I’d held it together long enough to grasp Ava’s hand Sunday morning over breakfast where she had a tearful but ultimately loving and understanding conversation with her parents about the pregnancy. I’d held it together long enough to accept the Mr. Licking Thicket crown I’d apparently won Saturday night in absentia. Mr. Ivey had placed it on my spot at the breakfast table and beamed at me. “You’re an official Thicketeer now, Mal,” he’d said.
The title had come with a T-shirt and a sash too, but I’d shoved them in my luggage without looking at them. There was no way I could face the guilt I had at not being there to accept such an honor in person. I must have looked like an ungrateful ass. Ava had told everyone that I’d had a work emergency come up which wasn’t far from the truth.
When I’d stood in the corner at the dance and used my phone to keep from making eye contact with anyone, I’d noticed an email from one of the galleries back in LA. They wanted my reef sculpture for an upcoming show. The only catch was an incredibly tight turnaround. They wanted the piece installed within the coming week for the opening Friday night. It was the kind of break I’d waited years for. Acceptance into the official art scene meant legitimacy, connections, and future opportunities at other galleries.
So the drunken flight was the only pity party I allowed myself. As soon as I got back to the studio, I went straight to work. I used my headphones like a hair shirt and blasted some stupid fucking Spotify playlist called All The Feels which, honestly, had a decided lack of happy ones. So then I switched to a playlist called Happy Beats which literally had a song on it called “Pour The Milk” which made me fucking cry and think of Annabelle and her soft udder and warm brown eyes, and Jesus fucking Christ, now I was missing a cow.
There really should be a warning on Spotify. Something like… never press play if you’ve just walked away from the one you… like a lot.
I sighed and yanked the headphones off. This was fucking ridiculous. “He’s just a guy. Nothing special,” I told the smashed muffler flounder I was attaching to the base of a coral formation. The movers were coming in three days to crate the piece for transportation to the gallery, and I still had at least thirty hours of work left on it. “He doesn’t even…” I tried to think of Brooks Johnson’s shortcomings. “He doesn’t even…” I sighed. “Know who Milton Reeves is,” I finally said to the flounder. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but one could guess Brooks wouldn’t know who the inventor of the muffler was. “So there. Imagine not knowing who Milton Reeves is. Pfft. You wouldn’t even be here without him.”
“Are you talking to a metal sproingy thing and his metal sproingy friends?” Ava asked, walking in with a giant iced coffee and a vanilla bean Frappuccino which was basically a milkshake dressed up to look like a fancy coffee drink.
“Those are struts, and if that coffee is for me, I will give you an extra foot rub later.”
She grinned. “It is, but you would have given me the foot rub anyway.”
I climbed down from the ladder and took the drink from her, groaning through the first sip. “True, but God, I could kiss you right now for this.”
“Looks like you could use it. No offense, but you look like dog poop.” She peered at the sculpture while she took a sip of her own drink. “How’s it coming?”
I let out an internal sigh of relief that she wasn’t bringing up the dreaded topic of a certain man from Tennessee. “Good. I’ll probably spend a few more hours working on it tonight, but then I need to get some decent sleep since I have a teleconference with the gallery owner early in the morning. I don’t want to look like dog shit on the call, you know?” I lifted an eyebrow at her.
“Good call. You might try some cucumbers on your eyes too. Or a cold compress if you don’t have cukes. If I’d realized how bad it was, I could have brought—”
I held up a hand. “Stop it right there. I don’t need a rundown on how bad I look or tips on how to fix it, okay?”
She tilted her head to study me. “This isn’t just from overworking yourself. You’re spending time sniffling over Brooks, aren’t you?”
So much for hoping she wouldn’t bring it up.
“No idea what you’re talking about,” I said before setting down my drink and stepping back toward the ladder.
She let me go without arguing. When I peeked back down at her after drilling my next hole in the base of the strut, she was lying back in the overstuffed armchair and sipping her drink with a thoughtful look on her face. I went back to what I was doing.