by Tawna Fenske
“Technically, you kissed me. But I’m not here to talk about that, either.”
“So that leaves your mom.” Meg gripped the door a little tighter, not sure she wanted to be having this conversation right now. But there was no avoiding it, was there? She sighed. “Or I guess I should say, your mom’s decision to hit me with both a bouquet of daisies and a lawsuit in the middle of a funeral reception.”
“Her timing and presentation could have used some work,” he admitted, peering over the top of her head toward her living room. “Are those the smoked salmon appetizer things you used to make?”
“Yes. Would you like one?”
“Please.”
“Come on, then.”
She turned back toward the living room and headed for the sofa, conscious of Kyle right behind her. Having him close was giving her flashbacks to the kiss, which was a lot more pleasant than the flashbacks she’d been having all evening. Her ears were still ringing with the sound of Sylvia lecturing her on artists’ rights and the importance of honoring commitments, her voice so high and shrill that everyone had turned to stare.
Meg sat down on the couch and waited for Kyle to join her. He seemed to hesitate, then sat on the loveseat instead.
“Keeping your distance?”
“Look, Meg—”
“No good conversation has ever started, ‘Look, Meg . . .’”
He sighed and picked up one of the crudités, but he didn’t bite into it. “I know my mom caught you off guard, but she has a valid point.”
“What point would that be?” she asked, feeling her temper flare. “You mean the one where she said I’d be nothing—I repeat, nothing—without Matt? Or the one where she called me an ungrateful bitch? Or the one where she said she always hated my cooking?”
“You have to admit, all that name-calling kept the funeral from being too dreary.”
Meg folded her arms over her chest, annoyed he didn’t seem more upset by his mother’s insults. “Forgive me if I’m not feeling honored by the opportunity to provide some levity.”
Kyle sighed and set the snack back on the platter. “I know my mom can be a jerk. God knows that’s her default setting most of the time. But as an artist, I think she has a valid point.”
“Come again?”
“Matt did take those photos. His artwork is a big part of what makes that book so amazing.”
Meg swallowed hard, ordering herself to breathe. “I’m not disputing that. I’m only saying the debt’s been paid already. Like I told your mom, I put the last check in the mail two days ago.”
“Right,” Kyle said, his voice equally strained. “And according to my mother, it hasn’t shown up yet.”
“Well, I sent it. It’s for eighteen hundred dollars.”
Kyle frowned. “According to the records, you still owed close to three thousand dollars.”
“That’s not true,” Meg said, hating the panicky note in her own voice. “I tried to get electronic records of the canceled checks from my bank, but apparently there was some sort of technical glitch when they got bought out by a bigger bank last month.”
“So you don’t have any proof.”
She glared at him. “It’s not like Matt was sending me a receipt every month. Look, I’m sure that’s what was left. I’ve been scrimping and saving and mailing those damn checks to Matt every month for two years.”
“I don’t want to quibble about dollar figures, but Matt’s accountant disagrees about what you still owed.”
Meg gritted her teeth and stared at him. “The bill was bullshit in the first place, Kyle. Ten thousand dollars for something he offered to do for free?”
“What did you do with your engagement ring?”
The question startled her so much it took her a moment to remember. Before she could answer, Kyle had picked up the appetizer again and shoved it in his mouth. “In a lot of cases of a broken engagement, the bride-to-be keeps the ring with the idea that it was given as a gift, and legally, the gift can’t be revoked.”
“Exactly,” Meg said warily, not sure if Kyle was taking her side or luring her into some sort of complacency.
“But did you know there have been plenty of court cases where the bride has to give back the ring? The legal argument is that it was a conditional gift, contingent upon the marriage taking place, and the acceptance of the proposal is an agreement to those terms. If the wedding doesn’t happen, the conditions haven’t been met and the ring goes back to the giver.”
Meg folded her arms over her chest. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I researched this when we called off the wedding. There’s something called a fault-based approach where the courts determine who caused the broken engagement and the other person keeps the ring.”
“So you’re saying it was Matt’s fault?”
Meg took another shaky breath, wishing she didn’t feel the thick bubble of temper flaring at the base of her neck. “I’m saying a guy who tells his bride the night before the wedding that he’s been sticking his dick in his acupuncturist might be considered at fault for the fact that the wedding didn’t happen.”
She saw Kyle flinch and felt a twinge of guilt for bringing up his dead brother’s dick, but he seemed to recover. “No one’s disputing that a portion of the fault was Matt’s. But he was the one who chose to come clean instead of keeping the secret from you. He made a mistake, and then he tried to atone for it. It was your choice not to forgive him.”
Meg glared. “So you’re saying the whole thing was my fault because I’m the one who didn’t forgive and forget?”
“That’s not what I said. But I do think you earned at least a little blame for dumping him in the most public fashion imaginable. You could have just postponed the wedding, maybe tried joint counseling or something.”
Meg stood up, blazing now. “You think I did it to humiliate him? You honestly think I didn’t stand there at the front of that church praying to God to give me the strength to just forgive him and go through with it? You think I didn’t have every intention of saying ‘I do’ until the last possible second when every fiber of my being screamed ‘I can’t!’ and I had no choice but to run?”
“I don’t—”
“You want the goddamn ring back? You can have it. It’s in my jewelry box.”
“Meg, wait—”
She whirled again to face him, too angry to tamp down her temper now. “Do you know why I still have it?” she snapped, fists clenched at her side. “After we got engaged, I took it to a jeweler to see if I could have the white gold replaced with something that didn’t have nickel in it. Stainless steel or something affordable. I kept having allergic reactions to the gold, but I didn’t tell Matt because I didn’t want him to feel bad.”
“Meg—”
“You know what the jeweler told me? It’s not real.”
“What?” He stared at her, his face registering the same shock she’d felt that afternoon in the jewelry store.
“The diamond. The ‘big ol’ rock’ Matt was always bragging about giving me? It’s something else, not even a real diamond.”
“Cubic zirconia?”
“No, something else. I think it’s called moissanite. The thing is, I didn’t care. I never wanted a big huge diamond. I didn’t want a diamond at all.”
“What did you want?”
“I didn’t care!” She threw her hands in the air, annoyed with herself for the torrent of words spilling from her mouth, but she felt powerless to stop them. “I would have been happy with a beach agate or a piece of glass. Or I would have really enjoyed having something special, like my grandmother’s birthstone. Something to show he paid attention to my life and to the things that really mattered to me.”
“What was your grandma’s birthstone?”
“A sapphire.” Meg shook her head, afraid they were getting lost now in the insignificant details. “That’s not the point, though. To have him lie to me about it. To have him pretending the ring or his feelings or our relationsh
ip was something it wasn’t—”
She broke off there and clasped her hands together, letting the words hang between them for a moment. A stupid, silly part of her felt like crying, but she ordered herself to hold it together. “I never told anyone that. About the ring, I mean.”
“That you knew the stone wasn’t real?”
She nodded, blinking hard until the threat of tears had faded. “Not even Matt.”
“Not Jess?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want them to think my own fiancé thought so little of me that he’d lie about something that never mattered to me in the first place.” She shrugged. “Anyway, you can have the ring back. I’ll go get it.”
She started to move that direction, but Kyle stood up and grabbed her hand. “Meg, I don’t want the ring. That’s not why I brought it up.”
She looked down at her hand in his, staring at their interlaced fingers as though they might hold a clue to how she should feel about all this. When she looked back at Kyle, he was watching her with an intensity that made heat rise in her cheeks.
“So why did you bring it up?” she asked. “What’s it to you where the engagement ring ended up?”
“I was making a point about broken engagements and gifts and the law. To show you the courts have a lot of different ways of looking at this, and it’s not as black and white as you seem to think.”
Meg nodded, conscious of his fingers still twined with hers. “So you’re saying this thing with the book is going to play out in the courts.”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it? I mean assuming you’re not just going to roll over and cut my mother a check.”
“Is that what you think I should do?”
He seemed to hesitate, then turned around, not letting go of her hand. “Come on,” he said, pulling her toward the door.
“What? Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something.”
“What if I don’t feel like going anywhere with you?”
“You do.”
Damn straight, her heart telegraphed, while her brain pointed out she was wearing dirty sweatpants and a Scooby-Doo T-shirt. Meg dug her bare heels into the floor, which left her feeling like a reluctant cocker spaniel trying to avoid a walk.
“Wait,” she said. “We’re not leaving the house, are we?”
“Yes.”
“Can I at least put away the food or put on some pants or blow my nose or—”
“You have five minutes,” he said, letting go of her hand. He folded his arms over his chest and held her gaze for a few beats. Then he nodded. “And bring the ring.”
“I thought you didn’t want the ring back,” Meg said behind him as Kyle fumbled the key into the lock and then rolled back the barn doors that led to the studio behind his gallery.
He turned to look at her and his heart cinched up into a tight ball when he saw those speckled brown eyes studying him. “I don’t want the ring,” he said. “But if you don’t want it, either, there’s something I’d like to do with it.”
“It’s all yours,” she said. “Make a doorstop out of it if you like.”
“Not a bad idea, but not my plan.”
He turned around again and led the way into the studio, flipping on the overhead lights as he went. He heard Meg rolling the barn doors closed and he thought about telling her not to bother, that he liked the night air blowing through the open space.
But he didn’t want anyone strolling in off the street. It wasn’t quite eight o’clock, but it was already dark outside and the raccoons that frequented the alley behind the gallery had a fondness for wandering through to look for sparkly objects.
There were plenty of those here.
“So this is where you work.” He turned to see Meg walking the perimeter of the room, her gaze traveling from one sculpture to another. She held her hands twined behind her back like a kid afraid of breaking something in a glass shop.
“You can touch anything you want,” he said.
“What?” She looked at him, and Kyle’s pulse quickened at the flush in her cheeks.
“The—uh—the art. You can touch any of the pieces if you like. One of the advantages of working with large-scale mixed metal is that most of it’s pretty sturdy.”
Meg laughed. “Have we met? In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the girl who broke Karma’s ‘unbreakable’ dog toy.”
“She told me on her deathbed she forgave you.”
“That’s a relief.”
Meg moved slowly around the room, and Kyle moved with her, trying to imagine what things might look like from her eyes. His studio space wasn’t particularly tidy, since gallery visitors didn’t get to wander back here. There were scraps of bent steel in one corner and a pile of copper shavings on the floor by his workbench. Big windows along one wall gave him plenty of natural light to work by, but right now they showcased an inky black sky pinpricked with stars. The air in the studio smelled like sawdust and metal, and next to Meg’s perfume, it was the sweetest scent he knew.
“You’ve never been in the gallery, right?” he asked.
“Right.” Meg turned and bit her lip. “After—well, I just thought I might not be welcome.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “How about I give you a tour?”
“I’d love that.”
She sounded like she meant it, which made Kyle’s heart swell. He watched her tuck a curl behind one ear, and he noticed the earrings she wore were a pair he’d made for her one Christmas long ago.
He swept an arm out to the side. “As you’ve probably guessed, you’re standing in my work space now. This is where I do all my planning and sketching and welding and sawing and tearing things apart so I can start again.”
“Do you only work with metal now?”
“Mostly, but I integrate wood sometimes or even glass.”
“Usually big sculptures?”
“A lot of those, but I still play with jewelry sometimes. I’ve even tried my hand at a couple of swords using Damascus steel.”
She smiled. “Those are probably a little sharper than the ones used for LARPing?”
Kyle grinned back. “Sure, but they’re no match for marshmallows.”
Something about the shared memory seemed to shift the tension between them, which was odd. They had plenty of shared memories from a decade of family connection.
But they didn’t have many that were theirs alone.
Meg tore her gaze from his and let it travel around the hodgepodge of art that lined the edges of his workspace—an unfinished sculpture of a tractor, a big sheet of punched tin, a box of old railroad ties he’d been meaning to sort through.
“Does everything you make here go into your gallery when it’s done?” she asked.
Kyle shook his head. “Nope. Some of it’s commissioned by private collectors and some of it’s going into galleries in other cities. And some of it’s yet to be determined.” He toed a spare piece of steel on the floor at his feet, wondering what it would be by this time next year. “That’s the beauty of doing this kind of work,” he added. “Sometimes you don’t know how something’s going to turn out.”
She looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “That is the beauty.” She turned and took a step forward, then reached out to stroke a tentative hand over a half-finished T. rex sculpture made from pieces of an old chain-link fence. “You know, that’s true of you,” she said, her hand moving over the dinosaur’s neck while her gaze didn’t quite reach his.
“What’s true of me?”
“The fact that you don’t know how something’s going to turn out.” She shrugged, eyes still on the sculpture. “I remember getting to know you that first year Matt and I dated. I was fascinated by the notion of having two artistic brothers in one family when I can’t draw a stick figure to save my life.”
He laughed. “I’m kinda hoping there’s never an occasion where you’ll need to draw a stick figure as a lifesaving measure.”
&nbs
p; She glanced at him and smiled, but he could tell her mind was still drifting down that path of memories. Back to those early days when Matt had been this big-shot photographer showing off his star-studded portfolio and his photo credit in Sports Illustrated and his hot new girlfriend, while Kyle had still been trying to figure out how to pay for a box of Cap’n Crunch.
“I remember meeting you that first time,” she said. “You were this grungy guy in ripped-up jeans playing guitar on the street corner to earn money for art supplies.”
“Considering how badly I played guitar, I think I made enough to buy a box of pipe cleaners at the Dollar Store.”
She took her hand off the dinosaur and moved on, stepping closer to a copper piece he’d started two days ago. He still didn’t know what it might turn into, but at the moment it bore an uncanny resemblance to a toboggan.
“I remember you asking Matt for twenty bucks to get your power turned back on,” Meg said, stroking a hand over the giraffe. “Matt was worried about you freezing to death in that crappy little apartment, but all you cared about was getting your electric band saw running again.”
“First piece I sold, I went out and bought a cordless saw. Problem solved.”
Meg laughed and drew her hand back from the toboggan. She looked at him, and Kyle had the unnerving sense she was staring straight through his eyes and into his brain. “Did you ever think you’d end up here?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him. “Really?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “You sound surprised.”
“I am, I guess. I didn’t realize you were so—”
“Cocky?”
“Confident,” she said. “I guess I didn’t realize back then that you had this sort of direction. That you’d set goals and had a plan to reach them.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I just knew what I wanted and I went after it.”
She nodded, and he watched her bite her lip. “I can see that.”
A familiar pang hit him in the chest, but he ushered her forward and pointed to another sculpture. “This one’s going in a gallery in Connecticut. I have a show out there in the spring, so I’ll be flying out to get things set up there.”