ONE
Ryan Hawthorne hissed out a sigh,threw his pencil down on the drafting paper laid out on the table in front of him, and pushed back into his chair, frustrated with the world. He stared at the middling work he’d spent the last hour busting his balls over, disappointed with all of it. None of the sketches or shapes he’d drawn resembled anything close to a coherent fall collection. A primary school kid drawing fairy princesses could have come up with more original designs than the shit that had been scratching out of his pencils lately.
He crossed his arms, clenched his jaw, and stared forward, out the open window and on to the vista of Hawthorne House’s vast grounds. It was June, and the weather had only just changed to the point where it was comfortable to keep the windows open all day. The sun was actually shining, for a change. He should probably go out and take a walk. Walking the grounds of his family’s ancient estate had always given him inspiration in the past. That was why he’d come home from Milan, wasn’t it? To find inspiration to relaunch his career among the eccentric, mad artistry of his family?
That was his reason on the surface. It was the reason he’d given his family for why he’d given up on life in one of the fashion capitals of the world so that he could move into the warren of flats for family use that the east wing of the old manor house had been transformed into a few decades back. It had been easy to convince his bohemian parents and his colorful siblings and cousins that he just wanted to be close to the family for a while and to tap into the creativity of the Hawthorne Community Arts center, which existed in the other half of the gigantic house.
It was a lie, of course.
He hadn’t returned to England out of some romantic sense of inspiration or out of a desire to reconnect with the wide, wild family that he, admittedly, loved. The truth was that he’d fled back to England after heartbreak and embarrassment, after all the promise of a shooting star career in high fashion had tumbled to earth in a smash of engineered failure.
He'd come so close to making a stir, opening his own fashion house, and competing with the likes of Balenciaga, Dior, and Louis Vuitton. All of that renown had come from the work he’d done under another designer’s house, though, and guess who had been given all the credit?
With a guttural growl, Ryan surged forward, picked up his pencil again, and hunched over a clean sheet of drafting paper. He forced his hand to draw lines and connect dots, searching for shapes and flow that would knock everyone on their arses at next February’s London Fashion Week.
The advantage of having a vast family estate in the southeast of England to run home to was that it was a hop, skip, and a jump from London and the chance to recapture what Giorgio had stolen from him. He could do it…if he could just come up with a few original ideas.
His sketching turned harsh. The lines on the page grew darker and more chaotic. The image he was producing was clunky and inelegant, so his sketching turned to scribbling as he blacked the whole thing out.
“Fuck, fuck, dammit, fuck-a-doodle-do!” he shouted, then threw his pencil.
The pencil sailed right through the open window and out into the garden just as his mum popped her head into the studio where he was working and asked, “If you’re attempting to teach pencils to fly, darling, there’s no point in invoking the call of the rooster. They’re flightless birds.”
Ryan nearly jumped out of his skin, like his mum had caught him doing something impulsive and shameful, like wanking. God only knew how many times she’d actually caught him with his hand around his willy in his embarrassing teens. Even worse, she’d encouraged him to carry on while she hung freshly laundered clothes in his wardrobe or tidied up his bedroom, because, she said, teenage boys needed to explore their sexuality and find release from the raging hormones within them.
Growing up with Janice Hawthorne as his mum had been an adventure few men he knew would have been able to survive.
“You’ve perfected the art of walking in on your children when they’re at their weakest, haven’t you,” Ryan said, frowning and pivoting on his chair to face her.
“Yes, dear,” Janice said, her smile pleased and wicked. “It keeps you all on your toes.” Ryan huffed as she walked over to the table and looked at the untidy spread of half-completed and abandoned sketches that made up his last hour of work. “Oh dear,” she said, shaking her head and humming. “The muse hasn’t come to visit you today, I see.”
As strong as the temptation to tell his mum off and get her to go away was, Ryan’s even greater impulse was to beg for his mum’s support. She was as creative and famous as anyone elsein the family. Her paintings had won numerous awards and sat in galleries across the world. If anyone would know how to break through creative blocks, it was her.
But asking for advice would mean confessing why he was in England and not Italy. It would mean revealing the embarrassing secret that had brought him home.
“It’s right there,” he said, standing so he could get a different perspective on the shit he’d been drawing. “The Ryan Hawthorne fall collection is right at the tip of my fingers.”
His mum hummed dubiously, picked up one of his sketches, then hummed again.
Ryan waited for her critique, or worse, for her pity. There was nothing worse than the pity of Janice Hawthorne. It made you want to sink into a ball and cry like a baby while she gathered you into her maternal arms and kissed away the heartbreak. Ryan was thirty-two. He did not need his mummy to kiss him and make him better.
Although….
“I’ve come on a mission of mercy,” she said, dropping the sketch and turning to Ryan with a bright smile.
“Oh?” Ryan asked warily.
Janice’s smile grew. “That lovely gardener your father so magnificently hired to redesign and replant all the gardens for our anniversary is outside right now, lugging around heavy bags of topsoil and digging up the old kitchen garden, and he hasn’t a soul to help him.”
Ryan raised one eyebrow. He didn’t love the twinkle in his mum’s eyes. It was the spark of her plotting something. And with her, it could be anything. She was very probably attempting to set Ryan up with the gardener. He was the last of her children who wasn’t in a relationship, after all. She could also have been trying to get him out of his head and into the sunshine to find inspiration. Or she could have been searching for ways toeconomize on labor for the estate by tricking him into helping with the new gardens. Goddess only knew this young gardener his dad had hired had come up with majestically grand plans for Hawthorne House’s old, tired gardens.
Then again, getting away from the frustrations of his designs and getting his hands dirty might have been just what the muse needed to come out of hiding.
“What does he need help with?” he asked, shoulders dropping in defeat.
His mum’s smile widened. “I’m not entirely certain, but he’s out there all alone in the hot sun, sweating away in singular labor, without someone to share his burden or wipe the sweat from his rather attractive, young brow.”
Ryan’s mouth pulled into a lopsided grin. So she was trying to matchmake for him after all.
