Read Online His Masterpiece by Ava Lore - Free Book Online

indisposition, but I found I couldn't care less about the wound. People get shot every day and for way stupider reasons. This was one scar I was going to whip out at parties and show off. I'd totally earned it and it would make a great story. So this one time I took a bullet for a guy who wasn't even my boyfriend...
    A few weeks passed and I was finally up and around again, stretching my legs, walking the length of his absurd bedroom, from the bed to the computer and back. It was only then that Malcolm started to take his eyes off me, as though he hadn't really thought my recovery was for real until he actually saw me standing on my own two feet. A tension I hadn't even known was in him disappeared.
    He began to work again, lying next to me in bed or curled up on the white couch and overstuffed chairs he had dragged up the stairs one afternoon. He'd arranged them in a little semi-circle, giving us a little suite in the bedroom. I wondered what part of the house he'd cribbed them from since I'd never had a grand tour when it was full of stuff, but when I finally trusted myself to go downstairs on my own, I was shocked to find the house still empty.
    “Where's all your junk?” I asked him when I came back up the stairs. He sat on the white couch, a book on his crossed legs as he wrote on a piece of paper.
    “I told you,” he said, “it didn't make me happy so I'm getting rid of it. I've decided that I'm not going to keep anything that doesn't make me happy.”
    I felt my mouth twist. “I liked the Rodin,” I said. “Sorry I had to ruin it.”
    A faint smile graced his lips at that. “Don't worry. I've lent it to the Museé Rodin where it will be meticulously restored and displayed, then returned. I always liked that bust, but if it makes you happy then it is a definite keeper.”
    I couldn't help but grin at that, relieved. “That's good to know.” Then he turned the piece of paper in his lap and I frowned, realizing that he wasn't writing—he was drawing. “What are you working on?” I blurted, then bit my cheek. I thought he'd given up sketching in his angry outburst on the boat.
    The look he gave me could only be described as smug. “My masterpiece,” he said.
    “Can I see?” I asked him.
    “Oh no. That would ruin it.”
    I scowled. “What, is it like a quantum masterpiece, where it's genius if you don't look at it and it sucks if you do?”
    He laughed. “No, but that's a pretty brilliant idea for a piece of art. I don't think I could pull that off, but I bet you could.”
    I blinked. “What? I haven't painted in months...”
    “You don't have to paint, just make art.” Delicately he placed the eraser of his pencil between his teeth. “Or perhaps you have already made such a piece? The theoretical piece of art that you could produce, and yet persist in not producing because you have a job and are now respectable?”
    Ouch. “I'm not that respectable,” I said.
    “Fair enough,” he replied. “But still. You should make art, Sadie.”
    He said it as though it were easy. And maybe it was. “I'll have to think about it.”
    “Do. I think you get sidetracked into other people too much and don't take care of yourself.”
    “I've been letting you take care of me, haven't I?”
    The hangdog look he gave me was almost comical. “Yes, after you took a bullet for me.”
    “Well, yeah.” I shrugged, as if that was no big deal. Brush with death? Please. The blowjob on the police moped was way more dangerous. It could have fallen over and we could have been seriously hurt. “Whatever. Are you sure I can't see it?”
    He nodded.
    “You won't even show it to the woman who took a bullet for you?”
    He snorted and shook his head. “Especially not you, my muse. You'll just have to wait and be patient.”
    I don't usually pout, but I was sorely tempted to do so. If there's one way to get me all worked up about something, it's forbidding me from it. I huffed and sighed very passive-aggressively for a