here?
Everyone would know I’d gotten one. As it was, people still asked me if I had talked to the hot artist from the festival.
The answer was no.
No, I had not, and I didn’t intend to.
Not really.
Probably not.
But now?
Quickly, I did my business and washed my hands. I took my smock with me, but I hung it up in our little locker area. I didn’t have a customer for another hour. That was just enough time to go to the pharmacy in the next town over.
I really didn’t want to be the next bit of gossip fodder in this town.
But if I was pregnant…
The timing was all wrong. The situation was crazy. I wasn’t ready to be a mother.
Or was I?
Chapter Eleven
CALLUM
My car was the cause of my life stress.
I should sell it.
Burn it?
Nah, too hasty. Selling it was a good idea. To someone far enough away that I would never take the chance of seeing it again on the street. A person in Idaho, for example. I never went to Idaho. That had to be safe.
I even went online and searched for a small town in that state with a dealership that might want to buy back my baby. I was that desperate.
Or insane, take your pick.
I’d stayed up too late grading papers several nights in a row, which had led to a recent dependence on Death by Coffee. Turned out they weren’t lying. Once you got on that stuff, it was hard to get off of it.
Who needed sleep, right?
Well, it turned out I did. Since my breakup—did it count as a breakup if our entire relationship had lasted under thirty-six hours?—and the start of the semester had worn me raw, I obviously should not be making big life choices.
So, naturally, I made several.
I didn’t sell my car. I did, however, agree to move my appointment for custom work to mid-February. Specifically, February 14th. A day I was guaranteed not to be busy, since I’d been dropped faster than tequila made a woman’s clothes come off.
Also, I was never voluntarily listening to the country channel on satellite radio again.
But as that date drew closer and my loneliness grew deeper instead of lessening, I began to consider the paths life had taken me on. Specifically, how I’d ended up in Crescent Cove and when I was going back.
There could be a message that I wasn’t seeing.
Sure, certain heartbreak and an early onset midlife crisis seemed like the likely ones. But I was an artist. Trained to look deeper.
An artist who was doing a series of paintings on the one woman I was supposed to be forgetting. So far, that wasn’t working out too well. Not to mention I was dreaming about her so much that I had no choice but to get them out of my head and on to paper.
I looked between the trio of canvases I had on easels in my studio. What I should’ve done was put them up for consignment—once they were finished anyway. The last thing I needed were more reminders of her.
Though it didn’t matter, because I thought of her all day every day anyway.
The first one was an amalgamation of that charcoal drawing I’d done in the park the day after our kiss. I’d changed her attire from just the scarf to the white dress shirt I’d dreamed of the night we’d been together. The material draped over her curves, clinging to her in some places and falling loosely in others.
Of course I kept dreaming about her in it.
I was near obsessed with getting everything down. The interesting shadows that teased the juncture of her thighs, mostly hidden by her shirttails. My shirttails, the buttons strategically undone. Her long hair dipped over one eye.
She made the perfect ingenue.
Perfectly unattainable.
In the second painting, she was different, although the changes were modest. Her hair was just a bit wilder, her shoulders back, the shirt barely held closed. More shadows. More defiance in every line of her body. Her beauty fisted my throat and made the sweeps of my paintbrush erratic.
I tried to catalog every detail, to show the subtle changes from the first. I didn’t know why I’d done a series. We’d only had that one stolen night. It wasn’t as if I’d seen her evolve. I never would.
The third canvas was bare.
I didn’t know what I’d do for that one. I’d just known I had to do three.
After I’d worked for a while getting the shading just right of her hair over her shoulder,