She touched her hand to my back and leaned in close. “Kids are wrapping up soon, we’ll never get the final scene set finished on time.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll cover it, we’ve achieved great things here.”
“I’ll help,” she said. “I don’t mind.”
I smiled. “I think your parents might have something to say about that, Helen. Don’t get yourself in trouble.”
She pulled a face. “It’s the last day, what are they going to do?” She dug around in her pocket. “I’ll text Mum, tell her I’m going to be late.”
“And that will be enough?”
She finished thumbing in the letters and pressed send with a smirk. “It’ll have to be,” she grinned, then pressed the off button. “I’m out of signal.”
I couldn’t help but smile back.
We stood and contemplated the final canvas; nothing but a vast expanse of white space, pregnant with potential. She looked at me and I looked back, and there was such excitement in her eyes at the prospect.
“Together?” she asked. “We could work on it in tandem, see where the muse takes us.”
I pondered it. “Without planning? Just ad-lib?”
“Free.” She smiled. “We’ll be free. Let’s see what happens.”
“I like that.”
“I’ll take the right side,” she said and grabbed up a paintbrush.
The final scene was a mountain range under the stars, with the golds of the desert rich but murky in the foreground. We ignored the faint pencil lines, discarding the brainstorm from earlier in the week altogether. This would be our work, the culmination of our week in perfect brilliance, embodied in paint for the year to come. I went to the radio and switched it to CD, firing up a soundtrack that changed the mood in the hall completely. Brooding instrumentals, with a woman’s soulful wail, void of words capable of interpretation but that didn’t matter. The music was alive.
Helen’s body moved to it, her brush strokes matching both tempo and emotion. Her brush marks became ragged and raw, and so did mine, and the work consumed me, consumed both of us, until we were moving as one joined visionary. It had been a long time since I’d worked in sync with another, but Helen made it easy. I could sense her movements before she made them, feel the natural flow of her brush, of her colours, of her body. I’d paint over her strokes and she’d paint over mine, but we never clashed, not once.
The canvas was alive, the scenery blurred and fluid in its brilliance. The sky was twinkling with stars, yet it was heavy with the promise of the new dawn, and the world outside our real life windows darkened to orange and red and finally to dull twilight blue, but it made no difference, we were in that timeless space, where everything loses meaning, just she and I.
We finished the final strokes with a flourish and Helen was out of breath.
“Phew,” she said. “That was intense… like really intense…”
I took a step back, and the result was spectacular. “We make a good team.”
She beamed from ear to ear. “Yes. We really, really do. That was amazing.”
My jeans were splattered with paint, a smear of violet streaking down my thigh from the explosive brushwork, but it mattered not. I was smiling. Happy.
I felt so alive.
“I love it,” she said. “I really love it.”
She turned to me and she was a beautiful mess. Her hair was wild and flyaway, and her cheeks were flushed. Her old pink t-shirt was stippled with gold and red, and there was a smear of green across her top lip. I smiled at her.
“What?” she said, then patted her face. “Am I dirty?”
“Just a little.”
She wiped her face on her sleeve but it did nothing. “Better?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She looked me up and down, gave me a little giggle. “You’re not looking so pristine yourself, Mr Roberts.”
“A small price to pay for art.” I took a step towards her and saw her breath hitch. She was close, and her eyes widened as I tilted her face up to mine. “Here,” I said, “Let me.”
There was a flash of surprise across her face as I dipped my thumb in my mouth, and her lips parted as I ran it across the dry paint. She closed her eyes, and my thumb brushed her mouth, and there was no paint left to clean, but I kept cleaning it anyway, kept moving my thumb back and forth across her soft lips. My stomach tightened and knotted, and I felt heady.
Helen opened her eyes slowly, and blinked at me, and her eyes were hooded and heavy, her lashes fluttering. She moved her head, just a fraction, her eyes on me as she opened her mouth to meet my thumb. She gasped, and I felt her breath before she sucked my thumb between her lips.
I swallowed and it was dry. And I was spinning. Buckling.