“Like… make me your art?”
“Yeah,” he says, jumping to his feet, grabbing my hand and pulling me with him. His palms go to my waist and hold me tight, they pull me into his solid chest. One hand slips behind my ass and the other tips my chin up so I have to look him in the eyes. “Let me take you somewhere else today, Veronica. Be my canvas, be my fantasy. Come into my imagination for a little while, explore with me, let me take you somewhere magical. And when I’m done, I promise I’ll bring you back.”
“What if I don’t want to come back?” I say, totally one hundred percent serious. “What if I like that journey? What if I want to stay gone with you forever?”
He doesn’t answer, instead he leans in and kisses me. Not the hard crushing way he kissed me that first time. Not the sexy seductive way he does when he’s f**king me.
But some totally different way that I’m not sure I can describe. I just know it’s… different.
I come up from the kiss gasping for air. “When do we leave?”
“Right now, Bombshell.”
“When do we come back?”
“When it’s over.”
“So you really didn’t bring me out here to make love to me?”
“No, baby.” He must read my disappointment, because he tips my chin up again. “But my paintbrush will.”
I shudder.
And this is when I realize. I’m caught in his fantasy.
Spencer walked into my life, tipped me upside down, and shook the love right out of me.
My love spills out all over the place.
My love piles up at his feet.
Chapter Seven
VERONICA
“I’ve never seen this costume before,” Rook says as she points to the framed picture on Spencer’s large walnut desk. It’s the magical one of me in the atrium.
I open my mouth to respond, but I stop before she realizes. It feels like a secret. Like that’s a special place that only Spencer and I even know exists. The entire day was like a dream. A fantastical dream. That was the best day of my life. And even though I understood back then that it was gonna rank up there as far as memories go, three years later it is so much more.
I have no idea if Spencer ever brought another girl to his gran’s atrium, but I doubt it. And just knowing that makes me feel special and sick at the same time. Like—why? How? How did we go from those perfect days during senior year to this?
My chest heaves with a sob and I turn and walk out before Rook catches on to my grief. The light flicks off as she exits behind me, and then I gather myself and wait for her at the top of the basement stairs.
She’s got a pouty face on when she catches up with me. “You’re sad?”
All I can do is nod, because if I speak right now, I’m gonna lose it and cry like a baby. Rook nods at me as she scoots past, then I follow her downstairs. When she opens the door, I brush past her hurriedly and flop down on her couch. We spent a lot of time together down here in her farm apartment. After she outed all those ass**les involved in a human trafficking ring back in Chicago she was relentlessly followed by the media. And the weirdos. Like those awful people who picket the homes of dead soldiers. They marched around town with giant signs, declaring her a slave-trading whore.
And yeah, Rook was involved in some pretty insane shit back in Chicago. But she was just a kid who got caught up with an abusive man. He beat the shit out of her for years. You can hardly blame a homeless sixteen-year-old for being susceptible to a ring of powerful and abusive slave traders.
“OK, Ronnie,” Rook says as she plops down on the couch next to me. “Spill, bitch. What’s going on with you?”
I think it over for a few seconds, trying to find a good place to start. “You know how you said—” I stop, because it’s unfair to drag her down into my wallowing bog of pity.
“Said what? Come on, just talk.”
I take a deep breath. “All that stuff about Ashleigh. About being sorta jealous. Well… I feel like that too. About you and her. Because you guys both have what I want.”
I feel terrible for admitting that, but it’s true.
“Ronnie, I have nothing but Ronin. And I know this sounds flippant because believe me, I understand what it’s like to have no money. But that money means nothing to me. It’s just… there. I know I’ll never be homeless and I’m not gonna starve. And if I wanted to run away again, I could. But that’s all that money means to me. I have nothing but Ronin.”
I look up at her and frown. “I don’t even have Spencer to make it all OK. I’m just so lonely without him. I feel like fate is telling me to give up. Just let him go, because he’ll never change. He’s not the guy I thought he was. He’s this… this… stranger. He’s not the guy I fell in love with. I love that guy I met back in college. This guy he is now, I don’t get it. And what makes it worse is that every once in a while, that other guy comes through.”
I’m thinking about Spencer that night he was in my apartment. When he said he was guilty. He said, ‘I am this guy,’ meaning that guy who committed those crimes he was accused of.
But he didn’t wait around for me to tell him what I thought of his confession. Because it was a huge relief.
That criminal who got kicked out of school, who got off a murder charge on a technicality—that’s the guy I fell in love with.
This guy today? This one who’s all cold and distant and leaves me hanging in a back alley and treats me like trash? I don’t like that guy. I’ll take the killer over that guy any day.