Painting Kisses

by Melanie Jacobson

  “Better men than you have tried, mister. She don’t pay attention to none of ’em,” Mr. Benny muttered.

  I turned to him in surprise. “Thank you, Mr. Benny.”

  He scowled at me. “Not sure why they’re trying so hard. Your coffee’s not that good.”

  This time I did roll my eyes before I headed back toward the grill.

  “What does he want?” Tom asked, his voice lowered.

  “Attention, I think. I’m not up to it right now, so I’m going to run some evasive maneuvers while he’s here, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do not. But why don’t I just throw him out?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Maybe let’s wait to see if he takes a hint, and throw him out if he doesn’t.” I gave him a “no big deal” look and headed back out, scooping up a couple of orders from the window on my way. They were for customers on the other side of the diner from Aidan, but his eyes followed me like a physical touch. I tried hard to act like nothing was wrong, but the weight of his stare gave me a heightened sense of my own movements.

  When his order appeared in the window, I dropped it at his table, along with the entire coffeepot and an apology for being too rushed to come back to check on him more regularly. “Just short my tip for making you do self-serve refills,” I said as I walked away.

  “I wouldn’t short you,” he said, his voice raised slightly so I could hear him as I returned to the kitchen.

  I waved in acknowledgment but didn’t turn around. Thanks to it being our peak time, I had plenty of reasons not to spend time at his table, but when he left with a 30 percent tip in his wake, I breathed out like I’d surfaced from a deep-sea dive and served the rest of my customers that day with real smiles.

  Tom shooed me out an hour early, saying there was no point in wiping down empty tables when I had art to do, and I left him with the threat of a hug if he kept being so nice to me.

  At home, I ducked my head in to let Dani know I was back early, but the house was empty. Voices drifted in from the open sliding door. I walked out to find Griff on his deck, and my stomach clenched—the good kind like right before a couple is going to kiss for the first time in a movie. He didn’t notice me at first, and I realized that he was listening to Dani, who was telling him about a ridiculous customer she’d had. He smiled at her impersonation of the woman demanding a full refund on the ketchup-stained jeans she’d “never worn,” and relief that the two could actually talk and carry on a conversation warmed me like a Chloe hug.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Dani turned to smile at me, and Griff looked startled to see me standing there. “Whoa. Hey. Are you a waitress/artist/ninja? I didn’t even hear you come out.”

  “Ha,” Dani said. “You’ve never heard her trying to sneak around to get ready in the morning.”

  If it were Aidan, he’d have made a crack about earning his way into waking up at my house in the morning, but Griff said nothing and laughed at Dani’s lame joke.

  I flicked her shoulder. “Nice. I’m going down to paint. Holler at me when you need me to take over.”

  “Sure.”

  “You working on something new?” Griff asked.

  “I hope so.” But I wasn’t at all sure. My ideas were a laundromat dryer, where I was trying to fish out a specific piece of clothing but kept coming up with other good-but-not-right pieces instead. I was working blind, and I wondered if I needed to go paint with all the colors of the wind again.

  The thought stopped me cold in the middle of the garage, and I burst into giggles. I suddenly reimagined the scene on the mountain with Aidan singing me the Pocahontas song. In fact, I wondered if that was where he’d gotten the idea for helping me feel Pine Peak instead of see it in the first place—watching Disney movies with his niece and then trying to play off the idea as some game she had made him do. The possibility made me like him a little better.

  Which was no good.

  I needed distance, not more liking. I reminded myself of his habit of kissing me whenever he felt like it. It didn’t create the distance I was looking for. If anything, it almost evaporated the distance I’d already fought to create.

  I pictured his expectant eyes when he’d sat in his booth that morning, waiting for my excitement at seeing him there. So cocky.

  That did the trick.

  When Dani poked her head into the garage an hour later to tell me she was leaving, I was on the floor, still staring at a blank canvas. At this rate, Tom would never have to worry about me spacing out at work because of my art. I was trying to fill my mind with images, but they all slid out without sticking, and I wanted to throw my brush at the canvas with enough force for the handle to pierce it and communicate my real feelings about being blocked again.

  I put everything away, which took no time at all since nothing needed cleaning, and went in to play with Chloe until bedtime. At least I still had enough creativity left to make elaborate plots for her Barbies to enact.

  The next morning I got to work well rested but frustrated. I eased into the morning routine. Mr. Benny showed up at seven thirty; Red Hat was in at eight. My nerves spooled up, ready to explode like a jack-in-the-box around the time Aidan would walk in, usually a few minutes after eight. But customers trickled in who never showed up until after Aidan did, and the tension eased out of me a bit at a time like the slow drip of the coffeemaker.

  By the midmorning lull, I was rubbing at spots on the clean glasses as if they were personally responsible for my creative block.

  “Now what’s wrong?” Tom asked.

  I looked up from a stubborn spot that wouldn’t come off. “If I can’t be good at painting, I’m going to be good at spot removal.”

  “Uh-huh. I somehow get the feeling your artwork is even better than your spot removal.”

  I sighed. “Thanks. But it hasn’t felt like it the last couple days.”

  He shrugged. “Carry on if it makes you happy.”

  “So happy.” I worked at the spot again, and several glasses after that, before the door opened and the air crackled. “You’re late,” I blurted when Aidan paused in the doorway.

  “Didn’t know I had a reservation.” He looked as if he was fighting to keep a straight face.

  Shoot. I wished I could snatch my words back. “Grab your booth. You’re on number fourteen.” It was abrupt, but his smile grew bigger, and he sat in his booth.

  Tom had already started the order, and I rose to fetch the coffee. I wouldn’t be able to hide behind other customers in the empty diner, so I’d need some busywork in the back.

  Aidan watched me as I filled his mug, his smile steady and unnerving. “Good morning,” he said.

  “It’s closer to lunchtime.”

  “How’s your painting going?”

  “Going? Fantastic,” I said. In a literal sense, at least one of them was going well because the guys dispatched by Victoria’s Park City connection had stopped by yesterday to crate up the piece I’d titled Breathe and load it into their van. So it was going, going, gone to Daddy Warbucks.

  “Good to hear. I’m invested now. Will I get to see it?”

  “Nope.” The watercolor he was thinking of was already at Griff’s house. “Does Chief want extra bacon?” I asked in a change of subject so clunky even the dog looked unimpressed.

  “More than chipmunks.”

  I nodded and headed back to the kitchen, dropping my voice to barely above a whisper when I reached Tom. “I’m going to do that project in the storage room I’ve been meaning to get to. It might take me a really long time to count everything.”

  There’d never been a project in the storage room, but Tom nodded. “Probably need to alphabetize stuff in there too.”

  “I mean it—one of these days I’m going to hug you.”

  “Go count,” he growled. “I’ll walk his breakfast out to him.”

  I slipped down the short hall to the ten-by-ten storage room, where Tom kept the nonperishable foods and other supplies. I bent and dragged a
big box of napkins out of the way. They were fine where they were, but they’d have to sacrifice their old location for a new one in the name of busywork.

  Twenty minutes later, I’d reached the point where I’d made a huge mess in an effort to organize the closet/room when the door opened behind me. “It looks worse than it is. You need me out there?”

  “Out there, in here. Whatever.”

  Aidan, not Tom. I jumped up to face him.“Something wrong with your food?”

  “Yeah. You’re not bringing it to me.”

  “Sorry about that. It’s a bad time of morning. Have to get my side work done.”

  “Funny. I thought picking the slow time would make it easier to see you.”

  I should probably have felt trapped. And I would have if the reason I was avoiding him was that he gave me the bad kind of goose bumps. But he gave me the good kind of goose bumps, and when he shut the door behind him and leaned against it, a shiver shot down my spine. It wasn’t the scared kind. “Tom’s going to come looking for you.”

  “Tom thinks I’m in the restroom, and two other customers came in, so I think he’ll be busy for a couple minutes.”

  “What do you want?” I asked. “I’m trying to avoid you.”

  “I know. And I want to know why.”

  “Seriously? Why do you think?”

  “Because I’m a terrible kisser?”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

  He grinned. “Yes. Free orange juice.” And he turned to go.

  “Wait, that’s it?”

  “Yeah. I mean, how else was I going to get free OJ if you wouldn’t come out there?”

  “No, I meant . . . Never mind.”

  “Lia?”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “It would be helpful if I could kiss you again. If I have proof that it’s not as good as I remember, I can go back to trying to score free juice off of you and nothing else.”

  “You’re saying if you kiss me again, you’re sure you won’t want to kiss me again?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s original.”

  He straightened but tucked his hands into his front pockets as if he understood that I needed the assurance that he wasn’t going to reach out and kiss me anyway. “Thanks. Do you believe me?”

  “No.”

  “Smart woman. Here’s the thing. I’m a pretty goal-oriented guy, and now my goal is that you’ll want to kiss me without tricks. I’m on a mission to figure out how to make that happen.”

  “You didn’t trick me the first time.” I hated to admit it, but fair was fair.

  “No, I did. I’ve been coming in here long enough to know that nothing pushes your buttons like a challenge. I figured if you had to choose between backing down and kissing me, you’d go for the kiss.”

  “I’d like to choke you right now.”

  He scrubbed his hand through his hair. “It’s progress if you’re having a hard time keeping your hands off me.”

  “And now I want to throw something at you.”

  “I should have stopped while I was ahead.”

  I fluttered my hand in the direction of the entire state. “There have to be way hotter women in the vicinity who you can bother.”

  “It’s not about hot, which, by the way, you are. It’s about interesting.”

  “Oh, conquest. I’ve seen twenty versions of this movie. You’re going to toy with me until I beg for you to kiss me, right? Good luck.”

  “That’s lame. No, I’m hoping you’ll spend nonkissing time with me until you decide I’m not the devil so the next time I kiss you, you seem happy about it.”

  “I don’t think you’re the devil. I just . . . you’re a smooth operator, you know? I don’t like those.”

  “Ouch. I really have to do a better job of presenting myself. I thought for sure I’d proven I’m more than that by now.”

  “Why? Because I caught on to you so fast?”

  “No,” he said. “Because I don’t think you get me at all.” He closed the gap between us. I stiffened, but he only leaned down and hefted the huge bag of flour I’d been trying to drag to a new corner. “Where does this go?”

  “On the bottom shelf,” I said, pointing to the wire racks I’d cleared. He set it down and turned to face me.

  “I problem-solve better when I’m moving. That’s something you didn’t know about me. The rest of the flour go there?”

  I nodded and moved out of the way, but when he grunted while picking up the next bag, I couldn’t stop a bubble of laughter.

  “What? It’s hard,” he said, slinging it over his shoulder.

  “It’s not that. This is just so ridiculous. We’re acting out an eighties Lifetime movie or something, where you’re the corporate wolf type and I’m the sassy underling, and you’re going to seduce me with the awesome combination of your brains and brawn because you’re so manly.”

  “I would really, really be glad if you said yes to coming on a date with me, where I promise not to flirt with you and only talk to you like a normal human being.” The last part was said with a strain in his voice as he tried to shift the flour to the floor without dropping it.

  The door burst open, and Tom stood there wearing his grease-spattered apron and a scowl. “What’s going on in here?”

  “Aidan was moving some flour around for me. He’s almost done.”

  Tom eyed Aidan, bent over with his hands on his knees. “Good. He can move the sugar next.” He walked back out, leaving the door open.

  “The sugar?” Aidan asked with a note of dread.

  I pointed to the sack as big as the flour he’d moved. “We make a lot of pie,” I said with no apology.

  He groaned and reached for the sugar. “If I were a player, wouldn’t I be making some kind of joke about this sugar? Something about sugar daddies or giving me some sugar or how you’re so sweet?”

  “I’m worried you even thought of those jokes.”

  “But I didn’t make them, and that’s the proof. I’m not a player.” Another grunt followed as he lifted the bag.

  “I believe you but only because a player would have done that so much more smoothly and flashed me some bicep.”

  He dropped the sugar in place and straightened, his face red from the effort. “Dinner? With me? No kissing. No flirting.”

  Could he be down-to-earth without hiding behind jokes and charm? His graceless flour-hauling hinted at maybe yes.

  “Maybe yes.”

  “Maybe yes?” he repeated. He walked up to me, so close the heat from his body was a touch in itself. His hands came up but reached past me, stretching to reach something high, but the movement brought him even closer. I caught a whiff of his soap, something spicy but not overwhelming. He drew back and handed me a short stack of lightbulbs he’d pulled down from the tall shelf.

  I took them. “What are these for?”

  “Replacements,” he said.

  “For?”

  “How do I know? I don’t switch out the bulbs around here.”

  “I meant why did you give them to me?”

  “I thought I’d clear the top shelf off so you don’t have to figure out how to get it all down.”

  It was thoughtful. And I liked the way he smelled. So I said, “Yes.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I meant yes, I’ll go to dinner with you sometime. Saturday.”

  “Saturday I have a—never mind,” he interrupted himself when I frowned. “Saturday. Where do you live?”

  “How about you tell me where to meet you.”

  “Leifson’s.”

  I almost laughed. “Don’t think that’s going to work for me. Could we go somewhere else?”

  “Rosetti’s. Do you know it?”

  The most exclusive Italian restaurant in town? Blowing too much of his foreman’s salary on a special-occasion restaurant wasn’t the way to impress me, but I’d let him dig his own grave. “Rosetti’s. Can it be after six?” I’d have to wait for Dani to get home.
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  He reached past me for the tall shelf again, and my pulse sped up. I swallowed against my suddenly dry mouth, but he just handed me more bulbs and reached up for the last set like he hadn’t given my nerve endings an electric shock.

  When the last bulbs were down, he crossed the tiny distance to the door and paused for a moment. “I’d stay and help longer, but I need to get back to the jobsite.”

  Wait, how had he gotten away for an hour in the middle of the morning? “No problem. Thanks for moving that stuff. I hope you don’t get in trouble with Sully for being gone so long.”

  “Nah. I’m too valuable for him to get rid of me. I’ll call it an early lunch. Either way, I don’t think he’ll care.”

  He offered a small wave, and a few minutes later, Tom eyed me over the grill. “I hope those evasive maneuvers were worth it,” he said. “Because now I need you out here for the early lunch crowd, and you’re still going to have to put my stockroom back in some kind of sane-person order.”

  “I will. Thanks,” I said as I hurried out to the tables. I handled my customers, but heat flared in my cheeks when I thought about how Aidan’s warmth had suffused me without ever touching me; I caught myself staring into space twice. The second time, I shook myself out of it and forced my attention elsewhere. Aidan shouldn’t be filling my brain. That was where my next painting was supposed to be percolating.

  Irritated, I focused on a blank canvas in my mind, tapping the sense memories of being at Pine Peak, and suddenly, there it was, the picture I needed. It squeezed Aidan right out of my head exactly like I’d hoped it would.

  By the time Tom sent me home, it felt like a hive had exploded inside me and the bees were pushing hard to get out, pressing on the inside of my mind and chest, the beat of their million wings making my palms itch with the need to paint and free them. But at home, there was still Chloe to manage. I practiced patience over and over when she insisted on a trip to the park instead of playing in the garage and then again when she wanted me to do a fancy braid for her instead of sitting on the deck so I could at least experiment with some of the colors. When I finally got her down for the night—half an hour early for my own sanity—I flew to the garage and snatched up brushes and paint tubes.