Chapter 21 Rivven
RIVVEN
Idid not fully relax into our marriage until the trial period of two human weeks was over.
If Shiloh knew this, I was certain she would not have been happy about it.
But I could not help it. Being married to her felt like I’d trapped some kind of lucky magic that I would never actually be able to keep.
I trusted her. But I did not trust this new happy turn in my life.
Surely, like everything else, it would all come to naught.
But we got married. Warden Tenn and Tasha left the property. And we spent fourteen glorious days living together. And when those fourteen days were up, she said nothing at all about it.
Perhaps she had not even noticed.
Seventeen days after our wedding, we received a visit from Warden Tenn and Tasha. The warden’s wife and mine embraced affectionately, wrapping their arms around each other and smiling broadly.
“Came to bring you something,” Warden Tenn said. “That Elora Station order you put through Warden Hallum arrived with some supplies for the men in my province. I’ve got it on my slicer.”
I glanced at Shiloh, but she was deep in conversation with Tasha, leading her towards the kitchen.
“I want you to have a sip of this latest batch of drinks Rivven made,” she was saying with excitement.
“It’s so good. It almost reminds me of something like a crémas because it’s so creamy.
That’s an Old-Earth traditional Haitian drink.
No matter how tight money got, Daddy and I always managed to scrounge some up around the holidays. ”
Shiloh said that I had made the batch, but she had helped.
She was interested in all facets of my work here, and had thrown herself eagerly into learning about how I fermented the drinks for the saloon.
She’d begun advising now, too, offering ideas on flavour profiles and ingredients.
She was just as brilliant at this as she was at her painting.
Creativity seemed to positively glow within her, but it was like sunshine in a cup.
It overflowed out of her, shining and reflecting.
Illuminating everything it touched. Including me. And the drinks.
She never drank much of it, though. The first time she’d tried, she’d taken a small sip then glanced at me with a shocked look on her face.
“What is it?” I’d asked, fearing something was wrong with it.
“Nothing! It’s absolutely delicious,” she said. “But holy…Tasha was right. This is very boozy! How the heck do you drink so much of it?” She indicated the large cup I’d poured for her, the same size as my own cup. I had filled it the same way I’d fill a cup with water. Just about to the top.
That was the day I learned what human drunkenness was.
Apparently, humans metabolized alcohol differently than Zabrians, and if they drank too much of it, they’d be slurring and stumbling and could even be entirely incapacitated.
They’d have to recover afterwards in what Shiloh described as a “hangover,” which sounded very much like the symptoms of her migraines to me.
So I was glad that she was careful and did not accidentally drink too much.
Seventeen days here, and she had not caught another migraine.
It would happen eventually. I knew it would. But I would be here to take care of her when it did.
“Come on,” Warden Tenn said. “I’ll show you.”
Leaving our wives (our wives! I had a wife!) inside, the warden and I went together to his slicer.
He opened its storage compartment and pulled out the items I had ordered.
Brand new tubes of paint, multiples of every colour.
New paintbrushes. Two more books with thick paper like the one Shiloh had brought with her, but bigger.
And several canvases or varying sizes. I had already built her a wooden easel.
It was currently stationed near the window of the dining room.
“The paint did not freeze, did it?” I asked.
Shiloh had mentioned a desire to paint outside more than once.
The phrase she used for this was odd, and did not translate well.
She had told me that she wanted to paint “in the full air.” But the full air, at least right now, was still very cold.
And she worried that her paint – which she did not currently have much of – would freeze outside, along with the water she used for her brushes.
“Engine provides some heat to the storage,” Warden Tenn replied as I gathered it all up into my arms. “Everything should be in order.” He closed the lid.
“Good.”
After Tasha and the warden left, I showed Shiloh her gifts.
She gasped when she saw it all, her face lighting up almost as if she had Zabrian eyes.
She put a human hug on me, all while thanking me enthusiastically.
I still found her gratitude somewhat uncomfortable to bear.
This seemed like such a small thing to do for her, and I always wanted to do so much more. But she acted as if it meant the world.
“Look at all this paint! Cerulean Blue, Deep Cyan Blue, Phthalo Blue. I can’t remember when I last had all three of those at the same time!” She ran her elegant fingers along the tubes in their boxes, then turned to the other items. “And the canvases!”
She picked up one of the smaller ones, and then offered it to me.
“Would you like to do one?”
“What would I paint?”
She moved her shoulders up and down. “Whatever you wanted. There’s no pressure at all. But it can be so lovely, sometimes. Therapeutic, even. Not that you need to, like, try to use it to dig into past trauma or anything. It could just be circles and squiggles and lines if you want.”
She selected another canvas with her other hand, a slightly larger one. “I know, for me, one of the first new pieces I’m going to work on is a portrait of you. I finally have enough good tubes of blue to do it!”
“Me?” I asked, startled. “Why the blazes would you want to paint me?”
“Because you’re beautiful. And you make me happy,” Shiloh said with quiet seriousness.
“These days, all I want to paint are the beautiful things that make me happy.” She smiled, a tender pull of her lips that made me feel like the floor had tilted beneath my boots.
“I love you, Rivven. And if love can’t make good art, then I don’t know what can. ”
And then, I knew what I would paint, if ever I were to try.
Shiloh was still holding that smaller canvas out to me. Hesitantly, I took it and laid it on the table. I did not think I had the right to try to use her easel.
“What colours would you like?” she asked. “A little of everything?”
I’d need brown, certainly. Black. White. Maybe some red or orange, but I really did not know beyond that.
Shiloh was already dabbing blobs of each colour onto the plate that she used as a paint palette. A little from each tube. She put it down beside my canvas, then bounded away to the kitchen, returning a moment later with a cup of water.
“Water thins out the paint,” she said. “Rinse your brushes between colours and dab the bristles off a bit on a clean rag. Or you can keep the brush very wet if you’re going for a more transparent, watercolour look.”
I did not know what a “watercolour look” was, but I did not like the sound of transparency. My wife’s colouring was vivid and deep. I did not want to water her down, wash her out.
I kept the water to a minimum when I finally dipped the slender, soft-bristled brush into the brown paint. I could sense Shiloh’s excitement, her desire to stay and watch me. But she turned away then, murmuring about “letting me work in peace,” and went to her easel where her back was to me.
As expected, painting was extremely difficult with my left hand.
But then again, I doubted it would have been much easier if I’d still had my dominant right hand.
I’d never attempted anything like this. I vaguely remembered using a stick to draw faces in the snow as a child, but that was about the extent of my artistic creations.
Briefly, I tried using my tail instead of my left hand.
While that did not seem any better, it also did not seem worse.
So I alternated between them, experimenting.
I knew from very early on that my painting was bad.
Unfortunately, it did not get better as I went.
But somehow, this was not as frustrating as it should have been.
My wife had been right. There was something deeply satisfying about merely doing the work, whatever the outcome.
About the bloom of colour on the canvas.
Saturating the brush with various degrees of water and paint.
Watching something form, something that had not been there before.
Or maybe it felt good because I was doing it with Shiloh. We painted together in the same room, a comfortable, companionable silence between us. Her painting was hidden by her body, but that was alright, because every time I glanced her way, I mostly just wanted to look at her.
I could never quite decide where and when Shiloh was most wondrous.
When she laughed with wild abandon, wobbling and clutching at me on her skates, the sun anointing her hair, her lips, the exquisite tips of her human eyelashes.
When she was naked and arching beneath me, or rolling her hips above me, her mouth open with pleasure, her gaze half-lidded and heavy.
Or when she was like this. Quiet. Focussed. Her lovely head tipping just slightly to one side.
I supposed I would just have to wonder at her everywhere. In every moment. Wonder at this perfect creature who’d somehow made her way into my world.
Wonder how I’d ever possibly managed to earn her.
“What should I do when I am finished?” I asked. Blinking with surprise, I realized the sun had begun to set. How long had we been standing here? Time seemed to have flowed past us, leaving me shocked at how much of it had disappeared without my notice.
“Just let it dry,” she said. “I’m done, too.”