Read Between The Lines: Business of Love 6

by Parker, Ali

  Nora cracked open one eye. “Would you care to join me?”

  That killed about forty-five minutes, after which we ran out of hot water entirely and bundled up in sweatpants and sweaters afterward to keep warm. Back in the kitchen, all the while swaddled like babies, we sipped hot coffee and I whipped up some fluffy omelettes with spinach, peppers, bacon, and cheese.

  When it was done, we sat in my kitchen nook and New York City slowly began to brighten as the fog ebbed away.

  Nora’s hair was wrapped up in one of my towels. As she ate, it slowly slid to one side and a couple of loose strands had fallen out and fell in damp curls around her face. She looked good in my light gray sweat suit. It was far too big for her, especially when it came to the length of the sleeves and pants, but she seemed content and cozy and looked cute as hell.

  The best part? It would smell like her afterward.

  I leaned back in my chair when I finished my omelette. “Do I need to drive you home this morning or do we have more time?”

  Nora grunted and sipped her coffee. “I have time. I’m in no rush to get back to the townhouse for the mad scramble to get everything in order before my parents arrive tomorrow. They’re the kind of people who will notice if a bed isn’t made or a countertop isn’t sparkling and they’ll say something about it. Actually, my dad doesn’t really care but my mother is borderline obsessive over trying to make me into a domesticated young woman.”

  I arched an eyebrow.

  Nora giggled. “She wants me to be marriage material. You know, because I’m woefully unprepared to be successful in my life unless I have a man making my decisions for me, making all our money, and keeping our heads above water. Without one, I’m just a doe-eyed girl with no prospects or promise of fulfillment, because how can you be fulfilled if you don’t become a mother? And how can you become a mother if you aren’t pursuing a marriage material man with good sperm?”

  “Does your mother seriously care that much?”

  “Yes,” Nora said. “It’s all fear-based nonsense. She doesn’t think I can be happy alone.”

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?” she asked, eyes curious over the rim of her coffee mug.

  “Happy alone?”

  She sipped her coffee and her brow furrowed just slightly. “I don’t know. How do you know when you’re happy? Can you even be happy? Or does happy only exist in fleeting moments? Days, weeks, sometimes months… but it all has to settle eventually. Happy isn’t permanent. Content is. But happy?”

  “Always the skeptic.”

  “Realist.”

  “That’s what all skeptics say.”

  She smiled knowingly. “I’m happy, Walker. I’m finally making decisions for myself and it feels good. But my mother will always stress me out. It’s inevitable. She looks at me and is reminded of how I disappointed her and how I’m not the daughter she dreamed I’d be. For a long time, I thought I owed it to her to become that woman. But traveling made me realize the only person I owe anything to is myself.”

  “I’m glad you realized that. I’m glad I get this version of Nora.”

  She smiled all rosy and bright eyed. “Thank you. I’m glad, too.”

  “You know what you need?”

  Nora pushed her plate aside and leaned forward to rest her elbow on the table. She tucked her chin into her palm. “What?”

  “A distraction. You need something that will put a pep in your step so that when your parents crash with you this weekend, they can’t suck all the joy out of you because you stocked up ahead of time.”

  “I don’t know if that’s how it works.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “Who gets to decide how it works?”

  She tapped two fingers against her cheek and let her gaze wander out the window. “It would need to be a pretty epic distraction.”

  “Easily done.”

  “Then by all means, share your ideas.”

  “Let’s go traveling,” I said.

  Nora blinked and sat up straighter. Her hand fell from her cheek. “Pardon?”

  I grinned at her confusion. “We don’t have to go far to do your favorite thing and travel. We could pick a small town somewhere in the state, go for a drive, and spend the day behaving like tourists until we have to come home. What do you say?”

  She bit her bottom lip as a grin stretched her cheeks. “That sounds perfect.”

  I stood up. “To the cartography room then.”

  Nora popped up out of her seat, took my hand, and giggled as we raced through the rooms, spilling from one to the next until we stepped over the threshold into the room of framed maps, globes, and images of New York City from the early 1900s. Nora moved slowly through the room and pressed her fingertips to the spines of books on shelves as well as the edges of tables bearing open maps sealed away under glass lids.

  “Over here,” I called as I opened a drawer and pulled out a map of New York State from the seventies. It had been my father’s. He kept it in the glove compartment of his old Chevy pickup truck that had rusted red paint for as long as I could remember. He’d often splay the map open over the dashboard or the steering wheel and slow down to ten miles an hour on forty-mile-an-hour roads. Cars would honk and blow past us and he’d throw them the middle finger while I, only eight or nine at the time, sat beside him on the bench seat picking at the peeling leather.

  Nora peered over my shoulder at the map as I laid it out on a table and smoothed out the fold creases. “How do we pick a place?”

  “We pick a radius within driving distance. What do you say, up to a hundred miles away?”

  Nora already had her hazel eyes fixed on a spot on the map. She pressed the tip of her finger to a tiny dot. “What about here?”

  “Hudson?”

  She nodded. “I’ve never been. Have you?”

  “Never.” I folded the map up. “Hudson, it is.”

  “I don’t have any clothes besides what I wore last night.”

  I shrugged. “Then I guess we’ll have to buy you more when we’re in Hudson.”

  She giggled. “Okay.”

  It was settled. Nora and I went to my room and got changed. She braided her wet hair in front of the mirror in my walk-in closet while I shaved and cleaned myself up. She found me as I was buttoning up my shirt, stopped in front of me, and took over, her delicate fingers maneuvering the buttons with far more ease than mine. I watched her work, her gaze initially fixed on the buttons before it slid to my collar and flicked decisively up to my lips.

  “I’m glad I’m here with you,” she said softly.

  I reached up and cupped her cheek. “Me too.”

  Nora stretched to the tips of her toes for a kiss. I wrapped my arms around her as she pressed her palms flush to my chest. Her breasts crushed up against me and I could feel her heart beating. Or it was my own. I wasn’t sure.

  I lifted her up off the floor with my arms still wrapped tightly around her. She smiled against my lips and crossed her ankles. I could smell her shampoo, lemon and mint or something of the like, and it reminded me of beaches in Fiji, sipping mojitos.

  When I set her back down, she cleared her throat and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “We should go before we get distracted.”

  I’d have been more than willing to spend the rest of the day and evening cooped up in my apartment with Nora. In fact, I might have preferred it, but something told me she and I had ample time to spend entire days alone together.

  This didn’t feel like something that was going to end soon.

  In fact, as we left my apartment and got in the elevator, I found myself thinking that this didn’t feel like something that should ever end.

  Chapter 21

  Nora

  Before leaving Manhattan and the city behind, we stopped to pick up hot coffees for the rest of the drive. Wide city roads gave way to two-lane country roads weaving through snow-covered hillsides. The sky was white and heavy, threatening to dump more snow, but I felt comfortable in th
e passenger seat of Walker’s SUV.

  As it turned out, he owned more than just his Maserati, which wasn’t suited for roads like this with potentially dangerous driving conditions. His SUV, however, came equipped with four-wheel drive, winter tires, and chains just in case the roads got really bad. So far, they were clear and wet, not icy. The temperature wasn’t cold enough for freezing but not warm enough to melt all the snow on the sides of the road, either.

  The scenery was beautiful. We listened to rock music playing quietly through the speakers and sipped our cappuccinos.

  I’d taken my shoes off early into the drive and now sat cross-legged, all cozy and comfortable in the luxury of his heated seats. Walker drove with one hand on top of the wheel and the other arm resting on the center console. He looked handsome and way too cool to be with the likes of me.

  It was a thought I’d had on more than one occasion.

  Walker was unlike any man I’d ever met. He was suave and mysterious but also vulnerable and humorous. He had an edge to him that wasn’t nearly as sharp as I’d initially thought.

  He glanced over at me. “What’s up?”

  “I want to know more about you.”

  “Ask me anything you want to know.”

  What do you think about me? Where is this thing going between us? When was your last long-term relationship?

  All those questions surged to the foreground of my brain but I smothered them and asked a safer question instead. “Why did you start painting?”

  He chuckled. “That’s what you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” he said slowly, thoughtfully. “In the beginning, it was more of an outlet than a passion. When I first picked up a paintbrush, I was fifteen or so. Maybe fourteen. I don’t remember. My high school had rotational semesters so the kids could sample different electives and have a better idea of what they wanted to study in their senior years. One of those rotations was art class.” He shifted in his seat as we took a gentle curve in the road. “I didn’t want to be there. I thought the teacher was a flake. I thought the kids who were actually trying were losers. I wanted to blend in with my friends. Jocks and assholes. You know the sort.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  Walker smiled. “Yes, well, I thought I wanted to be one of those guys because they were the ones who, from the outside looking in, looked like they had their shit together. So when we had to paint, I made a joke out of it at first. I painted the teacher. She was a thin, wiry little woman with a terrible haircut. She always wore men’s shirts and cargo shorts and I’d be lying if I said she hadn’t been the brunt of a lot of jokes.”

  “Kids are dicks.”

  “Yes, they are,” he agreed. “Anyway, I painted this portrait of her. It was supposed to be a joke. I was going to make it funny, like a comic-book page, but as I kept going, I got so sucked into trying to capture her qualities. The way her eyes were crinkled around the edges, how she had a dimple only in her left cheek when she frowned and not when she smiled, how one eyebrow was always arched and the other straight. She saw the finished piece and insisted I take her classes when I was able to pick my own electives. I laughed it off and said I would never. It was just puffing out my chest and trying to make sure my friends didn’t think I was a ninny.”

  I felt bad for him and wondered how many young boys had the same experience but never went for it like I assumed Walker did.

  “I never took her classes,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t want to separate myself from the cool kids. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how dumb of a decision that was. The other kids had more to offer than my so-called friends. But they offered something I wanted. The kids I hung around with had parties with alcohol and other substances that helped me forget what was going on at home.”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek. I knew he’d lost his family, and I never got the impression that they’d been all warm and fuzzy together based on the few things he’d told me about them so far, but I also didn’t think he’d have been the kind of kid to drown his sorrows in a bottle of raspberry vodka.

  “My best friend died in a drunk-driving accident,” Walker said. “I was supposed to drive him home that night but I got too sloshed and passed out. He left without me, in my dad’s truck I borrowed, and drove it head-on into a tree four blocks away from the party. According to the coroner, it took him six full minutes to die from his lungs collapsing. He choked on his own blood and suffocated.”

  I swallowed. “Walker… I’m so sorry. That’s horrible. Who went around telling kids that? That’s just cruel.”

  “His mother made sure we all knew. She blamed us for not keeping him safe. I blamed myself, too. Went on a bender. Pushed back against my folks who were coming apart at the seams with their own addiction problems and my father’s adultery. It was just a mess. There was nowhere for me to turn until one day after school that same art teacher happened upon me drinking in school.”

  I hadn’t expected any of this. Part of me wanted him to stop talking. I hated to think of him suffering like that. But another part of me wanted to know how a child hurting that badly could have made something of himself the way Walker had.

  “She pulled me into her art room, poured all my liquor out, slapped a paintbrush in my hand, and told me to paint. She closed the blinds, put on some music, and graded papers while I painted. She was also a history teacher, I should add. Miss Hall. She changed my life. I poured all my anger, pain, fear, and grief onto the canvas and I spent every day after school in her classroom until the guilt got smaller. Painting gave me something I could control. Something I could make as beautiful or as hideous as I wanted. It was something nobody could ruin for me and I never looked back.”

  He reached over and put his hand on my knee. His thumb moved back and forth in miniscule affection.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  He shrugged. “I used to be, but I’m not anymore.”

  “What happened to your parents, Walker?”

  His thumb on my knee stilled. “My mother left my father on Easter morning. They had an explosive fight the night before. He’d cheated on her for the millionth time and didn’t care about hiding it anymore. All their friends and family knew. Our church knew. She couldn’t take it anymore, so she packed a bag and left. She never came back. And my old man drank himself away after that. His liver failed when I was nineteen. He never knew I painted. Never saw a single piece I did. He thought I was still the football player he wanted me to be.”

  “Football?” I couldn’t see Walker in spandex with a football tucked under his arm. The two things simply did not go together.

  “Yeah.” He smiled, but there was sadness in his eyes as he gazed out at the snowy hills stretching out ahead of us broken up by dark trees jutting out of the white like spears.

  “What happened to your mother?”

  “She remarried. Started over. Moved to Florida.”

  “That’s it?”

  Walker nodded. “I tracked her down one time but she didn’t want to see me. I couldn’t blame her. I look like my old man. There was too much trauma there for her. She just wanted to forget. And to be honest, I was okay with that. Even when she had been around, she hadn’t really been there, if you know what I mean.”

  I put my hand over his and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Thank you for sharing all that with me.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Still, it’s not easy to talk about. As it shouldn’t be. I just… I appreciate you being so open with me.”

  Walker smiled and this time the sadness began to ebb away. “You’re an easy person to talk to, Nora.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, we drove in a comfortable quiet. I watched the scenic hills and trees pass outside the window as the miles passed under the tires and we grew closer and closer to Hudson.

  I pulled my phone out of my purse to send Grace a message and keep her in the loop and found that I
had an email from one of the websites I’d submitted a travel article for. I sat up straighter in my seat, clicked the email, and read frantically.

  “Is everything okay?” Walker asked.

  I nodded eagerly. “It’s more than okay. The website I applied for just emailed me back.” I looked over at him and grinned like an idiot. “They want to publish my piece!”

  His enthusiasm was contagious. Walker smacked a hand on the steering wheel. The horn yelped. The smile he gave me was warm and full of pride. “There was no doubt in my mind you’d get traction quickly.”

  I kept reading. “There’s more. They want me to write for them on a weekly basis. They’re asking if I can do a Skype call with them next week to discuss the details of a contract with them.” I pressed a hand to my forehead. “I didn’t expect this.”

  “I did,” Walker said. “You have a lot to offer, Nora. They have no idea how lucky they are that you decided to write for them. I have a good feeling about this.”

  “So do I,” I gushed.

  There was nobody I would have rather shared this moment with. Walker’s support and genuine excitement for me meant the world. Grace would be thrilled for me too when I told her. I had no doubt about that. But my folks? An opportunity like this would cause them nothing but worry.

  Because they didn’t understand me.

  But Walker did. He knew who I was to my core. Sure, we hadn’t known each other all that long, but it felt like he’d been in my life for years already.

  It felt like I was right where I was supposed to be, and the only other times I’d felt that was when I was in another country as far from New York as I could get.

  Chapter 22

  Walker

  The nineteenth-century town of Hudson greeted us with flurries of snow falling from the sky and shop windows beckoning us to come inside and escape the cold off Warren Street, which was lined in old homes and antique shops with frosted windowpanes. I found us a parking spot on the side of the street tucked in front of a snowbank, and Nora and I bundled up before stepping out and making our way across the street to a freshly salted sidewalk. Nora put her gloved hand in mine and we started walking with no destination in mind.