Page 83 of The Backup Plan
She rested her cheek on his forearm and let her hair fall into her face as she stroked his arms with pastel-smudged fingers. He would let her paint his entire body if it would soothe the nervous thrum of her heart. The slow release of the tension in her neck and shoulders melted her against him, and he moved his lips against her hair, unable to speak.
The whispers in the studio disappeared. He held her in silence, and she made no move to pull away or offer any update or explanation about Justin or Isaac. If she was content with that, so was he. He remembered that feeling of sitting quietly with someone who had nothing to do with the things that hurt or infuriated him, the small peace that brought him, and understood why she wanted him to leave the night before.
That morning in the gym, he kept to his usual workout with the tight ends and other quarterbacks, and watched the linebackers from a safe distance. Isaac stuck close to Justin, probably to load the weights a little easier and not tell him. Justin was washed-out and sweating before he lifted a thing, and took more water and bathroom breaks than he was supposed to. Cam probably should have offered a light smack on the shoulder and an atta-boy for pushing through, but couldn’t. Not after what Justin said to Avery the night before.
He’d have to learn how to draw that line and compartmentalize another day. He would and could do a lot more than that.
From the gentle shift of her weight, he thought Avery might be falling asleep upright in his arms. He yearned to carry her home and lay her somewhere soft to regain her strength, but even in his daydreams he knew she was right where she needed to be: in her studio, drawing water with washes of color, houses looking over the swell of the same ocean that took her brother, and doodling waves on his arms with pastel smudges.
“Cameron?”
“Avery?”
“He didn’t drown, you know. I don’t know why I’m afraid of water. He didn’t drown. He was wearing his life jacket. He wasn’t stupid like Justin said.”
“He doesn’t sound stupid at all. He sounds braver than I could ever be. Someone to be proud of.”
“I am proud of him.” She swallowed thickly. “It was hypothermia. Isaac was out that afternoon with his friend Braden for one last run before he cleaned the boat out for the winter. The water was cold. When that jet-skier hit the boat, Braden said he went flying. Isaac dove in. He was a strong swimmer, but he kept yelling back that he saw something, and went further away. I learned later that sometimes, in the early stages of hypothermia, you might hallucinate a little. Braden couldn’t drive the boat, but he called the Coast Guard right away. It was too late when they found him.”
She untucked an arm from his embrace and dragged her finger through the whirlpool of blue. “So I—I don’t really know why I’m afraid of water and not afraid of being cold. He loved the water. It’s not like you being afraid of bees. Those really could kill you.” She shuddered.
“Fears show up in different ways. My parents refused to have any flowering plants around our house. They didn’t want to take me to parks or zoos. Flowers became this exotic thing to me, and I chased them. I still do.”
Avery inspected her blue-smudged fingertip and traced a squiggle on his forearm. “Maybe I should try chasing water.”
“You already are.” He pointed at her drawing. “It’s making you stronger. You’re facing it on your own terms.”
“I wish my brother would.”
“I wish he would, too.”
“I didn’t speak to him before I left. Maybe I should have.” She pivoted on the stool a few degrees. “Did you see him today?”
“He was at the gym. He looked like shit, but he was there.”
“I wonder if he’s spoken to Mindy.”
He noticed she didn’t ask about Isaac, and let it slide.
“Do you like drawing the water? Does it make you feel good, or is it just something awful you force yourself to do?”
She nodded at the paper. “I like this water. It seems like it must make the people in these houses happy to look out on it every day. I haven’t moved on from it, though. I should try something else soon.”
Cameron retrieved a sketchbook from his bag and opened it midway through. He’d carried it around for weeks, waiting for the right time. When he looked up, she met his eyes for the first time since he set foot in the studio, and the collision of hope and pain starved his heart for the love of hers, but a series of crude pencil sketches was all he could offer.
“I want you to see this. It’s from my class last spring,” he said, turning the book around. “With Mindy, if you can believe it. It’s yours if you want it.”
Lips slack and jaw slightly agape, she traced the air over the buildings, careful not to smudge pastels on the paper. “You drew it,” she whispered. “You saw me staring at that drawing in the lounge and probably thought I was a madwoman, and that was your picture.”
“It wasn’t even that great a picture. I drew it from memory, and it’s probably all wrong. I couldn’t understand what you saw in it that was so important to you, and honestly, I was afraid to ask. Then you came back and looked at it again and again. I can throw a football and make thousands of people happy, but Avery, I don’t know if I’ve ever created art that had meaning to someone besides myself.”
He spun her on her stool so her back was against him again, and wrapped his arms tight around her. She held the book in her lap and didn’t look up.
“There are a couple pages of sketches if you want to see how it all came together. I know you took the one from the lounge, and I thought you might like to have these, too.”
“It’s hanging over my desk.”
“If it wants company, grab those three pages.”