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

anything to contribute to the rent. I swear.”
    He stared at the floor and crossed his arms.
    “What if I don’t like what you paint?” Claudia said.
    “I promise you will,” he said, looking up at her eyes. “I’ll paint you some of my best dreams.”
    “I should just kick you out right now,” she said. “I can just see you on the corner with a cardboard sign that says, ‘will paint for food.’”
    “But you won’t,” he said, touching her arm.
    “I’m not sure. I barely know you.”
    “Please, Claudia.”
    “Maybe if you make me pancakes.” Her stomach growled. “I’m hungry. I’m a lousy cook. And don’t get any ideas.”
    “Sure, I’ll cook for food.” He smiled and then he got to work. He pulled out a heavy griddle and set it on the stovetop.
    The next day he returned, juggling a torn duffel bag full of his worldly possessions, a dilapidated easel, a stack of canvases and a smaller bag full of tubes of paint.
    “It was a bitch carrying all this on the train,” he said, throwing the bags down onto the bed in his new room.
    “I told my girlfriend, if she still wants me, I’d move back in after getting a decent-paying job. We’ll see.”
    He didn’t look Claudia in the eye when he said this.
    She didn’t like that. She wondered if he had told her he was moving in with another girl, but didn’t ask.
    She wondered if he was any good as an artist.
    It was strangely exciting to see what he would create. She was tired of living alone, anyway.
    But it took him days to get started on his painting. Every morning before she left for work, he was sitting in his boxers eating her Cheerios.
    “Can you at least put on pants?” she would ask and he would, for a while.
    She’d come back from work and he’d be sitting on the couch watching “Judge Judy,” and yelling “not guilty!” at the TV screen.
    She started to wonder if it was all a lie, if she was just the world’s biggest sucker with a mooch living in her apartment. Maybe his ex had it right and he was just a con artist in search of a sugar mama.
    “Why haven’t you started painting yet?” It made her mouth feel dry and her stomach twinge nervously every time she asked.
    “I’m waiting for the right dream,” he’d say.
    So after ten days, Claudia decided it was time to evict. Just as she was about to raise her fist and knock on his bedroom door, he opened it.
    “I’ve got something to show you,” he said, smiling. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the room. And suddenly she could smell the paint fumes emanating from the corner, like the smell of wet soil after a rain.
    Tom wore a white shirt, which she found odd for someone surrounded by paint, but not a drop had touched the fabric.
    It was a brown-haired woman in a white dress on the beach with her feet just touching the shimmering blue water and a black dog sitting neatly by her side.
    “That is a pretty picture,” she said. “I like it.”
    “It’s you,” he said, nervously, with his fingers in his mouth.
    “It’s hard to tell with her facing away,” Claudia said. “But it can’t be me. She’s got long hair coiled in an updo, and I have short hair.”
    “It is you, just not you at this moment,” he said, crossing his arms. “She’s you at a different time. Your hair won’t always be short.”
    “But I like my hair short,” Claudia said, patting the back of it. “And I don’t have a dog. Don’t get me wrong. I like it.”
    He frowned.
    “I love it. I like the light in the picture,” she said. It was drenched in a yellow white glow. “I like the way the sunlight reflects off the water and the sand and her skin. It seems like everything is glowing with happiness.”
    She smiled. The man was actually talented.
    Tom explained the inspiration behind his work, over breakfast a few days later. He was just wearing his boxers, of course. After two weeks, she had given up asking him to put on pants. At least he didn’t have a beer belly. In fact, his