Unlike other women that he’d been close to, except AJ and Dora, there were no games. Glory never calculated. She simply felt and reacted.
“Can I watch you paint?” she’d asked him another afternoon, her hands on his shoulders as she leaned over him, her breasts pressed into his back.
“No,” he’d growled and then cursed at himself as he saw her face fall. “Fine. But you cannot touch. You must stay over there.”
He’d painted like a madman since she’d come into his life. He was always a hard worker. He’d firmly believed in working on his art every day, no matter if he felt like it or not. But these days he was downright inspired.
It irritated him.
The compulsion, the desire, the need he felt to put his brush to the canvas was completely due to Glory. She’d injected fire into his work, and even he, with his critical eye, could see that he was painting a series that was special, different from his other work. When Maxim had come over a few days before and pointed out that most of his new paintings were all done in the red golds of Glory’s hair, Emin had stubbornly switched to blues.
So it was a blue that she watched him mix with his palette knife, gruffly mixing colors with a confidence that she admired. She had a hundred questions that she wanted to ask but she kept it buttoned, as AJ would say, so she didn’t break his concentration.
Emin liked silence, she’d noticed. And he liked to watch. His family most of all. Glory was fairly sure that he knew much more about them than they even knew. But he didn’t particularly like to be watched himself. Anytime he caught her watching him, she was met with a scowl.
She liked his scowl. She couldn’t say why, in particular. But she did. Same as how she liked his smell after he’d been outside and sweating. He came in and smelled like a man. Sharp and sweaty. The cat in her wanted to roll in the smell, in perfect feline ecstasy, but she knew he wouldn’t like that either.
She watched his hand, so sure, guide the brush across the canvas, leaving a blue green line behind. Just a single, streaking line and Glory already knew that he was painting trees. He was just so good. He managed to catch the essence of it without the exact, constricting form of it.
“Those are different than the trees here,” she said quietly, not wanting to disturb, but needing to speak all the same.
He nodded. “Da. This is Belarusian forest.”
“Where you’re from?”
“Da.”
She chewed on her lip for a second. Trying to swallow down the words.
“Ask your question, Glory,” he said, not looking up from his work.
She let out a surprised little laugh. “How did you know I had a question?”
He looked back at her now, his eyes dark under his brow, his hair curling behind his ears. “You always have question. You are bubbly. Like little river.”
“And you’re like a lake. A mountain lake. No ripples and deep, deep, deep.”
He kept looking at her for another moment before he turned back to his painting, dipped his brush in a different, darker blue, and started adding a lake to his painting, just to please her.
She smiled at his back as she watched him.
“You never asked original question,” he prompted her.
“Do you miss it? Belarus?”
He paused, mixed colors again and resumed. “Da. Every day. My motherland. But it was not safe for us. Anton especially, after Navuka. Navuka was a government organization back then. Now? Who knows? But then, we knew the government was calling shots. The president there, he is bad man. He makes people,” he snapped his fingers, “disappear.”
Emin shrugged his shoulders. “It was right decision to come here.”
Glory bit her lip and turned to look out the window for a moment, the cheerful afternoon light soothing her. She thought about that word, motherland. So perfect. “I miss my motherland too.”
“We will find it. We will find your mother. You will return. You won’t be sad forever.”
Glory twisted a hunk of her hair in her hand. “But I will,” Glory replied. “Because here, I’m sad without my mother. But there, if I get back to her, I would be so sad without…” she trailed off.
Emin had too much pride to ask her to finish the sentence. Without AJ? Dora? All the Malashoviks? Or just him? Just Emin?
He didn’t think the answer would be good for him. No matter what it was. So he didn’t press. He simply kept painting. Even when the light changed. Even when AJ stopped by to pick up Glory for dinner.
He kept painting until it was too late to barely even see the canvas. And when he looked at what he’d painted, the trees, the lake, he realized he’d added a river into the painting as well. Painted with bright blues and greens, it popped out of the painting like light.