Read Online Painting With Fire by K. B. Jensen - Free Book Online Page A

Tom for one hundred reasons. She had one hundred reasons not to sleep, didn’t she? She had one hundred reasons to toss and turn.
    Claudia couldn’t fall back asleep, so she just lay there, like a corpse with her hands folded on her belly clasped in an unuttered prayer. She breathed deeply and rhythmically. But the sleep wouldn’t come.
    She should just get it over with and ask him again. But the thought made her heart pound. The few times she had started to ask, her hands started to shake involuntarily. That’s how nervous she had gotten around him lately. It was silly. Here she was, a grown woman with a close male roommate and they had built their whole home life together around not talking about anything serious, avoiding all their real problems.
    She got up, tied the string on her pajama pants and walked around the living room looking at his pictures. She couldn’t imagine going back to empty, white walls. She loved the paintings.
    One of her favorite pictures was propped up on the wooden bookshelf. It was of a little girl walking down a lane full of sunflowers. They were taller than she was. Maybe it wasn’t a little girl, but a young woman. It was hard to tell. She was dwarfed by the flowers and her hair hung in braids. Claudia liked the picture because the scale was all Alice in Wonderland. She stared and stared at the image and then went back to bed.
    She fell asleep thinking of giant sunflowers and walking down the winding path into a distant, lush, green forest. The n, she started to dream about them swaying in the breeze, snapping a tall stem and carrying the flower like a parasol under the sun. Tom was suddenly carrying his own parasol and twirling it around. “Art can heal,” he said.
    “You always say dreams mean something,” she said. “What does this one mean?”
    “I don’t know, Claude, you tell me.” He leaned over and kissed her. She woke up gasping with thoughts whirling in her head again.
    What had he done and would it make a difference, she wondered.
    She ran through the list of possible offenses in her head. She could forgive shop lifting but not drunk driving, she thought. Smoking a joint was not the end of the world but felony drug possession was not OK. What was she even thinking? She thought. There was no way Tom could have done hard drugs and still have his brains. Well, maybe shoplifting, she decided. She could see him stealing art supplies. Canvases are expensive. He told her so all the time.
    It was the same endless loop of worry playing like a bad recording. Who killed Steve Jackson? What was Tom’s real past?
    For a moment, she lay in her bed, listening to the sounds of the birds and the rain. A sea gull squawked over the whoosh of cars slicing through the water and the low rumble roar of engines.
    The new spring leaves outside the window were bright, freshly washed green. Even the building across the street seemed cleaner. The black blemishes of pollution seemed to shrink against the old brick and stones.
    She stumbled out of bed and saw Tom sitting on the couch in his boxers.
    “How’d you sleep?” he asked.
    “Like shit,” she scratched her head under the tangled misshapen mess of hair. “I need to stop thinking about this murder.”
    “ Sometimes there is such a thing as knowing too much about people,” he said.
    “ I know,” she said.
    “You’ve got one of those faces,” Tom said, touching her cheek. “People think they can trust you and you care. With a face like yours, it seems so easy to spill secrets.”
    “I know what you mean. People are always telling me crazy shit about themselves,” she said. “Except you.”
    “What do you mean?” he asked.
    “Tom, do you have a criminal record?”
    “No,” he said quickly. “Of course not.”
    S he sighed. “Then why did Detective Stan tell me you did.”
    “It was stupid, juvenile shit, Claude,” he said. “It shouldn’t count.”
    “Great, so you just lied to me then,” she said. “Why didn’t