Life's Too Short (The Friend Zone #3)(16)

We hadn’t slept with each other since early October. It was almost December.

I should have known something was wrong.

I couldn’t stop looking for all the signs. Scouring the last few months for red flags or things I should have picked up on. We were both busy. She was a software engineer and just like me she worked long days and irregular hours, so not being able to reach her wasn’t exactly eyebrow raising. But it was hard not to be angry at myself for not noticing something wasn’t right.

I had to shake it off and try to focus on something else before I let it drag my mood back down.

I looked around Vanessa’s studio. She had a wall of art. “That’s a nice photograph,” I said, nodding at a framed picture. It was a copper-colored dog on the shore of a lake. Looked like up north.

She closed the space between us to stand next to me. “It’s not a photograph. It’s a painting.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really.”

“Yeah. I got it at a MADD fund-raiser. I had to pledge a fortune for it. It’s a Sloan Monroe.”

“Oh, Jaxon Waters’s wife. I know her,” I said, studying it.

“You know her?” she said to the side of my face. “How?”

“My cousin Josh is married to her best friend. He lives next door to them in Ely. And I went on a date with her once.”

“Bullshit.”

I looked at her and her eyes were wide. I pulled out my cell phone and went to Instagram. I found Sloan’s private page and handed her the phone.

“Oh my God,” she breathed, scrolling through the pictures of Sloan and Jaxon, my cousin and his family intermingled in the feed, sitting around a campfire, at the table for Thanksgiving, playing with each other’s kids.

“This is so cool! You just got cooler by association,” she said, smiling up at me. “I’m a total fangirl. I love her—she is so talented. There’s like a three-year waiting list for one of these.”

“I can see why,” I said, looking back at the artwork. This couldn’t have been cheap. She must make pretty good money doing this vlogger thing to afford fine wines and a Sloan Monroe.

I moved down the wall to look at the next piece. It was made out of real butterfly wings, arranged in a colorful, intricate design. “They’re all so different.”

“I surround myself with things that make me happy. That’s sort of a rule I have. I got that one in Costa Rica.”

“And this one?” I pointed to a black-and-white pencil drawing of a half-naked woman draped in a sheet. Her head was tipped, and her hair covered one eye.

“An artist in Sicily. That’s me, by the way.”

I arched an eyebrow at her.

She laughed. “Antonio is about seventy-five years old and very professional. I wanted someone to paint me like one of Jack’s French girls before I die.”

I looked back at the drawing. It was tastefully done. But she was nude from the navel up. “You could have given the old guy a heart attack.”

She laughed again. “He painted Sophia Loren topless. My boobs didn’t stand a chance of doing him in.”

I begged to differ on that.

She’d hung it, so she must be okay with people looking at it, but I wasn’t really appreciating the art—I was appreciating the view, and that wasn’t the same thing. I went on to the next one, just so I wasn’t staring at her naked.

It was a photo of a graffitied brick wall with a woman dressed like the Statue of Liberty painted on it holding up a globe. “Why does this look familiar?”

“That one’s a Banksy,” she said.

I narrowed my eyes at the woman’s face. “Is that you too?” I looked back at her.

She shrugged. “Yeah. I met him at a water park in Shanghai.”

“You met Banksy, the famous anonymous street artist, at a water park in Shanghai,” I deadpanned.

She shrugged again. “I mean, I didn’t know it was him. We talked for like twenty minutes by the kiddie pool. And then like two days later this photo gets delivered to my hotel room—which was super weird because I didn’t tell him where I was staying. He wrote on the back ‘From the guy you talked to by the kiddie pool—Banksy.’”

I blinked at her.

“He authenticated it on his website. It’s supposed to represent global unity through traveling and embracing other cultures or something? I don’t know, it’s sorta confusing. They sell prints of it.”

I shook my head. “What did he look like?”

“I don’t know. A normal guy? Not as handsome as you.”

I snorted.

She looked up at me. “So what kind of law do you practice, Adrian?”

“I’m a criminal defender.”

“Huh. Why?” She tilted her head.

I looked back at the Banksy. “I like the challenge of it.”

“Are a lot of your clients guilty?”

I scoffed. “Most of my clients are guilty.”

“And that doesn’t bother you, trying to get people off when you know they deserve to go to prison?”

“Everyone deserves a defense,” I said.

She went quiet next to me for a moment. “You know, somebody like you could really change the world if you wanted to.”