Free Forever & Always: The Ever Trilogy (Book 1) by Jasinda Wilder Page A

 
    Or…I could paint him a picture and mail it to him.  
    I left the letter on my bed and went into my studio. There were five bedrooms in our house; Dad slept in one, Eden in one, me in another, and then Eden and I each had our own private studios, me for painting and Eden for playing cello. I put on my painting shirt, an old white long-sleeved button-down of Daddy’s. It was huge on me; the sleeves rolled four times still came to my forearms, and the hem fell just above my knees. I liked to paint wearing just the shirt. The free feeling of the soft cotton against my skin let me focus all of my attention on painting. I left my T-shirt and jeans in a pile on the floor, locked the door, and unfolded my painting case.  
    I stroked the smooth wood of the case’s edge, thinking of Mom. The case was the last gift she’d ever given me, a reward for getting straight A’s for the first half of the year. I was supposed to have gotten an even bigger gift for a 4.0 at the end of the full year, but she’d died and Daddy hadn’t followed through on her promise. Not that it mattered now. If it wasn’t her giving me the present, it didn’t really matter.  
    Now the case was my most prized possession. I didn’t care about anything else. The expensive clothes I’d once been so consumed with, the latest iPhone and jewelry, all that? None of it mattered. Mom had been an artist, and the paint case was all I really had left of her.
    Thinking of Mom, and then Caden, I dabbed my brush—a medium-point one, just to start out with—into the blue. Sometimes, if I knew exactly what I was setting out to paint, I would use a pencil and sketch it out first. Other times, like now, when I was letting my instincts take over, I just painted without any planning or forethought. I imagined my mind as a canvas as blank as the one in front of me, and let my hand and wrist take over. It was pure emotion, really. I tapped into my gut, my heart, and my soul.  
    One stroke began the process. A single diagonal sweep across the lower left corner of the canvas. Another. A curve. Suddenly, it was a lake, rippling and unfocused. More brushes, finer ones, broader ones, melded colors and smeared shades. An image of Caden flashed into my mind, the way I’d drawn him that day beside the lake. I imagined him alone at home, in bed. On his back staring up at the ceiling, tears trickling down the side of his face onto his pillow. He’d cry alone, in his room.  
    Me? After Mom died, I would burst into tears at the most random times. I couldn’t help it. I’d be in math class and then I’d be crying, and people would stare at me because they knew. Caden would likely hold it in and wait until he was at home in his room, and then he’d just quietly let go. Or maybe he wouldn’t, not ever. He’d hold it in and hold it in, and never let it out, and then someday he’d explode, because he never let it out.  
    A sun appeared in the sky above the lake, blurred yellow and bright, reflecting on the water. Trees. Bushes. A clearing just beneath the lake, which would be the foreground, the focal point of the piece.  
    And then Caden. Just the back of him, his hair shaggy and thick and brown like bear fur. Broad shoulders, also like a bear. He’d be big like a grizzly when he was full-grown, I knew. I had an image of him ten years from now, huge and burly, with unkempt but beautifully wild hair, and eyes like burning dark brown orbs in his handsome face. I didn’t paint him that way, but I imagined it. I saw his eyes, and in my fantasy he was smiling at me, teeth white as porcelain and even. In the painting, he was facing the lake, one hand at his side, the other, the left, stretched out to the side. He was reaching for something. For someone. For someone to hold his hand.  
    I couldn’t help it. It was how the painting was meant to be, so I let it happen. I painted myself beside him, my hair loose and tangled in the breeze around my shoulders, nearly to my