by Danika Stone
“All right.”
She smiled, glancing over at him.
“It’s nothing bad, Cole... don’t worry. I just don’t want to send you in without a little... preparation.”
“That’s probably what I should’ve done,” Cole confessed with an embarrassed laugh. Ava winked.
“Yeah, well... that would’ve helped, but I think it turned out okay.”
He grinned and tugged at her right arm until she let go of the wheel. Her hand lay between them on the bench seat.
“So my dad’s a hippie,” Ava began, her voice becoming matter-of-fact. “You should just know that going in. Just accept it. He really is that weird. It’s not just some show, or something pretend. It’s him.”
Cole let out a bark of laughter.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She glared at him in annoyance.
“Sorry,” Cole said, forcing himself to stop laughing, calming his expression. Ava sighed, her eyes going back to the road. Cole began to trace down her wrist toward her hand, following bones and muscles whose lines he knew from figure drawing classes and sculpting.
“I’m not kidding, Cole. It’s how my dad is,” she said tartly. “He’s an amazing person, but he’s not like... well... other dads. He’s different. That freaks some people out.”
She looked at him nervously, and Cole squeezed her fingers in response.
“Hey. I don’t care. It’s all good... tell me about him.”
Ava smiled.
“Well, I told you a bit about him before. He’s a Buddhist, if anything, but he’s cool with all different kinds of ideas and theories on life. Believes in reincarnation... past lives... psychic abilities... that we need to learn from our mistakes.”
Ava paused, wondering how much to say, but this was Cole, so she kept going.
“Dad’s just kind of an interesting guy. Very open-minded.” She laughed as she stared at the highway. “God, you should hear him and Marcus talking. It’s like they’re the same person at different ages.... hilarious when they argue!” Ava grinned. “And do not believe my dad when he starts claiming he was a saint in university. He wasn’t.”
“Sounds like my kind of guy,” Cole said. “Chim’s great.”
Ava nodded.
“There’s other stuff too... He has this way of...” she frowned, wondering how to phrase it. “... of reading people… knowing things about them that he shouldn’t be able to tell. I don’t know how to describe it better than that. He’s just really good at understanding what makes people tick. He dabbles in tarot cards, palmistry, tea-cup reading... all of that stuff that makes most people kind of... uncomfortable...”
Cole turned her hand over and began circling the pads of her fingers.
“Do you believe in all of that?” he asked quietly.
She peered at him before turning her attention back to the road.
“Well, I don’t know about all of it...” Ava said warily. “I mean, I’m open to the idea of past lives and all that... and some of it I totally believe – my Dad can be really accurate with tea cup readings. In fact, I’m going to get him to do mine when he gets back. But there are a lot of things in life I just don’t know for sure... and I guess I’m okay with that.”
She was worried that, somehow, this was going to change things. He was still smiling, waiting for her to go on.
“But yeah,” she said softly, “I believe in most of it. I mean, there are things in life sometimes that just seem to fit.”
“Like us,” Cole said. He lifted her palm to his face, resting his cheek against it.
Ava smiled, heart thudding. This was half of what scared her about Cole… that he could feel it too.
“I... I felt like I already knew you when I first met you,” she said. “This connection I couldn’t explain. I still feel it now, just stronger.” Ava’s face shifted, the guarded expression moving into mischief. “I remember you telling me that after the opening,” she said with a smirk, dropping her voice to a sexy drawl. “It was a great line, Cole.”
He placed a kiss against her palm, then brought it down to the seat, twining his fingers with hers.
“I keep telling you it wasn’t a line. I’ve never said that to someone before.”
She couldn’t keep the smile off her lips. Cole leaned closer, his voice low.
“I actually knew as soon as I talked to you outside the class that day,” he said solemnly, “when we talked about Donatello. Something just clicks when we’re together. I haven’t felt like that since—”
His words stopped, swallowed up by something else. Ava glanced over at him. Cole's face warred with some dark emotion, pain hidden just under the surface.
“Since..?”
He swallowed hard, throat bobbing.
“Since Hanna, actually.”
Ava let her eyes slide back to the road as she squeezed his hand. There was a lull in the conversation and then Cole spoke, though his voice sounded more hollow than before. Emptier.
“Hanna and I were really close growing up, and when she was around I just felt... safe.”
His fingers were tight against hers, as if she anchored him to this moment. Ava waited, unwilling to break it, wondering what Hanna Thomas must have been like to instill this kind of undying love in those around her.
“God, I miss her,” Cole said brokenly.
Ava smiled sadly, her thumb running over his knuckles in comfort.
“I can tell.”
: : : : : : : : : :
They spent the next day catching up on the daily grind of real life. Cole was back at his place doing laundry and cleaning. Ava was in her studio painting. Cole had agreed to pose for her and she had every intention of making him follow through. She grinned, remembering the conversation as she’d dropped him off. He was nervous about posing nude... but Ava refused to back down. As she’d pointed out, with Marcus and Suzanne gone, the studio would be completely hers for the next week and a half. It was the ideal opportunity.
She’d decided that this new painting was going to be a study in musculature, and Cole Thomas, naked, would be the perfect model for that. The frame needed to be built, the canvas stretched, and the raw fabric primed before she could begin.
That was her goal for the day.
It took her all afternoon to get the frame completed, but Ava was determined to finish the canvas so she could paint when she returned. As early evening darkened to night, Ava was still upstairs, blasting music, large gesso brush in hand. She had just dipped the brush again, working the heavy medium into the last few patches of raw canvas, when she heard someone coming up the stairs. She grinned, excited that Cole had decided to join her.
“C’mon in,” Ava shouted without looking up. “The canvas is just about done. Anytime you want to strip down and let me start sketching, I’m ready.”
Finishing the last strokes, she looked up, grinning. Her happiness flipped into hot embarrassment as she laid her eyes on Kip Chambers. He was leaning inside the doorway, his arms crossed on his chest, smiling down at her, an eyebrow lifted in interest.
“Strip down, huh?” he teased. “You’re gonna have to buy me dinner first, Booker. I’m not that easy.”
“Oh shit,” Ava said, her face flooded with colour. “I... uh... I’m sorry Kip... I thought you were someone else.”
He laughed, stepping inside as Ava set her gesso brush back into the container. She stood up, rubbing white-flecked hands against her jeans.
“Yeah, I figured. Though I’m a little insulted you didn’t ask me,” he said with a wink, brushing her shoulder as he walked up to the canvases. “Might have been fun.”
She smiled nervously, getting out of his way, arms crossing her chest. Kip Chambers was good-looking, of course but he was a goddamned celebrity too! There was no way she’d ask him to pose for her. The other, more likely, possibility was that he was flirting with her, and while that was flattering, she was a little irritated by it. Ava wasn’t interested! She sure as hell h
adn’t forgotten what she saw in the back room of the gallery. This was before bringing Cole into the mix.
Being with him changed everything.
Chambers paused, flipping through the canvases he’d seen before. The steely sky and a calm ocean. The one that looked like a bird in a sun-bright sky. A colourful one of tree branches overhead and several others. Now that he was here, Ava found herself unsure what to do. Kip had a bigger-than-life personality. She was more used to him in a gallery space or the cover of a magazine. It was weird to see him standing next in her cluttered easel. The minutes stretched on, and he peeked back at her, seeing her waiting, arms crossed.
“Relax. I was kidding, Ava,” he said with a sigh. “It was a bad joke.”
When Ava still didn’t answer, he shook his head and went back to the canvases.
“I was actually wondering if I could see your progress with the mural project. I’d like to start planning my sections. Raya’s been riding my ass about it.”
Feeling a little more settled now that the topic was business, Ava came up beside him, lifting the drop cloths on the panels.
“I finished them a few days ago,” she said, pulling the paint-splattered sheet to the side. “I was going to call you but I was away for a few…”
She turned back to Chambers, about to say more, but his eyes were riveted to the canvas, mouth agape. It was the same look she must’ve had seeing the Francis Bacon painting of the destroyed head with the sides of beef, like wings on either side. The angel of death.
Kip’s face was horrified.
“My god, how can this...?” he gasped, then swallowed audibly. “This is... I think I...” His words disappeared. He looked over at her in terror, then stepped forward, his hand going to her arm.
“Where is this place?” he asked, voice rising shrilly. “I know it, Ava... I’ve dreamt this.”
She stepped back in shock. Her uneasiness was back, full force.
“I honestly don’t know,” she admitted tremulously, “I just paint what I feel most times... and I think I might have been there before at some point... or saw a picture… or maybe dreamed it...” She shifted uncomfortably. “…maybe.”
Kip stepped closer and her eyes jumped to his face. The anguish she saw there made no sense to her.
“I’ve dreamed this place too,” he said, reaching out to put a hand back on her arm.
Kip’s face was horror-struck, his fingers tight and shaking. Ava quelled the urge to wrench her arm free, even as his next words filled her with panic.
“I think I’ve been there before, Ava.”
Chapter 30: Breakdown
Kip Chambers sat on the floor of Ava’s studio, his head in his hands. He had been in the same position for the last ten minutes. Ava was desperate for an excuse to leave, but she had no idea how to get him out. Kip sat against the wall, chattering with rising panic, and she didn’t know how to stop him. It struck her that if she thought Cole’s intensity was unsettling, she had no idea how much scarier it could get.
Now she knew.
“...and I had the dream all the time when I was a kid...” Kip gasped, his words a stream of consciousness. “For as long back as I can remember.... It was this dark city and the masses of people pushing and shoving around me… and I knew I had to leave! Go someplace where I could breathe... Fuck! It was awful – I’d always be trying to wake up, but I never could! And then the dream would change… and there’d these missionaries…” He glanced up, face wild. “My mom was sent to a residential school when she was a kid, you know? So I KNOW the crazy shit that happened with them. Horrible, fucked-up stuff. You can’t imagine it, Ava, but that happened… that HAPPENED to my people! Mom always thought my dreams were visions of what had happened to our people! But they… they never stopped!”
“A lot of kids get nightmares, Kip,” Ava said softly, trying not to startle him. “Doesn’t have to mean—”
“No!” he cried, interrupting her. “It MEANS something! You see, it’s the city… THAT CITY! I kept dreaming about these missionaries in black robes coming after our people… I could see children running and hiding... men and women fighting… trying to get away from these monsters... who destroyed the Hopi and all the other indigenous peoples... Th- these people who weren’t really like people at all... they were awful… like monsters... giving out smallpox infected blankets, trading for whiskey, taking our land, killing… so much killing!”
He angrily rubbed away tears as he struggled for breath, his body crumpled down. Ava watched him in unmoving horror. She sat on the couch on the other side of the room. There was no way she was getting closer. His meltdown was really freaking her out and she was primed to run if she needed to.
Her eyes scuttled over to the stairs, and then back to him again.
“Kip,” she said carefully, “it’s just a painting.”
“But it’s NOT!” he roared.
She jumped.
“That place you painted,” he shouted, pointing at the three half-draped canvases, “is EXACTLY my dream! Like I’ve been there a thousand times before... I have been there! I fucking DREAMED IT ALL!”
“Okay...” she said quietly.
In the back of her mind, Ava was calculating how to just leave Kip Chambers in her studio. She didn’t care anymore, she just needed to get the hell away. But Kip was talking again.
“...night after night I’d wake up screaming... terrified that these men in black robes were coming to kill me... I kept dreaming of millions of First Nations’ people dead; children starving, whole tribes destroyed, sent away, starving... There was so much pain and death. So much fighting… but the black robes kept coming...”
Ava frowned at the description, unwilling to interrupt. Kip seemed to be somewhere else now, his eyes distant and hazy.
“...You can’t imagine how real it was for me... I was terrified of the missionaries… they were the demons of my nightmares. Had the dream so many times that my parents finally sent me to a doctor. He called them night terrors... prescribed me anti-anxiety medications... had me drugged up from the time I was five until I was fifteen...”
“Oh my god,” Ava muttered, her hand coming up to her mouth. “That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah,” Kip said, “You know what the really awful part was?”
Ava waited, not sure she wanted to hear the answer, because Kip was reacting the way she had reacted to that painting in Wilkins’ class… and she didn’t want to know what that meant for her.
“The worst part… the really fucked up thing about it,” Kip said, dropping his voice to a hoarse whisper, “is that when they drugged me up, I still had the dream, Ava, only I didn’t care about anyone anymore. It didn’t scare me as much. I could see it. Could watch it all. It came to me... as I got older... I wasn’t scared of it because I was one of the black robes too.... I just didn’t know it.”
He took a shuddering breath, his head dropping down, before looking back up at her. Tears ran down his cheeks, his eyes red and raw.
“It was me all along, don’t you understand?!? I WAS A MISSIONARY… and then... and then...” His words stuttered to a stop, breathing in gulps.
Ava felt a sudden wave of protectiveness. ‘He only meant well…’ a voice inside her whispered, but she hardly noticed. Her thoughts were on Kip, his dark head tipped down, strands of hair dangling into his eyes. He looked so lost.
“It’s okay, Qaletaqa,” she said, “it’s gonna be okay...”
He stopped talking at her words, wiping his face.
“No one calls me that,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Well... I guess my mom used to when I was little, but not anymore.”
He laughed again, a bit louder. Ava's cheeks were burning. She wasn’t even sure why she’d used his full name.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Kip said shakily, shoving his hair roughly off his face, “you can call me that if you want to... no one else though.”
“What does it mean?” she asked shyly. “Your n
ame, I mean… I’ve read it before but never knew.”
He smiled wanly.
“My grandmother named me,” he said quietly. “Qaletaqa is Hopi for guardian of the people.” His lips quivered, his gaze going back to the distant wall. “My grandmother thought she’d called a spirit into me with my naming, but I never thought that. More just a fucked-up kid with an overactive imagination …”
He chuckled again, his face growing calmer. The panic seemed to recede with his laughter, and he let his head thud back against the wall, finishing his story.
“Once I hit puberty, the nightmares slowed down, until they were only once or twice a month... and then a few times a year... and then by the time I was out of high school they just... stopped.” Kip nodded at Ava’s canvas. “Until today.” His expression rippled, the worry returning. “I’m not kidding… that means something, Ava.”
She nodded, wishing she knew what it was.
Ava watched as Kip Chambers pulled himself together. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, sniffling loudly, then straightened his clothing. This done, he cleared his throat and stood up. Walking over to the three canvases, he tugged at the drop cloth, hiding them from view.
Chambers turned around, fidgeting uncomfortably.
“I’ve... uh... got to think about what I’m going to paint on top of those, if anything...” He took a slow breath, calm returned. “It’s just kind of... too much, you know?”
Ava nodded. It was like a storm had passed, leaving him ravaged and weary. This Kip Chambers she could deal with... just not the volatile one from minutes earlier.
“I feel like I’ve got this connection with you,” he muttered.
Ava frowned, crossing her arms. His words stirred something inside her.
“How so...?”
He shrugged, shoving his hands in his pockets and leaning against the wall. He looked like a skate punk again, only a bit more fragile.
“You’re a graffiti artist too,” he explained. “I get that... And you’re nice and funny and—”
“I’m with someone,” she interrupted, voice sharp.
Kip shook his head (though Ava could’ve sworn she saw the hint of a smile pulling up his mouth).