Misplaced Innocence Read Online Free Page B

hand moving quickly, her mouth alternately lifting upwards in a smile and downward in a frown as she thought of different things. She didn’t notice, that is, until Scruffy hefted herself up off the concrete floor that was cool despite the heat in the poorly ventilated room and headed toward Jared.
    His voice jarred her away from her work, the pencil dragging across the paper in an unbidden direction, a thick dark line upsetting the tranquility and airiness of the picture. Charisma clamped her jaw down in displeasure. To make matters even worse, Jared completely ignored her, fawned over the dog and then walked back out into the store. Presumably to do something useful, though Charisma couldn’t imagine what. Charisma’s frown deepened. As if a man like that ever did something useful. He was probably too busy seducing all the women in town. Or, if what Bill had said was true, being seduced by all the women in the town.
    Charisma tossed the pencil aside. The primer was dry anyway. She skimmed her sketches. Bowls of fruit, paper bags brimming with fruit… she frowned. There was a strong fruit theme happening in her pictures. With a shrug, she let it go. Was she supposed to paint hunks of raw meat instead? Cans of tuna fish? After a moment of half-hearted deliberation Charisma decided the fruit really wasn’t that bad and it would look nice on the sign. It wouldn’t look like the apple.
    She hummed to herself as she ran a nice, neutral beige over the sign. She checked her watch when she was finished. Another frown pulled at her eyebrows. This wasn’t going to be the day project she had imagined. It had taken much longer than she had anticipated to completely cover that awful apple, and now she had to wait for the background paint to dry before she could even   consider working on the painting itself. She sighed and gathered her brushes. She would tell Bill she’d be back the following morning. She had a nice lull in work, but suspected that once her agent called she would be holed up in the house again, working to meet what seemed like impossible deadlines. Impossible, she thought wryly, but somehow she always made them. She shut the light off on her way out, bathing the room in inky darkness, hiding her work-in-progress. The opened door let in a rush of sweet, fresh air. Charisma took a deep breath. She hadn’t noticed the heavy, chemical small of paint in the small room until she was greeted with the welcoming air of the day.  
    “Hey, Bill,” she called, searching the comparable gloom of the store for any sign of him. He wasn’t at his usual place behind the counter, although his ever-present newspaper was folded up and tossed carelessly on the wood surface, and Charisma suspected he hadn’t ventured too far out of his domain.
    Through the shop window Charisma could see that darkness had begun to settle around the town. Or at least, what could be counted as darkness in this part of Arizona. Time had passed quickly as she worked on the sign; the sweep of her brushes and the development of her art pulled her away from reality, left her ungrounded and lost in the moment, in her images. She hadn’t realized how late it had become. The sun had sunk low in the sky, pinks and purples mingling together and bleeding outward, erasing the vibrant blues of day. Charisma took a deep breath and, for once, truly enjoyed where she was. She knew that when she got home the songs of evening insects, and the occasional sound of some mammal scurrying around would surround her, soft and melodic, and more hypnotic than any traffic she had ever heard living off the Garden State Parkway.  
    She frowned just thinking about New Jersey. It had been a long time since she’d heard from anyone back there. It had been a long time since she’d thought about them really. Of course, it didn’t help that she hadn’t left a phone number or address; that she had packed her car and left one day, had arranged her apartment to be packed and