Page 134 of A Shore Thing

“Kit.” Lucy lowered her hands. “You are not so powerful. You can’t banish art from your life by burning an easel. Art is extremely tenacious. How else could it persist in the face of so much misunderstanding and rejection?”

“Ha,” he muttered, but as he looked at her face, its familiar, no-nonsense expression, he felt the lead in his gut begin to lighten.

Her gaze faltered and then firmed, as she came to some decision.

“I couldn’t paint,” she confessed. “After Anthony built me my studio. It was so grand, I felt like an utter fraud. I couldn’t paint for a month.”

“I don’t remember that.” He crossed his arms.

“I didn’t tell you.” She went pink. “Any of you. I was ashamed. I let you think I was preoccupied with married life.”

That he did remember. “You and Weston spent all of that April holed up and cooing at each other like doves.”

“You thought I was with him, and he thought I was at the studio. Really, I was going for soggy, horrible walks all over London, hating myself for squandering what ninety-nine percent of the people I passed could never ever have.”

“Lucy,” said Gwen in a soft voice. “Why?”

Lucy looked at her, then at Kit. “You know what it was like for me, before. I painted in a little, dark room, on old canvas, with cheap brushes and not enough of anything. Not enough light. Not enough space. Not enough time. Not enough pigment. Suddenly, I had everything, and it should have made painting so much easier—the possibilities were limitless. But I’d always made art in response to limits, and I didn’t know myself as a painter without them. I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t begin. My head didn’t pound, and my hands didn’t shake, but my feet propelled me miles and miles, sent me anywhere but the studio.”

“You invited me to share the studio with you.” Kit frowned as he reinterpreted events. “I thought it was because you felt guilty for avoiding me. But it was because you needed me to help you stay put.”

“And to help me feel like myself again.” Lucy chewed her lip. “I wish I’d tried to explain, but it felt so vile—whining about luxury.” She paused. “I know our situations aren’t the same. But I also know you and art haven’t done with each other yet. You’ll meet on new terms.”

“Perhaps.” He moved his shoulders, loosening his neck, the motion agnostic. Lucy’s smile was suffused with faith. It thawed him to the marrow.

“All right,” he allowed. “I hope so.”

“Enough talk.” Gwen tore a sheet of paper from her sketchbook and folded back the top quarter too quickly for anyone to glimpse what she’d drawn there. “Let’s play.”

She passed the folded paper to Lucy.

Lucy’s eyes twinkled.

“Kit,” she said. “Meet Mr. Malkin, the bird-cow in spats.” She bent her head and began to sketch.

“We’ve already met.” Kit snorted. “I invented this game.”

“Don’t look.” Lucy hid her sketch with her left hand, right hand flying. “Voilà!”

She folded the paper again, concealing all but the thinnest bottom sliver of pencil marks. She passed it to Kit.

“Mr. Malkin, the bird-cow in spats,” he muttered, extracting a pencil from his knapsack. The first time they’d ever played, they’d produced a drawing of exactly that: Lucy’s cat, Mr. Malkin, with the torso of a bird, the legs of a cow, and the feet of a dapper young man.

Hence, the name.

“Hurry up,” said Lucy.

He examined the edge of Lucy’s sketch. Had she been drawing scales?

“No thinking,” she said, so he filled his segment quickly, more scribble than sketch, the coils of a serpent. He folded the paper down and passed it to Nelly, just as Lucy handed him another.

“I started this one,” she said, so he elongated the neck, draped the shoulders in a flowing toga, contributing the midsection of a Roman senator.

They kept passing papers, and his pencil kept moving, scrawling chicken feet and shading tiger stripes. It was drawing—but drawing with four hands instead of just one. Connecting lines that a friend had begun, and another would continue.

He felt fine. Better than fine.

Maybe his hand shook a little, but maybe that was because he was laughing as he clothed a walrus in a tartan waistcoat and put a horse on a bicycle.