Page 33 of Until Tomorrow (Love Doesn’t Cure All: The Ashwood Duet #1)

Rhett

I had three homes—only one of them counted as an actual home, but I rarely stayed there.

Maybe once a month. I kept a spare living space over my garage.

The place was fucking tiny with half a kitchen, a dresser, a bed, and a bathroom.

It was the easiest place for me to crash after work or gigs.

Across town, I also kept a studio. It was probably the nicest thing I owned.

Art came first, especially when it paid the bills.

The space was cultivated to handle multiple life-size sculptures as I worked and carved them in stages.

Clay and metal stands took up a majority of the space, but I had a whole corner dedicated to painting.

Sometimes, painting was just easier. Zoning out on a large canvas felt easier than fucking up clay when I couldn’t concentrate.

I kept a couch in a corner and some spare clothes there—things to make it easy when I was lost to my creative demons.

No way in hell could I sleep. Not after the shit that’d happened.

Not after her. She’d burrowed her way under my skin.

It was everything and anything about her.

I couldn’t quite place it. Fuck, I didn’t even know her name.

But the woman did something to me. Things I honestly didn’t know how to fucking handle feeling. Shit I hadn’t felt in over a decade.

I tossed my jacket aside and peeled off my t-shirt.

My thumb toyed with my wedding ring, anxiously rotating it around my finger as I stared at the cheap ring.

My wife, Aimee, had died when we were twenty-one, three days before our first wedding anniversary.

That was sixteen years ago—well, sixteen years, eight months, and twenty-six days ago, but who was co unting?

Move on. That was what everyone told me.

It was time to move on, date again, find another wife, and all that shit.

They said it like it was easy. Like it was just a switch I had to flip in my head.

No one seemed to remember it was a matter of the heart, and my heart had a vice grip on my feelings for my wife.

It wouldn’t let go. So, I got comfortable with being alone—just me and my creative demons doing whatever the hell we needed to get by.

I did fine. I worked, I created, and occasionally, I hooked up with someone to meet that need. I was doing just fine.

But was I happy? That was a loaded question. I wasn’t sure I knew what happiness felt like anymore. Truthfully, I didn’t know what a lot of fucking things felt like at this point.

Until now.

This woman was wildly inspiring—a spark igniting things deep inside me. I needed to get her out of my system. Whatever hold she had on me, I needed it gone. I needed to rip her from inside me.

Kicking off my boots, I weighed my options. Clay, while my preferred medium, took too much work. It’d take days to make something out of it. Painting it was.

I blasted music and let the heavy beat thrum through every nerve in my body. Thank fuck for no neighbors to complain about the noise.

Autopilot took over as I smeared paint on a pallet, cutting each with a gel medium to keep them from drying out. Sometimes it was just easier to give in to the demons and let them sort this shit out.

Brush stroke after brush stroke, my soul bled onto the canvas.

Blues.

Grays.

Reds.

Blacks.

Shades of color blended together to create a haze I lost myself in. I lost track of time. The sun rose, changing the lighting in the room, and I didn’t care.

It was just me, the canvas, and the beautiful woman I couldn’t get out of my head.

I stayed that way for hours, building paint, mixing colors, and letting the piece tell me exactly what I was supposed to create.

This haze. This energy. I lived for the exchange.

There was nothing like it. It was a high.

It was comfor ting. Thrilling and calming simultaneously.

No matter how many times I picked up a brush, it was always the same.

When the daze lifted, I sighed with relief—a weight melting off my shoulder and the exhaustion settling in.

I stepped back to stare at the canvas. At what I’d created.

Big blue eyes, creamy skin, red lips. Hers was a face that would haunt me.

Wild onyx framed her face and melted in musical notes that damn near floated off the canvas.

And nothing. The frenzy of painting had done nothing. She was still there, slipped under my skin in a place I didn’t want her—in a way I didn’t need someone else’s wife to be.

But damn if it wasn’t one of my better pieces in years. There was a life to it. A soul. Something about the way the music moved through her… it took me back to that moment in the bar where it’d been just me and her and my music.

Yeah, I was still all wrapped up in her.

I left the painting to dry and collapsed on the couch. It was old as fuck and lumpy but molded perfectly to my ass. I threw an arm over my face to block out the sun and let exhaustion put me to sleep.