“I can’t right now, Charlie. It’s been a day. Can we call it a truce for now?”
“Truce?” I asked. “I wasn’t aware we were at war.”
“Oh cut the crap,” he snapped, his eyes rising to meet mine. “We have a weird rivalry.”
I gave a quick, curt nod. “We shouldn’t. I don’t know why you started it.”
“Just drop it. Let’s go to dinner.”
I was pissed and was about to refuse him, but then he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Please?”
His superiority complex had fallen for a moment, and he was just a man staring at me as his equal, asking for mercy.
“Fine,” I snapped. “But it doesn’t mean you can call me farm boy, so cut that out.”
“Only for tonight,” he said, his eyes going all heavy-lidded. “Tomorrow, all bets are off.”
I was about to sass him back, but I bit my tongue when I saw his upper lip quivering. He was just barely holding it together.
I could at least let him have his pride for now.
“Alright, come on. Let’s walk,” I relented.
He pursed his lips ever so slightly and joined my side.
For a few moments, we walked in silence toward the restaurant. The awkwardness stretched out greedily between us.
“I think I was just broken up with,” Oliver finally said.
I opened my mouth to respond, but Oliver cut me off. “No, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Maybe… maybe because you’re the only person here I can tell.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, surprised.
He stiffened up a little and said, “We’re both kind of in the same boat, I think. We’re both trying to make our mark on the world, but we have to do everything perfectly. All of this stuff we create is going to be remembered in film forever.”
I was quiet, letting him have his dramatic moment. I didn’t think about it that way; all I was trying to do was to make Alina happy. Keeping clients happy was what I lived for.
“I guess that’s one way to look at it,” I said, if only to keep the conversation going.
“My boyfrie— I mean, my ex didn’t think anything like what we do was worthwhile,” he said, his green eyes far away.
I felt a prickle of annoyance. “What do you mean by that? What we do?”
“I mean, making people look a certain way. Being designers; artists of the aesthetic.”
I relaxed. “I’ve never heard it put that way,” I admitted.
“You don’t think you’re an artist?” Oliver asked, looking at me earnestly.
For a moment I went quiet. It was true; I’d never thought of myself in that way. “Calling myself an artist seems… disingenuous. It feels like I’m trying to be something I’m not.”
“Why wouldn’t you be an artist? Because you don’t paint, or sculpt, or whatever traditional thing is supposed to “qualify” you as an artist?”
As I thought about Oliver’s words, a sudden tectonic shift was happening inside of me. It was like my understanding of the world was being rearranged ever so slightly, and for some reason, it was making me feel better about myself.
Way better.
“I guess I make people look a certain way with hair and makeup…”
“So your canvases are people,” Oliver mused. “It’s way more complicated than painting on an actual canvas, don’t you think? For us, we have to think about all the dimensions more traditional artists don’t have to consider; we have to think about how our subjects move, how much they’ll sweat, if there’s going to be a lot of wind or sun on them, etcetera etcetera.”
I felt the strangest sensation just then; it was like I was a wilting flower that had suddenly gotten a generous drink of water and was on the way to blooming in bright colors. It made me walk with my head held a little higher.
“…thanks, I didn’t know I needed to hear that,” I said cautiously. Even though Oliver was being nice for now, I knew it was only a matter of time before he resumed his holier-than-thou attitude. For now, he was being vulnerable because he just had a breakup.
“So, what happens when artists like us have breakups?” he asked, a mischievous gleam glinting in his eye.
“Um… we drink and complain about our exes?” I answered.
He laughed loud and honestly. The sound was pure and true, coming from somewhere underneath his layers of arrogance.
I smiled a little, catching the laughter.
“I was thinking something about channeling all of the feelings into our art, but we could do both,” he said.
I wanted to keep him in this mood, keep him talking like this. If he just had a breakup that was in any way significant to him, he should be more… more broken up about it, I thought. And if this helped him keep his mind off of things, then I would prolong it as long as possible.
“There,” I said, pointing to an unassuming storefront. “I’ve heard about that place online, they’ve got drinks inside. Want to get one before we go to this dinner? We’ve got a little bit of time.”
Oliver squinted and surveyed the spot I was pointing to. “It’s just a flower shop,” he said, his eyes lingering on the multicolored floral display out front.
“No, it’s more. I researched the hidden gems of this town online before I flew out here. That place looks like a flower shop on the outside, and it is on the inside, too. But there’s a secret door and a password that you can go through, and it opens up into this bar in the back.”
Oliver’s eyes were gleaming, and I knew he’d been hooked.
“Yeah, let’s go,” he said, making a beeline for the shop.
I was happy that I was finally getting to explore one of the places on my checklist for this Italian seaside town, but I was apprehensive about sharing it with Oliver. There was something about exploring new places with new people to me; it was as though the experience was put through a filter, forever painted in my memory in a different way than
