The Genius and the Muse (24 page)

He glared at her. “Are you being serious right now?”

She repressed her smile. She was mostly joking. There was no doubt in her mind Javi considered them committed to each other, but she could also confess a small, juvenile part of her wanted to hear Javi call her his girlfriend.

The longer they were together, the more things seemed to fall into place for Kate. Javi was one of the smartest people she had ever met and one of the most talented. He was respectful but challenging in exactly the ways she needed. Being with him filled a hole in her life she didn’t even know she had.

And she also had to admit that she was fascinated by him. She loved tracing the hard planes and angles of his body, transfixed by the shadows they created. She would lay next to him while he slept and stare at the large phoenix adorning his back, trying to imagine what moment had inspired each tattoo that covered his body. Someday, she wanted to know the story behind each one, whether it was happy or sad.

For some reason, at that moment sitting in the car next to him, what Javi had said all those months ago at the art walk finally made sense.

“Oh!” she said with a small laugh.

He looked at her as she drove the old pickup.

“What? You’re joking with me, right?”

She grinned at him. “I don’t need a nice guy.”

“What?”

She needed
him
. He was rude, gruff, and mostly lacking in manners. He was brilliant and intense. He saw her in a way that Cody had never seen her in all the time they had known each other. He’d seen her from the beginning. And despite the years and circumstances that separated them, she had seen him, too.

“One frame?”

“One frame to capture who you think I am.”

It was the same one Kate would pick today, highlighting his stubborn jaw, his strangely graceful collarbone, and the star-like scars that dotted his thick neck.

Kate glanced at him and realized she had never answered his question and he was now glaring at her. She pulled over to the side of the road and put the truck in park.

Turning to him, she leaned across the cab of his pickup truck and kissed the cheek she hadn’t been able to convince him to shave. She smiled as her lips met rough stubble.

“Javier Lugo,” she asked simply, “will you be my boyfriend?”

She was pretty sure his face was red, despite the darkness of the truck cab, and she snickered a little.

“You’re cute when you blush, old man.”

Grunting, he turned and reached an arm around her waist, dragging her to straddle his lap as his other hand grasped the back of her neck and he pulled her in for a searing kiss. He devoured her mouth and pressed her body into his so she could feel how much he wanted her.

She only pulled him closer, arching against his chest when his hands gripped the small of her back.

They were lost in each other, ignoring the traffic that whizzed by on the busy street. When he finally let her up for air, she panted, but still held him close.

“Don’t,” he said as he continued to bite along her neck and behind her ear, “call your boyfriend an ‘old man.’” He paused and looked at her with a smirk. “It’s bad manners.”

She pinched his ear as he laughed and crawled off his lap to the driver’s seat again.

“We’re going to be late.”

He shrugged. “It’s Dee and Chris. They don’t care. They’re our ‘couple friends’ now.”

Kate laughed as she put the car in drive and pulled back onto the road heading toward the Bradley’s house in Claremont. After a minute, she heard Javi’s phone ring. Fishing it out of his pocket, he flipped it open.

“Hey, man, what’s up?”

She guessed from the friendly tone of voice it was probably Reed, who was still staying in the mountains at Sam’s cabin. Kate had been thrilled to hear he had flown out to California after receiving her note, and Susan had called her last month to tell her she thought Sam and Reed were working things out. Judging from Reed’s loud voice on the phone, she imagined there might be a few bumps in their happily ever after.

“Reed, I don’t know what to tell you.” Javi paused. “I’m sure she thought she was doing the right thing. Wouldn’t you try to protect her if you thought—” He scowled as his friend interrupted him.

Kate continued driving, turning onto the small residential street where Chris and Dee lived.

“Oh, no. Turn your damn car around and drive back to that cabin, asshole. If I come home with my girlfriend to find your drunk ass sitting on my porch again, I’m going to kick you back to New York, and you won’t be near as pretty when you get there.”

She grinned when she heard him call her his girlfriend, even if it wasn’t in the most romantic context, but she had to laugh a little, too. They had found Reed sitting on Javi’s porch a couple of weeks ago, drunk and pissed off, when Javi and Kate came back from dinner at his sister’s restaurant. Within the hour, Reed had been talking with Sam on the phone again, and she had driven down the mountain to pick him up, looking more than a little embarrassed.

“Do I look like Dr. Phil? Work this shit out, Reed.” His voice lowered and took on a more serious tone. “You two have dealt with worse… just work it out, man.” He paused again and Kate heard Reed’s voice, calmer and sounding more collected. “Yeah… call me tomorrow. Not too early.”

She parked in front of Chris and Dee’s house and waited for him to finish his call. When he finally snapped the phone shut, he turned and looked at her with a grimace.

“I am not Dr. Phil.”

She shook her head seriously. “No, you’re not. You still have all your hair… for now.”

He just rolled his eyes and walked over to grab her hand. Suddenly, he stopped on the walkway and pulled her in for a fierce embrace.

“Javi—”

“Please don’t ever try to protect me by not telling me things, Katie,” he said quietly. “Do you understand?” He pulled away and looked into her wide blue eyes. “I don’t ever want you to not tell me if something’s not okay.” He frowned as he smoothed a strand of hair away from her face to tuck behind her ear.

“Fair enough. Same to you.”

Frowning a little, he nodded. “I know we’re not… I mean, we’re not them, but—”

Kate cut him off with a gentle kiss. “Nothing wrong with learning from your friends.”

Javi cupped her cheeks with his hands and placed a lingering kiss on her lips before he backed away, taking her hand in his and walking up the path.

“Boring Chris.” He sighed. “He’s going to end up talking all night about the thrill of capturing the two-toed horny woodpecker in its natural habitat or some shit like that.”

Kate suppressed her laugh. “Shut up and be polite, you cranky old man.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Crestline, California

November 2010

R
eed could see her bundled in a blanket and sitting on the end of the dock when he pulled back into the clearing in front of the cabin. His immediate thought was that it was too cold for her to be sitting on the water like that, but then he imagined the scathing comment she would make about him being “overprotective” and decided not to say anything.

Instead, he walked up to the porch and grabbed another blanket before walking out to join her. When he got close enough, she turned and he could see the tear tracks on her cheeks.

“I thought you were going to Javi’s.”

“He said he’d kick me out if I showed up. I think he likes Kate more than me now.”

Reed saw Sam’s mouth curl up a bit at the corner, and he went to settle next to her. Instead of sitting, he lay down on his back with his head almost at the edge of the dock so he could look into her face while he looked at the stars.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at him. “I should have told you.”

“I’m sorry, too. I hate to think of you going through that alone.”

“I wasn’t al—”

“Sam,” he bit out. “You’re making excuses.” It hadn’t been her cousin’s responsibility to help her through her depression. It had been his, and it was going to be a while before he wasn’t mad at her for hiding it from him.

He had spent their first week back together apologizing for kissing another woman, something he still felt guilty about, but it wasn’t until she had confessed the depression to him that Reed had felt the true cost of their separation. He felt concern first, then a resurgence of grief, and tonight he had finally reached anger.

“How would
you
feel, Sam? If you knew I had gone through something like that and not allowed you to help me?”

“I’d be angry,” she whispered, nodding as she looked across the cold lake. “I’d be—”

“Furious. You’d be absolutely furious.”

She sighed. “I know.”

They both stared into the dark night around them as they processed their thoughts.

“I can’t apologize anymore, Reed. I can’t. I feel like we’re going through the same arguments over and over. I messed up. You messed up. We both messed up. A lot. We’re both guilty. We both assumed things. We’re both stubborn about listening to our friends. So what do we do? Do you want to move past this? Or is this it?”

He frowned. “What?”

“You heard me. We have to forgive each other…
really
forgive each other, or just say goodbye.”

“Forget that,” he snorted.

“What?”

Reed reached up to grab her chin so she had to look at him. “I lived four years without you like some kind of zombie. I’m not letting you go again. We were both miserable.”

“Fine.” She reached down to frame his face with both hands. “Then I forgive you, Reed O’Connor. For everything. And I apologize for hiding things from you, and for running away instead of trusting you. And I don’t want to ever bring it up again.”

He placed one large hand on hers to hold it to his cheek when he responded. “I forgive you,” he said in a hoarse voice. “And I’m sorry for breaking our trust in a foolish moment. I’m sorry for letting you go too easily and not seeing what you were going through. And I don’t ever want to bring it up again, either.”

“Okay.”

“Okay… but you have to promise not to hide stuff from me.”

“And you have to promise not to wrap me up in protective packaging when you get scared.”

He nodded. “I can do that.”

“Okay. No hiding stuff. And no bubble wrap.”

“Sounds fair.” He finally smiled. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

They sat quietly in the moonlight for a while longer, Reed cradling Sam’s hand against his face as he looked at the stars, and Sam staring out at the dark tree line.

“I want you to move back to New York,” he whispered.

Sam looked at him and tried to pull her hand away, but he pressed his hand over hers more securely and refused to let her break contact.

“You came here to heal,” he persisted. “You’ve healed. Don’t you think it’s time to move forward?”

“I love this place,” Sam blinked the tears from her eyes. “I have a life here. I have family, I have—”

“You’re alone. Hiding. Just like I’ve been.” He sat up and angled his shoulders toward her. “You’re in the middle of nowhere, and I’m surrounded by people, but we’re both still alone. You love this place? Fine, we’ll come back. We’ll spend summers here. God knows it’s nicer than Manhattan in August. But Sam”—He hugged her to his chest—“aren’t you ready for the people again?”

She closed her eyes and leaned into his embrace. Reed’s memory flashed through a thousand mental pictures of her in the city they had loved. Sam laughing with Lydia in a cafe wearing a cappuccino foam mustache. Sketching a busker in the subway as the musician danced and grinned. Sitting with an old man, smiling and tossing crumbs for pigeons in Central Park as Reed snapped pictures. He remembered flashes of her stretched out on the bed in their studio as the afternoon sun poured in through the high windows and made her skin glow like she was lit from within.

Reed held her, willing her to remember as he did. “Please, Sam, I need you back. I
can’t
go back without you.”

Finally, her hand lifted and stroked his temple, as if maybe she could see the pictures in his mind’s eye. He held her close, relaxing into the anchor of her touch. Reed felt her pull away from him, but her hand remained stroking his hair. When he finally looked her in the eye, he smiled.

“Yeah,” Sam said, “I think… maybe I am ready.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Pomona, California

March 2011

“
K
atie!”

Javi called toward the back corner where he had seen Kate heading to work.

“Yeah?” she called back.

“Where are you?”

“In the back by the pipes. Why?”

He rounded the corner where he saw the glow from the light kits she had set up. Kate was in the corner sitting inside a giant concrete pipe he had salvaged from a building site. She was curled up and only wearing a thin t-shirt and a pair of panties with the camera trained on her. He uttered a muffled groan when he saw her; his reaction toward her bare skin as strong as the first time he’d seen it, eight months before.

She sat up in surprise as she spotted him out of the corner of her eye. “Hey,” she called, but the movement left her off balance, and she toppled over backward.

“Oh, shit!” she cried.

Javi rushed forward, panicked by her sudden fall. “Kate?”

He heard her small voice from behind the pipes. “I’m okay. I pulled a mattress back here 'cause it happened before. I’m not hurt. Just… sort of stuck.”

Relief flooded him when he heard her, quickly overtaken by the hilarity of the situation, as he burst into laughter.

“It happened before?” he gasped. “What have you been doing back here?”