Page 14

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That summer, Rose and Hart came together in a kaleidoscope of colors.

She didn’t remember it ever feeling like this. Granted, Rose didn’t have much experience in the field. Back in New York there were a couple of boys. Eddie Fuentes kissed her at the end of eighth grade, when they were hanging out on a bench in the park. He used too much tongue. Rose used tongue, too, but as a tool, like a poker in a fireplace, trying to shift his tongue out of her mouth. Suffice to say, that was both the beginning and end of Eddie and Rose.

But then in sophomore year there was Dash Nemec, who she kissed a lot. Usually it was someone’s look, their style, their attitude that told you what kind of person they were, but with Dash, it was his accent. A Bronx dialect so deep you knew everything about him just by the way he said, “You know I god id bad for you, righd?”

Rose didn’t stop kissing him until she heard him use that same line on another girl.

And then there was Hart. Rose couldn’t explain what she felt for him, but she knew it was like sunshine. As hot and undeniable as summer pressing into bare skin. As optimistic and uplifting as lemon-bright rays breaking through clouds. As happy as bright yellow. And like with sunshine, all Rose wanted to do was bask in it, this burst-of-light feeling. She didn’t call it love, because that word felt too big. So for now, she called it sunlight. And with Hart shining on her, Rose bloomed.

He’d been trying to be romantic, making a big brunch, but now they were both covered in so much food. Hart got the brunt of it. Fresh-squeezed orange juice trailing down an arm, apricot jelly jammed in his hair, cantaloupe staining his T-shirt.

It started with the oranges. Hart had gotten a whole box of them, and he and Rose squeezed them to make their own juice. Rose couldn’t believe it took four whole oranges to make a single glass. Hart worked on the omelets, grating a block of cheddar to fold in. Rose diced the cantaloupe into juicy chunks for a fruit salad, popping kumquats into her mouth all the while.

It was nice, fixing a meal together. Nice to be working side by side on the table. Rose had already set it, and Hart cut marigolds for a vase in the center. The Hargrove kitchen was big but still homey, with china hutches against the walls and frilly curtains in the windows. The glass back doors framed the garden, and the bright afternoon sunlight filtered through. Hart worked diligently like he knew what he was doing, but by the way he’d burned the first omelet, Rose wasn’t so sure. He looked cute, though, a coral tea towel over one shoulder and a spatula in his hand.

Every time Rose cut into a new fruit, she’d give Hart a slice to sample. And since he had his hands busy, she had to feed it to him, of course. All the fruit was overripe, and every time he bit, the juices would leave his lips slick. Rose helped him clean up. She had a lot of juice that morning.

The burnt omelet should’ve been a sign, but Rose knew for sure that Hart wasn’t a very good cook when the sweet potato hush puppies in the frying pan caught fire. Orange flames licked the backsplash, threatening to torch the cabinets. Rose let out a yelp and Hart froze, but only for a minute, before dashing for the sink.

“Not water, it’s a grease fire!” Rose shrieked.

So he searched for something to smother the fiery blast. His frantic eyes landed on the table, covered in jars of jam, a pitcher of orange juice, chunks of papaya, cantaloupe, peaches, and nectarines. Hart pinched the tablecloth, swiping it like a bad party trick. The pitcher clattered sideways and bits of food blasted everywhere, like someone had just shot up the place. But at least the tablecloth put the fire out.

The flames died down to nothing more than smoke, and Hart’s hands roamed all over Rose, checking for damage, maybe from the fire, maybe from the glass. “Are you okay?” he asked, running his hands over the back of her arms, fingers brushing away sticky seeds, thumbs squeegeeing clean the tangy smears of jelly.

There was so much concern in his voice that Rose’s own voice caught in her throat and all she could do was nod. Hart was breathing heavily. He was so worried about her, she wasn’t even sure that he realized he was covered in their brunch. And that was when he sneezed.

“Gesundheit,” Rose said.

Hart startled. “What?”

“Gesundheit,” she said again.

The corners of his lips turned up in a smile. “ What? ”

“It’s what you say when someone sneezes,” Rose said.

“No, it’s not.” Hart was already laughing. Somehow, he had never heard that word before, and he laughed harder than she’d ever seen him laugh. Though maybe it also had something to do with the ruins all around them.

There’d been a fire, and there was shattered glass, and it was a disaster, but it was also funny. An acidic sort of funny, like squeezing an orange peel for its fragrance, but getting a squirt of citrus in your eye. Brunch was ruined, but Rose and Hart were full anyway.

Her dad was at work, so when Hart rapped urgent knuckles at Rose’s front door, she was the only one to hear it. His words came in one long string, beaded with apologies and pleading. Rose could’ve wandered deep into the house, creating an ocean of space between them to drown Hart out. But she stayed on the other side of the door, forehead pressed against it, listening.

It had been so stupid, the way they’d slipped into this fight, tripping over words they should never have said, building up enough stumbling blocks that they couldn’t seem to climb over them. They were both in the wrong, but Rose didn’t know if she’d said the hurtful things out of anger or fear. A careless reaction to things getting too real between them. A way to protect herself, maybe, because she was feeling too much and she needed to cap those emotions before they fully took over. Maim before getting maimed herself.

Rose hadn’t realized until this very moment that when you start to fall for someone, you really fall. You stumble and trip and crash and get bruised along the way. But that was what happened when you let your guard down. You flayed yourself open until you were just cobalt veins. You exposed yourself to every kind of pain, and one day you found yourself on the other side of a closed door, not sure what hurt more, opening yourself up to someone, or being apart from them. Rose never knew it could feel so blue.

She’d seen it by night, seen it littered with people, but Rose loved the garden the most in the daytime, when it was just her and Hart on a lazy weekend morning.

Rose stood at her easel, hands on hips and sable-hair paintbrush clamped between her teeth. She was trying for an impressionist-style landscape and the light was perfect—bright and dappled over the verdant foliage. Greens waited on her palette—lime, hunter, sage, laurel—but Rose left them slowly drying, her gaze constantly wandering, distracted by Hart.

He was digging a hole. Well, a compost pit. He’d explained it to her, how it was important to dig three separate holes, and how pits are better than bins because the compostables are in more immediate contact with microbes, but it was hard to focus on any of that when he wore a tank top and gripped a shovel in his hands.

Sweat made his shoulders glisten in the sun and plastered his tank top to his skin. His biceps were never so defined as when he pierced the tip of his spade into the soft topsoil. Rose found herself looking at Hart more than at her canvas, her teeth digging deep grooves into her wooden paintbrush.

She took it out of her mouth. “Water break!”

It was less of a command and more of a code word. The thing she said whenever she wanted him closer. And her need to have him closer was something she could physically feel. An itch. Prickly like cactus. Hart, in all his glory, whipped his head in her direction like a dog hearing Pavlov’s bell. He spiked the shovel in the dirt, wiped his hands on his jeans, and ambled over to her.

Hart smelled of clean sweat, sweet earth, and fresh-cut grass, and on days like this Rose was sure she could inhale him whole. There was balance to this, she thought. To her painting in the garden while he tended to it. The kind of balance you could only find in nature. Rose handed him the water bottle and watched his throat work; watched it the way a famished vampire might. She licked her lips.

“Ahh,” Hart said when he came up for air. She loved that he actually said “Ahh” after taking a drink. She loved that there was a single blade of grass stuck with sweat to the base of his neck, greening him up like botanical jewelry.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, Rose pressed her hunter-green-coated brush to the blade of grass and painted four rounded leaves sprouting from its tip. A lucky clover. Hart didn’t seem to think anything of it, and in fact angled his head back to provide more of his throat for a canvas. Rose painted another stroke, up his neck in the same path a razor might take, with the same careful precision, until the brush reached his chin and ran out of color. She took the water bottle from him, dumped it at her feet, and rose on her tippy-toes to press her lips to his. Hart’s hands found her waist, his fingers settling on the strip of skin where the top of her pants met the hem of her T-shirt.

There was balance in this, like peas in a pod. And Rose was sure she could do this for the rest of her life.

Boyfriends didn’t sneak in through Rose’s bedroom window back in New York. Mostly because she’d lived on the seventh floor of her building. But at the little pink house, Hart stood outside Rose’s window and knocked. Though her dad was just in the other room, hunched over his work in progress, Rose lifted the window to let Hart in.

The clickety-clack of Mr. Pauly’s typewriter only added to the clandestine nature of the thing, a constant ticking time-bomb reminder that they could get caught at any minute. But it was also a good signal—so long as they could hear the typing, they knew Mr. Pauly was too preoccupied to barge in on them.

Rose took Hart’s hand, and as she pulled him in, she wondered if he could feel the nervousness pulsing through her veins. She was about to expose a part of herself to him, show Hart something she’d never shown him before. She felt as raw as a skinned knee. When she turned on the lights, there would be nowhere for her to hide.

But she also, kind of, didn’t want to hide anything from him. She let go of Hart’s hand to flick the light switch.

When Hart saw it, his eyes widened. Rose was desperate to know what he was thinking, but there was only the sound of the typewriter, the clickety-clack pounding louder, like it was coming from behind Rose’s ribs.

Hart lingered on every inch, scanning the whole wall. “You painted this?”

Rose nodded, her cheeks going hot. If she looked as rosy as she felt, she’d blame it on the pink walls reflecting on her skin. And it wouldn’t even be a lie—the walls in here had a tendency to make everything look like it was inside a cloud of cotton candy. The flamingo string lights draped over her mirror weren’t helping much. But Rose looked at the mural and tried to see it the way Hart did. She’d painted it on her very first night in Meadow Falls, after meeting Hart for the first time.

That night, Rose’s head had been so full of him that she knew she wouldn’t be able to stop thinking of him until she got him out. Specifically, until she got him all over her wall. It was an abstract interpretation of that night at the gas station store. The Quinacridone Coral color of his shirt, the violent splash of the cherry slushie, the ruddiness of his cheeks, like he had run there as fast as he could.

But as she looked at the mural now, through Hart’s eyes, Rose wondered if it was too abstract. The Hart in the painting wasn’t so much a person as a shape, with smudges for eyes and a scribbled mouth, and no clear boundaries between his hair and skin and clothes. Rose could feel her blush worming its way down to her neck, her nerves turning her into strawberry taffy. All of her feelings were splashed on the wall, and she felt suddenly naked showing it to Hart. Clickety-clack.

“It’s bad,” she declared, her dream of becoming an artist instantly popping like a bubble of gum. Clickety-clack. She was sure Hart found it weird. Clickety-clack. Or worse, creepy. “Forget I showed this to you.”

Clickety-clack.

Clickety-clack.

Clickety-clack.

Hart tore his eyes away from the mural to look at Rose. “You’re so talented.”

Her lips parted with unconcealed awe. “You don’t think I’m…” She searched for the right words. For confirmation that no one in her life had been able to give her. “Do you think I’m good enough,” Rose asked, “to be a real artist one day?”

And Hart said, with so much certainty, “You are a real artist.”

He pushed Rose’s hair behind her ear, looked her in the eye, and said, “It’s beautiful.” And she believed him, and therefore believed in herself.

Throughout the summer, anytime they went anywhere, it was Rose’s car they took. She would’ve preferred to take Hart’s car, of course. His had air-conditioning and a radio that actually worked. Rose couldn’t even open her window without spending a full minute winding down a crank on the door like someone from a past life. Plus, there were the cracked faux-leather seats, the broken bits of which always dug into the backs of her knees. Not to mention the fact that the car was brown, Rose’s least favorite color.

But Hart insisted they always take her car everywhere. She needed the driving practice, he said. In general, Rose didn’t love how he transformed into parental-boss person whenever he was in the passenger seat. There was a lot of “You forgot to signal the turn,” or “You need to look back before you reverse,” or “WATCH OUT FOR THAT LAMPPOST!” All in all, as much as she liked Hart, Rose could’ve done without him in her car. But today he’d actually come in handy.

They’d planned on a picnic and loaded the car with all the essentials. A basket full of stuff they’d made hastily (paper-bagged peanut butter sandwiches), stuff they’d found in Hart’s pantry (cookies, caramels, chocolates), and stuff they’d picked up at the bakery that morning (a box of fudge brownies, croissants, a couple of baguettes, and two iced coffees melting in the cup holders). But they’d hit a snag.

Rose stood back, arms folded over her chest, a safe distance from the scene and, most importantly, squeaky clean. Hart, on the other hand, stood at the back of the car, using all his strength to push it out of the mud, where it’d gotten stuck. They probably shouldn’t have been horsing around while they drove. In fact, it was the one thing Hart kept warning, between giggles, as Rose had one hand on the wheel and one hand tickling his knee. She ended up driving onto the shoulder of the road. Really, the mud came out of nowhere. Now it covered Hart’s knees and shins as he slipped in it.

“You sure you got this?” she called.

“I don’t need any help!” Hart huffed.

“I wasn’t offering!” Rose answered. This was the kind of problem that she never would have encountered in her old life back home—driving in the country, stuck on dirt roads, boyfriend having to move a car with his bare hands. All things considered, she’d done a good job of avoiding that wooden fence along the field.

Hart really put his shoulders in it this time, and one final push got the car back onto the road again. He tried to cheer but settled for catching his breath. Now that the crisis had been dealt with, Rose walked back to the car. “Thank you,” she said. “But you’re not getting in my car covered in mud.”

Hart tried to protest but was still catching his breath. After a beat, he nodded and took his shirt off. Not that that did any good, since his khakis were still splattered brown. But his chest heaved, and his tan abs clenched with the effort, and really, who was Rose to deny him a place to rest? “Okay, you can come into my car.”

He headed for the passenger seat, but Rose pulled open the back door and pushed him inside.

“Ow,” Hart said, lying flat on his back, the cracked seat not cushioning him so much as digging into him. “You really need to fix the upholstery in here.”

“If you don’t like my seats, then we could just take your car next time.” But secretly, Rose was happy they’d taken hers today. How would they ever have gotten into this mess otherwise? She climbed in on top of Hart and pulled the door closed behind them.

A call from her mom was what did it. Rose didn’t know why she expected it to go any different, but when her mom said she couldn’t come to Connecticut because of a “work conflict,” it still surprised Rose. And stung, a purple bruise that refused to fade. Hart held Rose to his chest, and in that moment, she wondered if this was what love was. A soothing palm down her back, and calming words whispered into her hair.

In figure drawing, you learn how to depict the human body through lines and shapes. You also learn about negative space. The figures themselves and all the attention you give them aren’t more important than the space around them. Between them. There was no negative space between Rose and Hart now. Even thoughts were washed away, leaving little else but sensation. Mouths gnashing together, hair sweeping over eyelids, blood rushing in veins. Rose’s blood seemed to rush to all the places Hart touched. And his gardener’s hands, so tender with his plants, were fumbling yet determined against her flushed skin. Rose didn’t recognize her own words but could hear, distantly, how they all sounded like begging. She knew what this was, could give it a name, but soon, even with lips parted and sounds spilling out, actual words fell away. The first time they slept together, all Rose could see was burning red.

If she were to draw the two of them now, she’d use one continuous line, sketching a single shape.

“Come in, the water’s fine.” Hart’s lips quirked wryly at the sound of his own cliché.

Puffy clouds filled the sky above, while Hart blew bubbles below the water. It was his idea to go for a swim when he saw the swan. She’d shown up alone, and Hart suggested they join her in the pond to keep the bird company. “Why would she want company?” Rose had asked.

Hart shrugged out of his undershirt and said, “Swans mate for life. They’re usually not alone.” But if the swan noticed Hart taking a dip in the water, she hardly cared, keeping to the far side of the pond.

“Maybe her partner died,” Rose said from shore. She had her sketchbook on her lap, open to a fresh sheet, but set it aside to reapply her sunscreen. She slathered the white cream onto her arms until it disappeared, leaving nothing behind but its summery coconut scent.

Hart glanced at the swan for a moment, then turned back to Rose. “I choose to believe it’s only a temporary separation,” he said. “I’m sure her partner will show up soon.”

It was just like Hart, seeing the glass half-full. It was one of the things that made them so different. Sometimes, Rose felt like salt to Hart’s sugar. Lucky for her, she had a sweet tooth. She slipped out of her clothes until she was in nothing but her cotton bra and underwear. She dipped a toe in first, then slunk into the pond to join him.

They faced each other, nothing between them but liquid. The water made her feel clean, pure. And as she looked at Hart’s face, pond-slick and beautiful, Rose felt compelled to say how she felt. “I like you.”

She wanted to say more, but it was too easy for her to pull the wool over her own eyes. She reserved her most vulnerable declarations for the canvas. A blank space where she could show her true colors and roll every die and not worry about risk or rejection. But Hart smiled, innately understanding that he needed to say what they were both feeling first, to show Rose that there was nothing to be afraid of. The water really was fine.

Beneath the surface of the pond, Rose could feel his touch ghosting along her skin, and the swoosh of the water as his feet kicked, working to stay afloat. But above, there was only peaceful stillness. “I like you,” Hart said. “And I love you.”

His words lured a shy smile to her lips. “I love you, too,” Rose said.

Her love for Hart gleamed brighter than white. Whiter than surrender. And after an entire summer of not calling it what it was, Rose gave in to it, feeling the truth of it in her bones. Loving Hart was as good and easy as wading into calm waters.