The Wishing Game(69)

“Is there a pirate ship in Jack’s new book?”

“No idea,” Hugo said as he sat back on the pillow and propped his feet in front of the fire. “But I felt like drawing a pirate ship captained by a corgi floating in front of the full moon, so I did. And to think I once thought I was going to be a serious artist.”

“Thank God you didn’t,” she said. “I don’t know a single kid on the planet who has, I don’t know, Rembrandts on their walls, but I know a whole lot of kids who have your art hanging in their bedrooms.”

“Really?”

She pointed at herself without making eye contact. “The Princess of Clock Island poster that came with the book? It hung over my bed for years.”

He groaned dramatically. “Thank you. Now I feel ancient.”

“You should be flattered.”

“Fine. Thank you. I’m very flattered.” And he was flattered. Old, but flattered.

Lucy kept flipping through the book. “Very nice,” she said, eyeing an old drawing of a charcoal raven wearing a watercolor red hat.

“That’s Thurl, except with a hat.”

“It suits him,” she said. The next page was a pencil drawing of a clown holding his head on a balloon string. She turned another page, and her eyebrows shot straight up. She turned the sketchbook around and showed the drawing to Hugo. “Ahem.”

“I told you I’d draw you a picture of a Jack and Danny,” he said, grinning. Hugo knew he ought to be embarrassed, but sometimes an orchid was just an orchid. Then again, sometimes an orchid was—

“It looks like a vulva,” Lucy said.

“That’s an orchid from Jack’s greenhouse. Second, blame Georgia O’Keeffe, not me. She started it.”

She merely shook her head as she turned page after page. “These are amazing,” she said. Hugo’s chest tightened. Like any artist, he was a sucker for flattery, but it was more than that. Lucy seemed so happy losing herself in his sketchbook, smiling or laughing at every page. He’d forgotten how good it felt to be the reason behind the smile on a pretty girl’s face.

“I wish I had any artistic talent whatsoever,” she said. “I can knit scarves, but that’s more of a craft than an art.”

“Craft is what they call artwork that’s useful to humanity,” Hugo said. “And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I’ve seen Amish quilts more impressive than a lot of Picassos.”

She smiled but said nothing as she studied one particular page for a long time.

Though he knew he should be trotting off to bed, he didn’t want the conversation to be over. He enjoyed spending time with Lucy more than he probably should.

“Did you ever want to be an artist?” he asked.

She closed the sketchbook and set it carefully onto the coffee table. “No, but I wanted to work in the arts. Closest I ever got was working as a semiprofessional muse.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Semiprofessional muse? How did that work?”

“I dated a writer once,” she said. “He called me his muse. I might have taken it as a compliment, except that he wrote books about miserable people.”

Hugo laughed softly as she tucked her feet under her legs, making herself smaller.

“Anyone I’ve heard of?” he asked.

“Sean Parrish?”

Hugo sat up. The name not only rang bells, it rang alarm bells. “Sean Parrish? You’re joking.”

She winced. “Do you know him? I mean, personally?”

“He and Jack were at the same agency for years, but we never met. His reputation precedes him. Good and bad.”

Lucy raised her hands like she was miming a scale. “On one hand, Pulitzer Prize winner,” she said. “On the other…”

“Legendary arsehole,” Hugo said. And not his favorite writer by any stretch. After reading the first fifty pages of one of his books, Hugo had wanted to give himself a paper cut and go swimming with the sharks.

“Right. So…yeah,” she said with a sigh. “I was his girlfriend.”

“Where on earth did you meet him?”

“He was my professor,” she said. “Creative writing. Back when I thought I’d work for a publisher someday. I was pretty naive. I thought I could just show up in New York with a degree in English and get a corner office at a publisher’s. Why not take a writing class with a famous writer? Maybe he could help me get a job.”

“So Sean Parrish sleeps with his students? Not surprised.” Hugo tried not to sound judgmental but knew he’d failed. Sean sounded like a lot of male artists he’d known, the sort with egos to match their talent but secretly so insecure they preyed on younger artists like vampires.

“In fairness to him—not that he deserves much fairness—nothing happened until after I was out of his class. Ran into him at a bar on New Year’s Eve. I went home with him to his incredibly nice apartment and didn’t leave for three years. Well, I mean, I left the apartment. I didn’t leave him for three years.”

“He’s…Isn’t he even older than I am?”

“He’s in his early forties now. Forty-three, I think? He’d just won the National Book Award for The Defectors when I met him. He had two huge bestsellers and one movie adaptation while we were together. He told me I was his lucky charm, his muse. He thought taking in a stray nobody else wanted or loved had tilted the universe in his favor. I was his good deed.”