HIS SKIN IS PAINTED shades of ivory and gold the first time she sees him. He is standing in front of a painting, not very big, but in it, she feels as if she can see the world. Between his chaotic strokes, there is a hint of everything; destruction, life, love, despair. Her lips part at the painting and she wonders how a small painting, consisting of only a few colors can make her feel so vulnerable.
She is not an artist. The farthest from it, actually. She studies economics in a nearby university and the only artists she knows are the ones that she has studied in school before, consisting solely of the classics. Van Gogh, Picasso, Da Vinci... not a very wide list but she has never felt the need to expand on her artistic knowledge.
He catches her awestruck gaze and a small smile curves his pink lips.
"Like it?" He asks, his voice falling into a deliciously deep pitch.
"That's an understatement." She murmurs back to him, eyes not wavering from the piece.
He chuckles underneath his breath. "Are you here for the class?"
Her vision snaps to the tall boy and she shakes her head. "Not at all. I'm here to pick up my younger brother. I don't have much, if any, talent in the art department."
He raises an eyebrow. "The art department is pretty spacious. I doubt you're completely hopeless."
"I'm a numbers kind of person." She admits, gaze falling down to her feet. She was nervous and she was trying so hard not to let it show.
"If you look a little closer, you'll find that the two have a lot of similarities." He says to her, as if he is entirely aware of her shuffling feet and the way that her hands fumble with her hair. She feels exposed as he regards her.
"Art," She gestures to the painting before him. "is open to interpretation. Numbers are not. They're numbers, and they cannot change with each person. They remain the same." She is surprised at the words that leave her mouth with confidence.
He is grinning now. "How about we grab coffee sometime and we can talk more?"
She bites the inside of her cheek to keep herself from smiling too widely and manages to give a little nod. "Okay. That sounds good." She feels a strange warmth blooming inside her chest and it excites her as equally as it does scare her. As if she was only a leaf, falling against the wind, with the distance between the ground and her lessening until she is only a hairsbreadth away from it.
A few months later, they are walking in a park against the beautiful backdrop of autumn. A bed of leaves decorate the path they walk hand in hand in the night. Her cheeks are pink from the chilly wind, and she lets him pull her to a bench.
"You were wrong." He says out of the blue.
"About what?"
"Numbers. Numbers are always open to interpretation. If I give you a set of numbers, you can interpret them in a million different ways. Art and numbers are both similar in the sense that it is profound in its impact." He muses, his hold on her hand growing tighter.
The same warmth in her chest blossoms like it did from the day that she met him. She is touched that he remembers the very first conversation they held.
She hums in thought. "I guess you could be right." Her tone is teasing.
He laughs at her reply, leaning down to rest his head on her shoulder. She catches the green adorning the skin under his neck that pokes out from the coat and she knows that with time, these same trees they walk under will turn the same color. She knows that the same leaves will come falling down again and that time never stops.
She figures thats why she loves him so much. He is unchanging in the face of time. He's her artist now and they will continue to watch the changing seasons hand in hand.
