Say Yes by Kandi Steiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Art of Illusion

“This is stupid,” Liam said, crossing his arms and scowling at the canvas.

I sighed, but couldn’t fight back my smile at the frown he wore, at the pouty lip and hair hanging in his eyes. He was being a petulant child. I found it strangely adorable.

“It’s not stupid. It’s a small step that can take your paintings to the next level.”

“I don’t need to sketch first. I know what I’m painting.”

“Maybe so, but big brushes make big mistakes that are hard to undo. Better to make those mistakes in pencil so they can be erased and redone.”

He inhaled the longest breath before letting it out between loose lips, making a horse sound.

I chuckled. “Come on. It’ll be fun,” I promised, holding the pencil up again.

He eyed it angrily before another huff, but resigned, he finally took it and started his sketch.

“Good boy,” I purred in his ear.

I tried to walk away, but he snatched my wrist, pulling me down until we were face to face.

“You keep talking like that, and the only work that will get done around here will be me working on making you come.”

“Focus, Mr. Benson,” I said, kissing his lips swiftly before I wiggled out of his grasp. “And maybe we can have playtime after class.”

“You’re cruel.”

“Hey, this was your idea,” I reminded him.

With another dramatic sigh, he peeled his eyes off me and back to his canvas, and I put on the Jagged Little Pill album by Alanis Morissette before taking the seat next to him.

Hours passed with little being said between us. When the music stopped, I’d get up long enough to change CDs before I’d be back next to him. And when our sketches were complete, Liam tossed his pencil behind him and threw me over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes, hauling me to the bed.

This was the way our week went after that night of the Olympics kicking off.

We watched our country battle for gold, while we each overcame our own hurdles abroad. You would have thought I was torturing Liam, for the way he fought me on every little lesson I tried to teach regarding how he could hone his craft.

Sketching was just the beginning. We branched into edging and blending, desaturation and color temperature, and though he threw a fit nearly every step of the way, I could see it at the end of each day, how proud he was of what he’d done, how it was clicking for him — the way one small adjustment could lead to a huge impact on his work.

To be fair, Liam wasn’t the only one getting fussy.

There were times I’d be deep into a painting, and he’d pull me from my chair, making me put the brush down when I was so far in the zone, it felt impossible to walk away. He’d choose those exact moments to take me back out into the real world, and every time, he’d lead me to something new, something unseen, something to shake me up — like reading to an older gentleman at a retirement home on the edge of the city, or eating pork blood cake, a Tuscan delicacy.

It wasn’t always about taking me out for bite-size experiences like what we had on our yes night, though. Sometimes, he’d stand behind me when I was intensely focused and cover my eyes with his hands. He’d hold them there, just breathing, until I realized my breathing was shallow and tense, and his was long and relaxed, and we’d just breathe together until mine matched his.

I’d critique his work technically, and he’d critique mine creatively. We were pushing each other to be better and, I had to hand it to him, he’d been right that night by the river.

We were a perfect balance.

One night, when we were both tired and had been working entirely too long, I hit my boiling point.

“No, do it again,” Liam said, dragging his hand across the canvas and marring my work so that I had no choice.

I gaped at the sight of his fingertip smudges destroying the field of sunflowers on my canvas. “Liam! How could you do that?!” I whipped around, tears stinging my eyes. “We’ve been here for hours. It’s ruined. How could you… how could—”

“It’s boring, Harley. It’s tired and you know it.”

“You’re so rude. Do you know that? You’re the rudest boy I’ve ever met.”

His nostrils flared. He hated it when I called him a boy.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said, wiping my tears before they could fall. “I want you to leave.”

He sighed, bending at the waist until his eyes were level with mine. “Harley, look at me.”

I shook my head, eyes on my feet, arms crossed hard over my chest.

“Please.”

My throat tightened, exhaustion and weariness making it impossible for me to discern what I actually wanted in that moment. Reluctantly, I pulled my gaze up to meet his.

“You can do better. Okay? That’s what I’m saying. Just like I hated spending an entire night on stupid blending, you knew it would help me. You knew I was capable of more.”

I swallowed, not wanting to admit he was right.

“You’re so focused on getting everything right — the lighting, the shade, the edges, the blends. You should have seen the wrinkles between your eyes, and the way your shoulders were tied up to your ears while you painted this past hour.” He shook his head. “What if you looked at it a different way? What if you gave yourself permission to not have to get it right the first time, but to simply play? What if instead of intense focus, you laughed and drank wine while you painted, and you didn’t get frustrated at the first misstep, but instead took it as a cue to go a different direction, to flow with your creativity instead of trying to wrangle it?”

I couldn’t explain it to anyone who wasn’t there — not Angela or my parents or Professor Beneventi — but the words Liam spoke to me in that moment seemed to pull back a curtain that I thought my whole life was a wall. He revealed a whole world behind that curtain, one that had been there all along, but that I had been too afraid to find.

I sniffed, because somehow, the realization hurt as much as it freed me.

“Turn around and look at your painting again,” he said, and when I did, it all made sense. I no longer saw the marred lines of his fingers in the paint as a nuisance. I saw them as a savior. I saw endless possibilities. And beneath them, I only saw a painting that fell short in every possible way, that — had I have finished it the way I wanted to — would have just been another oil painting of a field of sunflowers that anyone with technical training could have painted.

Anyone.

It didn’t leave a mark, it didn’t have a soul or a style that was my own.

When I looked back at Liam, my eyes welled with tears again. “This is so hard.”

He smirked, grabbing my hand and leading me over to my bed. He sat us down on the edge, wiping the tears off my cheeks before he framed my face in his hands.

“Why do you feel the need to be perfect?”

I closed my eyes, releasing another tiny river of tears as my chest split open at the truth that wanted to pour out of me just the same.

“Because I never can be.”

When I opened my eyes again, Liam was frowning, his head tilted as he tried to figure out what I was trying to say.

I held up my right hand between us, wiggling my fingers and nubbins. The words I’d never spoken aloud to anyone felt like steel bars around my heart, each beat throttled, each breath too tight.

“I’m defective,” I whispered. “I have been my whole life. I never stood a chance to be perfect in anything, in any way, because of how I was born. I’ll never be the perfect daughter, or the perfect athlete, or the perfect wife.” A sob choked me with that admission. “Or the perfect mother,” I whispered through the tears. Finally, my eyes found Liam’s again, and the pain reflected in his irises only made it easier for me to break. “So, I try to be the perfect artist, because it’s the only thing I actually think I might be able to do.”

Liam swallowed, shaking his head as his hands tightened where he held me. “Jesus, Harley.”

“I know,” I said, shaking my head and looking at my lap. “It’s stupid.”

“No. It’s not stupid. Everything you feel is valid. It’s real. Which is why it hurts so damn much.”

I nodded, pressing my lips together to fight against another wave of tears.

“And now, my parents are having a baby. I should be excited, Liam. I should be happy.” Emotion warped my face again, and I shook my head against another wave of tears. “But all I can think about is how they waited until I was gone to try again, how I was too much to handle, and how they’re probably thinking maybe this time we can get it right.”

Liam let out a long, slow breath, his hands rubbing my arms. “It’s okay to feel that way.”

“It’s awful.”

“I have to tell you something,” he said, leaning down until I looked at him again. “You’re right.”

The pain in my chest was too much to bear.

“You’re right. You’re not perfect,” he continued. “You’re far from it. But you know what else? Perfect is boring. Perfect is safe. Perfect is stress and anxiety and pretending like you have some sort of control over life, when the truth is, none of us do.”

He shook his head, a little smile on his lips as he swiped his thumb across the line of my jaw.

“Perfect is the last thing I want in a daughter or wife or the mother of my child. And it’s the last thing I wish for you. Because you, Harley Chambers, are so goddamn beautiful and smart and charming and funny and stubborn and maddening, that it would be a shame — no, a crime — for perfection to take all that away.”

Something between a laugh and a sob left my chest, and Liam pulled me in closer, his lips hovering over mine.

“I know I’m not much older than you, but what happened with…” He swallowed. “What I have learned is that nothing is promised. Nothing. I don’t believe in love or hate or good luck or bad luck or mistakes, and I most certainly don’t believe in perfection. Because life is just that — life. It’s hard most days. Some days, it’s okay. And in the end, you only have this very moment. There’s no sense worrying about impressing other people or driving yourself crazy trying to be something or do something when right now, today, here,” he whispered, squeezing my hands in his. “This is it. Let go of that desire to be something else and find whatever joy you can in being exactly who you are. Do it now,” he added. “While you still have breath in your lungs.”

His words mixed up the wildest tornado inside me, thoughts I’d never had before swirling and blowing a hundred miles an hour, knocking everything off the walls, ripping the house I’d built my entire life from its foundation.

“I think there’s a lot of beauty and poetry in what you just said,” I finally whispered. “But… I also don’t think we can live expecting tragedy and death around every corner. Because what kind of life is that?” I shook my head, pulling back a little so I could look into his eyes. “It’s a hopeless one.”

He let out a breath of a laugh, his eyes flicking back and forth between mine. “Well, that’s just it,” he said. “Hope is the most dangerous of all.”

A long silence fell between us, the tears drying on my face, and then all I could feel was the overwhelming need to be close to him.

I climbed into his lap, straddling him, pressing my lips to his, and winding my hands up into his hair as he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me into him. All I wanted was to soak up his sadness, to replace it with the love he insisted didn’t exist.

What a treacherous game to play.

It went on like this, the days bleeding into the nights. We watched Naim Süleymanoglu win his third gold medal and comfort the man he beat as we struggled for our first championships and held each other up along the way. We watched Kerri Strug endure heartbreaking pain and injury to bring honor to her country while we endured discomfort and pain of our own to honor creating something worth existing.

But in working the way we were, our previous boundaries we’d set were completely obliterated.

We were together every waking moment of the day — if not in class, then after, and all into the night. I slept in Liam’s bed, or he slept in mine. We ate every meal together. The only time we had to ourselves was when I was at the museum — and he usually took that time to nap or hang out with Thomas.

Angela didn’t have to tell me she was worried. I could see it in the way she watched me, the way her brows furrowed every time she saw us together.

“I hope you know better than I do what you’re getting yourself into,” she said to me one morning, pouring a cup of coffee for herself before getting two more mugs down for me and Liam. She filled them to the top and handed them to me, her eyes heavy with warning. “Remember what he told you. Remember what he said he can give you, and what he can’t.”

“I know,” I assured her.

And I did know. I hadn’t forgotten our arrangement, and every day, he dropped subtle reminders in our conversations.

He didn’t believe in love.

He didn’t believe in anything.

He had nothing to give to anyone.

He didn’t even know what he wanted in his own life.

And then, as if he could sense the thin line we were walking, too — Liam pulled away from me that very same day.

It was sudden and abrupt, so much so that for a while I wondered if I was just imagining it. But he didn’t come over after my internship that evening, or the next, or the one after that. For three days, I only saw him in class, and even there he seemed cold and distant, like he was retreating back into the shell I’d found him under at the beginning of the summer.

He’s having a bad week.

He wants to be left alone.

He doesn’t want to be with me all the time.

He doesn’t want me like that.

He doesn’t want to give himself to me like that.

All of this I knew. I repeated it to myself over and over, as if the repetition would make it sink in and become an unchangeable truth.

Yet, on July twenty-eighth, when news of a terrorist bombing in Centennial Park reached Italy, and the world watched our Olympians with bated breath, I felt an overwhelming sense of urgency to seize the day, to soak up life’s precious dew, to heed every verity Liam had breathed into existence for me.

The school called for a three-day suspension of classes, and that was all the permission I needed.

“Come away with me,” I said breathlessly on Liam’s doorstep after running the few blocks to his dorm.

He looked at the small suitcase in my hand, then back at me, and for the longest time, he stood there with his chest heaving each new breath.

And though his frown warned me that we shouldn’t, and his shoulders tensed as if trying to restrain him, to keep him from giving in, to remind him of all the reasons he should say no — his eyes lit up like I was all he’d ever wanted.

Like I was all he’d ever need again.

I watched a war rage on within that man as he silently packed a bag, and then he grabbed my hand, and we caught the first train out of the city.