Page 18 of Back in the Saddle

No, this was last: I wasn’t going to share why.

That being, I’d had none of this stuff growing up, so from the moment I moved out at eighteen, and for the last fifteen years, I’d busted my ass to make this just so because I’d never had it.

Instead, I told Eric a little fib, which was only a fib because it wasn’t the whole truth, just a small part of it.

“I get wild hairs to take up cooking, or baking, or breadmaking. I buy the shit, but then I get busy and never do it.”

“Right,” he murmured, and I felt his eyes on me so I looked back at him.

When I did, I saw the depth of his gaze wasn’t his resting sexy laziness I could swim in for eternity.

It was searching, acute…uncomfortable.

“What’s question two?” I prompted.

“Why no color?”

That one threw me. “What?”

He didn’t answer verbally.

He looked over his shoulder at my living room, then to my kitchen, and back to me.

“Oh, you mean the black and white thing?” I queried.

He again didn’t answer with words.

He looked down at my black jeans with the ripped knee to my white tee with the black transfer of Debbie Harry’s face on it.

“It makes things easy to match,” I told him.

Another little fib, because it did, but that wasn’t the only reason.

“I can see that with clothes. But Jess, it’s everywhere.”

I turned to look at my living room, with its crisp gray sectional in the corner. The black toss pillows mixed with the black and white striped ones. The round black coffee table in the middle. The black lamps. The black and white photos that I’d taken and framed with white mattes and black frames, arranging them on a gallery wall above one angle of the couch.

I thought it was the shit.

And it felt like something twisted in me when I looked back at him.

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s fantastic,” he declared. “But I sense there’s a story behind it.”

I felt such extreme relief he liked it that it tweaked me.

I opened my mouth to say something, but then jumped again, because there was a sharp rap on the picture window behind us.

We both swiveled to see Martha standing there, her hands cupped beside her eyes, looking in.

When she had our attention, she marched toward my door and, without knocking, walked in.

“Thank God you’re here!” she exclaimed, still marching, this time to my kitchen.

Of note: Martha was another tenant at the Oasis. She was somewhere in her late fifties, early sixties. She could live elsewhere, she had the means, but she lived here, because she’d lived here in her younger years. Thus, it reminded her of the days before she fell in love then had to spend years helping her husband fight cancer at the same time she raised three boys, and she did this until the boys left the nest, whereupon her beloved husband died from said cancer.

I adored Martha. She had no filter, said what she wanted, did what she wanted, didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of her, and by some miracle still managed to be loving no matter how irascible she was. And she was pretty damned irascible.

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