"What?"
"Like, holding the brush," he explains, making hand gestures to illustrate. "Is the brush too narrow?"
"Uh." I think about it. "Yeah, but I need to be able to use the smaller ones for the finer details. I can't mash color onto the canvas with a fucking palette knife or a Filbert 14."
I'm not even sure those would have a wide enough handle to help with the ache from holding them.
"I have an idea."
I shake my head. "No, man. It's no use. I tried. It was stupid. I'm going to?—"
"Eli," Sev says sharply. "Give me one minute. Stay there. Don't move."
It goes against every instinct, but I do. I stay for a minute, chewing my lip to shit until Sev comes back with a…blue ball.
"I miss Aurora, too, Sev, but I don't need a visual?—"
"Shut up," he says, voice ringing with a playful lilt as he brings it closer.
I grab the easel and angle it more away from him, and he gives me a look.
"I wasn't trying to sneak a peek, bro," he says, hand out, fingers impatiently waving for me to hurry up. "Give me the brush you need."
I hand him the one I need, only half a size from the one I broke. It should work.
He takes it and stabs it right through the middle of the ball I now recognize as one of the stress balls from Atticus's office. Hethen tests it himself, holding the ball in his palm, adjusting it to show me how it should make holding the brush easier.
"I won't have as much control with that," I grouse, and he sucks his teeth.
"Try it. If it helps, we can make something that'll work better."
"But—"
"Would you just try it?"
I take the ball brush thing and try to fit it into my hand the way Sev did. Right away, I notice how my hand doesn't contract so tightly, the ball keeping my palm more open and rounded. I adjust a little more, and when I look up, Seven is already nodding and grinning like he's invented the fucking solution for world hunger and is therefore one of the best human beings on the planet.
He is, but I'm not going to tell him. He doesn't need to inflate his ego any more than it already is.
"Good, right?"
"With some modifications," I concede.
The ball feels good in my palm, definitely reduces the strain, but I can imagine that if it were extended to include a sort of wedge shape that I could pinch, making that pressure point less narrow, too, that would make this even better.
I wet the tip and dip it in the shade I need to fix the mistake I made when my hand spasmed. "You going to stand there and watch?"
Sev grins. "Am I allowed?"
"Absolutely not."
He laughs to himself as he shoves his hands in his pockets and turns around.
"Hey, Sev?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't tell the others, okay? Making the other painting with Aurora was different. But this is… I don't want to…"
