Above All, page 8
“And what if I don’t know?” Casey said weakly.
Lee reached over the table and grabbed Casey’s hands in hers. Her fingers were soft and warm with the heart she brought to everything she did.
“You’ll know. You keep an open heart and you’ll know.”
“Thanks,” Casey whispered.
“Keep your heart open,” Lee repeated. “You don’t want to be finished before you’ve even begun.”
“And you?” Casey asked, gripping Lee’s hand before she pulled away. “Did you always keep your heart open?”
“My heart did its thing. And since then, it’s found plenty of other ways to bring in more happiness than this one body ever deserved. The store, the people of this town, the mountains, my friends, you.” She gave a tight squeeze. “I’m so full it’s a wonder I don’t float away.”
“Well, that’s how I feel,” Casey said, sinking back in the chair. “I’ve got so much here, why should I need anything—or anyone—else? Why can’t I live like you?”
“You mean get a few cats and putter around Bonnet by yourself for the rest of your years?”
“Exactly!”
Lee smiled, but it was only half a smile. The other half was sad.
“Because I’ve lived a lot more life than you have. I can say these things. You—you still don’t know what you might be missing. Now, don’t get me wrong. Don’t go after it because you think it’s what you might want, or what you should. You know the contents of your own mind. You know what beats in your heart. But I’m old, Casey.”
“You are not!” Casey objected, dimly recalling herself saying similar words to Ben’s friends last night about her own age.
“Ah, but I’m older than you. You, my dear, still have to earn this throne of wisdom.”
She leaned forward on her stool, flapping her arms around as if she were draping herself in a gown. Casey snorted, laughing at Lee’s antics as she leapt up to keep Felix from gnawing the edge of an ivy plant trailing down from a hook. Lee’s kitchen throne clattered to the floor with a crash that made both cats run screeching into the other room.
“Damn fools,” Lee muttered, righting the metal chair and shaking her fist at the cats.
“Aren’t we all?” Casey said, and both women smiled, forced to agree.
CASEY WAS DRIVING BACK on Main Street, full of coffee and food and cat snuggles and Lee’s infectious laughter, when she spotted a group walking along the side of the road. Six boisterous North Face-clad bodies were talking animatedly up ahead as two more serious forms took up the rear. Ben’s lanky gait she would recognize anywhere, high on the balls of his toes with that telltale lean as he bent over to hear Janelle. The memory of his lips on hers flooded her in a rush that nearly took her breath away.
She pressed on the accelerator and roared by. Before she turned off for the campsite, she allowed herself one peek in the rearview mirror. But they were dark dots now, heading up the hill into town.
She parked next to Geller’s truck and met with him in the office. “Saw that Vassar group walking toward Bonnet,” she said casually, rearranging the brochures.
“Sent ’em up to Pam’s place. Sounded like they wanted a walk,” Geller said. “Good kids, that bunch. Nicer than the boys we sometimes get.” Casey had to agree with that, but she wasn’t going to say anything else about it.
“Do we have other groups checking in?” She went over to look at the list. Only two checkouts today.
“Easy few days,” Geller said. “Two more nights of that big group and then we’ll be quiet for a spell.”
He glanced from her face to the raw circles in her thumbs.
“Everything going okay there, hotshot?” he asked.
What was up with everyone immediately sensing that something was going on? It was like Lee had X-ray vision that could tell everything Casey had been thinking. And now Geller was asking after her, too. Of course, his way was a little less colorful than Lee’s, but the point was the same.
“I’m fine,” Casey assured him. “Enjoying the nice weather we’re finally getting up here.”
“Lord knows we’re overdue,” Geller agreed.
She left him to putter around the office while she did her rounds. It was quiet with the party of eight gone for the morning, and she was relieved that she didn’t have to worry about running into them. That kiss was probably just some drunken late night thing that Ben had already forgotten. She should try to forget about it, too.
But the rush, again, as she remembered him in the doorway, the way he looked at her, the way she’d felt when he pressed his palm against the small of her back and searched her lips with his...
She stopped in the middle of the trail. This was getting ridiculous. She was completely out of her mind. She kept her hands busy and her mind off Ben—and his hands—for the rest of the morning. Which really meant that she kept her mind blank.
Chapter Seven
Geller didn’t have much for her to do after lunch since the campground wasn’t that busy yet, so he gave her the afternoon off, saying she looked as if she needed some rest. Casey wondered how it could be that obvious, but she was happy to gather her things and head down to the water to paint.
She’d been sketching throughout the long winter, immersed in all the variations of snow white and storm gray that appeared throughout the landscape. She’d spent a long time on a series of deer tracks in dark charcoal lines blushed over with watercolor blues to depict the tone and edge of the ice. On the stretches when there was no light or fresh snow and everything muddled into gray, she’d looked for the browns in the trees and the shades of darkness in the frozen ground. The signs that life continued after all.
In the spring, though, there was color to be found, and it was color she was after today. She hungered for it, greedy to capture it all. She wanted to show the world at its most beautiful, to believe that out of all those months of darkness, something could come flowering across the page.
She rummaged through her supplies for paint and a fresh pad of watercolor paper. Her brushes were well used but still good. She carried her supplies down to the large flat rocks by the shore. Warm in the sun, she propped the pad on her lap and got comfortable.
Then she started to paint.
The purples and blues of the water, the ripples of light where the sun glinted from behind, the first blushes up the mountains, the strokes of yellow blooming amidst the green along the shore. Clouds, too, and a streak of pale blue behind the mountaintops; the barest suggestion of sky.
She couldn’t have said how long she’d been sitting there before she sensed the prickle between her shoulder blades that told her she was being watched. Two looser sketches were already drying on the rocks beside her. She was working through a more detailed one, building up the shades of green that spread and soared across the top of Bonnet, when she finally pried her eyes away and craned her neck around.
She didn’t know who looked more startled, she or Ben. He was the one who’d been spying on her, but he looked like a deer who’d been trapped, tail up, cautiously nosing around.
“How long have you been standing there?” Casey frowned.
“Long enough to have figured out you’re a really, really good artist,” Ben said, stepping closer. “I thought you had something up your sleeve when you hid your sketchbook, but I figured that meant it was something you enjoyed but weren’t that good at.”
“I’m not that good,” Casey said.
“No, you’re not,” he agreed, and she whirled around to fix him with a glare. It was one thing for her to admit that she didn’t have much talent. It was quite another for some pipsqueak baby-faced stalker to tell her she—
“You’re amazing,” Ben said softly, interrupting the whirring of Casey’s thoughts. “I’m leaving you alone,” he added quickly, before she could say a word. “You should not be bothered while you’re doing this. I really didn’t mean to interrupt, but once I saw what you were doing...” He cocked his head at her curiously. “Can I swing by later?”
Casey bit her lip. She was telling her mouth to say no, but it didn’t seem to want to listen.
“Okay.” She nodded, but before she could say anything else, he was gone, leaving her to wonder what had just transpired. If her ears and eyes could be believed, Ben had marveled at her work and then left her so she could do more of it.
He hadn’t tried to talk to her, to take her attention from the paper back to him. He hadn’t even tried to come up with some platitude to lull her into a false sense of accomplishment before he shifted her away from her creativity and back into something that included him. He hadn’t tried to make himself included at all.
And that was what was so different about Ben, she realized. It was the way he stood out when he was with his friends. He wasn’t trying to be a part of anything. He just was.
Like the rocks were, and the trees, and the lake and the mountains behind. Take it or leave it, they would always be there.
She remembered how hard it had been to paint when she was with Nick. There was always something else that needed to be done. Whenever she found a few spare moments to herself, he would be hanging around, leaning over her shoulder, interrupting her concentration, wondering why she had to spend so much time lost in her thoughts. It wasn’t that he forbade her from doing anything, but the reality was that he saw Casey’s painting as a hobby—something that didn’t much matter. Slowly, inevitably, she’d spent less and less time on her own artwork, until she couldn’t remember the last time she’d picked up a pencil to do anything other than grade student papers.
Even in this short weekend, it was becoming clear. She had never known anyone quite like Ben.
Casey worked on the painting until her legs were stiff and had long since gone from tingling to entirely numb. When she finally set the page aside, as the light was slipping into a new kind of painting, a new kind of view, she felt her back complaining and wondered how long she’d been sitting there. She’d passed a lot of those kinds of hours in Bonnet, so engrossed she lost all awareness of herself.
She packed up her things and carried the paintings back to the cabin to finish drying, still amazed that someone could be interested in her and also let her be, with the promise that he would return.
CASEY MOVED ABOUT HER cabin that evening, setting water to boil and trying to scrape together the bits from almost-finished boxes of spaghetti to make enough for leftovers. She was in the middle of trying to pour the spaghetti into the pot without spilling it everywhere—a disaster she was remarkably good at—when the knock came. No matter how much she’d tried to convince herself that there was nothing going on with Ben and the kiss had been a one-time deal—she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know who it was, true to his word.
But she couldn’t answer the door with her hands full. In a moment, Ben pushed open the door and stuck his head in. “Anybody home?”
She dumped the rest of the spaghetti in and wiped her hands on a dishtowel, already flustered. Some part of her was surprised to find herself inviting him in. Another part sat back smugly and asked if she really believed that line that she wasn’t interested in him.
“Spaghetti crisis, come on in,” she called. The pot was too small and the long pieces were still sticking straight up. She tried to push them down with a wooden spoon before they burned.
Ben let himself in and something clunked down on the table, making Casey look over. He had brought a bottle of wine.
“Jesus,” she muttered to herself. You kiss one boy once in your doorway when it’s late at night and you don’t know any better, and suddenly it’s a date?
“Geller said you were at home,” Ben said.
“You talked to Geller about me?” Casey’s eyebrows shot up.
“Not like that,” Ben said quickly. “I went to the office.” He scratched at his neck. “It just sort of came up.”
Casey narrowed her eyes at him. “Right,” she said. “Like that wine just sort of appeared.”
Ben lifted his palms to the ceiling, pleading for mercy. “Guilty, I guess? Is that spaghetti really going to cook like that?”
Casey looked back at the pot, realizing she’d been standing in front of the stove, arms folded across her chest and wooden spoon in her hand like a weapon, completely neglecting to get the spaghetti all the way into the pot. You didn’t need to be studying Italian cooking at one of the best culinary schools in the country to know that wasn’t a good idea. Dry pieces of spaghetti poked out of the water and were starting to whither and burn.
“Shit,” she grumbled, frantically stirring. “It’s a little embarrassing to make spaghetti in front of you.”
“May I?” Ben said gently, coming over and extending his hand for the spoon.
“You’re supposed to be taking a break this weekend, remember?”
“I’m pretty sure I can handle a pot of spaghetti.”
“Fine.” Casey handed over the spoon, relieved not to have to deal with the mess she was making. “Knock yourself out.”
In three deft flicks of the wrist, Ben had twirled the pasta around so it lay calmly in the water, which was beginning to roll back to a boil.
“Did you set a timer?”
“No,” Casey admitted.
“That’s okay, we’ll eyeball.” He smiled. “How about sauce?”
Casey pulled out a jar of tomato sauce from the fridge and handed it over, making a face in the process. The jar was half used and she could already guess there’d be a layer of fuzz growing around the rim that she’d been planning to scrape off without looking too hard.
“Let me ask you something,” he said.
“Shoot,” said Casey, bracing herself. Now was the time for it all to come out—the inevitable questions about what she was doing up here, the subtext being, What’s wrong with you that you’re hiding from the world?
But all he said was, “Do you have any canned tomatoes?”
Casey’s eyes fluttered in surprise. “Uh, it’s possible? Look up there.” She pointed to the cabinets above the fridge. Ben rooted around behind some cans of black beans.
“Aha!” he finally said, triumphantly grabbing a can. “Now dare I ask, how about onion?”
He was in luck. Casey had two withered onions and, bonus, half a head of equally wizened garlic.
“Things are starting to look up!”
“If you say so.” Casey rolled her eyes.
“Now we get down to business.” Ben made himself at home rooting through her cabinets, pulling out a half-empty bottle of olive oil and some red wine vinegar she didn’t even know she had. “Spices? Oregano? Red pepper flakes?”
Casey shook her head. “Not unless you find it somewhere.”
“That’s okay,” he said with forced optimism. “There’s hope for you yet.” His dimples as he smiled made her flush.
Ben pulled out a cutting board and what he deemed the sharpest knife Casey had and proceeded to chop the onion and garlic with such alacrity that Casey didn’t even try to make the pitiful offer to help in her own kitchen. Then he went to work dicing the canned tomatoes while she got a strainer for the pasta and a pot to heat the impromptu sauce he was putting together.
“Perfect,” he declared as he transferred the last of the tomatoes to the pot, somehow without spilling any of the juices that swam across the cutting board. If Casey had tried such a feat, half the sauce would have wound up on her shirt.
“Well, almost perfect,” he conceded. “It would be better if you had a food mill, but let’s not get picky.”
“No, let’s not.” She wrinkled her nose.
It was strange how easy it was to move in the tiny kitchen with him. She was aware, always, of how close they were standing, bumping past each other to move from the fridge to the stove, angling around his side to get a knife to cut the questionable parts off the parmesan cheese, his hand brushing her hip as he nudged her over to reach for the cups they were using as wine glasses. Even as she knew where he was at all times, something about it felt easy. Like falling into a rhythm without needing to be told what the beat was going to be.
Careful, she warned herself as she poured him more wine. This wasn’t how she usually spent her weekends, and it wasn’t how she usually spent her nights. She’d come up here for a reason, to focus on her own life and not go around losing her heart.
But it was hard, in the moment, not to feel herself getting carried away by the food and the company. Even if, she was quick to remember, she still didn’t know him that well.
Chapter Eight
When the wine was open and the sauce bubbling away, Ben practiced his wind-up to throw a strand of spaghetti against the wall, claiming he was going to use the trick to test for doneness, because when else was he going to be in a kitchen where pasta sticking to the wall wouldn’t throw the homeowner into a tizzy?
Cocooned in the warm glow of the cabin and the sweet, sharp smells of the simmering sauce, Casey couldn’t believe she was laughing this hard. She was perfectly happy for him to have taken over the cooking—it was certainly going to be a better meal than anything she’d have come up with on her own.
He, though, was far more interested in asking about her than he was in talking about the infinite varieties of cheese being drilled into his head this semester.
