Authors: Eveline Hunt
Darksoul
| Darksoul |
| Eveline Hunt |
| Essiel Publishing (2014) |
Darksoul
Copyright © 2014 by Eveline Hunt
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For all the people who kept asking when this book was coming out.
Thanks for making
it feel real.
From the moment I saw him
,
I knew this wouldn’t work out.
First of all, the tattoos. Who the hell had that many tattoos? Racing down his arms, clawing their way to his wrists, even pokin
g out of the collar of his shirt. Dark and deadly and—well, I had to admit it—expertly rendered against his skin. Okay, fine. So they were good. Were they pretty? Um, no. Nor were they nice, or cute. They made me want to go back to my seat and pretend Ms. Sanchez hadn’t paired me up with the guy.
I lingered
near the wall, clutching my camera to my chest. My classmates flurried about, getting their utensils ready, sitting with their assigned halves. I loved art class—I really did—but I was so not looking forward to our next project.
“Hazel?”
said Laura, the girl who shared a table with me. She’d stopped on her way to the paintbrush stand. “You don’t have a partner?”
“No. I do.” I tried to sm
ile at her. “Thanks.”
Meanwhile, Hunter Slade hadn’t moved
from his seat. That’s right. Hunter Slade. Even his name made me want to grab all of my guns and move three towns away.
Giving in,
I crept closer to his table and slipped into the chair in front of him. I set my camera down. Waited for him to acknowledge his fabulous new partner. But he was drawing in his sketchbook, seemingly unmindful of his surroundings. Tousled white-blond tufts fell into his lowered eyes. They looked as silky and unkempt as Ash’s black waves.
My gaze went down from there.
One of his hands had a spattering of scars on it, short and shallow and a shade lighter than his skin, and he wore a ring on his index finger and thumb. Not bad. I should tell him to let me borrow one of those. The damn tattoos glared at me from his arms, and now that I looked closely,
holy shit
. They were more than done well. They were freaking masterpieces.
And then there was his face
. Never mind the ink and the fact that he wore black from head to toe; the dude was good
-looking
. It was a face that belonged in the cover of a magazine. In an underwear ad. With a hot girl and a motorcycle and then Ash, too, just for kicks. Inviting, rosy lips. Eyelashes that were such an impossible dark blonde that they looked black. Chiseled jaw. The whole deal.
Thankfully, I’m trained in dealing with good-looking men. Putting up with Ash for all these years hadn’t been for nothing.
Might as well make the first move. “Hi,” I said.
He didn’t
look up at me. “May I help you?”
He sounded as though he’d known I was sitting here this whole time. The bastard.
Channel niceness. You’re a nice person. You won’t get pissed off. Right? Won’t get pissed off.
“I’m Hazel,” I said. “Your partner. Um, for the next project. Hunter, right?”
He kept drawing, gaze lowered and dark lashes brushing against his cheekbones.
“Hunter,” I repeated, “right?”
Nothing.
Yeah. Okay. “I’m talking to you, asshole.”
At last
, his eyes flicked up and met mine. They were gray and unreadable, those eyes, and impossibly steady, as though nothing could possibly startle them. They weren’t nice eyes. Not warm and playful, like Ash’s. They were icy and unfathomable, and they currently stared straight at me.
“We’re doing por
traits,” I said, taking my sketchbook out of my bag. “And like I said before, I’m your partner—”
He
glanced down at his drawing again. His pencil began to dance across the page, light and in control. As if it knew exactly where it was going.
A little annoyed by his uncooperative attitude
, I pulled my pencil out of my pocket and held back the urge to break it in half. “I need to look directly at your face, you know, to be able to do this. So if you’d be kind enough—”
He finally spoke. “Will you shut up if I do what you want?”
Annoyance turned to irritation. My eyebrow twitched. “No.”
“Fine.” He
languidly flipped to a new page, looking as though he wanted to be anywhere but here right now. “Let’s get this shit over with.”
Lovely.
“Okay, well. Just so you know, I’m more of a photographer than an artist, so I might butcher your face—”
“Let me see if I can fin
d any fucks to give,” he said, his voice a smooth, lazy drawl. “And it’s just as I thought. There are none to be seen.”
“Yeah. Wow.” Okay. Not so attractive after all. “Awesome. Fuck you, too.”
He didn’t bat an eye at my charming vocabulary. Ignoring him as much as I could, I started to draw my majestically awful rendition of his face, the tip of my pencil darting clumsily across the page. I really wasn’t an artist. I was only taking the class because I figured it’d be fun. And it
was
fun. Even if I had to deal with this transitory bag of shit. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to talk to him in the future.
I just had to put up
with him for now. Then it’d be over. So I continued sketching, glancing at him every once in a while and nearly throwing my pencil across the room when I couldn’t get it right. My drawing looked like a blob of lines, with two eyes and a pair of meaty things that faintly resembled a mouth. Don’t get me started on the potato of a neck I drew on him.
Then there was the fact that he wasn’t making the slightest attempt to finish his own assignment. Every
time I glanced up, I found him staring straight at me. Cool, unreadable expression. Gray eyes steady under the lacy shadows of his lashes.
I gave up on my disaster. “Honestly
,” I said. “Are you even drawing?”
He closed his sketchbook and set it aside. “I’m done.”
“You’re kidding.” We couldn’t have been going at it for more than twenty minutes. And I hadn’t even seen him move his damn pencil.
“I find you easy to draw. Simple features. Plain face. Not much of a challenge.”
“Are you calling me ugly?”
“I’m certainly not calling you pretty.”
Oh, dear Lord. “Give me a moment. I’m going to see if I can find any fucks to give, and then I’ll get right back to you.”
He
looked as affected by my comment as a rock might be by a passing fly.
For half a
second, I reconsidered my screw-you strategy. Maybe I should try to get along with him. He’d called me less than attractive, but everyone was entitled to their own opinion and I wasn’t about to bawl over the fact that he didn’t see me as girlfriend material. Ha. In fact, I’d laugh over it. Rejoice. Throw around colorful confetti and dance like there was no tomorrow.
Not kn
owing what else I could do, I leaned forward and nodded my head at his arms. “I like your tattoos.”
He stared at me.
“They’re nice,” I said, my grip tightening around the edges of my sketchbook. That might’ve been a slight lie. Like I said. Though they were aesthetically pleasing—someone had better give his artist a pat on the back, three million dollars, and the presidency of Artists Incorporated—they weren’t pretty, and they certainly weren’t nice.
He blinked once. “I
’m sorry. I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”
And there went my last attempts to be nice to him. “Yeah. You’re welcome.”
“I also don’t remember saying thank you.”
“Okay, f
ine. I get it. You don’t like me.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Really,” I said. “That’s nice, but you’ve already ruined the chances of us becoming friends.”
“Who said I wanted to become your friend?”
I clenched my teeth. “Well, since we’re stuck together for the next month, I figured that you and I could—oh, I don’t know—
get along?”
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table, regarding me from under the thick, sooty canopy of his lashes. “I don’t want to be your friend.”
I held back the urge to poke out his eye. “You’ve made that pretty clear. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to do my work.”
Without waiting for an answer, I yanked my ear buds
out of my hoodie’s pockets and plugged myself in, putting on the awesome cello music that I’d found on the Internet a couple of weeks before. I wasn’t a big fan of classical pieces, but there was something about the damn cello going at it with the piano that got me going. Not even with the piano. Just the cello and nothing else. A solo piece. Simple, beautiful, elegant.
Asshole Slade didn’t try to talk to me again. Class flew by and I continued butchering the paper with my pencil, erasing and editing and erasing before
doing it again. I tucked my longish bangs behind my ear and spared another glance toward him. He was still staring at me. I tried not to give him the stink-eye and then looked down at my drawing, focusing on the silky notes that tickled my ears.
“Children,” I heard Ms. Sanchez say over one of Bach’s cello suites. I tugged
out an earphone but kept contouring Asshole Slade’s eyes. Eyes that were still fixed on me. “Unfortunately, I won’t be able to give you more time in class to work on this project. I know it’s massive, boys and girls, but I’m sure you can finish it! Just for today, it’s mandatory that you give your sketch, no matter how rough, to your partner.” She clapped twice. “It’s always fun to see how other people perceive you!”
“Ms. S!” someone tried to protest, but she shushed them with kind laughter and danced back
to her desk, her colorful skirts swishing around her.
Huh
. I’d have to give this to him? So he could see how I perceived him?
So be it.
Plugging in my earbud again, I scratched the tip of my pencil along both of his brows, making them into a nasty V-shape. Much better. I gave him a giant mole on his nose and added a hair on top of it, too, just for kicks. On his forehead, I scrawled,
I NEED A HUG.
Shit. This was way too damn fun. Holding back laughter, I drew more stuff. Fangs protruding out of his lips. Pointy ears. Black mouth. The whole deal. Meanwhile, Asshole Slade picked up his sketchbook and leafed through it, looking bored with this whole thing already.
“Wait,” I said, pulling out one of my buds. Ba
ch kept singing in my other ear. “I’m not particularly interested in getting a drawing from you. In fact, I’d rather you not give me anything—”
He kept
going through his sketchbook, lashes lowered. Back to the ignoring act.
My mouth tightened
. At the bottom of my piece, I scribbled a quick note:
You know what, asshole, the joke’s on you. Calling me ugly and shit. I know I’m gorgeous. So—
B
efore I could finish, two words slipped into my head, hushed and nondescript.
That’s funny.
I froze.
It’d been a quiet voice, neither female no
r male, unfamiliar yet familiar at the same time. I blinked down at my stupid sketch and then up at Asshole Slade, stopping on my tracks when I saw that the corner of his mouth—formerly straight and expressionless—had quirked up.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
He glanced up at me. “Hear what?”
An amused, hushed whisper.
Your drawing is kind of cute, to be honest.
I scrunched up my eyebrows. Slade returned to his
lazy leafing, and my eyes unintentionally flicked to the hand that flipped the pages. So many scars. I almost wanted to turn away. The cuts were light and short, like scratches that might’ve been deeper once upon a time, but I’d been wrong—it wasn’t just a spattering. They were everywhere, slashed all over his skin, his slim fingers, like a pale constellation of hatch marks. I tried not to feel anything when I looked at them. No pity, no sympathy. Nothing. He did call me ugly, after all. And plain. Ugh.
With a renewed flare of anger,
I stiffly folded the paper in half and held it out to him. He didn’t grab it right away. He was taking his sweet time adding the finishing touches to my oh-so-plain face.
“Will you
be done already?” I said, just as the bell rang. “I have a class to get to.”
At last, he folded it and handed it
to me, taking my drawing in exchange. His eyes were steady and unreadable and they didn’t leave mine. The quirk on his lips was gone. Jesus, I couldn’t wait until this project was over. An hour with him and my soul had nearly died.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Thanks.”
Not bothering to look at it, I shucked it into my bag and then threw in my sketchbook. The drawing crinkled under the weight, crushed and probably ruined, and for a moment I felt guilty. He hadn’t treated mine like that. Like I was treating his. He’d simply slipped it in between the pages of his book, keeping it perfectly preserved as though it meant something to his tattooed self.
I plugged myself into my cello awesomeness and zipped up my book bag. Most of the class was already gone. Good for them. Not so good for me, since I was still
here. Hiking my bag on my shoulder, I speed-walked to the door, eager to hustle after my
awesome
,
non-Slade-like
classmates.