Chapter 5 #2
“Anyway, that’s why I took on the caretaker’s gig.
My dad did it for years before me. It’s kind of an odd job, but it works for me.
I spend a lot of time out in backcountry for my photography, so when I come back, I take care of the cabins like I do my own place. It’s not a fancy job. Not like yours.”
She puffed her cheeks and rolled her eyes. “Yeah. My job is so ‘fancy.’”
“What? Don’t you like your job?”
“I love my job. Or, I guess I love parts of my job, but there are a lot of parts I hate.”
The way she spat the word made me turn to fully face her.
I was surprised. I figured she’d love nothing more than to do the job she’d fought her family so hard for.
When I handed her a bowl of soup, I motioned for her to follow me back to the living room.
I handed her a napkin with a piece of bread as she sat on the couch, and I sat on the floor with my back to the fire.
“Which parts don’t you like?”
She frowned and readjusted, facing me and crossing her legs in front of her on the couch cushion. “It might be faster if I tell you the parts I don’t hate.”
“Okay then. Tell me what you don’t hate.”
“Writing songs. Singing songs. Meeting fans.”
“Aren’t those the main parts of what you do?”
She laughed without humor, then slurped up a spoonful of soup.
“You’d think, but there’s so much more. Meetings with my label, wherein they pretty much plan out my life, wardrobe, and aesthetic.
I’m told where to go, what to say, what to like, what to support.
Can you believe they tried to get me to vote a certain way in the last election?
Sorry, no, they said I could vote for whomever I liked, but that I should show support for certain candidates because those candidates would fit better with my brand.
“And when I told them I wanted to do a movie about Holly Collette’s life, they lost their minds.
If it had been a puff piece I’d wanted to make or a movie all about music, they wouldn’t have cared, but Holly wanted to tell her story, and that story isn’t pretty.
It won’t be received well by some of those old, rich farts who made their names and their millions off women in the country genre.
My label fought me hard. I finally threatened to leave them if they couldn’t support me.
They got behind it reluctantly, but they’ve been waiting for something to go wrong so they could—”
“So they could what?” I couldn’t imagine living her life no matter how hard I tried, but I still wanted to listen to her. Some kind of fire had been lit behind her eyes as she talked. It brightened her face and made her eyes glow like emeralds.
“Have you been online in the last two months? Are you honestly going to sit there acting like you don’t know what happened?”
“You’re sure full of yourself,” I said, and I reached over to flick her knee with my fingers.
She scowled at me.
“Fine. Yeah, I did see your face on some magazines when I was waitin’ in line at the grocery store, but I didn’t buy them.
Didn’t read the articles, and I didn’t go online lookin’ for dirt.
” She seemed dissatisfied by my answer, so I figured I should probably give her a little more to go on.
“I have seen your face on countless magazines, Lizzie, but I never buy them. I never read them. Don’t get me wrong.
I want to. I think about you a lot, and so many times I wanted to email you or whatever, but I didn’t.
You and me live very different lives. That’s a fact.
So, I didn’t read the gossip. I didn’t seek you out. What would’ve been the point?”
She looked so sad when I said it that I wanted make a joke just to see her smile again, but I needed to be honest with us both.
She was back in my life, like I’d daydreamed about for the last six years, but it was a fleeting thing.
She’d leave, go back to Hollywood, and I’d still be here. Alone on my mountain.
“You think we’re that different?”
“Well… yeah. You’re a superstar. I’m the guy who cleans your granddad’s cabin.”
“There’s nothing wrong with what you do. And caretaking isn’t all you do.” She bit her bottom lip and wiggled her hips a little, sitting deeper into the couch. Through a mouthful of bread, she said, “I looked you up, too, you know.”
I laughed. I hadn’t meant to, but her lying to try to make me feel better wasn’t going to do me any good. I was already half in love with her. If she said all the right things, I’d fall right off the bluff. And when she went back to her life, I’d still be falling.
This whole conversation would make my landing even more painful than it was already going to be.
Her eyebrows did a sad little dance and shaded her eyes. “What?”
“You don’t have to say things like that. I’m not under some false impression that you and I could ever be… friends.”
The fire was back in her eyes now as she scolded me. “Evan Moran, you dope. You think I’m lying?”
I nodded and took a bite of my bread. “Pretty sure you are.”
She set her bowl on the side table next to the couch and turned back to stare me down.
“‘Land of Last.’ That’s the name of the photo you took of a bison, the one that won you photographer of the year in the Wyoming Mountain Journal.
It’s the same picture that made it all the way to New York where some celebrity bought it. ”
I was frozen now as she pursed her lips. She looked… guilty? “Wonder who that could’ve been?”
“You?”
She tilted her head, lifted an eyebrow, and a smile filled her eyes. “Me.”
“That photo sold for forty-thousand dollars. It was my income for a whole year.”
“I would’ve paid much more than that.”
The air in my lungs rushed out in one long, deflating breath.
I didn’t know how to respond. I couldn’t describe how it made me feel to know that Eli Winter had bought my work.
Should I be proud? Happy? Intimidated? Maybe I should’ve been pissed that she’d known who I was all this time, but I wasn’t.
I couldn’t be because I’d done the same damn thing to her.
“To be fair, I wasn’t certain it was yours.
The gallery website only gave the name ‘Van’ and the location of ‘Wyoming.’ There isn’t a picture of the artist anywhere online that I could find, and you didn’t mention photography that night at the bar.
But something about those images reminded me of you.
” She relaxed a bit and lowered her voice.
“The photos have the same sadness you had that night.
I did everything I could, short of hiring a private investigator, to find you.
I asked my grandpa if he knew anyone who lived near Wisper named Van, but he said no.
“By then, I was big enough that if I did go digging and anyone found out, your life probably would’ve been disrupted, so I stopped.
I bought the photograph through my label, so it would’ve looked like a company had bought it, not me.
They inquired about you, but the gallery would only say that you were a private person and wanted to remain anonymous.
And it was nice, you know? I liked the secret. You gave me something to dream about.”
Her eyes drifted to the fireplace, and I knew what they saw above it—my photograph of the meadow out back.
“When I walked in here tonight, I saw that”—she nodded toward the framed picture—“and I knew for certain you were the artist who’d taken the photo I love so much.”
Was I blushing? It felt like I was as my neck and cheeks heated. Lizzie’s smile grew, and so did mine.
“If I’d known—”
“What?” I asked, already falling down from the high.
“You would’ve what? Asked me out? I bet your actor boyfriends would’ve appreciated that.
Would you have cut short your world tours so you could come here to visit me in this place that has shitty cell service on a good day and no Wi-Fi?
” I laughed. “Like I said, you and me? We live very different lives.”
“So? Am I not worth it? If I had asked you out? What would you have said?”
There was no pause before I answered, “Yes. Without a doubt.”
“See? We may be different, but why does that have to be a bad thing?”
What exactly was she asking me? What did she want?
“This is my home, Lizzie. I won’t ever leave it. Not for anything. There are things here that I… I just won’t leave. I’ll die here. So you and me? We’d never work. Your home is there, in LA.”
“LA is not my home.”
“You have a house there?” I asked with an extra dose of sarcasm. “Your car registered there? When you order a new pair of five-thousand-dollar boots, do they get delivered to your house in LA?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s your home.”
She shook her head and looked at her lap. “It’s not. It’s just a place. I haven’t had a home in a long time.”
That broke my heart in two. I’d lost everyone I’d ever loved, probably including her, but I had my home, and I realized that it was the only thing in my life I could count on.
“That hurts my heart,” I said before I could stop the words.
“Mine too.” She looked up, and the tears collecting at the edges of her beautiful green eyes ripped at my stomach.
So badly, I wanted to cross the distance between us and wrap her up in my arms. I wanted to hold her and kiss away her sadness. She deserved to be happy. She deserved the same certainty I had when I thought of home, but the last time I’d done that, she’d cried.
Making her cry was the very last thing I wanted.
“What about the fans?” I asked, setting my empty bowl next to my feet on the floor, hoping that reminding her about the millions of people who adored her would brighten the sour mood between us now.
“What?”
“Your fans. Tell me about ’em.”
Just like I’d hoped, a smile grew from the edges of her sadness.
It was so big it almost didn’t fit on her face.
“They are the best part. They give me courage and inspire me every day. Just last week, I received a letter in the mail. People send them to my label, and once a month they forward them to me. When I opened the box, there was a sherbet-orange envelope on top. I opened it and found a drawing from a ten-year-old little girl from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She’s really good!
She said she loves to draw, but she especially loves to draw when she listens to my songs because they make her feel happy, and they make her forget how sick her little brother is.
He’s going through cancer treatment, and Deondra said she sings my songs to him when he has to stay overnight at the hospital.
“I get emails from elderly fans who tell me that they’ve fallen in love again or that they danced for the first time in fifty years when they heard a new song.
It’s an amazing feeling to think about those people’s lives and know that I’ve impacted them in some small way.
It brings me such joy.” She stopped, smiling from ear to ear, and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.
“I’m probably not doing a very good job of describing it, but… ”
I couldn’t stop smiling either. I couldn’t stop anything I was doing as I crawled to her and sat in front of her on the floor. She uncrossed her legs and extended them on either side of me.
Gripping her thighs in my hands, I spread them apart and moved closer, and then I closed the distance between us and hugged her. “The light in your eyes right now is the best description you could give me.”