A strange look still in his eye, he stripped off his layers, carrying them all over to the fire to dry them more quickly.
“You did good with the fire,” he told me, poking at it a little to make the flames lap higher, warming his hands in front of it for a long minute. “Doesn’t look like purses,” he said oddly as he turned to face me.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your file,” he told me, waving toward where he left it on the counter. I hadn’t looked at it. I knew what it would say. Right down to my credit score and weight. “It said you were some big shot purse designer. I didn’t know such a thing existed.”
“Such a thing?”
“A ‘big shot purse designer.'”
“You’ve never heard of Birkin bags? Coach? Gucci?”
“Didn’t figure there was a way to have a name alongside them.”
“You have to work for it, like anything else,” I said, shrugging, though there was nothing to shrug about. I put my lifeblood into making my name. I went sleepless nights to do it. I sacrificed relationships and friends to it. I survived on bread and cheese sandwiches for it. It was nothing to shrug off.
“You care that much about bags?” he asked, looking dubious.
“I’m very good at it.”
“So, that’s a no,” he guessed. His hand reached out so suddenly that I couldn’t react quickly enough to pull back when he snagged my sketchpad and pulled it away from me. “Duchess, what the fuck?” he asked after a long, nerve-racking moment of staring down at my sketchpad, flipping back and forth between the two most recent pages.
The one I had been working on was a drawing of the cabin we were currently staying in. The one directly before was the common room of the upstairs in his office, complete with my pile of pink and gold luggage on the floor.
“It’s just a… doodle,” I defended, hating the word, but not liking the weird thickness in the air around us, made that way with his undefinable reaction and my own insecurity.
“It’s something you could frame and throw on the wall,” he countered as he dropped down next to me on the couch, flipping back another couple of pages, finding an old sketch of my apartment building in Manhattan. Seeing it now, it felt like it was lightyears away instead of just a few days, a few hundred miles. “This your old place?” he asked, looking over at me, searching for something. “Think I get it.”
“Get what?” I asked, shaking my head.
“Why you have been so tense,” he explained. “You’re giving up a fuckuva lot.”
The words made my belly drop a bit, a sensation I didn’t have a name for, didn’t know how to handle.
It was right about then that I felt his hand – wide, firm, strong – close around my knee, giving it what could only be called a reassuring squeeze.
“Fucking sucks, duchess,” he said, shaking his head. “But no one can take this,” he added, gesturing with his free hand to my sketchpad. “You can’t do bags anymore, but you can draw, paint, do something else with this. It’d be a waste not to. You clearly love it.” I must have stiffened or jerked back or something because he added, “It’s the most peaceful I’ve seen you look. You didn’t even hear me when I stomped up the path and opened the door.”
“It’s a hobby,” I insisted, feeling odd at admitting it was more.
“It’s a passion,” he corrected, shaking his head. “Don’t do that shit.”
“What?”
“Play something down that you enjoy. What’s the point of that?”
“Self-preservation,” I admitted, not knowing what possessed me to do so, to open up to this person. Of all of those in the world.
“Because someone belittled this,” he assumed, motioning to my picture.
I was finding it hard to swallow as I nodded. “Yes.”
“Your parents.”
“Yes.”
“You could draw like this as a kid?”
“Probably better,” I told him. “I practiced more. Now, it is mostly about work designs.”
“Better than this, and someone talked shit about it,” he went on, sounding like he could only half-believe it. “That sucks, duchess. Your parents were fuckheads.”
“Yes, they were,” I agreed. “When I was thirteen,” I started, almost feeling like I was going to burst if I didn’t get the words out, the desire to share something very foreign to me, but in this situation, seemingly unstoppable, “I didn’t have any money to buy my mom a birthday present. There was never any money for anything,” I added, shrugging off something that was my driving force in life – the desire to get out of that crushing poverty. “But I wanted to get her something because my dad usually forgot. And then she would cry and drink and get mean about it.”
“And you were the only target in sight,” he guessed.
“Yeah,” I admitted, looking off into the fire. “So I spent two weeks making this really intricate family portrait. It was good,” I added. “Looked exactly like all of us. I even made this little makeshift frame for it out of woven sticks from the woods behind the house. I wrapped it up and gave it to her.”