Together Apart: Change is Never Easy

by Maxxwell, Lexi

  “Why?”

  “It makes you happy,” she said. “And I fell in love with this promising young artist.” Her face became serious. It was supposed to be mock-serious, but he could see through it. “Unfortunately, he met some Yoko and stopped creating.”

  The statement punched most of Zach’s remaining urgency from his body. He looked at his easel’s half-finished canvas, then passed it to Sam, still perched on the stool. She looked almost sad. It was his turn to assure her that everything was okay. And it was.

  “Come over here,” he said, forcing a sly smile. At first it felt alien, but then began to seem comfortable, like an old shoe.

  Sam stood. She hesitated. He realized he hadn’t been giving her enough credit; of course she understood the depth of his art’s reflection and of course she knew what it meant, after that bit of filibustering, to invite Sam to see it … especially before he’d even finished. Of course she knew because she’d done something similar herself. As curious as Sam seemed to be about Zach’s new work, Zach was curious about Sam’s. Just as he was spending more time in his studio, Zach knew Sam had started to tinker on a bit of creative in her office. It was as if his odd new renaissance had inspired her to pull the trigger on her own — break past the rigidity of journalistic writing to the beautiful core Zach had read in her novel. But despite his asking, Sam hadn’t been willing to show him a word of what she was working on. She said it was “vulnerable.”

  So Zach made his playful smile larger, curling a finger at his wife and beckoning.

  She walked forward, came around the canvas, looked at it, and said nothing.

  After a while, Zach laughed. “It doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”

  “It’s pretty,” she said, looking lamely up at him.

  “It’s okay. I could tell you what I think it means, but I don’t even know I could get it right.”

  “You don’t know what it is?”

  He knew exactly what it was. It was frustration. Confinement. A sense of being bound. It was the knot he felt in his stomach every day when he woke at 7 and put on a dress shirt. It was an odd new awareness of his mortality — a sense that his life wouldn’t last forever, and that even at age 24, an inevitable and inescapable death was always on the horizon. But that wasn’t what Sam meant, so he only shook his head.

  “Look at it, Sam,” he said. “But stop looking for objects. Feel it instead.”

  Zach almost laughed again. Sam focused so hard that her face scrunched up. She really, really, really wanted to see what he was showing her. They’d been together for five years. That was enough time to learn what art meant to Zach, where it seemed to come from, and what it meant when an artist was reluctant to share. But she’d never felt like she “got” it, and didn’t think she was able. But as was always the case with people who didn’t think they understood, Sam’s problem wasn’t her depth, it was that she tried going too deep, and ignored the humanity that bobbed on the surface.

  “You know me better than anyone,” Zach said, waiting.

  She had to see it. It was so obvious.

  And with that thought, he wondered if he’d made a mistake. This was too much. Showing her did make him too vulnerable. And there was more: Once Sam saw the torment in these pieces — and the raw, blunt brush strokes used to paint them, contrasting with his usual feather touch — she’d take it personally. She’d feel guilty. She’d feel bad for him. She’d feel insulted, both because he was committing his fury to tangible form (like an accusation) and because he hadn’t apparently felt comfortable enough to discuss it. He could try and explain that it was possible to be two people at once — one a devoted, happy husband and another a bound artist — but it wouldn’t matter. Sam would feel slapped all the same.

  But as she looked, as Zach felt a delirious recklessness rocketing through him, he realized that was exactly why he’d decided to let Sam peek. If they moved to Memphis, that would be the final cutting off — the point of no return. He had to show her how much it hurt while there was still time to go back.

  “I’m sorry, Zach.”

  Sam turned. “It’s okay. It only has to mean something to me.”

  “But it does mean something to you? I mean, it ‘frees the demons,’ as you used to say. You coming back in here again … that’s a good thing, right?”

  “Of course.”

  Sam looked into his eyes, searching for truth. She said, “I’m sorry I talked you into taking the job at Matrix.”

  Big smile. “Hey, we have to pay rent, right?” And it was true. Zach’s job, though he hated it, paid well. They had almost enough money for a down payment on a house. After that was out of the way, they both knew kids would follow. He used to be a lone wolf, responsible only to himself. But with each passing year, life became a little less about him and a little more about others. Living in an industrial loft might have sounded sexy a few years back, but if he wanted a family, they needed a place to live and food to eat.

  “Is this enough, Zach? You coming in here to work? Is it a decent substitute for the life you wanted?”

  The statement twisted like a knife in the gut. Sam had said it dead honestly, craving the straight answer to a question she thought he spent his days asking.

  Zach set his hands on Sam’s arms, squeezing. “This is the life I wanted.”

  Sam stared at the painting — all reds and oranges and blues. Something like a face at one edge, but hollow and indistinct enough that it could be anything. Zach thought he saw her eyes recognize something inside the color, but now he no longer wanted to.

  She turned, back to the easel. “You wanted to freelance.”

  “I wanted to be with you. I wanted to have a family.”

  She watched him, trying to determine if he spoke true.

  “For so long,” Sam said, “you just worked and then we hung out in the evenings. But you didn’t want to come in here.”

  “Artists sometimes take breaks,” he said. “Like vacations.”

  “You were on vacation?”

  “I was recalibrating.” It was a half truth. The larger one was that Zach felt inspired at two ends of the spectrum — joy and pain. The past years were middle ground, not quite sated, but satisfied enough to do nothing about it.

  Sam turned back to the painting, pulling away from his grip. She looked down and saw two dark smudges on her pale-blue dress shirt sleeves from where his paint-covered fingers had touched the fabric.

  “Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  But Sam wasn’t listening. She was looking at the painting, taking it in. Her back was to him, hair pinned in place, a few loose hairs tumbling loose, coming undone.

  “How can you create this and not know what it is?”

  “When you write stories,” he said, “do you ever realize that characters are talking without you telling them what to say?”

  She paused. He stared at her back, two steps behind her. Sam’s blue blouse and pinned-up hair were unreadable, but Zach didn’t feel like he should walk around and disturb her.

  “I guess I do.”

  “Same thing,” he said.

  “So it comes from somewhere else. Something deeper?”

  “I guess.”

  She continued to stare at the painting. Her hands moved to her front, at her neck, and started to do something.

  “You aren’t happy,” she said.

  “I’m happy enough.”

  “Do you think we’re supposed to be happy? As in, what we used to call ‘happy’? Or do you think it settles into something more mature, like ‘satisfaction’?”

  He shrugged. Sam didn’t see it. He wished he could read her face, but he couldn’t, and her hands stopped whatever they had been doing. She reached one out, index extended, and touched the painting’s surface. The paint had gone on thick and was still wet. Sam’s finger made a distinctive cut through it, like a giant comma. He should have been bothered but wasn’t.

  “When I wrote Relegated,” she said, still
facing away from him, “it felt like something had to come out. Something primal inside me saying I needed to get a pen in my hand or my fingers on a keyboard and pour it out. If it didn’t want to come, I would have to entice it, get behind and push if needed. But I couldn’t keep it in. Literally couldn’t. I know what inspired that book, but not the details of how it was born. But maybe it’s not up to me to understand. Maybe it was my job to give it a place to grow, maybe it was always supposed to be what it was supposed to be. Maybe I can’t be applauded or blamed for its creation.”

  “That’s why you have to publish it,” Zach said.

  He thought she might balk at the old dispute, but didn’t know what else to say. Something had shifted in their conversation, he wasn’t sure what.

  Sam turned. She had unbuttoned her shirt and wasn’t wearing a bra. Her smooth skin ran in an unbroken column from face to navel to waist. She held the crimson finger she’d used to touch the canvas in front of him. Behind her, the comma shape cut through the unfinished work.

  “Maybe I can’t be applauded or blamed for ruining your painting,” she said.

  Zach looked from Sam to his art, from his art to Sam. She hadn’t ruined it. She had only made it different. Sam had impressed herself on what he was creating and left her mark. As it should be. And whether that was good or bad was up to the two of them and nobody else.

  “I don’t know what to say, Sam,” Zach said.

  She matched his eyes, blue irises shaking minutely. He could see goose bumps on her chest, and when she slipped the shirt from her shoulders and onto the floor, Zach saw how her nipples stood erect. The studio wasn’t cold. This was coming from somewhere else.

  Sam took her red finger and touched it to her left nipple, dragging a line of paint down her front, impressing his art upon her in the same way she’d impressed herself upon his canvas.

  “Tell me you love me,” she said.

  “Of course, I love you.”

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s true anymore.”

  “Sam, where is this coming from?”

  In front of him, her eyes were still shaking, shining, and wet. Her last sentence had cut him. He felt like he’d been impaled on a spear, and a thousand images flooded his mind: a county fair at night, a meadow, a party, a box with an elastic gold string. Each felt precious, worth dying for.

  “What happened to us, Zach?”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened.”

  “I can’t decide if I’m glad you’re in here or not,” she said. “You need to do what you need to do. And I need to do what I need to do. I’ve been writing a lot lately. I don’t know if it’s any good, but I know it feels like Relegated felt. It has to come out. But why? Why now? You used to do your art, and I didn’t care about mine. I was the whore for the steady job. I was left brain; you were right. We fit. But now, we’re both … ”

  Zach cut Sam off, and wrapped her in his arms, not wanting her to finish the sentence. “Growing pains, Sam. That’s all. They even have a term for it: ‘quarter-life crisis.’ When we all have to grow up, realize we’re not kids anymore, and enter the real world.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But I feel like we’re stepping into it separately.”

  Zach stepped back, breaking their embrace, then reached past Sam, pressed his hand against the canvas, and wiped away the dark shape, the impression fire he’d felt compelled to create, the area of shadows. When he withdrew his hand, the vision was gone as if never there.

  He pressed his paint-covered hand to Sam’s chest and cradled the firm weight of one breast in his palm. The hand moved lazily. She watched his face as Zach’s hand moved to the other side, turning her into a living canvas. She closed her eyes, sighed, and opened them. Then she reached out and pulled Zach’s shirt over his head. Her hands went to his jeans, leaving a red mark. Jeans came off; he pulled one leg out and almost tripped over the other. She pulled off her own slacks, then both her panties and his boxers. His cock, in front of her, looked lazy and tumescent, like a dozing snake.

  His other hand went to the painting. Both hands in reds and oranges and blues, he traced slow, seductive lines up the insides of her legs, to where she was warm, beyond, up her sides, down her arms, along her neck.

  “You’re ruining your painting,” she panted, his hands back between her thighs, painting their facing surfaces. He could feel the heat coming off of her pussy. He wanted to touch it but didn’t know if the paint would harm her. So he kneeled and licked her clit as best he could, her knees slightly bent and her bearing unsteady.

  “I’m not ruining it,” he said. “I’m turning it into something different.”

  Sam’s knees surrendered under his tongue’s ministrations. She stumbled backward, grasped the easel for support, and sent it crashing to the floor. Paint went everywhere. Zach had laid down a sheet of plastic (something he hated, though the landlord would surely approve), but paint on the canvas had been thick and as Sam tumbled onto and ripped it, he saw flecks of paint clear the area covered by the plastic, striking both wall and carpet.

  Sam’s ass was covered in paint. She rolled over to try and look back at it, mashing her tits and hands into the ruined stretcher in the process. She half-stumbled over the easel, almost looking ready to apologize, but was up and looking back. Zach felt his earlier urgency return as he saw Sam’s pussy from behind, back and butt swirled in color above it. He reached for her legs, still feeling her heat on his hand, and pushed them apart enough to get between them. Then his cock was all the way inside, his torso collapsed over her back, the hand not supporting his weight curled around and cupping her swaying tits.

  “Oh, Zach,” Sam moaned. He withdrew slowly, then slid his shaft slowly back into her wet hole. Once seated, he pushed hard into her as if trying to get an extra inch, as close to her as possible. He squeezed the arm around her. Laid his chest flat on her back. Put his cheek against the base of her neck and started to kiss it.

  “I love you, Sam,” he said. He had to let her know. It suddenly seemed very, very important. Desperate, even.

  Like time was thinning.

  Sam’s hand slipped on the canvas, and they nearly spilled. He continued to shove his cock deep inside her. Zach could already feel pressure building, his art orgasm slowly becoming a biological one. Sam was so wet. As he pulled out and pushed his cock into her pussy, it sounded like the washing of a paintbrush. He felt her squeeze him back. She had no free hands, so she did it with all she had, gripping Zach’s shaft like a hug. He felt the ridge of his dick’s head roll along the walls inside her, making his cum want to rise.

  “I want you to be happy,” she said.

  “I am happy.”

  “I don’t want to hold you back.”

  “I’m not held back.”

  “I don’t … ”

  “Sam,” he said, cutting her off.

  She sighed, seeming to surrender. “Oh, God, Zach. Then just make me cum. Make me cum.”

  He pushed himself against her pussy from behind, making shallow, grinding strokes. She reached back between her legs and began stroking her clit. Zach pulled up, seeing paint now smeared across the whole of her back. He looked down and saw it across his own chest. His knees. Her knees. The insides of Sam’s thighs, where he’d touched her.

  Without a word, she gave a giant, heaving moan. Her pussy clenched his cock hard, milking it. Zach continued to stroke. Sam bucked back, and his dick slipped out of her hole. He was at the edge, so instead of inserting his dick back into Sam’s slit, he gripped it in his paint-covered hand and stroked himself until he came, shooting several lines of thick, white cum across her back where it pooled on the multicolored canvas of her skin, stark white against the reds and blues.

  She rolled over, heedless of the paint or collapsed easel. They were both covered, and as they clutched at and touched each other in the afterglow, it moved onto their faces, hair, and everywhere else.

  Sometime later, spent, they fell asleep as two living works of co-created art.
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  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Present Day

  “Zach, we’re going to be late,” Sam said, peeking her head into the studio, where he was sketching.

  Zach hadn’t used the studio much during the two weeks since Sam’s ill-fated visit to the doctor, but he’d at least used it. Sam had insisted. Just as he’d insisted that she carve some time out to work on “something that nurtured her.” Sam had mocked the way he’d phrased it of course, because she was Sam, then followed orders anyway. The rule was that neither had to show the other what they were working on, but they had to do the work. On one level, it seemed counterintuitive that one of the initiatives intended to bring them back into alignment had them spending more time apart, but on another level, they, as individuals, were the pyramid’s base.

  Sam and Zach first, as separate people.

  Sam and Zach next, as a couple.

  Then and only then could they even consider the idea of trying (deliberately, this time) to have a baby.

  Despite Zach’s protests that he was plenty fulfilled, Sam insisted that he spend time creating. Zach, to retaliate, insisted on the same from her: more time spent becoming what her innermost being wanted her to be; a little less time spent with news work.

  “I’m almost finished,” he said. Zach looked up at Sam and felt his heart swoon. She was always stunning, but had taken her look to a new level. Her hair was half pinned back, flowing out of whatever held it in big, loose curls. She wore a slinky, red dress that he wanted badly to tear from her body. It was both incredibly sexy and professional — the kind of dress a girl could get an award in now and be bent over a sink by her husband in later.

  “We need to leave in 10 minutes,” she said. Her expression was almost comical. She looked stressed (of course she was; this was Sam, after all), but she was obviously trying not to nag him. Her teeth were bared in what wanted to be a white smile, but her eyes were almost apologetic. I’m trying to be nice and I love you, the look said, but Jesus, hurry the fuck up.