I have never resented my obligation to Bubbles & More as much as I do in this moment, but as always, I do what needs to be done.
I take a deep breath and step away from Sebastian. “Please excuse me.”
He nods, and I feel his eyes on my back as I walk away.
We don’t speak the rest of the evening, and yet every time I search the room for him, which is admittedly often, he’s standing by Genevieve’s side, nodding pleasantly at whomever he’s speaking to.
And every time, he seems to sense my gaze, because his eyes find mine. The moments of eye contact are brief—a few seconds at most.
The butterflies in my stomach last much, much longer.
To Sir, with aggravation,
Do you ever want something you can’t have—that you shouldn’t want? But the more you try to stop, the harder you want?
Lady
* * *
My dear Lady,
Very much so. And I hope you get what you want that you can’t have—at least one of us should.
Yours in yearning,
Sir
* * *
To Sir,
What is it you yearn for?
Lady
Eleven
Sir doesn’t reply to my last message, but I can’t stop thinking about his.
Yours in yearning.
Yearning!
My thoughts of Sebastian haven’t faded, but now they’re competing with thoughts of Sir, each man as unattainable as the other, and each causing twin pulls of, well, yearning.
After three straight days of what I can only describe as teenage pining after the champagne tasting and Sir’s last message, I get sick of my mopey self and throw myself into my art with a vengeance in a desperate attempt to forget about both men.
I don’t remember when I first fell in love with art. It’s just always been a part of my life, the thing I was meant to do. Finger paints. Construction paper. Pastels. I loved it all, and I was good at it all.
Or as much a master of finger paints as anyone can be.
And my love for art only increased with each passing year. In eighth grade, a student from a local art school had come in to teach us how to sketch a still life. Most of the kids had been glad that the art lesson had replaced social studies for the day. But man, I was really into that bowl of fruit. I erased the shading on the apple so many times that the art student—Juliet—had had to get me a new sheet of paper, and she’d stayed with me after school awhile longer to explain how changing the angle of how I held the pencil could help create dimension in my strokes.
Most vividly of all though, I remember when I realized watercolors were my thing. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was seventeen, and Caleb and I had spent the morning helping my dad dust all of the bottles before the shop opened at noon. The rest of the day was ours, since he’d hired May by that point.
We were heading home through Central Park—a route I was allowed to take only during the day, and only when the younger but much larger Caleb was with me. Caleb had been going through a nerdy but intense Ultimate Frisbee stage, and when he’d spotted a pickup game on one of the lawns, had begged to play for a few minutes.
Since I was behind on my summer reading, I settled on a bench with the intent to make progress on The Grapes of Wrath, but Steinbeck couldn’t hold a candle to the art class happening a few feet away.
A group of ten adults stood in front of one of Central Park’s iconic bridges, as a wiry man with a big bushy beard wound around them, offering blunt pointers and gruff words of encouragement.
I was familiar with watercolors as a medium, but my actual experience was limited to one day in fifth grade. The paint quality had been crap, the brushes may as well have been pieces of straw, and the paper was regular old computer paper.
Needless to say, I didn’t understand the full magic of watercolors.
But from my place on the bench that day, I was fascinated by how the same subject could look so different from one artist to the next. As I crept closer, I could see the unpredictable way the colors blended, or didn’t blend. The way those who were generous with their water had a soft wash of pastel color and those who were more reserved had a more vivid result.
An irritable woman wearing an actual beret had loudly, and passive aggressively, mentioned that she’d thought the class was forty dollars while giving me the side-eye.
Embarrassed, I’d pulled out the blue Fossil wallet Dad got me for Christmas. The crusty instructor had looked down at my two fives and two ones—all of my allowance—and instead of pointing out that I was twenty-eight short, had refused my cash with a wink, and instead handed me his own paints and brush to use for the afternoon.
Another, much nicer woman than the first had given me an extra pad and a pop-up easel, which she’d brought for a friend who couldn’t make it.
I’m not going to tell you my painting of the bridge that day was better than anyone else’s—it was an intermediate class, and I was a definite beginner—but it hadn’t mattered. It wasn’t the bridge that had called to me, it was the medium. Watching the class paint in watercolors paled in comparison to experimenting myself.
By the time I looked up, my bridge was largely a blur of color, thanks to one too many trial and errors, and most of the class had dispersed. My eyes had watered when I’d given the paints back to the instructor because I knew he’d given me something far more longer lasting than his paints, which I later learned were professional quality and very expensive.
Caleb’s Frisbee game had ended, and though I’m sure sitting and watching a bunch of amateurs paint was the last thing a restless fifteen-year-old boy had wanted to do with his afternoon, I think his sibling intuition had kicked in and he knew dragging me home would have been cruel.
On our walk home, he’d told me that I’d looked possessed “and a little psycho.”
The next afternoon, I was sitting on the couch suffering through Steinbeck when Caleb came home from a friend’s house and unceremoniously dumped a plastic bag into my lap. Without a word, he headed into the bathroom, and I upended the bag.
My brother had bought me a set of watercolors, blue plastic brushes, and a sketchbook filled with thick paper. The supplies weren’t fancy, but I also knew he’d been carefully saving up his allowance to buy a new video game—and he’d spent it on these art supplies instead.
I’d cried and hugged him until he’d threatened to return everything if I didn’t stop. I’ve never loved my brother more.
My dad was another story. He wasn’t unsupportive—any art supplies I put on my Christmas lists over the years were generally found under the tree—but my “craft time” always had to come after homework (fair) and my duties at Bubbles (at times, that felt less fair).
My dad was a real follow-your-passion type of guy. As long as it was his passion. By the time Lily had married and more or less moved on from the shop, Caleb kept himself busy with girls, sports, and school, working at Bubbles only on the occasional weekend. I was busy too. I had friends. The occasional boyfriend. Classes. But none of this had stopped my dad from assuming I’d be available to work at the shop when he asked, and I felt too guilty about abandoning him to say no.
I can’t pretend teenage me didn’t occasionally resent that Caleb could be off doing whatever he wanted, that Lily had escaped by way of Alec, and that I was stuck at the store. But I also liked that Dad called me his right-hand woman. I liked that I eventually knew the store even better than know-it-all Lily. I liked that I was May’s favorite, and probably Dad’s too.