You should call him.
“Should I?”
“Should you what?” James asks, offering me a third sandwich. My heart expands and I accept the delicious gift as easily as I accepted all of his compliments on the notes I wrote for him.
“Nothing, I was just thinking out loud,” I say, hiding behind the semicircle of yumminess.
“You do that a lot—” He points to my cheek and I wipe off a bit of cheese. “Talk to yourself.”
I don’t know which is crazier, talking to myself or to my dead mom, so I let it go.
“Well, you take too many photos,” I say. Excellent comeback.
He laughs and lies back on the blanket, hands folded beneath his head.
“That’s almost definitely true. But when I take that many, there’s always that one out of a million that captures something so perfectly it takes your breath away.”
“Like the little girl at Franco’s?”
He murmurs an mmhmmm.
“Or the old men walking in the market? That’s my favorite. The hand gestures and facial expressions! There is so much communication between them in that shot. I can hear it.”
He’s turned his head to the side and is studying me with a small smile.
“You love art,” he says in the same way a middle schooler might accuse his friend of having a crush on someone.
I lower my sandwich shield.
“I never said I didn’t.”
“No. But you really, really love art. You light up when you talk about it. There’s only one other time I’ve seen you light up like that.”
I know better than to ask when that other time was.
“I was going to be an art teacher,” I say so softly I doubt he’s heard me.
He sits up, resting on his elbows. The way he looks at me—I’m suddenly the most interesting woman in the world.
“You what?”
I shrug.
“I was in my second year of an education/art history double major when my mom got sick,” I say, staring at the bronze Raphael above me. “The month I took off to be with her turned into two years, and then when she passed—well, art kind of lost its appeal. I couldn’t even look at a painting without falling apart.”
“So you switched paths,” he offers.
“My dad had always wanted me to study law. He said I had a natural talent for argument.” I give him a warning look so he knows not to comment. But he doesn’t look interested in the low-hanging fruit. He looks like he wants to wrap me up in the blanket and put me on his lap.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him, my voice thicker than I’d like.
“Like what?”
“You know what,” I say, gesturing to his face.
“Oh, you mean with actual emotion? Like you looked at me when I told you about my parents?” He sits up, wipes his hands on his pants. “How do you want me to look at you, Ava? With indifference?”
I shake my head. How do I want him to look at me? I don’t have time to decide, because the warmth of his hand finds my own as he lifts it to his mouth.
