Page 39 of Selling Innocence

I opened my mouth to argue the point, but I couldn’t come up with a reason. She wasn’t wrong—I didn’t have the right to dig too deeply into her head. Judging from the way she spoke, she had plenty of hang-ups in her life. Ripping open those wounds would do neither of us any good.

“If you find you can’t sleep, just tell me.”

“You won’t give me my pills?”

“Not all of them, no.”

“You think I’ll do something with them?”

“You’re in a hard place right now. People have done crazier things when up against a wall, and sometimes by the time you realize the risk, it’s too late to do anything. So if you need one, I’ll give you one.”

“So I guess I’ll go without.”

“Why? You only need to tell me.”

Kenz closed her eyes, leaning back in her seat as though the conversation had ended. I thought she wouldn’t answer me until, after a long silence, she spoke once more. “If I’m bad enough to need one, I’d rather just lose sleep than let anyone see me like that.”

And just like that, this terrible sense of foreboding hit me. I’d lost clients before, had suffered through the guilt of failure. No person was perfect, and if someone wanted to kill someone else, there was little anyone could do to prevent it.

When Kenz spoke, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she would be my next failure.

* * * *

Kenz

I hadn’t managed to draw a thing. After getting our assignment, other students had started to work. They’d sketched out rough outlines of what they might want to do, but me?

The blank page had stared at me like some albino snake that would strike if I got too close. I’d picked up my pencil, but I hadn’t been able to touch the graphite against the paper.

So despite three hours in class, I hadn’t gotten a thing done.

“That’s it,” Hayden said as he drove me, breaking me out of my own pity party.

“What?”

“You’ve been sighing non-stop since we left. If I take you back to the house now, you’ll just go into your room and hide the rest of the day.”

“So? Doesn’t that make it easier for you to protect me?” I knew my words were snarky, but so what? If I wanted to play the part of angsty, rebellious teenager, I might as well.

He pulled the car into a parking spot outside of a small set of buildings. The brick path out front had people walking and the large glass window showed off the wares of the places.

A pizza place, a café, a tourist shop with shirts and knick-knacks and an art store.

Hayden said nothing before he got out, slid a couple of coins into the meter, then came over and opened my door for me.

“What are we doing here?” I got out of the car as I asked. Even if I didn’t want to go anywhere except for a hot shower and mindless television, it seemed my manners had been instilled so deeply I couldn’t resist when someone did something nice for me.

“We are going to pick up the supplies you need for your art, then we’ll order pizza and bring it back for dinner.”

“And what? Have a paint night?”

Hayden frowned for a moment, that already familiar way he tried to make sense of something I’d said that he hadn’t expected. “Those get-togethers where women drink and paint? I think you had enough alcohol yesterday, didn’t you?”

My cheeks burned at the memory. I hadn’t been wrong about what I’d said or done to Vance, and I didn’t regret my actions, but I wished I’d been sober for them. It would have been better to have faced it without the alcohol. The high ground was a lot more unsteady when it rested on top of a mountain of liquor.

“Fine, I won’t help you paint. You’ll be all on your own and when you fail? I’ll make sure we hang up the atrocity in the living room.”

“You are a cruel woman.” His voice held fondness.

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