Games People Play by Shelby Reed

much. Beyond healing. Maybe it really was escape, a black hole where reality didn’t exist—the reality Colm had given her.
    The thought echoed in his brain as he climbed the steps to the cabin porch. He slammed the door hard behind him and strode straight to the shower, stripping as he went and leaving his clothing in a trail behind him. He felt so filthy. The shower beat hot on his shoulders, hot enough to sting his skin, and he let it, burning himself with its fire, nothing as hot as the hell he secreted away. He braced his palms on the shower wall and hung his head, breathing the steam in slow inhalations and cleansing away the mud clouding his conscience until the water turned cold.
    When he climbed out, someone knocked at the cabin door. He wrapped a towel around his hips, not bothering to dry off whatsoever, and crossed the living room to answer it.
    Sydney stood there in a paint-stained man’s shirt and torn jeans, her blue eyes wide in the glow from the porch lights. Her gaze darted down his body and away before she said, “I didn’t mean to drag you out of the shower.”
    “I was done.” He fought the urge to shiver in the chilly night air and leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb, enjoying the sight of her a little too much. “What can I do for you?”
    She hesitated. “I know it’s late, but can you come pose for a while? I feel a sudden drive to work on your portrait.”
    “Let me get dressed.” He backed up and opened the door wider. “Come in.”
    Glancing at the threshold as though it were the line between her feet and hell’s fire, she shook her head. “I’ll meet you in the studio.”
    “It’ll just take a second. We’ll walk over together.”
    But she backed off the porch, her arms wrapped around herself as though he were something menacing, as though she sensed the threat he was. And before he could say anything more, she’d disappeared into the darkness.
    * * *
    S ade wound serpentine vocals around Sydney’s senses as she mixed colors on her palette, tan, more white, less burnt umber, a touch of crimson. Her hands were shaking. This wouldn’t bode well for the portrait, but she didn’t care. She needed to paint, to remember who she was—not the statue to Max’s Pygmalion, not some ingénue anymore, but herself, the self she’d lost. Maybe Max was planning to replace her with the artist from Chicago. She knew him well enough to recognize the signs, and finally understood that the tension between them in the last few weeks had been leading up to the moment at dinner tonight when he mentioned his new client. Doubtless Sydney would never know the truth, but the mere suspicion fed the late-night drive she was experiencing to get something, anything, on canvas, to remind herself of the artist she was . . . and at long last to paint what she loved. Bodies in motion, love and emotion and faces of all kinds, ugly, beautiful, mesmerizing.
    She would start with Colm, beauty personified. She would entangle him with other models in compositions of muscles and flesh and lithe limbs, and find her deepest desires again through the voyeurism of an artist’s eyes.
    Tonight’s dinner didn’t matter. Max’s threats didn’t, either. Nor Max.
    Colm hardly made a sound when he entered the studio, closing the door softly behind him. She didn’t look at him until he reached the platform, where he shucked his leather jacket, kicked off his shoes, and stripped off his long-sleeved T-shirt without asking her what she wanted for this session.
    Sydney decided not to break the peace with unnecessary conversation. She worked a brush into her palette and added the gleam to his image’s shoulders cast by the work light. His pectorals were firm, sculpted, his nipples hard from the draft in the studio. When he shivered, she ignored it and kept working. His expression was as set and determined as she felt tonight.
    It wasn’t enough, the shoulders, the chest. Setting aside her brush and palette, she