Critical Instinct(18)

Paige flew out of bed, throwing on a pair or yoga pants from a nearby drawer, and ran down the hall.

The door was open. Paige knew for a fact it had been shut last night as she brought Brett through. But it was open now. She slowed as she reached it.

She immediately looked at the easel, feeling relief pour through her when she saw a live woman’s face. Maybe if Brett had seen it she could just tell a few fibs —she’d woken up in the middle of the night with the need to draw and this is what happened— not mention drawing in her sleep.

She was trying to back out of the room and close the door when he showed up.

“Here’s your coffee.”

“Thanks.”

Brett walked right into the room. “So, that’s a pretty amazing drawing. Is she a friend of yours?”

So he had seen it. Did he know the truth about how she had drawn it? “Um, no. Just someone I saw in my head and drew.”

He walked over to study the picture more closely. She forced herself to take a sip of her coffee and not fidget.

“You just saw her in your head? This wasn’t from a photograph?”

“Yep. Just from my head. No picture.” Her voice sounded a little high and unnatural even to her own ears.

“That’s pretty amazing detail.” He glanced over his shoulder at her where she stood in the doorway. “And this is drawing, right? Not painting like you normally do.”

“Yeah. Colored pencils.” She always used them when she created a picture in her sleep. Definitely not her normal medium.

“Do you know what this reminds me of?”

Paige knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“The picture you drew of yourself from the attack,” he continue. “The style, I mean. I’m no art critic, but it is the same style, right?”

He’d obviously been thinking about this for a while. His words were too carefully chosen for it to be otherwise. But maybe he’d just seen the drawing when he went down to make coffee this morning.

“Yes. Both from pencils. Both same general composition and size.”

“But no bruises on this lady.”

Not this time, thank God. “Nope. I guess I’m not always morbid when I draw.”

“Yeah, about that. I thought you said last week that you really only paint, don’t really ever draw.”

Paige gripped her coffee mug more tightly. How was she going to explain to him that she couldn’t draw like this normally? Pictures of dead women aside, that was the hardest part to accept about her ability to draw in her sleep: she didn’t have the same skill when she was awake. If he asked her to grab the pencils right now and draw him, she wouldn’t be able to do it.

Exhaustion poured over her. She was tired of having to hide this. Tired of it happening. Tired of the toll it took on her body every time she did one.

“Painting is definitely my primary medium,” she verbally side-stepped.

“It’s a good thing you’re already a world-renowned painter or I would say you need to switch to drawing. You definitely have a talent there.”

She just shrugged. Yep. She had a talent for drawing dead women in her sleep. That wasn’t bat-shit crazy or anything.

“So she’s not a real person? That’s a shame. I would think someone would really appreciate having a drawing of this caliber —a Paige Jeffries original no less— of herself.”

Paige would be thrilled if the woman wasn’t real. If she was just a figment of Paige’s imagination. If that was true then the next time she drew a dead face staring out at her she could say that woman was a figment also.

Not someone who had died a horrible death that Paige somehow saw in her sleep.

“Nope, not anybody I know. I probably saw her somewhere yesterday and my subconscious remembered her or something.”

“Have you done this a lot? Drawn people you don’t know?”

Paige walked over to study the drawing more closely.

“I do it every once in a while. Like I said, painting is definitely my primary medium. I don’t really… enjoy drawing like this.” That much she could say with utter truthfulness.

“What do you do with the drawings? I’m sure you could sell them.”

She didn’t want to tell him the truth. That she had tried destroying the drawings at first, particularly the ones with the dead women. But she had just drawn the same scene again each time she’d destroyed them. So now they were all stuffed in a portfolio file. At least that way she didn’t have to look at them.

“No, I don’t want to sell them.” She looked at the woman in the drawing. Young. Beautiful.

Was she dead? Paige had no idea. She closed her eyes, trying to take in enough air to tamp down her panic. She didn’t want to have a breakdown in front of Brett.

When she opened her eyes she found he had circled around to the other side of the painting so he could see her, rather than the woman on the easel.

He knew. Something about the look he gave her told her. His questions were all neutral and without judgment, but they were attempting to lead her down a path where she confessed to drawing in her sleep. He was a detective, after all.

“You saw me, didn’t you?” she whispered.

Even after the dozens and dozens of times she had done it, Paige wasn’t totally sure what happened when she drew in her sleep. Usually she woke up in some awkward pile on the floor, bloody and stiff from how she’d slept, her right arm sore from overuse. She never knew how she’d gotten there or how long she’d been there or how long the drawing had taken her.

“I woke up when you got out of bed,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what was happening. I thought maybe you were upset or overwhelmed by yesterday or… us.”

It was the first time since she had woken this morning that his eyes had softened and his voice wasn’t so distant. He wasn’t mad, she realized. Confused, but not mad.

“I really just wanted to make sure you were okay,” he continued. “Although I’ll admit my curiosity was a little piqued last night when you didn’t show me this room, so when you went in here, I didn’t hesitate to follow.”

Paige both wanted and didn’t want to hear the rest. But she knew she didn’t have any choice.

“I finally realized you were sleepwalking. Not uncommon. Lydia did it all the time when she was young. I tried to get you to come back to bed, but you wouldn’t leave the front of the easel. Standing almost exactly where you are now.”

She knew this spot. She had woken up here on the floor many times.

“And then I watched as for the next hour and a half you drew that picture right there.” He gestured to it with his hand from where he stood at the side. “Without waking up even once, or even looking at the easel.”

Paige wrapped her arms around her middle, certain she might fly apart any second. How was she supposed to explain this? It seemed like every day she had something more outlandish to tell Brett. She glanced over at the portfolio folder leaning against the wall. He didn’t even know the worst of it.

A folder full of drawings of women. Some fine, some beaten, some dead. Because she was sick. Because her brain had some sort of morbid fascination with brutality towards women.

He seemed to have handled the auras conversation yesterday without too much pause. And to his credit, he hadn’t left in the middle of the night when he found her drawing in her sleep. But to show him those pictures in the folder would mean the end of whatever this budding relationship was. Those pictures were abnormal.

She was abnormal. She gripped her stomach tighter and tucked her head down and away from Brett. Maybe even more than what had happened to her physically in the attack, this was the reason she had shied away from any sort of intimacy. No man in his right mind would want to deal with all this.

“Hey,” he whispered and she felt his hand stroke her arms where they hugged her body. “It’s okay, you know.”

She stepped back. “It’s not okay. It’s weird!” She could feel tears welling in her eyes but didn’t know how to stop them.

He stepped forward again, his palms cupping her shoulders for just a minute before he pulled her hard up against his chest. Paige knew she should step away but she couldn’t seem to force herself to do it.

His arms felt strong enough to protect her from the terrifying images she drew. From the evil black colors she sometimes saw swirling around people. Maybe he could protect her from her own mind.

“Lydia used to play outside on the swing in her sleep. That’s much more freaky than drawing,” he said into her hair.

Paige couldn’t quite laugh, but his statement at least stopped the tears that were threatening. When she didn’t pull away, he tucked her even closer into his hard body.

“I know I draw in my sleep. But I don’t know why and I don’t know how to make it stop” she murmured into his chest.

“Maybe you shouldn’t try to make it stop. Maybe it’s your brain’s way of trying to release something.”

She knew she should show him the other drawings; the more gruesome ones. They would make him understand why she wanted it to stop. Nobody wanted to wake up in the morning to those scenes.

He was a detective, so the images probably wouldn’t phase him. But it would change what he thought about her, wouldn’t it? It would have to.