Free His Work of Art by Shannyn Schroeder Page B

was a lot of emotion when Alexis heard her parents fighting. The fear she felt came across the page too realistically.”
    â€œMaybe I’m just that good of a writer.”
    He chuckled. “I wasn’t implying that you’re not. It was a lucky guess then.”
    â€œMy dad beat my mom. I used to hear them fighting. He always had certain expectations for the house, my mom, me. If something wasn’t just right, she paid the price. So that part was real. Being struck by a meteorite and having the power to kill my dad? Not so much. When I was ten, my mom left him and took me with her. I haven’t seen him since.”
    Adam was speechless. Although he’d suspected, he hadn’t really thought about what having this conversation would be like. He went with his gut. “That’s really shitty.”
    She turned to look at him with a slight smile on her face. “Yeah, it was.”
    He reached out and brushed her hair back over her shoulder away from her face. He needed to touch her, make sure she was okay now. Her smile widened, but her eyes were still sad. The air around them charged with tension.
    Something in her car made a loud rattling noise. He stared at the dash like it might explode.
    â€œDon’t worry. That’s just the heater letting me know it’s okay to drive now.”
    â€œThanks for telling me about your dad.”
    â€œThanks for asking.”
    As if that took any effort. Pulling away from her now, though, did take effort. He popped the door open and stepped out. “See you this weekend? We can work at my apartment if you want. My roommate will be working late.”
    â€œSure. See you then.”
    He closed the door and jogged back to his car, unsure of what he was thinking. Hanging out with her friends, making her ex jealous and getting off on it, and asking personal details was not a way to steer clear of complicated relationships. But something about Reese kept drawing him in. He just didn’t know what to do about it.

Chapter 7
    R eese had spent the last few days working furiously on rewriting her first comic so that she and Adam would have something to work on Saturday night. She’d been uneasy since their last conversation in her car. While she didn’t keep it a secret, she rarely talked about her dad.
    Knowing that Adam had figured it out based on the comic should’ve made her feel better. It meant that she’d done something right with the story. However, there was always the fear that Adam would look at her differently now. They’d become friends and she didn’t want to strain that.
    Of course, inviting him to hang out with her ex-boyfriend hadn’t been the smartest move. Frankie had been an asshole all night. Maybe it was time for her to move on and find a new group to play with, but she really hated the idea of walking away from Lee, Chris, and Kim. They’d become her friends as much as they were Frankie’s. That was probably the worst part of a breakup—deciding who got the friends. And with Frankie, so much of their lives had been intertwined: school, work, play.
    Finishing the anthology and publishing it would be a definite sign of moving on. It was something that was completely separate from anything she’d done with Frankie. Adam’s ability to handle all the artwork made it that much sweeter.
    She listened to her phone give her directions to Adam’s house. As she drove through the residential neighborhood, she immediately felt out of place. This was the kind of neighborhood she’d dreamed of living in when she was younger. After a string of crappy one-bedroom apartments with her mom, anything started to look good, but this neighborhood held a mix of single-family homes and two- and three-flat apartments. A light dusting of snow that had fallen earlier that day coated the lawns, making everything more picturesque.
    This was a different kind of jealousy than she had when she went to