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“All done painting?” he asks.
“For now,” I say.
“That’s a good answer. It means you plan to pick up that brush again tomorrow. Do I get to see today’s work?”
“No,” I say without hesitation. “You already saw it before it was finished.”
“And what, Faith, makes a painting of me ‘finished’?”
“I’ll know when it happens.”
“But we’ve established it won’t be tonight.”
“No,” I say. “It won’t be tonight.”
There’s an implication there that he will be around to see it another day—or night—but, unique for Nick, he doesn’t push. Instead, his gaze lifts beyond my shoulder, and he scans what I know to be the now shadowy horizon. “It’s peaceful here,” he says. “I see why you were drawn to this place.”
“It’s easy to feel alone here.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Yes,” I say, my stare unwaveringly on his, my answer the truth, for so many reasons I will never explain to anyone.
His eyes hold mine as well, and that warmth I’d seen in his stare minutes before expands between us. “Tonight, Faith?”
“No,” I say softly, because while alone is good, he feels better. “Not tonight.”
His big hands come down on my waist, and he pulls me to him, our bodies flush, and when his gaze lowers to my mouth and lingers, I know he is thinking about kissing me. I desperately want him to kiss me. But he does not. Instead he says, “How about those gourmet pancakes?”
“Mine or yours?” I ask, finding a smile isn’t as hard to come by with this man as I’d once thought.
“I’m thinking we better go with mine,” he says. “But we’re going to have to make a run to the store.”
To the store.
With Nick.
Hard limit number two:Just sex. Don’t get personal.
I have to put the brakes on everything but sex.
I should tell him this, but he’s laced his fingers with mine, and he’s leading me toward the stairs.
…
I repeat my new hard limit often for the next hour. In my head, and not to him, and I do this for what I consider a logical reason. He likes a challenge. I’m not going to issue him one on something I can’t afford for him to win. So over and over, I mentally recite: Hard limit number two:Just sex.Don’t get personal.
The first roadblock to maintaining that limit is that I go to the store with Nick in the first place. I should have said no to this trip, but the fact that he’s absolutely consuming, assuming, and arrogant while there should have made limit number two easy to follow. The opposite proves true. I learn little things about him, and he learns little things about me, like that I hate mushrooms and he hates olives. He loves orange juice, and so do I. Cereal is a necessity, the more marshmallows the better.
In other words: Hard limit number two is afailure.And when it comes to Nick Rogers,resistance is futile.
The man finds ways to touch me the entire time we’re in the store, drawing attention to us that he seems to enjoy, while I dread the wagging tongues to follow. And I know every moment that I should tell myself to back him off, but I don’t. Instead, I help him load up bags with nuts, strawberries, cream, and various other items, and before long we are back in my kitchen, both of us working on his specialty pancakes. And we’re talking too much. We have on too many clothes. This is not what I signed up for, but I don’t stop it from happening. Somehow, we end up on my bed with our clothes on but no shoes, eating pancakes. Talking again.
There is so much—too much—talking going on. And yet I’m doing a lot of the talking. What is wrong with me? “Tell me about your most memorable courtroom experiences,” I prod, my excuse for prodding my need to finish my painting, to finish the story in his eyes.
Nick laughs. “Where to start?” He considers several moments. “Okay. How’s this for memorable? I’m giving the biggest closing argument of my very young career at the time, and I have enough adrenaline pumping through me to fuel an eighteen-wheeler. I’m halfway through it, and it’s going well. Really damn well.”
“And you nailed it.”
