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I wouldn’t mind if he looked like Logan, talked dirty like Logan, and
kissed me with the same intensity. All that. Without the backward ideas.
My finger hovered over the call button when the screen flashed and the
device exploded into vibrations.
Logan Crowne was calling just as I was about to call him.
Accept or reject?
I answered it and put the phone to my ear.
“Ella,” he said.
I bit my lip, unable to confirm or deny because I was busy adding
another real-husband trait to my list. The voice. My real husband had to
have a voice as deep and resonant as Logan’s, with the same confidence,
even when asking a question.
“Ella? Are you there?”
“Yes, Logan. I’m here.”
I stood in front of a copy paper-sized painting I’d done two years ago.
My parents’ wedding photo, but as I imagined it from behind, with the
photographer in the background. One of the rear vents in my father’s tux
jacket opened to accommodate a pair of scissors in his back pocket, and the
back of my mother’s vest was embroidered with bookkeeping notations. It
was terribly on-the-nose, but the way I’d painted his hand on her back, with
the thumb just resting on her skin, seemed so real and intimate—such an
encapsulation of who they were together—that I’d spent a year trying to
recapture that square inch of canvas.
“And yes,” I added. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“We can get married if you still want to.”
“You need to give up that thing,” he said. “The gorilla thing.”
“The Guerilla Arts Collective?”
“Past is past, but I can’t have you getting arrested or caught trespassing
while we’re together. It would look bad.”
I’d used the GAC as a way to get him to change his mind, but now he
was turning it on me. The one thing I enjoyed was the one thing he was
asking me to stop doing.
But what was there to do anyway? We were all exhausted from Geode
House, which had been years in the making. We didn’t even have a concrete
plan for a second piece.