Page 140 of The Right Kind of Wrong

They followed Maisie over to a piece that was clearly pulling her attention, falling side by side into step behind her.

Electricity sparked through Blake when Monroe brushed their fingers together, giving her hand a quick squeeze.

Just because she’d wanted to do it. Or because she’d wanted Blake to know that she missed their closeness, too.

Either way, the butterflies flapped in Blake’s stomach even as she tried to tamp down on her reaction.

A better idea was probably to focus on Maisie, who was looking up, focusing intently on the painting. Blake had never been exposed to art as a kid, except for whatever terrifying Jesus-centric pieces had adorned the church walls.

But art, as she’d learned from Monroe, was meant to be evocative. Those stained-glass windows and oil paintings had done an incredible job of scaring her throughout her adolescence, so, in that respect, maybe they’d achieved their intended goal.

For a while, at least.

Maisie interlaced her fingers behind her back and tilted her head. Blake knew, without turning, that Monroe was currently in the exact same pose.

And she knew that Monroe and Maisie weren’t hers, but watching the two of them caused an intense feeling to bubble up in Blake’s chest.

Because . . . she wanted them to be.

The rational part of her brain knew that it was too soon to be thinking things like this. Genuinely, Blake was happy with where she and Monroe were.

It wasn’t like she was clamoring to push them into something with defined boundaries and expectations, but she couldn’t pretend that the amorphous idea of more didn’t flit through her mind, especially during moments when everything felt so simple.

They were away from Cypress Falls. Maisie was riding high on an exciting weekend. Monroe was practically buzzing from how much she’d accomplished on the mural today.

And Blake felt like she belonged. With the two of them. With the idiots at Gumby’s. With Holland at the dance studio.

She was pulled from her thoughts by Monroe’s voice breaking through. “How do you feel when you look at this, Maisie?” she asked quietly.

They were the only people in the gallery, but Monroe treated it like it was her version of a church.

The piece that Maisie had been drawn to was a large, white canvas with an open box of matches, painted hyper-realistically. The matches themselves looked like they had depth and dimension, with shadows creating the impression that they were stuck out at odd angles from the box, almost overflowing.

“I feel . . .” Maisie scrunched her nose, which Blake could tell because the tips of her ears lifted.

“There’s no right or wrong answer,” Monroe encouraged without pressing her. “It’s about how you feel inside.” She held her hand up to her chest, right over her heart.

“Mixed up,” Maisie finally said. “It looks real, but it’s not.”

Blake could see that Maisie desperately wanted to reach out and touch the painting; she rocked forward on her toes but stayed rooted in place, trying to figure out if the dimension was actually there.

It looked like someone had taken a giant box of matches and glued it onto the canvas, so Blake could understand her confusion.

“Boxes of matches aren’t usually that big,” Monroe agreed. “And you can hold matches in your hand, but you can’t hold the painting in your hand.”

“Yep,” Maisie agreed, nodding along.

“And if you walk over to the side,” Monroe said, moving closer to the painting and facing parallel to the wall, “it feels like it should be sticking out, right?”

Maisie moved directly in front of Monroe so that she could see it, too. “Yeah,” she gasped. “It’s flat.”

Monroe placed her hands on Maisie’s shoulders. “That’s called perspective. It makes things look real, even though they aren’t.”

Blake had to bite back another laugh when Maisie held her hand up to her face, waving it around. “It’s weird.”

Monroe did laugh. “It is weird. Art can be weird. And confusing. Art can be pretty, or it can be ugly. It can be a lot of things.”

Blake didn’t understand how she’d gotten so lucky, to be watching as Monroe shared this thing that she cared deeply about with Maisie, who was absorbing it all with rapt attention.