All This Time

41 ⦿ in which i learn

After a guarded sweep of the room, I yawn. It's been an exciting opening night for Levi, but a pretty boring one for me. Even though Graeme and Xander were invited, they've spent the majority of the evening parading around the room so Graeme can show off her ring to her fashionable friends. Every so often I see Xander's pleading face staring at me across the room, or, equally as often, snagging something to eat off a passing waiter's tray.

Levi had stuck to me at first, but his face was too recognizable, and before I could say "pig in a blanket", he'd been whisked off to charm and schmooze some of the old biddies who had bank accounts larger than their wigs.

The gallery gleams white and gold, everything sparkling and glossed with an expensive veneer. Levi's art, bold black strokes and bright colors, splashes over multiple canvasses. He loves landscapes, but unless you were one of the old masters, it was hard getting work painting scenery in the modern age. Instead, he draws people. It had sold well and had helped him make a name for himself.

The paintings that brought him to fame are from a series called Emote. His subjects portrayed an emotion across their faces, but their gender is curiously fluid. Drawn without hair or any other gender-specific qualities, the faces staring back at me from the canvas are androgynous.

I sip at the free champagne and wonder if Levi painted us, his family, in any of these. Nothing I can recognize jumps out at me, but as I stroll around the room, I stay alert. I see one that looks suspiciously like Graeme—light skin, light eyes—and one that looks kind of like Celine Dion, but other than that, there's a stark unrecognizability in his work.

"That one kind of looks like you," a voice whispers behind me.

I whirl, grinning at Brett. She stands there with a mushroom on a toothpick and a floor-length gown the color of baby vomit. "Nice dress, B," I say as I give her a hug, careful not to let the greasy mushroom come into contact with my white lace V-back dress.

"I could say the same." She takes a step back to look at me. "Are you..." She blinks at me. "Is that a wedding dress?"

"What on earth would make you think that?" I snicker. "Geez, Brett, it's just a dress."

"Well," she says, still looking at me with wariness, "You disappeared on me when I thought we were supposed to be getting ready together. Then I talked to Levi and he said you left the apartment without him and there's like, a whole half hour that's unaccounted for."

"A half hour?" I gasp, bringing my empty champagne glass to my chest in mock-horror.

"Don't mock." Brett mutinously chews her mushroom and brandishes the pointy end of the toothpick at me. "Babies have been conceived in far less."

"I promise you that I'm not pregnant," I tell her dryly. "Graeme would kill me if I did anything to steal attention away from her big day, and I'm pretty sure if I'm waiting at the altar as big as a watermelon, she'd claw my eyes out."

"I don't know about that." Brett laughs. "Graeme might be a totally kick-ass aunt. All the fun of a cute, squashy baby, and none of the work."

I grin and wrap an arm around her shoulders. "She might be a great aunt," I allow, "but not as great as you." Before she can get any ideas, I add swiftly, "And no, I promise you, you are so not going to be an aunt any time soon, so don't give me that calculating look."

A quick scan of the crowd reveals what I've suspected - Wolf's absence. Brett catches my face fall and she leans her head on my shoulder, sighing. "He's not here?" she asks.

"Nope."

Her arm wraps around my waist. "I'm sorry," she says, sympathy dripping from each word.