Fearless (The Story of Samantha Smith #1) (22 page)

I blinked several times. “You caught me.”

He slid his palm across my cheek and ran his thumb across my bottom lip. I didn’t want him to stop touching me. Ever.

My lips parted and my eyes narrowed in response to the whirlwind of ecstasy emanating from his touch. I felt heat swim out from my core. My legs shook. It wasn’t the adrenalin from almost falling. It was Christos. I wanted him to kiss me. Badly.

His eyes clamped shut. Sighing deeply, he touched his forehead gently to mine. “We can’t do this.”

I looked up at him.
Please, kiss me. Please.

He straightened and rubbed my back vigorously, like a parent would. I clenched my arms around him.
No.
My cheek rested against his chest.

An image of his naked butt thrusting into Paisley flashed in my mind. I broke our embrace and pulled back. I forgot that the cliff was behind me.

“Be careful,” he said. “You don’t want to fall again.” He grabbed my shoulders, pulling me away from the edge.
 

My eyes flashed with anger. “What would you care anyway? I’m just your student. Or mentee, or whatever.”

“No, you’re not. You’re more than that.”

“No, I’m not!
Paisley
is more than that.”

“Paisley is less than that. She’s a girl I see now and then. We have an agreement. We like each other.”

“You
like
her?” I shouted.

“I like a lot of people.”

“But you don’t like me!”

“You know that’s not true. I wouldn’t be doing this mentoring thing if I didn’t like you. And see your potential.”

“I don’t care about my potential!”

“I do.”

I opened my mouth to shout more, then snapped it shut. Why did he insist on being so thoughtful and reasonable and concerned? Like my parents. That wasn’t what I wanted from him. I didn’t need anymore parenting than I already had. Impending tears burned my eyes.
 

What was this man doing to me? He was making me a total wreck.

I tried to go around him, but I was caged in his arms. “Let go of me.”

He backed up a step and released me.

I considered running, but I couldn’t. I noticed his sketchbook lying on the ground, so I picked it up to hand it to him. It opened in my hands to the page he’d been working on. The page had been folded part way over, but I could see that he had been drawing an incredibly realistic portrait of me. And I looked beautiful. Did I look like that? Is that how he saw me? “It’s so good, Christos. I look…beautiful.”

“It’s easy to make you look beautiful.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Why was he doing this to me? It was breaking my heart. I looked into his eyes. I wanted him more than anything I’d ever wanted. But he wouldn’t give himself to me.
 

I did the only thing I could. If he was going to drive a wedge between us, then I was going to help him swing the hammer.

A storm of cattiness boiled up inside me. I rolled my eyes at him.“You probably take Paisley and every other girl up here to draw them, just so you can get their pants off.”

“I don’t.”

“Are you saying you don’t have to take their pants off? Because all of them drop their pants for you when they walk in the door?”

“No.”

“Yes,” I snarled. “Tiffany and all the girls in your paintings. You don’t even have to ask them to get naked. They do it so they can be in your stupid trophy room. It probably makes them feel special.” Unlike me.

I didn’t have time to realize how nasty I sounded. I was too busy covering up my pain.

“They’re not trophy paintings,” he said quietly.

I was on a roll. I mimicked his earlier words in a snide voice, “‘You’re seeing their true self,’ or whatever bullshit you tell yourself. And them. I’m sure they eat it up with a spoon. You take the most intimate piece of them and put it on a canvas for all the world to see. That’s terrible. You’re invading their privacy. It’s foul.”

His head hung, his expression dark and heavy.

“So why did you take me up here, anyway? So we could draw the stupid view and sit on the stupid bench?”

His nostrils suddenly flared. “Stupid? Is that what you think?”
 

“Yeah, it’s stupid. You’ve probably fucked every one one of your girlfriends right here on that bench.”

He shook his head. “None of them,” he said hoarsely.

“None what?” I was bitchiness incarnate. I didn’t know how to stop myself. It was easier being angry at
him
than feeling all the hurt and rejection that was suffocating
me
. I desperately walled my pain behind anger. If I didn’t, I feared I was going to run off the cliff and dive headfirst to my death. Being dead sounded easier than feeling what was killing me in that moment.

He grit his teeth. “I haven’t taken any women up here. Ever.”

“Bullshit!” I spat. I was horrible.

“My grandfather has been coming up here to paint for forty years. He built that bench himself. He brought my dad up here almost every day when he was a kid. My dad brought
me
up here since I was a baby. When I was two years old, my dad put me on his lap and put a pencil in my hand and taught me how to draw. Right on this bench. This place is sacred to me. No one comes up here, except family.”
 

My eyes goggled. I stopped myself before I could do more damage with my runaway mouth. But I was afraid it was too late.

I remembered the photos on his grandfather’s mantle. The shining love between Christos and his father. What happened to his father? Christos never mentioned him. Was he dead or something?

I didn’t know the answer to that, but I did know I had unwittingly trampled on Christos’ precious memories of his dad.

Another thought spun my mind out of control. What did Christos mean only family came up here? I wasn’t his family. Why was he calling me family?
 

A second later, everything collided together in my head.
Oh my god.
I realized Christos was as confused and mixed up about us as I was.

He shouldered past me and stormed down the hill before I could protest.

My stomach tightened and nausea clenched my guts.
 

I still held his sketchbook. “Wait! Christos!” I trotted after him.

He bounded down the trail like a jungle cat. Clouds of dust billowed behind him.
 

I couldn’t keep up. “Christos!”

What had I done?

Not only was my pain eating away at me, it was biting into Christos. I was destroying the man I wanted because I couldn’t have him.

As I jogged down the hill, I hoped that I would trip and break my neck. Unfortunately, I was so overwhelmed with emotion, I couldn’t breathe. I ran out of air after a short distance and slowed to a walk.
 

To my dismay, I made it to the bottom without killing myself. I trudged the rest of the way to Christos’ house. My legs felt like lead. My heart was even heavier.

His motorcycle was gone. I climbed into my VW and drove toward home.

Chapter 15

Back at my apartment, I grabbed a spoon and a pint of ice cream from the freezer, and collapsed on my couch with my sugary contraband.

Despite all the drama in my life since college started, I’d miraculously managed to keep my binging to a minimum thus far, compared to previous years.

Tonight, I decided to relax my rules and indulge whole hog. Pun intended.

The ice cream went down so smoothly. At first, I was consumed by the intoxicating effects of the junk food. Oh, sweet surrender. But when I was half past full, I pushed away the empty ice cream carton with disdain.

Although I’d only eaten a single pint, I was disgusted with my lack of self control, not only with my binging, but with all the horrible things I’d said to Christos.

I seriously considered dashing to the freezer and chucking all the remaining ice cream into a trash bag and running it down to the dumpster outside.

But that felt as chaotic as my binging. I did my best to calm myself. I would use will-power to make a wise choice. Not heat-of-the-moment extremism.

Hands on hips, I looked around my apartment for something, anything, to distract myself. I went into my bedroom and dug through my make up kit. Found what I was looking for at the bottom.

Black nail polish. I still had some left. I never should have stripped it off a few weeks back. But that wasn’t really the point. There was something therapeutic about the application process. And once it was on, you were forced to sit and do nothing until it dried.

A form of fashion-induced straight jacketing. It was the best I could come up with on short notice.

I sat on the couch and brushed black onto my index finger.

Emo.

Shut up.

Goth

I brushed polish onto my middle finger, and paused for a moment to curl my other fingers and flip myself off.
 

Fuck you
, from me. Fake smile. Bitch.

Witch.

So what? So fucking what?
I didn’t care what people called me. I had problems they couldn’t begin to fathom. So I armored myself behind black.

I spread my wet nails in front of me and smiled. My old friend, isolation.

The only problem with isolation was that you had to listen to the voices inside your head.

Bitch. Slut. Whore.

I considered calling Madison. She was more than likely tied up with Jake, having a good time while I drowned in bad memories.
 

Tease.

Besides. I didn’t want to dwell on my past. I’d had enough of it.

Taylor.

Fucking shut up!
I decided to willpower my way out of this.

If I was going to reinvent myself, like I’d promised myself when I enrolled at SDU, I needed to shed the black nails and the bad memories for good. At this point, my skin was golden brown and my dishwater hair had lightened noticeably from the lemon juice rinses and all the time I’d spent in the sun with Madison. I wasn’t ready to throw away all my hard work.

I dug out the acetone and wiped all of the polish off.
Fuck you, black. I ain’t never going back.

I remembered I still had Christos’ sketchbook. I retrieved it from my backpack and paged through it.
 

His drawings were amazing. Everything he drew looked so real. He was such an incredible artist compared to me.

Despair slipped in beneath my awareness. Who was I fooling? My parents were totally right about the Accounting.

After my blow out with Christos, the mentoring was probably over. How was I going to keep making progress without his extra help?
 

Every phone call with my parents since the last one was more of the same. Them ramming caution down my throat.

I turned to the last drawing in his sketchbook. The one with my portrait. I folded back the crease at the bottom of the page that covered everything from the chin down.

Beneath my face, Christos had drawn a cartoon body, like one of those novelty caricature drawings you get at amusement parks. He had depicted me wearing an artist’s smock, and I stood in front of an easel and canvas, holding a palette of paint in one hand, and a brush in the other. Beneath my body were block letters that read “World Famous Master Artist Samantha Smith.” Below that, in cursive, “You can totally do it!”

Had he meant this as a gift?
 

Now I felt like a complete asshole. An immature baby. What was wrong with me? Christos was so totally supportive of my dreams. He encouraged me in a way my parents never could. They worried about getting beaten down by life. He looked upward, toward the heavens, where dreams were fulfilled.

With him gone, I was lost.

I would be right back to where I was when I left D.C.

Emo. Goth. Sorceress.

Running away when my fingers got burned.

Tease.

Running away from my pain.

Suicide Watch.

Always running away from what I knew was right.

Taylor.

That name. I had tried so hard to block it out. I hated that name. It was still dragging me down. Because of the shame. Because of the guilt.

Because of the lies. The ones I still told myself every day.
 

I couldn’t let myself think about the truth or I would slit my wrists. Literally.

Taylor.

Every time I thought of that name, it enticed me to run away from my own life.
 

Taylor.

Because of the one I’d ruined.

Taylor.

It was too much.

Taylor.

It wasn’t my fault.

Suicide Watch.

It was all my fault.

Tease.

I couldn’t let it go. The anger, the hatred, the disrespect for basic human life.

The selfishness.

Taylor.

I grabbed my purse and car keys and ran out the front door, eyes swimming with tears. I sped down the freeway in my VW, sobbing uncontrollably, hoping I would be pulled over for speeding, or spin my car out of control into the cement column of an overpass. Anything to silence the insanity boiling through my veins.

At some point, my cell phone rang. I dug my phone out of my purse one-handed, welcoming the distraction, secretly hoping it was Christos.

“Huh, huh, hello?” I mumbled through tears.

“SAM!” Romeo squealed. “Where have you BEEN, girlfriend!!!”

I broke into more sobs. It wasn’t Christos like I’d hoped. I blubbered.

“Sam? Are you humping a yak? What’s that noise, Sam?” Romeo chuckled. “You’re humping a yak, aren’t you?”

My sobs lightened and transformed into crying and laughing.

“Did you kill the yak, Sam? Did he die of auto-erotic asphyxiation? You must be pretty good in the sack, girl.”

I chuckled through snotty tears. The picture he painted seemed so morbidly comical, I couldn’t take it seriously.

“Necro-bestiality is a serious crime, Sam.” I could hear him grinning.

I cried a coughing laugh.

“Do you need help getting rid of the body? I know a guy who knows a guy. We can sell it as deer meat. No one will know.”