Page 33 of Not Before Game Night
I gazed up at him and looked him over. “I didn’t know you could do this.”
“Yeah, the only other person who knows I can do that is my mom.”
“Really? Why would you tell me, then? Or show me?”
He raised his shoulders into a shrug. “Want to see more?”
I nodded, paralyzed against my will, or maybe it was his.
He kept his gaze trained on me as he backed away, and I got up to follow him.
We went up one flight of stairs and through a large set of oak wood doors. The lights came on, revealing a big hall. The sort my parents had for dinner parties in their mansion.
In Cole’s hall were paintings and drawings of naked women, but they all had wings like fairies, and they weren’t really naked. Well, not naked in the sense that you couldn’t see their private parts in full.
It was all just enough. The wings either covered their bodies, or he’d covered it with shadows or other mythical animals.
It was like I’d stepped into a dark fantasy dimension. The kind that lured me to walk right in, deeper into the room, so I could look at each painting.
They were all so beautiful, and the further I got, the more I realized that they kind of followed a chronological order. So, the latest ones were at the front of the room. The older ones were a little different, like he’d had more time to add more intricacy to the image.
I stopped short from proceeding when my eyes landed on the painting of the only naked woman of the batch. And that wasn’t what made me stop.
It was because she looked like me.
I had the urge people who wore glasses had to reach for them and put them on so they could check that what they were seeing was real. Except I didn’t wear glasses.
I didn’t need them either to know what I was looking at was totally real, and it was indeed me.
Of all the fairies he’d drawn, I was the only one who really looked like a fairy. He’d even given me the pixie ears with my trademark studs in my ear. Back in high school, I’d worn a pair of studs that looked like little bows. I was looking at them in the painting.
He’d painted me sitting on a white horse and made a point of placing my hair to the side so you could see my breasts. He’d also positioned me on the horse so you could see everything from the waist down too. That was all striking, but what got me was the tear he’d painted on my cheek. The tear on my cheek and the wealth of sadness he’d captured in my eyes.
I’d never really taken the time to appreciate art, but maybe it was because I’d never seen anything like this that had such an effect on me. There was a definite eloquence about the painting that made me want to stare.
I knew though that it was more than that.
This painting was me, and it wasn’t done in recent years. He’d never seen me naked until yesterday, and there was only one night in my life when I’d looked the way this image depicted. That was the night he rejected me. I moved to look at him but didn’t quite make it. To my left were more paintings. More of me.
There were about twenty of them, a mixture of drawings and paintings. All of me when I was younger. Much younger, and I was always a fairy. There wasn’t a single one of me without those wings.
These weren’t naked and didn’t seem as dark as the rest. They were lighthearted and carefree.
There was one of me sitting on the grass overlooking the football field that made me smile. There was another of me in the bleachers at the stadium watching the players.
Aware that he was near me, I turned to face him, not sure what to say. Not sure what to ask.
What was a person supposed to say after discovering something like this?
“They’re beautiful,” I breathed.
“They’re you. Of course they would be,” he answered. It was so odd to hear him say something like that.
“You think I’m beautiful?”
“Yeah.”
I glanced back at the paintings. “Why would you do this? Why would you paint me? Cole… why are there so many of me?” I wasn’t sure which question I wanted answered first. “They’re all from years ago.” Many years ago.
