wasn’t supposed to know.
The first time she’d stumbled across this view, she’d turned away instantly, squeezing her eyes shut while her heart tried to break free of its cage. And she’d shut her curtains. Hard. But the image had stayed with her, and curiosity had built. She’d spent days wondering—Was he naked? Naked in front of his window? And what had been in his hand? What was he doing in there?