There Are No Saints (Sinners Duet #1)(51)

I don’t know what to call this one. I’ve never felt it before.

I look at Mara and I don’t know what to say.

My lips form the words anyway.

“I’m sorry.”

It startles her as much as me.

She turns and faces me, dropping my hand.

“What do you mean?”

“I just . . . I’m sorry.”

She shakes her head slowly, lips parted, eyebrows raised.

“You surprise me, Cole.”

I’m surprised, too.

Surprised at the sound of my name on her lips. How it rings like a bell, clear and true.

She stands on tiptoe, stretching up to kiss me. Soft and slow.

Warmer than the rising sun between us.





24





Mara





I have to work late at Zam Zam tonight.

I know I’ll be exhausted. I’ve been putting in long hours at the studio, sucked into my latest painting.

Cole comes to see it in the early afternoon.

The painting is steeped in deeply shadowed tones of charcoal, merlot, and garnet. The figure is monstrous with its gleaming bat-like wings and thick, scaly, muscular tail. But his face is beautiful—a dark angel, fallen from grace.

Cole stands in front of the canvas for a long time, a hint of a smile playing on his lips.

“Well?” I say, when I can’t stand it anymore. “What do you think?”

“The chiaroscuro is masterful,” he says. “It reminds me of Caravaggio.”

“Judith Beheading Holofernes is one of my favorite paintings,” I say, trying to hide how pleased I am at his compliment.

“I prefer David with the Head of Goliath,” he says.

“You know that’s a self-portrait, don’t you?” I tell him. “Caravaggio used his own face as the model for Goliath’s severed head.”

“Yes. And his lover was the model for David.”

“Maybe they were fighting at the time,” I laugh.

Cole looks at me with that dark, steady gaze. “Or he knew that love is inherently dangerous.”

I mix white and a fractional portion of black on my palette. “Do you really think that?”

“All emotions are dangerous. Especially when they involve other people.”

I dip my brush in the fresh paint, not looking at him. My heart is already beating fast, and it’s impossible to look at Cole’s face and form a coherent sentence at the same time.

“Have you always been this way?” I say.

“What way?”

He knows what I mean, but he’s making me say it out loud. He knows he can’t trick me as easily as other people -- which irritates him.

He wants to know exactly what I can see and what I can’t. Probably so he can learn to trick me better.

“Cold,” I say. “Calculated. Uncaring.”

Now I do look at him, because I want to see if he’ll admit it.

“Yes,” he says, unblinking, unashamed. “I’ve always been this way.”

I dab the paint on my demon’s tail, bringing out the highlights on the scales. I can feel Cole pacing behind me, though I can’t actually hear his light footsteps on the wooden boards. He’s disturbingly quiet. It unnerves me when I can’t see where he’s at in the room. But it’s worse trying to talk with that burning black stare drilling into me.

“Have you ever loved anyone?” I ask. “Or were you just voicing a theory?”

I can sense him going still, considering the question.

This is one of the things I like about Cole: he doesn’t just say whatever pops into his head. Every word that comes out of his mouth is deliberate.

“I don’t know,” he says at last.

I have to turn then, because that answer surprises me.

He’s got his hands in the pockets of his fine wool trousers, looking past me out the window, lost in thought.

“I might have loved my mother. She was important to me. I wanted to be near her all the time. I would go in her room in the morning, when she was still sleeping, and curl up on the end of her bed like a dog. I liked the smell of her perfume on the blankets and on the clothes that hung in her closet. I liked the way her voice sounded and how she laughed. But she died when I was four. So I don’t know if that would have changed as I got older. Children are always attached to their mothers.”

I feel that sick, squirming feeling in my stomach that always accompanies conversations about mothers. As if my demon’s tail is lodged down in my guts.

“You loved your mother,” Cole says, reading my thoughts. “Even though she was a shit parent.”

“Yeah, I did,” I say bitterly. “That’s what’s fucked up about it. I wanted to impress her. I wanted to make her happy.”

“Loving someone gives them power over you,” Cole says.

When we talk like this, I feel like he really is the devil, and we’re battling for my soul. Everything he believes is so opposite to me. And yet, he can be horribly convincing . . .

I hate that my mother had power over me. I hate that she still does.

“She trained me from the time I was little,” I say. “She was always the victim, everything bad that happened in her life was someone else’s fault—especially mine. And the thing that makes me angriest is that it fucking worked—I still feel guilty. Every time I ignore her emails or block her calls, I feel guilty. Rationally, I know she’s the fucking worst and I don’t owe her anything. But the emotion is still there, because she conditioned me like a rat looking for pellets. She pressured me and manipulated me and fucked with me every day of my life until I got away from her.”