“I won’t hurt you,” I say. “I won’t let you ruin your career just for me.”

He hands me back my phone, that damn poker face unreadable.

But it doesn’t matter.

This is over.

And when he starts shaking his head like I’m crazy, I know for a fact that I’ve ruined everything.

Chapter Thirty-Two

I don’t like to think about Thomas. Or about the sequence of events that led to my mugshot. I prefer to keep those memories wrapped up tight and buried deep in the back of my mind. Like if those thoughts were in a box in the attic, they’d be shoved in the corner and you’d be so exhausted by the time you finally reached the box you’d just drop it off at Goodwill without even opening it.

Like that.

I wish I could forget. That denial and avoidance equaled erasure.

But it doesn’t.

And now, with Warren in front of me, hearing my confession, every horrible memory is front and center. Replaying themselves like a bad nightmare in my mind, over and over. One icky scene after the next.

Ugh.

It all started innocently enough. Girl meets jerkbag, girl thinks jerkbag is the One. Except that Thomas was—is, especially after tonight—one of those uptight, thinks-he’s-better-than-everyone, likes-to-hear-himself-talk kind of men. But he was hot, and I was dumb, and his mysterious reputation as an “artist” was enough to reel me in.

Of course, there were signs we were not meant to be. Like, billboard-sized signs. He never cared about my dreams, or even asked about them, but he’d spend entire date nights talking about his own. How his work in progress was going to be the art piece that he sold to a collector who’d put him on the map.

But his art? God, his art. How many times did I have to look at it? All of it was just moody brush strokes that didn’t mean anything. Seriously. He’d get drunk or loaded and throw paint at a canvas, and then the next morning, he’d call it something like The Inner Beast and declare it his next masterpiece.

Except that everyone saw it for what it was. Dull paintings executed with a bare minimum of skill. Artwork that could have been created at a paint-and-wine evening by a suburban housewife with an unused art degree and half a bottle of Chardonnay.

Harsh? Yes. And that wasn’t coming from me as a bitter ex-girlfriend. That was coming from the art critic at the New York Times.

Which, of course, pissed him off.

At first, I didn’t see any of this. Early on I was convinced he was a genius and I just couldn’t understand his work, but I figured that was because I wasn’t educated about art. Not that he had any appreciation for my art. He considered what I did to be nothing more than seamstress work.

Even though I graduated from F.I.T. And interned at Calvin Klein. And spent three years pattern-making for Naeem Khan.

But to Thomas, none of that meant anything. And neither did I.

Usually, whenever Thomas got a bad critique or failed to sell yet another piece, he’d bitch about it, and I’d comfort him. I’d tell him that he was brilliant and other people just didn’t get him. I’d assure him that he couldn’t sell because the right critic hadn’t discovered him yet. Or that he was too good. That was the problem. Not him.

But then he tried to sell a piece he called The Failure. And the thing about The Failure was that… it was about me. The painting was of a distorted garment, with needles and thread hanging from it, a pair of cutting shears in a woman’s hand, about to tear into the fabric. And when I saw that, I realized that that was how Thomas saw me.

As a failure. As he’d so aptly titled the piece.

And then he’d tried to turn me into a shitty piece of art.

So I called him on it.

“What you do isn’t art,” he told me. “I’m sorry, but this is the tough love you need to hear. You’re just taking what other people do and fixing the hem. The lady at my dry cleaner does that for twenty bucks.”

That wasn’t what I was doing. I was deconstructing entire pieces. And now I have customers like Mrs Bianchi and Estelle who see the beauty in what I do, which makes it easier to look back and see just how wrong Thomas was.

But at the time? At the time, all I could see was red.

Especially when, after he took a sip of overpriced gin, he said that if I couldn’t see the difference between what he did and what I did, it was time for us to part.

I should’ve had the chance to dump his ass. But I didn’t.

And for obvious reasons, I was upset about it.

So upset that after we parted I bought a bottle of cheap wine from the nearest liquor store and drank it straight from the bottle. It burned all the way down my throat, but it still wasn’t enough to drown my shame.

Tags: Jana Aston Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net