Chapter 3
1237 Words
The door clicked shut behind her with the soft finality of a choice made. Ava didn’t wait for the elevator—she took the stairs. Forty-one floors down. Fast steps. Controlled breathing. Her tote bounced against her hip with every stride, her heart a little faster than it should’ve been.
She didn’t stop until she hit the street, the wind snatching at her jacket like the city was trying to pull her back in.
What the hell was that?
Julian Blackwell had a way of turning a conversation into something heavier than words. He didn’t flirt. He didn’t charm. He just… unsettled. Like he knew how to press on the bruises you didn’t show the world.
And now she was in it. Whatever this was. Curiosity, attraction, maybe even something more dangerous—recognition.
Ava walked. She didn’t know where she was going, but her feet carried her west, toward the river, toward air. She needed to paint. Or scream. Or sleep for a week.
Instead, she ended up at Maddie’s.
The door opened before she could knock.
“You look like you saw a ghost or kissed one. Spill.” Maddie stood barefoot in ripped sweats and a paint-stained tee that read I ART HARDER THAN YOU PARTY.
Ava stepped inside, dropped her bag on the floor, and collapsed onto the couch. “Julian Blackwell left me a note.”
Maddie’s jaw dropped. “Wait, the Julian Blackwell? Billionaire brooding baritone jawline man from your gallery showing?”
Ava nodded.
“Holy hell.” Maddie disappeared into the kitchen. “We need wine. Or tequila. Or both.”
She returned with a bottle of red and two mismatched mugs. “Start talking.”
Ava took a sip and stared at the ceiling. “He invited me to his place. Said my painting ‘held him still.’ He wanted to talk.”
“Talk?” Maddie raised an eyebrow. “Did you?”
“Yeah. It was weird. Intense. Honest. He said I felt unfinished.”
Maddie blinked. “Okay, I take back every bad thing I’ve ever said about rich men. That’s poetry.”
“It’s manipulation.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just someone who sees you.” Maddie sat beside her. “You going back?”
Ava chewed her bottom lip. “I don’t know.”
The thing was—Julian didn’t chase. He invited. And somehow, that was more dangerous.
---
Julian stood in front of Solace.
He’d bought the painting the next morning.
Not through the gallery. Not with a phone call to his assistant. He went in person, spoke to the curator, and wrote the check himself. When they offered to deliver it, he refused.
He wanted it now.
It leaned against the whitewashed brick of his living room wall, still wrapped at the edges. The colors felt different here. More exposed. More vulnerable. Just like Ava.
He didn’t understand what it was about her that stuck. Women threw themselves at him. Dinners, events, gallery nights, charity balls—they all blurred. Ava didn’t blur.
She looked like she painted her way through pain. Like she was still figuring out if survival was the same thing as healing.
And he wanted to know what happened when someone like her let you stay.
---
The days passed.
Ava painted like she was trying to exorcise him. Fast strokes. Raw texture. Everything too loud or not loud enough. Nothing landed.
She didn’t text him. He didn’t reach out again.
But she knew the painting was gone. Solace was no longer hanging in the gallery. They told her it had sold to a private collector—undisclosed. But she knew.
She almost felt naked without it.
So she painted a new one.
This time, it was all shadow. A silhouette of a man looking out a window, smoke curling around him, the city a blur in the background. No face. No name.
But anyone who saw it would know.
When Maddie came by and saw it drying on the easel, she just said, “You should probably call him.”
Ava didn’t respond.
Instead, she stared at the canvas, wondering why something unfinished could feel so complete—and so terrifying.
Julian wasn’t impulsive.
Every decision in his life had been weighed, measured, dissected until no angle remained unexplored. But that was before Ava Monroe.
Before a woman with paint under her nails and shadows in her eyes walked into his gallery showing and unraveled something in him with a single glance.
So when he saw the new piece she’d posted—barely a whisper of it, a cropped corner with the caption “unfinished”—he didn’t wait.
He texted her. One sentence.
Come back. Tonight.
No flourish. No questions.
He poured himself a drink and waited, standing barefoot at the window as the sky darkened over Manhattan. If she didn’t come, he’d understand. He’d respect it.
But if she did...
At 9:12 p.m., the elevator chimed.
He turned just as the door opened.
Ava stepped out slowly, wrapped in a dark coat, her hair pulled back in a loose knot. She looked like something between defiance and surrender. He felt the pulse at his neck beat harder.
“You’re late,” he said, voice smooth.
“You didn’t say a time,” she replied, walking in.
He took the coat from her shoulders without asking. Underneath, she wore black—simple, fitted, soft-looking. Like she’d dressed for comfort but wanted him to notice anyway.
Julian stepped closer, slow and certain, eyes locked on hers. “You painted me,” he said.
A flicker of something flashed in her eyes. “I painted what you made me feel.”
His fingers brushed her jaw, just enough to make her tilt her head. “And what was that?”
“Off balance,” she whispered.
He leaned in, his mouth near her ear. “Good.”
Then he kissed her.
Not like a man who was testing the waters.
Like a man who had already decided what he wanted—and was now showing her what came next.
Ava melted into him, her hands slipping under his shirt, fingers exploring the warm skin of his back. He walked her backward through the room, never breaking contact, until her thighs hit the edge of the velvet couch.
He didn’t ask permission.
He didn’t need to.
He peeled her shirt over her head slowly, watching her eyes the entire time, as if waiting for any sign she wanted him to stop.
She didn’t.
She unbuttoned his shirt one button at a time, teasing him with the same maddening restraint he had shown her. When he finally pushed her back onto the couch, she gasped—half surprise, half invitation.
Their mouths met again, hungrier this time, all the silence between them burning away in the heat. His hands were firm, sure, reverent in the way they mapped her body like he’d waited years to memorize her curves.
He whispered her name once—just once—like it was something sacred.
And when they finally let go of every carefully constructed piece of themselves, when her moans echoed off his city windows and his name tumbled from her lips like a confession, Julian Blackwell knew one thing with absolute certainty:
He would not be able to stay away from her.
Not now.
Maybe not ever.
- Writer
