Connor asked if I would like to get back to making my jewelry, and offered one of the upstairs bedrooms in the apartment next door for me to use as my studio. That sounded like an excellent idea — after thinking it over for a while, I’d decided to withdraw from my online coursework for a while, and I couldn’t just sit around and watch TV all day. Connor ordered some furniture and equipment for me, had the room painted almost the same cheerful turquoise as my old bedroom back at my aunt’s apartment.
The supplies, though, I had Sydney bring up. I didn’t want to face the Jerome contingent quite yet, and since my jewelry-making tools and loose stones and other items all fit easily into a few small boxes, she was all too happy to get everything together for me and drive up with Anthony on a Saturday when we could all go out on the town. She seemed to be getting quite a taste for Flagstaff nightlife. Not that I could really blame her. Maybe in the grand scheme of things Flagstaff wasn’t a big city, but compared to Cottonwood it was practically a metropolis.
All through this placid domesticity, though, I had this niggling sensation in the back of my mind, a feeling that things couldn’t go on like this indefinitely. I wasn’t sure why, because it seemed as if Connor and I were being left alone to live our lives. I tried to tell myself that it was silly, that my unease was probably due to guilt over not returning to Jerome and nothing more, but I couldn’t quite seem to convince myself of that. And as far as I knew, I had absolutely zero precognition, so it couldn’t be some hazy vision of the future trying to work its way into my mind.
Even so, I managed to shove the feeling away as January began to move into February. Imbolc, the ritual start of spring, came and went with little fanfare; the Wilcoxes didn’t follow the old calendar and holidays the same way the McAllisters did, save the major quarterly observances of the solstice and the equinox. But it was on Imbolc when the homesickness came over me the worst, thinking of how we would be calling on Blessed Brigid, celebrating her with fire and feast. In Flagstaff, February 2nd was Groundhog Day, and that was about it.
But I pushed the melancholy aside, reminding myself that I was here with Connor, and that was the most important thing. As time passed, either my family would become reconciled to the relationship, or they wouldn’t. I couldn’t put my life on hold simply because they were too narrow-minded to understand that Connor was the only man I’d ever truly want or need.
A few days after Imbolc, he was just putting the finishing touches on the autumn aspen painting I’d first seen back in December, looking at it with narrowed eyes as he put a dab of color here, a touch of shadow there. I came downstairs from my own studio, fingers tired from wrapping thin copper wire around some new pieces of Kingman turquoise I’d acquired a few weeks earlier.
“So what are you going to do with that one?” I asked.
“Stack it up against a wall somewhere, I suppose,” he replied with a shrug. “Or maybe replace one of the paintings in the apartment. It would go pretty well over the fireplace, actually.”
Coming closer, I admired the sure, strong brush strokes, the way he’d managed to evoke the slanting quality of the autumn light. “Or you could, you know, put it in the gallery.”
His face went still. “You know I don’t sell my stuff.”
“Well, why not give it a try?”
“Because putting my art in the gallery just because it’s my gallery isn’t a good enough reason. It’s like…selling your kid’s finger-paintings or something.”
“Um, if I had a kid whose finger-painting was this good, I’d sure as hell be selling it.” I wanted to put my arms around him, if only to get that dead expression off his face, but since he was still holding a brush with wet paint on it, I decided that wasn’t such a good idea. “You’re selling my jewelry, aren’t you?”
“Well, that’s different. People really like it. That’s why I have you working your fingers to the bone, getting together enough stock for Valentine’s Day.”
That was true. Oh, I wanted to be working, and it was gratifying to see the way my pieces sold so quickly, but the pace at which I’d been churning out earrings and pendants and talismans was a lot more intense than back in Jerome, where the demand hadn’t been as high. “You are a slave driver,” I agreed with a smile. “And I also think you have a weirdly distorted idea of how people are going to receive your work. Why not put a couple in there, see what happens?”
His expression was still dubious. “I don’t know.”
“How the hell did you manage to get an MFA if you have so little confidence in your work?”