Chapter 27 Matías
Matías
Five Months Ago
Matías stood in his studio surveying the fortune cookie still life he was almost done with. He wanted to surprise Claire with this piece to celebrate their six months together, which would be right when she returned from the business trip she was currently on. The painting wouldn’t be completely finished by then—it would still need to dry fully for a couple of months before he could varnish it—but at least she would get to see the gift now. He would build a custom frame for it, too, in whatever style she liked.
He picked up his palette and a mahl stick to brace his hand because he was going to do detail work today. The painting was of a fortune cookie split in half, connected by the white sliver of paper inside. He was going to add miniature versions of himself and Claire sitting on the fortune, having a picnic of Chinese takeout.
Matías referenced the sketch he’d taped up on the wall behind the easel, then grabbed several of his smallest brushes and wedged them between different fingers of his left hand. He could work faster this way with multiple colors of varying darkness—deep red for Claire’s dress, rich brown for her hair, and a glowy peach for her face.
As he began to paint her, though, an unwelcome memory also floated to the surface. Years ago, back in Madrid, he had done an enormous painting of him and his then fiancée, Vega. They had known each other since they were eighteen and starting art school, and Matías wanted to capture their journey of growing together as artists, as a couple, and as people. So he’d painted a piece where he was bringing her from faint ébauche to full color, and she was molding him out of clay, each forming the other as they themselves were being formed.
Matías cringed at the thought of where he’d put Vega’s hands in the painting. The sex between them had loomed as such a significant part of their relationship because he’d been so young when he met her, and there was nothing that took up more space in the brain of an eighteen-year-old man than sex. But looking back now, he could see how their unrestrained physical passion blinded him to Vega’s selfishness, her inability to give more than she took.
Vega was gorgeous, and she’d wielded that like a demand. She expected to be cut to the front of every line, to be given free drinks at every bar. If Matías wanted to go out, it was always on Vega’s schedule, not his. And if she called him at four in the morning drunk at an all-night party she hadn’t invited him to, she still expected him to get out of bed and come pick her up.
Claire, on the other hand, was beautiful in a quiet way. She did not use it as a weapon. Her beauty was there, but it wasn’t the most important thing to her, and that, Matías thought, made her even more beautiful.
He brushed the oval of her face onto the painting. The tumbling chestnut waves of hair. Then he drew her body in a burgundy dress, and as the tip of the brush stroked every curve—breasts, waist, hips—his pulse quickened.
But unlike Vega, it wasn’t just Claire’s body that made Matías’s heart race. It was the way she lit up when she saw him at the end of a long day. The way she always touched him when she walked by—just a light brush of the fingertips on the back of his neck or a hand pressed momentarily on his shoulder.
It was in how she made little moans of appreciation whenever he cooked, and how she’d bring him small gifts each time she saw something she thought he might like—a novel, a hand-bound sketchbook, a single stem of a beautiful flower.
It was how she listened to him. How she kept him from forgetting his appointments.
It was, most of all, her love.