by AJ Rose
“What are ‘these things’?”
He half-turned and grinned. “Nope. Nice try.”
I smiled, shoving my hands in my pockets to keep from lingering along his neck. He’d attempted to tame his hair so his normal shag was more like a businessman’s, which had always made my mouth water, if I was honest. He walked the line between put together and rugged whenever he dressed up, donning the minimum formality required in order to get by. I loved how he looked all the time, but given how rarely he used to need to dress up—his job was casual dress, given it was a bunch of artists sitting behind computers all day, so jeans and a t-shirt were his staple—it was a treat to see him polished even a little. Who knew what would ever happen if I saw him in black tie. I’d probably need a defibrillator to restart my heart.
“You look nice,” he complimented, giving me a once-over that raised a shiver along my spine. “Even with the noose.” He flipped the end of my tie and I flashed on a memory of him pulling me to him by the knot at my neck once upon a time in some posh bathroom, and frotting us both to an orgasm during which he’d literally held me captive. I think it was his parents’ anniversary party or one of the times they came to the city from Pennsylvania for a show and gifted us a pair of tickets to accompany them. I remembered with a pang how nice they’d always been to me, and wondered what they thought now.
Craig interrupted my musings by slipping his hand through the crook of my elbow and resting his palm on my forearm. “Ready?”
Surprised, I automatically bent my arm to escort him. It wasn’t something we’d done often when we were together, due to my insecurities about looking like a couple in public, but I stood taller whenever we had the opportunity to walk that close. Now, I smiled at him, and when I didn’t disengage after the doorman bid us a good time and we emerged to the street, he raised a brow as if this had been some test. Based on his spreading smile, I’d passed. Guess I was correct in thinking this was a date.
When I realized the limo parked in the loading zone for the building was for us, I halted. “What’s this?”
“Our ride.”
“Okay, now you have to tell me where we’re going.” I tried to keep it light, as though I were just dying to know, and my curiosity wouldn’t be held in check any longer.
“We have a few more minutes until you find out.” He nudged me and stepped to the door the driver held open for us, letting my arm go. “Just go with it.” When I didn’t follow, he looked at me and did a double take. Hurrying back to my side, he must have realized it wasn’t something I could simply go with. “Dane, you’re white as a sheet. Are you okay?”
I closed my eyes and willed myself to be calm, taking deliberate deep breaths. After a moment, I was able to look him in the eye.
“I need to know things about where we’re going, or I won’t be able to get in the car.”
He stared at me, and I cringed, but there didn’t seem to be judgment when he spoke. “What do you need to know?” His hand landed on my upper arm and squeezed, his voice taking on the carefully neutral tone he’d used when I’d gotten sick. “What can I do to make this easier?”
“How big is the room and how many people will be there? Is it a bar or a restaurant? I need to know what I’m walking into. What kind of crowd? Rowdy people rocking out or some sort of work party where everyone’s standing around talking, canned music piped at the perfect volume?” I tried to smile, to play it off like it wasn’t as big a deal as it was. I must have failed, because Craig clucked in sympathy. I hurried on. “Don’t give it away. I just have to know some stuff.”
“Okay, it’s not a bar or restaurant. It’s an airy room. There will probably be a couple hundred people there, but the place could easily fit a thousand with space to mingle and chat. There will be an open bar, but I highly doubt people will be getting hammered and puking on anyone else’s shoes. No loud music, so piped-in classical is a good bet. It’s well lit, not a lot of windows, and will probably be a little on the warm side. You’re wise not to have worn a jacket.” He winked. It was obvious he was doing his best to relax me. It worked, for the most part. My pulse slowed from a gallop to a trot, then to a fast walk, and I shivered as the fall breeze cooled the sweat on my forehead. “Dane, what is going on?”
With sad eyes, I gestured to driver waiting by the open car door. “I’ll explain on the way. I can go now.”
He took my hand and pulled me into the car behind him, then entwined our fingers once we were ensconced inside, gazing at me with concern.
“I have a few new… quirks to deal with,” I began. “Because of the anxiety and PTSD, I have triggers, and if I’m going someplace unknown, I get very nervous. If you’d said we were going to a concert with thousands of people who’d be all smooshed together, I’d have had to suggest something else for entertainment this evening.”
His gaze fell to our linked hands and he swallowed. “I’m sorry, Dane. I should have realized.”
I squeezed his fingers. “No, you shouldn’t have.” When he looked up sharply, I determinedly held his gaze. “I dropped out of your life for two years, Craig. A lot has changed in that time, at least for me. In fact, this is better. We sort of get to rediscover each other, right? Only without me being a cagey bastard about my past,” I tried to joke.
“I was there, Dane, when you… fell apart,” he said, swallowing visibly. “I remember those few days like they were yesterday. I should have known trying to surprise you would be a bad idea.”
“Nah,” I said, my stomach heaving uncomfortably, like the gravity shift when a plane begins to descend. I hated the paradox of me being treated carefully so I could go out in the world and learn how to function without being treated so carefully, but it was particularly bitter that Craig was required to play along.
“So you didn’t spend the last few days freaking out about tonight every time you wondered what I’d planned?”
He had me there. “Well, I won’t say I was entirely comfortable, but generally, I’d go with you just about anywhere. You’re one of the few people I trust wholeheartedly. One of just three I ever let in.”
His brow furrowed. “Me, Holly, and… your brother?”
“Yeah,” I said softly, not wanting to talk about that, but not taking it off the table, either. No secrets anymore, even if it could bring down the date. Luckily for me, he let me change the subject. “Speaking of families, how are your parents?”
“They’re good. Dad finally retired. He makes clocks now.” The oppressive air inside the limo lightened considerably, much to my relief.
I chuckled. “Clocks?”
Craig nodded. “He says it’s better than buying a big, expensive train set to fiddle with, or driving my mother batshit by taking up house space with puzzles. He turned the third bay in their garage into a woodworking area, and he makes these intricate little clocks with tiny little gears, the fussier the better. He kind of reminds me of Doc Brown from Back to the Future. His hair is mostly white now, and he wears these goggles that are magnifying glasses so he can see the small parts. You should see some of the clocks. They’re kind of steampunk. He’s selling them on eBay. The hobby is actually paying for itself, which is cool.”
“Fascinating,” I said. Lawrence Dahl was a gentle giant at close to six-four, and from whom Craig got his easygoing nature. His mother, Isabelle, was much more determined to bend things to her will with charm. She was a force to be reckoned with, her heart of gold assuring she put her iron will to good use. Craig’s father may have been the breadwinner as an executive financial planner, but Isabelle was the one who should have taken over the world. Lord knew it would be a better place if she had.
“Mom got another dog. Said she needed someone warm by her side since Dad disappears with his clocks for entire days at a time.” Craig sobered. We both knew why Isabelle needed a canine by her side, but we were pretending it was a choice, so I played along.
“Let me guess. She got a bichon frisé. Or a poodle.”
Craig snorted
. “She got herself a mastiff. This beast is going to be nearly two hundred pounds when fully grown. He doesn’t leave her side, and she’s training him for her situation.”
I chuckled, and even if it hadn’t been my first thought, the idea of Isabelle having a massive animal like that made a backward sort of sense. She wouldn’t think twice about taming such an animal, never mind turning it into a seizure dog. The year before our breakup, Isabelle had been diagnosed with skin cancer that had left mets on a kidney and in her brain. They were successfully removed, although one of her kidneys hadn’t survived, and her chemo treatment had been the most rigorous available. The disease’s poor odds hadn’t known what had hit them when Isabelle had blown through her treatment and come out the other side like a rockstar, the cancer cowering in remission where it belonged. Unfortunately, the brain surgery hadn’t been entirely complication free, and she now had a seizure disorder and needed a dog to alert her when a seizure was pending so she could move to safety before it hit. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what had happened to the last dog they’d been working with.
“Don’t mastiffs drool a lot?”
He nodded, his eyes gleaming in the dim limo interior. “She’s got him trained to lie on towels placed around the house. When he gets too juicy, she tells him to go wipe his chin, and he actually does it. He’s already bigger than most adult dogs. I swear, I think she plans to ride him around the neighborhood when he’s big enough. She named him Zeus.”
“Fitting. And if your mom can prove she tamed Zeus, there’ll be no stopping her. She already pummeled cancer.”
Craig’s eyes widened and he burst into laughter. “I never thought of that. That’s really good. I’ll have to remember to mention that to her.”
“I’m glad they’re doing well,” I said, somewhat wistful.
He sobered a little, and a pained look flitted over his face, almost indecipherable in the dark interior of the car. “Yeah, they are.”
I didn’t want to know if their opinions of me had changed after I’d broken their son’s heart. No good could come of learning what they might have said, so I didn’t ask. Thankfully, the lull in the conversation didn’t have a chance to turn awkward, as the driver announced that we’d reached our destination.
Through the windows, the name of an exclusive art gallery front and center had me whipping my head around to stare at Craig, who simply shrugged.
“Thought you’d like to see what I’ve been up to lately. Or, well, lately meaning last year. It took me that long to get them looked at. I had to peddle more mainstream stuff first to get a foot in the door.”
“Is this your first gallery show?” I demanded as I followed him out of the car and onto the crowded sidewalk. I’m always a mess before these things, his earlier words rang in my ears. He answered about the same moment I realized what he would say.
“Not exactly, but it’s not like I’ve had a bunch. This is my third.”
“You have arrived,” I said, awed.
His humble shrug and dip of his shoulders spoke of sheepishness I’d never seen in him, but they were endearing. He’d loved his art so much; he’d always been enthusiastic to share it with anyone who would stop and look for a few seconds. It seemed success, however moderate, had cooled his jets, which both made me proud and sad. I hoped the critics were kind to him. Though his humility shouldn’t have been surprising. He knew he was good, but never bragged, never seemed entitled to accolades, and when people praised his talent, he had always responded with a simple, sincere thank you.
“I have all these questions, but I don’t know where to start,” I admitted, holding my arm out to him. This explained his attire, too, how he could get away with not wearing a tie for something obviously requiring dressier clothes. If he was the guest of honor, he could damn well wear whatever he wanted.
Gazing at my offered arm with something resembling longing, he closed his eyes as he took it and let me lead him into the gallery. A sea of faces turned to us, and for a moment, a ball of lightning formed in my throat. I didn’t know if it would rise to my head and ricochet around, electrifying all my panic centers into immediate action at being the center of attention, or if it would sink to the pit of my stomach to power a low hum of energy from which I could feed all evening. I used to rely on that lightning ball to get me through intense surgeries for hours at a time, though I hadn’t felt it in quite a while. Thankfully, it decided south was the way to go, and it sat, sizzling at the base of my spine as we circled the room, stopping to speak with nearly everyone in the vicinity. I realized in short order Craig was the focus of the attention, not me. In between conversations with groups coming forth as the preceding set wandered off to peruse more of Craig’s perfectly displayed work, Craig murmured to me, answering questions before I could even frame them into words.
“Yes, I still get nervous as hell, and not just because people are shelling out stupid sums of money to put my work on their walls, but because several of these people are critics. I’m not sure who all is here tonight, or who will arrive later, but it’s nerve-wracking being the center of attention, having your talent under such scrutiny.”
“Can we actually walk around and see what they’ve displayed when you’re done talking? I don’t want to leave you to the wolves, but I would love to see what you’ve been doing.”
“That’s why I brought you here,” he said, then turned to greet another balding benefactor with a hearty handshake.
I politely declined the offer of a glass of champagne, but I did nibble hors d’oeuvres as they came around, little toast points with unidentifiable meat spreads garnished with sprigs of further unidentifiable leaves. I assumed they were all edible, and I hadn’t eaten much all day with my worry over tonight’s date, so I was grateful for something to settle my belly. When Craig’s current conversation wrapped up, I picked up where we left off.
“Show me what you’ve been working on?”
With a lull in the procession of well-wishers, Craig steered me along until we were in front of one of the pieces, a large canvas done with acrylics in a fairly minimalist style—for Craig. There were fewer colors, starker contrast between light and dark, and fewer gradients. What caught my attention wasn’t the detail but the subject matter.
The painting depicted a stage-dancing couple, brutal spotlight directed on them for a faceless lump of an audience to see. It felt very judgmental to me, the couple very much on trial, though the smiles on their faces were normal, happy even. The man wore a white shirt and black tux pants with the satin stripe up the leg, and the woman wore a vibrant red dancing dress that flowed around her legs as the man held her above him in a lift designed to make her appear swan-like. But their shadows on the curtain were what held my attention. The man-shadow’s hands were not on the woman-shadow’s waist, but around her neck. She was not arched and soaring in triumph, but flailing, desperate to escape.
Craig had titled it Partners.
The next one was no less painful: A pair of young men kissing in front of a shop window, one clearly swooning and ready to fall into the other’s arms (or bed). But the reflection in the shop window showed the kisser with his hand over the kissee’s nose and mouth while the kissee sagged limp in his arms, their faces less than an inch apart. In the reflection, the kisser’s expression was far more sinister. The shopkeeper, a mere shadow behind the counter through the glass, was the shape of an enrobed and hooded Grim Reaper.
It went on, idyllic settings turned on their ear by a hint of menace and destruction. A father was teaching his young girl how to hit a baseball, their shadows painted as though the daughter had swung at her father’s head. A young woman laughed with a friend in a bar, and in the mirror at the back, her eyes bugged out as she choked, her own hands around her neck, the friend laughing with no intention of helping.
The one that disturbed me most was a man sleeping on his couch, apparently snuggled beneath a blanket while snow piled outside the window at his back. One hand trailed toward the floor,
and at his fingertip, a spilled bottle of pills was partially hidden behind the leg of the coffee table that held his book and reading glasses. This one wasn’t a reflection or incongruous shadows. It just looked like a man who’d given up on life and done something about it.
“Craig?” I asked, tentative and trying not to show how disturbed I was.
“Yes?” he said, having remained quiet the entire time I’d walked from painting to painting.
“Is this you?”
“Some nights, he was me. Or rather, the wisp of me, the desperately lonely part of me who needed something and knew he couldn’t have it. The part that had seen beauty, only to have his vision taken away. Yeah. In a way, they’re all me—my anger, my vulnerability, my exposure to prying eyes, my despair.”
“When did you paint these?”
He shrugged, but didn’t back down from my questions. “Most of it in the months after you left. It wasn’t a beautiful place to be. If I hadn’t done these, I might have ended up on the couch under that blanket for real. This was how I got the poison out.” He looked around, then leaned close, the barest of smiles tilting his mouth. “Is it just me, or is it kind of disturbing people want this hanging on their walls? If you ask me, that’s creepy.”
I smiled, but knew it didn’t reach my eyes. I pinned him with a stare, ignoring what he’d said. “Because of me, though? All this was my doing?”
He sighed and led me to an angled place in the wall that sort of hid an odd niche where nothing was displayed, allowing us a modicum of privacy to talk without interruption.
“No, not all of it was your doing. Some was mine. I wallowed for a while. But in the beginning, when I painted the dancing stage couple, and the kissing couple, yeah.”
“Why did you want me to see this again?” I asked, trying not to get upset or angry. Was he trying to remind me how despicable I’d been?
“Because the title of the whole show is The Ones We Love. It’s a commentary on how we hurt them, but in each one, there’s a point of hope, too. The dancing couple aren’t really fighting. They’re actually happy, and their problems really are but shadows. The kissers are head over heels for each other. The father and daughter are playing in real life, the bar girls having a good time out for an evening. The dangers, those are just hints of the overall picture, sometimes possibilities that may never come to fruition. It’s not the focus.”
