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Did seeing me affect him as much as it affected me?

The need to know all of these answers has become borderline obsessive. Along with the need to self-analyze those last few moments I spent face to face with him—over, and over, and over again.

Why did I have to run off like a total spaz? Why couldn’t I have kept it together long enough to hear the answers I needed and go home and completely lose my shit in my own space, on my own time?

I hate that I had fooled myself into thinking I was okay. That I thought I had accepted the course my life had taken. A personal sacrifice made and experienced for the sake of self-growth and art.

I was wrong. Because these feelings, these long forgottenfuckingfeelingshe managed to dig up in a matter of minutes, won’t go away.They won’t. Go. Away.

But if I’m being completely honest with myself, I’m not sure they ever have. I’ve just gotten used to spilling them onto the canvas. To twisting every memory, and experience, and regret into my craft so I don’t have to deal with them on any level beyond that. Because if I avoid the thoughts, and pour them into pictures and paint instead, they can’t haunt me, right?

I had honestly thought so. For a long time, I had really,reallythought so.God, I’m such an idiot.

I take a deep breath and shake off the burning thoughts, focusing instead on the paper in front of me. Because if there’s one positive in all of this, a yin to the yang, it’s that I now know exactly what was missing—from the painting.

The heart. That’s the part that needs to be real. It is the bleeding, feeling, life-pounding epicenter of it all, isn’t it? The beginning and ending of everything.

As soon as the idea clicked, hours post-Greyson run-in, I ordered one of those anatomically correct hearts online, along with a packet of fake blood—because apparently, you can order fucking anything online now—and receive them in less than forty-eight hours.

I heard that package hit the floor of my front porch this afternoon and was up faster than a teenager on prom night.

Pretty sure I scared the living shit out of my mailman.

I pull the image of a bloody heart from the tray in front of me and plunge it into the rinse tub, clipping it on the line above me to dry when I’m finished. I step back and observe it, inexplicably relieved at the perfection of it. But itis perfect, and it’ll fit into the painting effortlessly.

It’s what sets me apart, I think. These snippets of reality pieced into my paintings. A mash-up of reality and fiction. A portrayal of what I know to be real and what feels like never was.

This one will be the last piece for an art opening I have this weekend—in the heart of the city. It won’t be my first art show, but that doesn’t make me any less nervous. If anything, I think I become more and more anxious with each one. In part, I think, because I put a little more of myself into these pieces each time. Ripping away a chunk of the darkness and leaving it behind on every painting until it was almost gone.

At least that’s what I had thought. Until I saw Greyson again. And now I don’t know anything. Up from down, left from right, day from night. Because call me crazy, but I just can’t shake this feeling that seeing him again has changed everything. That my life—my hopes, my dreams, my fate—has all been turned upside down. Like all of it has been picked up and flipped on its motherfucking axis, and I’m not sure how to cope.

Eighteen Before

HIS EYES. HISeyes, his eyes, his eyes. It was those damn green anchors of Greyson’s that were going to be the eventual death of me. They kept landing on mine from across Jaymes’ living room.

We were playing a phenomenal game of pretend.

Pretending we didn’t share something that special earlier.

Pretending I wasn’t the first person he’d ever wanted to hear him sing on stage.

Pretending we hadn’t beenthatclose to kissing.

Pretending, pretending, pretending.

I was great at pretending. But I felt like I was going to burst.

Did he like me, or didn’t he?No, strike that. I wasn’t an idiot. He liked me, at least a little bit. It was just thata little bitwasn’t enough for him to risk burning his bridges with Jaymes over. And for that, I was at a total loss. Because if he felt even a fraction of what I felt, it would be worth burning down that whole damn house.

Yet here we were. Pretending.

I knew exactly what would make pretending easier: whiskey.

I lifted Sara’s legs from my lap and stood from the couch, making my way into Jaymes’ kitchen. He had a nice house. Nicer than any of our friends, anyway, and nicer than anything I’d ever grown up dwelling in. And his mom was never home, always either working or staying the night at her boyfriend’s house a few hours away—hence the parties Jaymes constantly threw.

I reached into the back of his mom’s liquor cabinet for the good stuff when I felt a body press into the back of mine.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Jaymes said, his lips touching my ear for a brief second before pulling away.