“What on canvas?”
“I had a dream last night that the two of us—“
“Oh my god, did you have a sex dream about me, Ben?” Krista interrupted with an evil smirk.
As expected, Ben turned a furious shade of red. “Krista, gross. That’s—I don’t—“
Krista laughed. “Okay, okay, go on.”
Ben, still flustered, cleared his throat and continued, his hands finding his hips. “It was this really strange dream. One of the strangest I’ve ever had actually. Potent. Extremely potent. You were present, but not always corporeal. As if the whole episode was coated in your aura. It was frightening in some places, knowing you needed my help, but me not able to find you.”
Ben gave her that anxious look again, checking the edge of the tarp to make sure he couldn’t get a little closer without dribbling paint on the floor to administer that hug.
“Go on,” Krista prodded, a strange unease in her stomach.
Ben’s eyes unfocused as he thought back. “Well, the whole dream landscape was saturated with your emotion. That’s all it was, really. Strong, turbulent emotion. The emotion came across in colors. The beginning was pastels mostly. Hope. Yellows and oranges later. It was bright and flowing. But hope started to fade. Yellows and oranges became reds and pinks. Hue changes. Pastels became bold reds. Blood reds. Maroon. Burgundy. The colors started to multiply, ‘round and ‘round, swirling.” His hands were shaping an invisible swirling ball between facing palms. “The color turned muddy brown. Mud made with red clay, though. Reddish tinged. That’s what everything became. As if a red filter was placed over the landscaping.”
Ben’s eyes sought her, checking to make sure she was following. She wasn’t, since she didn’t speak art, but she nodded anyway.
“Next came pulses. A deep current ran beneath us. This was when you became afraid. Apprehensive. When you needed the most help, but were unreachable. A new color now. Blue. Soft blue at first. Translucent. Then the color got deeper. The current stronger. The red filter slashed with blues and purples. Anger now. Then sadness. This is when I start losing the themes.”
He turned back to his painting, Krista forgotten for the moment, working things out. He scratched his head with the hand that still held the paint brush. He’d have a job washing his hair.
“This was when you were corporeal. When you were warning me. It’s when the most enormous waves I have ever seen emerged. Suddenly we were on a beach and waves were coming in as normal. But you kept warning me. Telling me not to go too close, because a big one could come in at any moment. I remember being confused at the warning. Wanting to play, but you kept holding me back.”
Ben turned to her, painting forgotten. His eyes were huge and haunted. “Krista, those waves—the fear was worse than any nightmare I can remember having. They blotted out the sky. We could see them building. Coming after us. You nearly dragged me, trying to get me to run. But the undertow was sucking us back. It was—I was terrified. And then—I remember this very clearly—you turned to me, grabbed me by the arms, and said, ‘We will be overtaken. When I say, hold your breath, and hope we can breathe underwater this time.’ That’s when I woke up.”
Krista stared at him in mute horror.
“You’ve had those wave dreams before, haven’t you?” Ben asked soberly.
“I think you really are clairvoyant, Ben. Holy hell.”
“But you’ve had those wave dreams?”
She nodded. “Lately, as a matter of fact. I don’t usually go under anymore. They started after I found out what Jim really was. What I’d got myself into.”
Ben’s brow furrowed. “Jim?”
Oh, yeah. She hadn’t told Ben why she’d left Seattle. The real reason. She’d always just said she needed a change of venue, never hinting that there was a reason behind it.
And then she was purging.
She told Ben about her job, and that first week. Then her mug. Also about what happened the last time she lost a lucky mug. Then, because she had opened the vault, and it was already on the table, and maybe, too, because Ben was hanging on her every word as if she was giving directions to a pile of gold, she just went ahead and told him the broad strokes about why she left Seattle. Miraculously, she didn’t cry once.
When she was done, Ben was nodding with a furrowed brow. “That makes sense. What about the ocean part, though? Where does that fit in?”
“I told you—the waves started with Jim.”
“No, not the waves. The blues. The deep current under everything. The waves were strong emotion. That makes sense. But it wasn’t a past…situation. It was present. This was all very present. Very now. There was ocean.” He was looking at her as if he wanted to unhinge her head and have a look instead.
“Ben, you are under the impression this relates to me simply because I was in it.”
He shook his head as he crossed his arms across his chest. The red on the brush was drying, but still managed to smear his coveralls. “Oh no, Krista, not only that. I am quite perceptive with emotional nuances. I am like a woman in that respect. I draw off it for my art. I hone in on it, you might say. You’ve been … turbulent lately. I’ve paid more attention than normal. I apologize, but it is great art.”
“That, umm, seems like a violation of privacy? Maybe? Pirating emotion, perhaps?”
“You never said, how was your day?”
“It was bad.”
“Oh yes, that’s right. You did say. I’m afraid I just botched that again. I’m sorry.”
Krista shook her head and heaved herself out of the chair. She approached the canvas, warning Ben with a finger that terrible things would happen if he hugged her with paint all over him. They turned toward it together.
It was a large rectangle half-covered in every shade of red that could be created. The strokes were broad and bold. Thick layers coated, piling on top of each other. Yellow and orange—what Ben had called hope—were under that, creating a background layer. It looked like a kid had found a bunch of finger paints and went wild.
“And that dream, with the waves and beach and stuff, is what you are drawing?”
Ben nodded, looking at the canvas with a crease between his eyebrows. “Painting, yes.”
“Huh.”
“I am not quite getting the emotion of it. I’m missing a very important piece. Your background helps—I’ll incorporate that—but I’m still missing something.”
She didn’t feel like asking how he planned to incorporate anything with the expectation that people would know what it was, so she said, “Hmm.”
“Ocean. Why ocean?” Ben asked himself thoughtfully, turning to gaze at her in thought.
“Well…we are right next to it. Maybe because you hear it?”
“I thought of that, but no. That’s not it.”
“I run by it? I like it?”
Ben turned back to his easel. “I don’t think that’s it. There is something else taking your concentration.”
“Well…” Strangely perplexed, even though this was more than just a bit illogical, Krista leaned in to look at the assortment of reds. “My job is taking its toll.”
Ben shook his head.
“Well… Oh! I just made up with a guy that originally asked me out and I turned down. I was a bitch about it—I didn’t mean to be. He kind of sur--”
Ben threw his hands up in exasperation. “Ben! How could you miss that?” He turned to Krista with an expression that said he thought himself the stupidest person on the face of the plant. “A man! I didn’t even think of that! You definitely tend to spend a lot of your time in sexual overtones.”
“Are you calling me a slut?” Krista asked with a cackle.
“Not the time for hysterics,” Ben said, waving away her jest.
Hysterics? She thought sourly.
“Hmmmm.” Ben took on a look of inward contemplation. He turned back to the easel. Krista followed his gaze and still saw the same random brush strokes of red.
“Anyway,” Krista started to wander away. “Not much on the man front, I’m afraid. I do need to start dating again, though.”
“Uh huh. Hmm. I might have to use my imagination on that one.”
“Okay, then. Let me know if you ever figure me out. I’ll pass the code along.”
If Ben heard her, he didn’t show it.
As she was halfway to the kitchen she heard the front door open.
Oh shit! Abbey’s home!
Krista ran back to Ben. “Ben, Abbey’s home! You need to cart this off to your room!”
Ben shook his head, still staring at the canvas. “Not this time, Krista. I need space for this one. This is finals material.”
“But Ben—“
“I’ll handle her, Krista. It is a buyer’s market out there. Past school starting. There is no one to take my place. She won’t kick me out. Not this time of year. She is insane, but when it comes to roommates, she’s been in the city too long to be stupid about it.”
“What the f**k has happened to my living room!”
Krista turned around slowly. Sure enough, Abbey the Horrible had shown up on scene. She was a Goth girl back in her distant youth, but hadn’t quite given it up completely. She was thirty-eight, often wore black clothes, but stopped with the black lipstick and nail polish when she hit thirty. She always looked like she was sniffing poo, and that was a thing she probably wouldn’t grow out of.
Ben turned to Abbey, looked her straight in the face, and said, “Abbey, I appreciate your territorialism, and I wouldn’t dare upset your balance, but I need all the space and concentration I can get to work on this piece. It is extremely important to me. If I mess anything up, I will be happy to pay for it. Now please, go away.”
Ben, who usually bowed his head and found somewhere else to be, standing up to Abbey, who was definitely a bully growing up who stole lunch money from kids like Ben, was so foreign, so totally absurd, that both Krista and Abbey stood speechless.
Ben turned back to his painting. “Now, if you two will excuse me, I have a masterpiece to put together.”
Krista hightailed it to her room. If Abbey exploded, she wanted to be somewhere else. If Abbey didn’t, she’d probably perch at the dining room table and watch Ben, making sure he didn’t mess anything up. Krista didn’t want to be an ingredient in that mixing bowl.
The next day, Krista got to her desk at one minute to eight. The stupid Muni had broken down in the tunnel and she had to nearly run in. As she dropped her handbag in the usual spot she froze. Her lucky mug sat in the middle of the clean desk, somehow back in one piece!
Tentatively, not believing her eyes, she leaned closer. It was then that she saw the cracks, small pock marks and fissure lines where it’d broken.
Next to the mug was a note. A neat but lazy hand scrawled,
“It was the best I could do. Please use this to buy a new one. –Sean.”
The arrow was pointing toward a Starbucks gift card.
“What the—“
She poked her head outside the cube, saw the usual nothing, and stepped back in.
“—hell?”
It was a really sweet gesture. He must have gone home and spent time gluing the mug back together. Not many men would put in the time or effort.
Damn. The guy was good, she’d say that much. He was on par with the best there was, Krista was sure of it. There probably wasn’t a woman alive he couldn’t get if he really tried.
Krista picked up the gift card. Too bad it was Starbucks. She was a Seattle girl, born and raised. Seattle’s Best Coffee was the coffee for her, and since Starbucks, the sell-out, had bought them out, Starbucks was the enemy. She would settle for a local San Francisco company, or free work coffee, but she would not set foot in a Starbucks. She had to draw the line somewhere, take some kind of stand in something. Everyone had their thing. Starbucks was hers.
She clutched the card. She couldn’t throw a gift away, and she couldn’t give it to someone else in the company because it’d look really bad if Sean found out. She could take it home to Ben, but he had an anti-Starbucks rule, also, even though his was for other reasons. He had tried to explain, once, but it had something to do with politics and rainforests and hippy stuff—she stopped listening when he got passionate. Everyone had their thing, but a person didn’t need to go spreading the insanity around. She had plenty of her own.
In the end, Sean did fix her mug. And she probably owed him an explanation why she couldn’t accept his peace-keeping offer—if that’s what a womanizer called bribery.
Well, crap. She had to return it. Sean could at least make use of it. No sense wasting twenty bucks.
With a sigh that made Mr. Montgomery look like an amateur, she jumped up, card in hand, and set out. She’d head straight into the lion’s den. She’d hold up her head, put all her logic defenses on red alert, and hope he didn’t smell good enough to lick.
On the way down her heart was in her throat and the base of her spine was tingling. If she was a prisoner, she’d hear the steady beat of drums as she walked toward a firing squad.
This is pure stupid! This is what he’s after.
He was backing her in a corner with this one. It was a good play. Dang it!
Willing herself forward, she exited the elevator. If she lost focus now, he’d have her. She couldn’t deny her interest. Hell, no woman in the company even tried to deny interest—unless they’d already been burned. But unlike the others, she could deny the desire to make more out of it. She could deny the need for a date. She could deny the craving for sweet talk. And she would deny it. She absolutely would!