Every Day (Brush of Love 2)

The gallery had been open for a little over a month now, and things were going pretty well. One of the first suggestions I’d ever received from a customer was how they wished they could see me painting. I’d originally set up the small back room as my painting studio, but I quickly started switching things around. I was in the process of making the original painting

studio a small shop for people to purchase things and started setting up my painting studio near the front of the store. I was exposed to everyone, which was a little daunting, but I set myself up where a cash register would’ve been in any other traditional store, just to see how things would pan out.

Everyone coming in loved seeing and watching me paint, so I decided to keep the setup the way it was.

The small store in the back was bringing in a good chunk of my weekly revenue. People were purchasing beginning painter’s packs and canvases for my therapy classes. They were requesting other tubes of colors be sold so they could purchase their paint right there before class began. I was able to stock and try selling some different wooden picture frames for the artwork that was selling and started offering framing services right there at the counter for those who wanted it.

Business was booming, and I couldn’t have been any prouder.

The gallery showing that showcased the grand opening included a bunch of paintings from other art therapy students. I stayed away from John’s because of everything that happened between me and Bryan, but there were still so many others that deserved to see the light of day. Fluid abstracts and beautiful portraits. Breathtaking landscapes and pictures that wrenched emotions deep from within someone’s gut. It only took me two weeks to sell all those paintings, and one by one, I replaced them with pieces of artwork I had been working on.

By the third week of being open, the walls were lined with pictures I’d painted and crafted over the course of the last four years. For the first time, I got to see them all side by side. I saw the evolution of my own craft. My own emotions. My own presence. I got to study the brushstrokes and how they’d changed over the years. I got to take in the subject of the paintings and how my focus and my muses bounced around depending on my emotional circumstance.

It was like peeling off my skin and holding myself up on a display for everyone to see, and it was a bit unnerving.

I was restocking the back room that had now become my little store when a blonde woman walked through the front doors. Today had been a particularly slow day, so I’d gotten a great deal of painting done. She was attractive. I had to give her that. Tall and slender, with legs for days and white skin that had the slightest hint of a tan. Her hazel eyes seemed to change colors with the artwork she was surveying, and there was something about her that made it hard for me to take my eyes off her.

I didn’t recognize her. She hadn’t ever been in here before, and I’d never seen her at the diner. She was walking around the gallery and taking in the pictures like she was floating on air. She walked as if her feet didn’t quite touch the ground, but she was dressed in a very professional manner. She had on this red and yellow dress that hugged her close to her neck and covered her all the way to below her knees. Her black and red heels added even more height to her, and her blond hair was pulled back into a large bun that sat on her head. She was clutching a notebook and a pencil, and part of me wondered if she was here for a specific purpose.

“Take your time and look around. No one’s going to kick you out,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said mindlessly.

I didn’t want to disturb the trance she seemed to be in with the paintings, so I went back to restocking while she took a look around. I sorted the last of the tube colors and put them in their respective bins before I hung up the last of the canvases, and by the time I walked back out onto the floor, she was looking at the painting I was currently doing. She was over by the front door, standing with the massive front window backdropping her frame. The fall sunlight cascading through the windows made her seem almost angelic.

Then she turned her face towards me and smiled.

“What made you choose this space?” she asked.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“This space. For the gallery. It’s in such a rundown part of town. Why did you choose it?”

“I enjoyed the beauty of it,” I said.

“The beauty of it?”

“Yes. There’s beauty even within loneliness. Its scars and its bones called to me, I guess.”

“What inspired you to open the gallery?” she asked.

“I’ve always wanted to open one eventually,” I said.

“Did San Diego call to you?” she asked.

My mind wafted back to John and to the conversations we used to have whenever he was sober. His eyes always lit up whenever he talked about San Diego. The beauty of the city simply called to him. He always felt this ethereal tug to get back, even though he never really told me why.

“I guess you could say it did, yes,” I said.

“Is this your art hanging on the walls?” she asked.

“It is, though I didn’t open the gallery with them.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. I opened the gallery with a bunch of paintings some of my art therapy students did when I was still hopping from city to city.”

“You hold art therapy classes? Are you a licensed psychologist?” she asked.