“God, this is embarrassing,” she muttered, her hand flying to her reddened cheeks. “3B.”
I carried her to 3B and carefully helped her stand, my arm around her hips for support as she fished through her purse for her keys. A blast of warmth hit our faces the second her apartment door opened. In the corner, a space heater roared in the direction of a makeshift studio. Exposed brick walls, a drafting table, huge canvases, and a cart filled with paints, brushes, and palettes took center stage. A large canvas, still wet and half-completed, rested against a paint-covered easel.
“Where do you want me to put you?” I asked, watching as her eyes danced longingly toward her art studio. I glanced around at her place. It was a fraction of the size of my loft. It was wide open with no walls save for the bathroom. A vintage, industrial kitchen stood across from a makeshift living room, and a large bed covered with a million pillows rested against an empty wall. Her studio took pride of place next to the large floor-to-ceiling windows I’d watched her through so many times.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. She wanted to paint. It pained her not to. I could see it all over her pretty face.
“Here,” I said, directing her toward her sofa. “Sit here.”
Her careful gaze never left me as I walked to her studio and lifted her easel and canvas bringing them over to her along with a palette and brushes. I ran to her kitchen and stuffed a hand towel with ice cubes from her freezer, filled a glass with water, and grabbed some ibuprofen.
“You don’t have to do all this, you know,” she said with an amused half-smile.
“I wasn’t going to leave you out there,” I said, handing her the water and gel caps.
“I mean all this,” she said, her eyes dancing around the makeshift studio I’d set up for her. “It was very nice of you. Thank you.”
I shrugged and offered a reserved smile.
“I’m Sophie, by the way,” she said. “I’ve seen you around. You go walking at night.”
My heart leaped. She’d noticed me, too.
“Jamison,” I said. We stood, my eyes locked on her big, brown gaze for far too long as an awkward silence filled the space between us. I couldn’t get enough of her pretty face. There was something wildly innocent and free-spirited about her. Maybe it was the way her hair hung in her face or the way she didn’t notice the paint streak on her cheek. Maybe it was the way her apartment was decorated in a mish-mash of colors and styles as if she’d found random things at a flea market and decided to claim them. There was no rhyme or reason for any of it as far as I could tell.
“What time does your art store close?”
Her arched brows raised under her thick bangs. “You don’t have to do that.”
I glanced down at my watch. “How far away is it? You said you needed white, right? What do you paint with?”
“Oils,” she said. “But you don’t have to do that.”
“What’s it called?” I asked. “If I bring you white, will you promise to stay off your feet and let your sprain heal?”
Her lips twisted, amused again. “Beacon Art Supplies. They were staying open late for me tonight. It’s up the block on the left.”
I bolted out of her apartment, practically running down the two flights of stairs and out past the spot where she’d slipped and fallen ten minutes prior. Five minutes later, I’d arrived.
“Hello?” I called, poking my head inside. The ‘open’ sign was unlit, but the door was unlocked, and the lights were still on.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice called from the back.
“I’m here to pick up some paint for, uh, Sophie,” I said, realizing I didn’t yet know her last name.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Be right there.”
A blonde woman about Sophie’s age with a braided ponytail hanging over her left shoulder strutted to the front. She was wearing a paint-covered smock and holding a giant bottle of white paint in her hand.
“She slipped on the way here,” I said. “I told her I’d grab it for her.”
The woman’s nametag identified her as Mia. She rolled her eyes and laughed. “I told her I’d stay open late. Must’ve been in a big hurry.”
“Sidewalks are slick,” I said, pulling out my wallet. “Be careful out there tonight.”
Mia waved her hand. “It’s free.”
“Free?”
“She works for me.”
“Oh,” I said, slipping my wallet back into my left back pocket. “All right, then.”
I hurried back to Sophie’s knocking before letting myself in. She was still right where I left her, lying across the couch with her leg propped up on a pillow, half asleep.
“Here’s your paint,” I whispered, sitting it next to the easel on her coffee table. I clicked off the lamp that lit the space above her sofa and showed myself out, pausing to look at her one more time before locking the door from the inside and shutting it tight.
So that’s her.
3
SOPHIE
I hated the cold. Hated it. Having lived my whole life in Upstate New York, I should’ve known better than to dash off to Manhattan the moment I graduated from art school. The twenty-two-year-old me was trying to go legit back then. That was where all the artists lived. That was where people set up shops and galleries and sold their paintings for unthinkable amounts of money. I dreamed of making enough money to buy a quaint little apartment and travel the world in search of new inspiration.
I also wanted to escape my past, the horrible memories, that horrific night when the unthinkable happened. ‘The Incident,’ my parents called it, though ‘Worst Nightmare’ would’ve been more fitting.
My fingers twisted around the delicate gold charms dangling from my neck as I entered Beacon Art Supplies. Beacon was my second favorite place, right after my apartment. If I wasn’t at home, I was usually at Beacons. It was my safe place. I could lose myself there. I could drown out the rest of the world. And when I needed a bit of human interaction or when my thoughts became too loud, I had Mia to bring me back down to earth.
“Morning,” I called out as I hung my puffy coat on a rack in Mia’s office. I hated that thing. Whenever I wore it, I looked like a bloated, blue marshmallow.
Mia popped her head out from a back room, her smock covered in fresh blue paint. Mia Beacon was quite possibly the only girl I knew who loved art more than me.
“Ankle feeling better?” she asked, eyes dropping down to my feet.
It still throbbed, and it killed me when I walked on it. But I choked down enough ibuprofen to make it manageable. I had to get to work that morning. Mia needed me, and it felt good to be needed.
“Okay, so who was that guy last night who came in here?” Mia asked, a curious smirk growing on her round, pretty face. “Can we talk about how freaking gorgeous he is for one minute?” Her big, blue eyes rolled to the back of her head as her hand clutched her chest.
I squinted my eyes and tried not to smile. “He is attractive, yes.”
“Where’d you find him?”
“He lives on my street. He was out walking when I fell. He helped me back to my place. He’s a kind stranger. That’s all.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Jamison.”
“Does he know yours?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re not strangers,” Mia said. “You get his number?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with my dating life.”
I didn’t date. I hadn’t dated since I’d arrived in the city. I lived and breathed my work. Besides, not loving someone meant not worrying about losing them. The two people I’d loved the most in my life had slipped through my fingers like sand.
“Because you’re twenty-four years old,” Mia said, squaring her shoulders with mine. “You’re freaking beautiful. You’re kind and funny and smart. You’re living in the greatest city in the entire world. And you sit at home every night with your easel. You need to be living your life, Sophie. You�
�re not getting any younger.”
I smiled as I walked off. Mia was the big sister I never had and a surrogate, big-city mother all wrapped into one opinionated little package.
“Ask him out.” She followed me to the front of the store.
I balked. “You want me to knock on every door of his apartment building until I find him?”
“Whatever works.”
Both my head and my ankle throbbed, despite the generous 800 mg of ibuprofen I’d washed down with my coffee that morning. I’d forgotten to take the meds Dr. Bledsoe had given me. I’d never had to take prescriptions for anything before, and it was hard getting in the habit. I raised my hands to my head massaging the tension from my scalp and working my way to the back of my neck.
“Headache again?” Mia asked with concerned eyes. I hadn’t told her everything yet.
“I told you I went to the doctor, right?”
Mia clicked on the ‘open’ sign and headed behind the cash register, cleaning off the counter with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels. “I think so.”
I took a deep breath. She had to know. I might have to miss work, and she’d wonder what was wrong. “I have an unruptured brain aneurysm.”
“What?” Mia stopped wiping off the counter, frozen in position. “Say that again?”
“It’s there,” I said, rubbing the base of my skull. “Just waiting for the right time to rupture.”
“They can fix that, right?” she asked, staring at me like I was a dead woman walking. “Surgeries and treatment and stuff?”
I nodded, eyes concentrating on the scuffed, vintage tile beneath my feet. “We’re going to try.”
“So what does your doctor say?” she asked.
“I have a neurologist, Dr. Bledsoe, but he wants me to meet with some fancy neurosurgeon,” I said. “Dr. Garner. Supposedly, brain aneurysms are his specialty, and he’s really hard to get in to see. I have to wait until January.”
“No,” Mia said, slapping her hand on the counter. “Demand to be seen sooner.”
I laughed. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Mia’s lips began to tremble.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said.
She lifted a single finger to the corner of her eye, dabbing away a tear that’d begun to form as her eyes misted. “I don’t want to hear this, Sophie. Not before Christmas. Not with our big plans about to take shape.”
Our big plans.
She was renovating her shop, turning the front half into a posh art gallery to exhibit both of our works. We had the same vision, she and I, and we were going to make it in the cutthroat world of art peddling. She just happened to have a hefty trust fund to help fund our little endeavor and getting us space in a prime Tribeca location.
“I’m going to be fine,” I assured her. “Whatever’s meant to happen will happen.”
“You tell me if you need anything, okay?” she said, her tone insistent. “I’ll do anything you need. Anything.”
“I know.” I reached behind her and grabbed a broom trying to sweep up the dried sidewalk ice melt and sand that had migrated into our shop from the day before. “Mia?”
“Yes?”
“Can we pretend like everything’s normal?” I asked, my voice breaking. “That would be helpful, I think.”
Mia’s eyes glinted with bittersweet hope, and she nodded. “Anything you want, Soph.”
4
JAMISON
The wind howled and whipped my plaid scarf in fifty different directions. A late- night New York blizzard was making for a formidable ten o’clock walk, but I needed it after pulling a twelve-hour shift at work. I glanced up at Sophie’s apartment. Pitch black. Trudging forward, my eyes watered from the cold, and my cheeks froze solid with impending windburn. Given the sub-zero temperatures, it had been a dumb idea to go for a walk.
The normally less-than-busy sidewalks were completely desolate. Everyone with half a brain was nestled warmly in their apartment. A neon sign flashed the words ‘GREAT DUETS’ in pink and yellow against near-whiteout conditions. The neighborhood karaoke bar I’d passed by a thousand times before and never thought twice about was going to soon become my refuge from the storm.
Using all my strength, I pulled the door open fighting the wind that blew against it. Dark warmth and the jingling of the bells hanging from the door hinges greeted me as my eyes adjusted. A handful of folks situated at the bar and couple of girls seated at a table by the stage were the only patrons.
Eyes still adjusting, a small figure with long, dark hair brushed past the front of the stage hopping up and taking the microphone as the music began to play and lyrics flashed across the screen behind her.
Sophie?
Her big brown eyes closed, and her delicate hands wrapped around the microphone, her lips parted, and out came the sweetest, softest voice I’d ever heard. Perfect notes, one after another, floated from her pretty lips. She was in her own little world, the way I imagined she was when she painted.
I headed toward the bar pulling off my hat and scarf and ordering a Glenlivet 18 on the rocks unable to keep my eyes off her for long.
“She’s got a great voice, doesn’t she?” the bartender asked in his thick, Brooklyn accent. “Sophie Salinger. Comes in here every Thursday night.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, my eardrums flooded with the kind of richness and talent that only could only come naturally.
Each night that week I’d walked the neighborhood hoping to run into her again, and each night I had to settle for watching her from afar as she painted up a storm in her loft. I shook my head realizing she’d completely disregarded my orders to stay off her ankle.
The bartender placed my Glenlivet on a thin paper napkin, and I wiped a rogue trickle of the golden liquid off the clean glass with my thumb.
The song finished, and Sophie climbed off the stage retreating to a small table where she sat across from a blonde who resembled the girl from the art supply store.
“You wanna sing somethin’?” the bartender asked.
My head whipped around, and I about choked on my drink. “No, no. Definitely not.”
My gaze honed in on the girls again, Sophie specifically, as I nursed my drink. I didn’t intend to stay long. I had to get up at five the next morning for work. I turned back toward the bar, hunched over my drink, and tried to finish it so I could head back home.
“Vinny! We need another round!” a girl’s voice said sounding more than buzzed.
“No, no,” another girl’s voice argued. “I have to go home. I’m done, Vinny. No more for me. Cut her off, too.”
“Hey,” the first girl said. I ducked my face down hoping they wouldn’t notice me. “Aren’t you that guy from the other night? Oh, my God. You are. Sophie, it’s that guy!”
Sophie looked past her instantly recognizing my face and looking surprisingly pleased to see me, though it may have been the alcohol.
“Sophie, is it?” I asked, knowing damn well exactly who she was.
“Jamison,” she said. “How’d you find this hole in the wall?”
“Flashing neon sign.” I took a sip of my scotch and set the glass down carefully, with intention. “Storm’s bad out there. I’m heading out soon.”
She glanced out the windows. From where we sat, the streetlights were whited out. We were going to need a North Star and a dog sled to get home.
Sophie bit her lip. “Mind if I walk with you? I don’t know if I should walk home alone in this.”
“Not at all,” I said, hiding my shock.
“Mia, you going to be okay?” she asked, turning to her friend who nodded drunkenly. “She lives upstairs. She’ll be fine.” Sophie patted Mia on the back. “Vinny, make sure she gets upstairs, okay?”
“Always,” Vinny said, eyeing me like he was trying to memorize my face as if he were a bodyguard for his two little regulars.
I tossed back the rest of my drink and stood up to button my coat, dreading the cold as Sophie ran o
ff to get her things from their table.
“Ready?” she asked, coming back fully dressed and appropriately bundled up for the blizzard we were about to face.
The jingling of the doorbells provided a jolly send-off into the blistering cold and whipping winds. Sophie’s hood flew down, blowing her dark hair every which way as she squinted to see through the blowing snow. Every step forward brought us closer to our street, and the heavy winds provided more than their fair share of resistance on our journey.
Sophie struggled to keep her hood up, and I reached over to grab her arm. “Walk behind me. It’ll block the wind.”
She tightly gripped the back of my coat as we forged ahead, looking like a two-person conga line, but I didn’t care.
Several long, freezing cold minutes later, we’d arrived at our street.
“You going to be okay from here?” I asked, barely able to see her face through all the flurrying flakes that swirled around us. She nodded, her dark eyes blinking and glassy from the cold. Her place was up ahead. I still had to jet across the street, hoping not to get hit by blinded cars, and make it to my building’s entrance.
“See you around,” she said, lingering longer than she had to. We were both shivering blocks of ice standing in a wind that bit through our layers and froze us all the way to our bones.
I nodded, turning to look for traffic.
“You want some hot chocolate or something?” she asked. “I have some. If you want.”
I’d fully resolved to spend my night alone like I did most nights.
“Yeah,” I said. “I could come up for a bit.”
A short time later, I was sitting on her couch trying to warm my bones as she shuffled around the kitchen in big, fuzzy slippers heating a kettle of hot water on her stove and rambling some small talk about the weather.
I relaxed back into the sofa. Something about Sophie made me feel at ease. Not a lot of women had that effect on me. My entire life I’d always played roles—the overachieving son, the picture-perfect boyfriend. Sophie didn’t place any expectations on me. She was who she was. I was who I was.
The Promise of Everything - Garner-Willoughby Brothers Book Three Page 2
