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.”