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“What are you doing up here?” he asks.
Spiraling.
“Just wanted some space,” I say instead.
He ignores the hint and climbs the rest of the way up the ladder. He has to duck his head or risk getting clocked by the rafters, but he comes to sit beside me anyway, our knees touching.
“Are you sketching?” he picks up the sketch pad, frowning at the blank page.
I shake my head.
“Why did you stop painting?”
The look in his eyes tells me this time I won’t get away with a flimsy excuse of being busy. I’ve never opened up to Nic about anything before. I didn’t trust him, but mostly I didn’t want him to see me weak. Thinking back on the two decades I’ve known him, I can’t think of a time when he took an undeserved shot at me. He’s snubbed me and rejected me, but he’s never been cruel. Maybe I can trust him with the truth. I could try. It might feel good to talk about it.
“No one wanted my art.” The words sink in and oh my god, it does not feel good to talk about this. My face is already hot, tears are already prickling my eyes. “Apparently,” I say, bent on destruction, my tone turning acidic as I try to turn this beast around, “my art issimplistic, boring, and tacky.”
Nic sucks in a breath. When he reaches for me, I squirm away. I don’t want him to touch me or look at me. I can’t believe I repeated his ex-wife’s words. Worse, I’ve let them define me. Gross.
After a few minutes, Nic speaks, his voice soft. “Remember the pictures of my house? Timothy shared them in the group chat, asking everyone to rate them on a scale of meh to purgatory.”
I snicker, because yeah, I remember the pictures, though I never rated them. That house could’ve been beautiful.
“Addison thought she knew what was trendy, what would inspire envy, but she couldn’t get a foot in the art world, even with help from her parents. She made that house into an empty, soulless statement piece.”
“You told her she was right, she was the expert.”
His eyes narrow. “That’s not how I meant it and that’s not how Addison took it, trust me.”
The image of him pulling her close to say that quietly in her ear makes it hard to trust him. Nic must read the skepticism on my face.
“Addison fucked up a show at one of her parents’ galleries a few months before,” he says. “So she took it as the insult it was. We fought about it the rest of the holiday.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t noticed them fighting. Maybe I was too drunk, too locked in my misery, too scared to look closely because I didn’t want to see him in love.
“I’m sorry.” His thumb slips over the corner of the sketchbook, the pages rustling softly. “Sorry I brought her here, sorry I asked her to marry me, sorry she made you feel bad, but mostly I’m sorry I made you feel bad. I like your paintings. I always have.”
“Not always.”
He knows what I’m talking about. He draws a deep breath into his lungs, holds it, and slowly releases it. “About that…”
“You weren’t in a good place. I didn’t mean to paint you—I didn’t think I was—but I saw it after, how it looked like you, and I’m sorry.”
“I still have it.”
I whip my head around to look at him. “What?”
His brows knit together like he’s not sure what to say. “I found it sitting by the trash and I brought it home. It’s been wrapped up in my closet since. You can’t have it back.”
“Why would you do that?”
“You threw me in the trash!”
“It wasn’t you!”
We stare at each other for a moment before his lips twitch up into a smile. Mine follow. Then we’re laughing. I feel lighter, the heavy grudge I’ve been holding against him lifting. My hurt is healing.
Nic leans over and kisses me, a quick kiss that turns into a longer, sweeter, slightly desperate one before he pulls back. He grins at me. “Wait here a moment.”
