The Anatomy of Emotion

Chapter Six

August—Los Angeles

Maeva scans her paintings as the man in the hipster sweater yammers to her about brushstroke articulation. The walls around her are a deep matte black, twisting and winding like a maze around her illuminated canvases. The lights are smoky, mysterious, playing around the colors and the shapes in the paint. Her eyes circle back to the one at the east side of the room—deep blue, painted in churning starbursts and shimmering with bits of gold. The tag underneath it reads Poison Storm by Maeva Leroux, on loan from Corin Olivier. She nibbles the inside of her lip as the memory of his kiss fills her mouth. Glimpses of that painting—between kisses in her studio, and then hanging over his paper-strewn piano.

"...and the way you display the emotions so clearly in the brushstrokes," the hipster man is out of breath, "it's amazing."

Maeva almost laughs out loud. Her, expressing emotion in her paintings.

Instead she smiles, "I know, thank you."

She shifts her hair over her bare shoulder and laughs around the rim of her champagne glass.

"So what's your technique for that?"

"I don't particularly have one, it just spills out of me."

Maeva frowns at the piece above them, something she had painted after scraping her knee, and then cocks her head at the hipster man, "so what emotions do you see in this one?"

His entire face brightens as he looks at the red and ivory canvas in front of him, "I see love, in the way it arches and curves so softly."

Now she cannot keep quiet—her lips part and a little laugh pops out. He turns his bright face back to hers.

"What? Am I wrong?"

"Of course not," Maeva shakes her head, "we only view art through the lens of our own psyche. Here, come with me."

He follows like an excited puppy as her heels click along the glossy marble floors, through the labyrinth of the gallery to the very back, where a soft, whipped looking pink and red painting is lit with dainty lights like falling stars.

"And what about this one?"

"I think it looks blissful, and light. Like one of those rare moments where everything is perfect and all the problems inside you have just evaporated."

Maeva looks at him with both of her brows raised. Not in the pointed way she would if he had said something stupid, but softly, because she finds herself impressed. He doesn't notice though, stuck on the canvas in front of him.

"This is a much lighter piece than your usual," he says, "what were you doing when you came up with it?"

A frown taps a crease into her forehead, "I was—"

She is cut off by the familiar hammer of platforms. Saria is sprinting up behind her, a cell phone buried in her curls. Maeva and the hipster man turn as Saria comes screeching to a halt.

"You have an urgent call," Saria gasps.

"From who?"

"Um, that...who has the blue eyes—oh, Corin, the singer."

Maeva's arched brow sinks into a frown as she snatches the phone and plugs her free ear, "this had better be glorious, why the fuck are you—"

"Maeva..." Corin whispers on the other line.

Her name trembles in the back of his throat, and there is an immediate click of dread in her mind.

"Where are you?"