His Gift 2(6)

I went back to the table and opened the cabinets. I tried not to gasp my surprise at the assortment of paints in front of me. Spray paint, oils, acrylics by the gallon. There were delicate brushes of a few hairs, and thick brushes, wedge-shaped, bleached at the ends. There were rollers of different textures, layering palette knives of all different shapes and sizes. There was everything I needed and more.

“I can use any of this stuff?” I asked. My fingers reached out, touching the materials in wonder.

“Any of it. Except for the storage area, which is locked.” He pointed to the black door that had a padlock on the outside hinge. “That’s not to be touched. Understood?”

“Understood,” I said, still gaping at the paints. Lord, this was thousands of dollars’ worth of paint sitting on this table. Maybe tens of thousands. And not the cheapo stuff, either.

He smiled a bit at my expression before turning away to leave.

“Where are you going?” I asked, before he had taken two steps. There was amusement in his eyes as he looked back at me.

“I’m going to get us breakfast. You will stay in here and paint.”

“And if I don’t?” It wasn’t a real question. I just wanted to see the spark light up his eyes again.

“If you don’t obey me, you’ll be punished. The same goes for if you touch yourself. Understood?”

I flushed. Even with all that he had done to me, touching myself in front of him made me turn red with imagined embarrassment.

“Understood.” It was a squeak coming from my mouth. I didn’t know why he had chosen me. I wasn’t special. I wasn’t nearly as beautiful as the girls who had swarmed his party.

All of those thoughts dropped away, though, when I looked back at the blank canvases waiting for me to put my mark on them.

Maybe that’s what he saw in me. That, and… loneliness.

I didn’t think a billionaire could know what it was like to be lonely, but maybe…

Jake cleared his throat. He pushed himself away from the doorframe and turned to go.

“I’ll be back shortly,” he said. “Enjoy.”

***

I painted.

It had been a while since I’d painted on an actual canvas, and in good light. All of my street art had been thrown up hastily, in dark alleyways or on subway cars in the train yard at night. I never got a good look at what I was painting, not really.

The first canvas I picked up was one of the bigger ones. Without too much preamble, I tossed it down onto the floor and headed back for the cabinets to pick out the paint.

Back when I was in elementary school, part of the ritual I had for painting was arranging all of my paints and brushes beforehand, getting everything ready before I started. I’d set my brushes out carefully, lining them up next to the paper. Slowly, meticulously.

Since living in New York City, I’d learned how to work as a street artist. I never got a chance to settle in before painting—I simply didn’t have the time. Security guards would be patrolling, and I had to paint out of my backpack with cans and brushes that I threw haphazardly back to make a run for it if I saw anyone coming.

So if you’d told me that I had a room full of painting supplies all to myself, I would have told you that I would take my time. I would go slow. I would savor the moment.

But I didn’t.

I don’t know what it was. The sleepless night, maybe, or the drugs they’d used to knock me out. Mostly, though, I thought it was the face that Jake Carville had spent the past hour teasing me past the point of sanity, and I didn’t have any mental energy left to think about the painting I was going to do.

So I just painted.

I didn’t bother to take out all of the paints and lay them out, or pick out all of the brushes I would use. I went for it, grabbing a handful of brushes and an armful of paint tubes. Without forethought, I squeezed the paint onto one of the plastic mixing palettes and started. No ceremony, no ritual. Nothing but pure emotion.

First, green. Green like his eyes. That would be the background. I smeared the brush back and forth, adding daubs of black when I needed to make the color richer, the values more contrasting.

As I painted, I remembered what he’d done to me. My frustrations surged through me and erupted out onto the canvas. The strokes of his fingers became strokes of my paintbrush.

I painted quickly, the way I wanted him to touch me. The brush roughed across the canvas in thick sheets. There was nothing in me to tell me to stop, that I was using too much paint. There was no restraint to tell me I should go slower. There was nothing but the furious insistent beat of my heart as I worked the canvas to its natural end.

I used a small brush to pick up beads of gold paint, spattering them over the deep emerald color with abandon. I didn’t wait for it to dry.