“That was awesome.” Elle slowed herself down, got off her swing, and climbed down the ladder. “Let’s go to the installation with those huge clear globes. I think we’re supposed to climb inside of them.”
“Al can go with you. I’m heading upstairs for the videos.” Hex twisted his hips as he sashayed out of the space with no regard for my opinion on the matter. I almost stopped him, but didn’t mind the fact that he left me with a beautiful woman to finish perusing the gallery with. I’d planned on doing it by myself as fast as I could before the ribbon cutting part of the ceremony to open the doors for the first time. With Elle, I would take my time and enjoy the moment.
“If you don’t feel like escorting me in my gallery adventures, I perfectly understand.” Elle held her hands on her hips and stared at the invisible path Hex had made when he’d abruptly left us to ourselves.
Does she not want to be alone with me or is she just giving me a polite excuse to get out of babysitting her?
“I would love to escort you as long as you don’t mind being with an unintelligent art enthusiast.” I extended my hand to her. She took it. That same charge pushed through her flesh and warmed against mine. She moved her face out of my view. I couldn’t see her reaction. Did she feel the same thing I felt? What was this between us? Was it all my imagination or something more?
Grandma claimed each heart entered the world with the ability to connect to fifty others spread out all over the globe. It was our job to find the perfect matches by focusing on little clues that the gods gave us.
When Grandma met my grandpa a tropical storm had battered against the earth. She’d been a young teenager by herself sunbathing on Guardalavaca Beach and then the storm came in. Rain dotted the fine white sand. Ocean waves grew high until water flooded the area and rose to her knees. She struggled to gather her things, stuff her mother would punish her for losing—her father’s new radio, her great aunt’s ivory broach that she’d snuck out of her mother’s jewelry box and pinned on the front of her swim suit to appear grown and mature, and all the pesos she’d received from her summer job as a maid. All of it floated on the waters and she ran around frantically seizing them with her hair whipping across her face and sand hitting her skin.
Grandpa appeared out of nowhere and scared Grandma so much she fell back into the water and landed on her behind. Later, Grandpa confessed to me he’d been following her for weeks due to spotting her at the beach once before. Regardless, he raced to her, captured all of her things, picked her up, and sprinted away with her and the items in his arms.
“The rain just stopped.” Grandma’s eyes always glittered when she said those words. “As soon as he lifted me up, the rain just ceased to exist. The clouds left. Blue skies came. The sun shone. The waters drifted back into the ocean. It all happened as if he controlled the weather. And when I looked at this lovely man who’d saved me from not just the storm, but my mother’s tongue lashings, sparks flared between us. Real ones. And not just regular magic, either. Something more. Something I could taste, feel, and smell but just not define. That was the gods’ ways of giving me a clue. I never left his arms after that.”
Elle released my hand and rubbed hers together as she bit her lip, signaling to me that she had to have experienced the same electric reaction I did. Right?
“So what do you mean you’re an unintelligent art enthusiast?” Elle left the area and went to the entrance of the next installation’s area.
“Well, like this last installation. I have no idea what it was trying to say. Swinging is better when it is more than one person?”
“I think it was saying life is better, or maybe we all need someone else from time to time.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Art isn’t about knowing what it means. It’s about coming to some consensus in your mind or maybe feeling something deeper or even being inspired. That’s at least what someone told me long ago.”
“That’s pretty much what Hex says, although I would still like to know what the artist intended.”
“Why?”
“I like answers to questions.”
“Do you usually get them?”
I studied the hand that had held hers. “Not as much as I would like.”
She blushed and looked at the installation in front of us. “Aren’t those globes pretty?”
‘Globes’ wasn’t a good word for them. Maybe ‘massive car-sized bubbles that hung around twenty feet in the air’ was a better way to describe them. I had no idea what they were made of, perhaps plastic or glass, but they connected to each other by clear bubbled paths bridging between each one. I counted ten bubbles altogether. They appeared like some futuristic city of clear livable spheres. Steps with hand rails started at the ground and extended to the first opening.