Page 33 of Finding New Dreams

She looked as fresh and beautiful as the flower she was named for in a crimson mini dress and black leggings. If only I could paint her…

Thermos clutched in one hand, Rose smiled at me. “Good morning.”

I grunted at her, my mind still a mess from my ex’s new social life, Chloe’s fear, and my own failure. It didn’t help that my first instinct was to tangle my fingers in her thick black hair and kiss her until we both forgot where or even who we were.

That kind of impulse had helped my creativity before. But I couldn’t with her.

Rose had come to stand next me while I brooded and joined me in staring at the white canvas.

“No ideas, huh?” she asked sympathetically.

“Or too many.”

She set her thermos on the table. “Well, what’s one of them?”

I rubbed my hand over my carefully trimmed beard, letting out a bitter laugh. “I don’t know if they’re ideas so much as thoughts…emotions. Nameless. Wordless.”

“Tell me.”

I held back for just a moment, then released a torrent of words about everything that had happened that morning. “…and I just feel so useless. I came here to try to use some of this anger and frustration and hurt to—to—” I gestured at the canvas. “You know? Like I always did whenever this stuff would happen when I was a kid and life started getting me down. Now everyone expects me to create these perfect, amazing works of art. But for the first time in my life, art is failing me. Why?” I asked Rose bleakly.

For a moment, I didn’t think she understood what I was trying to say through all my blabbering. Her head was tilted to one side, her mouth twisted up in concern.

But then she did something I wasn’t expecting at all.

She took my right hand in hers, folded all but my pointer finger, and dipped it in the yellow paint. Lifting my hand, she pressed my wet finger to the middle of the canvas.

A perfect drop of sunshine on a field of snow.

“There,” she said softly. “The first step is always the hardest because it’s the only difference between doing something and not doing it at all.” She used my finger to create another yellow dot next to the first. “That also makes it the scariest. Unless”—she swept my finger in a wide U under the two dots—“you simply change your mind about it.” She smiled at the smiley face we’d created.

I smiled too. Slowly at first then gaining momentum until I was grinning. Facing her, I nearly collided with her mouth, we were so close.

“I could kiss you right now—a thousand times—for your brilliance,” I told her. I watched as panic tinged with excitement lit up her eyes. “But seeing as we’re just friends…I’ll do this instead.”

Deftly switching our hands so that I was the one holding hers, I dipped her finger in the blue paint and ran it across the canvas, creating a streaky sky.

She laughed, her breath warm and strawberry-sweet on my cheek. Then she plunged my middle finger, ring finger, and pinky into purple, green, and orange respectively and danced my fingers across the canvas, spotting it with color.

Standing up and gripping her wrist in my multi-colored hand, I smeared her palm with red paint and slapped it onto the canvas.

“Ha! Caught you red-handed!”

She gasped in mock outrage and looked up at me with wide eyes. “Doing what?”

“For being the most beautiful woman in the world.”

She gave a cute little huff, as if I were being ridiculous, but her cheeks were pink. “I don’t know about that, but I am guilty of this!” She brushed her finger down the bridge of my nose, leaving a trail of wet paint.

My jaw dropped open.

“Don’t worry—it’s washable,” she said.

“Well, you definitely shouldn’t have told me that.”

I dunked my fingers into the blue paint as she gasped for real this time. She wrenched herself out of my grasp but not before I left a long blue streak down her arm.

She stared down at it as a wicked sense of pleasure sizzled through my veins.

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