I stepped forward to get closer to the…painting, then stepped back and tilted my head to the side. I repeated this routine once more and finally asked, “What’s he doing with the fork?”

“It’s a demon consuming the fallen souls of humanity.”

I rolled my eyes, and thank God he didn’t see me. I needed to keep that attitude in check if I didn’t want him to stab me with a fork.

“You don’t like it?” he asked, affronted.

“Hang on.” I put my hand up and waved it around to the top of the painting. “What’s going on with the demon guy’s tongue?” There was literally a forked tongue, one half apparently impaling a woman vaginally and the other half sodomizing a man.

“The demon is showing the humans the cost of their sexual depravity,” he explained.

Well, if this painting was anything to go by, I knew what Hell had in store for me.

I finished my drink, turned to him, and said, “I can’t move in with you Goya. I like my place, and I don’t want to leave it.”

“That’s fine,” he said with his own brand of practiced ease and shrugged. “I can move in with you.”

No. No no no no no no no.

“I have to go,” I blurted, turned on my heel, and got the hell out of there.

Holst

A week had gone by and I’d not yet heard or seen Katherine. I took all the paperwork to her apartment, just as she’d requested, and within twenty-four hours, she’d returned everything back to me.

By messenger.

I had no intention of pushing her. There was a war going on inside Katherine, and I could see it happening. I witnessed the exact moment when she’d made up her mind. Her declaration that she never went back on her word had a deeper meaning. There was much more to Katherine, and each and every time I was in her presence, I felt a pull to learn exactly what it was.

The invitation to her boyfriend’s exhibit had been given to me by Frodo, the man who finished the tattoo on my leg and set the ball in motion for the coffee shop. I figured that giving my support to Katherine’s partner was a show of good faith. No matter my attraction to her, she was involved with someone else, and I, of course, respected that.

I remembered learning about the Spanish painter, Goya, and knowing Katherine’s boyfriend had been greatly influenced by him, I was intrigued. As I walked through the exhibit, I saw this Goya wasn’t an imposter; he had his own style, which was obvious, even to someone untrained like myself. The similarities lied in the imagery, the topics: dark, depressing stories from the bible or Greek Mythology. Yes, Mark “Goya” Espinoza was talented, but there was nothing beautiful in his art. My one requirement in any kind of artwork was to gaze upon something beautiful, and from his hand, I had yet to see beauty…that was, until the very end of the exhibit. Mark had painted his lover, Katherine, and captured every emotional nuance of her within that frame.

Breathtaking.

I knew she’d be there, or assumed she would, but I wasn’t fully prepared for the vision of Katherine. She was wearing—barely—a black dress, tight, made of four large Xs. It started mid-thigh and crossed below her shoulders, the pattern showing a diamond patch of tan skin on each side of her ribs, her stomach, and her lower back. She finished it off with shoes that invited a man to hold the heel while she rode him, and a long scarf that would’ve been perfect to tie her to the bed while he returned the favor.

I recognized mystery and pain in Katherine, just as Mark did in his depiction of her. From her blond locks to her pale brown eyes and a blush she probably wasn’t even aware she wore. That portrait was created by the hand of a man in love. She was his muse, but at that very moment, I looked to see his hand wrapped around her arm, too tight, roughly yanking her to his side. She quickly tugged herself away and hastily retreated to the front entrance of the art college.

It was none of my business, and it wasn’t my place, but I followed, because his handling of Katherine absolutely made the blood beneath the surface of my skin boil. I felt my fists curl and prepared for whatever might happen when I confronted this man.

The art college, tucked into the hills deep in Laguna Canyon, was poorly lit. My apartment was a block from Pacific Coast Highway, densely populated, houses practically stacked one on top of the other, but still, coyotes bravely came looking for food, forced there by building projects. A woman should not be in the canyon on her own, and not just because of hungry coyotes. I doubted she’d had time to call a cab, so I would intervene if necessary, if only to offer her a ride home.

I moved toward the two figures, quite hidden in the shadows, and that’s when I overheard Goya’s words to Katherine.

“I have given you everything, Kath. No one else. I have never let anyone else into my life before you.”

“Mark—” she began.

“And you walk out of my exhibit, out of my life?”

“Mark, I’m sorry, just let me—”

“You’re over thirty,” he told her softly. But his gentility was only there to falsely cushion the blow he was about to deal. “And for now, you can use those long legs, firm ass, and great smile to get laid. But another, what, eight years, your looks will dim. You’ll be the middle-aged slut trying to pick up thirty-year-olds, in your mind thinking you’re still the beautiful woman I’m looking at now. The problem for you is, you’ll be almost forty. And the men like me, the ones that would have taken you at thirty and kept you, married you…they won’t give you that second chance. Five years from now, I see you in the same bar, I don’t care how good you look, Kath. I’ll fuck the new batch of thirty-year old pussy. I’ll still be able to have a family with them, but you’ll be alone and too old to give any man over the age of forty what he really wants. And you know it.”

Fuckin’ hell.

“Mark.” Her voice broke as she said his name. I knew she didn’t want him. She was too good for him anyway, but for any woman to endure what he’d just said, I wanted to sweep her up into my arms and carry her away. Kick the living shit out of him, and then carry her away.

I moved silently toward them and watched as he closed the distance between them and said, “Beg.”

“Excuse me?” she asked, her words weak as she spoke them.

“You’ll change your mind, and when you do, I expect you to beg.”

She stepped back, rolled her shoulders, and arranged her wrap, giving herself time to rise from the ashes. “You’re gonna need to lower your expectations then. And Mark?” she spat, using his given name, apparently something he hated almost as much as she did. “If I had to name that last painting with the forked tongue in the guy’s ass? I’d call it Abomination in Oil. It makes me want to slit my fucking wrists.”

“Then it did what it was supposed to do. It invoked a powerful reaction from you.”

I understood what Frodo meant when he mentioned the man had a sizable ego. Katherine walked back to him. Her first words were too quiet for me to hear, but the finale, was loud and clear.

“…never asked why I refused to give you more because you think you love me, but I know what it is to not have your love returned, Mark. I know what that one-sided feeling is like, and if you really loved me,” she said with a finger in his chest, “you’d be the one begging me to make that pain stop.”

I could see the physical reaction as her words manifested in him. “Kath…I’m sorry, I overreacted and—”

“No.” She pushed him, forcing him to step back from her. “I told you from the beginning. I made you no promises, and this is exactly why. This isn’t the first time I’ve been in this situation, Mark. But I have the decency to tell the people I’m with it’ll never be more.”