Painting Kisses

by Melanie Jacobson

  “I’ll take you up on that.”

  “Good.” She studied me for a minute. “You like him?”

  “I . . . yeah. I do. And I like him more every time we hang out. He may be the nicest guy I’ve ever met.”

  “I admit I’m impressed he stepped his game up for you. He’s always seemed so shy; I can’t believe he got up the guts to ask you to dinner.”

  “He surprises me every time we talk now, with the stuff he knows and the stuff he notices. I mean, he’s nailed these gifts, and it’s all based on what he sees and pays attention to. It’s pretty amazing.”

  “The big question is when he’s going to make a big move. Is he going to wine and dine you tonight so he can lay one on you? You could use some kissing.”

  I busied myself rinsing dishes in the sink so my expression wouldn’t give away that I’d already been doing an excessive amount of kissing lately. “Me? What about you? You can’t hide behind school and work forever. At some point, you’ll have to pay attention to the guys who pay attention to you.”

  “You mean all the guys in my nursing program? Oh wait, there are none. I think Griff is the only single guy left in the greater Salt Lake area, and he hasn’t looked my way once.”

  Something about the way she said that caught my attention. “Are you saying you wanted him to?”

  “I’m saying that I might know how to put an outfit together, but you’re still way more interesting. And I’m saying I’m not at all surprised you caught his attention because you’re awesome.”

  “But y—”

  “Don’t go reading into anything. It’s been fun watching this unfold, but it’s made me wish I had time or space in my life for something like this.”

  “When the right person comes along, you will, no matter what else you have going on.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Phil. And now I have to go.” She found Chloe and swept her into a hug before heading out to work.

  As soon as the door shut behind Dani, Chloe’s intense stare lasered in on me. “Auntie Wia? We do mac and cheese, yes? I get the box.”

  I grinned. Dani hated for Chloe to have any packaged foods, but I’d taught Chloe my great love for mac and cheese from a box, mixed with hamburger, and slapped on a bun in my twisted version of a sloppy joe. It was gross and awesome, and Dani would kill me if she knew how often we snuck them. Gourmet foods had their place, but not much could top a sloppy mac. “I have something even better, cute thing. How about if we dress up and go to Griff’s restaurant?”

  Her brow crinkled as she processed the idea of a new place and new people. I crouched down and hugged her. “Griff is going to take good care of us and give us a quiet table all by ourselves, with no one to bother us.” Her face relaxed, but guilt niggled at me. She shouldn’t be so crowd averse so young, should she?

  An hour later we headed out to Leifson’s in our nicest jeans, with a sparkle shirt for Chloe and a tailored jacket and boots for me, pilfered from Dani.

  At the restaurant, confusion tinged the hostess’s greeting when I explained we weren’t waiting for anyone else in our party. It was as if she couldn’t figure out why I was bringing a toddler out for an expensive steak dinner for two. I took pity on her. “Is Griff around? He invited us.”

  Her face cleared. “Sure, wait a second, and I’ll get him for you.”

  A minute later he appeared, looking completely pulled together, tucked in, and fully buttoned. Which was kind of a shame.

  “Ladies, good to see you. I saved a special table for you in case you decided to show up.” He led us to a corner in the unused half of the dining room. “See? Nothing to worry about.”

  I helped Chloe into her seat, and Griff pulled out my chair for me. Nice. Was that a thing he’d learned from working in a fancy restaurant or simply plain good manners?

  “I’ll get a booster,” he said before I could ask, and again, I appreciated his thoughtfulness.

  He strolled off toward the kitchen area, and I squeezed Chloe’s hand. “Are you excited?”

  She looked around, her eyes big. They’d probably be bigger if she could understand the quality of the linens and heavy silverware on the table in front of us. “Pwetty,” she said, touching the crystal water goblet in front of her.

  “Very pretty. We have to be careful about everything we touch, okay, sweet pea? It all breaks easily.” She frowned, and I rushed to explain. “This is a princess restaurant, where royalty eat. Princesses would never break a glass or knock something on the table over, so we can’t either if we want to fool them into thinking we’re princesses.”

  “Pwincess?” Chloe repeated. She looked intrigued now.

  “Of course. Why do you think I dressed you in a sparkle shirt? Princesses need sparkles.”

  Griff reappeared, not only with a booster seat but also with a sturdy glass tumbler that would normally hold whiskey. “Harder to break,” he mouthed as he swapped it out for Chloe’s goblet. “I hope you’re ready for the royal treatment,” he said aloud, and Chloe’s eyes widened.

  Man, Griff was developing a talent for saying exactly the right thing. I gave Chloe a “See, I told you so” wink.

  He held a menu in front of him. “You’re welcome to look through this, but I’m kind of an expert on the food here, and if you trust me, I think I can order you up a pretty perfect dinner.”

  “Yes, pwease.”

  I nodded to back up Chloe. “We’d love that.”

  He disappeared for a few minutes while I kept Chloe busy with some I Spy. When Griff reappeared, he circulated through the rest of the diners first, stopping at a table here and there to chat before he rejoined us, pulling up a chair this time.

  “I’m glad you guys came,” he said, and the warmth in his words kindled an answering warmth in my abdomen that spread up and out, coloring my cheeks.

  “Me too. Us too,” I amended with a glance at Chloe, who was busy trying to dress her spoon with her cloth napkin. “Most people don’t treat their most annoying neighbors to four-star restaurants as a thanks for the hassle.”

  “You guys aren’t a hassle,” he said. “All of you are great. Chloe cracks me up, I could watch you paint all day, and your sister hasn’t said fifty words to me since I moved in. An artist, a mute, and a cool little kid—so what’s the hassle?”

  I laughed. “If you think Dani’s a mute, you haven’t been paying attention.”

  “She doesn’t talk to me.”

  “Lucky. She talks to me too much. I’m the oldest. It’s my job to have an opinion on everything she does, not the other way around.”

  “If you say so,” he said. “We’ve never had a conversation, so I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  “You were pretty quiet with me for a long time. Have you tried talking to her?”

  He shifted in his chair. “Sure, I guess.”

  I eyed him. “I don’t know exactly what that means, but to be honest, she’s been overwhelmed by her schedule. She’s doing a pretty stellar job of hanging in there.”

  He smiled at Chloe. “I can’t argue if Chloe is the evidence.”

  A waiter approached with our meal, and Griff stood up again. “Hope you like it,” he said.

  The server put a plate down in front of each of us, Chloe’s a perfectly miniature version of mine: mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, potato chips, french fries, corn on the cob, and a filet mignon, only Chloe’s was already cut into small pieces for her.

  “If I’d known this was what on the Leifson’s menu, I’d have come in a lot sooner.”

  Griff laughed. “Let’s just say it’s the secret menu.”

  “Whoever’s in charge of the secret menu has been paying attention to our eating habits.”

  “Don’t be too impressed. If it’s potato in any form, you guys will eat it. Does that sound about right? Enjoy,” he said. “I have to check in on the kitchen, but let me know if you need anything else.”

  “I’m sure we’ll be fine,” I said, waving good-bye despite a twinge of disappointme
nt in my stomach that he was leaving. I ate some perfectly crisped french fries to smother it. I’d hoped Griff would stay with us, but that was stupid when I thought about it. I couldn’t bring him to T&R’s even on a slow shift and sit and visit with him the whole time, but I watched him circulate among the guests again and wished he could stay anyway.

  After following up the ridiculously good dinner with ice cream and cookies that I suspected were also from the secret menu, Griff walked us to the exit.

  “Thanks for coming in,” he said.

  “Thank you for da food,” Chloe answered and then threw herself at his legs to wrap him in a hug.

  He grinned, and I disentangled her, my heart squeezing to see her share that kind of affection with someone besides Dani and me. “What Chloe said,” I said. “This was so great. I’m not sure I’d be repaying the favor by inviting you to the diner, but you’re welcome any time.”

  “I’ll have to take you up on that,” he said. And this time my stomach twinged like I was sailing on a swing next to Chloe to the highest point.

  “Great,” I said. Chloe was now attached to my leg and was yanking on it, trying to hustle me to the parking lot. “I better go.”

  “Catch you later.”

  I tried to figure the night out on the way home. He’d invited us to come, gone out of his way to prepare our favorite foods, but spent relatively little time with us, which I understood. As the boss, he couldn’t suddenly act all super casual in front of his employees.

  But even when we’d talked, it had stayed at the friendly conversation level, not even kind of flirtatious. But . . . then I went back to the food he’d picked. It said more than flirting.

  For the first time, I wished he was more like Aidan: happy to take credit for anything and everything and bold with his interest. It would be a lot less confusing. With Aidan, I’d kissed him only long enough to remember why it was incredibly stupid to get caught up in his act and push him away. But with Griff, if anything, I was thinking I wanted to pull him closer.

  When it came right down to it, I liked that Griff was leaving me a lot of options. Too many, maybe, but it was better than Aidan, who didn’t leave me enough.

  Chapter 12

  I put Chloe down for the night and fished out her old baby monitor so I could listen for her from the “studio.”

  In the garage, I sat on the cold cement and stared up at the canvas. It loomed from that perspective as if I was in one of those movies where the character gets shrunk down, like in Epic, which Chloe watched on repeat. But I wanted that. I wanted the scope of the white space to overwhelm me so I could be sure that all the things bubbling up inside me would have somewhere to go. I closed my eyes, waiting to see what rose to the surface, waiting for the sensory overload I’d carried down with me from the mountain to coalesce into something—an image, an emotion. I closed my eyes and remembered everything I had felt rather than seen while standing on the mountain. And then I opened my eyes and reached for a brush.

  I painted, and not-mountains that were somehow utterly mountains appeared. The verge of summer emerged without shape, as pure motion. And then the awareness that had stirred inside me when I had stood on the slope sensing everything growing and being showed up, and I stepped back. The colors on the canvas didn’t look like anything, but the whole thing together began to feel like exactly what that moment had been.

  And the artist part of me that had withered, that had drawn into itself like an arthritic hand crippled before its time, opened and stretched and flexed. And worked. And became right.

  I threw open the garage door to let the paint smell out and the night air in and painted until my shoulders ached, spreading the color further and further. By the time I heard someone clear their throat behind me, the canvas had become the feeling of looking out from a ski slope and seeing nothing made by humans except the single path the viewer stood on.

  I turned, and Griff was there, his hands in his pockets and his jaw nearly slack as he studied the canvas.

  I wiped the excess paint from the brush and set it in a jar of solvent until I could get to it to rinse it out. “Hi.”

  “Am I messing you up? Because I can go home and let you get back to being a genius.”

  “It’s okay.” I stretched my neck and rubbed at a crick in it. It hurt. If it’d been Aidan standing in front of me, he would have sauntered right over and rubbed at it like I’d been hinting at a massage. I wasn’t, and I wondered what Griff would do. He stayed put, tearing his eyes away from the painting to survey the garage. It was odd to have him there, but long before I’d broken out big enough to have my own studio, I’d had to paint in any space I could find, often where all kinds of people had drifted through. Griff’s presence was far less distracting than any of them had been.

  “Can I offer you something to eat?” I asked, and when his eyebrows shot up, I laughed. “That’s a dumb question to ask someone who barely came from working in a restaurant, isn’t it?”

  “No, actually. I get tired of the same old, same old.”

  “Then I might be the wrong person to feed you, considering where I got the gift basket I’m going to share.”

  “Bring it on.”

  “Grab a seat and make yourself comfortable,” I said, pointing at the floor. “I’ll be back in a second.”

  When I came back out with the box of food he’d given me, he was coming back up my driveway carrying two deck chairs. “So you’re feeding and furnishing me?”

  He looked as if I’d asked him to solve a quadratic equation. “I’m not feeding you. You’re feeding me.”

  I patted the box. “I meant this. And the brushes. And the book. It was crazy generous of you. It takes talent to put together a gourmet gift that doesn’t have gross stuff in it. You nailed it, so the least I can do is share it.”

  This time he stared at me like I’d asked him to solve the quadratic equation using the color purple and a toothbrush. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Nausea washed over me, the kind where excruciating embarrassment struck me with such force, flooding all of my systems, that the one thing that would make it better was the only thing that could make the situation worse: puking. Every single not-so-subtle hint I’d dropped about my gratitude to him flashed like neon signs in my mind’s eye, all of them illuminating my total stupidity. And I saw him remember them all and make sense of them in the same instant.

  The urge to puke grew. He would figure out quickly that me thanking him for gifts he hadn’t given me meant that I’d wanted him to be the one who was sending them. Which meant that I’d been taking all of his friendly neighbor gestures way beyond what he’d ever intended them to be, and it was a shame we both had to figure that out at once. Especially the part where I had to figure that out with him standing right there.

  Suddenly, my fingers needed something to do, something that would let me turn my back on him now until I could sell the condo and move away and keep my back turned to him forever. I set the box on the ground, plucked a brush from the jar, and turned to the canvas. “Sorry,” I said, pretending to study what I’d done so far. “I think I was confused. But there’s some good stuff in there. Help yourself to cheese or whatever.” I fought a cringe. I lost.

  A long silence met that, and I touched the brush to the canvas. There was no paint on it, and even if there was, I wouldn’t have been able to fix on a clear image with the rapid-fire highlight reel of conversations I’d had with Griff reframing themselves in my head and crucifying me with the utter wrongness I’d read him with.

  I was as bad at men as I’d ever been with Donovan, and it had become obvious with Donovan that I’d never be as bad at anything as I’d been at reading him. The truth had always been there—the narcissism, the entitlement, the addictive behaviors. But I’d been blind to it. With Griff, I’d looked so hard I’d obviously seen way past the truth into things that weren’t there.

  It was my turn to clear my throat, and I pretended to dab at something el
se on the canvas. “So I should probably get back to this.”

  “Lia?”

  I didn’t answer, only smooshed the brush in harder to an area I could easily touch up when he left.

  “Lia? I would have given you all those things if I’d thought of them.”

  That stopped me, and I dared a quarter turn to study him from the corner of my eye. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed. I just . . . I don’t know why anyone would give me these things, but there’s no real reason you should have either.”

  He took a step toward me. “I’m serious. The only reason I didn’t is that I didn’t think of it.”

  But if he hadn’t given those things to me, who had?

  Aidan’s face immediately flashed through my mind, but he had no idea where I lived. Only Tom would be able to give him that information, and there was no way he’d do it without first letting me know he was passing it along.

  So who had been paying close enough attention to me to know exactly what to send me and where to find me?

  The only possibilities that even kind of worked made me shiver. Now I had even more reasons to wish it had been Griff and not whoever was behind these gifts.

  Griff still stood there, and I turned further to face him.

  “Sorry. I kind of put you on the spot by assuming. Don’t worry about it. I was trying to play Sherlock, but I guess I’m more of a Clouseau.” His shyness really had been shyness. He was a watercolor, and I’d tried to complicate him into an abstract oil.

  “Clouseau?”

  “The idiot detective on Pink Panther who can’t get anything right?”

  “Sure,” he said, his face clearing. “Quit beating yourself up. I like it when getting it wrong means someone thought I was a much better guy than I am.”

  He stood there for another moment, and I didn’t want to shut him out by turning back to the canvas, but at the same time, I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  As if he sensed that, he took a step back through the open garage door. “I should let you get back to work.”