Page 59 of Forever Never
“Do you want me to turn on more lights?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
She shook her head. Those emerald eyes searching his face.
“Are you hungry? Cold?”
“No.”
He kicked off the quilt he’d used to cover his legs. “Then come here. I want to show you something.”
He towed her off the couch and back into the dark hallway, noting how she drew closer to him in the dark. She might not like him right now, but he damn well made her feel safer. He led her to the door and nudged it open.
“I did a little rearranging,” he said, fumbling for the light switch. Finding it, he moved aside so she could step out first.
“Oh, come on,” she groaned. “Why’d you go and show me a thing like this when I’m trying to stay mad at you?”
She wandered down the ramp into the room. Where kayaks and outdoor gear had once hibernated, clean work tables and empty shelves stood, waiting. He’d put down drop cloths in the center of the space and built a framework for her to hang larger canvases.
He’d rescued several of his grandmother’s glass canning jars from the basement and grouped them on the work tables.
“I changed out the lightbulbs in here to those smart LED ones,” he explained, pointing at the pitched ceiling. “You can download an app and change the color and brightness.”
She looked up and sighed.
“I also cleaned out Pop’s old tool cabinet,” he said, gesturing at the red metal chest. “You can use it for storage. Or whatever.”
He watched as she wandered the space, pausing to run a hand over neat stacks of boards. “Those are if you decide to make your canvases.” He scraped a hand over the back of his neck, wishing she would say something.
She glanced his way again, a considering look on her pretty face.
“I honestly don’t know what the hell to do with you,” she said finally. “One minute you’re pushing my buttons, the next you’re stealing my breath. You make my head spin.”
“Talk to me, Remington. Tell me what happened.”
“You never give up, do you?”
“Not when it matters.”
“Fine. You asked for it.” She hopped up on one of the folding tables and let her legs dangle. “There was an accident. My friend and I were driving back to her place after my showing at a gallery downtown.”
“You had a showing?”
She bit her lip. “I’m gonna say this, and it’s gonna sound like I’m being funny, but I’m kind of a big deal. Or I was. Or I still might be. I don’t really know. I’ve been painting. But not as Remi Ford. To the art community, I’m Alessandra Ballard.”
“Why?”
She swung her legs. “Because Remi Ford got arrested for skinny dipping. Because she’s a troublemaking screw-up who’s always on the brink of disaster.”
“That’s not who you are.”
“That’s who people here see me as. I’m the girl who fixed the street hockey championship. Or the one who got in a bar fight when she was nineteen. I didn’t want that girl following me into the world. So I’m Alessandra Ballard who wears beautiful clothes, goes to fancy parties, and paints music.”
He didn’t much care for the idea that Remi felt she had to hide who she really was. But he decided not to derail the conversation into an argument. Yet.
“Anyway, my friend Camille was driving us back to her place. It was late. The roads were icy. We ended up going through a guardrail. I broke my arm, but Camille was really hurt. She was knocked unconscious. And there we were, stuck in the dark. I felt so…helpless. So alone. I didn’t know if the car was going to slide into the blackness. I didn’t know what was in the blackness. A ravine. A river. A gentle slope. I didn’t know.”
Not wanting to distract her from the tale, he was careful not to move a muscle. But his arms ached to hold on to her so she’d remember she wasn’t alone.
“Anyway, we were finally rescued. I didn’t realize at the time that my arm was broken. I was more worried about Camille. She still hadn’t woken up. They wouldn’t let me go to the hospital with her, and I was rightfully very upset. They had an officer drive me home.”
