I’d never slept with another man before, but I’d had boyfriends. None of them, though, had ever aroused the kinds of feelings in me that Jake did. He pushed me to the edge of my limits in every way. He made me uncomfortable. And yet, I couldn’t help falling in love with him. When he touched me, my heart sang.
I thought that maybe Jake was in love with something else, an idea of me that I couldn’t live up to. Today, meeting with this art collector, I was determined to prove to him that I deserved his love right back.
Of course, I couldn’t prove how responsible I was if I was late waking up. The art collector was coming here, to Jake’s studio, to see my paintings. And I hadn’t even gotten dressed yet.
Jake had already taken a shower. He came out wearing one of the slim black suits I’d gotten used to seeing him in. He insisted that they were charcoal gray, but even as a painter I didn’t really care about the color of fabric. All I knew was that he looked smoking hot.
“Lacey!” he cried, when he saw me half-dressed. “I thought you were going to get up while I got ready.”
“I kind of fell back asleep,” I said, smiling apologetically.
“Aren’t you going to wear a dress?”
“Black jeans are classy enough,” I said, hiking the pants up over my curvy hips. Jake slid behind me and cupped my ass. My heart fluttered in my chest.
“Oh, Lacey,” he whispered. He gave my ass a squeeze. “Okay, okay, the artist is always right. At least wear that blouse I got you.”
He rummaged in my drawers and pulled out the top he’d bought me on one of his random shopping trips. It was a pastel orange—no, coral—and the sleeve caps spilled over my shoulders in twisting spirals of fabric that served no purpose at all except to irritate me. Jake knew me well, but he didn’t know anything about my taste in clothing.
“Don’t forget shoes. Those black heels,” he said, pulling them out. I sighed and began strapping on the silly, impractical shoes.
As a tomboy, I’d been dedicated to living my life in jeans and a hoodie. If you had told ten-year-old me that I’d be wearing a frilly Easter Egg-colored blouse over black jeans and heels, I’d have thrown up in disgust.
Somehow, though, Jake had convinced me that dressing up was okay. Maybe it was his hands running over my body as I got dressed.
“Shoo, Jake,” I said, Now, as I pulled the blouse over my head and arranged the frills over my shoulders with consternation, I thought that maybe it was true love that drove me to wearing such ridiculous things.
We went to meet the art collector.
I thought that art collectors were somewhat cool. They collected art, right? But this man wasn’t anything like what I’d thought. He was a middle-aged man with peppered hair and thin glasses that perched on the tip of his nose so precariously that I thought they would slide right off.
He peered over his spectacles at a canvas.
“Very interesting.”
He seemed only to want to impress me with his knowledge of art. He didn’t care about my paintings, I realized. Someone had told him that I was an up and coming new painter, that was the only reason he was here. To invest in something that someone else had told him was good.
Stopping in front of a nearly all-black piece of my graffiti name, the collector turned back at me and sniffed. I looked up in surprise.
“I don’t quite see what you’re doing here,” the collector said.
“Um… it’s my name.”
The lettering I’d done was LACE like I’d never done it before—as pure stylized shadow. There were no lines to the letters, only the space where they caused darkness. The tops of the letters were bright as the sun, and I’d added broad highlights.
The next one was a more abstract set of letters. More curvy. I thought of it like my counterpart to Jake. My body was soft and curvy while his was hard and rigid. I’d kept him in the background here, in the form of crisscrossed lines interspersed with the ballooned letters.
“Interesting. Very interesting.”
I got the feeling that whenever he didn’t know what to say, he said that it was very interesting.
He walked to the end of the row of paintings and stopped in front of the last canvas.
Oh no. That was the canvas Jake and I had—ah—struggled over—yesterday. It still had the smears of Jake’s hand pinning mine back against the paint.
“This isn’t quite ready yet,” I said.
“It’s an experimental piece,” Jake said.
The collector looked more closely at my painting. I hoped that he would back away. Of all the paintings, I couldn’t sell that one.
“Very interesting,” he said.