“Then clearly it worked.” Ian bent and kissed her lightly on the lips. She wanted more of a kiss than that but she saw a flash when their lips met—someone in a suit had just taken their picture.
“What was that?” she asked as the man in the suit with the camera slipped into another room.
“Reporter from the Portland Mercury,” Ian said as if she should have known. “Drink up, we need to go meet the fam. Also, you look incredible.” He held out his arm and together they walked from the front room down a hall toward the sound of voices coming from a back room.
“You don’t look so bad yourself. I’m glad you like the dress.”
“I love the dress. I love the lady in the dress even more. And I will love the lady out of the dress most of all.”
“You’re already trying to get me naked?” she asked.
“Yes. My old bedroom’s upstairs,” he said. “We will make a pilgrimage to it before this night is over.”
“Is that an order?”
“Yes.”
“Just in case I never told you,” she said, standing on her tiptoes to whisper in her ear. “I love your orders.”
Ian kissed her again in the darkened hallway before leading her through the door. He’d brought her to a large ebony wood paneled library where young women in red and silver sequined dresses sat on the arms of leather sofas chatting to men in tuxedos. An older couple sat on the sofa with a baby between them kicking her feet in shiny new baby girl shoes.
The chitchat quieted as Ian cleared his throat.
“Everybody, I want you to meet Flash, my girlfriend. Real name Veronica, everybody calls her Flash. She’s a metal sculptor and a welder and the best thing that’s ever happened to me. So be nice or you’re all out of the will.”
“Whose will?” asked a girl who was obviously a teenager and trying very hard not to look like it tonight. “Yours or Uncle Dean’s? Because I’ll behave for Uncle Dean’s will. Probably not yours, though.”
“That’s fair,” Ian said. “Flash, this is my cousin Angie. Angie, Flash.”
“Hi, Flash. Cool ink,” Angie said with a bright smile, and Flash thanked her very sincerely. So far tonight she’d had her truck and her tattoos complimented. She might survive this party, after all.
She met Ian’s grandparents, John and Marianne, and the baby was Penny, his cousin Jake’s daughter. The introductions rolled on for a few minutes until she was dizzy with names, relations and connections. But so far so good. Everyone was friendly, especially Ian’s grandparents.
Her tension started to ease as she fell into comfortable conversation with Ian’s aunt Lacey and her daughter Petra. They talked about Portland’s art scene, a topic Flash could handle with ease. Petra was an aspiring writer who was heading into an MFA program in the fall. Flash talked about the handful of art classes she’d taken, and when she casually mentioned she’d sold a piece recently, Petra high-fived her. She had a novel on submission and knew what it was like waiting for that all-important phone call.
“How you doing?” Ian whispered into her ear as they walked to the large formal living room for his father’s announcement. Flash braced herself for more photographs.
“Good. I like your family.”
“They like you.”
“They’re drunk,” she said. “Of course they like me.”
“There are benefits to being in a Catholic family,” he said.
“You have three uncles and four aunts and that’s just on your dad’s side of the family.”
“There are downsides to being in a Catholic family.”
“I’m never going to remember all their names.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Ian said under his breath. “I don’t even remember them.”
“I heard that,” Ian’s uncle...Lewis? said. Yeah, Lewis. Maybe. Or Louis. Oh, fuck it. She was buying them all name tags for Christmas.
The family lined up along the walls of the elegantly appointed formal living room as Ian’s father stood in front the Christmas tree as several reporters took pictures.
“You have a reason for inviting us?” one reporter asked Dean Asher. “Or did you just miss us?”
“I missed you, Joe. You have no idea how much I’ve missed having you at my house. When was the last time?”
“Four years ago,” Joe the reporter said. “Last time you announced you were running for the senate.”
“You’re stealing my thunder,” Dean said.
“So that means you are running for reelection?”
“No,” Dean Asher said.
“No?” Joe said. Everyone in the room went silent. This was not the announcement everyone had been expecting.
“Instead I’m running for the House of Representatives. You know, the big one. In DC.”
“Oh, holy shit,” Ian breathed. The entire room heard.
“Thank you for that, son,” Dean Asher said. “My first endorsement, everyone.”
With that, everyone in the room applauded and cheered wildly. Under the cover of the noise, Ian leaned in and whispered in her ear.
“Second floor,” he said. “Last room on the left.”
“What is?” she whispered back.
“My old bedroom. Slip out while nobody’s watching us. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“You’re really going to fuck me at your family’s Christmas party?”
“Do you even have to ask?”
“You know, Mrs. Scheinberg said you had a big Christmas present you were going to give me tonight. Is it your cock?”
“I can’t tell you that. It would ruin the surprise.”
“Okay, I’m going,” she said. “But if you show up with your dick in a box, it’s not going to be a happy holiday.”
Flash slipped out of the living room while Ian’s father was launching into a speech about why he was ready to go to Washington. She didn’t feel too bad about missing out on the speech. First of all, Ian had ordered her to go upstairs. And second, Dean Asher already had her vote. Not like she was going to vote against her boyfriend’s dad.
Trying to look as casual as possible, Flash headed up the stairs with a purposeful stride. If anyone saw her and wondered where she was going, she’d simply tell them she was looking for the bathroom. Too much champagne. That excuse worked every time. She made it to the second floor and found it much cozier and homier than the downstairs. No fancy oil paintings on the walls up here. No leather sofas and libraries that looked like something out of an English manor house in one of those mystery movies where the murder is always solved by the unassuming old lady. She peeked in on one room and found a simple yellow guest bedroom. Another room was nothing but labeled file boxes—years and years of tax returns for all of Dean Asher’s business ventures. Boring. She couldn’t wait to see Ian’s childhood bedroom. She hoped it was full of embarrassing stuff like photographs of him at prom or posters for stupid movies he’d been obsessed with as a kid or old Playboys or something good. Something she could tease him about mercilessly for as long as they lived.
She opened the door and flipped on the light switch.
Her heart fell to her stomach and stayed there.
Standing right in the very center of the floor of Ian’s old bedroom was a sculpture. Her sculpture. The sculpture he’d inspired her to make while talking about his mother.
“You son of a bitch,” she said, choking back tears. Ian did the one thing she told him not to do. He was the one who bought her sculpture from the gallery. This was supposed to be the amazing Christmas present he’d gotten for her? She had never felt more pain, more disappointment. She’d been on cloud nine for two days feeling like her life as an artist had finally begun and there was proof it had all been fake. An art collector hadn’t seen her talent and bought her stuff. Ian had bought it so she could move in with him. The sense of betrayal tasted like copper in her mouth. There was nothing for it—she would do what she’d told Ian she would do if he dared buy one of her sculptures.
She would n
ever see him again.
* * *
IAN LOVED HIS FATHER. He really did. And one thing he loved about his father was his speeches. They were equal parts entertaining and long-winded. And tonight Ian knew the speech would be especially long as his father had decided—without telling him—to run for the US House of Representatives instead of for reelection as a state senator.
Well.
Good for Dad. Meanwhile, Ian needed Flash’s body and he needed it five minutes ago.
While everyone else in the room was laughing at a particularly funny but good-natured jab at the governor, Ian slipped quietly out of the room and up the stairs. He’d been on edge all night as Flash met his extended family. The last time Flash had come to an Asher party it had ended in disaster. He’d told his entire family before she arrived that he was dead serious about this woman, and if anyone even stepped one toe out of line around her, this would be the last Asher party they’d be getting an invitation to. And every last one of them had behaved perfectly, treating Flash like she was already one of the family. He hoped by this time next year she would be.
Thoughts of their future together put a smile on his face as he snuck up to the second floor, looked around for any party stragglers and then strode to the door of his childhood bedroom.
When he opened the door he didn’t find Flash in his bed like he’d hoped. Although there was a woman in his room.
“Oh, my God...” he breathed as he walked around the metal sculpture that stood over five feet tall.
This was Flash’s sculpture of his mother. It had to be. The piece was ivy vines that had been sculpted into the shape of a woman’s body, one arm extended as if reaching for something or someone. Vines as veins. One long vine ran from the bottom of the woman’s left heel all the way up to the neck. And it was that central core of steel, the spine, that anchored the entire sculpture. He could see through the various leaves at the hollow core of the sculpture. But it wasn’t entirely hollow. Where the woman’s heart should be was a single ivy leaf hanging from a metal chain suspended in the chest cavity. Engraved on the leaf was one word—Ian.
“It’s your mother, isn’t it?”
Ian spun around and found his father standing in the doorway.
“Yeah,” Ian said. “It is. This is Flash’s sculpture?”
His father nodded. “You told me to go to the gallery to see your girlfriend’s art. I did. I wasn’t expecting...” He stood in front of the sculpture as if to look the woman in her ivy eyes. “I wasn’t expecting this.”
“It’s... I knew she was good, but I didn’t know she was this good,” Ian said. He felt like someone had punched him in the throat. He could hardly speak.
“I saw your name written on the heart,” his father said softly, his voice choked with emotion, “and I had to leave the room for a few minutes.”
Ian blinked back tears.
“You bought this?” Ian asked.
“I did. For you. For us. For our family. I want this in our family.”
“Flash said an art collector from Seattle bought this. She was so happy.”
“I didn’t want you knowing I’d bought it. It would have ruined the surprise. I saw you two sneaking up here. I wanted to catch you before you saw your Christmas present. I guess I was too late.”
“A little. I...” Ian walked around the sculpture again. “She called me her muse. She told me to give her an idea for a piece, and I said I wanted something of my mother since I never got to know her. I never imagined she’d do this.”
“I never stopped loving her,” his father said. “Even after all these years it still feels like an open wound. I shouldn’t have cut you off from her family. When she died...when the accident happened, she was coming back to me. She’d taken you to her parents’ house and I called and begged and begged for her to come back. And she wanted to come back but she wasn’t sure yet. She left you with her parents and she was on her way to meet me, to talk it out with me. She died coming back to me.”
“Dad...”
“And your grandparents, her parents, they did not want to give you back to me. I just lost my wife, and I was facing the possibility of losing my baby boy, too? We fought. It was an ugly fight.”
“They filed for custody?”
“They did. I won, but you lost. I blamed them for a long time for her death. That was unfair of me. My parents were as unhappy with us eloping as her parents were. And then I punished you by keeping you away from your grandparents because I couldn’t forgive them for trying to take you from me. I spent too many years seeing Ivy’s parents as the enemy instead of what they really were—my son’s family.”
“Dad, don’t you think you should be downstairs talking to the reporters?”
“You are more important. This is more important.” He pointed at the sculpture. “I want you to contact your grandparents. They’re still alive. I have their phone number, their address. They should see this sculpture. They should know their grandson and his girlfriend who made it. I have everything down in my office. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll give it all to you. And I hope you can forgive me for being so selfish with you the past thirty-five years. It was hard to forgive the people who tried to take my son from me. It was too easy to think about my own pain and my own grief instead of remembering they’d lost their daughter and were acting out of pain and grief just like I was. I don’t know if they’ll forgive me, but they’ll love you and that’s all that matters to me.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing to say. I was wrong. And you know how hard it is for a politician to say he’s wrong.”
“Christmas miracle.”
“And all thanks to your lovely lady. Where is she, by the way? I want to thank her for this.”
“I don’t know.” Ian stuck his head into the hallway. “I wanted to give her the Christmas gift I got her so I sent her up here...”
Flash would have done what he asked. She would have come to his bedroom. She would have seen the sculpture. And he’d told her he’d gotten her a big Christmas gift...
And she would have been fucking furious at him because the only thing she told him not to do was buy one of her sculptures. He hadn’t, but his dad had.
“Oh, fuck,” Ian said with a groan.
“Ian!”
“Dad, I have to go,” he said.
“Go? Where?”
“I have to find Flash.”
“She was just here.”
“I know my girlfriend. She saw this and ran.”
“Why?”
“Because she told me to never buy any of her art.”
“You didn’t buy it. I did.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t know that. I need to find her.”
“Well, find her. I have a Christmas gift for her.”
“Dad, I don’t think she’ll—”
“She’ll want it. I promise. Go get your lady. Do whatever you have to do to get her back. Trust me on that.”
Ian didn’t walk out of the room. He ran. He ran out of the bedroom, down the hall, down the stairs, and hopped in his dad’s Prius since it was easier to get to than his own car. And his father said he should do whatever it takes to get Flash back. Surely that included grand theft auto.
He drove as fast as he safely could to Flash’s apartment complex. He ran up to her door and knocked.
And knocked.
And knocked.
Nothing.
He ran back down the stairs and knocked on Mrs. Scheinberg’s door.
He hated doing it. It was after ten and he assumed she was already asleep, but if Flash had come home, Mrs. Scheinberg would probably have heard her truck.
The door opened two inches only and Ian saw Mrs. Scheinberg peeking through the gap over the door chain.
“Ian? What on earth?”
She closed the door and opened it all the way.