Page 49 of Iced Out
Trust wasn’t a switch. It was a thread—frayed, knotted, one pull from snapping.
Then she turned and walked away. This time, I didn’t stop her—but not because I didn’t want to. Because if I did, I wouldn’t let her go again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
MILA
The studio doors creaked when I pushed them open—same old hinges, same hollow sound echoing off the light wood floor. The building smelled of turpentine and old memories. Today it wrapped around me, a second skin that clung close in familiarity. Comforting. Dangerous.
The lights were half off—motion-sensor sensitive—so the hallway glowed in patches, casting long shadows between each frame lining the wall. I moved through them slowly, fingers grazing the smooth plaster as if touching the space might slow my heartbeat.
From somewhere deeper in the building, muted voices carried—other artists working in another room. But not here. Not in the room with windows that framed the ocean I was most drawn to. The one I’d left behind.
Elise’s voice wouldn’t leave me.“I had him before you—and after.”Every time I replayed Luke’s kiss, it threaded through. Poisoning the memory. He kissed me like I was the only thing that mattered. But what if it was the same with her too? Was I just another distraction for him?
Thinking that way was what Elise wanted.Screw her. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. She’d taken up enough space in my head. I was in the studio for a reason, and she did not belong here.
I froze when my gaze settled on a row of oil paintings. Many of them were mine. Shock rooted me in place that they were still there.
They hadn’t been moved. Or replaced. Just… there. Tucked among newer ones, older ones. I could pick mine out easily. Rich colors, bold lines, as if I’d bled onto the canvas and didn’t know how to stop.
I paused in front of one I’d done of a stormy sea, my fingers tracing the lines I knew by heart, and the past cracked open, rolling through my mind, echoing the thunder outside.
Indigo bled into cerulean, rippling across the canvas, veins frozen beneath ice. I’d swept the brush lower, where a jagged slash ofwhitebroke through the darker blues—a foaming crest, violent and alive. I’d added hints ofgray, deepening the shadows beneath the waves until the water churned with motion. With each stroke, the sea clawed higher, angry and aching, and still that tiny boat—my boat—tilted into the storm.
It didn’t take a genius to know what it meant. That boat was me. Tossed. Isolated. Barely staying afloat.
This was the only place I’d ever felt safe enough to bare everything inside me without fear of it being used as a weapon. Until him.
Here, the past was too close, and because of that, my mind tripped back to a time when warmth wrapped my waist, his chest pressed to my spine. Then scratchy stubble grazed my neck. I jolted a little, a laugh bursting out before I could help it.
“Luke,” I said on an exhale, trying to squirm away. “That tickles.”
His arms tightened. He nuzzled the hollow beneath my ear, lips brushing over my skin, a quiet promise in the contact. “I thought you liked when I tickled you.”
I leaned back into him anyway. “I thought you had a family thing?”
Late afternoon sunlight spilled through the studio’s massive windows, painting the floor in gold hues. I stood in front of the easel, facing the wide-open view beyond—the glittering stretch of sand, the skeletal curve of the boardwalk, and just past all that, the ocean I was trying to capture. Feral and endless. Familiar.
“I do,” he murmured.
His lips skimmed my neck again, trailing lower. I shivered. My paintbrush clattered to the table beside me, forgotten, landing in a mess of blues and grays and saltwater.
“I did. Don’t care. Not going.”
I turned my head, just enough to see him in the edge of my vision—windblown hair, cheeks flushed, eyes lit up as though he already knew how dangerous this was. How dangerousIwas. But he didn’t care. That was the problem. Or maybe the miracle.
“Luke—” I started.
He spun me gently until I faced him. His fingers ghosted over my paint-splattered tank top, tracing where the fabric clung to my ribs.
“You looked like you were painting something that was pulling you under.” His gaze flicked to the canvas. “So I figured you might need a lifeline.”
A breath hitched in my throat. He said things—soft, reckless words—that left bruises in their absence.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I rose on my toes and kissed him—quick, salty, paint-scented. Because I couldn’t say what I wanted to. Couldn’t promise what he needed. Not when I already knew I was the storm.
I blinked back into the present, the past leaving like an old friend slipping through the doorway, and I swallowed hard. The hallway pulsed with silence, broken only by the soft buzz of overhead lights and the echo of his voice in my head. The ache clawed up my spine before I could bury it. We’d almost had everything, until we didn’t. And now? There was so much distrust between us, and rightfully so—every step forward wading through quicksand.
