Always the Last to Know by Kristan Higgins Page 0,128

bucket for the leaks. The sound of the dripping was strangely companionable. Pepper was asleep on the couch, curled into her little cinnamon bun position, snoring gently.

Me, I was painting. Painting something because I wanted to, not because it matched a comforter or a couch.

Without a lot of forethought, I’d gotten out my paints, set up my easel, taken a canvas, prepped it and, before I could talk myself out of it, squeezed out the delicious, shiny blobs of oil paint onto my palette—cadmium red, cerulean blue, burnt umber, titanium white, Naples yellow, magenta, black—and put paint on canvas as fast as I could.

The sky.

I was painting the sky, lost in the smell of the oil paint, the bite of turpentine, the swirl of colors, the gentle, wet whisper of the brush against the canvas. The sun, the clouds, the sea.

A sunset, the most painted scene in the world, and I didn’t care. I was lost in colors—and the infinite possibilities of mixing shades that created turquoise, lavender, purple, rose. Pushing the paint, dragging it, twisting it, dabbing, brushing, watching in an almost out-of-body experience as the sky began to form.

This wasn’t a couch painting. This was an impulse. Instinct. For weeks, I’d been wanting to paint the sky, and I’d found all sorts of reasons not to start.

Today was different. Now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop. Lightening the red here, bringing up the blue, adding more black and purple to the water and the clouds. Time was marked by the dripping in the bucket and the shifting gray afternoon light, and that was all.

I had nowhere to go. A branch had fallen just behind the car this morning (thank God it hadn’t fallen on the car, since it was Juliet’s). It was big enough that I couldn’t drag it out of the way; I’d need a chainsaw to cut it and move it. I’d called Mom and Juliet and let them know I was stuck for the day, and an hour later, the storm knocked out the power. I had a battery lantern on in the kitchen, and the gray, watery light poured through the new windows Noah had put in.

So I was stuck, and I could do nothing outside, and I had to release some of the energy and electricity that had been building since my marathon make-out session with Noah.

Somewhere around one a.m. that night, he’d said, “I better go,” and we disentangled from each other. I was barely able to stand, so turned on I felt like I could float, but also like my legs wouldn’t hold me. Noah was in no better shape.

“Time for a swim in the Sound,” he said. “Hope the water’s cold enough.”

“I wish I could come with you,” I said, and we were kissing again. It took him fifteen minutes to get from the living room to the door, because we just couldn’t stop kissing, touching, winding ourselves around each other, our hands stopping to admire, caress, feel.

Finally, he caught both my hands in his and kissed them. Then he just looked at me, his hair tangled and wild, his eyes so dark and happy, and he smiled, and finally left the house, leaving me to collapse on the couch in a pile of raging pheromones.

Joy. That’s what it was. It was joy. Whatever our future was, it was best to stay right here, right now, and let the joy fill me and lift me, because Noah and I were something. I didn’t know what, but we were something to each other, and something important.

For now, that was enough. I didn’t let myself think past that.

And it clearly had an effect on my mood. My house was immaculate, Pepper and I had gone for a five-mile run last night, knowing the storm would keep us inside. I sanded the butcher-block island I’d bought on Etsy, oiled it and then made spaghetti sauce from scratch.

Today, when the branch fell and the power went out, I busted out the paints.

It was time. All that joy, that floating, buoyant emotion, needed to come out on a canvas.

God, I’d missed this. It felt so good to see the painting bloom as my brush danced and bustled. All these weeks I’d been in this house staring west in the evenings, watching the sunset, the moon rise, the rain blow the reeds of the salt marsh. For the first time in years, painting once again felt like my destiny. For the first time since I could