Brian followed her, but Candace lingered at the door. “Mom, I…” Her voice trailed off, but Sylvia lifted a quelling hand anyway.
“I don’t want to hear it. You do what you feel you have to do, Candace. I don’t care anymore, either.”
“That’s not what I want. I don’t want you to not care. I just want you to see how you’ve hurt me, especially about this. He means everything to me. Maybe we’ll stay together forever, and you know what? Maybe we won’t. Right now that’s not the point. The point is, he’s my choice. The risk is solely on my shoulders.”
Jameson got unsteadily to his feet and walked away without a word, his hands cupped to catch the blood still pouring from his nose. He didn’t stop or reply, even when Candace asked if he needed a towel. Sylvia turned without further comment and followed him. Just before Candace shut the door, she heard her mother warn him that he’d better not bleed all over her leather seats.
She found Michelle and Brian sitting at the kitchen table, Michelle staring at nothing in particular, Brian brooding. He kept flexing the hand he’d used to punch Jameson. Candace went straight to the freezer and got some ice for him to put on it, wrapping it in a thin dishtowel.
“Well, that actually went over a little worse than expected,” she proclaimed, dropping into a chair with them. Brian let her take his hand and settle the ice on his knuckles. “I didn’t count on actual bloodshed.”
“Yeah. Sorry about decking your brother,” he muttered. “Hell of a way to make a good impression, huh?”
“It’s all right.” She sighed, stroking his forearm. Deep inside, it made her proud that her man was strong and fearless enough to defend her physically, if it came to that. And that he cared enough.
Proud, hell. If it wouldn’t be entirely inappropriate, she’d be grinning like a fiend.
Poor Jameson. He’d run off at the mouth to the wrong person. Despite everything, she loved her big brother, but she’d always known his day was coming.
Michelle’s lips quirked. “I take it my ride left.”
“Sorry. I’ll take you home. So how much does Deanne hate me?”
She seemed to debate it for a moment. “Deanne was…weird. At first I could see the steam rising, and I thought we were going to have a major meltdown they’d hear all the way up to the space shuttle, but then it was as if a calm came over her and she didn’t really care anymore. She was so ready to walk down the aisle and get the whole thing over with. She stuck Becky back in the wedding.”
Candace laughed. “Tattoo and all?”
“Yep. She didn’t have much choice, unless she wanted a lone groomsmen during the recessional. She made her try to cover her tattoo with gobs of foundation, though.”
Brian scoffed and Candace sent him a smile. “I’d have told her to f**k off,” he said.
“Yes, I’m aware,” Michelle said, rolling her eyes fondly.
“So…when did you two talk?”
Brian opened his mouth, but Michelle beat him to the punch. “I called him. It was after we all went to lunch, and we’d been talking about tattoos. I really just wanted to check in on him. I had no idea about you guys.”
“But you said you talked about me?”
Brian shook his head. “She asked if I was seeing someone. I told her about you without really saying it was you.”
“And what he told me is how I know he’s serious.” She smiled at him, a little sadly. “You take care of her. You’ll have me to answer to if you don’t.”
“Don’t worry. She won’t ever be picking herself up off the floor with a broken nose,” he said bitterly. Candace felt terrible that her mother had insinuated that about him. It was just a taste of what she dealt with on a daily basis. Maybe now he understood.
“Hey, congratulations, that punch was a beauty,” Michelle said. “And Aunt Syl’s face was priceless.”
“Why, thank you.”
“I pretty much missed the whole thing,” Candace said.
Michelle looked at her. “And you. I think I like this new side he’s brought out in you. Before all of this, I’d never seen you stand up to them.”
“For all the good it did me. I’m just worried about the repercussions.”
Michelle gave her a worried frown. “Honestly, I am too.”
Brian looked Candace in the eyes, his own serious and troubled. He put his uninjured hand over hers, where she was still holding the ice over his sore knuckles. “Baby, I need to get to work. You’re still more than welcome to come with me. In fact, I wish you would. I don’t want you being alone right now.”
“It’s not like they’re going to come back and hurt me or something—”
“I still want you with me. Maybe take your mind off things for a while.”
“Are you sure you’ll be able to work with your hand this way?”
He pulled it from under the ice and wiggled his fingers. “It’s not that bad.” Sending her a wicked grin, he chuckled. “I guess I should’ve had enough presence of mind to give him a left hook, though.”
Watching him that night, Candace was afraid he was hurting more than he let on. But if that was the case, he suffered through without a single complaint.
After a while she retreated to Brian’s office, called Sam—Macy was inexplicably absent tonight—then spent the rest of the time poring over her notes for her psych final tomorrow. All of his employees were fun and gracious, but she hadn’t wanted to hover out there with them. She didn’t want to get in their way, or make them uncomfortable. How did they feel about the boss’s girlfriend hanging around watching them work?
And she supposed she really was his girlfriend. The thought was almost too astounding to entertain.
“You okay?” he asked from the doorway. She shifted her gaze to him, resisting the urge to lick her lips at the sight of him leaning against the frame. So tall, so gorgeous, with his normally intense eyes gentle as he looked at her. No telling how long he’d been standing there, watching her. He looked comfortable.
“I’m fine. Are you?”
Brian nodded, stepping in and dropping into the chair beside the door. “It’s pretty slow out there. Sundays usually are. I told them we could go ahead and shut down. I think they’re still tired and hung over from last night.”
“Aw. Nice boss,” she teased.
He grinned. “I’d love to go home and boss you around a little bit.”
“Really. Well, I regret to inform you that you aren’t the boss of me, Mr. Ross.”
Smoothing his hand down his goatee, he gave her a long appraisal that made her insanely curious as to what was going on behind those eyes. “What if I was?”
“Huh?”
He shrugged. “I was just thinking how good you look sitting in here, and you mentioned getting a job to your mother. I could use someone to handle the business side of things so I can be out front most of the time. It would be perfect, because you could work around your class schedule.”
“That sounds ideal, but…have you really thought that through?”
“No, not really. It was just an idea. I know what you’re going to say, though, and you’re probably right.”
“It would complicate things. Not that I have any doubts about you at all, but it’s so early. If we didn’t work out, God forbid, what would happen?”
“I would never do you wrong like that, Candace. Even if we didn’t work out, you could stay until you found something else, if you felt you had to quit. I wouldn’t screw you over with your job. And I trust you wouldn’t screw me over, either.”
“Depends on what you did, I guess,” she joked.
He laughed. “Hey, now, why does it have to be me who messes up?”
“And I don’t know that you could afford me.”
Something melted in his gaze, in his expression, and her heart softened. Any more of that and the mushy organ wouldn’t be of much use to her. “Now, that might be a legitimate concern,” he said. “I don’t know if I can afford you now, but I’m damn sure gonna break the bank trying.”
She was hoping to not have one more reason to love him, because he was enticing her to leave everything she’d ever known and insinuate herself fully into his life. It was thrilling and terrifying, and if there could only be one thing to make her want to hang on to her former self, she thought maybe she could resist his all-consuming allure.
But, no. He took her home to his apartment, and she found she even loved where he lived. Her community was silent and dull, mostly parents and working professionals who wanted it quiet at all times. She rarely saw any of her neighbors—except for the ones who kept her entertained most nights with the sounds of their sexual escapades, of course; it seemed she was always running into them. Usually she was too embarrassed to look them in the eyes.
They hadn’t been at Brian’s apartment twenty minutes when some of his neighbors stopped by to invite them to a get-together in the courtyard by the pool. Brian declined, but she liked the whole atmosphere of the place: laid-back, easy-going fun. She’d lay bets no one here was going to snap your head off if you wanted to play your music a little loud one night. Even now, the muffled sounds of the party could be heard below.
Brian’s place was neat and sparse, a typical bachelor pad, she imagined. Not that she had been in any of those. He had the essential furniture and lots of toys: HD flat, X-Box, Wii, awesome computer set-up, a massive stereo system.
Several pieces of abstract artwork covered his walls, along with some bizarre surrealist pieces that looked like they could’ve been done by H. R. Giger. It wasn’t until she peeked in one of the two bedrooms and saw his makeshift art studio and the work on the easel that she realized most of the art on the walls—here and at his parlor—must be his. The same style, despite the nuances.
He looked so modest when she told him how much she loved it. And when she asked if he could paint something for her, he wordlessly took her hand and led her back in the room.
“Something I did a few days ago,” he said, riffling through several canvases stacked against one wall. “I just…had to.”
What he pulled out then made her lose her breath. It was her. Her face, laughing with her chin in her hands, sketched out with charcoal in a way she could only describe as…loving. Meticulous. She found herself glancing around the room to see if he had a picture of her somewhere that she wasn’t aware of.
“It looks so much like me. It’s…beautiful. I mean, it’s a beautiful drawing, not that I’m beautiful—”
“Stop that. You are beautiful.”
“You did this a few days ago?”
“Yeah.”
While they hadn’t been speaking. He’d drawn it and then hidden it from his sight. Trying to exorcise her from his mind? She brought trembling fingers to her lips. “And…you didn’t have a picture of me for reference?”
“This is how you looked at me once when I was still with Michelle, when I said something undoubtedly stupid I can’t even remember now. I just know the way you laughed at me stuck in my head and I couldn’t get it out. Your face is so clear in my mind, Candace, I could sketch it in my sleep.”