The first few pages were purses I had drawn back in my old life. Then my apartment. The cabin. A bit of the hotel room that I didn’t finish. One of him giving me a raised-brow look he wore so often.
But then, as my mind had been seeking things to focus on that didn’t involve him, I started to sketch other half-finished things. Scenes from my childhood, adolescence, things that maybe I should have purged onto paper a long time ago like this guy a friend of mine was dating who was majoring in psychology had suggested.
Pictures of booze and pills on my kitchen table.
Empty cabinets.
My father smacking around my mother.
My mother smacking around me.
And the one his eyes seemed to be so fixated on.
The one of me fishing something out of the neighbor’s trash bin at the street.
An old McDonald’s box.
There had only been a few fries in it.
But it was more than I had had all day.
“Gunner, please,” I said, voice thick with an emotion I almost didn’t recognize at first because it was so new to me. Vulnerability. Complete and utter exposure, and the fear and insecurity that came with that.
“Sloane… what the fuck?” he asked, looking up at me finally. His voice was thick too, lower, almost quiet.
“We were between Food Stamps that week,” I supplied, humiliation – though it was certainly not my fault – welling up inside, making my face feel hot. “There was nothing in the house.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said, sounding genuinely sad for little nine-year-old me. “Why didn’t she take you to a food pantry or soup kitchen or some shit?”
“I imagine because she was too drunk to realize I was starving,” I said, hearing a snippiness in my tone, not knowing why it was there. I certainly never wanted to defend the woman, excuse her actions.
“Where’d the money for alcohol come from?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. I don’t want to.”
“I get it, baby,” he said, the endearment making my belly wobble a little. Not duchess. Baby. It somehow seemed more personal. Especially as his hand went to my leg right above my knee, and gave it a squeeze.
“Get what?”
“This,” he said releasing my leg to wave at me. “You. I get it. But this shit, this doesn’t define you. You don’t need to be embarrassed about it. You were a kid. Your mom was a bitch. Your dad was useless. None of that reflects on you.”
“The people in my world… they cared about things like pedigree.”
“Fuck them. Like their shit don’t stink. Rich people from quote-unquote good families have just as much dirt as the rest of it. They just pay other people to sweep it under the rugs.” He closed the book, putting it back on my lap, but kept his hand on the closed black cover. “Don’t let this define who you want to be now, Sloane. You have a chance now. To reinvent. If you aren’t completely happy as Miss Blythe-Meuller, be someone else. Not many people get that chance. Sure, it sucks that you didn’t choose it for yourself. But if you were being honest, would you have ever taken the opportunity if it wasn’t forced on you?”
“No.”
“And were you happy – genuinely happy – being who you were pretending to be back in that life?”
As much as it hurt to admit it, as much as my belly coiled at even voicing that tiny little nagging voice I tried to keep gagged and bound inside, I told him. “No.”
“Life’s short. Don’t waste it unhappy. Take the chance you have now to be happy. You’ve done the making a big name and lots of money thing. It didn’t do it for you. Find what does. Do that.”
I nodded a bit at that, feeling a tad too emotional to say anything – or even make eye-contact – right then.
“You want to eat first, or drop off your shit here?” he asked, making my head snap up to the strip mall we were parked in where there was a pizza place and a dry cleaner.
“Seems most sensible to drop it off, then eat while we wait.”
“Yes. We must always be sensible,” he said in a tone clearly meant to mock me. But where I would maybe – just even a few days ago – have bristled at someone doing that, I smiled at him, acknowledging the fact that those words were a very Miss Blythe-Meuller thing to say. And maybe Sloane Livingston wasn’t going to be quite as sensible and snobby as that.
“It means you’d have to run back out to pick up the dry cleaning,” I reasoned. “After we get to the hotel.”
“Yeah, fuck that. Sensible it is.”
So we dropped off my dry cleaning.
We had pizza.
He made fun of me for liking mushrooms and onions on my pizza. I told him my arteries appreciated that I didn’t order three types of meat on mine like he did.