I missed Khell giving me baths and feeding me and hiding his smiles, although I preferred it even more when he didn't hide them at all. I missed the night in the moonlight, when I'd pretended we were more than client and partner. And a small part of me missed the games too. Being trapped and out of control. The simplicity of following orders to their delicious end.

On the canvas, a girl spun in the grass, her long braid—it reminded me of Khell's—twisting around her like a rope. The shadows were at her back, the woods quiet and peaceful there, and ahead of her was glaring brilliance and a mass of strange creatures with bright eyes and sharp teeth, perfectly crisp and clear in the light. In the midst of them was a monster, bare and naked and golden, a lion's mane and a satyr's strong legs and the dense muscles of an orc's torso all melded together. He shone brighter than anything else in the frame, his vivid white gaze on the girl, a long golden arm and articulated fingers tipped with blood red claws reaching out to her.

She was rearing back, eyes wide and lips parted on a gasp or scream, but her own hand was floating toward him too, toward the violent clarity of the bright side of the woods, the outrageous strangeness of the creatures calling to her. She was hesitating, still deciding between the dim safety of normalcy and the monstrous exposure of the light.

Before Khell, the most frightening possibility was to know myself, accept myself, and love myself for who I truly was. Because what if no one else ever felt the same way for me in that truth?

Now I was terrified I might sink back into those mild and unchallenging shadows.

My blog was more active than ever. I had stacks of new art to get ready to scan and have available in prints. My home was growing more my own as I played in my spaces and reshaped the rooms.

But it was as if I'd stepped into that brilliance, experienced its warmth and peace, learned every bit of myself and embraced it, and then had been promptly shoved back toward the shadowy edge of the wood.

I squinted at the canvas. The bright edge of the wood almost blended in with the creamy yellow of my walls as the sun blinked in through the window and struck them both.

I twisted, looking at the mess of my studio, at the gentle slope of the beams up to the roof, like trees leaning to cover me, at the bare, cream-colored canvas of the walls.

Inspiration struck hard, clearing some of the fog of sitting at work too long, a fresh shot of adrenaline to my brain before I grew maudlin and mopey again.

I needed more paint.

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