A breeze kicked up, and the scent of the meadow floated over to me, clearing my head and leaving me with one simple truth: Aidan was not Donovan. It was why I’d come here—the quiet parts of me had already known that. While there were a hundred things to be afraid of about getting involved with Aidan, none of them had to do with losing myself and disappearing into his world. His was defined by the same things mine was; I could see that now—hard work, family, roots.
I breathed in deeply, and the cool air filled my lungs and expanded in a more-than-physical way—it was like a tiny baptism inside, sloughing away the old hurts and fears that had nothing to do with Aidan. It filled me with possibility, and I exhaled a breath of resolve. He was telling me things about himself and his motives that I’d begun admitting to myself from the second he’d walked out of the diner earlier. I was ready to take the last step toward him.
I drew in another deep breath, this time for courage and to steady my nerves. “Okay. You were kind of an idiot, but I get why. But I’ve been a bigger idiot. I’m sorry I just figured that out. Let’s start over.” I stepped toward him and placed my hand on his arms, which he’d folded across his chest. I smiled up at him and tilted my head in a way that asked for a kiss. This moment was as perfect and balanced as my favorite Matisse painting.
He stayed still for a tiny forever, his eyes locked with mine, and then his expression closed with a flash of regret as plain as a shutter dropping into place. He took a step back, and I snatched my hand back. “It’s not that easy,” he said.
I dropped my gaze to the ground so he wouldn’t see the tears of humiliation stinging my eyes. His words were heavy with regret. “I wish I were above my ego. I really do. But you’ve shut me down so many times at this point that I don’t know what you want from me, and I’ve given you several different versions of me to choose from. The other night when I brought you to my home, I showed you the realest me there is, and that’s who you walked out on.”
He whistled for Chief and turned to face me again. “I’m glad you came up here today. I’m glad we talked this through and figured it all out. But your instincts seemed to be telling you all along that we’re a bad fit, and I guess we both should have been listening. I’m sorry.” His radio crackled something about a lift, and he turned it down. “I should go. Stay as long as you want. And Chloe can pick all the flowers she wants. I’m going to go check on some things.” He gave me an uncomfortable nod and headed back toward the lodge.
There were a hundred things I wanted to say to that, but it was my actions that had shut him down, and words couldn’t fix that. And as much as part of me wanted to dig a hole where I stood and bury myself in it, the part of me where paintings grew stirred, and I called out before he disappeared from earshot. “Aidan!”
He turned in the doorway.
“There’s a reason I ran out of your house that night, but it’s not what you think. You know that painting you saw me working on here the first day?” He nodded. “Remember it, okay?”
He hesitated like he was trying to figure out the point of the request, but he nodded again and disappeared.
Chloe wandered over with a fistful of flowers. “He go bye bye?”
I stooped down to hug her and brush some pollen off her nose, staring over her head toward the lodge. “Just for now, I hope.” And I meant it. I hoped it with all my whole being. I still had a shot left to take, and if it didn’t work, then Aidan and I were never meant to be.
Chapter 23
Dani poked her head into the garage and wrinkled her nose. “You want the door open right now?”
A clap of thunder punctuated her question. I glanced over my shoulder to catch another flash of heat lightning. “Definitely.” The charge of ozone in the air was exactly what my imagination would smell like if I could bottle the scent. I smiled at the thought of explaining it to Aidan that way.
Dani edged farther in. She was pretty careful to stay out of my space when I was on a painting jag, which I had been since the late afternoon when she’d returned home from a final. “Can I see?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She rounded the canvas, coming to a sudden stop and gasping. “I think you’re brilliant until I see another one of your paintings, and then I realize when I thought the last one was brilliant, I had no idea what I was talking about because the new one is pure genius.”
“Wow. Thank you.”
“I mean it,” she said, her voice soft again. “It makes my heart hurt to look at that.”
The words sounded bad, but her tone sounded like it was a very good thing. “And I mean it when I say thank you,” I said. “It matters to me that you love what I do.”
“I do,” she said. “You know that. I haven’t always understood it. But this one . . . I get this one. I feel it, I guess is the right way to say it.”
“Yeah?” I watched her study the painting. “What does it feel like?”
She studied the two entwined flowers I had painted, glacier lilies I’d seen on the mountain with Aidan. “I’m sure I’m about to sound like a bad imitation of a big-shot New York art critic by talking about how I respond and not what I see, but it’s the best way to explain it. So I’ll start with this. I get that we’re looking at two flowers. I get that, okay?”
I nodded, not sure where she was going.
“But they don’t feel like two flowers. When I found out I was pregnant with Chloe, Brandon bailed. He didn’t do it all at once, but over time, he disappeared utterly and completely. And there was a huge hole in my life. At first I thought I wanted him back. I was so scared about keeping Chloe and raising her by myself. I thought it would be so much easier if he were here helping me figure everything out. I wanted him back so much it was like an ache. Then Chloe was born, and I thought I would collapse under the weight of her. I mean, not her teeny self but the reality of her and this whole life that she is and how I could feel myself failing her before it all started.”
I dropped my brush and pulled her into a hug as her first tear fell. “Baby girl, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for that.”
She hugged me back, hard. “You were here soon enough.” She pushed away from me and dashed the tears away. “But that’s not what I’m trying to tell you. When Chloe was about a week old, I got up to nurse her in the middle of the night, and I was so tired I thought I would die. She wrapped her hand around my pinkie and fell asleep while she was eating, then she twitched in her sleep and squeezed my finger, and suddenly, I knew it was going to be okay, that I would tear down and rebuild the whole world for her with my bare hands if she needed me to. And that’s when I realized it wasn’t Brandon I was missing. It was someone who would look at my baby and love her like I did, someone who could understand that emotion I couldn’t explain.”
She walked closer to the painting and studied in silence for another long moment. “The way I imagine that will be, finding someone who loves me and Chloe like that? If I could paint that future us? That’s what it would look like.”
I cleared my throat once and then again so I could get words past the lump that had filled it. “You understand what I do better than any New York art critic ever did.”
“Is this the one you’re sending in for the festival?”
“No, those are already in.” I walked over to the two paintings I’d photographed and submitted, the one Chloe had seen herself in and the one that showed the joy of a trail run. I would hear soon whether I’d made the cut, but my gut told me I had a good chance.
“I love both of those,” Dani said. She stared at the pictures for another minute, then took her turn clearing her throat. “Um.”
I narrowed my eyes. That was a favor-wheedling um. “Yes?”
“So Chloe’s asleep.”
“You need to go do something? I can keep an ear out for her. Bring the monitor down.”
She reddened. “That would be good. But, uh, I won’t be that far away.”
My eyebrow rose. “Spit it out.”
“Griff
and I were talking the other day—”
“Oh, reallllly,” I drawled, and her flush deepened.
“Shut up. We were both out on the deck. And he mentioned the Veronica Mars movie and how his sister is all nuts for it and how he didn’t get it.”
Good one, Griff. “So you’re going to watch it.”
It shouldn’t have been possible, but she went even redder, which made her extra effort to sound casual even funnier. “I told him he should probably watch the series first before he saw it, and he asked if I had it, and I said yes and that he could borrow it sometime.” Her words got faster. “Then he asked if I minded watching it with him at first in case he had any questions about it, and I said I thought that would be fine, and then just now when I was on the deck—”
“Where he happened to be too?”
“Shut up. So I was on the deck, and he suggested that maybe now would be a good time to watch the movie, and I said I’d check with you about keeping an ear out for Chloe.”
“So you know he doesn’t need you to explain anything to him, right?”
Her blush faded, and a small smile appeared. “Oh, I know.”
And seeing that bit of happiness on her face might have made me fall in love with Griff myself if I wasn’t heading down that path toward someone else. I’d spent three days trying to hide from that realization, but as I worked on this painting for Aidan, every stroke of my paintbrush uncovered more of the truth.
“Enjoy the make out. I mean, the movie.”
“Oh, I will,” she said, not specifying which one, which made me laugh. “I won’t be gone long.” She scooted for the stairs but stopped at the foot. “You sure you’re okay with this?”
“Beyond okay. I’m insistent. Go.”
When the door closed behind her, I grinned and only grinned bigger when it opened long enough for her to shove the baby monitor onto the landing and disappear again. Every instinct in me told me Griff was the right fit for her.
I went back to the painting. The same instincts told me I’d found the right fit too, but that wasn’t going to matter if it was only my instincts talking. It had been a long time since I’d trusted them, but I’d never wanted to believe them as much as I did about this.
Chapter 24
The road to Aidan’s house looked a lot different in the warm light of late afternoon, but I remembered seeing a clump of aspens at the turnoff to his place that I hoped would guide me right. It had been a white-knuckled drive all the way up the mountain so far, which made me think of how I’d driven away from his house the same way last time. Even though I was running to something and not from it this time, I couldn’t make my hands relax. What happened next mattered too much.
I should be seeing the aspens any moment, and my stomach fluttered when the evergreens passing by my window blended into each other with no hint of a driveway. Finally, a mile past where I’d expected them and only a few minutes short of utter panic, I spotted the clump I was looking for.
I slowed and made the turn, forcing my hands to stay steady as the road rose higher to reach Aidan’s house. We’d driven forever when I’d followed him up here after our dinner at Rosetti’s, but this time the miles flew by, and suddenly I was there, pulling into the driveway in the falling dusk. I hoped I’d come late enough to catch Aidan home from work, but there was no way to tell from the empty driveway if he was gone or had parked in the long garage I spotted in the remaining daylight.
I could make out all the details of his house I’d missed in the dark—the natural stone and wood that joined in striking angles. I’d seen mountain homes that were so aggressively modern that the contrast to their setting was eye-jarring. Aidan’s home was unapologetically contemporary yet still in harmony with the woods surrounding it.
I wondered if I’d get a chance to see what the view from his great room actually looked like, and I sat for a moment picturing it, but it was a delaying tactic, and I knew it. I squeezed the steering wheel like it was a life preserver, my last connection to safety, and let go.
The paintings slid easily enough from the back seat, but when I hefted them into my arms, I felt like an ant trying to carry a giant crumb except way less graceful. They weren’t even big paintings, only three feet long each, but I’d agonized for hours over the right frame for the one that was my reason for coming here today. And now I held that one and another one wrapped in cardboard to protect them. It was impossible not to think about the situation as some kind of metaphor. This whole relationship is in my hands, like these paintings. I have to protect this relationship like I would these paintings. I tried pushing the cheesy thoughts out of my head, but as I climbed the steps to Aidan’s front door and juggled the paintings when I couldn’t see the stairs, I thought about how my package was symbolic of the figurative step I was trying to take.
Ugh. Stupid. Time to stop thinking about symbols and ring the doorbell. It was weird that there would even be a doorbell to ring. A house this size should have a doorman standing out front at all times, ready to spring into action.
Nothing happened when I pressed the bell. I waited for half a minute, trying to decide if I needed to give Aidan time to cross the house to answer or if I should ring again in case he hadn’t heard it or in case the doorbell didn’t work. I rang again and waited a full minute this time. If the doorbell was broken, what was I supposed to do? I remembered the alarm Aidan had disarmed the other night with its eye scanner. What would it do if I opened the door and stuck my head in to holler “Hello?” like a nosy neighbor? Drop a cage around me and trap me where I stood?
Intruder cages? I didn’t need a clearer sign that my imagination was getting the better of me. I drew a cleansing breath, held it, and pressed the doorbell one more time right as the door opened and startled my cleansing breath out of me in an inelegant whoosh.
“Lia? What are you doing here?” Aidan asked, standing in the doorway in bare feet and jeans, his hair poking up and his eyes blinking like he was still clearing sleep from them.
Crud. There were a few marginally worse ways I could think of to have started this visit than pulling Aidan from a nap. But not many. I lifted a hand as much as I dared to offer a tiny wave without dropping the painting. “Hi. I, uh, brought something for you?”
A frown crossed his face. “I’m confused. I thought our last conversation pretty much wrapped things up.”
“Maybe it should have. But I owe you an explanation for why I ran away from your house before you decide you’re done with us, and this seemed like the right way to do it.” I glanced down at the load wearing out my arms and shoulders. “It’s not brown paper and twine, but I needed to make sure nothing happened to the canvas.”
He leaned against the door and scrubbed his hand through his hair like he was trying to remove the last of the sleepiness from his brain. “I think you’re going to make me crazy,” he said, dropping his head against the door and closing his eyes for a moment.
The chest fist appeared, squeezing hard without any warning. His response was far from the “Come in. Let’s pick up where we left off, no questions asked” I’d imagined. He straightened and jerked his head for me to follow him to the great room. “I need caffeine if we’re going to do this. Can I get you anything?”
I shook my head while he made his way to a bar built into the far corner while I leaned the paintings against the sofa. I turned to the windows and gasped. It was a thousand times more intense than I’d imagined. Mountain peaks loomed in the distance, the tallest one looking snowdusted because of its permanent glacier. The yard in back encompassed a beautiful pool before stretching for at least an acre of smooth lawn broken by a stream cutting through. Small boulders lined its sides and practically begged for someone to sit on them and paint or read or dream. The lawn stretched out to meet the tree line as it sloped downward, an unbroken expanse of firs and pines as far as I could see. I pictured them with their own coat of snow and wanted to cry at the perfection.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
>
Aidan’s voice made me jump. I hadn’t heard him walk up. “Yeah. Amazing. Way better than my imagination.”
Silence fell between us, an uncomfortable one. An air of waiting surrounded him, but fear choked me. He cleared his throat after another minute dragged by. “So you brought something for me? Or you were going to explain . . . something?”
I hoped his detachment was an act. Like, hoped it a lot. I wished he’d make it easier on me. A simple, “My life has been desolate without you” would have broken the ice.
Instead, he stood there, arms crossed, perfectly still, but with a tightness around his shoulders and jaw that betrayed his outward show of patience. This was nothing like the courtesy he usually showed me, and irritation flared in my stomach. It was more comfortable than the panic fluttering there, so I stoked it to settle my nerves. He had to know it wasn’t easy for me to come here. “Why are you making this so hard on me?” I asked, keeping my voice even but firm like I did when Chloe was wheedling for extra TV time.
His eyebrows lifted, and I saw the first signs of life in his eyes. I wished it wasn’t anger. “You are the last person who should be asking that question.”
I swallowed, but it didn’t push the fear down. All my insecurities flooded back to me. This wasn’t about winning a verbal slap fight anymore. I wanted something totally different, something that not once in my life had I ever had the courage to ask for. I could walk away now, leaving the question unasked and the last tatters of my pride intact. Or I could do something brave instead. I closed my eyes and thought of the emotion that had poured into the second canvas I held, how it had flowed out through my paintbrush without stopping off at my brain for deconstruction. It had been wild and chaotic and the first thing that had purely made sense in a long, long time.
Painting Kisses Page 21