Suddenly the lightbulb goes on. “Oooooh, you want me to catch some snow in the bowl? Why didn’t you just say so?” I take it and bend down, planning to scoop up a whole bunch of the fluffy white stuff.
“No, not that crap on the ground. You want the snow from the trees. Hold on, I’ll get it for ya.”
My jaw eases open as I prepare to respond, but then the words are stolen away by surprise when I see him climbing the tree. Tiny limbs and barely-there ridges are enough for his boots to get a grip, and suddenly he’s up to the same level as the branch above me.
“Now put the bowl on your head like I told you.”
I sigh out really loudly, letting him know how silly I think this whole thing is. But I put the bowl on my head now and wait. “This is ridiculous. I feel like an idiot.”
“Just oooone moooore second…” Jeremy climbs up a few more feet, stands on the branch, and begins jumping up and down on it, holding onto the tree trunk for balance.
I open my mouth to protest, but close it when it fills with snow.
Every bit of the frozen white pile that was on the branch is now on me.
“Awesome!” Jeremy yells. “Hold it right there! Don’t spill any of it!”
I’m too busy spitting snow out of my mouth and blinking it off my eyelashes to answer him. He’s going to be in so much trouble when I get my hands on him.
I hear a big BOOF! and realize that he’s jumped out of the tree and into the snow. He struggles through his former path to get to me, a huge grin on his face.
“Are you ready for some dessert?” he asks.
I blink at him, melted snow making it look like I’m crying. “If you tell me my dessert is snow, I’m going to kill you.”
He reaches up slowly and takes the bowl from my head. “Easy now. Wouldn’t want you to spill your dessert.” He gives me a big exaggerated wink, pushes me in between the boobs, sending me on my back into the snow, and takes off running with the bowl held to his chest.
I point at his back, my other arm and legs flailing around, trying to make contact with something that will help me get to my feet. “Kill, Jaws! Kill! Bite him in the ass!”
Jaws picks his way over the uneven snow and stops when he gets to my leg, using it to leverage himself up onto four feet. He starts walking daintily up my leg. When I see him coming for me and guess his plans, I flip onto my side and then get on all fours. “No way, you stinky mutt. No French kisses. Not anymore. Not ever again.”
Struggling through the snow, I make my way back to the cabin with Jaws behind me. The door to the cabin slams shut as I reach the bottom of the stairs. My heart is racing and my pulse pounding, and it’s not all from the workout I just got trying to get through the snow. Jeremy is most definitely flirting. I just have to decide what I’m going to do about it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
STOMPING LIKE A BIG GIANT among Lilliputians as I cross the porch helps to get rid of most of the snow from my body and boots. I leave the rest to melt into puddles just inside the door to the cabin. Jeremy’s already undressed and standing in the kitchen with two bowls.
“Do you prefer maple syrup or blueberry?” he asks.
My plans for revenge are tempered by two of my favorite words. “What?” Maple syrup? Blueberry? Sex on a beach? What?
He holds up two bottles. One looks like regular old maple syrup like I’d buy for my pancakes, and the other looks like something that would be at a snow-cone machine at a state fair. I can’t help but grin like a kid.
“You have snow-cone syrup?”
“Always. It’s a tradition up here at the cabin. But you have to use the right snow. You can’t risk anything that’s been on the ground. Too many critters with bladders around here.”
I sit at the stool where I had my dinner and watch as he pours maple syrup over a round ball of snow in a bowl.
“How’d you get it so perfect?” I ask, pointing to its smoothly domed surface.
He grins to himself. “Secret. Can’t tell you.”
“No fair. No secrets in the cabin.” I pretend-pout.
He looks over at my painting alcove. “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
I scowl at him, trying like hell to ignore the jolt of sexual electricity that just raced through my body and zapped me in the nether regions. Does he want to get naked as much as I do?
“Not fair,” I finally say, possibly a little out of breath.
“All’s fair in love and war,” he says, grinning again.
The silence that follows nearly eats me alive. I have to look away. I can’t imagine he’s feeling what I am, thinking what I am, namely: Which is this? Love or war?
When he first arrived, it felt like war. Now it doesn’t so much. Does that mean there’s something else happening between us?
I nearly laugh out loud at the path my thoughts are taking. I must be way lonelier than I thought. This poor guy can’t think or talk about anyone but his deceased wife, and yet I’m imagining him falling in love with me. Crazy town. I need to paint these deranged feelings out of me, ASAP.
“Here,” he says in a more subdued voice, “try mine, and if you like it, I’ll make you one with the maple.”
I take a small bite and decide it’s my new favorite cabin dessert.
“You like it?” His smile reminds me of a little kid giving the perfect present on Christmas.
“Love it.”
He reaches for the bowl, but I wrap my arm around it and drag it closer. “Mine.”
He laughs. “I’ll make you another one.”
“Mine.” I hover closer over the top of it and hold my spoon out in a threatening gesture. “I will cut you.”
He puts his hands up in surrender. “Fine. Yours. I’ll make myself a new one.” He licks his lips as he starts the process. “But with more syrup this time.”
“Hey! No fair!” I reach over and hit the bottle with my spoon as he pours it over his snowball. “Save some for me!”
“I don’t knooow,” he says in a singsong voice. “Maybe if you agree to show me your painting later, I might be able to save you some.”
“No deal.” I pretend to be mad as I eat more of my maple-flavored snowball. I can’t call this a mere snowcone. It’s much better, plus there’s no cone in sight.
We crunch our snowy desserts in silence, grinning at each other over the island. Twice he pretends to try and steal some of mine and twice we enter into a spoon-sparring competition. Of course, I win. I think he’s letting me, though.
When we’re done, he takes our bowls and rinses them in the sink.
“Now what?” I say, resting my chin in my hands and my elbows on the counter. My lips are sticky, so I keep licking them. I watch his every move, too, so the whole scene makes me think I must seem like a total weirdo. Luckily, he’s not giving me any strange looks.
As he moves around the kitchen, his muscles bend and flex. I could get used to staring at him all day. He’s a truly beautiful specimen. I haven’t done any nudes in a while, but I could sure be convinced to do one of him…
I sit up suddenly, jerking myself out of my dream-haze. A nude? Of Jeremy? Am I insane? Talk about playing with fire; I’m already sweating.
“Now what?” he says, parroting my question as he wipes down the counter with a sponge. “Now, we have you telling me the rest of your story.” He looks up at me and winks. “Thought I forgot, didn’t you?”
I shrug, hating that we’re back on this subject. It’s so boring and not something I want to re-live. I’m totally ready to move on. My time here with Jeremy has at least brought me to that conclusion. I knew it before, but now I feel it too, all the way deep in my bones.
“It’s not a big deal,” I say, shrugging. “I just got burned out, and one night after I had a bunch of tequila shots, I drafted a letter to my landlord telling him I was putting in my notice and then mailed it.”
“Wow.” He tosses the sponge in the sink. “I’ve heard of drunk-dialing and drunk-texting, but never dr
unk-notice-giving.”
“I know.” I smile a little at my foolishness. Those were the actions of a girl in high school, not a grown woman. “I’m original, what can I say.”
“So you gave notice, and then what?”
“Well, then I looked around me and realized I had enough money in the bank to stop working for about six months, and since I didn’t have a life outside of work and I hated working, I really didn’t have any other choice.”
“What do you mean?” He leans on the island with both forearms, staring into my eyes.
I can’t look away. “I was lost. Disconnected. I didn’t know who I was anymore or what I wanted. All I knew was that I needed a change and I needed to be able to paint again.”
“And you drove out here?”
“No, I called up my friend Leah and she invited me to come visit her in Manhattan.”
“James’s girlfriend, I guess,” he says.
I nod, hypnotized by his beautiful eyes. “I drove out, thinking I’d stay a little while and paint there, but when I saw his place …”
Jeremy grins.
“…I knew it wouldn’t work.”
“Not very art-studio-ish, is it?” he asks.
“No. I mean, Leah’s changed it all around. It looks nothing like it did before. But still, it’s too beautiful to mess up with my stuff.”
“James changed his condo?” Jeremy stands up straighter at this news.
“Oh my god, yes.” I laugh remembering the before and after photographs. “Completely. He let Leah loose in there.”
Jeremy tilts his head. “What’s she like?”
I look out the front window, trying to see past the darkness, but all I can see is our reflection. My mind falls back in time to my past. “Leah is colors. She is an entire color wheel on legs. She has energy, she’s silly, she’s a hippy born in the wrong generation, and she’s very kind. And forgiving.”
“Not James’s type at all,” Jeremy says.
I turn my gaze back to him. “Oh, you’d be surprised. They actually compliment each other really well.”
“I don’t get it.” Jeremy shakes his head.
I slide off the stool and go over to my studio. “I’ll show you.”
Jeremy follows me over and stands behind me as I grab my palette and squeeze some colors out onto it. I turn around with it and several small paintbrushes in my hand.
“This is James,” I say, grabbing some of the brown and sliding it across my palette’s surface.
“Yes. I can see that.” Jeremy laughs silently for a second. “Brown. Dull, boring, and predictable brown.”
“Not so fast,” I say, winking at him. I use another brush to draw a stripe of hot pink next to it. “This is Leah.”
“Bright.”
I add a stripe of electric blue next to it. “And this is Leah too.”
“Colorful.”
“And this is Leah.” I add some yellow and orange to the lines I’ve already painted.
I hold up the palette so it’s below his chin. “Tell me what you see now.”
“Well, I see lots of colors around the brown streak.” He laughs.
“And what do you see in the brown? Anything?”
He stares and shrugs.
I turn on the lamp without the shade on it and wait for him.
“Maybe I see some red.”
“Very good. Anything else?”
“Orange? Spices?”
I put the palette down. “You said spices.” I feel like hugging him. This is what I used to feel like when I first started teaching — pride in a job well done.
He looks embarrassed. “I know. Stupid, huh?”
“No, not at all. Spices can seem muted when you first look at them, color-wise, but if you spill some out on a white piece of paper and really look at them, or put them next to something with a complimentary color, you often will see them differently.”
“So you’re saying that James is like a spice.”
I laugh. “Maybe. I don’t know him that well, but I do know Leah, and I can guarantee you, she wouldn’t be having a baby with a guy who was boring.”
“A baby?” Jeremy takes a step back. “She’s pregnant?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Why would I? No one tells me anything.” He sounds offended.
I have to laugh at his outrage. “Well, they’d love to tell you things, but you’ve been impossible to find.” I tilt my head and really look at him. “You’re missing out on your entire life, hiding out here in this cabin. Is that what you want? To miss Cassie growing up? To miss your brother becoming a father?”
Jeremy shakes his head, and then turns around, staring at the front door. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I don’t believe that. Be honest. You love your family, I know you do. You should go see them. You should go see your daughter.”
His chin drops to his chest. “It’s too late for that.”
“Too late? Are you kidding? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s never too late to make things right.” As I found out recently when I went back to a friend who’d I’d left in the dust. Thank goodness Leah is so forgiving. I wouldn’t have met Jeremy if it weren’t for her kind heart, and I already know that would have been a tragedy. Even if he leaves tomorrow, I’m still a better person having spent this time with him.
Jeremy’s upset. “You said they already took custody away from me. That sounds like too late to me.” He walks away and sits down on the couch.
I follow closely behind, suddenly desperate to get him to understand. “No, it’s not like that! They just did it as a temporary measure in case she needed medical care. I guess she got really sick one week and they worried the hospital wouldn’t take their treatment decisions without something legal to back them up. And they couldn’t find you. They tried really hard. Jana told me they drove all over the city, going to every place they knew you went to before.”
“Sick?” Jeremy’s head jerks sideways to look at me as I come around the couch. “How sick?”
“Nothing bad, but for a couple days they were worried about her fever.” I sit down next to him and take his hand in mine, resting it on my leg. “Please go back home. Please go back and see your family.”
He looks down at our hands and then up at me. “Why do you care so much what I do?”
My heart is beating too fast. I’m afraid he’s going to figure out that I’m panting after him like a dog in heat. I try to pull my hand back, but he grabs my fingers and holds on tight.
“Tell me,” he says, his eyes now smoldering where before they were full of anger and pain.
“Ummm, because I want you out of the cabin so I can paint in peace?” I try to sound firm about it, but it comes out like a question.
“I don’t think so,” he says.
We stare at each other for a long time. I hold my breath until I start to see stars swimming around his head.
“I want to kiss you,” he whispers. “I haven’t wanted to kiss another woman in years. Since I first met Laura.”
I let out my breath in a loud huff. “Don’t.”
The two of us kissing feels like a really bad idea. I know me. As badly as I want to feel his lips on mine, I know I won’t recover from this one as easily as I’ve recovered from bad hookups in the past. This one will really hurt. Jeremy’s not like other guys. Not even close.
“Why not?” he asks, his eyes showing hurt now.
I want to answer honestly, but I have no answer that makes sense. “I don’t know,” I finally admit.
He leans in and puts his free hand gently on my cheek. Only his fingertips are there, sending electric shocks and shivers down my face, my neck, and across my body. He’s so close I can feel his breath on my face. He smells like sticky-sweet maple syrup.
My eyes are drifting closed and I’m thinking about all the ways I’m probably going to regret this, when suddenly a loud bang, a yelp, and a crash yank me out of the moment and away from Jeremy’s touch.
Chap
ter Twenty-Seven
MY PAINTING IS ON THE floor and the cloth that was covering it is halfway across the room. Jaws is under it and trying to escape, dragging it around with his struggles.
“What the hell?” I scramble around the couch to get to the alcove before Jeremy does.
By the time I get there, Jaws has lost his attacker-sheet and is hiding in the corner, looking like he’s afraid he’s about to be kicked or something the way he’s cowering and shivering. He’s knocked the easel over and spilled an entire paint-can of brushes too. Thank goodness I’d emptied it of dirty water this morning before I went to bed, otherwise the painting would be destroyed.
I wrestle the easel back into place and then bend over to grab the painting. Jeremy is standing there to help, but freezes when he sees the image on the canvas.
I walk over and grab the sheet without a word. As I start to throw it over the painting, his hand on my wrist stops me from completing the motion.
“I’m sorry …,” he says absently, “…I didn’t mean to look.” He’s still staring at it, his eyes scanning every inch of the images there.
“Never mind,” I say, pulling away from him and gathering the sheet up so I can throw it over properly. “It’s not your fault. Jaws is the guilty party.” I raise my eyes to my furry friend. “Look at him. Have you ever seen anyone look so guilty?”
Jeremy ignores my attempt to pull his gaze away from the painting.
“That’s me,” he says, staring at his likeness.
I don’t respond. What am I going to say? That it’s not? Of course it is. I know I’m good enough to paint someone’s image with clarity. I’m just embarrassed that he caught me reading him, delving into his emotions. I couldn’t help it, though. That’s how I saw him when he first arrived here. Now I realize I see something, someone else when I look at him in this moment. Some of the darkness has lifted from around him. Some of the pain that was swallowing him up has left. Or at least I’d like to think it has.
“Do I really look that sad?” he asks, stepping closer to it.
“Maybe.” I’m embarrassed. More eloquent words escape me.