Chapter 10 #2
She’s three pages away from the sketch I did approximately thirty-six hours ago at eleven o’clock at night when I couldn’t sleep and Owen was passed out in the next room, snoring his little boy snores—
I drew something I shouldn’t have put down on pencil and paper in the sketchpad I carry everywhere. It was late and I was tired and it was just a drawing—
She turns another page.
Oh shit.
“Yeah so that’s my sketchbook.” I reach over and snatch the sketchpad back. Not smoothly, either. The pages flutter as I pull it from her hands and I catch a glimpse of her face in that half-second—her eyes tracking the fluttering pages, landing somewhere near the back—
I don’t know how much she saw.
“That’s all there is,” I say.
A pause.
“Oh,” she says, a little breathless.
She’s looking at her hands now, not at me.
I die on the inside.
She saw it.
Or she saw enough of the intricate full drawing of an angel that mighta kinda sorta have her face.
Hands off, says every functional part of my brain.
She is Jake’s wife and you drew her face, in detail even though she was just a memory, on an angel in your sketchbook at eleven o’clock at night two days after sleeping with her.
And she just saw it.
Walk to the RV.
Walk directly to the RV.
“Hey,” she says, posture changing again like she’s decided something. “Just because I’m locked out of my old business doesn’t mean I can’t start a new one. Like, take on new clients.”
I look at her.
“Texas is a community property state,” she says. “I’m going to get half of everything… eventually. But in the meantime I need income, plus I need something to do or I’m going to lose my mind, so.” She tilts her head. “Do you want more exposure for your shop?”
I hear myself laugh. “What? What do you mean?”
“I do marketing. Like for independent artists and influencers.” Her whole face lights up, actually, which is not a thing I expected from marketing as a topic. But then most things about her are not what I expected.
“And I can market you and your art. We could start with shoots with my phone. Show people what you actually do and build you a following.” She pauses. “How online are you currently?”
I hate all that stuff, so… “Barely.”
She looks me up and down. Head to toe, which I feel more than see, and then she lets out a quick breath and says, “You would do very well online.”
“Meaning you like what you see?” I ask, flirting before I mean to.
She rolls her eyes and shoves my shoulder. It’s the first time she’s touched me since that morning. It’s nothing, just a shoulder shove, but I feel it through my whole arm and then further through my entire body.
Hands off.
“I’m saying you might gather an adoring public which translates to real money,” she says. “For you and for me.”
“So you want to use me as your cash cow.” I can’t hold back my grin now.
“Only if you want to be.” She bites at her thumbnail, which I’ve noticed she does when she’s thinking. “I had a waiting list before all this. It’s not poaching if they were never officially signed.”
She looks up, a sudden frown creasing her brow. “But if you’re my client, it would mean we’d be spending more time together… which might be—”
“A bad idea,” I finish for her.
I mean it.
I do mean it.
She’s Jake’s wife—his ex-wife, his almost-ex-wife, whatever—and I drew her face in my sketchbook like a seventeen-year-old with a crush.
And she may or may not have seen it. And we spent one night together that I have been very carefully not thinking about for two days.
More time together is objectively a bad idea.
“Probably,” she agrees.
Neither of us moves.
“Where were you?” she asks suddenly. “The last two days.”
She immediately follows up with a full-body wince and, “Sorry, you don’t have to—”
“With my son,” I say.
The words land in the space between us.
The moment Owen enters the picture is usually the moment I watch people recalibrate what they think they know about me.
Most women do one of two things: they get warmer in the performative way of oh how sweet and then start romanticizing me in ways that are nothing even close to accurate. Or they get cooler in a way that means they’re doing math about complications.
I’ve learned to read either reaction fast.
Owen is not a detail. Owen is the whole center.
Lennon does neither of those things.
She goes still and tilts her head with a complicated look on her face that’s half softness and half some sort of sadness I can’t quite put my finger on, and asks, “How old?”
“Four.”
“Yeah?” A small smile. Just a real, unmanaged one, like she’s imagining my son out there as a real little human. “What’s his name?”
“Owen.”
She repeats it softly, like she’s trying it out. “Owen.”
“He’s big into dragons.”
That makes her smile turn huge. “Oh my gosh. So it’s him holding the sword that’s too big for him over the downed dragon?”
She’s talking about in the sketchbook. The sketchbook that she paid frighteningly close attention to.
“Yeah.”
“I bet you’re an amazing dad.” Now she’s beaming at me.
Gorgeous woman full-teeth grinning at me and calling me an amazing dad hits different than when Dr. Delaney says it.
Like maybe I am actually getting somewhere with how hard I’ve been working to change my life.
She’s Jake’s wife, says the voice, but it’s quieter now, working harder to be heard over everything else.
“So,” Lennon says. “When do we begin?”
I should say: I’ll think about it. Or: let me look at my schedule.
I should say any of the things that put appropriate distance between right now and more time with my brother’s soon-to-be ex-wife.
Instead I ask, “Got anywhere else to be right now?”
Her smile goes on high-beams again.
I am so fucked.
“No,” she says.
“Then let’s go.”