Chapter Six
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Maple
Soft blue streaks the canvas as my paintbrush glides across it, creating an underpainting with imprecise stripes of color.
My breaths come easy, and my heart beats a melody of hues.
I am Artist, lost in her process. Specks of twilight dust my cheeks.
Peace consumes me while the rest of the world falls away, a haze just out of reach.
I am only paint, and brush, and the sweep of an arm.
My phone cuts through the silence, blaring a jarring tune.
I jump, splattering globs of blue across the canvas in big, ugly dots, and I drop the paintbrush on the tarp beneath my feet before I can further ruin the painting.
Wiping my hands on my smock in the vain hope that I won’t get paint on my phone, I turn and stomp across the tarp.
I snatch the screaming device from beside the basket of charcoal where I tucked it before starting my journey to a moment of calm.
Ivy’s name and a picture of the two of us, cheeks smooshed together, shine up at me from the screen.
“I’m painting,” I say in lieu of a hello. “You have the worst timing.”
“You answered,” Ivy replies, bewildered. “I wasn’t expecting you to pick up on the first call.”
“Me either,” I grump. “I’m painting.” I hit the speaker button and return to my easel, where I prop the phone on my drinks and snacks table between a room service bowl of cut fruit and a sweating can of Dr. Pepper.
He apologizes. “You know I wouldn’t interrupt your reverie on purpose.”
“I’m sure I don’t know anything about how you might behave.
” I sniff. Not entirely fair of me, I’ll admit.
Ivy has never once interrupted me when I’m painting, being far more likely to find a seat to watch in silence when he comes upon me in the zone.
Still, I can’t find it in me to feel bad.
He’s the man who married me without even deigning to get down on one knee, and I’m the woman who didn’t see it coming.
“You know me, Maple,” he protests softly with a rueful tinge. “You know me completely.”
Uh huh. Except for the part where I don’t, because if I knew him “completely”, then I would have seen what he was doing, and I would have been able to address it before we were standing on a beloved tablecloth saying I do.
I pick up my paintbrush and press my lips together.
Iverson sighs, a harsh, regretful puff. “I was hoping we could arrange a time to talk.”
Uh huh. Because now he wants to communicate, in the aftermath. How very convenient. “Talk about what?” I ask bitterly. My brush dips into blue, then slashes across canvas, my ire becoming a tangible thing in the physical realm.
“Talk about how I can fix this,” he asserts with no small amount of determination in his tone. “And about how to get you home.”
I shiver. A determined Ivy is a thing to behold under normal circumstances.
I’ve seen him on work calls before, self-assured resolve coating his bossly orders with steel.
When he puts his mind to something, Iverson Swallow is an immovable force, a stone you can neither push nor pull.
He stands steady against any wind or pummeling—or common sense, it seems, which would tell him that you can’t truly fix something like our current situation.
You can maybe stitch together the leftover pieces, wrap them up, and hope that when you unveil them again the scar won’t be too bad.
Is this a battle I’m going to win? No. And is it a battle I even want to win? Also no. I don’t want to cut Ivy off forever. I love him. I’m in love with him. Losing him would be like losing a vital piece of myself—a hand, or a heart, or a retinal cone.
I’m going to have to talk to him, because he is a rock, and because I am a sap, and because it would be hypocritical to be upset with him for not communicating just for me to commit the same crime.
I’m going to have to talk to him, because that is what you do when you love someone, even when they make you mad.
I can’t talk to him in person, though. I’ll fold quicker than a taco if I have to look at him in my current emotional state. He’s too… him.
“We can talk now,” I offer magnanimously, clearing my throat. “Via the phone, where you can’t use your whole… thing to convince me to forgive you.”
“My whole thing?”
I roll my eyes. As if he does not know he’s gorgeous.
As if he does not use it to his advantage at every available opportunity, flaunting his beauty until my fingers itch for my sketchbook and my mind forgets all thoughts beyond capturing his wonder on a page.
He might not know I’m in love with him, but there’s no missing that I’m enamored with his outer shell, and there’s definitely no missing how he takes advantage of that fact.
“Your whole thing,” I repeat firmly, squinting at my canvas.
I pick up a darker blue and deepen what will eventually be a shadow at the bottom of the painting.
“I’m not sure if I’d be susceptible to your good looks at the moment, but I’m unwilling to risk it.
I’m still upset with you, and I’m not going to let you distract it away from me. Not this time.”
“I promise not to do my thing,” he vows. “I’ll wear a paper bag over my head if that will help.” He quiets—softens, pitching his voice just so to pull at my heartstrings. “I miss you, Maple. I want to see you.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to see you,” I tell him, shooing him away from my heartstrings. He has no business being that close to them right now. “You have a serious problem with boundaries lately.”
He hesitates for long enough that I’ve finished the shadow work on my canvas and am rinsing my brush out when he speaks. “What can I do to fix this?”
“Practice proper boundaries between friends,” I answer immediately. “And follow correct procedures when confessing love and asking for marriage.” I so badly want to add duh to the end, but I rein myself in. He’s trying, I suppose, and I can, too. Probably.
“I don’t think we have ever had what most people would consider to be ‘proper boundaries between friends,’” he says slowly. “And…”
I wait, wet paintbrush held aloft while water trickles down its handle to drip softly against my hand. “And?”
His voice takes on a… tone. A tone I’ve never heard before that reaches through the phone line to tug at my nerve endings until my skin flushes fire.
A tone I would have dreamt of had I known it was a possibility.
A tone I like way too freaking much, highlighting that Iverson Swallow doesn’t need to be in person to do his thing.
He can make do over the phone just fine.
“Rosy Maple,” he all but purrs, “are you upset because we’re married, or are you upset because I didn’t ask you first?”
I blink.
Well.
That’s just.
“Both!” I proclaim, half lying. A not insignificant portion of my body in and around my heart region calls me out for being a big fat liar. My brain, however, pats me on the back for the excellent use of common sense in the face of absurdity.
“It doesn’t seem like both,” Ivy notes in that same gruff, heated tone.
My stomach flips.
“Yeah, well, it is,” I assert.
He hums. Ominously.
My stomach flops.
“What?” I ask. “Stop that.”
“You know what I think?” he asks, and doesn’t wait for an answer.
“I think you aren’t upset about the marriage at all.
I think you’re upset that you missed out on the before stuff—the courtship and proposal and general wooing.
I think you want me to sweep you off your feet, and you just don’t want to admit it. ”
My jaw drops, and I suddenly wish that I had opted for an in-person meeting instead. In person, I could have whacked him with my paintbrush for being such a cocky pest. “Do you have a parasite eating your brain?”
“Okay,” he says, stupidly smug. “Then tell me why you are mad, and this time do try to sound convincing.”
Oh, for flag’s sake.
“I’m mad,” I retort, answering him just as much as I am reminding myself.
I shake off the tingles his thing have left skittering over my skin and bring us both back to reality.
“Because you didn’t give me a choice. You know, that thing autonomous humans are given?
Free will? Options? The ability to decide what course of action they’re going to take? ”
He hums a facsimile of understanding. “Right,” he drawls. “So you want me to woo you.”
I need a hard surface to bang my head against.
I need a hard surface to bang his head against.
At a loss, I stare at the hues of blue in front of me and consider my options. I could keep going as I am, trying to get across to my stubborn, bullheaded, single-minded friend that he is, shockingly, wrong.
Or I could remember that my friend is stubborn, bullheaded, single-minded, and nearly as spoiled rotten as I am. He isn’t accustomed to being told “no,” and I don’t think he could describe the sensation of being wrong if he tried.
Decisions, decisions…
With a defeated sigh, I make my choice, dangerous as it may be for my emotions—not to mention my psyche.
“Whatever,” I huff. “Sure, Ivy, you can try to woo me, under the condition that I am allowed to say no. This isn’t going to be a haranguing, and it’s not going to be a convincing or a negotiation, either.
You can express your feelings, and I can decide on my own, in my own time, without pressure, how I feel about them.
I want the option to say no anytime I want.
” Capitulating to this now doesn’t mean I have to let him run rampant over me.
He already has my love, but only I get to choose if I’m going to act on that love.
Not him, no matter how much “wooing” he plans to do. I want my own choice.
“You can have it,” he agrees readily. Then, in his purring lilt, “But you won’t need it.”
And just what does he think that means?
He says a quick goodbye, citing his need to “create a war plan,” and the call ends before I can ask.
I shake excess anxious energy out of my hands, belatedly remembering I have a wet paintbrush in one of them, so paint-tinted water flies all over the space, landing on canvas, dress, tarp, palette, and everything in between.
With a wince, and perhaps a little groaning, I lay the brush down and grab a sheet from the paper towels to dab the hydration off the painting before it ruins my base layer.
I will the action to be a symbolism of things to come.
A mess has been made, and it will be cleaned up tidily and with minimal lasting effects.
Nothing to worry about. “Warfare” is naught but a drop of water in an inconvenient place, and all I need is a bit of paper to mop it right up.
Easy. And also peasy. Lemon squeezy. Piece of cake.
Easy as pie. Nothing has ever been more simple, in fact.
Blots of blue peel away with every press of the paper towel, and, for the sake of my mental well-being at this current moment, I choose not to explore whatever symbolism the stolen layers might hold.
Lemon, squeeze, cake, pie. I am on the path to everything in my life being okay again.
I still have my no, regardless of whether or not Ivy believes I will use it.
It’s there, a loaded gun with my finger on the trigger.
My frantic blotting smooths, becoming less erratically desperate and more confidently sure. The paint doesn’t smudge too much, and neither will I.
I cling to my no like a lifeline in the water. It is both shield and weapon, protecting me from the terrors of this world—terrors like a man who believes himself in love and immune to silly things like societal expectations and basic common sense and decency.
Perhaps I should spend the time Ivy is using to prepare himself refining my weapon.
Instead of a pistol, it can be… I don’t know.
A bigger gun, I guess. One of those huge ones that can shoot a million bullets a minute without even getting warm to the touch, and I can have a band across my body holding extra ammunition. A hoard of nos, ready to be used.
Bolstered by this plan, I finish cleaning up the mess that I’ve made and get to work shoring up my defenses. If Ivy wants a war, he can have one.
But, armed with my nos, I do not intend to lose it.