How to Discipline Your Vampire(46)

            The museum we were headed to next was near Fenway Park, and I thought back to the days of my childhood when my dad had been my best friend, and how he would take me to baseball games. “Do you like baseball, William?”

            He shrugged. “I’ll watch with Steve if it’s on, but I prefer hockey. It’s faster.”

            I nodded. “Hockey’s huge here. God, when I was in college, the hockey players were celebrities on campus.”

            He opened the door for me politely. “After you, Mis”—he leaned into my ear and finished the rest—“tress.”

            I shivered.

            We began in the section that held more traditional paintings. Matisse, Renoir, artists who I had heard of. “This is nice,” I remarked, holding his hand.

            “You haven’t said much.”

            “I don’t really know what to say. This place is beautiful.”

            “Do any of the pieces speak to you?”

            I frowned. “I like them, but there’s nothing that makes me want to really look at it longer, the way you do.”

            “Whatever draws you in,” he said, tracing my spine with his finger. “It’s just preference, as is everything in life.”

            “But what are you looking for when you’re staring at a painting for more than—I don’t know—three seconds?”

            “A lot of things, I guess,” he answered, weighing his words. “I suppose I think about the artist, what his life was like when he painted the work, and maybe what inspired it, you know? What story is it telling?”

            I sucked at art. “Cool.”

            He laughed. “I think you may like modern art. There’s an exhibit upstairs. I think you may react more to it.”

            We climbed the stairs together, arms locked, and approached the modern exhibit.

            “I’ve never seen this particular artist’s work, but apparently he’s huge in Japan.”

            I nodded silently and looked at the “art.”

            They were just meaningless swipes of color and dots. The paintings meant nothing to me, and I worried that William would think less of me if I said so.

            He lingered for more than a minute at one. It was a bunch of red swirls.

            “You like this one,” I noted. “Why?”

            He grinned at me with a wicked look. “It reminds me of you.”

            I looked at the splotches and tried to find some semblance of me. “Ah, I don’t see it,” I laughed.

            “It’s so sexual,” he said low and in my ear. “The curves”— he gestured to one in particular—“especially here. They mirror parts of your body.”

            My voice caught in my throat. “Tell me more,” I croaked.

            “And the red,” he purred, “is cherry red.” He reached his hand out, almost as if to stroke the thick curls of paint.

            “I guess it is pretty sexy.”

            He flagged for an attendant. “I’d like to buy this.”

            “William!” I gasped, looking back and forth between him and the museum employee.

            “Of course, Mr. Gentry,” the man said.

            “Um, you know him?” I asked.