Page 61 of The Player

“Do that shit again,” he said, his voice still wrecked.

Nicole lifted her head. “Right now?”

“Give me five minutes.”

She laughed. “You cannot be serious.”

His fingers sank into her ass. “You can’t ride me like that and expect one time to be enough.”

“Five minutes, huh?”

“Maybe ten. You took a lot out of me.”

Still laughing, Nicole settled against him and traced her fingers over his smooth chest. Her eyes went to the open bedroom door and the dark hallway past it. “I think I’m ready to show you my work.”

Drew’s hand stopped. “Shit, for real?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

He slipped out from under her and reached for his boxer briefs before she could reconsider. Nicole watched him pull them on, wondering why she’d chosen now, when she was naked and soft from sex, to get brave about this.

She found his T-shirt on the floor beside the bed and pulled it over her head. It fell halfway down her thighs. “If you laugh, I’m putting you out.”

Drew frowned. “Why the fuck would I laugh?”

“That was stupid. I know you won’t.” She tugged at the hem of his shirt. “I’m just nervous.”

“Don’t be.”

Nicole led him up the stairs and stood outside her studio with her hand on the doorknob. Drew waited behind her while she took a breath, opened the door, and reached inside for the light.

The room smelled faintly of linseed oil and drying paint. Canvases leaned three and four deep against the walls, some finished, others abandoned after a few frustrated hours. Brushes crowded the glass jars on her worktable beside crumpled rags, palette knives, and tubes of paint squeezed nearly flat. Her easel stood near the large windows, where the dark glass reflected the room back at them.

Drew stopped just inside the doorway. Nicole folded her arms while he looked from one painting to the next. He took his time with each one, and the longer he stayed quiet, the more she wanted to start explaining herself.

Then he crossed to the rain-soaked street scene. “This is the red umbrella.”

Nicole moved beside him and looked at the woman in the saffron sari crossing under it. “You remembered.”

“You said the light was wrong.”

“It was. I fixed it.”

Drew leaned closer, studying the pavement under the woman’s feet. “It looks wet. Like I could step into it and fuck up my shoes.”

Nicole smiled. “That might be the most Drew Kiernan art critique ever.”

“Is it wrong?”

“No. That’s exactly what I was going for.”

“Then I’m sticking with it.”

He moved farther into the room, pausing at a portrait and then one of a crowded sidewalk. Nicole followed a few steps behind, trying not to watch his face too closely.

Eventually he reached the painting she kept pulling out of her portfolio.

Three children raced through waist-high weeds in an overgrown city lot. Behind them stood tired brick apartment buildings with boarded windows and a chain-link fence that sagged toward cracked concrete. Nicole had built the neighborhood from umber, rust, mossy green, and smudges of gray, keeping the buildings low against a sky that took up nearly half the canvas.