“Don’t get too excited. He’s at a stage where everything looks like food and drool-worthy.” He whips out a tissue from his pocket, removes the hat from Nicky’s mouth, and wipes off his drool. I take this tiny moment to study him and his expert movements.
“Is this your way of not giving up?” Thomas asks, pointing to the open book I’d completely forgotten about.
Shyness stabs my cheeks again and I lower my eyes. “Maybe.”
“Show me what you’ve written so far”
I jerk my gaze up at him. “No—not that I’ve written anything. I can’t write. I don’t know how. Isn’t that what the problem is?”
He shakes his head and snaps my notebook shut, making Nicky chuckle. Thanks for the support, buddy. “Now, I’m only going to say this once, so you better listen.”
His professor-y voice makes me raise my hand as if we are in a classroom.
“What?”
“That’s exactly what you said in class,” I say, thinking about the time he blew his lid when people talked about their favorite writers. I lower my voice and imitate him, “I’m only gonna say this once…”
Nicky chortles again and I beam with pleasure.
“Do you want the advice or not?”
I nod enthusiastically.
“These books are no help to you unless you actually write something. They can’t teach you to write. They can only teach you to polish what you’ve written.” Sighing, he looks around, then settles his eyes on his coffee mug.
“Wrap your hands around the coffee mug and close your eyes,” he tells me.
Confused, I don’t do either of those things and he shakes his head at me. He leans forward, careful of Nicky, and drapes his big, thick fingers over my hands, bringing them to the mug.
My breath hitches at the very first contact between us. His rough, bumpy hands over my tiny, pale ones, it’s…it’s jarring. It’s what I imagine touching a lightning rod feels like. Electric. Humming. Bubbling with energy.
“Layla, you with me?” Thomas asks, and I gulp, jerking out a nod. “Close your eyes.”
I do, because I’ve got no other option but to obey. He holds the functions of my body hostage with his touch, and my eyelids fall shut at his voice.
I become awake, hypersensitive. I can hear the rasp of his breaths, punctuated by Nicky’s gurgles. I feel the sun on my face even though we’re sitting inside and the morning is grey. I want to shift in my chair, rub my thighs together. I want to ask him to increase the pressure of his grip so the feel of his skin is tattooed onto mine.
“Tell me how the coffee mug feels.”
Can you taste sound? I don’t know, but I can taste his voice in this moment. It’s viscous and thick and sweet. “I-I… Well, it’s hot.” But not as hot as your hands.
“What else?”
Under his palm, I move my fingers, feeling the rough contours of the coffee mug. It’s yellow in color with a brown ridged sleeve. “It’s rough, scratchy.” But the roughness of your hands feels so much better.
“And?”
I try to feel more and come in contact with something metallic. I bend my digit and touch something smooth with the knuckle. It’s the wedding band, cool against his patent heat, icy cold. The rhythm of my breathing changes—or maybe it’s his altered breaths, choppy and broken.
Feeling the wrongness of it, I snap my finger straight and away, taking refuge in the sensations of our skin rubbing together. “It feels like…like sunshine, like just by touching it I’m —I’m awake and alert and I don’t know…just, alive.” And I’m not talking about the stupid coffee mug.
Thomas removes his hand and I’m forced to open my eyes. There’s color on his cheeks, not quite red, but something similar that brightens up his flesh. It flips something in my chest.
He shrugs. “There you have it. A cup of coffee is a pocketful of sunshine for you. Writing isn’t only about technique, though that’s important. It’s not about what you see; it’s about what you feel. You have to go in deeper, turn stones, look where you’d rather not look to be able to write. Ergo, you don’t need these books right now.”
I put my hands in my lap, covering one with the other—a poor attempt to preserve the heat left by him. “Is that what you do? Look where you’d rather not?”
“Sometimes.”
“Aren’t you afraid of what you’ll find?”
I don’t have to wonder what I’ll find when I look inside me—a selfish, crazy girl who fell in the wrong kind of love—so I’d rather not look.
“Terrified,” he murmurs, answering my question. “Art is painful, Layla. It’s potentially dangerous. Explosive. It takes everything from you, sometimes more than you can afford. It’s a beast, and it’s always starving. You feed it and feed it…until you have nothing left.” He sucks in a breath. “But you don’t mind because you’d rather chase the high of creating something than live in darkness. It’s insanity.”
It’s the most truthful and the most miserable thing he’s ever said to me. His words lodge somewhere in my cracked heart, breaking it further. I realize he could be talking about love—an insane, hungry beast who takes and takes.
“Are you going to take that?” Thomas asks after a while.
“What?”
Vibrations echo on my thigh, alerting me that my phone is ringing. I take it out of my pocket and almost drop it like I’m holding an icicle in my hand.
It’s Caleb.
Caleb, with his green eyes and dirty blond hair, grinning at me through my phone screen.
I don’t…I don’t understand. I keep staring at it, keep listening to the shrill tune, hoping it will change, hoping Caleb’s face will dissolve, hoping this is a joke.
It has to be, right? Why would he call me after two years?
The phone stops ringing and I manage to take a halting breath.
“Layla.”
I look at Thomas like I don’t remember him.
Before I can say something, the phone rings again, buzzing on the table. Without a second thought, I hop up from my seat, gather my things, and throw Thomas a distracted glance.
“I-I have to go.”
I run out of the café as if Caleb is here, rather than in fucking Massachusetts, as if Caleb has come to tell me how much he hates me.
“No.” Emma is shaking her head. “I won’t wear that. I won’t.”
“Why not?” I look at her in the mirror and then back to the dress in my hands. “What’s wrong with it?”
“The color. It’s…orange.”
“Tangerine,” I say for the millionth time. “It’s tangerine.”
“They’re the same thing.” She puts her hand on her hip and turns to me. “Ugh. I just…don’t know about this.” She walks over to my bed and plops down on the pile of clothes.
“Do you trust me?” I ask her seriously, and she laughs at my expression.
I thrust the dress in her face to make her stop and she swats at it. “Just try it, okay? Tangerine is fucking awesome. It’ll look great on you. Trust me.” When she throws me a dubious look, I add, “Dylan’s gonna love it. It’s like you’re wearing…sunshine.”
My lips curve up in a smile at the word. A cup of coffee is a pocketful of sunshine for you.
“Wow, aren’t you the poet?” Emma teases.
“Yeah, I might be.” I pull her up and shove her in the direction of my en suite. “Now, go change.”
She gulps. “What if he doesn’t like me? You know, we’ve been friends for so long, and now, everything is changing. I don’t—”