Artistic License (4 page)

Sophy yanked the cushion from behind her back, threw it at Dale’s head and quirked a brow at Melissa.

“I thought you got rid of this pest months ago,” she said, grinning.

“He can’t resist me,” her cousin replied, deadpan. She picked up the discarded cushion and smoothed it. Melissa lived by the gospel of the pick up, smooth, straighten, dust, wipe and polish. Sophy lived by a system of scrawled post-it notes to remind her to change the sheets and clean the bathroom once a week. She usually remembered to do the washing when she woke up and couldn’t find any clean underwear. They had so far managed to live together for four years without excessive homicidal impulses on either side.

“I do feel her fatal fascination,” Dale agreed. “Or my radiator is shot and I need a lift to work.” His levity fell into an uncharacteristically solemn expression. “Seriously, though, Soph, you
are
okay?”

“Seriously, I’m fine,” Sophy returned. “It’s always horrible when it gets that bad, but it turned out to be more embarrassing than anything.”

“I don’t know,” said Melissa lightly, picking up her coffee mug. “I saw the footage on the news when I got home from the hospital last night. The hot security guy must have been a bit of a consolation.”

Sophy choked on the finger of toast she’d just snitched from her cousin’s plate.

“What?” she managed around a cough, licking a smear of margarine from her thumb. Jeeves leaned closer.

“The sandy-haired cutie who looked like Tom Hiddleston.” Melissa made a noise of approval. “I totally would.”

“Uh, ex-boyfriend. Right here,” Dale said dryly, and both women ignored him.

“Oh. Right.” Sophy forced a smile. “Yeah, I guess.”

Casting around quickly for a new subject, she noticed that her cousin’s wavy blonde hair had gained four or five pink streaks since she’d left the hospital the previous evening.

“Nice to see you were so prostrated with anxiety that you managed to dye your hair,” she said, snorting.

“Done out of love, poppet, done out of love,” Melissa drawled unrepentantly. “Were you all right getting a lift home with Lisa this morning? I could have come and got you.”

“No, it was fine. Lisa lives out by the medical centre anyway and she was heading in for a class at nine.” Sophy stole the last finger of toast. “Is there any more bread? I’m starving.”

“I did the shop yesterday while you were swooning your way into the headlines. Your artery-clogging loaf of white is in the pantry. Enjoy your premature death at sixty.” Melissa shoved Dale’s hand away from her coffee mug and rose to her feet. “Didn’t they feed you at the hospital?” she asked as she took the empty plate to the dishwasher.

“Oh.” Sophy thought back to the night before and Mick Hollister’s expression when he’d got up to leave and had finally noticed the contents of her dinner tray, the quiche not improved by having sat around for two hours. He’d handed her the sack of Thai food without a word and vanished from the room with that characteristic purposeful stride before she could protest. It had been her favourite: chicken stir-fry with cashew nuts, in quantities that could feed a small family. “No, they did.” She shook her head and rallied her fleeing wits. “But breakfast was at about six o’clock this morning. It was two Weet-bix and they forgot the milk.”

Melissa and Dale departed for the tourist bureau where they worked, in a flurry of arm touches and admonishments to spend the morning in bed. Sophy, who until that moment had fully intended to pack up her stuff and head straight to campus to start prepping her new piece, suddenly felt exhausted in the wake of the extroverts.

Walking wearily into her bedroom, she scooped up yesterday’s discarded clothing options, flung them over her desk chair, pushed a dog-eared
Harry Potter
book out of her way and flopped down on the bed. The sun shone red against her closed eyelids. She always got the sun in the morning; Melissa’s room trapped it in the afternoon. She opened her eyes and enjoyed the sensation of coming home after the long, sterile night in the hospital. She had always loved this room. The house belonged to her aunt and uncle, who had since moved to a large modern homestead ten minutes down the road by Lake Hayes. When she and Melissa had been growing up and before they’d started boarding school at thirteen in Dunedin, the nearest city, she had spent the afternoons at her cousin’s home while her parents were at work. This had then been the spare room. They’d taken it over with toys and forts and lip-synched to the latest pop songs, secure in the perks of being only children with no brothers on hand to witness the humiliation.

In the fundamentals, the bedroom hadn’t changed much. The wallpaper was still a pink floral nightmare better suited to an elderly spinster’s nightgown and the lightshade was a fantastically fringed homage to the seventies. Her current student budget didn’t lend itself to extensive renovation, although she and Melissa had been in total agreement that a splurge was necessary when it came to the brown shagpile carpet.

“It’s like somebody skinned Chewbacca,” Melissa had said with a shudder.

Sophy shoved a pillow behind her head and glanced at the bedside clock, wondering if she could fit in a decent nap before she had to be on campus for lunch. A warm furry presence appeared at her back, drooly chin resting on the curve of her waist, tail beating the bedspread with rhythmic thumps. Tucking her hand under her cheek, she closed her eyes again and began to drift.

She managed not to think about a pair of kind grey eyes for an entire six minutes.

Chapter Three

Sophy’s hand slid rapidly across the parchment, lines webbing out and shading into familiar features. She was impatient as she blew loose charcoal from the page, eager and intent on her work. She could usually tell right from the beginning of a new piece if it was going to succeed or not and she felt the magic with this one.

It was four days since the incident, as she thought of it, and Mick had called her cell at breakfast to say that he had the morning off and could sit for a couple of hours if she was still interested. She had appreciated that he had made
some
effort to disguise the raging hope that she might have changed her mind in the interim.

So far he had been an ideal model, statue-still and not inclined to chatter, although the first half-hour had been a bit excruciating. Paid life models were accustomed to the process, could discard the entirety of their clothing as calmly and carelessly as the average human being would take off their gloves or coat. Roped-in amateurs usually had a few more qualms. And Sophy suspected that Mick had more than most.

For a man who had a body from the cover of a fitness magazine, he was either remarkably modest or just seriously lacking in self-esteem. His face was not, perhaps, the stuff of teen idols, but she was truly unable to see it as anything but striking. There were millions of different faces out there, features that ranged from clean-cut and symmetrical to weak-chinned and beady-eyed, but on the whole many people began to blur together. Mick was so distinctly his own person that she found it difficult to tear her eyes away from his face and keep track of what her fingers were doing.

He was starting to roll his left shoulder just a fraction, keeping the movement slow and narrow in case it distracted her focus. Sophy flicked a glance at the clock and winced.

“Sorry, it’s been almost two hours. Do you want to take a break?”

“No, I’m good.” Mick stood up and did a full stretch, rotating his neck and arms in a way that set off a chain reaction through his pectoral and abdominal muscles, like a ripple through a wave pool. Sophy hastily averted her gaze. “Keep going. You seem to be on a roll with it.”

“You’re doing great. I really appreciate this, Mick. I’ve had a concept sketch in mind for this piece for weeks, but I haven’t been able to find a suitable model anywhere.”

He seemed uncomfortable with any subject that touched on his appearance, so she didn’t elaborate. It was true, however. This work was her intended entry for the upcoming national sculpture competition and the rules were explicit that artists could not draw on their imagination but must use a life model. As Sophy literally needed an Olympian-sized figure from which to sketch and the bars and souvenir shops of Queenstown were rife with lanky tourists but distinctly lacking in body builders, she had been out of luck.

“You’re interested in Greek mythology, then?” Mick broke a long stretch of silence to ask, taking the opportunity to move as he did so. At her impatient gesture, he grinned and returned his fist to the arranged position, folded knuckles pressed to his denim-clad thigh.

She had to be fully immersed in her art before she dared to be bossy.

“Love it. I did my undergraduate degree in Business Studies at the university in Dunedin,” she said. “But I minored in Classics and those were my favourite papers. I was always fascinated by Hades and I’ve been wanting to do an Underworld sculpture for years.”

Mick’s attention seemed to have stopped at the first part of her explanation.

“
Business Studies?
” he repeated, and his tone would have been more applicable had she confessed to an educational background in the circus ring or strip club.

Sophy couldn’t help laughing.

“For the record, it’s going to ruin my sketch if your jawbone drops to the floor again,” she said, smudging a charcoal shadow with the side of her thumb. “And I might have taken exception to your raging scepticism if it hadn’t been the most boring three years of my life.”

“I wasn’t implying that you don’t seem particularly commerce-minded,” Mick said hastily, then paused. “No, actually, I was implying that. You don’t seem at all commerce-minded.”

“I’m not,” replied Sophy, not offended. “Sorry, could you just move your arm up a little? No, the left one. Thanks. I learned to balance accounts and spin a marketing pitch with the best of them, but it was a steep learning curve and I probably forgot half of it the moment I grabbed the degree paper. The statistics requirement was a bit of a stretch and I didn’t enjoy all the group work. I still have nightmares about the words “class participation”. In art history and Classics lectures, you can just sit in the back of a dark room and look at beautiful pictures, you know.”

She grinned at him and it belatedly occurred to her that they were getting on very well. Her shyness of him was breaking down into familiar friend status at a more rapid pace than she’d ever experienced. She just genuinely
liked
him.

“So why didn’t you major in Humanities? It’s obviously where your interests lie.” Mick obeyed her silent gesture and turned his head to the left, giving her an excellent view of that wonderful profile. He probably wished he had half as much nose, but Sophy thought it gave him a sort of…Caesar vibe. The tendons flexed in his immense shoulders and biceps, right down through the ropy cords of his forearms.

She had never found excessive muscles that attractive in the past, unlike Melissa who watched every televised rugby game for reasons that had nothing to do with the score or team pride. If she’d thought about it, Sophy would have assumed that such physiques were entirely dependent on a man spending a narcissistic amount of time with a weights machine and a protein shake. But although Mick was clearly fit in a way that made her asthma threaten a pre-emptive wheeze at the thought, when she looked at his bone structure and the size of his hands and feet there was also an obvious genetic element in play. She wondered what his dad looked like and if he had any brothers.

Realising that she had been ignoring his question for several long minutes of ogling, Sophy flushed and said quickly, “It was my single attempt at practicality and forward-planning. I knew that I would probably be involved in my parents’ business at some stage, you see. They own the Cheesery on the Silver Leigh vineyard near Gibbston and I’ve worked there on and off since I was fifteen. I’m the only child and Dad really wants me to have a role, so…”

“Is that what you want? Or just what he wants?” There was an oddly serious undercurrent to the question and Sophy looked up at him in surprise.

“Oh, it’s not a sob story. I’m not going to be forced to give up my art and report to the warehouse in chains. They’ll hire a manager when they retire, but it’s important to them that there’s at least a nominal family presence. I don’t mind. It’s beautiful on the vineyard and I quite like working on the production side. The process that goes into making the cheese is really creative. It’s fascinating.” She smiled. “And I’m in clover for free brie and camembert for life. Comes in handy when you’re still trying to budget like a student. Stone and marble sculpture isn’t a cheap medium.”

Without altering the angle of his head, Mick’s eyes flicked to the waiting block of Oamaru stone in the corner.

“I hadn’t initially realised this was going to be a three-dimensional project,” he said, still not sounding overly enthusiastic about it, although after an initial wince he had borne the news with stoic martyrdom. “Do you prefer sculpture to sketching?”

Sophy looked ruefully down at her messy hands.

“I suppose they both have their ups and downs. I suspect that if I want to make a living as a practicing artist, though, I’ll get more paper commissions than stone. I think the days of consistent employment as a monumental sculptor went out with the industrial revolution. I already sell quite a lot of charcoal portraits through online craft marketplaces. Combined with my wages from the bar, it’s enough to live on as long as I don’t develop a taste for fast cars and poker games.”

“Imminent danger there?” Mick asked lightly, those dimples winking out like stars making a brief appearance from behind a cloud.

“Well, I do play a mean game of Spider Solitaire, so you never know.”

Sophy worked in silence for another twenty minutes, momentarily losing her awareness of Mick, the person, and any lingering self-consciousness with it. He was deconstructed in her mind as a series of shapes and shadows.

She was so deep in the sketch that she jumped slightly when he spoke again. His voice was expectedly deep but more striking in its precise elocution than in register. He had already joined Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman on her mental list of people whose vocal rendition of the phonebook she would happily purchase.

“Would it completely blot my copybook if I suggested that a bar doesn’t seem quite your scene?”

He wasn’t the first person to express surprise at Sophy moonlighting as a bartender. Her mother had been astonished and Melissa had given it a week, less if Sophy was caught doodling on napkins. The bar was one of the busier nightspots right on the waterfront, saw a regular turnover of tourists every night and more than its fair share of drunken high spirits and poor decision-making. Honestly, there were evenings when there was nothing she felt less like doing than heading into the centre of town to mix suggestively-named spirits for frat boys on holiday. For the most part, though, it wasn’t too bad. The extra money was useful and she liked the music. She’d always preferred going dancing at a club, where it was loud enough that nobody had to make much conversation, to having to make small talk at dinner parties. Academic cocktail functions and gallery openings she placed somewhere in the third circle of hell.

She shrugged.

“The money’s decent,” she said simply. “And I can essentially take up residence behind the bar all night. I leave the circulating and wrangling to the waitresses and bouncers.”

The workroom was very quiet and she could hear the faint, even sound of Mick’s breathing. Usually the sounds of chisels, welding irons and rock music flooded the entire wing, but most of the students had disappeared off to lunch or were playing hooky at the summer festival. It was the waterskiing competition on Lake Wakatipu today; she knew that Melissa and Dale had the morning off to go and watch. She realised with a flash of guilt that Mick might have wanted to see it too. He was only in town for the month, while the exhibition was running, and he’d already admitted that he hadn’t visited Queenstown since a family skiing trip when he was six. She knew only that he was Auckland born-and-bred, but mostly worked out of London these days. The old icy wall had come down at the brief mention of his family, so that topic was clearly off-limits. She could take a hint. She felt similarly hostile when people questioned her about her love life. It was the main reason why she didn’t call her paternal grandmother as often as she ought. Her Grandma had actually introduced her in public as “my spinster granddaughter”.

“I’m sorry, Mick. I should have realised that you might prefer to spend your morning off having a look around the town,” she blurted, at the precise moment he asked abruptly, “Is there a reason why you aren’t seeing someone?”

They both paused.

“Where did that come from?” Mick sounded a bit bemused, like it was
her
question that was inappropriately personal.

“I don’t – what?” Sophy stammered. She looked up and met his frowning gaze, her fingernail scratching absently at the charcoal tip of her pencil. A tendril of unease unwound in her stomach. He wasn’t…making a pass, was he? She had no desire for their budding friendship to disintegrate into a smile-nod-and-flee acquaintance. It was already unlikely they would stay in touch after next month, since the man acted like Facebook was the social media equivalent of walking naked down the street waving your dirty laundry and Sophy had an aversion to awkward silences on the phone.

No. There was no personal or sexual interest in his face. She had several times caught him looking at her in the vaguely affectionate way that men viewed their younger sisters.

Something about that was not quite as satisfying as it should be.

“What do you mean, is there a reason I’m not seeing anybody?” Sophy asked, and winced. She had pitched for sharp and achieved witchy. One could infer that the question was unnecessary since her snottiness made it perfectly evident why she was single. Rapid affront followed. “How do you know I’m
not
seeing anyone?”