I just feel too exposed.
I clear my throat again and finish the rest of my cider, setting the empty glass on a small table. “Thanks.” The word comes out clipped and defensive, and I’m sure he can hear it.
We walk toward the east wall together, and I’m acutely aware of the space between us. Two feet. Maybe less. Close enough that I catch his scent again, that woodsmoke-and-rain combination that has no business being so distracting. I focus on the paintings we pass instead. A watercolor landscape that’s moody and actually something I’m into. An oil portrait with muddy shadows.
From somewhere outside the gallery, faint through the walls, a few notes of music drift in. It must be from someone’s booming car as they drive by, but it sounds like a child’s tune because it’s tinny and repetitive. My heart races. If I think about that music much longer…
It passes, so I take a breath. Maybe it was never there. Maybe my brain invented it just to torture me.
Dorien gives me a sideways glance. “You’re quiet.”
“I’m always quiet when I’m not actively insulting you.”
“So never, then.”
I don’t dignify that with a response, but one corner of my lips curves up.
We reach my painting and stop. His comment earlier about one of my other pieces looking like a murder scene is still lodged in my head. So the first thing I see hanging on the gallery wall is all the cadmium red bleeding into prussian blue. My teeth are gnawing at my bottom lip.Crap, maybe I’m using too much red lately.Is that what I’ll be known for? The mediocre sophomore who smothers her canvases in buckets of crimson.
The figure at the center is caught mid-motion. Or mid-collapse. I remember painting it over the summer, the way the brush felt like an extension of my pulse. I thought I was paintinganger. Rage at nothing and everything. The kind of fury that has no target so it just burns and burns and burns.
But standing here now, next to Dorien, with his sculpture behind me haunting the western walls, I see my painting differently. It’s grief. That’s what I painted. And it’s so similar to Dorien’s figure that I want to scream.
My figure isn’t raging the way I had thought. She’s drowning. The red isn’t anger; it’s the color of a wound that won’t close. And the blue creeping in at the edges is the cold that follows when you’ve been bleeding too long.
“There it is,” Dorien says quietly.
I glance at him. “There what is?”
He’s not looking at the painting anymore. He’s looking at me, and there’s nothing sharp in his expression. No smirk. No armor. Just those eyes, open and clear in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times.
“You see it now,” he says, like he knows everything about me. “What you were really making.”
My throat tightens, and I want to deflect. I want to say something cutting about how he’s projecting, how not everything is some deep psychological revelation, or how maybe I just like the color red, dammit.
But I can’t because he’s right. And worse, he understands why. We spent our entire teens only saying a polite “how are you” when Dorien was at my house hanging out with my cousin, only hearing about each other through friends and family, and yet he can see right through me as if we’ve been in each other’s lives all along.
Maybe worse than that is how our shared demon still taunts us, guiding our hands so we produce similar art through different mediums.
We stare at each other, and the gallery falls away again. The murmur of voices becomes static. The lights blur into a softglow, and suddenly I’m not standing in front of my painting anymore. I’m not even at AlariaU. I’m standing face-to-face with everything I’ve tried to forget for twelve years.
I see Dorien at nine years old, laughing with real joy and love. His eyes shining, his voice calling my name. My best friend.
Before everything.
The memory stabs me and I have to look away.
“June.” His voice is barely a whisper.
“Don’t.” Mine is equally quiet, but my tone warns him there’s a line neither of us can cross. Ever. Not if we don’t want bad things to happen, like someone we love getting hurt.
I need out.
My eyes sweep the gallery, desperate for any excuse to leave, and that’s when I spot my brother. Aeron is hovering near the entrance, half-hidden behind a group of upperclassmen, his sketchbook open in his hands. His pencil moves in quick, furtive strokes as he captures something only he can see.
Relief floods through me so fast it almost makes me dizzy.
I didn’t think he’d come for opening night because my brother hates crowds. I figured he’d wait until later in the week when the gallery was empty and he could stand in front of each piece without anyone watching.
