The Art of Romance (41 page)

Pax leaned his elbows on his desk, putting his face closer to the camera on his computer. “And did you hear that voice tonight when Caylor kissed you?”

“No.” He didn’t even have to think about it.

“Why not?”

He heaved a sigh. “Because I’ve been wanting to kiss her for a long time. I just wasn’t sure how she felt about me. She’s so poised and polished and mature and…well, she just has her life together, and mine’s a mess. I mean, I’m getting back to a point at which I understand myself. I’ve been able to separate my disappointment with the church from my relationship with God, and I feel like I’m on good terms with Him again. I’ve accepted the full-time position at Robertson. But it’s like I’m fresh out of college and just getting started with life, while she’s been living the life she’s chosen for a long time now. She’s settled and secure and…tenured.”

“So why would that preclude her from falling in love with you?” Tyler’s voice rasped from the cold he’d had for several days. “What does all that stuff have to do with who you fall in love with?”

“Because I don’t want to feel like I’m living off of her the way I did with Rhonda. I don’t want her to feel like she has to support me or take care of me. I want to be the provider. I want to be the one who takes care of her.” Embarrassment washed over him as soon as the words finished tumbling out of his mouth.

His brothers burst out laughing.

“Good grief, could you
be
any more nineteenth century about it?” Spencer leaned back in his swivel desk chair. “Seriously? You’re going to put a damper on your feelings for this girl because she makes more money than you? Because she has tenure and you don’t?”

“No—you’re being obtuse.” Or was he? Spencer had a point—Dylan was putting a little too much emphasis on external values instead of focusing on Caylor herself. “I just don’t want to find myself in the same situation I was in with Rhonda.”

“Oh, so you’re saying Caylor is just like Rhonda, then?” Spencer’s tone changed from mirthful to challenging. “That she’s going to dictate to you what you should paint, where you should live, and who your friends should be?”

Dylan wanted to shout at his brother. He gripped the edge of the table. “No—she’s not like that at all. She’s kind and considerate and funny and selfless. She gave up her own life to move in with and take care of her grandmother five years ago. She stepped in and picked up the slack for her younger sister when Sage didn’t show up to model for my studio class. She loves my paintings.” She loved the sketches he’d done of himself—slightly disguised—so much she’d based her characters on him.

“So she’s not anything like Rhonda.” Tyler’s soft voice broke through Dylan’s memory of Caylor telling him about her books. “Yet you still believe your relationship with someone who’s the total opposite from Rhonda will turn out the same way. That just doesn’t add up for me.”

“The scientific approach would be to try it out—look on it as an experiment—and see if you get a different result with different components.” Pax’s mouth quirked to the side, an obvious attempt to try to hide his humor.

“Shall I give you a business analogy to go along with math and science?” Spencer asked.

“No. Please don’t.” Dylan’s bottom lip trembled with his effort to keep frowning rather than let himself smile. “We’re supposed to be having coffee after I get finished with class tomorrow. What should I say to her?”

His brothers looked around at each other on their own screens.

“Just be honest with her,” Pax finally said. “Tell her everything about Rhonda, and then tell her how you feel about her. Let her decide how she wants to proceed based on the absolute truth. Don’t gloss over anything.”

Pax’s last statement sucker-punched Dylan. He thought about all of those canvases downstairs he’d painted over, covering the original artwork and preparing the canvas for a new image. That’s what he’d been doing with Caylor—only letting her see a veneer, the top layer of the image of his life when what he should do was let that layer become transparent so she could see the pentimento of false starts and mistakes he’d made and then painted over.

Even after the pep talk from his brothers, Dylan had trouble sleeping. He should talk to Ken about this. The advice he’d gotten in the counseling sessions, the things he’d learned about himself in just a couple of months had made Dylan feel like a different person—or like Rip van Winkle waking up after a twenty-year sleep, or five in this case.

But Ken wouldn’t be able to give him advice that was any better than what his brothers had told him. It wasn’t advice he needed. It was guidance. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

“Lord, I know I haven’t been on the best terms with You over the last several years, but I can’t deny that You’ve managed to take the mess that I made out of my life on my own and turn it into something good. I don’t want to assume too much, but I think You put Caylor in my life for a reason. And I want to make sure I do this on Your terms, not mine—because I don’t want to mess this up by moving outside of Your will. So if You’d see fit, I’d really appreciate it if You could give me some clarity on this…thing with her and show me where You want us to go with it.”

His eyelids drooped, and he yawned. “Thanks. Um, amen.”

She might as well have canceled classes today, for all that she was able to pay attention during them. Caylor paced the cramped confines of her office, tempted to call Zarah or Flannery and tell them what had happened last night. But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Not when it would most likely mean humiliation when Dylan didn’t show up for coffee this afternoon and never wanted anything to do with her ever again because she’d completely offended and embarrassed him.

What had she been thinking, kissing him like that?

Goose bumps ran up her arms. When he’d kissed her back, she could have died a happy woman. But then they’d both fallen back on inane chatter to keep awkward silence at bay, and by the time they got to campus, Caylor’s mortification had been complete. How would she ever be able to face him again—even just to apologize for her rash action?

Oh, but what a kiss it had been. Would she be able to apologize for something she wasn’t sorry she’d done?

Three twenty-five. She should probably go—though she’d most likely beat him there, since a teacher rarely managed to get away from the classroom right at dismissal time. She grabbed some cash and locked up her desk and the office. She almost wished for a student to come around the corner at the top of the stairs and stop her with a life-or-death issue.

But no student materialized.

No one stopped her on the way to the student center, diagonally across the quad from Davidson. The food court area in the lowest level of the student center buzzed with activity, but even it wasn’t as crowded as usual. She ordered a caramel latte at the coffee kiosk and stood to the side to wait for it, greeting students as they recognized her.

She’d just picked up her coffee when Dylan entered. Taller than most of the people in the room, he was hard to miss. A few drama students gathered around a table nearby stopped him to say hi, but he didn’t linger.

Their gazes locked. Caylor’s breath caught in her chest. Then he smiled at her. Not a tight, nervous smile, but a genuine, warmth-filled smile.

Unlike every other time they’d ever seen each other, Dylan came close, placed his hands on her upper arms, and kissed her right cheek.

“Hey.” He stepped back.

Caylor had to clear the gleeful surprise that clogged her throat. “Hey, yourself.”

“Want to grab a table? I’ll join you as soon as I get my coffee.”

Though she’d never thought him immature, something about him was different today—maybe the assertiveness in his manner or the confidence in his voice. Different in a good way, because it made Caylor believe that the seven years’ difference in their ages really wasn’t an issue at all.

She picked a table in a back corner where they could have a modicum of privacy for their talk. Their talks. Because after last night, two things needed to be discussed.

A few minutes later, Dylan joined her, stirring the whipped cream down into his frozen latte. He set a few extra napkins down and sat across from her at the small, two-person table.

“I know you probably have a reason why you wanted to get together and chat today before deciding whether or not to go to the World War II concert with me this weekend.” Dylan took a sip of his drink through the green straw. “But there’s something I want to talk to you about first. Something I need to tell you.”

Her heart sank. Here it came—the let’s-just-be-friends speech.

“At Watts-Maxwell I was an assistant professor in the painting department under the direct supervision of Dr. Rhonda Kramer, the department chair….” Dylan’s eyes hardly wavered from Caylor’s as he told her what she’d wanted to know without her asking about it.

Latte forgotten, Caylor leaned forward, bracing her elbows on the table, resting her chin in her hands. She ached for the impressionable young man he’d been, falling into the clutches of an overbearing, manipulative woman like Dr. Kramer. Now what Wyatt Oakes had told her made sense. That’s why Dr. Kramer answered Dylan’s personal phone and told Wyatt to stop calling. She’d been trying to isolate Dylan from anyone who might be able to show him what she was doing to him.

“I knew better than to let the relationship go as far as it did—to become intimate, to move in together—but I was so far in it at that point, I didn’t see any way out. She had changed everything about me—my painting, my friends, my whole being.” He watched his hand as he moved his straw in and out of the cup, making it squeak against the lid holding it in place.

“How did you get out?” Caylor lifted her cup to drink and soothe her throat, dried out from the anger building there.

Dylan looked up from his cup, a wry expression pulling at one corner of his mouth. “I wanted to come home for Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. Rhonda told me she was my family. She’d made me who I was, and if I left the apartment, she’d ruin me. I packed up my few belongings, threw them in the truck, and drove over to a friend’s place where I crashed for a few days until my employment was terminated due to her going to the human resources department and invoking the nepotism regulation to get me fired. And then I came home.”

He moved his empty cup aside and traced the condensation ring with his forefinger. “I was so angry and resentful when I first got back. I thought everyone had an agenda and was working against me—even my grandparents, who’ve always been the most supportive people in my life. It got so bad, my brothers had to hold an intervention with me and suggest I go into counseling.”

Caylor smiled at the mention of his brothers. “It’s good to know that you have people in your life who care that much about you.”
Like me
, she wanted to add.

He reflected her smile. “I don’t deserve them. But they’re my best friends. I couldn’t have gotten through this recovery without them.” His smile faded. “And I am still recovering, Caylor. I still have hangups and issues and things I need to work through. And a mother who does have an agenda and may still be working against me.”

“That can’t be true.” At least Caylor couldn’t believe a mother could do that to her son.

Dylan quirked a brow. “You haven’t met my mother.”

Caylor knew she couldn’t wait any longer to broach the other topic of conversation they needed to explore. “I’m sorry about last night. I’m sorry if I complicated things for you by what I did…by kissing you.”

The tension in his face eased, his eyes softened, and he leaned closer, taking her hands in his across the table. “Don’t be sorry. I’m glad you did it. I’ve been wanting to kiss you for a while now.”

Her heart sped up a little, though she tried to control it. “But it isn’t the right time.”

“Not the right time for us to be moving forward that quickly, no. Caylor—I need to take this slowly. I need to figure out who I am, what I want out of my life, and what God wants me to do before I can make any commitments to a relationship between us.” He squeezed her hands then released them. “But I can tell you that I do want a relationship with you. An old-fashioned, Saturday-night-date, we-can-hold-hands-at-the-movies kind of relationship—because I can’t imagine not spending time with you.”

Caylor’s joy swelled—then deflated. “Dylan, you know I live with my grandmother, right?”

He nodded.

“And she depends on me. I’ve committed to staying with her until…well, until she doesn’t need me anymore. And that may be ten, fifteen, or even twenty years from now.” She wanted to cry—overwhelmed by the idea she wasn’t free to promise Dylan anything more than just the casual dating relationship he’d described, not for many, many years to come.

“I understand.” He reached for her hands again. “I’m still getting back in touch with God right now, but I truly believe that if He means for us to be together, He’ll make a way for us to be together. Besides,” he grinned, “I like Sassy.”

“Good. She likes you, too.” Caylor turned her hands over and squeezed his. “Since we’re baring our pasts, I should probably tell you I was engaged twelve years ago. He played baseball for Vanderbilt when we were in college there. He was the first guy who ever showed any romantic interest in me. We were together three years, and I’d already started planning the wedding.”