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My voice nearly breaks, but Evie looks down at her plate with a smile dancing on her lips that confuses me. I can tell when she speaks she’s trying not to laugh, and it breaks some of the tension in the room.
“From everything you told me, I think your mother was an amazing person, but I’m not her. You don’t have to worry about me feeling pushed out because if I ever do, I’ll push harder. I won’t need to find my own thing outside of what we do because it will be mine just as much as it is yours.”
Her face turns serious as she looks up at me. “I’m not afraid of you, and I never plan to let you be in a position of power over me. If we aren’tallequals, then there is no us.”
The fire that burns in her eyes, the intensity of those words, shows me how serious she is. My fears of her getting left behind have no ground because she won’t let herself be tossed aside. I should know better than to worry about her place among us. While she might see it as us all being equals, the truth is, she owns us.
She owns our souls; Damien’s monster, Alexi’s demon, and my heart. She’s the queen we never knew we needed, and one I don’t know if we could ever manage to live without.
“Do you want to paint with me?” I don’t even realize the words are out of my mouth until after I’ve said them. My face freezes in shock.
“I um, I don’t know how to paint,” she says shyly.
“I’ll show you.” A grin stretches over my lips as I get to my feet, moving over to a box with old paints and hoping a few were sealed well enough that they are still usable. I move to the other side of the room, laying down a cloth and setting up an easel with a large canvas.
Getting out the few paints that haven’t totally dried out, I squeeze them onto a palette. I grab a few brushes and bring back water and towels from the bathroom.
I look at the makeshift studio space with an odd feeling in my heart. The last thing I ever painted was my mother, and I never imagined I would paint again when I stocked all of these things in here. Evie’s hand slides into my own, and when her fingers thread between mine, a sense of rightness fills me. I kiss the top of her head and lead her to sit on the stool in front of the canvas.
“What do you want to make?” Her eyes widen as she looks at me.
“Lev, I’d be lucky to draw a heart that’s even on each side.” I laugh, a full laugh that lights me up from head to toe, and Evie chuckles with me.
“Art doesn’t have to be even. Paint what you feel, Lucky Charm.”
She eyes the blank space before her. She considers the few colors I was able to provide and without instruction she begins dipping her brush in the black. She covers the whole canvas in it, not a white spot left, and then she sits back. I grab another stool and sit to watch her as she looks at the other colors left. She rinses the brush then picks up a much thinner one and dips her paint in the yellow.
For over an hour she works, and I watch how seriously she considers each movement. Her face pinches when something isn’t quite right, then lights up again as a new idea starts to spark. I think about my mother being here, watching her, guiding her hand, showing her all the beautiful things she can create with just a small amount of paint.
I’ve never been a teacher though. So I just watch as her feelings come to life in an abstract and blurry mess of colors.
When she puts the brush down to look back at me, I find I don’t have to force the expression on my face; what she made is truly beautiful.
“What do you think?” She sounds breathless like she just ran a marathon.
“I think you are perfection personified, and I’m never going to let you go.” I stand up and wrap my arms around her as I take in the piece and her.
She has paint smudged on her dress, her face, some of it even stuck in her hair. But as I look at her, I’m in awe of the likeness she holds to my mother. My mother always had this softness about her brush strokes, but Evie’s are so strong and precise that they hold the power of her strength in each one. She didn’t second guess her movements. Evie did what I told her to do—she put her heart on a canvas for the world to see.
The black background makes you feel as if you're in a tunnel with a swirl of white and yellow in the center bringing you light. Strokes of red bleed into the black, some clearly seen and others seeming to hide between the layers of strokes of gray. At the center, where she brought the white in, three black hearts sit inside. One is bigger than the others. The one to the left is a little gray, and the one to the bottom has a small clover inside of it.
“This is how you feel?” I keep my eyes pinned to the canvas as I turn her in my arms to look back at her painting.
“You’re all my light in the darkness, Ghost. You’ve each given me back a piece of myself I never thought I’d get to feel again. There’s still darkness, wounds that don’t know how to heal and others buried too deep to see, but there’s light too. The last words my mother ever said to me…”
Her voice breaks off, and I know the rarity of her talking about them. I can’t imagine how she must feel. I squeeze her close to me. With her back pressed tightly to my front, I give her all of the support I can.
“The last thing she told me was not to be afraid of the dark, that darkness can be a friend to those who learn to harness its power. Sometimes, I think that I’ve been in the dark so long I wouldn’t know what light is anymore.” She shakes her head as if she’s trying to clear a bad feeling, and I hold her even tighter, lending her my strength in the only way I know how.
“But then Damien makes me laugh in a way that makes my toes curl and my heart hum. Alexi looks at me like he’d dive in front of a bullet, catch it in midair, and throw it back at my attacker out of sheer will alone. Or you touch me in a way that makes me feel like I’m the center of your universe, and that’s when I see the light again.”
I smile knowing that I can do that—knowing we all have the ability to do that for her. She may think she’s in the dark, but she’s our light just as much as we are hers.
“You don’t have to leave the darkness to find the light, it’s in there with me. The power is in finding each other and holding on like our lives depend on it because...” she turns in my hold, “I think they just might.”
Our lips meet and I give her all the light left inside me. My fingers dig into her waist as hers go around my neck. Our tongues tangle together and I swear she’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted. Her warm body is pressed so firmly to mine that it feels like we are the same, one entity coming together. The collision of two stars.
“Lev,” she pants between kisses, “I love you.”
