my pulse roaring, but I don’t falter. I hold the mug steady in my hands. I put one foot in front of the other, cool and even, a picture of calm. Until I reach the second-floor landing and they can no longer see me, that is. My hand shakes so violently that the coffee in the mug sloshes over the side, splattering to the polished floorboards. Thankfully the liquid misses the plush grey carpet runner, but I’ve still made one hell of a mess.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Quickly shrugging out of my zip-up hoody, I drop it to the ground, stepping on it and using my foot to mop up the coffee, shaking all over now. What the fuck did I just do? In front of Dashiell and Pax. And Wren. What the fuck? I’m gonna go up to your room? I’m gonna go up to your room??? Oh my god. I barely know the guy. Sweet Baby Jesus, why couldn’t I have just sent him a shitty text message for ghosting me and stayed in my fucking room?
Lord knows how I make it up the second flight of stairs or the third, but I do. My legs are unsteady, barely holding me up as I open the door to Wren’s room and go inside, hurriedly closing it behind me. Well this could not have gone any worse. I should have made a plan. I mean, even if they hadn’t found me stalking about outside the house like a fucking psychopath, what was I gonna do? Just walk up to the front door and just fucking knock? Like that would have been a sane thing to do?
I toss the book on the bed, and then I discard the half-empty mug of coffee on a shelf by the door, no longer needing the prop to make myself look normal, definitely not needing the caffeine—I’m already jittery enough, thank you very much—and I turn around, leaning back against the wall, closing my eyes for a second.
Breathe, Elodie.
Just breathe.
In and out, in and out.
Everything’s okay. This is a totally salvageable situation.
It isn’t, though. And breathing makes things worse. The bedroom smells so acutely of Wren—all salt sea air, and fresh wood shavings, and the faintest hint of citrus—that my slowing heart rate ratchets up all over again, the pounding, pounding, pounding threatening to blow out my ear drums.
Calm down, Elodie.
Calm down.
Name five things you can see. Come on. Five things you can see. You can do this. Just calm the fuck down.
I lock onto the first thing I lay eyes on: a tattered notebook, sitting on top of Wren’s bed. Even from the door, I can see the scribbles of black ink all over the lined paper. It looks like some kind of journal…
The second thing I see: a canvas, set up on an easel in the corner of the room, right by the floor to ceiling windows. There’s a sheet on the floor underneath the easel, splattered with paint. A pot full of brushes sits on Wren’s desk not far away, their bristled ends sticking out of the glass jar, their wooden handles flecked with even more paint. On the canvas itself…I walk over to it, my heart finally calming a little as I take in what I’m seeing.
Black, and moody, midnight blue, and grey and white. I remember thinking to myself, when I broke into Riot House with Carina, that the paintings downstairs all looked like raging, angry storms. They had no point of focus or subject, but I could feel the unrest radiating off of them even in the dark. This painting is a far cry from those pieces of art hanging on the walls on the first floor floor. There most definitely is a subject to this painting…and that subject is me.
Broad, flat, sweeping brushstrokes make up the lines of my torso and my shoulders, but the details of my neck and my face are finer and more delicate. Half of the painting looks like it was done quickly, angrily, with resentful slashes, while the other half appears as though great care and effort was taken to carefully stroke in each minute detail.
I’m not smiling in the painting. I’m sitting on a couch, the floral print of the fabric smeared and blurred out of focus behind me. The jumble and confusion of shapes and patterns directly behind my head tells me where I am—sitting beneath the print of Gustav Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ that hangs in Doctor Fitzpatrick’s den. I’m looking