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Reluctantly, I returned everything to my bag, turned off both lights, and slid under the blankets of the absurdly small bed. Who used full-sized beds anymore? I’d had a bigger bed as a kid. My feet practically hung off the end of this one.
June settled in, letting loose a contended sigh, and curled up into a ball on her edge, which was more like the middle anyway. I reached over and dragged her across the sliver of space, fitting her against my stomach.
She snuggled closer. “You smell good.”
“Mm,” I said, sleep already settling over my tired mind. Keeping June alive had me more exhausted than my medical residency days.
A few seconds ticked by and then June said, “Thank you, Amos. That was really everything I hoped it would be.”
“Mm,” I said again, although my brain plucked at that, setting it aside to inspect later because it was a strange way to thank someone for sex. But then June’s breathing settled into a deep, restful rhythm, and I sank into dreams with her.
* * *
I sat beside June, watching her paintbrush as it dappled magic highlights and shadows on a spring tree, turning it from a random blob of colors to a hyper-detailed birch. Behind the tree, majestic mountains like the ones she’d stopped to sketch on our drive up here, had been dropped in perfect proportion to the trees and flowers in the foreground.
Everything had started out darker, and as she moved closer in perspective, the colors grew lighter. I didn’t know how she had done it, but she’d taken elements from our surroundings and fashioned them into a “sketch” of a fairytale forest. The fact that she considered this a sketch boggled my mind, but she’d insisted it was the crucial first step to painting a large mural for one of her clients.
While June sat in her camp chair and stroked away at the canvas on an easel, I jotted down words and phrases that drifted through my mind as I watched her. We’d set up on the edge of campus facing a wall of trees that bordered towering mountains like natural wainscoting. Stray, puffy clouds floated over the dazzling blue sky overhead, and it finally felt like summer with the sun warming my shoulders and the back of my neck.
Miracle of miracles, Carla had planned the “Imagination Oasis” this morning to help us find our “calm center” when dealing with conflict resolution in the future. I didn’t know how writing poetry now would help me stay calm when June inevitably mashed every last button on my patience control panel in the future, but sure. Oasis. Nice. At least it kept June from pushing her already taxed lungs and might give her a chance to recover.
June looked over at me with a bit of green paint smudged on her chin. “How long have you been writing poetry?”
I shrugged, scratching out a phrase. “Since I could legibly put two words together. It’s my ‘Imagination Oasis’ if you will.”
She snickered and then cocked her head, examining her painting. “I kind of hate it.”
“Stop,” I intoned. “It’s a commission for a kid. It’s fine.”
“Yes, but it still represents who I am as an artist,” she said defensively.
“Well, it represents you as an artist who is clearly skilled at what she does. I wouldn’t worry,” I said simply.
She turned a soft smile on me, which quickly puckered with mischief. “Aww, Brady. Youlikeme.” I rolled my eyes. “Brady and Matthews, hiding in a tree,” she sang. Then, veering off course from the song, she continued, “to run from a psycho moose, hee, hee, hee.”
“Wow. That was beautiful,” I said sarcastically, not looking up from my book.
“It did rhyme,” she said with a lofty tilt of her chin.
“’Hee’ is not a word, June.”
“It’s an onomatopoeia. Spellthatin chocolate, mister. I dare you.”
I leaned over in my camp chair so my lips hovered inches from her surprised face. “Careful what you ask for, Cupcake.”
June’s cheeks flushed and an imp-like gleam entered her forest green eyes. She had one dimple on her right cheek that peeked out as she smiled and asked, “Please?”
I released a breathy laugh, leaning away and shaking my head.
“So that’s a no, then? That’s okay.” She turned back to her painting and sketched out shapes along the forest floor with dark paint. “We can use something else next time. Ooh, caramel.”
I smoothed away a smile. Honestly, I’d expected June to do the whole “let’s define this” bit when we’d woken this morning. But no, she had popped out of bed and danced her way through her morning routine like a daffodil in a breeze. She didn’t seem phased by the fact that she’d almost died or that she’d had sex with her boss, which could potentially complicate both our lives.
No, she seemed wholly unconcerned about what to label our relationship as, and for some reason, that needled me. I usually hated it when women did that. But something feral inside of me wanted her to nail me down and force me to declare my exclusivity with her.
I used to think that men who became besotted with a woman were overly tame. Sedate. Boring. But the urge to grab onto June and make sure I never had to share her with anyone else felt like the exact opposite of that. It felt wild and uncontrolled. It was a gnashing, slavering thing that lusted after every part of her, and it barked at anything that might get between that.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, so I closed my book and looked at the caller ID. It said it was Lachlan and I answered immediately. “Cade,” I said.
