was good and I needed to have a plan B if Adam ever needed to live with me.
Nursing homes were filled with throwaways. People whose families had essentially given up on
them. Not all families, but more than a few. You could always spot those residents a mile away. Zero
visitors, vacant eyes, low energy.
I knew what it felt like to not have someone on your side—someone who didn’t fight for you.
Support you. Believe in you.
To curl in a ball and feel hopeless. Frustrated. Despondent.
I tuned back in to Bennett’s question about my job. He was waiting on my answer.
“Helping . . . learning . . . experience . . . Mrs. Jackson.”
“Mrs. Jackson?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow at me. “My turn,” I said, hoping to get away from the topic. Her name had slipped out before I could stop
myself.
I was too flustered to remember my other question, so I came up with a different one. “What’s the
strangest tattoo you’ve ever inked?”
He thought about it forever, like there was a catalogue in his brain of all his past customers. I could
tell he was struggling for a good enough answer.
“If that’s too hard to answer, then at least the strangest one this month.”
His answer came immediately. “Tree stump, kid’s book, dude.”
My heart pumped out one large thump. “From
The Giving Tree
?”
His eyes widened as he nodded.
“The most depressing kid’s book ever,” I mumbled, never admitting that I cried like a baby first
time I’d read it. I’d pulled it from Ella’s bookshelf back in high school. It had left an indelible
impression on my brain. She told me it was her favorite book, that her mother had dedicated it to her,
and then I broke down in front of her.
I knew inherently back then that no one had ever—
would
ever—sacrifice themselves for me like
that tree character had in the book—most of all, my own mother.
But I’d do it for Adam, in a heartbeat. He was my brother, my responsibility, my heart. Even
though he was pretty good at taking care of himself. Just like I had to.
Bennett reached out his hand. He could tell I’d drifted off on him. His warm fingers squeezed mine
briefly before pulling away, bringing me back to the present.
“My turn,” he said. “Mrs. Jackson?”
“Wise, hopeless romantic, grandma figure.”
“A resident?”
I nodded. His mouth pulled into a sad little smile. Like he realized she was pretty important, but he
didn’t want to press the issue. I turned away from him to look at the passing landscape. “My turn. What do you hope to be when you grow up?” I asked.
“Artist who actually makes money,” he said, and then we both laughed.
His voice became low and gravelly. “What made you notice me at that party?”
I gulped down my surprise. Were we really going there?
I kept my gaze turned to the window and said the most honest thing I could think of. “Sexy . . .
magical smile . . . soulful eyes.”
Gorgeous. Amazing. Special.
His breath hitched but he remained silent. I noticed how his hands gripped the steering wheel. It
was the same way that I now grasped at the door handle.
I adjusted myself in my seat, but refused to meet his eyes.
“What made you want to kiss me?” I whispered. I wasn’t even sure if he heard me, until he finally
spoke.
“Explosive chemistry . . . powerful conversations . . . beautiful.”
I tipped my head forward, unable to breathe. I pretended to fish for my cell phone in my handbag
on the floor.
I felt his warm fingers on my back and heard him swallow roughly. “We’re here, Avery.”
I looked up as he turned into the Holiday Inn hotel. He pulled into a parking space, and we still
didn’t make eye contact.
“Let me grab our bags,” he said, and then rushed out of the car. I took several deep breaths trying to
get a grip on myself.
They were only words, Avery.
I met him in front of the car, and our eyes locked. His searing gaze reached straight through my
chest and grabbed hold of my tattered heart. It stroked and soothed the bruised places like a salve before
finally releasing its penetrating hold.
Bennett strode toward the hotel lobby. My legs started working again, and I stumbled toward the front desk as he gave his name and waited on our room key.
“You here for the art fair?” the hotel manager asked.
“Yep,” Bennett answered.
I cleared my throat. “Are there any other rooms available?”
Bennett stiffened beside me while the manager punched keys on her computer. “We’re pretty
booked because of the fair and another conference this weekend. The only availability is a smoking
room on the third floor.”
I cringed. I hated anything having to do with smoke. I knew those rooms stunk to high heaven.
“No, I’m good. Thank you.”
She handed Bennett the room cards, and as we walked to the elevators he gave me the extra one
without even a glance. When the doors to the elevator shut, he said, “
Damn
it. I’m sorry if you feel
uncomfortable. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
His pained voice made my stomach clench.
“No, Bennett, I agreed to come because I wanted to,” I said. “I just had a moment of doubt at the
desk, like maybe being near you and those beds . . .”
“Not if we don’t let it,” he said. “I promise I’ll sleep on the very edge of the other bed.”
We got off the elevator, found our door, and slipped inside. It was a plain but clean room. Two
queen beds sat side by side, separated by a nightstand. A bathroom was across the room, along with a
closet, a mini refrigerator, and a sink.
“I call this one,” I said, pointing to the bed closest to the window.
“Sounds good to me.” He lifted the corners of his cheeks.
I smiled back. “Now, let’s go sell your stuff.”
***
We drove to the art exhibit, which was in a huge space in one of the local shopping malls. I helped Bennett bring in his pieces from the back of his Jeep and find the table where he was to set up his
display.
The event coordinator assigned him one of the last tables in the far corner of the largest section and
he got to work placing his art on easels as well as on the long table provided him. His pictures were of
varying sizes, and though all of them were black-and-white charcoal drawings, a couple had hints of
added color.
Like the one he set on the easel that resembled the eye of a tornado—black and gray and angry. But
when you directed your gaze to the center of the storm, you saw that Bennett had inserted splashes of
green and orange. The effect was awe-inspiring.
There were dozens of other exhibitors setting up, and I found myself moving down the line passing
table after table of artists and their wares. There were sculptures, photographs, and abstract paintings.
And almost every artist held that same intensity in their eyes that Bennett had. Like gratification
restrained by sheer nervousness. Maybe pleased with their craft, yet still reserved. Not quite ready to
show off their art, to perhaps give it away, for the world to see.
Bennett had encouraged me to bring my books to study from during the setup, but I was too jazzed
up to pull them out of my bag. There was too much creative energy in this room and spilling over its
sides.
When I headed back in the direction of Bennett’s table, he was talking to a short redhead with
pretty blue eyes—another artist? She placed her hand on his arm, a personal gesture that made my chest
constrict.
“Avery, this is my friend Rebecca.”
Rebecca turned and smiled, all the while appraising me closely, from my jeans to my sweater to my
hair.
“Are you also exhibiting here?” I asked to be polite.
“Yeah, my sculptures are at table fourteen.” She pointed in the direction of her art. “I saw those,” I said looking back to the table I had recently passed. “Your stuff is really good.”
Bennett cleared his throat. “Rebecca and I know each other from the Bane Center for the Arts, in
our hometown.”
“Yep, and I haven’t seen you in months,” she said, pouting out her bottom lip. It gave me the
impression he had known those lips more intimately. “Next time you’re home, give me a call so we can
grab coffee.”
He nodded, and she walked away, throwing a smile over her shoulder. I wanted to ask him about
her, but it was none of my business.
Although maybe it
was
my business—because we were friends too, right? Besides, I was more than
curious about who and how much Bennett had dated. Or maybe he just had hordes of female friends—
like me—all of us waiting, hoping, to jump his bones someday.
Ugh, my imagination was getting the best of me.
“So what did you think of the other artists?” he asked, placing an empty box beneath the table.
“Some amazing stuff,” I said. “But I’m partial to this
one
artist’s work.”
“Oh, really?” A deep red splattered across his cheeks. “Why is that?”
I looked down at his display and noticed a piece I hadn’t seen before. It was so stunning I couldn’t
help being drawn to it, tracing my fingers along the outer edges, trying to understand it. “Take this
breathtaking one, for example.”
Two charcoal figures stood on opposite ends, as far away as the canvas would allow. They were
drawn in swirls of stormy grays, browns, and blacks. But in the space between them, the entire center of
the drawing, were abstract colorful objects floating in midair, like a misshapen hourglass, melted books,
and ghostly trees.
As if the objects represented all of the stuff between them, cluttering their path, keeping them apart.
Swirls of reds and yellows and purples offset the dull colors of the androgynous figures, as if their lives
were colorless in comparison to the bits and pieces in the center. The two characters couldn’t see each other clearly—there was so much in the way. But one of the
figures leaned to the side trying to see around all of that
stuff
, trying to get a good look at the other one.
And the look on this figure’s face was unabashed want and need and desire.
It occurred to me that the drawing could have been a metaphor for Bennett and me. An absurd one,
at best, because I was pretty sure it wasn’t at all and that Bennett had created it long before he had met
me.
But for some reason this drawing spoke to me. To something deeply rooted inside of me. I was so
moved by its intensity, I felt the stinging of tears behind my eyes.
Bennett was directly behind me now, so close I could feel the heat radiating from his body. His
mouth moved close to my ear, and my stomach quivered at the feel of his breath on my neck.
“Tell me what that drawing makes you feel in five words or less,” he murmured against my hair.
And as the first tear rolled down my cheek, the words came to me. “Pain, melancholy, beauty,
longing . . .”
The sound had whooshed out of the room, like he and I were the only two people standing in the
entire place, discussing the brilliance of his drawing. And unlike those two figures he had drawn, we had
gotten past all of that
stuff
and were standing in the space between, close enough to touch.
I turned to him, and he wiped the tear from my cheek with his thumb. “And?”
“Hope,” I whispered.
He said nothing more. Only searched deeply in my eyes for something—but I wasn’t sure what.
Maybe my tattered and bruised heart.
“Is that one your favorite?” he asked.
And then the moment was lost, because there was an announcement and the doors were swung
open and the public was let inside. Bennett steered me to one of the chairs behind his table before the
pandemonium hit. People mobbed the artwork, asked questions, shouted prices, and moved in herds to
the next table and the next. And so the morning passed in that way, with very few lulls. When I returned from getting us a couple of sandwiches for lunch, I noticed Bennett had sold
another two drawings to a man who was hunched over the table writing a check. Bennett moved the
pictures under the table so he could wrap them in brown butcher paper and have the man pick them up
on his way out to his car.
One of the drawings he was storing away was the one I had developed an affinity for. I felt a stab of
regret, because all morning long I had considered buying it for myself. But now that it had sold, I was
happy for him. Besides, I could barely afford much beyond rent, food, and gas.
As the afternoon wound down, I looked up from the nursing textbook I had finally pulled out only
to see Rebecca staring at me from across the way. I turned to Bennett, who was busy playing a game on
