Beautiful Confusion (New Adult Romance) Room 105 Read Online Free

mind, that he was too damned close to my creation, I couldn’t get up and walk away. I kept questioning him, anxious to hear his answers. “How did you feel about being in foster care?”
    “I hated it, and I wanted to go back to Jack.”
    “Weren’t you afraid of living with a delusional man? Of him regarding you as his adoptive son?”
    “As delusional as he was, he wasn’t dangerous or violent. He treated me with love and kindness. He gave me a sense of belonging that foster care never did. And he encouraged my artwork. I used to graffiti when we were on the streets.”
    The parallels continued, right along with my crazy fear. “Are you an artist now? Is that how you make your living?”
    He shook his head, surprising me with his answer.
    I double-checked his response. “You’re not an artist?”
    “Yes, I am. But that isn’t how I make my living. I’m a freelance locksmith. I know, and with the name Lock.” He shrugged, laughed a little. “I get ribbed about that a lot.”
    A locksmith named Lock. If this was a hallucination, why had I created that identity for him?
    “I actually have my first art show coming up,” he said.
    I blinked, grappling to break free of the locks. “You do?”
    “It’s in a few weeks, if you’d like to go. It’s at a gallery a friend of mine owns.”
    A showing. At a gallery. By an owner-friend. How could he be a product of my imagination if he had a life outside my mind? “I’d very much like to go.” To see his work. To talk to his peers. “Can I bring my aunt with me?” If Carol met him, then I would know, without a doubt, that my sanity was intact.
    “Sure. That would be great.”
    It was beyond great. He had to be real. He absolutely had to be. “Then we’ll both come.”
    “Do you have a pen and paper? I’ll write down the information for you.”
    I dug through my purse and found a pen, but no paper. He got up and grabbed a napkin to write on.
    He gave it to me afterward, and I noticed how striking his penmanship was. Most guys scribbled, but not this one. His script looked like a natural form of calligraphy.
    “What’s your artwork like?” I asked. “Can I see any of it online?”
    “Not yet. Not until after the show. But it has a street vibe, like the graffiti art I did when I was a kid. I’m a fantasy artist, too. Mostly I just paint whatever feels right. I did a self-portrait that depicts my unknown identity. It’s a nude. To me, that’s the purest form of self-expression.”
    I merely nodded, wondering, shamefully, what he looked like without his clothes. Then I caved in to curiosity and asked, “Is it going to be at the show?”
    “I haven’t decided yet. Do you think I should include it?”
    Feeling like the virgin I was, I fussed with my coffee, peeling bits of plastic off the rim of the lid. “That’s up to you.”
    Silence drifted between us, intensifying the moment. I waited it out, hoping he changed the subject.
    He said, “I did a portrait of Jack that I’m definitely going to include. I painted him from memory, the way I remember him most, with his chipped smile and a frayed beanie pulled down low on his head.”
    “How did he become homeless?”
    “He didn’t have any family left and he was too mixed up to hold down a job or make it in mainstream society. The only place that made any sense to him was being on the streets.”
    “How long ago did he die?”
    “It’s been three years.”
    I did the math. “When you were seventeen.”
    He nodded, his voice brimming with emotion. “I was still in foster care and missing the life I had with him. I used to get on a bus and go downtown and see him whenever I could. Then on one of those visits, I couldn’t find him anywhere. Finally, I went into the shelter where he sometimes stayed and learned that he’d had a heart attack and was gone. It happened the night before I got there. I was one day late.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “It helps to talk about it. That’s why I joined the