She knew Vincent was a photographer, but until the art show she hadn’t considered him as an artist. At first she felt bad for ignoring this aspect of him, but then she remembered that it took conscious effort on her part to even consider herself as an artist. Writers and photographers were in the same boat in this regard. All she had to do was remember how similar they were and stand together with him in this sensitive space in solidarity as a fellow artist.
When Jacqueline told him she wanted to see his work, she wasn’t sure what she was expecting. She thought on their next date he might come with a portfolio for her to look at, like what his boss had shown her to give her headshot examples. Maybe he would come with a scrapbook. Or maybe he would just bring his camera and scroll through the photos he hadn’t gotten printed yet.
Instead she found herself led into a studio. It wasn’t big, but there wasn’t an inch of space not in use. Stashed in corners were different types of lights and labelled jars spilling loose film. There were sticky notes with instructions written in cryptic scribbles she could barely decipher as words. The walls were technicolored with paint swatches surrounding rough pencil and ink sketches. Landscapes. Still life. Bodies posturing. The air was dust and chemicals. She found it hard to take deep breaths while she took everything in.
“Sorry if it’s a little much. Don’t mind the mess.” Vincent rambled as he shrugged off his jacket, trying to mask his nerves with his voice, “I tried to clean up, but honestly I don’t really have much of an organizational system so the moment I move something I have to tear the place apart to find it again. Man, it’s kinda stuffy in here, huh? I’ll open a window.”
He scurried off and wrestled with the window, stuck in place from months possibly years of being closed. Jacqueline was torn between watching him struggle and continuing to examine his work. Her eyes flickered from one to the other.
A sketched sunset in black and white, the dying light exploding between the thin, naked tree branches in the foreground. An actual photo would be breathtaking. She’d always thought those kinds of photos were spontaneous. Clearly, at least for Vincent, that wasn’t the case.
Vincent grunted. She turned and watched the muscles of his shoulders strain from the effort.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Vincent, I’m okay.”
He shook his head, continuing to work on the window while facing away from her. “No, no, I’ll get it open. This air’s so stale, some circulation would probably be good.”
“If you think it’s best.” At this point, Jacqueline wasn’t sure if she found Vincent’s desperation to please her endearing anymore. It spoke of a deep seated discomfort. If he'd just open up and talk it out with her, then she was sure she could help him work through it and he'd stop feeling like he had to bend over backwards for her. As it was, she couldn't do anything.
Not that Jacqueline could talk. He wasn’t the only one keeping things closed off.
Her wandering eye was drawn to a distant piece, where sweet pastels and bright, violent reds clustered around thumbnails of future sketches. These weren’t like the fully realized ideas taking center stage on the walls. These were… fetal. Ideas still in the developmental stage.
“I didn’t realize you planned projects this far in advance.” She commented to him, not taking her eyes off it.
“Oh? Yeah, the trick with some of those landscape ones is to be so meticulous in detailing your plan that by the time you get the picture it seems perfect and effortless.” He made another strangled noise. The window really wasn’t budging. “You like them? You can come with me when I take that sunset one if you want to. The location’s not too far from your place.”
“That sounds nice, but I was actually talking about these ones over here with the conversation hearts. You’re already planning for Valentine’s day?”
“What?”
She was slammed from behind by a blast of air. Jacqueline shivered.
“Window’s open!” Vincent announced, finally coming to join her. “Now what were you saying?”
Jacqueline pointed wordlessly to the little sketches taped to the wall amid the sea of paint swatches. Vincent smiled, but it was a thin, almost worrisome smile that barely flickered on his face.
“These are actually kind of embarrassing for me. See, one of my classes had this warm up exercise where the professor would give us an abstract idea and we would have to draw as many concept sketches as we could think of that fit the description. It’s supposed to loosen up your creativity and get the juices flowing, you know? I’m sure you did something similar in your writing classes.”
“Oh, yeah.” She nodded. “I get the idea. So then these are…?”
“These are my attempt at doing that. When I get stuck, I pick some words out of a hat and draw as many sketches as I can based on it. I got kind of invested with these ones, even picked out possible color schemes and stuff. Honestly, I forgot I even left these up.”
Jacqueline examined him. The bemused expression stuck on his face. There was a slight pinkening brushing his cheeks. When they made eye contact, Vincent’s gaze dropped to his shoes like he couldn’t bear to meet hers anymore.
“I’m glad you left them up.” She said. Out of all the little sketches, there was one her eyes kept wandering back to. A conversation heart caught in someone’s teeth. The crushing bite was already happening, the little heart fracturing from the force. BE MINE. “I like them.”
The breeze froze the room again, and she shivered. Vincent put his arms around her, pressing his front against her back. He radiated heat. His chin came to rest on her shoulder.
“I’m glad.” Vincent mumbled. With their current proximity he didn’t need to do more than that.
“What was the concept?” She asked. “I mean, obviously Valentine’s Day was one, but what was the other?”
He groaned and squeezed her tight. “It’s going to sound tacky at this point.”
Now she was really curious. “I don’t mind. What was it?”
“Horror.”
“Horror?” She wanted to turn to look at him fully, but with his head positioned against her she could only side eye him. “Is that really tacky?”
“I would say so,” she could practically taste his breath against her cheek, “there’s a lot of horror movies set during it. I would say aside from Halloween, it’s the holiday with the most.”
“Do you watch a lot of those? Horror movies, I mean?”
“I watch enough,” he loosened one of his arms from around her and touched one of the swatches on the wall, “this color would look good on you, I think. Do you not like horror, Jacqueline? From how you described your book when we met, I pegged you as a fan.”
The color his finger was brushing against was bright red. She wanted to shake her head, but that would risk hitting him with her hair or worse, her face. “No. I mean, I’ve seen a few but I’ve never gone out of my way to watch them. I Know What You Did Last Summer holds a special place in my heart, though.”
She was afraid he would ask what she meant, but he didn’t. He gingerly tore the red paint swatch off the wall. His grip around her waist was much looser now, his arms simply looped around her as he held the slip in both hands. He started folding it.
Jacqueline watched him work. He was tearing it now. “What’s so scary about Valentine’s Day?”
“I think it’s because of how easy it is for infatuation to become obsession.” He said. Vincent unfolded the swatch. A bright red heart. A makeshift valentine. “Or the inherent vulnerability in giving your heart away to another person.” He held it out to her. “What if they break it?”
With Vincent’s face in the corner of her eye, she wasn’t able to read his expression. She felt like she could cry. “Oh. Yeah, I can see how that could be terrifying.”
She reached out to take the heart from him.
The breeze picked up. Her fingers barely grazed it before it was snatched by the air and through the open window. She ran after it, trying to chase it down. There was no point. By the time she reached the window it was out of her reach. All she could do was watch the heart tumble through the breeze of the city streets.
Beside her, Vincent sighed. He leaned against the window sill and stood watch with her until the heart was untraceable. “That’s too bad. I really wanted you to have it.”
He was looking outside, but his eyes were far away, somewhere distant. He saw that she was looking at him and not the city, and he smiled. It didn’t look real.
“Vincent.”
She wrestled the window closed. The air was stagnant again.
“Take mine.”
He fucked her on the floor dust.
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