Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

It's another sweltering afternoon as summer heats up, and I picked up a last-minute closing shift, wrapping up around four. Even though my ego is still recovering from the last time I stopped by, I decide to go see Lorraine on my way home.

She calls out to me as soon as I step inside. "Tia! Perfect, I was hoping you'd come by today. I was wondering if you'd like to talk shop, maybe get you a spark of inspiration."

She pulls a thick stack of hardbound books out from under the register and sets them on the counter with a thud, giving them a nudge towards me. They're all coffee table books of portraits: The Art of the Portrait , Women Painting Women , books from The Met and the National Portrait Gallery.

"Take a long browse, and let's talk about some of them," instructs Lorraine.

I leisurely peruse through the pages, taking my time to study each full-page illustration before turning to the next. "Think of the myriad decisions that have to be made when painting a portrait," I murmur. "The angle of the nose, the curve of the eyelid, the bow of the lip. So many minuscule choices. And you change one little thing and it becomes a picture of another person entirely. It must take forever to do one of these paintings."

"How long does it take to do one of your nightscapes?" asks Lorraine.

"Mm, four or five hours of painting, lots of time spent prepping and sketching before that. I paint alla prima, adding in all the layers before letting it dry."

"Good. And how long do you think a portrait would take you?"

"I have no idea. With my usual style, I deal in shades and shadows and shapes that meld together to meet a vision. There's less precision involved. But with a portrait, I'd have to think about each move I make before I make it."

"I wonder though. Really, I think if you close your eyes and trust your mind's eye, it's more intuitive than you think."

"Have you painted portraits before?" I ask, glancing over at her.

"A few."

"Do you do them from photographs or live models?"

"I prefer to have a living, breathing person in front of me. It helps me remember that what I'm painting isn't simply a memory or a moment, it's biographical."

"Oh, I like that word. A visual biography."

"There's a point of inspiration for all these artists," Lorraine says, flipping through pages. "Something that clearly represented their subject so well, they knew that's what would make the best portrait. And then adding in the details to tell the story behind the person."

"Well, I thought I had that with the painting of Aunt Mari."

"I think you need a true portrait, someone's full facial expression combined with the right setting. Trust me, when it happens, it'll feel like someone ringing a bell, like you just won a prize."

She sends a few of the books home with me and after depositing them in my mini art studio, I grab my soccer ball and head straight for the beach with a backpack full of art supplies and a towel.

Once I get to the packed wet sand of low tide, I stash my flip-flops in the outer pockets of my backpack and roll my ball out in front of me. Dribbling slowly down the beach gives me something to do while I think. I tap the ball again and again, watching the way it picks up little drops of water as it rolls closer to the edge of the waves. My mind wanders to how I would paint that, but instead of focusing on the details, my worries drift to the surface and crowd my thoughts.

I have no inspiration for what to paint. Am I doing the right thing? Should I quit this little painting side quest and get a more career-oriented job? Or should I do the opposite? Find a shift-work job that pays better and go back to school for art?

I got into painting because of Ms. Staten's art class in high school. I always doodled in my notebooks growing up, but when I saw the elective, I jumped at the chance to really learn art. She's the one who taught me how to work with different mediums and encouraged what she called my "natural talent." I doubted those words then, still doubt them now.

Ms. Staten was tough, and she taught us well, always keeping us fueled with inspiration and supplies. One time I overheard her and another teacher bartering to exchange resources so she could get more paint and brushes. The way she fought for her art students combined with lectures on art history showed me art was invaluable. It held inherent worth for both the artist and the viewer.

She also showed me how my thoughts could be processed out into a painting, how art could be a form of therapy. I loved every minute of being in front of an easel with paintbrush in hand, but art was always just an elective, something on the side, never the main thing. I never thought it could be a career, and no one in my life told me anything different.

I shake my head, clearing my reverie. At this point, I just need to keep going. There's no fallback because I'm in the fallback and I won't let myself stay here forever.

I lift my eyes off the sand and take a deep breath, looking down the beach. The sun is bright; kids are splashing and dragging boogie boards through the shallow tide. Someone's playing country music on a speaker and cracking a drink open. There's a runner coming towards me in a white shirt, black running shorts, and a blue baseball cap on backwards. His gait looks a lot like Cole's, and his build is the same, a mix between a soccer player and a rugby player. Yep, it's him.

I line up my kick and send the soccer ball sailing down the beach in a low arc. Cole traps it with ease.

"Hey, I thought that was you," he says, dribbling the ball closer, then passing it to me. "What are you up to?"

"What does it look like?" I say with a smile.

"Right," he says, falling into step next to me.

"You don't need to interrupt your run for me," I say as I pass the ball to him.

He dribbles ahead of me, does a few step-overs, looks like he's going to pass it, then pulls it back. "Eh, I already did five miles, I think I'm good for the day."

I lunge towards him and follow him when he jukes right, earning the ball back, and a smile from him. "You don't want to go for an even six? You're one of those people who can do things that end in odd numbers?"

"I guess so," he says. "Can you?"

I shake my head, keeping the ball close between my feet. "I go for even numbers every time, if I can help it."

"Good to know. Are you going to walk the whole beach?" Cole says, suddenly shouldering his way into my space and trying to throw me off balance to get the ball back. I push hard against his shoulder, but his upper body is one solid mass of carved muscle.

"What are you doing, you sweaty beast?" I say with a laugh, trying to shove him again. He goes nowhere, but he lets up with a grin, leaving the ball in my possession.

"Yeah, I'll walk for a while. I have a lot on my mind, some things I need to work through."

"Want to talk about it?" he says, our little soccer game now over. "Always helps me."

A laugh bubbles out of me. Cole's always ready to talk, especially now that he's post-breakup.

"What?" he asks, his face reddening.

"Nothing," I say.

"No, really, what?"

"You're cute." I pass the ball to him.

"You're cute."

He kicks the ball back to me, and I pop it in the air and knee it a few times before letting it fall back to the sand.

"Want a burrito? C'mon, let's go to Mexican Take Out and get burritos. I'm starving, and it'll fuel you up for your contemplation."

I feel like I should object, but I can't even remember what I ate for lunch. And I never pass up a free burrito from MTO, the best hole-in-the-wall on Crown Island.

"Let's do it."

A perfect breeze kicks up from the ocean, brushing my hair away from my face as I sit cross-legged on top of the sand dune, my soccer ball cradled in my lap and a California burrito in my hand. Everything about this is a slice of summer heaven. This is what I want for myself—for my future to have more of this than I can imagine.

But what if luck turns against me? What if life requires that I work in a concrete jungle with my feet in court heels instead of flip-flops, a hurried lunch break in a small kebab shop instead of a burrito on the beach? No, I'll fight for that to never happen again.

"What are you thinking about?" Cole asks.

"A lot about the future, some about the past."

"Don't tell me you're thinking about your ex," Cole says.

I shake my head. "No, not him. But sometimes I do wonder how exactly I wound up in D.C., a place I don't love, with a jerk of a boyfriend. Like, what was the specific series of events that made that happen?"

Cole nods in understanding. "Yeah, I get that. With Ripley, we matched on an app and I thought we had this instant connection. I was new to San Diego, didn't really have anyone. Luko wasn't here yet, Denny was deployed, and I didn't like how lonely I felt. She took me around, showed me the best food, the most beautiful beaches. I thought she was pretty, she said I was hot. She kept her crazy hidden well for a while." He pauses to take a bite, then adds, "Why do you think you were with him?"

I shrug. "It was exciting, people looked at me differently. I was someone because I was with him. He could be really attentive when he wanted to be. And he was…subtle in the way he wore me down."

I wonder how much more of myself would have been eroded away if I hadn't left when I did. If I had married Bryce—well, I guess that never would have happened. But it wasn't just staying with him that was wearing on me. It was everything around me: the shallow friendships, the way the city made everything feel too close all the time, the unnecessary stress, the loneliness.

"The other night, you said you're ready for marriage."

"What?" I shriek, laughing, then choking on a bit of tortilla. "No, no, I did not say that."

"You said you wanted to marry the next guy you dated," Cole protests with a smile. His neck is flushed red.

"Yeah, but I'm not necessarily ready right now," I say, digging my feet in the sand. "If I let someone into my life again, it will be after a lot of time and there would have to be a ton of trust."

Cole crumples up the wrapper of his burrito and tucks it under his leg so it doesn't blow away.

"What about you? You going to be single for a bit?"

He shrugs. "So, Denny and Luko and I have been friends for years, like, way before San Diego. Denny says I'm a hopeless romantic. Luko says I commit to relationships too easily and quickly. I guess I am kind of a romantic, always believing any bit of chemistry with someone could turn out to be true love."

"Really?" I ask with a laugh and a questioning look. "True love?"

"Why is that so hard to believe?"

"I've never known a guy to be a romantic. And I don't really believe in true love anyway."

"Wait, what? Then what do you believe in?" Cole asks, his eyebrows furrowing. "Like, how would you know you wanted to commit to someone?"

"I think you just make a decision. There's logic involved, you decide that it's going to be the right thing, and then you go all in on that. That's where you put all your effort."

"Effort?" Cole says incredulously. "Love is not effort."

My cheeks heat as I defend my position. "It is, at least to some degree."

"Commitment takes effort, sure. But falling in love…there's the initial free-fall of not knowing how you could ever stop yourself from loving this person to the point of being willing to do anything for them. There's a crush, there's obsession, there's lust even. They take up your entire mind and your heart. That's falling in love. And then you do whatever you can to help them, encourage them, be there for them. You give up anything and everything to be by their side and try to spend every waking minute with them. The feeling ebbs and flows, but it never leaves. And to have that with someone who feels the same way about you, to love and be loved…it's magic. That's true love."

I don't think I've ever put into words what love looks like to me. What Cole's talking about is…beautiful. Poetic, even. I didn't know guys spent this much time thinking about love.

Cole blushes and clears his throat, shaking his head. "That was a lot, I'm?—"

"No, don't apologize," I say, nudging my shoulder against his.

Cole grins sheepishly, then looks out at the waves for a while. I glance over at his profile.

"What you're talking about…I've never had that," I say softly. "And I don't know if I will. Maybe it's easier to not believe in it, if you don't think you can have it."

"You'll find your soulmate one day and fall so madly in love?—"

"I don't know…"

"That's like saying why believe in unicorns if you can never have your own. I say you might as well believe in something beautiful."

"Okay, but why would you believe in Santa Claus if he never brought you any presents?"

Cole moves his head side to side, weighing my counterargument. "Okay, touché."

We listen to the waves for a while. "But the one Christmas where Santa got you everything on your wish list would be all the more magical, right?"

I laugh and turn my gaze to him, tucking my chin against my shoulder. "I like that you believe in true love."

He adjusts his hat, still flipped backwards, then mirrors me, looking over his broad shoulder at me with a smile. "One day, you'll get hit over the head with it, and you'll remember this moment on the beach. And I'll go ahead and say it now in case I don't get to say it then. I told you so."

I grin as I stare into his brown, twinkling eyes. "You know what? I hope you're right."

And those darn butterflies come back with a vengeance.

I go home and put the finishing touches on my painting of Aunt Mari. Lorraine had a point about building up a collection, so I'm not going to leave it unfinished. The brush strokes grow less precise towards the bottom which makes it seem a little slapdash, but the end result surprises me by being more dynamic with brighter pops of color. I kind of love it.

It takes me a while to tidy up my space and put away my supplies, and while I'm cleaning my brushes, I cycle through my situation again. Am I doing the right thing? Should I be somewhere else, somewhere with a lower cost of living, or nearer to my dad? Am I really, truly meant to stay here on Crown Island? I'm happy. Doesn't that mean something?

By the time I'm done, I'm groaning with exasperation. I'm here. The end. I need to stop overthinking it. I flop backwards on my bed with a sigh and open my phone. Some mindless scrolling should give me a break.

I'm watching reel after reel, smiling at some, laughing internally, but nothing really grabs my attention. Until a Navy recruiting ad about becoming a corpsman fills my screen.

I sit up and watch a montage of guys in uniform doing training, something called Field Medical Training Battalion. They're inserting IVs, carrying stretchers, bandaging fake wounds. One guy shoves a breathing tube down a dummy's throat, and my gag reflex is triggered.

The whole video is over in sixty seconds with a fair sprinkling of motivational quotes and people in green camouflage and blue medical gloves working together, and it ends with the words "America's Navy" and the slogan "Forged by the Sea." Impressive. I wonder if this is the kind of thing that caught Cole's attention and made him want to join the Navy.

I tap the "#corpsmanup", and so begins my tumble down the rabbit hole. For the rest of the afternoon, I'm learning acronyms and terms I've never heard before. Parts of it sound familiar, like Cole being Navy but working with Marines, but a lot of it I have to pick up in context.

It's wildly interesting to me. These individuals sign up to join the Navy, get a contract to go corpsman, go through training, and then they're out in the world taking care of other Navy and Marine Corps personnel. Most of the videos are about training and faux combat scenarios, but there's this unspoken reality that all the training is in preparation for actual conflict. Something harmful, deadly.

I suck in a breath, and my mind plays it out before I can stop it.

Cole on a battlefield, putting pressure on a bleeding wound, carrying a Marine, putting in an IV, shouting instructions as Marines lift a stretcher, all while dust kicks up and mortars explode in the distance. That's what he trains for. That's the mission. And should the need arise, I know he would be the best corpsman out there.

I'm kind of proud of him.

I click my lock button, and the screen goes dark, mirroring my own face back to me. My thoughts float back to my conversation with Cole earlier, the butterflies that came when we looked at each other. Those warm brown eyes, that gorgeous smile, his sharp haircut and solid, muscular build. He's…interesting, dimensional. I wonder what it would be like to see him in action as a corpsman. I wonder what he looks like in uniform. I wonder if I'll ever see that side of his life.

I wonder if I need to stop thinking about him as much as I do.