“You told me you grew up in that area,” I recalled.
He’d been the only child of an investment banker and a world champion ice skater. After she retired from competing, his mom had started an elite training center for skaters at Tahoe that regularly spit out world champions and Olympians. I also remembered that his parents were retired and had moved back to Long Island, where they’d grown up.
Evan had grown up on the shores of Lake Tahoe, though. Elizabeth and her family had lived there, as well. Evan and she had been teenage sweethearts.
“How long would we stay there?” I asked.
“As long as you like. It’s amazing there during the summer, the fall… the winters are spectacular.”
“Just leave San Francisco? Leave my jobs?” I asked, my voice flat in disbelief. The past twenty-four hours had provided more shocks and surprises then I’d had in a lifetime.
“Yes,” he said.
“You can’t be serious. What would I do when I got back? Look for jobs all over again?” I started to rise to a sitting position, feeling disoriented lying there staring into his X-ray eyes. He pressed gently with his hand on my hip and I remained in place.
“You just said you’re working for money to survive. I have plenty of money, Anna. You can focus on painting. Finally.”
“You’re asking me to live with you? Live off you?”
“I don’t see it that way. If you’re concerned about it, I have no doubt that if you’re given time and opportunity to paint, you’ll eventually be able to support yourself, and then some. You’re very talented. I know the owner of a very reputable gallery in South Lake. I’m sure she’d consider herself lucky to show you. Look at your last exhibition. You sold three paintings in one night.”
“Two of them to you. I’m not sure that counts.”
“Of course it does. I have excellent taste, you know,” he said, that tiny, distracting smile flickering across his mouth. “You just need the time and the opportunity to create… to do what you’re meant to do.”
As always, his absolute certainty stole my voice. I can’t begin to describe what I was feeling in that moment. Disbelief, of course. A sense of the surreal. I was like a lifetime prisoner, and he’d just casually flung open the door of my cell. The bright light of the outside world stunned me. I didn’t know how to just take a step from the world I knew into freedom.
Into joy.
He saw my bewilderment, of course. He exhaled and shut his eyes for a moment.
“I realize this must feel like it’s coming out of nowhere for you. You don’t know what’s been going on in my head. You have no idea, Anna, about the battle I’ve been fighting on the inside, ever since I first saw you.”
“Sometimes I feel like what goes on in your head is the biggest mystery in the world.”
“If it is, I’m trying to demystify things now,” he countered quietly, but firmly. He leaned down and pressed his forehead next to mine. “I’ll admit it. I was hesitant to plunge in, head first. I was hesitant to sleep with you, because—”
“Of Elizabeth,” I whispered when he broke off midsentence.
“Yes,” he confessed tensely. “I was afraid that if I touched you, if I crossed the line, there’d be no going back. But now that it’s happened… Well, it’s happened.”
“What’s happened?” I asked, praying to God he’d tell me the answer to that question.
He smiled. It transformed his face when he did. He ruffled my hair in a fond gesture that made me feel about eight years old. “I’ve fallen for you, Anna. Uncomfortably hard,” he added with a gruff, endearing laugh. He swung his long legs off the bed and sat up, his back to me.
“You know, I don’t think I can live or rest, knowing you’re out there in the world… separate from me,” he mused, almost as if to himself. Suddenly he looked over his shoulder at me. “If you don’t feel the same way, then—”
/> “I feel the same way,” I said in a rush, anxious I’d miss the moment and be left like a kid with a dollar clutched in her hand, watching forlornly as the ice cream truck pulled away from the curb and down the street.
A crooked half-smile broke over his face. My flash of panic melted at the sight of it. He cradled my jaw and caressed my cheek with his thumb, and there I was…
Flying all over again.
Chapter Two
Seven Weeks Later
It was like the first couple months of Evan’s and my relationship had been filmed in slow motion. Then some unseen hand had flipped the speed button on the camera. Suddenly, we flew down a golden slope, a twisting, exhilarating rollercoaster, all inertia, no effort required.