Violet
I clutch my chest and drag in a deep breath.
“You scared me,” I tell him as I pull my ear buds out and hit pause on the playlist on my cell phone.
I can’t work without music. I prefer it blaring over the sound system in the corner, but when I’m up here in the middle of the night, that’s not exactly possible.
His intense blue eyes watch me carefully as a wide smile graces his full lips.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…” His gaze shifts, and his apology is lost. “Are these yours?”
I feel the blush colour my cheeks – I don’t make it a habit of showing people my work and he’s still no exception to the rule.
Even Lucy, my best friend since we were in nappies, has never seen the entire collection of my work. I’ve shown her only two pieces, one of which she begged for until she wore me down and I agreed.
That particular piece sits proudly on the wall in the entry to her and Emmett’s house, with a pinky promise from her that she’ll never spill the beans on where she got it.
Rylan has never seen anything more from me than a doodle on a napkin and the ‘safe’ paintings my mum and dad have on their walls.
“Yeah… they’re mine. I thought you’d be sleeping… I didn’t mean to wake you. Do you want to go back to bed?”
“You didn’t wake me,” he murmurs as he slowly walks past me, his eyes studying one canvas before moving onto the next, ignoring my question about returning to the safety of my sheets.
I normally don’t paint when he’s here, but ever since he came home broken, I haven’t slept much at all.
It was a rookie error on my behalf – leaving myself exposed this way, and even though I don’t want to hide all of this from him forever, I’m not mentally prepared to have him in here right now.
This room is filled with my work and as he slowly takes appraisal of each piece, it’s almost as though he’s stripping me bare of an item of clothing.
These are my inner most thoughts and feelings – some of the images on these canvases are so raw and real they take me right back to the specific moment in time and the feelings hit me with such force it can literally knock me backwards.
That’s why I keep it all up here, in the large attic, with a locked door.
The light provided from the huge skylights makes it the perfect place for me to paint –it’s my happy place. But right now it feels more like a prison cell I can’t escape.
Rylan’s gently flicking through the stack of canvases against the wall now.
I suck in a ragged breath because I know exactly what he’s seeing.
I haven’t laid eyes on those paintings in close to two years, but each and every one of them is burned into my memory for all eternity.
Those are some of the hardest hitting works of art I’ve ever created.
I’m paralysed, almost gasping for air as I wait for him to question me on them, for him to ask things I can’t answer.
But he doesn’t.
When he reaches the last one, he rubs forcefully with the ball of his hand at a spot on his chest and glances around at the collection I have displayed on the far wall.
The relief I feel almost brings me to my knees.
These I can talk about, mainly because they make little to no sense to me.
He turns to face me for the first time in what feels like an eternity. He raises a dark brow at me. “What’s with all the flowers?”
I shrug. “I’m not sure to be honest… I just started painting them one day, and I’ve never stopped.”
“I like them,” he whispers, his voice thick with an emotion I can’t place.
“Thank you.”
I don’t tell him about the dream or vision, if you want to call it that, that I had a few years ago.
I don’t tell him about the fields of daisies that everything important to me, including he himself was in.
I don’t tell him that as soon as I was allowed home, I was back in front of a canvas, painting daisy after daisy, with no real idea why they were so important.
I can’t tell him all of that. If I do, he’ll have questions, and I’ll end up telling him that he was there in my dreams – that I’ve been picturing him in my mind for nearly four years.
I’m still not quite ready for that revelation yet.
He strolls back over to me, leaving the other half of the room and the work in it safe from his intense stare.
There’s a lot of memories over there too and a pair of blue eyes he was bound to recognise as his own, but I don’t feel relief knowing he didn’t see that particular painting, instead I still feel stripped bare as though he’s already seen everything.
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about him in these past two months, it’s that he misses nothing.
His mind is sharp, his eyes are focused, and his soul is curious.
He sees everything, even the things I don’t say or show… he sees them too.
“Can we go for a walk?”
I’m surprised by his request, given that it’s after midnight, but I’d give just about anything to be out of this room right now, so I nod eagerly, and when he holds out his hand to me, I take it.