up to anyone in this way. I respect that for the gift it is as I listen closely to everything she has to say.
“It’s big,” she answers shyly. “I want to go really big.”
“Okay.”
She’s searching my eyes for doubt. For anything that will prove this is a foolish notion. But I can’t
and won’t do that to her.
She continues.
“It’s a series,” she says. “Of movement and paint fusion. I already have them picked out.”
“Tell me what they are,” I insist.
She glances over her shoulder, once again checking to be sure that she is not embarrassing herself.
That nobody else is privy to this vulnerable moment. Nobody else but me.
I shouldn’t like that. But I do. I like it very much. And I am selfish for wanting more of these
vulnerable moments.
“Since Christmas is around the corner, I was thinking the Nutcracker on canvas,” she tells me.
The idea is brilliant in its simplicity. The idea of her body and her feet laying claim to the canvas
with a classic. The audience trying to reverse engineer the movements in their minds as they capture
each splatter of paint in their eye.
“It’s perfect,” I tell her. “I have no doubts it will be huge, Chloe.”
“Really?”
She lights up under my praise, and my cock is pressing at the seam of my trousers. Fuck.
“Yes, really,” I answer her.
“Well there’s a couple more. I was thinking a yoga sequence too. I know it’s been done before. But
there’s a class in the city. For amputees.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I know exactly why. It hits me right in the fucking gut, her words. Her
meaning. I know the people in that class. Many of them are the same faces from the theater that day.
The people whose lives I altered irrevocably.
“I thought we could give them a chance to create something beautiful,” she says softly. “To show
that beauty still exists, even after the darkest of days.”
I can imagine what she’s speaking of in my mind. Again, the idea is astounding in its simplicity. But
what she is asking of me is to face my own demons. To face the people I have destroyed. For simply
being fans of my work.