from me.
Strangely, his canvas was blank. He had a full palette of paints and several brushes in front of him but he hadn’t made a single stroke.
I ran my finger down his arm then picked up his discarded brush. “Not in the mood to paint today?”
He took a deep breath and reached for the brush, looking at me expectantly.
“Do you want me to tell you about my day?”
Liam dipped his brush in the light blue paint and made a line across the top of the canvas. Then he pulled the brush away and looked at me again.
I smiled and slid down the wall until my ass was on the ground. “Okay, fine. I’ll talk while you paint.”
He dipped the brush again and turned fully toward the canvas while I explained how my day had gone.
“I guess I’ll start at the beginning.” I leaned my head against the wall, unintentionally reliving the worst day of my life. “My dad died when I was thirteen. We were camping and he had a heart attack. I was just waking up and he was coming back from a walk when he fell to the ground.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what Liam understood, but I could tell by the tension in his body that he felt my pain as if it were his own.
“We had hiked in almost two miles to get to the camp site. Dad‘s phone didn’t have a signal, and I couldn’t carry him, so I ran his phone all the way back to the car to get a signal so I could call for help. He had been alone for more than an hour before a ranger and paramedic finally came to help. God, I was so scared. I remember leaning against a tree and crying as the men hovered over my dad. The flap on our little orange tent was slapping against the side of it and that noise seemed so loud as I watched the men try to resuscitate my dad. It was like a timer counting down the last seconds of his life.”
A single tear escaped from the corner of my eye, so I flicked it away and cleared the lump from my throat. “Anyway, that was ten years ago. That’s where I was today. I went with my mom to visit his grave. We do it every year, but it still makes me sad. When I was younger, I really hated going. I believed it was my fault he was gone. The doctors said he probably died instantly and there was nothing I could have done to save him…but it wasn’t until I was an adult before I really understood that. Now it just makes me sad that Mom is all by herself. I wish she had someone to love.”
Liam sighed heavily but kept painting without turning around. He didn’t make noises very often, which made me think I was depressing him too.
I didn’t mean to be such a downer so I hopped up to my feet and stretched my back. “How about I go get some snacks. I’ll be right back.”
Liam didn’t look up as he kept working, more focused than usual as he tried to express his own emotions without the verbal diarrhea I’d just unloaded on him.
When I returned from the kitchen with bottles of Gatorade and a box of Oreos, Liam’s brushes were soaking in a cup of solvent and he was staring out the window, watching a hummingbird nip at a trumpet flower growing up the trellis attached to the house. I’d caught him glancing at it before, but this time seemed different.
He seemed different.
“Hey, bud. Everything okay?”
He inhaled deeply but didn’t respond. That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that the canvas he’d been working on was already off his easel and leaning against the wall…with the backside facing me.
“What happened to your picture?” I walked over to it and reached for the canvas without actually lifting it up. “Can I see it?”
Liam turned toward me and crossed his arms over his chest.
As I lifted the canvas, I kept my eyes on him, waiting for some kind of indicator that he didn’t want me to look. When his posture didn’t change at all, I pulled my gaze from his gorgeous face to the freshly painted scene. My breath hitched and I almost dropped the canvas to the ground.
The picture wasn’t the same one he always painted. The only picture I’d seen him paint in all the time I’d known him. It wasn’t