He surveyed the attic. The table he’d used for the paints and supplies looked like a small tornado had hit it. At his father’s house, he had always prided himself on keeping a tidy studio. Something another of his artist-mentors had drilled into him: “A clean studio promotes creativity.”
Between the painting—the mere fact of the painting—and the chaos of the space, it looked like he’d been on a bender of sorts. And like an addict the morning after, shame flooded his gut. He had fallen short of his own expectations. To be disappointed by someone else was one thing. To disappoint oneself? Unacceptable.
He hadn’t purchased any gesso. But it wasn’t enough to toss the canvas. He picked up the tube of Ivory Black Extra, squirted its entire contents on his palette, picked up a size twelve flat brush, and got started.
He was almost done when Emmy—the real one—appeared.
“What are you doing?”
Okay, that had come out wrong. Emmy could hear how shrill she sounded, like she was a mother catching her kid smoking pot in the attic.
Evan whirled, his shirtless chest covered with specks of paint, mostly black. She had watched him for a few moments before asking the question, so she already knew the answer. He was covering up a painting. She couldn’t tell what the original image had been, but he’d been making long, globby, angry strokes with a brush loaded with black paint to methodically cover it up. All that was left was an unidentifiable pink-beige thing that looked like it might have been an arm.
“Get out,” he said. The command wasn’t hurled in anger. Anger would have been preferable, actually, to the eerie calmness with which he spoke.
She did not obey. “Why are you covering that painting?”
“Because I don’t paint,” he said, voice rising—there was some anger suddenly. “Which you would know if you had listened to me today.”
“And yet you appear to be painting,” she said, smiling as the observation he had made about her a day ago—And yet you appear to be crying—echoed through her mind.
He stepped closer, putting himself directly under the naked bulb that swung from the ceiling, and she almost gasped. He wasn’t angry; he was distraught. There was a wildness in his eyes that she had never seen before. It was different from the intense look he’d leveled at her while she was playing for him earlier, less controlled, even a little feral.
“What’s more,” she said, teasing him, hoping to puncture the heavy, charged atmosphere, to bring him back to himself, “you appear to be painting in the least well-lit space in your enormous house.” Her joking did not have the desired effect: he took a step closer, but did not speak.
Until he did. “Goddammit, Emmy. I don’t paint.”
“Okay,” she started to say. She’d been going to retreat then—know when to fold ’em and all that. It was his house. If he wanted to paint/not paint alone in the attic, that was his prerogative. She’d been headed to bed anyway, after an afternoon of moderately-successful songwriting and very successful OkCupid profile writing with Mrs. Johansen. She’d heard Evan banging around in the attic, and had left him alone all evening, eating some of the leftover tuna casserole alone in the kitchen before finally giving in to the impulse to come up and say goodnight.
He was so fast that she didn’t catch up with what was happening until it was happening. His hands landed on the sides of her face, warm and insistent, the pads of his fingers pressing down hard as he tilted her head back and crashed his mouth down on hers. And just like that, their stupid confrontation was gone, evaporated, replaced by a spike of need so strong and gritty that she had to grab his shoulders to keep herself upright. Her skin came alive, as if it were made of millions of tiny, dried-out cells that were shifting, clamoring for the relief that pressing herself against him could bring.
Lifting onto her tiptoes, she parted her lips and sighed against his mouth. The answering groan as he thrust his tongue in made her bold, and she met him stroke for stroke until all she could see was the need he created. It was red. It was blinding. It made her breasts hurt and the low, pulsing ache in her core deepen like he was wearing a groove in her being.
Could he have heard her silent pleas? Because at that moment, one hand fell from her face. She wanted to protest the loss of the steady, anchoring caress, but then his fingers lifted the hem of her tank top. When he found nothing underneath it but her, another groan ripped from his throat. “Fuck, Emmy.” He cupped a breast in one of his hands.
“Oh!” She gasped as the first hand was joined by the second, but this one, instead of pressing, grazed her swollen nipple on the other side. The juxtaposition between one hand roughly kneading and the other barely flicking lanced her with a white-hot lust more intense than any she had ever experienced.
And then they were walking, shuffling really—he forward as he propelled her backward, marching her deeper into the dim attic until her butt banged up against the edge of a table. He reached one arm around her and used it to sweep everything from the surface. Brushes and tubes of paint and bottles of liquid she couldn’t identify crashed to the ground. He pressed her down and pulled up her tank top in a single fluid motion, stopping only when he’d lowered his mouth to one aching nipple, already made oversensitive by his touch. She hissed when a flick of his teeth was quickly replaced by the laving of his tongue.
“You like that?” he rasped.
Unable to make her mouth form words, she could only nod vigorously. He wasn’t paying attention, though. His world—and hers—seemed to have shrunk to the diameter of her left nipple.
She wanted to touch him, to touch his bare skin, so she moved to press back against his hold, only to discover that he wasn’t holding her arms down. It had only felt so: his touch, his mouth, everything about him had seemed to immobilize her. It was a shock to realize that she had been lying prostrate of her own volition, while rivers of desire coursed through her limbs.
Almost angry with herself for the lost opportunity, she reached for him. But when the back of her hand brushed against taut abs, he hissed and let go of her, holding his hands suspended above her breasts, frozen in space.
Suddenly, reanimated, he ran his hands through his hair and hissed again, but this time it was a long, slow exhalation, like the air coming out of a pinhole poked into a balloon. Then he pulled her shirt down and lowered his forehead to hers. She tried to grab his head, to position his lips over hers, but he resisted, shaking his head, a silent no rubbing their noses together.
“Oh my God.” The horror in his voice was unmistakable, and it was a bucket of cold water over her desire. “I’m so sorry.”
He pulled away as she shook her head, trying but failing to find the words to absolve him.
“I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t get entangled with Emerson Quinn.”
It wasn’t lost on her that he’d said “Emerson Quinn” and not “you,” like there were two versions of her, and one of them was lethal.
The worst part was, he was right.
“I know. It won’t—”
“And you can’t do this either.” He spoke over her as he paced away, still raking his hands through his hair. “This is your summer of independence.”
Right.
And it was so like her to forget that. Stupid, she berated herself. So, so stupid. This was how it always happened. She let herself stand in front of a man and just…melt. Subsume all her plans, her goals, her self into the feelings he could create in her without a care for how fleeting they were likely to be.
He turned, having reached the far corner of the attic.
Then he said, simply, “Stay.”
“What?” She bolted to sitting. “What are you talking about?”
“This summer. Stay for the summer and write your songs. Get yourself back.”
When she didn’t answer immediately, he crossed back over to her, covering the distance between them in a few big steps. Looking down at her—she was still sitting on the table—he said, “You don’t have anywhere to go, do you?”
He must have taken her continued silence for agreement—and it was, wasn’t it? She’d all but admitted as much yesterday.
“That song from earlier,” he said. “It was amazing. You have to finish it—and others. Are there others?”
“I hope so,” she said, her voice appallingly shaky. She was ridiculously pleased that despite his apparent lukewarm reception earlier, he’d actually liked the song she’d played for him.
“Then stay. Work.”
She wasn’t sure what to say, so she just whispered, “Thank you.”
He took a deep breath before offering her his hand. She took it, and he levered her up and off the table.
His face had grown hard, grim. She struggled to reconcile his apparent upset with the generous invitation—and compliment, she thought—he’d bestowed on her. The minute she found her feet, he dropped her hand.
“But this,” he said, waving his hand back and forth in the space between them. “I’m sorry again about this. I got…carried away.”
“It’s okay,” she said, smiling sheepishly. “I did too.” Understatement of the year.
“This can’t happen again,” he said.
“Right. I am one hundred percent in agreement. It’s my Summer of No Men,” she said. Because it was.
He softened then, and shot her a half-smile. “Go on downstairs. I’m going to clean up here.”
She took herself down the stairs on leaden legs. This had been a weird, ill-advised episode, but she would feel better tomorrow. And she had a place to stay. A longer respite than she’d dared to hope for.
Exactly what she’d been chasing by coming here.
Flipping on the light in the little bathroom that adjoined the guest bedroom she’d chosen, she lifted her eyes to her reflection.
Her face was covered in paint.
Chapter Seven
Emmy got up early the next morning. It was the damned birds. Her room looked over Evan’s enormous backyard, which was verdant with willows and a bunch of other trees and bushes she couldn’t name but were apparently home to approximately seven million chirping and hooting residents of the avian persuasion. Her house in the hills was on a fair parcel of treed land, but she had never heard anything like the wild kingdom symphony that was Evan’s yard. But of course, she would never dare to sleep with the windows open at home, so who knew?
She checked her phone. There was a string of middle-of-the-night texts from Tony. After her encounter with Evan in the attic last night, she’d been unable to sleep, so she’d continued working on the song she’d started earlier in the day and had sent Tony a crude recording of her progress, as well as the song she’d written the day before and played for Evan, before she had finally forced herself to go to bed around midnight.
Holy shit: That’s two days’ work?
If I’d known this was what you were going to come up with, I’d have dumped you in a cornfield years ago. Forget L.A., we should have gone straight to Iowa.
Seriously, Em, both these songs are AMAZING.
Stay there. Keep working. I’ll cover for you. B&C have been calling. I’ll think of something to tell them.
She laughed. That was certainly true. They’d been calling her constantly since she left. In addition to the texts from Tony this morning, she had a bunch from her increasingly agitated managers. Voicemails, too. She went back to Tony’s epic string of texts.
And let me save you the typing: YOU WERE RIGHT AND I WAS WRONG.
Let me know if you need anything. xo
Warmed by the positive feedback—Tony didn’t do false flattery—she typed a reply.
I need some money. I don’t want Brian and Claudia to find me. Am I paranoid that I don’t want to use my existing credit cards? Can you send me a new one? Or wire me some cash somehow? I’m planning to stay the whole summer.
Then she deleted all the messages from her managers and typed one more to Tony.
I’m going to get a new phone, too. I want to cut out the noise and focus. I’m not going to put any social media on it. I’ll text you with the number ASAP.
Wow. So she was really doing this. Going into hiding for the whole summer. She didn’t know if the tingles spreading from her stomach up through her chest were exhilaration or fear. Or hell, maybe it was just residual lust from last night.
Right. Time to think about something else. She glanced at the clock radio on the nightstand. Five in the morning. What did normal people do at five in the morning?
Well, she was pretty sure that most normal people were asleep at five in the morning, but that was not happening—she was too excited to sleep. She looked around her room as if it would provide a clue to what her next move should be. There was a still life on the wall that she suspected had come with the house, a classic fruit bowl.
“Breakfast!” she exclaimed. All right, then. Time to get some shit done.
After rummaging through Evan’s pantry and finding a carton of old-fashioned oats, she looked up “how to make oatmeal” on her phone and was delighted when following the directions yielded a bowl of hot cereal that was actually edible. She ate some and left the rest on the stove in case Evan wanted some.
High on her culinary triumph, she did the dishes and wiped down the kitchen. Then, on a whim, having spotted a broom in the pantry, she moved on to sweeping the cracked linoleum floor. Evan, it seemed, was the quintessential absentminded professor when it came to his house. It wasn’t that things were terribly dirty, more that everything was dull and dusty and in need of a little TLC. And clearly he had only half unpacked, judging by the number of unopened boxes stacked in pretty much every room.
It was kind of heady, actually, doing domestic stuff. She didn’t know how to cook. In her starving artist phase, which she’d gone through in lieu of college, she had subsisted on ramen noodles and cheap take-out. These days, she was always on the road, but somehow healthy, organic meals appeared when she wanted them. But cleaning? She was embarrassed to admit that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d cleaned anything. She had forgotten how satisfying it could be to do something simple with your own hands that led to an immediate improvement in your environment.
“Emmy.”
Startled, she looked up from her sweeping to find a sleep-disheveled Evan wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. Not that she, in her tiny sleep shorts and camisole, was particularly modestly dressed either. It needed to cool off in this town so they could wear some actual clothes. Evan’s whole “this can’t happen again” thing was going to be a lot harder if he was going to parade around nearly naked.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, eyeing her broom and running a hand though his hair, which was sticking up at all angles.
He was adorable, but also something else. Something more like…dangerous. It was harder than it should have been to drag her gaze from his sculpted pecs. There was something about the juxtaposition between his persona—the art professor with the horn-rimmed glasses—and his unexpectedly buff body. Her skin tingled. An awareness crackled between them that hadn’t been there before. Of course, it was last night’s kiss. Last night’s more-than-kiss. “You must work out.”
Oh, shit. Had she said that out loud? She clamped a hand over her mouth. She knew he worked out—she’d seen his home gym in the basement when he’d given her a tour of the house two days ago.
He didn’t respond, merely raised his eyebrows, grabbed a hoodie that was hanging over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, and shrugged into it—never mind that it was seven hundred degrees in the kitchen.
She cleared her throat and didn’t even bother hoping she wasn’t blushing—if it was seven hundred degrees in the kitchen, it was seven thousand degrees on the skin of her face.
“I know I don’t have to,” she said, gesturing toward the broom she still held. “But I wanted to make myself useful.” It was the truth. She was so grateful he was putting her up for the summer. But more than that, it felt good to do something tangible.
“You’re not Cinderella. You don’t have to earn your keep.”
“You said you had all this work you wanted to do on the house, but you hadn’t found the time. Let me help with that.”
He cocked his head and regarded her silently.
“I can’t write songs all day long,” she argued. That’s how things would have been at the Beverly Wilshire. But she wanted this album to be…different. Less forced, more organic. “I got a second song roughed out yesterday, but it’ll be better if I have something else to do. And apparently I’m going to get up at five every day. How do you sleep through those birds in the morning?”
He chuckled. “It did take a while to get used to it.”
“Come on,” she said. “You have your classes and this big tenure bid to worry about—you’re gonna have to explain that to me. I don’t really understand it. But the point is, if I’m going to be rattling around this house all summer, you might as well put me to work.” When he didn’t answer, she said, “I made oatmeal.” He didn’t know that was akin to saying, “I aced the SATs.”
He moved to the stove and served himself some. He leaned against the counter and took a bite. “This is good.”
She thrilled at the praise, as if he’d awarded her a Grammy rather than said a kind word about porridge.
“I mushed up a banana in it and added some cinnamon,” she said, not telling him that twist had been straight out of the list of “variations” on the wikiHow “How to make oatmeal” post she’d consulted and not the product of her own culinary genius.
“Mrs. Johansen keeps me in casseroles,” Evan said, “but I have to say, sometimes a guy just wants, I don’t know, a burger or something. Or a fresh vegetable.” He flashed her a self-deprecating smile. “Unlike you, I’m not much of a cook.”
She beamed back at him. “Burgers! I’ll make us burgers for dinner tonight.” How hard could it be? “And back to the house. Let me help you with it. There are boxes everywhere, but I’m not sure if they’re yours or if they came with the house.”
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