Chapter Twenty-One
The Decorative Mailbox
Cheyenne
The flyer I tugged from the bulletin board at Falls Market earlier today feels like it weighs a ton. I mean that in the literal sense. Two-thousand pounds of emotional weight in a single, slightly pixelated, full-color sheet of paper.
Art Gallery Opening at Midtown in Omaha, July 27th.
Submissions open.
That’s not why Colton came down here, though. I haven’t even told Indi yet—she and Milo were distracted trying to pick a decent cart when I slipped the paper into my tote bag. He’s here to discuss what happened last night.
But I’m not ready for him to vocalize his regret, so I blurt out, “Stephen cheated on me.”
Colton stills. I don’t think he even realized he was fidgeting with a splinter of wood on the dock, but now he doesn’t move a single muscle. If not for the rise and fall of his chest beneath his Falls Lake tee, I’d wonder if he was still breathing. I’m not brave enough to look at his face, though, and when he doesn’t say anything, I keep talking.
“Now that I can see it from the other side, I know I missed the signs. Late nights and early mornings at the office seemed plausible—I mean, he was the head curator at the Institute. A position like that comes with a lot of responsibility.” I inhale sharply, my fingertips turning white from gripping the flyer so tightly. “Or maybe I just wanted to believe the best. He was my husband. I wanted to trust him. Wanted him to…”
Trust me. Love me. Cherish me. Want me.
I never imagined he would rather dispose of me.
“I was up for a promotion—the position just under Stephen’s—and I thought I was going to get it,” I continue. “I had the degree, I had the experience, I had the connections. And then the position was given to a girl named Courtney.”
Acid burns my throat. Stephen had pressed his hand into Courtney’s lower back when she was invited onto the small stage at that gala, and I’d known. I’d been played, professionally and personally. My marriage had a ticking time clock on it, as did my job.
“I didn’t truly know that they were together until he left his email open one night, though,” I say stiffly. “You don’t have to be Einstein to connect the dots, considering she said she’d have a bottle of chardonnay at her place to celebrate, and he called her babe —emphatically. Stephen hated endearments and pet names. Or maybe that was just with me.”
Between us on the dock, Colton’s hands curl into fists. I have no doubt there would be downright fury in his expression if I looked up. I don’t. I stare at the paper in my hands until the words blur in my vision, and I force the rest of the story out before my courage fizzles.
“When I approached the board, his infidelity had nothing to do with it. I had a right to know why the position was given to Courtney, so I asked. She was, after all, an intern who had graduated college only months before. Without a trace of hesitation, Stephen said, in front of everyone, that she was better qualified because she…” My voice breaks. I lift my chin higher, as if that’ll help. “She was better qualified because she was singularly focused on her career. Her focus wasn’t divided like mine was.”
I squeeze my eyes closed. Against the betrayal that still stings all these months later, against the inadequacy and the spiraling self-doubt. “He knew—he knew —that it had only been a couple months since I lost the baby, and he…” I shake my head and press the back of my hand to my mouth. “But you want to know what hurt the most? What hurt the most—worse than his infidelity, worse than losing my promotion, worse than my failing marriage—was when he fired me behind closed doors. He told me he couldn’t believe I had the audacity to jeopardize his career by approaching the board like I had.”
My voice is barely audible by the time I finish. A fish snaps up a fly ten feet from the end of the dock. My toes trace the ripples on the surface of the lake. A jet leaves a stream of white across the sun-streaked azure sky.
Colton says nothing.
Outside the no wake buoys, a Sea Ray idles by on a sunset cruise, Jimmy Buffett’s Oceans of Time drifting across the waves. Laughter from neighboring docks, from kids and adults alike, softens the sharp edges of a siren in the distance. Cicadas are warming up for their nightly choir from oak trees bordering the shorelines, and wind rustles leafy tree branches.
Our surroundings are anything but silent, but Colton and me? We’re deafeningly silent.
“Colton?” I whisper when it becomes too much. “This is where you say I told you so , or—”
“No.” The word is so firm that I have to look at him. God, help me , because I was right. Fire sparks in his blue irises, his mouth set in a grim line, his jaw tightening. “I will never say that to you, because that would put me on the same level as him . I’m a flawed man, Cheyenne, but if I ever treat a woman that way—if I ever treat you that way—I don’t deserve the breath in my lungs.”
My own lungs cease to function. I should say something, and if I could, I would. Habitually, I want to defend Stephen; to say he didn’t mean it, or he wasn’t bad all the time. But the pain simmering in my chest? The physical ache that I want more than anything to be free from? That reminds me how valid my hurt is.
I’ve spent the last year of my life rationalizing Stephen’s behavior while, little by little, wearing my own confidence down to the quick. I’ve internalized his words and tucked them into neat little boxes that build, and build, and build, until the weight of them is too crushing.
“Colton, about last night—”
He holds up a silencing hand. “Let me make one thing very clear to you about last night, Cheyenne. I don’t regret the kiss. I regret letting it happen like that.”
Confusion creases my brow. “What do you mean?”
“Fini, if you think I didn’t want to kiss you, that I wouldn’t have continued kissing you if we hadn’t been interrupted, you’re wrong,” he says evenly. “But I can’t let anything happen between us when there’s so much…” He pauses. His gaze flits heavenward, as if the sky can form words for him. “When we have no clarity.”
When I don’t know what we are.
“I’m not good at this, Fini. I’m not good at expressing myself with nothing but words.” He stops and shakes his head. Frustration chafes at the edges of his movements. “I wanted to buy you flowers or paints because they speak for themselves. Because they’d mean something to you.”
I fold the flyer and tuck it halfway under my thigh. I shift my body enough to look him directly in the eye. “Try me.”
“What?”
“Try me,” I repeat, more firmly. “Use your words. It doesn’t have to make sense, Collie. Tell me everything you’re thinking. Tell me what you’re feeling. I’m your best friend, right?” My smile wobbles around the corners. “You can tell me anything.”
Uncertainty tightens his mouth. An errant curl blows across his tanned forehead when he shakes his head, and he blows a soft exhale through his nose. When the words finally come, he really does just spill every last thought.
Unfiltered and unorganized and uncertain as they are.
It’s beautiful.
“Sitting in rush-hour traffic today, I thought about how I’ve never walked into a coffee shop where the barista knew my order just from facial recognition. Because I frequent the coffee shop, not because of my career. We don’t know more than what can be deduced in the two-minute ordering time, just that she wears a lot of bracelets, and I don’t ever change my order. But here, two of the baristas are my brothers’ partners. I would know that one of them reads when there’s a lull in customers, and one sets a double chocolate muffin back for my niece every Monday.
“That made me think about how this summer is the longest I’ve been in one place for almost a decade and a half. I like it even though I don’t think I should. Because what if I don’t like it when I have the choice to leave again?” He pauses only long enough to take a much-needed breath. “Then I thought about how I’ve never had a mailing address of my own. When I order something I always have it shipped to Graham’s house. But when I asked Gran to order the most ridiculous mushroom themed thing she could find as a wedding gag gift, I asked her to ship it here. Which made me think about how I’ve never kept a post office key in my truck. I’ve never walked in and opened the same little metal box for days, weeks, and years. Never thought there might be something exciting waiting in there for me. But even the thought of junk mail seems thrilling because I’ve never even had that, not to an address with my name on it.
“I think that, if I didn’t like to swim so much, I wouldn’t have taught Milo to swim. If I hadn’t taught him to swim, I wouldn’t feel more attached to him every time we go swimming. I wouldn’t poke his Pillsbury dough belly and I wouldn’t read the same book with him every single night. But I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything, and that scares me, because I’m not like Jordan is with Jolene. I’m not whole or complete or really even that stable , Cheyenne, so what if he eventually realizes that I’m maybe even more broken than his mother— our mother—was?
“Because the truth is that I’m just like my father and I’m just like my mother, and they were two very different people. They weren’t opposites attracting, they were opposites detracting. And even if I want to be different, I don’t know how to be. I don’t…” He squeezes his eyes closed and turns his face away. “Never mind. I doubt any of that even makes sense.”
He turns to face the sun, away from me, but the light is too much, because he then hangs his head. His chest heaves and his eyes squeeze tightly closed, his hands trembling in his lap and his jawline quivering.
“You don’t what, Colton?” I ask softly.
He shakes his head. He wants to run. I sense it in the tense line of his shoulders and in the way he shifts away from me. If it were up to him, he would have been in his truck already, taillights fading out of town.
But he’s not. He’s sitting still.
“Colton, you—”
“I don’t know how to love you, Cheyenne,” he rasps. Tortured eyes meet mine, those lake water irises clouded with fear. “I don’t know how to love you, or Milo, or anyone else. That’s the truth. Even if I want to, even when I do love someone, I don’t know how.”
And there it is—the truth he’s been running from his entire life.
“Colton.” I lift my hand to his face. I brush my thumb softly across the dark whiskers on his jawline and over the puckered scar near his lips. “You don’t have to know how. You just have to be willing to try.”
If not for me holding him steady, he would have shaken his head again. Vulnerability and denial are battling for control; they wage war in his drawn expression and well the tears in his eyes.
“What if I fail you, Cheyenne? What if I’m no better than—” Air empties from his lungs, and he sucks in sharply. “What if I’m no better than Stephen?”
“Colton Del Ray,” I say firmly, fighting tears. “You are not him. Do you hear me?”
He doesn’t. His breathing is shallow, and he says, “What if we get almost there? What if we come the closest, and it’s still not enough?”
“What if,” I counter, dipping my head to meet his eyes, “ we are more than enough?”
He doesn’t have another comeback. I wish he could see himself the way I do, but I can’t make him. He has to make that decision for himself, and I’ll wait, even if it nearly kills me.
I drop my hands from his face, take a deep breath, and say, “I haven’t painted since my miscarriage.”
A moan tears through his throat, and his eyes fall closed. He exhales roughly before reaching for the flyer tucked under my leg. His knuckles brush the bare skin of my thigh, washing awareness over me like a wave, and he looks at me questioningly.
I nod.
He unfolds the paper and studies it, his breathing slowly evening out. I wonder if he’s actually just processing the last fifteen minutes. I wouldn’t blame him. It’s one thing to process how the sky has shifted from cerulean to periwinkle; it’s another to digest everything that we’ve shared.
He raises his eyes. “Do you want to submit something?”
Two answers immediately vie to be the one. Yes and no. I can’t say both, so I take the middle road. “I don’t know.”
Colton hums. “So, yes.”
“I didn’t say that. I…” It’s my turn to shake my head. “I haven’t tried to venture back into that world since everything happened, Colton. It’s not like I was known, but I wasn’t not known.”
“Fini, that’s an oxymoron.”
A short laugh sputters from me. “Yeah, well, it’s also the truth.”
“What is? That you don’t know if you want to do it, or that you were semi-known in the art world?” A half smile curls his mouth, and relief pours through me. That smile is like sunlight poking through ominous black clouds, like a sunrise after the darkest, coldest night. “I mean, I don’t know the art world, but I definitely know you.”
I roll my eyes, and buoyed by his smile, I tip my head onto his shoulder. His body doesn’t tense this time. He holds the flyer in one hand, and he reaches for mine with the other. He presses a kiss to my ring finger, just below the ring he placed there. Fizzy warmth crackles and pops under my skin. He lowers our joined hands to his thigh, and the polyester of his swim trunks is damp against my knuckles.
“I have an idea,” he says.
“Which is?”
“I’ll try ,” he says, emphasizing the word, “if you’ll agree to submit something.”
It feels like an ultimatum. With anyone else, it probably would be.
But it’s Colton, so I straighten and hold out a hand between us. “Okay.”
Colton pushes my hand down and cups my face tenderly. “We’re not colleagues, Cheyenne, and we’re not just best friends. We’re fake fiancés, and sometimes fake fiancés want to kiss each other.”
My fingers cover his on my jaw. He presses his mouth to mine, and I release a shuddering breath that feathers over his tear-salty lips. One that fuels the passion with which he kisses me, and gives him permission to pull me close to his chest and hold me there until the sun sinks far, far below the hazy July horizon.
Thursday night, I go upstairs to get ready for bed. Ember and Graham’s wedding is Saturday, and last-minute preparations have everyone moving a hundred miles a minute. But when I cross the threshold of my room, I stop short.
Three canvases, two palettes of paint, and an array of paintbrushes are fanned out on my downy white comforter. I pick up a note with Colton’s handwriting scrawled across it.
I wandered the aisles of Target with my soon-to-be sister-in-law for this stuff today (she was there for extra wedding favors and a book). I narrowly avoided being propositioned by a woman pushing a cart full of, I kid you not, Kleenex. Boxes and boxes of them. This means two things:
You HAVE to paint something
Why don’t men wear engagement rings? This is my petition to change that.
If you need a muse for your painting, let me know. I’d be happy to tell Graham that Ember wants a portrait as her wedding gift.
Love, C
P.S. Check the decorative mailbox.
Fighting a smile, I set the note next to my seashell lamp. I cross to my closet to dig out my old wooden easel. It’s buried under clothes that fell from their hangers years ago and random puffy paints long ago dried up, but I haul it out with a grunt.
I prop it against my window seat, and then I go back to find the oversized t-shirt and slouchy cotton shorts that I painted in every summer. They have wall paint, watercolor, and acrylic paint stains on them, and they might fit a little snugger than before, but I drape them over the back of the easel.
I dig out that sparkly blue pen from my desk drawer again, and then I go downstairs. Colton is nowhere in sight, but I quietly unlock the front door. The welcome rug on the porch prickles my bare feet uncomfortably and the neighbors across the street are turning into their driveway. I swat away a mosquito and lift the lid of the striped navy and white mailbox and pull out a piece of scratch paper.
BOGO Sale at Hank’s Hardware! one side reads.
On the other, in Colton’s beautifully choppy handwriting, it says, Paint anything or paint nothing, Fini. But whatever you do, paint for yourself. P.S. Will you be my wedding date this weekend?
Tucking a smile into my shoulder, I hold the paper up against the cedar shake siding, and I write back, I thought you’d never ask.