Page 32 of The Painter and His Poet

The minutes tick by slowly, and with every passing second my anxiety builds. I just need to get through the next forty-eight hours, and then I’ll be free to live my life the way I choose, but more importantly, free to continue my search for Friday.

Because here’s the thing. I have a lead on finding her.

A week or so after my mother’s visit, I decided to open an account on Instagram just so I could see whether Friday had ever posted there. Honestly, I’ve avoided the app like the plague just because music is so pervasive in the app, but I was beginning to get desperate after my physical searches for her were coming up empty.

After punching in her name, a raft of variations came up with accounts. There were hundreds, but determined I looked through each of them until Ifinallycame across an account called@FridayI’mInLove. I’d almost passed it by because all the videos were scenes of nature, but something told me to click on the first video. You can imagine my surprise when it washervoice that I heard.

Truth be known, it’d sent me into a tailspin, and for the next few days I didn’t eat or sleep. I was so fucking overcome with inspiration that all I could do was paint, and when I’d finallysatiated my synesthesia enough to think straight, I did a little digging.

Apart from her very distinctive voice, there was nothing to correlate the random account name to Friday. Neither was there anything in the content of the posts apart from the title of the song to give me a lead on finding her, and the last time she’d posted was over two years ago, so I figured she no longer used the account. Didn’t stop me from messaging her though.

“You embarrass me, and we’ll have a problem,” my father suddenly says, dragging me back into the present moment.

“What the fuck do you mean by–” I hiss, but the rest of my reply is abruptly cut off by the sound of someone singing.

What.

The.

Actual.

Fuck.

A bomb goes off in my head.

Purple explodes into red, ripping outwards into deep blue, as I blink and gasp trying to make sense of what I’m hearing.

It can’t be.

Green pillows and blooms like a dust cloud, curling into a deep brown and then coral as I shake my head, forcing my eyes to blink.

Is that…?

Silver sparkles against black, as lightning strikes of yellow burst across my vision.

I gasp, dragging in a tremulous breath.

She’s here?

White splinters the colours tumbling around me, merging with grey then twisting into cerise pink as my stomach curls with nausea.

How the hell is she here?

FUCK!

“No!” I mutter as my body stiffens and my skin covers in a cascade of painful goosebumps.

“Sterling!” My father warns, but his voice is lost beneath the pounding of my heart, so loud that I stumble into him.

“Get a fucking grip!” he snarls under his breath.

“Itcan’tbe,” I groan, righting myself on unsteady legs ashervoice, the voice of the woman I’ve longed for these past few months, who I’ve listened to obsessively, washes over me.

I’m immediately thrown into a cyclone of more colour that’s so fucking vibrant that the ground beneath my feet undulates with a tidal wave of feeling.

Elation. Joy. Anger. Confusion. Fear. Bliss. Lust. Pain.

Emotions rise up, making me tilt sideways again, and if it wasn’t for my father’s painful grip on my arm, I’d have collapsed to the floor. His grip is the only thing keeping me upright as my brain tries to contend with the onslaught of colour.

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