I shut my eyes with the throb of the hangover and growled when I couldn’t shut my own voice up in my head. That’s when I shoved the letter into a drawer and left my apartment for an entire day.
I partied with Azor.
I went to see Sasha and showed her my new ideas.
Then I stumbled my way to Aaron’s where I slept on the couch in the basement again.
It was everything back to the normal I knew. The normal I had before Amelia came walking back into my life. She knew what she had been walking into. And just like before, all she wanted were answers. She had all these questions, maybe from the mind of a writer, but they were my questions and my answers.
But better yet, what did she want with those answers? To write a story? To write a book? To find a way to let the rest of the world read about my life and who I was? The man behind all the pictures, drawings, and paintings.
As angry as it all made me, there was a part of me that wanted Amelia to know everything. To know the truth she had been waiting to hear for so long. The truth was going to change everything though. That’s why I didn’t want her to have it. Because right now she could go through her life with the story she believed and that was okay.
Aaron called me for the fourth time as I sipped another beer.
I stood in my apartment alone, dressed in my cleanest jeans and a shirt with buttons, the sleeves rolled up twice. Azor had a showing at Sasha’s gallery and I was requested to be there. I told him he could use the painting we worked on.
It was a big night for him.
I promised to be there.
I ignored Aaron’s call for the fourth time.
His voicemails and texts were vague. That was his sign that he was trying to check up on me. Which I appreciated, but he had his own family to take care of. That wasn’t me. Last time we talked, he pushed at me about Amelia and I was one second away from punching him when Toby came into the room with a broken wheel off of a toy truck that Aaron went to work, quickly fixing it.
I finished my beer and left the apartment.
Letting Amelia go was hard. The answers she didn’t have hurt.
The bigger problem… I was empty.
Amelia had taken everything from me. I had given everything to her.
Almost everything.
I had no desire to take a picture. To draw a line. To paint the smallest of marks.
I knew the truth of Delilah.
But I also knew the truth of Amelia.
I couldn’t live without her.
“You’re going to need this soon,” I said to Azor.
I handed him back the flask he had given to me the night of my gallery showing.
That seemed like a lifetime ago.
The night Amelia stepped back into my life. The night she pushed at me. The night I dropped the fucking letter to Delilah, and she found it…
“Hey, thanks for this,” Azor said.
He was dressed in all black and smelled like the cologne counter at a department store. And he wore about fifteen pounds of gold jewelry on his neck, wrists, and fingers. I wasn’t sure what kind of look he was going for, but it was Azor. Even he tried to make some kind of fashion statement.
“Congrats on tonight,” I said.
“Have a drink with me,” he said.
“Oh, I’ve been drinking out of that already,” I said with a grin. “It’s probably half empty by now.”
Azor laughed. “Hey. You know this is because of you. You walked into my apartment and destroyed that terrible painting…”
“I was an asshole for doing that,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I was closing myself up. I was forcing a certain look. You broke that, Josh. You were vicious and it worked.”
“You can thank me in your speech later,” I said. “Go enjoy your night.”
Azor lumbered into the crowd waiting for him. Everyone gathered around the painting he and I worked on. I refused to answer a question about the painting. I wanted all the attention to be on Azor.
Sasha slithered her way toward me, her tight dress and tick tock hips trying to flirt, but it didn’t work on me.
“This is exciting,” she whispered.
“He’s a good guy,” I said. “He deserves more. Hope he chases this down.”