Chapter 7
Seven
Toby’s punctual for our photo session, which surprises me given his absent-minded artist routine I’ve witnessed. We’ve exchanged a few texts since that first night, to settle on terms for the commission, then most recently yesterday evening when I told him I’d safely arrived in Rosedale. He promised to meet me at my house at eleven.
It’s exactly eleven when the knock sounds on my door. I’m caught slightly unawares, barefoot, mid-coffee. I’ve had a jumpy feeling in my stomach since waking up, similar to the sensation of being about to take an important exam you haven’t studied for.
What is the big deal—I should be able to deal with the man. He’s an artist, not a chemistry test, I remind myself. I open the door, and all that positive self-talk flies out of my head. I could probably manage if he wasn’t so damn perfect. He’s not hot like a gym bunny or an oiled fifties pinup, but when he blinks those long-lashed amber eyes at me, I forget how to string two words together. And reticence has never been an issue for me.
“Kingston, hey,” he says when I don’t speak. His gaze slides down my body to my bare feet and back up to my face. “I was wondering if I’d ever see you in anything less formal than pleated trousers.”
I’m wearing my lazy weekend clothes, loose gray sweats made from cotton softer than a dandelion seed, a white T-shirt (designer, of course), and a loose overshirt, unbuttoned, in a blocky black-and-white pattern. I haven’t bothered pulling my hair back and my locs hang loose—the ends brushing my shoulders.
Toby’s wearing the jeans I remember from my visit to his studio and another black sweater, but this one doesn’t have any holes in it. Instead of loafers with white athletic socks, he’s got on sneakers. With white athletic socks.
“Well, it’s Saturday,” I say, finding my voice and hoping it sounds normal.
“So it is. Lovely place you’ve got here.”
I realize I haven’t asked him in, just let him stand at my front door while taking inventory. Get it together, James.
“Thanks, come on in. I was just finishing my coffee. Would you like some?” The good host in me finally makes an appearance.
“No, thanks.” He lifts a black camera bag. “Is it okay if I start taking pictures?”
“Of the inside?” I ask, passing him to lead the way into the living room.
“Of whatever,” he says ambiguously, glancing around. “I tend to snap away obnoxiously, I’m afraid.”
I wave my hand. “Then snap away.”
He opens the bag and brings out a much smaller camera than I expected. It’s a black rectangle barely bigger than his palm.
“What kind of camera is that?”
“It’s a Leica. German. It takes lovely pictures.” He raises the camera and looks through the viewfinder at the bookshelf next to him, pushes a button at the top, and I hear a satisfying click. I only use the camera on my phone, and I have to fight the urge to take a picture of him taking pictures.
“It’s not a film camera, right?”
“No, digital. I have a film one, an old-school Pentax. I thought when I first went to art school I’d study photography. It was hell to get them to change my focus once I realized it wasn’t meant to be. But I still love taking pictures.” He takes several more of different parts of the living room. I look around, trying to see what’s so worth capturing on the camera’s memory card. My faux-Tiffany reading lamp? The stack of unread bestsellers I’ll never get around to?
“Why did you pick photography at first?”
“I was trying to differentiate myself from my father, I suppose. He was a painter, therefore I never would be,” he says, sounding rueful. “Silly, but I was young, and I tended to make all my decisions in response to something I didn’t want, when I should have been making them based on something I did want.”
“Very wise.”
“I am a decade older. I’d like to think I have some things figured out.”
“Is your dad famous, then?” I remember Ivy mentioning him like he was a household name.
“In England, he’s pretty well-known. Fairly successful. But difficult.” Toby’s not looking at me, but at the watercolor of a lake I picked up at a Rosedale Art Center show a few years ago. “We’re not—we don’t get along well. What about you?”
There he goes, changing the subject off him again. “What about me?”
“What did you go to school for?”
“I was a business major, actually, with a minor in English.”
“Then you always knew you wanted to be a book agent?”
“I knew I wanted to make money. And I liked books. When I analyzed the publishing industry, I decided it was the job best suited to me. It’s a bonkers industry, really. I’ve made it work.”
“So analytical, Kingston, you surprise me. I thought you were a creative at heart.”
I laugh. “I have good instincts, strong opinions, and flawless taste. None of those I learned in school, but I knew I had to pair my strengths with practicality.”
“You never wanted to write?” Toby asks, lifting the camera again to look out the front window toward his station wagon, rusty and bulky compared to the sleek green machine parked next to it. I arrived late enough last night that I didn’t bother pulling the Beamer onto the slab.
“I write all the time,” I say. “Part of the job. But no, I never wanted to be an author.”
“You’re so impressive,” he murmurs, clicking away without looking my way. “You seem to know exactly what you want. And what you don’t want. I envy that.”
I let myself bask in the compliment, even if I don’t quite understand it. “You consider yourself indecisive?”
He laughs, lowers the camera, and looks at me dead-on. “I’d like to think of myself as unwilling to cut off possibilities. But I don’t know—lately it feels more like cowardice than keeping my options open.”
“Sometimes keeping one’s options open is code for being scared to make a decision,” I say without judgement.
“Ivy accused me of that the other day. She wants me to be excited about setting up a meeting with Pete’s agent, about finally making my debut. And I keep dragging my heels.”
“Why?”
He shrugs one shoulder elegantly. “Fear of failure?”
“But you have to know how good your paintings are. You’re not stupid.”
He looks at me, surprised that I might make such a personal claim. Well, he is being stupid if he thinks his work is lacking.
“I know how good they are,” he says slowly. He looks down at his camera, fiddles with some of the buttons. “Fear of success, then.”
“I’ve heard of such a thing,” I say, folding my arms over my chest and rocking back on my heels, “but I’ve never observed it in real life.”
“Success turned my dad into an asshole. An entitled, womanizing, greedy asshole. I can’t let that happen to me. I’ve spent my entire life trying not to be like him. Except, of course, when I wanted to be exactly like him.”
The sadness in his voice hits me hard. I know something about wanting to be like someone and unlike them at the same time.
“My dad wasn’t an asshole,” I offer. “He wasn’t a successful man, either. He died when I was ten because he wouldn’t take an afternoon off his hourly wage job to see a doctor. A cold that turned into pneumonia killed him at fifty. I never wanted to be like him—living paycheck to paycheck, raising two kids on a shoestring.” I sigh and let myself feel the pain of missing him for a moment. “But then again, I wanted to be exactly like him. Loved by his family, his community.” I wonder how real to get, then remember his exhortation—no regrets. “My mom and sister live down in Georgia and I don’t have a family of my own. I have a sweet car, though. An apartment in the city, this place.” I pause. “I wonder sometimes if he’d be proud of me, or sad for me.”
I worry in the silence after my little overshare that I’ve made Toby so uncomfortable that he’ll leave, but he just lifts the camera to his eyes and takes a picture. Of me.
I shake my head. “Not me—the house. And the outside of it, at that.”
He lowers the camera again, smiles. “I know. I just thought you should see how you looked right then. Your heart was on your face. Beautiful.”
He presses some buttons on the camera and turns it around, my own face now on the viewfinder. At first, I don’t grasp what he means—it’s my face, utterly familiar. But then I catch the particular set of my jaw and the slope of my eyebrows. They’re my dad’s eyebrows. I haven’t thought about him this much in ages and I find myself blinking rapidly.
“You all right?” Toby asks gently, removing the camera from my field of vision.
“Sure,” I say, overly loudly. “It’s just—you caught me by surprise with how much I look like him.”
“Do you have a picture?” Toby asks. “Of your dad?”
The only one I know of in the cottage is in my bedroom. “Yeah.”
“Can I see?”
It’s not an odd request when this entire morning has been so surprisingly intimate.
“All right.” I walk across the room and down the short hall that leads to my room in the back. I thought I’d grab the photo and bring it to Toby, but when I glance over my shoulder, he’s trailing me, his amber gaze taking in everything along the way. I cautiously push open the door, but the room isn’t a disaster. A few clothes thrown over the back of the green velvet armchair next to the bed, but nothing incriminating.
“This is my room,” I say unnecessarily.
“Oh, you have French doors leading to your patio,” Toby says excitedly. “I am so jealous. I’d love an outdoor-indoor room.”
“I had them put in after I bought the place.” I pick up a framed photo from the top of my big walnut dresser. It’s my mother and father on their wedding day in the early ‘80s, with the big hair to show for it. I pass it to Toby, who looks at it with a delighted smile.
“Handsome couple. What does your mom do?”
“She’s a retired teacher who substitutes part-time now. And she helps my sister with her twins.”
“Twins?” Toby sounds awed. “How old?”
“Six-year-old identical boys.”
“I bet they’re a lot of fun and a lot of work.”
“It’s good they’re such adorable little terrors or she and her husband might have gone off the deep end a long time ago.”
“Only child here. Always thought it would be fun to be an uncle, though.” He hands the photo back to me. “You do look a lot like your father.”
I take one last glance before setting the picture on the dresser again. “Thanks.”
It should be odd to be alone with Toby in this space, but it’s not. It’s comfortable, and the nervous energy I woke up with is gone, replaced by a need to spend as much time as possible with the man standing a foot away from me, to get to know him in his entirety, to have him know me. We’re already off to a good start.
But I can’t lie to myself about not wanting more from him, even though I accept it’s hopeless. He might have called me beautiful earlier, but I know he meant it in an aesthetic, artist’s eye kind of way. Even if he did mean it differently, he’s off-limits. I don’t mess around with guys in relationships—unless they’re in an open relationship and everyone’s on the same page. That could work for a brief encounter, but not for the kind of relationship the undaunted romantic corner of my heart still wants.
We clearly need to leave this room with its big comfortable bed. “Shall we go take pictures of the outside now?” I suggest.
“Sure.”
“Let me put on some shoes.”
Toby glances at my feet, then takes a photo of them.
“Hey, those pictures better not end up online.”
He laughs. “You do have very nice feet.”
Again with a compliment and a comment about my appearance. I ruthlessly shut down the tingly feeling that wants to spread from my core to my fingers and make me reach out and touch him.
“And don’t worry. They will be for my eyes only,” he says, while I slip on faux-shearling boots and desperately try not to read anything into his words.
“Pervert,” I say affectionately as we exit through the French doors. He laughs good-naturedly and keeps taking pictures while I give him a tour of the outside, talking up a storm about the history of the house, the improvements I’ve made to it, the plans I have to put in a garage and a hot tub one of these days.
“The previous owners did a lot to establish the native pollinator garden,” I say. “I’m no expert, but I’ve tried to keep it up.”
“Beautiful,” he says. It seems to be one of his favorite words. He touches a soft green salvia leaf. It’s one of the first things that will bloom here, any day now. “I can’t wait to see it later in the season.”
“Come by anytime,” I say. “Even if I’m not here. My friends have an open invitation.”
He freezes, and I wonder if I’ve overstepped by implying he’s a friend. But he just says, “Thanks,” and starts taking pictures again.
We walk around to the front and that’s where he really gets to work, eyeing the sun and ambling into the road to get some wider shots. I duck out of what I assume is the frame, but he motions me back in.
“You aren’t painting me,” I remind him. “Or the car.”
He steps forward quickly, out of the path of an SUV that’s zooming a little too fast for my liking down Bramble Street.
“True,” he says. “But you are the soul of the house. I want to make sure I include the soul.”
I shake my head in wonder. “I don’t know how you do what you do, but I can’t wait to see how this is going to turn out.”
“You and me both. I know how to paint, but I can’t exactly explain how it comes out looking the way it does. There’s a dash of alchemy somewhere in the creative process.”
“Best not examine it too closely,” I advise. “And just do it.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
Finally, he seems satisfied with the million or so shots he’s taken and comes to stand with me on the driveway between our two cars.
“Nice ride,” he says. “Had her long?”
“Her?”
He winces. “It’s a thing my dad does. Names all his cars. Of course, they’re always female.”
“So what’s her name?” I ask, pointing at his station wagon.
“Helen,” he says promptly.
“As in of Troy?”
“Actually, as in Frankenthaler. One of my favorite painters.”
I make a mental note to look her up later. “I’ve never anthropomorphized my vehicles, but if I did, this would be Daniel.”
“As in?”
“Craig. Sexy and powerful—someone I’d love to take for a ride.”
Toby, not put off by my innuendo, laughs. “Nice choice.”
It’s only after he leaves, having reminded me about Easter brunch at his and Ivy’s house tomorrow, that I realize I impulsively named the car after another hot British guy I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on. I hope Toby doesn’t notice the parallel.