Page 11 of Sin of Love
Until I saw her eyes.
You know when you’re a kid and you see the stovetop turn red, and your parent or whoever tells you not to touch it because it’ll burn your hand… but you touch it anyway?
She kept telling me not to come closer, that she was going to burn me. I touched her anyway.
Restraint has never been my strong suit.
I spend the rest of the day in my studio with a joint, some leftover pizza, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. If there’s one thing to be said for heartache, it opens the door to some monumentally disturbing art.
My favorite kind.
* * *
Hours later,I’m sprawled in the studio’s old plastic chair, its surface graffitied liberally from years of being a bystander to art. A discarded sketch pad lies open near my feet, the pages mostly torn or crumpled from trying—and failing—to capture my muse in charcoal.
The problem isn’t that I’m too drunk or can’t focus, but the opposite. I’m too sober. My thoughts too clear. Too maudlin.
I’m a lonely fool.
Staring at the distant ceiling, I think back to the first time I felt a crack in Deirdre’s defenses. The night I stopped wanting her and started needing her—the night of the gala.
I only said yes to my father’s shocking request for my attendance because it meant my resentful publicist would have to put on a fancy dress and come as my date. Which she’d hate because it would remind her of the contract I’d blackmailed her into signing that didn’t give her a choice. And I loved that it would infuriate her because fuck she was gorgeous when she was mad.
But I didn’t even want her then—not really—not in comparison to after.
That night, amidst my father’s ritzy social crowd, I made her dance an endless and inappropriately intimate waltz, teased her relentlessly, and experienced the curves and slopes of her body beneath my hands.
For the first time, she was more than a woman who made me curious, which in and of itself was a miracle I hadn’t felt in years.
That night, she took my heart hostage, and I lied to protect myself, telling her that the reason I’d never painted my ex-wife was because I didn’t paint the things I loved. The truth? I’d never painted anything I loved until I painted her.
I didn’t know that then.
All I knew was the flash of hurt in her eyes and the sudden epiphany that she was more. More than art, than a passing fascination, than a model who would pose and briefly inspire, and who would eventually cease to interest me.
I lied again when I said I didn’t know what I wanted from her. And again when I said I’d stop touching her.
“Tell me a true story, Deirdre, and I’ll make art for you.”
And she told me a story, vague and mostly in metaphor, about a young girl and boy who were forced to perform for others. I remember my hand with the brush freezing, falling, as I listened, because nothing I could create would be any more beautiful than the truth she was showing me.
I couldn’t not touch her then—this woman who didn’t need to be saved. This woman with so many Van Gogh layers I knew even if I spent a lifetime peeling I’d never reach bare canvas.
She sat in this very chair, her delicate fingers gripping the plastic arms, twisting like she wanted to break them. I watched her come on my fingers and decided in that moment…
I loved her.
Now, I’m living with her ghost, and nowhere do I feel her more strongly than in this studio. The place she bared herself to me for the first time. Where I saw her scars, her fear and bravery. Where we fought, and fucked, and eventually made love on a paint-smeared tarp like a scene from some cheesy B-romance movie, colors smearing on our legs and asses and congealing in our hair.
My gaze lifts to the painting entitled Pride. It depicts Deirdre as an ancient warrior-goddess, half lion half woman, standing with an expression of immense satisfaction on a battlefield of the dead, with the carcass of a man laid at her feet.
Me, of course.
Freeing myself from my pants, I fist my cock, painfully hard and aching for the woman who left me. I pump my hand hard and fast, gaze on her Mona Lisa smile. My groan as I come is pitiful, as pitiful as the tears that steal from my eyes.
For a moment, I hate her. I hate what loving her has done to me—and what loving me did to her. I was the catalyst. Nate knows it; I know it. As long as Deirdre was unhappy and alone, that fucking psycho was content to let her live her life.
But she met me. I slammed into her defenses like a bulldozer, punching and pushing through all her protective layers. Finding and exposing her under the naive assumption that my love would keep her safe. Allow her to flourish. That nothing in her past could be that bad—bad enough to warrant leaving her alone.
I was an idiot.
Destruction is not so different than creation, I’ve found. No different than sin and virtue. I can’t let her go, because just as surely as I destroyed her life, she destroyed mine. We destroyed and recreated each other.
Loving her is my greatest virtue.
And my greatest sin.
