Fox looks at the painting and nods pensively. “Water holds light differently every moment, and you can never actually catch it; you can only approximate it, but maybe he wanted tocatchit, and the only way to do it was to paint it in different ways.”
It’s a remarkable thing that Fox keeps surprising me. I lean into him and smile. “That’s very insightful.”
“What can I say, I’m an insightful sort of guy.” He kisses my hair.
In the next room, we’re enchanted by a Van Gogh.
They don’t have his famous ones, but when an artist is as good as Vincent, he could paint on tissue paper, and it would be museum-worthy.
We stand in front of a painting of a field, the sky typical of Van Gogh, alive even when still.
“I’ve always thought he painted with the verve of a man who sees the world in a most unique way.” Fox rubs his hand up and down my arm.
I suppress a moan.
I have a feeling he knows what he’s doing.
I look up at him, and he smiles pleasantly at me. “What?”
I bite my lower lip. His eyes darken, become hungry. He leans down and kisses me, slow, soft, deep.
I don’t suppress my moan this time.
Someone coughs around us, and we pull away like teenagers caught necking in the backseat of a car.
I giggle.
He grins cheekily.
For lunch, he takes me to East Nashville.
Not a Bennett family-type restaurant. No white tablecloth, no snooty maître d’, no performance of expense.
Margot, on Woodland Street, has brick walls, an open kitchen, and customers who are locals who’ve been coming here for twenty years and will continue to do so for another twenty.
The room smells like browning butter and something slow-cooked. The cornbread arrives in a cast-iron skillet.
I pick up the menu, and I do not put it down for a while.
“It’s a seasonal menu,” I gush.
Fox strokes my cheek with a finger. “Like Dina’s. Like what you do.”
We order, and I tell him that I’m ready to go back to work.
“Let’s talk to Dr. Reyes and take it from there,” he evades.
“Fox, I’m going nuts doing nothing.”
“But you look so cute going nuts,” he teases and kisses my nose.
The owner moves through the room the way good restaurateurs do—unhurried, stopping at tables not to perform hospitality but because she is genuinely curious about how things are landing.
She crouches to talk to an older couple about the fish.
She debates the merits of the pork shoulder with a table of four who clearly come here often.
She refills someone’s water herself because she’s passing and it needs to be done.
