Page 46 of My End
Something was coming. I could feel it like thunder under the ground.
But for now, I took another bite of my apple and tried to pretend I wasn’t falling for a man who could easily be the love of my life or destroy me.
Chapter Nineteen
Stretch
I hadn’t seen Tilly all damn day.
And yeah, that was probably my fault.
I’d kissed her with everything I had, but then she’d said it,Jake.
And I’d felt it in my chest like a brick to the sternum. Because I wasn’t Jake. Not really. Jake was the name on my fake ID and the one Gibbs barked out like a command. Jake was the lie Boone paid for. But Stretch… Stretch was me.
And she didn’t know him. Not yet.
I could’ve handled it better. Hell, Ishouldhave. Instead, I kissed her like I owned her and walked away like a damn ghost. No excuse. No goodbye. Just left her standing in the hallway with lips swollen from my mouth and confusion in her eyes.
Now it was nearing midnight, and I couldn’t take another second of waiting.
If she wasn’t going to come to me, I’d go to her.
I moved through the second-floor hallway with the ease of someone who knew every creaking board and blind corner. Her bedroom door was open, dark inside. Empty.
But halfway down the hall, the door to the art studio was shut. A thin bar of golden light spilled from underneath.
Bingo.
I knocked once. Just loud enough to be heard.
It took a second, but then the door opened, and there she was. Tilly in an oversized shirt splattered with streaks of paint, her hair pinned messily on top of her head, and that same startled softness in her eyes.
“Uh… hi?” she said, her voice just above a whisper.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
She stepped aside and motioned for me to come in. “Come on.”
The second I crossed the threshold, the smell of turpentine and oil paint hit me like a memory I’d never had. Her studio was small but alive. The walls were lined with canvases stacked and leaning, bursts of color in every direction. A short loveseat sat in the middle of the room with a coffee table in front of it, a fuzzy throw blanket crumpled on one side of the couch. Her paint cart was parked near the easel by the window, and the curtains were pulled back to let the moonlight in.
And then I saw it.
The easel.
The canvas.
I took a step closer, and my heart did something weird in my chest.
Holy shit.
“Is that…” I trailed off as the words died in my throat.
Tilly moved up beside me. “Um… yeah. That’s you. The first day we met.”
I looked at it,reallylooked at it.
She’d painted me in bold strokes. Bright oranges and cobalt blue contrasted the sharp lines of my jaw. My eyes, painted deeper than anything I’d ever seen, seemed to stare right through the canvas.
