The color was gorgeous today, a peacock green which shimmered purple and blue when it moved in the light. As I picked up my smallest glass muller and slowly began to mix the paint, my shoulders started to relax. I hadn’t left my house since the party, and that was just fine with me. A couple of days in the house wouldn’t kill me. None of the world needed to see me right now.

Music blared through the speakers, and I was glad my face was never in these videos and that I always replaced the sound. It meant I could sing at the top of my lungs and no one gave a shit but me.

The paint I was making was going to be incredibly exclusive. Simply because there wasn’t much of this pigment. Eva gave me all the make-up palettes she didn’t want, and I used them sometimes when I didn’t want to buy bigger pigment shipments. Or when I was bored.

Companies practically rained down gifts on her head, so I always had plenty of these to use. And people loved fighting over which ones they’d get when I put them up for sale.

I snorted, imagining what people would think if they knew they were buying watercolors from one of the most infamous Omegas on the planet.

I’d avoided everything on purpose the last couple of days. I wasn’t interested in seeing a picture of me wrapped around Bennett Gray like I was a monkey. No matter that I couldn’t get his vanilla cupcake scent out of my nose, and there were faint traces of it still on my skin because I hadn’t bothered to shower it off.

Gross? Maybe. But no one was here to see me, and it wasn’t like I was going to see him again.

And sure, I looked him up, since Eva seemed to know who he was. I think I lost several hours yesterday going down the rabbit hole of not only him, but his entire pack. They were all experts in their own right and owned a tattoo shop downtown. Nautilus.

Their work was beautiful. Once I was scrolling, I recognized some of their work. Particularly a tattoo of a statue Bennett had done on someone’s arm. It was so realistic it felt like you could reach into their skin and feel the stone. It still popped up in my feeds now and again.

All of them had an impressive level of skill, and it seemed like they could do pretty much anything. I didn’t have any tattoos, but scrolling through their work, which ranged from traditional to hyperrealism to watercolor, made me rethink it.