Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Rian sighed, letting his gaze drift over the classroom, past the rows of tables and to the little work area Chris had claimed for himself. Just as he had every day, Chris bent over his wisteria sculpture, completely absorbed in those fine details to the point where Rian was starting to wonder if, for some reason, Chris was putting off firing it, committing those details to their final form.
But was Rian imagining things, or did Chris look...?
He tried not to be obvious about watching Chris directly, instead turning his head to watch the storm drip-drip-dripping outside and only studying Chris from the corner of his eye. He looked...exhausted, honestly; the shadows beneath his eyes bordered on purple, deep and bagged, and there was a certain gauntness to his cheeks, a certain haggardness that haunted his face. His hair was dirty, oily, unkempt. And once again he wasn’t really doing much with the sculpture; his hand poised with a wire texturing brush, but it wasn’t moving and hadn’t for at least the past ten minutes while Chris stared at it dully, as if he was asleep while wide awake.
Rian flipped his phone up, thumbing through the texts with Damon, then tapped the camera icon next to the message composition field, made sure the sound and the flash were turned off...and surreptitiously snapped a photo of Chris. In the harsh storm-light coming through the window he looked even worse, washed-out and pale in the image; his skin sallow and pockmarked, red splotches of what looked like stress acne leaping into bright relief.
Without a word, Rian attached the image to the text window.
And hit Send.
Just as he did, the last bell went off; Rian watched as the boys filed out. Chris walked slower than usual, his feet dragging, his head down.
How much longer was Rian supposed to let this go on just to play along with Walden’s asinine rules, while whatever was hurting Chris grew worse and worse?
Were Chris’s parents really so damned indifferent that they wouldn’t want to know something was wrong with their son?
Rian waited until the last of the boys filed out of the room, then checked his phone.
Nothing.
Damn it.
Was he the only one who actually gave a damn?
Maybe you’re just trying to control everything again. Sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong, trying to fix things that don’t need to be fixed just to feel better about yourself.
He closed his eyes, hissing out his breath through his teeth.
It wasn’t that.
...was it?
He couldn’t deal with this train of thought right now.
And, with a frustrated sound, he thrust away from his desk, scooping up his sketchbook and flipping back through the pages until he found the rough sketches he’d made of that lightning-struck tree. Stalking into his workroom, he flicked the overhead light on, tossed the sketchbook onto a worktable, and yanked an unfinished painting off one of the easels scattered around the room, replacing it with a fresh one.
He needed to do something with all this brimming energy running through him until he felt lightning-struck himself, burning up from inside.
Rian ran his fingertips over the sketches, the different ways he’d captured his memory of the tree’s silhouette and how it had glowed against the dark, stripped naked until it was all heart, no armor.
All heart, no armor.
Yeah.
That.
That feeling.
He’d always been all heart, no armor, but right now it felt like he’d lost even his skin, his flesh, his bones, nothing to wrap up and protect his bright-beating heart that just kept pounding and pounding and pounding more furiously with rage, with frustration, with...with...
Stop it.
He traced his fingers along the various sketches until he found one that felt like silk under his fingertips, the lines flowing as if charting the moving lines of a creature of muscle and sinew and bone, rather than a tree of fibers and branches and roots. As if a man had planted himself in the earth, and slept for ages until his yearning heart began to reach up and up and up to the sky, seeking to burn himself in the heavens while the heavens came down to meet him in jagged shots of light.
That one.
He plucked a wooden pencil with a softer lead core from the rack of pencils, pens, and brushes alongside his worktable, and gave the sketch another long look before setting out to duplicate it in more details, marking out lines on the canvas that he would later paint over in first solid tones, then shadows, then highlights, then more and more layers of detail until it became not just the memory of that lightning-cored tree...
...but the feeling of it, burning hot.
All heart.
No armor.
Just fire.
So he sketched—he sketched in swift slashing lines, in soft gray wisps of graphite, in feathery strokes that gave impressions he could follow later, until he was moving so fast he felt like he couldn’t wait: breathless, needy, aching for the creamy-sharp smell of fresh paint and the feeling of the brush and the wet slide of its bristles over the canvas, until he only needed faint scribbles of shadows and contours to be ready. To pluck tubes of oil paints from the rack, pouring color after color over the palette, mixing it into swirls with his fingertips until it made irregular streaks that would perfectly mimic the streaking texture of a tree’s soft inner fibers.