Thirty-Four
Alistair calls before I finish my coffee.
I sit very still at Hudson’s kitchen island, preparing myself for either enormous success or immediate death.
“You’ve seen the reviews?” he asks.
I have not seen the reviews.
I have been actively avoiding the reviews with the same commitment I usually reserve for my mother’s medication cabinet, because there is absolutely a version of this morning where I open my phone, read one bad sentence, and spiral so completely that I never pick up a brush again.
He tells me three embargoed reviews landed this morning.
I immediately stop listening. “I’ll call you back.”
“Rowan—”
“I mean it. I just need to either read them or die first.”
I hang up before he can argue.
Hudson takes one look at me working myself into a state over opening a browser and volunteers to find physical copies instead.
Something I can hold in my hands and, if necessary, throw across the room.
I used to imagine it this way. In my head, success always came on paper. A review I could hold. Something I could fold up and keep forever.
I never once imagined I’d be sitting on Hudson’s kitchen island in nothing but his shirt, waiting for him to bring the verdict home with coffee.
Life has taken some strange turns.
We spent the last hour wandering through rooms I hadn’t seen yet and trading useless facts about ourselves like we’re trying to catch up on years we weren’t there for.
It’s been easy. Well, it’s been easy up until this point because now I’m fairly sure I’m going to be sick with nerves.
The front door opens, and my entire body goes rigid.
“Relax,” Hudson calls.
“I can’t.”
He appears in the kitchen a second later, sets a fresh coffee beside me, then puts a folded stack of newspapers on the opposite side of the island.
I stare at them.
“Did you read them?” I ask.
“No.”
“Can you read them now?”
“You want me to read them to you?”
“Yes.”
“Out loud.”
“Yes, Hudson. That’s generally what reading to somebody means.”
I’m pacing back and forth across the kitchen while Hudson unfolds the newspapers one at a time and spreads them across the island.
One has a full review and a photograph of me in front of the underwater piece, the image supplied by the gallery from the press preview.
Oh God.
I’m going to die in his kitchen, completely commando
“It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
Hudson looks up.
“Just tell me. Put me out of my misery.”
“You sold out your first solo show,” he reminds me like it should make me feel better.
“I’ll never work again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nobody sells out their first solo show and then has a normal career. That’s probably a curse. I read about things like this.”
“At least you’ll be financially comfortable during your inevitable decline.”
“But for how long? A year? Two?”
“How recklessly do you plan to spend the money?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll go broke. Then what?”
He ignores me and starts reading.
“‘Distance Studies is not a polite exhibition,’” Hudson reads, leaning his elbows on the island.
“‘It does not ask to be liked. It demands to be felt. Callahan has managed something rare for an artist of her generation: she has stripped away the comfort of faces and given us the architecture of human disconnect instead.’”
I stop pacing, my heart hammering against my ribs.
“‘Callahan has given us a collection that aches, but more importantly, one that refuses to let us look away.’”
Hudson looks up over the edge of the paper. “The critic gave it five stars. Called you one of the most vital new voices in contemporary art.”
“Five stars?”
“Five.”
I choke on a breathless laugh, burying my face in my hands. “I didn’t fail.”
“Not even close.”
I throw myself into his arms, and he catches me with a startled laugh, one arm going securely around my waist as the other braces my back before I can do anything structurally irresponsible.
“Easy.”
The adrenaline in my body slowly settles into a restless buzz I know too well.
“Ro, you’re going to shake out of your skin. I need you to relax.”
“I’ve been so locked into the work for the last few months that I don’t know how to come down from it gently. Usually, after something big, I just paint through it.”
He sets me back on my feet but keeps his hands on my waist. “You want to paint?”
I look around his kitchen. “You happen to have a blank canvas hidden behind the refrigerator?”
Without a word, he takes my hand.
He leads me upstairs and down the hallway, past the rooms he showed me earlier, all the way to the door at the far end.
The room is almost completely empty.
White walls. Bare hardwood. A huge window overlooking the leafy street below, morning light pouring through.
Against one wall sits a neat stack of unopened cans of interior paint, a package of brushes and two rollers that look like leftovers from a decorating project somebody organized and then never actually started.
“You want me to paint in here?”
“If you’d like.”
He leans one shoulder against the doorframe.
“It’s an empty room. Do whatever you want with it.”
I look back at the largest wall. “You understand what you’re saying to me?”
He nods toward the wall. “You’re a big deal now. If I ever sell this house, I expect you to add several zeros to the asking price.”
I nudge him with my elbow. “Anything I want?”
“Anything.”
I turn slowly in the middle of the room, already seeing shapes where there aren’t any yet.
Nobody has given me a blank wall and permission to make a mess since I was a kid.
Morning light stretches across the floorboards, warming my bare feet.
For the first time in months, there is nothing attached to this. I’d almost forgotten what making something feels like when I don’t need it to prove anything.
The reviews don’t make me love this.
They can’t.
Painting lives somewhere deeper than a headline can reach, in the part of me that kept doing it when nobody was watching and when I was convinced nobody ever would.
But God, it’s nice.
Just for this morning, the voice that has spent months whispering that I’m not good enough to stand in rooms like the one I stood in last night has finally shut the hell up.
Hudson opens the tins of paint and hands me a brush, but he doesn’t leave. He stands against the wall, watching me.
I glance over. “You don’t have to stay. Watching paint dry isn’t exactly thrilling entertainment.”
“Watching is the best part.” He folds his arms. “Who else gets to say they’ve watched Rowan Callahan work?”
Nobody can say that because I never let anyone watch until Hudson. With him, I don’t want to hide away.
“Besides.” He tips his head, taking in the shirt still hanging off one shoulder, the bare legs, the whole picture of me standing barefoot in his empty room about to make a mess of his floor. He blows out a slow breath. “Fuck me.”
I burst out laughing. “Pervert. Always watching me, Shrink Wrap.”
I pick up a brush, already reaching for the first tin. “Fine. Stay. But don’t say a single word about my process, or I’ll make you model for the next one.”
“I’ll behave.”
He doesn’t behave. Not one bit.