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chapter nineteen. summer, kind of wonderful
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Unlike the rest of us, sex, lies and scandal never take a vacation. Instead, they take the Long Island Expressway and head east to the Hamptons. Some would say summer is their busiest season. Think Park Avenue, but with tennis whites and Bain de Soleil. The players change, but the game remains the same.
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THE SUMMER WAS Victoria Humphrey's biggest muse for her art. It would form the development of her admiration for the heat as nature took its course throughout New York City. Where the autumn leaves faded and sprung the vibrant green that complimented the clear blue sky decorated with the brightness of the sun. Though some would throw their disgust about summer in the city. All of a sudden it begins to feel as though they were suffocated with each other, that not only did the sun radiate heat but the person who they might've walked past. She saw the beauty in something that might've not been deemed the prettiest. That was the time when she committed heavily to her art, finding herself sitting in front of a canvas already prepared to draw.
This summer? Victoria Humphrey hadn't even unfolded her easel from where it rested in the corner of her room. For the first summer yet, Victoria found herself facing a creative burnout. To her, there was nothing that needed to be painted. There was nothing she thought as pretty.
Now, she didn't know if it had something to do with her commitment at Columbia's Art Internship for the summer. Was it the pressure that Aria Huntington was giving her to be at her continuous best? Was it the fact she spent the other half of her summer trying to make sure that the cafe she embedded into the gallery would deeply please her father? Victoria had thought about it, but she found that the cafe was a creative process. So why was it so hard to pick up a paintbrush and paint in the sense she would've preferred?
With the Columbia's Art Internship it involved aiding with the overseeing of art shows, if you were lucky enough you had the opportunity to sell a painting. Victoria even allowed the programme to use her father's gallery if need be. The internship highlighted the way the art system worked, and most importantly allowed for each other them to be a potential art student at one of the finest university in the city. Columbia. But the part the Humphrey dreaded? It was when paintings were told to be handed in. Oh, she did a bad thing. She handed in old paintings she had cluttering in her room and she'd be lucky if Aria's gaze even lingered on what a younger and less mature version of her conjured.
Victoria hadn't painted once ( unless painting her father's gallery and designing a mural counted ), and she was running out of paintings. The girl was seated on a stool, amongst the few students who had managed to get into the internship programme for the summer. Her hair was tied loosely back, a slight fringe dangling over her forehead, what she had cut purely out of boredom and in her creative burnout. Victoria's hair was just a slight darker, and far more skin was on show with the summer heat that hauntingly loomed over the city.
