by Julie Wright
Thawing the ice between us took almost the whole drive to the shoot. “Sorry,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me what you wear. If it makes you happy, then it makes me happy.”
His apology took the wind out of my sails of indignation. “Sorry if I seem sensitive. My mom keeps giving me angst about the amount of makeup I’m wearing now. She says I’m becoming a Barbie. You know how my mom puts me on edge.”
“I don’t think you’re becoming a Barbie, but you also don’t need the makeup to be beautiful.” When I gave him a withering look, he added, “But it doesn’t matter to me what makeup you wear. If it makes you happy, it makes me happy.”
We moved to other topics that didn’t include anything Toni had changed about me. I felt the need to defend her choices because she’d done what she’d promised: my social media engagement and following had become something epic. I had become a strange sort of online-famous. It didn’t hurt that many of Lillian’s followers had taken a liking to me. Several other authors had followed me based on the media buzz surrounding my book. The advance reviews had been stellar and had earned me respect I’d never imagined.
Even my mom was proud of me, though she acted completely devastated that none of my social media accounts would follow or friend her. Kat didn’t act devastated over the friend-follow debacle, but she rolled her eyes every time it came up. Anders hadn’t brought it up since that first conversation.
We arrived at the spot Anders had chosen for the shoot and unloaded his equipment. We hadn’t strayed too far out of suburbia to find a great place to set up, which meant that when an ice cream truck’s music floated our direction, I sat up straight from where I’d been lounging against an elm tree. I dropped the jagged-edged leaf I’d been shredding and said, “Tear Jerker Bomb Pop or Choco Taco?”
His camera had been set up on a tripod to get various shots of a row of moss- and ivy-covered sycamores. He straightened from where he’d been squinting into the camera and laughed. “It’s gotta be a mile away. You’ll never find it.”
“Don’t doubt the woman who’s buying you ice cream. Just give me your order.”
He looked to where the sun was setting. We were in what he called the “golden hour,” where the lighting on those moss- and ivy-covered trees looked positively magical. There would be little to no digital manipulation needed to make his images incredible. “Fine, but if you don’t find the truck immediately, come back. I don’t want you wandering around in the dark.”
I grunted. “Look at you being all primeval. I live in the city. And I’m usually wandering around after dark.”
“It’s not primeval. It’s smart. Even I don’t wander around by myself after dark when I’m alone, and I outweigh you by a good—”
“You seriously don’t want to play the guess-Charlotte’s-weight game. Just tell me what you want me to get you.”
“Choco Taco.”
“Got it!” I sped off, racing through the trees until I hit pavement. I stopped for a brief second to listen and ascertain the direction of the truck, and then I sped off again.
I returned before the sun could even think about setting and handed off the Choco Taco with triumph. Then I opened the original Bomb Pop I’d bought for myself.
Anders watched me instead of opening his Choco Taco. “Didn’t you once tell me you always got the chocolate eclair ice cream bar?”
“This has fewer calories.”
Anders ate his Choco Taco in relative silence before making a grunting kind of noise. “Lettie, you didn’t change what you were going to get because of what I said, did you?”
It took a moment for me to figure out what he might be referencing. “Oh! No. Not at all. Tour is starting soon, and I want to look my best.”
He didn’t respond, but the tension I felt from knowing what he wanted to say made me grind my teeth together until they ached. When he spoke up again, I stiffened, expecting a lecture.
“You know, when I was a kid and we’d first moved to the States, my parents told me that the ice-cream-truck music only ever played when the truck had run out of ice cream.”
I stared at him; the horror of such blasphemy and my own gratitude that he hadn’t lectured me soaked right down to my bones.
He stared back, tilting his head so the light from the still-sinking sun caught the ends of his blond hair and turned it to gold. “You have nothing to say to that?”
“I’m paying my respects to your stolen childhood with a moment of silence.”
He laughed and sat next to me. “My sister told me they were lying and that if I’d just look at them with sad eyes, we’d both get ice cream out of the deal because I was the baby, but I believed them and couldn’t see the point of crying over an empty truck.”
I swallowed a cold bite and shook my head. “I can’t tell you how sad this makes me for you.”
“What? Your parents never told you something that wasn’t true?”
“You’ve met my mom. You know that’s not how she rolls.” I thought a minute longer before adding, “But my dad told me that avocados were crocodile eggs, and that he had to sneak around the crocodile nests while the crocs were sleeping just so he could make my mom’s sandwiches magical. I totally believed him and thought he was a really tough guy for being brave enough to sneak around crocodiles.”
“I’ll bet your mom loved that.”
“She didn’t. At all. Especially when I cried one morning because I thought she was being selfish to put him in danger just so she could have magical sandwiches. But she loved it even less when my dad convinced me that paintings were windows into other worlds and that if you stared at one long enough and believed hard enough, you could travel to wherever the painting was. The trick was that the picture had to be done on canvas and painted with oils. Then Dad placed the most beautiful, fantastic paintings he could find in my room. My favorite was one with a little girl on a swing out in space among the stars and planets.”
“With that kind of story, I’m surprised you didn’t become an artist instead of a writer. Were you disappointed you couldn’t ever get into a different world?”
“Actually . . . no. I would look at the paintings and imagine what life would be like inside them. It was almost like actually going. At night, I’d tell my dad the stories I came up with. After a while, he started writing them down, and that was how the writing thing started.”
“It’s funny that the make-believe things you were told as a child were charming and sweet, while the make-believe things I was told as a child are the reasons I have a therapist.”
“You don’t have a therapist,” I said.
“Not technically. But you listen to my rantings often enough that you kinda count. You care that I bought into the biggest ice-cream-truck lie ever. What other therapy could I need than that?”
“If that’s the worst thing you were ever told as a child, then you had a pretty good time of it.”
He finished his Choco Taco and folded up the wrapper into a tidy little square that kept any of the sticky stuff inside the wrapper so he could put the wrapper in his pocket. “See. That’s the thing. The ice cream truck wasn’t the half of it. My sister told me that if she pressed the little ‘diet’ or ‘cola’ buttons on the top of plastic lids from fast food restaurants, it would magically turn my drink into something else. She did it all the time, and no matter what my parents told me, I believed she’d really ruined my root beer. I started drinking water because of her.”
“So that’s where your aversion to soda comes from. I knew there had to be a reason.”
“Now you know. It was childhood trauma.” He ran his hands down his jeans and looked back through the viewfinder of his camera. He snapped a few more shots, using the remote control so he didn’t have to touch the camera while taking shots in the much lower levels of light. The sun had completely escaped the sky while we’d been talking.
I slapped at my arm. “The blood suckers are out.” I didn’t believe in vampires, but I had a healthy conviction about their insectoid counterparts.
Instead of giving me grief about having told me to bring a long-sleeved shirt, he pulled an old long-sleeved pullover out of his camera bag and tossed it to me. I didn’t try arguing that I was fine and didn’t need the protection he offered. My wounded pride was not worth having wounded arms as I scratched at the many bites that would have been sure to follow. “I’m going to work at not ignoring good advice in the future,” I said as I pulled the shirt over my head and stuffed my arms inside as quickly as possible.
He snorted, which was likely as much sarcasm as I’d get from him over the whole thing. The guy knew me. He understood my quirks and faults and shrugged them off like they weren’t that big of a deal. What made us good together was that I understood his quirks and faults as well. I understood that conversations with him sometimes felt like being on a merry-go-round that just never ended because he always circled back to the same ideas over and over again. When I was with him, I often found myself doing the same thing, which made me laugh. It was what made us work.
I thought we had wrapped up the picture taking for the night, but Anders didn’t remove his camera from the tripod or start to gather up his camera bag and the sandbags he’d placed on the tripod to keep it solid during the shoot.
“Are we waiting for something?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm,” he said.
That was the whole of his answer, which wasn’t like my Anders at all. I was waiting for him to expand that answer into something understandable when the first flickers of fireflies appeared in the foliage around us.
“Ohh,” I whispered.
He put his eye to the viewfinder without touching or bumping the camera and tripod. His finger clicked the remote, and in quick succession, several shots were taken.
“Hey,” he said. “Do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Go stand in the path by the third tree down. Face away from me.”
I did as directed. He gave me a few other instructions to adjust where and how I stood and then the click of his camera signaled he’d found what he was looking for.
I turned, expecting to be done, but he said, “Wait a second. Do that again.”
“Do what again?”
“Turn, but do it slowly and lift your arms out, with your palms up like you’re catching rain, and lift your face up.”
I laughed at that but did as directed. After a few turns, he finally said, “Got it. Come on back to me.”
“Happily.”
When I met him back at the tripod, he caught my hand in his and spun me into him. He tilted his face down and whispered, “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” His thumb traced over my palm before he brought my hand to his lips, where he pressed a kiss to the center of my palm.
I hadn’t expected the contact. He was working, after all, and Anders had a way of being able to focus. He didn’t allow much deviation when he was working. His lips moved to my wrist, and then he pulled me closer and covered my mouth with his in a slow, exquisite moment.
“What was that for?” I asked when we broke apart.
“For inspiring me to be a better version of myself. You . . . well, Lettie, let’s just say I love you.”
I blinked.
I almost fell over except he was holding me.
Anders loves me.
Anders loved me!
He said it, and there were no givebacks.
Few people in my life used those words with me.
My father. My sister.
Once, Edward-the-stepdad had given me a one-armed hug and said, “You know I love you, right?” And he often told me my mother loved me, though she never said the words.
So much power in three words.
They were a magic spell bigger than curses from witches, bigger than wolves, bigger than trolls and dark forests, bigger than even kisses.
I love you. Those words could unravel the darkest hour of a human’s life.
They undid me completely.
“Anders? I . . . I love you, too.”
He smiled and kissed me again.
We stood there in the firefly light, breathing one another in, for a long time.
Anders broke away first. “We should get going. We have those movie tickets.”
“Right. Tickets.” It was hard to think of going to a movie with my head so full of him and those three glorious words.
We were heading back to our apartment building to get the camera stuff put away before the movie when my phone pinged with a message.
It was from Toni. “You haven’t answered the interview questions from that writer’s group in Texas, and you haven’t responded to any of the comments on Instagram or Twitter. Also, I have an article set up for you to write about making goals for that online magazine Seize the Day. They really need the article tonight if they’re going to publish it at all, so if you could take a moment.”
I was on the clock.
I swallowed and put my phone away in my purse. I didn’t bring up the fact that I was ditching our plans—at least not immediately. I didn’t want Anders to correlate the phone ping to my sudden need to stay home. He already hated Toni.
Anders was talking. I only caught a few of the words, but it was something about the photography he’d just done and how much he liked doing stuff for writers.
“Maybe I can do a few covers for you sometime.”
“What?”
“Covers. Pictures. For your books?”
“The publisher will be doing my book covers.” The words came out almost absently, since I was trying to find a way to tell him that I had to bow out of the rest of the evening.
“Well yeah, but what if you decide to go the indie route for your fiction like some of your friends?”
I frowned. “Why would I do that?”
He let out a bewildered bark of a laugh. “Are you getting mad at me, Lettie? There’s nothing wrong with indie publishing. This isn’t an insult.”
“I don’t think it’s an insult. But why would I do that? Do you not think a publisher will want my other books?”
I hadn’t meant to get defensive. But so far, my agent hadn’t sold the others. And it stung whenever I thought about it. Did Anders notice how the words had an unintended bite to them?
“Lettie, like I said, this isn’t an insult.” Yes. He’d noticed the bite. “I do freelance photography work so I can work on my own terms. I think independent publishing is a lot like that.”
“Independent publishing would mean doing my own marketing, and there’s no way I’m the sort of person equipped to pull off marketing with any kind of skill.”
He snorted. “All you do is market. Isn’t that the point of the shackles Toni has clapped on your wrists while you proudly display your British pride?”
Signing with a publisher had given me new hope for my fiction work. But each month that passed had dimmed my hope. “Leave Toni out of this. If I’d planned on publishing independently, why would I have put myself through all the emotional distress of being rejected for all those years?” I laughed, though I didn’t feel the humor. Bite was in the laugh as well. The request for the interview coming on a night I had looked forward to made it impossible for some of the frustration to not come out in my voice. “Don’t worry, Anders. You’ll never be doing cover work for me.”
“Ouch. Now who’s being rejected?”
He fell silent, keeping his eyes on the road. Not sure how to gauge his silence, I stayed silent as well. Was he mad that I didn’t need him to do photography for me?
As we neared our apartment building, I realized I had to speak up soon. Ditching him at the last minute would make me a monster. He deserved some lead time. “Hey, I . . . I’m not . . . feeling ver
y well. Sitting through a late movie would probably be a bad idea for me right now. I’m so sorry, Anders, but can we call it a night?”
Surprise registered on his face, but he nodded. No verbal response followed. Just the nod. Parking, exiting the vehicle, and walking into the building all happened in silence, aside from a murmur of assent or acknowledgement. He walked me to my door. I no longer pretended to feel ill because my stomach twisted in unease. “Are we fighting?” I asked after opening my door to let myself in. Who fought after declaring their love for each other?
Did that sort of thing ever happen?
The idea mystified me. Anders and I didn’t do silent fighting. We’d always practiced a verbal disagreement kind of friendship.
He licked his lips, but he didn’t swallow down his words to replace them with untrue words. “No. I don’t think so. Maybe. I don’t know. I just thought it might be fun if we worked on something together. I guess it bugged me that you were so quick to shut that thought down. But don’t let it worry you. I’m fine. You’re the one who doesn’t feel good here, so go inside. Get some sleep. Feel better. If you need anything, let me know. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“But—”
He finally did smile. “We’re not fighting, Lettie.”
“I’m sorry about wasting the movie tickets.”
“They won’t get wasted. I’ll call one of my buddies to meet me. No worries.”
“Okay.”
It was what I said but not how I felt. Especially when he kissed me on the cheek before turning to the stairwell. A kiss on the cheek could have come from anyone. It wasn’t the sort of farewell I’d come to expect from the man I was dating—not the sort of farewell I’d expect from a man who had said he loved me, especially since he didn’t repeat the sentiment now.
“Anders?”
He turned. I caught up to him in a matter of a few steps. “I’m sorry,” I said and meant it. I was sorry I’d hurt his feelings with the conversation about him doing photography work for me, but more than that . . . I was sorry I’d brought our evening to an end with a lie.