Bartered Betrayal - The Billionaire's Wife 08 (2 page)

I blushed. “Could... could I borrow a few dollars?” I asked. A few dollars could get me almost a week's worth of ramen. I wasn't sure what I would cook it in, but if worst came to worst I could just eat a block of dried noodles and call it a day. I'd done it before. I have a lot of flaws, but pride, I don't think, is one of them.

“Haven't you made up with your husband yet?” she demanded. “Seems like you should talk to him or something.”

I stared at her. “I haven't even been gone for a full day,” I said.

“So?” She waved a bony hand at me. “Time is wasting. Isn't your head on straight by now?”

I barked out a disbelieving laugh. “I've been trying to get my head on straight for years,” I told her. “I did therapy with, like, three different counselors before—”

“Bored,” she said. “You are boring me. If I give you five dollars will you go away?”

I shut my mouth and nodded.

She slammed the door in my face. I heard her rummaging around in her apartment before the door opened again and she shoved a five dollar bill in my hand. “Here,” she said. “Go get something to eat, and then for God's sake go home.”

“I am home,” I told her.

“You are married now, this is not your home!”

My eyes stung. “What matters to me is still here,” I said, and it wasn't a lie. My clay. My tools. My art. Why had I left it here? Why hadn't I come back? Had I really been so swept up with Anton and planning my stupid wedding, pleasing my husband and my mother, that I'd just... stopped being an artist?

Stopped being me?

Well, yeah. I'd already had that little revelation about ten times. But the realization that I hadn't touched clay in almost a month hit me like a bolt of lightning. I needed to sculpt. That would help me work through my problems, wouldn't it? And even if it didn't I'd have a nice piece of art at the end.

“Yes, well,” Mrs. Andersen said, oblivious to the personal revelations occurring in front of her, “go get to it. And be quiet while you do.” And she shut the door again.

Thoughtfully, I walked downstairs and out of the building, running on autopilot to the nearest S & S. The wind was fierce and the sky full of clouds, but I barely noticed the weather. I was too busy thinking about clay.

Just like Anton, clay was experiential. It could only be experienced, rather than thought about, but that didn't stop me from trying. By the time I checked out with ten packages of ramen and two dollars and change left over, my fingers were itching to get to work. Flipping my hood up over my head, I jogged back to my apartment. I was almost in the front door when I realized someone was watching me.

He wasn't even being subtle about it. Just sort of standing there, huddled in the wind and sucking on a cigarette, staring at my building door. The second he saw me, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a camera.

Paparazzo. Fuck.

I thought about flipping him the bird while he took my picture. I really did. But then I realized that any attention I gave him would just be juicy fodder for the gossip mill, and I turned my head away so he wouldn't catch my face, which probably looked horrible since I'd slept in my makeup. Keeping my hood between him and me, I ran up the steps and into the building, and I didn't breathe easily until I was in my apartment again, locking the door behind me.

I ate two packages of ramen, raw and dry. They reminded me of the really lean times, the times when I had no money for anything but clay and shit food, and when I let the rent notices pile up. I could have called my parents and had money, but I hadn't. I'd wanted to be my own person. Sure, sometimes Mom sent me a hundred bucks just because she worried about me, but I'd only had to ask her for money a couple of times, and those were to move out of a place I could no longer afford. The rest of the time, I'd been going it alone. Being a starving artist. It wasn't half as romantic as it seemed. Dry ramen noodles get pretty old after a while, but right now, they were my connection to what I'd wanted to do, what I'd wanted to be when I was younger.

I'd never wanted to marry a rich man who didn't love me. But I had.

I munched on the noodles and stared into space until I finally felt like a shadow of my old self.

I should sculpt,
I thought to myself.
I should make something.
Making something would calm me down. Soothe me. Some kind of purpose. Anything other than knocking around this shitty apartment, waiting for my heart to heal back together.

I stood up and brushed the ramen noodle crumbs from my hoodie front. I'd left Anton's house wearing my old work clothes, and there was nothing I wanted to do more than get them filthy with clay.

I stalked over to my work area. I kept my clay in huge buckets, sealed well so as to keep them wet and easy to work with. It was cold in the apartment so it was going to be a little bit harder than I normally liked, but a good challenge would get my mind off things. My fingernails had grown in the past few weeks, between when I had ceased making art and started fucking Anton. I didn't have anything to cut them with, though, so I went ahead and dug in.

Huge lumps of cold gray clay came up in my hands, and I began to knead them together, pushing and pulling, squeezing and pounding. The rhythm relaxed me, putting my head into a soft space, a place where it was okay that I wasn't thinking, or eating, or sleeping, or crying. I just was. The smell of clay filled my nose, sweet and earthy and familiar.

I worked for a while, not letting myself think or feel anything, just letting myself build and move. I didn't have an armature to work with, but that was okay. I didn't have a plan, but I could always scavenge something from the dumpsters to use. I mean, I'm not picky or anything. An old kitchen chair is really solid. A lot of my pieces are kind of weird looking because I used whatever I could find to support the clay while I built my work. It's rare I don't start out with a plan and have to adjust to what I can afford, but right now I didn't have any kind of a plan. No plan for my life. No plan for my art. I was betting they would work out with equal degrees of success.

When I finally let myself surface, I found I had a huge lump of clay that looked like... well, like a huge lump of clay. My arms ached. My normal spate of activity is twenty or thirty minutes with the clay. I'd been at it almost an hour. Exhausted, I sat down on my mattress and stared at the piece.

It hunched in the middle of my floor, heavy and cold. Lifeless. But inside it, I knew, there was something waiting to emerge. The promise of something sweet and beautiful, just waiting for me to find it. Perhaps that was what I had been thinking when I'd first become involved with Anton. I mean, yes, we coupled out of convenience and necessity—at least, I thought it had been necessary—but no matter what I have in front of me, I know something beautiful can come from it. It just takes a little time and patience.

Maybe that's why I trusted my father. Not stupidity, but sheer, dumb optimism. Which can be remarkably like stupidity, but perhaps is a more charitable interpretation of my motives. I'd wanted to save my mother. I've always wanted to save my mother. Save her from her own dumb decisions, from her bullheaded devotion to a terrible man. I've always wanted a father who I could trust, who I could have secrets with. Dumb little secrets, I mean, like who actually ate all the peanut butter straight from the jar, not secrets like keeping my mouth shut about his latest secretary sneaking out through the utility room window, or secrets like marrying a man I didn't even know to save his ruined ass. And maybe that's why I let myself fall into Anton. Because I thought I could make something beautiful from it.

And it had been beautiful in its own way. His touch, his mastery of my body, his locked heart, his iron control... they were all beautiful, like an old chipped china cup is beautiful, all the more lovely for its flaws and its history. Anton's history was a mystery to me, but I saw the scars of it on him all the same. I knew that when we fucked, he found something approaching catharsis. I knew that he wanted me to be happy with him, and he'd done what he could to facilitate that with the only thing he had that he knew I needed—money. I knew that he didn't understand family, or much about interpersonal relationships.

He was kind of a goon, to be honest. A really fucking sexy goon, with oodles of magnetic appeal and just the right amount of distance from humanity to make him a force to be reckoned with in the cutthroat world of business, but he was a bit awkward, to tell the truth. And I liked that about him. It made him human instead of a sociopathic sex god. I'd seen my way into him from his very isolation.

I rubbed my hands over my face, no doubt leaving streaks of clay over my cheeks. Now, all that was well and good, but what did it mean?

It meant I had to get over being angry with him before we could move forward. It meant I had to show him that I did want love in our marriage, even if he didn't. It meant I had to show him that I could be the one he could trust with his heart and his feelings. He'd been hurt very badly—anyone could see that—and he'd channeled that into an obsessive need to control his own life, and anyone that messed with that was an enemy to him. I was his companion, not his enemy. I wanted him to know that he could count on me. He really, really could.

But words are words, and actions are actions, and I was pretty bad at both. There wasn't really anything I could do to show him how I felt if he kept himself locked down so tightly no light could get in.

I stared at the lump of clay in the middle of my floor, then got up and began to pace.

I passed in front of the windows several times before I realized that the photographer might still be down there, snapping photos of me in my apartment. I paused, then looked down into the street.

He
was
still there, watching the door, waiting for me to come out. Christ, didn't these guys have anything better to do? What would they do if I started rooting through the garbage as I went in search of armature supplies?

A slow, bitter smile spread across my face, completely at odds with the misery inside me.

Why not find out?

*

All right, I'll be honest. It is a little embarrassing to know that some guy is photographing you as you hit every dumpster from your apartment to Queens. No one wants to be seen doing that. But when I found a huge dining room table that someone had decided was just too splintered to be usable any more, it took me about three seconds to decide what to do.

Rubbing my freezing hands together, I looked both ways and crossed the street, walking straight up to my trailing paparazzo.

"Hey," I said when I got near enough to him to be heard. A panicked look crossed his face—I don't think he realized I was specifically approaching him, and he'd probably assumed I'd gone mad with grief or something. I was sure someone was gossiping about my marriage and everyone was sure to have heard about it by now. Why else would I be moping around in my old apartment? So I got quite close before he realized he should probably have been bolting down a side-alley.

I put up a hand. "Wait! Don't go anywhere, I need your help."

"Yeah?" he said. He gave me the sort of look I'm sure lambs like to give wolves, which was pretty fucking funny given my history with the paparazzi. But I forced a smile on my face.

"Yeah," I replied. "I need you to help me break the legs off this table. You think you can do that?"

He squinted across the street, peering into the alley where I'd been ineffectually tugging at the dining room table for several minutes. My hands were so cold that any touch sent little spears of pain through my fingers. Meanwhile Mr. Paparrazo Moneybags had a pair of thick gloves.

"Why?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Does it matter?"

He grinned without humor. "Yeah, it matters if you're gonna knock my block off with one of those table legs."

I arched an eyebrow. "Is there a reason I should?"

"Oh. Oh, no. Of course not. I'm just saying..."

I was certain now that he was one of the photographers that took pictures of Anton and me during our more intimate moments. But whatever. I had worse things to deal with now. "I'm going to use it to make a sculpture," I said. "I need it to hold up my clay."

He looked faintly surprised. "Oh, you're an artist?" he said.

"Starving," I told him. "Didn't you read all the profiles on me in the papers?"

He shrugged. "Nah, I just take pictures."

"Right. So. Want to help?"

He appeared to consider this for a moment. It probably sounded an awful lot like work to some guy who spent all his time hanging out around famous people's apartments hoping to catch a shot of them in their skivvies. But after a second he nodded. "Yeah, all right," he said.

The work went a lot easier with his help. His name was Jake and he was a skinny guy, but he could kick like a mule, and in less than ten minutes we had the legs off the table and I was moving on to the next dumpster. He fell in beside me, since we were apparently friends now.

"So," he said after about half a block, "what are you making?"

"A sculpture," I said.

"Yeah, I know that," he told me. "What kind?"

"I'm not telling you," I said. "You'll just tell whoever writes those little blind items or whatever and then it won't be a surprise."

"It's a surprise?"

To more than just you, I thought. "Yeah, it's a surprise," I told him. "A nice surprise for good little paparazzi who take pictures of me naked."

He blushed red at that. "Hey, I never took pictures of you naked," he said.

"But you have taken pictures of me?" The spanking pictures maybe?

"I plead the fifth."

I shook my head. The damage was done. And it didn't really matter now anyway. "Well, stick around. Maybe you'll see what I'm making."

"Can I take pictures of it?"

I slowed down. I hadn't thought about that. An idea started to form in my head.

"Yeah..." I said after a minute. "You can. You can take pictures while I'm making it, even."