We made it through the entire first room without addressing the elephant in the room. I was going to have to be the one that started it. It was pretty damn obvious that he was just waiting on me to start the conversation. “I don’t regret kissing you,” I told him quietly.
“I don’t regret it either.” Well, there was that. Neither one of us regretted the night before. “I guess that’s a good thing.”
“It is.”
We stepped into the next gallery. I recognized some of the paintings from our shared teenage afternoons spent at this same museum. Noah talked my ear off about whatever gallery we were currently in. He seemed to know something about every artist on the wall, be it their history, the style of art, or even the work itself. I’d been enamored, listening to him talk about every piece we passed. Watching the way his keen eyes studied every picture now, I wondered if he was fighting the urge to narrate our trip the way he had when we were younger.
The heavy silence had settled back over us like a thick blanket. How was it so hard to talk to him now when it had once been as easy as breathing? Hell, even yesterday, talking to him felt natural. Of course, yesterday we didn’t have anything heavy to talk about. Today, we had the kiss to discuss, and I didn’t know what I wanted to say about it.
That had to be a first. I was never lost for words. If anything, most people thought I was a chatterbox.
“So…” I rubbed my hand over the back of my neck nervously. I needed to say something to make this conversation happen. I’d shown up at his place of business, after all. The problem wasn’t talking about the kiss. It was talking about the after of it. It was talking about that moment he wanted to come upstairs and I turned him down. I could still see that hurt look in his green eyes, and I needed to addressthat.
“Do you remember this painting?” Noah asked, as we stopped in front of a painting of two men standing in a forest, staring at the moon. One man leaned on the shoulder of another. It had caught my eye on our first date, and Noah had told me everything he knew about it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t remember anything that he’d told me. I only remembered watching the way his lips moved, carefully shaping every word, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he spoke. Even now, I could remember the passionate look in his eyes as he talked about the story behind the painting, the date and the artist, and the fact that this painting wasn’t the authentic one.
“We saw it on our first date,” I reminisced.
“Do you remember what it’s called?”
“No,” I admitted with a laugh. “I remember you gave me a whole lecture on it, but I didn’t absorb a single word of it. Just that you knew what you were talking about, and you talked about it with so much passion, that I thought I was falling in love with the painting because of you.” I thought I was falling in love with him in that moment, too, but even in hindsight, that seemed ridiculous to admit. Maybe even more so in hindsight, because I was older and wiser and more experienced with love than I’d been at sixteen.
“Two Men Contemplating the Moon.”
“What?”
“The name of the painting. It’sTwo Men Contemplating the Moon.”
“You said the real thing was at the Met, right?” See, I did remember something. At least, I thought I was remembering it correctly. He nodded, and pride swelled inside me. “Did you go see it?”
“Once or twice, when I first moved to the city. But the Met’s huge. I couldn’t go see it every time I went, not if I wanted to explore the rest of the museum.”
I’d never been to the Met, but I knew how long it took Noah to look around art museums. The fact that we were already in our second gallery room and we’d only been walking, mostly in silence, for about half an hour was amazing. Back then, it had taken us at least five dates to make our way through every room of the museum, and it wasn’t that large. “Did you actually see every exhibit?”
“I lived there for almost four years.”
There was an indignant tone to his voice that tugged at my memories. It was a voice I’d heard at least a thousand times when we’d been together. I knew exactly what it meant when I heard it. I’d toed too close to a truth that he didn’t want me stepping on, so of course, I stepped further onto it.
“So, you finally got to see the last permanent exhibit what? A month before you left? Two weeks?”
“No,” he scoffed. I thought that maybe I’d offended him. Maybe my memory of him finding my old habit of poking at him endearing was wrong and he found it annoying. Or maybe it was something that had changed over the years. Maybe I’d accidentally upset him. Maybe I should have backed up before—My spiraling thoughts derailed when a bright smile exploded across his face. “I saw the last permanent exhibit the day before I left. Moira took me. It was one of the last items on our city bucket list.”
“City bucket list?” I questioned with a raised eyebrow.
“It was a list we created together when we were at Brown, just before we graduated, and we decided we were moving to New York. We had a whole list of things we wanted to do, places we wanted to visit, cliches we wanted to live out, all of it.” That sounded just like him. I was so happy he’d found a friend who shared that trait with him. He’d always been a planner. “She wanted to make sure that I got everything done on it before I moved.”
“Did you add things to it?”
“No, it was set in stone. We had other lists of things we heard about to try. It was mostly restaurants, galleries, and stores. Maybe the occasional night club, but it was different from the bucket list. It was less sacred.”
I nodded. I didn’t have any kind of list like that when I’d been in California for college, and I’d come right back to King’s Bay after graduation. The closest I’d come were my sailing trips, but even those were done without a lot of planning beyond picking a destination and plotting my route.
I looked back at the painting on the wall. “But you saw the real one? Was it everything you hoped it’d be?”
“The colors were subtly different,” he said quietly. His attention turned to the painting, and he began listing the differences between the painting in front of us and the real one in New York. I wouldn’t have noticed any of them. I wouldn’t have noticed the change in the brush strokes or the aging of the canvas. I wouldn’t have been able to tell that the gold of the moon was subtly different, but Noah? He knew it all.
I saw that old glimmer in his eyes again, the passion as he pointed out little details in the painting and described in painstaking detail how it was different than the original. My stomach swooped, and I stopped paying attention to the parts of the painting he pointed at. I was too focused on him. I watchedhis lips shaped words that I wasn’t taking in, watched his Adam’s apple bob. It was our first date all over again.
