Page 110 of Rivals
I nod and take another sip. I know this feeling will pass. I know the other stuff will come back, but I need to work while I can see through the forest.
“So, I came up with an idea.” My head jerks back, and he looks at me nervously as if I won’t like it.
“Well, this should be good.”
Chapter 65
Lachlan
Two weeks Until Round Four Gala
“Ithinkweneedto do sculpture.”
She groans, leaning back into the pillows, and lifts the little cup to her lips. “I like how you continue to come back to this. I told you, Lachlan, I can’t, and we don’t have enough time for you to show me how to do it well. Plus, weren’t you the one that told me that marble was brittle and it would take a semester or longer to do something small?” she says.
“Yes, I did. But I think we can do something similar. It will take us the time we have left. So, we’ll need to take our clean canvases back, get un-stretched ones, a lot more gel paste, some foam, and putty.”
“Uh, kinky?” Revna says. I chuckle and slip my hand under the covers to rub her leg.
“You’re funny, but no. I think we need to split the difference on our talents.”
“Ok, how so?” she asks.
“What if we create a column with a classicism take on it? And then form a statue in it?” Revna’s eyes widen and the spark that I love so much appears.
“What if the statue tries to come out? Almost like alivingpainting,“ she says.
I grin at her excitement. “I love that idea. And it can be three dimensional so the experience is larger, more impactful.” I grip her thigh. “We’ve got it. We can do this. This is so much better than our other idea.”
She nods and hands me the little espresso cup as she hops out of bed. I watch her bounce into the bathroom and close the door. I love seeing her like this. I’m not an idiot; I realize this could be momentary. There are good days and bad days. We had a rough night last night, but it ended better than expected. If we can stay focused on this, then we might have a chance at winning this round. It might help center Revna. If she’s ok, then I’m ok.
I recognize that this codependency could hurt us one day, but right now, it simply doesn’t matter. “Come on, baby! We need to get to the store!”
***
We returned the canvases and got all the other supplies that we needed. “We need to start right now because time is of the essence. I have no idea how long this could take us,” I say.
Revna purses her lips and looks at our supplies. “Agreed. I have to admit, though, I’mexcitedabout this one. I’ve got a good feeling,“ she says.
I nod and rub my thumb over her chin. “Me, too, muse.”
After we got organized, I started on the column, using the carving tools I brought. Revna works on the canvas and how she will glue it to the column. She sketches the concept while I carve the basic shape of the styrofoam column. l comment while she draws our vision, and once we agree on the rough sketch, she starts on a more detailed sketch and begins painting it. They didn’t have one large cylinder of the material, so we had to glue them together and make sure we perfectly lined them up so the canvas will adhere right.
While I carve and glue, Revna asks me about colors and the angle the statue will hang out. The sun descends past the other row of buildings across from us. We lose ourselves in the process of what we are creating together.
The column is done, and we’ve been working on painstakingly adding the canvas around it to make sure it dips in the carved grooves so it’s as seamless as possible. It kind of reminds me of the Gesú and how Gaulli painted it to blend two completely different structures so they all appeared as one. The goal is to make it look alive. The texture of the canvas is important. Otherwise, we would have gone with a smoother fabric or maybe even gessoed the thing.
Revna sighs as I carefully poke the glue and the canvas into one of the ridges on its side. Next, I’ll need to form the carvings for the top and bottom of the column. “You ok over there?” I ask her without looking up, afraid to get an air bubble under the canvas.
She takes another deep breath and I peer up at her from my end of the long column. It’s about as tall as me, so she’s almost six feet away. “I’m fine,” she mumbles. I finish with the rest of the canvas I was working on and roam over to her. Her whole face is scrunched up like she’s concentrating, but I know better. She’s fighting the craving.
She’s trying to ignore that stabbing pain in her chest that she believes only drugs can numb. I’m proud of her for trying, and I hesitate to say that. I’ve learned to work around the ache, and sometimes it’s stronger than others. But that’s the part of pain that’s odd, especially emotional pain. It stays with you, and it’s not a muscular sort of ache. Yet, it’s still very much physical. The longer it continues, the more it becomes a dull throb in the back of my heart, like there is a little opening, and tiny little knives stab there continuously, but my body manages to work around it in order to survive.
I think Revna has learned to work around it out of pure rebellion, not to let anyone get to her. There is no question in my mind it’s a throbbing kind of pain. With the appearance of her mother, it’s become too much to be able to work around. She is addicted to the feeling of it not being there.
We all want that feeling offreedom. It’s not necessarily the drug. I know that. It’s the desire for peace. It’s the break from fighting the bloody battle for your life with the animal that feeds on the blood. If it’s not fed, it will consumeyou. There comes a point when our bodies cannot fight both battles, so one must lose. Most of the time, it is you. Revna is losing, and the part of me that wants to rip my own heart out when she’s in pain wants to give in to what she wants. It makes me want to find something for her to numb it, to give her a chance to breathe, to stop fighting for just a moment. That’s why I did the X with her. I didn’t want her to be alone. We do it together or not at all.
In those brief times when we aren’t fighting within ourselves, we are beautiful together. It makes me love her even more because I see who she is without the blood dripping down her hands. I love her with or without the gore that has never bothered me. But it’s nice to see what we would be like without all of that. It’s a fairytale, in so many words. I’m not dumb. I’m aware that we will never rid ourselves of the demons that chain themselves to us. We didn’t ask for this, but that doesn’t make us victims. It makes us survivors.
