Dance Away with Me - Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page 0,128

why didn’t he?

Because he couldn’t.

He was lost, besieged by loneliness and uncertainty—by the smell of diesel and the stench of rotting garbage from the trash bags piled at the curb. Would Wren even remember him when she saw him again? It had been only a few weeks, but he knew how quickly she changed, and he was missing all of it.

His anger with Tess butted straight up against his longing to be with her. Life without her was as pointless as soda that had lost its fizz. She’d opened him to new experiences, new emotions, to becoming part of a community that existed beyond the boundaries of studios and galleries. She’d shown him what it was like to make love with a woman who held nothing back. Life with her had unfolded in every hue of the rainbow.

Then she’d ruined it by rejecting him. How could she think he was a threat to Wren when that baby belonged to him as much as to her? All that bullshit about him not being domestic. If that was true, why was the schoolhouse and their life on the mountain all he could think about? She’d even had the gall to accuse him of looking miserable when he told her he loved her. What the hell kind of thing was that to say?

His head ached. Maybe he was running a fever. He should go out to the drugstore and get something to take, but if he opened the door, they’d be waiting for him.

“Ian, I don’t want to bother you, but could you take a look at—”

“Ian, I’m not sure it has anything to say . . .”

They were great kids, talented, and deserving of the studio space he was happy to give them. He just didn’t want to talk to them right now. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. Yet now that he was back in Manhattan, his phone wouldn’t stop ringing. He turned it off, then turned it right back on again. What if there was an emergency with Wren? What if Tess finally realized how unreasonable she was being and called to apologize?

He replayed their last conversation a thousand times in his head, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember her ever once saying she loved him.

* * *

He was up at dawn. He should go train, but his dojo here didn’t smell of pine and leaf mold. No weeds brushed his calves. No birdsong mingled with the sound of his own breath.

He forced himself back into the studio. It was more functional than his schoolhouse studio, but its cement floor; high, open ceiling; and cold, industrial walls weren’t nearly as welcoming. And why, with all the noise around him, was it so quiet here?

He flipped through those small canvas squares. What he really wanted to do was sketch—a squirrel scuttling through the underbrush, early wildflowers in the meadow. Tess. Wren. Sketching calmed him, but therapy wasn’t art.

In a fit of frustration, he grabbed a canvas he’d abandoned months ago, a big, insipid, tonal composition. He turned it upside down and set it on the easel hard enough to make the frame shake. He snatched up the closest tube of paint and squeezed all of it into his hand. Primary yellow. Good enough. He rubbed the thick paint between his palms and smeared it over the canvas without caring where it went or how it looked. He picked up another random tube, squeezed it out, and did the same. He found another and then another—edges bleeding, no regard for line or form, shape or value.

He glued the canvas imprints from Tess’s body on top and pulled a random can of Krylon from the shelf. He shook it and spattered it in short, choppy bursts without attempting a pattern. He found another can and did the same. And then another. He was breathing hard as he finally spelled out IHN4.

He dropped back, drained.

It was a madman’s mess, lumpy, disjointed and nonsensical. It could have been done by anyone or anything. One of those elephants who’d been given a brush and a bucket of paint. He set his pigment-smeared hands to his knees, trying to catch his breath. He looked again. The chaos in front of him had no purpose, no reason for being.

Like him.

He needed order, some kind of structure and sanity. He rubbed his palms on the legs of his jeans and reached for the one thing in the studio that held the order he craved: