The Blank Canvas (Apartment #2) (4 page)

Just then, Maggie’s phone started playing “Mr. Big Stuff” from under a pile of scattered cheese popcorn. Her face lit up and she scrambled for it, wading through the junk food.

“Speak of the devil!” she smiled, answering it excitedly. “Hey baby!”

“How are all my girls doing tonight?” Eric laughed, hearing the slight slur in his wife’s words.

“We’re doing margaritas, that’s how we’re doing!” she giggled, holding out the phone and waving at the others to say something.

“Hey, Eric!” They both yelled into the phone before Emma began making kissy noises in the background and Lily started making whip crack sounds. They loved teasing him about being whipped whenever he would call. Eric never forgot to call and check in, no matter how late it was or how short the call was. Neither one of them could sleep right if they hadn’t spoken at least once that day.

“You bitches,” he laughed, wishing he was in town and could witness their drunken antics.

“How’s Denver, baby?” Maggie asked when she put the phone back up to her ear.

“Eh, you know, Broncos, Shmoncos. I miss Chicago.”

“Well, Chicago misses you too. You’d be so proud, I totally kicked ass on all the sports questions in
Trivial Pursuit
.”

“That’s my girl! What have you guys been up to besides drunken trivia?”

“Oh, you know. Talking about the selfish prick.”

“Ah… I knew Emma would bring him up. Is Lily doing okay?”

“Yeah,” she answered, smiling at Lily as she spoke. “Turns out that our little girl is all grown up. She can talk about big girl things without me looking out for her every step of the way.”

“I told you she could handle it, hon. She’s got balls bigger than mine.”

“Well, I don’t know about
that
,” Maggie purred.

“Alright, that’s my cue to hang up. I can’t have you start talking sexy now or I’m gonna have to jerk it again before I go to sleep, and I’m fucking exhausted. Rain check?”

“Of course!” she smiled, thinking of the fun they would have the next night when she was alone again. “I love you.” The girls watched as she ended the call, but before she set the phone down on the table again she made a face as if remembering something and fired off a quick text message. “There,” she said to herself as she set it back down.

“Forget to tell him something nasty?” Emma teased.

“Yeah, something like that.”

On the East Coast, a loud beeping noise could be heard in a dark hotel room.

Ethan rolled over and swatted at the alarm, but as he reached for it he realized that the noise had already stopped. Peeling his eyes open slowly, he groaned when he saw that it was barely one in the morning.

“Fucking Maggie,” he grumbled as he reached for his phone instead, realizing that it must be time for his nightly text. He wasn’t pissed at the content of the texts—he’d gotten used to it—but he was frustrated that he had actually managed to fall asleep that night. It happened so rarely anymore.

His foggy brain was still swimming with flashes of warm brown and soft pink, so he sat up all the way and turned on the small table lamp, hoping to chase them away. As he looked around the dimly lit room, he could make out the various shapes of different canvases stacked along the wall, none of them finished. Looking at them disturbed him even more, so he forced his attention back to his phone and opened up that night’s message.

Have I mentioned lately that you’re a selfish prick?

“As a matter of fact, you have,” he whispered to himself as he scrolled back through his very full inbox. When he had first left, he’d been bombarded with calls and text messages from his family, some of them wanting to know what had happened, others seeming to know way too much. Emma, Eric, Maggie, his mom and dad, and even Emma’s husband, Brandon, whom Ethan hardly knew, had all chimed in:

The texts starting dwindling after he refused to answer them (or return any calls), but he found it almost touching that Maggie and Eric were still in it for the long haul.

Ethan sighed loudly and hit DELETE, finally clearing out the messages that had been stacking up. He knew that one day soon he would need to get in touch with someone, but he’d been too busy hiding his head in the sand to worry about it yet. He kept one message, unable to get rid of it, and read it over a few more times.

He couldn’t stop reading that sentence, so he forced himself to exit his inbox and start in on the voicemails. As he listened to each member of his family yell at him in turn, he found his mind wandering yet again to some of the text messages.

It was apparent that some of his family members, if not all of them by now, had found out about their secret relationship. He wondered briefly if she had told them, but what would have been her aim? She clearly hadn’t sought them out to get his phone number, because she was the one person who
hadn’t
sent him texts and left him messages. He’d expected something from her by now—even a simple “fuck off”—and he didn’t know what to make of the complete lack of contact.

He kept telling himself that he’d been dreading it, that he hadn’t wanted to hear her screaming and crying at him. That he’d wanted her to move on quickly, to get back to her normal life so she could be happy. But no matter how many times he told himself those things, they never got any easier to believe.

He had been absolutely terrified when she told him what her intentions were. He couldn’t imagine that she really knew what she wanted that easily. When he’d heard the words “I just want to be with you” come out of her mouth, he felt the most amazing rush of happiness, as if he could finally get everything that he had ever wanted.

But just as quickly, the panic set in.

How could he possibly deserve her? She was good in every way that he was horribly wrong. She had no idea what she was saying. How could anyone really want a man who could take such a sweet, innocent soul and corrupt her against everything she had ever known? Less than a month with him and she was ready to break up her impending marriage and most likely desert the only family she had in the area. All of this for a man with nothing but a history of selfishness, always putting himself before everyone else.

The thing that his dear sister-in-law didn’t realize was that this was the most unselfish thing he’d ever done in his entire life.

Leaving Lily had been the hardest thing Ethan had ever forced himself to do. It was as if someone had placed the most glorious diamond in the palm of his hand and said it was his for the taking—as long as he didn’t care about ruining the lives of everyone it had ever come in contact with. And he had wanted it. Badly.

He had imagined scooping her up that very night, throwing her in his car and just driving until they ran out of gas, away from anyone they knew. If he asked, he knew that she would go. He saw himself dragging her to the first courthouse he could find for a quick elopement, then racing to the closest motel so that he could fuck her stupid for the next three days straight, maybe five, only stopping to eat—and when they ran out of food he would live on her sweat and her moans and her cries of pleasure.

And then it hit him: an image of his family, ashamed of him for stealing such a precious girl away from her family. That was quickly followed by a vision of Lily, lonely and scared, far away from home and bored out of her mind in a foreign country while he disappeared for days on end to paint. She had no one to talk to, and her father refused to speak to her ever again for what she had done. Ethan knew without a doubt that she would grow to hate him. She would blame him for wrecking everything, knowing that he had taken advantage of her naiveté so he could keep her as his own precious jewel.

He also knew without a doubt that seeing that look of hate in her eyes would kill him.

So he did the only thing he knew how to do.

He ran.

He ran away like the chickenshit Maggie called him, hoping that Lily would go back to the life that she had always known, the life she had been perfectly happy with before he bulldozed into it. He hoped that after a few weeks, she would forget all about him.

He just hadn’t taken into account how hard it would be to forget
her
. He saw her everywhere, in every passing smile, every bubbly laugh—even the sunset had shades of gold that reminded him of the highlights in her hair. He also wasn’t sleeping again, but this time, it wasn’t because of Rachel’s cruel departure. It was because of the lack of Lily’s warmth in the dark, the smell of her sweet skin, the sound of her breathing softly as she slept.

He just fucking
missed
her.

He couldn’t listen to his music anymore; every song made him think of her. If the lyrics were sad, all he could think of was how badly he wanted her to be there with him. If it was a happy tune, he would immediately think of the fun, playful times they had shared together. And he didn’t even want to think about the sexy songs. Those opened up a floodgate of memories that kept him paralyzed with need for hours on end.

Of course, not being able to listen to his music had made painting nearly impossible. He couldn’t focus—his thoughts were always leading back to her, and when he would step back and look at his canvas he would see her eyes or her lips or some other feature that his subconscious was fixating on at that given moment.

So now he had a large collection of half-finished paintings stacked up, all of them some version of Lily, all of them screaming at him to finish them properly and admit that he wanted nothing more than to be with the real thing. Just thinking of them made him glance across the room at the canvases before he could stop himself, which caused him to shut his eyes tightly and repeat his newest mantra over and over in his mind.

You did the right thing. You did the right thing. You put her before yourself for the first time. You weren’t what she needed. You did the right thing
.

It helped for the most part. Whenever he was hit with moments of doubt it usually calmed his nerves, but lately there had been times when he found himself doubting whether he actually
had
done the right thing.

He hadn’t even asked her what she wanted; he’d simply decided what was best for her. When these thoughts struck him, he would try to convince himself that she was only infatuated with him, that there was no way she could have actually loved him, and then he would berate himself for assuming that he knew about love any better than she did. He’d never even been in love before, so what gave him the right to assume that his feelings were more honest and real than hers?

“Fuck!” he yelled out, throwing one of the wadded-up pillows next to him across the room. He couldn’t stand the nagging feelings of doubt that were creeping in and taking over his brain. What if he had made a split-second decision based on fear, and rather than saving her from herself, he had sentenced her to a life with someone she truly didn’t want? What if they were
both
miserable right now?

No
, he thought to himself.
She will move on. She will marry that big oaf and have his babies and never think of you again
.

“God dammit!” he roared, chucking another pillow, this time knocking over a figurine on the mantle across the room and sending it to the floor where it shattered into a million tiny pieces. Just the thought of that fucking guy’s hands anywhere near her body made him feel sick to his stomach.

He reminded himself that this was what he wanted for her, regardless of how horrible it was to think of her being with that Neanderthal. But what if she
didn’t
end up with her fiancé? She was going to eventually let someone else touch her. A girl that passionate wouldn’t be alone for long. She was going to be someone’s wildest fucking dream come true when they realized what a firecracker she was. And she had only him to thank for tapping into the passion that was hidden deep down inside of her. He had left her there, all alone, ripe and ready for the plucking.

“Mine!” he growled loudly, chucking another pillow across the room.

The nights were the worst for Ethan.

All he wanted was to drift back to sleep and shut out all of his traitorous thoughts, even if it meant dreaming of her. But once he was tossing and turning and these thoughts set in, he knew that he would be up for the rest of the night. He glanced at his luggage across the room, eyeing the side pocket that contained his treasure, and mentally scolded himself, knowing it would never get any better for him if he kept depending on such a pathetic crutch.

Focusing instead on his voicemails again, he continued plowing through them, using all of his energy to keep his mind from wandering. His phone played them in reverse order, from most recent to oldest, and he listened to his family’s anger morph backwards to their initial worry. When he finally reached the last one, which must have come in right after he left, he expected more of the same and nearly dropped the phone when he heard the last thing he’d ever expected to hear again.