Page 84 of Fruit
Well, I always manage to banish the pain in the morning light.
**********
Eventually, I have to gather my courage and go find Sebastián.
The gallery show is fast approaching, and there’s more than one picture of him which belongs in the collection. Part of me wants to keep the paintings hidden away, secreted somewhere intimate and safe, but the collection would be incomplete without them. Sebastián was, after all, the tree that had born the fruit in every other painting.
Despite my technical artistic freedom to showcase any subject I want, it feels strange to make public the intimate portrayals of him without his permission. Which is why I find myself knocking on his office door, feeling vaguely sick and like a complete loser and admonishing myself for the emotions at the same time.
“Come in,” Sebastián says from inside the room. I debate how mature it would be to just run down the hallway and away from the room instead of opening the door.
Not very, probably.
I open the door and step in. Surprise flickers across Sebastián’s face as he looks up, but he flattens it quickly.
He looks good. A small, desperate part of me had been expecting him to look a little worse for wear. For him to have bags under his eyes, a coffee stain on his shirt from getting distracted thinking of me and spilling some on himself.
I snort at myself internally.Yeah, right. He’d been the one to cut things off with me. There has to be only relief on his side. He was the one too fucking stupid to realise what a great thing we’d had go—
I stop my internal rant. Now’s not the time to go off. I take a deep breath and attempt a smile.
“Everything okay?” he asks. It’s torture to have his dark eyes on me. I imagine myself poking them out of his head. It doesn’t really work.
“Yeah,” I say, and even I can hear the hollow ring of the false cheer in my tone. I decide to just get to the point. I feel like I’m suffocating in this damn room.
“So,” I say, not taking a seat, “I got a gallery show for, you know, the stuff I’ve been painting lately.”
His whole face lights up, and fuck, that hurts.
“But, uh,” I go on before he can do something horrific like congratulate me, “A few of the pieces are of you. It’s nothing, you know, nude or whatever but…yeah. I just wanted to see if you were, you know, cool about me showing them. I mean, if you don’t—”
“It’s fine. They’re your pictures. I’m fine with whatever you want to do with them,” he cuts in, thankfully putting me out of my misery.
“Okay. Thanks,” I say.
We look at each other for a few seconds. I can’t believe how unbearably thick and awkward the air between us is. It wasn’t just that’d we’d fucked and spent time together. We shared things with each other that revealed more than skin. That showed a trust which should have been harder to simply eradicate with a simple, ‘This isn’t working anymore.’
I realise, as I look at him, that I’m waiting for him to ask me about the show. How I got it, where it is—whenit is, at least. But he doesn’t.
A pulse of hurt goes through me. I try to mask it with anger. It doesn’t quite work.
“All right. Well. Thanks,” I say, and I step out of the room.
I stay there for a moment.
Fuck him, I think, but it rings hollow in my ears.
**********
There’s always something excruciating about attending my own gallery show. Yeah, it’s exciting to have people acknowledge pieces I’ve worked so hard on and given so much of myself to. But it’s also terrifying. Not really because I’m scared the art won't be well received, but because the simple act of exposing myself like this is painful to the part of my soul that is used to being comfortable in the dark.
Around me, staining the walls in colours that the deepest parts of our brains learnt millennia ago to startle at, are fruit. Teeth sinking into a strawberry, the red of it staining lips, dripping down skin. Pomegranate seeds spilling out of their husk, swimming in their juice. The spray of oranges fills the air. Figs are split open to reveal their vulnerable insides. Fingers sink into plums that fill your mouth when you look at them.
Amidst all the acidity, the sweetness, is Sebastián, the only person depicted fully. His brown skin glows like I see him glow. His eyes are almost closed, peering from underneath his eyelashes. He stares back at you and you feel what he feels, the rush of pleasure at the taste.
It’s a mixture of the animal skin of humans and the ripe flesh of fruit, the sensory experience of them.
“Wow,” Ezra says, walking up to me with Joaquin. “Holy shit, Iva. I don’t know if I’m hungry or turned-on. And it’s not even the people—although they’re hot too. But the fruit…wow.”
