True Colors

by Judith Arnold

  Chapter Fourteen

   

  The long walk up the hill was exactly what Emma needed. The air was humid enough that anyone who saw her hiking back to the house would assume she was sweating, not crying. And by the time she reached the house, she wasn’t crying anymore, anyway.

  How could a day that had started so wonderfully turn rotten so abruptly?

  The day wasn’t completely rotten, she reminded herself as she unlocked the house and let herself in. She’d lined up a new work space—nowhere near as nice as the loft; Max was right about that. But the room at the community center would do. And she had a new potential source of income. Thanks to the community center, she’d be able to paint. She’d be able to teach. She’d be able to take care of herself.

  Emma had a remarkably well-developed gene for responsibility. Growing up, she’d eaten food her family had grown on their own land or bartered for with their neighbors. She’d learned from her father how to repair a leaky roof, and from her mother how to sew a shirt. She wasn’t averse to accepting gifts—she liked getting gifts, actually—but only gifts freely given. Like the boots Claudio had given her, simply because she’d seen them in a boutique window and said, “Aren’t those gorgeous?”

  Sex was a gift, too. You gave it to someone you liked, someone you loved, someone to whom you were irresistibly drawn. Someone who fit you in all the right ways, like the interlocking shapes of an Escher drawing.

  She’d shared something powerful with Max. She had reveled in every moment of it, every sweet, sharp sensation. It had been something pure, something generous and open. No conditions. No strings. Something as true as the colors in a rainbow.

  And then he’d transformed it so it was about a landlord and a tenant and him owing her something.

  She cursed.

  “Wow, you’re in a good mood,” Monica said, emerging from the kitchen and joining Emma in the entry hall as she turned the bolt on the front door. Monica must have driven her car into the garage; Emma hadn’t seen it parked on the road in front of the house. Monica had changed from the conservative work apparel she’d had on that morning into a droop-shouldered sweater and a pair of stylish jeans. A glass of white wine in her hand, she eyed Emma up and down. “You should have let me know you were hiking the hill,” she said. “I would have driven down and picked you up. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Emma muttered, then sighed. “Everything. Is there more wine?”

  “I just opened a bottle.” Monica beckoned her toward the kitchen. “Come and tell me what happened.”

  Emma settled on one of the stools at the center island while Monica moved directly to the refrigerator to fetch the wine. She had begun dinner preparations—a package of chicken sat defrosting on the counter, and an onion, some carrots and a flowery crown of broccoli lay beside the sink. Ignoring the food, Monica filled a second wine goblet with chilled Chardonnay and handed it to Emma. It wasn’t champagne, for which Emma was very grateful.

  “Max and I…” Just saying those words ignited a pain in her chest, round and hard. There was no Max and I. Emma had thought there could be, but there wasn’t.

  “Our landlord?” Monica asked.

  Emma nodded dolefully. “I’m an idiot. I know.”

  “You’re not an idiot. What happened?”

  “I thought…” She heaved a sigh. “I thought something was going on between us.”

  “Something romantic?”

  Emma nodded.

  “You slept with him?”

  Another nod. Emma wasn’t sure she wanted to reveal, even to her best friend, what an impulsive, reckless, poor judge of character she was. “And he turned it into a tit-for-tat thing. He made me feel…” She sipped some wine. Icy and dry, it soothed her throat, and her soul. “I mean, I thought I was falling in love with him. I felt so close to him. Like we understood each other. Like we knew each other on a really deep level. And he…” She swallowed the quiver in her voice. “He told me I could stay here in this house.”

  Monica scrutinized her across the center island. Evidently, Emma wouldn’t have to explain further. Monica got what Emma was implying. “In other words, he’d let you live here like a kept woman?”

  “I don’t think he meant it quite that way, but that was how his offer felt to me. Maybe I’m too sensitive, I don’t know…” She drifted off, once again sinking into a bitter self-evaluation. Impulsive Reckless. Poor judge of character.

  “So—wait a minute. He was willing to continue to rent the house to us?”

  “He said he wouldn’t sell it. I could live here.”

  “Because you slept with him?”

  One more sad, pitiful nod.

  “Emma.” Monica sounded not judgmental but confused. “I know he’s a good-looking guy. Very good-looking. But…shit, Emma. Why on earth would you have sex with the landlord?”

  Emma stifled her sigh by sipping some wine. “It was just—like this spontaneous thing. Magic.”

  “Did he break your heart?” Monica’s voice bristled with righteous anger.

  “No,” Emma assured her, although for some reason she wasn’t quite convinced of that. How could Max have broken her heart? They hardly knew each other. Surely what she’d felt for him couldn’t be love.

  Yet the pain increased inside her, swelling like a tender bruise in the center of her soul. Something was broken, that much was certain.

  “So it was just one of those things,” Monica summarized. “And then he botched the aftermath.”

  “Maybe we both botched it,” Emma conceded. “Maybe he didn’t mean his offer the way I took it. Maybe I overreacted. I don’t know.” She felt her tears returning, and in the stark white light of the kitchen, she couldn’t pass them off as perspiration.

  “Then there’s a chance we can fix this,” Monica said briskly, setting down her glass and digging in her hip pocket. She pulled out her cell phone and started tapping the buttons.

  “Don’t call him!”

  “I’m not calling him,” Monica said. “I’m calling Andrea Simonetti to see if Max listed the house for sale. If you’re right about him, he might do something out of spite. If you’re wrong about him, it’s possible he was serious about letting you stay on in the house. And honestly, if he does, I want to stay here, too. That efficiency apartment at the inn is so tiny—and much too close to my parents. It would be practically like moving back in with them. Ugh.” She shuddered.

  “What about living with Jimmy?”

  Another shudder. “The more I thought about that, the less I liked the idea. You know him—if I moved in, he’d say, ‘Oh, you’re running a load of laundry? You can wash these clothes of mine while you’re at it.’ I don’t want to do his laundry. I don’t want to clean up his messes. He’s a great guy, he’s fun, he makes me laugh, he’s good in bed, but I don’t want to have to pull his hair out of the shower drain.” As she spoke, she tapped her phone, then held it to her ear and listened. After a minute, she said, “Hey, Andrea. It’s Monica Reinhart. I’m glad I caught you…” After a couple of minutes of chit-chat, she said goodbye and disconnected the call. “He hasn’t listed the house,” she informed Emma with a smile. “Andrea hasn’t heard from him in a couple of days.”

  “I don’t know if I can live here,” Emma said dolefully. “Not after…”

  “Not after you and he had one of those things? That’s no reason to give up on the house. We both want to continue living here. Before he showed up on our front doorstep, we were figuring on renewing our lease, right? You can work this out with him. Don’t be a wimp.” She tapped her phone again, her thumbs flying over the screen. She stared at it, squinted, enlarged it, scrolled. Her smile faded. “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “I just accessed the inn’s registration files. He’s checked out.”

  “He has?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago.”

  “So…he’s gone, but he didn’t put the house up for sale.” Emma wasn’t sure what that meant. She wasn’t
sure of anything, except that at the rate she was sipping her wine, she was going to need a refill soon.

  “Our lease doesn’t expire until the end of June. He’s still got a few weeks to kick us out. He might go back to California and have Andrea take care of everything for him.”

  A few more tears leaked out of Emma’s eyes. She didn’t want Max in California. She wanted him here. She wanted him to come to the house and tell her he hadn’t meant his offer the way it had come out. She wanted him to say he was thrilled that she’d found a new work space, and he hoped she’d find an affordable new place to live, and he couldn’t wait to see her Dream Portrait of him. She wanted him to take her in his arms and kiss her, and murmur that one of the things he loved about her was her independence, her self-sufficiency, her ability to survive even though she was an artist living in a society that didn’t value artists terribly highly.

  But now he was gone. Back to his job, directing a foundation? Back to his view of San Francisco Bay? Back to a life that had never really had a place for her in it?

  San Francisco Bay. The Atlantic Ocean.

  Suddenly she knew the dream she would paint in his portrait. Because damn it, he might have vanished, but she was going to paint his Dream Portrait, anyway.