Good, Bad…Better

by Cindi Myers

  12

  JEN DIDN’T WANT TO OPEN her eyes the next morning, afraid the night before had been a dream. Instead, she kept her eyes shut and reached out a hand to feel the bed beside her. But she encountered only tangled sheets and an empty pillow. Disappointment seeped into her like the damp cold of a winter day, driving out the last vestiges of sleep. She opened her eyes and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling, then realized she was indeed in Zach’s bedroom.

  The bathroom door opened and he emerged in a cloud of steam. He had one towel draped around his hips and was using another to dry his hair. He grinned at her. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

  She sat up, gathering the sheet around her, feeling giddy at the sight of his still-damp body. “You should have woke me up to take a shower with you.”

  “That sounds like a good idea, but you haven’t seen the shower in this place.” He tossed aside the towel he’d been using to dry his hair and picked up a comb off the dresser. “I barely fit in it by myself.”

  “Hmm. Then you’ll have to come over to my place sometime. I’m pretty sure the shower is big enough for both of us.”

  He leaned down to kiss her. “There are definite advantages to you having your own place.” He sat on the edge of the bed, beside her, and finished combing his hair. “So have your parents seen it yet?”

  “No. I think my dad is exercising incredible willpower, not coming over.” She smoothed the sheet over her knees. “He and Mom are coming to dinner tomorrow night, though.”

  “Guess that means I won’t see you then.” He smoothed his hand down her arm.

  “Why not?” She leaned toward him. “Come have dinner with us.”

  “I’ll pass. If your dad knew you were here he’d probably have me arrested.” He tapped the comb against his palm.

  “No, he wouldn’t. He’s not as bad as that.”

  “Didn’t you see the way he looks at me? He thinks I’m scum.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” She reached for his hand and cradled it in her lap. “He doesn’t even know you, really.”

  “He knows what I look like, and what I do for a living. He’s probably done some checking on my background. I don’t have a blue-blood pedigree or money behind my name.”

  “You make him sound like such a snob. He’s not!”

  Zach reached up and pushed her hair behind one ear. “You’re not a snob. But I’ve spent years dealing with people like your father. Call it what you will, but I don’t meet his standards. That’s all he needs to know to be certain I’m not good enough for his little girl.”

  She sat up straighter. “I’m not his little girl.”

  “No, you’re not a little girl.” He tugged the sheet away from her. “That definitely wasn’t a little girl in that alley with me last night.”

  His voice, low and husky, sent a shaft of heat straight through her. He pulled the sheet lower and began kissing her breasts. There was so much she wanted to say to him—about her father, about herself, about the feelings bouncing back and forth between the two of them. But with his mouth on her this way, she couldn’t think.

  She buried her fingers in his still-damp hair and held him close. He pulled the towel from around his waist, then pushed the sheet to the foot of the bed. They fell back on the mattress together, arms and legs tangled, the differences between them once more dissolved by this need they had for each other.

  AFTER THEY MADE LOVE, Jen took a shower while Zach went to make breakfast. When she entered the kitchen later, he handed her a cup of coffee. “Your options for breakfast are ham sandwiches or Kirby Lane.”

  “Kirby Lane.” The Austin institution was famous for its gingerbread pancakes and other breakfast offerings. She picked up one of the kittens that was twining at her ankles. “Mick, isn’t it? He’s getting big.”

  “They’re both growing. I have to take them to the vet for their shots next week and see when I can get them neutered.”

  She rubbed the kitten under the chin. “That’s very responsible of you.”

  He made a face. “That’s me, Mr. Upstanding Citizen. The last thing I want is a bunch more kittens running around here.”

  She set the kitten back on the floor. “You keep going like this, you’re going to ruin your bad-dude image.”

  “Unless I suddenly decide to cut my hair, give up the bike and start wearing a suit—fat chance.” He set his empty coffee cup in the sink. “I’m hungry. You ready to head out?”

  Since his bike was still at the Black Cat, they took her car to Kirby Lane. They sat on the outside deck and feasted on migas, gingerbread pancakes and fresh fruit. Ceiling fans whirred overhead, stirring the already warm air.

  “It’s going to be another hot day,” she observed over her second cup of coffee.

  “It’s late July in Austin. What else is new?”

  “Do you have plans for the day?”

  “I have to open the shop at eleven, but I’m free until then. What about you?”

  “I have classes all afternoon, but they don’t start until one.”

  He waggled his eyebrows à la Groucho Marx. “Wanna go home and fool around?”

  She laughed. “I was thinking we might play tourist and see some sights.”

  “I’ve lived in Austin all my life. I’ve seen the sights.”

  She set aside her empty cup. “Have you been to the Harry Ransom Center?”

  He frowned. “The art museum? Yeah, I’ve been there.”

  “When was the last time you were there?”

  “I was in school.” The old wariness had returned to his eyes, as if he suspected she was up to something, but hadn’t yet figured out what it was.

  “Then you need to go again. They have a new exhibit of contemporary artists that opened last weekend. My dad was talking about it.”

  He picked up his fork and balanced it on his knuckles, avoiding looking at her. “Then maybe you should go with your dad. I’m sure he’d love it.”

  “I want to go with you.” She leaned across the table and took his hand. “Come on. I know you like art.”

  He tried to pull away, but she held him fast.

  “I really need to go over to the Black Cat and get my bike.”

  “We can go on the way back from the museum. Please?”

  She could see him wavering, juggling his desire to be with her and his interest in the paintings with his resistance to anything that smacked of conforming. “What are you going to do if you don’t go with me? Go home and sit until it’s time to go to work?”

  He slipped out of her grasp and stood. “All right, I’ll go with you. At least it’s someplace inside, out of the heat.”

  THE HARRY RANSOM HUMANITIES Research Center on the University of Texas campus was a windowless, institutional box of a building, a plain gray limestone wrapper around a rich and varied collection of literary and visual artworks.

  When Zach walked in the door, the smell of the place hit him. A mixture of dust and paint and varnish transported him back to the days when he would cut his last class of the day—social studies—and come here with a sketchbook, trying to copy his favorites, to learn how those artists made their pictures come to life.

  They walked along the first-floor gallery, their footsteps echoing in the expanse of space. Jen stopped in front of Texas artist Jerry Bywaters’s Oil Field Girls. The painting showed a curvy blonde and brunette in tight-fitting dresses, suitcases at their sides, waiting by the road on the edge of an oil boomtown. “This is my favorite,” she said.

  He looked at her, surprised. He would have guessed she favored one of the softer, more impressionistic pieces in the collection. “Why is that?”

  “Look at them.” She motioned toward the painting. “They’re obviously bad girls. They’re on their way out of town.” She glanced up at him. “They look tough. Everything I wanted to be.”

  “Did you come here with school groups?”

  She shook her head. “With my father. He started taking me to art museums as soon as I could walk. H
e wanted me to love art as much as he does.” She took Zach’s hand and they started walking again, past a display of caricatures of famous literary figures. “I think he was a little disappointed I became a dancer instead of a painter, but unfortunately, I can’t draw a straight line.”

  “If the dance you did for me is any indication of your talent, I’d say you made the right choice.”

  They took the stairs to the second floor. “What was your favorite painting when you came here when you were younger?” she asked.

  “I don’t remember.” It was a lie, but there was no point in remembering. No point in dredging up the past.

  They entered the section of the gallery devoted to the new exhibit. Works by living artists such as Julian Opie, Daniel Beach and Judy Jones filled the space. “This is my father’s favorite,” she said, stopping before a painting of an embracing couple, by Alex Katz. She looked at him. “Your work reminds me of this.”

  He could see the similarities in the sharp lines and bright colors and the realist style. “I wonder if he’s ever done any tattoos?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he really wanted to be a tattoo artist, but his family and teachers expected him to be a painter. He might be envious of you.”

  “Right. Everyone’s envious of me.”

  They left the new exhibit and entered the older collection again. He paused before a familiar work, his feet unable to pass it. Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait with Necklace of Thorns. The painting depicted the artist with thorns around her neck and shoulders. A bird appeared caught in the thorns at her throat, while a black cat peered malevolently over one shoulder and a monkey perched on the other. “This is my favorite. Was my favorite.”

  “Why?”

  He struggled to put his feelings about the painting into words. “It’s so…honest. She had a lot of pain in her life and that shows in her paintings. I used to come here a lot and try to copy it.”

  Jen linked her arm with his. “So you sometimes thought about being a painter. At least back then.”

  “I did. But it didn’t work out.”

  “What happened?”

  He started to change the subject, but being here, in this place where his old dreams still seemed to hover in the dusty air, made him feel reckless. She was going away. Why not tell her what had happened? Let her see the reality he lived with—a harsh side of life she could never understand.

  “I applied to art school, but they told me I wasn’t good enough.”

  “But I’ve seen your work! You’re obviously talented.”

  Her indignation touched him. He smoothed his hand down her arm. “Not my work—they told me I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t have the right background. The right connections.”

  “You should have tried somewhere else.”

  He shook his head. “It would have been the same.” He shrugged. “Hey, everybody knows long-haired biker dudes aren’t painters. Once I figured that out, life got easier.”

  “Not everybody thinks that way, Zach. Especially not now. Smart people know talent comes from all over. My father’s collection has works done by refugees who came to this country with nothing, and by artists who grew up in ghettos. There are even people who specialize in collecting prison art.”

  “Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter now anyway.” He turned and walked away.

  He listened for her to follow, telling himself it didn’t matter if she didn’t. For all her desire to be tough, she was still naive. She didn’t want to believe that where you came from and who you were were more important than talent. To her, they weren’t. But to other people, people with more power, those things still mattered.

  She walked up beside him and took his arm again. “I want you to come to my parents’ house and see my father’s collection.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, I doubt your father would let me in the door. For another, if you think seeing all those other disadvantaged artists’ success is going to convince me I gave up too soon, you’re wrong. So don’t bother.”

  “My father will invite you into his house if I ask him to. And I want you to see his collection because I know you’ll enjoy it. Even if you’ve decided not to be a painter you can still appreciate others’ paintings, can’t you?” She indicated the works hung around them. “You’ve enjoyed this today, haven’t you?”

  Enjoy was not a word he would use to describe what he was feeling right now. Everywhere he looked here, another memory leaped out at him, reminding him how much those hours of painting and sketching had meant to him. Art had been, for him, the escape that athletics was for other poor kids. It had offered a way out.

  Then that door had slammed in his face and he’d been forced to find his own path. Right now, he was enjoying success and more money than he’d ever had. And he still had art, in the tattoos he created.

  But today had brought the old anger and frustration boiling to the surface. He couldn’t thank Jen for that. “I think we’d better go,” he said. “I need to get my bike.”

  She didn’t say anything else on the subject until she pulled the car into the parking lot at the Black Cat. “I’m going to ask my parents to invite you to dinner,” she said. “And I want you to come.”

  “Don’t. You’ll just make it awkward for everyone.”

  “Good girls make a point of smoothing everything over so that everyone is comfortable. I don’t do that anymore.” She leaned over and put her hand on his. “Say you’ll accept their invitation. If you don’t, my father can continue to think all the worst things about you. This way, you at least have a chance to prove him wrong.”

  She was trying to goad him into doing what she wanted. Ordinarily, he would have resisted that much harder. But if he did that this time, she might think he was a coward, afraid to walk into that fancy house and sit down to dinner with the police chief.

  He looked into her eyes, at all that earnestness. What was it in her that made her believe in him so much? Whatever it was, she ought to get over it now, before she headed to Chicago all alone. For the first time, he shared her father’s concern. Anybody this innocent was bound to get into trouble.

  This was his chance to help her get past that naiveté. He’d show her there were some people who just shouldn’t try to be together, the way you couldn’t mix oil and water and expect them to stay merged. “All right, you get your old man to invite me to dinner and I’ll show up. But don’t blame me if the evening turns out to be a disaster.”

  Then he was out of the car, striding toward his bike before she could say anything else. He was annoyed with himself for letting her talk him into so many things he should have had the good sense to avoid, from going to her parents’ for dinner to hanging around with her in the first place. He’d had his life together before she showed up. Who would have thought someone who looked so straight and innocent could have shaken his world so much?

  THE NEXT DAY, JEN RUSHED home after teaching her last class of the day to get ready for her parents’ visit. Not trusting her own cooking skills, she’d settled for getting takeout from Chez Zee and transferring it to her own dishes. Her mother wouldn’t be fooled, but she’d be too polite to say anything. The important thing was for Jen to prove she was capable of feeding them and herself.

  She was searching through the kitchen drawers, trying to find three forks that matched, when her phone rang. It was Shelly, sounding out of breath. “Oh, Jen, it’s the most wonderful thing! I’m getting married.”

  She clutched the phone in both hands and leaned against the wall, grinning. “Who’s the lucky groom?”

  “Aaron, of course!” Shelly laughed. “He asked me this afternoon. Well, at lunch, really. We were supposed to have dinner this evening, but he called and said he had to work late, so on my lunch hour I went to his office and told him we had to talk.”

  “Good girl!”

  “Hey, I figured if you could start an affair with a hot guy you hardly knew, I could talk to my own boyfr
iend.”

  “Glad to know I inspired you. So what did you say?”

  “I told him I was hurt and upset that he kept canceling dates with me, and he was working all the time and if he didn’t want to be with me, we should just break it off.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was stunned. He said he had no idea I felt that way. That yes, he’d been putting in a lot of extra hours at work, but only because he was trying to get ahead. He’d been putting all the extra money into a special account, saving for us. Then he opened his desk drawer and said he had something he’d been saving for the right time, but he thought that time might be now.”

  Shelly paused and Jen stomped her foot. “Well, don’t leave me in suspense. What was it?”

  “Oh, Jen, it was the most beautiful ring. A diamond solitaire in a platinum band. Then, right there in his office, he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.” Shelly sniffed and her voice grew wavery. “It was so romantic.”

  Jen felt a lump in her own throat. “That’s wonderful. Congratulations.”

  “We’re going to get married as soon as we can. We’re both really tired of waiting. My mom has been on the phone all afternoon lining up a caterer and a photographer. And I’ve had my dress picked out forever. But you have to come over and help me choose flowers and stuff.”

  “I will, I promise. I’m so happy for you.”

  “I have to go now. I told Aaron I’d bring dinner to him at work. And I’m thinking later we might have, you know, a special dessert.”

  Jen laughed. “Have fun.”

  She hung up the phone and stared into space, imagining how Shelly would look walking down the aisle in her gown. She was happy for her friend, but sad, too. How wonderful to know you’d found the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with. Had she ever been that certain about anything?

  The only man she’d ever really loved wasn’t someone she’d ever planned to stay with. Was Zach even the staying kind? He was still so convinced the two of them didn’t belong together.

  And even if they did, wouldn’t that make things worse? She’d waited her whole life for a chance like the one waiting for her in Chicago. How could she give that up for anyone?