It’s mesmerizing to watch Pippa talk about her mom. To see her face light up with love and adoration when talking about her. I’m fascinated by listening to every detail she wants to tell me. I like her better like this. Her cheeks are flushed from talking so fast, her hands moving in every direction from telling a story about how her mom once brought home a box of kittens because she found them on the side of the road and couldn’t leave them there.
Earlier, something had hurt inside me to see her cry. I’m not someone who is good at handling other people’s emotions. To be honest, I don’t do well at handling my own emotions—partially due to how I grew up and the verbal lashings I got from my mother if I wasn’t acting like a perfect little robot for them to show off to their friends. Partially because I wasn’t taught to be compassionate. Other people’s feelings have never really been my business. Except right now, I want to know every single feeling she’s ever felt, everything she’s feeling. I want to know everything about her.
“One time, me and my best friend, Mare, wanted to do a lemonade stand so badly. It’s all we talked about, even though Cade and my parents kept telling us that we lived on the edge of town, no one was driving by to stop for lemonade. Mare and I would hear none of it,” Pippa explains, laughing to herself.
Something about her makes me want to laugh along with her, as if I was remembering the same memory she is. It’s just the two of us, our horses, and the mountains around us. I feel like without the distraction of the real world, I can almost let my guard down with her. At least enough to enjoy hearing what it’d be like to have a parent who cared about you.
“So, come to find out, my mom forced half the town to drive out to the ranch to visit our lemonade stand. Mare and I were so young and naive we truly thought everyone was driving by and wanted to taste our lemonade, but no, it wasn’t that. It was because my mom strong-armed half the Sutten population to purchase glasses of overpriced lemonade from us.”
“What’d you buy with the hard-earned money?”
“An Easy-Bake Oven,” she answers immediately.
“I have no idea what that is.”
“Oh my god!” She sits up on her knees, slapping the ground underneath her as she looks at me in shock. “You don’t know what an Easy-Bake Oven is?”
I shake my head.
She sighs dramatically, as if the fact I didn’t grow up with whatever this appliance is was the reason my childhood sucked. “You’re right, you did have a terrible childhood,” she mutters, almost reading my mind.
“You’re right,” I joke. “Not having some fancy oven was the reason my childhood was stolen from me.”
Pippa throws her head back with laughter. Her hair falls down her back as her entire body shakes with her laugh. “It’s the fact you think the Easy-Bake Oven is fancy.” She looks at me once again. There’s wetness under her eyes, but this time, it’s from laughter. She wipes at her smudged mascara.
The thought occurs to me that I could get used to hearing her laugh more, to seeing her happy tears. And those are both things I shouldn’t want to get used to.
“Is it not?”
“No. It’s terrible. I don’t know how the food that you bake in it is even edible.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
She takes a long, deep breath in an attempt to calm herself. It’s quiet between us, but a comfortable kind of quiet. The one without expectations to awkwardly fill it.
Eventually, she takes another drink of her coffee with her eyes trained on the view in front of us. In the back of my mind, I still want to find a way to bring people here. To give some of the landscape artists I know the chance to capture the beauty to the best of their abilities.
“So are you going to tell me more about your childhood?” She doesn’t sound timid while asking it. She seems curious, but I also get the sense I could tell her no and she wouldn’t keep prying.
“Doubt it,” I answer honestly. I have a complicated relationship with my parents. As an adult, I can’t fathom treating a child the way they treated me. I could imagine myself having a kid or two if I met the right person, and I can’t imagine just discarding a child the way they discarded me. “All there is to say is that I was their trophy child. Paraded around and appreciated when they wanted to show me off to others but hidden away and forgotten about when there was nobody around to brag to.”
“Did they encourage you to be an artist?”
I take a drink of coffee because her question is a complicated one. They shoved art down my throat from the moment I could hold a pencil, but even from a young age, I rebelled against them. I didn’t want to become them, and every day of my adult life, I wonder if I became everything they hated or everything they wanted me to be.
“Encourage isn’t the word I’d use. Forced is more like it.”
“Something tells me you don’t take well to being forced to do anything.”
I chuckle. I appreciate that she seems to always say exactly what’s on her mind. “You could say that.”
“So you rebelled by becoming an art owner instead of a creator?”
“I rebelled by not ever giving in to their wishes and following in their footsteps. I was supposed to be some nepo baby art prodigy. They wanted me to be that desperately. It’s the one thing I refused to become.”
“So could you have been an art prodigy? Are you any good?”
My lips twitch as I do my best to fight a smirk. “Remember that statue you liked so much in my office?”
Her face scrunches in confusion. It makes me laugh, a small chuckle rumbling from low in my chest.
“The most beautiful piece of art I’ve ever seen? Yeah, I remember it.”
My teeth run over my bottom lip because she’s feeding my ego, and I love it. “The artist who didn’t know if they wanted to sell it? That’s me.”
“Shut up!”
“No one knows it’s me.”
“Oh my god, I gave you compliments without even knowing it.”
“You gave me so many compliments,” I tease, popping another bite of scone into my mouth. It’s my second one. They’re just so damn good.
“I want to throw up.” She sighs dramatically, falling backward onto the quilt. “How could you let me say such nice things about you and not say anything?”
“Maybe I like it when you say nice things to me.”
She looks at me from the corner of her eye. “No you don’t.”
I shrug because I won’t confess to her what I do or don’t like. I loved watching her fawn over a piece I spent so long on. It was fun to see my art through somebody else’s eyes since I don’t allow a lot of people in on my secret. It was even more fun with the knowledge that she had no clue the artist she was complimenting was me.
“Camden,” she groans, covering her face with her hands. “You’re the actual worst for letting me make a fool of myself.”
Leaning forward, I attempt to push her hands from her face, but she keeps them locked in place. “You didn’t make a fool of yourself. I liked hearing what you thought of my work.”
She grunts, not giving any indication that she’ll move her hands. “I was telling you what I thought that artist was trying to convey when you were the artist.” Another loud groan comes from her. I try to look away from the skin she’s showing between the denim waistband of her jeans and the ruffle at her midriff. So much sun-kissed skin that’s begging for attention.
“Stop being dramatic.” My fingers wrap around her wrist. I pull again, this time a little harder. Finally, I get one of her hands to move enough to see both her eyes. “Everything you saw was exactly what I wanted the beholder to see. I’ll deny this if you ask me again, but to be honest, I was flattered you noticed all the little details I’d hidden in there.”
“I can’t believe you actually have talent. I thought all there was to you was, well…you being a dick.”
“Maybe I like it that way.”
She catches her plump bottom lip between her teeth. Without invitation, I wonder what it’d be like to catch her lip between my teeth. I imagine myself tugging on it, digging my teeth deeper until she’d moan.
Fuck. What does she sound like moaning?
She seems so untamed. I bet she doesn’t hold back in bed. I’d bite and suck before licking across the seam of her lips, hearing the sound of…
“Camden?”