Page 37 of Submit

“Food for thought.”

“Do you need to meet up? Talk it out?” Shaye offered.

“That’s not my style.”

“Yeah, not mine, either, but sometimes this kind of shit can just eat at you.”

“It’s definitely doing that, but I need to try to figure it out on my own from here. I just needed a sounding board, you know?”

“Okay. Call if you want to, bro.”

“Thanks. Good of you to offer.”

They hung up and he pushed back from his desk, stood and moved into the living room, but once he was there, he realized he didn’t know what to do with himself. He shook his head, grabbed his keys and went down to the garage, got into his car and backed into the street. He had no idea where he was going. He only knew he had to drive. To think. Or not think.

Damn it.

He down-shifted as he rounded a corner, the tires squealing a little as he took the turn too fast.

Skye had gotten under his skin, climbed right in and curled up somewhere deep in his system. He didn’t know if she would ever go. If he could ever let her go. He didn’t like it one damn bit.

But he didn’t want to stop feeling the way he did about her. It felt too good, even if it hurt like hell at the moment. Even if it made him crazy. He didn’t want to shut it off, for the first time in his life. He knew that on some very deep level.

What he didn’t know was what the hell he was going to do about it.

More than a week had gone by and Skye hadn’t heard from him. She’d mostly holed up in her apartment, alone and miserable, other than when Esme had dragged her out for coffee. Not that she’d been able to drink any coffee—her stomach had been in knots since the night she’d left Adam’s house. She’d been living on tea and old black and white movies, going through boxes of Kleenex.

Why couldn’t she seem to stop crying? She was supposed to be mad, not sad. Wasn’t she?

Of course, he had every right to be angry with her after she’d run out on him like that. Terrible manners, she knew, especially in the more formal realm of the BDSM life, but she’d had to get out of there.

Curled up on her old, overstuffed velvet sofa with a soft afghan over her lap, as she was now, she’d spent most of the week going over their conversation, dissecting it from every angle. But she always came to the same conclusion—that Adam was incapable of real intimacy. He’d pretty much told her so himself, had even told her why. And he obviously resented that she’d made him do it, made him feel something for her.

What sort of transformation would he have to go through before he could break through those old walls? If he was even willing to try.

No, he would have dumped her sooner or later, and the longer it took, the more attached she would have become, until his rejection would have been unbearable.

It was nearly unbearable already.

She turned to look out the living room window at the cityscape she’d always loved. But it looked bleak and lonely to her now. As empty as she felt on the inside.

The only other thing she’d done other than huddling under a blanket was drawing. She’d been drawing him all week. The table in her tiny kitchen was littered with sketches in charcoal and pencil. She’d tried to capture the musculature of his big body, the details of his strong hands, the flawless lines of his tattoo. Mostly she’d tried to draw his face, but she couldn’t seem to get the eyes right. And every time she tried, she’d start crying again.

Finally she’d set up her easel in the living room close to the bay window and painted, just a series of strokes in burnt umber and highlighted with white. The result wasn’t very good, but it captured him a little better than the flatter sketches did. Still, his eyes refused to come alive for her.

She didn’t think she’d ever feel Adam again, alive and warm and commanding her heart as much as her body.

Never again.

What had happened to forever? Had that ever been anything more than fantasy? An illusion she’d only ever hoped for in those fleeting moments when she’d dared?

Shit.

She dropped her gaze. She still had paint under her fingernails. She hadn’t bothered to give her hands a good scrub, hadn’t bathed in a day or two. She wasn’t really sure how long it had been since she’d done anything more than throw on an old pair of paint-splattered jeans and a warm thermal top, twisting her long hair up into a loose ponytail. She felt like a mess, inside and out. And she couldn’t get warm no matter how high she turned up the furnace, no matter how many layers of clothing she put on. The cold came from deep inside her, like an internal stratum of ice.

So this was what a broken heart felt like. She didn’t much like it. In fact, it was fucking awful.

She pulled a pillow to her body, telling herself to pull it together. She had a gallery show next month and was way behind in her work, but she felt completely devoid of inspiration. She could paint nothing but him.

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