Kate rolled her eyes, but walked over to the fridge, prying it open to find a treasure trove of beer. Imported. Artisan. She spotted a local brewery that her friends had raved about. There were also random bottles of hot sauce, but not much else. She grabbed two longnecks and walked back toward the table. The sculptor opened one bottle on the edge of the table and handed it to her before opening his own. She hid a smile at the surprisingly gallant gesture.
“Wait… you’re twenty-one, right?” He squinted. “Hell, I don’t actually care. Drink up. Here’s to messed up pasts and old friends.” He raised his bottle and took a long drink, gulping down half of the beer in one draw.
“I’m twenty-four. And thanks for the beer. You’ve got some good stuff in there.”
“Yeah, well that’s the best thing about selling shit, isn’t it? I can afford to buy the good beer now. Never drink another Tecate, no matter what my uncle says about abandoning my heritage.” He finished one cigarette and immediately lit another.
Her eyes roamed the cluttered warehouse, searching for something to break the awkward silence. They landed on the worn equipment he’d been using in his work.
“That’s a nice welder. It’s a Miller, right?” She nodded toward the blue welding unit he had been using.
He paused for a moment, his eyes lit in slight amusement. “Yeah, it is. I thought Dee said you were a photographer. Do you work with metal, too? How do you keep from falling over with all the gear on?”
Kate smiled. “That’d be a sight, huh? No, my dad—before he got really successful—he would take me out to job sites. He was a contractor. There was this one guy my dad worked with a really long time. He was a welder. He had this truck and he would fix any broken equipment, stuff like that.”
The sculptor watched her in amusement, and a slightly indulgent look settled on his face.
“I remember Miller because that’s the kind of welder he had. It was mounted on the side of the truck and I could read the name. I called him Mr. Miller for years. My dad eventually told me his name was Mr. West. I was kind of disappointed.”
A wry smile twisted his lips as he shook his head.
“What does he do now?”
“Mr. Miller?”
He barked out a laugh. ”No, your dad. You said, ‘before he got successful.’ What does he do now?”
“Oh, he’s still a contractor. He just has a lot of different jobs now. He builds all over Orange County.” She shrugged. “I don’t think he ever goes to job sites anymore; he has foremen for that.”
He studied her for a few moments, finishing his beer. “Well, good for him.”
“I guess,” she said, glancing back at the blue welder.
“There’s nothing glamorous about breaking your back, you know.”
“Is that why you’re a sculptor instead of a mechanic?” she asked, remembering some of what Dee had told her about the thirty-six-year-old artist.
“Well, that and I like to buy the good beer.” He stretched and stood up to grab another. The cigarette dangled from his mouth. “It’s still not what my dad would consider a ‘real job,’ but it’s better than being a surf bum or an actor, you know?”
She snorted. “Tell me about it.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her, as if surprised by the bitterness of her tone. “I thought all you Orange County girls liked the surfers.” He smirked as he sat back down at the table. “Or was it an actor who made that pretty little mouth frown?”
“No one.” Kate gave him a hard look. “It was no one.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, their eyes measuring the other across the scarred table. Kate could tell that Javier Lugo knew she wanted something from him, but she had no interest in flattery and had the feeling the man wouldn’t be impressed with it anyway. He didn’t seem to care what she thought of him. Kate realized that she didn’t really care what he thought of her, either. And really, not caring about his opinion felt like a refreshing change.
Javier leaned back, stretching his stocky legs in front of him as he took another drink. “When I was in school, we were all so incestuous. We always dated other artists. Usually visual artists. Musicians were okay. Dancers weren’t. Strictly speaking, photographers were a little looked down on.” He grinned and winked at her shocked expression.
She shifted in her seat and rolled her eyes a little. “Well, moving past odd dating trivia, Mr. Lugo—”
“Oh fuck!” He snorted beer through his nose as Kate dodged the spray, visibly disgusted. “It’s just Javi, all right? Everyone calls me Javi. Even stick-in-the-mud Bradley doesn’t call me Mr. Lugo. My sister would laugh her ass off.”
“Professor Bradley’s not a ‘stick-in-the-mud.’” Kate defended her advisor.
Javi looked at her sympathetically. “Yes, he is. Of course he is. But he’s a nice stick-in-the-mud, and that counts for something.” He paused to light another cigarette. “Most importantly, he adores Dee, so that gives him points in my book. Thank God the baby looks like her, though.”
Kate snickered, but quickly tried to rein back the artist’s wandering narrative. “Did Dee tell you why I wanted to talk to you?”
“Yeah,” Javi said as he exhaled a long stream of smoke. “Sort of. Seriously, though, I don’t know if anything I tell you is going to help with your thesis. If Dee didn’t ask me, I wouldn’t give you the time of day.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“What?” He coughed and scratched at the back of his neck. “You think your idol would? Reed’s a bigger asshole than me. And a hermit. He’s just a good-looking one, so people let him get away with it. They call him ‘mercurial’ and ‘enigmatic’ instead of ‘pissy’ and ‘rude.’”
“You don’t sound like you like him very much.”
“Of course I like him. He’s one of my best friends.” He took another draw on his Marlboro. “Doesn’t mean I think he’s particularly nice, though.”
Kate raised her eyebrows in amusement. “So, does Reed O’Connor have any good qualities?”
Javi looked her in the eye. “He’s brilliant, and he’s not cocky about it. He’s generous—way more than he would ever let on.” He paused to take another swallow of beer. “To the people that matter to him, Reed O’Connor one of the most loyal people you will ever meet. Ever. That’s what made the whole thing so nuts.”
“What thing?” Kate asked quickly.
Javi waved a dismissive hand. “Dee says you remind her of Reed. I’ve never seen you work, so I can’t say one way or another, but since she practically walks on water, in my not-humble-at-all opinion, I’ll take her word for it.”
Kate sighed in disappointment before she shrugged. “I admire O’Connor’s work. I think it says a lot about the twisted concepts of beauty in our society.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.” She met his gaze unflinchingly.
“So, little girl—”
“I’m not a little girl. My name is Kate.”
His mouth twisted in a smile. “So, Katie… if you were O’Connor—which you’re not, but let’s pretend—what part of my face would you photograph? Remember”—he lifted his chin in challenge—“never the whole face. That gives too much away.”
“One frame?”
“One frame to capture who you think I am.”
Kate cocked her head at him, studying him for a few moments as they sat in tense silence. She reached over to pull his chin down a little and tilt his head forward. His chin was covered in a course stubble, and his black eyes studied her face as she concentrated.
“Here,” she said softly, making her fingers into a rectangle and leaning back. “Your jaw from the side angle, encompassing your neck and the top of your collarbone.”
“And why is that your frame?” he murmured.
“Your jaw is the most prominent feature of your face, except your eyes” She glanced up to meet them. “Which are too revealing. Your neck is thickly muscled, indicating the physical nature of your work, an
d there’s a slight scattering of tiny scars along your collarbone from where I imagine you started welding on something without your helmet. You had an idea. You couldn’t wait to put on your safety equipment. Maybe you were just wearing glasses, or holding the helmet to the flame.”
Her eyes lifted, and their gazes locked for a moment. Kate was stunned by the spark that jumped between them.
“I mean… that’s what might have happened,” she whispered.
Javi broke away first and leaned back, reaching for another cigarette. After he lit it, he inhaled deeply before blowing out a line of smoke. “What’s your question?” he asked quietly.
Kate sat up straight. “I only get one?”
“Maybe. It depends on what question you ask.”
“Fine. Who was Samantha Rhodes to Reed O’Connor?”
A slow smile grew on his face. “Now that is a very good question.”
“So, what’s the answer?”
“Which one do you want?”
“If it’s a good question, I want the good answer.”
Javi chuckled. “You do remind me of him, a little. I see what Dee was talking about.” He exhaled another stream of smoke. “What was Sam to Reed? Hmm. The short answer would be his girlfriend, but the good answer would be, what wasn’t she?”
“What do you mean?”
Javi’s eyes started to drift around the studio. “Before he met her, Reed was brilliant, just… fucking brilliant.” He frowned, shaking his head a little. “We met at an art show in L.A. before he started at Foothill. He’s a couple years younger than me, but I liked him. He wasn’t part of the ‘in-crowd,’ so to speak. He could’ve done anything, really. He downplayed all his other talents because he liked photography so much, but he was good at almost everything. He could draw; he could sculpt. Not as good as me, but he was pretty damn good. Surprisingly good at ceramics, of all things. And that was before he met Sam.”
“And after?”
He took another draw on his cigarette. “After? Shit, that’s when he found his genius. That perfect vision married with his technical skills and focused by this incredible passion. What was Sam to Reed?” Javi shrugged, shaking his head back and forth. “His muse, his passion… Probably the love of his life—not that we had any idea what that meant when we were that age.”
“What do you mean?”
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “We were so young; we just took it for granted. How the hell were we supposed to know we would never feel anything like that again?”
“I don’t—feel what?” Kate frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“That crazy energy they had.” He leaned forward. “Both of them were brilliant separately, but then put them together? They were like a—a battery or a reactor or something. They charged us all. Our whole damn group: me, Vanessa, Dee, Suz, even Bradley’s work got better. And their own stuff? Pure genius. I can’t—”
He broke off, leaning back in his chair as he collected himself, shaking his head with regret. “There’s no way to describe it, Katie. It’s impossible.”
Kate sat back in her chair, consumed with regret for a loss she could feel down to her bones. She had to clear her throat before she spoke. “What the hell happened to them?”
A flicker of pain crossed his face. He took another drink of his beer. “Human,” he said hoarsely, glancing up into her eyes again before staring at his feet. “They were just… human.”
Kate stared at him, but he didn’t look back. Finally, she stood and walked to the fridge, helping herself to another beer and wiping the unexpected tears from her eyes. She grabbed one for Javi as well and walked back, sitting down as he opened them on the edge of the scarred table.
“So, what’s this you’re working on?” she asked, gesturing to the inverted flame which seemed to burn in the background.
He watched her for a moment before he smiled. “Beer money.”
Kate and Javi launched into a hesitant discussion of his work, but eventually they relaxed. After a couple of hours sharing jokes and stories about Chris and Dee in college, he even offered to show her his personal gallery.
“Every artist has one, you know,” he said over his shoulder as he led her toward the back of the warehouse. “Whether they do it deliberately or not. We all have pieces that are too personal to sell or even give away.”
“Thanks.” She smiled at him. “For showing me your stuff, I mean. I really appreciate it.”
He shrugged, turning on the light in what was once a small office. Scattered around the room were small sculptures in marble, wood and a few metal pieces. In one corner was a case of delicate gold and silver jewelry. Kate slowly walked around the room until one sculpture caught her attention.
“Wow, that’s—is that based on Dee’s photograph of them?” She pointed to the wooden sculpture done in a fine grained, golden wood. The curved figures were abstract and the faces indistinct, but the figures’ position was exactly that of the revealing picture of Reed and Sam she had seen in Dee’s studio.
Javi looked at her in surprise. “Oh, you’ve seen that? Um… yeah. I have to put this one away on the rare occasions Reed comes back to town. I did that one years ago. He had that picture hanging up in his apartment for a while, and I remembered seeing it.”
He stood in front of the sculpture, leaning his head to mimic the slant of the piece. ”I loved the angles in it. Two perfectly melded into one, you know? And the way their arms were… This is an old one. I was doing a lot of wood carving back then.”
She gazed again at the figures as she walked around the piece, imagining she could see the two lovers in the three dimensions not captured in the photograph.
“It’s stunning,” she said wistfully.
Javi cleared his throat. “I should probably…” He shook his head and turned to the jewelry case, waving her over. “Come here.”
Kate smiled. “You do silver and gold-smithing, too? That’s amazing.”
“Why?”
“Be—because of… Well, the sculpture stuff is so big and this—” She waved her hand at the intricate jewelry. “It’s just so small and delicate. How do you do it?”
Javi looked at her for a moment before he shrugged. “Most sculptors study metal-smithing. It’s just another form of sculpture. Did… did Dee mention you were going to see Vanessa this week?” Javi looked at her sideways, rubbing the tattoos on the back of his neck.
“Yeah, I am. I’m meeting her at her studio in Hollywood tomorrow.”
He cleared his throat. “Could you deliver a piece to her for me? I did some work for her a while back and never got a chance to give it to her. I’d appreciate it if you could.” He smiled a little. “Pay me back for the beer, you know.”
Kate shrugged. “Sure. No problem.”
He nodded and opened a drawer in the bottom of the case, taking a small, cloth-wrapped package from it and quickly handing it to Kate. She took the piece and put it in her pocket before they returned to the kitchen.
Kate gathered her things to go, and Javi walked her out through his maze of a studio.
“You could get lost for days in this junk pile, little girl.”
“I actually think it’s kind of cool.” Kate looked around. It was cluttered, but not dirty. The whole building was a riot of texture and angle, a mess of parts that added up to a surprisingly intriguing setting. Then her eyes fell on Javi, who was watching her with an inexplicable frown.
“You think this place is cool?”
She suddenly felt shy, so she kept walking. “Yeah, kinda.”
When they reached the door to the outside, he put his hand out and she shook it.
“Javi, thanks for… just thanks. I appreciate you talking to me.”
“No problem.” He shrugged. “Well, yeah, it was sort of irritating, but not as bad as I thought.”
Kate just smiled and walked to her car, glancing at him as he stood in the dim shadow created by the door of the warehouse. She realized she must have driven b
y his studio a thousand times and never looked at it, never realized that an artist of his stature lived so close by.
She stared at him. “I guess…”
He leaned forward as if he was about to step into the sunlight. “Yeah?”
Her eyes met his and she felt a sudden pull, but she carefully took another step toward her car. “I’ll see you around.”
His mouth twisted into a smile. “Yeah. I’ll see you.”
CHAPTER NINE
Claremont, California
May 2000
“Please, Dee? Please, please, please? I’ll make you whatever jewelry you want,” Javi whined and wheedled, trying to persuade his friend to take the pictures he so desperately needed for his portfolio the next week.
Dee huffed impatiently and went back to cooking the chicken biryani everyone had clamored for earlier. “What kind of jewelry?” she asked, glancing at Chris who sat at the table with Susan and Vanessa, waiting for dinner. Chris winked at her, eliciting a small, rueful smile.
The sculptor continued, “Remember that turquoise I got? I’ll make something out of that for you. A necklace. Or a bracelet if you want. Just please take the pictures. I don’t trust anyone else.”
She sighed. “Really, Javi, I’m not joking about this! I’m so swamped this weekend. Why don’t you ask Reed?”
Javi snorted in disgust. “Reed?”
The man in question walked into the open apartment, stopping in the kitchen to snag a piece of chicken out of the pan. “What about me?” he asked as Dee slapped at his hand.
Javi curled his lip. “I was just about to tell Dee how you don’t have time to do anything for your friends anymore.”
“What? I’m just on a productive streak right now. Don’t mess with it, asshole.” Reed kissed Dee on top of her head and walked back toward Sam’s room. He knocked on the closed door. “You ready?”