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Seeing it from her perspective makes me feel like shit.
Shoes on, I grab my keys and head out the door.
I run as farand as fast as I can. I’m soaked through within seconds of stepping out onto the sidewalk but I don’t care. The streets are flooded, businesses and shops shuttered against the rain. The few commuters brave or maybe dumb enough to try and make it to work drive impossibly slow, water slushing above their wheel wells, windshield wipers slapping uselessly at the rain. As they drive by at a crawl, the all stare at me like I’m nuts. Like trying to operate a vehicle in this shit is any smarter than running around in it.
I don’t care. I just keep running. Until my legs are numb and too heavy to lift. Until my fingers won’t work right and my elbows scream when I try to unbend them. Until rivers of water stream down my back and pool in my shoes.
I don’t care. I just keep running.
But running myself into the ground doesn’t stop me from thinking. Every time I blink, every time I close my eyes, I see that painting. Not the one she hung in the living room. The one I saw propped against the stack of hidden canvases in her room, The one of me in the kitchen.
Watching her while, all the while, she was watching me.
I can’t stop thinking about it because it changes everything. Everything I ever thought or felt about what’s been going on for the past six months. The past four days. The past three years. About how Cari feels and what she thinks about me. Wants from me. What made her do the things she did. What made me react the way I did when I figure out she was doing them on purpose. Right now, I think none of it really matters.
I love her. And I think she loves me.
I stop running and go home.
Forty-six
Cari
It’s raining inside myroom, cold drops of water hit my arm and face and I screw my eyes shut even tighter for a moment. The clouds rolled in sometime around 3AM. I watched them swell and bulge from my place behind my easel, scrape and tumble their way across the skyline until they burst. Then I crawled between the sheets of my bed and let the deafening sound of it pull me under.
Another drop of water hits my cheek, rolls to slide across the bridge of my nose and I groan softly. I turn my head and look up, expecting to see a fast leak from the skylight above my bed. Instead of a leaky skylight I see Patrick.
Patrick is in mybedroom.
And he isn’t just in my bedroom, he’s standing over me, soaking wet, inches from where I laying, his T-shirt and shorts sodden. His shoes sopping, water puddling on the floor and on my mattress.
“What time is it?” I lift my head and turn but I can’t quite make out the display on my alarm clock.
He shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, still looking at me. “Early.”
“Did you go for a run?” I say. It’s a stupid question. Unless he took a shower, fully clothed, that’s exactly what he did.
He grins at me before squeegeeing rain off his face with his hand. “Yup.”
“Are you crazy?” Another stupid question. I’m pretty sure we’re both crazy.
Instead of answering me, he just grins some more while he toes off his runners.
“What do you think you’re doing?” My gaze strays behind him to the painting of him still propped against the stack and I feel heat erupt across my chest. Even though I know he’s already seen it, I feel naked. Exposed. Much more exposed and naked than the painting I hung in the living room. When I look back at him he’s got his socks off and he drops them onto the floor next to his shoes.
“You’re going to be late for work,” I tell him even though he said it was early, I have no idea what time it is. “Declan’s going to have a—”
“I’m not going to work today.” Patrick catches the hem of his shirt, still grinning. “Neither are you,” he says, peeling his shirt off, up over his head before letting it hit the floor with a wet thwack. “Not unless you have a boat somewhere.”
I shake my head and sit up. “It’s Monday,” I say, feeling around in the bed for my phone. I haven’t seen it since yesterday afternoon and I have no idea where I left it. “We’re expecting a shipment today. Miranda—”
“It’s in the kitchen,” he tells me, laughing a little because he knows exactly what I’m looking for. “Dead and a doornail.” He hooks his thumbs into the waistband of his shorts and boxer briefs and takes them off together, discarding them as unceremoniously as he did his shirt. “I texted her for you. She said the shipment is delayed because of the rain and she’ll see you tomorrow.” He’s completely naked, so perfect and beautiful that I can’t look away even though the sight of him makes it hard to breathe.
“I can’t stay here,” I say, shaking my head again. I don’t have the mental or emotional strength to handle Patrick right now. An entire day trapped in this apartment with him will probably kill me.
He cocks his head at me. “Why not?”
“Because—” I stare up at him, my eyes widened slightly. Because you’re angry at me. Because being around you makes me angry. And horny. And stupid. “Because.”