“Uh-huh,” Tom said, unconvinced. “Which was why she found you on a sugar-baby app, rather than your gallery page?”
“She doesn’t know any better,” Adrian said. “And I am trying to be mindful of that.”
Tom began wrestling the writing desk away from the wall. “You say that, but there are probably five hundred other guys on that site whoaregoing to be assholes to her if you won’t do the kinky sex shit she wants, along with the light musical theater talk.”
Adrian put down the torn painting he’d been cradling like a sickly child so that he could throw a roll of tape at his roommate. “She said she just wants me to go with her to the theater! What possible reason do you have to think she wants any, quote,kinky sex shit?”
Tom ducked and grinned at him. “Well, none, really. I’m just hoping for your sake she does.”
It took a few hours to get all the paintings wrapped to Adrian’s satisfaction and his writing desk (a beautiful antique, the exact opposite of all the angular pale furniture in the rest of the house) arranged in the back of the Tahoe. Adrian and Tom went through the kitchen, tossing the odd utensil into a final cardboard box.
Caroline wandered through the upstairs rooms looking for other piles of his belongings they might have missed. She couldn’t imagine hating someone enough to destroy their flower garden, much less their art, but maybe making a really pointed Spotify playlist grew less satisfying as people got older.
“What about the art on the walls?” she called downstairs. Adrian’s gold-ink signature was in the lower left-hand corner of a painting of women talking amid a flurry of magnolia blossoms. She thought she’d spotted more hung elsewhere about the house.
Adrian came to the bottom of the stairs and looked up at her. He had a smudge of dust across one cheek and a spot of sweat between his chest muscles. It wasn’t a bad look for him at all, veryartist at work.
“Leave them, I guess,” he said reluctantly.
Tom called from the kitchen, “Wait, did you ever give them to Nora?”
“No,” Adrian admitted.
“You want her to have them?” Tom pressed.
“No, but...”
“You can’t.” Caroline gasped. “You’re just going to walk away from them?”
Adrian’s face reflected mixed emotions at the idea. Caroline thought she understood his reluctance, since the paintings looked like they belonged where they were hung, but she also thought that the same woman who had trashed his gallery works did not deserve to have his art on the walls of her house.
She put her hands back on her hips and squinted down at Adrian.
“Don’t your paintings sell for thousands of dollars?” she demanded.
Adrian rubbed the back of his head. “They don’t sell at all, recently, but yes.”
Caroline thought that was likely a problem of a less-than-motivated seller, not a fair market valuation. The paintings were lovely. Much better than the ones on his gallery’s website, which were gray and uncomfortable and depicted some very unfortunate historical events.
“You can’t just abandon your inventory,” she informed him.
“My what?” he asked, confused.
“Your assets. Your salable stock. The widgets that your small business uses to generate revenue,” Caroline pointed out. Her drawl was less pronounced when she was talking finance, but he’d yet to tease her about it at all.
“I don’t have a small business,” Adrian said, bemused.
“Not with that attitude you don’t,” Caroline said, shaking her head in dismay, because this was why he was broke. He needed to get into his personal accounting and gain control of his life. “Anyway, let’s get the rest of them. The one in the living room is the prettiest one here!”
Tom shouted an agreement, and Adrian came up to help her get the painting off the wall bracket. He held it inhis hands, considering. The swirl of bright colors suggested a party, the background defined by a row of blue asters. Maybe that was what his backyard used to look like before the hot tub.
“You should take one,” he said, offering the painting to her. “If you hadn’t come, I probably wouldn’t have thought to take any of them off the walls.”
Caroline snorted. “You can’t make money by giving away your inventory either. You should be trying to sell it to me.”
His full lower lip twisted in amusement, a little life coming back into his shadowed blue eyes. “And you shouldn’t be paying me to help me move.”
She looked at the painting in his hands, hesitating because it would be really nice to have in her beige box of an apartment. She didn’t have anything up on the walls at all, not even posters. Any of these flowers would remind her of today: the first good day in a long time.
