Color Me Pretty: A Father's Best Friend Romance

“Theo knows you better than anybody, so that was why I told Sophie I’d come instead of her. We both know she’d take the wrong approach and come on too strong. I figured I was the lesser of two evils.”

I winced. The last time Sophie had come here she remarked on every piece of furniture she didn’t like, telling me she could buy me better things. Of course she could. Her husband let her buy whatever she wanted to get her off his back. Her taste was the opposite of mine and she knew it. The second I agreed to let her buy me new stuff, I’d lose. Sophie was family and I loved her, but I didn’t want her to think she had any influence or control over me.

“I appreciate it,” I told her honestly.

“You’re painting,” she commented, her attention going toward my overalls. “I still have one of the pictures you drew me when you were little. Do you remember? It was of me and your father. You said you wanted me to have something of us together since we didn’t have many photographs of just the two of us.”

I did remember that. I didn’t understand why the photo album Sophie had given me didn’t have many pictures of them together. Lydia might have come into their lives later, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be part of family photos.

I nodded, a gentle smile forming on my face when she turned to me. “I do. You still have it? I figured all that stuff I drew would be long gone by now. They were awful.”

To my surprise, she laughed. Loudly. Lydia usually only had two volumes—soft and softer. That sound was abnormal. “Oh, Della. I’m not the only one who kept them. There’s a man we both know who’s kept everything you gave him. Art or not.”

Or not? What else had I given Theo that he could have kept? I hadn’t even known he had anything I’d gifted him from back then. The drawings didn’t even seem like anything worth keeping considering some of them were lines and squiggles that made no sense.

“I didn’t give him anything else, Aunt Lydia. But the fact he kept those…” It made my heart thump a little faster than I wanted to admit.

Her smirk was tiny, her eyes dancing as she shook her head. “We’ll agree to disagree, yes? Can I see what you were working on?”

I only paused for a moment before nodding slowly, setting my water down on the coffee table and standing. She followed close behind me as I led her to the room I’d left my latest painting, something I woke up in the middle of the night to create after a dream that was too vivid not to do something about. The sweat that’d been collecting on my brow had stayed there as I’d gotten out of bed and stormed into my spare room in nothing but a pair of panties and the oversized tee I liked sleeping in. I stayed there for four hours, until exhaustion swept over me at six in the morning and I crawled back in bed.

It took me another two hours to get it where it was now. My palms were stained a dark pink from the color I’d mixed up—a dusty rose tone that matched the tint of my cheeks when Lydia’s lips parted after seeing it on the easel.

“Della,” she whispered, grazing her fingertips along the edge of the canvas.

Resting in a black background with various shades of pink, peach, and purple was a lonesome girl who looked too frail, too brittle to be wearing the tutu that graced her narrow waist. The ballerina lacked the leotard that normally clung to her body, her back bare and painted in cream with the darker shadows emphasizing a sickly spine everybody would point at and whisper about because they knew it wasn’t right the way her skin clung to her bones. She was bent over, as if to bow, her face hidden, her stance somber, yet screaming so many things.

Help me.

Save me.

Do something to end this.

That was what the girl in the dream did.

She begged.

I swallowed as Lydia peeled her eyes from my creation and up to me. “It’s stunning. Is it…?” She dipped her chin. I knew what she was asking but all I could do was shake my head.

Another lie. So many lies. “It’s just a girl, Aunt Lydia.”

Despite my aunt not knowing me well, it was clear she didn’t believe me. With good reason. She didn’t call me out and I didn’t offer any further information.

Maybe if I weren’t scared, I could be honest with her. I would tell her that I’d dreamt about me, the girl I was. I’d tell her that I saw my father being hauled off in handcuffs while being read his rights. I’d admit that I saw my mother on her deathbed, holding my father’s hand and telling him to be strong.

“Be better, Anthony. For Della.”

Those words plagued me. I never used to think about them as more than a plea to stop working so much and spend more time with me. We were all each other had without her. It meant we needed to be there for each other when it mat

tered. Now, I didn’t think that was what she meant at all.

Be better.

Maybe that was why I’d repeated it to myself so often. It was like my mother had meant it for both of us even though she’d directed it at my father…at what he was doing. As morbid as it was, maybe it was better she didn’t witness his demise. She’d be disappointed that he didn’t listen to her last wish.

Tears stung my eyes as I inhaled a long, deep breath. It eased the pain my lungs had succumbed to at the thought that always influenced my subconscious as I slept.

The dreams were awful. If I didn’t wake up right away from them, I silently pleaded to, so I didn’t have to relive the torture. When I did wake up, it was always the same. I would realize it may have been a dream, but it was so very real.