• Jackson Pollock painting above •
Come Monday morning, Mia still had troubles walking straight. She could still feel the slight soreness of her latest 'inspiration-session' with Eli, even though it had been over two days since it happened.
God, she silently thought in her head. She couldn't even get herself to call it anything but an 'inspiration-session', because honestly, she didn't know what it was. Eli used the word sex, and she had expected fucking like they had in that studio the first time, but this time had been different. Sure, it had been fast, wild and furious, but it had also been about more than just climaxing and making her scream – but then again, it hadn't been about making love either, that was also completely certain.
Mia couldn't explain it. Eli had been as raw as he was the first time, but just more... explorative. He had trailed his hands over her body, used his mouth in and on places she didn't even know she had or knew could feel so good. There were a lot of things you could criticize him for; being a vandalizer, a criminal, an arrogant, stupid, chauvinistic simpleton with a mouth and mind dirtier than a sink full of seven-day-old thanksgiving utensils – but when it came to pleasuring a woman to the brink of docility, you had nothing on him. He could shut you up with just his eyes and then proceed to make you cūm, just by exhaling on your skin.
Yup. Mia had gotten it good, which was why walking and especially sitting on the hard, wooden stool in her art class was a real pain in the ass – literally. But other than getting the ōrgasms of her life, she had also gotten what she needed to continue her drawing. Maybe even finish it.
"Mia, I rarely curse since I find it diminishes my learning of appropriate ways to express myself, but I'm going to make an exception just this one time," Valenches said, observing her art. "This is fucking brilliant – genius, I might even go as far as to say. However, I still think it needs a little something. I can't put my finger on it, but then again, that's your job to do," He said and gave her reassuring smile. "I'm just here to encourage you and correct you."
"Thank you," Mia replied, returning his smile, nervously.
"Alright, with that said, let's pack it up, class," Valenches then said and turned to the rest of his students. "Next Monday I want you to have read up on Jackson Pollock. We'll be studying his work and seeing if we can find order in his chaotic work, yeah? Great job today, guys! Off to lunch with you."
Mia happily wiped her fingers from the grease smudges from her pencils and begun setting aside her easel. She hadn't forgotten about her and Valenches little deal, so while everyone scurried off to enjoy their much needed lunch, Mia stayed behind to clean up the studio. It was incredible just how much a bunch of young adults could actually mess up one studio in just three hours.
Artistic minds were never organized, Mia thought, knowing just how bad she was at staying organized herself. She begun cleaning up and was nearly done when a voice from the door suddenly spoke and startled her.
"Why are you doing my job?"
Mia whipped around, and of course, she already knew it was him. Nevertheless, her pulse rose as he stepped inside, wearing his usual navy janitor suit and reversed cap. She suspected he did so to keep the focus off the tattoos on his neck and skull – laying low, as you were.
Mia quickly took a nervous breath and then continued what she was doing. "My art professor Valenches found out about what we did and promised to keep it secret if I made up for it. This is my punishment for being caught doing something I shouldn't have done – with a person I shouldn't have done it with."
"Mm, sucks, doesn't it?"
She looked up and frowned at him. He was glaring at her with only the slightest hint of sarcasm, but other than that, he just looked cold and emotionless.
"I have a question for you," He then continued, languidly walking closer, almost stalk-prey-like. "If you thought us fucking was a mistake the first time, why did you come back for more then?"
Oh he was sly, Mia thought and gritted her teeth. There was no way she was going to say what he wanted her to say; I came back for more because the dick is too good!
– Fat chance.
Instead, Mia toughened up and straightened her back. "I came back because I needed intel on your tattoos. And by the way, you can not compare what you and I did in that studio with what you did to this school. What we did was—"
"—was impulsive and done on an overdose of adrenalin," He cut in and walked even closer. "What I did was exactly the same. Only I got a fine and court mandated community service; You got a reprimand and even got to keep it secret from the rest of the school. Imagine having pretentious people stare at you all day long, judging you for something you never planned on doing."
"What?" Mia blinked when something suddenly clicked inside her head. "You didn't plan on trashing the school?"
"No. Why the fuck would I waste my time with this place?"
"Then why the hell did you do it?!" Mia angrily snapped, walking up to him, completely abandoning the fact that she was supposed to be cleaning. "If you didn't want anything to do with this place, then why—"
"Sounds like you're about to cross the whole non-of-your-fucking-business-line one more time," Eli interrupted with a cold tone. "So stop talking and mop the fucking floor, bitch."
"Excuse me?" Mia seethed, rage clouding her mind. "What did you just fucking call me?!"
Eli dramatically rolled his eyes. "Jesus fucking Christ, you rich chicks overreact to every single little thing. If I call you princess, you bitch; If I call you bitch, you act like a Prada princess. Will you fucking get your shit straight?"
"Me, get my shit straight?!" Mia yelled, "You're the one who's the criminal, who's on probation, and that's putting it nicely! Do you even know what they're saying about you in the hall?" She snarled, her nostrils flaring. "They're calling you a thug and a—"
"I really don't give a damn about what shitty things you pretentious people are saying behind my back," Eli scoffed. "Honestly, that just means you're focusing on my problems rather than fixing your goddamn own. And you, Mia, have one huge, fucking problem."
Mia just stared, boiling with anger. "I'm the one with a problem?"
"Yeah," He answered and stepped up to her so close, Mia felt herself shrink under his dark gaze. "You call yourself an artist, but you don't fucking see shit. You're shallow. You look at my tattoos, not into them. A fucking proper artist wouldn't have to fuck her way into learning what she needs to know like some whore who's out for a little somethin-somethin."
"How dare you fucking call me a—"
"You're just like every person I pass in the hall; Narrow-minded, blind," He hissed, talking over her. "You look and you look, but you never see a damn thing, except for all my fucking flaws. So yeah, I fuck you," He whispered, leaning down to Mia's face. "Because it messes the fuck out of you and because I love seeing you try to hopelessly figure it all out afterwards. You get desperate – and trust me baby, people do wild things when they're desperate, and I love wild."
Mia took a step back, feeling like she had just been slapped. What the hell just went down? She couldn't keep track of all the insults he had managed to give her in just one speech; He had offended her as person, called her a prostitute, insulted her art and her skills as an artist, but most of all, he had humiliated her by calling her dumb and easy and so confused, he had managed to get into her panties by simply offering her a look at his ink – which he had.
– Never in her life had Mia felt so disrespected.
"Come on. You got nothing to say to that?" He provoked when she didn't speak. "Pretty little rich princess gone completely mute? Should I try the non-verbal approach? I think I should."
When his hand moved, clearly to grab her ass, Mia slapped him hard across his cheekbone, feeling the sting on her palm afterwards. Eli didn't even as much as flinch, but he withdrew his hand.
"Don't ever touch me again," Mia whispered, holding back the tears in her eyes. "You goddamn sociopath! Don't ever come close to me again or I swear to God, I'll—"
"You'll what? Tell the whole school I fucked you up against a wall until you couldn't stand?" He offered and made Mia's face pale. "Go ahead, princess, I won't be the one they glare at afterwards."
Mia simply just clenched her fists and tried to control her breathing. There was nothing she wanted more than to kick his sorry, tattooed ass into the ground and beat the fucking shit out him as well. He was a monster. A pathetic monster who loved seeing people rage war against him and try and bring him down, only so he could bring them down even more. He got off on it or some shit. She wasn't going to help him have the satisfaction.
"Fuck off, Elijah," She whispered harshly up at him, grabbing her bag before walking straight past him. "Stay the hell away from me."
~~~
Mia still couldn't believe what had went down earlier. It remained fresh in her mind, even several hours later, and swirled around in her head like a maelstrom.
What had shocked her most about it all was how calm Eli had been the whole time. No rise and fall of his voice like her own, but instead complete and utter control. Almost like... he was emotionally detached from what he was saying, like... he was doing a routine of some sort.
Mia refused to think more about it and looked down at the book she had brought with her for her study session with Zoe. Unfortunately Anna couldn't join them, it was her sister's birthday or something, so she had to leave early. That meant Mia and Zoe (well, mostly Zoe) had decided to take a long study session in the recently reopened auditorium.
After endless investigations, the forensic team had finally declared that the auditorium could be opened again for the students who needed it, on the one condition that the blackboard was to be left untouched. The students were allowed to sit in there quietly and do their homework like they used to before, and even eat their lunch in there in peace if they wanted, but now they had something to inspire and distract themselves with at the same time; The big blackboard with the Genius's handwriting.
It had seriously become a shrine of some sort. They had hired a guard to watch that nobody snug under the rope to try and touch it, and people were only allowed to go so close before getting told to take a step back.
Students were happy to sit there and ponder over the mystery which they now had a chance at solving. Mia had accepted when Zoe had suggested they go there, but not for the reasons you would think; The room was off limits to janitors these days, since cleaning could contaminate the evidence. Mia felt like everywhere she went, she bumped into Eli, and she had a feeling he did it on purpose, just to further agitate her.
She didn't understand why he was acting like that. His words had hurt her, but luckily she was a lot tougher than that; It would take more than just empty words from a certifiable idiot to bring her down. He knew nothing about what he was talking about. Maybe he should educate himself before he bad-mouthed her again, that arrogant, cocky, sonofa—
There she went again. She shouldn't be thinking about him, she had better things to do.
She shook her head and focused back on just that; Mia had brought her homework on Jackson Pollock – the artist that Valenches asked them to read up on – to the auditorium with Zoe. Pollock's paintings pretty much looked like what any five-year-old's work would look like if you imagined they'd been given a brush and five buckets of paints and then got left alone in a white room for about a solid hour. However, there was something about Pollock's art that apparently made him unique and it was up to Mia to find it and see the beauty in it.
But after two hours of reading and looking at photos of his paintings, she had gotten nowhere. Her only consolation was that Zoe seemed just as stumped with whatever math problem she was working on.
Finally, Mia sighed to herself and closed her book, folding the corner to mark where she was at. She rubbed her eyes and then looked up at the blackboard with the Genius's handwriting. It was slightly slanted to the left which could mean the person was left-handed... weird she hadn't noticed that before now. What difference did it make, anyway? She was certain the forensic's already knew that already.
Zoe sighed too, doing like Mia and glanced heavily up at the blackboard. "I wonder if we'll ever find him."
Mia shook her head and yawned. "I don't care. I'm over it. At this point, I just couldn't care less."
Zoe sighed one last time and closed her math book as well. "Well I'm not giving up just yet. Hey, can you look after my stuff for a moment? I gotta go to the bathroom."
"Sure."
Zoe left and Mia was then left in the auditorium where only a few more students had lingered behind, since it was about 4pm in the afternoon. There was a small group of people down at the base of the platform, who had huddled together in a study group, and was looking into their books and then back up at the blackboard repeatedly. Mia figured they were trying to crack the 'Genius Mystery' like the rest of them.
She noticed they were using the same book as the one Zoe had lying right in front of her on the table. Hesitantly, Mia decided to pick it up and opened it on a random page. She didn't know what she was doing, honestly, maybe she was just trying to see things from their perspective – and after meddling with Eli, that shouldn't have been difficult. But it was.
Mia started leafing through Zoe's book, trying to find a pattern between what was on the blackboard and in her book, but came up short. It all looked like Chinese to her, so with a roll of her eyes, she closed the book again.
But just as she slammed the book shut, she caught a glimpse of something; at first she thought it was her mind messing with her, but then she realized it might not be. Picking up Zoe's book again, she begun frantically leafing through it to find the same page. And then it was there.
Scribbles. All over the sleek page. Written with a pen. The S's were curved, the K's were sloppy. The penmanship was tilted slightly to the left.
Thinking that Zoe had lied to her, Mia flipped her eyes to Zoe's loose notes on the table and then saw how her penmanship was round and swingy, whereas the penmanship in the book was cut and hard. Firm. Like a man's hand. So it wasn't her handwriting, she wasn't the genius... but who else had written in Zoe's book then? Who else would've had the opportunity to scandalously write directly into the—
Mia dropped Zoe's book into her lap and stared down at it in complete mortification when the shock hit her.
It couldn't be...
She might not have been a genius, but despite Eli's hurtful words, she was a talented artist, and her mind was great at connecting things, such as patterns; A flashback started to appear before her eyes and she was taken back to the night where she saw Eli in that very same auditorium, writing in Zoe's book – the book that was currently in her lap and had the same handwriting in it as the one on the blackboard.
Mia felt as if she couldn't breathe. It couldn't possibly be... could it? It was Eli for Christ sake, it couldn't be him. The criminal, the vandalist, the chauvinistic sociopath...
But what better way to conceal who you are than pretending to be someone you're not?
Mia swallowed hard as the puzzle finally began coming together; She had always felt like everything Eli did or said was a façade that he put up for the world to see, that it wasn't really him. She knew everyone did it one way or another, but something had always felt way off about the way Eli did it. Even after what he had just said to her today, she still knew he knew better; He knew better than to demand sex for knowledge; he knew better than to call her nasty things, and he most certainly knew better than to keep trying to sleep with her. He knew, yet he still chose to do it. Why?
Mia looked down at the page and swallowed hard again.
Could it really be... that Eli... was the Genius?
• • •
And here we cue the dramatic music.