Sculpting Grace: A Light Romance Novel (Art of Grace Book 2) (18 page)

"Hey! Dean! Open up!" I shouted as I repeatedly jammed my finger into the doorbell's buzzer, alternating with a few hard knocks on the door itself for good measure.

The artist dragged the door open after a minute, his eyes wide and his mouth twisted down. "Good lord in heaven, woman, what's gotten into you-"

"Shut up," I told him, marching into the house and extending one finger out in front of me, from which he backed away like it was the tip of a knife. "Don't give me any of your usual crap, dodging my questions. Shut up and answer me."

An instant later, it occurred to me that this comment was a paradox, that he couldn't technically shut up and answer my questions at the same time, but de St. James seemed to read the intention of my tone, rather than just obeying the direct interpretation of my words. His mouth closed, and he gave me a nod.

This time, instead of retreating back to his studio, I instead directed him into the front room, which must have once been a living room. "Sit," I ordered de St. James, pointing at a dirty and dusty couch.

He sat.

"Good," I told him, my voice not warming up much. "Now, I went and talked to Richard Gunn."

At the name, despite my admonishment, de St. James rose up a little from the couch, his eyebrows coming together. "You saw him? He talked to you? How did he-"

"Hey, I'm not done," I snapped, cutting him off. And, wonder of wonders, de St. James meekly shrank back when I snapped at him! Somehow, amazingly, I'd managed to get the upper hand over him, at least for the moment.

I couldn't let this opportunity go to waste. I plunged on.

"And from what he told me, it sounds like you're pretty much the one who screwed all of this up, being emotionally distant and focusing more on your artwork instead of on the relationship," I went on, not pulling my punches. At the bottom of my gut, a little knot in my intestine grew tighter, as these words resonated with my own actions towards Carter. Not that I'd been emotionally distant, necessarily - I just didn't want things to rush so far forward, so fast! That wasn't the same at all.

"Now," I finished, "I want to hear your side. And don't hold anything back, no matter whether you like it or not. Got it?"

For a moment, de St. James said nothing.

"You can answer me," I quickly added, realizing that I'd ordered him to be silent.

He nodded, and sighed. "Fine. Here's what happened between Rich and me..."

Chapter Twenty-One

*

At first, as de St. James started to tell his side of how he and Richard Gunn had their falling out, I just stood and did my best to listen. As my legs grew tired, however, I first began shifting back and forth and then, reluctantly, started trying to clean off another place to sit in the dirty living room.

"And so, I really needed - should I stop?" de St. James asked, frowning at me, as I pulled a rather squishy plastic bag that appeared to be stuffed with damp towels off of a chair, grimacing at how the lump felt in my hands.

"No, keep going," I told him, opening up the bag a little bit so that I could glance inside - and then immediately recoiling at the smell. "Good god, what is this?"

"Beach towels," he answered, as if the answer was obvious.

"And what, you decided to bring home every dead fish you could find on the beach inside of them? No, don't answer that," I quickly added, as he started to open his mouth. "Keep going with your story."

With the bag full of smelly, disgusting towels off of the chair, I patted the cushion. Fortunately, it seemed like the plastic bag had done a decently good job of acting as a barrier between the towels and the fabric of the cushion, and the seat felt dry. Trying not to look over at de St. James, I bent down close enough to take an exploratory sniff. Nope, no stench of rot and decay coming from the chair.

I held my breath as I settled my butt down on the chair, but it supported my weight. "Keep going," I repeated to de St. James as I drew the chair up to listen.

Surprisingly, de St. James' story wasn't too different from the version that Richard Gunn had given me. I'd expected for de St. James to bluster and get angry with me, insisting that none of it had been his fault, that he'd been trying to do his best and it was all Richard's unreasonable expectations. Instead, however, the man talked in a low and rather depressed tone, and he freely admitted that most of it was his fault.

"I'm not expecting you to take my side," he said to me, as if this explained anything for me. "But I want you to try and understand my reasons. I thought that I did the best job that I could, at the time." He sighed, looking down between his knees at his hands, knotted together in his lap. "It just never seemed to be enough."

From the story that he told me, de St. James had known for a while, just like Gunn had, that the relationship was on a rocky stretch. "I knew that we were in trouble, but I didn't know how to fix it," he lamented. "I kept on wanting to make things better, but I didn't know what to say or what to do, and every time I tried to think about it, I just kept on getting angry! And then, I'd go into my studio and do some carving, because that was how I dealt with that anger, that frustration of not knowing what to do. I'd channel it into my work."

I remembered some of those art features and interviews I'd read when researching de St. James, how some reviewers talked about the passion that they saw evident in the man's creations. Now, I was beginning to understand more where that passion came from - and it wasn't a pretty picture.

"And as time went by, I just kept doing that, and things kept on getting worse," de St. James continued, his fingers twisting together. "I mean, looking back now, I shouldn't have been surprised. I didn't do anything. But I kept on thinking that, maybe all of this was a good thing, that it would turn around in the end."

"How?" I hadn't meant to interrupt, but the word slipped out of me.

Fortunately, he didn't take it as a slight. "I mean, we'd just moved in here, and Richard wasn't working yet. We didn't have much money, which was one of the things that we very carefully avoided fighting about. But it was always on my mind, at least, and I thought that maybe, if I kept on working, I'd eventually manage to earn enough from the artwork so that it wouldn't be an issue now. Once I hit the right levels of success, the stress would just sort of go away on its own." He fell silent, shaking his head.

"So you kept on working, instead of talking," I gently prompted him after a minute.

He nodded, cleared his throat. "I kept on working. But the anger didn't go away. And then, all of a sudden, he just came home one day and came back into my studio, searched me out."

Here, de St. James paused for a moment, and a curious sound came out of his throat. It sounded almost like a half-choked sob. "For a moment, when I saw him, I had this surge of hope shoot through me. I thought that maybe he'd come back to talk to me, to tell me that he understood what I was going through, that he wanted to work through it."

For several seconds, the man just stopped, his shoulders heaving a little. I shifted back and forth in my chair, feeling a bit uncomfortable with this. I was seeing his deepest regrets, experiencing the most stressful part of his life as I forced him to relive it, and I felt almost like I was spying on his secrets. It was like I'd found his journal and decided to read through it. I wondered if I should lean forward and pat him on the shoulder.

After a minute, however, de St. James managed to get his tears under control. "But no, that wasn't why he'd come back to find me," he said softly, his voice thick with sadness. "He had come back for the other reason. He told it to me straight, no dancing around the issue. He couldn't take it any longer, had to get out."

"And that was six months ago," I filled in, repeating what Richard had told me. Now, I finally understood why de St. James' work seemed to vanish and stop, six months ago.

de St. James nodded. "And I just sort of fell apart. I thought that before he left, I was putting effort into my artwork? After Richard moved out, I practically lived in that back room, my studio. I didn't go out, ordered everything in, had it all delivered to me. I didn't bother with anything besides my art - what was the point? I just created my sculptures because it was a way to get a little of my feelings out, even though I could never work enough to fully empty all the emotions that still flooded me."

I blinked, tried to figure out how to even start to address this. How could I even start to try and fix this? What could I possibly do? de St. James had written this as one of the problems on his to-do list, but I didn't know how I could ever repair this much damage, fix a relationship that had gone this badly astray.

As I tried to think, de St. James wiped at his eyes with a grimy sleeve of his bathrobe, looked back at me. "Look, don't worry about it," he said finally, with a sigh.

"Don't worry about what?"

"This." He spread his arms out, as if taking in the house, the garbage, his sadness. "All of this. You don't need to be the one trying to fix my problems. Just bring me whatever papers it takes to get my art into your gallery, and I'll sign them." He let out another little sniffle. "What art I can still produce, at least."

I felt my spirits, already low, drop even further down through my body, all the way to the soles of my feet. "Look, Richard let me in to talk," I said gently. "He still thinks about you - he wasn't with anyone else in his apartment."

"Too bad." There was a small bubble of snot extending from the end of de St. James' nose, gently inflating and deflating with each breath. "He ought to be happy. One of us should be, at least."

"But that's my point!" I insisted. "He's not happy, either! So maybe there's still a chance for you to save this!"

For just a moment, de St. James looked up, his expression absurdly hopeful, like a lost puppy. But it only lasted for a moment before despair once again clouded his eyes. "No, I can't. What could I even do? It's hopeless."

"It's not!" I tried, jumping up from my chair. "Look, you never opened up to Richard, so as far as he could tell, you were the one who started everything! He thinks that you shut him out, that you were being withdrawn on purpose - not because you didn't know what else to do!"

"That's even worse," de St. James said, slumping even further down on the couch.

"No, it's better - because you can set the record straight!" Up from my chair, I paced back and forth. "Look, what's the harm in just talking to him? You told me that you kept on wanting to talk to him, but you didn't know what to say, and you kept on getting more and more frustrated. Well, it's not too late - you can still try talking to him, just telling him how you feel and putting it all out in the open!"

I didn't know what I expected; maybe I thought that de St. James, energized by my uplifting motivational speech, would jump up from the sofa and declare that he'd do it. But although I saw what might have been a flicker of consideration in his eyes, he didn't get up, didn't even sit up straighter.

I doubled down. "Come on, promise me that you'll give this a chance," I pushed. "Look, things couldn't get much worse, right? You two aren't talking, but it's clear, at least to me, that neither of you is over the other yet. Don't you think that it could help for you to just talk, just to give it a chance?"

I held my breath, wondering if he'd say no. If he said no - well, I'd be successful, still, wouldn't I? He had already agreed to let me sell his art at the Halesford Gallery, and that had been my goal from the beginning. That had been what all of this was for.

Right?

Somehow, I didn't feel like this was a win, however. Maybe it was just seeing how pathetic de St. James looked, now, how this man that had once scared me half to death now just inspired pity. Or maybe, just maybe, I'd come to not entirely detest the fellow.

Finally, de St. James opened his mouth. "What would I even say?" he asked, almost too softly for me to hear.

I couldn't hold back a smile. He might not have confidence in me, but he was still willing to at least give it a shot! "Just be open with him," I said. "Don't ask for anything, don't think that he owes you anything. Just apologize, tell him your side, let him know how you felt." I took a deep breath. "How you still feel."

The man just sat there on the couch for another minute, unmoving. "I'll think about it," he finally said, shrugging. "But I don't think anything will come of it. Sometimes, two people just miss, and it wasn't meant to be. Even if they would have been perfect together. Something comes up, and it just doesn't work out."

I tried to cheer de St. James up a couple more times, but the man had apparently reached his emotional breaking point. He just sat there on the sofa, and then, finally, dragged himself up.

"Where are you going?" I called after him as he headed out of the room.

"To bed," he answered, his voice more despondent than I'd ever heard from him before. "I'm done."

For a crazy second, I thought about chasing after him, but realized that this wouldn't help. Instead, not knowing if I'd really achieved anything at all, I left the house. It was nearly five, and I needed to go back to the gallery and check in with Lizzie as she closed up. I'd need to also look up what forms were necessary to get de St. James' work displayed at the gallery, what sort of agreement the artist needed to sign.