the forehead before he told you good night, the voice in her head reminded her.
That’s different, she argued.
And then there was the rape. You were close to Terrance during that horrible ordeal, the pesky voice reminded her.
Don’t ever compare Josh to that monster, she said silently.
“Are you all right?” Josh yelled over the roar of the engine and the wind. “I can feel your heart racing.”
“I’m fine,” she answered. “I can feel your heart doing the same.” She amazed herself when she tapped her fingers on the left side of his chest. She was flirting, and it didn’t feel weird.
“Only other time I’ve had a girl pressed up against me was when I woke up this morning,” he admitted.
“You’ve never dated?” she asked.
“Nope.” He stopped the vehicle and turned off the engine. “Don’t get off. I just wanted you to see the cottontail rabbit over there against that big cow’s tongue cactus. He’d be a real cutie for one of your paintings.”
The bunny was sitting up on his hind feet and staring right at them. She took her new phone from her hip pocket and took a picture of him. “I can see him sitting at the end of a rainbow,” she whispered.
“Or maybe with a stylized cactus behind him. He’d be the only real-looking thing in the picture,” Josh suggested.
“Purple cactus with pink spines.” She thought again of what Sophie had said about the liberties an artist could take with her work.
“Might be interesting.” Josh fired up the engine.
She tucked the phone back into the hip pocket of her jeans and wrapped her arms back around him. Then they were off again. The mountain range didn’t look nearly as tall when Emma viewed it from the trailer, but the closer they got to the shade that it threw, the bigger it was.
Josh parked the four-wheeler under a big scrub oak tree. She moved her arms so he could hop off, and then she slung a leg over the seat and did the same. He got out their supplies and a quilt from the saddlebags.
“You thought of everything,” she said.
“This ain’t my first time to come out here. I even discovered a cave about a quarter of the way up the mountain.” He grinned. “We’ll spread this out and have a little snack. Then we’ll just let the ideas for future projects come to us.”
“How do we do that?” Emma asked.
“The ideas?” Josh whipped the quilt up into the air, let it fall, and then smoothed it out. “You just lay down on your back and stare at the tree limbs and leaves and even the clouds. You clear your mind of everything and wait. When you get an idea, you write it down. I brought two small notebooks—one for you and one for me.”
“Couldn’t we just make a note in our phone?” she asked.
“Of course, but I always back up everything with notes in case I lose my phone. You can use the notes app on your phone, but there’s no service when we’re this far out. That picture you took of the bunny was about the last place that got reception,” he explained. “We can spend the whole day until dark, or if nothing comes to mind, we can go home anytime we want.”
She opened her backpack and brought out two bottles of water and some snacks that she’d packed, thinking the whole time that she should have tucked in more. But then, she hadn’t figured on spending the whole day. And ideas about painting? Forget that when she was stretched out beside Josh on a quilt all day. Her mind would be going in circles about him and what Filly had said about hunting for truth, love, and inspiration, not thinking about pictures to produce for Leo and Sophie.
Josh handed her a protein bar and a bottle of apple juice. “There’s”—he blushed—“I don’t know how to say this”—he rolled his eyes up toward the sky—“but if you need it, there’s toilet paper and a small trenching tool in my backpack.”
“I brought some, too, but I didn’t think of a little shovel.” She’d lay dollars to doughnuts that Sophie never had to discuss such things on her first date with Teddy. She opened the protein bar and took a bite. Forget love, inspiration, and truth. I’m hunting for the new me.
Josh handed her a small notebook and a sharpened pencil, finished the last of his snack, and stretched out on his back. “Those clouds look like an angel.