The Artist and Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

might not ever have opened the door. “This is the Captain’s Suite,” he joked, popping right back into his old expressive self and opening the door. It was a bedroom with navy blue walls and two light-colored wooden beds, one on each side of the room. He tossed the bag he’d been holding on one of the beds. “That’ll be your bed.”
    I lifted an eyebrow. “Is that my stuff?” I asked, walking over and unzipping the bag to find my clothes. I looked at him, but he was laughing. “When did you get my stuff?”
    “Don’t worry about that,” he answered before strolling back down the hall. He gestured to a door across from ours. “That’s the girls’ room.” He said it quickly, like when you’re a kid and your mom rips off a bandage, then he was walking down the hallway into another open room. It opened onto an extension of the porch. The back yard wasn’t overgrown. It was carefully cut and there was a fence outlining the property line. It was a simple wire fence, nothing fancy, but it marked the difference between the house and the forest around it. Outside the fence, the trees were overgrown and surrounded by tall, unattended-to grass. He ambled through the room I now noticed was the dining room and kitchen and out onto the porch. Once we were both outside, he nodded to the corner of the porch and I lifted an eyebrow. He grinned. “Yes, my friend. That is a hot tub. Yes, it is.”
    I laughed, grinning at him. “You had some cool granddad, didn’t you, Mikester?”
    He smiled, nodding. “He was the coolest old guy around,” he agreed, extending his arm to point into the trees directly behind the yard. “There’s a lake back there.”
    I nodded. “This place is great.”
    “Isn’t it?” he asked, turning to me with a grin. “I thought it’d be a good place to come to unwind after a long, hard week at work.” He grinned pointedly at me.
    Honestly, Mike wasn’t happy about my internship. Guess he missed me. I wasn’t going to complain. After all, if he’d been thrilled at the prospect of not having to deal with me all summer, I’d feel like that trampled pair of jeans on the floor of a thrift shop that no one would buy.
    I grinned back. “’Course it is, man.” I patted him on the back, smiling.
    “Come on. Let’s go watch some sports.” It was comedic, of course.

Chapter Five
     
     
     
    Julie
     
    Sun blared through my windows and I dragged my covers over my face as a shield. I’d stayed up late the night before—even later than usual. The clock by my bed read eleven-twenty-four in painfully bright numbers. I honestly felt like the lying dead with heavy eyes, a tight chest and a clouded mind.
    I groaned as my stomach turned. It’d been over nineteen hours since I’d eaten but I couldn’t force myself to move. My limbs felt like a hundred angry pounds.
    Note to self—don’t stay up until four in the morning ever again.
    That was when I heard a startling ringing that bounced off the walls of the house. I groaned, slowly blinking my eyes in my barricade to adjust to the blue-gray of my own personal oasis. Then there was that noise again—sharp, darting daggers through my head. Ding dong! I sighed, pushing the blanket off my body, but shuddering at the light that assaulted my senses.
    Groaning, I stumbled forward from my room into the shady hallway, exhaling at the darkness. I blinked the sleep from my eyes and slowly became aware that there was no one home. Silently, I walked to the door. My fingers reached forward through my other-worldly haze and wrapped around the brass knob, turning it then opening it to the blinding sunlight.
    Vision black, I merely heard her voice. “Oh, Julie, did I wake you?”
    I must have looked awful. I laughed. “No, why do you ask?” I countered, fraying sarcasm over my embarrassment.
    She laughed with me. “Oh, no reason.” She was coming into focus now, standing in the middle of the sidewalk wearing jeans and a soft gray T-shirt. She was