Thirty Nights (American Beauty #1)(2)
Once I am outside, my knees give out and the tears start. I lean against the cold wall of the building, not giving a damn about curious passersby who are writing me off as hysterical. Because that’s what I am. There is nothing waiting for me in England. Nothing but my parents’ graves.
I take a deep breath and start reciting the periodic table to silence the sobs. Hydrogen, atomic weight 1.008. Helium, 4.003. Lithium, 6.94… For the first time in four years, the table does not calm me. It merely brings the rest of the world into focus. The smell of wet bark, the bluebirds, the phone beeping in my pocket… Oh, bloody hell, I have to be at work in thirty minutes. Not at the Reed chemistry lab where I have been developing my nutritional supplement. My student visa only allows me to work twenty hours per week there. If I want to eat more than the protein I concoct in a vial, I need something else. I push away from the cold wall and wrap my mum’s scarf over my head. I start wobbling to Reagan’s MINI Cooper, trying to ignore the sidewalk rosebuds that this year, I will not see bloom.
Chapter Two
Cold Fire
I park the MINI in the parking lot of Feign Art—one of Portland’s finest galleries—snorting at the double entendre of its name. It tells the truth behind one of Portland’s best lies. Every painting in this gallery is sold under the name of the owner, Brett Feign. But in reality, he is not the artist. My best friend, Javier Solis, is. Like me, he is part of the immigrant community. Except he’s undocumented. He cannot work here under the law. So he ghost-paints instead, and I model for him sometimes, completely under the table. If the truth behind Feign’s fraud ever came out, Feign would be ruined and Javier could get deported. So we all keep our silence—for different reasons.
I get out of the car and leave the binders in the backseat. Who gives a damn about them anymore? At least I have managed to get my tears under control, although my eyes feel dry, as though I have not blinked for hours. There is no need to upset Javier. He will flip enough when he finds out. The thought of saying goodbye to Javier threatens my tenuous grip on breathing so I scurry as fast as I can across the parking lot to the gallery.
Kasia, the immaculate blonde receptionist, greets me with a glistening smile that looks nothing like the forced one she usually reserves for me. I think my subpar hand-me-down clothes offend her sensibilities. Bugger off, lady. I don’t have any money, and some of these are my mum’s and I’ll wear them until the day I die. But Kasia seems really happy about something today. One look to her right and the reason is obvious.
A tall man, dressed in a tailored charcoal suit, white shirt and cobalt-blue tie, is standing a few feet from her desk, scrutinizing a painting. His dark brown hair is swept back in casual waves. His eyes burn an intense sapphire blue. On the corner of his right eye is an inch-long scar, bleached by time. Beautiful in its savagery. Like something sharp could not resist his beauty but ricocheted at the last minute, desperate to mark him as its own, yet unable to defile him.
Attractive. Much, much too attractive. In fact, only someone so bewildering could reach me in this final hour. For a wild second, I wonder whether my brain has snapped and has created him, like a hallucination, to get me through the next thirty-seven days alive.
Despite his magnetic pull, something about his posture creates a force field around him. Untouchable. Distant. He stands straight, away from everything, his back angled toward the wall. His broad shoulders are tense, as though he senses an invisible, uninvited presence behind him. I scan the gallery, expecting to see something or someone other than Kasia. But it’s utterly empty, except a tall man, the size of Shaquille O’Neal, standing in the far corner like a security guard.
“Would you like something to drink, Mr. Hale?” Kasia simpers, her voice higher than usual. She sounds like she is faking a British accent. I snort.
“No, thank you,” he answers coldly, continuing to stare at the painting in front of him.
I follow his gaze and stop. I feel a twinge of satisfaction to see that he is looking at a painting of me. Not that he would know that. I never model my face, just random parts of my body. This painting portrays only the curve of my throat and jawline, my hair slightly swept back, exposing the skin. The rest of the canvas recedes into darkness. That’s Javier’s style—he never paints blatantly erotic things like breasts, arse, pubic hair. That’s not the point, he says. The point is to force the viewer to imagine the rest of the beauty. Good thing too. I couldn’t have posed naked for anyone, especially Javier. Today, we are painting my waist and left hipbone, but I have a long white sheet to cover the rest of me.
“We could probably have that painting done in color as well.” Kasia is melting. “But the artist feels that the black, white and gray colors allow the real beauty to shine through.”
He does not respond to her. I feel a tiny bit of sympathy for Kasia now. Really, anyone would be a mess. I need to leave, but suddenly I want to hear his voice again. It’s cold and cutting, as if every word is intended to crack a canyon between him and the world. But it’s also hypnotic. Like you would do anything it bid you to do.
My short-lived sympathy evaporates like smoke when Kasia turns to me with a raised eyebrow.
“Isa! Why are you standing there? You know Brett’s instructions. Cleaning ladies in the back.” She cocks her head to the side, pointing to the back door that leads to Javier’s secret studio.