After I closed the sponsorship deal for Mark Delgado's exhibition, my stomach started bleeding and I collapsed on the curb.
I clung to the last thread of consciousness and called him. All I got was a busy signal, over and over.
The next second, a notification popped up on my social feed.
His new protégée had posted a risqué photo, the sensitive parts barely covered by little strawberry stickers.
Frowning, I swiped right to the next one.
Same girl, different pose. Only this time the background was the floral-print bedsheets I'd swapped onto the bed before leaving that very morning.
"Being a body model is exhausting! Sitting still half the day, my back is killing me. The bed's so much cozier. Another day of being thoroughly spoiled by my dear, dear mentor!"
"But mentor scolded me hard, too. Said my figure's so good he keeps losing focus because of me."
A string of blushing emojis trailed the caption. The comment section was even worse.
I tapped the like button, looked down at the wine stains soaking my dress, the wreck of myself, and dialed another number.
"I'm sorry. The contract we just finalized—let's put it on hold."
——
I hung up. My assistant, Dana Barnes, hailed a cab and took me to the hospital for a gastric lavage.
I hugged a trash can and threw up until the world spun, tears and snot smeared across my face.
The doctor frowned and couldn't hold it back.
"You again? Drinking like this, you're going to get yourself killed. Do you understand that?"
I gave a bitter smile and nodded.
I was a regular in the ER at 2 a.m. Every single time, I came in flat on my back, blackout drunk.
At dinner that night, the sponsor had made me a bet.
If I could down three bottles of high-proof liquor in one go, he'd sponsor Mark Delgado's exhibition.
Mark and I had been together ten years. I'd watched him claw his way up from a broke art student to a name that finally stuck in the art world.
One last push and his dream would come true.
And there was more. He'd promised to propose to me, officially, at the exhibition.
Ten years of chasing this together, and I wanted that show even more than he did.
The joke of it was, while I was drinking myself into a stomach hemorrhage, he was lying naked with another woman in my marital bed.
After a night on an IV drip, I had Dana take me back to the office.
I'd barely been asleep on the couch half an hour when the door slammed open.
Mark stormed in, face like a thundercloud, brandishing his phone.
"What is this supposed to mean?"
"Ava Jenner, your mind is filthy. Everything you see looks dirty because you're dirty!"
"There is nothing between me and Lucretia Monroe. It's all for the sake of art. Do you even understand that?"
He said it with total conviction, as if he'd forgotten what he swore when he first started out: that he'd never touch figure drawing, and if he ever did, I would be his only model.
I forced my eyes open and realized my finger had slipped earlier. I'd liked a comment.
"I'd bet money your mentor's intentions are anything but pure!"
A laugh escaped me, dry and helpless.
"You've got the nerve to call me dirty? You and your protégée rolled around in my marriage bed. How clean could that possibly be?"
"Did you forget what you promised me, way back when?"
Something guilty flickered across Mark's face, but his tone stayed hard.
"I was just using her to practice, that's all. And what about you? Drinking yourself blind with a different man every night, never coming home?"
"And that male assistant of yours, glued to your side twenty-four hours a day. Who knows what the two of you—"
"Crack!"
I cut him off with a slap across the face.
"Mark Delgado, you have no conscience!"
We'd both come from ordinary families, but he was the one obsessed with art.
After college, to buy him the best paints, the most expensive brushes, I'd been so broke I couldn't even afford a shared meal-prep box.
I lived on one plain dinner roll a day. The chronic malnutrition wrecked my stomach for good.
Later, when his career started taking off, I worked day and night chasing sponsors, drinking through endless business dinners. Stomach bleeds became routine.
