arms. I could control my scent, but that wasn’t going to help.
I wouldn’t have an excuse to keep my back to him if we ate lunch.
And yet, I didn’t want to turn him down.
Catch-22. I was fucked no matter what I did, so I may as well go out with him, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.
“No. Not at work. I can meet you somewhere for dinner at seven. Tell me where.” I was painting an area that didn’t take creativity while I talked to him. Lines and shadows, nothing complicated. He needed to leave soon though.
He named a barbecue place with an excellent menu, and with several locations around town.
“Tell me which is closest to you, and we’ll go to that one.”
Owls are sneaky. And smart. I suppressed a sigh and told him which would be the easiest for me to get to after going home for a shower.
And then I realized I’d just told him I lived next door to my ex. It didn’t matter how much I’d worked to hide my location. He only had to find out where Gil lived. Fuck me.
When he left, I stretched out on the scaffolding and stared at the ceiling. My creative muse had left the building, and I needed to get her back. In order to do that, I had to figure out what the fuck had just happened.
Frost, the man I’d fallen in love with and then tried for months to forget, had just walked in and flipped my world on its side.
I sat up, turned my phone on, and looked through the sketches and paintings I’d done in preparation for this job. I wasn’t up to painting, so I washed my brushes, closed the paints, cleaned my palette, dug an easily erasable pencil from my bag, and started measuring where I needed to sketch the columns on the side wall. You can’t let your mind wander while you’re doing math.
Somehow, I managed to stay productive the rest of the day, but then my mind wandered once again while I drove home.
Home meant something different now than it had during the riots.
My new neighborhood was hit hard during the battle, but I’d lived in a smaller house across town at the time, where the fighting had been minimal. I’d bought my new house after, at a rock-bottom price, and then fixed it up myself. Squatters had messed up some of the interior, but it was structurally sound — the roof was intact and nothing had been burned, so it was a good deal. I’d needed to tear out floors and sheetrock, pay someone to put them back in, and then paint the walls myself. Gil and I still owned the old house, and we were renting it out until housing prices recovered.
This new house was a lot of square footage for one person, but the kids were over a lot, and I kept telling myself someday I might have my own kids. Mainly, I liked it because it sat on four acres, enclosed by a stone wall. Three of those acres made up my mostly-forested backyard, which was also walled off from the front. For the first time in my life, I could walk out my back door and let my lynx roam.
This also meant that even though my ex lived next door, he wasn’t all that close. We couldn’t look out our windows and see the other.
On this day, I came home from work, stripped out of my work clothes in the laundry-room, walked out the back door completely naked, and swam laps in the pool until my muscles were jelly. I finally went back inside, up the overly dramatic staircase, took a shower, conditioned the hell out of my hair, and then stood naked in the center of my closet.
What the fuck was I supposed to wear?
My fifteen-year-old stepdaughter had organized my closet, so one wall held my clubbing and biker clothes, another held my everyday clothes. Two-thirds of another wall held dressy stuff, and the other third was my painting clothes — mostly everyday clothes that’d been downgraded to clothes I didn’t mind fucking up.
The dressy wall was out, but so was my slut wall. That left my everyday clothes, but nothing felt right. I heard Nora’s footsteps coming down the hall, into my room, and finally to my closet.
“Are you okay?”
Right, because I usually come home and either fix food or toss a bunch of raw meat into the backyard and