Secondary Colors

by Aubrey Brenner

  “It depends.”

  “On?”

  “Why you stayed.”

  “Why did you leave?” he shoots out, crossing his arms over his chest, closing himself off to me.

  “Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do? Wasn’t that what we planned?” I turn from him, tears welling in my eyes.

  “Until I bared myself to you, Evie. You didn’t leave like planned. You ran.” He’s pacing across the room behind me, the floorboards grumbling under his weighty steps. “I thought running was my thing.”

  “Apparently, we’re both good at it.”

  Through watery vision, I admire the powder-covered meadow outside the window, the lake frozen over, dead and still as everything else. “This place looks great.”

  “Evie, where the fuck have you been?” he demands.

  I turn back to him, my tears sucking back into my skull. “I went to New York to work with Sonya.”

  “You took the job at the gallery.” He seems disappointed.

  “No. I spent the first two-and-a-half months painting, meeting people in the art world, learning, healing, and following my dreams. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Yes,” he says with the most heartfelt voice, “with me by your side.”

  “I couldn’t do it, Holt.” I find the strength to face him again. “I was so hurt, so angry, so lost. I needed time to figure things out, figure myself out.”

  “I understand being hurt by your parents. I understand the desire to run away better than anyone. But why would you run from me? I never did anything to betray your trust.”

  “I—” I’ve devoted the past three months to processing everything I thought I knew, my family, my friends, my life, my Holt, only to realize everything I knew was wrong. The person I am today is because I believed my father abandoned me, that affects a child, confuses and scares them, thinking they aren’t wanted, aren’t loved. But in the end, I did the same thing. There aren’t words compelling enough to fix this.

  “Do you want my forgiveness? It’s going to take a lot more.”

  He walks away from me.

  He halts in his tracks. “I’ve been—I was in love with Aidan for years. It’s a lot harder once you’ve had someone’s kid. There’s a—” I lack the word I want to express. It’s hard to focus when your heart is on the line.

  “Connection,” he mumbles, his back still facing me.

  “Yes. A connection when that happens. I had this fantasy, of what it would be like to be his, to be a family. When I saw him again, I was finally getting to experience my fantasy in some small way.” I shove my hands into my back pockets, wishing I could ball up inside one and hide. “But every time I was with him, I wanted to be with you, in the attic, our attic, reading, sketching, making love. It might seem stupid, but it scared me. No man has ever gotten close to me like that, because I wouldn’t let them. It took me years to build this wall. It was made from bricks of mistrust, heartbreak, and lies. I decided who I let inside.” Tears infiltrate the corners of my eyes again. “You didn’t wait to be invited inside. You built a damn gate and let yourself in. You never gave me a choice. I didn’t like it.”

  He turns back to me, his face unreadable. His silence makes me nervous. I flood it with random facts about myself, hoping if I open myself to him enough, he’ll see this is real and true.

  “I don’t like marshmallows unless they’re in a s’more. I’m allergic to peppermint trees. I breakout into these ugly hives and my face swells. I despise snakes. Their slimy, wriggling bodies creep me out. I don’t trust easily. I have issues with men and relationships and my father. I’m profoundly flawed. And I love you, Holt Turner, acutely, foolishly, irrefutably.”

  Grabbing my waist, he yanks me into his deeply missed embrace. “Shut up,” he says, pinning my face in his hands. “Shut that beautiful, infuriating mouth.”

  I bury my incisors into my lower lip to keep it from flapping any further.

  “I’m not the same since you, Evie.” His forehead slumps against the top of my head. “You’re a part of me now. But if I’m going to forgive you, I need you to promise something first.”

  I distance my face from his, needing to look into those fiery eyes. His hands still clasped to the edges of my face.

  “Anything.”

  “Promise me you won’t run again.” The friction of his rough thumb wiping over my cheek, drying the trails of tears, prompts more to fall. I can’t hold them back. My heart is swelling in my chest from unabashed joy. “Promise you’ll stand and fight with me when shit gets tough.”

  I whimper, “Promise,” against his mouth as he brings it onto mine.

  The road hasn’t been easy. I’d like to say it’s been happily ever after, but it hasn’t. Of course, this is the real world and we have no delusions of perfection. I’ve faltered some in the years. He’s always been there to catch me. When he does, I catch him. But other than those moments of being human, it’s been better than I’d ever hoped.

  I paint every day. Selling the ones I can stand to part with. The ones I can’t, we hang around the cottage or give to people for their homes. That way, I can still see them when I visit. I’ve done really well for myself painting. Sonya continues to mentor me and showcase my pieces in her gallery, an honor any artist would murder for. Holt and I head to New York to attend my exhibitions bi-annually.

  I’ve yet to visit my father while we’re there. Holt has asked me every time. I always decline. He does it to be supportive. A loving gesture considering he doesn’t like my father much. I feel for him, for Meredith’s affair, but he was a lackluster parent to me by choice. He hasn’t contacted me in years.

  Only difference between now and then, it’s my decision this time.

  Holt earned his contractor’s license and has been working steadily. He made a deal with Charles to work on the real estate he handles. It’s taken him out of town and even out of state. I’ve accompanied him. Mostly, I stay home, in Aurora, or head over to Vermont. It gives me time to be me, to paint, to spend time with my family and with my daughter. We’ve had Bails come to stay with us weekends and vacations from school. She absolutely loves Holt. At nearly eight, she’s hardly the newborn I gave away years ago. She’s creative like me. Anything where she can express herself, she loves and excels at. She’s far more talented than I was at her age.

  Aidan has since moved to New York and has done very well for himself working on Wall Street. He’s married with a baby on the way, but he makes time to come see our daughter for milestones, birthdays, holidays, weekends, any reason he can make up, which we usually hold at the main house. Meredith and Charles are still together and extremely blissful living in the old Victorian.

  We’ve become a family. A strange, wonderful family.

  Sadly, we lost a member recently. Roy passed away in his sleep this past winter, with Hettie by his side. She’s slowly adjusting to his absence. She says she always goes to yell at him for one thing or another and then remembers he isn’t there. We make sure to spend a lot of time with her and get her out of the house, if only a simple dinner at Meredith’s. I have a hard time picturing myself old and gray, having suffered the loss of Holt. It tears my heart to pieces every time it crosses my mind. But it makes me grateful for the present.

  One summer night, Holt and I go for a midnight swim, as we usually do when the heat gets so bad we can’t sleep. We float under the bright face of the moon watching over us. The water relieves the hot night air.

  Once we’re cooled down, we drip dry on our way back to the house, the little cottage Holt brought back to life. I take the lead. He likes when I do.

  “Do you remember that bet you lost?” he asks as we walk up to the porch.

  “That night at the bar?”

  “Yeah,” he confirms. “I never got my prize.”

  I open the front door and enter the living room.

  “You’re really worried about some meaningless drunken wager we made years ago?” I walk through the fan-cooled room and
down the back hall, Holt hot on my trail.

  “It’s not meaningless.”

  “Alright, what do you want?”

  “You.”

  “You have me.”

  I open the door and halt in my tracks, stunned by the scene I just wandered into. At the end of our bed, a canvas is set on an easel, with two words painted across it.

  I spin back to Holt, my hand over my mouth and my eyes large. The platinum band of an art deco emerald ring is pinched between his shaking fingers, held out to me.

  “Forever.”

  My heart jumps up my throat. My skin itches with nervous excitement. My eyes fog over with tears. My head screams it’ll never work, a natural reflex from my past. I turn to the canvas and away from him, the fateful words staring me down, provoking the fears of abandonment.

  “We aren’t your parents, Violet,” he says, his voice weak and terrified, baring his heart.

  He understands me better than I understand myself.

  I walk over to the canvas, picking up the paint brush on the table beside it with numb hands, and paint my answer. When I step aside to show him, tears take his eyes hostage as the hand with the ring drops to his side. His jaw locks, the muscles ticking.

  “Really?” he asks from tight, trembling lips.

  “It’s the only answer I have left.”

  He paces up to me. His hands cup my face, the rough touch of his thumb running over the plumpness of my lower lip. His mouth crowds mine until my neck aches from the force.

  I never planned to fall in love.

  Holt never gave me a choice.

  Aubrey Brenner is a native Californian who enjoys spending time with her fiancé and their four-legged children. She always had a passion for story-telling and visual artistry. Through her writing, she’s able to showcase both.