Page 16 of Knot a Bad Idea
I never did.
Hunter gives me silence. At first, I feel his eyes on me, but the longer I paint, the less I notice it.
I paint until the sun starts to set and the homes on the hills turn their lights on. Hunter stays by me, and occasionally I hear the sketching of his pencil.
Eventually, I set the paintbrush down and heave a sigh. Hunter joins me by my side and crosses his arms, taking in the canvas.
“How do you feel?” he asks me softly.
I stare at my creation.
It’s a mess of muddled colors, splotches of muddied browns and blacks decorating the surface. Slashes of red cross through it, along with splatters of greens, blues, and purples.
It’s how my mind feels most of the time.
A cloud of darkness, with the occasional color peeking out.
“Better,” I answer honestly.
Hunter nods. “I like it,” he says carefully.
“Like it?” I turn to look at his amused expression. “Hunter, it’s a shitshow. All I did was think about everything fucked up in my head.”
He nods. “And now it’s out of you and on the canvas.” He smiles before his eyes fall back to my painting.
And suddenly, I get it.
I understand what he did for me, and why he took me here.
It’s out of you and on the canvas.
“Do you have a pair of scissors?” I ask him.
“Sure, baby.” He heads over to the drawer of supplies against the wall and hands me a thick metal pair.
And because Hunter won’t judge me, and it’s obvious he knows what I’m about to do, I don’t hold back as I stab the canvas over and over, destroying the chaos that was inside of me.I grit my teeth as I do it, my fist aching from the force I apply to the scissors.
I stab, I cut, and I tear at my painting until it’s ruined beyond repair.
And when I hand the scissors wordlessly back to him, he watches me carefully.
“Better?” he asks.
I nod. “Much.”
He gives me a lopsided smile. “Well, now that that’s over…are you hungry?”
My stomach gurgles in response, and he laughs.
“One of these days,”he says, watching as I pick a grape off my plate, “I’m going to have you sit on my lap so I can feed you.”
I raise an eyebrow. “That is…a very strange thing to say to someone. And absolutely not.”
His gold eyes glimmer while he takes a bite of his sandwich. “Not even once?”
“No, you psycho, not even once. I’m not a child.”
Hunter said he brought snacks—he brought afeast. He packed us sandwiches, fruit and cheese, and a bottle of wine in a cooler, and we set up a makeshift dinner table in the far corner of the studio away from all the supplies. Strawberry macarons are for dessert, which he picked up at a local bakery while I was in Heat.