If I need reasons to stay away from a man like him—from any man, in fact—I have plenty. But that doesn’t keep my pulse from speeding up as I watch his powerful body move. It doesn’t keep my skin from heating and tightening at the memory of penetratingly sharp blue eyes piercing me—stripping me bare—earlier tonight.
He is not for me. I know this.
But once I see him, I can’t stop looking.
Not until the distance stretches between us and he vanishes into the night behind me.
~ ~ ~
After a restless night on the pull-down bed in my one-room studio, reality wakes me in the form of my landlord pounding on my door just before eight in the morning. Dreams of glittering high-rises and glowering blue-eyed strangers dissolve under the relentless hammering.
“Avery, I know you’re in there!” my landlord, Leo, shouts to me in his smoker’s rasp through the dead bolted door. “We need to talk about the apartment.”
Bam-bam-bam.
“Come on, open up, now. I know you got the eviction notice I left for you. How long you think you can avoid me? Avery?”
He pounds again. At the same time, my cell phone starts ringing.
On a groan, I throw the blanket off me and drag my eyelids open to see who’s calling.
Wonderful. It’s my mother. The last thing I want is for her to hear my landlord threatening to break down my door and toss me out onto the street. She worries about me enough as it is. I’m not about to add any stress to her life.
“I’ll come down to your office in an hour,” I tell Leo as I get out of bed with my phone in hand. “I promise.”
“That’s what you told me last week,” he reminds me.
When he starts banging again, I curse under my breath and pad out of the cramped living room-slash-dining room. I have to dodge the riverscape painting that sits half-completed on my easel as I make my way into the bathroom and close myself inside.
Seated on the cold lid of the toilet, I slump down with my elbows on my knees and accept my mother’s call.
“I tried to call you yesterday,” she says after we move past the usual preamble and hellos. “You didn’t pick up, so I figured you must’ve had a busy day working.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry I missed you, Mom. Things have been crazy here.”
“You sound tired, honey. Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine.” I straighten up when I hear the concern in her reedy voice. Thankfully, Leo’s decided to quit his pounding and shouting, so my attempt to reassure her stands at least half a chance of being believed. “Everything is going great with me, Mom.”
“Oh, that’s good, sweetheart.” I picture her face on the other end of the line, her relieved smile, which I can hear in her voice. “Tell me about your new painting. Did your friend at the gallery like it?”
“Yeah, she did. Margot thinks it’s going to do really well.” The lie slides off my tongue without hesitation, but it leaves a bitter residue of guilt in my throat.
“Of course it will do well, honey. They all have. How many paintings have you sold now?”
I shake my head in silence, grateful that I don’t have to look her in the eye every time I feed her this fairy tale of how I want her to imagine my life here in New York. She’s given me so much, made sacrifices I can never hope to reconcile, all in the hopes of offering me a better life than she’s had.
And while I know she loves me unconditionally, I feel a responsibility to make something of myself. I want to prove to her—and to myself—that I might actually be worth all of it one day.
“I’m not sure how many paintings I’ve sold, Mom. I guess I haven’t kept close track.”
“Well then, we’ll have to make a list next time we talk,” she suggests cheerfully.
“Okay, sure,” I say. “Let’s do that.”
“I’m just so proud of you, Avery. I always have been. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, Mom. I know.”
We talk for a little while about inconsequential things. The group of ladies she plays cards with on the weekends. The awful weather, which, she informs me, is making her arthritis act up. It soothes me, our conversation about everyday minutiae. I crave the normalcy of it, even though it also makes me ache sometimes that it’s been so long since I’ve been to see her.
After a few minutes, she sighs. I try not to hear the decades of weariness in that slow exhalation.
“Well, honey . . . they’re telling me I have to wrap up now. My call time is almost over.”
“All right,” I murmur. “I know.”
It’s never easy to say goodbye to her. Our allotted fifteen minutes always go so fast.