To Sir, with Love

by Lauren Layne

  My usually full-flavored blanc de pinot noir, with notes of strawberries and cherry, suddenly tastes sour.

  “You should get it for her,” I say mildly, turning so we’re standing shoulder to shoulder. “Better yet, let me get it for you. It would make a fabulous engagement gift.”

  I say it to needle him, a reminder that I’d overheard his conversation with his marriage-minded mother.

  But I feel a little guilty about it when I see a troubled look cross his face.

  “I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “That’s really none of my business.”

  “No, it’s not.” Then he looks down at his glass. “It’s complicated.”

  “How so?” I ask, because I’m genuinely curious, especially now I know his and Genevieve’s intertwined history. Even more bafflingly though, I want to know because it seems he actually wants to tell me.

  “Well, for starters, we’re not dating.”

  My head whips around. “What?”

  He lifts a shoulder and looks back at the watercolor, but I don’t sense he’s really seeing it. “We’re just friends. We have been our entire life, though my mother wasn’t wrong about our dating history. We’ve dated on and off since we were teens, trying to make it work because it feels like it should work. Up until a few months ago we were on again, but I called it.” He pauses. “This time for good.”

  I blink. “But you guys still came together tonight?”

  He gives a small half smile. “She loves champagne. And when you’re as well practiced at breaking up as Gen and me, and still have to see each other at holidays, you get pretty good at going straight to the friends stage with minimal awkwardness.”

  “That’s impressive,” I murmur. “Why for good this time on the breakup?”

  He says nothing.

  “Hmm, okay, stop me when I get close,” I say, taking a sip of wine. We both pretend to study the art as I begin rattling off the potential snags to their relationship. “You’re gay. She’s gay. She likes cats. You’re a dog person. Opposing political views. One of you likes pineapple on your pizza, and the other thinks fruit on pizza’s an aberration. She wants to summer in East Hampton, you in Southampton. You have a porn addiction. You have different tastes in china patterns. She falls asleep to whale noises, but you like silence and a night-light. There’s someone else—”

  His eyes flick over to me, just for a second, but it’s unmistakably a tell.

  “Ah,” I say lightly, trying to ignore the way my heart irrationally soars at the realization he’s single, only to tumble again at the realization that there’s another woman in the picture. “Tricky.”

  “It’s not like that,” he says a little irritably.

  I look up at him questioningly.

  “It’s just…” He exhales with a quiet laugh. “Complicated. And I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  “Maybe because you know I already think you’re the worst, and thus you can tell me anything without my opinion of you sinking any lower?” I say, batting my eyelashes.

  He rolls his eyes, then turns to face me. “What about you?” he asks, glancing my way. “In a relationship?”

  “Sort of,” I say, thinking of Sir. Then I smile and echo his words. “It’s complicated.”

  For a moment, I think he might smile back, and it feels like we understand each other in a way I haven’t felt understood in a really long time. Well, outside of my online conversations with Sir.

  Is it just me? I want to know.

  “What?” he prods, as though sensing the question I haven’t voiced.

  I take a tiny sip of my champagne for courage and decide to feel brave. “That day we first met. Did you—” My courage fades slightly, and I press my lips together and look down at my shoes as I try again. “Did you feel…”

  His gaze sharpens. “What? Did I feel what?”

  I swallow, and when May barks my name in her sharp drill sergeant voice, I jump. I lose my nerve. I start to turn to see what she wants, but Sebastian’s gaze holds me frozen, silently trying to tell me something…

  “Gracie?” May says again, gentler this time.

  Reluctantly, I turn and see May and Robyn standing beside a lanky man with a large nose, who I know from Twitter is the sommelier blogger I need to woo if I want a good write-up for the shop.

  I have never resented my obligation to Bubbles & More as much as I do in this moment, but as always, I do what needs to be done.

  I take a deep breath and step away from Sebastian. “Please excuse me.”

  He nods, and I feel his eyes on my back as I walk away.

  We don’t speak the rest of the evening, and yet every time I search the room for him, which is admittedly often, he’s standing by Genevieve’s side, nodding pleasantly at whomever he’s speaking to.

  And every time, he seems to sense my gaze, because his eyes find mine. The moments of eye contact are brief—a few seconds at most.

  The butterflies in my stomach last much, much longer.

  To Sir, with aggravation,

  Do you ever want something you can’t have—that you shouldn’t want? But the more you try to stop, the harder you want?

  Lady

  * * *

  My dear Lady,

  Very much so. And I hope you get what you want that you can’t have—at least one of us should.

  Yours in yearning,

  Sir

  * * *

  To Sir,

  What is it you yearn for?

  Lady

  Eleven

  Sir doesn’t reply to my last message, but I can’t stop thinking about his.

  Yours in yearning.

  Yearning!

  My thoughts of Sebastian haven’t faded, but now they’re competing with thoughts of Sir, each man as unattainable as the other, and each causing twin pulls of, well, yearning.

  After three straight days of what I can only describe as teenage pining after the champagne tasting and Sir’s last message, I get sick of my mopey self and throw myself into my art with a vengeance in a desperate attempt to forget about both men.

  I don’t remember when I first fell in love with art. It’s just always been a part of my life, the thing I was meant to do. Finger paints. Construction paper. Pastels. I loved it all, and I was good at it all.

  Or as much a master of finger paints as anyone can be.

  And my love for art only increased with each passing year. In eighth grade, a student from a local art school had come in to teach us how to sketch a still life. Most of the kids had been glad that the art lesson had replaced social studies for the day. But man, I was really into that bowl of fruit. I erased the shading on the apple so many times that the art student—Juliet—had had to get me a new sheet of paper, and she’d stayed with me after school awhile longer to explain how changing the angle of how I held the pencil could help create dimension in my strokes.

  Most vividly of all though, I remember when I realized watercolors were my thing. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was seventeen, and Caleb and I had spent the morning helping my dad dust all of the bottles before the shop opened at noon. The rest of the day was ours, since he’d hired May by that point.

  We were heading home through Central Park—a route I was allowed to take only during the day, and only when the younger but much larger Caleb was with me. Caleb had been going through a nerdy but intense Ultimate Frisbee stage, and when he’d spotted a pickup game on one of the lawns, had begged to play for a few minutes.

  Since I was behind on my summer reading, I settled on a bench with the intent to make progress on The Grapes of Wrath, but Steinbeck couldn’t hold a candle to the art class happening a few feet away.

  A group of ten adults stood in front of one of Central Park’s iconic bridges, as a wiry man with a big bushy beard wound around them, offering blunt pointers and gruff words of encouragement.

  I was familiar with watercolors as a medium, but my actual experience was limited to one day in fifth grade. The paint quality had
been crap, the brushes may as well have been pieces of straw, and the paper was regular old computer paper.

  Needless to say, I didn’t understand the full magic of watercolors.

  But from my place on the bench that day, I was fascinated by how the same subject could look so different from one artist to the next. As I crept closer, I could see the unpredictable way the colors blended, or didn’t blend. The way those who were generous with their water had a soft wash of pastel color and those who were more reserved had a more vivid result.

  An irritable woman wearing an actual beret had loudly, and passive aggressively, mentioned that she’d thought the class was forty dollars while giving me the side-eye.

  Embarrassed, I’d pulled out the blue Fossil wallet Dad got me for Christmas. The crusty instructor had looked down at my two fives and two ones—all of my allowance—and instead of pointing out that I was twenty-eight short, had refused my cash with a wink, and instead handed me his own paints and brush to use for the afternoon.

  Another, much nicer woman than the first had given me an extra pad and a pop-up easel, which she’d brought for a friend who couldn’t make it.

  I’m not going to tell you my painting of the bridge that day was better than anyone else’s—it was an intermediate class, and I was a definite beginner—but it hadn’t mattered. It wasn’t the bridge that had called to me, it was the medium. Watching the class paint in watercolors paled in comparison to experimenting myself.

  By the time I looked up, my bridge was largely a blur of color, thanks to one too many trial and errors, and most of the class had dispersed. My eyes had watered when I’d given the paints back to the instructor because I knew he’d given me something far more longer lasting than his paints, which I later learned were professional quality and very expensive.

  Caleb’s Frisbee game had ended, and though I’m sure sitting and watching a bunch of amateurs paint was the last thing a restless fifteen-year-old boy had wanted to do with his afternoon, I think his sibling intuition had kicked in and he knew dragging me home would have been cruel.

  On our walk home, he’d told me that I’d looked possessed “and a little psycho.”

  The next afternoon, I was sitting on the couch suffering through Steinbeck when Caleb came home from a friend’s house and unceremoniously dumped a plastic bag into my lap. Without a word, he headed into the bathroom, and I upended the bag.

  My brother had bought me a set of watercolors, blue plastic brushes, and a sketchbook filled with thick paper. The supplies weren’t fancy, but I also knew he’d been carefully saving up his allowance to buy a new video game—and he’d spent it on these art supplies instead.

  I’d cried and hugged him until he’d threatened to return everything if I didn’t stop. I’ve never loved my brother more.

  My dad was another story. He wasn’t unsupportive—any art supplies I put on my Christmas lists over the years were generally found under the tree—but my “craft time” always had to come after homework (fair) and my duties at Bubbles (at times, that felt less fair).

  My dad was a real follow-your-passion type of guy. As long as it was his passion. By the time Lily had married and more or less moved on from the shop, Caleb kept himself busy with girls, sports, and school, working at Bubbles only on the occasional weekend. I was busy too. I had friends. The occasional boyfriend. Classes. But none of this had stopped my dad from assuming I’d be available to work at the shop when he asked, and I felt too guilty about abandoning him to say no.

  I can’t pretend teenage me didn’t occasionally resent that Caleb could be off doing whatever he wanted, that Lily had escaped by way of Alec, and that I was stuck at the store. But I also liked that Dad called me his right-hand woman. I liked that I eventually knew the store even better than know-it-all Lily. I liked that I was May’s favorite, and probably Dad’s too.

  But what I liked more than any of that were the afternoons and rare days off when I could just paint.

  Days like today, when Robyn and Josh are manning the store on what is likely to be a quiet Tuesday, as most Tuesdays are. Days where the only thing on my to-do list is to clean out that funky Tupperware in the fridge (I’ll get to it) and work on my latest painting.

  I’m loving this one. It’s got sharper edges than usual. A rocks glass. Amber liquid—whisky, I guess, though I don’t drink it. The background, as with most of my work, is New York, but it’s New York seen through the panes of a window—an apartment window. A man’s apartment window.

  I’ve painted men before, but usually as part of a couple—strolling through Central Park holding hands, a bottle of champagne in his free hand, two flutes in hers. And I’ve done a few bride and groom pieces on request and a Valentine’s series that sold out almost immediately.

  But this is the first time I’ve done a man alone. I don’t know that it’ll sell—my clientele is almost entirely female, or men buying for women. But I’m enjoying the challenge of trying to convey Clooney-level attractiveness, a touch of Dean Martin charm, with Clint Eastwood’s gravitas.

  I put on my headphones, turn on Queen, and lose myself in “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  An hour later, when my hand cramps and my playlist runs out, there’s a woman in my kitchen who was not there when I started.

  My heart jumps but settles quickly. I’ve grown used to Keva letting herself in, and without my ever having to tell her, she’s always known not to interrupt me when I’m working. Often, it’s the smells that pull me out of the zone, and I’m wondering how I didn’t notice before now, because my apartment smells like brown-buttery heaven.

  “Hey, babe,” she says over her shoulder, fussing with something on the stove with one hand, pouring herself a glass of wine with the other. She lifts the bottle. “Chianti?”

  “Why not?” I get myself a glass, and she pours without spilling a drop, even though her gaze never leaves the grilled cheese.

  I look around my kitchen. There is a lot of grilled cheese, with about a half dozen different breads and cheeses.

  “PMS craving?”

  “Not entirely a bad guess,” she says, using the edge of a spatula—hers, not mine, she hates my kitchen tools—to test the crispness of what looks to be raisin bread.

  “Last-minute baby shower tomorrow. Some local politician’s wife has apparently been craving grilled cheese for her entire pregnancy, so they’re going with a grilled cheese bar and want six different options. I talked them down from ten, which is just nuts. And since Grady’s got a date tonight, I’m on my own to come up with the selections, which suits me fine since he had the gall to suggest cashew cheese.”

  “Horror,” I say loyally, scanning the half dozen sandwiches on my counters. “Are any of these rejects?”

  “Take your pick and be honest about your thoughts, because they’re all good, and I’ve got to narrow it down. But don’t even think about axing the smoked Gouda on sourdough, browned in bacon fat. That stays. Oh, and imagine all of them infinitely better, because they’ll be made with homemade bread, which is rising upstairs. Hence why I’m here.” She waggles the spatula at me. “The temperature upstairs is just right for bread rising, and I can’t mess with it.”

  The sandwiches all sort of look the same, so I pick up the one closest to me and take a bite of the corner, my eyes closing as I let out a low moan. The cheese is creamy and a tiny bit funky, and there’s both a sweetness and a bitterness that play off each other perfectly.

  “Taleggio, escarole, and caramelized onions,” she says, pushing her headband back with her wine hand.

  “I normally wouldn’t let a leafy green near my grilled cheese,” I say, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “But the bitterness really works here. This makes the short list.”

  I pick up another sandwich that looks a lot like the grilled cheese we used to get on Fridays in school, only a million times better. I stare at the sandwich in wonder. “I don’t remember American cheese tasting like this.”

  “That’s because it’
s homemade,” she says.

  “Please, let’s run away together.” I take another bite, wash it down with wine, and stare at my friend adoringly. “Live happily ever after, just us and this cheese.”

  “I totally would,” she says, checking the underside of the sandwich she’s making and then flipping off the burner. “But you’re missing a body part I really like. Though, if I keep having dates like last night, don’t think I won’t come knocking.”

  “I thought you were excited about this one.” I ponder my other sandwich options and pick up one with apples and Brie, I think.

  “I was. He told me I looked like Beyoncé.”

  “So?” I say around a delicious mouthful. “That’s a major compliment.”

  “Girl, anytime a man tells you that you look like Queen Bey on the first date, before the bruschetta even gets to the table and while ogling your boobs, he’s looking for one night and one night only. Bleck,” she says, holding her palms up. “Not even worth discussion.”

  She picks up one of the grilled cheeses I’ve already tried, adds her own bite mark, then gestures toward my work in progress with the sandwich. “You seemed super into it today—didn’t even notice when I got distracted grating cheese and burned the butter on round two.”

  I roll my shoulders a little and wipe my greasy fingers on my dirty painting smock. “Yeah, trying something a little different. Masculine. A little cooler. Hard to get the lines right. It started out too washed out, then got too dark, but after a few false starts, I’m happy with it.”

  “I love it. It’s enchanting, as your stuff always is, but it’s a little sexy too. Plus, the eyes on that guy.” She gives a sexy shiver. “Can you imagine if they made eyes that color in real life? You’d have to hose me down on the regular.”

  The eyes? I frown and glance over at my painting, then toss the sandwich I’ve just picked up back onto the plate, appetite gone.

  I’ve made the man’s eyes aqua.

  So much for my art helping me forget about men.