Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel) (34 page)

Addy’s reaction to the house was classic six-year-old: excitement as she rushed through the rooms with no real grasp of what it meant to move. After all, she hadn’t done so since she was an infant. “But what about Olaf? Can I bring him, or does he have to stay at the loft?”

Callum stood in the doorway of the library, his fists in his pockets as if trying to keep himself from grabbing her before all her running sent her crashing through a wall. “We’ll be bringing everything, pumpkin. All your clothes and toys. All the food in the kitchen.”

“And Olaf, too? And all my books? And your motorcycle? And a kitty?”

He leaned close to Brooklyn, who stood opposite him, and said, “Notice how she slipped that cat thing in there?”

“And your bike,” she pointed out. “I told you you’re going to be the most popular dad on campus.”

“Campus. Ugh.” He reached up and dragged both hands down his face as if he were the weariest man in the world. “That makes me think about her leaving elementary school, and things like braces and makeup and . . . bras.”

He added the last with a shudder, this big bad biker so out of his element that Brooklyn couldn’t help but laugh. Loudly. He was too adorable for words. “Just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.”

“Is that your opinion as a professional educator? Because I gotta say, that cackle of yours doesn’t instill a lot of confidence.”

“It’s my opinion as someone who’s seen the two of you together several times the last three months. Trust me. You’re a good father. And that’s speaking as both a friend and an educator. Because I’ve seen bad. And indifferent. And you may not like my laugh, but I know what I’m talking about.”

“I know you do, and I love your laugh, and it’s a bit of a relief to know I haven’t effed things up completely.”

She looked down at the bamboo hardwood they both stood on, her pink floral ballet flats so at odds with his tough black boots. “I don’t have a single worry about Addy’s future.”

“The first time I buy her the wrong bra and you hear her screaming all the way across town, I’ll remind you of that.”

“They have bra-fit specialists, you know,” she said, instead of reminding him she wouldn’t be living across town anymore.

“Seriously? That’s a job?”

Shaking her head, she pushed away from the door, catching a glimpse of Addy as the girl ran down the hall into her room. The library sat in the front of the house. A big bay window took up the front wall, and across from it, a pass-through fireplace opened to the den on the other side.

She hadn’t seen this room since he’d outfitted it, and he’d done that without her input. At least verbal input. He’d shopped with her. He’d seen her classroom, her house. He knew what she liked. Knew her taste in things. Or so she surmised; how else could he have come up with . . . this?

It was her. The whole room. The lampshades. The throw rugs. The end tables and the coffee table and the chair-and-a-half with the ottoman in a rust and pine green and navy tartan, and the complementary one in a dark paisley floral. The copper spittoons on the fireplace, one holding cattails, one the fireplace tools. The scrollwork on the grate made her think of Jane Austen.

“Did you do this?” She stopped in the middle of the room, the carpet beneath her feet like marshmallows, and looked at him. “The decorating?”

“Yeah, well,” he said, coming into the room, his hands still in his pockets, shuffling, “with some help from Lena, Dolly Pepper, your neighbor Jean, and about a hundred salesmen.”

She held his gaze, her heart racing, his expression so hopeful that it stole her breath. Then he added, “I thought you might need a place to come back to. You know, when you got tired of Italy and needed somewhere to land.”

Somewhere to land.
Did he know what those words did to her? Hearing them come from him when he was where she wanted to be? When she wanted nothing more than to close her eyes, lay down her head, and rest?

Her eyes burning, she turned away, pressing her hand to her mouth. How was she going to leave him? How was she going to walk away?

He hadn’t asked her to stay, but he wouldn’t because his doing so would make things harder. He knew how important this journey was for her, how vital that she reach this destination she’d been preparing for for a year.

Except she didn’t think it was. Not anymore. Not because any of what she wanted for Artie mattered less, but because it wasn’t what
she
wanted for herself. Artie was gone. And she’d done the very thing she’d promised him she wouldn’t: she’d stopped living her life when he’d lost his.

Taking a deep breath, she shook off the melancholy; this was not the time or the place. Callum and Addy had this gorgeous new home, and if she ever wanted a quiet place to sit and read—

“Wait a minute,” she said, crossing to the closest of the wall-to-wall shelves and running her fingers along the books’ spines, reading the titles, pulling one of the hardcovers from the shelf and opening it to look inside. “These are my books, aren’t they? The ones I brought over to store?”

He nodded, then shrugged. “I figured since it’s a library, and a library needs books, and I’ve been too busy with the furniture and Addy’s things to pack mine . . . anyway, I heard it’s not great to store them in cardboard. Silverfish. Roaches. Sorry,” he said, as if he didn’t want her to think about her books being eaten by bugs. “I thought they’d get some air in here, and it’s not like they’re in the way, and when you’re ready for them, I’ll pack them back up. I’m not holding them hostage for any nefarious ransom or anything creepy—”

“It’s not that,” she said, shaking her head. The day she’d brought over the boxes . . . she’d thought then that he’d never know how important to her the books were. She’d been wrong. Because he did. What he’d done in this room proved it, and for a very long moment she found it hard to breathe. “It’s just . . .” She stopped, tried again, struggling for the words. “You saw the shelves they came off of. They were never this neat and organized.”

“That control freak thing. Rears its ugly head even when I don’t want it to.”

“I love that you’re using them. I do, really. They deserve a nice, OCD, bug-free home.”

“Good,” he said, clearing his throat. “I was worried you’d turn it into a big deal, thinking I was trying to keep them so you’d stick around or something.”

“That might’ve been nice.” She tried for a grin, not sure it came out the way she wanted. “Except for it being creepy.”

“So,” he said, facing her, his oxford shirt wrinkled, the lowest two buttons undone, the very edge of his dragon tattoo exposed in the open placket, “you don’t want me to try to convince you to stick around?”

What was she supposed to say to that? “You know I can’t.”

He looked at her like he didn’t know it at all. “I know you have a ticket to fly. That doesn’t mean you can’t stay here. It’s just money. The airline isn’t holding your firstborn hostage or anything.”

She thought about his Pooh Bear and Piglet tattoo. The promise of a grand adventure his life with Adrianne Michelle Drake had lived up to. She wondered, and for not the first time, about his love of literature. How he had come to find solace and absolution and joy in the words of others.

Then she took him in, head to toe, wishing she could save this moment and take it with her, because she didn’t want to ever forget.
You don’t have to forget. There’s this thing called a camera.
“Don’t move,” she told him, digging into her jeans pocket for her phone.

His mouth quirked. “You’re going to take my picture.”

“Why not?” She centered him on the screen, then took a step to the right, taking her time setting up the shot. She wanted it to be perfect, though seriously, with her subject matter, how could it be anything else?

“Weren’t we just talking about creepy?” he asked, one brow going up, one dimple deepening. The light from the front window lit his hair until the hint of auburn was no longer a coal but a flame.

She took a shot and said, “This is not creepy. This is me commemorating the moment I realized you and I are kindred bibliophilic spirits.”

“Thought you might’ve realized that when I showed you the Nietzsche and the Tennyson.” He started to pull his fists from his pockets; she stopped him with a sharp shake of her head. “Or when you saw the Frank Herbert. Though, really, Pooh should’ve clinched it.”

“I didn’t know you as well then,” she said, wanting to get closer, to photograph the words on his wrist, the ones on his neck. “I thought you might’ve just pulled quotes out of the air. Or off the Internet.”

“Not to burst your bubble, but a couple of them, I did.”

“What?” She looked away from his framed image to the man in front of her. “Say it isn’t so.”

He shrugged. “Can’t keep it all in my brain. No matter how big my head is.”

She centered him again and touched the button. She wanted to capture all of him: his boots, his jeans bunched around them and hanging low on his hips from the weight of his fists. The strip of his abdomen and the text from
Dune
that showed above his jeans’ copper buttons.

She took another shot. She wanted every wrinkle of his shirt. She loved his wrinkles. This shirt was a faded-to-white pink; she liked that he’d owned it in its original color. The collar was twisted, the sleeves cuffed up his forearms; both allowed for more of his tattoos to show.

She lined him up once more. She wanted his dimples and his grin and the scruff on his face. His sharp cheekbones. His blade of a nose. His green eyes and long lashes and his brow that even when frowning wasn’t heavy.

But mostly she wanted his hair, every ginger-brown strand. The ones wound into the knot he always wore, the ones sticking out, the ones hanging in twists that made her think of his daughter’s corkscrew pigtails.

She didn’t want to forget anything about him, or lose a single memory of their time together, or get to Italy and wonder if she’d made the right choice for fear of losing what she’d had with her first love.

“Got it,” she said at last, because she couldn’t stare at him forever. At least not the him across the room in the flesh. “And your head’s not that big. So I forgive you for having to cheat.”

“Like you had that Jane Austen bit memorized.”

“Actually, I did,” she said. The quote had stuck with her for a very long time. The idea of hope being equated with patience . . . funny that patience was a concrete emotion within her control while hope seemed so ethereal, yet they were so closely related as she looked ahead.

“How’s it healing? The tat?” he asked, walking toward her.

“It’s good,” she said, tucking her phone into her pocket.

“Show me.”

She brought her gaze up slowly, her pulse quickening, the look in his eyes bringing to mind the first time he’d kissed her, the second time he’d kissed her, the third time . . . and how none of them had been kisses between friends.

“Now?” she asked, because to show him she’d have to lift her shirt to reveal her back and her shoulder, and it seemed too much a tempting of fate with his daughter liable to run into the room.

“It’s just your shoulder,” he said, stopping in front of her, one brow going up, his tongue in his cheek as he tried not to grin.

“This isn’t funny. Me baring skin in front of you is not a good idea. Addy could come in at the worst possible time.”

“That being me looking at your tattoo? It’s not like I haven’t seen—”

“Don’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t. We can’t. Not now.”

“Hey, Brooklyn.” He frowned as he said her name. “I’m teasing. If you don’t want me to see—”

“Oh, Callum. It’s not that,” she said, but she didn’t say more, because she wasn’t sure she could explain what she was feeling without losing the very tenuous hold she had on her composure. “It’s just . . .”

“What?” he asked, his concern making things so much worse. “Just tell me. What did I do? What’s wrong?”

“That’s just it,” she said, burying her face in her hands. “Nothing is wrong. Absolutely everything is right. Except I’m not going to be here to enjoy this room, or you, or Addy . . .”

“Oh, baby,” he said, stepping closer and wrapping her up in his arms. “This room isn’t going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. Addy on the other hand . . .”

She laughed, nuzzled into his chest, breathed him in, and let go of the doubts and worries that felt like walls closing in. She had patience. She would get through the next month. And she would cling with every ounce of strength she had to the hope that the rest of her life would fall into place.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2001

Closing her eyes, Brooklyn leaned back on her pillows, needing the break from the books spread across her bed. As hard as it was to believe, she was tired of reading, the exhaustion the fault of the research required for her dissertation. Even the title was enough to put her to sleep: The Use of After-School Programs in Aiding the Development of At-Risk Youth.

A juicy medieval-set story. That’s what she wanted. Knights and castles and bloody battles. A fair maiden. A noble steed. Sighing, she sank deeper and closer to sleep, her forearm thrown across her forehead to block the overhead light. Just five minutes. Make it ten. No more than fifteen. Her eyes ached. She was starving. She swore she smelled pizza.

Then came a knock on her bedroom door, a sharp rap of knuckles that only one person ever used. “You can come in if you have food.”

Artie opened the door wide enough for the pizza box he led with, then peered around the corner. “Pepperoni, bacon, onions, olives, and fresh jalapeños.”

“Real bacon. Not that ham that likes to pretend.”

“Real bacon. Exactly the way you like it.”

He knew her so well. She shoved the books to the foot of the bed, making room for him to join her. “Is it all for us, or did you have to share with my parents?”

“I offered but they both declined.”

“You know,” she said as she lifted a slice from the box he opened, winding strings of cheese around one finger, “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen my father eat a slice of pizza.”

“He does seem to be more the broiled chicken and broccoli type.”

She laughed at that. “He’s the type who doesn’t think about food as anything but nourishment.”