There were a number of gallery spaces in Santa Fe. Some were fairly static fixtures with names and reputations. Others were rented out to whichever artist or organization happened to claim them that week. This particular gallery was of the latter variety and was currently hosting a show of student artwork in a variety of mediums. The quality of the work was, of course, variable, but some of the pieces were interesting enough. And there were wine and desserts available on a table near the door.
The turn-out wasn't bad for a student art show. A number of those present had just begun to filter in from the various restaurants nearby. Among those, Ian and a tallish, elegant-looking woman moved past the door (skipping the desserts) to stand in front of a large oil painting. The body language between the two was companionable, inasmuch as either of them could ever be called such. The woman leaned over to whisper something into Ian's ear, and Ian smiled and put a hand to his mouth (as though to keep himself from laughing.) The painting - it wasn't quite Ian's style. It was warm and sentimental: an old man walking with his grandson along the beach. Ian glanced over the room, searching until his eyes lit upon a display of photography. The subjects were condemned and abandoned buildings, half crumbled and overrun with wildlife and graffiti. They were eerie and beautiful all at once.
With a nod, he pulled away from his companion's side and walked toward the photographs. She cast a linger gaze toward the painting before following in his wake.
Ian[Edit: lingering gaze]
SerafíneThe truth is Serafíne loves student art shows. The disparate elements, the clash of styles, the lack of any overarching goddamned theme. Here is someone, and someone else, and someone else, putting some piece of him or herself on the wall and hoping it sticks, hoping it means something, meaning it to mean something, without quite knowing what sort of meaning is worth striving for, because who the fuck knows that shit because as soon as you start thinking you know that shit, some important part of your brain: open to wisdom, open to wonder, is already starting to shut down.
Sera is saying that to someone who is not a stranger as they walk in. They were at another gallery down the street and then stopped for drinks and Sera had a couple and nothing really to eat so she's feeling them, bright and shining in her blood, those drinks, they make her feel both luminous and lifted, uplifted, like there are balloons in her blood, like she could rise and rise and rise and rise.
She's telling someone a story, several someones, several stories, about this guy in Macon, Georia and these acrylics he did of clowns and everyone who is hearing this story thinks she is going to say something about velvet and they all think that this story is meant fucking ironically, but Sera, she does not mean it ironically and she is not making fun of the eighty-six year old clown painter from Georgia.
She loved him.
She loves so many things.
--
The story ends and the little knot of new-come hipsters unclusters and Sera makes a beeline for the wine-and-dessert tables. One of the bakers is there tending to her treats and Sera is very EEEE! and half-circles and gives Dee and takes a mini-red-velvet cupcake because Dee insists and Sera usually eschews dessert tables too, not because she works for that remarkable body she shows off so regularly (tonight is no exception: a tiny ruched satin skirt, black. Fishnets. Remarkable heels, and a see-through black lace bra beneath a leather jacket. Sweat at her temples because it is warm outside, strangely humid and she is strangely human) but because she just doesn't remember to eat.
Sera takes her red velvet cupcake and heads over to the wine, flirting with a girl who turns out to be one of the artists over what sort of wine goes with cream cheese icing.
SerafínePerception + Awareness?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 10) ( success x 3 )
Ian[Not that one really needs Awareness to notice Sera...]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
IanThe woman with Ian tonight, she didn't resonate the way that he did, and she was not possessed of his particular talents (at least, not those which might be considered less than mundane.) But she noticed Sera around the same time that Ian did, because it was difficult to exist within the same space as Sera and not know that she was there. Even Sleepers felt the magnetic draw of her presence. Sera was beautiful and eye-catching. Of course Emma looked.
Emma was beautiful too. Less raw than Sera. Her beauty was a bit more like Ian's. And she wasn't dressed in fishnets or a leather jacket. Instead she wore skin-tight jeans, red silk stilettos and a flowing white peasant blouse. She tipped back her head to gaze around Ian, eyeing Sera with casual interest. Ian, however, kept his eyes on the photographs for a few moments longer, lost in a kind of contemplative focus.
He was wearing coated black jeans (skinny with a tapered leg,) black dress boots and a white t-shirt. A black leather bracelet with a metal infinity symbol braided into it was clasped around his left wrist.
After a long moment, he followed Emma's gaze and found Sera and Dee over by the dessert table.
"I think I'll grab us some wine. You like red, right?"
"Mm. I'll take a cupcake while you're at it."
Ian nodded and pulled away, making a line for the table where the wine was set out. When he reached it, he caught Sera's eye and smiled. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to find you here."
Serafíne"It's my fucking scene," returns Sera, and it would almost be without a glance except that he caught her eyes but there's something so immediate and present and assured and active about her. Reactive about her. The quick crawl of her mouth.
Ian picks up a couple glasses of red. Sera has talked the wine-table-guy into opening a bottle of prosecco and she has also discovered where in the space his works are displayed, "Doug here crocheted the Che Guevara Afghan on the south wall and also knitted the bicycle cozy around the fucking bike. Fucking amazing."
Then Sera is turning to Ian fully, lifting her drink and following a line-of-sight over his shoulder toward Emma, and she - well - she smirks, Sera. Just a little bit.
Er, maybe more than a little bit.
"What about you, still breaking hearts and taking names I see?"
A quirk of her left brow, that is more challenge than inquiry.
Serafíne"It's my fucking scene," returns Sera, and it would almost be without a glance except that he caught her eyes but there's something so immediate and present and assured and active about her. Reactive about her. The quick crawl of her mouth.
Ian picks up a couple glasses of red. Sera has talked the wine-table-guy into opening a bottle of prosecco and she has also discovered where in the space his works are displayed, "Doug here crocheted the Che Guevara Afghan on the south wall and also knitted the bicycle cozy around the fucking bike. Fucking amazing."
Then Sera is turning to Ian fully, lifting her drink and following a line-of-sight over his shoulder toward Emma, and she - well - she smirks, Sera. Just a little bit.
Er, maybe more than a little bit.
"What about you, still breaking hearts and taking names I see?"
A quirk of her left brow, that is more challenge than inquiry.
IanIan went for the pinot noir, picking up a couple of glasses and resting them deftly between the fingers of his left hand. The cupcake took a bit more consideration, despite the fact that he wasn't planning to eat any of it, and his eyes drifted away from Sera as he took a few steps to the dessert table, contemplating the myriad choices on display.
Sera took note of Emma, and Ian looked up from the cupcakes and laughed. Amusement lingered in his eyes as he followed Sera's gaze across the room.
"I'm not her type. Even if I was, I doubt I could break her heart."
Chocolate. Emma liked chocolate, and it went with the wine. Ian grabbed a plate with his free hand and set a cupcake on it. A bit of the frosting got on his thumb and he put it to his mouth and sucked on it lightly.
"Emma's a co-worker. She's in my dance company."
Ian lifted the plate and turned his gaze back to Sera fully, regarding her contemplatively. "You can join us if you like."
Serafíne"What the hell does that mean, you're not her type?" She is - well, she is fairly close to his height tonight, because her shoes have both these remarkable platforms and these remarkable heels and she does not wear these things the way most women wear them, taking half-mincing steps because fuck they hurt, no. She wears them and walks in them with a remarkably powerful stride, as if she meant to claim and keep all the space she could for herself in the world.
"Let me guess: she likes people who are emotionally available, maybe even fucking vulnerable sometimes, and - oh, fuck - who don't hold themselves apart from everything with a kind of detached superiority as a way of striving to retain control in a chaotic and fundamentally uncontrollable world - "
A neat little shrug, then. Sera pops her red velvet cupcake (they are minis, but still) in her mouth in its entirety and beams up at Ian. Still, he has invited her to join them if she likes and she seems to be falling into step beside him, though Sera turns, lifts her chin and glances behind them, at that picture that they abandoned in favor of more artful arrangements of empty, abandoned spaces. Looks ahead - at Emma and the photographs she and Ian had been perusing.
"Or, wait," Sera's grin, raw and (more than a little bit) edgy, "maybe she just prefers some other kind of douchebag."
Then Sera points her cup back over her shoulder.
"You guys didn't like that one?" Inquiry, and then another, "Dance company?"
Ian[Manip+Subterfuge]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1
Serafíne(Mmm. Perception + Awareness-as-empathy.)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 3, 4, 4, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
IanSera fell into step, but Ian, see... he stopped moving. Not out of shock, really. Sera was hardly the first person to call him a douchebag. But she had introduced a rather dramatic shift in their conversation, and it required a certain amount of reconfiguration. There were people around them. The boy pouring wine. The baker. Artists and gallery patrons milling about, talking, stealing wine and cupcakes. Dee was nearby. Emma was looking at them from across the room with veiled curiosity (she could be rather catlike herself, you see.) The room had an echo. Voices carried. It wasn't the sort of environment where one could reasonably expect any degree of privacy.
So Ian stopped and regarded Sera silently. Then he said, "I meant that she's gay."
When he glanced at the painting (the one with the old man and the child and that radiating warmth of family) he shrugged. "It doesn't interest me."
After a moment he added, "No one's forcing you to be around me, Sera. If you don't like it, go talk to someone else." The tone of his voice wasn't angry or condescending so much as flat. Distant, just as she'd accused him of being.
SerafíneSo there's no falling in step and in fact Sera is a handful of steps ahead when she kind of sort of notices that Ian is not beside her. She stops then: turns around while Ian reconfigured himself, readjusted to the new turn in the conversation.
Sera: her smile, quick and challenging, still that edge to it that is, yes, visceral - entirely and wholly of-the-gut, you understand.
"Do you really think I do anything I don't want to do?"
The answer is: yes and yes and yes. Sera does things that she doesn't want to do all the fucking time. She doesn't want to follow a cannibal-monster-thing into an alley behind a bar and doesn't want to see a poor bastard of a jock sprawled on the ground, choking on his own blood while a madman gnawed on his goddamned cheek but you know, the way Sera asks that question, you would never imagine that the answer is anything but no.
She waits for him. Glasses up and past him at that painting that doesn't interest him and at first the look is cursory and then the look (at the painting) deepens and then Sera glances back at Ian's face, kept so carefully blank that even she cannot penetrate his mask.
"I don't think you're a fucking douchebag," Sera, to Ian, rather more conversationally should he indeed fall into step beside her again. "I do think you're kind of a jerk. Kalen likes you but I think half of that's projection. You know the I feel nothing (and fuck, maybe it's true) shit backfires when other people start projecting their hopes and desires onto it. He does think you saved his life though, so. That's why you got "kind of" instead of full blown jerk.
IanThe truth about that painting, and Ian's reaction to it, was rather a lot deeper and more complex than what he'd claimed. But he was a good liar. Even in the presence of someone like Sera. Maybe it frustrated her or maybe she found it distasteful or fucking obnoxious or any number of other things, but her open dislike of his cold detachment wasn't likely to have any positive effect on removing it.
She asked if he thought she ever did anything she didn't want to do, and Ian's lips turned up lightly at one side. "No, but I try not to make assumptions."
And yes, he did fall into step beside her again. Though whatever he thought of the rest of her claims, he kept that to himself. When they reached Emma's side, Ian handed over one of the wine glasses and the plate with the cupcake on it, to which Emma responded with a sly smile and a kiss on Ian's cheek. "You brought food and wine and beautiful company. You really do think of everything." Emma shuffled the plate to her left hand and offered the other in greeting to Sera. "Emma."
"Sera just got done telling me I'm kind of a jerk," Ian offered dryly. "Maybe the two of you will get along."
"Only kind of?" Emma's smile broadened, but there wasn't any real bite to the insult. If anything, her voice held a bit of fondness.
Serafíne"Serafíne."
This to Emma, right hand to right hand. Sera has a bronze ring with impressions like stick figures or hieroglyphs stamped onto a slender shield on her right index finger, and a spiked something on both her ring finger and pinky. An assortment of bracelets - notable if only for their shear fucking variety is clustered against her wrist, half caught between the cuff of her leather jacket and the slender span of her hand.
She has so many tattoos. Visible now: the ink on both hands, a flash of sharkscissors on her inner left palm, indecipherable scrawls of letters on her fingers, inner wrist, and along the meat of her palm. The hint of something beneath her right breast, when she lifts her hand to shake like that.
"Like Ian said, most people call me Sera."
--
And honestly Sera rolls her eyes a little bit at Emma's quip about wine and food and beautiful company and that look: wry, skeptical, challenging, is a lit fuse from Emma to Ian and back again.
"So you're dancers, huh? Which one of you is black swan and which one is the good girl ingenue from Idaho who is going to be murdered or ruined in furtherance of the plot.
"Or, you know, what kind of dance?"
IanEmma raised an eyebrow lightly at Sera's quip, and there was a vague hint of something tired about it. Like maybe she'd heard that one a few times before. When she retrieved her hand from Sera's grasp, she began to peel back the wrapper on her tiny cupcake.
"I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an ingenue in our group."
She took a bite of the cupcake, neatly devouring about half of it. Ian's eyes drifted to her mouth for a moment, but they didn't linger long.
"We do contemporary ballet," Ian added, by way of an actual answer. "No Swan Lake, sorry." He took a drink from his wine glass and began to walk slowly toward the next exhibit, which happened to be a handful of smaller abstract paintings.
"I don't think I ever asked what you do?" (This to Sera.)
SerafíneSomething about Emma's non-verbal response has Sera's rather shit-eating grin spreading wider. She kind of presses her mouth together and gives Ian an arch look that is extended in a sweep to Emma. And Emma tells Sera that she would be hard-pressed to find an ingenue in their group, and Sera laughs as Emma takes that neat little bite of the cupcake and not unlike Ian's gaze, Sera's goes directly to the woman's mouth.
"Fucking of course. I bet you're all world weary sophisticates. So, does contemporary ballet mean a rigorous grounding in Martha Graham and maybe some throwbacks to Nijinsky and Diagalev, or does it mean a shitty mix of U2 and Beethoven, with a helluva lot of backflips as a stand in for actual passion?
"'Cos like, Dan and I went to one of the latter once in New York. It was fucking awful. I had to spend three days afterward drunk on grain alcohol listening to nothing but the Sex Pistols just to get it out of my system and I pretty much hate the Sex Pistols too.
"I mean I like the snarl but it all feels so manufactured, you know? I guess the good thing about Swan Lake is, you've had a hundred years to lose all the shit from the repertoire and whatever's fucking left can be pretty goddamned powerful if people let themselves feel it rather than just going through the motions."
--
Serafíne's Rant About Art™ concludes, and Ian says he's never really asked what she does and Sera breathes out this laugh, whole and genuine, her grin quick and engaging and mildly self-deprecating. "I don't do shit, man. I'm in a band." A little wrinkle of her nose, like a wink.
"Sometimes we play out. That's pretty much it."
IanPoint in fact, both Ian and Emma had starred in productions of Swan Lake. Most ballet dancers had, at one point or another. It was like the Nutcracker that way - ubiquitous, overplayed, and difficult to avoid. Unlike the Nutcracker, Swan Lake at least had some redeeming value (as Sera had put it, in the hands of the right dancers, the right choreographers - it could be powerful.)
Sera painted Ian and Emma as world-weary sophisticates, to which Emma just smirked as she finished off her cupcake. Ian's eyes were on one of the paintings in front of him when he said, "Well shit, there goes my concept for the next show. I always wanted to do a mashup of Beethoven's Fifth with Beautiful Day."
Emma nearly spit out her wine. But of course, it was Emma, so she managed to make it look charming rather than silly, uttering this little huff of breath through her nose as she put the tips of her fingers to her mouth to press her lips closed.
When she had her amusement under control, she swallowed the wine and said, "That sounds awful." (Of the mashup.) "What sort of music do you play?"
Serafíne"Rock and roll," Sera returns, with a razor-wire grin and an ironic / not-at-fucking-all-ironic set of devil horns. "What the fuck else is there? Shit, what do I fucking look like.
"Maybe," this, with a gesture of her glass of inexpensive Prosecco in the vague-general-direction of Emma's cupcake plate, with a sort of intimation of secrecy, everything all confidential, you understand. "I should change it up, you know. Subvert expectations and say I'm play easy listening on contemporary christian or slow jazz, one of those twee, tiny little fucking saxes, you know the ones I mean?
"Those things are awesome."
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