As Long As I Have You

~ Chapter Ten ~

Kirsten called into Travis Enterprises the next morning and told Danny she wouldn't be in for the next couple days. She put off his barrage of questions surrounding Beaumont Industries by telling him she had met with both financial and operational heads of the company, participated in an early discovery meeting, and carried on negotiations into the evening before things were ultimately left in Beaumont's court with assurances they would be in touch in the next few days.

Her explanation was technically true, but as far as she was concerned the real technicalities were the last thing her brother and his short-fused temper needed to know about. She needed more time to think, and having Danny prod her incessantly for information wasn't going to help at all.

Nevertheless, he pushed for more information in typical fashion and she was forced to move from truth to lie and claim a burst of creative energy that couldn't be ignored. He finally relented, and it wasn't until nearly an hour later when she set her tablet and the daily news aside that she realized the false claim actually had some merit to it.

Her time spent in bed was filled with the beginnings of an image, and she lazed about long enough that the itch in her fingers took root and needed to be sketched out and put onto canvas. After a quick shower she changed into a soft pair of faded jeans and one of her favourite worn out t-shirts stained with haphazard streaks of paint, and launched herself into a new painting.

People were more often than not shocked when she told them she was a lawyer turned abstract artist since it wasn't exactly a natural career transition or enviable income earner. Nevertheless, drawing and painting had always consumed her, even though practicality and insecurity kept her talents and her sketchbooks a secret for most of her life. In her mind her proper place was at her father's company, and fantasies of sharing her art with the world were best left between the pages of her journals and in the margins of her legal pads.

It was a perfectly practical plan, and one she was wholly committed to until the day her father came to see her as she studied for the bar exam. Her sketchbook had been left open and forgotten on a table, and when her father came across it she froze in embarrassment and anticipation. Carl said nothing as he flipped through the book back to front and then once again, slowly examining each page. She remembered very well the way her stomach churned and her mouth went dry in fear. But the terror she felt welling inside of herself vanished when he looked up, unshed tears in his eyes and a pride-filled smile spread across his face.

"I don't know a damn thing about this stuff, my sweet girl, but I do know you shouldn't be wasting your time as a lawyer."

After a short exchange the two of them spent hours paging through stacks of sketchbooks and determining next steps that could both support her current plans for taking a place at Travis Enterprises, and nurture the gift she had kept hidden for nearly twenty years. He conceded to her insistence that she write her bar exam, but once completed she promised to seek out formal training to explore her craft before committing herself to any final decisions. Carl surmised that Travis Enterprises and the law would always be there for her, but seizing the opportunity to build an artist's portfolio would be much harder to come by once she found herself entrenched in contract law.

Neither of them could have predicted how the following two years would play out, nor the tragic event that would act as a tipping point and steer her away from practicing law altogether and onto a creative path permanently.

Shaking herself from memories past, she spent the next hour sketching out her thoughts, then turned her focus to the canvas, and followed the instincts that guided her brush and brought the image inside of her head to life.

She was often asked about the inspiration for her work, where her ideas came from and so on, but no matter how sincerely she tried to describe the why and how of it the words simply never came to her. It was like asking a fish why it swam or a bird why it flew — the only real answer was that they were born to do it.