Page 55 of Here Comes Trouble
If she could forgive him.
She stood in front of him now, head held high, looking so beautiful and bold he wanted to pull her against him and kiss her hard, to let her know just how much he wanted her back. How amazing she was. But he knew he couldn’t do that – he needed to be more subtle, to prove to her this wasn’t just about sex.
‘Where is everyone? Did I read the invitation wrong? I thought it started at seven thirty,’ Jess said, staring at him defiantly, her arms folded across her chest. He could see she was trying to brazen it out, but her awkward stance and the slight tremor in her voice gave her away.
Maybe there was hope? The thought made his blood buzz with adrenaline.
‘You’re on time. This is a private viewing, just for you, before all the other guests arrive. I wanted you to be the first to see it.’
‘So I have time to run away and hide before they all arrive?’ she asked, an eyebrow quirked, clearly trying to keep her voice controlled, but failing spectacularly to hit the right note of nonchalance and sliding right on through to utter terror.
He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, feeling the heat of her skin burn through her thin cotton top. His mind flicked back to the memory of how her body felt against his and he almost lost his cool.
‘I’m really hoping you won’t want to run,’ he said, begging with his eyes for her to give him another chance.
‘You know, I don’t know if I can bear to look at it again, Xander.’ Taking a step backwards, she broke his hold on her and gave him a wobbly smile. ‘But I wish you luck with the exhibition. I’m sure everyone’s going to love it.’ She turned to walk away.
‘Wait! Jess, please.’ No way was he going to let her go before he’d had a chance to at least apologise. ‘Don’t leave. I did all this for you. Not for my critics. I wanted you to know how much I miss you. How much I care about you. Please don’t walk away now.’
He saw her falter and pressed on quickly before she could gather herself enough to leave.
‘This is my apology to you. No one has ever given me that much of themselves before, Jess and I can’t believe I took advantage of you like that. I was scared I was actually as washed up as everyone suspected, I lost sight of what was right and wrong. You trusted me and I treated that trust as if it was nothing. It was a cowardly, selfish, pathetic thing to do. I get why it upset you and you were right to call me out on it.’
She stared at him, her eyes wide with confusion. ‘Okay. Well, thank you for apologising.’
‘I destroyed that painting you saw, so you don’t need to worry about it ever being seen by anybody.’
Releasing her arm and digging into his pocket, he pulled out a handful of long painted ribbons of canvas. ‘This is all that’s left of that painting and the one of you covered in paint.’ He handed them to her and she stared down at them, her eyes widening in surprise.
When she looked back up into his face, her bottom lip was trembling and her eyes were shining with tears.
‘What do you want me to say? That I’m pleased you tore your work apart?’
It was hell being this close to her without being allowed to enfold her in his arms and soothe all the pain away, but he knew he couldn’t do that right now. The weight of his reputation for short, intense affairs with his muses lay heavily between them. He’d given her no reason to believe she was any different to the women he’d already cast aside.
‘Let me show you what I replaced those pictures with,’ he said, walking over to the light switches on the wall and flicking them up so the room was flooded with light.
He heard Jess gasp as she saw what he’d been pouring his heart into for the last month.
* * *
It took Jess a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the light before she could fully focus on what was in front of her.
There was a sculpture, made up of what looked like a multicoloured canvas stretched across a man-shaped frame, sitting in the middle of the room beneath four white spotlights. His posture was tensed as if ready to jump up and run forwards, but eerily, there was a flat picture where the contours of his face should be.
She walked towards it on shaking legs, utterly captivated, and as she peered closer, she realised the flat piece had a self-portrait of Xander’s face painted on it, showing an expression of such pain in his eyes it nearly broke her heart to look at it. The word ‘loser’ was painted across his forehead in dark purple paint.
Dragging her gaze away from the face, she peered more closely at the rest of the sculpture and realised with a shock that the multicoloured body was made up of hundreds of tiny paintings.
Of her.
In some of them she was smiling, some looking confused, some looking insecure. In fact, he seemed to have captured every possible emotion she’d ever had in her life. As if he knew her. As if he’d seen inside her and understood exactly what made her tick.
There was something metallic and shiny protruding from the chest of the sculpture, as if it had been dragged out of his body and was hovering in mid-air before him.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she dropped to her knees to study it more closely and realised it was a small metal cage, in the shape of a heart with fine filigree letters trapped inside it.
She peered closer, barely able to focus through a bewildering haze of emotions.
