Page 81

I want it. That part is already clear. What I do not know yet is what else I am asking for when I put that kind of control in her hands.

I loosen the willow and slide my hand free. The restraint is gone. The wanting is not.

I pick up the next strand and keep working. A few minutes later, Laura lowers her book.

“How’s it going?”

I hold up the narrow rectangle. She studies it.

“That is definitely more mat-like.”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I still do not know.”

“Just promise me you won’t put wet willow on the furniture.”

She returns to her book. I pick up the next strand.

My hands find the pattern again, but every time the willow brushes the place around my wrist, my internal rhythm changes. Across the room, Laura keeps reading. I keep weaving.

Chapter Thirteen

Laura

Two weeks after Kell came to life, he has outgrown my dining room.

Three canvases lean against the wall, one chair permanently wears a streak of blue paint, and a drop cloth covers enough of the floor that I’ve stopped pretending I’m going to fold it up between projects. The first painting is dry. The second is almost dry. The third appears to have been finished sometime yesterday while I was at work, although with Kell it’s difficult to tell the difference between finished and temporarily abandoned because another color occurred to him.

He’s standing in the dining room studying the newest one when I come in with my coffee. Paint streaks one forearm and the side of his black T-shirt, despite the apron I specifically bought him because he keeps getting paint on his clothes.

“I thought the apron was supposed to prevent that.”

He checks his shirt. “I forgot it.”

“I’m shocked.”

“No, you’re not.”

He has me there.

That first Wednesday’s vacation day somehow turned into the beginning of a routine. I went back to work Thursday, and over the next week and a half Kell stayed here, painted, ate with the enthusiasm of three men who actually require calories, and called Locke without my involvement.

Since we first started having sex, there has been something startlingly easy about reaching for him and having him reach back, about already knowing the low change in his resonance when I touch the right place and the way his hands settle on me without either of us needing to stop and negotiate every inch.

Afterward, he still goes back to the guest room. The other night I lay in the dark for a few minutes after his door closed, my body loose and pleasantly tired, the bed still warm where he’d been.

Although sex has slipped surprisingly easily into our routine, sleeping together hasn’t. Somehow, that distinction feels safer than I want to examine. I drink my coffee instead of doing anything with that.

Kell gestures toward the canvases. “They’re too small.”

I almost choke. They’re considerably larger than the paint-by-number that started all of this and are perfectly adequate by any definition I recognize.

“They’re absolutely not too small.”

“It is for what I want next.”