She puffed her cheeks out, obviously debating, then huffed her disgruntlement as she opened the car door, swung her bag over her shoulder, and slammed the door shut before marching around to his side of the car. “Okay. Let’s go,” she said grimly.
“It’s not like I am asking you to jump off a cliff, you know,” he said as he unthinkingly grasped her elbow to shepherd her across the street.
“I just think it would be better if we went our separate ways and moved on,” she said pertly.
What was he, the last guy on earth or something? “Why are you making this out to be such a big deal?”
“I’m not making it into anything,” she said. “And FYI, you may think it’s all well and good, but it is a big deal to me—”
“It would be to me, too, after four years,” he grumbled, steering her down the path.
“Do you mind? I’m trying to say I am not the sort for casual sex.”
Matt quirked a brow and glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Like to really go at it, eh?”
“Matt.”
He sighed. “Just trying to get you to lighten up, Rebecca. We agreed—a good time was had by all. That’s it, nothing more,” he said, noticing her cheeks were turning an appealing shade of pink. “And since it was agreed that I am not going to drop down on a knee and ask you to make it permanent, I think you could stand a little shopping.”
She sighed. “Okay.” She followed him into the first row of canvas-bound booths. “Are you an art enthusiast?” The tents were filled with original oil and watercolor paintings, colorful pottery, wrought iron yard art, woodworks, and metal sculptures.
“I don’t know. I just like originality in anything.”
“I wanted to be an artist,” she said wistfully, and paused, looked at an oil painting of a field of bluebonnets. “When I was a girl, I never went anywhere without my sketch pad and pencils.”
Honestly, Matt had her pegged as the cheerleader homecoming queen type, not the thoughtful artist type. “So what stopped you?”
“Life,” she said with an indifferent shrug. “What else?” And she continued into the little booth, looking at more paintings of windmills and bluebonnets and dilapidated country barns.
But that sounded like a cop-out to Matt, and he followed her inside, asking, “Why would life stop you? Life happened to me, too, but I still went to law school.”
“Of course. But you’re a smart man.” (Matt immediately chalked that up in her pro column). “But I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to be me. I tried to be who others wanted me to be.”
“Now why on earth would you want to be who others wanted you to be?”
Rebecca flashed a funny, sad little smile that crinkled the corner of her eyes. “That is the million dollar question. I don’t know. I was so young and so stupid and I gave up so much. I’ve only recently begun to realize how much.” She moved away from him to look at a painting of a herd of cattle.
Her answer intrigued him—Rebecca didn’t seem like a woman who had ever had to give up anything, but in fact, quite the opposite. “So you made some mistakes as a kid— everyone does,” he said. “Can’t you just get it back?”
“Get what back?”
“Your life. Whoever you were going to be.”
Her laugh was pleasant and light, washing over him like some freaky cosmic rain. “I would if I could go back in time.”
“I know you can’t go back in time, but you can pick up where you left off,” he insisted, suddenly wanting nothing more than to see the Rebecca that might have been.
“No, I can’t. Too much time has passed since then, and besides, you should never look back, only forward, for tomorrow is where the future lies, not in your past.”
Matt laughed. Where did you get that? Out of some lame self-help book?”
That remark earned him a cool look. “I suppose you have something against people who try to improve themselves?”
“No. But I have something against people deciding they can’t have the same desires and dreams they did when they were a kid. Do you still want to pick up a sketch book?”
Rebecca sort of rolled her shoulders.
“What’s that?”
“What?
“That little thing you just did with your shoulders. Was it a yes or a no?”
“I didn’t do anything with my shoulders. I just don’t have anything else to say on the subject.”
“Ah,” he said as they paused at a potter’s booth. “I hit a button.”
“Nooo, you didn’t hit a button, Matt,” she said impatiently. “I’m just not the same person I was then.”
“Or last night, for that matter,” he muttered.
“I’m going to ignore that,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “I will tell you, however, that most people go through at least seven stages of personal development before they are transformed into who they really are!”
Man, she had been reading self-help books. “That’s a bunch of crap. We are all essentially the same person we were as a kid. And I think you still want to paint but that you’ve been trained to think it is some sort of childish wish.”
“It is a childish wish. And besides, I have Grayson now.”