Read Painting With Fire for Free Online Page A

believed the same thing.
    “You two should really just get married,” she would repeat.
    That’s when Claudia’s voice would start to hit the high notes and Tom would start laughing in the background.

 
    Chapter 6: A Close Stranger
     
    Claudia hated being interrogated about Tom. There were just too many questions she didn’t know the answer to. She didn’t know anything about his childhood. She didn’t know anything about where he was from. And she didn’t know what he was doing the night Steve Jackson died. Sure, he said he was sleeping, but how could she know for sure?
    She scrubbed the dishes from her baking spree with a kind of violence. She scraped steel wool against aluminum with the murky , lukewarm water lapping at her hands.
    She never asked him many questions. He had a way of clamming up. He would literally get up and go into his room and lock the door. Sometimes, he’d paint. Sometimes, he’d just stew. Sometimes it had to do with her, but most of the time he just seemed to be stewing in his own bad memories, judging by his scowl.
    She never had the heart or gut s to ask him again where he was that night, but she always wondered about it. She had gone to bed by 11 that night. He asked her if she had heard anything.
    “No,” she said. “I’m a deep sleeper.”
    And that had been the end of the conversation. He never volunteered anything more. It was typical of him to shut up like that when she had a million questions racing through her mind.
    Maybe it was time they parted ways. They had started out as temporary roommates and never meant to live together permanently. Maybe it was time to move back in with mom. She shuddered. No, she’d rather die.
    Her friends always asked her why she didn’t date him. She liked him, but it would have made things too complicated. Claudia had a bad track record when it came to love. She had never been able to be friends with an ex. The good and bad feelings just had a strange way of hanging on forever. She couldn’t afford to get confused right now. She couldn’t afford to complicate things when she depended on him so much.
    He was not bad looking with that strong jaw, those dark eyes, a golden complexion and a daily pushup habit that showed when he was shirtless coming out of the shower. A lot of women liked him, until they realized he was a lost dreamer with very little money. That didn’t matter to her.
    What did matter was that she had a safe place to stay with a decent roommate. She didn’t want to move back in with her mother. Claudia scrubbed the dishes harder just thinking about the prospect. It was always possible, but it wasn’t ideal. The bills were piling up. No, she’d go bankrupt before she walked back into that house. Meanwhile, Tom was paying the phone bill and the electricity, while her savings had trickled and dwindled. She bit her lip. She didn’t know how she was going to repay him.
    Her mother didn’t approve of the arrangement, of her living with a man, and wanted her to marry him. But in general, her mom wasn’t a good judge of character after two divorces. There was always something off-kilter with Tom, something not quite normal. Sometimes it was a good thing, sometimes not. It was a mix of genius and madness. She started to make a list of the pros and cons in her head as she washed the dirty dishes from her baking spree.
    Cons: What kind of grown man honest to God believes in time travel? She wondered.
    As her fingers rinsed silverware under the cold water , Claudia thought back in time to when she first picked him up in a club. This was when she actually had a little money and could afford to go out. About a hundred people were gyrating around them, grinding to the pulsing music. Girls flung their hair through the air and shook their booties. Guys did pelvic thrusts and bopped their heads up and down like an army of robotic clones.
    All of her girlfriends had already left her, each hand in hand with one of the clones. Claudia was