Outside the Lines(43)

I’m afraid of jinxing this.

Because this—whatever the hell it is—is pretty fucking awesome.

“What do you think about that one?” Ben asks me a while later. I follow his gaze to a glass sculpture rising from the ground. It’s twisted yet graceful and is every color you’d see if you looked up at a starry sky.

“I like it,” I say as I inspect it. “It’s pretty, and reminds me of … I really don’t know. I’m bad at interpreting art, don’t be mad.”

Ben chuckles. “I wouldn’t be mad, and I think the interpretation is so open. What one person feels and sees is so different from another, and even more different from what the artist was thinking and feeling at the time.”

I nod. “Like maybe this artist only had midnight colors to work with, but everyone else says blue means depression or some psychological stuff like that. I happen to think blue is calming, by the way. And open at the same time. That makes no sense, I know.”

“I think I’m following,” he says.

“It’s probably because the TARDIS is blue,” I try to joke, then remember Ben isn’t a Whovian. That’ll have to change if this thing develops further. “And it reminds me of magic and the sky. And the sky is magic, really. The sky is the literal sky, but it’s so much more than that too. It’s like a symbol of not putting limits on things, and a dark sky reminds me that there is so much out there left to be discovered.”

He nods, eyeing the glass shapes. “You did a good job interpreting that one. Don’t say you’re not good.”

I shrug. “But who knows if that’s what I’m supposed to feel.”

“You’re not supposed to feel one thing or another. Just feel.” His arm goes around me and my heart does a skip-a-beat thing. I rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes for a long blink. “And the artist would agree with you about blues and limits, well lack thereof.”

“How do you know?” I ask, then realize Ben is the artist who made this. Duh, Felicity. “Oh, right. Do you have anything else here?”

“Yes, but we don’t have to search it out,” he says and I get the feeling he’s too humble to take me on a tour to show off his work. “And we’ve already been by one other one.”

My eyes widen. “I didn’t insult your work, did I?”

He laughs again, and fuck, I love when he does. “No, you didn’t insult anything. And I take criticism really well. I know not everyone is going to like something I make. You can’t please everyone anyway, so why try?”

“Very true,” I reply and his statement resonates deep inside. I take the words personally, thinking of how it’s taken me years to figure that out.

You can’t please everyone.

Not in art, not in life. Why waste the time and emotion fretting about it?

“Haters gonna hate,” I say and lace my fingers through Ben’s. We continue walking the path. “Life is too short to worry like that, ya know? It took me a while to realize that, to be honest, but I like doing my own thing. It makes me happy, so who cares what others think, right?”

He pulls me in for a kiss. “Exactly.”





CHAPTER TEN





Ben lives in the historic district of Grand Rapids. It’s yet another place I’d heard of but hadn’t invested the time into seeing. There are historic home tours I meant to go on, but forgot. And it’s not like I can just go knocking on doors. Though I have driven down his road a time or two.

His house is one of the larger old homes, and he tells me it was built in the early 1900s. He parks around back, inside a detached garage. The sun is setting, but when we get out, I slow.

“Wow,” I say and look up at the large, dark-gray Victorian house. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thanks,” he says and gives the house the same starry-eye look I’m giving it. “It’s been a lot of work restoring her, but I love it.”

Hearing him refer to his house as a female is oddly charming. “Was it in bad shape when you bought it?”

He shakes his head. “Not horrible shape, but the previous owners attempted to do a lot of upgrades themselves when they weren’t skilled enough to do so. I had to take a lot out and redo what could have been left original.”

He holds my hand as we go up the wooden steps of the back porch. They creak under my feet. The old wood has a new shine to it, and a cast-iron table and chairs are positioned against the house on the covered porch. I imagine waking up and having coffee out here, looking across the way at the other historic homes. Oh, I wonder if his house is haunted! That would be terrifying and neat at the same time.