Pastel Bones (The Unfinished Gallery #1)

1. June

CHAPTER ONE

JUNE

White. So much white it feels like I’ve stopped existing and entered a world of nothingness.

It’s familiar; it’s where my heart has been for years, since one particular day in my childhood I don’t dare think of.

I step further into the Thorne Gallery at Alaria University.

The space has been transformed for the fall showcase, its walls scrubbed clean so every piece of art pops and every artist feels like an imposter.

I adjust the strap of my messenger bag and remind myself to breathe.

I need to stop fidgeting with my hands like a freshman who wandered in by accident.

I’m not a freshman. I’m a sophomore whose painting has been selected for a real exhibition for the first time, and that matters more than I’ll ever admit to anyone. I’ll especially never admit it to Dorien.

I managed to avoid him last year, so I plan to do the same this year; I don’t need the grief.

Slowly, I move around the gallery with my chin up.

The crowd is doing what gallery crowds do: clustering in performative little groups, wine glasses catching the track lighting.

Everyone wants to be overheard saying something clever.

Of course, they can’t serve alcohol on campus, so everyone is only playing adult while drinking sparkling cider.

I grab a glass from a passing tray because it gives my hands something to do, then pivot to walk in a specific direction.

My piece is on the east wall.

I let myself look for exactly two seconds as I pass.

Cadmium red bleeds into prussian blue, the figure at the center more suggestion than form.

No one is standing in front of it. No one is even glancing.

I keep walking, because hovering near your own work is the artistic equivalent of laughing at your own joke, and I also don’t want to know if people are ignoring it on purpose or just haven’t gotten there yet.

Both options make my stomach twist into the same knot.

Honestly, being ignored might be the better outcome.

If someone stops in front of my painting and hates it, if they tilt their head and wrinkle their nose and move on without a word, I’ll know.

I’ll feel it in my skin like a sunburn. And the worst part is I’ll never be able to un-know it.

I’ll carry that stranger’s disapproval into the studio every time I pick up a brush.

I wander, skimming other works on the wall. There’s a screen print, a rainbow of colors and hues, that I can imagine someone hanging above their couch. Beside that are some black and white photographs of bridges. I recognize the name of who took them because she was in a class with me last year.

I pass in front of an abstract metal installation that’s fine, technically competent, the kind of piece that will get a polite nod from the professors and zero emotional response from anyone else.

I move on to a series of portrait photographs that are trying very hard to be profound and succeeding only at being aggressively beige.

And then I see it.

A sculpture near the west wall. It stops me the way a hand on the chest stops you. I make a full halt, glass frozen halfway to my mouth, feet suddenly unwilling to carry me onward.

Burnt umber clay is twisted into something that looks like grief given form.

There’s a person in the tangled display, the figure reaching, or maybe falling, caught in that terrible space between.

The surface is rough in places, deliberately unfinished, as if the artist knew smoothing it would be a lie.

The whole piece has a rawness to it that makes my throat tight.

It’s raw like the things you say at 3 a.m. that you can’t unsay.

Raw like an open wound still deciding whether to scar.

It’s so overwhelming tears actually try to pool along my lower lids. I refuse to cry, though.

I stand here too long. Long enough that I stop seeing the gallery around me. I forget I’m supposed to be acting confident and instead I just feel small in front of something—this art created by a stranger—that captures pieces of me I’ve buried.

There’s the warmth of another body as someone pauses beside me. I don’t look over. Strangers wander through galleries all the time. They stop, they move on, they don’t require acknowledgment.

This person doesn’t move on.

I can feel them looking, but not at the sculpture anymore. At me.

“You’ve been standing here ten minutes,” a voice says. Low, amused, insufferably familiar. “Should I call someone? Check for a pulse?”

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up the same moment my cheeks flush. I close my eyes for a single second just to steady myself. Of course. Of course it’s him. My mission to avoid him again this semester: failed.

I turn, and there’s Dorien Kael, looking exactly like he always does.

Expensive, disheveled, and deeply punchable.

He’s wearing a black leather jacket over a charcoal sweater, dark hair doing that artfully messy thing that definitely takes him twenty minutes to achieve.

His gloved hands are shoved in his pockets, which means his fingers are cold again, which means nothing because his hands are usually cold.

“Ten minutes,” I repeat. “Were you timing me, or do you just naturally hover like a vulture waiting for something to die?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. It’s that half-smile he wears, the one designed to make you wonder if he’s laughing at you or with you. “Vultures serve a valuable ecological purpose.”

“So does mold. I don’t want it standing next to me either.”

He doesn’t move. If anything, he shifts closer, because he’s never met a boundary he didn’t want to test. His scent—that inexplicable combination of woodsmoke and rain that annoys me because I can’t figure out how a person manages to smell like weather—is so strong I can taste it on my tongue.

His coppery-hazel eyes flick to the sculpture, then back to me. “You felt it.”

Ugh. That’s the problem with Dorien. He says things like statements when they should be questions, and then waits for you to prove him right.

Arrogant ass.

“Felt what?” I keep my voice bored. “The overwhelming urge to stand somewhere you aren’t?”

“This piece.” He nods toward it, and for a moment his eyes become soft at the edges. “It got to you. I could tell from across the room. I think you stopped breathing for a second.”

I hate that he was watching. I hate it more that he’s right.

Self-righteous bastard.

“Hmm.” I turn my full attention back to the sculpture and cross my arms. I think it’s a masterpiece, but I’d never admit my true feelings to this jerk.

I snub my nose at the art and pretend I’m a disinterested critic.

“Well, it’s technically interesting. You can tell the artist knows how to work with clay.

And the form has… potential. But the surface treatment is a bit heavy-handed in places. It’s definitely trying too hard.”

“Heavy-handed.” He repeats the words like he’s figuring out how they taste.

“The roughness. It’s trying very hard to communicate raw emotion.” I make the phrase sound like a disease. “Subtlety might have served the concept better.”

Dorien’s half-smile widens and he almost looks genuinely amused, which is worse than him being neutral because it makes his whole face change.

It reminds me that he’s annoyingly handsome.

“Subtlety,” he says. “This from the girl whose last painting looked like a crime scene with red splashed all over. I saw your post.”

My shoulders tense and raise an inch. “That was a deliberate aesthetic choice.”

“I think you spilled paint and didn’t want to clean it up.”

“I did not!”

I did. I really did spill fucking paint.

He laughs. An actual laugh, short and surprised, and I feel it somewhere I don’t want to feel things. The sound of it is too real and unguarded, gone as quickly as it appears.

“Well,” he says, his voice dipping into a lower register. “Since you have so many notes, the artist would probably love to hear them.”

That husky tone mixes with his goddamn scent and I’m starting to feel overheated. “I doubt it. You know artists struggle with criticism.”

“I don’t.” The half-smile returns, and it’s edged with mischief. He holds my gaze a beat too long, those autumn-leaf eyes catching the track lighting, and the air between us feels charged.

Somehow, I know what he’s going to say before he says it.

“I made it.”

Irritating, smug, know-it-all, goddamn…

My eyes won’t cooperate and drop to the floor.

Instead, they study the sculpture with new awareness.

The reaching figure. The deliberate roughness.

The grief given form, the heaviness I felt deep in my bones.

And suddenly I can see Dorien in every line and angle.

There’s isolation. The something-lost that he carries like a shadow; that I carry too.

The rawness he’s never once shown me in a decade of bickering and barbs, laid out here in burnt umber clay for everyone to see.

Only they won’t really see it. Only I can.

I need to say something cutting and clever that will bring the distance back, that will turn this moment into another skirmish in the endless war we’ve been fighting.

I need a canyon between us, with him on the other end so he’s only a speck in the distance.

My chest is too tight and he’s looking at me like he can see all of it, every stupid thing I feel standing in front of his work, and I hate him for that.

I clear my throat the same moment I hear his heavy exhale. He’s looking for that canyon too. I’m thankful—as long as we both still want that divide, nothing bad will happen.

“Heavy-handed,” I say again, though my voice is softer than I want it to be. “I stand by my critique.”

Dorien’s smile finally fades and he inches away.

Space. Yes, we must maintain space.

“Noted,” he says. Then, lighter, like he’s deliberately pulling us both back to safer ground: “I saw your painting. Congrats on getting selected.”