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

stomach was closer to a six-pack. She usually tried not to look at it. It was too distracting.
    “Pleasant dreams?” he asked, when she sat down and started eating half a bowl of Cheerios. It was the last dusty dredges of the box in her bowl, after he had finished most of the box.
    “No dreams that I remember,” she said.
    “Sad,” he said. “I dream all the time. That’s how I get the ideas for my paintings.
    “I believe we time travel in our dreams,” he said. “That’s the theme of my work. The images we see aren’t just random. They’re the future, the past and the present without any context. It might be from our lives, past lives or those of others, people long dead or who haven’t even been born yet. Even animals. So it doesn’t always make a lot of sense to us.”
    “What about the crazy dreams?” she asked. “Like where you are banging your high school history teacher and flying across corn fields?”
    “Well, not every dream predicts the future, but a certain kind of dream,” Tom said.
    “But how can you tell the difference?” she said.
    “You just can. There’s a certain vibe, but it is tricky. You are just seeing one little piece of the picture.” He used his fingers to form a frame in front of his eyes. “You might not recognize it until years later.”
    “That’s kind of a neat idea,” Claudia said. “But I don’t know. You really believe that?”
    “I really do,” he said, rubbing the side of his face with his hand. She noticed the dark red paint lining his cuticles. It reminded her of blood.
    She swallowed the last mouthful of her cereal and ran out the door.
    In one way, Tom’s ideas made him charming. In another way, it was kind of crazy. Just crazy.
    There’s no way anything like that could ever be true, she thought.
    She shook her head and told herself he was not the man for her. She couldn’t help but feel something heavy sinking in her gut when he talked about time travel or clammed up about his past. He never wanted to talk about the past.
    Pros: He stood b y her when no one else was there. He was probably her best friend.
    Cons: She didn’t want to mess that up.
    The truth was Tom was a gamble she wanted to believe in, but she wasn’t much of a gambler.
    It would have been easier if they’d started dating back then, Claudia thought. Now, there was so much to lose if things went bad. It wasn’t about the apartment. Her overprotective mother would be overjoyed to have her move back home. She’d offered to pay for the flight and the moving truck. It was about going back to a life with plain white walls.
    She stared at the paintings. The colors seemed off. Claudia loved the imperfections in his art, like a field of grass with purple blades spotting the landscape. She knew he wasn’t perfect, but she didn’t care. Maybe it didn’t matter that she didn’t really know him that well. Maybe all the things he hadn’t told her didn’t matter. Or maybe they did.

 
    Chapter 7: Neighborly Vibes
     
    Claudia knocked on Janice’s door the next day. This time, she didn’t need to make an excuse. Over the years, they’d swapped Christmas cards, spare keys and glasses of milk.
    Kevin undid the chain on the door and peeked out the gap. The teenager was still wearing a ratty T-shirt and pajama bottoms.
    “Hi,” he said, pausing. “What do you want?”
    “Is Janice home?” Claudia said a little too cheerfully.
    “She’s at work,” he mumbled.
    “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”
    Kevin didn’t answer the question. “I’ll let her know you stopped by.” He coughed theatrically and closed the door.
    Claudia could smell cigarette smoke and cats from the hallway. Her heart knocked nervously as she pounded on other doors, but no one else answered.
    “ Whenever I walk by their door, I always hear the TV blasting, even during the day after Janice has gone to work,” Claudia said to Tom over dinner. “Why isn’t that boy in school? It seems