NICK AND I SPEND THE rest of Saturday afternoon and into the evening inside my studio, him in my office, and me sitting in front of a once-blank canvas with a brush in hand. And I do what I love, what I have denied myself for far too long.
I paint and I do so without hesitation.
I paint without what I now believe to be the fear of the past few months. Fear of failure. Fear of disappointment. Fear of seeing myself through my brush when I do not like who, and what, the past few months have made me.
I paint Nick.
His strong face.
His piercing eyes.
His tattoos. The Tiger. The words: An eye for an eye.
And I do all of this while trying to understand a man who seems to understand me perhaps too well. I also do so quite entertained by the way he paces my office, throws paper balls at a trashcan, talks to himself, and then repeats. His creative process. And what I like about seeing this is that the hard work beneath it shows me what’s beneath the arrogance.
Amazingly too, at random times, I look up from my canvas to find him standing at the office door, his broad shoulder resting against the doorway, a force that consumes the room while he intently watches me work, and I do not withdraw. I’m okay with him being here. I’m okay with him observing my creative process when I have never allowed anyone to watch me work, including Macom. But then, Macom was always critical of every creative choice I made and Nick…is not.
But then Nick and I are new to each other and time changes people. I’ve often wondered when my father became my mother’s man-child rather than her husband. Was it instant? Was it at one month? One year? Ten years? Every question leads me back to the paint on my brush, and the man in my office. That’s the great thing about a one-night hard limit: It never has time to go sour. The person can never see too much or know too much. And yet, any minute now, Nick and I will be at two.
Unless I send him away.
As if he senses where my thoughts are, I feel him, rather than see him, step back into the doorway of my office. And after hours of this push and pull of wordless energy between us, I don’t have to look at him to know that one of his broad shoulders rests on the doorway. Or that his piercing blue eyes are on me, not the sun fading and washing the green from the mountainsides, soon to disappear and leave them black. But this time, I do not allow him to watch me work.
Instead, I clean my brush and remove my smock. Then, and only then do I lift my gaze to meet his. He doesn’t speak, but his piercing blue eyes are softer now, but still warm. So very warm. Not the kind of warm that says he’s about to strip me naked and remind me why I can’t resist him. But warm with affection, and that kind of warm, mixed with the fact that he sees too much and knows too much, should be exactly why I send him on his way.
Hard limit: One night.
Inhaling, I tell myself that limits are not made to be broken. My limit was meant to protect me.
I start walking toward him, and I know immediately why I need that protection. Because he affects me on every possible level, inside and out. Because as those warm eyes of his track my every step, I feel his attention like a touch when it’s not a touch at all. I feel this man in so many ways, inside and out, that I have never felt with another. And I have only just met him. What impact might he have on me, what things might he see in me that I do not want seen, if he were with me beyond my hard limit?
There is little time for me to answer this question, as my path to him is short, and when I stop in front of him, he doesn’t touch me. Free will. The decision about tonight is in the air.
“All done painting?” he asks.
“For now,” I say.
“That’s a good answer. It means you plan to pick up that brush again tomorrow. Do I get to see today’s work?”
“No,” I say without hesitation. “You already saw it before it was finished.”
“And what, Faith, makes a painting of me ‘finished’?”
“I’ll know when it happens.”
“But we’ve established it won’t be tonight.”
“No,” I say. “It won’t be tonight.”
There’s an inference there that he will be around to see it another day, or night, but unique for Nick, he doesn’t push. Instead, his gaze lifts beyond my shoulder and he scans what I know to be the now shadowy horizon. “It’s peaceful here,” he says. “I see why you were drawn to this place.”
“It’s easy to feel alone here.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Yes,” I say, my stare unwaveringly on his, my answer the truth, for so many reasons I will never explain to anyone.
His eyes hold mine as well, and that warmth I’d seen in his stare of minutes before expands between us. “Tonight, Faith?”
“No,” I say softly, because while alone is good, he feels better. “Not tonight.”
His big hands come down on my waist, and he pulls me to him, our bodies flush, and when his gaze lowers to my mouth and lingers, I know he is thinking about kissing me, I desperately want him to kiss me. But he does not. Instead he says, “How about those gourmet pancakes?”
“Mine or yours?” I ask, finding a smile isn’t so hard to come by with this man as I’d once thought.
“I’m thinking we better go with mine,” he says. “But we’re going to have to make a run to the store.”
To the store.
With Nick.
Hard limit number two: Just sex. Don’t get personal.
I have to put the brakes on everything but sex.
I should tell him this, but he’s laced his fingers with mine, and he’s leading me toward the stairs.
I repeat my new hard limit often for the next hour. In my head, and not to him, and I do this for what I consider a logical reason. He likes a challenge. I’m not going to issue him one on something I can’t afford for him to win. So over and over, I mentally recite: Hard limit number two: Just sex. Don’t get personal.
The first road block to maintaining that limit is that I go to the store with Nick in the first place. I should have said no to this trip, but the fact that he’s absolutely consuming, assuming, and arrogant while there, should have made limit number two easy to follow. The opposite proves true. I learn little things about him and he learns little things about me, like that I hate mushrooms, and he hates olives. He loves orange juice and so do I. Cereal is a necessity, the more marshmallows the better.
In other words: Hard limit number two is a failure. And when it comes to Nick Rogers, resistance is futile.
The man finds ways to touch me the entire time we’re in the store, drawing attention to us that he seems to enjoy, while I dread the wagging tongues to follow. And I know every moment that I should tell myself to back him off, but I don’t. Instead, I help him load up bags with nuts, strawberries, cream, and various other items, and before long we are back in my kitchen, both of us working on his specialty pancakes. And we’re talking too much. We have on too many clothes. This is not what I signed up for, but I don’t stop it from happening. Somehow, we end up on my bed with our clothes on but no shoes, eating pancakes. Talking again.
There is so much—too much—talking going on. And yet I’m doing a lot of the talking. What is wrong with me? “Tell me about your most memorable courtroom experiences,” I prod, my excuse for prodding, my need to finish my painting, to finish the story in his eyes.
Nick laughs. “Where to start?” He considers several moments. “Okay. How’s this for memorable? I’m giving the biggest closing argument of my very young career at the time, and I have enough adrenaline pumping through me to fuel an eighteen-wheeler. I’m halfway through it and it’s going well. Really damn well.”
“And you nailed it.”
He laughs again, that deep, sexy laugh, that seems to slide up and down my spine, before landing in my belly. “No. I would have, or so I tell myself to this day, but the judge let out a burp so loud that the entire courtroom went silent and then burst into laughter that went on eternally.”
“Oh my God. Did you—what did you do?”
“I had to finish, but no one was listening. Thankfully no one listened to the opposing counsel either.”
“Did you win?”
“I won,” he says, setting our empty plates on the nightstand behind him, before adding, “and I was proud of that win then, but looking back, the case was a slam dunk anyone could have won.”
I study him, charmed by this man who gave me humor over the grandeur I’ve expected. “Humble pie from Nick Rogers? Really?”
That warmth is back in his eyes. “There’s much about me that might surprise you, Faith.”
“So it seems,” I say, but I do not tempt fate, or his questions, by once again telling him the same is true of me, nor do I have a chance to be lured into that misstep. He reaches for me and pulls me to the mattress, his big body framing mine, his powerful thigh pressed between mine. “There is much about you that has surprised me, Faith Winter, and I should tell you that I am so far from fucking you out of my system that I haven’t even begun.”
He doesn’t give me time to react, let alone speak, before his lips are on mine, and he’s kissing me, a drugging, slow kiss. And it seems now that I feel every new kiss he claims deeper now in every possible way. He is the escape I’d hoped for, but he is so much more. And eventually we are once again naked, but it’s not kinky spankings and naughty talk. It’s not just sex at all. It’s passionate, and intense, yes, but it’s softer and gentler than before, in ways I don’t understand but feel.
Until we are here and now, in this exact moment when the lights are out, the TV playing a movie with barely audible sound. His heart thunders beneath my ear, telling me that he is still awake as well. I inhale, breathing in that woodsy scent of him, wondering how one person can feel so right and so wrong at the same time. Macom had felt right and then wrong, though the wrong took me longer than it should have to admit, but he was never both at once. Ironically too, when I look into Nick’s eyes, I believe he feels the same of me.
I’d told Nick that it’s easy to feel alone here in this house, but I didn’t tell him just how good that usually is to me. I didn’t tell him that alone is safe. I didn’t tell him that alone allows me to be me without fearing what someone will see or judge. Alone is a place where I take shelter, and can breathe again. But as necessary as being alone feels right now, Nick has awakened something in me and not just the woman. I am painting again, and suddenly I realize that painting is how I learn, grow, cope.
My mind starts to travel back to the past, to how solitude became my sanctuary, and I meld myself closer to Nick, and somehow find myself asking, “Did you speak to your father often?”
“No,” he says simply.
“Do you feel guilty about that?”
“No,” he says, no hesitation. Just straight up. This is how it is. This is what it is.
“Have you cried for him?”
“No,” he says again. “I have not.”
“Me either,” I say, and I don’t mean to say more, but in the safety of darkness, my eyes hidden, my expression with them, I do. “And it feels bad,” I add. “Like I’m supposed to be crying for her.”
“If the person didn’t deserve your love in life,” he replies, “they don’t deserve your tears in death.”
I know he’s right. My mother doesn’t deserve my tears, but death is her friend and my enemy. Death is the gaping hole in your soul that just keeps spiraling into blackness. “Do you have siblings, Nick?
“No.”
“Other family?”
“No.”
“Then you’re alone now, too.”
“Sweetheart, I was alone when that man was in the room.”
As was I with my mother, I think, memories trying to invade my mind, I do not want to revisit. I shut my eyes, inhaling Nick’s woodsy sent, losing myself in him. In sleep, I hope. And the shadows start to form. The darkness, too, but then suddenly, I don’t smell Nick any longer. That woodsy scent is replaced by flowers. So many flowers. Daisies. Roses. Lilacs. The scent of the Reid Winter Gardens. The scent of my mother that clings to my hair and clothes almost daily. I will my mind away from the place I sense it’s taking me. I fight a mental war I lose. I am back in time living my tenth birthday.
My father has just picked me up from school and we’ve returned to the mansion, and I cannot wait to find my mother, a drawing in my hand, a present for her, while my father has promised mine will come soon. I push through the doors leading to the garden. I drop my drawing, and gasp when it starts to blow. I run and catch it, picking it up and staring down at the colors. So many colors. So many flowers. I’ve drawn my mother’s garden and I know she will be proud.
With my prize back in hand, I rush to the gazebo where I always find her, but stop short when I spy a tall, dark-haired man with her. “I told you not to come here,” my mother says.
“Return my phone calls, Meredith, and I won’t.”
“You do understand I’m married?”
He grabs my mother’s arm and pulls her to him. “I also understand you want me,” he says, and then he is kissing her, and I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. I turn away and start running and just when I reach the door to the mansion, it opens and my father steps outside. And he’s big and tall and like a teddy bear that loves and loves and I want to protect him like he protects me.
“Daddy!” I shout and fling myself at him, hugging him.
“Hey honey. Did you find your mother?”
“She’s inside,” I say. “We have to find her. I need cake.”
He laughs and takes my hand, leading me to the mansion. “Let’s find her and have cake.”
My lashes lift, my eyes pierced by sunlight, and I blink away slumber with the sudden realization that Nick is gone. I jolt to a sitting position, pulling the blanket over my nudity, a ball of emotion I refuse to name in my chest. Of course he’s gone. Why wouldn’t he be gone? That ball in my chest expands and I reject it, refusing to name it. Glancing at the clock, I’m appalled to discover it’s after nine. I have the rest of today here before I go back to the mansion, and I’m wasting it in bed, which admittedly was more appealing when Nick was in it, but I’m damn sure not letting today suck because of him leaving without saying a word.
Throwing off the covers, I walk into the bathroom and pull on my pink robe and shove my feet in my pink fluffy slippers. By habit, I brush my teeth and hair, and note the smudges of mascara under my eyes. “No wonder he left,” I murmur. I look like the scary chick from that horror movie, Grudge, or something like that. Only she had dark hair, meant to be Goth and scary. At this moment, I’m a close second to her though, for sure. I decide I don’t care either. There is no one to care but me and I just want coffee. And I think I might make me some gourmet pancakes my way. I need to stick to doing things my way. And bill collectors or not, I need to stop staying at the mansion. I need my space. I guess that is the gift Nick Rogers left me with.
Me again.
Or maybe that will turn out to be a curse, and I will in turn curse him for months to follow.
I walk back into the bedroom, and note that he is, indeed, polite. He took our plates to the kitchen when he left. For some reason, that really irritates me. I walk into the living room, and my mind goes back to the dream, to my tenth birthday, and without a conscious decision to do so, I cross the living room and enter the library. Once I’m there, I walk to the bookshelf and pull out a worn brown journal and sit down on the chair beside it, opening it to pull out a piece of old, worn paper that was once balled up like one of the pieces of paper Nick used for paper basketball in my office yesterday.
“Faith.”
I jolt at Nick’s voice, looking up to find him standing in the doorway.
“You scared the heck out of me, Nick,” I say, my hand at my chest, while his chest is hugged by a snug black t-shirt he’s paired with black jeans and biker style boots, the many sides of this man dauntingly sexy.
He starts laughing in reaction, his jaw sporting a heavy stubble, while his hair is loose and damp, because apparently, he took a shower and I didn’t know.
“It’s not funny,” I scold.
“No,” he says crossing the room to sit on the footstool in front of me. “It’s not funny, but I hate to tell you Faith, as beautiful as you are, right now you look like the girl from—”
“The Grudge,” I supply, remembering my make-up. “I noticed that but I thought…I noticed.”
He narrows those too blue, too intelligent eyes on me. “You thought I was gone?”
I could deny the truth but he already knows and games are better when naked or trying to get naked. “Yes,” I say. “I did.”
His eyes fill with mischief. “And miss a chance to see how you look this morning?”
I scowl and he leans in to kiss me, before saying, “Minty fresh. I find it interesting that you brushed your teeth and left your mascara like that.”
“Maybe I wanted to scare you away,” I say. “And fair warning. I’m cranky without coffee.”
“We can fix that in about two minutes.” His gaze goes to the drawing. “What’s this?”
It’s a testament to how this man distracts and consumes me that I’ve forgotten what I’m holding in my hand. “The past,” I say, and when I would fold it, Nick catches my hand.
“Was this your work as a child?”
“Yes,” I say. “It was.”
“You saw things in color then. When did that change?”
That day, I think, but instead I focus on the next time I created anything. “Sixteen.”
“What made you change?”
“Life,” I say, and because I have no intent of explaining, I add, “I really need that coffee. Actually, I really need a shower.”
He studies me several beats, and then releases my hand. “I’ll be armed with coffee in the kitchen.” I shut the journal and Nick glances at it. “You’re a journal writer?”
“No,” I say. “I paint. I don’t write. It’s actually my father’s.”
He tilts his head. “Did you read it?”
The question cuts right along with the answer. “Every page many times over and I understand him less now that I ever thought possible.” I stand and shove it back on the shelf, thinking of the words inside with biting clarity. “He loved her so damn unconditionally.” I look at Nick, who remains on the stool. “And affection to me is as you said, with tears. It has to be earned.”
“As it should be,” he says, and this leaves me curious about him but I tell myself it’s time to just stay curious about Nick. To stop talking.
I walk toward the door, but that curiosity wins. I pause before exiting. “Has anyone earned that from you, Nick?” I ask, turning to find him standing by the stool now, facing me.
“There were a few swipes I tried to turn into something right, but they were always wrong.”
“Why?”
“The only answer I have is that I don’t believe in happily ever after,” he says. “That doesn’t sit well with most women.”
And just like that he validates an acceptable reason for me to continue to bypass my hard limit of one night. “Since I don’t either,” I say, “Then we really are the perfect distraction for each other, now aren’t we? It’s really kind of liberating. I don’t have to worry about you falling in love with me and you don’t have to worry about me falling in love with you.”
I don’t wait for a reply. I exit the library.