Sunflowers and Roses: Chapter 1

I hadn’t washed off last night’s makeup yet and my clothes were in need of a washing machine but the paper in my canvas bag couldn’t wait for me to make myself into a human being, rather it demanded delivery at an extreme urgency. It was a Tuesday morning with three hours until the deadline and a single blustery storm took my normally bitter mood and churn it into a congealed buttermilk of a personality.

The air was thick, as Aprils tend to be in this part of the country. Humidity was ruining everyone’s hair and the stillness of everything was a preamble to the mess of Biblical portions to go. Me? I didn’t notice. I couldn’t, there was too much to do. Three months of work on the lasting impact of Artemisia Gentileschi was the only thing stopping me from my internship with the Museum of Modern Art, but any nerves I might have felt were deadened by a night without sleep and an all-around feeling of acceptance. My mind was so far afield I didn’t even notice the first drop of rain on my head. I did notice the second. After that, the third through fiftieth drops of rain all kind of blurred together. 

Only one thing bounced around my mind as I ran straight for the nearest cover I could see (some stupid awning over a service entrance): don’t get the paper wet. Almost falling into the cover, I shook my barely damp hair out of my eyes and wiped my hands on the driest part of my jeans before opening my bag to reveal a still pristine twelve pages of carefully honed down research and two pages of sources. My sigh of relief could have rattled the branches of nearby trees if the rain wasn’t doing that by itself. However, my pleasure was cut short by a sudden cry from somewhere too close for comfort. 

“Gangway!” I looked up just in time, to snag my bag to my chest as some random man ricocheted off a low-stone wall and into my cover. He unslung his own bag and pulled out a few pages of handwritten designs for some grid that he promptly shoved back in before even wiping water out of his eyes. Those papers would be smudged later (unlike mine) but they were safe. He finally deigned to look at me and I felt my breath catch in the back of my throat. “Sorry to crash your party, I was working on these lighting designs for like three hours and the deadline for submissions for fall shows is coming up and I just needed it to, like, not die before I could at least get a picture of it on my phone.”

“Why don’t you do it now and you can let me have this oasis to myself?” I replied, trying to give him space while not going back into the wet. The whole area couldn’t have been more than three feet of space. Besides, he was distractingly good looking and I was just not in a state of body to feel like I could measure up. 

“Dead phone,” he pulled it out and waved it for emphasis. “Sorry to disappoint, sweetheart.”

“Don’t call me that.” I leveled a glare at him as he casually leaned up against the wall. His hair fell in dark espresso waves over his shoulders that seemed all-together too beautiful and too well kept for it to belong to some man. He had a beard that felt like it was grown from a combination of casual lack of care that had then been carefully trimmed to accent a strong jawline and lips with smiles tucked in the corners. Most of all he looked like someone I could never forget where laughter fell everywhere he moved. 

“I don’t know what your name is, I can’t call you anything else.” He didn’t glare, but he did pout a little, even though the twinkle in his deep brown eyes intensified. “Does it help if I tell you my name is Romeo?”

I couldn’t help but laugh a little, “No it’s not, you’re just a flirt.” 

His pout disappeared and was replaced by a smirk that sent my cheeks to flame. “You’re right, but it got you to smile so at least there’s that.” He thrust a hand out, unintentionally showing off some very well toned forearms. “I’m Archer.”

“No it’s not, come on what’s your name actually!” I couldn’t help it, it was morally illegal to be so beautiful with such a ridiculously cool name. I’m sure the guy did things like rescue sacks of puppies from rivers or model underwear in his spare time. “You get one more shot before I insist you give me all four inches of this awning, let alone my name.”

Archer blushed a little, his ears turned red before his cheeks even began to flush. He pulled his hand back and scratched the back of his head. “I mean my full name is Euclid Archeron Donato. I can like grab my student ID if it helps, but it’s true. And yes I’m well aware that it’s ridiculous but it’s why I go by Archer, you tell me what else someone could possibly go by with a name like that.”

The rain suddenly increased its ferocity only making me laugh harder as he struggled to dig his wallet out of his bag. “Stop, you’re fine I believe you. There is no way someone could come up with a name like that on the spot.”

“Maybe I’m a comedic genius, there is always that.” His grin was back, shining so bright I thought my heart had stopped beating for a second. “So give it to me then, what’s your name?”

I smiled despite myself, his was that infectious. “I’m Fallon. And I have a fully charged laptop that can charge your phone while we wait for the rain to stop.”

“Fallon you are not only beautiful, you are a lifesaver.” I ignored his compliment, flapping a hand at him dismissively as I went to work pulling out my laptop from my backpack and then its memory foam case. Once his phone was plugged into the USB port, I tucked them both into my backpack again for safekeeping. The rain fell in sheets.

We stood awkwardly for a moment, me shifting back and forth on my feet him casually watching the rain change the world outside of our little bubble of dry air. I did my best not to stare, instead taking a minute to pull my hair tie off to fix my pony-tail, letting my dark blonde hair fall over my shoulders. Archer glanced over and immediately looked away again as I pulled it back into a ponytail again, a couple of locks falling out like they always do, no matter what. I sighed into the loud silence of a downpour.

I studied him out of the corner of my eye, the way his mouth quirked in a curious tilt, as if he were trying to listen to each individual raindrop that hit the roof over our heads. I could see the wisps of his hair curl slightly in the humidity, a small freckle sitting just over his lip. It was little, inconsequential, but distinct enough that it stood out from the darker hue of his beard. His eyes moved to mine out of nowhere, catching me blatantly staring at his cupid’s bow lips. I shut my eyes and pretended I was just blinking very hard, that any gaze he might have seen was simple coincidence.

The rain kept falling. 

After a minute of close confinement, I sighed and pulled out my paper and started proofreading for the fiftieth time, looking for typos or grammar slip ups that I was in no position to fix now but desperate for something to do, something to distract me from the person next to me. My plans began to fall apart as I pretended not to notice Archer’s warm presence getting a little closer as he pretended not to read over my shoulder. We stood like that, in an unacknowledged quiet for about two minutes before he finally said something. 

“How do you pronounce this name?” he said, pointing at the seven billionth instance of Gentileschi’s name. I carefully took his hand and moved it away from the precious cargo before answering, ignoring the scrape of a callus along my hand. How does one get calluses on their knuckles?

“Your last name is Donato and you can’t pronounce an Italian surname?” I asked. He wouldn’t be the first person I’d met who had never tried to learn about his history but for some reason I thought he’d be better than that, but it didn’t stop me from feeling pleased at the attention.

“I mean yeah but I’m kind of bored and I didn’t know how else to break the silence.” Archer shrugged as I whipped my face towards his, much closer than I thought it had been, and I felt my entire body go stiff at his presence. 

“I’m going over my final submission for an internship with MOMA, can you not wrinkle it please?” His casual smile tugged at my lips, asking them to relent and curve to mirror his, but the dark weight of memory pulled the corners back down before my instincts could fully take control from me. Just to be sure, I drew my brows further into a frown, trying to hammer home the point 

“Fine,” He held up  his hands in mock retreat. “But then I won’t take out my blanket for us to sit on, concrete is very uncomfortable and it looks like we’ll be here for a while. Unless, of course, you’d really prefer to stand?” 

My shoes weren’t made for standing. Or being outside. Or doing anything beyond protecting my feet from the ground while I walked to a building across campus. I was tired and, much as I resented it, he was right. I sighed in defeat. “Euclid would you please let me sit on your blanket? I feel like I’ve been run over by several slow moving ships. On land.” 

“Only if you promise never to call me Euclid again.” he was already pulling out a red tartan blanket from his backpack, despite his own protests. He accidentally released his designs from their confines and made a grab for them before they were destroyed in the rain, but I was faster, snatching them from the air and the deadly jaws of rain. I casually ignored his still outstretched hand as I took my time to leaf through each page, one by one and analyze the carefully marked dots on grids with carefully scrawled notes in the margins.

“I have no idea what any of this means.” I admitted grudgingly, turning to face my companion. He was busy folding the blanket on the ground carefully, giving the edge of the awning an inch or two of space. He met my eyes and smirked. 

“Am I supposed to be surprised? Move your feet real quick; you look like you wouldn’t know a tie line from a tree line.” I shuffled a little as he slid the blanket further into my slice of dry land, keeping my backpack to the center of our space and avoiding the deluge. 

Settling down, I still hadn’t returned the sheaf of diagrams to him. I shoved my backpack behind me to form some kind of pillow. Archer, with his long legs carefully folded to stay out of the rain and not take up too much space on the blanket, leaned back against the wall and began to sketch pictures in the air that only he could see. His eyes were somewhere else and my heart gave a sudden unwanted thump at the sight and the sound of someone talking about something they absolutely loved. The vague concentration that stilled his features shifted his boyish exuberance to the air of pure expertise. “Macbeth is this endlessly controversial play, you love it or you hate it and if you’re in theater you straight up fear the Scottish play,” he began. “But the point is I need like a million different ways to light a super bare stage, I need to get spooky leaf patterns to show the witches, I need something bleak but welcoming for the porter in Act II, I need a way to make an intimate scene on an empty stage with ultimate power couple Lord and Lady Macbeth-”

“Power couple? She manipulates him into murder.” I interjected, unable to help myself.

“Maybe,” he said, letting his hands fall. He kept his eyes turned outward for a moment before shifting to look at me, a soft edge of curiosity lining his eyes. The way his tumble of hair fell across his shoulders and slightly over my bag looked nothing short of poetic as the rain fell in a curtain behind him. “But they’re one of the only couples in literature history who really were a team, there for each other and building each other up. The only couple comparable, in my highly biased opinion,  is Morticia and Gomez Addams.”

I couldn’t help but giggle and his answering, glowing smile made every inch of me go warm. It reminded me of dawn breaking over the horizon, chasing away the morning mist and erasing the remnants of the night before. I felt myself finally relax, a bit of a rigidity I hadn’t noticed sitting in my spine melting into the same ease that I felt only when alone. We sat and let the comfortable silence stretch a bit longer, waiting for the rain to pass long enough to get to our final destinations. Outside our dry, concrete bubble the world continued to slip by without our notice. An occasional person passed as a moving blur, either at a dead run or shrouded by an umbrella. Only once did we hear anything remotely human as two children darted by, their laughter echoing off every raindrop and bouncing through the crowded airspace only to quickly fade away, replaced by the orchestral soundtrack of the rain.

“Why did you go for art?” He asked, popping a fruit snack in his mouth before offering the rest of the bag to me. I took my time pulling out one for myself, rolling the question over my tongue, tasting the different answers I could give him and probing how much depth he could read into them. He settled back against his own makeshift pillow and cocked a brow at me. 

“I guess,” I couldn’t look at him, rather peering through the haze of rain to what could lay beyond. “It came down to liking seeing something of people that would endure. Part of it was definitely seeing different ages encapsulated on a piece of canvas or marble or whatever, but you can see the anxieties of the age reflected in the art of the same time. The same can be said for stories but you don’t need to deal with translation errors when you decipher the symbolism in a painting or to see the care Veneer had for his work. It also masks the bad in people, you can’t guess that Degas was atrociously antisemetic from “The Little Dancer” but you might catch a glimpse of his blatant misogyny. Whatever they created, people will project what they want to see onto art and rarely look for the person who made it.”

Rain filtered back into the void left by her impromptu speech, leaving a gulf between me and the man at my side. I felt the blood rise in my cheeks and I tugged the tie out of my hair if only so I could let it cover my heated face. My heart beat in time with the words running through my head: you said too much, now he hates you; you said too much, now he hates you; you said too much, now he hates you over and over, filling my eyes and ears. 

“That’s a really interesting insight,” Archer’s words pushed past what I was hearing. “I thought it might be for reasons similar to mine with stagework: a hankering for the world onstage except I can’t sing and I totally freeze onstage. Ergo: I play with lights and make things prettier for pretty people.”

I turned to find him staring into the rain as I had been, his lips quirked in what seemed to be a permanent soft smile as he studied a world only he could see. His own words plucked at something in my heart, wondering how he could possibly consider himself outside the realm of being a pretty person. It was nothing for me to imagine his profile in acrylics, to think of the depths of brown I would have to mix to come close to the shifting hue of his hair. It would take years of constant work for me to capture the gentle curve of his lips and the twinkle of his eye and I might be an old woman before I came close to matching the beauty of a painted canvas to the beauty of the man. 

He turned to face me and his quirked lips curved higher. “What?” 

“Just trying to figure out how someone as arrogant as you could think they aren’t beautiful.” My own lips curved like his as I leaned back, propping my face on my hand. Archer sat up and mirrored my pose so we lay in our urban oasis in reflections of each other. The clouds broke just enough for sunlight to filter through the rain and bathe him in a soft light that managed to pick out every single glimmer of gold in his eyes before he shielded them with his other hand. 

“I could ask the same of you.” 

My heart didn’t flutter, it didn’t beat more heavily, instead I felt the rush of my blood going hot through my veins setting me on fire from the inside out. The breath of space between us seemed mockingly chaste when I could feel the heat radiating off his body as it lay so near to mine. The sunlight played over his face, revealing the gold dust in his eyes once more as they flicked towards my mouth for just a moment, so quick that I wouldn’t have caught it had I not been staring at those long-lashed, beautiful eyes. 

But as quickly as he had looked, so my mind had registered exactly what it had seen. The monsoon that had seemed to drown out the rest of the world had relaxed into a light shower, gentle enough that I was able to hear the unspoken words between us. What had been a comfortable nearness of our two bodies suddenly felt far too intimate and far too charged. I pulled away too quickly to be casual and got to work putting away my things with all the casualness of a dog chasing a squirrel. My cheeks were too warm and my muscles too tense and, upon checking my phone, I realized I only had another thirty minutes to deliver the paper that could determine my entire career. 

“I’m sorry, I really need to rush off,” I stammered, getting to my feet and shrugging my bag over a shoulder. Archer was still on the ground but half rising, responding automatically to my urgent tone.

“Fallon, but-” 

“This has been...” I let myself slow for a heartbeat, one thud of a complex internal organ that could have no bearing on my actions and yet felt so inexplicably heavy at the thought of leaving him behind. As soon as the thought went through my head, he reached out and put his hand on mine, barely there but warmer than the sun and infinitely more important. He made me stop and in the opening I left he opened his mouth to say something, something probably beautiful and probably kind and certainly funny. But my heart lurched again and I cut him off before he could say a word. “This has been really, really nice. I’ll see you around.”

I pulled out of his grasp, feeling every miniscule point of contact as his skin dragged against mine. 

I left before I could stop myself, before I could let him pull me back to the peace I had felt. My body abandoned the awning that had been my shelter for an hour but my mind stayed with him, running through everything that might have happened had the clouds stayed closed. The sun was bright on my eyes, reflecting off of the wet concrete with an odd intensity. The storm was gone for now, but a new one loomed just past where the university buildings obscured my sight. Seeing them in the distance while I hurried towards the professor’s office I let myself think briefly about where I might find myself if the sky opened up once more.