Page 6 of Under Pressure
He quirked a brow. “What?”
“Everything about it, from conception to completion, is a hundred percent in my control. I get to pick the design, the cut, the color, the fabric. And I can change my mind as I go. If I don’t like what I’m doing, I can take my scissors to it and change everything.” She shrugged a shoulder. “No one gets to dictate to me.”
“Does that happen a lot?” It didn’t sound so bad to him. He and his brothers had always been latchkey kids—he’d loved the discipline he’d gotten from Grandpa. It felt safe. Plus, he liked keeping busy. But he wouldn’t call Grandpa’s strict routine being dictated to. “People dictating to you?”
A lock of her dark blond hair, loose from her pony, fell over her cheek and she blew it back. “Not anymore.”
“Do you ever wear your designs?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“I can’t imagine there’d be much more empowering—freeing—than wearing something you made,” he said. “The freedom isn’t just in making it, right? It’s in putting it to use?”
There she went again, looking at him like a startled doe. Those big eyes of hers went wide, the light from the building reflected out of the whites and indigo in a surreal sort of way. He’d never seen eyes so beautiful before.
He chuckled. “You’re kind of an enigma, Blue.” He faced her. “All right, I’m throwing in my bid. I’d love it if you came with me to the concert tomorrow and wore one of your creations.”
“I don’t—” she hesitated, her gaze honing in on one of her drawings—his favorite of them, actually—then she worried her bottom lip again.
“Don’t what?” he asked. “Go to concerts with friends? Or date?”
“Either,” she said and bit her bottom lip.
“But you want to go?”
She didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. He just knew.
He picked her cell up off the tan couch between them and put his number in it. “Okay, I’m going to plan on this, and wait for your call to say you’re coming.”
She nodded slowly.
Sanding his hands together, Sean turned from her and to the work. “All right, let’s do this.”
Blue
Blue pushed into the ground-level apartment she shared with her dad, and slipped her flip-flops off before heading down the hall. Her day had gone fast. School, work, home. The group presentation had gone swimmingly, at least the parts that were hers and Sean’s. The rest of the group fumbled through theirs.
She kind of felt bad about it, she’d meant to do their work for them, but Sean had gotten her so excited about her project, asking her all the right questions, that she’d super focused on what she was doing. Although, she’d had no problem helping him with his. Which had been the point of the project she supposed. To see how well you could help someone who had a totally different business they wanted to go into, successfully brainstorm how they’d go about starting their company.
Her dad sat at the counter at the kitchen island, eating a bowl of cereal. He wore jeans and a t-shirt, and he’d finally been able to pull his golden hair back into a man bun he’d been trying to get for months now.
“Hey, dad,” she said, heading into the kitchen and helping herself to her own bowl of Captain Crunch. Neither of them was very good in the kitchen.
“Hey sweetheart,” he said in his deep and scratchy timber from years of smoking, giving her a big toothy grin showing pearly whites that no smoker ever had. He had grease under his fingernails from work at a local garage. His once slightly soft physique was all muscle now. It’d come from necessity, really, but she still had a hard time contrasting the happy-go-lucky muscle-toting, blond, grease-covered dad now, from the softer, suit-wearing, always clean, dark, and foreboding consigliere he’d been. If he hadn’t always been a softie with her, she’d say he was a completely different person now. Funny that he’d be more physically capable of bloodying a person now with all those muscles than he’d been when he was the kind of person to bloody someone up.
She poured her milk over her cereal, then took a seat next to him, enjoying the familiar scent of his All Spice that surrounded him.
“How’d your group project go?” He held his spoon like a cigarette, a habit he’d formed after quitting smoking; she doubted he even realized he did it.
She nodded and gave a little shrug.
“Did you take that outfit you’ve been working on?” He was referring to the dress she currently had hanging on the mannequin in her room. A pale pink Maxi skirt made of chiffon with pleats that she paired with a white t-shirt she’d re-fashioned to be fitted and with a sweetheart neckline. She planned to pull the outfit together with a beaded leather belt and brown boots—that is if she ever decided to wear it. It was also the one that’d come to mind when Sean had asked her out. His favorite.
The clothes were great for a girl with a name like Bluebell, but not so great for a girl formally known as Vittoria Rockefeller now hiding in the witness protection program. They were the kind of clothes a person stood out in, but not in the same way as she’d stood out in The Outfit.
“No, just the pattern. It wasn’t really necessary for the project.”
Dad dropped his spoon with a metal clank into his bowl and faced her. “You have a closet full of designs and you never wear them.”
