I watch her change out of my clothes and into her own. Handing her the jeans she wore here, a folded up piece of yellow printer paper falls out of them. I know it’s an invasion of privacy, but my curiosity takes the better of me as I unfold it, quickly skimming the flyer in my hands before it’s snatched out of them.
“Excuse me.” A playful smile dances across her face as sherepockets what I now know is a flyer for an art competition sponsored by the conservatory and Boston Museum of Fine Art.
“You gonna do it?” I ask, even though it’s hard to tell if I have the right to.
She sighs, putting her hair up with a rubber band and pulling the front pieces only to get frustrated and tuck them back behind her ears.
“I don’t know…I haven’t really been inspired lately.” She bites her lip, shyly like this is a half truth and she isn’t ready to give me all of it.
I move behind her, running my fingers up her arm and feel her shiver at the sensation. “I think you're scared,” I breathe into her ear. She turns on me quick. Hands on her hips as she cocks her head, that fire I love so much burning behind her eyes.
“And what might I be scared of, Andrew?”
One eyebrow up, I wrap an arm around her waist pulling her into me, a small gasp escaping her.
“The inspiration.”
We stand centimeters from each other, our mouths so close I can feel her breath hitch on the bow of my lips. For a second her eyes are an open and heated blue flame, until her phone pings with a text pulling us both out of it.
“Shit, I’m gonna be late pickin’ up my mom.” She lightly pulls from my hold grabbing her stuff.
“Let me go with?—”
“No,” she tells me, pressing her lips together. “That’s sweet but…it’s fine. Really.”
I nod to myself, wondering if I overstepped with the art show thing, with calling her out on lowering her guard but I know it’s true. She’s scared to let me in, maybe more scared than I am to let her.
Cradling her face in my hands I tip her head back, surprising her with a kiss. “You know you just have to ask, right?”
Her breath hitches when I look at her, and I want it to mean something. Desperately. She rakes her teeth over her bottom lip, softly smiling. “I know. But it’s not like we’re…”
“What?” My heart feels heavy against my ribcage, but I already know what she’s thinking. She fought this so hard; she was never giving in this easily.
“You know,” she shrugs, her brows and nose pinching.
“What Idoknow is that you,” I pull her toward me, “are the only woman I’m seeing.”
Her eyes turn like a deer in headlights before her blush deepens, and she glances away instead of telling me how that makes her feel. “You don’t seem like the exclusive type.”
I huff a laugh as she levels her attention back to me. “Do you want me to see other people?” I joke, my amusement falling when her lips don’t lift at all.
“Maybe,” she says, her throat bobbing. “I mean, don’t like…stop your life forme.” A laugh finally leaves her when she says that.
Asking if this applies in reverse is sure to irritate me, so I don’t do it. Just pass a hand through my hair to distract from the voice in my head telling me to pump the brakes, to stop investing in this outcome. To stop believing thereisan outcome.
She kisses me, quickly, pulling away like you’d rip off a bandaid. “I’ll see you later,” she tells me as she walks away, and once I’ve watched her drive away, I notice she took the play.
28
Sloane
Connie’s asleep in her bed, and it’s a relief to see her free of I.V.’s and wires. She’s tucked beneath the striped sheet set I ordered for her when we found this place back in September. It feels like a lifetime ago. I sometimes wonder if the end of summer marked a cosmic shift that jolted me off my axis. At the time it felt like my world was ending, like the tracks had been switched, abruptly, without warning.
I watch the blue and gray melt together against the grain of the sketchpad. It’s obvious that the better I’ve gotten at working with oils the rustier my watercolor has become. I close my eyes, trying to see mom’s veins, the way they seem to be the only thing keeping her bones from breaking through pale translucent skin. I breathe in my nose transfixed on the way the blue seems to swim to the surface, a shade I’ve used in almost every work always begging to be properly blended, mixed into something new. I dip my brush into the small cup of water beside me, dabbing it into the same shade I let Carmen use, when the brush hits the page and the mixture bubbles in different directions, the blue now muted andruined.
“Darlin’, that’s how you get wrinkles,” my mom says through her sleep-addled rasp, sitting up against the headboard with a wince, I push the frown off my face. “I’m fine. Just old bones,” she insists when I reach forward on instinct. “What’s got you scowlin’?”
“Nothin’,” I tell her, forcing forward a sincere smile. Because Iamhappy. Happier than I’ve been in months.
