Out of Control (32 page)

“Hell no, that was what made it so much fun.” She kissed him, a gentle kiss with the promise of sizzle behind it. “I missed you. It was only a couple of days, but I missed you. And I like pushing boundaries. We weren’t breaking the law or anything, but it was definitely naughty—and arousing.” She took a deep breath and finished the thought, though it streaked the rosy glow with steel gray. “I thought I’d never get to touch you again. Never again experience the way that submitting to you sexually makes me feel stronger. I was eager myself.”

Drake swept her up into another crazy kiss, one that called forth the promise of her gentle one, stealing her breath, stealing her thoughts, building on the need and lust his earlier caresses and the bit of public exposure had generated. Her body flamed. For a few wild seconds, she wanted to forget the show and everything she needed to do and spend the rest of the day making love with Drake. Fucking Drake. Being tied up and teased and tormented and hurt in consensual, wonderfully sexy ways by Drake.

For those few seconds, she indulged in the fantasy. Then she slipped away. “Food,” she said. “Then work. Work before play.”

“For a wacky, kinky artist,” Drake said, sitting again at the picnic table, “you’ve got a Puritan work ethic.”

She grabbed a chicken wing, thoroughly cold by now but still fragrant and tempting. “Self-employed people have the toughest bosses ever.” She ate the chicken wing in two bites, then reached for some of the noodles.

With a fork full of noodles partway to her mouth, a thought dawned on her. “Wait a minute. You like making lists. How do you feel about helping me inventory for the show?”

“It won’t be color-coded,” Drake said drily

“Oh yes, it will be, once you make the initial lists. I know you like to be in charge, but this time, you’re working for me.”

Drake shook her hand. “Agreed.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Of course it wasn’t that simple. Jen and Drake snipped and snarled all the way through inventory and pricing, though the snipping and snarling was punctuated by plenty of kissing, teasing and groping. Drake made what he thought were reasonable suggestions to simplify the process, and Jen repeatedly rejected them. Finally, sometime that was technically Friday morning but was late Thursday night from Drake’s point of view, since he’d gotten no sleep and not for fun reasons—just after the point when Jen crossly admitted she had to stop making new pieces and start packing the ones she had done—she insisted on one last crack at color-coding the inventory list, price list and packing boxes.

Drake snapped, “The lists are fine. We’re going home and sleeping for a while, then coming back to pack the last items.”

“The lists aren’t fine.”

“The lists are fucking perfect as far as I can tell. It’s three a.m… We’re going home.”

Jen, seemingly unfazed by his raised voice, ruffled his hair. “You go home, Drake. This is a great start. I’ll finish it now. Get the prices colored and print out price tags to match, that fussy stuff. Then I’ll come home for a quick nap, and we’ll drive over later and pack the car.” She stepped away, immediately diving into the next project.

“Why can’t you just have plain white price tags like a normal person?”

He’d meant it lightly, but Jen wheeled around and glared at him. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Drake held his ground on the outside, but inside, he felt himself shrinking like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Except a kid with his hand in the cookie jar would know exactly why he was being scolded, and Drake wasn’t clear. “Just that you’re a little obsessive about colors. Most people won’t care if your price tags are pretty, and no one will ever know if your price lists are. And your color-coded inventories seem way too complicated. No normal person can make sense of it.”

“Don’t you get it?” Jen was shouting now, and Drake shrank back in the face of her vehemence. “Don’t you think I’d be normal if I could be?”

Not again!
was his first thought. He’d obviously stepped right into something that, while seemingly innocuous, wasn’t to Jen. “I didn’t mean you weren’t normal,” he said slowly. “Not in a bad way, anyway. You’re unusual, eccentric. So am I. It’s part of why we suit each other. But it’s late, and you might want to simplify things and just get them done.”

Jen sat down abruptly, half collapsing onto the floor. “I need the color coding, Drake. Otherwise I’ll screw up the prices. Numbers have colors, and the colors help me know what I’m reading.”

Drake flushed, embarrassed it had taken him that long to figure out the basis of Jen’s seeming eccentricities. “You have synesthesia. Numbers have colors to you.”

“Everything has colors. Some things have tastes and sounds as well. By the way, I prefer
synesthethic
over
having synesthesia
. The other way sounds like a disorder, and it’s not. It’s just a different way of processing information. I also have perfect memory for colors. I can distinguish between one shade of blue and another that might be too subtle for a lot of people, and remember what they mean. It helps with the real disorder.”

“Which is?” Drake asked gingerly.

“I’m dyslexic. Really, really dyslexic.” She said it quietly and with a sense of shame. “When I get tired, it’s worse. By midday on Saturday, I’ll be lucky if I can read at all. But I’ll remember what the colors mean.”

Drake slumped back in his chair, feeling his face flame with embarrassment. “I’m sorry for picking on you all this time about the color coding. I thought it was an affectation, something fun you did to be artsy.”

“Sometimes it is just for fun, like the coffee cups for different days and different kinds of weather, and always matching my underwear to my clothes. But the really fussy, anal color coding serves a purpose, like alphabetizing or numbering does for someone who doesn’t see letters upside down and backwards.” She sighed heavily. “I’m not crazy or particularly dumb. Just trying to make the best of things.”

The words cut into Drake. Now that he knew what she was doing with colors, Drake thought it was brilliant. But she seemed embarrassed by her own coping mechanism. Drake got down on the floor with her and snuggled her close. “You’re one of the brightest people I know, and I teach at Cornell, so I know a lot of smart people. Now that I know
why
you’re doing the complicated color code, I think it’s genius, even if it did make it harder for me to pitch in.”

“You’re the first person I’ve ever asked to help me,” Jen admitted, her voice small. “I figured you understand patterns, so you’d see there was a method to my madness, even if it didn’t make sense to you.”

“I didn’t see it,” he confessed, “except that maybe colored prices would help out if you were rushed. I thought you were doing what I do sometimes, getting caught up in your habits and not seeing it was a good idea to do something differently this time.”

“I’m not going to say I’ve never done that, but in this, I know what I’m doing. The color coding helps me run the business end of things.”

“Like I said, for you, it’s genius.”

“If only I could get other people to understand my system. I’ve tried applying for small business loans, but when your financials are based on color and shape, it’s hard to translate them so number-crunchers even believe you
have
a business plan, let alone a serious one. And grants? They want you to write about your work, not just send pictures, and I go all to pieces when I try to explain my vision in writing. The words start doing the mambo on the computer screen. I’m at the point where to develop as an artist I need to go somewhere like the studio program at the glass museum in Corning—but I can’t manage to get the damn application done, let alone the scholarship application.”

“But you can talk fine,” Drake said, a light dawning. “And I know how to write grants. There’s a formula involved—a word formula—and it’s practically as important to an academic as getting the degree in the first place.”

“I couldn’t ask you to do that for me.” Jen’s eyes were wide.

“You didn’t ask. I volunteered. You’re a good artist, Jen. Maybe better than good. Your big pieces are really impressive, but I know you can only do them in between the vases and other little things that you can sell online. I’d love to know what you’d be able to do if you weren’t worried about money and working all those odd jobs. A grant could buy you a few months of breathing room. Getting into a studio program would be better yet. I hear enough about artists’ and writers’ retreats just by overhearing faculty gossip to know that.”

“I can’t let you do that for me,” she corrected. “I have to take care of myself. If I can’t get a grant on my own, it’s my problem. I’d be embarrassed to rely on someone else.”

“If I asked you to pick out colors to paint my house because I know your color sense is good and mine sucks, would that be embarrassing for me?”

She shook her head. “That’s just asking a friend for ideas.”

“And if I were blind and asked you to help arrange my closet so I didn’t turn up at work dressed like a clown, would there be any shame in that?”

Again, she shook her head. “Of course not! Even that blind guy who climbed Mount Everest needs someone to tell him what color his shirt is. No shame in that.” She paused. “That was a trick question, wasn’t it?”

“Just a little.”

“But I’m not handicapped.”

Drake sighed. “Didn’t you ever have someone proofread your college papers?”

“If I had, maybe I could have finished school.”

She spat out the words. Then an expression of horror passed over her face, and she looked away. Drake put his hand under her chin and gently turned her face back toward him.

“Yeah. Now you know. I’m a dropout. Not quite a flunk-out, but because I did great in the studio classes. But I couldn’t do well enough to keep my scholarships. I only got through high school because I was considered learning disabled and they made accommodations for me. My parents never let me live that down. College was even harder, and I didn’t dare ask for help.” Hot tears filled her eyes, and she blinked them away. “My parents didn’t want me to go further into debt if I wasn’t going to do well in school, and they wouldn’t pay for a fine arts degree. They couldn’t have kicked in much anyway, but they would have if I could have majored in something that could actually help me get a job. So I’m the dunce with no degree in a town where the pizza guy has a MA.”

She couldn’t look at Drake. She couldn’t. He had two masters and a PhD. He’d started his undergraduate at an age most people were still juniors in high school. He’d think she was an idiot. A failure.

Maybe she
was
an idiot and a failure. People who weren’t failures finished college. If they weren’t cut out for college, they got jobs doing something like construction or plumbing or cooking in a restaurant or working in a store. They farmed. They fixed cars. Maybe they became homemakers and raised kids and made sure their partners came home to good meals and a clean house.

They were
useful
.

She made pretty things of glass, and she did it well, but she didn’t even have the skills to take care of herself or get a decent job, thanks to her dyslexia, and now Drake knew it.

Drake didn’t speak. Was he trying to figure out a way to ease out of the relationship he’d just been fighting to restart? He must be. She mustered her courage and said, “I guess we’re through, then. I understand. You’re a genius. I’m practically short school bus.” She tried to keep her tone light but failed, too tired for lies.

“Oh, you are in so much trouble. No one gets to put down my girl. No one gets to tell you you’re anything less than smart and hard-working and a damn fine artist. Especially not you.” He slammed his mouth onto hers. The kiss was almost a punishment, searing and brutal.

Caught in her own misery, Jen resisted at first, distrusting the angry promise of the kiss, distrusting that Drake meant what he said, or that, if he did mean it, he’d thought beyond her body and his desire for it.

Distrusting herself.

Then Drake cupped the back of her head possessively, and somehow, improbably, deepened the kiss. He pressed his body to hers, and his lips were hard yet somehow tender, his tongue invasive, yet right.

The kiss cracked something open inside her, then started to repair the crack with lust as hot as molten glass and love just as fiery.

This man kept showing how much he cared about her, and not just in bed. He’d apologized when he’d angered her and had tried to figure out ways he could be a genuine help instead of a pest.

And she was pretty sure she was in love with him.

So maybe she’d better take the leap of faith and believe him now.

All resistance left her body, and she gave herself to the kiss. Gave herself to him, in a way she didn’t think she had before. She’d given him something she’d always tried to hide, and he accepted it completely.

Drake’s kiss wasn’t magic. Jen realized one kiss, even as an expression of a good, smart man’s devotion, wasn’t going to fix decades of feeling inadequate or undo the harm her parents had accidentally done by their loving insistence that working harder would overcome her dyslexia.

It did, however, fix the moment. Fix the crashing sense of unworthiness she’d felt as she’d confessed her dropout status to Drake. And certainly fixed the doubts she had about Drake not wanting to be involved with her anymore.