“I hope it’s okay that I did that. I wasn’t trying to violate your privacy—” I started to say. Maxx grabbed me suddenly and hauled me up against him, his mouth claiming mine hungrily. He pulled back a moment later, both of us breathless.
“Thank you, Aubrey. Thank you so much. Every day you remind me of what it means to be given a second chance. And I swear to God I won’t let you down.”
Then we stopped talking for a while.
Sometime later, when we finally came up for air, we lay on our sides pressed together in his bed. Maxx played with my hair, and I stroked lazy circles on his chest. “Do you ever think about where we’ll be in ten years?” I asked him.
Maxx ran his hand up and down my back. “All the time,” he murmured. I rolled onto my belly and propped my chin on his chest, looking up at him through my lashes.
“What do you see?”
Maxx pulled me up so that I was eye level with him. “I see you. I see me. I see us living in a great big house with a dog that you insisted on naming Molly, though I liked the name Daisy.” Maxx’s eyes take on a faraway expression, and I watch him, fascinated as he recounts a life we hadn’t lived yet.
“We have a little girl, five years old, who looks exactly like you, but she loves to paint, just like me. You’re pregnant with our little boy and we spend our weekends fixing up the nursery. I paint a motorcycle on the wall and you hang blue curtains in the windows. Your parents come to visit on holidays and my brother stays with us when he’s in town. You’re a teacher and I’m an artist and we make it work because we love each other just as much, ten years from now, as we do right now.”
His beautiful vision for our future gives me goose bumps. “Wow, you’ve really thought about this,” I said softly, kissing his chin.
“Every day, Aubrey. It’s what gets me through all the bad stuff. It’s what kept me in rehab. Let me show you something.” He carefully pulled out from underneath me and got out of bed.
He walked over to the pile of painted canvases that had slowly grown over the past few months. He pulled out a canvas toward the back. He brought it over to the bed and sat down, holding it in his lap.
I sat up and crawled over to him, looking over his shoulder, and was instantly speechless.
It was a picture of me in profile. In true X style, it was vivid and detailed. The colors were more muted than was typical of his artwork, but it punched me in the gut with its power.
In the painting, I stood in front of a window, looking over my shoulder, my long hair billowing behind me, bleeding into a large sun hanging in the imaginary sky. I wore a long, flowing dress that disappeared into a field of flowers at my feet.
The painted Aubrey held her hand out, and long, masculine fingers intertwined with my slender ones. Maxx had painted himself emerging from the shadows to grasp me. He had never painted himself before. I couldn’t deny the significance of this picture. It took my breath away.
Maxx looked at me. “When I think of my future, this is what I see. You. Me. Together.” I kissed his shoulders. He put the painting down beside him and reached around to cup my face. “Which is why I will doanythingfor you. I will walk through fire to give you the life you deserve. Do you trust me to take care of you?” he whispered, kissing my cheeks, my nose, my mouth.
Did I trust him?
I wanted to.
So I didn’t answer him, choosing to kiss him instead and hoping that was all the answer he needed right now.
I stared down at the course listing for the education department and was overwhelmed. There was a lot to choose from. And in doing the calculations, by changing my academic track midstream like this, I was pushing back my estimated graduation date by at least a year.
But I wasn’t questioning my decision to move away from counseling. I truly felt it was the best choice I could have made. It just feltright.
I was sitting in the Coffee Jerk, sipping on my latte and poring over the catalogue. Maxx wasn’t working, which was just as well, because I needed to focus on figuring out how I was going to make this whole change-my-major thing work.
“Whatcha lookin’ at?” I glanced up as Brooks pulled out the chair opposite me and sat down. I hadn’t seen much of him in the last few weeks. Not since his declaration that had left things feeling very awkward.
I lifted the course book in my hands. “Picking out classes for the fall.”
Brooks frowned. “So you’re really changing your major?” he asked.
I bit on my lip and nodded. “Yeah, I am.”
I expected a lecture or at least a snort of disgust, but I got neither. Brooks simply looked at me thoughtfully.
“You’re not going to tell me again how stupid I’m being to throw away the last three years? No berating comments on how far behind I’m putting myself by doing this?”
Brooks shook his head. “Nope. None of that. You can’t force something that doesn’t work, Aubrey,” he said with a tinge of sadness.
I had a feeling that he was talking about more than just my major.
