Be Careful What You Wish For Read online

  “Sure, I guess,” Brandon said vaguely. “Talk to ya later, ‘kay, babydoll?”

  “Okay.” Cass sighed as the phone clicked and the dial tone rang in her ear. She put the old-fashioned princess phone’s handset back down on the elaborate gold hook cradle (her grandmother was one of the only people she knew who still had a landline) and looked around her room at Nana’s house, which was now doubling as her work space. Half finished canvases and sculptures were stacked along the walls and crammed into her closet. They were mostly male nudes which went oddly with the climbing roses wallpaper and the lacy pink duvet that covered the bed.

  Cass had been practically living at her studio for the last few months which had given her Nana a chance to redecorate and turn the room into a girly shrine that made Cass, who hated pastels and always wore black clothes summer or winter, want to gak.

  But after the fiasco Brandon had caused by leaving his one nude posing session wrapped in her best red drop cloth, Cass had lost her old studio in the back of the little Cuban restaurant , El Guyo de Oro, that made the best café con leche in Tampa.

  Now she was back in her old room which looked like something a little girl with pretensions of being a princess might dream up and she missed her messy, cramped studio fiercely. Not that I could have afforded it much longer anyway, she told herself with a sigh.

  She wasn’t exactly a starving artist yet—as long as she lived in her grandmother’s house there was no danger of that. There was, however, the distinct possibility of food poisoning since Nana considered herself a much better cook than she actually was and insisted on trying exotic ethnic recipes on a regular basis.

  But food aside, canvas, paints, brushes, and clay didn’t exactly grow on trees—not even in her weird and semi-magical life. Cass’s work was beginning to sell around the city but she still wasn’t making enough to afford all the raw materials she needed to create. In fact, she was so desperate she’d had to take a substitute teaching gig at a local private elementary school.

  Cass shuttered when she thought of it. She’d had plenty of jobs in the service industry from flipping burgers to clipping pets to working in a plant nursery. But in terms of sheer irritation her latest part time job had to be the worst.

  “Teaching spoiled rich brats to finger paint,” was how she’d described it to Rory and Phil and that was basically what it amounted to. She knew she ought to be grateful—her good friend and former classmate, Sheila had gotten her the job filling in for her while she was on maternity leave. The job paid well and wasn’t hard labor. But the fact was Cass didn’t like kids—especially not the kind she had to put up with at the Grover Titus Academy for Privileged Youth.

  Oh well, she reminded herself, it’s only once or twice a week. Thank goodness the curriculum at the Grover Tight-Ass Academy, as Rory called it, was heavy on math and business skills and light on music and the arts. The parents that sent their kids there expected their offspring to be CEOs, not Picassos.

  Giving the wooden-looking portrait of her boyfriend one more glance. Cass wandered over to the round oval mirror on the wall. Deep violet eyes set in a pale, tired face stared back at her. She rubbed a hand through her fly-away coal black curls and stuck out her tongue at herself.

  She’d been up most of the night trying to get the portrait just right. If it didn’t look spectacular, there was no point in dropping it off at the I.C.U. gallery because Albert Rodriguez, the short, round, beach ball of an owner, was a notorious perfectionist. He’d been calling her for days, demanding to see the centerpiece of the show and if she didn’t come up with it soon, he might well decide to scrap the whole thing.

  And if he scrapped it, Cass reminded herself, she was going to be looking for another part time job pretty quick because Sheila came back from maternity leave at the end of the week. But a show at the I.C.U. gallery meant more than just sales—it meant prestige and the chance to meet Mrs. Blankenship, one of the foremost art critics in Tampa who had a weekly column in the local magazine, Bay Beautiful.

  Lydia Blankenship, or Lady Blankenship, as the local art crowd called her, had connections in New York and if she liked an artist’s work enough to do a write up on them in Bay Beautiful, it often spelled a ticket out of Tampa and straight to the big apple.

  A write up in Bay Beautiful also turned an artist into a ‘find’ meaning Lady Blankenship’s extended network of friends would want to snap up every available piece of work before the artist in question became famous. Cass had one friend whose entire show had been bought out by the Blankenship crowd. The lucky guy was still living on the proceeds, painting cubist nightmares into the wee hours in his new loft in New York and watching bad daytime TV while he scarfed down Ben and Jerry’s all day.

  What a life.

  A life that could be hers if only Brandon would get his tight little ass down here and let her finish his portrait.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself to imagine what it would be like. She could get back her old studio or maybe even move to New York and rent a new one. She could afford to hire models instead of having to rely on friends and family and she could buy as much clay, paints and canvases as she wanted. And she wouldn’t have to take time off from her art to flip burgers or arrange flowers in order to afford to keep painting and sculpting.

  She could create art all day long. She would burst onto the New York art scene as the next Warhol, or Pollock or O’Keeffe and never look back.

  What a beautiful dream.

  But it was still just a dream. She sighed and picked up a brush to tame her curls, then decided against it. After all, there was nobody downstairs but family—her Nana and her two sisters plus Phil’s new fiancé who was also her best friend, Josh. He was practically family since he and Phil had moved back into the big old house on States Street while Phil looked into different law schools.

  For the life of her, Cass couldn’t understand why Phil would want to be a member of the stuffy, boring legal profession, but to each their own. She loved her older sister and was glad Phil had finally found her niche and a man that appreciated her. She just wished her own life would work out as neatly.

  “Cassandra? Are you coming down?” It was her Nana’s cultured voice, trilling from the bottom of the large curving staircase. She sounded urgent, but then, she always did. She would use the same tone to tell Cass that they were having pancakes for breakfast as she might to let her know the house was on fire. That was Nana—ever the drama queen.

  “Coming,” Cass yelled back, yawning. She was really going to have to get more sleep tonight—she had to teach at the Tight-Ass Academy tomorrow and those damn rich kids were like lions—they could smell weakness and they went for the throat.

  Still wearing her long white night shirt which said, Snug as a Bug in a Rug! and showed a ladybug tucked into a four poster bed, and the Bert and Ernie slippers that Rory had given her as a joke gift the Christmas before last, she padded down the stairs to breakfast.

  Two

  “Cassandra, I’m surprised at you. Are you really intending to wear that?” Nana was standing at the bottom of the stairs with her long silver hair swept up into an elaborate up-do on top of her head and a frown on her face.

  Nana was in her mid seventies but due to being half fairy, she looked about twenty-five years younger. She was dressed in a daisy yellow polyester pantsuit with bellbottoms so wide they looked like a flared skirt.

  Cass had always thought of her grandmother as being behind the times, not that she cared much about clothing styles since ninety-nine percent of her own wardrobe was solid black. But lately Nana was looking like something of a fashionista—maybe because she was trying to get back into the dating scene after years of being single.

  “I’ll change after breakfast,” Cass said, in answer to her grandmother’s disapproving look. “What—you want me to come down dressed in Dior to eat waffles? And what are you all dressed up for anyway? Got another hot date?”

  For a while Nana had been dati