To Sir, with Love

I have never resented my obligation to Bubbles & More as much as I do in this moment, but as always, I do what needs to be done.

I take a deep breath and step away from Sebastian. “Please excuse me.”

He nods, and I feel his eyes on my back as I walk away.

We don’t speak the rest of the evening, and yet every time I search the room for him, which is admittedly often, he’s standing by Genevieve’s side, nodding pleasantly at whomever he’s speaking to.

And every time, he seems to sense my gaze, because his eyes find mine. The moments of eye contact are brief—a few seconds at most.

The butterflies in my stomach last much, much longer.

To Sir, with aggravation,

Do you ever want something you can’t have—that you shouldn’t want? But the more you try to stop, the harder you want?

Lady

* * *

My dear Lady,

Very much so. And I hope you get what you want that you can’t have—at least one of us should.

Yours in yearning,

Sir

* * *

To Sir,

What is it you yearn for?

Lady

Eleven

Sir doesn’t reply to my last message, but I can’t stop thinking about his.

Yours in yearning.

Yearning!

My thoughts of Sebastian haven’t faded, but now they’re competing with thoughts of Sir, each man as unattainable as the other, and each causing twin pulls of, well, yearning.

After three straight days of what I can only describe as teenage pining after the champagne tasting and Sir’s last message, I get sick of my mopey self and throw myself into my art with a vengeance in a desperate attempt to forget about both men.

I don’t remember when I first fell in love with art. It’s just always been a part of my life, the thing I was meant to do. Finger paints. Construction paper. Pastels. I loved it all, and I was good at it all.

Or as much a master of finger paints as anyone can be.

And my love for art only increased with each passing year. In eighth grade, a student from a local art school had come in to teach us how to sketch a still life. Most of the kids had been glad that the art lesson had replaced social studies for the day. But man, I was really into that bowl of fruit. I erased the shading on the apple so many times that the art student—Juliet—had had to get me a new sheet of paper, and she’d stayed with me after school awhile longer to explain how changing the angle of how I held the pencil could help create dimension in my strokes.

Most vividly of all though, I remember when I realized watercolors were my thing. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was seventeen, and Caleb and I had spent the morning helping my dad dust all of the bottles before the shop opened at noon. The rest of the day was ours, since he’d hired May by that point.

We were heading home through Central Park—a route I was allowed to take only during the day, and only when the younger but much larger Caleb was with me. Caleb had been going through a nerdy but intense Ultimate Frisbee stage, and when he’d spotted a pickup game on one of the lawns, had begged to play for a few minutes.

Since I was behind on my summer reading, I settled on a bench with the intent to make progress on The Grapes of Wrath, but Steinbeck couldn’t hold a candle to the art class happening a few feet away.

A group of ten adults stood in front of one of Central Park’s iconic bridges, as a wiry man with a big bushy beard wound around them, offering blunt pointers and gruff words of encouragement.

I was familiar with watercolors as a medium, but my actual experience was limited to one day in fifth grade. The paint quality had been crap, the brushes may as well have been pieces of straw, and the paper was regular old computer paper.

Needless to say, I didn’t understand the full magic of watercolors.

But from my place on the bench that day, I was fascinated by how the same subject could look so different from one artist to the next. As I crept closer, I could see the unpredictable way the colors blended, or didn’t blend. The way those who were generous with their water had a soft wash of pastel color and those who were more reserved had a more vivid result.

An irritable woman wearing an actual beret had loudly, and passive aggressively, mentioned that she’d thought the class was forty dollars while giving me the side-eye.

Embarrassed, I’d pulled out the blue Fossil wallet Dad got me for Christmas. The crusty instructor had looked down at my two fives and two ones—all of my allowance—and instead of pointing out that I was twenty-eight short, had refused my cash with a wink, and instead handed me his own paints and brush to use for the afternoon.