It was wrapped in brown paper.
“Go ahead. G’head. Open it up.” He was like a kid on his birthday. Except apparently it was my birthday.
“What’s going on, Ryker?” We sat down on the bench, and I ran my finger under the tape along the back seam. “You’re freaking me out.”
“No, you’ll be the one freaking out when you see what’s in here. Come on. Look.”
I ripped back the paper, and once it was open, I had to gasp, and then stand up again and haul it toward the front window where natural light streamed in.
“Is this what I think it is?” I could barely push the words out for lack of breath. The signature at the bottom was plain as any hand in art. The blues, the thick paint application in its free-flowing swirls, the careless yet careful style, the striking color choices in bold yellows and deep blues.
“If you think it’s an original Vincent Van Gogh, then it’s what you’re thinking it is.”
I gripped the frame tighter than anything I’d ever clutched. This thing had better not drop.
“It’s not real, is it? It’s a copy.”
“It’s not a copy. And boy howdy, you wouldn’t even believe what a pain it is to try and get your hands on one of these. Seriously, it’s like every single owner out there has a death-grip on them. I had to resort to desperate measures. Not that I’ll go into what they were because my granny would say that was impolite when it came to gift-giving. But still. Yeah. What do you think?”
I still couldn’t talk, despite Ryker’s talking streak explanation. I just had to soak in the moment, try to absorb whether it was real or not.
“Why are you bringing it to me?” I finally got my words back. “You want me to display it, I guess? Or sell it for you?”
“Don’t sell it! It’s for Red Drape. It’s the replacement for that other painting.”
Oh. Some pieces started to fall into place. “Replacement.”
“You know. So you can give that other one to Aero. Then you’ll have this in its place, and you’ll still be able to have people come into your gallery and shop because they’ll want to see the Van Gogh. Everybody, apparently, wants to see— and not sell— their Van Gogh. I’ve been finding that out first hand for a few weeks now. I’m telling you,” he pointed at the depiction of sunflowers, their yellow and orange antipasto of oil paints like a topographical relief map, “this thing is probably your ticket. And a way bigger ticket than that naked woman. Not that I’m against naked women— I’m a normal teenage boy. It’s just— yeah. Take this. Sell the other one to Aero. He’s out in the car.”
My head snapped up and I looked at Ryker, who aimed a thumb over his shoulder toward the curb.
Suspicion surged in me. Had he put Ryker up to this? Man, just when I thought he’d given up on ruining my gallery, he’d come to play on my heartstrings using Ryker.
“He wouldn’t come in and talk to me himself?”
“Oh, give the guy a break. You stomp all over his heart like that, and he’s not going to want to come in here and grovel. Believe me, Aero Jantzen is not the desperate, begging puppy-dog type. Now I, on the other hand, have no problem with being a desperate puppy. I mean, after Phoebe told me to take a long walk off a tall cliff because I hid in her car and scared her when she came out of work one day and she freaked, I was the first one with sixteen dozen roses sent to her house, and serenading her from beneath her bedroom window, begging her to let me take her to Montana to see the sunsets there and meet my Uncle Wyatt, whose idea this whole acting thing was for me. I think it was just to get me out of his hair so he wouldn’t have to raise me, you know? But it turns out, it worked for him— and a little for me too, or else I wouldn’t have met Phoebe. I’m turning sixteen next week, and I’m going to tell everyone in the whole world that Phoebe and I are engaged.”
Engaged. What the—
“You’re sixteen.” I didn’t want to insult him with the truth— that he was technically fifteen.
“I didn’t say it would be a short engagement. I just am so totally committed. It’s all I can do.”
I was surrounded by— nay, plagued by— commitment hogs. Usually the world seemed totally teeming with commitment-phobes, but here I was, surrounded by the opposite: people who couldn’t wait to put rings on fingers and pledges in writing.
“So tell me the honest truth. The Montana sky truth, Ryker.”
“That I love Phoebe with all my heart and soul?”
“No, we’re heading back to the topic of the Van Gogh.”
“Oh.” He seemed a little less interested in it now that he’d switched to the topic of his obsession with this girl. Granted, she was a cute thing.
“Did Aero put you up to buying the Van Gogh?”
Scoffing fell from his lips. “Are you being serious right now? Aero is as straight as his name. I’d trust that guy with my life.”
“Right. So did he ask you to come in here and offer me the Van Gogh in exchange for the Yuber?” I had to ask directly. I still might get the straight answer if I pressed.
Ryker frowned. “He most certainly did not. It was all my idea. The fact you’re asking really disappoints me, Jilly. But I’ll give you the whole truth, the Montana sky truth, as you put it. It’s that I saw him totally bummed out and asked him why. He told me. So I came up with this plan. I searched on the internet for who was the number one most desirable painter and then went from there.”
Ryker had googled most desirable painter. Typical kid move. My heart spasmed with appreciation for him.
“And the search came up Van Gogh?”
“Of course. Believe me, I found out just how dogged the fans are. More than my fans are crazy for me, that’s for sure.”
Ah the humility of a teen superstar. Precious. “So you bought it and told Aero.”
“Nope. In fact, Aero doesn’t know anything about the Van Gogh. We were going over to Burbank to discuss something about my mouthwash commercial with the director, and I forced him to stop here. He didn’t want to at all, but I insisted. I might have threatened a little, even though he keeps telling me that’s manipulative behavior and it’s unbecoming.”
I knew enough about Ryker’s threats to know what it might have entailed— arthritis medication or such. “You need to quit that. Aero’s right. It’s unbecoming.”
“I know I need to quit. But this was for his own good. He’s probably going to chew me out all the way to Burbank. So, I want you to think about that. What I have to go through to get the two of you together! A lecture, from Aero.” He rolled his eyes. “At least your lectures come from your pretty face.”
Aero wasn’t bad looking himself, but that was beside the point.
“I might not like his lectures, but still. He was miserable, Jilly. You did that to him. You rejected him. He’s a tough guy, but, geez. Can’t you just take this instead? I’m sure he’ll still buy that naked one from you, if you want. Either way, I’ll just give you this one. I don’t really like it all that much.”
I was scared to think how much money Ryker had forked over for a painting he hated.
“It’s so complicated, Ryker. I had an article come out in a magazine today, and—”
A banging on the front door commenced. “Ryker? You coming? The director for the mouthwash commercial texted and wonders where you are.”
Aero’s voice tripped into my ears. I went and opened the door, and his deep blue eyes pierced me. They were, as Ryker said, teeming with hurt, and it pained me to see them. I would wash that away in a second if I could. Instead, I brought him inside.
“Come in and see this.” I tugged him in by his coat sleeve. “The commercial can wait.”
Chapter Fourteen
“What on earth have you done, Ryker?” Aero stared at the Van Gogh with his jaw dropped open— practically pressed onto his chest. “I never said you should do something like this.”
“I heard you. You said she wouldn’t take money for the painting, and that the only hope was for her to have som
ething else even more of a draw for her patrons. I took that as a call to action.”
“A call to action.”
“I’m a Montana kid. We ride horses out on the range and round up the cattle when we get the call to action.”
“You’ve been in Hollywood since you were six. You haven’t been on a cattle drive in your life.”
“Fine. But I played a cowboy in a movie once. Does that count?”
“It does not,” Aero and I said simultaneously. We exchanged glances. Aero’s blue eyes penetrated into mine, and I was so relieved that this wasn’t some ploy to get me to bend on my sale of the Woman Draped in Red that I would have thrown my arms around him in a second just for the gratitude of it. Despite our disagreement over this one, enormous thing, I couldn’t deny that Aero’s very being— his tenacity for buying my painting, his fierce protectiveness of Ryker, his dedication to others, not to mention his heart-stopping good looks— still dangled me by what started as a thread and was now a steel cable hundreds of strands strong.
I wanted to be with this guy. I wanted to take his mother’s amethyst ring and shout to everyone, just like Ryker about Phoebe, that I had fallen for Aero Jantzen with my whole soul— tell the whole world, just like Tyanne and Grady, that I was getting married and becoming Mrs. Jantzen not next Christmas but this Christmas, because when it’s right it’s right and waiting is risky and—
“Look, Ryker. I know you meant well. But this is over the top.” Aero pointed at the painting now balancing against the wall beneath a fairly bad watercolor of a warren of bunnies in a meadow by that guy who played Zeus in last summer’s blockbuster about Hercules. “Nobody just goes out and buys a Van Gogh to try to convince his friend’s girlfriend to forgive him.”
Girlfriend? I hyper-focused on that word.
“I wasn’t trying to do that. I was trying to make it so everyone could win. You get the naked lady portrait out of this gallery, she gets something famous— if not nearly as nice, not that I’ve even seen the painting yet. Ooh, can I? I’m up for a nude viewing right about now.”
“No.” Again we answered with solidarity.
“Fine.” Ryker huffed in resignation. “But see? It’s the extra solution that makes it possible, the one nobody else figured out. Everybody thinks because I’m a kid I can’t come up with the answer, but if you’d both just chuck away all your preconceived stubbornness and see how perfect this is—” He didn’t point to the Van Gogh. Instead he waved his hand between the two of us, as if our relationship was the perfection he was referring to. “Then everybody wins.”
“I fail to see how you win.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, I see how Jillian wins.” Aero called me Jillian. It sounded different. I preferred Jilly from his mouth, it turned out. “She gets a Van Gogh, and I get my Mars Yuber, so I win.” His Mars Yuber! His comment rankled, but I didn’t interrupt. “But what about you, Ryker?”
“Hello!” The kid smacked himself in the forehead with the butt of his palm, like Homer Simpson saying Doh! “Do I have to spell out every, single, thing for you two?”
“Apparently, yes.” It seemed as if Aero’s skepticism was still up there, hovering around Total Disbelief. Mine was, too.
“If I can finally get the two of you together, then the chances of the two of you adopting me skyrocket— as compared to now.”
The words turned me to stone for a moment. All I could do was stare. Finally, I blinked and craned my neck to see Aero was giving me the same blank look of shock I could imagine on my own face.
“You want us. To adopt you.” It didn’t come out unkindly from Aero’s tone, but it did have a measure of disbelief— not nearly as high as what I was currently experiencing, but up there, to be sure.
“But you’re an emancipated minor,” I said, “every child star’s aspiration, pretty much.” Or so it seemed from the interactions I’d had with others in Ryker’s boat while I was at BGG. Kid stars constantly fought parents’ rules and hated when parents took a chunk of their payday, and so on. It was always ugly. Money had an evaporative effect on family love, it seemed.
“You’re almost sixteen. You’ve arrived at adulthood. Why— adoption?”
“Uh, aren’t you, like, pushing thirty?” he asked me, an eyebrow raised as if he was pointing out something obvious. Before I could retort that, no, I was still firmly in my mid-twenties, Ryker said, “You still want parents, right?”
Of course I did. I needed their guidance, their support, their love— maybe even more now than I did last year. I loved them, and I needed them to be my rock, my safe place. I was starting to see what Ryker was getting at.
“They’re my anchor.” It came out in a whisper.
“See? So, what’s to explain?” Ryker’s eccentricity never ceased to amaze, nor did his insights. Still, I had to protest, just based on what I’d noted in my interactions in life as an entertainment attorney, and in what few observations I’d made about teens and their unconquerable need for independence.
“You’re doing so well on your own, Ryker, really proving your strength. In fact, despite some of your annoying manipulative tendencies, you’re pretty mature.” Saying so made me both realize and believe it more. Ryker, for his quirks, was all right. I liked him. In fact, I might have a little spark of maternal-type love for the kid. Or, make that at least aunt-like. He seemed to understand and care about me, which was a little unusual, if I was being honest. Most kids kept their thoughts pretty much in a steady orbit around their own feelings.
But not Ryker.
“Just how blind are you two?” Ryker started pacing the gallery, his footfalls on the wood floor echoing against the high tray ceiling. “Haven’t you noticed? I dropped my original last name, the one my parents stuck me with before abandoning me to my uncle, and the one my uncle abandoned me to Hollywood with. I figured if I was a Hollywood orphan, I might as well sound like one, so I just chopped all ties to them.”
All along I’d thought he had warm feelings for the people who put him on the path to success. I hadn’t realized he’d been so damaged by how everything had gone down in his life.
“At first, the only good thing I had was Phoebe. She pretty much snatched me from the jaws of despair. But then I met you two. Aero here was the first guy to really get me. He’d lost his mom and dad too. When he told me he didn’t feel angry about it, finally I realized I didn’t have to either. Aero said I could choose to look inward and be miserable, or I could choose to look outward and be happy. That’s when I started wanting to do the right things with the stuff my parents and uncle gave me. You know, microfinance.” He turned to Aero. “It’s okay, Jantzen. I told Jilly about all of it. She’s cool.”
“Yeah, she is.”
Then the kid turned to me. “And you— you’re the one adult who didn’t tell me I was being an idiot for wanting to help the people in the poor countries. Even though you didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing with all the product endorsements, you didn’t tell me I was an idiot, or that I was tanking my career, wrecking a bright future. I’m not a fool. I’ve seen how long most of the child film stars’ light burns before it goes out— not long, that is. I’m not under any illusion I’ll be any different.” He rolled his eyes in a self-deprecating manner and shrugged one shoulder. He understood how short his career might be, it seemed, and he’d come to terms with it.
“The rest of everyone I’d met up until you two were all just people who wanted to get as much money out of me for themselves as possible while they could before my fire’s fuel ran out. You, Jilly, came along and told me I could do what I wanted. And you protected me. That one time? Remember? The juice? If I’d taken that contract, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of my other deals that have been helping a lot of people out there. You protected people— because you believed in me.” He stopped pacing and turned to face us. “You see why I need you both? And why it would be so much more convenient if you two would just drop the stupidity and tell each other you’re in love?
”
My face must have drained of color. Telling Aero I was in love was a big step. Yes, I was in serious like. I had a major, incredible, unstoppable attraction to him. And yes, he was by far the best man I’d met in decades, maybe ever. But I didn’t know if I was all the way there to love yet.
“You can’t just jump the gun like this, Ryker.” I went over and put an arm around his shoulder and led him to the viewing bench. “You have to let things happen naturally.” We sat down together and I put an arm on Ryker’s shoulders.
Aero came and sat beside us and put in his two cents.
“Think about a tree. You plant it, believing— hoping it will have fruit. But you can’t just stand around hollering, ‘Give me a peach! Give me a peach!’ all day and expect it to happen on your time schedule.”
Instead of looking dejected, Ryker brightened. “So you’re saying the tree has been planted and there’s a chance? Sweet!” He didn’t wait for a response. “I’m calling for a ride down to Burbank. You two— take your time.” He winked and pulled one of those smiles that had sold a million or more bags of horse feed in the past six months, and then he was gone.
Aero lurched to go after him.
“He’ll be fine.” I rolled my eyes. “The nerve of some people’s children.”
“The nerve.” Aero turned to face me. “Can you believe him? Manipulator, conniver, verging on sociopath.”
“But he did buy you a Van Gogh.” I pointed to the painting still leaning against the wall beneath the bunny warren. “One he thinks it’s fine to just leave lying around, no security, no insurance, just … bam. Against the wall.”
“When I have kids, I’m going to teach them to take better care of their Van Goghs.”
“Me, too. Top priority. We’ll have a special feature at mealtime every night— how to treat priceless pieces of art.”
Legally in Love Boxed Set 1 Page 90