Page 46 of More Than I Can Bear

“You better,” he said. “I can’t draw with these kinds of things.”

“You could.” I kept my voice deliberately upbeat. “I could show you—”

“Show me what you would make with these,” he said, staring into my eyes. “Please.”

My feet were moving and so were my hands, grabbing the box and cradling it to my chest. It might have been insufferably rude, but he just smiled.

“You could,” I repeated, even as I started to angle my body slightly away from him. “You’re very good.”

“And you’re better.” He nodded to the doorway. “You’re gonna be stuck here for a few days, so I figure you could get at least half of those shoes done.”

“Half…?”

My still partly drunk brain was struggling to put things together, but as I looked down at the markers, then back at the boxes, I felt a growing sense of excitement. “Is this…?” I couldn’t complete that sentence. “Are you…?”

“Apologising?” He straightened up, arms laden with yet more art supplies. I saw paint pens and glitter and brushes and there was still more in boxes lined up in the small space. “Yeah, we are. We fucked everything up.” All the light seemed to go out of him, and strands of that shaggy black hair fell in his face. “None of us expect you to forgive us, but…” He shook his head sharply. “We will provide for you, Freya. We’ll look after you and make sure you have everything you need up until you want to move on and be with someone else.”

Who?That was my immediate thought. He acted like I had guys lined up around the block, but there was literally no one there.

“Well, markers rather than flowers is definitely a good start,” I said, caressing the box idly before stopping myself. He smiled widely, briefly, and his smile was different again, a lightning flash behind dark clouds, there and gone again so fast you weren’t sure you’d see it. “But really, you didn’t have to.”

“Yes, we did,” he said, “now, can you hold the door open? I’ll get this stuff inside and then go back for the rest.”

“The rest?” I looked around me in a daze. “What else is there?”

“You’ll see.”

I did, fairly quickly, as box after box was opened with a flick of River’s pocket knife and the contents set before me. Flat acrylics to act as a base coat and others with some gloss in them to put on top of that. Beautiful pencils with leads as soft as butter and a sketchbook with paper so fine I could have cried. I sat there in a state of complete overwhelm as every single art supply I’d ever fantasised about was placed on the coffee table or the floor around me, until I felt like an art dragon sitting on my mound of treasure.

“This is too much,” I said, throwing my hands in the air. “It’s so much money and someone had to spend all their time picking each piece out.”

“It’s not.” There was something in River’s tone that had me pausing, meeting his gaze and then being held by it. “It was Kaine’s idea, but he didn’t know what to get, so I advised him. And Adam…” He forced himself to smile. “He put up the cash for it. We’re not trying to buy our way into anything, Freya. We just wanted you to be happy.”

And right then I was, too much so. I was tired and fragile and still feeling pretty seedy, so my eyes filled with tears. And even though they didn’t spill, he saw them. He nodded and retrieved a pair of dark blue Chucks, men’s size 12, and handed them over.

“Make me a pair that I can wear,” he said. “Gimme that and we’ll call things even.”

Chapter24

River

“Make me a pair that I can wear,” I said, trying to keep it all tamped down. Freya was surrounded by the stuff that made her happy, stuff we’d given her and I couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride. Kaine had suggested it, Adam had bankrolled it, but I… I’d scoured the art supplies section of Amazon and made the selections. I caught the way her cheeks glowed a pretty shade of pink and fought the urge to roar in satisfaction. “Gimme that and we’ll call things even.”

She blinked, looking down at the box and then her hands seemed to move on auto-pilot. Hands delved into an open box and then she pulled the shoes out reverently.

“I’ve never worked with new pairs before,” she said, then flushed. “Usually I have to wash them first, clean them up and while I wait, I think up a design.” Those beautiful hazel eyes met mine. “These will be for you to wear?”

No, I’d keep them in a glass box and put them in pride of place in my bedroom. But telling a girl you were going to create a shrine in her name was not the best way to get to know her, so I just nodded instead. I watched her look at the shoes, then the mounds of supplies, her fingers reaching out towards a box of markers almost tentatively, then veering off to grab some colour pencils. She picked out a white one and then started to sketch.

I didn’t mean to join her. This was about her, not me, but as soon as those long, elegant fingers wrapped themselves around the pencil, mine twitched. I didn’t know if I wanted that pencil in my own hand or for her to toss it aside and replace it with something else.

Me.

But my hand went to my shirt pocket and I had my notebook out without thought, the click of my pen catching her attention. She looked up and smiled and my brain froze. My only focus was to record the curve of those lips, from the pouty bottom one to the sweet cupid bow of the top one, and my pen moved without thought.

Did she feel this? That was my last conscious thought, wondering if she was sinking down into that no-space of creative flow. Her eyes dropped down and she went to work, drawing all over the shoe. I didn’t bother to try and guess what she was creating, focusing on my own work. Capturing the little dimple that formed in her cheek, the small crease at the corners of her mouth, a tiny peek of teeth in the gap, I laid line upon line on the piece of paper, building them up in a lattice work to create the suggestion of three dimensional form, to make shadows and highlights appear, all while she worked. I drew and I drew until she broke the spell, holding out the shoe for me to look at.

“What do you think?” Nothing at first. My brain felt like it needed to come back online so for a few seconds I just stared. As it did, I caught the moment her face fell, interpreting my silence for disapproval. “If you don’t like it—” she said hurriedly.

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