CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Holden
For as much as life is unfair, it’s also sadistic and confusing. We have all these concepts and beliefs, views shared by the majority as part of a collective unconscious, the landscape always changing as to what is shunned and what is accepted by people who dare to step outside the box.
Not that the box ever existed for me, the walls failing to rise and close me in like they should have done when I was born. I’ve existed so far outside those expectations of normality that encapsulate most people that I’ve never suffered the loss of companionship or similarity because it had never existed in the first place.
If the world were a crowd of people moving in an endless circle, I was that one outlier you’d see when viewing us from above - the one soul shuffling in the opposite direction, always on the outside, always alone.
I didn’t mind it, not until this moment anyway, when I had to wonder if, for once, I’d been wrong about one of those marching people endlessly circling.
Stripping off my clothes, I climbed in the shower to blast my body with scalding water, the ice from the walk home melting from my nose, the blood returning to my cheeks as pins and needles. Snow was supposed to fall tonight, heavy and thick, the potential of getting trapped inside, a looming threat. Angela had given me another double tomorrow, per my request, but if I couldn’t get outside, it meant I was trapped with a woman who’d managed to surprise me with many of the things she’d said and done.
Had I judged her wrongly all these years?
My head dipped beneath the spray, my eyes watching the falling water as that question echoed inside my head.
I’ve never been a true genius, never had the ease with math and writing as I did with visual art, but when it came to understanding people, I would have put myself above the rest, would have sworn I couldn’t be wrong about a person because I looked beneath the surface.
Michaela, however, a woman I’d watched grow from a girl, an open book I’d read for years on end, was proving to be a mystery. I thought I’d seen beneath the facade, but the more she revealed in her behavior now, the more I wondered if there weren’t additional defenses she’d constructed beneath the superficial demeanor, hiding places that no other person had breached. I couldn’t stop staring at her, couldn’t stop trying to pick apart the puzzle and understand what made her tick.
Not that staring at her was difficult. It had never been. Michaela checked all the right boxes when it came to appearance. Tall and curved in all the right places, dancing had done well to tone Michaela’s physique, her long dark brown hair flowing down her back where the ends brushed her hips.
I used to watch her walk the halls of Tranquil Falls High, used to memorize the way her hair swayed back and forth as she moved, reaching but not quite touching her heart shaped butt. In dance class, I’d snapped a few mental images of her as well, had sketched them out, but could never get the angles of her face just right, could never catch that something in her eyes that was more akin to pain than happiness. So I simply left the face blank, as empty and shallow as what I’d believed was her true self.
It’s not unheard of for people to change. Time, age and maturity come into play as we grow, experience coloring the pages of a person’s life - joy, heartache, love and hate a liberally sprinkled glitter to highlight the moments that matter the most, sticking to our skin, scratching us when we least expect it because you can never get all of it off.
Had she changed so much in the past two years, or had this always been who she was beneath the practiced smiles, the complacent behavior, the desperation to fit in?
I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure I’d find out. Time was being snatched away like sand caught in the wind, the minutes scattered until nothing remained but my view of the prison cell as I was being walked to it.
Turning off the water, I stood dripping, my skin pink, my forehead pressed to the tile wall. There were moments when I forgot my present circumstances, tiny slivers of time where the crimes I’d committed weren’t crushing down on my chest making it impossible to breathe. Oddly, those moments occurred the most when Michaela was around.
That thought bothered me.
Climbing out of the shower, I dried off and got dressed, my head so clogged with chaos that I needed a release before bed. I hadn’t even noticed while selecting my clothes that I’d grabbed my old pair of tattered jeans, the legs spattered with paint in all colors. My t-shirt was a plain white, but I would take it off before working. It was easier to wash the paint from my skin than to wash it from my clothes.
Michaela was sitting on the couch when I stepped out, her eyes darting to me as soon as I entered the living room. I’d never seen her look so lonely. The need to comfort her was a pulsing warmth inside me, but I shoved it away, scrubbing my palm over my neck before glancing down the hallway to my studio. Awkward silence lingered between us, her full lips parting to say something when I blurted out my words instead.
“I’m going to go work on some stuff for a little while. Will you be okay by yourself out here?”
Her mouth hung open for a few seconds, her eyes widening then narrowing again, disappointment apparent in the lines of her face. “Yeah, I should be fine.”
“Awesome. I’m just going to go.”
Disappearing from view as quickly as possible, I didn’t slow down until I was tucked behind the closed door of the studio, my back pressed against the wood, my eyes clenched shut because everything inside me when it came to Michaela was becoming a frustrating contradiction. I felt like a jerk for running and leaving her in there alone. It also didn’t escape my notice that I’d literally bolted to get away from her like a scared little boy with a crush.
What was wrong with me?
Brushing it off, I crossed the room on two long strides, slipped my favorite CD into the player and relaxed a touch as the music blared through the speakers. This was my place, my sanctuary, the church that I ran to when I needed to pray. Within these walls, there was no need for words, and reality bled away as I transferred the snapshots in my brain to canvas. Tugging off my shirt to avoid dousing it in paint, I grabbed my brushes and absorbed the music, my eyes scanning between the paintings that were incomplete, none of them calling to me or drawing me close.
A new image had captured my mind, a sleeping woman, her veil slipping away to show me who she was inside. The details of her face becoming clear for the first time since I sketched her years before.
Fighting against the need to paint it, I dabbed some details onto one of the seven canvases already on their easels, but still I was unsatisfied, unable to enter that space where the art flowed freely, where it wasn’t my thoughts directing my brush, but my soul. After several minutes passed and the urge expanded until it filled me, I removed the last canvas from its easel, grabbed a blank slate, and set it up to begin assigning this new image to the canvas.
As soon as the first line dragged down the white background, I dropped the brush knowing the angle was wrong, my fingers itching for a sketch pad and pencil where I could rework the memory over and over again until I had it just right.
Gathering the tools of my beleaguered trade, I dropped down in the center of the studio to sit on the drop cloths and pull the memory from my mind, the quiet scritch scritch of lead over paper lost to the beat of music filling the room. Within minutes, the outline was complete, but the shading was the detail that would bring it to life.
It was wrong. Something was wrong. I couldn’t quite grasp what I was missing, the snapshot not quite complete in my head. Flipping the page, I attempted it again. Wrong. I flipped another page, drew another line. Shaded. Traced. Wrong. Another page. Another. I couldn’t get it right.
Lead dust blackened the skin of my hand, my lip caught between my teeth, my focus so acute, my frustration so overwhelming that I almost missed a soft knock at the door.
Head snapping up toward the sound, I waited for it to come again, wondering if in my trance I’d imagined it.
The knock came again.
A breath poured out of me, the need to ignore the knock and keep sketching holding me in place, but the knock came again, only harder.
Dropping the pad face down onto the ground, I pushed to my feet and stalked to the door, wrenched it open to find Michaela on the other side looking panicked.
“I didn’t want to bother you but somebody is knocking on your front door.”
“What?” Eyes wide, I shot a glance over her shoulder as if I could see the door in question, which I couldn’t.
“Maybe they’ll go away?” I mused.
Her lips pulled into a tight grin. “That was my thought. I ignored it the first three times, but whoever is out there isn’t going away.”
This was not good. In fact, this was very, VERY bad. Racking my brain to remember if the trail through the woods had been disturbed on my walk home, I couldn’t think of anything out of the ordinary. If they’d found Jack, that entire area would have been taped off, police cars and a medical examiner’s van blocking the path. There was no possible way whoever stood outside was here to haul me off to jail.
“What should we do?” Michaela asked.
Reaching out, I pulled her into the room. “Stay in here. Don’t make a sound. Don’t come out.”
So concerned with who would be at my house this late at night - in weather that had dropped below freezing, no less - I wasn’t thinking straight when I closed the door behind me locking Michaela inside a room that nobody had seen since I’d converted it.
Eating the distance between my studio and the front door with a rapid, pace, I waited to hear if the person would knock again. Within seconds, there was a rap of knuckles against the wood. I pulled the door open and froze in place.
“Hey, I was wondering if we can talk?”
“Uh...” It was insanely difficult to formulate words at that moment.
Kaley stood just outside the door, a thick jacket covering her body, the hood pulled over her head. White plumes of hot breath poured over her lips, her brown eyes looking up at me, pleading. Shaking myself of the panicked shock, I pulled the door open and angled my body to give her room to step in.
“Why are you here, Kaley? Is something wrong?”
She stepped in and was shivering beneath her jacket, her teeth chattering loudly as I closed the door against the wind racing in with icy fingers. Kaley looked up at me with the same swollen eyes she’d had at the diner. “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to talk to you about...us.”
Crap...
‘Us’ was the last thing I wanted to talk about. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Kaley - it was that I had a secret that would tear her apart if I didn’t let her down gently now, and unfortunately the time and place for that discussion was not here where I had the ex-girlfriend of the man I killed hanging out, a girl Kaley would recognize because she despised her as much as I used to.
“It’s not a good time,” I muttered, my arms crossing over my chest that I just now remembered was bare to her eyes. Music blasted from the studio at the back of the long hall, Kaley’s eyes darting in the direction of the noise just before suspicion rolled in to mix with the brown color.
“Do you have somebody here?”
My heart stuttered. “No. Why?”
“I thought I saw someone move past the front window when I knocked.”
“Yeah, no,” I lied, adding yet another one to the pile of lies I’d been building since two nights ago. “Let me go take care of the stuff I was working on in back real quick, and I’ll throw on some clothes and walk you home. We can talk on the way.”
Pivoting on my heel, I stepped toward the hallway, Kaley’s hand gripping over my wrist before I could escape. “Actually, I was hoping you’d invite me to stay the night.”
Twisting to look at her, I locked my gaze on the hesitant smile pulling at her lips.
She shrugged. “I thought with your sister being gone, it could be the first time we stayed an entire night together.”
Floored by the amount of hope that dripped from her words, I struggled to think of a way to tell her no. If Deli were around, I’d ask her what to do. She was always quick with girly advice, always my savior when it came to avoiding the pitfalls that left a trail of broken hearts in my wake.
But Deli wasn’t here.
Only Michaela.
It wasn’t the best idea, but it was worth a shot.
“I really need to get back to my studio and take care of some things real quick. Can you hold on for a second?”
Kaley hadn’t finished nodding ‘yes’ before I was racing down the hall. Opening the door to the studio, I slipped inside, and turned to find Michaela staring at a painting of Deli I hadn’t yet finished.
Her head swiveled to look at me, genuine admiration in her green gaze. “Holden, these paintings are amazing.”
It irked me to have someone in my space, to have my work exposed to new eyes when they weren’t finished. There was nothing I could do about it at the moment. Crossing the room, I turned down the music, my mouth running dry when I forced myself to ask the question.
“Michaela, listen, I need your help.”
She stood silently, her brows arching above her eyes.
“If you were sleeping with a guy and it had been casual at first, but you suddenly had feelings for him, what would be the best thing he could say to let you down easy?”
Her expression relaxed, a grin tugging at her lips before she shook her head and smiled brighter. “Oh dear. It sounds like you’ve got a slight problem on your hands, Holden.”
Nodding emphatically, I couldn’t have agreed with her more.
Soft laughter shook her shoulders. “How much time do we have to work this out?”
“Like three minutes,” I admitted.
“Okay. Then tell me the details as quickly as you can and I’ll give you my advice. But, in all honesty, I’m not sure there’s anything you can say or do to prevent hurting her.”
That’s not what I wanted to hear. Taking a deep breath to steady the erratic beat of my heart, I leaned against the door behind me and spilled the details.