All the Waters of the Earth (Giving You ... #3) (17 page)

I took his hand and squeezed it. What could you say to that?

“We got evicted often and I stayed in shelters sometimes. When that happened, normally I’d be with my mom and my brother.  My dad had to stay in a different building, with the men. But the thing is, he had artist friends, so he’d just leave us, sometimes for days. He’d come back and I’d hear my parents fighting, and it was always about the same thing.  Why wouldn’t he work more and make some money so that we could have food and a home.”

“Did your parents use drugs?”  I was not able to comprehend people who wouldn’t sacrifice everything to take care of their children and thought that was the only explanation for this behavior. But maybe it wasn’t.

He nodded. “My mom especially. It was her way of coping. So I basically took care of my brother when she was out of it.”

His story just kept getting worse and worse.

“So when my brother was killed in a car accident—a freak thing, coming home from school—everything collapsed. My mom went into this zombie state, where she was almost catatonic. When she came out, she left us. She went back home to her parents. I talk to her every once in a while, but she has a new family now, with two kids. She lives in Arizona. We’re pretty much estranged.”

“And your dad?”

“He couldn’t paint any more after Ethan died. With my mom leaving, he checked out too, but he checked out by working. Finally, for the first time in his life, he got clean and held a steady job, working as a copy machine salesman in Ventura. But he does nothing but work now. I barely saw him in high school. I never saw my mom. Now I don’t see either.  So I got the fuck out of there as soon as I could. I got a job at a grocery store bagging groceries the minute I was old enough, and kept working, making money to go to school, to go to law school, and to just—” He paused.

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “To get some security.”

“So since I was old enough, I’ve spent almost all of my waking life working to make sure I had a place to sleep and food.  Now?  I’m fine.  Doing well.  I won a few big plaintiff’s cases and I have plenty of money.  But I can’t seem to get away.  I’m so used to being in the office.  I’m never home.”

It had to be a refuge for him. A safe place where this awful, unsafe, hungry childhood didn’t come to haunt him.

“Do you think you could work less?” I asked tentatively. “I mean, if there were a reason to come home?”

He looked at me for a long time and it felt like he was analyzing me again, the artist taking a picture of the way I looked when I asked. “Yes,” he said finally. “Growing up like that, the only dream you have, really, is to have enough money for a home and food and a family. The traditional shit. When you don’t have it, you want it because it looks so nice that everyone has it.”

“But no family is perfect,” I started, but he interrupted,

“I’m not interested in perfect. I’m interested in real.”

“But what about your art?” I asked, wanting to know why it was so important to him and why he hid it.

“What about it?”

“Where does that fit in? In your life, I mean?”

“It doesn’t.”

That couldn’t be true. No one could create art the way Jake did, have a separate room set up, even in a temporary house, just for it, and not have it be a major part of their life.

“Jake. It does.”

He sighed and was a little grumpy when he spoke. “Here’s the deal with my art, or whatever you call it. I’ve always doodled. I drew as a kid. But after Ethan died and my dad stopped painting, he buried himself in his work and I never saw him. Making a living off of art, in my dad’s mind, was equated with him losing my mom to drugs and divorce, and losing my brother. So he freaked out, stopped doing his paintings and his mixed-media, and started being addicted to work.”

He got the message that it was not safe for him to be an artist. Not with that background. “So your dad was your role model?”

“Sort of, yeah, I guess. I don’t really have a role model in my family. I mean I have no idea how you make it, Lucy, being creative for a living. Writing? Seriously? I don’t know how that works. I can’t believe that you can do it and make money off of it. I couldn’t do it, so I chose the law. Always wanted to be Atticus Finch, I guess.”

“Really?”

“I liked that movie with Gregory Peck.”

I snuggled into his chest.  “It’s a wonderful movie, but the art. I know you still do it, regardless of whether you get paid for it, regardless of whether it makes sense. You have to do it. Right?”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, fingering my hair. “I have to do it. I can’t stop drawing. I started drawing for real after Ethan died. I didn’t want to forget him. I must have drawn hundreds and hundreds of pictures of my brother, so that I would remember everything about him. The way he put on his shoes. The way he rode his bike. The way he ate spaghetti. But between my dad working, and me working to get out of there, it was never something that I considered doing as a profession. Never something I could consider.  It meant homeless shelter again and I needed to pay for school, a roof, and food.”

I nodded into his t-shirt.

“But I still had to paint.”

Pulling back from him, I hooked my hands low behind his waist.  “Of course you did. It’s a gift and a talent that you have and you have to do it. You have to share it. By not creating what comes easy for you to create, or what you want to create, you deny all of us the chance to see it and to know that we are understood. To know that there is a connection. It is basic human nature to create.”

He looked skeptical.

“I can’t live on the streets again,” he said. “I can’t just be all free and creative. Life doesn’t work that way. I have no idea how you did it, but it’s not the way it worked for my dad, and it wouldn’t work for me.”

“You don’t know that,” I challenged, pulling a hand away from him but resisting putting it on my waist. I settled for walking my fingers up his chest.  Yum.  “It sounds like you haven’t tried.”

He stared at me. “It isn’t worth trying to do anything. It’s just something that I do.  It doesn’t mean that I could make a living off of it.”

Now my hand was on my hip.  “It’s more than that, and you know it.”

“So what if it is? Like I’m going to be some sort of slacker artist, who draws all day long and gets nothing done? No thanks. I’ll go to my office.”

“Do you like your office?”

He paused. “It doesn’t matter if I like it or not. It’s my life.”

“Jake, you said you have plenty of money.  Think about it.  Do you need to work so hard?”

“Yeah,” he whispered.  “I do.  I have so many cases, so much responsibility.  So many people counting on me.”

I shook my head.  “You need to do something for fun.”

“These days I hang out with you or your kid.  That’s really fun.” He smiled an adorable half-smile on the last one, some of the grumpiness from his earlier words subsiding. Oh, I wanted to kiss him.

So I did.

I leaned over and brushed my lips against his and he wrapped his arms around me, holding me to him, warm and comfortable. I broke apart and snuggled back into his chest.

“When is the last time you took a vacation?”

“What’s that?”

“No jokes, guapo. When’s the last time you took a vacation?”

“Does going somewhere for a work conference count?”

I rolled my eyes and looked up at him. “Answer the question.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve been anywhere since I made partner, and I don’t think I’ve really ever been on vacation. Other than moving around a lot as a kid, I’ve never been anywhere just for fun.”

Oh my poor nene. “We’re going to fix that. For Christmas, I’m giving you a vacation. You and me. We’re going away for a weekend. Plan on it. We’ll pick a weekend when Rob’s dad has him and we’ll go.”

He looked interested but also worried. “The office will freak.”

“Your office will function just fine without you. You’re just scared that they will think something got into you if you’re not around. But they can handle it just fine.”

“That’s probably true,” he admitted. “But it’s going to feel weird to go somewhere.”

“That’s the point.”

He nodded.

“It’s also the point to get a really nice hotel room and make the most of it.  Go get tested and I will, too.”

“Done,” he said immediately.

“I want to invite you inside,” I whispered, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea tonight.”

“Probably not. But Rob is with his dad this weekend, right?”

“More like with his grandma, apparently. But yes.”

“We’ll make up for it then.”

A few minutes later, he kissed me, rubbed my cheek with the back of his hand, kissed my nose, and whispered, “Good night, honey.” And then he hopped over the partition between our patios, and we both went in to sleep in our separate beds.

“Okay, mijo, I’ll see you Sunday night,” I said to Roberto, very early Saturday morning, as we walked up the pathway to Carlos’s house. As much as I wanted to keep Rob for myself, his dad had the legal right to see him overnight, every other weekend. I couldn’t change it. I kissed him and watched him go into the house, then drove back home.

And if I was truthful, it would be nice to have a break from my kid to do some last minute Christmas shopping and to spend time with my neighbor. I also modeled later this morning—the class was halfway through the session—and my skin prickled with anticipation. That class now constituted serious foreplay. 

Per the Saturday routine, at my usual fifteen minutes before class, I went into the anteroom and took off my clothes, putting on my robe. Today the class assignment was to use charcoal to draw my weight, making the drawings of my body darker where I weighed more. I tried not to think about this concept too much.

I hadn’t been with Jake since our quickie the other day.  He’d been back to his working ways, although I was starting to make up a dinner plate for him, and bring it over, so he had something to eat. He stopped by every night to talk, say hi to Rob, give me as much of a kiss as he could get away with, and take a plate of food home. I wished that he’d work less, but he explained that a case of his was blowing up, and he needed to be there.

Now, as usual, Jake sat at an easel in the back, watching me with increasingly lusty eyes. Clad, again, in a white t-shirt and dark blue jeans with a heavy black belt, he looked like the bad boy, not the buttoned-up lawyer. He kept running his hands through his ebony hair, making him look even sexier and with those dark blue eyes? Lordy.

Although he was working on his drawings, every time he caught my eye, I felt a throb go through my body. I was looking forward to tonight, since right now, my libido was going haywire. It was a good thing that women can hide their arousal.  If an aroused man was the nude model, the whole class would know.

After class, I met him at his easel. He pulled me into him by my waist and wrapped his arms around me, not caring that anyone saw. Uh huh. Yes. This was major progress for the man who initially hid from others that he knew me. We got a few curious looks from two other students who were packing up, but I didn’t care. I was seeing him, and I had the right to see him.  Their opinion didn’t matter. One of the remaining students left.