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Because that’s who Lacey is. She’s a runner and an escape artist. The kind of woman who’s hard to hold.
Still staring at the painting, I reach out and trace the soldier’s features. I yank my phone from my pocket and dial her number.
My heart skips a beat when she answers on the third ring.
She doesn’t say anything and neither do I. We’re just two people frozen in the middle of uncertainty.
“You don’t have to run, kitten,” I whisper the words. Now I’m the one in the abandoned parking lot, trying desperately to hold onto someone that’s too scarred to hope for love.
“Tonight was a beautiful night but let’s leave it at that,” she says. Her voice shakes and she sniffs as if she’s been crying.
Grief claws at my heart that she’s hurting. Even if her wounds are self-inflicted, it doesn’t ease my pain. We became joined today, a bond was formed and now, I’ll forever feel her joy and heartache and disappointments as my own.
“Tell me where you are.” I close my eyes and focus on the sound of the call, hoping I can hear enough background noise to discern where she is.
“Somewhere safe,” she answers.
“I’ll find you,” I promise. “If I have to search the whole damn world and give up everything I own, I’ll do that. I’ll keep searching until you’re in my arms again.”
“Let me go, Ryan. You’ll be better that way,” she says before the line goes dead.
What little remains of my heart shatters all over again. I wander through the apartment, looking for anything she may have left behind.
At first, all I find is an old bottle of purple nail polish and receipts for grape slushies at the gas station.
Then I check her closet and discover the canvases.
Her other work was based on her life. Maybe these ones are too. I stare and stare at them, looking for a clue as to where she went. But it’s always the same theme in her paintings…a lost little girl looking for a home.
I shake my head at the girl in the painting who is staring longingly at a red house with a happy family inside. “Don’t you know I would have been your home, Lacey?”
9
LACEY
I end the phone call with Ryan. My heart feels like it weighs a hundred pounds and all I want to do is rush to the apartment and tell him how much I love him.
I want to be there every morning he wakes up and be the last person he talks to at night. I want to make him pancakes and show him my art and listen to him tell me about exactly why Star Trek isn’t just fiction. It’s the stuff of the future.
But the moment I start dreaming about things like that, I know it’s time to leave. It’s better to go before I’m kicked out.
I reach for my coffee cup but it’s empty again. Forcing myself to stand on wooden legs, I walk over to the counter. I order another drink at the tiny café housed inside the independent bookstore. It’s my favorite little hideaway in Asheville.
When I have my drink, I settle at the table with my laptop. I’m pricing plane tickets to California. Putting a few thousand miles between me and Ryan won’t cure my broken heart. But it will make it harder for me to show up at the apartment and beg him to want me.
Once I’ve booked my plane ticket on my maxed-out credit card, I grab my art journal and start doodling. Even if I can’t paint right now, just having my fingers in motion is enough to soothe me.
I start sketching with no real image in my mind. Sometimes, I simply let my imagination take over and see what I come up with.
My tears wet the page more than once but each time, I wipe them away and keep going. Would he have ever loved me? Would it have been possible?
Maybe it would have taken a long time. Maybe I would have to be really good. But maybe one day, he’d look at me and say it.
I push back the longing thoughts. No matter how much I hurt right now, things are better this way. The pain is worse the longer you let yourself grow attached. By walking away so early, I saved myself.
“Are you alright, dear?”
I look up from my blurry artwork to see Norah, the Dean from the party tonight. I sniff, embarrassed to be caught like this. I manage a nod and try to smile. But it fails and instead, I start crying harder.
