Читать книгу Lost in Me - Barbara Hancock J. - Страница 5

Chapter Two

He didn’t take me to a guest bedroom. While my blood still sang and the magnet pulled and I avoided the dark light in his blue eyes, he led me onward until we came to a corner of the house I knew to be a rounded turret I’d seen from the street.

When he turned the key and opened the door, I breathed out a rush of air I hadn’t realized I’d been holding tight in my lungs like a diver plunged deep into a cold, tumultuous sea.

I stepped forward onto paint-spattered tarps. Here they covered the Cyprus floors and led me in a wrinkled path straight to an easel and stool. Beside the easel, a long low bench held the paints I’d need. Only the deep, rich midnight colors I’d been working with for the past year and the necessary others for blending.

I dropped my bag and went for the paints and blank canvas.

But, unlike at St. Mary’s, the world didn’t narrow and fade around me. La Croix walked to a wall and placed the trunk against it and I watched him even as I began to mix and blend the deep purple I’d need for the background of the painting already taking amorphous shape in my mind.

This time I would paint something different.

“Chloe,” La Croix said and my fingers actually stilled. I didn’t make a move as he approached. I didn’t blink or breathe. There was still a hint of impatience in his voice or maybe it was frustration. He worked his hands open and closed as if he needed to do something with them now that the trunk had been placed on the floor. He didn’t stop until he stood directly beside my perch on the stool. The proximity of his warm body was more of a distraction to my senses than I’d ever allowed before when the paint called to me.

“Y…yes?” I replied.

I slowly rose to my feet because he was so tall and I didn’t want to feel small beside him. I immediately knew it for a mistake. He was still taller than me. I had to tilt my chin to meet his gaze and our bodies were also much closer than they had been before. I had met day after empty day for a year as if life was a vacuum threatening to leave me forever in limbo surrounded by nothingness. Surely I could look into this familiar stranger’s eyes.

I rubbed my fingers together.

The cool slide of bruised lavender reminded me I couldn’t reach up to trace the planes of his angular face no matter how they intrigued me.

He searched my direct gaze and I let him because paint was already on my fingers and I couldn’t run away from him without running away from the canvas I was compelled to fill.

“They told me that you sometimes forget to eat or sleep,” he began.

“No. I don’t forget. Not about those things,” I said. I never forgot my need for food and rest. I’d only learned exactly how little I needed to survive.