“She looks a little like Lachlyn... Is this your mom?” Sage asked, glancing up.
Tyce nodded. “Yeah, as I mentioned, she suffered from chronic depression. She’d stay like that for days.”
Sage thankfully didn’t comment. She just flipped through the portraits, wrinkling her nose when she came across the one of her working at her bench. She looked at the date and lifted her eyes to his, her eyebrows raised. Tyce felt his cheeks warm. “I saw a photo of you in a magazine. I decided to copy it.”
Still no comment. Tyce felt ants crawling up his skin as she flipped through the portraits, many of which were of her. After examining the last one, she rested her forearms on her knees.
He saw the anger in her eyes when all that blue slammed into his. “Why the hell have you never exhibited these? They are so good, Tyce, possibly even better than your sculptures and your oils. They are emotional and, sometimes, hard to look at but so damn real!”
Tyce ran a finger along the edge of his ragged sweatshirt, trying to keep up. “I can’t do it,” he admitted.
“Why on earth not?” Sage cried. “They are fantastic. The emotion jumps off the canvas.”
His feelings about her, about them, were a tangled mess but she was still the mother of his child and she deserved to know the truth. The entire truth. Tyce paced the area in front of the oil painting, his fingers holding the glass tumbler in a tight grip. “I discovered that I could sell my portraits when I was thirteen or so. I’d take my sketch pad to Central Park and sketch people who passed by. I’d shove the drawing under their nose and they’d pay me... I still don’t know if they paid because they thought the work was good or because they felt sorry for the too-thin kid in old clothes.”
Sage quietly sipped of her coffee, her silence encouraging him to continue.
“I did that for a few years. I finished high school and was offered a scholarship to art school but I had to work and the only job I could find was in construction. To make some extra cash, I agreed to pose naked for an art class comprised mostly of women wanting to dabble in art.”
Sage just lifted one arched eyebrow higher, looking unaffected. Her shoulders lifted in a tiny So?
“I used to draw portraits of the women, which they’d buy. Then they’d take me home and they’d pose naked, telling me that the portrait was for their husband or their lover.”
“And you’d end up sleeping with them,” Sage said, her tone utterly prosaic.
Tyce rubbed the back of his neck. “I sold many portraits and I slept with quite a few women.”
Sage tipped her head to the side and just looked at him. “So?” When he sent her a puzzled look, she continued. “I’m sorry but I’m trying to find the link between you sleeping with someone and why you won’t sell your portraits.”
Tyce couldn’t understand why she was being obtuse. “I slept with them, Sage!”
“You were nineteen and you would’ve slept with a gorilla if it wore lipstick,” Sage replied, impatient. Then the confusion cleared from her eyes. “Oh...wait, I get it. You don’t know whether they used the sketches as an excuse to pay you for sex.”
Nailed it, Tyce thought morosely, turning away from her.
Tyce heard Sage stand up, heard the sound of her mug hitting the surface of his desk and then felt her hand on his back. He waited for her words, his heart bouncing off his rib cage. “You don’t actually know how good you are, do you? That’s why you don’t attend your own exhibitions, why you don’t do interviews... You don’t think that you are worth the accolades, the money.”
Tyce whirled around and pointed at the oil. “I did that oil in half a day, Sage! I slapped some paint on a canvas, I didn’t even think about it and idiots will pay me a quarter mil for it, maybe a whole lot more. The sculptures take more work but nothing that’s worth the price tags the galleries put on my pieces. My portraits, they mean something, but yeah, every time I think of selling one, exhibiting one, I feel that I am that confused kid again, trying to keep his head above water, not sure whether he was being pitied or paid for being a stud.”