The oil paint was still wet, so the red smeared into the features, and what started as a clear red streak became muddied by the woman’s dark sadness by the time I got to the bottom of the canvas.
Still, when I stepped back, I was satisfied. I turned back to Rafe, and I was fierce.
“I’m not sad, I’m enraged. I paint my rage because no one will let me fucking scream!” Though I did scream the last word.
Because out here at the end of this long oak-lined lane, who the fuck would hear other than Mama H, the help, and… oh yeah, the other belle and her Initiate?
It probably wouldn’t be good for her to hear another woman screaming and screeching. That would have freaked me out if I’d heard that my first week here, so I shut my mouth.
I shut my mouth and reached for another canvas, my red hand leaving prints as I went.
I didn’t bother with the brush this time. I squirted out large blobs of paint, of acrylic this time, and then I started painting with my fingers.
Bright yellows, oranges, and deep reds.
I wasn’t sure at first what it was, but soon I realized I was painting a phoenix. A beautiful phoenix goddess rising from the ashes.
Again and again, they tried to kill her, thought they did.
But she just kept rising.
They could never keep her down, no matter how hard they tried.
I’d all but forgotten Rafe was even there until he said, “God, I wish I could do what you do. I see it now. You’re screaming on canvas. It’s beautiful. You always were the brave one of us.”
Goddamn him.
Dagger to the heart.
I’d started painting today to forget him. To escape him. To tell myself that he was just like his parents, that any soft spot I might have witnessed last night was just an errant moment.
But when he said things like this… or did things like bringing me the paints in the first place…
Why did he keep confusing me like this?
I had everything figured out. I had my new life, a new man, a college degree…
And yet, something had drawn me back to this accursed place. Because the truth was, Rafe wasn’t the only one with ghosts of the past haunting him. His just had a face—his brother.
But me? Mine was a pain without form. Like a missing limb, I could almost feel the shape of it sometimes, a lingering loss, a lingering pain from what was once so important having been violently severed.
Because it was him.
Rafe was what I’d lost. Rafe was what I missed and ached for in the middle of the night. The part of my life that had been cut out so sharply and suddenly, and I still didn’t understand why, why he’d let me go, why he’d—
“You want to learn?” I asked, cutting off my troublesome thoughts. I gestured to the canvas. Just focus on the painting, Fallon. Dear God, could I just get the fuck out of my own head, for fucking once?
Rafe laughed in disbelief. “What? No, I can’t paint.” He took a few steps back as if to prove it.
Which made me twice as determined. “That’s bullshit. Everyone can paint.”
I put down the canvas I was working on and pulled up another one. Mama H kept me well stocked in canvases and paints now that Rafe had requested it. What an Initiate wanted, an Initiate got, after all.
“Here, we’ll start with something easy. A tree. Everyone can paint a tree.”
Rafe looked at me skeptically. I just rolled my eyes at him.
“Here, put your fingers in this dark paint, right here.” I mixed up some brown, black, and blue, a big glob of it.
“My fingers?” Rafe sounded confused and like I was crazy.
I smiled at him. “Yes, come on, you can’t tell me you’ve never finger painted before.”
This time he rolled his eyes at me. But like a good boy, he put his big finger into the glob of paint, though he made a face as he did it. Which was funny because the Rafe I’d known back in the day never hesitated to get dirty. As kids we’d made countless mud pies in the side garden, much to my mother’s consternation. She always had to clean Rafe up before Mrs. Jackson ever saw.
“Now put it on the canvas, for the base of the tree.”
He hesitated. “Where?”
I laughed. “Anywhere. It doesn’t have to be perfect. We’ll start building up the base. Here, we’ll do it together. We’re building up the shadows.” I dipped my first two fingers in the paint and then reached around him from behind, guiding his arm until we were both touching the canvas.
His broad back was warm against my chest, and only now did I realize just how intimate the position was. I didn’t let it deter me.