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Only this wasn’t a theoretical proposition or a nebulous idea.
It was Mick.
And it wasn’t a question of whether she wanted to pursue a relationship with him.
She rather suspected that she had been in a relationship with him for several weeks now.
It seemed to have happened without waiting for permission from either one of them. They just sort of…were. And the loss of control was playing merry hell with her composure. She was a messy, disorganised person with a fairly casual attitude toward timing and scheduling. She had never pegged herself as a control freak. It was all quite disconcerting, these new insights into her personality.
The fear of being hurt was a heavy weight. The potential for causing hurt in return was suffocating. He had been treated so poorly, so often. She felt a responsibility, as narcissistic as it seemed, to be only light and smiles for him. To cause him any further pain was a nightmare prospect.
They got one another. It was something for which she had never looked or expected. From approximately day three, she seemed to have been programmed with the interpretation manual to the majority of Mick’s silences, impassivity and reserve. She had a good inkling of what he felt for her.
A relationship of half measures would never be enough for him. Probably not enough for her, either. When she committed to something, she committed.
But how did you reconcile opening up completely, sharing your life completely with another human being, while still being whole within yourself? She had never lost herself within a relationship, but she had never fully invested in one either.
She was in love with Mick, but she didn’t want to identify solely as one half of a couple. She was Sophy and she wanted to remain an individual.
It sounded awful, selfish, even as an unspoken thought.
She was unhappy and confused. Right at this moment, the interior of her head, her so highly prized sanctity of solitude, was starting to feel like the playpen of a repetitive, sulky, spoiled brat. Really, could she be any more pretentious? The temperamental artiste, not wanting to sacrifice her time and her art.
For once in a blue moon, she welcomed the interruption of her cell phone, which bleeped twice in short succession with incoming texts. Scrabbling about in her bag, she hauled it out and thumbed through her inbox. The first message was from Melissa, informing her that Jeeves had been sick on the living room carpet and what should she do about it? “Clean it up” seemed like the obvious answer, but probably not the one her cousin was after. She sent back a quick reply, promising to come home after lunch and deal with the mess. Her dog, her puke, she supposed. Even if it was probably Melissa’s fault for giving him scraps from her breakfast croissant. She always seemed to think that sharing negated calories.
Her stomach fluttered when she saw Mick’s name on the second alert. It was a characteristically brief note, asking her if she wanted to have lunch with him, and signed with the usual impersonal “M”. Not that she wanted him to start composing sonnets or signing off with effusive love hearts and emoticons. The mind boggled. She texted back, saying that she’d walk down and meet him at the hotel. After a pause, she deleted her instinctive “x” and followed his lead with a simple “S”.
Suddenly she was worrying what he might read into the most ubiquitous, banal chat speak. She thought she’d successfully avoided this sort of behaviour in high school.
At least she wasn’t such a coward or so masochistic that she was going to avoid his company. She also needed to mention the incident with the paints. That whole situation was starting to get a little unnerving. It would be one thing if someone was openly flirtatious or giving off the most remotely interested vibe, but she hadn’t noticed a thing. And she didn’t walk around with her eyes closed to people’s behavioural patterns; she was usually far too self-conscious about the way that others reacted and interacted with her.
A gentle knock sounded at the door and Don stuck his curly head in with a smile. His hair was wafting about in all directions; there was always something sweetly lethargic about it, as if the strands had made a sleepy attempt to drift their separate ways and lost the energy to continue.
“May I invade the realms of creativity?” he asked, and invited himself in without waiting for an answer. Coming straight over to observe the birth pangs of Hades, he tilted his head and circled the sculpture, bending to examine the more minute emerging details.
Sophy waited for the initial verdict, her hands clasped in front of her, nerves knotting her gut. She trusted Don’s opinion over any of the other tutors. He had always been able to pinpoint her successes and resounding failures from an early stage. He was a great believer in first instincts.
“It’s very good,” he said slowly after a long stretch of silence, and she released a tense breath. Coming from Don, that was a ringing endorsement. “Very good,” he said again, dropping to a crouch to look up into the lowered, pensive face of the god. He glanced over his shoulder and raised one eyebrow in a slightly mischievous quirk that made him look like a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “And you’re going great guns with it. You only started cutting last week, didn’t you? Must be an…inspiring subject.”
She felt a tide of violent red surge up her cheeks and her eyes snapped away from the gentle teasing in his.
“Hmm,” she managed. She reached out her forefinger and touched the tip of her nail to the cold, chiselled lower lip. “Something like that.”
Hades’s flesh and blood prototype was nowhere in sight when she arrived at the hotel at lunchtime, but Sean was coming out of the exhibition hall. He grinned when he saw her and immediately turned in her direction.
“If it isn’t our damsel,” he said, looking genuinely pleased to see her. “How’s it going, Sophy?”
She answered him easily enough. For some reason, knowing that Sean squeaked like a seven-year-old girl at the first scurry of a spider eased her shyness of him. Arachnophobia seemed a lot more humanising than the old idiom about imagining people in their underwear, which she’d always found ineffectual at best and potentially traumatising depending on who was flashing their knickers at her mind’s eye.
Sean hooked his thumbs in his pockets. He was dressed in a sharp navy suit with a lighter blue shirt that exactly matched his eyes. Objectively, he was one of the most handsome men she had ever seen in real life, one of those people who were so physically beautiful that they seemed incongruous in person, like someone had puffed air into a magazine cut-out. She thought it would be pretty frightful, to have people literally turn their heads in the street wherever you went. And with all due respect to Sean’s intelligence and personality strengths, which appeared to grow on a person, Sophy found herself watching him in the same way that she might admire a Monet. Nice to look at, but she was happy to do it from a distance and not for too long. He wasn’t…touchable the way that Mick was.
“Sophy,” said Sean suddenly, with such unusual seriousness that she returned her full attention to him. “Listen… Thanks. For going to the wedding with Mick.”
Consuming, intense heat started in Sophy’s neck and began to creep past her ears toward her face. The day was turning into one continuous blush.
“Um. Did he…tell you about it?”
And how much had he told him about it? Men didn’t talk about stuff like that, did they? Unless they were bedpost-notching jerks, which Mick absolutely was not.
