Because YouTube was an asshole, it kept showing me more clips, more videos, more music news shows peppered with his name. And I was a junkie.
I watched them in the middle of the night when I couldn’t paint anymore. When exhaustion should have pulled me under. But then I dreamed of him. Those fucking eyes always followed me into dreams.
Sometimes I woke with phantom fingers trailing over my skin. Gentle fingers chased by flames. Instinctively, I knew he’d burn me. But then it would morph into the day with Whitey.
Of course there was still talk about that day at the skate park. The news outlets had a field day with it. The asshole had gotten a lot of mileage out of our afternoon together. Tack on some outrage for better safety at the skate park, at the boardwalk, at the beach—and the press had been outstanding. Some slanted against Ian. That he was a punk who’d been looking for trouble. Others spun him as a hero fit for romance novels and swooning girls who were constantly talking about the newest bad boy of rock.
I knew he was bits and pieces of all of that.
Hero.
Asshole.
Broken.
Fascinating.
And he was my obsession.
I trailed my paint-smudged fingertip over his bruised knuckles on the canvas. His fingers fisted and torn. As if my camera had captured him just out of frame. A hint of black pants and his shoelace belt lifting in the breeze.
No matter what I did, he snuck into my paintings.
Elegant, dangerous fingers.
Sea-glass green creeping into even a commission piece. J Town was a haven for artists, but it was also a hub for work. And while I didn’t need money to stay there, I did need it to eat and buy more supplies.
So, I took the commission works I could find. I painted signs for businesses. I even repurposed some flea market finds and sold them on the J Town Etsy store. Bent liked to find me ugly dressers to revitalize. But I didn’t take on more jobs than I needed. Part of me wanted to hide in the easy work. Because the hard stuff—the paintings that dragged me under like a stormy tide full of seaweed—was what I was meant to do.
Even if they didn’t make sense to me, or they didn’t work for a collection. I still couldn’t stop doing them.
As six months creeped toward seven, I had a stack of stretched canvases multiplying against the walls. The corner of my studio got more crowded as I tried to hide my fascination with a man I had no business chasing.
Even if it was only in a dream or splatter of paint.
My stomach twisted, reminding me that food had surpassed need and grown into necessity. I padded into my kitchen and dug through the cupboards. Stale saltines and an expired jar of salsa was not promising.
I stood on my tiptoes and checked my candy stash.
Also empty.
And good grief, I needed a shower.
I found a sleeve of chocolate chip cookies and ate a quarter of it before I hit the bathroom. I stripped off my painting shirt—an oversized T-shirt nearly threadbare from washes—and kicked off the boxers I painted in.
I didn’t like restrictions when I was climbing the ladder to get to every last corner of an eight-foot board.
Unwilling to deal with my hair, I pinned it up under one of my shower caps. The curse of thick, coarse hair meant that washing it all the time created a Brillo pad status. It didn’t help that my friend Heidi was forever chasing me down to add one of her new color mixtures to my near-white blond hair.
I was her idea of a blank canvas.
I loved color, so I was usually more than willing to be her guinea pig. Thankfully, she was past her mermaid hair fascination. Hurricane purple was her latest creation, and I was certainly here for it.
A mixture of gray and purple ombre crawled up the ends of my hair, making me look like California Punk Barbie.
Right now, a nice long, hot shower was way more important than dealing with my hair. I even shaved all the things. It was a goddamn banner day.
I finished my cookies and swapped one of the cushy sage-colored towels my cousin had gifted me for a pair of jeans, a cami, and a zipper hoodie. The nice thing about Venice was the boardwalk always seemed to have something open. I needed to eat before my second wind died. Then I could drop for a dozen hours. Once I had some sleep under my belt, I could work on my collection again.