Page 81 of Exposed

I realized I wasn’t even painting. I was just staring at her. Completely exposed to me. I picked up my palette again. This was so much better than a still image.

After a few minutes she shifted slightly. But I didn’t even care. I wanted her to move. Break the pose. Do whatever she wanted. I was just happy she was breathing. That she was here with me.

I paused and stared at her toned legs. “Do you still like to run?”

She turned her head slightly to me. “Yeah.”

“I can tell.”

She laughed and turned her gaze back to the ceiling.

“Tell me what a normal day was like at the lake house,” I said. Even though it was hard for me to hear it, I wanted to. I needed to know about those years that I’d missed out on.

“I’d bake every morning with Jacob. And deliver the desserts to the restaurant where Miller was the chef. And in the afternoons I’d try to teach Jacob, but I mostly just played with him.”

I smiled. “It must have been hard to persuade Jacob to do something he didn’t want to do. Because of how he says nooooo.” I did my best interpretation of him.

She laughed. “Exactly. He knows just how to make me give him whatever he wants.”

I got that. I certainly didn’t know how to say no to him. I was used to spoiling Scarlett and Sophie. But I’d probably need to do more than that if I was going to be a good father figure to Jacob. “Tell me more.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Matt.”

“I want you to tell me the truth. I want to know everything.”

She didn’t reply.

I was pretty sure this was as hard for her as it was for me. I focused on painting her left breast. Because it was easy to not be upset when I was staring at her breasts. “You told Jacob that his father is a star?”

“The North Star.”

I was quiet as I painted her.

She cleared her throat. “Miller put up string lights like the ones you hung for me outside. He said we were written in the stars.”

I stayed quiet. Even though it felt like there was a knife in my chest. I focused on her other breast.

“I feel close to him when I look at the stars. And I wanted to give Jacob that. And maybe Miller is up there, you know? I don’t know if I believe in any of that. It’s hard when so many people I know died too young. Is there really someone out there watching over us? If there is, it feels like all he does is take.”

“I felt that too. Bitter that you were taken away from me. And I liked having your tombstone to visit. And going to the school. But I only started visiting the school after I came back from college. Before then it was too hard to go to Empire High. But mostly I felt close to you by doing this.” I nodded to the canvas.

“Painting nude portraits of me?”

I laughed. “No. Usually just your face. Sometimes when I really felt like shit, I’d think that maybe I made you cry more than I made you laugh.”

“Well that certainly wasn’t true.”

I saw the curve of her lip as she smiled at the ceiling. Her words and that smile made me feel better about how I’d treated her when we first met.

“You were everything to me, Matt.”

Were.“Tell me more. About the lake.”

“I used to run around it. I wore down a path around it. Miller used to run with me, but he secretly hated running. But I used to feel someone watching me. I was paranoid about it. And he knew I felt safer when he was beside me.”

“I like running,” I said.

She tilted her head toward me again. “Do you run in Central Park?”

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