Page 60 of Love Among Vines

In seconds, Rett and Penny were headed back down the slope toward the vineyard. Jade turned to the blank canvas clipped to the easel. She approached it cautiously, as if it might scream at her.

Universal primed, medium grain linen on a stretched canvas. Several more were stacked on one of the tables.

Tupperware containers overflowed with products. Oil pastels, six different sets of brushes, acrylic paints, pencils, wax, feathers, glitter, twigs, dried vines, newspaper, powders, gouache, even a stray bottle of wine. Virtually everything she could have wanted in her dream studio was spread in front of her. How much had he spent on all of this? And what would he expect in repayment?

The least she could do was commit to the paint and sip night.

She lifted her face to the sun and basked in its warmth like a drunk lizard. The cloying humidity wasn’t ideal for paint drying conditions, but maybe that was okay for today. This was just practice.

She dabbed a layer of glue on the canvas and quickly set to work. Sticks broken to varying lengths were pressed into the canvas for texture. As it dried, she lifted the wine bottle and dug through one of the totes. The vineyard and the lake were a stunning mix of browns, blues, and greens, layer after layer of color.

She turned the bottle on its side and squirted small puddles of acrylic paint onto it. When the glue was dry, she pressedthe bottle onto the page and carefully rolled it back and forth, leaving a gap for the dirt road that split the property. The colors bled together, creating a serene scene.

It didn’t look like much—a blue-green mess on a canvas. But there was a whisper of something there. She set it aside to dry and pulled out another canvas, then closed her eyes and took a moment to still her mind.

Penny’s adorable form floated in, running full-tilt between two vineyard rows. Jade’s eyes snapped open, and she picked up the nearest pencil. After roughly sketching Penny in, she prepared a palette in a rainbow of colors. She set to work bringing it to life with yellows and greens. Shades of brown for her haunches. Robin’s egg blue for the sky. A shiny black nose and a perfectly pink tongue.

It was the first time she had ever tried to capture Penny in any medium beyond the probable two thousand-plus pictures in her camera roll.

Like the experimental landscape, it was far from perfect. It didn’t sing to her in the way that many of her pre-breakup paintings did. But there was something purposeful and meaningful here. Penny had been her reason to get out of bed every day for the last two years. Her furry and faithful companion, always there to drop a slobbery tennis ball in her lap when it felt like things were getting to be too much.

Setting Penny to the side, she came back to the first painting. She added in powdery white clouds and bursts of purple, and just the corner of the stone-covered tasting room. Before she could stop herself, the shape of a man leading a vaguely yellow dog-like creature up the dirt path added itself in. It was abstract, unclear. But there was feeling in it.

Gradually, the fog of alcohol lifted. And still she painted. She pulled out the next blank canvas and just threw paint andfeathers at it. It was hot pink and lime green and tempestuously loud, like her apartment back home.

“Hey,” a familiar voice said. “Just me. I thought you might be getting hungry.”

Rett rounded the corner of a row with a picnic basket in hand.

Jade jumped in front of her canvas and threw her arms out like a teenage boy blocking a laptop screen.

“Oh, god,” he said.

“I know. I’m sorry. I was in the zone. I’ll clean it up.”

“No, I don’t care about the stuff on the ground. You just kind of look like you got shot by a unicorn.”

She glanced down at herself. Apparently she had been unknowingly wiping her hands on her previously paint-covered shirt.

“Shit.” She giggled and slapped a hand to her mouth to stifle it. “I can’t go back in there looking like this.”

“Well, there’s always my house. Walking distance.”

She debated for a moment before tossing a brush into the water cup.

“Race you.” With that, she took off downhill, beelining for the crest of the roof that was barely visible between the dense trees.

“Wait!”

She smiled and glanced over her shoulder.

Rett was full-on smiling, dragged through the vineyard by Penny’s exuberant tugging. The picnic basket hung from his other hand.

With a quick glance at the highway, she dashed across and kept going. It felt so good to run. Her hair streamed behind her in the wind. She stepped onto Rett’s driveway and sped up, bolting down the lane until she rounded the house.

The shadows had grown long. She had been painting longer than she realized.

Dashing through the side yard, she didn’t stop until she hit the dock. She tugged her shirt off over her head and tossed it to the ground. Her shorts were next.

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