Thrash
It was the calm before the storm. The board had been shuffled. The players were scattered and unpredictable. One thing was for certain: war was coming.
We had chosen our side carefully, testing the waters. Checking trust and needs. Now our choice men were in hiding, and we were blind in one eye. Strike was clever as ever, but his situation left the MC in an interesting predicament. The big questions were how to help? And should we?
With Bones gaining strength and our greatest ally crippled, we were in a bind.
I was Rage’s right-hand man. We had a meeting in an hour. I should have been there, at the club.
Instead, I was staring at a beautiful woman. And her art. Because those were the important things in life, right?
Her work was beautiful, unique and out of place among the minimal surrounding work, but I had noticed the artist first. Her soft, vaguely sultry voice caught my ear, then the golden halo of her hair caught my eye.
I’d met a lot of women in my life. Seen a lot of different types of beauty. I didn’t believe there was just one way to go, one “look.” Like the best paintings, every woman had something that made her stand out from the rest. For this woman, it was her hair.
That thick mane of curls reached out into the air around her, framing her face in a glorious sunburst. It was alive. Warmed the blood. She looked almost angelic.
Almost.
I grinned. There was something in the way she walked, an unconscious flair that told me ‘obedience’ wasn’t high on her list of accomplishments. Loyalty, maybe, but this was the sort of woman who broke the rules without trying. I’d bet good money she didn’t even do it on purpose.
She caught sight of my grin, and I nodded, letting my amusement show before turning back to her work.
She was talking to a customer about the piece in front of her, explaining the inspiration. She had to be one of the new artists the studio had brought in for the night. Both lithe and curvy, she had one of those unusual bodies. Her face was delicate, but her bright blue eyes seemed so serious. Both face and eyes were surprisingly difficult to read.
She seemed soft-spoken and self-contained, but as she spoke, she became animated and excited. Obviously, her work was still new and exciting to her.
The pleasure of sharing her ideas lit her eyes. It laced a husky note of enthusiasm into her soft voice. It was a subtle thing, the kind of sound that wrapped a man’s imagination in silk, teased at the edges of his thoughts, made his blood simmer and suggest. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, either. The buyer she was speaking with seemed more interested in the swell of her breasts and hips than in what she had to say.
Hell, I was too. But I still probably heard more than he did. She had been telling him about her trips to the West End, about reading and sketching at the Outlook. Tourists loved the Outlook. I somehow doubted she had looked much like a tourist there.
She seemed like the kind of person who could make her way anywhere. At the same time, she would never fit in. Not among the blondes, not among the rich or poor.
Ignorant or cultured, people would notice her.
As someone who knew that feeling well, was it any wonder then that I liked her?
She kept glancing at me, but she didn’t drop everything to come speak with me. No coquettish tricks. No batting lashes or head-to-toe visual cues. She took note of me, then she went back to what she was doing.
She was a focused woman. I liked that.
Catching sight of my watch, I winced. I’d lingered longer than I should have. Wanting to speak to her, I had enjoyed circling, listening, watching. But I’d left her alone. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.
The longer I stayed, the more I had realized: I wanted her to be a painting, one that I could stare at for hours without anyone giving me a second look. As it was, if I eyed her any longer I might get escorted out for leering.
So I turned to a piece her artwork. The canvas was just as captivating. Her work showed versatility: she seemed as comfortable with thick swatching as she was with the delicate flow of softer brushes.
In the piece before me, a lone woman had been captured in elegant whorls of purple and peach. She was framed by the burning oranges and reds of a sunset bathed river – “The Monongahela,” the plaque read.
The painted woman’s face was tilted downward as she looked out over the water. She had the same blond hair as the artist. The same blonde lashes and the same hands. Her build was different, though, as if the artist admired women with stronger frames.
It was always interesting to see what artists favored in their work. Some preferred to paint themselves. Others showed respect to lives that were different from their own. This woman seemed to be the latter type of painter.
But she had painted her own hair onto the woman. It was flying up into the light, caught in a moment, rippling like heat rising off blacktop by the light of a bloody sun.