Dance Away with Me(112)

Surely she was mistaken.

Her gaze flew from one part of the figure to another.

There. Over there. And . . . THERE!

Dear God . . .

Tess’s own body parts had been carefully drawn on the amazon’s body! Her toes in the elbow, her nose in an earlobe, and her breast— Her breast in a knee. She was everywhere!

She clutched Wren and took a step backward as she spotted . . . in front of her . . . right in the amazon’s shoulder blade . . .

No! Even he wouldn’t . . .

But he had. Tucked in the shadow of the amazon’s waist were her own labia.

Bastard!

She wasn’t going to bail him out of jail. She was going to kill him!

*

Freddy shot up from his chair as she stormed into the police station.

“Let me at him!” she exclaimed.

“I gotta search you before you go in there.”

“Like hell!”

He apparently decided a woman, however furious, couldn’t do too much harm with a baby strapped to her chest because he opened his desk drawer, drew out the keys, and led her through the doorway.

The only jail cell held a stainless steel toilet and a cot with a blue polyurethane mattress where Ian lay sound asleep. Freddy unlocked the barred door for her. “Call me if it gets out of hand.”

“I’ll do that,” Ian said, in a sleep-rasped voice.

“Not you,” Freddy said. “Her.”

“Just shows what you know.”

As Freddy left, a pair of leather, paint-crackled boots hit the floor of the cell. Ian stood up. He’d never been scruffier. His hair hadn’t been cut since she’d last seen him, and he displayed at least a week’s worth of beard stubble. But instead of looking at Tess, he only had eyes for Wren. “Hey, sweetheart, remember me?”

Wren kicked at the sound of his voice. He walked over to Tess and pulled Wren out of the sling. “Look at you. . . . You’ve grown a foot.”

Wren gazed up at him with her shiny, navy-blue eyes, taking in every detail. She smiled. A big, gummy, drooly smile. He tucked her against his neck, turned his back on Tess—turned his back!—and carried Wren to the other end of the cell, crooning to her the whole time. “. . . missed you so much. . . . My big girl. . . . My little sweetheart . . .”

Tess waited.

“. . . Disneyland . . . and the circus. We’ll pitch a tent and read books . . .”

Tess crossed her arms over her chest.

“. . . shoot baskets and paint.”

Tess tapped her foot.

“. . . ride bikes.” He finally turned to look at Tess. “We’ll dance together.”

Her heart did a flip-flop. She set her teeth against it. “You put my vagina on the wall of the Broken Chimney!”

He smiled. “You know that, and I know that. Are you planning to tell anyone else?”

She started to give him the smackdown of his life and then paused. Her body parts were all there, depicted in miniature on the amazon. And yet . . . If she hadn’t known what the two of them had done that night in the studio, would she have recognized those small details for what they were? Surely someone would spot a breast or a navel, but it wasn’t as if he’d labeled the parts with her name.

She regarded him quizzically.

Wren studied him with googly eyes, but now he had his full attention on Tess. “You put me through hell. I was furious with you, but it turns out you were right.”

She tilted her head She needed to hear more, even as she was afraid of what he’d say.

Wren kept staring into his face as he spoke. “I had to find a new direction, but I couldn’t. I was stuck.”

“And now you’ve found that new direction?” Her legs were giving her trouble, and she sank down on the edge of the cot.

“I painted it all over the Broken Chimney,” he said, with the trace of a smile.

“My body parts?”

“What I’ve been missing.” He moved toward the cell bars. “Last year, I blamed my problems on all the distractions in Manhattan. Then, when I came to Tempest and still couldn’t work, I blamed Bianca. Finally, I blamed you. But all the blame was on my own shoulders. I didn’t need peace or quiet. What I needed was to remember the most basic precept of street art. It’s about freedom.”

“Art for the people, not only the elite, right?”

“Exactly. A great street artist’s work shouldn’t fit into a single box. It’s not supposed to. But I had pigeonholed myself, and it paralyzed me. Then you came along.”

“Me?”

“You got in my head with all your messes and your complications.” He wrapped his hand around a bar in the cell door. “I tried to back off, but all I wanted to do was sketch you. It was a compulsion. Sketching you, then Wren, then a rock that caught my attention or the curve of a blade of grass.”

“You hated all of those sketches.”

“Every one. I was already on shaky ground creatively. They were trite, ordinary.”

“Beautiful.”

“But they didn’t have anything to say that hadn’t been said a thousand times before by a thousand other artists. They scared the hell out of me, yet I couldn’t stop.” He moved away from the cell door. “Then you kicked me out.”