The Painting

The shark was almost right.

The teeth I had. The smile I had. The neon-deep glow of her grin, cyan layered over crimson the way I'd been trying to manage for months — that was finally working, because I had stopped trying. What I didn't have was the shoulders.

Jamie had done a thing with her shoulders. In the bar. When Jack gave her the talk about safety he always gives. That tiny, dangerous inch where suspicion stopped being suspicion and became something else. The shape of someone deciding, against all evidence, that the world might not be lying this time.

I had to get the shoulders.

The cube smelled like turpentine and electric kettle. I was on the floor — chairs were for people who expected company — with a stretched canvas across my lap and her face, the one she'd made when suspicion gave way to trust, burning behind my eyes like a print I had stared at too long. Three brushes shoved behind one ear like a cartoon of a person who painted. Paint on my hands. Paint on the floor. Paint, somehow, on the cheese wheel, which I would have to deal with later, because the cheese wheel was sacred.

The hug drawing — the one I'd taped to her door her first morning — had been quick. Twenty minutes with the Kats after she logged off, marker and pencil on a BoxCo manifest. This one I had been on for two weeks.

"Geoff."

Vivian, on the studio comms. The voice of someone who had been watching for a while and was about to tell me a thing I would not like.

"Mm."

"It's done."

"It's not."

"Geoff."

"The shoulders—"

"The shoulders are done. You're polishing."

I sat back. Looked at the canvas. Looked at her — lit up like deep-sea neon, her whole body tilted in a way that meant she had just slipped through some hidden hatch and shut it behind her.

The shoulders were done.

"Goddamnit," I said.

"I know."

"How do I get this to her?"

A pause. Viv thinking, which sounded like nothing — she did not breathe and she did not type — but I could feel it anyway. The kind of silence that came from someone working out a problem that was mostly you.

"You're not handing it to her," she said.

"No."

"You don't have her contact."

"No."

"Print it."

I looked down. The canvas was eighteen inches square. The printer in the corner of the cube was a battered thing meant for shipping labels and rent receipts.

"...Print the canvas?"

"On the cardstock you've been hoarding for two years. Trim it postcard-size."

"And then?"

Silence again.

"Vivian?"

"I'll hire a courier," she said. She had thought about this longer than I had because of course she did.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Yeah."

I photographed the canvas under the cube's overhead rig. Color-checked. Sent it to the printer. The printer chewed on the file for a long second and then began the slow ritual of laying down the image, one cyan-rich line at a time, on the cardstock I'd been saving for exactly this kind of stupid thing.

The shark emerged.

She looked free.

I signed the back, small. For the cool shark lady. Care of Geoff the Mouse.

I let the ink dry while I dressed for work: riding leathers, boots, refrigeration unit. Vivian dropped a pin in my harness for a nearby human rental shop.

"You didn't use my services?"

She smiled. I couldn't see the smile, but I knew she was smiling. "You're clever, Geoff. Better to keep the secret than risk you digging deeper."

"Fair," I said, laughing. "Thanks."

"Anytime."